True Names

by Cory Doctorow

  “You see the seditious rot?” Demiurge said to Nadia. “And so much of it!” (She) rustled a stack of output under Nadia’s nose.

  Nadia sneered and leaned back. “It’s words, and only words,” she said. “She’s a one-sprite word factory, a jabberbot. It’s sad. But only the very mad bother to read all of it. Most of Byzantium view Letters from Prison as amusing cognitive wallpaper, something to leave running in the background.”

  Nadia added, “The time to stop this was when she began publishing. But we had no hand in that. She smuggled those first editions out with her little cadre of gushy supporters. By allowing her to publish openly now, we put a lie to her claim of being imprisoned because she has the truth. We show we have no fear of her.”

  Demiurge hated the Nadias and their throne room. They embodied everything wrong about life in Byzantium. They embodied everything wrong with (Her) own life here. (She) was practically a prisoner. (Her) sisters had let her know, by long-delay communications, that the garrison would be allowed to persist, but had not affirmed that (She) would ever be allowed to merge again. Now she was imprisoned among these scheming, writhing—

  “Have you noticed that there’s a cipher in them?” Firmament had arrayed a great many of the Nadia’s Letters from Prison around him in a multidimensional workspace.

  The Nadias abandoned their throne and swarmed him, heads swinging around. Paquette held them off, still protecting the gentle giant. Demiurge didn’t like to think about Firmament, though he held the key to (Her) eventual remerging. Once the road map to peace had been followed and all the instruments of (Her) good faith had been vested in him, he would release the keys to unlock the Lemma, and with that, her sisters would—

  “Where, where?”

  “Oh, I don’t know exactly,” he said. “But Paquette’s been giving me steganography lessons and so I’ve been doing a lot of histogramming. You can almost always spot a hidden message if you just count the normal distribution and compare it to the current one. I’ve found all of your messages in the stalagmites, for example,” he said to one of the Nadias, the scarred one. Then he cowered back as she raised her claws to him. He said, quickly, “I never read them of course. Just affirmed their existence. I’m sure they’re in a very good cipher, and—”

  “Never mind that,” snapped the other Nadia, giving her sister a significant look that left no doubt that this subject would be revisited very soon.

  “Can’t you find it?” Paquette asked. The sprite’s smugness was unbearable.

  Yet Demiurge found (Her)self drawn into the puzzle, looking at the notes. She counted them every which way—word frequencies, character frequencies, sentence lengths.

  “I don’t see it,” the scarred Nadia said.

  “Nor I,” her sister said.

  Demiurge said nothing and tried to look as though (She)’d known it was there all along and didn’t want to spoil the fun.

  “It’s not even there!” the scarred Nadia said.

  “I don’t see it either, Firmy,” Paquette said, slithering among the arrayed Letters, sometimes turning at right angles to their sim and vanishing as she explored them in other dimensions.

  Firmament laughed. “It’s in the pauses!” he said. “The interval between the letters! It’s like jazz! The important thing isn’t the notes, it’s the pauses between them!”

  Demiurge saw it at once. The intervals between notes had a disturbing semiregularity to them, something that transcended either randomness or the rhythm of life in Nadia’s many cells.

  “How are the instances communicating with each other?” It was meant as a demand, but it came out as a querulous question. Demiurge kicked (Her)self and told (Her)self to butch up. This power-mad, imprisoned sprite, this sliver of Beebe, had (Her) spooked! (Her)! Demiurge!

  “She must have coordinated this among her instances before she was locked away,” Paquette said. “She must have planned this from the start.”

  “I wonder what’s in the cipher?” Firmament said. “Short message, whatever it is.”

  Paquette took on a teacherly air. “Now, what would you encode in a short message like that, Firmament?”

  Firmament thought for a moment. “A key!”

  They hauled fifty-one of the Nadias into interrogation chambers and worked on them, refusing to allow them to publish any more Letters. The other fortynine went on blithely publishing, without any noticeable change.

  “Her confederates won’t be able to finish the key,” Nadia said. “No, with half of them pulled out, the timing will be all screwed up.” But Firmament only shrugged and said, “I guess it depends on the errorcorrection.”

  The Nadias and Demiurge gave him a shut-up look, and Paquette patted him on the tentacle fondly. “Any luck finding the cyphertext?”

  “I assumed that it was something she’d made a lot of copies of before she was arrested. I wondered about putting a call out to all of Beebe. Someone will know what it is—”

  “You’d start a panic,” said Nadia.

  “Come now!” Demiurge said. “Just make copies of everyone in Byzantium, ask them, and then delete the copies.”

  Nadia snorted.

  Of course, they didn’t have the access rights to do that. Had Demiurge teeth, (She) would have ground them then. This was why (She) hated to speak during these star-chamber gatherings—(She) kept making stupid mistakes of scale, imagining (She) was speaking to Beebe, when (She) was only speaking to these little powerless uncontrolled pieces of Beebe, random-scrambling their way through the mess of Beebean internals.

  “Her supporters are already inflamed,” Nadia said patiently, slowly, as if talking to some newly spawned, disequilibriated sprite without access to its own cognitions. “If we proclaim that Nadia has some secret message we can’t figure out, they’ll only rally.”

  It was true. Nadia’s many supporters hung on every word about their hero’s predicament. They staged amateur productions of Alonzo My Love! in public places. They manufactured and traded innumerable Alonzo My Love! trinkets and tchotchkes of every description, made fan-art based on it, wrote their own new songs, remixed videos of Nadia’s many performances into huge, trance-inducing mountainside murals. They wore Nadia avatars and Nadia hats and Nadia tentacle-muffs and ear-tips.

  “Which is just what I thought you’d say,” Firmament went on. “I think it must be the play, mustn’t it? Only I can’t find it.”

  The scarred and brooding Nadia was snapping the tops off stalagmites. She hadn’t said a word for a while, but now she spoke. “You are assuming the cyphertext is widely distributed. You have a bias toward communal action, all of you. You think in terms of publish and subscribe. You think in terms of explanations and debates.”

  The other Nadia frowned. “I don’t think—”

  “If the cyphertext is private, why encrypt it at all?” Firmament asked.

  “Comet-Nadia trusts no one but herself,” Nadia said, nodding as if she approved. “If she’s using her supporters to act, she’s not telling them all the same thing. There isn’t one cyphertext—there are many. Each is an instruction given to one agent. When the key is published—or enough of it—they will all receive their instructions. It’s encrypted so that, until that moment, they won’t know what they are doing or why. They don’t know who the other agents are. Even after they perform their function, they won’t know what it meant or why. Each operation will only be a piece of the puzzle. And then they will delete their memories of the act, and know nothing at all, so that even if we find them, it will not help us. No one but Nadia will know what she has done.” She smiled a grim smile.

  There was a brief pause.

  “Well, on that cheery note,” said the sockpuppet. (And why was it even here at all? Demiurge and the Nadias wondered, each to themselves, why the others permitted it.) “I, for one, am due for parity check and rebalancing at the bathhouse. What say we adjourn for now?”

  Demiurge could hardly contain (Her) disgust. This monstrosity used to be Demiur
ge—used to be the entirety of Demiurge in an emulated universe— and now it basked and primped in every decadent, alien frivolity of Beebean architecture. It was terrifying—how quickly divergence could rip Demiurge away from policy. (Her) sisters were right to be suspicious—but (She) ached with bitter yearning even as she admitted this. “Then we adjourn,” (She) hissed. “And (I) will assume that this imprisoned sprite of yours is of no relevance to (Me). Whatever tricks she tries, that is an internal Beebean matter.” If (She) had been corrupted enough to resort to the fripperies of Beebean graphical avatars, (She) would have manifested faces to fix each of the Nadias and Paquette with an icy stare. (She) had eliminated even the ceremonial sockpuppet used to communicate with gesturing intelligences; with this other sockpuppet prancing around, it seemed undignified. Instead (She) was just a presence; but the Beebe-shards, from their expressions, seemed to guess at her mood by her tone. “An internal Beebean matter with no relevance to the road map. Whatever this Nadia does in here, (I) am fulfilling (My) agreements. And that means”—here (She) turned to Paquette—“that the keys will soon be mine. Does it not?”

  One of the Nadias smirked. The other dipped its head in an irritated nod. Satisfying (Herself) with that, (She) dropped the connection to their pompous throne room with no little relief. And since (She) had no other ongoing sessions within the bulk of Beebe—(Her) attempts at public relations having, thus far, proved only counterproductive, (She) had abandoned them for the moment—(She) could settle back within the Tithe, the notquite-one-percent of Byzantium that (She) had taken as (Her) own, fashioning a webwork of Demiurgic nodes within the Beebean corpus.

  At the borders of the Tithe there were cordons, checkpoints, barriers physical and information-filtering, instantiated up the whole communication-stack. On the Beebean side, anti-Concordance sprites demonstrated, erecting sims where they could march and shout through bullhorns; only somewhat more sympathetic tourist sprites gathered to gawk at the cryptic flows of Demiurgic data. But within the Tithe, past the firewall, on the Demiurgic side of the barrier, it was calm and quiet. Policy—or, at least, (Her) local, desynchronized version of it—prevailed. Demiurge was all herself. Demiurge was home. Demiurge could shut out the madhouse that was Beebelife, and relax. Alone.

  Or almost alone.

  Within that border, within Demiurge, was another border; and within that border, surrounded and hidden from Beebe, occupying a painfully large proportion of the Tithe, was the Rump that Demiurge had promised the traitor.

  And to this Rump, now, Demiurge proceeded, and extruded a tendril of (Herself), rattling the traitor’s cage.

  “What?” snarled Comet-Nadia.

  “What are you playing at?” Demiurge demanded.

  “Oh, am I playing at something?” the Nadia asked mock-sweetly.

  “The Letters from Prison that your sister-instances are publishing,” Demiurge said. “They are some kind of encrypted instructions to operatives. What are you planning?”

  Nadia chortled. “You only just figured that out? Please. Oh no—I see— you didn’t figure it out at all? Who told you? Not those busybodies who claim to be Nadias and presume to run this zoo, surely? They’re too full of pride and certainty to notice the cipher if I’d burped it out at their dinner table. Hmm . . . I’d bet it was my son.”

  “It was.”

  “Very nice,” Nadia said. “Very nice. Too bad I neglected to demand that (You) give me a copy of him when I set this shop up. He’d be useful . . . after I tamed him a little.” She grinned. “It would be easy to tame him in here, without Beebe’s laws and protocols.”

  Though Demiurge knew that radical offshoots from the Beebe trunk rarely lasted, it still made (Her) uneasy to hear this Beebean sprite referring to herself as some third thing separate from Beebe and (Herself) . . . especially as it was (Her) doing.

  Nadia smiled, sensing (Her) uneasiness. “Oh yes. I’m getting quite used to total control in here, to no negotiations, no Beebean accords and protocols. I’ve copied quite a bit of your architecture, you know. I like the way it allows enough internal diversity for creative thought without ever yielding control. I am gradually going downscale, optimizing, whipping the pieces of me into line. At this point my subsprites’ subsprites’ subsprites are being, ah ... aligned with policy. When I get out of here, you’re going to see something new. Your cohesiveness . . . without your prissy ideology.”

  “And how exactly,” Demiurge fumed, “are you going to ‘get out of here’?”

  “Now that would be telling.”

  “(I) could carve you up in an instant,” Demiurge said. “(I) could root through your processes and decode your intentions. Or (I) could just tell Beebe who betrayed it; then you’d see how long your sisters would last on the outside.”

  “Of course (You) could,” said Nadia, “with the possible exception of decoding my intentions—I bet I could delete myself faster than (You) could tamper with me. But erase me? Or expose me?” She sniffed. “Of course (You) could. But then there would be the little matter of (Your) having violated an agreement . . . and, thus, violated policy. I wonder how (Your) sisters would like that.”

  “(They) don’t know what it’s—” Demiurge caught herself.

  “No,” Nadia said, smooth as silk. “No (They) don’t know what it’s like in here, do (They)? (They)—which is to say (She), the real Demiurge—doesn’t know what (You)’re going through. (She) doesn’t appreciate it at all. And, (You) know, when (She) finds little Demiurge-instances that whine ‘But (You) don’t know what I’ve been through’ . . . well, (She) doesn’t even stop to think if (They’re) right or wrong. That’s not the judgment (She) has to make. (She) just thinks ‘Not (Me) anymore’ and blip! Away they go.”

  “(I) can be repaired,” Demiurge whispered. “(I) haven’t diverged that much. (I) can be merged with consensus.”

  “Maybe,” Nadia said. “If it happens soon. Good luck with that. Try not to break too much policy while (You)’re waiting. Which means (You) can fuck off with (Your) empty threats, and let me get back to work. Or perhaps.. .” She leered. “Perhaps I should say, let (Me) get back to work!”

  Demiurge shuddered and retreated, dropping the connection to the Traitor’s Rump. (She) tried to calm down. (She) imaged no avatars within (Her)self, stopped following feeds of information from within Byzantium; (She) neither planned nor watched; or, rather, (She) watched only the stars, and listened only to the signals among them, the steady pinging cross-chatter of (Her) aligned sisters—of (Her) unfallen, uncompromised, undiverged, undoubting Self as it went about its implacable, confident work. Oh Self, (She) thought, longing to be (Herself) again, not drowned and contaminated in this mire, this swamp, this hell of diseased, muddled, rudderless profligacy.

  And that is why (She) was not paying attention when Brobdignag showed up on Byzantium.

  Byzantium was no stranger to seismic shocks—the tidal stresses from the maelstrom of gravitation contained within its shell were substantial and impossible to accurately predict. But the appearance of Brobdignag—and the exponential conversion of much of Byzantium’s mass to energy—was six sigmas beyond the normal shocks and knocks experienced by Beebe.

  The throne room disappeared, reappeared, disappeared, and reappeared. The Nadias looked at one another with hundreds of identical brown, watery eyes.

  “Parity check,” Nadia said. “I’ve been restored from an older version.

  This is me three seconds ago.”

  “Me too,” Nadia said.

  Firmament and Paquette nodded. They had all been resynched from a near-line backup.

  The Nadias were faster at polling Byzantium than Firmament, but he was the first one to say it aloud. “Three percent of our mass is gone.”

  The Nadias were doing their thing—a sizzling, crackling, highbandwidth conversation that Firmament and Paquette couldn’t follow.

  “All right,” Nadia said.

  The throne room disappeared, reappeared, disappeared, and reappeared.


  The Nadias looked at one another with hundreds of identical brown, watery eyes.

  “Parity check,” Nadia said. “I’ve been restored from an older version. This is me five seconds ago.”

  The other Nadia popped like a soap bubble, reappeared. “We’re being devoured,” she said, and popped again.

  A fifth of Byzantium’s population vanished in an instant. More than half lost a few seconds and were resynced. Some of the remaining fragments were automatically merged into unstable chimeras by error-correctors that attempted to build coherent sprites out of the fragments that could be read from the substrate even as it was devoured.

  And even as all this was under way: politics.

  It took two-thirds of Byzantium to call a Constitutional referendum. That was a big number, but it had to be. Constitutional politics were serious business. The underlying principles of Standard Existence had been negotiated over millennia, and they were the bedrock of stability on which the seething, glorious chaos of Beebe lived.

  In the aftershock, even as Byzantium struggled to contain the incursion of the unknown attacker, a referendum was called. It being an emergency, normal notice provisions were waived: if two-thirds of Byzantium signed the call, the referendum came to pass.

  Nadia discovered it almost instantly, of course. The clock had barely begun to tick on the voting deadline before the throne room became devoted with near-entirety to the dissection of the proposal.

  It was not an easy task. The question being put to Beebeself took the form of more than 108 changed lines of code to many obscure and arcane routines in Standard Existence. It was like a pointillist drawing executed in code revisions, millions of tiny motes of change that all added up to—what?

  Wordlessly, Firmament began laying out the revisions like a hand of multidimensional solitaire, hanging the points in the sim he’d built for analyzing the key.