Exodus

by Alex Lamb

  With reluctance, Will turned away from the mechanism. He’d made a promise to Moneko and this was not the time to change agendas, no matter how tempting it was. He made his way back up the stairs, then froze again as he caught sight of Balance agents in police uniforms hurrying in his direction. They were running down one of the causeways he’d taken just minutes before, sniffing the air before them like bloodhounds, looking for a Glitch.

  Will’s heart lurched. Given all the marching obstacles, he now stood little chance of reaching Balance’s trunk program before the agents reached him. Apparently, the good fortune right in front of him was all he was going to get. Even if he chose not to leave the world today, Orbital Defence was surely a decent place to create a distraction that would cover his escape. With Balance’s attention drawn to a security breach, he might even reach the main cog.

  Will quickly made his way down another level to something called Fleet Controls, his hands sweating in anticipation. Before him, a square platform enclosed the top of the management gear, exposing its slowly rotating axle. Hovering above it was a shining SAP schematic, bathing the platform in gently pulsing light.

  Will scanned the augmented hackpack Moneko had given him and picked something that would allow non-invasive monitoring. He gulped it down and reached out gingerly to touch the SAP, fully aware that any attempt to edit or probe the system might trigger a tripwire.

  Understanding filtered into his mind with the smooth, comfortable familiarity Will had once felt handling the Ariel Two. He sensed the presence of hundreds of huge vessels, all sleeping. Not mere drones, actual starships already launched and fuelled, forged from millions of clustered drones and augmented with raw material from all across the system.

  Will reeled. While not permitting himself to leave, Balance had nevertheless prepared for that moment. It would only take a single change to this SAP to pass a copy of his own avatar across to the slumbering cruiser of his choice.

  He grimaced. After he acted, Balance would no doubt add extra security to this branch to prevent his return. But what else was he supposed to do? The agents were almost on top of him, with any number of cloned instances at their disposal. Then Will groaned as the obvious struck him. He was a thread, too, and should start thinking like one. Why choose whether to escape the world or change it when he could just as easily do both?

  He broke out Moneko’s chocolates again, this time picking a suite of branching tools manifested as an orange swirl. The command sequences for splitting his thread appeared in his memory, and with that knowledge came options. He didn’t need to fully separate his threads, apparently. He could cluster them, in effect turning himself into a tiny version of Balance – a Meta to his own Glitch instances. While that prospect scared him, he immediately saw that it would allow him to tightly coordinate his actions – an advantage he needed right now.

  Will stuffed his mouth full of SAPs, gorging himself. Subminds woke inside him like forgotten senses bursting back to life. The machine room took on a curious, luminous quality as his mind grew. The whole thing started to sing around him. He could hear it, like a choir belting out some hyper-complex madrigal. At the same time, the space took on a charged quality of meticulous meaning, as if crackling with semantic electricity.

  Will remembered a tiny part of what it meant to be a world. There was a weird sort of power and beauty to it – an unearthly rightness, ringing and joyful and provocative. He was as ready as he was ever going to be.

  He reached out and seized the Fleet Control SAP. At the same time, he started manufacturing tethered duplicates. The effect was entirely peculiar, like inhabiting the mental equivalent of an ever-shifting Picasso painting with a hundred parallel perspectives at once. Ironically, the more bodies he made, the easier it got, as the perspectives began to average themselves out.

  He liberated a starship, waking it out of its multi-year slumber. The inevitable police sirens started wailing, but by then Will was already legion. Balance agents poured down the ladders towards him.

  Will chuckled. It looked like he’d decided to build an army after all. He threw his clones up the ladder to the level above to combat the approaching agents and started copying himself across to the ship.

  With frustration, he discovered that Balance was already blocking him. Lines of control had somehow been thrown at the starship from all across the world. In a surge of insight, Will remembered how this kind of fighting worked. As a world, he’d learned to do battle on multiple complexity scales at once. Balance would be doing that already, with forty years’ more practice. Will knew he badly needed more control over the world’s command hierarchy.

  Feeling less like a person and more like some kind of cerebral amoeba every second, he sent clones rushing out on walkways in every direction, trying to dominate as many parts of the system as possible. By then, some of his instances had joined battle with the giants. The agents were stronger than Will, but his copies were invisible to the enemy, still protected by Balance’s own unwillingness to perceive unpleasant truths. That gave him an edge. He toppled the giants over the railings, sending them tumbling into the gaps between the cogs where they floated awkwardly like animate balloons.

  All too quickly, Balance’s numbers escalated, boxing in Will’s expansion, and Will realised how deep in trouble he really was. To pull this off, he’d have needed to start distributing his clones across the mechanism from the moment he walked in. Had he done that, he’d be winning by now. Instead, the numbers were against him and rising. Panic seized him as the battle swiftly turned. Balance agents materialised from nowhere by the thousand, landing all across the mechanism like raindrops in a hurricane.

  As Will’s fear and anger mounted, he reached out with a half-dozen hands and ripped away the mask of one of the agents stomping towards him. Underneath was his own face, eyes shut as if peacefully asleep. He ripped off another and found the face of a female variant, just as unconscious.

  Will clued in as the agents pushed him back, crowding him away from the master cog. No wonder he didn’t dream here. Dream-time belonged to the god. Balance had ten billion agents – each one running on the borrowed sleep of a clone-mind upstairs. One of these enforcers might even be Moneko. And if the agents couldn’t see him, they could still feel him. There was nowhere to go. He didn’t stand a chance.

  Then, at last, one of the giants gained enough purchase to rip a mask from one of Will’s clones.

  ‘There you are,’ said all the giants in a chorus as loud as the world.

  They reached for him as one. Everything went blank.

  14.2: ANN

  Ann huddled on the floor of the tiny cabin and poked at her freshly fabbed touchboard. She had just that and the wall-screens – nothing but touch, voice control and a little passive 3D. It was excruciating, like scratching on vellum with a quill. Worse, whenever she stopped working, the agitation patterns on the wall-panels turned back on – for her health, apparently. She couldn’t make them stop and it was slowly driving her mad.

  Living in the cabin as a lowly mortal wasn’t easy. Bland emergency rations appeared in the fabber slot like prison food. When she needed to use the bathroom, she had to plug herself back into her casket and pee in the dark.

  And now there was a new, fresh flavour of despair. Ann had finally worked through the contents of the backup brain she’d collected – the only bright side to her stunted condition. But in it she’d found fresh disappointment. The stable of cryptographic programs she set to work analysing the brain had all finally come back delivering the same result: there was no mind-bomb, no hidden virus, no weapon.

  The brain was nothing but a dull study in the esoteric business of building hierarchical learning systems out of nested public-goods games. It was like a rule book for the world’s most overwrought Bridge variant.

  At first, she’d been able to kid herself that even if the SAPs couldn’t see anything, there might still be something cunning lurking in the details. But no, the best she could say about it was
that it was probably the most perfectly legible copy of what Judj had called the Phote Protocol – the standards system on which their enemies were based. That was all. She stared at the horrible, wriggling wall-patterns and wondered if this was the right time to go crazy.

  Behind her, Ira’s casket hissed open. She shut her eyes and held her breath. He was visiting again. He came a lot. She dreaded his arrivals and still somehow managed to long for his return after he left. He infuriated her with his warm, soft voice and kindly fucking eyes. Every minute of his attention took her further from the sense of independence she was desperate to regain. It was like he was trying to force her to want his company.

  ‘How are you doing?’ he said.

  ‘Horribly,’ she replied.

  In truth, she’d been ferociously lonely, even with a vid-link to the yacht metaphor. She’d had someone to talk to inside her skull for years and was unused to reaching out. Now that she no longer had her poor, ill-treated shadow, she mourned it like a sibling.

  ‘The only thing …’ she started, and stopped.

  She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of knowing that she waited for his visits. He’d get entirely the wrong impression.

  ‘How’s the touchboard working out?’ he said.

  ‘Fine.’

  He might as well have asked, How’s that wooden leg? The device was a lifeless cognitive prosthesis.

  ‘We got past the knives and into the ark,’ he said gently.

  Ann stiffened. ‘That’s great.’ she replied.

  She could have followed his feed on video, but that was a problem that she’d wanted to solve. It had been her new project before all this happened. Before she’d been crippled.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Ira. ‘I’ve hurt you.’

  Her shoulders cranked upwards. Fuck Ira and his body-language reading. Having a conversation with him was like trying to play poker with a telepath. There wasn’t any point.

  ‘Why do you come?’ she snapped. ‘Nobody asked you to. It’s not like I’m your patient or something. I’ve not needed this kind of attention for my entire life and I’m not about to start now.’

  ‘It’s my job, remember? I’m the psych officer,’ he said. He paused. ‘Wait. Stop.’ He looked at the floor and then back at her, his gaze unexpectedly intense. ‘Let me retract that remark. I come because I care.’

  ‘Why?’ she demanded. ‘Why, in Gal’s name, when I’ve done absolutely nothing to warrant that kind of attention?’

  ‘Because you’re my friend,’ said Ira.

  His expression held a hopeless, puppy-dog appeal that looked ridiculous on that hawkish, square-jawed face. She felt like something was going to burst inside her.

  ‘I’m not your friend!’ she shouted. ‘We barely talked for years before this trip. I thought my pain was supposedly fucking with your head, so why do you keep dredging it up by disturbing me?’

  ‘Because your pain is my pain,’ he said. ‘When you hurt, I hurt. I feel it even when I’m not here. I can’t get you out of my mind.’

  This remark was so outrageous that she had nowhere to put it. As if he could possibly comprehend what it had been like to be undead for forty years with nothing to do but fight.

  ‘You know nothing about my pain.’ Her voice cracked.

  Ira smiled. ‘Usually that line is reserved for petulant teenagers,’ he said.

  She lashed out to smack his face. He caught her hand gently and easily. He set it calmly aside. She wasn’t sure what was more frightening – that she’d resorted to violence or that she had no strength against him. None.

  ‘There’s a space down in the ark,’ he said, as if she’d done nothing untoward. ‘It’s safe – we’ve tested it – and Judj has solved the slippage problem. I’m going to convince Mark to keep the thing aboard. That way you’ll have somewhere to go and something genuinely important to do. We could use a pair of intelligent eyes down there that don’t need a comms-link all the time. It’s amazing in there, Ann. You could be doing real science and helping all of us.’

  She stared at him, outraged by his compassion. Her breath came in heaves. Her universe was slipping.

  ‘Why did you even bother?’ she told him. ‘Mark and Palla won’t agree to that. They’ll want the ark dumped.’

  ‘I’ll make them agree,’ said Ira. ‘They can’t expect you to sit cooped up in here alone for the rest of the voyage when there’s a miracle in the hold you could be exploring. I’m going to use every lever I have. You deserve this.’

  She could stand it no longer. ‘Why do you have to be so goddamned kind?’ she yelled.

  Didn’t he get it? He was stopping her from standing on her own. He was making her weak, and that prospect terrified her. She’d have to depend on others then. She’d have to depend on him and she was far too close to doing that already. He’d wormed his therapist’s fingers into her imagination. Those awful, gentle eyes of his plagued her dreams.

  ‘Because you’re worth it,’ he replied, his voice cracking. ‘You’re strong and rational. And stupid. And vulnerable. And beautiful. You make dumb mistakes and brilliant inferences and burn brighter than the rest of us put together. Because you’re intelligent and fearless and unflinchingly ethical and good, and everything else I tried to be before I washed out of the human race.’

  ‘Stop!’ she implored him. ‘Don’t!’

  He was talking about someone else. That wasn’t her. She was the ugly robot everyone hated. She noticed with shame that tears were pouring down her face. She tried to punch him again. She could think of nothing else to do. He stopped her.

  ‘Ann,’ he said. ‘Get a grip on yourself. This isn’t you.’

  She flailed at him with eyes wide, trying to hit him. She couldn’t. With nothing but his mundane Fleet augs, he caught her hand every time. A white heat built behind her eyes. He couldn’t be allowed to stand there and say shit like that. All the stuff inside her that enabled her to keep going would drain out and leave her broken and wanting. And it was just so that he could feel okay with himself for laying on all this attention. Like a blanket smothering her – making it impossible for her to ignore his stupid presence. And impossible for her to keep hating him.

  ‘Stop fighting!’ he urged. ‘Ann, you don’t have to be alone.’

  She crumpled to her knees against him, her fists shaking. Before she understood what was happening, he seized her and kissed her. Ann’s mind exploded into sparks. Her body went rigid. He pulled back.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, looking away. ‘I shouldn’t …’

  But by then it was too late. The dam inside her had already given way. Forty years without a moment’s intimacy or vulnerability caught up with her in a single heartbeat. She grabbed his face, kissed him back and couldn’t stop, even while she could feel herself drowning inside.

  14.3: MARK

  For two days after Judj activated the frameshift stabilisers, Clath’s team carried out tests in the mining bay while Mark flew. The engines didn’t fail once. When they were confident of the results, Clath and the others met him in helm-space to talk.

  ‘The good news is that it’s working,’ said Clath.

  Mark sagged with relief. Now, perhaps, he’d get some proper sleep. Since passing the lobe he’d been relying on Palla more and more. She didn’t seem to mind but it felt dishonest depending on her. ‘Thank God,’ he groaned. ‘That’s one more nightmare over.’

  ‘The bad news is that Rachel’s assessed how much work it would take to cut the ark out and it’s not pretty. It’s already partly through the bulkhead wall. Now that the ark isn’t a problem, it’d be easier to leave it where it is.’

  Mark felt an unexpected surge of loathing towards the alien ship. He’d been waiting days to get rid of it. Who could tell what the awful thing would do next?

  ‘Fuck that,’ he said. ‘It’s going. We’re done.’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ said Clath, raising a hand. ‘There are advantages to keeping it. Ann is trapped in the cabin,
remember. It’d be trivial to substitute a human-compatible air mix and let her explore down there – helpful, even. There’s a lot to learn.’

  ‘Who cares?’ said Mark. ‘It’s a risk to the mission.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Judj, ‘while I hate to admit it, Clath has a point. There are database stores in that ship that we’re only now beginning to understand. We came here to make a difference in the war. This ship could help us do that and the security risks are negligible.’

  Mark peered at him. The more time Judj spent with Clath, the more fungible the security expert’s standards appeared to get – at least concerning what she wanted.

  ‘Are you nuts?’ he said. ‘These stabilisers – do you even know what they run on, or how long their fuel lasts?’

  Clath looked uncomfortable at that. ‘That’s unclear,’ he said. ‘So far as we can tell, it’s some kind of passive system that pulls energy from its environment.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ said Mark. ‘That it’s magic? That it beats thermodynamics? Because that sounds like bullshit to me. That thing is deadly dangerous and I want it off this ship.’

  ‘Mark,’ said Ira, ‘I have to agree with Clath. It makes more sense to keep the ark at this point. It may prove beneficial. It was designed as a refuge, and if our mission hits a blockade of the sort Ann predicted, it might make the difference between success or failure.’

  ‘No!’ said Mark.

  Why couldn’t they get it? Didn’t they see how much trouble the damned thing had already caused? He caught Palla staring at him oddly.

  ‘Let’s think about this,’ Ira insisted. ‘How much is this about the ark, and how much is it about your feelings towards it?’

  Mark blinked. ‘What are you fucking talking about? Don’t you dare make this into a therapy session!’ He turned to Rachel. ‘Rach, you were doing the cutting but you haven’t said a word. What do you think?’

  She regarded him wearily, her arms folded. ‘I don’t like that ship, either,’ she said, ‘but I also don’t think you’re being rational. In fact, I’m not sure anyone here is.’