“My dad,” the girl asked. “Is he okay?”
The shield reshaped as Lytel remotely prepped it to leave the ship.
Neither Rodriguez nor the girl should remain in the corridor while that happened.
“I don’t know how your father is,” Rodriguez said, putting her hand on the little girl’s back. The child was shaking so hard it looked like she might rattle out of her skin. “But I’m sure we can find out.”
NAPIER WAS ALMOST out of the Asteroid Belt when six ships surrounded him. All of those ships had official insignia, but not all of the insignia were from the same organization.
Different rescue and security companies, all government owned, all looking pretty official.
“What is going on?” Griz said from beside him. “We didn’t steal anything.”
“No, we didn’t,” Napier said. They had just killed half the crew. But they’d killed a lot of people out here before, and no one had come after them.
“So what the heck was different about this job?” Griz asked.
Napier didn’t have the answer to that. Except bad luck. And that bad luck started when he saw the kid.
Kids threw Napier off his game.
But he didn’t tell Griz that. Instead, Napier deleted all the records he had for theBlue Moon, and then contacted all of the security vessels.
Contacting them first might buy him some time. Although time probably wasn’t what he needed. Because he had violated his own code, and used bombs to kill that kid for no reason at all.
EXCEPT THAT HE hadn’t killed Colette Euphemia Josephine Treacher Singh Wilkinson Lopez. The ship didn’t blow up. Instead, the Sally guarded the Blue Moon all the way to the nearest Mars Rescue base where everyone reported their own truth about what happened.
The only truth the authorities listened to, though, was Colette’s, because it proved accurate from the moment the investigators had the tablet she had stolen.
That tablet had recorded her every move.
It also showed where Napier’s crew was, because of what Colette had done with the holographic concierges. She had turned them into location beacons.
Colette did not want attention for what she had done. She didn’t want a medal or recognition from the governments of Mars.
She wanted something else entirely.
Something no government had the power to give.
“I DON’T WANT to go to boarding school,” Colette said to her dad after all the officials left. “I want to go home.”
Her family was in a tiny hotel room on the base where the Blue Moon had ended up. Her mother lay on the bed, her forearm over her forehead. She’d had a headache ever since she’d woken up, something the medical personnel said was a pretty normal reaction to the gas the bad guys had filtered into the buffet.
Dad didn’t seem to have a headache at all. He was frowning at Colette, and she knew, she knew, he was going to make her go to that school anyway, just because he had no idea what else to do with her.
“All right,” he said quietly.
“What?” Colette asked, not sure she had heard him right.
“I’m taking you home,” he said.
Colette’s mouth opened ever so slightly. She hadn’t expected that.
“No, you’re not,” her mother said. “She’s more than we can handle.”
“You won’t have to handle her, Louise,” Dad said.
Her mother sat up on one elbow, her face pale.
“What?” she asked, in almost the same tone Colette had used a moment before.
Something crossed Dad’s face, something hard and fascinating.
“Colette saved our lives,” he said after a moment. “All of us. Even you. We owe her, Louise.”
Her mother made a dismissive sound and collapsed on the bed. Dad’s gaze met Colette’s and his eyes actually twinkled.
“We could send her away,” Colette said softly.
“My thoughts exactly,” he said just as softly.
Then he opened the door to the hotel room, and peered into the hall as if he expected to see a man cradling a laser rifle.
There was none—no man, no rifle.
Dad ushered Colette out of the room.
He was protecting her again. Like he had tried to do on the Blue Moon. Only he had failed.
And he would probably fail now. But that was okay.
Because Colette could protect them all.
As she had learned recently, she was really really good at that.
A PORTRAIT OF SALAI
HANNU RAJANIEMI
SFUMATO KNEW SOMETHING was very wrong when ver comet organ played a discordant note.
Ver aquatic selves—floating in the Leaf’s capillary oceans—heard it as a mistimed thunderclap. To the anthropoid Sfumato-selves in the zero-gravity jungles, it was an off-key earthquake.
Each note in the melody was an actual comet, striking the dark side of the ancient Dyson ringlet. Tiny scouts from Sfumato’s self-fleet watched them from an orbit above the grainy surface. Pale dots blossomed into milk-splash explosions, one by one: megatons of dirty snow, a hundred musical Tunguskas—until one of them missed its impact target by fifty kilometres and more than a second.
It was not only jarring, it was disappointing. Sfumato had worked hard on the piece. Ve had picked the comets amongst the countless trans-Plutonian bodies from the Kuiper Belt that had been bombarding the Inner System ever since the failed Great Projects turned their dynamics into insane pinball. Ve had used the Leaf’s laser array—originally built to propel starwisps to Proxima Centauri—to boil the comets’ surface ice into jets of steam that nudged their trajectories just so. Ve even had an anthropoid-self play the melody on the keys of an ice organ in an observatory in one of the Leaf’s rim-towers, synchronised with the impacts.
It was true the music was mostly improvised. Sfumato had not gotten around to finishing the composition. Ve rarely finished things. What was the point of being a minsky, a colony of a thousand sentient nooids, if you had to limit your options? A cluster of ver nooids had gotten sidetracked by the spectroscopy of comet ice; another had decided to calculate what pieces of classical music could be represented by Newtonian collisions with a planar surface. The anthropoid organist had started carving gorgeous ice sculptures between each slow keystroke.
But ve had confidence in ver ability to do things properly, and as emotion blocks of annoyance and self-doubt piled on ver thought-chain, ve retraced the orbit of the mistimed comet all the way to the Outer System.
That was when ve saw the Pageant.
It had appeared out of nowhere in the last kilosecond, derailing Sfumato’s comet with its gravitational pull. The sky was ablaze with gamma rays from its warp bubble deceleration. Its core was a distorted bulge in the firmament, a gravitational lensing effect from the twin Jupiter-mass black holes in its heart. Around that dark eye was an expanding halo of bright motes, millions of them: each a kilometre-long capsid with a metallic, angular von Neumann core and a seething envelope of smartmatter. These were the Iron Critics, the Pageant’s watchdogs and heralds.
As Sfumato watched, the Critic halo burned delta-v in unison, changed shape, elongated. Ve plotted their orbits. A rain of lines fell onto the million-kilometre-long ribbon of the Leaf. The Critics had seen Sfumato’s comets, and were—as always—ferociously, relentlessly, ravenously curious. No civilisation in the System, aestivating or awake, had ever survived their inquiry once it was initiated.
Sfumato’s thought-chain filled with icy blocks of fear and stark survival instinct. Ve started waking up the ancient vessels of ver self-fleet, uploading nooid snapshots to starwisp memory crystals, directing anthropoid and zooid selves in vain, brave mass migrations towards hastily fabbed mass launchers.
The Critics would reach the Leaf in eighty kiloseconds, and soon after that, the Dyson ringlet that had been Sfumato’s home for a hundred gigaseconds, and any selves remaining behind, would cease to be. But that was not the worst thing.
Sfumat
o would also have to break the bad news to Salai.
SALAI DID NOT answer Sfumato’s call. That was not surprising: they had not spoken for gigaseconds, not since the war. Salai’s minsky was much smaller than Sfumato’s, and ve preferred to wander the Leaf’s vast expanse in first person, inhabiting a small pod of zooids and synthoids.
While the rest of ver made preparations to leave, Sfumato crammed a thought sidechain into the tiny brain of ver fastest ship-self, an antimatter-powered drone, and did a hard burn across the Leaf’s day side to find ver former lover before it was too late.
The Dyson ringlet had no gravity to speak of, but it was full of life, more than a thousand Earthlike planets. The capillary oceans were a tracery of blue against the lush tangled jungles of zero-g trees. Some of the green tendrils stretched nearly to the nightshade discs—lightsails weaving back and forth between the Leaf and the Sun. They had been designed to provide a night-day cycle. But ever since the Sun had become unstable, with its madly flailing polar protuberances spewed by the out-of-control sunlifter engines, the Leaf’s biosphere only thrived in their shadow.
The rest was deserts, grey-and-brown scars where solar activity bursts had burned the biosphere all the way to Leaf’s adamantine bedrock. For centuries, those had provided a canvas for Sfumato’s projects: hollow-boned kilometre-high humanoid automata acting out ver unfinished plays; synthetic bacteria mutated by cosmic rays, their genetic circuits carving a novel in the Leaf’s bare surface letter by giant letter.
Now that ve knew the Iron Critics would swallow it all, the Leaf seemed to Sfumato like a child’s sandbox full of broken toys. Ve had always meant to fix the biosphere, reprogram the nightshades, repair the broken capillary that had created a spherical ocean. Now it was too late.
Far below, ve detected an electromagnetic signature near the mountainous water bubble. A pod of silver amphibians danced in and out of its undulating surface.
Sfumato descended and hovered nearby. Ve knew the pattern of delicate motion: it was Salai, lost in joy, and for a moment, regret overwhelmed ver thought-chain. Then the boom of a distant comet reminded ver of the task, and ve sent Salai a cautious thought-packet.
Gather yourselves, Sfumato said. We have to leave. The Pageant is coming.
Ve attached a description of the approaching entity to ver plea. The Pageant was the last of the Great Projects: an attempt to evolve a truly benevolent superintelligence. Inside was a growing god-seed, caged in a hierarchy of nested simulations where each virtual layer was watched by agents in the next layer for any signs of perverse instantiations; a matryoshka of guardians. Outermost were the Iron Critics, who had the unenviable task of finding zero day exploits in crude matter. To resist the Temptation, the Pageant had to move, seek anomalies, entertainments, puzzles—anything to keep the Critics from slipping into the stupor of simulated realities.
Silent, Salai considered. Then ver bodies dove into the wall of water, and emerged again in a spray. The droplets scattered, tiny sparkling planets.
Thank you for telling me, ve said, but I’m staying.
For a moment, Sfumato did not know what to feel. Ver self-ship was so far from the rest of verselves that it took seconds to form a consensus between nooids. Blocks of anger, confusion, and disbelief competed for addition to ver thought-chain.
What do you mean you are staying? ve asked finally, attaching images of the Pageant passing through the Jovian system a gigasecond ago: the dreamcoral-covered moons that ran the Star-Makers’ virtuals, bombarded by the Critics and dissected until there was nothing left. Is this what you want? We have to go.
You have to go, Salai said. I’m staying.
You are insane. Is this one of your crazy notions? Towards the end, before they fought, Salai had become enamoured of physics, claiming there were still jewels of theory and experiment undiscovered by the ancients, that it was the best way to resist the Great Temptation of endless virtuality. There are no answers to your questions in the god-seed, just oblivion.
A nightshade passed over them. Fluorescent bacteria in the water clinging to the silver Salai-selves made it look like ve was made of stars.
I proved the Principle of Precedence, you know, Salai said. It turns out the ancients were right. When you measure a quantum system, the results come from the ensemble of precedents. If you have something without precedent, you don’t know what is going to happen. If we make something truly new, entangled states the Universe has never seen before, we are free to make our own laws. But if you just repeat something, many times over, after a while you cannot escape the precedents.
Ve passed Sfumato a thought-block. It contained meticulous experiments, carried out with entangled photons; postulates, predictions, results.
That was why you ran from me, Sfumato said. You did not want to be trapped.
The nightshade passed, and the silver was back.
Are you going to try to take me with you? Salai asked. You have many more selves. I cannot fight you anymore.
The war, ten gigaseconds ago: nooid armies and drones scorching Dyson trees, malware weapons unmooring a nightshade that crashed and formed the wrinkled Night Mountains.
No, Sfumato said. No more wars. I just don’t understand. Do you hate me so much you would rather die a true death than come with me? I am asking. Please.
Salai sent ver another thought-block filled with a sad smile.
I cannot leave without becoming something else. You came here first, but you never made the Leaf your home. I did. It is one of my selves now. That was the one thing you could never teach me—how to stay and not leave. It was your music that brought the Pageant here, wasn’t it? Did you do it on purpose? Did you look for a reason to escape?
Sfumato said nothing.
It is all right, Salai said. I forgive you. Now go, before the Critics come.
Then ver selves dove into the ocean. Sfumato watched them disappear, like silver bubbles of air. Far away, the comets kept falling, pounding like a sick, arrhythmic heart.
TEN KILOSECONDS BEFORE the arrival of the Pageant, Sfumato launched ver self-fleet and left the Leaf behind.
Ver thought-chain was spread out nearly a thousand vessels. There were von Neumanns that had gnawed Mercury and Venus, apple-sized, self-replicating machines. There were ancient ships that had been Sfumato since the beginning, since the disappointed refugees from the Great Projects came to ver: a gigantic Star-Maker bristling with gamma ray lasers; even a magnetoform, a piece of living solar wind, that had once swum in the heart of the Sun when the sunlifting engine was made.
The minds of zooid and anthropoid selves were uploaded into memory crystals with minimal manoeuvring capability and launched from mass drivers into an eccentric orbit. After the Pageant’s passing, Sfumato would recover them. It felt strange to be without biological selves, see everything through ships’ sensors alone. It was cold and flat and clear, like an anthropoid’s mind after days of fasting.
The Leaf receded in the glare of ver self-fleet’s engines, a patchwork quilt of nightshade shadows, ochre deserts and silver capillaries. Sfumato felt a sudden relief. It was a broken world, full of broken things ve no longer needed. It had been ver home for a terasecond, but it was time to move on and start anew.
Then came a thought-block of utter loss, the feeling of being an uprooted tree, tiny roots clinging to the ground, crackling as they break, gobbets of earth shaking loose. Ver nooids struggled to achieve consensus, could not agree whether or not this was a Sfumato-thought at all.
Ve examined the block. Memories of Salai glared back at ver.
Salai had come to learn, sought ways to escape the Great Temptation. There had been a golden period when they first became lovers; anthroid and zooid couplings in the Leaf’s jungles, the bliss of two thought-chains tangling up. But they had never merged, not quite. Merging required breaking a self-link, a discontinuity, so that a new consensus could be reached. That had terrified Sfumato as much as disappearing into the nested, endless virtual of the Tempt
ation. Salai had seen that and fled. Sfumato had tried to make ver stay. That had started the war. In the end, ve had let Salai go into the vast reaches of the Leaf but had always known ve was still there, that one day they would be reunited; there was still time to heal the wounds. Just not yet.
That was Sfumato’s precedent, that was what ve did. That was what defined ver: running away from unfinished things. Ve had been doing it since before ve was born.
Ver most ancient nooids remembered the Disappointment: the reluctant admission that no minsky or sentient would ever cross the vast dark between the stars. So humanity had set out to make another kind of infinity.
The sunlifting engine, plumes of plasma roaring up from the magnetic poles, to reduce the Sun’s mass to extend its lifetime to hundreds of billions of years. The Tree—of which the Leaf was a remnant—a network of Dyson ringlets made from dismantled Venus and Mars, to capture all of the star’s energy. The Star-Makers’ black hole engine to stellify Jupiter, to light up the Outer System. And the grandest project of all, the Skhadov Thruster, an incomprehensibly vast mirror built from sunlifted matter, to redirect the Sun’s photons as thrust, to sail the System itself across the galaxy and beyond.
All of them had failed. Such grand projects needed to be simulated before they could be built, and the simulations were always more attractive than the cold bedrock of reality. That was the truth of the Temptation, the solution to the Fermi Paradox. And as their creators dreamed or aestivated, their sub-sentient servants degenerated, and things broke down.
The Sun broke free from its sunlifter chains. Its exhalations destabilised the Skhadov mirror, whose gravity loosened the orbits of the countless Kuiper belt bodies and sent them careening into the Inner System. They bombarded old empty Earth and the other planets. With all the excess mass within reach, the Von Neumann machines building the Tree grew wild and made their orbital rings crooked, unsettling things further, until what remained of Mercury collided with Mars in a cataclysm unlike any the System had seen since the formation of the Moon.
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