It was heading towards the Affronter vessel at about half a klick a second; the ship’s be-bladed, swollen-looking bulk drifted closer.
— Turn off your shields!
— I can’t! It put expression into the signal, so that it came across as a wail.
— Now!
— I’m trying! I’m trying! You damaged me! Damaged me even more! Such weaponry! What chance have I, a mere drone, something smaller than an Affronter’s beak, against such power?
Nearly in range. Not far. Not far now. Another two seconds.
— Drop your shields instantly and allow yourself to be taken over or suffer instant destruction.
Still nearly two seconds. It would never keep them talking long enough…
— Please don’t! I’m attempting to shut off the shield projector, but it’s in fail-safe mode; it won’t let itself be shut off. It’s arguing; can you believe that? But, honestly; I am doing my best. Please believe me. Please don’t kill me. I’m the only survivor, you know; our ship was attacked! I was lucky to get away. I’ve never seen anything like it. Never heard of anything like it either.
A pause. A pause of animal dimensions. Time for animal thoughts. Loads of time.
— Final chance; turn off—
— There; turning shields off now. I’m all yours.
The drone Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 turned off its electromagnetic mirrorshield. In the same instant, it fired its laser straight at the Affronter ship.
An instant later it released the containment around its remaining stock of anti-matter, detonated its in-built self-destruct charge and instructed the single nanomissile it still carried within its body to explode too.
— Fuck you! were its final words.
Its last emotion was a mixture of sorrow, elation, and a kind of desperate pride that its plan might have worked… Then it died, instantly and forever, in its own small fireball of heat and light.
To the Affronter ship, the effect of the tiny drone’s laser was rather less than a tickle; it flickered across its hull and barely singed it.
The cloud of glowing wreckage the drone’s self-destruction had caused passed over the Affronter ship, and was duly swept by analysing sensors. Plasma. Atoms. Nothing as big as a molecule. Likewise the slowly expanding debris from the two groups of nanomissiles.
Disappointment, then; that had been a particularly sophisticated model of Elencher drone, not far behind the leading-edge of Culture drone technology. Capturing one would have been a good prize. Still, it had put up a reasonable fight considering, and provided a morsel of unexpected sport.
The Affront light cruiser Furious Purpose came about and headed slowly away from the scene of its miniature battle, carefully scanning for more nanomissiles. They posed no threat to the cruiser, of course, but the small drone appeared to have tried to use some of the tiny weapons to place information in, and it might have left others behind which were not inclined to self-destruct when effector-targeted. None showed up. The cruiser back-tracked along the course the drifting drone appeared to have taken. It discovered a small cooling cloud of matter at one point, the remnants of some sort of explosion apparently, but that was all. Beyond that; nothing. Nothing everywhere one looked. Most dissatisfying.
The Furious Purpose’s restless officers debated how much more time they should spend looking for this lost Elencher ship. Had something happened to it? Had the small drone been lying? Might there be a more interesting opponent floating around out here somewhere?
Or might it all be a ruse, a decoy? The Culture — the real Culture, the wily ones, not these semi-mystical Elenchers with their miserable hankering to be somebody else — had been known to give whole Affronter fleets the run-around for several months with not dissimilar enticements and subterfuges, keeping them occupied, seemingly on the track of some wildly promising prey which turned out to be nothing at all, or a Culture ship with some ridiculous but earnestly argued excuse, while the Culture or one of its snivelling client species got on — or away — with something else somewhere else, spoiling rightful Affronter fun.
How were they to know this was not one of those occasions? Perhaps the Elencher ship was under contract to the Culture proper. Perhaps they had lost the Explorer craft and a GCU — trailing them as they had been trailing the Elench craft — had slipped in to take its place. Might this not be true?
No, argued some of the officers, because the Culture would never sacrifice a drone it considered sentient.
The rest thought about this, considered the Culture’s bizarrely sentimental attitude to life, and were forced to concede the point.
The cruiser spent another two days around the Esperi system and then broke away. It returned to the habitat called Tier with a trivial but niggling engine fault.
III
Technically, it was a branch of metamathematics, usually called metamathics. Metamathics; the investigation of the properties of Realities (more correctly, Reality-fields) intrinsically unknowable by and from our own, but whose general principles could be hazarded at.
Metamathics led to everything else, it led to the places that nobody else had ever seen or heard of or previously imagined.
It was like living half your life in a tiny, stuffy, warm grey box, and being moderately happy in there because you knew no better… and then discovering a little hole in one corner of the box, a tiny opening which you could get a finger into, and tease and pull at, so that eventually you created a tear, which led to a greater tear, which led to the box falling apart around you… so that you stepped out of the tiny box’s confines into startlingly cool, clear fresh air and found yourself on top of a mountain, surrounded by deep valleys, sighing forests, soaring peaks, glittering lakes, sparkling snowfields and a stunning, breathtakingly blue sky. And that, of course, wasn’t even the start of the real story, that was more like the breath that is drawn in before the first syllable of the first word of the first paragraph of the first chapter of the first book of the first volume of the story.
Metamathics led to the Mind equivalent of that experience, repeated a million times, magnified a billion times, and then beyond, to configurations of wonder and bliss even the simplest abstract of which the human-basic brain had no conceivable way of comprehending. It was like a drug; an ultimately liberating, utterly enhancing, unadulterably beneficial, overpoweringly glorious drug for the intellect of machines as far beyond the sagacity of the human mind as they were beyond its understanding.
This was the way the Minds spent their time. They imagined entirely new universes with altered physical laws, and played with them, lived in them and tinkered with them, sometimes setting up the conditions for life, sometimes just letting things run to see if it would arise spontaneously, sometimes arranging things so that life was impossible but other kinds and types of bizarrely fabulous complication were enabled.
Some of the universes possessed just one tiny but significant alteration, leading to some subtle twist in the way things worked, while others were so wildly, aberrantly different it could take a perfectly first-rate Mind the human equivalent of years of intense thought even to find the one tenuously familiar strand of recognisable reality that would allow it to translate the rest into comprehensibility. Between those extremes lay an infinitude of universes of unutterable fascination, consummate joy and absolute enlightenment. All that humanity knew and could understand, every single aspect, known, guessed at and hoped for in and of the universe was like a mean and base mud hut compared to the vast, glittering cloud-high palace of monumentally exquisite proportions and prodigious riches that was the metamathical realm. Within the infinities raised to the power of infinities that those metamathical rules provided, the Minds built their immense pleasure-domes of rhapsodic philosophical ecstasy.