Aurora Rising

by Alastair Reynolds

“It’s not about room. It’s about resources.” Newkirk smiled at her. He had a young man’s face, not unattractive when one ignored everything else about him. His eyes were white orbs, blank save for a tiny dot of a pupil. They trembled constantly, with the coordinated motion of someone in deep REM sleep.

  “Resources?” she asked.

  “Funds have to be used in the most efficient manner possible. There are more than a million people living in Sea-Tac. If every single one of them had the mass-energy demands of an adult human, we’d be spending so much money keeping them all fed and watered that we wouldn’t have a penny left over for bandwidth.”

  “Bandwidth?” Thalia asked, blearily conscious of where this was heading.

  “For abstraction, of course,” Newkirk said, sounding surprised that this wasn’t obvious.

  “But there isn’t any. My glasses were dead.”

  “That’s because you were outside the participatory core. It’s heavily shielded. We don’t waste a watt broadcasting abstraction where it isn’t needed.”

  She cut him off. “Where is everyone, Citizen?”

  “We’re all right here.”

  Lights blazed on, descending in a wave from a vanishing point that appeared to be almost infinitely far above. Thalia saw tier upon tier of compartments, each of which held an identical glass box to the one in which Newkirk resided. There wasn’t room for this inside the habitat, she started to think, before realising that she must be looking along one of the connecting spokes, all the way to the weightless hub.

  “Why have you done this to yourselves?”

  “That’s not the right question. What you should be asking is, who do I have to kill to join?”

  She grinned nervously. “No thanks.”

  “You don’t know what you’re missing.”

  “Maybe not. I do know that I quite like having a body, being able to walk around and breathe.”

  “But you know nothing of abstraction. If you had any experience of it before you became a prefect, it must be just a fading memory by now. Like a glimpse of the gates of heaven between a crack in the clouds. Before the clouds closed again.”

  “I’ve sampled abstraction—I had implants before I joined Panoply.”

  “You’ve sampled it, yes. But only in Sea-Tac would you know the euphoric bliss of total immersion.”

  Thalia looked across the open space, at the boxes ranked on the far wall, the endless parade of human busts. “They’re all somewhere else, aren’t they? Mentally, I mean. Their minds aren’t in Sea-Tac at all.”

  “What would be the point? My people are the only real citizens of the Glitter Band, the only ones who truly inhabit it. Their minds are out there now, Thalia: spread across the entire volume of near-Yellowstone space, a choir invisible, singing the body electric, angels in the architecture.”

  “They’ve paid a price for it.”

  “One they’d all gladly pay ten times over.”

  “I really should be getting on with the upgrade,” Thalia said.

  “The polling core’s at the bottom of the shaft. Follow the walkway and it’ll bring you to the base in two rotations.”

  Thalia did as Citizen Newkirk instructed. When she reached the bottom of the shaft—Newkirk lowering down to match her descent until he was hovering only a metre above the floor—she reached out her right hand and summoned the whiphound back. It sprang into her grip, retracting its filament with a supersonic crack. She locked the whiphound back onto her belt.

  “I’ll run through what I need to do. I’m going to open a ten-minute access window into the polling core’s internal operating architecture.” Thalia patted the cylinder she had brought with her. “Then I’m going to implement a minor software upgrade. I won’t need to take abstraction down for more than a few milliseconds.” She cast a glance at the wall of busts. “They won’t notice it, will they?”

  “A few milliseconds? Not very likely. Buffering software in their implants will smooth over any glitches, in any case.”

  “Then there’s no reason for me not to begin.”

  Thalia’s cylinder opened like a puzzle box, revealing racks of specialised tools and colour-coded data diskettes. She pulled out the first of the four one-time pads and held the rectangle up to eye level. She applied finger pressure and watched text spill across the rectangle’s surface.

  “This is Deputy Field Prefect Thalia Ng. Acknowledge security access override Probity Three Saxifrage.”

  “Override confirmed,” the apparatus replied. “You now have six hundred seconds of clearance, Deputy Field Prefect Ng.”

  “Present entry port sixteen.”

  The polling core sank into the floor like a descending periscope, rotating on its axis as it did so. An illuminated slot came into view. Thalia reached into her cylinder and extracted the diskette containing the relevant software upgrade. She slid the diskette into the slot, feeling the reassuring tug as the pillar accepted it. The diskette vanished into the polling core, accompanied by a series of faint rumbles and thuds.

  “The diskette contains a data fragment. What do you wish me to do with this data fragment, Deputy Field Prefect Ng?”

  “Use the fragment to overwrite the contents of executable data segment alpha alpha five one six.” She turned to Newkirk and whispered, “This will only take an instant. It’s a run-time fragment, so there won’t be any need to recompile the main operating stack.”

  “I cannot overwrite the contents of executable data segment alpha alpha five one six,” the core said.

  Thalia felt a tingle of sweat on her brow. “Clarify.”

  “The requested operation would introduce a tertiary-stage conflict in the virtual memory array addressing the executable image in segment kappa epsilon nine nine four.”

  “A problem, Prefect?” Newkirk asked mildly.

  Thalia wiped her brow dry. “Nothing we can’t work around. The architecture’s just a bit knottier than I expected. I might have to take abstraction down for slightly longer than a few milliseconds.”

  “What counts as ‘slightly longer’?”

  “Maybe a tenth of a second.”

  “That won’t go unnoticed.”

  “You now have four hundred and eighty seconds of access, Deputy Field Prefect Ng.”

  “Thank you,” she said, struggling not to sound flustered. “Please evaluate the following. Suspend run-time execution of all images between segments alpha alpha to kappa epsilon inclusive, then perform the data segment overwrite I already requested. Confirm that this would not involve a suspension of abstraction access exceeding one hundred milliseconds—”

  “The aforementioned tertiary-stage conflict would now be resolved, but a quaternary-stage conflict would then arise.”

  Thalia swore under her breath. Why had she not probed the architecture before initiating the one-time access window? She could have learned everything she needed to without invoking Panoply privileges.

  “Turn it around,” she said, suddenly seeing a way. “Tell me what would be required to perform a clean installation of the new data segment.”

  “The new data segment can be installed, but it will entail a complete rebuild of all run-time images in all segments between alpha alpha and kappa epsilon inclusive.”

  “Status of abstraction during downtime?”

  “Abstraction will be fully suspended during the rebuild.”

  “Estimated build-time?” Thalia asked, her throat dry.

  “Three hundred and forty seconds, plus or minus ten seconds, for a confidence interval of ninety-five per cent.”

  “State remaining time on access window.”

  “You now have four hundred and six seconds of access, Deputy Field Prefect Ng.”

  She looked at Newkirk, who was studying her with a distinctly unamused expression, in so far as his wax-like mask was capable of expression.

  “You heard what the machine said,” Thalia told him. “You’re going to lose abstraction for more than five minutes. I have to begin the buil
d in the next minute to stand a chance of it finishing before my window closes.”

  “If it doesn’t build in time?”

  “The core will default to safe mode. It’ll need more than a six-hundred-second pad to unlock it then. You could be down for days, with the way Panoply’s tied up at the moment.”

  “Losing abstraction for five minutes will cost us dearly.”

  “I wish there was some other way. But I really need to start that build.”

  “Then do whatever you must.”

  “Do you wish to warn the citizens?” Thalia asked.

  “It wouldn’t help them. Or me, for that matter.” His voice turned stern. “Begin, Prefect. Get this over with.”

  Thalia nodded and told the polling core to commence the build. “Abstraction will be interrupted in ten seconds,” the pillar informed her. “Predicted resumption in three hundred and forty seconds.”

  “Time on window.”

  “Access window will close in three hundred and forty-four seconds.”

  “You like to cut it fine,” Newkirk said.

  Thalia made to respond, but even as she was opening her mouth she saw that there would be no point. The man’s face had frozen into mask-like stiffness, his eyes no longer quivering in their sockets. He looked dead; or rather he had become the dead stone bust he had always resembled.

  They would all be like that, Thalia realised. All one million, two hundred and seventy four thousand, six hundred and eighteen people inside Carousel New Seattle-Tacoma would now be in a state of limbo, severed from the realm of abstract reality that for them was the entire meaningful world. Just from looking at Newkirk, she knew that there was no consciousness going on inside his skull. If his mind could be said to exist at all, it was somewhere else, locked out, knocking on a door that would remain resolutely shut for another five minutes.

  Thalia was utterly alone in a room containing more than a million other people.

  “Give me an update,” she queried.

  “Rebuild is proceeding on schedule. Estimated time to resumption of abstraction is now two hundred and ninety seconds.”

  Thalia clenched her fists. It was going to be the longest three minutes of her life.

  “Sorry to bother you again,” Dreyfus said as the beta-level copy of Delphine Ruskin-Sartorious resumed existence in the interview suite, “but I wondered if you wouldn’t mind answering a few more questions.”

  “I’m at your disposal, as you’ve already made abundantly clear.”

  Dreyfus smiled briefly. “Let’s not make this any harder than it has to be, Delphine. We may not agree on the sanctity of beta-level simulation, but we both agree a crime’s been committed. I need your help to get to the bottom of it.”

  She had her arms crossed before her, silver bracelets hanging from her wrists. “Which will inevitably lead us back to the vexed question of my art, I suppose.”

  “Something made someone angry enough to destroy your habitat,” Dreyfus went on. “Your art may have been a factor in that.”

  “We’re back to the jealousy thing.”

  “I’m wondering if it was more than that. You may have strayed into a politically sensitive area when you picked Philip Lascaille as your subject matter.”

  “I’m not sure I follow you.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I looked at your history as an artist and until recently you were keeping something of a low profile. Then suddenly—well, I won’t say you became an overnight celebrity, but all of a sudden your work was being talked about, and your pieces were starting to sell for more than just small change.”

  “These things happen. It’s why we keep struggling.”

  “All the same, it appears that your work started attracting attention from about the time you began work on the Lascaille series.”

  Delphine shrugged, giving nothing away. “I’ve worked on many thematic sequences. This is just the most recent one.”

  “But it’s the one that got people looking at your work, Delphine. For one reason or another, something happened. Why did you settle on Lascaille for your subject matter?”

  “I’m not sure where you’re going with this, Prefect. Lascaille and everything that happened to him is part of our shared history. There are already a million works of art inspired by his visit to the Shroud. Is it any great surprise that I have incorporated a tragic and familiar figurehead into my own?”

  Dreyfus made an equivocal face. “But it was a long time ago, Delphine. We’re going back to the time of the Eighty. Those wounds healed years ago.”

  “Doesn’t mean there isn’t still resonance in the theme,” she countered.

  “I don’t deny it. But has it occurred to you that you might have raked over some ground that was better left undisturbed?”

  “With Lascaille?”

  “Why not? The man came back a lunatic. He was barely capable of feeding himself. Word is he drowned himself in the Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies. That made some of the other organisations with an interest in the Shrouders very unhappy. They’d long wanted to get their own hands on Lascaille, so that they could look into his skull and see what the hell had happened to him. Then word got out that he’d drowned himself in an ornamental fish pond.”

  “He was more than likely suicidal. You’re not suggesting someone murdered him?”

  “Only that his dying didn’t look good for House Sylveste.”

  “So what you’re saying is—let me get this right—someone killed me and my family, not to mention my entire habitat, because I had the temerity to refer to Philip Lascaille in my art?”

  “It’s a theory. If someone connected to the Sylveste family perceived your art as a veiled critique of their actions, they might well have considered retaliation.”

  “But why not just kill me, if I made them so angry?”

  “I don’t know,” Dreyfus admitted. “But it would help if I knew that you really hadn’t intended that work to embarrass the Sylvestes.”

  “Would that have been a crime, if I had?”

  “No, but if you’d intended the art to provoke a response, it wouldn’t be too surprising that you got one.”

  “I can’t speculate on the motives of the Sylveste family.”

  “But you can tell me why you picked Lascaille.”

  She looked at him witheringly, as if she’d only just appreciated his true worth. “You think it’s that easy? You think I can articulate my reasons for choosing that subject matter as if it was no more complicated or involved than picking the colour of a chair?”

  “I’m not saying—”

  “You’ve precious little insight into the artistic process, Prefect. It’s a shame; I pity you. You must see the world in such drab, mechanistic terms. What a crushing, regimented, soullessly predictable universe you must inhabit. Art—anything that can’t be described in strictly procedural terms—is utterly alien to you, isn’t it?”

  “I knew my wife,” Dreyfus said quietly.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “She was an artist.”

  Delphine looked at him for long moments, her expression softening. “What happened to her?” she asked.

  “She died.”

  “I’m sorry,” Delphine said, Dreyfus hearing genuine remorse in her voice. “What I just said to you—that was cruel and unnecessary.”

  “You were right, though. I’ve no artistic side. But I spent enough time with my wife to understand something of the creative process.”

  “Do you want to tell me what happened to her?”

  Dreyfus shot her a steely smile. “Quid pro quo is the phrase, I believe.”

  “I don’t need to know about your wife. But you do need to know about my art.”

  “You’re curious, though. I can tell.”

  She breathed out through her nose, looking down it at him. “Tell me what kind of an artist she was.”

  “Valery wasn’t exceptionally talented,” Dreyfus said. “She discovered that early enough in her career
for it not to cause her too much grief and disappointment when she brushed against real genius. But she still wanted to find a way to make art her vocation.”

  “And?”

  “She succeeded. Valery became interested in art created by machine intelligences. Her mission was to prove that it was as valid as purely human art; that there wasn’t some essential creative spark that required the input of a flesh-and-blood mind.”

  “That’s reassuring, given that I’m no longer a flesh-and-blood intelligence myself.”

  “Valery would have insisted that your art be taken just as seriously now as when you were alive. But she wasn’t so much interested in what beta-level simulations could produce as she was in art created by intelligences that had no human antecedents. That was what took her to SIAM.”

  “That rings a bell.”

  “The Sylveste Institute for Artificial Mentation.”

  “That family again.”

  “Yes, they do tend to crop up.”

  “What did they want with your wife, Prefect Dreyfus?”

  “In SIAM they were building experimental machine intelligences based on a raft of different neural architectures. Valery was assigned to the Laboratory for Cognitive Studies, a department within SIAM. Her function was to evaluate the creative potential of these new minds, with the goal of creating a generation of gamma-level intelligences with the ability to solve problems by intuitive breakthrough, rather than step-by-step analysis. In essence, they wanted to create gamma-levels that were not only capable of passing the standard Turing tests, but which had the potential for intuitive thinking.” Dreyfus touched a finger to his upper lip. “Valery tried to coax these machines into making art. To one degree or another, she usually got something out of them. But it was more like children daubing paint with their fingers than true creative expression. Valery began to despair of finding anything with an artistic impulse. Then she was introduced to a new machine.”

  “Wait a minute,” Delphine said, uncrossing her arms. “I knew I’d heard of SIAM before. Wasn’t that where the Clockmaker happened?”

  Dreyfus nodded. “That was the machine. Its origin was obscure: there was secrecy and interdepartmental rivalry within SIAM, as in any organisation of that nature. What was clear was this: someone had created an artificial mind unlike anything that had gone before. Not just a brain in a bottle, but an autonomous robotic entity with the ability to move and interact with its surroundings. By the time my wife got to see it, it was already making things. Toys. Puzzles. Little ornaments and objets d’art. Clocks and musical boxes. Soon it started making more clocks than anything else.”