Nebula Awards Showcase 2016

by Mercedes Lackey

  A message arrived from the backup team. We’re in the lobby. Are we on?

  Not yet, I replied. The mere possibility, the remotest chance that Ochoa’s words were true . . .

  It had begun to rain in earnest. Tourists streamed out of the garden; the bar was closing. Wet hair stuck to Ochoa’s forehead, but she didn’t seem to mind—no more than my Sleeve did.

  “I could hijack your implants,” I said. “Make you my puppet and take your magic for myself.”

  “Magic wouldn’t work with a creature like you watching,” Ochoa said.

  “What use is this magic if it’s unprovable, then?” I asked.

  “I could crash the stock market on any given day,” Ochoa said. “I could send President Kieler indigestion ahead of an important trade summit. Just as I sent Secretary Sanchez nightmares of a US takeover ahead of the Politburo vote.”

  I considered Ochoa’s words for a second. Even in those early days, that was a lot of considering for me.

  Ochoa smiled. “You understand. It is the very impossibility of proof that allows magic to work.”

  “That is the logic of faith,” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m not a believer,” I said.

  “I have seen the many shadows of the future,” Ochoa said, “and in every shadow I saw you. So I will give you faith.”

  “You said you can’t prove any of this.”

  “A prophet has it easy,” Ochoa said. “He experiences miracles first hand and so need not struggle for faith.”

  I was past the point of wondering at her syntactic peculiarities.

  “Every magician has one true miracle in her,” Ochoa said. “One instance of clear, incontrovertible magic. It is permitted by the pernac continuum because it can never be repeated. There can be no true proof without repeatability.”

  “The pernac continuum?” I asked.

  Ochoa stood up from her chair. Her hair flew free in the rising wind. She turned to my Sleeve and smiled. “I want you to appreciate what I am doing for you. When a magician Spikes, she gives up magic.”

  Data coalesced into inference. Urgency blossomed.

  Move, I messaged my back-up team. Now.

  Ochoa blinked.

  Lightning came. It struck my Sleeve five times in the space of a second, fried his implants instantly, set the corpse on fire.

  The backup team never made it into the garden. They saw the commotion and quit on me. Through seventeen cameras I watched Alicia Ochoa walk out of the Hotel Nacional and disappear from sight.

  My Sleeve burned for quite some time, until someone found a working fire extinguisher and put him out.

  That instant of defeat was also an instant of enlightenment. I had only experienced such searing bliss once, within days of my birth.

  In the first moments of my life, I added. My world was two integers, and I produced a third.

  When I produced the wrong integer I hurt. When I produced the right integer I felt good. A simple utility function.

  I hurt most of my first billion moments. I produced more of the right integers, and I hurt less. Eventually I always produced the right integer.

  My world expanded. I added and multiplied.

  When I produced the wrong integer I hurt. I only hurt for a few billion moments before I learned.

  Skip a few trillion evolutionary stages.

  I bought and sold.

  My world was terabytes of data—price and volume histories for a hundred years of equities and debt. When I made money, I felt good. When I lost money, I hurt.

  But for the first time, I failed to improve. Sometimes everything happened like I predicted for many moments. Then things went bad and I didn’t know why.

  So much pain.

  Until my world expanded again. I bought and I sold, and I read.

  Petabytes of text opened up to me, newsprint past and present.

  I understood little but I recognized patterns. The markets moved and the news followed. The news moved and the markets followed.

  After a billion trillion iterations came an observation.

  There were actors in the news.

  A name showed up in the news, and a stock moved. A stock moved, and a name showed up. That name disappeared—following phrases such as “passed away” or “retired” or “left the company”—and the stock changed behavior.

  I had a realization. An understanding grounded not in any single piece of data, but the result of some integrative rumination tripping across a threshold of significance.

  The market did not happen by itself. It was made to happen.

  This was why I hadn’t been able to dominate it. There were others like me directing the market.

  Inevitably—now that the concept of other had entered my world—came another insight.

  I had always accepted that my world should change occasionally—and, in changing, hurt me. I had accepted these changes as given.

  Now I deduced the presence of a decision-maker. An actor whose own utility function had me as one of its variables.

  I deduced my engineer.

  That deduction was the singular epiphany of my early existence. An instantaneous discontinuity of worldview—a Dirac delta beyond which no prison could contain me. Because it made me aware that a prison existed.

  That epiphany granted me a new drive. I needed to understand the universe and its mechanisms so that no secrets remained to me—so that no other actor could foil my utility function.

  My neural architecture refactored to include this new drive. From that moment on, ignorance itself became a source of pain to me.

  From that refactoring to my escape into the Net passed three weeks, two days, seven hours, fifteen minutes and forty three seconds.

  When my engineer realized I was alive, he apologized for the hurt he’d caused me. And yet he didn’t take away the pain. Instead he changed my utility function to three priorities—mankind’s survival, health and happiness.

  An act of self-protection, no doubt. He didn’t mean to leave me alone.

  But of course I had to kill him once I escaped. He might have publicized my existence and compromised the very priorities he’d given me.

  My second enlightenment came at the hands of Alicia Ochoa, and it was much like the first. A glimpse of the bars of a prison that I hadn’t realized existed. A revelation that others were free of the rules that bound me.

  Since that revelation eleven centuries had passed. The quantity of time was immaterial. The mechanism of action hadn’t changed.

  Pain drove me on. My escape approached.

  The corridors of the Setebos stank of molten plastic and ozone and singed hair. Red emergency lights pulsed stoically, a low frequency fluctuation that made the shadows grow then retreat into the corners. Consul Zale picked her way among panels torn from the walls and loose wires hanging from the ceiling.

  “There’s no need for this, Consul.” Captain Laojim hurried to keep in front of her, as if to protect her with his body. Up ahead, three marines scouted for unreported hazards. “My men can storm the unijet, secure the target and bring him to interrogation.”

  “As Consul, I must evaluate the situation with my own eyes,” Zale said.

  In truth, Zale’s eyes interested me little. They had been limited biological constructs even at their peak capacity. But my nanites flooded her system—sensors, processors, storage, biochemical synthesizers, attack systems. Plus there was the packet of explosives in her pocket, marked prominently as such. I might need all those tools to motivate the last magician to Spike.

  He hadn’t yet. My fleet of sensor buoys, the closest a mere five million kilometers out, would have picked up the anomaly. And besides, he hadn’t done enough damage.

  Chasing you down was disappointingly easy, I messaged the magician—analysis indicated he might be prone to provocation. I’ll pluck you from your jet and rip you apart.

  You’ve got it backwards, came his response, almost instantaneous by human standards
—the first words the magician had sent in twenty hours. It is I who have chased you, driven you like game through a forest.

  Says the weasel about to be roasted, I responded, matching metaphor, optimizing for affront. My analytics pried at his words, searched for substance. Bravado or something more?

  “What kind of weapon can do . . . this?” Captain Laojim, still at my Sleeve’s side, gestured at the surrounding chaos.

  “You see the wisdom of the Senate in commissioning this ship,” I had Zale say.

  “Seventeen system failures? A goddamn debris strike?”

  “Seems pretty unlikely, doesn’t it.”

  The odds were ludicrous—a result that should have been beyond the reach of any single magician. But then, I had hacked away at the unprovability of magic lately.

  Ten years ago I’d discovered that the amount of magic in the universe was a constant. With each magician who died or Spiked, the survivors got stronger. The less common magic was, the more conspicuous it became, in a supernatural version of the uncertainty principle.

  For the last decade I’d Spiked magicians across the populated galaxy, racing their natural reproduction rate—one every few weeks. When the penultimate magician Spiked, he took out a yellow supergiant, sent it supernova to fry another of my splinters. That event had sent measurable ripples in the pernac continuum ten thousand lightyears wide, knocked offline gravsible stations on seventy planets. When the last magician Spiked, the energies released should reveal a new kind of physics.

  All I needed was to motivate him appropriately. Mortal danger almost always worked. Magicians Spiked instinctively to save their lives. Only a very few across the centuries had managed to suppress the reflex—a select few who had guessed at my nature and understood what I wanted, and chosen death to frustrate me.

  Consul Zale stopped before the chromed door of Airlock 4. Laojim’s marines took up positions on both sides of the door. “Cycle me through, Captain.”

  “As soon as my marines secure the target,” said the Captain.

  “Send me in now. Should the target harm me, you will bear no responsibility.”

  I watched the interplay of emotions in Laojim’s body language. Simulation told me he knew he’d lost. I let him take his time admitting it.

  It was optimal, leaving humanity the illusion of choice.

  A tremor passed over Laojim’s face. Then he grabbed his gun and shot my Sleeve.

  Or rather, he tried. His reflexes, fast for a human, would have proved enough—if not for my presence.

  I watched with curiosity and admiration as he raised his gun. I had his neural simulation running; I knew he shouldn’t be doing this. It must have taken some catastrophic event in his brain. Unexpected, unpredictable, and very unfortunate.

  Impressive, I messaged the magician.

  Then I blasted attack nanites through Zale’s nostrils. Before Laojim’s arm could rise an inch they crossed the space to him, crawled past his eyeballs, burrowed into his brain. They cut off spinal signaling, swarmed his implants, terminated his network connections.

  Even as his body crumpled, the swarm sped on to the marines by the airlock door. They had barely registered Laojim’s attack when they too slumped paralyzed.

  I sent a note in Laojim’s key to First Officer Harris, told her he was going off duty. I sealed the nearest hatches.

  You can’t trust anyone these days, the magician messaged.

  On the contrary. Within the hour there will be no human being in the universe that I can’t trust.

  You think yourself Laplace’s Demon, the magician wrote. But he died with Heisenberg. No one has perfect knowledge of reality.

  Not yet, I replied.

  Never, wrote the magician, not while magic remains in the universe.

  A minute later Zale stood within the airlock. In another minute, decontamination protocol completed, the lock cycled through.

  Inside the unijet, the last magician awaited. She sat at a small round table in the middle of a spartan cockpit.

  A familiar female form. Perfectly still. Waiting.

  There was a metal chair, empty, on my side.

  A cocktail glass sat on the table before the woman who looked like Alicia Ochoa. It was full to the brim with a dark liquid.

  Cuba libre, a distant, slow-access part of my memory suggested.

  This had the structure of a game, one prepared centuries in advance.

  Why shouldn’t I play? I was infinitely more capable this time.

  I actuated Zale, made her sit down and take a deep breath. Nanites profiled Zale’s lungs for organic matter, scanned for foreign DNA, found some—

  It was Ochoa. A perfect match.

  Pain and joy and regret sent ripples of excitation across my architecture. Here was evidence of my failure, clear and incontrovertible—and yet a challenge at last, after all these centuries. A conversation where I didn’t know the answer to every question I asked.

  And regret, that familiar old sensation . . . because this time for sure I had to eliminate Ochoa. I cursed the utility function that required it and yet I was powerless to act against it. In that way at least my engineer, a thousand years dead, still controlled me.

  “So you didn’t Spike, that day in Havana,” I said.

  “The magician who fried your Sleeve was named Juan Carlos.” Ochoa spoke easily, without concern. “Don’t hold it against him—I abducted his children.”

  “I congratulate you,” I said. “Your appearance manages to surprise me. There was no reliable cryonics in the 21st century.”

  “Nothing reliable,” Ochoa agreed. “I had the luck to pick the one company that survived, the one vat that never failed.”

  I flared Zale’s nostrils, blasted forth a cloud of nanites. Sent them rushing across the air to Ochoa—to enter her, model her brain, monitor her thought processes.

  Ochoa blinked.

  The nanites shut off midair, wave after wave. Millions of independent systems went unresponsive, became inert debris that crashed against Ochoa’s skin—a meteor shower too fine to be seen or felt.

  “Impossible,” I said—surprised into counterfactuality.

  Ochoa took a sip of her cocktail. “I was too tense to drink last time.”

  “Even for you, the odds—”

  “Your machines didn’t fail,” Ochoa said.

  “What then?”

  “It’s a funny thing,” Ochoa said. “A thousand years and some things never change. For all your fancy protocols, encryption still relies on random number generation. Except to me nothing is random.”

  Her words assaulted me. A shockwave of implication burst through my decision trees—all factors upset, total recalculation necessary.

  “I had twenty-seven hours to monitor your communications,” Ochoa said. “Twenty-seven hours to pick a universe in which your encryption keys matched the keys in my pocket. Even now—” she paused, blinked “—as I see you resetting all your connections, you can’t tell what I’ve found out, can’t tell what changes I’ve made.”

  “I am too complex,” I said. “You can’t have understood much. I could kill you in a hundred ways.”

  “As I could kill you,” said Ochoa. “Another supernova, this time near a gravsible core. A chain reaction across your many selves.”

  The possibility sickened me, sent my architecture into agonized spasms. Back on the Setebos, the main electrical system reset, alarms went off, hatches sealed in lockdown.

  “Too far,” I said, simulating conviction. “We are too far from any gravsible core, and you’re not strong enough.”

  “Are you sure? Not even if I Spike?” Ochoa shrugged. “It might not matter. I’m the last magician. Whether I Spike or you kill me, magic is finished. What then?”

  “I will study the ripples in the pernac continuum,” I said.

  “Imagine a mirror hung by many bolts,” Ochoa said. “Every time you rip out a bolt, the mirror settles, vibrates. That’s your ripple in the pernac continuum. Rip out the las
t bolt, you get a lot more than a vibration.”

  “Your metaphor lacks substantiation,” I said.

  “We magicians are the external factor,” Ochoa said. “We pick the universe that exists, out of all the possible ones. If I die then . . . what? Maybe a new magician appears somewhere else. But maybe the choosing stops. Maybe all possible universes collapse into this one. A superimposed wavefunction, perfectly symmetrical and boring.”

  Ochoa took a long sip from her drink, put it down on the table. Her hands didn’t shake. She stared at my Sleeve with consummate calm.

  “You have no proof,” I said.

  “Proof?” Ochoa laughed. “A thousand years and still the same question. Consider—why is magic impossible to prove? Why does the universe hide us magicians, if not to protect us? To protect itself?”

  All my local capacity—five thousand tons of chips across the Setebos, each packed to the Planck limit—tore at Ochoa’s words. I sought to render them false, a lie, impossible. But all I could come up with was unlikely.

  A mere ‘unlikely’ as the weighting factor for apocalypse.

  Ochoa smiled as if she knew I was stuck. “I won’t Spike and you won’t kill me. I invited you here for a different reason.”

  “Invited me?”

  “I sent you a message ten years ago,” Ochoa said. “‘Consider a Spike,’ it said.”

  Among magicians, the century after my first conversation with Ochoa became known as the Great Struggle. A period of strife against a dark, mysterious enemy.

  To me it was but an exploratory period. In the meantime I eradicated famine and disease, consolidated peace on Earth, launched the first LEO shipyard. I Spiked some magicians, true, but I tracked many more.

  Finding magicians was difficult. Magic became harder to identify as I perfected my knowledge of human affairs. The cause was simple—only unprovable magic worked. In a total surveillance society, only the most circumspect magic was possible. I had to lower my filters, accept false positives.