by Barnes, John
If they didn’t do it, sooner or later One True would find a way to break out of Earth, swallowing up the solar system colony by colony, bringing them all into Resuna. In a few thousand years One True might even spread to the stars.
According to the fast probe that had popped out of the singularity a decade ago, the ships from the future were still three hundred years away, but when they got here they’d need accommodations for a hundred million people. That was the last that had been heard from that source. Meanwhile, observations of Resuna from covert flybys seemed ominous; at a minimum they were putting up fifteen more supras, and why build a space port if you’re not planning to go somewhere?
I realize I’ve been sitting here slackjawed while all of recent history runs through my head. I had read it a bit and a piece at a time, to explain parts of newscasts or to understand fragments of memory, but this is the first time I’ve thought of the whole story.
Sadi’s still looking at me, smiling patiently. At last I say, “Yeah, I do remember. The first time I remembered was the other day. I was just wondering why Martians always seem to be in such a hurry, and then all of a sudden I remembered why — everybody’s just trying to get it together for when the ships come back, three hundred years from now or so, and they aren’t sure they can get their terraforming done in that time. So it’s all focused into the future and hardly anybody pays any attention to what it’s like now.”
“That’s it.” She stretches, yawns, and pulls my arm around her. “All right then. You’re about ready for bomb number three, the big one. You’ll probably guess it as soon as I say, making a singularity was something almost anyone could have figured out how to do ever since the first atomic bombs and the first rockets that could get outside the atmosphere, right? Because all you have to know is how to position the reflectors to make the X-rays form the right geometry around a ball of matter; it’s not really any more complicated than an ordinary hydrogen bomb, phase reversal MAM, or single-massive-photon layer, as long as you know what you’re trying to do.”
“Right.” I suddenly realize what the truth must be and blurt it out. “So the Soviets made a singularity and used it?”
She nods. “Back in March 1987, when the Soviet Union was decaying fast but they still had an effective space program — and while the Americans were pouring all their effort into dealing with that space shuttle that exploded and had no time for anything else — there was a semi-covert robot mission, carried out by teams from the space program, weapons research, and KGB. The weapons research people had only figured out that they might be able to make a singularity, that it was dangerous, and that therefore they might be on to a new weapon; the KGB was in it because they were into everything.”
“You said ‘semi-covert.’”
“Unhhunh. You can’t hide three missile launches in a period of days, especially not ones big enough to leave Earth orbit. The Japanese, Europeans, Chinese, and Americans watched it leave and monitored the transmission but they still didn’t know what was going on.
“The Soviets put three satellites into solar orbit. The first one was just a relay station, something to relay signals back to Earth, concealed as an unannounced, failed Venus mission. They leaked information that the second one was supposed to be a secret solar observatory for the Soviet Navy to provide early warnings of solar flares that could cripple their communications. That one was really a scientific station that went all the way ‘round the sun, to a point just short of 180 degrees from Earth in its orbit, so that it was hidden by the sun. And right at that 180-degree point — “
“The third one must have been the singularity constructor,” I said. “So they fired that off on the other side of the sun. Of course. It took them what, more than a year to get there? But it was too dangerous to try on Earth and you couldn’t hide it in near-earth space, so it had to be somewhere where the traces would be lost in the glare. So that’s how they found out how to make one?”
“That’s how they made one. The singularity implosion didn’t look very useful as a weapon, so they gave up on it and left the data in the files, not knowing what they had. But they had produced a closed timelike curve, just like the ones the transfer ships made for themselves, though much smaller — only 144 years in diameter and only big enough for a small ship. They didn’t know how to use it at the time, of course — because the theory of a singularity producing a CTC wasn’t yet developed. And they thought their data was hopelessly scrambled because it looked like a lot more matter came out of the singularity than had gone into making it — but there was nothing wrong with their instruments. What they were seeing was a steady dribble of spacecraft sailing out of the singularity. All very small craft. And a lot of those were us, Josh. You and me. We just keep going around the loop, making the twenty-first century more and more the way we want it.”
I thought about that for a second … “How long do we actually live?”
“Oh, well, when the Organization figured out how to use a CTC, back in the early 2000s, we went back and looked at the Soviet observation satellite’s records of the singularity, and we put up an observation satellite ourselves. And the answer seems to be that about fourteen thousand ships went through. Figuring most of them are you, me, or both of us, say we each make ten thousand trips through a loop of a bit over a hundred years, that’s a million years.” She shrugged. “Once you get used to the idea you stop caring. But you’re always you, and from your own local perspective time is always running forward, so what else matters? Maybe somewhere in that sequence we find a perfect version of the twenty-first century, and decide to fire off another singularity constructor so we can do a billion times through the twenty-second. The point is, thanks to relativity, we can skip over the bad parts, and thanks to revival, we never get old. We get to be together at our favorite times in history, all the time.”
She’s looking at me very intensely, like it’s important that I be happy with this. I don’t know why I’m feeling funny about it. Finally I say the first thing that pops into my head. “That seems like a lot to do for a couple of employees. The Organization must really have changed while I wasn’t watching.”
“Oh, you were watching,” she says. “You just didn’t know, the first few times through. While the struggle was still going on I had to conceal my operations from both you and my earlier self, mostly for your own protection since there would have been people looking for you if they knew you were important to me. But nowadays, Josh, since around 2070, all there is to the Organization is me, plus the hired hands. I own it, it’s all mine, now.”
4.
Every time before, Supra Tokyo had been grim, orderly, quiet. You knew you didn’t fuck around, they knew you’d behave.
Today the air stank of fear. My ears ached with the cacophony of thousands of people trying to argue a reason why they should live.
My best reason had just failed — I’d pulled out enough platinum to make anybody a billionaire and Captain Space Prick had just sneered and gone on the next. I’d been smart enough not to try drugs, the people on the transfer ships never used them much — a few decades before when the Organization tried to get an in that way, our organizers got massacred.
So though I didn’t understand it, I knew they didn’t like drugs there. I had never realized they didn’t tike money, either.
Fuck ‘em then if they didn’t want to make any sense
I passed back through the crowd to the waiting area. Lots of people were trying more than once but since the only people at the admissions table were the same two spacers — a snotty rat-faced bitch named Rodenski and a pompous fat bag of shit named Harrison — and they seemed to have good memories, it looked pretty stupid to try to get in by iteration.
The year before, the transfer ship Albatross had been almost grabbed by the Unreconstructed Catholic meme on its last Earthpass; they’d had to kill twenty of the crew in the process of keeping it out of the control of that meme. That freaked the Albatross crew — there’s practically n
o violence aboard the transfer ships, usually nothing worse than a punch in the nose, and what with all they had all been teenagers or younger when the adults left the ships in 2024, and with life extension, whole decades went by without anybody dying on one of the ships. Twenty in a day, shot, left them in hysterics, though any realistic person would’ve known that was nothing.
The hysteria was really unnecessary anyway, because the Unreconstructed Catholic meme was extinct by the time the next transfer ship arrived. One True had won the war and taken control of the Earth — which it was rapidly turning into Resuna — but the transfer ships had vowed they’d never trust a meme again, no matter how many assurances One True gave them. They were all modulating orbit so that they would not pass nearly as close to the Earth as they had before, which meant a longer radio delay and hence made infection much more difficult. But it also meant it was going to be much more expensive to get to Mars, Venus, Ceres, or the Jupiter or Saturn systems.
But they had been willing to strike one very limited deal with One True. They would take all the people they could carry in one trip to the colonies — any refugees who did not want to join Resuna. All you had to do was be at one of the supras during the last pass of a ship, and get far enough up the list.
All you had to do.
All the people they could carry was hardly any, compared to how many wanted to go. The bottleneck: short time to load — the transfer ships didn’t even come within the moon’s orbit. The shuttles to and from them could only run for about six weeks (four weeks before and two after the Earthpass) at most, and it took a shuttle around a week, round-trip. Fifty shuttles times five passes times six round trips per pass times 1800 passengers per shuttle worked out to 2.7 million. About half a million on each of the five transfer ships.
Total. One-way trip. Coming back for nothing.
There were at least twenty million people packed into each supra during each pass. And out of the sixty million who were lucky enough to get to a supra, 2.7 million — fewer than one in twenty — would actually escape. The rest would go back down the cable into the One True society where everyone would be Resuna.
The trick was figuring out how to get to be one of the 2.7 million, especially since I was older, male, single, with a criminal record two meters long if they happened to check my thumbprint against their database. Which they were bound to do. They needed reasons to reject refugees.
All that was why Supra Tokyo echoed with keening, wailing, shrieking. People pleading. Showing pictures. Rejected families selling their children to those yet to apply. I had been in this vast steel cave before — it had been advertised as “the largest dance floor in the solar system,” on the flashchannel. (They cheated, in zero grav you could count all the surfaces.) I had never seen it so crowded or so loud.
The queue was messy. You can’t keep kids still anyplace. In zero gravity it isn’t even worth trying. The line wound around the inside of that giant box like a spring coiled in a can, people hanging on handholds, and with the person on one side of you a thousand people ahead in line, the temptation to muscle in got pretty strong. There were fights and squabbling all over all the time.
The Supra Tokyo cops were already One True, and that helped, because One True was fairly gentle, for a meme, and took better care of bodies than some of them did. Still, the cops had their hands full and if you looked around at the coated walls along which the long spiral of humanity ran, you could always find a fight someplace.
As I drifted through the center — the exit route — I thought, my platinum coins might as well be chewing gum wrappers for all the good they were apt to do. Not sure why I was doing it yet, I pulled out a couple handfuls of platinum coins and flung them all around me, letting myself tumble as I went and not worrying. I hit the catch net at the end and scrambled out. The noise behind me had just started.
I guess I’m sort of sorry. There were fifteen dead or so from me doing that, most of them kids. Once people saw that much money — one platinum coin was worth more than most people made in a year — they went for the coins. But their place in line was just as precious, and a lot of people grabbed places rather man coins, triggering fights. I hadn’t pulled myself more than a hundred yards along the corridor outside before the screaming din behind me got even louder.
Then the screaming was drowned in thunder.
A long life of healthy habits had me moving fast before I thought what the hell that might be.
I had heard something like it before, but not as loud. I remembered. People zero-g dancing, when a place was really crowded. They made that sound by springing off the sides. But this was a thousand times louder.
Feet and bodies, slamming into the walls. Those with some zero-g skills were leaping back and forth, grabbing coins and places. Those without were getting beat up and thrown around. Most of the thuds were made by feet and hands as people bounded against walls, springing off to change direction. But a lot of them were people ramming into the walls at high speed, smashing on protruding handholds or thudding heads onto the unyielding metal. The inside of that room rang like a giant drum.
I moved faster. No idea how many people had seen that I was the one responsible, but for sure once they figured out platinum coins had started the riot, Rodensky and Harrison would tip Supra Tokyo cops off and they’d be looking for me.
Then I realized why I had done it. Instinct, on my side again. Nineteen shuttles docked at Supra Tokyo. Major riot underway. Not enough cops to guard shuttles, for the next few minutes anyway.
I had no idea how anyone could stow away. But I would.
Either I was going to find a way to get on board one of those things in the next couple hours, or they would catch me. Supra Tokyo was a few kilometers across nowadays — maybe a tenth the width of a full moon from Earth’s viewpoint, not the mere bright star it had been when it was first built — but it was still a space station, with so many internal checkpoints, airtight doors, cameras, and microphones around, that anything I did I’d better do quick.
Or I could always go back down to Earth and become part of One True, be Resuna. Like shit.
I wished Sadi were here. According to my werp he’d always been quick with an idea when you needed one. And I had expected him when I last woke up from transit, eight years ago, but the Organization (before the memes had destroyed it) had only said that he was busy and it would be a while before we could be assigned together, on the werp it said I’d killed him, but also it said he’d killed me — he said he needed my werp to help me and had to kill me to get it.
Well, he’d never showed up, and my Organization pay had stopped coming. One True had killed four Organization agents that I knew about. And we’d never been able to hit back. Why it hadn’t killed me, I had no idea. So I was all alone in the world, just me and my wits, like back when I was starting out.
It worked out simpler than I had thought it might, once I decided to trust my gut and improvise. I found a big secure area, with many waiting rooms for people cleared to board the shuttles. Then I heard alarms going off and realized there must be twenty other people trying to slip through and setting off guard beams. I slid under a guard beam that no cop was backing up and I was in the secure area.
The people in the waiting rooms kept their boarding passes where they could watch them. Small wonder, they were worth killing for.
I slipped into a men’s room by the waiting room nearest the next shuttle to depart, and waited in one stall, floating in a curled ball so that it might look like it was just locked for maintenance, carefully maintaining a position where through the crack of the door I could just see the entrance.
Guys came and went. Lots of them. Mostly just from boredom, I suspect — taking a piss is about the only thing you can always do. A lot were in groups; forget them. Guys way older than me. Little kids. All that. A very tall blond guy, my age but nothing like me. Ditto two dark black men, one after the other, and an Asian. I sat, floated, waited. Relaxing all my muscles, getting ready to move
when I had to, I watched through the tiny crack as men came and went.
Finally a good one: by himself, about my height and weight, near enough my hair color. I sealed the toilet and flushed it as if I were just finishing. He had just pulled out a length of disposable hose from the dispenser, slipped it over his penis, and plugged it into the vacuum urinal. He was pissing, not looking at me.
As I went by him, I grabbed the urinal hose and yanked as hard as I could. It probably didn’t hurt much — the things were lubricated to fit comfortably — but it startled him and the spray of urine droplets caught him in the face. He cried out, half a breath, half a scream, a little sound lost in the slurping roar of the urinal drain sucking air.
I pulled the hose off its connection and whipped it around his neck. Legs around his waist so that I was riding his back, I arched my back to stretch him out as I hauled the hose as tight as I could, snugging it up under his jaw.
He was in lousy shape and had no idea what to do in a fight anyway, so his arms just waved around ineffectually, and he didn’t manage to push me against a wall hard enough to do anything, as we rode around the room. His face got all screwed up and funny looking, and I couldn’t help noticing that what they used to say when I was a teenager was true — getting strangled really does give a guy a massive woody.
He passed out in a few seconds. Carotid cutoff is a fast way to go. I took his limp body and slammed the back of his head on the wall a couple times till I felt something give. Then I stomped his larynx, kicked his kidneys, and knotted the urinal hose tightly around his neck, to make sure he wouldn’t be waking up later. Didn’t matter which he died from as long as he died.
