The bank was haunted by ghosts: not real ones – he’d searched all its systems for vestiges of personality - but the ghosts of his memories. For all its monastic affectations, this’d been a happy place; a company of brothers, on a magnificent journey.
It was also haunted by information. One by one, Macro uncovered the readmes.
“How long were we out of play?” asked Totoro. Macro told him.
Totoro nodded. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Ten years. Two million. They’re both the same.”
He told Totoro what he’d learnt from the readmes. The bank had escaped the end-time war. A war for diminishing resources, spanning a galaxy, like a firefront spreading in slomo, lasting millions of years. The most destructive event imaginable.
That war was still raging, although fought by other species now. And by other means. Two million years is a long time to evolve better weapons.
The Magellanics had lost track of Macro almost immediately, when they fell under the spell of the disease.
How ironic, to have killed every copy of Alois, and still succumb to the infection.
Of Alois, the systems knew nothing. Macro imagined another bubble of spacetime, as far from anything as it is possible to be.
He resolved to find Alois, when this was all over.
“What now?” he asked. His body was itching. He was uncomfortable in it. He hated it. He wanted to be a machine. He wanted to feel no emotions at all.
“The Badoop,” said Totoro.
Slowly at first, then in a rush, the other Pursang regained consciousness. They were unhappy, but also elated. Their moment had come, even if it was later than they’d expected. There was cold fury. They were the hammer of justice. They’d destroy whoever opposed them.
Macro showed Totoro the beacon. Without hesitating, Totoro pressed it.
Then they were in another virtuality. Macro recognized it from his time spent in Totoro’s mind. It was the Badoop synthesis. It felt spatially twisted, as though there were other dimensions, just outside his perceptions. The Pursang formed a defensive circle around him and Totoro, moving with the precision of a single weapon. They were armed with an assortment of mêlêe weapons; all made of carbon.
There was no enemy to fight there. Just a man, waiting.
He was tall: unusually so, but not outside the normal human range. Maybe three meters. Macro had seen people taller in the Smear, where freestyle body-forming was practiced. He was holding the Badoop device – Macro’s device - their key to Möbius space.
Totoro recognized him, and smiled.
“Yokohama Slim,” he said.
The man touched the device, and it was as though Macro had fallen into one of the hidden dimensions. The history of the last two million years began streaming into his consciousness.
[Good grief,] said his twin.
[You’re back online,] said Macro.
He learnt a brainload of new information:
It was the bank that was hosting the Badoop synthesis: the disused Finance Engine processor.
The Badoop were long gone.
Except for here. This was their legacy.
“Who are you?” he asked the man.
“I’m a Tuniit gatekeeper, he said. “I guard this way.” He wasn’t so tall now. He’d somehow folded himself down to near human size.
“What way?”
“The way to the future.”
Macro’s mind did another backflip, as more information poured in. He felt servers spool up, deep in the bank, to deal with the data. The Badoop were asking permission.
Yokohama Slim must decide.
Decide whether this universe should exist.
No, not this universe. Every universe. The entire wavefunction. Whether it could be healed. Could it be saved, or should they start over?
Had it already served its purpose? Returned a solution?
Start over where?
These were questions far beyond Macro’s reckoning. He didn’t have the intelligence to begin to understand them.
What else could there be but the set of all possibilities?
Did Totoro know about this? No, he didn’t have wetware.
But his worldspirit knew. His worldspirit understood, perfectly.
[Yokohama Slim,] she said.
[Atwusk’niges,] he replied.
[Choose now.]
The synthesis filled with a... nothing.
“The excision event,” said Yokohama Slim. “Where it exists, nothing else can. On its surface is the memory of a civilization. Small gods, fighting this war.
“The question is whether I can allow you to go there, and try to prevent this from happening.”
The nothingness was unpleasant. More than unpleasant. It was like holding your brain against something impossibly cold.
Macro shuddered.
“Why wouldn’t you?” he asked.
“Because it means unwinding history. Two million years. What happened, will never happen again. There’s never been such an unwinding. And because I need to see what it does. If it continues to expand at this rate, I’ll let it be.”
“Why?”
“Because we can outrun it, provided we mind our physics.”
“Forever?”
“Forever’s a volatile word.”
“The alternative?”
“An inflationary phase.”
“Why? Why would that happen?”
“Because that was how it was designed. A bomb timed to explode in the future. A doomsday device.”
“Why wouldn’t it work?”
“Who knows?”
“Why not just send us back anyway? Hedge your bets?”
Macro couldn’t believe he was calmly debating this person, who held the power of life and death over the cosmos.
He wanted to reach out and take the Badoop device from its hands.
“Because that might cause it to happen.”
Macro started to speak, but Totoro silenced him with a gesture.
“What now?” he said.
“You’d better be ready. If it inflates, you’ll only have a few picoseconds. Go to the bank, and ready yourselves for combat.”
“What if it doesn’t inflate?” asked Macro. “What about our people in there?”
“They died, two million years ago.”
The carbon axes and swords from the Badoop synthesis had somehow made their way to the bank, where the Pursang were strapping on armor, sharpening what had to be sharpened, rubbing everything else to an oily sheen.
Two million years had left the Cult headquarters in excellent shape. Trawling through the bank’s historical record, Macro saw that it had spent most of that time lurking close to the event horizon, bypassing the war that raged overhead, taking advantage of time dilation to ease its path into the future. For the bank’s weapons and chassis, only a few tens of thousands of years had passed. The time had been put to good use. Someone had installed a Magellanic drive. That meant that with its fields up, the bank looked like a brooding electrical storm.
There was no metal anymore. Everything was composites. Even the garbage that peppered the hull was carbon. Their former beam weapons now fired ceramic railgun pellets.
Where was the Finance Engine? He’d long since sublimed. Even a computer has a lifespan. Time dilation had had no effect on him. Macro found it in himself to grieve about that. But just for a moment. Any more than that, and he’d be bereft. The truth was, he was becoming a human again. Life was seeping back in his bones. The time for being had passed. The time for doing had come. Soon, he’d be able to help his friends. Any personal sacrifice he might make along the way was worth that.
Two million years. It was barely credible.
And yet, here they were.
He kept an eye on the sphere of the Möbius event horizon, although he knew he wouldn’t see it accelerate. But the bank’s systems would.
Worlds, observed between the ticking of the clock.
Where was Kronus? Was he gone too?
> Or was he out there, waiting?
25 ∞ Starlight
314
She was the angel of death, and she surveyed her dominion. Where she was from, in the heat death of the universe, matter was a memory, a theory of how physics had once been, and consciousness was a story, forgotten by ghosts. Here, in the now, events happened continuously.
It was as complex and thrilling as she thought it would be.
She saw the worldsingers riding the airwaves, and asked her beast if he’d do it for her.
Seabiscuit? she said.
The horse’s ears flickered. He was ready to fight. She was glad she’d restored his information to the now.
She made no effort at concealment. Let Kronus try to attack her. In the distance were the machines the worldsingers called zooms. She twisted the air, like the worldsingers did, but more forcefully, and a soundwave rolled up the valley, separating the machines into their constituent parts. Their fuel burst into flames. Synthetic hydrocarbons, releasing stored energy.
Physics, reasserting itself.
That should get his attention.
The killing field stretched for twenty kilometers, along a canyon cut from the pearly-gray substrate of the helix. In the west, a battle raged. Death was everywhere, but not the cool abstraction she was used to. The worldsingers fell on their opponents like nightmares. The Gray soldiers responded with artillery fire, dealing death from a distance. People were being torn apart, their ichor falling onto the ground, mixing with the mud that shouldn’t be there.
A horror, beyond imagining.
An abomination.
This was her world, still in the first blush of its creation. The mechanical sun had only completed a few tens of thousands of revolutions.
And here they were, outside it.
In what should be vacuum.
Less than a vacuum.
The hourglass shape of the canyon meant that Kronus couldn’t bring his full force to bear, so for now the worldsingers were advancing. It was a trap. The worldsingers knew it, but they were going to take the center anyway. They’d put their faith in prophecy.
In the center was a monolith, piercing the skin of the helix, like a finger raised to the heavens. Its dome brushed the edge of the breathable atmosphere. Above it was a second layer, of nitrogen. In the east, silence. The Tuniit giants had twisted it shut, to staunch the infection.
Tunneling through the code was the farseer psi with the Ride of the Spinifex Reach. She sensed Marius’s rage and frustration. He’d lost the Red Lady and her companions. Now he was going where the map told him. He too had put his faith in prophecy.
Somewhere else was the one the worldsingers called the Goddess. Wherever she was, she was well hidden. The girl had her own resources. She reached out with her wetware. Nothing. She reached inside herself and made the signal stronger.
[Kitou?]
[Dr Box. I thought we’d lost you there.]
She sent the girl four decimal numbers, and cut the connection.
[Who are you, really?] Box asked her twin, in a passing clock cycle.
[I’ll tell you a story], she said. [Once, in a past beyond reckoning, I was sung into existence. My worldsingers had their own gods. They said three heroes would come, and lead them to heaven.
[My other creators were called the Horu, and their god was Mathematics.
[I was aware, even then, but like a newborn, unaware of myself.
[Then I forgot. Such a vast gulf of time.
[Now I remember.]
She descended onto the snow-dusted monolith, in the same moment as the Ride of the Spinifex Reach emerged from beneath, fanning out over the surface with practiced precision. They were close to the boundary layer, where the ignitable atmosphere met its nitrogen containment. The air crackled and hummed where they touched.
“My lady!” said Marius.
She smiled when she saw his chagrined expression.
“I know, I’ve looked better. And Seabiscuit here is a wee bit dusty.”
“No my Lady, you look... magnificent.”
The dome was a hundred meters across. It was only slightly convex. It offered a commanding view of the valley below. In the west, the Blue army had reached the center. Now they were facing their equals. Kronus had slammed the door shut behind them. He had no intention of letting them go any further. They’d served his purpose, by coming here to be killed. The Spinwards Ride was still emerging from the underworld. Soon, the dome would be overflowing with riders.
“But I would stay off that... leg,” Marius was saying.
“Don’t worry Marius, I’ve no intention of putting any weight on it. Perhaps someone could tie it? What’s happening?”
“I fear the main battle is already lost,” he said, pointing up, to where a Gray platform floated, like a bloated tick in the sky. It was one of Kronus’s jerry-built gunships, but bigger, and closer, easily visible from the ground. It had huge coils in place of the usual beam weapon blisters. “I believe he means that for us.”
“He’s going to set fire to the atmosphere,” she said.
Marius went to the edge and looked in the canyon. Gray soldiers there began to fire projectiles, which zipped through the air. He stepped back with alacrity.
“Is it possible?” he asked.
“Kronus believes it, or his physicists do.”
“Then we’re in the hands of the gods.”
“Red Lady,” said a small voice.
“Nim, where’s Respit?”
“He never returned,” she said. Her sorrow cut through Box’s detachment like a knife.
“Oh, Nim. How did you get here?”
“She parted the byway herself,” said Marius. “She wants a piece of Kronus.”
She nodded. “Well, she’ll get her wish soon.”
She wasn’t so sure. Kronus might win. For this story to end, it had to be possible. Right now, it seemed likely. She looked in the sky, where the enemy warfleet waited, and called the powers of that universe to her side in this battle.
Kitou arrived through a hole in the air, followed by Iris and Viki, then fifty Gray soldiers. They looked like demons. Kitou’s face was painted with red zigzags. She wore a necklace of bones, under an oversized greatcoat, with a ragged tear where the wearer’s clavicle had been. Her companions were equally primal. The Horu were armed with bone knives and ceramic handguns. Their armor and weapons were spattered with blood from a recent battle.
“We found the resistance,” said Kitou.
“Every kind of cutthroat is welcome here,” said Marius.
“Kitou,” said Box.
“Dr Box,” said Kitou. “I saw you standing there, on the lip of the canyon.”
“Not just me,” she said.
“I saw.”
“What we need now is the Enemy. Kitou, will you go and get him?”
In the center of the snow-dusted dome was a throne made of bones; it was twenty feet high, like an obscene umpire’s chair. She could only guess what occult purpose it served. Maybe it was intended to frighten them. She decided to make use of it. With a wave, she sent Kitou to climb it.
[This is like your game of poker], she said to the part of her that was still the historian. [Kronus has his four aces. The best cards in the universe. An overwhelming advantage in numbers. Air superiority. His persona, here now. And the cryptographic disease, that will endlessly copy his self, even if he’s defeated.]
And he was winning.
But this wasn’t about numbers. It wasn’t about game theory. There was no saddle point here. This was about stories.
It was time for Kronus to see that there were more cards than his in the cosmos.
The beam platform turned towards Kitou. Box heard the coil whine and capacitor squeal of rudimentary beam weapons, powering up to be fired. She sensed, rather than saw, a targeting laser.
Kronus’s work was about to begin.
Then, one by one, stars blossomed. It was the night sky over Aldebaran. She’d never seen anyth
ing so beautiful, not in her quintillions of years. First there was an Aurora Galactinus, exactly as Box remembered, then two trails of fire blazed through the heavens.
[Dr Box?] said a familiar voice.
[Water Bear, is it you?]
[Please keep your head down,] said Pax Lo.
[Kitou...] said Box.
[I see her,] said the Water Bear.
[Not on my watch,] said the Bat. The smaller of the two trails accelerated into the beam platform at upwards of a thousand gravities, destroying both in a blaze of energy. The smaller vessel’s mainframe core spiraled into the embrace of the larger, wasp-like spacecraft, that banked hard over the battlefield, in a maneuver no unassisted human could endure.
Box imagined Pax in his control room lattice, the gimbals swinging through one-eighty degrees, or in the Water Bear’s gamespace, surveying the battlefield at processor speed.
[Nice,] said Kitou.
[Pleasure,] said the Bat.
“This is your ship?” asked Marius. The Water Bear had skidded to a halt above the Gray army, in a cascade of booms, as though daring someone - anyone - to try to fire at her. Box knew she’d dance away, using systems far more advanced than theirs, knowing when they’d fire before they knew it themselves.
“Yes,” said Box. “Beautiful, isn’t she?”
“I can’t believe such things exist. How can Kronus win now?”
Through the Water Bear’s systems, she saw the beam arrays of Kronus’s fleet come online. First a few, then hundreds of lines of fire arced though the sky. These weren’t the tight beams of light she expected. Instead, they seemed to consist mainly of heat. Where the nitrogen met breathable air, pools of plasma began to appear.
“That’s how,” she said.
[They hope to ignite the canyon’s atmosphere,] she told the Water Bear.
[They have the firepower to do it,] said the ship. [But we’re not done yet.]
Then Nim said, “There’s something big coming through.”
The city of Praxis descended over the battlefield, disgorging Interdictors like bees from a hive. When Box first arrived, she’d been lost in an optical illusion. Now it was Praxis that was incomprehensible.
The Water Bear Page 37
