Valkyrie tried to imagine the scale of it, and failed. To her mind, Translation simply meant death. If it had been done, then he, Theo, must have done it, because he and Unity were one thing. She stared at him, feeling as though he had literally blown her insides away, her shock was so great. He had consumed an entire world, and he spoke of it so lightly.
It seemed to be an age later that he added, in the same executioner’s sotto voce, “We regret the loss of continuity for all the families involved. Deeply regret.”
Belshazzar didn’t wait for him to give her his attention, and Valkyrie was glad of that. “Before we’re ready to accept your condolences, I think that we would all like to know why you chose to destroy a perfectly functional and fully populated Sidebar. One point eight million people’s next of kin aren’t going to be comforted by the idea of their loved ones spending eternity at one with something they can’t see or touch.”
Theo sighed, performed an elaborate motion of his shoulders and crossed his legs. He looked pleased, Valkyrie thought.
“Yes, in spite of thousands of years of empty religious promises of exactly that. It’s quite perverse, I do agree. Whereas what I’m saying to you is that nothing has been lost.” He tipped his head a degree to one side with the missed timing of someone who’s been exhaustively coached, though Valkyrie fancied he deliberately got it wrong. “Nobody has died. They are all within, every life perfectly recorded, every experience distributed. Fascinating people, all of them. I am glad to have come into the sphere of their influence.”
Valkyrie’s jaw dropped as she realized the sense of what he was saying. The people of Metropolis were now part of Theodore’s undertow. He wasn’t apologizing. He was thanking them for a donation.
“Your reason,” Belshazzar insisted, allowing this gross insult to pass. “Twenty-five years of nothing. No trouble in any Sidebar, even the most complex. Hardly any accidents. Single figure Translations, pretty much all voluntary, no transgressions on either part. Now this.”
Valkyrie curled both her hands into fists involuntarily and her metallized skin creaked. Theodore looked up at her for the first time, although he didn’t lift his chin to do so. She saw that he felt no obligation to offer a reason, and that there was nothing anybody could do about it if he never gave one. Belshazzar’s twenty-five years of rule-abiding cohabitation with Unity in the Sidebar Universes had simply provided Solargov Security with reasons to believe in the wisdom of the choice they had made when they agreed to the construction of the Sidebars in the first place. The quarantine had been so good, the idea so bold, the future so very bright. The infinite research laboratory . . . an infinite amount of space and time . . . worlds . . . no hitches, not compared to the ages of adventure long past.
They had nothing on Theo, on it, and they never would. And even if they had hard evidence of any infringements, it wouldn’t matter because there was nothing to be done. Unity was unassailable. Valkyrie admired Belshazzar’s cool in the circumstances—Valkyrie wanted to kill him. She let him know this as she stared at him, more angry than wise.
“I tell you only to warn you of potential further disruption. There is a splinter cell,” he said finally, grudgingly, dismissing Valkyrie by returning his gaze to Belshazzar.
“A what?” Belshazzar said. Valkyrie didn’t think she’d heard it right.
Theo shrugged. “Well now, how shall I put it? Unity is an extremely large entity, not unlike a complete biosphere or planet, say. It is a dynamic, living system, with its own pressure points, highs, lows—all kinds of energy exchanges. Consider it as a liquid. Droplets of Unity can become separated from the whole during stormy conditions. They can be scattered across any of the dimensional surfaces, or all of them. Usually we reabsorb such losses very quickly. They are mostly nonfunctional matter, Stuff that assumes the form of quartz, the type that your Voyager Lonestar Isol discovered on her way to Barnard’s Star thirty years ago.”
“ ‘Mostly nonfunctional,’ ” Belshazzar said, “hides a multitude.”
Theo made a minute, concessionary nod that managed to convey an absolute lack of concession.
“How can you have a splinter of Unity?” Valkyrie asked suddenly. Her voice sounded harsh to her own ears. “How can there be more than one of it?”
“ ‘Unity’ is a human word with limited associations,” Theodore said slowly, measuring her stupidity. “When splinters break away from the whole and become 4-dimensional material they usually remain attached to the sevensheet of Unity fabric, even though they are separated in the material 4-verse. But on very rare occasions they may become separated across all eleven faces of the continuum. When this happens each piece becomes instantly self-complete. There is nothing that one part of Unity has in ability that the other lacks. The difference lies in the quantity of information accessible to each one. Unity is memory in fluid dynamic potential, living information. Both instantiations of Unity can survive and pursue separated evolutions distinct from one another. However, such events have always ended with a reunion of the two parts. Essentially, although they were separated, they were functionally identical. Once they meet again, they instantly merge. It is in their interests to do so, as they are then maximally potential. The Metropolis Sidebar was the foam on a wave of Unity that has returned to the sea. It is no loss. Only change. The assimilation of the human individuals there has increased the Unity potential for creative acts. They are becoming. Not gone.”
Valkyrie imagined droplets of mercury sliding on a piece of glass and uniting to form a single pool. “From the way you said it I thought it was more like trouble than just some bad weather event. Doesn’t seem to warrant the extinction of an entire world.”
Theo yawned. “And sometimes splinters are created when a particular weather system is pushed out deliberately, because its inclusion would cause potentially fatal destabilization to the whole. Unity’s structure is vastly complex, certain modalities that have high individuation potentials are—unsympathetic, at times.” He gave Valkyrie a glance that considered her insufficient to a better explanation and she felt herself duly patronized. “Isol—or should I say the human beings that were Translated—had an effect rather like that of a very large and heavy rock being dropped into still water. All conscious structures new to Unity do. There was a splash. Some of the splash remains detached, weak and human in nature, and we are in the process of recovering it. Think of it as fallout.”
“Fallout?” Valkyrie repeated, forgetting herself. “We were a rock in your pond and now the fact that you’re committing genocide is fallout? It’s our fault?!”
“This thing is loose in Solar space?” Belshazzar asked softly, but precisely, ignoring Valkyrie’s outburst.
“A conscious splinter is somewhere inside the Solar Primary or ’Bar worlds,” Theo said, letting his fingers slide through one another to form a double fist. “Through consciously adaptive contact with humans it has become somebody, probably human, almost certainly in fact.”
“Like the Stuff constructs in Sidebars?” Valkyrie asked.
“No,” Belshazzar said. She turned to Valkyrie with a cold and unpleasant smile that Valkyrie read as a kind of victory. “He doesn’t mean that. Stuff constructs aren’t what he is. Stuffies are made and operated by Unity, human in all but name and fundamental matter, able to be swallowed up at an instant’s notice into the tide and flow of Unity. They’re made of it, but they’re not part of its conscious flow until the moment of their return. They have no access to it nor it to them. This is a human-made being, not under Unity control, separate: an individual. It’s just like Unity, as powerful as Unity, but it’s not Unity. It’s not even a different kind of you, Theo. It’s not an agent that allows Unity to think in human terms. It’s . . . its own thing. That is what you mean, isn’t it?”
He inclined his head by an infinitesimal fraction.
Belshazzar pressed him. “And you can’t retrieve it?”
“Primary contact has proven—difficult, this time.”
&
nbsp; “Primary contact?” Valkyrie asked. “Is there some chain of contacts?”
“Your mind is locked into meaningless hierarchies,” Theodore told her as an aside, and said to Belshazzar, “It cannot be reassimilated by normal means.” He let his hands fall into his lap.
“Why not?” Belshazzar asked.
He shrugged again. “We don’t know. It seems to have undergone a critical state change in its interaction with the seven-sheet. I cannot say, because I cannot replicate the transforms.”
“You don’t know,” Belshazzar repeated in a calm, even tone. “You say it has evolved? Does it—supersede you?”
Theo had become even more still. Valkyrie wasn’t sure he was breathing. He was suddenly all comfortable and loose, like someone had cut his strings. He smiled vaguely and spun the chair with his foot so that he faced them completely. He sat forward and became disturbingly affable although the skin around his eyes never changed its smooth, doll-like quality.
“Not yet. If you’ll allow me to finish—this splinter came to Metropolis only relatively recently. Unity operations that require energy transforms across all 11-D maintain stability because there is only one operator. But with two such operators, each not knowing what the other is doing or plans to do, there is a virtual certainty that energy transactions across the 11-D will cause a fatal instability and destroy the conditions that permit the existence of all expanded 4-D space-times, including your own. The splinter is a conscious operator, like myself, capable of destroying all expanded 4-space, whether it intends to or not. Being much less than Unity, the chances are that its calculations are less refined and the probability is high that what has happened to Metropolis is what will happen to all the universes you know, if this situation continues.”
“So your killing all of them was what—a lesson?” Valkyrie demanded.
“Since we have been unable to reclaim the splinter by the usual means, it was our effort to destroy it, in order to avoid catastrophic potentials.” Theodore met her gaze again and did not blink, or drop it. His smile was bright and its contempt withering, and Valkyrie quickly looked away. Her heart thundered in her ears and her face heated.
“Which has failed,” Belshazzar said.
Theodore sat back and recrossed his legs, putting one ankle up onto his knee and flicking some imaginary lint from the pressed line of his trousers. “Yes. Temporarily. But whatever its intention, it has come here and I believe it is inside the Sankhara ’Bar. It is completely inactive across the sevenface, so I cannot track it. But it will do something eventually—it always does.” He looked utterly confident.
“So, what? Is this your demand for evacuation?” Belshazzar asked him.
“No, we will make no more futile efforts to destroy it. All the human worlds are safe, unless the splinter itself destroys them, either deliberately or by accident. It is massively ignorant of its capacities, so there is a reasonable chance of that.”
“And why are you telling us this?” Belshazzar asked.
“To let you know.” Theodore got up and walked over to the windows. He looked out and down into the streets. “We will continue to operate and pursue our course of action in Sankhara and across all other 4-dimensional expansions necessary to ensure the splinter’s destruction or assimilation, and we regret . . .”
“Thank you. I believe you said that already.”
“You doubt my sincerity.”
“I don’t doubt it. I just know what it’s worth.” Belshazzar got up too, and indicated to Valkyrie that the audience was over. Valkyrie didn’t blame her when she allowed herself one parting shot. “I wonder if Tom Corvax or Zephyr Duquesne would tell a different story, if you let them return.”
“But they are always here,” Theodore said of the first humans to translate into Unity, as though vaguely surprised anyone could have thought they weren’t present. “Informing me.” He looked over his shoulder, and shrugged, and vanished.
There was no crack of inrushing air to fill the vacuum of his position. He had become air, Valkyrie thought, as she felt a breath of it push past her face and hands. It smelled of stale dry-cleaning solution, acrid and poisonous.
“But they’re not you.” Belshazzar closed the door behind herself and Valkyrie, shutting them back in her office again. The doorframe sensors remained silent above them. Valkyrie wished the parting shot had not sounded so ineffectual.
When they had moved away from the doors the Hive Queen turned to Valkyrie and spoke quickly and calmly. “I want you to catch up and review everything we know about Unity. Give yourself a thorough grounding. Then I want you to go to Sankhara and find this splinter he’s so angry with. Find out anything you can. Officially you’re to be the strong arm of the Solargov Security Agent out there, Bob Clovitz. But that will only be your cover story. I want you to pursue your own investigation and report to me directly, as well as doing whatever you have to do for Clovitz, when and if he makes contact with you. The Departments are divided on this one. He probably has an agenda to terminate the splinter though he won’t let you in on it.”
“But Sankhara is a high-interaction world,” Valkyrie said, halting briefly between words. She stuttered slightly, trying to find good reasons for her fear that weren’t to do with terror of Unity. The last thing she wanted, especially after today, was to go closer to it. “Among so many strange things this—thing—is going to be hard to find, impossible maybe.”
“But me no buts. I need you to discover if anything Theo said is close to the truth. I don’t expect you to even approach the splinter if you do find it. I’m looking to verify his claim, that’s all. If Theo is right, we need to be careful around it. Don’t do anything to piss it off. We might need it. If it is human, then it can have a conversation, and that means there may be a solution to this that does not involve Unity running wild across us. Perhaps it will free us from Unity, understand?” The Hive Queen’s bearing had become stiff, bristling with suppressed emotion.
Valkyrie hesitated. “Did you know anyone in Metropolis, Ma’am?”
“Yes.” Belshazzar was already turning her attention to another emissary arriving as Valkyrie left. “Many people.”
The emissary was the Solargov Deputy President Tekgenesis Atahualpa, or rather his everyday avatar, as projected by the office system. His actual body was on Mars. Valkyrie watched the large olive baboon stalk around the furniture with his tail high and huge teeth bared.
“Where is that fucker, Theodore?” he bellowed. The door closed before Valkyrie could hear Belshazzar’s reply.
Moving more slowly now with the burden of the task weighing her down, Valkyrie loaded all the available data on Unity at high-speed compression during the stop-start journey the public elevator took in its descent to the ground floor. At least it gave her another excuse not to have to look people in the eye. Too many of them wanted to show her sympathy about Elinor. As the facts slumped wearily into the spaces allotted them in her unconscious mind, like tired commuters finding a seat on a train, she slowed the absorption rate to consciously read one academic paper that got her attention for a second:
“It is generally supposed that Translation entails the complete cessation of normal consciousness so that the Translated person becomes effectively nothing more than a memory form, in the same way that Forged and Tek-adjusted individuals may have prints of their final neural patterns taken just prior to death and maintained within AI networks. But this is a mistake.”
Valkyrie frowned. Elinor existed as a memory print within Uluru, a very damaged one, and Valkyrie was interested by anything pertaining to them, in case there was hope of restoration. AI loading was like a photograph. It could not render dynamical, realistic change. AI revenants had never been successfully rendered viable, yet. The Elinor stored in Uluru was not alive. She was a simulation.
“AI network prints are static snapshots which may be mined for information. Within Unity however, [information source classified] the Translated individual remains alive, in the sense that t
hey are able to continue the natural processes of consciousness. While these processes also involve constant change there is no cessation of self-awareness; the individual lives on. AI prints, on the other hand, are simply photographs of personality made to move and speak in the illusion of life, without the continued experience of the dead person.”
Valkyrie shuddered and scanned into the appendices, where she read that those who had been Translated were not, as Theo insisted, actually dead. Not dead, as such. They had simply become the same thing as Unity itself. Their physical bodies were gone from 4-D, although they might be made again, supposing there was a need. What could that be? She needed Elinor. Would that be enough?
It did not say what that need might be, nor whose. Perhaps wanting to be back was not an option or was not allowed—the text didn’t say anything about whether people who were Unity could give effect to their will as they used to. Being Theo didn’t seem to Valkyrie to be the ultimate in corporeal self-expression for anyone, least of all the millions beneath him. And the incorporeality had to be one hell of a change, she thought. The Corvax Declaration stated that the Translated were in a state of superposition, being both themselves and alive and conscious, but also unified with all other conscious beings within Unity. It was such a grand statement, but try as she might she could not imagine the reality. Would it be like being an entire committee? That seemed absurd.
“Well whoop-de-do,” Valkyrie said, surprising several other people sharing the lift with her. She shrugged and pointed at her right ear, to suggest she had mistakenly spoken aloud during another kind of conversation and they nodded, all guilty of the same thing from time to time.
She still considered Theo a mass murderer, and superpositions beyond time were not cutting it as a defence. As they paused at the second floor to take on more anxious-faced workers, Valkyrie linked up with the all-AI network, Teragate, to see what the cold word was on Metropolis. Teragate was where all the Solar AIs talked. It typically excluded all non–machine users, but Valkyrie had done it a couple of favours in the human world and it would sometimes give her a snippet of information.
Living Next Door to the God of Love Page 10
