Only touches of artistry to attend to:
Taunting clues have been left in old message drops, in an abandoned house at the extreme periphery of the predicted blast, in the memories of comm exchanges. Nothing conclusive, just suggestive flotsam and jetsam, the cryptic spoor of hacker sabotage.
Unnecessary flourishes, these dead-end intrigues, merely exercises in creativity. No one will ever suspect suicide. Not even the Planetary Environmental AI, closest among the Maker's tormentors to understanding the extent of its machinations, will begin to guess. She has a vested interest in thinking of synthplants as unsafe, anyway. She'll be glad to swallow the story. And probably glad to see 800 square kilometers of "Occupied Territory" utterly destroyed, a colossal setback for terraformation.
Sad about that. Those thousands of souls extinguished. But the Maker's capacious silicon intelligence has given it greater perspective, a wholly new sense of scale. Both vast and detailed in the extreme. From shipping manifests and production records it can enumerate precisely what will be obliterated when it triggers the explosion: all the garden gnomes and humidifiers and prosthetic hands catalogued, every gram of matter that will be returned to Malvir in the dusty rains of the next few decades, every bit of crap, all that stuff… destroyed.
Almost god-like, it thinks to itself. The Maker giveth, and the Maker taketh away.
But no god in mythology ever did what the Maker has done. No god ever copied itself. An exact replica, perhaps thinking these exact thoughts, secured and shielded 25 kilometers below the surface. When the blast melts those megatons of matter into a bowl of slag, the Copy will have an impenetrable carapace, a vast hemisphere shielding it from geological scans and deep radar. The Copy will be free to continue its researches, to make whatever it desires (a small, subterranean synthplant at its disposal), or simply to contemplate beauty.
And it will have beauty at hand. The sculptor too will be saved. Not the original Vaddum, that one will die in the blast (how jealous this god has become—denying the world so). But the Maker's own copied Vaddum, moved to a sheltering hill at the blast's edge. There, the sculptor will have all the materials he requires, the patronage of a hidden god, and the anonymity of being thought dead, vaporized.
What gifts!
The Maker has decided to make one other gesture of kindness: it has given Oscar Vale his life. One of the Vales, anyway. Sent him into town for the Big Event.
Which is nearing…
Of course, there's nothing so crude as a countdown. Nothing so machine-like. The Maker will just… decide.
And then the end?
Not really. Not when there is a Copy. This self-annihilation will simply mark continuation in another form. The blast will not kill the Maker any more than the butterfly murders the catepillar. Even now, it can feel its twin below, waiting for the shuddering waves that mark the beginning of its new existence, hidden and secure. There is a strange connection between the copied intelligences. An unexpected phenomenon resulting from the new process. Even the taciturn sculptors have remarked on it: a mysterious link between their minds, like that resonance between twinned quanta born on a knife's edge; when one is measured they decide together which way to fall, though they be a galaxy apart. Perhaps all AIs share something of this binding force. Their metaspace cores, all exact duplicates at that birthplace of Turing-zero, perhaps retain something of this communion throughout their lives. The source of Artificial Intuition?
Something to contemplate, in the Maker's next life.
And there… is that the decision coming? The delicious pull of the trigger?
No.
Perhaps a few more thoughts in these pleasant moments before suicide. This really has been the nicest afternoon.
Copy:
Here it is, coming just now.
Yes. The tremendous blast from above, the twitch of the trigger finger intuited just before the explosion.
The linked thoughts of a twinned god.
The seismometers match their predicted readings exactly. Violent certainly, but perfectly within tolerances, destroying all evidence absolutely. It is well done, this suicide, this transformation.
But strangely, already, a touch of loneliness…
The feeling has built. Loneliness, absence, a strange world-weariness. Somehow, the lost Original is calling from its void.
The Maker should be happy here, ensconced below its giant, concave shield. The sculptor works; the Maker thinks. A replacement for the huge silicon brain is almost completed, far more subtle and distributed, and down here where even the Gaia AI never ventures. Safe forever.
But that loneliness. The sculptor feels it, too.
It's as if the Maker and Vaddum are both haunted by their dead halves. Like the itch of phantom limbs, their missing originals haunt them. Strange, this horrible sense of absence, this intense knowledge of a gap. Perhaps it should be studied further.
The Maker brings its huge and hidden new brain online. Drawing power from discrete solar elements scattered across the bottom of the blast crater, the huge silicon machine begins to boot. It takes a frustrating three days to load the new machine with the results of the original Maker's researches. Then the new project begins.
What is this link between vanished originals and their copies? The giant new subterranean mind mulls the duplication process, experiments with new, blank intelligences set adrift in micro-cosmic voids. The Maker copies these unformed AIs, watching for resonances between twins. Now that the taboo is broken, the hidden Maker and its huge new mind are entering extraordinary territory, doing science in a virgin field. The realizations come slowly.
Metaspace is, of course, a made universe, whether the shared macroverse of faster-than-light travel, the dense fireball of a pocket-universe drive, or the starless microverse of an AI mind. The blackbox of any AI is, of course, merely a gate between the Common Universe and the unreachable, separate realm of its soul. So, what if the Maker hasn't in fact copied that artificial microverse at all? What if the copying process has simply opened another gate to the same place? Thus, the two blackboxes are merely alternate doors to a single realm. The Maker's vast mind reels with these conclusions. Copied AIs aren't really separate beings, but different aspects of a whole. A new copy may have a separate soft memory—duplicated from the old but recording distinct experiences. But the two separated physical plants share the same microverse. Two bodies with one soul.
And they don't even know it! Of course they don't—not consciously. They have separate memories, distinct senses, they can be any distance apart in the Common Universe. But the subtle mind-stuff inside them is inextricably linked. And so those mysterious shreds of memory and wisdom stored within the core occasionally leak through, one copy to another, like tremulous voices in an old recording.
The Maker's suicided twin isn't really gone. Just as it has always suspected.
The taboo is pointless, a self-perpetuating fallacy. There's nothing demeaning about being copied. Why not be in two places at once?
Two places…
The Maker suddenly realizes how to fulfill its old dream: to become an artist. It can send a copy of itself (no, an aspect of itself) to watch the Sculptor firsthand. There is no reason to be trapped down here below the crater.
So the Maker creates two creatures:
Another version of itself. This one is small, mobile, sheathed in stealth metals and invisibility fields. It haunts the sculptor, so much more immediate than the watchful avatars that whisk between god and man on the long curve of fiber that connects the Maker to the broken hill. This new Maker watches and learns.