Forbidden Planets

by Peter Crowther (Ed)

  “That still doesn’t explain why the keywords would crop up in . . . a play, of all things.”

  “Perhaps it does, though. Especially if the acausal signaling involves the transmission of patterns directly into the human mind, across time, in a scattergun fashion. The playwright . . .”

  “What about him?” she asked, with a knowingness that told him she had listened in on his conversation with Cook.

  “The man lived and died before the discovery of quantum mechanics, let alone braneworlds. Even if the warning arrived fully formed and coherent in his mind, he could only have interpreted it according to his existing mental framework. It’s no wonder things got mixed up, confused. His conceptual vocabulary didn’t extend to vanished alien cultures in adjacent reality stacks. It did extend to islands, dead witches, ghosts.”

  “Ridiculous. Next you’ll be telling me that the other clusters . . .”

  “Exactly so. The dramatized recording—the ‘film’—was made a few centuries later. The creators did the best they could with their limited understanding of the universe. They knew of space travel, other worlds. Closer to the truth than the playwright but still limited by the mental prison of their contemporary worldview. The same goes for all the other clusters, I’m willing to bet.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Austvro said. “The future Metagovernment resurrects ancient KR-L time-signaling machinery, technology that it barely understands. It attempts to send a message back in time, but it ends up spraying it through history, back to the time of a man who probably thought the Sun ran on coal.”

  “Maybe even earlier,” Fernando said. “There’s nothing to say there aren’t other clusters, lurking in the statistical noise. . . .”

  Austvro cut him off. “And yet despite this limited understanding of the machinery, the—as you said—scattershot approach, they still managed to score direct hits into the heads of playwrights, dramatists, sculptors. . . .” She shook her head pityingly.

  “Not necessarily,” Fernando said. “We only know that these people became what they were in our timeline. It might have been the warning itself that set these individuals on their artistic courses . . . planting a seed, a vaguely felt anxiety, that they had no choice but to exorcise through creative expression, be it a play, a film, or an ice-opera on Pluto Prime.”

  “I’ll give you credit, Inspector. You really know how to take an argument beyond its logical limit. You’re actually suggesting that if the signaling hadn’t taken place, none of these works of art would ever have existed?”

  He shrugged. “If you admit the possibility of time messages . . .”

  “I don’t. Not at all.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’d hoped to convince you—I thought it might make your arrest an easier matter for both of us—but it’s really not necessary. You understand now, though, why I must put an end to your research. Scrutiny and Exploitation can decide for themselves whether there’s any truth in my theory.”

  “And if they don’t think there is—then I’ll be allowed to resume my studies?”

  “There’s still the small matter of your murder charge, Meranda.”

  She looked sad. “I’d hoped you might have forgotten.”

  “It’s not my job to forget.”

  “How did you guess?”

  “I didn’t guess,” he said. “You led me to it. More than that: I think some part of you—some hidden, subconscious part—actually wanted me to learn the truth. If not, that was a very unfortunate choice of card game, Meranda.”

  “You’re saying I wanted you to arrest me?”

  “I can’t believe that you ever hated your husband enough to kill him. You just hated the way he opposed your research. For that reason he had to go, but I doubt that there’s been a moment since when what you did hasn’t been eating you from inside.”

  “You’re right,” she said, as if arriving at a firm decision. “I didn’t hate him. But he still had to go. And so do you.”

  In a flash her hand had emerged from the silvery folds of her dress, clutching the sleek black form of a weapon. Fernando recognized it as a simple blaster: not the most sophisticated weapon in existence, but more than capable of inflicting mortal harm.

  “Please, Doctor. Put that thing away, before you do one of us an injury.”

  She stood, the weapon wavering in her hand but never losing its lock on him.

  “Caliph,” she said. “Escort the Inspector to the dissolution chamber. He’s leaving us.”

  “You’re making a mistake, Meranda.”

  “The mistake would be in allowing the Metagovernment to close me down when I’m so close to success. Caliph!”

  “I cannot escort the Inspector unless the Inspector wishes to be escorted,” the aerial informed her.

  “I gave you an order!”

  “He is an agent of the Office of Scrutiny. My programming does not permit . . .”

  “Walk with me, please,” Fernando said. “Put the gun away, and we’ll say no more about it. You’re in enough trouble as it is.”

  “I’m not going with you.”

  “You’ll receive a fair trial. With the right argument, you may even be able to claim your husband’s death as manslaughter. Perhaps you didn’t mean to kill him, just to strand him . . .”

  “It’s not the trial,” she snarled. “It’s the thought of stepping into that thing . . . when I came here, I never intended to leave. I won’t go with you.”

  “You must.”

  He took a step toward her, knowing even as he did it that the move was unwise. He watched her finger tense on the blaster’s trigger, and for an instant he thought he might cross the space to her before the weapon discharged. Few people had the nerve to hold a gun against an agent of Scrutiny; even fewer had the nerve to fire.

  But Meranda Austvro was one of those few. The muzzle spat rapid bolts of self-confined plasma, and he watched in slow-motion horror as three of the bolts slammed into his right arm, below the elbow, and took his hand and forearm away in an agonizing orange fire, like a chalk drawing smeared in the rain. The pain hit him like a hammer, and despite his training he felt the full force of it before mental barriers slammed down in rapid succession, blocking the worst. He could smell his own charred fur.

  “An error, Doctor Austvro,” he grunted, forcing the words out.

  “Don’t take another step, Inspector.”

  “I’m afraid I must.”

  “I’ll kill you.” The weapon was now aimed directly at his chest. If her earlier shot had been wide, there would be no error now.

  He took another step. He watched her finger tense again and readied himself for the annihilating fire.

  But the weapon dropped from her hand. One of Caliph’s smaller spheres had dashed it from her grip. Austvro clutched her hand with the other, massaging the fingers. Her face showed stunned incomprehension. “You betrayed me,” she said to the aerial.

  “You injured an agent of Scrutiny. You were about to inflict further harm. I could not allow that to happen.” Then one of the larger spheres swerved into Fernando’s line of sight. “Do you require medical assistance?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m about done with this body anyway.”

  “Very well.”

  “Will you help me to escort Doctor Austvro to the dissolution chamber?”

  “If you order it.”

  “Help me, in that case.”

  Doctor Austvro tried to resist, but between them Fernando and Caliph quickly had the better of her. Fernando kicked the weapon out of harm’s way, then pulled Austvro against his chest with his left arm, pinning her there. She struggled to escape, but her strength was nothing against his, even allowing for the shock of losing his right arm.

  Caliph propelled them to the dissolution chamber. Austvro fought all the way but with steadily draining will. Only at the last moment, when she saw the gray hood of the memory recorder next to the recessed alcove of the dissolution field, did she summon some last reserve of resistance.
But her efforts counted for nothing. Fernando and the robot placed her into the recorder, closing the heavy metal restraining buckles across her body. The hood lowered itself, ready to capture a final neural image, a snapshot of her mind that would be encoded into a graviton pulse and relayed back to the homebrane.

  “Meranda Austvro,” Fernando said, pushing the blackened stump of his arm into his chest fur, “I am arresting you on the authority of the Office of Scrutiny. Your resurrection profile will be captured and transmitted into the safekeeping of the Metagovernment. A new body will be quickened and employed as a host for these patterns and then brought to trial. Please compose your thoughts accordingly.”

  “When they quicken me again, I’ll destroy your career,” she told him.

  Fernando looked sympathetic. “You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve heard that before.”

  “I should have skinned you twice.”

  “It wouldn’t have worked. They’d have sent a third copy of me.”

  He activated the memory recorder. Amber lights flickered across the hood, stabilizing to indicate that the device had obtained a coherent image and that the relevant data was ready to be committed to the graviton pulse. Fernando issued the command, and a tumbling hourglass symbol appeared on the hood.

  “Your patterns are on their way home now, Meranda. For the moment you still have a legal existence. Enjoy it while you can.”

  He’d never said anything that cruel before, and almost as soon as the words were out he regretted them. Taunting the soon-to-be-destroyed had never been his style, and it shamed him that he had permitted himself such a gross lapse of professionalism. The only compensation was that he would soon find himself in the same predicament as Doctor Austvro.

  The hourglass vanished, replaced by a steady green light. It signified that the homebrane had received the graviton pulse and that the resurrection profile had been transmitted without error.

  “Former body of Meranda Austvro,” he began, “I must now inform you . . .”

  “Just get it over with.”

  Fernando and Caliph helped her from the recorder. Her body felt light in his hands, as if some essential part of it had been erased or extracted during the recording process. Legally, this was no longer Doctor Meranda Austvro: just the biological vehicle Austvro had used while resident in this brane. According to Metagovernment law, the vehicle must now be recycled.

  Fernando turned on the pearly screen of the dissolution field. He tested it with a stylus, satisfied when he saw the instant actinic flash as the stylus was wrenched from existence. Dissolution was quick and efficient. In principle the atomic fires destroyed the central nervous system long before pain signals had a chance to reach it, let alone be experienced as pain.

  Not that anyone ever knew, of course. By the time you went through the field, your memories had already been captured. Anything you experienced at the moment of destruction never made it into the profile.

  “I can push you into the field,” he told Austvro. “But by all accounts you’ll find it quicker and easier if you run at it yourself.”

  She didn’t want it to happen that way. Caliph and Fernando had to help her through the field. It wasn’t the nicest part of the job.

  Afterward, Fernando sat down to marshal and clarify his thoughts. In a little while he too would be consumed by fire, only to be reborn in the homebrane. Scrutiny would be expecting a comprehensive report into the Pegasus affair, and it would not do to be woolly on the details. Experience had taught him that a little mental preparation now paid dividends in the long run. The recording and quickening process always blurred matters a little, so the clearer one could be at the outset, the better.

  When he was done with the recorder, when the green light had reported safe receipt of his neural patterns, he turned to Caliph. “I no longer have legal jurisdiction here. The ‘me’ speaking to you is not even legally entitled to call itself Adam Fernando. But I hope you won’t consider it improper of me to offer some small thanks for your assistance.”

  “Will someone come back to take over?” Caliph asked.

  “Probably. But don’t be surprised if they come to shut down Pegasus. I’m sure my legal self will put in a good word for you, though.”

  “Thank you,” the aerial said.

  “It’s the least I can do.”

  Fernando stood from the recorder and—as was his usual habit—took a running jump at the dissolution field. It wasn’t the most elegant of ends—the lack of an arm hindered his balance—but it was quick and efficient and the execution not without a certain dignity.

  Caliph watched the tiger burn, the stripes seeming to linger in the air before fading away. Then it gathered its spheres into an agitated swarm and wondered what to do next.

  The Singularity Needs Women!

  Paul Di Filippo

  So this Singularity walks into a bar—That’s how my sad yet ultimately hopeful story starts. Like a bad joke.

  Maruta and I were drinking Ghostyheads in the Sand Castle. You know that drink. Pureed ectoplasm from the Wraiths of Bongwater 9, cut with tequila from the mutant agaves of New Old New Mexico and a spritz of volcano water. Pretty potent. By the second sip, your head is full of dark energy and your limbs are parsecs long. By the third sip, you’ve solved the riddle of where the Growlers disappeared to. And by the fourth, you feel you could walk a tightrope strung between Mount Meru and Shambhala.

  But even that altered consciousness didn’t equip us to deal with a naked Singularity.

  Maruta was telling me about the vicissitudes and excitements of her past month. At that period, she worked for Captain Pongo and his Mathspace Explorers. They had just returned from a long voyage to the von Bitter Shoals with a rich cargo of novel Penrose tilings. Captain Pongo had declared an extended shore leave for his weary sailors. Hence our little celebration.

  “So, Lu, there we were, our ship hung up on fractal coral, the waters full of savage zero knots. None of us had eaten anything other than a slice of pi in the past week, and half our crew lay in sick bay, undergoing emergency Fourier Transforms. And what do you think Captain Pongo says? ‘Damn the toroids, full secant ahead!’ ”

  Maruta laughed heartily at the punchline of her own anecdote, then tilted her head back to glug down an immoderate slug of her drink. I admired the sheer mechanical efficiency of her slim throat as it worked, let my eyes roam over the rest of her fine body, which was clothed in the latest fashionable cuirass and greaves from designer Hulda Loveling. Maruta was visibly happy to be reembodied and was exulting in her pure physicality.

  As was I. I had missed her more than I had imagined I would, over the past several weeks. I tried to convey that by sensuously gripping her knee, although the joint of her greaves didn’t actually allow for any flesh-to-flesh contact.

  “Damn dangerous job, Ruta. Always said so. But you’re good at it, and you enjoy it, so that’s all that counts. I’m just happy you’re back safely. Pretty lonely here without you.”

  Maruta grinned broadly, then leaned forward to bring her face close to mine. The pungent odor of Ghostyhead wafted off her lips. “I didn’t really have time to miss you, Lu. But once I got back, I realized once more just how much you mean to me. So, what do you say to finishing our drinks and going back to your place?”

  Closing her eyes and inching even closer, she invited a kiss. I moved to comply. But our lips never connected.

  The noisy, revelry rich environment of the Sand Castle suddenly became quiet as a deepsea trench. Maruta and I both straightened up to see what had caused the hush.

  Standing in the fine-grained flowing curtain of the doorway was a naked Singularity.

  Appearing as a dark-haired, light-skinned human male some seven feet tall, impeccably proportioned and endowed in masculine fashion, the Singularity was instantly recognizable as such by his magisterium corona. No one knew the origin or exact nature of the field that always surrounded an incarnate Singularity, but the presence of the refulgence was an unm
istakable sign of posthuman activity.

  For several eternal frozen seconds, none of us humans dared do so much as breathe or blink. Then a few brave souls fingered their Lifelines, insta-texting calls to Ess-Cubed.

  The Singularity took no notice of these silent cries for help, although I’m sure he registered them. Rather, he just proceeded further into the club.

  There was a single step down from the doorway. The Singularity moved off the step but did not obey gravity’s injunction to meet the floor. Rather, he walked through the air, one-step-high.

  And he headed straight for Maruta and me.

  I got down off my stool, and Maruta followed. Those patrons of the bar nearest us backed hurriedly away, some falling over themselves in their efforts to disassociate themselves from us.

  For me and Maruta, there was no point in running, no point in adopting a combative stance. But somehow it just felt better to meet this intrusion on my feet rather than sitting down.

  With no haste and an air of implacable deliberate-ness, the Singularity closed the interval between us. I had plenty of time to experience a gamut of emotions: fear, curiosity, anger, envy, and, inexplicably, shame and guilt. All my surroundings, including the stressor-shaped circulating-particle walls and ceiling of the room, assumed a preternatural lucidity. I wasn’t sure if this was just plain old human fight-or-flight sharpening of my senses or some kind of magisterium leakage.

  Halfway across the room, the worst thing happened.

  The Singularity smiled and held out a hand, like some kind of commission-driven flitter salesman.

  The essential banality of the gesture chilled me more than anything that had preceded it.

  Inevitably, the Singularity reached us, still grinning and inviting a handshake. For all the insignificant good it would do, I interposed myself protectively between the intruder and Maruta. The fringes of his magisterium tickled my vision, inducing strange fractures and curdlings in the scene before me. I blinked three times rapidly, and the effect lessened, although things still did not look quite right.