Singularity's Children Box Set

by Toby Weston

  Knight nodded, accepting the frustrating reality of the situation.

  “Benedict!” Niato said suddenly. “How about some good news?”

  Admiral Butler looked startled. “Well, let’s see…” He was not used to being looked to as a good-news sort of guy. “The operation with NEO_73920 is on track. Bogdanova is five years away from her final burn. We’ve passed the two-hundredth OLV launch over this past month. Thirty tons of cargo have migrated via low-energy transfer orbits and are waiting at L5. In the next few months, these packages will begin a retrograde burn to intercept NEO_73920 on its next orbit.”

  “Are the Forwards getting suspicious about our launches?” Niato asked.

  “We are reasonably sure this is all under the radar,” replied Butler. “Until you announced Cat’s Cradle last year, the Forwards had been too preoccupied with consolidating power to even think about Space. Against the background of MeshNode launches and OLV tests, we are reasonably sure nobody suspects we are going to intercept the asteroid before it approaches Earth.”

  “Perfect. Thank you, Benedict.” The King turned to the two Kinmates. “I know Nebulous is scheduled to give a full update on Cat’s Cradle next month, but do you have anything to mention today?”

  They exchanged a glance and then the taller of the anonymous pair replied. “Not really, Your Highness. Everything is on track. The tower is pushing past three thousand metres and we have tested as much dynamic flexing as possible without the next ring of tethers. As you mentioned, we’ll have more data then and I will give a full update next month.”

  “Okay, thanks, that’s fine. So, moving onto any other business…”

  “Sorry, Your Highness,” the other Kinmate began. “We are not done, and unfortunately it’s not all good news.” The others around the table stared at him. “Commander Wilson just came back from our Spain Fab site. It’s not good. In Commander Wilson’s own words, the hull looks like a melted lunch box. Something must have gone wrong with the printhead calibration.”

  Niato looked crestfallen.

  Long ago, while fighting the fight—eating cold beans out of tins; huddling in freezing shipping containers; drinking rum and coconut juice on deserted beaches, sitting around driftwood fires, while the Milky Way wheeled overhead; blasting through spray-flecked bow waves, firing CS gas onto the decks of towering belligerent whalers—Niato and his fellow terrorists had shaped The Plan with the audacity of those who knew that nothing they discussed would ever come to pass.

  While Blue’s cell had splintered, and reformed, factions becoming fractions; rigid principles coagulating from the inspissated dregs of ideologies; the bitterest disagreements had always been about the curse of technology. All agreed it enabled desecration and oppression at an almost inconceivable scale. But others insisted it would be their salvation, too.

  At the moment, the technological pessimists seemed to be winning the argument. The world was on track to become a gigantic gulag, with the fucking and suffering of its inmates providing entertainment for the dead eyes of their nihilistic guards. Citizens’ rights were a laughable naïvety. Atlantis was a quaint anomaly, a tourist attraction, a toothless amusement park for techno-utopian idealists.

  Benevolent patriarchy will always become oppressive kleptocracy. Only citizens with the power to defend themselves—or, at least, the means to run away—will resist the destructive tendencies. The right to bear firearms might have once provided the means, but in a world of mechOids, railguns and drone swarms, a rifle wasn’t going to intimidate anybody.

  The hulls were Atlantis’ first experiment at dealing real power back to the people. They would enable it to build a distributed capability which would shift away from oligarchies and preservatism, to audacious visions of a better tomorrow.

  The technology they contained was bleeding edge and the manufacturing processes still experimental. Losing even one was crushing, because the failure cast doubt on the entire enterprise.

  “On the positive side, London and Latakia are on track. Printing should finish in another six months at both sites,” the shorter, blurry-faced N-Kin continued, trying to paper over the bad news. “Integration of life support and avionics will be completed by the end of Q2 next year. Commander Wilson will visit the sites with Hafnium Torches for motor testing...”

  “I know we’ve discussed this before…” Butler interrupted apologetically.

  “Not again! I know what you are going to say,” Narasimhan scowled. “And yes, we have discussed this far too many times before already. You are very pig headed. You bring it up at each and every meeting without fail! We need to test. I cannot guarantee that everything will work without testing. Look, we already have problems. Won’t you listen to me and accept my expert opinion?”

  Several of the seated experts and executive officers looked pleadingly at Niato, hoping he would intervene and prevent this week’s flare-up. However, he was still staring into the distance, considering how this failure might change their plans.

  Butler sighed and continued, his voice placating and level. “Doctor, I know you think I am singling out you and your colleagues for victimisation. But again, let me assure you, I am only concerned with our security. The Torches are our most protected assets. I cannot allow myself to miss any opportunity to plead for level heads here. I know you are keen to test, but why do we need to send them halfway around the world into enemy territory? Why can’t we just run another round of tests here?”

  “Because,” Narasimhan began, irritation and animosity clinging to his words, “we are building these experiments in the real world. They are almost completely untested. Quality control is entirely out of my hands! The things might not even work! I don’t want to find out just before—or worse, just after—we launch them!”

  “He’s right, Benedict,” Knight said. “This is a known and accepted risk. The H-Torches and the hulls need to be tested together. We can only do that in the field. This Keith Wilson, he’s a good soldier, and the Torches all have Zeno processors programmed for radical protection of privacy. They are ready to self-destruct at the slightest hint of trouble...”

  “Paranoid, autonomous, nuclear armed… forgive me, but you are doing very little to reassure me here!” Butler said dryly.

  “Okay, gentlemen!” Niato banged the flat of his palm on the desk gently, but with enough force to silence the discussion. “The plan remains. We need to test. Needless to say, please make sure everybody does everything in their power to avoid an incident.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” the Admiral replied with a sharp salute.

  “Anything else? No? Okay, then I will dash.”

  Chapter 16 – The Fifth Force

  “Things were made of stuff.” This seemed like a reasonable assumption.

  Even intangible things like the wind and light would be tiny bits of stuff moving quickly.

  It followed that the sun and the moon were anchored to big pieces of transparent stuff; crystal shells curving across the heavens.

  It made sense, as long as you didn’t get too pedantic about the details—

  —but then Newton had come along with his theory of gravitation and showed that stuff was not enough. Maxwell backed him up. Light was a wave; there was no vacuum; an invisible ocean of luminiferous æther filled all spaces between stars and atoms. Intuition was in full retreat when Poincaré destroyed the neat concept of time with his theory of relativity.

  And all this was just the opening salvo. It was going to get much worse. For the foreseeable future, there would be no reprieve for the reeling scientists from affronts to their intuition.

  Quantum mechanics arrived like a bus full of hyperactive teenagers and proceeded to gibber unintelligibly at the scientific establishment, spewing science fiction nonsense about multiverses and the uniqueness of conscious observers. Everything was uncertain; reality resisted measurement, like a rebellious teen who refused to be pigeonholed.

  The smirking public delighted in the intellectual torment of their
academic betters. The priests of science were aware that their explanations made them sound like freshers on acid, so they disengaged from the dialogue and retreated into math, hunkering down and taking refuge behind ramparts of obscure notation.

  Yet, even the mathematical barricades were found to be shaky. Gödel proved you can either find all the truths, but accept there will inevitably be falsehoods mixed in with them, or insist on banishing all untruth, knowing you will end up missing some of what is true. Math was either provably false or incomplete—possibly both.

  It seemed the universe just didn’t like to be pinned down.

  It just kept getting worse. Quaint Euclidean ideas of a three-dimensional geometric world had been abandoned long ago in favour of a far less intuitive, four-dimensional space-time. Now, this was also in doubt. Forget the three dimensions of space, or the four of space-time, or the eleven of Stringtheorie. The universe, it seemed, was really a 2D membrane; volume was an illusion. We all lived in a holographic world projected from the surface of a giant black hole…

  It sounded like nonsense. The universe described by modern science was far too weird to be real. But, neither could the constant deluge of irrational raving be ignored; it simply produced far too much good tech.

  ***

  The Forwards had Zeno processors. The implications of this were still ricocheting through the halls of the National Statistics Office. Quantum cognition, along with the hafnium ignition technology, was touted by the King as proof that The Plan was working, Atlantis was pulling ahead. But, if the Forwards had started catching up, The Plan was in doubt—

  Niato stood at a wide, curving window, lost in apprehensive thought. He was staring out past Atlantis City far below, its concentric, glittering canals making it look like a giant bull’s eye. Beyond the land, a sweep of blue-mottled ocean, dotted with the shadows of drifting clouds, filled in the space below the sky.

  Apparently, as research for a future mission, Niato had asked Keith to join him for a chat with the head of the Atlantean Institute of Sciences. Keith was not thrilled at the prospect. He was already fully booked for the next six months with final testing of the Fab Hulls, and his history with Abhyuday didn’t help, either.

  Keith had found Niato in the unfinished lobby of the Cat’s Cradle. Sheets of plastic blew in empty frames and blocks and tools were spread about the floor. Above a delicate trestlework that would presumably soon support a glass roof, the tower was visible, growing out of the peak of the dormant volcano.

  Every minute or so, a pair of crab-like robots exited the lift carrying chunky, wedge-shaped tiles, and carried them upwards out of sight. Somewhere above, other tiles were being fitted onto the tower’s extending spitz. Each was grown from calcium carbonate honeycomb and was packed with intelligence. Piezoelectrics in the tiles allowed them to expand or contract minutely; working together, they could make the tower bend and flex like a huge, stiff, upraised trunk. As it grew, rearing up, teetering precariously towards the rarefied stratosphere, its prehensile articulation should allow it to compensate for messy atmospheric and seismological instability.

  Niato nodded a greeting and they walked together towards a row of lifts. A door to one slid open to greet them. The lift was new and smelt of plastic. Transparent protective film still covered its polished surfaces. Keith felt his heels raise as gravity diminished rapidly; presumably they were now dropping precariously towards the bowels of the volcano.

  “Abhyuday Narasimhan is a Hindu,” said Niato. “His results fit right in with his world view. I am not sure a Western scientist would have interpreted the data in the same way.”

  “I suppose,” Keith said. The dizziness reversed and, for a few seconds, it felt as if a monkey had jumped onto his back.

  They exited onto a bright corridor. A group of people passing in the other direction smiled and nodded, barely interrupting their relaxed conversation to greet their liege. There was no awkwardness. Keith supposed that, even before coming to Bäna, scientists had become accustomed to having mini kings holding their research purse strings. To them, Niato was just another bureaucrat.

  Once the group had passed, Niato continued. “Narasimhan was using a new gravity satellite to measure crust density, looking for precious metals.”

  “Prospecting for gold, he found the soul. That’s pretty ironic,” Keith said.

  “That’s how these things work, its karma. It moves in mysterious ways!” Niato slapped Keith on the back affectionately.

  “Mystic mumbo jumbo.”

  “Call it mysticism if you like,” said Niato. “Six thousand years ago, when these guys along the Indus started coming up with this stuff, there was no established science. There wasn’t even the concept of a concept! All they had were stories and the characters in them. That’s the only reason why they talk about so many gods. Just replace the word god with the word concept when you read the Vadas and it will suddenly make sense.”

  Keith pondered this as Niato continued. “What I find humbling is that those gurus worked out so much, that we are only just catching up with them. Incredible, isn’t it?”

  “I think you’re reading too much into it,” replied Keith. “Narasimhan is probably just slapping on the mysticism because he knows it makes you happy and he wants to ask for more money!”

  “He better not be. I kind of need this.”

  “Wanting something doesn’t make it real, Nick.”

  “Are you sure, Keith?”

  Keith rolled his eyes. “You want me here because I am a cynic, I get that. So, let’s see what Narasimhan says and I’ll be sure to let you know if I get religion.”

  They had arrived at an unmarked white door, similar to many others lining both sides of the corridor. Niato had been ‘recruiting’ scientists by the dozen, chasing down every barely plausible wild claim in case it might turn out to be the next big thing. If Narasimhan was imaging souls, Keith wondered what quackery was going on behind the other doors.

  Niato knocked. Algorithms compared his iris, facial geometry and micro-gestures. After recognising the King, the door’s latch clicked. Niato pushed the door open and held it for Keith.

  Dr Abhyuday Narasimhan was hunched over a keyboard, typing. He was entering cramped green text into one tiny window that covered a minute fraction of the available surface that his massive, top-of-the-range screen had to offer. A pair of fancy Spex protruded, ignored and half buried, from under a leaning stack of paper.

  The room smelt of human. A long-haired, dreadlocked white guy sat at a small bench across the room. He turned to look as they entered. His left hand was full of wires, while his right fiddled with the knobs on an old, analogue oscilloscope.

  “Hello, doctor, sorry to disturb your work,” Niato said to the doctor, then nodded to his assistant.

  Narasimhan started at the King’s words.

  “Yes. Come in. Interesting. Just one second. Let me finish this…” he said without turning away from his keyboard.

  Keith saw the doctor’s attention slip back down into the strange equations that lurked beneath the world.

  They waited. Keith looked quizzically at the guy with the dreadlocks, which were tied back in a pony tail, but he just shrugged. At least two minutes later, Niato tried again.

  “Doctor, could we have just a few minutes of your time?”

  The thin Indian gentleman, who wore an academic’s obligatory corduroy jacket, looked up for the first time. He took in his visitors. Niato, with his impeccably tailored cotton shirt and signature flowing brown herringbone trousers, and Keith, with his khaki short-sleeved shirt stretched across his chest. At the sight of Keith, the frown of slight irritation was replaced by a flash of anger, which lingered.

  “Yes, of course. How can I help today?” Narasimhan replied coldly.

  “Just a chat, really. How are things coming along? Perhaps you could give Keith here a brief overview and update?”

  Abhyuday caught himself, but only after snorting derisively at the very idea.

/>   Keith hadn’t seen the man since they had become briefly acquainted during the scientist’s recruitment/kidnapping. The last time they’d met was when Keith had released him from the boot of an auto.

  Niato continued. “It is important that he understands the fundamentals.”

  The doctor looked longingly at his code on the computer screen, then visibly slumped. “I am in the middle of something right now. I will keep this brief, okay?”

  “Fine by me,” said Keith.

  Dr Narasimhan was clearly not happy, but he indicated two vacant chairs for his visitors. Keith had to move a plate covered in crumbs, cigarette ash and what looked like egg yolk, before he could sit.

  “Are you familiar with the concepts of circular entanglement and Shannon entropies?” Narasimhan asked, somewhat provocatively.