Neptune's Brood

by Charles Stross

  Scant minutes were, after all, not of vital significance.

  “You must tell me first who sent you, and what you were supposed to do. Once you do that, we will give you an opportunity to beg for a merciful death. If you choose to do so, we will then tell you what you must do to earn the privilege. And if you do that, then we will consider your debt discharged.” Not that Medea had any expectation that this assassin would live that long—but it would leave no blood on her hands. “So. First, tell me who sent you and what they sent you to do. Will you tell me that?”

  Silence. Then shuddering and deep breaths: And in an archaic reflex, a drop of water trickled from the prisoner’s eye, running down the side of her head. A gasp. Then: “Yes. I remember being Krina Alizond-114, in New California. I have her memories. From her upload, archived when she went on pilgrimage. Memories but no I-ness, no me. I’m not her. I’m new. I have no memories of my own before I awakened here.”

  The prisoner fell silent for a while. Then: “This person was created by Sondra Alizond-1 to clear the way. To catch and replace Krina, to bait the line and trap the runaway sib. A false brood. This person is to masquerade as Krina and find Ana and take her treasure and kill her, then bring it to Sondra on her arrival. This person is not an I but an it. I think that was the idea. I am . . . not able to be what I should be.”

  “Fascinating.” The Queen stared at the prisoner. “You had no self-consciousness? Only now you do. Marvelous! A newborn!” She clapped her hands: “You have so much to learn!” A nod to the head surgeon-executioner: “Be sure to teach her everything you know about pain. Teach her well.” And, without further ado, she sank into her pool and dived headfirst through the underwater tunnel back to the light and the surface, where she could imagine herself serenaded by the screams of the newly damned without being confronted by the distressingly physical realities of the process of torment.

  * * *

  “Interrogative: Identify: You are shoal-sibs? Other is coming?”

  The squid rolled in the water, pointing both great golden eyes at me, its mantle flashed silver and red and yellow when it spoke: It took the translator pod seconds to catch up.

  “Confirm interrogative,” said Ana. “We are shoal-sibs. Assertion: We need to talk, alone, in my office. Can you leave us?”

  Alef rolled again, looking at Ana. “Assertion: Committee summons you. Much to ask you and shoal-sib Krina. Interrogative: Available soon?”

  “Available soon,” Ana reassured them. “We’ll be going now.” She gestured at her bodyguards, dismissing them, then at me. “Can you follow . . . ?”

  “I’ll try.” I confess I was angry: But I was also spooked by Ana’s blunt confirmation that Sondra knew about our little conspiracy. “How do you know about—”

  “Hush: Follow me, I’ll show you.” She turned and swam straight down, toward a shadowy recess at the bottom of the Palace.

  “What is this place?” I called after her as I followed, my assumption being that she might be willing to talk about less intimate affairs while on the move.

  “It’s the People’s Palace. These are the People.” Her gesture took in a small clump of rapidly flickering squid, hovering nearby as we dove past them. “It’s their talking hall, their parler-a-ment. They do everything by committee, instinctively.”

  “Instinctively?”

  “They modified their neural connectome heavily when they came down here, to make it easier to work in teams when mining the blue smokers. Speech was too low-bandwidth for the job of coordinating thousands of tool-using limbs in three dimensions. So their neural architecture is human-derived, but so different that even without the body-plan changes, they might as well be another species.” Abruptly, we passed out of the great luminous space and into a constricted tunnel, gulletlike. It was round in cross section and narrower than I was comfortable with, dimly illuminated by flecks of bioluminescent coral. I forced my imagination back and concentrated on following Ana. She’d obviously worn this form far longer than I, long enough that her swimming was instinctively fluid, elegant, and abhumanly beautiful. I could envy her that grace: But I had every intention of ascending to the surface and reclaiming my lost legs at the first opportunity—then giving her hired kidnappers a piece of my mind.

  “Here.” A section of what I had taken to be wall proved to be a curtain when she turned and tunneled through it. “Behold, my office.”

  “What is”—I looked around—“I mean, what are you doing here? With an office? And what were those books about, in your apartment in Nova Ploetsk? What’s going on?”

  “Patience.” She waved me across the spherical space, toward a foam sleeping platform not unlike the ones I had encountered at the waypoint buoys. Then, while I waited, she slid a circular door across the opening we had entered through. A gesture across a retina surface, and the luminous flecks embedded in the walls brightened. “We can speak here.” She reached over and handed me a small message chip. “Andrea sent this to me a bit more than a year ago. You’ll want to review it: It’s why I cut and ran.”

  “You ran because she told you to?”

  “Not exactly.” For a moment, Ana looked shifty. “But it told me that if I didn’t run now, then sooner or later the long arm of She Who Is Not To Be Named would catch up with me.”

  “You mean”—I caught her drift—“Mother?” I glanced around. “I thought you said we could talk here?”

  “Yes, but not totally freely. They usually ignore me when I hang out the privacy sign, or at least they pretend to, but if there’s juicy gossip to be had, you can’t be so sure. They tend to overshare, and they don’t understand when others object to being listened in on, so if you mention something, it might come back up later. Or not. They’re not malicious; they just don’t understand privacy very well.”

  “Wait, who are we talking about?” My mind was a-spin with possible candidates who resembled her description.

  “The squid-folk.” She looked at me as if she was wondering if I had left my wits on the surface. “They’re communists, sis. They hacked their mirror neurons. And the uncinate fasciculus, whatever that is. There are no sociopaths among them: Everyone has an enhanced empathic sense, optical signaling mostly replacing verbal linear speech with a system that allows them to simultaneously converse with multiple others in parallel—so it’s hard for them to understand privacy. They think we’re weirdly deformed, emotionally crippled for wanting it. It took me ages to explain that it was hurting their negotiating position.”

  “Neg—” I blinked, transparent inner eyelids that blur the room around us. “They mine the blue smokers, right? What, how—”

  “They’re squid-people, sis, because they’re uranium miners. They’re jet-propelled. They can sense currents with their acoustic sensory nets, and they’ve got neutron sensors in the backs of their eyes. They mix up boron salts and other neutron absorbers into the water in their siphons, then squirt it into the prompt-critical zones to damp the reactions down below the danger level. They find the blue smoker outflow vents, damp down each rising criticality bubble and split it up into safer volumes of concentrated uranium salt solutions. Then they send them upstairs, in balloon trains. If they sense a smoker that’s too big or dangerous, they can scatter and run away from it: By the time you or I could see the Cerenkov glow it would be much too late to dodge. You or I, we couldn’t do their job or make a living exporting concentrated, enriched, uranium salts. Trouble is, they’re mostly so specialized they can’t cope with life near the surface. Even with pressure mods, it’s too bright and too loud for them, and they go crazy if they’re cut off from each other. Like I said, they’re instinctive communists. So someone has to handle their interface with the planetary economy.”

  I unblinked, stared closely at Ana. This wasn’t like her; she sounded fierce, almost protective. “You sound like you’re going native, sis.”

  She barked, a sharp pulse of s
ound that rippled through my guts as she flicked her tail: “You would say that! They’re good people, Krina. I’ve been in this system for years, and in Shin-Tethys for long enough to have a handle on them. At first I thought I was lying low—literally so—that it was a convenience, that I could pay my way by organizing their bookkeeping at this end better to keep that bitch Medea from stealing them blind, and that in return they’d keep Sondra’s minions away from me while I continued the search. That’s what I was doing keeping their books in Nova Ploetsk, using techniques that ensured maximum security against everyone. But—do you know something? I think they’re better than we are. They fixed a lot of what’s wrong with our basic cognitive model. Made themselves over as new communist squid-folk. Yes, they’re still individuals, but the border between self and other is thinner. And they don’t hate. They own property but they don’t have strong social hierarchies—top-down control is a dangerous liability to a team trying to trap a runaway natural nuclear reactor—they’re instinctive mutualists. They understand money and debt and credit and so on, but they don’t feel a visceral need to own: What they owe doesn’t define their identity. They trade, and yes, they buy stuff from the laminar kingdoms above: medical tools, wetware, bright shiny jewelry to line their nests—but to some extent they keep mining the smokers because the folks upstairs want them to, and they like to please other people. They get a pleasure-reward for making other people happy. Even an abstraction of other people. Isn’t that freaky?”

  “If you say so, sis.” I glanced around, wondering how much longer the lecture would continue. “But if you’re so happy, why did you invite me here?”

  “Wha—” Ana did a slow double take. “I’m sorry. I got carried away.” She glanced around the spherical nest-office, as if seeing it for the first time. “Partly because you just weren’t safe up in the daystar waters. I’d hate to see you mindraped or kidnapped just because you didn’t know what was going on. Oh, and because they found it for me.”

  “Found what?”

  “The missing soul chip, sis.” In the twilit waters it was hard for me to tell for sure, but the tensing of her cheeks and the lustrous sheen of the scaly chromatophores around her face hinted at triumph. “The Atlantis transaction’s uncommitted counterfoil.” She reached over to a niche in the nearest wall and withdrew a filter-feeding animal’s shell, valves clenched tight against the threatening predators polluting the waters nearby with their vibrations. She offered it to me with one hand as she repeatedly tickled the edge of the bivalve with a finger of the other. The half shells began to loosen, a fringe of tenuous tissue appearing between them: Then it opened fully, a mecha-oyster relaxing to reveal the lambent interior of its shell, and a rectangular, flattish shard of glittering nacre within. “Oops, nearly left it in there too long. Not to worry, the pearl coating will rub off.”

  I stared. “You’re pulling my leg.”

  “No.” She motioned it toward me. “Take it.”

  “What, the—”

  “Just the soul chip: I’d rather you didn’t kill my pet.”

  I reached in carefully and tugged at the chip. It came away easily. It was indeed soul-chip-sized, and my fingertip proximity-sense told me that it was active, full. “Where did you get it?”

  “Like I said, they like to make people happy. If I hadn’t kept their books on water-soluble paper where they couldn’t get at them, one of them would probably have offered them to a local brokerage as a gift.” She tapped the open shell: The animal within (mechanocytes imitating a long-extinct invertebrate) pulled its valves closed, and she returned it to its niche. “The People did it for me. I was here a few years and had barely begun to feel safe again when Gimmel glitter-of-slow-neutrons-beneath asked why I was unhappy. It took me a long time to open up and explain . . .” She looked down. “I broke. Told them the whole sorry story.”

  “You. Didn’t.” I clenched my fist around the impossible, glittering soul chip.

  She looked up again, met my accusing gaze: “I did, Krina. And you know what happened? To cheer me up, they went and found it for me. It’s the real thing. The primary soul-level backup of Ivar Trask-1, murdered more than nine hundred years ago, lost forever in a volume of ocean a thousand kilometers in diameter. An impossible search: You couldn’t buy that kind of service for money! I gather it took a half of a million-strong shoal almost ten days of searching in the bottom silt. They did it for fun, Krina. They’re too altruistic for their own good, when dealing with the likes of us. And I guess it’s all my fault that one of them sent a happy message to Sondra, thinking that would make her happy, too.”

  * * *

  Iam told that one of the signs of an abusive relationship is the creeping normalization of the abnormal: that one takes the most disturbing or painful circumstances as a meter stick for everyday life, and assumes that what one is experiencing is in fact the way everyone else lives, and not an aberration.

  You could take it as a sign of our abnormal instantiation and upbringing (in a polity where child slavery and postinstantiation abortion were considered normal) that it took us nearly four standard years after our discovery of the incomplete Atlantean slow money transaction to admit to ourselves that our lineage mother, Sondra Alizond-1, was in fact a monster and a criminal.

  A criminal! The thought itself, the mere idea that the most conservative, staid, wealthy citizen of a fabulously well funded financial polity might be a thief is so outrageous that it bankrupts the imagination. So let me try to explain . . .

  As is the case with all other long cons, it is necessary for the perpetrators of the FTL scam to have a way of extracting value from their mark. And, value having been extracted, value must be liquidated and recycled in some entirely deniable manner that does not connect the practitioners of the fraud with their newly gained loot. In ages noted for war and disorder and violence, this may be relatively easy: Fungible coinage is readily available, anonymous money circulates easily, and nobody asks too many questions about where the soldiers got the cash with which they pay their bills. But that is not the character of this era: This is a peaceful period, and slow money is held to account in the balance sheets of banking institutions or harnessed but frozen in light-speed transition between star systems, locked to the identity tokens of the financiers who countersign the transactions to notarize a transfer of value.

  It should therefore not come as a surprise to learn that every splendid and visionary fraud needs the collusion of a banker. Or, in the case of the Atlantis bust-out, several thousand of them.

  Bankers are in the business of minimizing risk, and participating in an actively fraudulent scheme, especially as a money laundry, is nothing if not risky. Most sensible, experienced, staid bankers will ignore the temptation to get involved with any such thing. But Sondra, back in the day, was young and hungry and inexperienced and had little appreciation for the likely consequences of such a youthful adventure echoing down the centuries and millennia to come. Some careful digging among brokerage records revealed the sordid truth. Far from making her fortune in her first fifty years, then buying her way into a colony venture and thence proceeding by a hop, skip, and a jump to staid success, she had made a series of near-disastrous decisions, actually losing money for the credit union that spawned her.

  The scale of her losses, had she admitted them, would have justified her immediate execution. But Sondra was cunning, and had an instinct for self-preservation, and so she kept the cover-up in place during a period of expansionary fiscal policies and outward investment. It was during this period that the Atlantis project was underway. The Atlantean conspirators built their exit pipelines even as they built their Potemkin village of a stellar civilization: and somehow Sondra became involved.

  I do not know all the details. We could barely acknowledge what we found: that within a decade of her involvement with the criminals, her personal debts had magically disappeared and her employer’s liabilities had been adjusted
back to zero, and then to a satisfactory profit margin. Clearly the money had to come from somewhere, and the only obvious source that could account for it was Atlantis. Running the records forward another few decades, we watched as Sondra’s account bloated with a commission on the slow dollars flowing through her managed funds. And then, finally, the blow-out came: Atlantis went dark, and the huge sums saved in hidden deposits throughout Hector SystemBank and elsewhere . . . well, they disappeared, for the most part, shuffled carefully into the startup funds of interstellar colony angel investors.

  Sondra somehow came out of it covered in money, wealthy beyond belief. She ran, then, to New California—to a polity in flight, a floating kingdom between the stars, beyond the easy reach of anyone not already wealthy. A prepared bolt-hole, in other words, where we were subsequently raised in her own image. Not everything went according to her plans. Slow money, as I have explained, must be transferred by three-phase commit across vast distances: and the change of ownership must be notarized by recognized banks at each end. Some of Sondra’s funds were, shall we say, long term deposits, for recipients who thought them safer in the custody of known and trusted bankers (ahem: ones who could be blackmailed) than in their direct possession during the inevitable post-Atlantis witch hunts. Some transfers were delayed: Sondra sent them, but received no acknowledgment of receipt from the payee. And some were aborted: she received a deposit, acknowledged it, but got no final sign-off from the sender.

  This wasn’t entirely surprising. The Atlantis scam was so vast and overarching that it involved hundreds of bankers and thousands of conspirators. Some of them were bound to die irreversibly or meet with other mishaps during the years, decades, and even centuries following the bust-out. Arrangements had, of course, been made to deal with the failures.