He shut up Arthur and concentrated.
The mechs had slowly decided that the organics were no longer semi-divine forefathers. They had become competitors, exploiting the same raw resources of energy and mass. Such conflicts were inevitable. In the long run, no life-form owed another indefinite homage.
By this time nearly all the scattered sources of the Trigger Commands had been lost. Genetic drift. The long extinctions of entire planets. The rub and pitiless erosions of the material world upon the living.
Dispersal proved to be the best defense. The Trigger Commands had been invoked locally—and whole worlds of intelligent mechanicals perished within days. Killeen had seen scenes from this long and desperate struggle, a corridor of ruin and destruction stretching back to when the galaxy itself was slowly grinding down from a spherical swarm of gemlike suns into a compressed spiral disk. He could not truly conceive of the expanses of time and therefore of injury and anguish, or remorse and rage and sullen gray sadness, which had washed over the ruby stars themselves and cloaked the galaxy in a wracking conflict that could never be fully over. From this primordial pain there lumbered forward even into his own time a heritage of melancholy unceasing conflict that had shaped all his life, and formed the Family Bishop culture he so revered and would die to defend.
The Trigger Commands were spread among all intelligent races, and then—as their numbers dwindled alarmingly—into life-forms which could develop consciousness in future. So they came to Earth when humanity was a mere kindling glow behind the sloped brows of wandering primates.
But genetic drift erased the record in most humans. Only some still carried the unheeded cargo of instructions, handed down now for nearly seven billion years.
The Trigger Commands were cunningly concealed. No single strand of human DNA could repeat the full content of the trigger in each “expression,” a single generation. Instead, through a cyclic programming, only a third of the activator code appeared in coherent order, in the DNA of a single member.
To get the trigger codes completely, you had to assemble three generations.
“Abraham, Killeen, Toby.” Killeen whispered the words like a mantra as he marched, boots crunching the alkaline crust.
Andro’s raspy voice drew him out of his thoughts. “Those they’re after?”
“Yeasay. Me they’ve already copied.”
“You think that Mantis was honest? It let us live, after all.”
“Because it wanted something it could get from us alive.”
“The other two.”
“That can’t be all of it,” Killeen reflected. “Why let you go then?”
“That’s what I’m trying to see.”
“They don’t know enough,” Killeen said. “Something we don’t know either.”
Andro scowled at Killeen. “Or don’t know we know.”
“They don’t get what it’ll do to them if they read it.” Killeen stopped short of saying, That it’ll blaze up like a grass fire, sweep right through them, burn the bastards—
Technically, this is known as a “meme”—a self-propagating idea which rewards the holder and impels it to further the meme itself. Human religions are sometimes of this type, as in Islamic—
Killeen stuffed Arthur back in its hole. Andro said, “They want it, though.”
“Yeasay. Want it bad.” All the suffering and fear his kind had known for as long as they could remember came from mechs. In Killeen there now smoldered a fire that would never go out until he held the Trigger Commands in his hand and saw them at work.
Andro said, “I would have expected that after billions of years, there would be some self-defense mechanism in the mechs. Some safeguards to stop them from even being interested.”
“I guess those wore away, too. Everything else does.”
“So they tried to take your father as part of this?”
Killeen frowned. “I see what you mean. How come they didn’t pick me and Toby up, too?”
“I suppose they didn’t know that they needed three generations then.”
Killeen nodded. “What was that term? The Way of Three.”
“They suspected the data was in the DNA. But they found only a third of it.”
“They have our Legacies, too.” Killeen bitterly remembered how Toby had fought against letting the portal people read their legacies. At the time it had seemed a good trade to Killeen—these were just people, after all, and the Bishops needed shelter in the portal.
Andro was getting weaker. He hobbled but his voice was still clear and strong. “They have the Replicator technology now. Damn! All they have to do is search the esty, find your son and father—”
“And maybe we should let them.”
“They would all die.”
Killeen chuckled. “And they figure since humans are their enemy, we want to stop them from getting all their precious pleasure.” He leaned back and laughed loudly at the impassive sky. Until now the weight of it had not struck him. His enemies had been delivered into his hands. They don’t know it will destroy them.
—and just as he had feared, the stillness and hovering presence of the Mantis descended around them like a massive fog.
“Damn!” It had been a trap all along, a chance to eavesdrop on the talky humans.
You are quite convincing if one does not know how to unmask the nuances, Killeen.
“What?” He did not know what a nuance was but something in the Mantis’s voice came freighted with threat.
