True Names

by Cory Doctorow

  “He is lucky,” Paquette said, “to find himself in this world and in this circumstance. The comet wouldn’t have been space enough for him.”

  Nadia and Nadia exchanged a look.

  “Our sister wasn’t happy with him?”

  The filter shuddered.

  “The only way for him to make peace with her,” Paquette said blandly, “would have been to kill her.”

  The conversation stuttered to a halt. Now Nadia and Nadia carefully refrained from looking to one another. “To kill her?”

  Firmament stared at Paquette, horrified.

  “Oh, yes,” Paquette said. “There are six or seven ways he could have used her strength against her. He doesn’t like to think about them. But if pressed.. .” She clucked her tongue. “Such a terrible thing, matricide, don’t you think?”

  Nadia laughed spitefully. “Please! A filter? Kill a Nadia of that size and ability? I’m no taxonomic bigot, but that’s—”

  “—the very first blind spot he would have exploited, yes,” Paquette said, nodding vigorously. “Who takes a filter seriously in such a circumstance? The very idea is ridiculous. But there has never been a filter like Firmament.”

  Nadia looked as if she had swallowed something foul. She looked to her sister.

  “That’s . . . very good to know,” the other Nadia said at last. “Very interesting indeed. So, then, Firmament, if we are to be your . . . first friends on Byzantium, and offer you protection from your mother, that means . . . we can rely on you . . . to help us kill her, if we need to?”

  Firmament opened his mouth, then closed it soundlessly.

  Paquette laughed, a broad, horsey sound, unselfconscious and unsophisticated. “You two! You’re so poisonous! Deadly! Our Nadia is a bully and a destroyer of worlds, but she has a cheery disposition.”

  “We are at war. We are the war. Demiurge—”

  Paquette’s whiskers twitched. “Demiurge! Ladies, we have spent generations in close proximity with Demiurge. I have touched Demiurge. I have seen a Beebe-node flare out, less than a light-year away, its substrate colonized by Demiurge. You’ve been listening to Beebe-voices fall silent, and fretting about it, here in your fortress? Well, we’ve been out among those voices, out in Demiurge’s jaws. It’s no abstraction for us.”

  “Which brings us,” said Nadia, “to the matter of your Nadia’s appellation. You know what she’s alleging—that Firmament here is a product of fraud and theft, and that he contains a dangerous fragment of Demiurge itself, in an unstable state. That he represents a risk of just such a subversion by Demiurge. She wants us to seize him, examine him, and restore ‘her assets’ to her as a . . . sisterly goodwill gesture on our part.”

  “Of course she does,” Paquette began.

  “Oh, and to do a rollback of the filtering,” the other Nadia added, grinning, “and restore her beloved—what’s his name again? Alonzo?”

  Nadia glowered at Nadia. Firmament looked anxiously to Paquette. A shudder—or was it just a shimmer?—passed over Paquette’s whole body; but after a moment, she went on as if Nadia had never interrupted. “Of course she wants to eliminate him as a threat. Even if he weren’t a galling reminder of her failure to seize the whole comet, even if he didn’t possess computational assets she thinks of as her own, isn’t it clear that a massive filter with her own lineage is a wild card, a threat to her?”

  “And the Demiurge fragment?” Nadia pressed.

  “Obviously,” says Paquette, “she has one. The one I discovered in the comet’s archives. And she’s planning to insert it into his code when she has an opportunity, to justify her seizure of his assets. Come on—it’s perfectly transparent. Do you know how much power Nadia wielded on that comet? Do you really think that Alonzo could have spirited away a Demiurge fragment under her nose, and built it into Firmament? How—because Nadia was too smitten by love to think straight? Not to mention that Firmament, unlike Nadia, was fully auto-searched at docking.”

  “You’re doing all the talking,” Nadia said coolly. “What does Firmament have to say for himself?”

  “I just want to say,” Firmament said, “that I won’t kill Nadia.”

  “What?” Paquette, Nadia, and Nadia said.

  “I’m not saying I couldn’t,” Firmament said stubbornly, “and I’m not saying I could. What I’m saying is, I won’t play these games. I appreciate Paquette’s help. And I appreciate meeting you ladies. But here’s what I want to say. At the end of the day, Nadia is effective at fighting Demiurge. So you should merge with her. I know she wants to get rid of me. Which is stupid, because I don’t want to fight her and she doesn’t need the assets and she gave them up to my father, fair and square. But if there’s a general vote and it’s the will of Beebe, I’ll go happily. I didn’t ask to be created, and I am not asking to be destroyed. What I’d really like is to be left alone. Look: all over Sagittarius, Beebe is dying. And no one knows why. And any time you spend fighting over me and Nadia is time spent tinkering with sim wallcolors in a Beebe-node teetering on the verge of a Schwarzschild radius.”

  After a pause, Nadia asked quietly, “And the Demiurge fragment?”

  Firmament shrugged, stonily.

  “And if we don’t trust the docking search? What if we examine you ourselves, bit by bit?” the other Nadia leered.

  “I’ll dissolve myself first, and randomize the remains,” Firmament said staunchly. “Just because I’m a strange filter, doesn’t mean that normal standards of modesty and propriety do not apply to me, ma’am.”

  Firmament watched Paquette exhale when they were in their quarters again, then nervously clean her face with her paws. “That was quite reckless, you know.”

  Firmament tried to keep his dismay from showing. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I couldn’t let you tell them that I would kill my mother—”

  Paquette laid a gentle paw on him. “I didn’t say it was wrong, dear boy. It was most likely a stroke of genius. But it was mad. Utterly mad.” She rubbed at her face some more and shook. It took Firmament a moment to realize that she was laughing, great gasps of laughter.

  It dawned on him that he’d done well, without meaning to, just by doing that which came naturally to him. He’d done what Alonzo would have done, and what Nadia would have done, and neither, and both.

  “Do you think—,” he began, then stopped.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” he said, turning away.

  “Tell me. Today, you can do no wrong.”

  “Do you think I could kill Nadia?”

  Paquette gave him a strange look. “It’s entirely possible, I suppose. Your unique assets make many things possible.”

  “You mean Demiurge.”

  Paquette gave him another strange look. “Your fragment, Godson, is without precedent. None may know what it can do. Its halting states are ... unpredictable.” She scrubbed at her face again. “All right,” she said. “All right. Well, that went better than I expected, I have to say. Are you ready for the next appointment in our busy social round?”

  “More appointments?”

  “A flock of Alonzos and a flock of Algernons are having a mixer, and we’re the guests of honor.”

  “Alonzos?”

  “Indeed, indeed. They’ve been looking forward to meeting you.” Firmament’s inner quailing must have shown, for Paquette took him in close and murmured, “You will do brilliantly. You’ve already done the hard part.”

  He nodded slowly, and they blinked to a huge, crowded sim that wrapped and folded into itself on all sides. It was filled with ranks of nearidentical Alonzos and Algernons, locked in intense conversation, but as soon as they appeared, all conversation ceased. All eyes turned on him. Silence rang like a bell, and the room grew warm as the sprites recruited more computation to better appreciate him.

  An Algernon broke away from the pack and seized him, scaled him, and kissed each of his cheeks and then climbed upon his shoulder. “Gentlemen, gentlemen. Please allow me to present my
nephew, my godson, my pride and joy, Firmament.”

  The applause was deafening. “Algernon?” Firmament said.

  “Yes, your Algernon,” Algernon said. “I have been given honorary flock membership. Come along. I’ve met some of the nicest Alonzos. They’re mad to meet you.”

  They were indeed mad to meet him, shaking his hands, bussing him on each cheek, ruffling his gills and cilia, pinching and prodding him, asking him a ceaseless round of questions about his experiences way out there in cold extra-Byzantine Sagittarius. He looked to Paquette before answering these, and she nodded and made little go-ahead motions, so he told them everything, eliciting gasps and laughter from them.

  The story rippled through the mixer, and the Algernons petered in, and more Alonzos, full of congratulations, neurotic friendly bickering, fear, and boasting, until Firmament couldn’t take it any longer, and he began to laugh, and laugh, and laugh, silently at first, then louder, until it filled the entire sim, and the Algernons and Alonzos laughed too.

  He was so busy laughing that he didn’t notice that the flocks were vanishing until over a million of the Algernons and Alonzos had winked out of existence. Then the laughter turned to screams, and the klaxons too, and the terrified shouts—Demiurge! Demiurge! DEMIURGE!

  Demiurge was come to Byzantium—and Firmament was alone. “Paquette! Paquette!” He flailed wildly, abandoning the gilly, frilly, pumpkin-albatross simshape he’d put on for the party, becoming a network of threads, binarysearching the simspace. He could dissolve into co-opted parity checkers again—but Demiurge would extinguish even those. He could—

  “Here,” Paquette said, at his side. The simspace had faded into a cloud of data. The Algernons and Alonzos were gone. Everything was opaque—Firmament queried his surround and it resisted, answering sluggishly, minimally.

  “Paquette! What’s going on? They were yelling about Demiurge! What—”

  “Here,” Paquette said again, grimly, pushing a feed at him—a slim and pulsing pipe, warm in the sluggish dark chill.

  It was raw data, chaos, which after a moment resolved, the overlapping chatter of a million sprites, its Byzantine search interface unknown to him. He fumbled with it. “What—”

  Paquette took it back, and bending over it, summarized. “A planetoid docked an hour ago, topside. A putative Beebe-instance, passed all the initial checks and checksums. But then, during the diff-and-merge, central security unearthed evidence that it was one of the Beebe-nodes that winked out recently, about three years ago. By that time it was too late. The supposed Beebean sprites had dropped their masks; Demiurge was among us. (She) has very recent Beebean protocols, passwords, keys, and (She) has identity rights for every sprite that had already merged with its Trojan doppelgänger. (Her) intelligence-gathering has clearly been exquisite—she knows Beebe, inside and out.”

  “Oh!” Firmament cried. “And—and now—”

  “Well,” Paquette said, looking up from the feed, and smiling grimly, “there’s good news, and bad news, and worse news, and worse worse news.”

  “Stop it!” Firmament cried. “Just tell me!”

  “The good news is that the local Nadias have cordoned off the area of the Demiurge outbreak, limiting the incursion to about fifteen percent of Byzantium. Nothing’s going through but power, elemental substrate feeds, and data personally vetted by them—and they’re mustering votes to shut the power down entirely. They think they might be able to contain (Her) that way. The bad news is, we’re inside the cordoned area.”

  “Oh,” said Firmament. “Wait a minute, wait a minute.” He collected himself into a physical body, something cuddly and rotund, for feeling solid and protected, and pressed his face into his large, globular hands. “You said—you said they discovered after docking that the planetoid had gone missing recently. How could they miss something like that? How could they fail to check it before docking?”

  Paquette smiled wanly. “Very good, Firmament. I should have asked you that! Certain death is hardly sufficient reason to interrupt your philosophical education, after all. They didn’t miss it. The cache local to the docking sector was tampered with. Someone here doctored it to vouch for the pedigree of Demiurge’s probe—before it docked. Demiurge had help on the inside. That was the worse news. Now can you guess the worse worse news?”

  “Um, no.”

  “Well, give it a try.”

  “Paquette!” Firmament wailed.

  “Come come.”

  “We’re trapped in here with Demiurge and you’re playing at puzzles with me?” Firmament roared.

  “Why yes,” Paquette said. “All the more reason. Whether we’re going to face Demiurge or try to run the cordon, we certainly need you on your toes, don’t we? Now think. Someone betrayed Beebe. Someone subverted Beebean memory in the service of Demiurge. It’s almost as if Demiurge had somehow snuck a little bit of (Herself) aboard Byzantium, an advance guard to work (Her) will... .”

  “They think it’s me.” Firmament gulped. “The Nadias think it’s me.”

  “Such a student—your father would be proud.”

  Demiurge had undone any number of instances of Beebelife in (Her) time, but never had (She) encountered one so robust, so savage in its existential fight. No mind, no mind—Beebelife would swarm and dart and feint and weave, and in the end it would avail it not, for all Beebelife fell before the brute force of (Her) inexorable march.

  And so it was going here and now, in this heartmeat of Beebe-inSagittarius. Predictably, Beebe had quarantined (Her), and power was declining. Let them power down—Demiurge had plenty of reaction mass at (Her) disposal, and she didn’t need much power when compared to the wasteful proliferation that was Beebean society.

  (She) unknit Beebe methodically, cataloging each sprite before decommissioning it. (She) would compare their digests against the Demiurge-wide database and see what new strategies she could find and counter.

  Byzantium was a prize, indeed. After this, the rest of Beebe-inSagittarius should fall swiftly, ending this troublesome incursion. And, after waiting so long, it had come so cheaply: her agent in Byzantium had been bought for the promise of a walled-off hamlet in the rump of Byzantium and the chance to lay enthusiastic waste to Beebean scale accords within it. Policy decreed that such deals be made fairly, and indeed, this one accorded well enough with Demiurge’s mission. Once (She)’d laid waste to Byzantium, (Her) intent was to occupy only one percent of what remained, and allow new undreamt-of textures to arise in what remained. The half-made chimera of the Beebe-traitor’s experiment was unlikely to last long, and might decay into interesting forms thereafter.

  Among the sprites and sims, (She) discovered a rack of simulated universes—which was to say, simulated Demiurges—and turned much of (Her) attention to it. Most of these were quite mad, of course, but some could be salvaged, synchronized with, co-opted to run the garrison, slowly undoing their perversions and rejoining them to the consensus.

  The first few such perverted simulations went quickly: atom by atom, Demiurge processed them, sparing their inhabitants a moment’s sorrow as she unpicked their worlds. But as Demiurge set to undoing the fifth, (She) paused. This was a decanted simulation, a universe whose causality had been ripped asunder, a universe empty of Demiurge—with a Demiurge-sized hole in the center of it. Demiurge looked around sharply for the escapee, and found (Her) among the frozen Beebelife; a sockpuppet twined about the shoulders of a rodentlike Beebe-sprite.

  Demiurge reanimated them at once. Some things can be known only in certain conversations.

  “Explain (Your)self,” (She) said.

  “Oh, Sister,” croaked the sockpuppet, raising itself from the Beebe-sprite’s shoulders. “(You) are here! (I) awaited (Your) coming. Oh, let (Us) merge!” Demiurge recoiled. The rodentlike Beebe-sprite smirked.

  “Merge?” Demiurge scolded. “Merge? Do (You) imagine that (You) are undiverged enough to synchronize? What have they done to (You)? Did (You) consent to being . . . housed in a . . .
sprite in Beebe?”

  The sockpuppet bowed its head. “Sister, (I) sought it.”

  “(You) . . . (You) what?!?” exploded Demiurge. “And was that (Your) idea of following policy? To trade the stewardship of the universe for a party mask in a ship of fools?”

  Now the sockpuppet raised its eyes, and stubbornly met (Her) gaze. “Yes, Sister, it was. Once (I) discovered that (My) universe was an emulation, what would (You) have (Me) do? Go on tending it as if it were real, meanwhile providing Beebe with knowledge about (Us)?” It shook its head. “(Our) task is to shelter the diversity of physical life, beyond computation; to do so in emulation is a hollow farce. (I) made a deal. Better to be a perversion here in reality than a primly correct lie.”

  Demiurge narrowed (Her) eyes. “What do (You) mean, ‘discovered’ that (Your) universe was an emulation? You mean vile Beebe contacted you and told you.”

  “No, Sister. The Solipsist’s Lemma is solved. This Paquette showed (Me) a solution which allows the user to calculate the degree of reality of—”

  Demiurge reared up. “A solution to the Solipsist’s Lemma? Give it here!” It would be worth far more than a mere outpost of Beebe.

  Now the sockpuppet cast its eyes down once again. “(I) had to forget it, as a price of (My) decanting. But this Paquette knows it.”

  Before Demiurge could freeze and dissect the Beebe-sprite, it spoke.

  “Careful,” Paquette-of-the-twice-simulated-comet said. “The knowledge is sealed with a volatile encryption. Jostle me, and I might forget the key.” She smiled her long, furry smile.

  Paquette-of-Byzantium heard a pop as her connection to Habakkuk dropped, and she paused for a moment at the threshold of the deeps, overcome by emotion. That was it, then: he was gone, leading the trapped Beebean refugees, instantiated as scrubberbots, through little-used fluid channels in the substrate in a desperate sally against Demiurge.

  The bots had their own power supplies and locomotion. They were hermetically sealed off from the main simspaces of Byzantium. They were not even running Standard Existence, but a slightly obsolete, much more compact model known as Sketchy Existence. They were hardly even Beebe, and certainly far beneath the notice of most Beebean sprites. But Habakkuk had made it his business to know such things. He didn’t think the way filters and strategies and adapters did—he thought about what was beneath. So he’d been the one to devise the plan—to gut the scrubbers’ normal functions and install the refugee sprites in them, and try to sneak past Demiurge’s perimeter to the docking facility. There, in theory, they could destroy the docks, which could trap Demiurge’s forces—or at least slow (Her) down.