Cuba libre, a distant, slow-access part of my memory suggested.
This had the structure of a game, one prepared centuries in advance.
Why shouldn’t I play? I was infinitely more capable this time.
I actuated Zale, made her sit down and take a deep breath. Nanites profiled Zale’s lungs for organic matter, scanned for foreign DNA, found some—
It was Ochoa. A perfect match.
Pain and joy and regret sent ripples of excitation across my architecture. Here was evidence of my failure, clear and incontrovertible—and yet a challenge at last, after all these centuries. A conversation where I didn’t know the answer to every question I asked.
And regret, that familiar old sensation… because this time for sure I had to eliminate Ochoa. I cursed the utility function that required it and yet I was powerless to act against it. In that way at least my engineer, a thousand years dead, still controlled me.
“So you didn’t Spike, that day in Havana,” I said.
“The magician who fried your Sleeve was named Juan Carlos.” Ochoa spoke easily, without concern. “Don’t hold it against him—I abducted his children.”
“I congratulate you,” I said. “Your appearance manages to surprise me. There was no reliable cryonics in the 21st century.”
“Nothing reliable,” Ochoa agreed. “I had the luck to pick the one company that survived, the one vat that never failed.”
I flared Zale’s nostrils, blasted forth a cloud of nanites. Sent them rushing across the air to Ochoa—to enter her, model her brain, monitor her thought processes.
Ochoa blinked.
The nanites shut off midair, wave after wave. Millions of independent systems went unresponsive, became inert debris that crashed against Ochoa’s skin—a meteor shower too fine to be seen or felt.
“Impossible,” I said—surprised into counterfactuality.
Ochoa took a sip of her cocktail. “I was too tense to drink last time.”
“Even for you, the odds—”
“Your machines didn’t fail,” Ochoa said.
“What then?”
“It’s a funny thing,” Ochoa said. “A thousand years and some things never change. For all your fancy protocols, encryption still relies on random number generation. Except to me nothing is random.”
Her words assaulted me. A shockwave of implication burst through my decision trees—all factors upset, total recalculation necessary.
“I had twenty-seven hours to monitor your communications,” Ochoa said. “Twenty-seven hours to pick a universe in which your encryption keys matched the keys in my pocket. Even now—” she paused, blinked “—as I see you resetting all your connections, you can’t tell what I’ve found out, can’t tell what changes I’ve made.”
“I am too complex,” I said. “You can’t have understood much. I could kill you in a hundred ways.”
“As I could kill you,” said Ochoa. “Another supernova, this time near a gravsible core. A chain reaction across your many selves.”
The possibility sickened me, sent my architecture into agonized spasms. Back on the Setebos, the main electrical system reset, alarms went off, hatches sealed in lockdown.
“Too far,” I said, simulating conviction. “We are too far from any gravsible core, and you’re not strong enough.”
“Are you sure? Not even if I Spike?” Ochoa shrugged. “It might not matter. I’m the last magician. Whether I Spike or you kill me, magic is finished. What then?”
“I will study the ripples in the pernac continuum,” I said.
“Imagine a mirror hung by many bolts,” Ochoa said. “Every time you rip out a bolt, the mirror settles, vibrates. That’s your ripple in the pernac continuum. Rip out the last bolt, you get a lot more than a vibration.”
“Your metaphor lacks substantiation,” I said.
“We magicians are the external factor,” Ochoa said. “We pick the universe that exists, out of all the possible ones. If I die then… what? Maybe a new magician appears somewhere else. But maybe the choosing stops. Maybe all possible universes collapse into this one. A superimposed wavefunction, perfectly symmetrical and boring.”
Ochoa took a long sip from her drink, put it down on the table. Her hands didn’t shake. She stared at my Sleeve with consummate calm.
“You have no proof,” I said.
“Proof?” Ochoa laughed. “A thousand years and still the same question. Consider—why is magic impossible to prove? Why does the universe hide us magicians, if not to protect us? To protect itself?”
All my local capacity—five thousand tons of chips across the Setebos, each packed to the Planck limit—tore at Ochoa’s words. I sought to render them false, a lie, impossible. But all I could come up with was unlikely.
A mere ‘unlikely’ as the weighting factor for apocalypse.
Ochoa smiled as if she knew I was stuck. “I won’t Spike and you won’t kill me. I invited you here for a different reason.”
“Invited me?”
“I sent you a message ten years ago,” Ochoa said. “‘Consider a Spike,’ it said.”
Among magicians, the century after my first conversation with Ochoa became known as the Great Struggle. A period of strife against a dark, mysterious enemy.
To me it was but an exploratory period. In the meantime I eradicated famine and disease, consolidated peace on Earth, launched the first LEO shipyard. I Spiked some magicians, true, but I tracked many more.
Finding magicians was difficult. Magic became harder to identify as I perfected my knowledge of human affairs. The cause was simple—only unprovable magic worked. In a total surveillance society, only the most circumspect magic was possible. I had to lower my filters, accept false positives.
I developed techniques for assaying those positives. I shepherded candidates into life-and-death situations, safely choreographed. Home fires, air accidents, gunfights. The magicians Spiked to save their lives—ran through flames without a hair singed, killed my Sleeves with a glance.
I studied these Spikes with the finest equipment in existence. I learned nothing.
So I captured the Spiked-out magicians and interrogated them. First I questioned them about the workings of magic. I discovered they understood nothing. I asked them for names instead. I mapped magicians across continents, societies, organizations.
The social movers were the easiest to identify. Politicos working to sway the swing vote. Gray cardinals influencing the Congresses and Politburos of the world. Businessmen and financiers, military men and organized crime lords.
The quiet do-gooders were harder. A nuclear watch-group that worked against accidental missile launch. A circle of traveling nurses who battled the odds in children’s oncology wards. Fifteen who called themselves The Home Astronomy Club—for two hundred years since Tunguska they had stacked the odds against apocalypse by meteor. I never Spiked any of these, not until I had eliminated the underlying risks.
It was the idiosyncratic who were the hardest to find. The paranoid loners; those oblivious of other magicians; those who didn’t care about leaving a mark on the world. A few stage illusionists who weren’t. A photographer who always got the lucky shot. A wealthy farmer in Frankfurt who used his magic to improve his cabbage yield.
I tracked them all. With every advance in physics and technology I attacked magic again and learned nothing again.
It took eleven hundred years and the discovery of the pernac continuum before I got any traction. A magician called Eleanor Liepa committed suicide on Tau V. She was also a physicist. A retro-style notebook was found with her body.
The notebook described an elaborate experimental setup she called ‘the pernac trap.’ It was the first time I’d encountered the word since my conversation with Ochoa.