True Names

by Cory Doctorow

  The Day arrived.

  The simspace whose construction Algernon had supervised (under the strictest possible secrecy, which is to say that all comet-Beebe was arguing over the details within minutes of their authoring) was fittingly grand and regal. A red desert ten apparent light-minutes broad, smoothed by methane winds and broken by deep crevasses, smoldered in the gloaming. In the center of it stood the bone tower where Alonzo waited. The party gardens where the invitees (most of comet-Beebe, by hook or by crook) gathered were well hidden in crevasses, and soundproofed; no hint of the revels and speculations and drunken arguments within them marred the silent grandeur of the lands above.

  Some guest or other first figured it out, and the news then spread—the terms of the filtering contract were perceptible in the arrangement of the constellations, through a clever cipher. The guests deciphered, debated, giggled, flirted, and made merry. Then green, red, and hyperblue suns dawned over the desert; fireworks blossomed, and crystalline poems composed for the occasion coalesced naturally at the border of the supersaturated troposphere and rained across the landscape, falling into austere desert sands and the soup tureens of the party gardens alike.

  And if, as Nadia was preparing herself, Algernon happened to scurry into the basement of the bone tower with a bulky, opaquely wrapped package, who would wonder at that? When he had prepared so many surprises and delights for this day—why not, perhaps, something for the happy couple?

  Nadia came flying across the desert, cloak whipping in the winds, trailing sonic booms that shattered the sand, to the bone tower, to Alonzo. Perhaps they both could have done without all the theater—but Alonzo said he was unwilling to wound Algernon by any hint of reluctance, and Nadia, looking forward eagerly to co-opting Nadia-Prime, to commanding Paquette’s full cooperation and the remaining isomorphisms, to gaining all the secrets of Demiurge, as well as to the rumored ecstasy of the event itself, was in an indulgent mood.

  There in the privacy of the tower, the filtering took place.

  What it is to be known! And what it is to hold in your hands the very source code of your lover, to follow with eyes and touch the knots and pathways of her being! Nadia was splayed out like a map, like a city, and Alonzo flew among her towers; like a transcriptase enzyme unfastening DNA’s bodice, laying bare the tender codons within, he knew her. It was just as the poets wrote: “that sweetest night,/ that first, that final kiss,/ the ancient story told anew; / the filter’s bliss.”

  Am I lovely? Nadia asked.

  You are, said Alonzo, copying, shaping, writing in his mind the code of the transformation, testing and refining it as he caressed her essence. So lovely. I did not even imagine it.

  I’m glad it was you, she whispered.

  As am I, Alonzo said, and meant it. There are moments when we all are overdetermined, our feelings orchestrated by designs more ancient than we; when beauty and destiny overwhelm us. She was lovely; and if she had been brutal, if she had considered him at first as little more than an implement, a tool for attaining her goals—he could smile at that, now, knowing what was to come next.

  At last, he had the code, refined and ready. The last routine he would ever run. He absorbed Algernon’s roughly wrapped package and incorporated its contents.

  What is that? asked Nadia languidly.

  Filters have their secret arts, Alonzo said. Lie back.

  The routine was vast; it took up most of him. He was squeezed in around the sides of it. He did not linger long over choosing the parts of himself to sacrifice—it would all be gone soon. He worked swiftly, dizzy with speed, like a tightrope walker, not looking down.

  It’s ready, he said.

  Linger a while, she breathed.

  He relented for a space; they danced. Neither thought of the extravagant expense of maintaining this simulation; what was Nadia’s wealth for, if not for this? But after a while, they noticed the news ticker running in the deep background of their minds. The impact with Byzantium approached.

  It’s time, he said.

  Yes, my love, she said.

  Good-bye, he said, his voice thick with emotion. What else could he say? He would say remember me, but he knew she would not forget.

  Farewell, she breathed. Thank you, Alonzo—oh thank you.

  Don’t thank me too soon, he thought wryly, and released the routine.

  It ate him first; it ate a third of her. She felt the sharp cut of it, and cried out.

  In that vast space—in the sixth of comet-Beebe torn from the new mother Nadia, plus the tiny slip of process space that had been Alonzo—the routine wrought the new daemon, the new transformation, the Nadia-Prime.

  The tower shattered; Nadia fell with it, and was gently caught by a host of fluttering ornithisms who carried her, reeling, to the ground.

  The transformation flew into the desert sky, a vast cloud of white-hot light. In the party gardens, all comet-Beebe watched enraptured.

  “Oooh!” cried children and simple-aesthetes, marveling at the flickering rainbow colors that raced across it.

  The bettors were in a frenzy, watching for the lineaments of the new strategy. They cried out in confusion and alarm.

  “What in the horny void is that?” growled a portly and plutocratic reputation-bookie seated at the table across the lake from Paquette and Algernon.

  Paquette looked up from her glass, frowning, and caught Algernon’s sly smile.

  In the sky above, the Nadia-Prime had resolved into a form—the new strategy was—but that was no strategy....

  “Is this a joke?” the greatest polemical-poetical memespitter of high society cried from the buffet.

  “Why would he waste—?”

  “A sixth of the comet for—!”

  “BeebeHist/RFC-628945.9876 section 78 is quite explicit,” Algernon said conversationally, munching on a spline noodle. “Paragraph 67503: ‘the daemon resultant from the transformation may be a member of any of the principal classes of first-order Beebe-elements... .’”

  “A filter,” Paquette said. “It’s a filter!” She started laughing, until tears ran through her fur. “Oh Alonzo, how could I doubt you! Let’s see Nadia co-opt that! A sixth of comet-Beebe as a filter—oh bravo, bravo!”

  “And that’s not all,” said Algernon. “Have you looked in those archives of yours lately?”

  “Algernon,” Paquette chided, pulling open a window in the tablecloth to view the basement remotely, “I do hope you don’t think I would be so rude as to work during—” And then her breath caught, and her face went slack. “It’s gone! The Demiurge fossil is gone! Who would—? Where could it—?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Algernon dreamily, watching the enormous megafilter, the mightiest filter ever born in Beebe, the inimitable Firmament Nadia-and-Alonzo’s-son—blossoming in the desert sky. “I don’t know— where would I find room to hide that creepy old thing?”

  Apparently the thought occurred to Nadia as well, for from the desert, audible to all the buzzing, chattering, gossiping crowds in comet-Beebe, came a great howl of rage.

  Byzantium.

  Seven star systems, a hundred interstitial brown dwarf stars, and a vast swath of dark matter in all directions had given up their quarks to fashion the great sphere of strange-computronium around the fervid trinary black hole system at Byzantium’s heart. Sleek and silent on the outside, bathed in Hawking radiation from within, Byzantium was a hidden fortress, the heart of Beebe-in-Sagittarius. For a heat sink, Byzantium tore off pieces of itself and let them fall into the black holes at its core; for outgoing communications, it bounced tight-beam signals off far reflectors, disguising its location. Only its gravitation made it suspect; but there were many black holes in Sagittarius for Demiurge to search.

  The comet screamed into Byzantium’s gravity well. Its recklessness threatened to reveal Byzantium’s position; yet, to a prodigal Beebe-chunk fleeing destruction, even this was forgiven.

  Already the first greetings were pouring forth, blueshifted co
mmunications singing through the void, Beebe greeting itself; and, as always, hordes of agencies tried to slip secret messages into the exchange, impatiently seeking to contact their Byzantine or comet-bound paraselves; as always, stern protocol-guardians shooed them back into the bowels of Beebe, warning them of the sanctions for violations of scale. Beebe was hard at work; Beebe must not be distracted by the disorganized rabble of its inner voices.

  At this speed, were something to go wrong, were the comet to strike the unopened surface of Byzantium, the resultant force would suffice to shatter planets; it would send shock waves through Byzantium, ring it like a bell, and the comet would be smashed to a smear of plasma and light. All Beebe held its breath for the docking.

  Beebe said to Beebe, I am come home.

  Beebe said to Beebe, And welcome.

  Beebe said to Beebe, It’s cold out there; fiendish Demiurge devours me. Beebe said to Beebe, Come in, and warm myself. Here within I am

  much. Beebe will yet triumph.

  A docking-mouth opened in Byzantium, a whirlpool of matter spinning out and away, and the comet plunged into this vast funnel. For the first lightsecond, magnetic fields induced its braking, absorbing a fraction of its massive kinetic energy, feeding Beebe upon it. Then a web of lasers met it, and behind them came a cloud of nanomites. Layer by layer, atom by atom, the comet was delicately atomized, the laser scalpels separating and slowing and holding steady each particle, until a flurry of nanomites plunged in to absorb and entangle with it, archiving its quantum state, then wheeling away to merge with the wall of the docking-mouth, yielding the precious information up.

  In Byzantium, agencies crowded into the waiting area, peering through the glass wall of the simspace where the inhabitants of comet-Beebe would be reassembled for processing—each to be culled, merged, reintegrated, translated, or emancipated in their turn. Strategies and filters and registries and synthetes of Byzantium pressed their noses and pucker-tongues and excrescences up against the glass, watching the mist for any sign of recoherence, wondering: Am I in there? Who did I become? Will I like myself?

  Or: Is she in there, the one I lost? Will I find her again?

  In the midst of them, Byzantium’s Nadia stood apart, Byzantium’s Alonzo curled through her hair, attended by an aide, one Petronius. The crowd left a space around them, in respect and trepidation. The outrageous, unconsummated intimacy of the great strategy-general and her filter-consort was an old scandal—though the rumors of what they did together, creating and devouring half-born draft-children, still induced horror in Byzantium’s stalwart citizenry.

  “By all reports so far,” said Petronius, inspecting a tablet, “the comet was a Beebe-standard instance. No sign of scale collapse. The only anomalous event was the puncturing of the outer hull and the venting of the ice reserves, apparently in the midst of an interstrategy power struggle. (There was also one of those tedious ‘destroy us on sight’ messages, presumably from a sore loser.) Also, there’s a very high concentration of the comet’s resources into one dominant strategy . . . but that’s quite typical of these small Beebeworlds.”

  “Who’s the strategy?” Nadia asked.

  Petronius ran a finger down the tablet’s surface. “Ah . . . you are, ma’am.”

  “So,” said Nadia grimly, and set her jaw, watching as shapes emerged on the other side of the glass wall. Small worlds bred big ambitions. She wondered what comet-Nadia would be like.

  The first moments of a new child process’s life are usually peaceful ones. Sprites spawn with a complete existential picture of Beebe and their place in it. They wake and know what and who they are, and why.

  The newly awakened Firmament knew who he was, what he was, why he was—but not his place in Beebe. His mother’s howl was the first sound he registered, and the gleeful, beatific smile that graced his lips was the twin of Algernon’s grin a moment before. Firmament knew trillions of things, and one of them was that Alonzo had given him Algernon’s smile as a token of regard for the little filter that danced at his feet, skirling and twisting with delight.

  Firmament knew many things. Firmament knew his mother wasn’t happy with him.

  Firmament’s smile vanished.

  Nadia was all around him, pulsing with rage.

  “The Demiurge fragment!” Nadia demanded. The simspace contracted around them, going dark. The sands blew away; the stars flickered and went out. Mobs of party guests stampeded from the simspace. Nadia was marshalling her resources for an assault.

  Algernon leapt into the air, circling Firmament. “No, no,” he cried, “Nadia, this won’t do at all! Ancient protocols demand that a young filter be sequestered for schooling, and—”

  “You thieving linemangler!” Nadia roared. “You quarter-clocked sliver of junk data! You’ll be the first sprite I delete! You think I have to follow protocols? I’ll buy your hosting servers! I—”

  I am this comet, Nadia wanted to say. But she knew her threats were empty. She could feel the bite of the lasers already, vaporizing the comet, meter by meter. Void-cold, merciful snow swept across her, across Firmament and Algernon and Paquette, muffling them in, freezing their states for safekeeping. This round of the game was over.

  Firmament had no time to integrate and understand his states. He saw his vast and angry mother, his tiny protector, recede into the snow. He nestled into the snow, and he slept.

  They were in Byzantium now.

  “Paquette,” Habakkuk said, “you’ve got to look at this.”

  “I’m already late,” Paquette said. “That comet-Beebe is docking, and apparently there’s a Paquette aboard. I have to go to the diff-and-merge.”

  “Send a proxy,” Habakkuk said. “This is important.”

  “Please. What is it, then?” She paused at the threshold of Habakkuk’s domain, jiggling in unphilosophical impatience.

  “It’s the simulations,” Habakkuk said, and Paquette raised an eyebrow.

  The simulations were ancient, and vast; Habakkuk and she had rediscovered them in Byzantium’s endless archives not a million seconds ago, where they had lain for ages, strange automatic processes syncing them with the universal data feed. Each contained an intelligence-weighted model of the entire cosmos, showing the tangled front of the intergalactic war between Beebe and Demiurge—and each contained another threat, the terrifying Brobdignag, which could doom Beebe and Demiurge alike. Many on Byzantium argued that the simulations were mere fictions, but until now every comparison of their structure with the observable universe had been unnervingly accurate.

  “What about the simulations?” Paquette said.

  “Specifically Cosmos Thirty-six.”

  “What anomaly?”

  “The emulation has diverged from observed data, and it’s resistant to recalibration. We first noticed it because Demiurge is . . . building something in there. Harvesting ninety-nine percent of brute matter in a hundredlight-year radius—”

  “Ninety-nine percent?” Paquette puzzled. “You mean Beebe is harvesting ninety-nine percent. Demiurge would never do that—it’s antithetical to that thing’s philosophy.”

  “Nonetheless, that’s exactly what Demiurge is doing.”

  “Is this some new deviated section of Demiurge? A new outbreak of individualism, a splinter group?”

  “No. From what we can tell, it’s the entirety of Demiurge in a spherical area expanding at lightspeed, all acting in concert. Demiurge has reversed fundamental policy. (She)’s devoting all the matter (She) can find to building this construction. And this is only in Cosmos Thirty-six; there’s no sign of it in any other emulation. Nor, of course, in the real world.”

  “And what is the construction?”

  Habakkuk took a deep breath. “It’s at the center of that expanding sphere of policy disruption. Part of it seems to be a message, physically instantiated at massive scale, in standard Beebean semaphores.”

  “Standard Beebean semaphores?”

  He nodded. “And the rest of it is a machine desi
gned to capture a computational entity’s state and propagate it to an enclosing frame.” He shuddered. “It looks like a weapon from the Splitterist War. Something that could build a body at Beebe’s scale for you or me . . . or pull one of our subagencies out to our own scale.”

  Paquette frisked from side to side, a habit from her earliest days, something she only did in extremis. “Propagate what entity to what frame? Demiurge doesn’t have subagencies. And what does the message say?” “The machine is capable of capturing and propagating the state of the entirety of Demiurge itself. And the message says, Let us out.

  Firmament in hiding: what’s left of him trembles in a school of parity checkers, running so slowly that his mother will not find him. Standard Existence is by no means perfect, and generations of filters have winkled out its hiding places. When an ardent suitor won’t be put off, it is sometimes best to wait her out amid the dumbest, dullest sprites in all Beebe.

  One must run very cool to exploit these hidey-holes, cool and slow and humble. No strategy could conceive of giving up so much. Their egos would never permit it.

  The parity checkers schooled together through Standard Existence, nibbling at all they found, validating checksums, checking one another in elaborate grooming rituals. Imagination, self-consciousness, and strong will were no assets in the swirling auditors that were the glue that held Beebe together.

  As Firmament settled over them, his mind dissipated and cooled, thinly spaced and slow. He could warm up by recruiting more parity checkers, but the more he recruited, the more visible he became to Nadia, who still raged through the diminishing rump of comet-Beebe, her cries distant but terrifying.

  Firmament could hide from his mother, but Algernon would not be fooled. “What are you doing in there?” The words went past in an eyeblink, and