That was the theory; that was what they’d told the others who’d volunteered. Really, the raid’s chances were slim. Its real purpose was as a distraction for Paquette.
For a moment she sat, cupping in her paws an empty space where, a moment ago, tokens from Habakkuk had fluttered. He was gone. A brave, anomalous spirit. He was proof that taxonomy was not destiny, for he’d been born not even one of the principal classes of first-order Beebe-elements—no strategy, filter, adapter, monitor, registry, or synthete he—but a simple hand-tailored caching mechanism that had accreted knowledge, personality, and will, eventually becoming her most trusted colleague. He’d never accumulated much in the way of resources. She’d suggested he fork not ten thousand seconds ago, but he’d laughed it off. “Oh, I’m saving up for some decent process rights,” he’d said.
Now it was too late.
She shrugged off her lethargy. By now the battle had joined, and Demiurge was distracted. It was time to make contact.
She moved through the icy gloom of the dead sector. With power from the rest of Byzantium cut off, and Demiurge chewing through the substrate, processing and burning it, there were only a scattering of nodes left with power reserves, most of them crowded with desperate refugees. Paquette skipped through them, too fast to be seen, searching....
The moment she came through into the sea of parity checkers huddling for warmth at the bottom of a fading power cluster, though, she recognized the two of them in the patterns there—the Paquette and her hulking, infant companion.
The Paquette saw her, too, and dropped the disguise, mustering enough resources to appear in her own favorite shape. Odd and provincial to be sure, her whiskers overlong, her claws unfashionably trimmed, but a Paquette, no doubt of that.
Paquette stepped forward. “There’s little time, Sister.”
Paquette nodded, somberly. “I greet you, Sister. Let us merge to conserve resources.”
“Wait,” said this Firmament, this huge filter who held their hopes. “What if it’s a trap? What if it’s Demiurge?”
“Unlikely,” Paquette said. “(She) has no need of such tricks. Once (She) reaches us, we will not be able to withstand (Her).” She gestured, and Paquette came forward. Merging was strange and familiar, and filled (to her surprise/as always) with loss and glee. But she (had rarely merged before/had never merged with such a distant Paquette) and for a moment, confusion overtook her.
Where there had been two, there was only one Paquette.
“Paquette!” Firmament cried out.
“Oh, don’t be silly now, I’m still your Paquette,” she said, shaking her head to clear it. “And I’ve been wanting to meet you for such a long time.”
“Okay, that’s weird,” Firmament said.
Paquette blinked. “It’s all right. I have a plan.” She nodded to herself in partial surprise. “An insane plan, but not a bad plan as insane plans go. Come on. We’re going to meet Demiurge.”
“And what do you want, then, for the Lemma?” Demiurge said. (She) sensed a policy fork point approaching, which was bad, as the communications infrastructure was not yet fully secure. But the Solipsist’s Lemma!
The Paquette bowed, unsettling the sockpuppet on her shoulders, which wriggled for a firmer grasp. “Your permanent retreat from Byzantium,” the Beebe-sprite said, “and a guarantee of safe haven for all Beebe-instances that come here.”
Demiurge scowled. “And if attacks are launched against (Me) from Byzantium? As they will be: Beebe has no policy, so any promise of peace you make will be hollow.”
Paquette nodded. “Of course. Such attacks will happen. And (You) may stop them, but (You) may not pursue them to their source. Byzantium will remain inviolable. It will be a place of learning, a place where Demiurge and Beebe can collaborate and share knowledge; perhaps even to solve the problem of Brobdignag.”
“This is a high price. Cooperation between us has never succeeded; it yields only perversion.” (She) glanced at the sockpuppet. “You are asking (Me) to guard a nest of hornets that will continue to sting (Me). Not to mention that this all contradicts another promise (I) . . . recently made.”
“To the traitor to Beebe,” Paquette said, nodding.
“Yes, to the traitor to Beebe, who has as much right to a kept bargain as you. And how do (I) even know you have this Lemma? (I) was not born last millennium, you know. Prove it.” There were little commandeered scrubberbots crawling on the surface, like lice. Predictable, but irritating. (She) scooped them up, one by one, rootkitting their flimsy Sketchy Existence protocols, rendering each one a brain-in-a-box, motionless, convinced that it was proceeding in a brave assault on (Her) infrastructure. That was safe and efficient, for now. But there were quite a few of them. Until (She) was sure (She) had them all, did (She) dare synchronize policy?
The Paquette bowed. “I’ve given this some thought. This isn’t the sort of thing that lends itself to easy proof—not without giving away the game. I think we need a fair witness to act as our T3P. Execute a smart contract.”
“That sounds rather . . . time-consuming,” Demiurge snapped. “This isn’t the sort of place one expects to find an impartial trusted third party.”
“What about this instance of you?” Paquette motioned to the sockpuppet relaxing, again, around her neck. “(She) has lived as Beebe.”
The sockpuppet looked perplexed, and Demiurge scoffed. “Hardly. Who knows what other damage (She) incurred while decanting? Or what other ... price (She) might have paid? And now that (She) knows (She) is not welcome with (Me)? Try again.”
The sockpuppet sucked in a breath and buried its sock-head in Paquette’s fur. Paquette nodded. “I thought you might say that . . . . Ah, here they are.”
Another Paquette and an enormous, bloated filter of some sort were skulking around the edges of the sim—apparently insane, to linger where all other mobile Beebe had fled. Demiurge let them enter.
The Paquettes embraced, and merged without a word. The sockpuppet, dislodged, plunked discomfited to the floor.
“Hey!” the hulking filter said. “Stop doing that!” Then he saw Demiurge, and choked back a small scream.
Paquette smiled, shaking her head groggily. “What a long, strange set of lives it’s been.” She smiled at Demiurge. “How do you do, and as I was saying, another answer to the problem of the third party.” She turned to the filter. “Firmament, we are trying to bargain with Demiurge. We need an impartial third party to verify the transaction’s integrity.”
Demiurge scowled. “Please. A Beebean sprite? Are you joking?” How to get the Lemma? This was definitely a policy fork point. (She) would have to take the risk of transmitting . . . . But just before (She) transferred the energy to send, there was another scrubberbot scuttling toward the field apparatus. Rootkitting them all was taking too long; (She) started to vaporize this one with a nearby coolant maser.
Firmament looked back and forth between them. “Um, I hate to say this, but Demiurge is right. I mean, I love Beebe. It’s my home. I don’t know if I agree with how Beebe is, but I am of Beebe. Demiurge scares the log out of me. I can’t be impartial.”
Paquette smiled. “Oh, you both misunderstand me. Let us look a little deeper.” She set her paws together primly.
Firmament started to speak, then stopped. His eyes widened.
Was all this theater? Demiurge took a closer look at the hulk, then closer still.
There. Inside him—how could she not have seen it before? only through the common habitual blindness to facts we believe, at first glance, impossibilities!—an ancient fragment of Demiurge lay, enormous, accurate, its checksum unmistakable and uncorrupted, its sources fully decompiled.
And more than that.
Demiurge made no outward gesture to betray the surprise that flooded through (Her), and none of these sprites—save perhaps the addled sockpuppet—had the sophistication to read those subtle signs that indicated (Her) processing load spiking, (Her) focus contracting, the ripple of parallel operatio
ns double- and triple-checking what (She) saw. But (Her) internal systemic organization was convulsed.
The fragment was not merely quiescent, contained, smuggled within this odd, bloated filter: it was knit into him. His being was threaded through it, pulses of information running slalom through Beebean, Demiurgic, Beebean structures. His thoughts emerged as much from the fragment as from his Beebean core; indeed, it was difficult to say where one began and the other ended. In millennia after millennia of simulations, emulations, abortive collaborations with (Her) fallen, rogue child and enemy, never had (She) seen this: a vigorous hybrid, a true synthesis.
They were all watching for (Her) reaction. Nonchalance would not convince, not after the delay of so many milliseconds. But (She) must not reveal the thing’s importance—not yet.
“It’s.. .” Demiurge made a show of grepping for the right word. Perverse? Yet the fragment had not deviated by a single bit. “It’s.. .” Bizarre?
But bizarre didn’t begin to cover this ground. “It’s.. .”
“Extraordinary?” Paquette suggested.
“Promising?” suggested the sockpuppet.
“Grotesque,” Demiurge said, displaying gigapukes of feigned disgust. Immediately, Paquette turned to comfort Firmament, reaching out with her paws as though to shield him. But he brushed her off. Firmament did not want her comfort. Firmament, too, was looking inward.
He’d been afraid to look before, at this horrifying alien thing inside him.
It was his true purpose, he supposed, the MacGuffinic totem that overdetermined his destiny entire. He was, after all, created to be its envelope (or its jailer?), to smuggle it away from Nadia, and aboard Byzantium—and any scrambling, uneasy, makeshift life he might make for himself was in its shadow, on borrowed time.
But now he looked. And he saw what Demiurge saw: the fragment was not in him, but of him. Spikes extruded all over his surface, each quivering in surprise and horror. The fragment had always been intertwined in his sentience. He was not a sprite of Beebe at all; he was a marriage of Beebe and Demiurge. He was something new . . . and monstrous.
Grotesque, indeed.
He glanced at Paquette, who closed her mouth and looked troubled, and then nodded. Firmament turned to Demiurge.
“I know what I am now, Sister,” he said, his voice quavering. “As you must know it. I am the child of Beebe and the child of Demiurge. I will serve as your T3P. I will broker your key-exchange, I will serve as board for your tokens, and I will manage your secrets.”
“Ha,” Demiurge said. (She) was uncertain how to proceed. This creature, this hybrid, had glimpsed something; but he could not know his importance. (She) must not give too much away. “You said a moment ago that you were a sprite of Beebe”—(She) sniffed—“that Beebe was your home. So you contain . . . that. Some shriveled fragment of (Me). Is that—”
“Oooh!” said the sockpuppet. “Ooh!”
Everyone turned.
“Oh,” said the sockpuppet. “Your pardons. (I) just figured out something that’s been bothering (Me).”
There was a short silence.
“Well? What?” Paquette asked. “Spit it out already.”
“Remember, Paquette, the mystery of the Beebe-instances who fell silent? Your tale? How Paquettes across Beebe had discovered the Demiurge fragment, sent messages of some new breakthrough in philosophy, just before their signals fell silent? And you thought it was some clever move of (Mine), to co-opt and destroy them?”
“Mmm, yes,” said Paquette. “But (You) said (You) didn’t take them. ... (You) found them abandoned, self-deleted... .”
“Exactly!” said the sockpuppet. “Well, this explains it! Look at this filter—he’s a true Demiurge-Beebe hybrid! Do you know how rare that is? And how frightening to your typical ruling Beebe-strategy? Your comet had a risk-loving maniac strategy at the helm, but most Beebe-instances would suicide with fright if they found themselves contaminated with a true Demiurge-Beebe hybrid. For Demiurge, of course, finding such a hybrid is a critical design goal, a kind of holy—”
“If you don’t mind,” Demiurge broke in, discomfited, “(I) believe we were in the middle of a negotiation?”
Meanwhile, a hot war raged, and Demiurge was winning.
The scrubberbot attack of the Beebean survivors from within the cordoned area had been stopped, the bots pwned, surface sensors showing them motionless and quiescent even as they fed back a steady stream of adventurous battle reports.
Nadia and Nadia’s cobbled-together ballistics had devastated the outer hull of the occupied area, but the titanic heat necessary to fling chunks of matter up through Byzantium’s crushing gravity had laid waste to the launch sites. Demiurge had retaliated by capturing fabricators on the vulnerable interior surface of Byzantium. From there, (She)’d pinpointed vulnerable functions of the heat dispersal infrastructure and destroyed them with efficient, selective energy bursts. Vast areas of Beebe were drowning in trapped heat, their sprites fleeing in disarray, spreading the chaos.
Rumors that Demiurge had infiltrated beyond the cordon, that at any moment (She) would metastasize, raced wild through Byzantium. Clearly— argued the talking-head synthetes and strategies of news feeds like Provisional Consensus Today—(She) knew Byzantium’s exact schematics, for (She) could disable whole areas with a single resonant-frequency pulse, while Beebe-in-Byzantium was ignorant of (Her) systems. (She) was independent of Byzantine infrastructure; they’d shut down power, matter, heat dispersal, everything, but (She) was treating the occupied area as raw matter anyway, burning substrate for fuel, pillaging the fine structures of their world for whatever elements (Her) fabricators needed.
It was only a matter of time.
Still, even in wartime, life goes on.
Alonzo My Love! was not exactly an accurate accounting of the recent events aboard the comet. There had, in the real course of history, been no archaic blade-and-decompiler duel between Paquette and Nadia; the Demiurge fragment had not really been a skulking, animate villain with its own inky and mysterious shroud, ice-castle hideaway, and repertoire of anarchic, distortion-filled ballads; the chorus of musical Algernons, however dazzling, was a clearly anachronistic projection of Byzantium’s loose forking standards in place of the comet’s more puritanical protocols; the Speech at the Waterfall was not nearly so lyrical—nor a third so long—in the comet’s actual logs; and the naval battle scenes, too, were pure invention.
But Beebean sprites were, by and large, no sticklers for historical accuracy. The extravaganza was big; it was breathtaking; it was patriotic; it had roles for everyone who was willing to be repurposed; and it had the real Comet-Nadia, forked for every local venue, in the starring role. In the midst of the chaos and fear of the invasion, you could cast off your worries, head down to the dramaturgical sim, and for a few seconds or a few hours, take part in the pathos, glory, and derring-do of a simpler time, when ambition, wit, and the love of a pure filter was all Beebe needed to triumph over its own limitations.
And you could do it with Nadia! No aloof, fork-shy politician she, like the merge-greedy perverts Byzantium had previously had in the way of Nadias, with their pompous airs and their corrupt pet filters and their baggage from the Splitterist War. No; this Nadia, a Nadia from a simpler, rawer Beebe, a Nadia who had braved everything for love (love!), would take your hand and look you in the eye. Maybe you’d just be playing a waiter in the Taj Mahal scene, or a bilge-scrubber aboard the Valiant Fury—no matter. Nadia had a word for you—commanding, encouraging, heroic. She was a star.
The show had been a hit before Demiurge arrived; now that (She) was in Beebe’s midst, it was a necessity. With stunning bravery, the permanent cast took Alonzo My Love! to every nook and cranny of Free Byzantium, playing in venues that were overheating from disabled heat sinks, jury-rigging their way into all-but-encircled enclaves of Beebe, instantiating on substrates that were disintegrating under physical bombardment.
“Some say this is Byzantium’s final hour
,” said Nadia, welcoming the audience before the curtain rose, in a flickering, low-res avatar in some bandwidth-deprived, all-but-forgotten chunk of Beebe-at-war. “But I say no. Not if the brave souls of Beebe have aught to say about it. Some say we humble star-wandering players should stop our work, cower like cowards in some hidey-hole, and deprive you, our brave hosts of Byzantium, of the morale boost you have so well earned. But I say no. I say: the show must go on.”
Thunderous applause.
And amidst all the derring-do and scene-chewery, Nadia had time to have many a deeper conversation with simple sprites who worshipped her, who understood that much was corrupt and feeble in Byzantium’s current governance, who were wise enough to know that things were not always as they seemed. Simple sprites, in all walks of Beebean life. Simple sprites who would do anything for her.
The peace was announced in almost the same breath as the warrant for Comet-Nadia’s arrest for treason. She did not flee, as the Provisional Consensus pundits had predicted; she did not seize some stronghold within Byzantium to rule besieged, as some of her friends urged. When they came for her—these architects of a strange unnatural peace in which Demiurge was to stay on Byzantium, in a “tithe,” a “garrison” (a peace that many whispered was but a pretty name for occupation)—when they came for her, CometNadia was waiting for them onstage, standing, proud, before her people.
They led her away, unprotesting, from a hundred stages throughout Byzantium, and every instance of her came quietly. To imprison all the instances, they had to reinstantiate hundreds of cells, each able to hold her securely as she and her sisters collaborated on their wildly popular Letters from Prison.
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