by Alex Lamb
‘No,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ they insisted. ‘You’ve seen the consequences of not following the pattern. Search Mark’s memories again and look at the Subtle.’
They had been a very promising species, but their impressive acts of collaboration were offset with limitations in their pattern of social cohesion. In their hunger for personal safety through defensive technologies, they learned too much too soon and secured their own ending. Being safe, he saw, was not the same as being alive. And that same lack of bravery under threat was now also the greatest risk to humankind, which was why the Transcended had let them see the ruins.
‘For species that get this far, terror-paralysis under existential threat is the most common form of failure,’ she said. ‘The inability to face a shared disaster condemns all. If you release your bomb, humanity will lose its Photes, and with them the chance to acquire social cohesion.’
‘Would that be so bad?’ said Will.
‘No, so long as you’re happy with the human race slaughtering itself within the next twenty years. You are not a stable species given your scale, intellect and technological reach. You saw that before the Photes were released. You tried to manage IPSO and failed. You watched your kind erupt into squabbling and brinkmanship. This is how it goes. Humanity’s options now are to grow up or die.’
Will rebelled against that notion.
‘This can’t be true,’ he said. ‘There must have been others who lived without these constraints before you came along. Races that lived on their own terms, who were free to develop.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There were several, a long time ago. But you don’t want their scars, or their fate. Those species never had guidance or a safe home. They faced more tragedy than you can imagine. They built all this so that it need never happen again.’
‘That’s who you are,’ said Will, stunned. ‘That’s what the Transcended represent.’
‘No,’ said Nada. ‘Those races are long gone. We are others raised just like you who inherited what they built.’
‘But you killed billions,’ Will said weakly.
‘To allow trillions to be born,’ she replied. ‘Would you have done differently? This is the dilemma every species faces. To develop courage at the level of the species, individuals must be ready to die. No life is more sacred than the whole, and no fortune more valuable than the one that is shared.’
Will realised with sudden sadness that his time in the company of the human race had come to an end.
‘There’s no going home with this knowledge, is there?’ he said.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘Not without irreparably harming those you love. You pressed a little too hard, Will. But that in itself is laudable.’
‘So what happens now, then?’
‘You were an accident, Will Monet, and an experiment, which makes your status special. So we’re prepared to offer you a deal.’
‘Explain,’ he said.
‘First, let us tidy up a little. If we let Nada die naturally, will you hold back your weapon?’
‘How can I not?’ said Will, and reeled at what the knowledge had already done to him.
23.3: MARK
While Moneko’s ships harried Nada, shutting down her ability to respond, Ann tore through the rest of the Photurian fleet like a fox through a henhouse.
‘She has the right idea!’ said Palla. ‘Let’s help.’
Mark joined in, bringing their impossibly fast ship around to trap the more sluggish Photurian vessels between them. The distorter-beam, he learned, was super-handy for clearing out large numbers of drones at once. And with their shielding, the Photes simply had nothing that could touch them. There was the odd frightening moment when someone lanced them with a boser, locking them behind their shield, but it felt more like squashing ants than conducting a major piece of interstellar conflict.
Then Moneko’s bosers started to stutter. She was running out of antimatter, or iron, or both. As Nada’s shield flicked off, her super-weapon stabbed outwards, obliterating nine nestships with the same terrible ease with which Mark had been destroying drones. The fight started to go frighteningly south even faster than it had improved.
‘No!’ he said. ‘There has to be something we can do. Targeting doesn’t matter. We can shoot at her from a distance.’
Before he could follow through on that thought, Nada picked him as her next target. Their shield flared. All three of them clung to their seats as another stampede of gravity disruptions rippled through the ship.
‘We can still suicide,’ Palla pointed out.
‘You have a point,’ said Mark. ‘Okay, let’s do this Academy-style.’
But before he could re-engage the drive, a better option appeared in the form of an icon deposited in their virt with a note attached.
‘Will Monet is busy,’ it read. ‘However, his ship is now at your disposal. Please use this remote helm-space link.’
‘Wha …?’ said Mark.
‘Don’t stare at it!’ Clath urged. ‘Eat it!’
Mark knocked it back and shifted. With apparently no attendant light-lag, he found his avatar in the helm-space of a larger, more powerful ship – one with a lot more weapons. Will was nowhere in the virt and neither was Rachel, but Mark didn’t have time for hide-and-seek.
‘Holy shit!’ he exclaimed.
‘What do you see?’ said Palla.
‘Guns,’ said Mark. ‘Lots of guns.’
He grabbed the scariest-looking weapon-handle he could find – a black and red icon labelled ‘Despatialiser: use with extreme caution’. He let loose a crazed chuckle, dropped Will’s standing-warp shield, targeted Nada and fired.
A light-sucking beam licked out, like the one Nada had been using but about thirty times as powerful. Nada’s shield flared and the space around her ship acquired an unhealthy glow. Abruptly, both shield and glow were gone. Nada’s exohull had taken on a lumpy, uneven texture.
Then, to his astonishment, she fired back – not with a super-weapon but with mere g-rays. Nevertheless, she was still coming.
Mark tight-beamed her ship.
‘Hey, Nada, nice to see you again,’ he said. ‘Just to let you know, I tried your flavour of joy, but on balance, I thought it was shit. So I have a final answer for you from the human race about that rapture of yours. No. Fucking. Thank you.’
He examined the rest of his weapons-spread and picked something else that looked exciting.
23.4: NADA
Nada stared in confusion at Monet’s ship. Was Ruiz now piloting it? She looked over the appalling damage he’d done to her systems and fought a surge of loathing so potent that her joined mind almost tore itself back into factions.
There had been so many interruptions, so many desperate attempts by the humans to avoid participating in harmony. And now came this hateful revelation that Ekkert had made a mess of reconverting the homeworld. Of course he had. He wasn’t her. She should never have left him with the responsibility.
‘I don’t care what weapons you have,’ she sent to Monet’s ship. ‘You’re going to fail. Even if I die, my kind will never give up on the human race. Your evil will end. Love will rise again.’
She broadcast a message to every Photurian machine in the system. She was vulnerable, but thousands of her sisters were distributed across local space in craft she’d intended for the domination of Galatea. Mark would never get all of them before they found their way into the human population.
‘We didn’t fail last time,’ Ruiz told her. ‘We beat you at New Panama. I asserted primacy over you myself.’
‘Impossible,’ she spat back.
So he sent her a memory, embedded in packets formatted to her own modified control protocol. Nada experienced a moment of real fear.
‘You’ve been hiding the truth from yourself,’ he said. He sounded sad now, and somehow that made it worse. ‘When your kind run out of people to convert, you just stop. There is no heaven. There never was. There’s only death.’
> The old dissonance rose up in Nada. ‘Liar!’ she said. ‘And even if it’s true, do you really want to live in a universe like that? Where there’s no happy ending? Where love doesn’t conquer all?’
‘Life is about living and knowing that you’ve lived,’ he told her. ‘Not endings, and not conquering. Look at you. You’ve thrown everything away – your principles, your identity, everything in the universe that’s not you, just because you want that happy ending.’
‘Why are you telling me all this?’ she shrieked. She felt sick, powerless, joyless. ‘Why ruin my last moments? My ship is crippled. So kill me again!’
Mark sighed over the comms-link. ‘Weirdly, I don’t want to have to,’ he said. ‘And besides, I’m broadcasting this to your sisters, too, so they all get the message.’
She kept firing at him, useless though it was.
‘So I made compromises,’ she raged. ‘Is wanting to create a heaven for everyone such a terrible crime? I die for love!’
‘No,’ said Mark, sounding as wistful as she’d ever heard him. ‘Love with room for only one perspective is selfishness. If anything, you die for that.’
And then he fired.
23.5: WILL
Will watched the battle become a rout. Moneko’s ships obliterated what was left of the original Photurian fleet, while Ann and Mark set about clearing away the outmatched machines Nada had spread throughout the system.
‘This was a mess,’ he said.
‘Agreed,’ said the Transcended. ‘But then, you weren’t expected. Very few species require the intervention of a messenger agent. The Subtle did not. And in none of those cases where a messenger was employed did we see your pattern. There have been other edge-cases, of course,’ she added, ‘some far more spectacular. But you are different, nonetheless. No individual has offered themselves up to a gingerbread world as a replacement for an entire race, mostly because it’s a terrible idea.’
‘It was a spur-of-the-moment thing,’ said Will, embarrassed.
‘Of course it was,’ she replied, ‘and thus extremely human. The sacrifices your kind make are often hyperbolic because they are informed by love – that human-specific and highly signalled pair-bonding operation. Like many species, your commitment pattern involves the deliberate abandonment of reason on game-theoretic grounds. However, not many are so … silly about it. There are other, more nuanced forms of committed affection that are nonetheless deep. We were fascinated, so we let the arrangement play out. Sadly, in the wake of that event, humanity’s response to training remained erratic. Your social behaviour is so crisis-driven that you failed to learn. You cling to self-organisation by your fingernails. Because you failed to adapt, we began to leave out clues. We pushed open the Flaw, accelerated Fatigue and left gaps in the Phote front lines. We were, perhaps, a little reckless. Nevertheless, humanity missed every gift. So, very reluctantly, we wrote you off.’
‘Why did you even keep trying if we were that hopeless?’ said Will.
‘Because unpredictable species have more value in the galactic competition we’re engaged in. If we can’t figure out what you’ll do next, maybe nobody else will, either. But a species so erratic that it kills itself is no use to anybody. Consequently, support for the human race was withdrawn, along with support for your side-experiment.
‘At the point when support was dropped, your world was expected to go into decline. There should have been Cancers and an analogue of Fatigue everywhere. Yet you didn’t succumb to synthetic bliss or rewrite yourself into rage or placidity, though those options were always available. Instead, because you perceived the existential crisis at some level, you developed an immune system. The twin urges to accept diversity and exercise honest self-criticism turned you temporarily into a functioning independent species. Then, at the last possible moment, humanity took the bait.’
The Nada avatar paused abruptly and then burst into peals of laughter. It was as if she’d lost the ability to stay aloof from it all.
‘Fuck,’ she said. ‘It was so annoying. I can’t even tell you.’ She slapped Will on the shoulder. ‘Suddenly, there we were with the chance of getting two new species instead of one. But by then we had so many hints in play, it was ludicrous. We’d cluttered the board horribly. So it wasn’t surprising when everything started cascading, right up until the technology you had in your hands was in danger of doing some real damage.’
‘Kids with fireworks,’ said Will bleakly, still reeling from the fact that she saw him as a species.
‘Exactly, and we stood to lose both of you.’
‘You screwed it up,’ said Will.
‘Yep,’ said the Nada avatar. ‘You have no idea. Badly prepped neural adaptations. Leaving tech out for the wrong people to find. Turning off the wrong talents. You name it, we did it. But you’re an odd race and we didn’t want you dead.’
‘I thought you’re supposed to be sentient civilisations,’ said Will. ‘Hyper-intelligent, immortal geniuses.’
She gave him a long, dry look. ‘What you’ll learn, Will, if you go that route, is that being an adult doesn’t prevent you from screwing up. Being Transcended doesn’t mean unlimited intellect. There’s no such thing. It just means a lot more time and a lot more room to learn and make mistakes. Big, embarrassing mistakes – on gigayear timescales. So now we’re in this unusual position. The Willworld was unstable for exactly the reason that all social systems are unstable – corruption from within. And now you’ve merged. Without external competitive pressure, you’ll self-destruct.’ Her expression became sly. ‘We can provide that pressure.’
‘This is the deal, isn’t it?’ said Will.
‘We can offer you two good outcomes,’ said the Transcended. ‘One is that we partially redact your memory. We repair Rachel and send you off as a real human individual for retirement somewhere nice, far away from here.’
Will’s heart pounded. To be himself again? To have a chance at a normal life? He thrilled at the thought, even while the smallness of it scared him.
‘Why far away and a memory redaction?’
‘Because caution,’ she replied. ‘Also policy. Besides, there’s going to be a lot of fighting for the next twenty years while humanity goes through its awkward adolescence. Are you really sure you’d want to be a part of that?’
‘What’s the other option?’
‘You transcend. Even if humanity makes it, it’ll be a completely different animal from what you’ve become. Your units share a cognitive base-pattern rather than a genetic one, which is refreshing. And frankly, you just qualified. So why not come and join the struggle?’
Will knew he couldn’t turn that down. He had too many instances now that deserved to live and grow. To snuff them out for the sake of marital bliss would be genocide.
‘Why do I have to choose?’ said Will. ‘Why can’t I have both?’
‘You don’t,’ she replied, and sounded pleased with his response. ‘And you can. Because you’re a species.’
‘What about Nada?’ he said.
The Transcended sighed. ‘Photes always lose, even when they win. That’s what they’re for. Maybe in some other universe, there might be room for someone like Nada to make it to the next level, but not here. She’d never adapt. The only great truths we have are the ones that emerge from game theory. The only lasting joy comes from helping others, and the only Founder is blind chance. That knowledge would break her, I’m afraid.’
That wasn’t what Will had meant to ask, and the sadness in the avatar’s expression surprised him.
‘I mean, isn’t she still a threat?’ he asked. ‘There are more copies of her out there.’
‘Look again,’ said the Transcended, and pointed at the video window.
23.6: ANN
Ann watched the Photes die. She slid her new ship around the system, mopping them up, scrubbing away all traces of the siege. For once, fighting really was like cleaning. Just observing it brought a strange kind of release – a lightness inside her like a su
n coming up.
‘I can take it from here,’ Mark told her.
He was cleaning, too, and was meticulous in his efforts. He flew two ships at once, picking off all traces of Nada Rien with tidy precision. She couldn’t have done a better job herself. She was proud of him.
‘All yours, then,’ she told him.
She unclipped from her crash couch, gathered Ira up in her arms and kissed him hard – but not too hard.
‘We’ve won,’ she breathed. ‘We’ve actually sodding won.’
He held her and grinned. ‘Shut up and kiss me again,’ he said.
She was so caught up in the moment that she almost didn’t notice when their ship’s drive gave out and they found themselves drifting a second time. A strange quiet descended on the cabin. Then, in helm-space, Will Monet appeared.
‘Hi, guys,’ he said. ‘I hate to interrupt your moment, but I have an invitation for you. How would you like some real and lasting peace?’
Ann’s face fell.
Will laughed. ‘Not that sort. Just another forty or fifty years of good health somewhere quiet, far away. A farm, maybe, under open skies. No powers. No responsibilities. Just us. I’m leaving, you see. And, as I figure it, you two have both done your duty many times over. So if you fancy something with a slower pace, the option is open.’
Ann’s skin chilled. Could this be real? Which Monet was she talking to now? But given how the battle had panned out, she knew there could only be one.
‘A farm?’ said Ira. ‘Who has a farm any more?’
She looked at him and didn’t have to say a word. Ira already knew her well enough to see the longing in her eyes – the desire to be done. An end to sacrifice. A chance to be human again. A glimpse of peace that would be beautiful because it wasn’t perfect. Because they’d fill it with wonderful, awkward compromises and grey hairs and laughter.
‘We accept,’ said Ira quietly.
‘Great,’ said Will. ‘Stay put.’
23.7: MARK
Mark barely had time to enjoy wiping out the last of Nada’s drones before something yanked him from the virt of Will’s ship and dumped him back into the cabin of the Dantes Two.
