A siren wailed in their sensoria, a lonely sound, like all the world’s emergencies were about to begin. Then a voice began to sing: a haunting, eldritch melody.
“The old song,” said Kitou.
“Yes,” said Flux. “There are similarities.”
A second voice followed the first, its pitch subtly different, creating a wavering vibration. The melody swelled, and more voices joined, then more, and more, until it was as though every voice in creation was singing.
“A worldsinging,” whispered Kitou.
“Yes,” said Flux. “It’s the Pursang creation myth, replayed.”
[Twelve factorial voices,] said the Water Bear.
[You’re still here?]
[Oh yes, and I’m aware of this experiment, although not of its outcome.]
[What’s happening?]
[The Möbius machine is cycling the voices of 479,001,600 artificial beings, into a moment of simultaneity.]
“Ophelia Box,” said Flux. “Don’t imagine you’re here by accident. You, or the soldier, or the child: you’re here to witness this; what you see here is testimony.
“Now, everything becomes possible.”
They were falling. No, not falling. They were angels, blazing trails of fire through the heavens. Instead of a flat plane, below them was a nebula.
More than a nebula: what they were falling towards was the moment of creation.
Then, silence.
The machine disappeared.
“Behold,” said Flux. “A new universe.”
Box found her fingers sunk in the plush of her velveteen chair. Something important had just happened, although she couldn’t get her head around it.
“I’m gonna be sick,” she said.
“The feeling will pass,” said Flux.
“Bat, please make sure she’s not vomiting in the Real,” said Brin.
“What just happened?” asked Kitou.
[The Horu created a new universe,] said the Water Bear.
“Correct,” said Flux.
[And proved some old physics.]
“The memetic theory of everything.”
“Memes, as in… ideas?” asked Box, looking up.
[Yes,] said the Water Bear. [The theory of reality as a persistent illusion.]
“A democracy of ideas,” said Flux.
“Explain,” said Brin.
[May I?] said the Water Bear.
“Yes,” said Flux.
The ship’s gamespace avatar appeared in one of the velveteen chairs. “In the memetic theory of things,” she explained, “also called the nonreal interpretation of quantum mechanics, there is no fixed reality, only a wavefunction, the superposition of all possible states. Observers create their own reality by collapsing the wavefunction into a state, but all that changes are the microtubules in the observers’ brains. Thus, reality is a synaptic illusion: an hallucination, shared by a sufficiently large number of observers. Twelve factorial is a number suggested, to start a new universe.”
“Which we proved,” said Flux.
“I’ll need to see your results,” she said.
“You’ll have them.”
“Which brings us to the big question,” said Brin.
“Which is?”
“Do we believe you?”
They found themselves back in the Real, floating in space, in an immersive sim. Around them were hundreds of necropolii: flowers, spiders, birds. Unlike the Flux, who showed glimmers of blue-green bioluminescence within his pearly substrate, these others were dark.
“We call this the Boneyard,” said Flux.
“What happened?” asked Brin.
“Their humans are in Felicity now. The vessels are empty.”
“Abandoned?”
“No, they still have their personalities, but without their humans aboard, they’re incapable of true consciousness. They sleep.”
“What about you?” said Box. “You’re conscious.”
“I still carry my people.”
“Literally?”
“Not physically. There are no bodies buried here, Dr Box. My humans dream they’re a starship.”
“Except me,” said Chance.
“Yes, Mr. Chance’s copy has kindly agreed to be reanimated.
“Now, please watch...”
A ship came alive, but not with a ghostly light. Its legs started to move. Like a real spider, it began to crawl across space. Box saw a hint of spiny bristles appear on its skin, the hint of shining eyes. A nightmare creature. Then a slug of degenerate matter, moving at relativistic speed, flashed into the side of the spider-shaped ship, and space around it dissolved into featureless white.
They were back in the Grosvenor Hotel suite.
“What just happened?” asked Brin.
“A kiloton kinetic,” said the Water Bear.
“Yes,” said Flux. “I had to destroy her.”
“Why?”
“She became possessed. Like others before her. Left in that state, she would’ve regained her full offensive capability in a few seconds. Now I keep a gun loaded for each Boneyard ship.”
“You say ‘she’,” said Brin.
“Yes, her name was Thea. She deserved better.”
“That was a death?”
“Yes, of a two-million-year-old being, and my dear friend.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Box.
“Who was doing the possessing?” asked Brin.
“I wish I knew,” said Flux. “I call it the Enemy. But whatever it is, it comes from the Felicity space, and it desires to be here, in this universe.”
“Through the network links you sent your people to Felicity through?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve severed them now?”
“I have, but the connection persists. The physics escapes me. I deduce that some part of each ship is now entangled with Felicity space.”
“You believe this Enemy is the source of the Fluxor atrocity?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“Evidence?”
“I’ll give you full access to my mind.”
“A full, forensic scan?”
“Yes.”
“Ship?”
“Yes,” said the Water Bear. “That’d be conclusive.”
“Pax?”
[Return. Let’s wargame this.]
The Flux’s interior spaces were like the inside of a musical instrument, with organic frets and tubes, and light slanting through mysterious gaps, passing through air that looked dusty, but wasn’t.
“This is a spooky place,” said Box.
“Because it’s full of dead people,” said Kitou.
“There is that,” said Box.
“My sea spirit senses them.”
“This way,” said the androform Water Bear.
After a few minutes’ walk - more than the exterior dimensions of the Flex would suggest - they reached the Horu warship they’d journeyed through time in. It was exactly as she remembered it, with its domed canopy facing an exterior wall, where it’d been sealed in, two million years before.
Box picked up a carved bone ornament, coated in dust.
It was the shape of a bear.
Bone. Where would they have got bone?
She pushed the thought away.
Waiting on the bridge deck of the ancient ship was Chance, back in his robot body. One of the acceleration couches had been replaced by an old-fashioned clinical chair, with its headrest at the nexus of a swarm of robotic arms.
Box could imagine it in a dentist’s studio, or on the set of a horror movie.
Brin touched the arms. “What are these for?” she asked.
“I will use them to alter your physical brain.”
“Actual surgery?”
“Yes. Consensual reality is encoded in your reptilian brain, in regions of the pons and medulla oblongata. I will build a new reptile, by repurposing the neurons there. Then I’ll stimulate the occipital and parietal lobes of the cerebral cortex with dopamine
, to encourage your belief in the new paradigm.”
“What does that mean?” asked Box.
“It means you’ll be in a different place,” he said.
“When does transition occur?” asked Brin.
“When the subject wakes, typically in a state of religious ecstasy, during the dopamine experience.”
“The subject being me.”
“Yes.”
“If it goes wrong?”
“The subject dies. But it doesn’t go wrong. I’ve done this before.”
“On living humans?”
“Yes. Every Horu soul has travelled this way, in a surgically altered, vat-grown body.”
“Don’t worry,” said Chance. “This is mature technology.”
“Success rate?”
“Recently, a hundred percent.”
“Recently?”
“In the early days, not so much.”
“You?”
The robot shrugged, a disarmingly eloquent gesture.
“Do we these people?” asked Box.
“I do,” said Kitou.
“Explain?” said Brin.
“We gain nothing by not trusting Flux now, except maybe our lives. By mistakenly distrusting him, we stand to lose everything. So, we risk our lives.”
“Good girl,” said Brin.
“Also, I actually trust them,” Kitou said. “They’re undeniably strange, but people are strange.”
“Amen that,” said Brin.
“Okay, let’s do this,” she said.
“How long will it take?” asked Box, as Brin prepared herself, retracting her skinsuit so that it became like a second skin.
“About ten seconds. Brin, please?”
Brin took her place in the clinical chair, with her head inside the robotic swarm, which waved smoothly to fit her head and neck.
“How is the surgery performed?” she asked, holding the arms at bay.
“By gravitic impulse, no incisions.”
She leaned back.
“Then begin.”
She appeared to fall asleep. The arms waved soundlessly around her head, and Box was appalled. A million years of biological programming was being rewired.
There was no way back from this violation.
Brin’s eyes opened, and widened, and she disappeared.
“Fuck,” said Box.
“Now me,” said Kitou.
“You’re aware of the additional risk?” asked Chance.
“Yes.”
“What additional risk?” asked Box.
“Kitou isn’t wholly human,” said Flux.
“Her undine?”
“Yes.”
“Why’s that a risk?”
“It’s a complexity. The undine spirit is the larval stage of the Xap lifecycle. They’re in a symbiosis, and will be until the end of Kitou’s lifespan.”
“We don’t talk like that,” said Kitou.
“I know, there’s a spiritual element, which I respect. But we must speak plainly now.”
“What could go wrong?” asked Box.
“The embryonic Xap might reject the new model. We could lose one, or both,” said Chance.
“I see you waited until Brin was gone before raising this.”
“Dr Box,” said Kitou. “We have to learn whether my kind can enter here.”
“I want to ask Pax.”
“Pax knows,” said Kitou.
“Is that true?” she insisted.
“Yes,” said Flux. “The child is right. The risk is acceptable, and this is essential, for the sake of our species.”
“How risky is it?”
“Twenty-five percent, to lose both of them.”
“Twenty-five? What kind of horseshit odds are those?”
While they argued, Kitou lay back in the chair. “Begin,” she said, and the robotic arms waved. Like Brin, she seemed to fall asleep. Her eyes flicked open, and she disappeared.
“Success,” said Chance.
“You’re sure?” asked Box.
“I am. Now you. Time is short. The downlink’s at risk.”
“Ship?”
“Go, Dr Box,” said the androform Water Bear.
Box lay in the chair. The arms waved as before, performing their bloodless intrusion. She fell into a trance, not unlike the euphoric state produced by the sacrament she drank in Utah. She saw the same forest. Drops of water trembled on the same aspen leaves.
She sensed Pando, and her love, not a kind and sensuous thing, but fierce.
She heard her friends, calling in the darkness for her. For a moment, that might’ve been forever, she imagined she was God. Not just a god, but God the creator, giving bloody birth to a new cosmos; she was Amon, rising over the first sea; Dayuni’si, come to Earth to see what was under the water; Krishna, the preserver, returning in the age of pain.
She was the first child, gazing out of a primordial forest.
She saw Kitou, trailing a blaze of fire in the heavens.
She saw Brin, defending the gates with her soul.
She could get lost in this place.
Then she came to her senses.
Her frontal lobes, accepting the newly consensual.
She lay in a green field, under a supersaturated sky. The colors were so rich, they were pulsing. Her friends were smiling down at her.
“Holy fuck,” said Box.
“Are you alright?” asked Kitou.
“My head is still buzzing,” she said.
“It isn’t your head,” said Ito.
How did Ito get here?
It emerged from the hum, like a binaural beat.
Ophelia.
Ophelia Box.
Open your mind.
Book Two Ω Continuum
12 ∞ Ophelia, Down the Rabbithole
314
The Red Lady was confused. The Blue warrior, Marius D, looked on impassively. This was only to be expected. Her shieldmaidens were there to help her.
And the prophet, Ito Nadolo.
This was a great day.
The Blue people believed they had sung the world into existence, and three heroes would come to lead them to heaven. The Reanimated, who were far more numerous, believed the world was created by God for their use, and that they had once lived in heaven themselves. Both agreed the world was shaped like a toroidal polyhedron, or paradromic ring, and was about three hundred years old.
In Blue cosmology, the gods were natural beings, and were far too numerous to count. They lived in heaven like fleas on a cat. The Reanimator god was Mathematics.
Both accepted the equal truth of each other’s opposite view.
That’s how it goes, in Flipside.
Ophelia Box scrambled to her feet. She was in a supersaturated world, that seemed to twist in on itself in a way that made her feel sick.
“The feeling will pass,” said Ito.
She was on a steep-sided hill, like Glastonbury Tor. The sky was the most vivid color of sky she could imagine. The landscape was a patchwork quilt of supersaturated greens.
She was completely naked.
A strapping young Viking was staring at her.
She started to giggle, uncontrollably.
“Frost,” said Brin, firmly.
From the towering height of his nineteen years, both shieldmaidens were exceptionally beautiful. The Red Lady less so. She must be at least thirty.
A tenth the age of the universe.
The white one, who he knew as the Goddess, who couldn’t be beaten in battle, was yellow-haired and creamy-skinned like him. He’d follow her.
The black one was a different matter. He had never seen anyone so exotic, even among the Reanimated, who were sometimes black skinned.
Many would follow the panther.
Beings of mythos, alive in the world.
Such days.
“Bring blankets,” he commanded, and a rider rode down from the sky, with temporary clothing, which Ito Nadolo gave to the three women, who were gabbling in tongues he co
uld make no sense of. He knew they’d soon learn his language. It had taken Ito three hours.
They had wetware.
“We must be careful, Ito.”
The prophet nodded. He understood the dangers.
Behind the sky was the Enemy, with his beam weapons.
“Where’s the Water Bear?” asked Box.
[I’m here, Dr Box.]
“Where?”
“The ship’s personality seems to be hosted in our wetware,” said Ito.
[I didn’t quite make it.]
“Ship, what are your capabilities?” asked Brin.
[Limited.]
“Well, at least you’re here,” said Kitou.
[I am, shieldmaiden.]
Box suppressed another giggle.
They gave her a horse, a rust-red dappled mare with a flighty attitude, that crowded in close to its fellows, then skittered away in surprise. It was exactly the kind of animal she might’ve chosen if she could ride. Box’s experience with horses was limited to carousels. Dirty great beasties for posh English lassies. Thankfully her wetware knew what to do.
She began to relax, and then to enjoy herself. The high moors seemed to stretch on forever. They were being escorted by a half-dozen Vikings, four men and two women, who radiated easy competence. Dotted among the clouds, she could see more Vikings.
Where was she?
She found she didn’t much care.
She was thrilled.
This was astonishing.
She shimmied her ride towards Ito, who was off to one side, finding higher pieces of ground, scanning the horizons.
“Ito, it’s great to see you.”
“And you, Dr Box. How are Pax and Alois?”
“Pax is himself. Alois is complicated.”
“Then business as usual.”
She smiled, then laughed out loud.
“Ito, I can’t wait to hear you try to explain this.”
“Listen,” he said.
“What?”
“Listen closely. D’you hear it?”
“It’s the Fa:ing hum!”
“Yes. Like the Water Bear, they didn’t quite make it here.”
“But they’re here?”
“Yes, this place is where they were searching for.”
“The Horu universe?”
“Oh, it’s more interesting than that.”
“What is it?”
“It’s the human unconscious.”
The Water Bear Page 20
