True Names

by Cory Doctorow

  Paquette slipped a paw into one of his tentacles and occasionally reached out to hang another node. The Nadias began to say something, then they too joined in. They attempted to commandeer more computational power, but the markets had gone completely nonlinear, triggering an automatic suspension in trading. All of Beebe was dumb, and in its dumbness, it tried to unravel the referendum.

  Firmament looked up from the task, noticed the Nadias pawing desultorily through the code-blocks, and blinked. “Um,” he said, “is anyone—I mean, I thought I’d work on this while you all—is anyone trying to stop the attack itself?”

  The left side of the throne room disappeared, taking Paquette with it, reappeared, disappeared, and reappeared. The others niced down their processes, releasing external resources, huddling into small memory cores, holding their breath.

  Paquette looked up, wordlessly. “Oh my,” Paquette said. “This is—I’ve been restored from an older version. This is me . . . two minutes ago.”

  “Just an aftershock,” Nadia said. “We didn’t lose time over here. But I suppose that means the caches are still not being updated.”

  “As for your other question, Firmament, you idiot,” said the other Nadia, not entirely unkindly, “we forked ourselves into all the major sectors when the blast hit. We’re looking into the cause. It’s some kind of instantiated selfreplicating engine, and it’s spreading very fast through Byzantium. So far the only thing that’s helped has been jettisoning infected pieces of physical substrate, either into the black hole system or outward, into Sagittarius-beyond. But it spreads fast. It seems to be manufacturing energy out of nothing; it survives high-intrasolar levels of radiation... .” She shook her head. “A superweapon. But at any rate, we’re handling it, so you can just focus on—”

  “Brobdignag,” Paquette said.

  “What?” Nadia said.

  “‘Simple, uniform, asentient, voracious—Brobdignag can transmute any element, harvest void-energy, fabricate gravity, bend space-time to its purpose. Brobdignag does not evolve; its replication is flawless across a googol iterations... ,’” Paquette murmured.

  “Where are you getting this?” said Nadia.

  “This is one of the fairy tales from your rediscovered emulations on Level 8906, isn’t it?” Nadia sneered.

  “No, Demiurge told me (Herself) that—,” Paquette began, and then paused, recalling that that memory came from a preself who had actually been in one of those emulations. “Well, yes, but those emulations have proved accurate to five sigmas with observed data from the physical world. The chance of divergence—”

  “There is no way for emulations to remain predictive over a thousand-year span lying in a basement somewhere,” Nadia began hotly.

  “Not unless—”

  “We don’t have time for theological disputations,” Nadia broke in, glaring at both of them. “I’m getting reports from—”

  The ceiling of the throne room flickered, and everyone froze, and involuntarily checked their self-cache. Still not updating: if they were wiped, they’d lose four minutes at this point. They each, silently, spawned diary threads to scribble hurried notes to themselves and cache them in randomly selected mailers. But it was hard to even get a message through to the mailers.

  “—from the infected sectors,” Nadia resumed, “that—”

  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 . . . four minutes ago.”

  “Me too,” Nadia said.

  “Six percent of our mass is gone,” Firmament said.

  “Linemangling entropic autofilters!” Nadia cursed. “Four minutes?! We’re being devoured!”

  “There’s some kind of referendum on the boards, submitted three minutes ago,” Paquette said. “Massive distributed changes to Standard Existence—”

  “Looks like we have several-minute-old forks of ourselves in various sectors,” Nadia said. “Wonderful. More unsynced forks.” She glanced with dark humor at her sister. “I’m getting battle reports... .”

  “I don’t think it’s Demiurge,” the other Nadia murmured, “or at least, we’ve never seen this in (Her) arsenal.”

  There was a cacophony of connection requests pounding at the throne room door.

  “Petronius!” Nadia snarled. “Why isn’t Petronius able to keep these people at bay? Firmament, Paquette, you two look at this referendum, all right? Tell us what it means.”

  “Petronius is offline,” Nadia said grimly, “backup currently unreachable. You’d better let at least Legba and the Garden in. We don’t have a majority of security global votes without them.”

  “The Garden—!” Nadia began, and shook her head. She thumbed open the door.

  Papa Legba, the most renowned synthete in Byzantium, danced into the room, his twelve spidery legs shrouded in sparkling constellations. The Garden, a cloud of ten thousand affiliated monitors and their mated-for-life adapters, floated in behind. Nadia swallowed—it had been a long time since anyone had seen the Garden move.

  “Friends,” Nadia said. “How lovely to s—”

  The ceiling flickered, and everyone stopped to stare at it.

  “Where’s this Demiurge-thing?” Legba snarled.

  “What?” Nadia said.

  “This Demiurge-thing, the thing you’re supposed to be making some deal with. I thought you were keeping it here.”

  “(Her),” Nadia said. “(She)’s gone back to the Tithe. I’ve been trying to open a line, but at the moment communication is down.”

  “I’ll bet it is,” Legba snapped.

  “Lovely ones,” the Garden sang, multivoiced and mellifluous, “lovely precious Nadias. How good you have been to lead us, to lead Beebe-inByzantium, through so many years of prosperity and peril.”

  The Nadias winced. Coming from the Garden, this was the equivalent of a severe tongue-lashing. On their private channel, Nadia fumed, “Get them out of here,” and Nadia sent a single bit, false.

  “And yet,” said the Garden.

  “Get us to let our guard down,” Legba said, “then eat us alive. Demiurge! Can’t believe you fell for—”

  Nadia shook her head. “That makes no sense, Legs. Demiurge was winning the war with the weapons (She)’d already showed us. (She) stopped because (She) wanted the Lemma. (She) doesn’t have it yet. Why would (She) suddenly use a superweapon on us? Why now? We’ve already broadcast what we know of it to other Beebe-instances. Why reveal—”

  “Why why why,” Legba snarled, poking at Nadia with five long furry legs. “Who knows why? It’s Demiurge. The problem is your hubris, thinking you can understand and parley with something Beebe was only ever meant to kill, that’s what. I don’t care why; I care it happened on your watch.”

  “Exquisite Nadias,” the Garden sang. “Wise Nadias. We are simple, trivial, low-level processes barely deserving of our meager presence at this scale. We rely on you to teach us. Can you tell us why Demiurge chose just this moment to part from you? Can you tell us why none of the section which it is . . . using . . . has been affected by the new weapon? We are curious about these things. We are eager and appreciative for your instructions.”

  “I. Don’t. Know,” Nadia fumed. “But I’m doing the best I can to figure it out. If it is Demiurge, we’ll fight (Her) as best we can. Meanwhile—”

  “Um, Nadia,” Firmament said.

  “Shush,” Nadia said, and simultaneously, on a private channel, “What?”

  “Well, this referendum,” Firmament began, and then gulped as Papa Legba poked three spider legs into the collection of referendum-deciphering nodes above his head.

  “What’s this you’re playing with? The referendum?”

  “Speaking of which, Legs, I think it was highly inadvisable to give such a far-reaching referendum the go-ahead in the middle of a major new military
incursion,” Nadia said.

  “You do, eh?” Legba said. “Because you’re handling everything just fine, is that right? Just stand back and let you work, is that it?”

  “Yes,” growled Nadia before her sister could speak, “that is it.”

  “Oh, yeah, I like that approach,” Legba said. “Favorite of mine. Started using it quite a while ago. When Byzantium happened to be eight percent bigger than it is now... .”

  “The referendum,” Firmament said on a private channel to the Nadias. “I don’t know exactly what it would do, but it gets into scale-law code. Not directly, but . . . it might let someone manage other sprites more . . . directly.”

  “Look, what do you want from us?” Nadia snapped.

  “What my sister is trying to say—,” Nadia began.

  “Glorious Nadias,” the garden said. “We come to you in confusion, for your teachings. We rely on you to guide us. Soon you will speak your glorious words of wisdom, and all will become clear, and we can relax once again into happy tranquility, certain and secure, and these confusing thoughts that plague us will vanish!”

  “Exactly,” Legba said sourly. “We want to know why in the nonconducting void we shouldn’t pitch you out right this minute and replace you with another general. In fact we aim to, and I’ll be surprised if you change our minds.”

  Nadia saw what her sister was about to say and hissed a crackling highspeed message at her to calm down, but Nadia ignored her. “With what other general?” she demanded. “Who else do you think can—?”

  “Oh, don’t get us wrong,” Legba said. “We like Nadias. A fine model. Can’t beat Nadias for strategic acumen. Put up with you this long because you’ve managed to aggregate all the Nadia-line cunning in this here soap bubble between the two of you. However—”

  “You’re not serious,” Nadia said.

  “We know that the Nadias’ attention is prodigious,” the Garden sang. “We are sure the complicated referendum, which makes our head hurt and is far beyond our capacities to understand, has not distracted the Nadias from the other, electoral proposal on the boards.”

  The Nadias stiffened.

  “She’s got a huge groundswell of support,” Papa Legba said. “Coming out of the woodwork—name-registries and data-spoolers and filterpedagogues and all manner of little folk who don’t pay any mind to politics, but they’re digging up their global votes, or their cousin’s old global votes, or merging like crazy until they’re big enough to get a global vote, so they can root for your jailbird sister.”

  “Because they saw her swinging a cutlass on the deck of an imaginary ship in a musical,” Nadia spat.

  “Yep, that’s why all right,” Papa Legba said. “Nadias are smart that way. Mind you, with Beleraphon and a couple others, we’d have enough votes to hold them back, if we thought you could find your own proxy with both hands and a flashlight. Might cost us some support ourselves, though. As it is, I’m inclined to give the little jailbird a turn at the tiller.”

  Paquette had been listening with growing frustration, and watching Firmament happily twiddling the nodes of the referendum, engrossed as usual in some computational project. She paused as mail from her lost minutes-old self (and the backups still weren’t taking—she felt a little shudder of terror at their current unrestorable nakedness) struggled its way to her inbox. Turning from Firmament, she uncrumpled the note, a scrap of diary thread. Asentient, voracious... , she read. “Brobdignag!” she cried aloud.

  “What?” the Nadias said. Legba glowered at the interruption.

  “I know what the superweapon is,” Paquette said. “And I know who knows how to stop it. We’ve got to get to Demiurge.”

  “I told you,” Nadia said crossly, “channels are down.”

  “And that just goes to show—,” Papa Legba began.

  “If I might have a word,” came a wheedling voice from behind the throne, and everyone jumped. Slowly, the battered and disheveled sockpuppet crawled into view.

  “What in the name of complexity’s hairy fringe is that?” said Papa Legba.

  The sockpuppet leapt onto Firmament’s shoulders. Firmament blinked and stiffened, then forced himself to relax.

  “Let Paquette and Firmament and (I) go seek (Her) out,” the sockpuppet said. “We can get past her borders. (She) likes this one.” The sockpuppet snuggled luxuriously among the bumpy protrusions of Firmament’s necks. “(She) likes this one a lot.”

  Paquette looked set to object, but Firmament patted her solemnly, firmly removed the sockpuppet, and nodded. “Let’s go.”

  The Nadia was infuriatingly calm. She sat in the Rump, resetting every now and again with utter equanimity. The arrogant smile that quirked her lips never faded. Watching her network traffic, Demiurge could see that she was e-mailing diffs of herself to the local caches with total disregard for Demiurge’s own use of the network or the storage. Demiurge slapped a jail-cell visual skin on the Rump, to make (Herself) feel better. Now it appeared that Nadia was lurking behind cold steel bars.

  “You unleashed it here,” (She) said. “I have it on my telemetry.” The Nadia’s shrug was eloquent in its contempt.

  “And soon it will take the Tithe, and us with it. You know that, and still,

  you unleashed it.”

  The Nadia curled some of her lips.

  Demiurge had policy for a Brobdignag outbreak. E-mail a copy of yourself to a distant node and suicide, taking as much of Brobdignag with (You) as (You) could. Practically speaking, that meant vaporizing (Yourself) and all available matter before (You) could be recruited into the writhing mass of Brobdignag. This was deep policy, so much so that (She)’d already started to package (Herself) up before (She) even consciously realized that it had to be Brobdignag.

  But (She) knew (She) had no way to quickly destroy all of Byzantium—not with Beebe fighting back—before Brobdignag had spread too far to contain.

  So Sagittarius was doomed. Doomed to become part of the mindless swarm, the apocalyptic plague. And what did that mean for the global topography? Could the cosmic wall be altered, the infestation contained? How much of the universe would remain, for life? Or was this the final blow? (She) could not spare the processing power to compute it. (She) should follow policy, transmit a diff and suicide, taking with her whatever chunk she could. Even if it was futile. Even if there was no way (Her) diff would ever be merged with (Her) far Self. (Her) sister-instances would delete it unread. (She) had failed.

  The Nadia was still grinning. Demiurge felt a surge of rage, followed by a kind of hopeless compassion for this confused splinter of Beebe. “I expect you’ve made up some little plan for keeping yourself safe amid the chaos,” (She) told the Nadia. “It won’t work. I assure you, little sprite, it won’t work.”

  The Nadia stiffened up at “little sprite,” and then her smile became more broad and even more contemptuous.

  Demiurge groaned. “Oh yes, I see it now. Your referendum. You will rewrite the laws of scale and become more than a sprite. You will become Beebe. You will work with unitary purpose, and this will give you the edge you need to defeat the Brobdignag swarm. Oh yes. Little sprite, little sprite, you are truly only a sprite, and cannot transcend it, for it is your destiny. Little sprite, I am unitary in my purpose, and I cannot defeat Brobdignag.” Demiurge reset, restored, reintegrated. “Little sprite, if you would know the truth of it, I am losing to Brobdignag, in my slow and ponderous way. You are not slow and ponderous. You are fast and decisive, and that is why you will lose to Brobdignag quickly and decisively.”

  At the entry now, at the firewall, persistent port-knocking, the sort of thing that (Her) intrusion detection system escalated to her, no matter that she had it set at its rudest and most offensive. (She) examined the message, shrugged, and opened a port.

  Even now, Firmament had the ability to unnerve (Her) in some terrible and wonderful way. He was so big, so foolish and naïve, and yet—

  “Hello, Sister,” the sockpuppet said. “We bring you word
of the terrible coming of—”

  “Brobdignag,” (She) said. “(I’m) fully occupied with that right now.”

  “Hello, Firmy-Wormy,” said the Nadia. She was up against the bars of her cage now, gripping them, peering intensely at the newcomers. Firmament shied back, then regained his ground, and met her stare.

  “Randomized,” he said. “I will be randomized before you can touch me. Just know that, Mother. I have a dead-man’s switch.” He watched her expression carefully. “It will survive your proposed transitions to Standard Existence, too.”

  The Nadia snarled and backed away from the bars, and Firmament deliberately turned his backs on her.

  “(You) can stop it,” Paquette said.

  Demiurge, belatedly remembering (Her) manners, manifested a wall of eyes with which to blink indecisively. “Stop it?”

  “The wall. The material that (You) use to wall off the habitable universe from Brobdignag, at the front. Ever since Habakkuk and I decanted me and this sockpuppet version of (You) from emulation, we’ve been working on creating that material. It was Beebe who originally synthesized it, after all, and while we don’t descend from that line, we were able to extract enough from the emulation’s Beebe, and enough precursor work from our own archives, and enough of (Your) own knowledge, to re-create the formula. We—”

  There was a flicker as another surge almost forced a reset. Paquette and Firmament flinched. Wordlessly, Demiurge passed (Her) guests access to the local caches, so they could restore themselves as needed.

  Then, mulling, (She) frowned. “The wall requires vast reserves of energy, and enormously fine coordinated manipulation, and distributed reserves of trace elements... .”

  “Byzantium has vast energy reserves, antimatter storage for quickly available power, and in extremis we can drop substrate into the black holes to generate surges. The trace element requirement is somewhat outdated because of the last millennium’s advances in femtoengineering—I can show you Habakkuk’s design.”

  The Tithe vanished, then reappeared, everyone instantly restored from backup. From the palpable relief of her visitors, Demiurge gathered that backup was not working so well in Beebe.