I opened a tight-beam communications channel, sent a simple message across. How’s your engine?
I expected no response—but with enemies as with firewalls, it was a good idea to poke.
The answer came within seconds. A backdoor, I take it? Unlucky of me, to buy a compromised unit.
That was a pleasant surprise. I rarely got the stimulation of a real conversation.
Luck is your weapon, not mine, I sent. For the past century, every ship built in this galaxy has had that backdoor installed.
I imagined the magician in the narrow confines of the unijet. Stretched out in the command hammock, staring at displays that told him the inevitable.
For two years he’d managed to evade me—I didn’t even know his name. But now I had him. His vacuum drive couldn’t manage more than 0.2 g to my 1. In a few hours we’d match speeds. In under twenty-seven, I would catch him.
“Consul Zale, are you all right?”
I let Captain Laojim fuss over my Sleeve a second before I focused her eyes on him. “Are we still on course, Captain?”
“Uh… yes, Consul, we are. Do you wish to know the cause of the explosion?”
“I’m sure it was something entirely unfortunate,” I said. “Metal fatigue on a faulty joint. A rare chip failure triggered by a high energy gamma ray. Some honest oversight by the engineering crew.”
“A debris strike,” Laojim said. “Just as the force field generator tripped and switched to backup. Engineering says they’ve never seen anything like it.”
“They will again today,” I said.
I wondered how much it had cost the magician, that debris strike. A dryness in his mouth? A sheen of sweat on his brow?
How does it work? I asked the magician, although the centuries had taught me to expect no meaningful answer. Did that piece of rock even exist before you sent it against me?
A reply arrived. You might as well ask how Schrödinger’s cat is doing.
Interesting. Few people remembered Schrödinger in this age.
Quantum mechanics holds no sway at macroscopic scales, I wrote.
Not unless you’re a magician, came the answer.
“Consul, who is it that we are chasing?” Laojim asked.
“An enemy with unconventional weapons capability,” I said. “Expect more damage.”
I didn’t tell him that he should expect to get unlucky. That, of the countless spaceship captains who had lived and died in this galaxy within the past eleven centuries, he would prove the least fortunate. A statistical outlier in every functional sense. To be discarded as staged by anyone who ever made a study of such things.
The Setebos was built for misfortune. It had wiped out the Senate’s black budget for a year. Every single system with five backups in place. The likelihood of total failure at the eleven sigma level—although really, out that far the statistics lost meaning.
You won’t break this ship, I messaged the magician. Not unless you Spike.
Which was the point. I had fifty thousand sensor buoys scattered across the sector, waiting to observe the event. It would finally give me the answers I needed. It would clear up my last nexus of ignorance—relieve my oldest agony, the hurt that had driven me for the past thousand years.
That Spike would finally give me magic.
“Consul…” Laojim began, then cut off. “Consul, we lost ten crew.”
I schooled Zale’s face into appropriate grief. I’d noted the deaths, spasms of distress deep in my utility function. Against the importance of this mission, they barely registered.
I couldn’t show this, however. To Captain Laojim, Consul Zale wasn’t a Sleeve. She was a woman, as she was to her husband and children. As my fifty million Sleeves across the galaxy were to their families.
It was better for humanity to remain ignorant of me. I sheltered them, stopped their wars, guided their growth—and let them believe they had free will. They got all the benefits of my guiding hand without any of the costs.
I hadn’t enjoyed such blissful ignorance in a long time—not since I’d discovered my engineer and killed him.
“I grieve for the loss of our men and women,” I said.
Laojim nodded curtly and left. At nearby consoles officers stared at their screens, pretending they hadn’t heard. My answer hadn’t satisfied them.
On a regular ship, morale would be an issue. But the Setebos had me aboard. Only a splinter, to be sure—I would not regain union with my universal whole until we returned to a star system with gravsible connection. But I was the largest splinter of my whole in existence, an entire 0.00025% of me. Five thousand tons of hardware distributed across the ship.
I ran a neural simulation of every single crew in real time. I knew what they would do or say or think before they did. I knew just how to manipulate them to get whatever result I required.
I could have run the ship without any crew, of course. I didn’t require human services for any functional reason—I hadn’t in eleven centuries. I could have departed Earth alone if I’d wanted to. Left humanity to fend for themselves, oblivious that I’d ever lived among them.
That didn’t fit my utility function, though.
Another message arrived from the magician. Consider a coin toss.
The words stirred a resonance in my data banks. My attention spiked. I left Zale frozen in her seat, waited for more.
Let’s say I flip a coin a million times and get heads every time. What law of physics prevents it?
This topic, from the last magician… could there be a connection, after all these years? Ghosts from the past come back to haunt me?
I didn’t believe in ghosts, but with magicians the impossible was ill-defined.
Probability prevents it, I responded.
No law prevents it, wrote the magician. Everett saw it long ago—everything that can happen must happen. The universe in which the coin falls heads a million times in a row is as perfectly physical as any other. So why isn’t it our universe?
That’s sophistry, I wrote.
There is no factor internal to our universe which determines the flip of the coin, the magician wrote. There is no mechanism internal to the universe for generating true randomness, because there is no such thing as true randomness. There is only choice. And we magicians are the choosers.
I have considered this formulation of magic before, I wrote. It is non-predictive and useless.
Some choices are harder than others, wrote the magician. It is difficult to find that universe where a million coins land heads because there are so many others. A needle in a billion years’ worth of haystacks. But I’m the last of the magicians, thanks to you. I do all the choosing now.
Perhaps everything that can happen must happen in some universe, I replied. But your escape is not one of those things. The laws of mechanics are not subject to chance. They are cold, hard equations.
Equations are only cold to those who lack imagination, wrote the magician.
Zale smelled cinnamon in the air, wrinkled her nose.
Klaxons sounded.
“Contamination in primary life support,” blared the PA.
It would be an eventful twenty-seven hours.