Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

  All she’d done, she’d done to reach Boston undetected. She had weapons here, a plan, a place to stand and a lever long enough to move the world. But worlds were big things, heavy, round, and once they started to move, they rolled with crushing force and did not stop no matter how many bodies lay across their path.

  In two thousand miles of road her lungs had not yet filled. But if she left now, she really would be running away.

  She got off the train at Back Bay, hat down, hood up, ears aching under metal hoops, and walked toward Boston Common and the future.

  2

  NONE OF VIV’S fitful dreams prepared her for seeing Magda Lopez grown and married, reading a romance novel in line for the Clover food truck on Boston Common.

  Thin rays of silver graced Magda’s dark hair. There was more of her than there had been in school, which was healthy considering that back in school she’d run ten miles every morning before eight, and she wore a thin gold ring these days. But she thumbed her place in her book just like she used to—she hated folding pages but could never keep track of a proper bookmark—and when she looked up to search the Common’s crowds her eyes were just the same, breathtakingly brown and kind.

  They had been freshman-year roommates, one of the few pairs that stuck. They’d seemed destined for disaster at first, Magda a lean coltish track star from Texas, Viv faking sophistication far too well thanks to her parents’ coaching and her own relief to be a continent away from them at last.

  Magda had left a boyfriend behind. For the first week she spent an hour on the phone with him each night, and on Thursday of the second week Viv came home tired from studying and tipsy from wine after studying to find Magda lying still and staring up at the ceiling. Her eyes glittered open and her breath was deep and forced. Viv climbed into her own bed, rolled onto her side, and turned out the light. As the dark closed in Magda let herself cry again. Viv listened, and wondered what she was supposed to do, and thought of Merlin in The Once and Future King, and felt like a foolish girl a long way from home.

  When Magda trailed off but had not yet gone to sleep Viv sat up in her pajamas and said, “Hey” quietly. You didn’t throw a life preserver at the person drowning, but next to them. And Magda drew a ragged breath and said, “Hey” back.

  Viv took a bottle of wine from underneath her bed, unscrewed the top, poured the wine into paper cups, and asked, “Do you know how to pick a lock?”

  “No.” But she was sitting up at least, with a weak smile behind the thicket of her hair.

  “Do you want to learn?”

  She had, and then she’d played Viv a song from Into the Woods, and Viv slept through her quiz the next day but didn’t care.

  That was how it started.

  And now, after years and countless miles of road, Viv held her breath as Magda searched the Common crowd for her, and wanted more than anything to be seen, for Magda’s eyes to widen and for her to wave and call Viv’s name across the grass, even though the microphones in the trees and the robot dogs on patrol would hear her. Viv needed Magda that much, and she had not let herself know until this moment. When Magda paused on her, considered her face, then looked away without a blink of recognition, Viv thought, Good, the disguise was working, but she felt like she’d taken a wrong step on false ground and fallen through.

  Hands clenched around her tourist map, she made her way to Magda.

  Viv had never met her old friend’s kid; Victor was born right before the Collapse, when Viv’s life turned the bad kind of interesting, so he’d be two now. She wouldn’t meet him on this visit. Magda wouldn’t take her home, too dangerous. Helping Viv even this much risked dragging in her husband, and her son. But Magda had come, just like she’d promised in the coded message she’d sent six months ago after Viv looped her in on the plan.

  She couldn’t turn Viv down.

  Viv had never deserved her friends.

  Of all the mean and lousy things the weasels on Viv’s heels had forced her to do, by far the hardest was to tap Magda on the shoulder, watch her turn, watch her eyes light up when she saw past makeup and earrings and cap—to do all that, and not embrace her.

  She wanted more than to hug her friend. She wanted, though she’d never admit it, to be hugged herself, held and anchored so the wind could never blow her away, even if her fortunes, her fame, the Mountain View house, her companies, had all been torn from her, leaving her a runaway with a rucksack, a painted face, absurd earrings. A woman with fake papers in a country that didn’t used to care so much about that sort of thing.

  She wanted to be human in her old friend’s arms.

  But to be human was to be weak, and she couldn’t allow that now, here, as robot dogs wandered past sniffing the Common for bombs.

  She shoved her map between them, open, and her grip was so tight she ripped it at the corner. “Excuse me.” Her voice shook. “I’m sorry, I’m lost. I’m trying to get to Faneuil Hall?” She mispronounced it like a tourist, and tried to look Magda in the eye but had to look away again fast, as if she’d stared into the sun. “Where am I?”

  “Right here.” Magda kept her voice almost casual. She tried to take the map and for a second Viv did not let it go and they were touching through the tense paper. Viv forced her fingers to part. “Here, see, you just go up this road—it’s not straight, exactly, nothing really is here—” Another laugh, also forced. “—until you get to a plaza with a blocky concrete building, then down these steps.” A pause. Tongue touched lip. Eyes darted up, away. “Are you here for long?”

  “Just the day.” They’d arranged the code phrase in advance. I’m not being followed, as far as I know.

  “If you have time—there are a few other places you should see.”

  A robot dog sniffed Viv’s ankle and moved along. Magda’s breath hooked, but she did not look down. She drew a pen from behind her ear and circled the Pru, the library, other landmarks, then folded Viv’s torn map and passed it back. When Viv forced herself to thank Magda and turn away she found the map’s folds held a key, and one of the circled landmarks was not a landmark at all.

  * * *

  PEOPLE VIV’S AND Magda’s age still called this kind of place an Airbnb even though that site rebranded after the murders. Same sort of thing, though, a nice one-bedroom night-by-night rental in Beacon Hill with a skylight above the bed and that bright early autumn Boston blue above. Champagne chilled in the fridge, decent stuff, actual AOP, rare these days with the climate; a shopping bag on the kitchen counter held a packet of fake rose petals, scented candles, and, separately wrapped, a few pieces of leather Viv didn’t examine closely. A Happy Anniversary card. A ruse—wasn’t it? Magda’s wedding had been in summer, though Viv couldn’t remember precise dates anymore without her screens.

  Magda arrived in late afternoon, and as the door shut behind her Viv found herself enveloped.

  She couldn’t breathe. Some of that was the hug—Magda had been working out—but wetness welled in her eyes and nose and a hot fist caught her windpipe. She held her like that long-gone life preserver. Oh, god, she was losing it. And if she lost it here, if all the disintegration came over her at once, she’d never pull herself back together for tonight.

  “Viv.” Magda kept repeating her name, a murmur like waves washing the North Carolina beach where Viv had lain exhausted after her swim ashore, sprawled in flotsam beside the sack that held her braid and the remnants of her life. In a way Magda’s voice was that surf. In a way Viv had only now made landfall. “I’ve been so worried, Viv, they said maybe suicide”—good, she’d hoped for that—“and I knew you wouldn’t, I knew the plan, but, Viv, Jesus, you’re alive, I can’t believe it, and—your hair.”

  Magda pulled away at that, hand on the back of Viv’s skull, and Viv grinned and wiped her own nose on her sleeve like, what, I have a cold. She turned the convulsions in her gut and lungs into something someone charitable might call a laugh, and lied, “I like it better this way.” There was so much she wanted to say about how
grateful she was, about what a risk Magda was taking, but those words were too big to speak. “Thank you,” she said, and Magda’s look when she said that, her shock that Viv might feel she had to say it, almost broke Viv’s last thread of composure. But Viv had been through too much to take friendship or faith for granted.

  For a while neither of them moved. They didn’t mention the stain Viv’s tears left on Magda’s shirt.

  “Oh! That reminds me.” Though Viv hadn’t said anything. Magda reached into her purse and removed a small package wrapped in striped paper with a red bow. “It’s not much, but happy birthday.”

  Viv blinked down at the package, then up at Magda, then down again. “Magda—I’m not—I can’t—” She didn’t trust herself to finish the sentence.

  “I know, you’re traveling.” She didn’t say on the run. “So it’s light. Go on, open it.”

  She slipped a thumb under the seam and popped the tape, and there inside was a battered old black paperback with a seated Buddha ringed in rainbows on the cover. A woman stood behind him, glowing, with butterfly wings. Viv’s laugh caught. “You’ve sent me this book, what, five times?”

  “Seven. Did you ever read it?”

  She shrugged, feeling only a little guilty. She hadn’t had much time for reading in a while.

  “I thought maybe you’d have time now.” She was trying to keep her voice light. “I’ve never been a fugitive, but I hear there’s a lot of riding in boxcars. And trains are slow. And before you say anything, I bought this in a used book store about ten years ago, cash. So it’s probably safe.”

  If Viv had been a better person she would have been able to say out loud all the things she was still thinking, like I love you, and I should have stayed, I never should have gone off and made myself big, I should have stayed here with you and the others and built small and had dumb little fights and remembered everyone’s anniversaries. But she didn’t believe that last bit really, no matter how she felt it, so she hugged her again instead, less desperate now but more firm. “I thought about you all the way here.” It wasn’t true but it approached truth sideways. She couldn’t bear to think about her. “I missed you.”

  “Of course you did. I bet all the rich jerks you invited to your birthday got you, what, stock certificates or something? Come on, let’s have wine.”

  “God, yes.”

  Magda poured this time, and the cups weren’t paper.

  Viv asked about Victor, about work, about whether she still ran and what she’d been up to in the six months since it got too dangerous for them to talk, and did not mention what she’d come to do, or how she felt. Magda had always understood Viv, even at school when there was barely any Viv to know yet, just a passel of immature reflexes drawn from her parents, her grandma’s cultural revolution horror stories, and the science-fiction section of the public library. Viv needed to be strong. So it was Magda, blessed Magda, who took the silence that opened between them after the first glass of wine and said: “It’s all ready. Just like you asked.”

  That night, she would break into Ogham.

  * * *

  MAGDA DIDN’T WORK for Ogham—she never had, technically; all the code she’d written for them had been part of a subcontractor consultant sort of gig, and she was never listed as an employee, so unless the feds did the kind of legwork nobody really remembered how to do these days except the Russians and Israelis, no one would be waiting for Viv, and no one would trace her intrusion back to Mags.

  Ogham wasn’t Ogham anymore, after three acquisitions, an inversion, and two name changes, but the service was more or less the same—like a police precinct surviving each new junta that rolled through town. They cached the Internet, and served it to everybody.

  Here was the problem: everyone wants everything instantly, but light only goes so fast. Easy solution: you move the Internet—most of it—closer. In a place like Boston, full of universities and hospitals and biotech and normal tech—including several of Viv’s own once and future companies—Ogham served machines with more processing power than the entire planet had back in the benighted oughts. Probably enough for what Viv had in mind.

  Which was war.

  Not the nuclear sort, at first. In a way, her enemies had betrayed themselves by coming for her now, when they’d let her other offenses slide. She wouldn’t have known she’d found a real threat otherwise.

  When Lucy asked what she was doing in all those hours blocked out on the calendar for “Research,” Viv had said machine learning stuff, which was almost true. Viv’s project—the root of all this trouble—this idea she’d been piecing together in secret, sideways, while she saw what happened to the real visionaries in this space, so many surprise bankruptcies and leveraged buyouts and “market fluctuations,” not to mention the cancers and the deaths in the family and that one particularly grisly murder-suicide, this idea that led to the audits and “discrepancies” and talk show warnings that made her cut and run because, let’s face it, a lot of those “real visionaries” had been white boys and if that’s what the suits did to them, she didn’t want to find out what they’d do to her—Viv’s project was machine learning stuff like the Death Star was laser pointer stuff.

  She had come within a hair’s breadth of a real self-optimizer: a smart program that could make itself smarter, without limit. Machine uplift, changing the destiny of the human race forever.

  But what concerned Viv most, for now, were the ancillary benefits.

  The most obvious was that, in a world run by machines, she’d own the machines. Hello, robot army. All those cameras, all that surveillance tech, all the levers of censorship and control—her cameras now, her tech, her censors, her control. She could walk out of any prison and into any vault. Which sounded fun, but that was thinking small. The entire global financial system depended on the strength of its encryption. A truly strong, self-improving machine intelligence could tear through crypto. Simply revealing what she’d done, let alone doing anything with it, would shatter markets. She’d have a gun pointed at the head of the world.

  And of course, she’d control the nukes.

  The fuckers would crawl. Or she’d crush them.

  She’d enjoy that.

  Oh, and once that was done she’d fix the planet. Geoengineering to put the climate back where it used to be. New math would pave the way for microtailored cancer treatments. Give a system like that the silicon and iron it needed to run, and it would solve global problems by the shovelful. A silver bullet. Bang.

  Next stop, the stars.

  Once she built the system, she could talk to it through a wristwatch—but first she had to make a trillion-node distributed protosentient mind. The easiest way to do that would be to seed a tiny bit of code on some appreciable fraction of all the computers in the world. To do that, she needed a zero day exploit or five—easy, if you had money like hers—and a distribution system—hard, with her enemies watching.

  So she’d left, and gone underground.

  There weren’t many places where you could reach as much of the Internet as Viv needed without bouncing off some censor gate. If Viv was really lucky, the government still thought she was dead. If she was less lucky but still generally on the ups, they’d expect her to go for the transatlantic cable anchor in New York—it would be ideal, if she had some way to slip past the DHS security and, worse, the Google security. Ever since New York became one of those euphemistically named High Watchfulness Zones, you couldn’t hide from its cameras anymore. Ogham was almost as good, and safer.

  In the Amazon rain forest there lived a parasitic fungus called the Cordyceps, which grew inside a particular species of ant. The Cordyceps hijacked its host’s tiny ant brain and forced it to climb to a high place inside the colony, where the fungus bloomed through the back of the host’s head, killing it and raining infectious spores on the colony below.

  Viv would be the Cordyceps, and Ogham would be her ant.

  Bad analogy. It made this whole thing sound sinister. Viv wasn’t
a mad scientist. She just wanted to crush her enemies, and save the world.

  And after a few more hours on the couch with Magda talking about anything else, drinking in stories about Victor, his first word (book, Magda was so proud), teething and attendant lack of sleep, and oh did Magda mention they got a dog, this chill waggly pibble so strong she doesn’t even notice when Vic tries to ride her—after an afternoon’s safety, Viv felt almost ready.

  * * *

  SO DID MAGDA. That was the problem.

  “No.” Viv moved away from her on the couch, hands out. “You’re not coming with me.”

  “Once you’re in, you just let me in through the side door.”

  “There will be cameras.”

  “You’re already dealing with the cameras. And the rest of the security.”

  “I can’t let anything happen to you.” After saying this most naked truth, Viv felt a burning sensation all over her skin and inside, only it wasn’t shame. Pride.

  “Then don’t.” As if Viv had that kind of power. “Viv, I won’t let you do this alone.”

  “It’s dangerous.”

  She gripped Viv’s arms and met her eyes, level, firm. “It was dangerous when you sent me your first letter. I answered because you needed my help. Do you think I’d stop halfway? You need someone to watch your back. There’s no way you’re talking me out of this.”

  “Give me the key card, Mags.”

  “No.” Her voice was flat, her gaze sharp, her body rigid and earnest, and Viv fell silent before the fierceness of her. “Not until you agree: I’m coming with you. No tricks.”

  And Viv, after all her careful preparation, was caught.

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT, AS she approached the building in shadow and streetlight, she thought about Victor, whose first word was book, and wondered what kind of monster she was to let Magda come.