Exodus

by Alex Lamb

‘Great,’ said Mark. ‘So why is she even here?’

  ‘As a replacement in case you don’t want the job we’re going to offer you,’ said Zip.

  Mark leaned back. ‘Interesting.’

  So they were levering him again. If he didn’t say yes, Palla didn’t get the job she deserved. He’d expect nothing less from the Academy.

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘The one good piece of news we have is that the population of Earth are still alive,’ said Zip. ‘We confirmed that yesterday. The Phote focus on the siege gave the refuge team extra room to manoeuvre. They’ve been camped out at a brown dwarf, waiting for a chance to transfer everyone to the surface of Saint Andrews. Now, though, we have better options. We’d like you and Professor Tamar to help us relocate them. That means finding a new world, establishing the habitat hardware and moving the people without letting the Photes grab them all.’

  Mark leaned forward, a smile sneaking onto his lips. ‘So you want a safe planet with tons of potential. A place where we already know the Photes won’t be a problem. And ideally one with plenty of habitats pre-built, ready to be occupied.’

  Zip’s eyebrows went up. ‘Ideally, of course. But I doubt—’

  ‘I know just where to take them,’ said Mark, steepling his hands.

  ‘You do?’ said Zip. ‘Where?’

  Mark couldn’t help grinning.

  ‘Carter,’ he said. ‘Carter is going to be Earth Two, and something tells me it’s going to be awesome.’

  24.5: WILL

  They began Will’s extraction. His threads were copied out of the Willworld’s matrix using the warpium nano-processors that had always been hidden there. One by one, his physical instances lay down and relinquished their bodies into the mud. The planet returned to silence and began its long, slow decay back into an ordinary biosphere.

  While the process was under way, Will reunited with Moneko somewhere outside of physical space. They used a part of the entangled galactic network that the Transcended had set aside for them. It could have looked like anything, but Moneko chose the park on Radical Hill for their setting. When Will stepped into it, he paused at the threshold. There was something a little melancholy about that view. It looked down at a city that had been emptied, on a world they couldn’t keep.

  She caught his expression as she rose from the bench to greet him.

  ‘We’ll build another park,’ she told him.

  ‘I guess it wasn’t so bad, was it?’ he said, peering at the twisted towers under those heavy skies.

  ‘It was what we made it,’ she replied. ‘And it was where I learned to be myself.’ She cocked her head. ‘By the way, are you Balance now?’

  ‘My brother is,’ said Will. ‘I spawned a new sub-instance. Or rather, he did. It’s no fun being Meta all the time. I wouldn’t have been able to see you, for starters.’

  She gave him an appraising look. ‘Don’t you miss your wife?’

  Will sighed. ‘Let’s be honest. We both miss our wife. We probably always will. But our wife isn’t us so she can’t be here. And it’s going to be a long future. Hopefully.’

  A part of him wondered if he’d made the right choice. Perhaps he should have just settled for being human and let the galaxy evolve without him. Certainly there’d be no peace in this future. And the company he kept, beside himselves, would be more foreign to him than his enemies ever had been.

  ‘Thank you for coming back for me,’ he said. ‘I never said that.’

  She shrugged. ‘No problem. We wanted to. After you left, things got bad for a while. But our Glitches finally had a chance to do what they always wanted: rip out all the old anchors. Those Glitches you freed were particularly zealous in that regard. And this time, there was no resistance. The poor Photes had no real notion of their significance so didn’t even try to protect them at first. By the time they clued in, it was too late.

  ‘To be frank, the whole occupation was very instructive. It was probably the most socially significant three weeks we’d ever had. After that, of course, we knew we had to find something else to keep us busy – the golden days of denial were over. Coming after you was the obvious choice. There were plenty of Balance fragments aboard the Dantes who watched you escape, so it wasn’t long before the whole planet knew.’

  ‘Shame we didn’t get to see Galatea again,’ said Will.

  ‘It’s not for us any more,’ said Moneko. ‘It’s for humans, and I’m sure they’ll do something wonderful with it.’

  A door opened in the virt, occluding the view of the towers.

  ‘Looks like that’s our cue,’ she said.

  They walked through into a rather mundane meeting room in the Galatean style, with too much carpeted floor space and walls of bare rock. Three comfortable-looking armchairs waited for them, along with a ceramic coffee table. Beyond lay a window-wall that looked out onto a view that had no place on the world of Will’s birth.

  They were gazing across the curve of a huge, blue sphere – a world, perhaps, or maybe a star of some kind. It was covered in tidy hexagonal convection cells flecked with white and gold foam. The cells slowly rippled as he watched. White beams stuck out of the sphere in a few places, like pins made of light, sliding around very slowly.

  Something about that sight suggested to Will that he was observing a very large object from high up. And the lighting was curiously off, hinting that particles other than vanilla photons were involved in the act of seeing it.

  A man rose from one of the chairs and stretched out a hand to greet them. He looked like someone Will had known on Galatea many years ago – Robert Rees-Noyes, his old division commander when he’d first joined the Fleet. He was dressed exactly as he had been when Will last saw him – in shorts and a Fleet T-shirt, with flip-flops on his feet. Farmer Bob, they’d called him. He’d given Will his slot on the Ariel mission. Will wondered whether the Transcended would always use faces from his past. The answer was yes, he realised, until they stopped bothering with faces altogether.

  ‘Welcome,’ said Bob. ‘Take a seat.’

  ‘No Rachel this time?’ said Will as he sat.

  Bob smiled. ‘You’re not in daycare any more.’

  ‘I see,’ said Will.

  ‘Your old teacher is a wonderful race,’ said Bob, ‘great with mesoscale air-breather types like you. But then she was one, too, I recall. You should look her up some time. I’ve never met an entity more gentle or patient with her extinction events than Carol. You were lucky.’

  The name wasn’t an accident. Carol had been the name of Will’s first teacher on Galatea. He received a fleeting glimpse of a world full of creatures halfway between termites and rats, building phenomenally complicated nests hundreds of kilometres on a side. His mentor, apparently. He suspected the memory packet served as her true name.

  ‘So what do we call you?’ said Moneko. ‘Bob?’

  ‘That’ll do for now,’ said Bob. ‘And I take it that you two instances are the representative pseudopod of the integrated Will-mind?’

  ‘We are,’ she said. ‘Our Meta is listening.’

  ‘Then I’m here to offer you a job. We’re under a lot of pressure from Andromeda right now and things are getting dicey. We’re hoping you can help. But for that, you’re going to have to consolidate and stabilise rapidly, otherwise I can’t see you lasting for more than a few millennia in the role. As it is, we’re taking a risk with you simply by offering to bring you on board. You’re not what we’d call a classic-track species, though you come with a very strong recommendation from Carol.’

  ‘What do you want us to do?’ said Will.

  ‘Well, now,’ said Bob. ‘What we’ve heard is that you have valuable experience in a variety of body formats, so we’re going to send you undercover to try to disrupt the social fabric of Andromeda’s new attack species. That race is young enough that it’s still keen on physical forms, just as you are, but we’re guessing you’re a little more flexible in that regard.

  ‘There’s n
o point handing the job to an older species that’s as far away from its root biology as you are from acquiring mitochondria – they’d just screw it up and get noticed. So that makes you perfect. But you’ll need to learn a lot of spatial mechanics in a hurry. You’ll be infiltrating a species with a far deeper knowledge of network algebras than you have.

  ‘We can provide you with a small training world and enough raw material for about a hundred billion threads soft, twenty billion manifested. And we’re going to recommend an aggressive training regimen, with mass-murder consequences for slow development. We can administer that for you, if it would help.’

  ‘How long do we have to get ready?’ said Will.

  ‘We can’t afford to give you more than five hundred years, I’m afraid. But Carol thinks you’re up to it.’

  Bob sent him the details in another surge of memory. It was a very different world from the one he was used to. It had a fifty-kilometre-thick smart-matter crust with quangled links to a pair of stellar teaching labs, not far from Galactic Central HQ. They’d also give him time on the smaller of the two vacuum-state testing arrays in Void Five and surface access to the Galactic Central Library.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Bob put in. ‘Your library access will come with selective filtering so that any tutorials likely to destroy your developing mind will be screened out.’

  In the scant five centuries they could provide, Will saw, he’d be expected to develop the skills to fully impersonate the species he’d be infiltrating without losing his own identity in the process.

  ‘Needless to say,’ said Bob, ‘if you’re caught in the field, the Andromeda Collective will devour your threads and repurpose your intellect as a weapon of their own. Which, frankly, would be embarrassing for everyone.’

  ‘What’s the alternative?’ said Moneko.

  Bob pulled an uncomfortable face. ‘You can go into passive development until another opportunity comes up that’s more to your liking,’ he suggested. ‘But the Milky Way isn’t responsible for providing you with selection pressure. As a fledgling race, you’d have to find another species of similar development level to engage in local competition with. A flatmate, if you will. You’d get a basic loan-world. Maybe compute power for five billion threads, tops. Library access, of course, to encourage you to develop skills. And a tenure of no more than six thousand years. Frankly, I don’t recommend that option, though. This job should be well within your capabilities. It might even be fun at the meta-level, and not so fatal for instances that it gets in the way of your growth. So, do you think you’re up for it?’

  Bob watched them closely while he waited for their reply. Behind him, the enigmatic blue sphere turned slowly.

  Will glanced at Moneko. She grinned and took his hand.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘We’ll give it a shot.’

  ‘Terrific. Welcome to the galaxy, Will,’ said Bob, rising to embrace them. ‘I think you’re going to like it here.’

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Special thanks to Louis Lamb, Sarah Pinborough, my agent John Jarrold, the fantastic team at Gollancz, those generous, insightful friends who helped me debug the work – Dave, Kate, DeeDee, K, Maciek – and my wonderful wife Genevieve, who gave me the time to fulfill a dream.

  Also by Alex Lamb from Gollancz:

  Roboteer

  Nemesis

  A Gollancz ebook

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Gollancz

  an imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK Company

  This eBook first published in 2017 by Gollancz.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Alex Lamb 2017

  The moral right of Alex Lamb to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (eBook) 978 1 473 20616 8

  Typeset at The Spartan Press Ltd, Lymington, Hants

  www.alexlamb.com

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  www.gollancz.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Contents

  1: Rising

  2: Alignment

  3: Motion

  4: Pursuit

  5: Reflection

  6: Discovery

  7: Investigation

  8: Complication

  9: Confliction

  10: Confrontation

  11: Faltering

  12: Inflection

  13: Inversion

  14: Adjustment

  15: Arrival

  16: Entrapment

  17: Compression

  18: Entanglement

  19: Fusion

  20: Fission

  21: Breakthrough

  22: Ultimatum

  23: Enlightenment

  24: Rebirth

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Alex Lamb from Gollancz:

  Copyright