K-Machines

by Damien Broderick

  "Pawns, the lot of them." Toby kicked aside the outstretched leg of the officer. "Not a samurai among them."

  "Always the bridegroom, never a bride."

  "I beg your pardon? Isn't that 'bridesmaid'?"

  "Oh no, have I revealed my deep inner conflicts?" Ember showed his teeth. "This is a mirthless grin. You've probably never seen one."

  "I have, I have," Toby told him. "After all, I have known you for a very long time."

  Ember found no virtue in this line of thought. But Toby was right about the Pawns. "It's quite strange, when you think about it. All this low-level attention. Maybe our opponents got rattled when we blew their battleship out of the sky. Decided to expend some cannon fodder for a while."

  "When August blew their battleship out of the sky."

  "Are you trying to pick a fight? Save your energy for these pricks. You think I really care which one of us smacks which one of them? The brat was on the scene."

  Toby crossed his arms and stood full-square in the raging wind, gave him the kind of look you'd expect from a phlegmatic Rock. "And just happened to be in possession of an X-caliber Vorpal implant. I don't recall you having the balls to put your hand on the stone."

  "Is that like having the stones to put..." Ember trailed off. He made a rubbing-out motion with one hand. "All right, all right. I'm irrationally jealous. I can live with that. Getting back to the matter in hand: Do you think there's any more cannon fodder lurking in the shadows?"

  "I believe we've scared them all out. You might as well absent yourself, if you find this watch tedious. If I need further help, I'll call for it." He hesitated, put out his hand. "Thank you, brother. I do appreciate what you did just now."

  "Hey, da nada. I detest these cockroaches as much as you do. But I don't think they were here to snatch your nuke or detonate it in advance."

  "It would take considerably more technical nous than any of these foot soldiers could muster. I believe you're right."

  "So it's a distraction. I wonder where the rest of the family is? Interesting if they are all being siphoned off by this kind of Sturm-und-Drang frivolity."

  "One way to find out," Toby said, and addressed the deixis operating system. "Give us... hmmm... Jules."

  A window opened into a fragrant tropical garden. Jules glanced at them in surprise. Beyond his shoulder, Ember saw his sisters Jan and Maybelline in colloquy with the kid, who was seated in a battered old armchair, and a rather haggard-looking gypsy with, of all things, a crystal ball showing a distorted image of the Tree of Life.

  "Hail, hail, the gang's all here," Ember said. "I don't suppose you have any more Seebecks sequestered over there? We're doing a head count."

  "Just us chickens," Jules told him. A ferocious excitement gleamed in his brother's eye. "Get in here, right now. Is that Toby with you? You're not going to believe—"

  An appallingly bright silver light flashed at Ember's back, splashed from Jules's face and body. Something struck him hard, flung him forward through the Schwelle. The doorway snapped shut. Ember disentangled himself from Toby. He blinked, rubbed at his eyes, blinded by a blazing purple-violet afterimage. A deep ache was spreading into his muscles.

  "Holy shit! Was that a—" The skin at his neck was itching. He touched it, winced.

  "Spoke too soon," Toby said in a rasping voice. "While we farted around with the small fry..." He stopped speaking, whined in pain. After a moment, he added, "They inserted an... engineer... into the container... with the... bomb."

  "The deformers nuked you?" Maybelline said, shocked into high pitch. Her face loomed in the purple blur.

  "We're dead men, brother," Ember said. "Well, hard to conceive of a more dramatic way to go. All pointless." He felt terrible, already he felt terrible. All the cells in his homunculus body had been sleeted by prompt radiation from the detonated nuclear device. "Sorry, Jules, I fear you picked up a lethal dose as well, if the Schwelle passed it through." The deck hit his knees. For the second time within an hour, he vomited copiously. Soon he'd be down to the poisonous, bitter taste of chyme.

  The gypsy thing was crouched in front of him, holding his head between two parched, chapped hands. Great gaudy dirty skirts. Her heavy, vulgar perfume.

  "We can upload you, should you choose preservation by that method."

  "What?" His mouth tasted vile, and the greenhouse room, the garden, was rotating. "Stick my brain in a vat?" He forced sardonic levity into his shaking voice. "Appealing as that might be under normal circumstances, I think I'll pass." He shut his eyes, but the whirling did not stop. "You might have a more gullible customer in Toby or your boy Jules."

  "Or you might prefer your brother's healing hand."

  Grudgingly, he reopened his burning eyes. The blinding purple afterimage was ebbing. The brat was leaning over Toby, who lay face down on a mattress that had not been there moments earlier, breathing in great convulsive gasps. He was shockingly burned, his garments tattered and melted into his scorched flesh. The kid's hand was pressed against the bubbled, blood-flushed skin of Toby's bald head. A kind of lambency, benign contrast to the dreadful radiation flash, bathed the place of contact. Even as Ember watched, blinking and in growing pain as shock withdrew, his brother's acute sunburn ebbed and faded. It seemed to his dazed mind that the scorched flesh itself was mending. Toby's agonized breath eased. August lingered a moment longer, turned then to Ember, stretched out his right hand. The golden metal piercing his palm was hotly luminous.

  "I'm a doctor, almost. You'll probably feel a little prick," the kid said and, unbelievably, he was grinning with happiness, not an iota of mean triumph in it.

  "I do," Ember said. To his horror, his eyes were filling with tears. He was not dead, after all. "I really am. Thank you."

  Heat surrounded him. He was asleep.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  SgrA*: 2026, Aged Eighty-Two

  Wrinkling his nose, he looks up from his datex. Johnny Hohepa Wilson has burst into Other Realities' Informatics Hub straight from the greenhouse winter outdoors and even warmer points north, surrounded by an invisible haze of sweat-soaked safari jacket underarm stink and masculine pheromones. Typical of the man's undiluted enthusiasm, to come directly here from the parking lot rather than slipping discreetly past the lobby into his own office, showering, and changing his shirt. "Damn me," Wilson shouts, tearing off his stained, black, solar topee, flinging it on the desk of an unattended workstation, "it's hotter up there in Capricornia than it is in Texas—and you know what General Sherman said about Texas and Hell."

  In a few weeks his boss, his former student, has managed to get his face burned beneath his tanned and inherited part-Maori coloring, topee-brim shade and all. Wilson is dressed like a British or German pukka explorer of a hundred years and more ago, penetrating the heat and wilderness of Africa or perhaps India or Afghanistan to put the natives in their place and keep the flag flying. Presumably it's an ironic fashion statement. Or maybe the tropical greenhouse weather in North Australia really does require off-white safari suit and sun hat, at least for Europeans. Apparently the Bangladeshi are doing just fine, millions of them arriving each month in ships and planes from their rancid, rotting, inundated fields. The relocation logistics, not to mention transport and resettlement costs, must be incalculable. Well, strictly, they probably are, at least in human terms. He waves a hand over the surface of his datex, which silently goes on standby or, rather, turns its full attention to the hundred background tasks its petabyte of pseudo-consciousness is dealing with.

  "So how are you anyway, you old bastard?" Johnny yells at him, pausing for a moment to kiss Shohreh on the cheek and fluff Brian's ragged hair. "Has Kashmala made an honest man of you yet?"

  He remains seated, coolly watching Johnny Wilson perform. "I thought Sherman said that war is hell."

  "You're right, he did, he did. The man was obsessed with the place. But he also said that if he owned Texas and Hell he'd rent out Texas and live in Hell." Wilson dragged up a chair, threw h
imself into it. "I tell you, man, we've made the same choice, and it's a bloody sensible one. The Indonesians and the Bangladeshi can have the whole of the damned scorched continent above the Tropic of Capricorn for all I care, and welcome to it."

  "Nice of you to be giving away someone else's country," Brian mutters from the other side of the room.

  "Come on, fair go, it's not as if you as a voter or I as an interested onlooker or the bloody president of Australia gave them the place. They came and took it—and rightly so, as the blue-helmeted ladies and gentlemen of the United Nations have assured us. But I can tell you, there's a lot of promise up north. I'll be recommending some infrastructure insertion and deposition to the board." He leans forward across the datex display, lowers his voice considerably. "Come and see me in my office in half an hour. I need to get cleaned up. I have some interesting news on the quantum computer front from Korea. By the way, your hair's coming in nicely."

  His new teeth, too, very painfully. He knows at last why infants cry all the time. The cultured stembrid cells, based on his own stochastically recompiled and optimized DNA, had been implanted a full fourteen months ago; the ache of their growth and irruption is never-ending, but after a while you learn to block it out. Once they've broken up through the soft-stapled gum, it gets easier to eat without wincing, although he still subsists on mushy gruel for most of his meals. Whey smoothies flavored with banana, strawberries, apple. He smiles to himself. Shakespeare had been dead right, and exactly wrong. Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. Yes, but they are coming back, one by one, expensively as hell at the moment, but things are looking up, finally. And Johnny Wilson does not stint with the health plan for his underlings. When you're planning to build new universes, it just seems ridiculous to be petty with the help. He brushes his fingertips over the bristles coming in through his naked, sun-spotted pate. Absurd self-indulgence, he'd have named it once, such cosmetic replenishment. But Kashmala wanted to see what he'd look like with a full head of hair, and he can't blame her, even if the stembrids are renewing him organ by organ, she's too young to be stuck with a man more than twice her age. He shakes his head at the absurdity. Back when he was indulging his midlife crisis with Moon Ku, Kashy hadn't even been born. Strange days indeed.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  August

  I got to my feet, at once exhilarated and frightened. I turned to Jules, who stood stock-still and aghast, hands pressed against his natty suitcoat breast.

  "Did it harm you?"

  "I don't... think so." His face was ashen. "The Schwelle system appears to have shielded us as they came in. The poor sods caught mucho rads as they passed into the portal. Much brighter, though, and it might have blinded me."

  I patted him reassuringly on the shoulder. "You're a lucky man. But I think these two are going to be all right."

  His pupils were still shut down to pinpoints. He looked hard at me, and he was trembling. "What in the hell are you? You arrive among us as a wet-behind-the-ears neophyte from a world I just happened to be observing, and a couple of weeks later you're raising the dead." He drew back. "I don't trust you. I don't believe you're who you say you are."

  The exhilaration was ebbing. I won't say that I felt drained, precisely, because the principle that had worked through me was not part of me, was not my virtue. The thing in my hand was a tool. I still didn't understand who or what wielded it. And my ignorance tipped the balance back to fright. The filthy things, whatever they were, whatever their motive, were insistent in their efforts to murder us all. Unless, of course, some deeper stratagem was in play. Had the K-machines deliberately timed the detonation of their weapon to coincide with the opening of the Schwelle? In the hope that the radiation would slay more Seebecks than Toby and Ember alone? An unnerving suspicion awoke in one baroque corner of my mind: Might this apparent attempted murder be designed to solicit from my X-caliber device the very healing it had wrought? Surely that was an excess of subtlety. I repressed the thought.

  "I am who I am. I never pretended to be anyone other than the son of Dramen and Angelina Seebeck. Believe what you wish."

  The gypsy woman was seated again at her baize table. She beckoned me toward her. Frowning, I pushed past Jules and leaned on the edge of her card table.

  "You will cross water," she told me, cackling. "You will meet a tall, dark, handsome man. Now you must cross my hand with gold." She extended one dark-seamed palm.

  I burst out laughing, and the tension drained from me. "This isn't gold," I told the M-Brain manifestation, "but it's the best I have on me." Pressing my own right palm against hers, I let the Xon implant rest against her imaginary skin. It felt perfectly real, warm and faintly leathery. Not so imaginary, perhaps. Something compiled instantly for the purpose of communicating with us, but no less real for that. A tingle ran up my arm. I tried to pull my hand away; it might have been welded in place. For a moment I thought I would faint. The Matrioshka Brain interrogated my implant, and perhaps whatever stood behind it. The transaction was entirely opaque to me. After a moment, she released me, and was gone, like the cat popping out of existence, table, crystal, and all.

  The others were turning their faces toward me, slowly. They had seen nothing. Strange. But then what was not strange in this place?

  Jan said, "Leave the kid alone, you pious fraud. He got us here despite everything Maybelline and I could do to fuck him up."

  "Please, people, let's calm down. I can understand Jules's concern. Hell, how do you think I feel? A couple of weeks ago, I was getting ready for my fourth year of medical studies. Now I suddenly find that I'm allegedly a Player in the Contest of Worlds, and I still don't know what that means, not really. I don't know what's at stake in the Contest, beyond simple survival and mayhem against the foe. I don't know the rules. I'm fairly sure we've all been taken for a ride, but I don't know who's leading us by the nose. Every time I try to get to the bottom of these questions, people rush to change the subject, or the roof caves in on me, or something dreadful tries to kill somebody I love. Marchmain accused me of being a clueless Parsifal, and at least I did understand that. But as I remember Wagner's opera, Parsifal was the idiot who never asked the right question at the right time. Don't blame me, dudes. I've been asking one question after another ever since I fell through the mirror into Ruth's world, and none of you bastards will give me the time of day." I stopped. I was trembling more than slightly. With an effort, I slowed my breathing. Before anyone else could speak—Jules looked resentful, teeth bared—I added, "Sorry, I asked everyone to calm down and then I had a tantrum." I spread my hands. "But cut me some slack, okay?"

  To my surprise, Maybelline said, "That's fair. You've annoyed some of us, but I don't think you set out to do that. You're a bull in a china shop, but it's not your fault. We've been embedded in this game forever, it feels like, so we take an awful lot for granted."

  "What do you want to know?" Jan added. I saw the fairy Sylvie detach itself from her shoulder, hover, watch me with an intent inquisitive gaze. Nobody else but Jan could see the projection; that was another oddity, and one I needed to think about if I ever found the leisure to think about anything.

  "What I said." I looked around, and the couch was still there. Toby and Ember lay stretched beside it on supportive mattresses, both sleeping comfortably. I sat down. "I have never heard of a contest without a goal and a list of competitors and a set of rules everyone agrees to and an adjudicator and... you get the drift."

  "You're being absurdly literal," Jules said. "It's like talking to an 'intelligent design' creationist. You think because you see structure in the universe, somebody must have put it there deliberately. No. Contestation is built into life by emergent Darwinian principles."

  "Nobody sets the goal, nobody picks the winner? It's all a matter of chance? You're telling me the Contest is a metaphor?" A semaphore, someone had punned. Who? Oh yes, Davenport. Mad Davers, the friend of my childhood. A light went on in my head, not as shockingly bright as the n
uclear blast but sharp and clear enough as a metaphor, as a semaphore, to flag down my attention. I would meet someone tall, dark, and handsome. That was Jamie Davenport. I could talk to James. He would think I was insane, but I could lay all this out before him, and he'd listen and, who knows, maybe he'd help clarify it for me. I was too close to it, and these people weren't going to help me. They were not antagonistic, not even Jules, not really. But they'd been mired in the mess for too long, for centuries, probably. They were looking at each other, trying to hand off the task of answering me.

  "You never discussed this topic with your girlfriend?" Jan said. "She being the computational ontology expert."

  "No, and now I can't reach her."

  "Really?" Jan gazed into the middle distance, murmured in a practiced way to the deixis system. After a moment of silence, she met my eyes and shrugged. "Sometimes we are simply inaccessible. Like we were in deep space. But mostly it's because we lock the Schwellen, if we're busy or need privacy, whatever. She's probably washing her hair. Or, like Jules said, killing something. You don't want to be distracted at a moment like that."

  Toby would know, but he was deep in a recuperative sleep that I had somehow induced. I guessed that he'd sleep for many hours. I determined to push on with my frustrating task.

  "I'll tell you what I think," I said to the assembled company. "Our theological brother Jules explains that everything is due to chance and natural selection. A week or so back, he brought me here and ran me through a couple of virtual-reality dioramas. The Doomsday Hypothesis, I believe he called it." When he tried to interrupt, I spoke more loudly. "Shut up. I've been trying to work out what he was up to with that. Just amusing himself by dazzling the rube? Very likely that's what he thought he was doing. I told you to shut up," I said again as he began to protest, "but I think it was a message from the M-Brain intelligences. Jules is their sock puppet."