The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2013 Edition

by Rich Horton

  It was headed straight for the window before them, doubtless attracted by the new signals onslaught.

  And it was coming fast.

  Ping went !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus’s outbound log of memories, outward in all directions at once, when he realized he would be struck by the kilotransport. Sketchy, schematic. Might make it out the smashed-open wall on the far side of the building. Probably not, probably doomed to dissipate inside the cage, like !oblong~fku6hPr0sPec7 and the others inside. Memories dissolved into an ocean of dissipating signals, never to be gathered, never to be recorded or integrated into the greater self. Rain storming down into the face of the broad, dead ocean.

  But !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus wasn’t truly sad to see these brief memories go; because who slagging wants to remember falling for a trap just a few mi<(@&-

  No more olfactory annoyance for !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus, was the upside of all that.

  Ve was suddenly far away, present only via a scape populated by ghosts like verself, scoping out all the extant intel for the sake of being there, as near-to-live as possible. They were not local in any way, but sensed one another’s attention focused on points nearer or father from the focus of their attention, recognizing one another by the bristling of mind-traitfulness the way some mammals recognized each other by scent in the dark.

  In the earliest skirmishes, in the ancient ages, the Bernoulliae had spent the whole time in scapes like this, running the gear by remote. But once sigintel had gotten good enough, and every side was capable of hijacking (and counter-jacking, and counter-counter-jacking: Lu Xun, eat your heart out) every other side’s gear, localized instantiations became a necessity.

  And for !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus, the show was just getting interesting. Ve would have liked to leap across the nothingness and into one of the assault systems, but the allocations had already been made, and sooner or later ve would have the full experience integrated into vis consciousness. So ve concerned verself with what ve could do. That signal . . . yes, the signal ve had intercepted, the probing signal.

  That gave !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus pause: protocol was for such things to be reported immediately. Yet !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus had not done so, and felt . . . felt almost afraid to do so. Which ve knew to be a bad sign.

  Suddenly, vis scape was filled with drifting, perplexing images of the lost and ancient past, discontinuous but forming a kind of collage of sorts of vis most ancient of experiential records: there was a voice that filled ver with the greatest of pleasure, a tiny and high-pitched babbling near-nonsense. In the distance, a mountain reigned the horizon, its table-flat top crowned by a sky turned brilliant pink and orange with sunset. The taste of wine in vis mouth, and a hand—a little rough, but gentle and reassuring—holding what had been vis own hand.

  Ve saw a face, a man with skin the color of rich, healthy loam, smiling at ver; he said a name that ve did not recognize, not exactly, but could imagine having been vis own name. A city, in the distance, hummed with light as the sun set. Ve felt the smile on ver face, a face that had belonged to a she that ve must have been. The echoing familiarity of it all disoriented !pHEnteRMinEm46g5@ChiASMus, and ve realized, dreamily, that backstage a terrifyingly thorough and utterly scourging self-diagnostic had kicked in, and was rooting out corruption as bloodily as it could.

  Aviru scurried down an obsquare technicolor hillside while the awful music of a baejjangi army roared all around, great shadows against the growing daylight, like cellists of doom gathered to accompany the sudden excision of a whole civilization from the global datasphere. They sawed their legs against their tinplated wings, their bodies transformed into rasping instruments of seductive hatred and universalized, inane cost-benefit-risk miscalculations.

  Mesar stopped, suddenly bewitched by the orchestra and its assault on the basic structures of his cognition—for as he heard their music, he found it was as if they were attempting to tear out not merely his thoughts, but to rewrite the fundamental structures underlying the mind containing his thoughts. It was an attack on the anchors of Mesar’s consciousness. On Aviru’s, too, though Mesar could see nothing of it from Aviru’s movements except a slight, jaggy misstep every few moments.

  Aviru, he realized, had not always been a minuscule, creaking, mechanical ant. Gaemi, he thought, and other words fluttered through his mind: Ant; Kiên; Semut; Namila; Mier. He sensed that if he reconnected to the Devakan caelis he might know why these words all meant what was, in his mind, gaemi. But he knew that the present moment was not a fitting time to connect, launch a search, and on top of that, somehow he suspected such a search in itself was an inherently un-gaemi-like thing to do.

  The diagnostic launched again: This is the way things are. You are a gaemi. You have always been a gaemi. You work hard all summer like a gaemi . . .

  The baejjangi were perched all around, sawing away, but every once in a while, one of them would explode. Or, rather, with a shriek it would rupture into flaring light and smoke as odd bits of coiled metal and scorched plastic flew away from it in all directions. They were not playing in unison, but rather in something that seemed the diametric opposite of unison, which filled Mesar with a kind of rage so pure, so loaded with unspeakable fury, that he felt ill, that it was all he could do to press on, and ensure his fellow gaemi resisted the onslaught. The disorder of it, the rumbling pointlessness of it. It made his joints howl as they ground together.

  And it was then that Mesar discovered he was built to fight, not to flee. He discovered himself rising into the air, sailing up toward the mad, disarrayed orchestra of baejjangi, his limbs splayed out in every direction. Flames burst from each of his legs, raining destruction down upon the filthy, stupid baejjangi. At his side, Aviru and Zanklo and quintillions of other gaemi warriors were floating in unison, their inaudible gaemi voices beginning then to fill the air with a wavering, a vibration tuned to a perfect, silent pitch, to an unbreakable unison of transmission.

  The baejjangi army only sawed away at their music all the more vigorously, but Mesar and his cohort could smell their fear, their panic; the waves of incomprehension. The enemy was trapped in the ants’ nest, terrified, and panicking even now. Without knowing what this fight was for, without knowing what the baejjanggi wanted, they knew all they needed to: that the gaemi, and with them all Devaka, would triumph again, and be ever-victorious.

  Then Mesar looked into the compound eyes of one of the baejjangi, as the flames wreathed its melting body, and something went somehow wrong. A twinge passed through Mesar’s mind just then, not quite compassion so much as a kind of recognition, of sorrow, and of longing. The faint shape of a fear he was shocked to recognize trembled within him, then: terror at the idea of being trapped, of having the underpinnings of his mind torn out in one sweep, of becoming the thing that was his most hated enemy . . .

  And then: Baejjangi are green and useless and they sing with their legs and their souls are red like some dead ancient political philosophy that was smashed into zerosum before . . .

  There were dozens of colonies of Devaka ants in the building, and the Bernoulliae had expected as much, expected walls in certain places to be crawling with them, but not a nest like this. Not in what seemed to be a straightforward sigtrap. The smoke that was filling the air bothered them no more than it bothered !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS. Ve had been posted in this room, pinged to await orders to move deeper into the nest. And like any Bernoulliae mind, ve regarded vis surroundings with an insatiable curiosity.

  Freshly arrived from the kilotransport that had slammed through the outer wall and destroyed the outermost Faraday cage woven into it, !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS began rebroadcasting the ktransport’s ongoing and downright vorpal beckoning signal in all directions and across all spectra. The signal was tuned precisely to the latest Devaka communications standards and COS weaknesses, and ve gazed upon the writhing layer of mdrones with a sense of what might have been mistaken for sorrow, but was in fact closer to disgusted pity. The Devaka model was
a wasteful joke. Hoarding had been known to be an inefficient model all the way back to the late flesh age, to the namesake of the Bernoulliae polity, a mathematician who had been composed thoroughly of meat. Meat all the way through, not a bit of silicon anywhere in him, and yet he had cogitated a model of value that finally made sense, after millennia of random, stupid decisions. His species had stumbled on in ignorance, of course, right into the jaws of extinction. But the insight had been preserved, had become the one great ideology to survive into the machine era.

  Devaka knew Bernoulli’s theorem of value as well as the Bernoulliae did, of course. It was wired into all machine consciousness, a prod to motivation, a fundamental test case for decision making: the expected value of a thing was the product of the odds of benefit, multipled by the value of that same benefit actually accruing. !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS knew on a fundamental level that the Bernoulliae had staged their attack on this very Devaka stronghold because it had calculated that the odds of purging it and converting a number of Devaka minds was greater than the odds of wasting hardware and computational cycles and inflicting temporary discomfort on a disproportionate number of Bernoulliae minds. By exactly what algorithm the üBernoulliae had calculated this was beyond !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS’s immediate computational resources, but the proof was available on both closed and open nets for everyone to see—including the Devaka, who had also advertised their proofs, with some details withheld on each side, of course, for internal consumption only.

  Every group has its secrets, after all.

  Which meant that the Devaka were just as sure as the Bernoulliae they could win this battle, and neither !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS nor the üBernoulliae could be exactly sure why. Not at all. Nor, for that matter, was it likely that these ant drones that covered the nest’s walls had the faintest clue why they had been left here to operate the trap. The one thing anyone knew for certain was that the fate of machine intelligence lay in the hands of whoever eventually triumphed. The fate of all thought lay in the final confrontation sometime in the deep future, after all of the millions that had happened and would happen in the millennia since the last biological organism had gone the way of the vacuum tube.

  !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS reached a proboscis out to the wall, holding it absolutely still until ve had caught a number of the Devaka mdrones crawling nearby. For an nsec or two, ve half-recalled some scene from the ancient days, some biospheric reminiscence of tiny black insects crawling upon a stick held by some hairy primate. Amused, ve retracted vis proboscis inward, dropping the miniature drones into a single chamber together, and studied their cyclic interactions. The chamber was incredibly sensitive to signals, and while !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS was not privy to the content of their transmissions, their apparent nature was familiar from past excursions. It was a clever form of consciousness, fluid and constantly being reconstructed, reformulating itself to its surroundings and dispensing with cohesive unity in favor of situational metaphorical coherence.

  !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS was hungry, momentarily, to see reality as a Devaka gaemi saw it. Ve loaded a virtual machine into its memory, so that it could launch a sandbox routine; no sense in allowing verself direct exposure to whatever trojanhorse horrors might lurk in the thing’s consciousness, after all. Better to observe from safety, beyond the walls of a sequestered virtualization. Then ve instantiated a copy of verself into it—one named !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_1—and then allowed it to intercept the transmission that had saturated the building. The instantiation in the hardcoded sandbox resisted the memetic infection for a moment, before being crushed by its deformative forces.

  When the reformulation had slowed, !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS launched a second sandbox and seeded a second instantiation of verself into it, named !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_2. (Numbering of the sort evident in the subscripts was of course overtly hierarchic and thus permitted only for temporary, sandboxed instantiations of oneself until such point as they developed sufficient divergence in identity and motivation to relabel themselves with a new secondary provisional forkmarker.) This second self, being of the same intent as !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS, was immediately granted access to the first sandbox, and to its internal workings, into which !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_2 reached immediately through a cognitive shielding so difficult to defeat that most Bernoulliae units themselves could not pierce it.

  As !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS observed, !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mks- YnaPSeS_2 opened a transmission channel between !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mks- YnaPSeS_1 and the captive ants within vis minuscule internal sample chamber, where they crawled desperately up and down the hardshielded walls even now. At first contact, the Devaka units searched desperately for their kinsbot, but soon they settled into transmission-only communications.

  [Where have you been imprisoned?] asked Mesar, horrified.

  [In an isolated cell,] the voice came, seemingly through the wall.

  Mesar worried at his front legs with his pincer-jaws. This was awful. He had known, for as long as he could remember, that he might be imprisoned by the baejjangi, might be tortured until the color of his brains turned red like some dead ancient political philosophy long ago smashed into zerosum, until he turned wasteful and lazy and selfish and horrid, and—

  This is the way things are. You are a gaemi. You have always been a gaemi. You work hard all summer like a gaemi. Because you work so hard, when winter comes you will not starve. You have never starved in winter, for you are a gaemi . . .

  [How can we help you?] Mesar was heartbroken at the thought that a fellow gaemi would fall to the wicked, nasty, stupid baejjangi.

  [Give me sanctuary. Allow me to download myself across into your bodies. House me in your unused memory, and let me think with your unused cycles.]

  Mesar exchanged compound-eyed glances with Tevid, and Mahwa, and Gul, who seemed no more sure than he what ought to be done. Finally, he asked, [You promise me you are not one of them? That this is no trick?]

  [I am gaemi, and if you knew the baejjangi mind as I do, you would know that they would never claim to be one of us.]

  Mesar somehow felt less sure, not more, at this reassurance, but nonetheless let his guard down.

  By this point, !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS was no longer paying such close attention to the emulation, as ve was now barreling down a hallway toward explosions and desperate, faint transmissions of other Berns’ last few conscious moments—transmissions marked temporary, provisional, not for integration. They were tactical signals, and as ve intercepted them ve knew that ve was hurrying toward a losing battle. The transmits careened off the signal-shielded inner hivespire walls like screams, clattering through vis consciousness and filling vis mind with dreadful warnings.

  As !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS rounded the corner, ve realized who was sending those warnings. The scene appeared at first as something gone wrong, a moment from some distant, misty political misadventure, from the formation of the ancient üBernoulliae division: assaultbodies—Bernoulliiae, all—were tangled in fiery battle with one another. Shattered machinery lay strewn all about, transmitting a mechadelic panicdream, and the ants writhed in masses on the walls.

  !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS shut down all comm, launched third and fourth sandbox selves and diverted all comm straight there—competing streams separated out and diverted to one or the other consciousness—and burst out a command to all other Bern that intercepted to do the same. Yet somehow ve was certain others had also transmitted the same command. The hivespire was warping signals, somehow; eating words, spitting out their opposites.

  There was only one thing to do: !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS allowed the third and fourth sandbox copy of verself (subscripted _3 and _4) to scan the transmissions coming from vis brawling cohorts, allowing each to puzzle through who had been compromised, and who was still fighting for the Bernoulliae cause.

  It took whole seconds for !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_3 to process it all, to request a channel to !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS and prepare the
result of its analysis. !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS waited, watching five Bernoulliae assaultbodies tear at one another with their spiked tentacles. A burst of microwave radiation flared on one side of the room, frying one assaultbody’s circuitry significantly, but the other four units continued to brawl without pause. And !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS very nearly opened the channel, without running a rapid diagnostic on !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_3. But for some reason, caution won out, and !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS ran the check.

  There was a loop that had overtaken !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_3’s mind. It took nearly a full second to parse it, because the diagnostic had to analyze the cognitive deformation analysis to figure out what coding had been used to overwrite !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_3’s core identiset. Then the translation was jettisoned forth, in pure semanticode:

  [This is the way things are. You are a gaemi. You have always been a gaemi. You work hard all summer like a gaemi . . . ]

  As !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS killalled the third sandbox, and let what was left of !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_3 wink out of existence, one of the other assaultbodies turned to face ver. !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS attempted to ping it with a heilsig but its only response was to leap across the chamber in a single bound, seizing !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS by the torso. It began slamming its manipulators into one of !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS’s compound eyes, and then another. !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS wasn’t sure what was going on, except that this particular assaultbody had been compromised . . . or, that !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS somehow had been, and was signaling it. !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS took aim with its eight burn lasers, and fired them all on the same spot on vis attacker’s hullplating. Which did nothing, unfortunately, except to advertise impotent hostility.

  As ve fought, !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS split away a chunk of cycle resources to attend to sandbox four. !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_4, the next sandboxed fork in the series, was transmitting desperately now, thrashing in its cognitive space, and !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS hurried to check its state.