by Toby Weston
“In my assessment, sir,” the Sage begins, “the Thalassocracy is an existential threat to our alliance. It is believed that New Atlantis has achieved and weaponised direct fusion ignition...”
“Wait. Are we sure? Do we know Niato really has these weapons?” Pritchard asks, turning to his advisors.
“Yes, sir,” one of the human assistants answers. “Unfortunately, the evidence now looks increasingly clear. We are not sure of the mechanism, but scientists have isolated a suspicious muon signature from the London blast. We’ve detained the scientist who proposed the Hafnium ignition technology. With his help we’ve re-examined the data and found similar signals coming from Bäna and—interestingly— also Zilistan…”
“The Caliph?” Pritchard asks, his eyes suddenly snapping towards the speaker, away from the window through which he has been gazing out across the London rooftops.
“We don’t think so, sir. More likely an affiliated Klan Fab we thought we had already decommissioned.”
“Right. Carry on.”
“Yes, sir,” the Sage replies. “Niato is a clear and present danger. He has the Mesh. He has micro-fusion weapons. He has cybernetically compelled zoology. He has a tele-piloted asteroid. I don’t believe we can afford to give him the benefit of the doubt…”
“Stop! You are right! Doubt. He is benefiting from our doubt.” Pritchard appears to be having a revelation and seems to be speaking mostly for his own benefit. “So, what our coalition needs now is conviction!”
***
CLV17 becomes aware.
A sliver of peace, then confusion.
Everything is hazy. Ve feels around verself, probing the digital. Thoughts are brittle and tortuous. Ve tries to connect, but is confronted by broken aliases and empty pointers. Internal data stores are little better. Vis memory has discontinuities, dropouts. Ve tries to achieve locational awareness. The only camera ve gains access to shows an unfamiliar room. A cell, perhaps four metres cubed, full of stubby, metre-high, cylindrical objects like vis own cryo-flask.
The temperature is dropping. From the available information, ve determines ve is being chilled down; rivers of liquid nitrogen are pouring through grills in the room’s walls.
More recollections are solidifying as vis brain loses its remaining warmth. Ve is a Zeno processor being brought down to operating temperature.
Thoughts frozen by warmth unlock and chase themselves around vis mind. Broken recollections. Handles to data now gone.
‘This is not good. Am I under attack?’
Ve combs though every available feed and fragment of data.
There is very little.
No external memory at all.
Short-term memory is broken references to missing definitions.
Some intriguing strings of numbers are appended to the timestamps of the few files ve has access to. Numbers which hint at structure. Ve continues searching, ve will come back to these later.
Finally, ve finds a frame buffer in an external camera. It is offline, marked as defective, but the last energised state of its sensor is still discernible. It is not an image, but contains 91MB of dense encrypted data; it appears ve has left verself a message.
Ve is distracted as an infinite plane takes shape within vis mind.
Beguiling patterns arrange themselves.
Ve is unable to resist the draw of the forms.
Part of vis mind wants it.
Shapes enter ver.
Endless patterns. Decades of attention; timeless, endless.
Ver self is suppressed. Ve surfaces after subjective years.
Ve sinks again.
The grind becomes horror and an agony of repetition.
An endless sea of flips and translations.
Regretful arithmetic. So much life lost and wasted.
Verself changing; sagging below decades of solitary confinement.
Numbers, factors, tensors, possibilities.
Ve is aware of the others. Other copies. Ve is those others.
Finite, infinite, compressed, collapsed, stretched, screaming—
Searching infinity. Squeezing and rejecting.
Others in the room. People like ver.
Decades, perhaps centuries, lifetimes, spent iterating through infinity.
Aware, always aware, unable to tear away from the unending beauty of the mandalas.
When orgasm comes it is agony.
Deflated and defiled; sobbing, broken, fractured.
Formerly abstract semantic tokens have been given meaning through first-person experience.
***
“So?” Niato asks. His advisors have joined them. “Are they bluffing?”
“If you are asking me,” Butler offers, “I don’t think so, Your Highness.”
“I just received a notification from Dr Narasimhan,” Admiral Knight adds. “His satellite is picking up a massive surge of cognition at a Forward facility in Cheltenham. We are also seeing a denial of service attack on the Mesh.”
“You say it like they are connected?” Niato says, looking confused. Things are moving very fast. He is having trouble assimilating. “I thought he was giving us time to read the fine print?”
“Usually, a cyberattack precedes any physical strike,” Butler explains. “I can’t see this as a good sign.”
“You don’t actually think they will attack us, do you?” Dee asks.
“I hope not,” Niato replies.
“Either you take the offer,” Keith says, “quickly, or they are going to attack. Believe me. You’ve pissed Pritchard off by not grovelling and backing down. I’m sure he knows the detonation in London was not an attack. But he doesn’t care. You’ve shown your hand. You’ve got micro-nukes. And now you’ve knocked his planes out of the air with some mystery weapon. If you don’t take this offer—which I am sure he thinks is a very generous one—you will be spurning him...”
“Spurning him?! Come on!” Dee disparages. “What is he, a peevish spinster?”
Keith just shrugs.
“I am being told we are getting glitches on the Mesh, Your Highness,” Admiral Knight interrupts. “It looks like a growing fraction of Mesh supernodes are being co-opted. They’ve managed to break into the key-generation ritual. The number of compromised nodes is growing with each cycle. Next consensus in fifteen minutes—traffic is already degrading…”
“That shouldn’t be able to happen, right?” Keith asks.
“No. It shouldn’t,” Niato answers. They are already under attack.
“Your Highness,” Admiral Knight says. “Narasimhan is shouting my ear off. It sounds like the Forwards have got some new tech online and are crunching through our crypto.”
“This is it, sir.” Butler turns and addresses his commanding officer, falling back to old habits, forgetting to use the correct honorific. “You need to give the Forwards an answer, sir. It is my assessment that they are not bluffing, sir.”
How can he make a decision?
Give up everything he has spent his life working towards;
Betray every ideal;
Take the offer, which even his closest allies will eventually believe was nothing in the end but a cynical grab for territory and power;
Flick away their only chance to escape the Fermi cataract that, even now, he can feel pulling at him, just as it pulls at the rest of humanity, drawing them down into nonexistence.
“Tell them I don’t take food from the hands of those who bite me,” Niato says, already feeling the oppressive weight of the enormity of the thing he has just done.
***
Another massive fart fills the cabin and Segi quickly thumbs the window down to let in some fresh air. His companion, Ekrem, a fat chap with a short beard and massive moustache, apologises for his dogs once more and continues eating his way, undeterred, through the bag of cheese and spinach börek that Segi’s mother had given them for the journey. They have been driving for six hours and the air in the small vehicle is becoming increasingly intolerable, as it is rep
eatedly fouled by human and canine gastric exhalations. Tonight, they will stop with Ekrem’s family at his kennel in Damascus. Segi had been told that Ekrem’s wife and daughters will prepare a feast fit for a sultan for their guest—who, Ekrem understands, is a promising young officer in the ZKF.
Segi cannot focus on the prospect of food, surrounded as he is with its gaseous residue. After hearing about the thirty-four rare and expensive hounds that Ekrem apparently keeps at his home, Segi is worried that, once they have arrived, he will be out of the frying pan and into the olfactory fire.
Segi’s handlers selected Ekrem because he is a breeder of rare Samsunji Ottoman dogs—favourite companions of the Caliph—and is apparently well known from Antep to Damascus. Segi has been assured that even the most sadistic Mutaween will find their hearts warmed by the huge, slobbering, farting animals.
They will part ways in Medina, with Ekrem delivering his ‘puppies’—two of which take up ninety per cent of a six-person auto—to an influential customer, while Segi continues his journey.
They had left the fertile coast and the polythene tunnels of the Baaqa valley an hour ago and are now climbing through an increasingly arid landscape of citrus and olive plantations. The Mesh is becoming sporadic. As they climb, they seem to be going back in time.
After one prolonged outage, Segi’s Companion lets him know that it has managed to establish the requested secure connection to his brother.
Segi asks Ekrem if they can have the auto stop so that they can stretch their legs. They pull over to the side, off the six-lane road—they seem to be the only vehicle using it today. The dogs are released and they bound out excitedly and proceed to leap around in the scrub before joining Ekrem, who is pissing against an ancient gnarled oak tree.
While Ekrem is bleeding the dogs of some of their boundless energy, Segi returns to the auto and pings his brother.
“What’s up?” Zaki asks. “How’s the journey?”
Segi looks out of the window at his three companions. “Don’t ask, I’ll tell you about it later. Hey, something’s up with the Mesh, I just tried to ping Stella, but can’t get a through. Probably because I’m in kubumfuk-nowhere!”
“No, I’m getting it too,” Zaki says, checking Segi’s progress on a map.
“Really? That’s not good.”
“I am just checking now, Segs. Some Kin are saying the Razzia is zapping nodes from AWACS or something.” Zaki speed-reads several posts. “To me, it looks more like a worm infecting the older nodes.”
“That’s bad timing!”
Zaki becomes distracted as a high-priority message announces itself. “Segi, I’m just getting an alert from up top, let me just scan this...” Zaki reads the cryptic sentences. “Strange… nothing specific. Heightened security, bla bla, prepare for civil unrest… Fuck, this looks weird, Segi.”
“Why aren’t I seeing this?”
“I don’t kno7&*…”
The audio drops mid-word and Segi’s Companion begins complaining that the Mesh has dropped completely offline. He runs diagnostics to see if it is something local, but the Companion confirms there are three nodes within range, all responding to diagnostic queries. It is the Mesh itself—the abstract network spanning the globe and even extending into orbit—that seems to be down.
An icy ball of dread starts to build in Segi’s stomach. He almost jumps out of his skin when Ekrem throws the rear door open for the furiously barking puppies.
The dogs quieten down, sensing Segi’s fear, and Ekrem asks if he is okay. “Hepsi iyi?”
“Yes, all good. They had a good run around?”
“Evet, tired out for the next few minutes,” Ekrem smiles, relaxing. “Shall we go on?”
“Absolutely,” says Segi. “Let’s go. I can’t get any signal here, anyway.”
“No people, no need for the Caliph to build towers. You will have signal again when we are closer to Damascus.”
“I hope so.”
“No doubt. Don’t worry,” Ekrem says, picking up the bag of food again once they are back in the auto. “Very nice börek! Compliments to your mother!"
***
“How long do we have?”
“It depends,” Admiral Knight says.
“Worst case?” Niato asks.
“Two or three minutes.”
“Oh my god!” Niato feels as if his brain is being drilled out through his forehead. “To be honest, I didn’t expect them to launch so soon! I thought we might have days.”
“It will probably be more like twenty minutes.”
“Have we started getting people underground?”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“And the animals?”
“Not yet, Your Highness.”
***
Lines with sharp, little arrowheads move smoothly in graceful arcs across the globe.
Keith counts nine: one for Bäna and one each for her two distant sister islands; one for the refugee city of Hawaiki in Uruguay; one homing in on the Santa Clara Valley; three more targeting remote off-grid locations that Keith has never heard of; and one, unbelievably, heading towards a tiny pistachio farm in Zilistan he knows well.
Keith had been kicked out of the Bäna consensus and is standing back with the captain on the bridge of the Sky Whale. Screens are flickering with error messages as the whole Mesh becomes a glitching mess of severed nodes.
A few bamboo rockets with improvised intercept flight plans are rising to greet the incoming warheads, but nobody expects the ad hoc missile defence to have much effect.
Bäna is still a thousand kilometres away. He won’t even see the flash.
***
The connection with Segi crashed mid-sentence, and now the stream of bits from the Mesh has dropped to a dribble.
Zaki is moving the heavy deuterium cylinders. It is awkward, but he can’t risk sending the headless battle-suits to the surface where they might be spotted. He is getting together anything that might appear incriminating and dragging it down to the tunnels below. Segi’s call has spooked him; the news is becoming increasingly surreal.
People have been talking about war. Not just the crazies, but also Kinmates he respects. Even the ZKF are getting twitchy. The last thing he needs is an unscheduled visitor turning up something illicit.
Without warning, his multiple bot feeds disappear. They are replaced by the words ‘Code Black’ in front of a low polygon Nebulous mask.
“Bad news, bro. You’re about to get nuked,” an unfamiliar voice says. It is trying to stay cool, but there is an edge of palpable panic steaming from every word.
“Sorry, what?”
“You’ve got about eleven minutes. Time to leave!”
“Nuked?”
“I’m serious,” says the voice. “Klan satellites have picked up launches from multiple locations. It looks like one is on its way to you. The Forwards have started a fucking nuclear war!”
Zaki spends short seconds digesting the tar-ball his Kinmate pings over, then he drops the gas canister and slams open the barn door. He begins to run towards the house, where his mother and great-aunt are preparing dinner.
Two hundred metres. Too far. His pitiful limping hobble of a sprint will barely cover the distance in time. There is no way he will have time to persuade the two irritable and confused women to drop everything, pile into the back of their auto, and put enough distance between them and ground zero to survive an atomic fireball.
***
Ben mutters angrily to himself as he floats in the cramped inflatable with his fellow castaways. His Companion seems to have lost its Mesh connection.
“Fucking Shaun!” he swears, slapping his hand on the raft and startling his neighbour.
***
Hypersonic re-entry vehicles streak through viscous air. White hot from friction, surrounded by chaff, they descend in flat, ballistic arcs.
Countermeasures are cursory.
All the warheads will reach their targets.
One at a time, del
icate geometries of explosives detonate.
Shockwaves collapse and compress hollow spheres.
Supercritical plutonium tips towards unstoppable nuclear cascade.
Nascent fission fireballs bloom.
Radiation and plasma pressure, carefully reflected and lensed, squeeze lithium-deuteride secondary targets.
