To Hold Infinity

by John Meaney

  “There.” His thumb and forefinger formed a circle, and the display zoomed in. “The documentation caption.”

  It read, Copyright © ident: 400IA2.001.Tetsuo Sunadomari2472. All rights reserved.

  “Kerrigan?” Tetsuo asked softly. He could sense both Kerrigan and Dhana staring at the text.

  “Mm?”

  “How did you know my mother's a biologist? And that TacCorps were using my ware?”

  A pause. Then, “Don't worry,” Kerrigan said. “I don't think you're responsible for this.”

  “I should bloody well hope not.”

  There was a strained silence.

  “Nice bit of negative publicity for TacCorps.” Dhana's tone was thoughtful. “Going to give it to journalists before the demos?”

  “During.” Kerrigan nodded towards the display. “Tetsuo, can you download a copy of that image to a crystal, while we take some pictures of Federico's man, here?”

  “Yeah.” Tetsuo slumped in his chair, suddenly exhausted. “I guess so.”

  “Welcome—” Kerrigan gave a tight, wry smile. “—to the revolution.”

  Steam rose from Yoshiko's cup, curling lazily up through the shaft of late morning sunshine which poured through the wide window.

  The window overlooked a pond, and the rest of the Sanctuary's grounds. Beyond the black iron railings, out on the green, children were running and playing.

  “More?” asked Jana, and poured daistral from a jug.

  They were seated in a pleasant polished-redwood dining area; it formed an interior balcony, overlooking the dojo Yoshiko had seen last night.

  “Here you are.” Jana blinked as she leaned into the sunlight, and handed Yoshiko the cup.

  Jana looked more comfortable when she leaned back into comparative shade. Her triangular, slightly pinched face made her look like a slim feral cat, relaxed but alert.

  Down below, in the clean wooden dojo, a practice mat was rolled up against one wall. Any lingering traces of exertion must be subliminal, but Yoshiko somehow knew that Jana and Edralix had been training hard this morning.

  Yoshiko, on the other hand, had slept for sixteen hours. On waking, she had tried to call Lori: still unavailable. So was Septor.

  Since then, she had sat here in a borrowed robe, sipping nutty daistral and eating dried fruit, trying to think of nothing.

  Edralix climbed the stairs up from below, his gait athletic and springy. He sat by the window, pale skin glowing.

  “Is this the one?” he asked, handing an infocrystal over to Yoshiko. “It was in your jacket pocket.”

  “Thank you.” There was a slot on the low redwood table, and Yoshiko inserted the crystal. “Yes, that's the one.”

  The crystal from Tetsuo's house.

  Swirling blue. The diagram of a Luculentus mind.

  Stolen info?

  “Oh.” Blue galaxies of reflected light sparked in Jana's eyes. “That's interesting.”

  While Edralix adroitly manipulated the display, Yoshiko explained about Rafael. Vin had been lying, dead or dying, on Yoshiko's bed. Rafael had seen the diagram displayed on Yoshiko's bedside terminal, left in memory from previous use.

  “He just stared at it, really coldly.” Even the memory of it chilled Yoshiko. “He looked ready to kill. And his voice—”

  No, not his voice. His eyes.

  She had seen that inhuman, reptilian depth in his eyes, and known instantly that he was responsible for what had happened to Xanthia. And to Vin.

  “Got it.” Edralix was almost humming to himself. “Interesting, that someone's decrypted this completely.”

  A kaleidoscope of flaring light washed over them, as Edralix rapidly manipulated variables, flicking through choices of axes, selecting three or four parameters at a time.

  “How many state variables are there?” asked Jana.

  “Eighty-three primaries.” He added, almost with relish, “That's recorded physical variables. There's an impressive list of derived functions, which is much greater. They're probably the sensible things to plot, as well.”

  A smile twitched across Jana's face.

  “You mean this is going to take a while.”

  “Well—”

  “If only my NetAgents worked in Skein—” Yoshiko held up her left hand. Her wedding band and the one remaining tu-ring, the one which had been too tight to remove, glinted in the light. “—I might have been able to analyse it myself.”

  Edralix froze the display, and leaned forward through a torn sheet of light, a strange attractor in an unlabelled phase-space, and looked at Yoshiko's tu-ring. Its status light burned dull orange, as it had since her arrival on Fulgor.

  “It's probably just a matter of protocols. Didn't they say anything about NetEnv devices at spaceport immigration?”

  “No. Unless I missed it.”

  “Groundlings,” Edralix muttered. “Er—”

  “No offence,” said Yoshiko, as Jana laughed.

  “Um, here's some descriptive text, but—” He paused, as a tesseract of text opened up, sheets of glowing metallic green script in four orthogonal emulated dimensions.

  “Don't worry.” Yoshiko tried not to sound proud, for these Pilots could visualize many more dimensions than she. “I ken FourSpeak.”

  “Hmm. OK.” Edralix was intent on the instructions now, his embarrassment forgotten. “Well, here goes.”

  The phase state display which sprang up was similar to before, but now revolving cubes of text and informational cartoon-graphics and InfoSprites floated and hovered among the pulsing sheets of light.

  “That's better.” Jana touched a sprite, and it began to talk about ion concentration gradients in a high crystalline voice, while supplementary script unfurled. “Now we can see what the pretty pictures mean.”

  They explored the diagram in minute detail. After twenty minutes, during which Edralix three times used another terminal to check technical explanations, they ground to a halt.

  “That's it.” Jana leaned back in her seat. “Next one, I suppose.”

  Jangling sheets of light tumbled and rearranged as an entirely new diagram, all silvery grey spaces and torn violet attractors, grew into being. A host of sprites and icons formed.

  Yoshiko stared.

  “How many variations are there? We could spend weeks checking every combination of parameters. Just what are we looking for?”

  Edralix looked up at Jana, and shrugged.

  Jana's eyes glittered.

  “Something worth killing for,” she said.

  After three hours, they called a halt, and Jana fetched carbo-chews and more daistral while Edralix obeyed her instructions to relax.

  “Have you flown solo yet?” Yoshiko asked, making conversation.

  “Oh, yes.”

  Edralix tried to look casual, but a tiny golden spark of excitement flickered in his jet black eyes, and was gone.

  “It must be wonderful.” Yoshiko sensed the wistfulness in her own voice.

  How marvellous it would be to see with one's own eyes the endless fractal dimensions of mu-space.

  “Another standard year, and I'll be eligible for my own ship.”

  “You'll do well.” Yoshiko hoped she did not sound patronizing. To get his own vessel so young, Edralix must be talented even by the Pilots’ standards.

  “Well—I might not take it.”

  He looked a little uncomfortable, so Yoshiko did not pursue the matter. She wondered, though, what he would do if he did not choose to fly.

  She had heard rumours, through old family friends, that many Pilots were choosing not to pilot for a living, but to pursue other careers.

  Having once seen mu-space, how could they ever stay away?

  Edralix finished his daistral, put the glass aside, and powered up the display once more.

  “I know.” Jana tapped her fingernails against the table. “Why don't we try plotting mass against physical space?”

  “Physical dimensions?” Edralix grinned. “How passé.”


  While the display swirled and coalesced, Yoshiko's thoughts grew grim. Whatever Rafael's crime, this was info which Tetsuo should not have.

  She remembered the pain and embarrassment, when she was summoned to Tetsuo's school to be informed of her son's infotheft, hacking the local NetNode.

  “Stop.” Jana's voice drew her back into the present. “Go back. There.”

  Edralix whistled softly.

  “How many plexcores does a Luculentus have? Two, three at most?”

  Translucent parallelepipeds—“squidged bricks,” as Tetsuo was fond of calling them—clustered around a central ovoid. The shapes were filled with a black and scarlet network of pulsing flows.

  “Dear God.”

  Edralix swallowed. “One hundred and two.”

  “I don't understand.” Yoshiko stared at the diagram, not believing what it told her.

  “This is a Luculentus, with over a hundred plexcores.”

  “You're kidding—”

  “Each of these—” Edralix indicated a parallelepiped block. “—represents a plexcore.”

  “A mind like this,” said Jana, “is scarcely human.”

  “Is this a real person? Or, I don't know, a model? Speculation?”

  “Real, I think.” Edralix frowned. “These are real scan readings, from the VSI ware—”

  “What is it?”

  “It's the sheer size.” Edralix stood up abruptly, and began to pace around the dining area. “What do we have here? Attotech?”

  Yoshiko had heard the term: twistor engineering, at the lowest level of physical dimension, where even subatomic particles were huge. Attotechnology. Pure speculation.

  “It can't be,” she said.

  “So what is it? Nobody can fit over a hundred plexcores inside a human body.”

  “A disembodied brain? In some kind of plexcore array?”

  While they talked, Jana was manipulating the diagram, dragging down sprites and examining what they had to say.

  “Not inside a body.”

  Edralix stopped. “What do you mean?”

  Tiny digits glowed above the main arteries of neural flow.

  “Those are distances.” Jana's voice was grim. “In thousands of kilometres.”

  Edralix called up a sketch display, transferred info with a gesture from one diagram to the other, and ordered it to plot a physical configuration.

  Only an extended sphere could fit the separations as shown.

  “They must be scattered all over Fulgor.”

  Jana and Edralix looked at each other, and their Pilots’ eyes were unreadable.

  “One man's mind, spread through a hundred and two plexcores, across the face of the planet.”

  Yoshiko shook her head. That couldn't be right.

  She touched a sprite. It displayed the distance between two neighbouring plexcores: nearly twenty thousand kilometres.

  “The lightspeed delay must be—sixty-six microseconds, is that right?”

  Jana's voice was very controlled. “That's why this needs mu-space comms to work.”

  “But—”

  Tetsuo.

  This was the connection to Tetsuo. Mu-space comms, subverted for use in VSI tech, so that a plexcore nexus could be expanded to such an extraordinary magnitude.

  But everyone said LuxPrime was incorruptible.

  “She's right.” Edralix was blank-faced.

  Yet a LuxPrime courier was killed at Tetsuo's house.

  At my son's house.

  “Wait a minute.” Yoshiko stared at the two Pilots, and some of Edralix's strange remarks played back through her memory: how the original Pilots had been “Only really alive when they were carrying other people's cargo—” And he was considering not accepting the offer of his own mu-space ship.

  So that's what the Pilots were up to.

  “I understand now.” Yoshiko looked from one to the other. “You're colonizing mu-space, aren't you?”

  “It's obvious, in retrospect.” Yoshiko's voice was strangely calm. “But we all have a blindspot, don't we? We think of Pilots as battling through, I don't know, a kind of wild raging sea. Glad to get back into real-space calm.”

  “It can be like that.” A soft smile played about Jana's feline features.

  “Well—An unenhanced human couldn't survive a second, conscious. But you're at home there, aren't you?”

  Jana merely looked at Edralix. “I told you she was quick.”

  The intuitive leap had been obvious: mu-space comms gear could never grow really small, because of the energies involved in tunnelling through from one continuum to the other. But the great machinery could exist in either continuum.

  If the hard work were done in mu-space, then real-space hardware could become small enough to interface with VSI tech. It only needed a transceiving film of smartatoms. It could be layered through a brain just like standard VSI, and would probably function better.

  “We're renting comms facilities to the various LuxPrime subagencies which run Skein,” Jana said.

  “And that's how they're implementing the EveryWare/Skein gateway?”

  Jana nodded.

  “So this—” Yoshiko's mood darkened, as the implications came upon her. “—this Luculentus is using the same facilities.”

  “It's been in place a good while, getting ready. A skilful Luculentus could hide what's going on: the very architecture of the protocols means we can't monitor info-flow.”

  While they were talking, Edralix was pointing at sprites, opening up code-volumes, trawling through the documentation.

  Yoshiko pictured vast floating cities in mu-space, in that endless fractal golden ocean among black spiky stars. Great structures, maybe whole worlds, which no one but the Pilots would ever see.

  She brought her attention back to the moment.

  “Object headers only,” Edralix was muttering. “The actual guts of the code isn't stored here—actually, it's way beyond the capacity of one crystal—but header info of all the main driver modules is here.”

  One hundred and two plexcores, plus one organic brain: all one mind.

  “So we can deduce what it does, even if we can't see the code?”

  “That depends on how helpful the header info is. Right now, the objects refuse to talk to me. They're looking for MindSet validation codes, and I'm just trying to—”

  “My NetAgents,” Yoshiko interrupted. “They're developed in MindSet. Tetsuo used it, back on Earth, when he coded them up for me.”

  She held up her nonfunctional tu-ring.

  “OK. Let's fix that ring.” Edralix got busy. “You just need a protocol driver, and a translation engine.”

  “So how long will that—? Oh, thank you.”

  Yoshiko's tu-ring was glowing green. Operational at last.

  The horse reared, hooves striking at the air. A samurai bannerman was mounted on its back; his banner fluttered in an unfelt breeze.

  The scroll in his left hand was a sign that h-mail was waiting.

  “Later,” said Yoshiko. “I need kensei now.”

  The bannerman and horse disappeared.

  Above her fist, a scruffy disreputable-looking samurai was sitting on a rock in the half-lotus position, cleaning his swords.

  Musashi Miyamoto—or kensei, sword saint—was the most powerful of her NetAgents.

  “Can you read this?” Yoshiko pointed at the glistening ovoid floating in front of Edralix, the representation of an object header.

  “Hai!”

  A text window grew into being on the ovoid's surface.

  Edralix touched it, and a high sprite-voice sounded the text aloud.

  “Author: Tetsuo Sunadomari. Purpose: seventh layer protocol interpreter.”

  “No,” whispered Yoshiko.

  “Wait a minute.” Edralix turned to the Musashi image. “Can you give me its provenance?”

  Yoshiko nodded, giving permission to proceed.

  “Hai.” The swordsman pointed a sword at the ovoid. “Provenance: un
authorized copy of licensed original.”

  Yoshiko let out a shaky breath. “Who created the unauthorized copy?”

  “Unknown.”

  It must have been someone good, to duplicate an object her son had designed.

  Jana leaned forward.

  “Who was the original copy licensed to?”

  Musashi waited for Yoshiko's nod before answering: “Luculentus Rafael Garcia de la Vega.”

  Rafael.

  Golden fire sparked in the obsidian depths of Jana's eyes.

  “Gotcha.”

  There were screams from above as an open-topped silver car was flung, tumbling and spinning, in a perfect parabola through the air.

  It was time to increase his arsenal.

  Hysterical laughter. Shrieks overhead, as mag-fields caught the car ten metres above the ground and slowed its descent.

  I could show you some real excitement. Rafael's thoughts were grim.

  The car was spat suddenly sideways, then corkscrewed upwards in a crazy trajectory while its passengers yelled again.

  Rafael pushed his way through a queue of tourists and holiday-makers waiting to get on the ride. A little girl stared up at him with wide frightened eyes.

  Pennants fluttered in the breeze.

  As he passed a row of flagpoles, a great dragon popped into existence and breathed holo fire all over him, then faded into nonexistence with a cartoon grin.

  Heart thumping, Rafael lowered his left arm. He had cocked his hand to arm the silver bracelet without even thinking about it.

  He kept his fist clenched. That would cause the bracelet to remain powered up.

  Tetsuo.

  There was no way he could find Tetsuo before the proctors. Not physically.

  Rafael crossed a footbridge over a small stream where model sharks swam. Holo tentacles reached up from the gentle waves to threaten children who walked near. None of them seemed fooled.

  If Tetsuo was not dead, then sooner or later he would drift into Skein. Then, he would be Rafael's.

  At the archery shoot, adults fired solid arrows at flying holo targets. For a moment, Rafael wondered how that could be safe. Then he saw a stray arrow freeze in midair and slowly fall to earth. Safety fields.

  Did he want to plunder Tetsuo's mind? Rafael was not sure. He could as easily use his infiltration code to wipe Tetsuo's consciousness completely, without ever copying a thought or memory back to his own mind.