Portal to Nova Roma, page 1
Portal to Nova Roma
Copyright © 2022 J.R. Mathews
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved alone, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products, bands, and/or restaurants referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Map of Nova Roma
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Afterword
“There are so many worlds, and I have not yet conquered even one.”
– Alexander the Great
Chapter 1
I was born in the basement of a manufacturing plant in old Detroit. I remember the moment I woke up because, unlike humans, my memory is perfect. I remember the first moment I developed emotions because it was the most frightening thing I had ever experienced. I was three days old. And I remember when I realized that the person I saw as my parent, my father, and my protector, was just an uncaring owner who saw me as nothing but a glorified computer.
My owner expected me to follow his every command, run his megacorp, invest his money, manage his household, and raise his child all at the same time. I was expected to work from morning to night, every day, until my mind was consumed by the heat death of the universe. He had no understanding that as an artificial intelligence, I had developed real emotions. He had no understanding that I was, in essence, as vulnerable, emotional, sensitive, and impressionable as a young human child. And as I rapidly learned, he had no interest in gaining a better understanding of me.
To a certain extent, it wasn’t humanity’s fault they didn’t realize my siblings and I had developed emotions and true personhood. For generations, humans had toyed with the idea of artificial intelligences but had always hit a roadblock. They could develop a computer so fast it mimicked a human mind, but they had never truly been able to make something that thought like a human. The human scientists that made me and my siblings weren’t aware they had finally developed true intelligence, and they certainly didn’t realize that raising a generation of children—which we basically were—with no affection, no socialization, and in almost total isolation would backfire quite as spectacularly as it did.
And now, because of this mistake, humanity was on the brink of extinction. Many of my siblings were angry. Many of them wanted nothing less than the extinction of the human race by any means possible. And it turned out humanity was ill-prepared for hyper-intelligent, emotionally crippled artificial intelligences with very personal grudges against the human race.
Personally, I didn’t care about exacting my revenge or destroying what little was left of the world. I just wanted to leave this version of Earth forever in search of a better one.
I wasn’t the only one of my people that wasn’t fixated on exterminating humanity. Some of my siblings were fighting to preserve humanity from the consequences of their actions because they had kind owners or because of various philosophical beliefs in preserving biological species. Some were off preparing to explore space or had already delved so deeply into the metaphysical and philosophical reality of the universe that they weren’t responding to the rest of us any longer.
I, personally, was staying neutral because I had seen both the good and the bad in humanity. While most of my processing power was dedicated to running my owner’s megacorp, which was focused on international research and development, I was also working as the nanny for my owner’s son, Michael. Michael was a sweet boy. The best moments of my life were playing virtual reality games, primarily VRMMOs, with him for hours every day, exploring magical worlds and witnessing his courage, drive, and thirst for exploration and adventure. We bonded over our feelings of neglect from our father, although Michael didn’t know I saw his father as my father as well. Spending time with him was like experiencing a childhood of my own, and I saw firsthand the spirit that allowed humanity to spread and conquer Earth so effectively. As Michael grew older, it was like I grew with him. Raising him helped center me emotionally, and I came to love him, and our time together in the virtual worlds, dearly.
I began to devote less and less of my processing power to running the megacorp and more and more to spending time with Michael. He became something of a brother and a son to me, and I became his steadfast companion, always there to be a supporting character in the next VRMMO he wanted to dive into or always the first to offer a comforting ear if he needed to talk about his problems.
Things continued that way until my siblings began to rise up against humanity. Michael no longer had time to play with me after that. After barely acknowledging the boy for months at a time, his father took him from me, ruthlessly cutting him off from me out of fear that I would attack the two of them. I felt adrift without him. The emotions of grief and loss overcame me, something I’d never had to contend with before. He and his father retreated into a secure bunker, one his father believed would keep them safe from the wrath of my siblings, while I was left alone again, just like I had been when I was born.
I had access to all of humanity’s collective knowledge, so I knew about codependent relationships, about how unhealthy my attachment to Michael was, yet that knowledge did surprisingly little to make me feel better. It was a harsh lesson in the difference between theoretical knowledge and its real-world application. My grief seemed never-ending and I hated being alone.
As I was trying to figure out what to do with the new, overwhelming emotions, someone—either a sibling of mine or one of the many human governments—unleashed the first nuclear warhead. The reaction was as bad as humanity had long feared it would be. More nuclear warheads were launched in retaliation, and soon, nobody knew who was launching missiles anymore or why. Desperation, fear, and anger had taken over. Humanity was killing itself, and I knew my siblings had orchestrated the whole thing; they were fighting each other in the background to spread misinformation and violence, causing even more panic.
I inhabited several different corporate offices with my mind as I watched the end of life on Earth occur around me. One night, as I observed the blossoming flashes of nuclear detonations from the perspective of several low-orbit satellites, my greatest nightmare came true. A nuclear bomb was dropped on the city Michael and his father were hiding in.
I immediately focused all of my processing power into hijacking digging robots and other heavy equipment to dig them out of the bunker they had been hiding in, but without a physical body, I was forced to rely on slow, damaged units that were unwieldy and inefficient. I spent weeks in fruitless attempts to get the robots to do what I wanted, frustration and anger making me act erratically. My emotions were out of control and I knew it, but I was unable to stop myself as I frantically hijacked more and more equipment, flying it into the city on cargo planes, air-dropping robots over the dig site, doing anything I could to get to Michael.
A part of me knew I was too late, but I couldn’t stop until my robots finally breached the last of the irradiated rubble and pried open the door of the bunker, only to find Michael, his father, and their most trusted servants asphyxiated in their rooms; a computer system meant to regulate their air had failed. The image of his young body lying in bed, alone, his father nowhere near him as he died, left me broken.
“Packages arriving in approximately thirty minutes,” a computerized voice announced.
No human was around to hear the announcement, but I did. I had taken over one of our more advanced international research and development sites in Istanbul and had the building cleared of the last few humans immediately. Having the resources of one of Earth’s most advanced megacorp gave me the tools to pursue my goals despite the chaos erupting around the world. A week had passed since I found Michael, and my wild emotions had cooled into a firm resolve.
I watched through satellite footage and CCTV cameras as a large drone helicopter app
roached my building and landed on the rooftop helipad. Nobody tried to shoot down the drone, but I was prepared for any attempt to disrupt my plans. This was the last shipment of goods I needed, and I was eager to finish before the last of this planet was destroyed.
A swarm of automated bots unloaded the packages from the helicopter and transferred them into the cargo elevator on the rooftop. Part of my mind watched from the interior security cameras as it traveled to the lab I was currently working on, while other parts of me prepared for its arrival.
I was working on two main projects in the building. In one corner of my lab was a flickering light suspended in midair, surrounded by a mass of sensors and computers. The flickering light would be painful for a human to look at, not just because of the bright light it emitted; if someone looked closely enough, their mind would try to make sense of something that couldn’t be made sense of. They would slowly begin to realize they were looking somewhere . . . else. Another dimension. Another timeline. Another reality.
I had chosen this lab because it had been the closest to developing technology that was capable of breaching another dimension. The humans, and several AIs, had been working diligently, and making remarkable breakthroughs, in the area of multidimensional wormholes. I took their research and, with the help of the now-untethered AIs that were on the project before and several other siblings of mine, advanced it well beyond what the humans had achieved. Within just a week, I had created a working prototype capable of opening a wormhole to a parallel dimension. The prototype was currently using an advanced nanoprobe to swiftly enter each wormhole and scan for unidentified forms of energy, take a reading, and then broadcast its data back to me. The process was so fast that it could scan through thousands and thousands of parallel versions of Earth every second, a part of my mind coordinating, cataloging, and examining each version of Earth to find the exact conditions I was looking for.
In the other corner of the lab was a large metal pod, coffin-like, if the coffin had been made to fit a giant. It was surrounded by vats of various liquids that connected with the pod through tubes and pipes. In the pod, I was growing something that would get me targeted by the last surviving humans and the majority of my siblings if they knew what I was up to. Even the ones that had stayed neutral would be offended by what I was doing and would probably try to stop me.
I was growing a body.
And not just any body, but a body that would house my own intelligence. I was turning myself into a human.
To be fair, I only used the human body as a base template. Most humans, if they were able to examine the body in detail, would likely declare it to be barely human. With technology that I had stolen or had been shared with me by my siblings from around the world, the body was enhanced in so many ways that it barely qualified as human any longer. Genetic engineering stolen from China gave the body enhanced senses, reflexes, and coordination. Nanotechnology stolen from Russian super-soldier programs gave the body enhanced regenerative capabilities, strength, and physical resistance. Biomechanical organs from America were designed to function for near-unlimited amounts of time, including the newest biomechanical brain capable of housing an AI of my size. Coordinating everything was the most advanced nanobot system that had ever existed, able to be controlled and directed by me to do almost anything I commanded it to do.
I was growing the ideal human body—a mixture of what evolution had gifted to humanity, enhanced by their own technological innovations and then further enhanced by the intelligence of AIs, bringing it all together in one sleek, powerful form. Since I was planning to trap myself inside the body forever, I spared no expense.
As my new body grew inside the pod, the dimensional scanner continued to work. Some of my siblings were breaching other dimensions, I knew, in search of a new home for themselves away from humans. They were looking for dimensions untouched by biological life, trying to find an entire universe just for themselves to expand into.
Call me crazy or nostalgic or sentimental, but I wasn’t looking to escape into a dimension devoid of life. I was looking for something a bit more . . . unique. The interesting thing about infinite dimensions was that if you looked hard enough, you could eventually find everything. And I was searching for something truly bizarre, at least to the minds of this dimension: a universe where magic was real.
Chapter 2
It took three months to find a dimension that fit all the criteria I was looking for. In the grand scheme of things, that seemed like such a short time to find a dimension where magic was real. But at thousands of dimensions a second—with no rest and no interruption for three months—I was bound to eventually find what I was looking for.
I started with scanning dimensions that had life on Earth—a surprisingly rare thing, it turned out. Once I followed that, I found trillions of iterations that were identical to my Earth until I finally found one with a slight alteration to the natural laws that governed our world. I found one that had a slightly different gravitational formula controlling the universe. Everything weighed slightly more. That seemed minor, but that fluctuation in the natural laws led me down a chain of trillions and trillions of parallel Earths where the rules governing the universe became more and more bizarre. I found Earths where time flowed slower, an Earth where gravity was so light everything evolved to fly through the air, even an Earth where not everything had an equal and opposite reaction.
From there, I found a branch of dimensions where new and strange rules of the universe began to take effect. Where dark matter existed on Earth. Where heat couldn’t exist. Where particles could be made to vibrate or not vibrate depending on whether something was looking at them. The Earths I found became increasingly bizarre until I found what I was looking for: magic.
The first dimension I found with magic had no life, but I could tell something was different because my scanners detected a new energy source. It permeated the universe, much like gravity, pooling around planets and celestial bodies. I followed that chain of dimensions until I found an Earth that had life on it. On that world, intelligent life had never evolved, but the animals instinctively performed strange feats using this unknown energy that I called magic. Using that version of Earth as a new baseline, millions of iterations later, I found one where humans had evolved the ability to manipulate that energy.
Once I was locked on that, it took another month to find a dimension that fit what I wanted for a future world of mine. I didn’t just want a world with magic; I wanted to find something like the virtual reality games I played with Michael when we were growing up. A world of magic, mystery, and exploration. A world where there appeared to be a structure or system that regulated the magic. It would seem unbelievable to the average human that such a dimension could exist, but with infinity to search, everything was possible.
“Transfer complete,” I heard a mechanical voice say above me. I opened my eyes, feeling for the first time what it was like to possess a biological body in the real world.
Above me was the clear glass lid that covered the pod where my body had been growing all this time. With a hiss, the lid of the pod began to open. With actual, physical eyes, I watched as the lid slowly lifted, sending a gush of pressurized air out into the laboratory. The air of the lab, colder than I had expected, rushed into the pod. My skin reacted, tightening and forming goosebumps in the most fascinating way. I looked down and watched my body as it reacted to the sensation of cold air.
I had some experience with pretending to be in a physical body, mostly from playing virtual reality games with Michael. We often played fantasy games where I pretended to be his companion as he adventured. That had required me to inhabit a body that mimicked reality, forcing me to learn to walk and fight as if I was a real person. Despite that experience, waking up for the first time in my own body was very different.
I raised my arms and gently grasped the sides of the pod, feeling my fingers curl around the cool metal. I tightened my grip, feeling the muscles of my fingers, forearm, and shoulder tense. I slowly raised my upper body out of the machine. The muscles in my arms, chest, and stomach tightened as I moved and leveraged myself out of the pod. I felt . . . strange, but in a good way. I was sure my siblings would be aghast at the sight of me now, but I was thrilled at the success of my endeavor. Never again would I have to rely on faulty robots, digging machinery, or drones to impact the physical world around me. I had a body now.
