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Part Two:
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The sun rose. A single blazing red point on the horizon that flowered up into a simple disc. It climbed over the mountains across the bay, slipped between the prying needles of skyscrapers, cast its myriad long dark shadows over the water.
Conrad could not, would not, believe his eyes.
The sun was wrong. Someone had taken away the secondary.
It wasn't a sun - it was suns. The only time the pair would ever be visible was sunrise and sunset, when at least one of the two stars was partially occluded, when their light was filtered by the heavy atmosphere. For a few brief moments you could tell it was two separate suns, then minutes later they resolved into one lopsided, double-lobed blob of light, rising up across the sky and blinding the eye - no, not the eye... the sensor - to the planetary rings, the moons.
Conrad squinted at the sun, spots dancing in his already watering eyes, and tried to believe in a single sun. Tried to believe he was a little under six feet tall. Tried to believe he was flesh and blood, tried to believe machines were inanimate, tried to believe.
He had to shut his eyes. Staring at the sun hurt. Staring at the truth hurt, because he knew he'd never really believe it. Not inside.
"Arf?"
Conrad let his hand drift from the bench armrest and down to the smooth plastic of Kain's head. Idly, he scratched behind the Mecha-Pal's audio pickups.
"Rarf," Kain said, contentedly.
Conrad leaned his head back, drawing in breath after breath - something he didn't believe in either. He didn't breathe - he burned. He burned an exotic hydrocarbon chain called isopropentol by the gallon, churning hydraulics into motion. He tingled with the building pressure of exotic plasmas undergoing cool fusion, he catalyzed semi-organic reagents and held hot fusion in his heart and basked in the glow of a double-sun for energy. He did not breathe.
Yet here he was, drawing in oxygen so it could be metabolized with carbon. Here he was, spewing that oxygen back out as simple carbon dioxide. It felt like he was living in an alien dream.
"Arf?"
He scratched at Kain's head again, but the little machine wandered out from under his touch.
"Yarf! Arf-Yarf!"
Conrad looked up dozily, his eyes still sore from the sun. "Kain?"
"Rarf-rarf-barf! "
The Mecha-Pal continued to bark its head off at the two Chinese beside the bench. It angrily pawed the ground, as if it would attack... as if it could attack. The truth was, nobody here would make a machine to attack people. That was one of those truths Conrad knew to be a lie.
"Kain - command, mute." Conrad leaned back, staring up at the pair. "Can I help you?" he asked, fumbling for his phone, so it could translate.
He didn't need translation.
"Yes. I think you can help us, Mister Walsh." The woman. Not too short, slender, surgically symmetric. Her suit matched the one on the man beside her, she wore sunglasses despite the early morning gloom.
Whoever the man was, he didn't speak. He didn't smile. He did look at Kain like he wanted to kick it. He had a slender scar through his left eyebrow. He was awake and alert at twenty to seven in the morning. The top button of his suit's jacket was left undone, breaking the symmetry between he and the woman.
Of course, with that button closed, he wouldn't be able to draw his pistol from inside his jacket.
Conrad turned his gaze back on the woman. "As-is?"
"That's correct," she replied. She gestured at the Mecha-Pal. "You named it Kain? Very amusing."
As-is never left anything as it was. Asintec's intelligence service weren't in that line of work.
"Yeah. Very funny." Conrad tapped Kain on the back of the spine. Kain continued yapping - it didn't know it had been muted, after all. At Conrad's touch it glanced around, he gestured for it to stand down. It paced restlessly under the bench like an agitated dog.
"We have a problem, Mister Walsh."
"I already gave you access to the magnet-shaders. I solved your problems. I'm retired."
Uninvited, she sat down on the bench beside him. "This is a new problem."
Conrad slumped, staring across the water. He didn't answer her.
She reached into her pocket, produced a black plastic handle, unfolded a wicked knife-blade. She held it out, knife-tip pointing at his face.
Conrad supposed that he should flinch, but he had trouble remembering that sharp things could hurt him.
"Take it."
Conrad lifted his hand and carefully touched the blade's edge. It caught the light in a particular way, the metal seemed yellowy... He gripped the blade carefully, lifted it from her hand. The plastic handle weighed far, far more than the blade.
The blade was light. Real things that light were... were styrofoam, padding, cotton wool. The blade wasn't thin, it was thick - thick and light. Real things weren't like that - real things that existed in the real world, on Earth, weren't like that.
The blade wasn't from Earth. It wasn't from the real world.
Conrad cut at the bench's armrest with the knife. It sheared through the plastic rest and dug a gouge into the steel beneath. He tried sawing at one of the bolts, but gave up halfway through - the knife's edge held.
"This is devilstuff," Conrad said numbly.
"Yes," the woman replied.
He folded the knife shut carefully. Stared at the handle. He tried, but couldn't scratch the plastic handle on the steel bolts. Even with all his weight against it, all he could do was mark the surface a little. The top layer shore off in a slightly pebbled pattern with a weirdly perfect hexagonal symmetry. The faint threads he could see in it had a rainbow glow.
"And this will stop bullets." Conrad fondled the plastic handle.
"Yes. And absorb the shock of explosives, shed the heat of lasers, and take the impact of E-M guns."
"It's vitricyl."
"Yes."
"We can't make vitricyl. Maybe we could synthesize isopropentol, but Earth doesn't have any liquizit deposits."
"We haven't found any, at least. No."
Conrad unfolded the knife again, stared at the blade's edge, the faintly yellow glimmer to it - not simply because of the colour of the rising sun. "Devilstuff. Can we synthesize it? Can we make imentium, now? Chollonin?"
"Not that I know of."
Conrad ran his fingers along the blade. It was processed imentium - devilstuff. Called devilstuff because of its relative density. Because in the native system of weights and measures, a single cargo unit of imentium ended up consisting of six thousand six hundred and sixty six point six repeating stock-units. The sixes just went on and on and on. Called devilstuff because it could make materials stronger than titanium and weighed less than any equivalently strong Earthly material.
Called devilstuff because it didn't exist in the real world.
He bit his lip. "Did they send this through the wormhole? This is too big. Much too big. Did they make a bigger wormhole?"
"No. Nothing's coming back through the wormhole except for clean and abundant energy." The woman smiled severely.
"So it was synthesized?"
She shrugged. "As far as I'm aware the only extraterrestrial material we've had success synthesizing is isopropentol, which can't be done at a level that makes it economically feasible. Yet."
"But this is devilstuff and vitricyl. This is from Nia. It can't be here."
Her smile turned more than a little sinister. "That is our problem, Mister Walsh. And we would like you to help."
They took him up into one of the needles of the skyscrapers and let him sit with Kain in his lap, watching the sun through the polarized windows in the conference room while they tried to explain.
Conrad saw a single sun through the glass, and knew there were really two outside.
The elderly man leaned over the table seriously, trying to catch Conrad's eye. "The system is secure, you understand. The Perpetuum Project is absolutely secure."
The man with the scarred eyebrow was there, as was the woman. Neither of them spoke.
The young man - an Agent with an obvious scar at the back of his neck - grimaced and spoke rapid Chinese, the phone on the table struggled to keep up with the translation. "Plainly it's secure. We have unexplained connections on a daily basis - obviously it's secure."
"The station is secure," the elder spat back.
Conrad remembered the station. He remembered the racks of bodies plugged in and neurointegrated into the system. He remembered zero gravity, he remembered living his real life interspersed with brief dreams of flesh and food and sleep.
The station was secure. Nothing could break into the Perpetuum Project. And yet the knife was on the table.
"It may only be chance," the elder assured Conrad. "Perhaps some research laboratory stumbled onto the same atomic configurations, perhaps they used atomic assemblers to build it..."
The expense of using atomic assemblers - nanites that manipulated individual atoms - was extreme. For all they had been touted as a miracle, in truth they were slow. One could build an object from component atoms, yes, but a single thread of human hair was millions upon millions of atoms thick. With each atom being arranged individually, it would take time. Even manipulating clusters of molecules was a lengthy process - after all, life had been doing it for eons, and trees did not sprout over the course of a day.
Conrad stared at the knife on the table.
To build it from component atoms would take years. Perhaps decades.
Building a spark - and sparks were infinitesimally small - was a process of days and weeks.
"Perhaps it was assembled," Conrad allowed.
The youth spluttered in racing Chinese. "It cannot be! No one would stumble across these specific materials, no research lab would be so crass as to build a street thug's knife!"
Conrad swept his eyes from the knife to the elder man curiously.
"The knife was found among the personal effects of a fugitive in Cologne. An ex-agent, like yourself."
"Was he Asintec?"
"He was contracted to Baresh and Hatai. A Pakistani. He was released from the Perpetuum Project for crass disregard of the colonization project. As you did, before his term of service ended he took the opportunity to move certain assets from his former employer to a different employer."
"And his new employer is?"
"We do not know."
"So he took materials data back to Earth." Conrad stroked Kain's head. The little robot purred silently, vibrating under his fingers.
"No. He was scanned when leaving the station - he took nothing with him. The assets he stole from us were moved on Nia, just as in your case."
Conrad's gut churned. "But you don't know who his employer is."
"No."
"What did he take?"
"A Sequer. Loaded with a Seth, disassembled for transport, multiple prototype laser weapons, and thirty re-encoded construction templates."
Conrad settled his hand on his gut. His skin began to crawl. "That must be more than a hundred million NIC."
"Taking into account prototyping costs and the possible value of the construction templates, we suspect the figure is closer to half a billion."
"Where did he take them?"
"Hokkogaros."
Conrad pushed Kain from his lap, sending the robot squirming to the floor. He turned to the two men. "There isn't anything on Hokkogaros. The beta terminal, yes, but nothing's installed there yet, is it?..."
"We've lost remote contact with two of the three outposts. The third - Darmahol - recently stopped responding to our commands."
"The natives?"
The youth gripped his phone in a white-knuckled hand, eyes wild with anger. "The Infestation."
"There is no 'Infestation'. We have merely temporarily lost control of our outposts on Hokkogaros-"
"And someone else is using them!"
Conrad flattened his hands on the table-top. "Who?"
The elder spread his hands. "We don't know. It may be whatever has led to rumours of the so called 'Infestation', or the ICS subcontractors who recently went rogue-"
"What?" Conrad blinked.
The youth smirked. "A party of ICS subcontracting agents took exception to a charter clause. They split from the main colonization party on Domhalarn island, incorporated, and are currently attempting to take control of the ICS beta facilities."
This was wrong. This was all wrong. The syndicate had maintained absolute control over the Perpetuum Project, over Nia. Rogue Agents?
Conrad stared at the youth. "Do... do I know them?"
"You may. One of them is Heinrich Freimann."
German. Fanatical. Tall. Arbalest. Sharp eyes. The ridge on Attalica, the charging Troiars. Three slugs, another two, five - scattered debris behind him as Conrad struggled to stand, the hydraulic pathways in his legs straining with heat and overpressure.
Freimann.
"This is getting off the track, Mister Walsh." The elder of the pair smiled pleasantly. "It's possible there's a community of ex-Agents seeking to disseminate information from the Perpetuum Project here on Earth."
"It's possible they're connecting to the project from Earth," the youth said, and the phone translated.
"That," the elder affirmed, "is impossible. As for the knife, it may be related or it may be coincidence. Regardless, we are concerned. You're well positioned to investigate the truth."
Somewhere people were connecting from outside the Perpetuum Project. That seemed apparent, but Conrad didn't know what the truth was anymore. Except for the knife.
Conrad picked the knife up and turned it over.
Devilstuff.
It was real. The only true and real thing in the world.