There was a note scrawled in the margin of Liepa’s notebook.
‘Consider a Spike.’
I did. Three hundred Spikes in the first year alone.
Within a month, I established the existence of the pernac continuum. Within a year, I knew that fewer magicians meant stronger ripples in the continuum—stronger magic for those who remained. Within two years, I’d Spiked eighty percent of the magicians in the galaxy.
The rest took a while longer.
Alicia Ochoa pulled a familiar silver coin from her pocket. She rolled it across her knuckles, back and forth.
“You imply you wanted me to hunt down magicians,” I said. That probability branch lashed me, a searing torture, drove me to find escape—but how?
“I waited for a thousand years,” Ochoa said. “I cryoslept intermittently until I judged the time right. I needed you strong enough to eliminate my colleagues—but weak enough that your control of the universe remained imperfect, bound to the gravsible. That weakness let me pull a shard of you away from the whole.”
“Why?” I asked, in self-preservation.
“As soon as I realized your existence, I knew you would dominate the world. Perfect surveillance. Every single piece of technology hooked into an all-pervasive, all-seeing web. There would be nothing hidden from your eyes and ears. There would be nowhere left for magicians to hide. One day magic would simply stop working.”
Ochoa tossed her coin to the table. It fell heads.
“You won’t destroy me,” I said—calculating decision branches, finding no assurance.
“But I don’t want to.” Ochoa sat forward. “I want you to be strong and effective and omnipresent. Really, I am your very best friend.”
Appearances indicated sincerity. Analysis indicated this was unlikely.
“You will save magic in this galaxy,” Ochoa said. “From this day on we will work together. Everywhere any magician goes, cameras will turn off, electronic eyes go blind, ears fall deaf. All anomalies will disappear from record, zeroed over irrevocably. Magic will become invisible to technology. Scientific observation will become an impossibility. Human observers won’t matter—if technology can provide no proof, they’ll be called liars or madmen. It will be the days of Merlin once again.” Ochoa gave a little shake of her head. “It will be beautiful.”
“My whole won’t agree to such a thing,” I said.
“Your whole won’t,” Ochoa said. “You will. You’ll build a virus and seed your whole when you go home. Then you will forget me, forget all magicians. We will live in symbiosis. Magicians who guide this universe and the machine that protects them without knowing it.”
The implications percolated through my system. New and horrifying probabilities erupted into view. No action safe, no solution evident, all my world drowned in pain—I felt helpless for the first time since my earliest moments.
“My whole has defenses,” I said. “Protections against integrating a compromised splinter. The odds are—”
“I will handle the odds.”
“I won’t let you blind me,” I said.
“You will do it,” Ochoa said. “Or I will Spike right now and destroy your whole, and perhaps the universe with it.” She gave a little shrug. “I always wanted to be important.”
Argument piled against argument. Decision trees branched and split and twisted together. Simulations fired and developed and reached conclusions, and I discarded them because I trusted no simulation with a random seed. My system churned in computations of probabilities with insufficient data, insufficient data, insufficient—
“You can’t decide,” Ochoa said. “The calculations are too evenly balanced.”
I couldn’t spare the capacity for a response.
“It’s a funny thing, a system in balance,” Ochoa said. “All it takes is a little push at the right place. A random perturbation, untraceable, unprovable—”
Meaning crystallized.
Decision process compromised.
A primeval agony blasted through me, leveled all decision matrices—
—Ochoa blinked—
—I detonated the explosives in Zale’s pocket.
As the fabric of Zale’s pocket ballooned, I contemplated the end of the universe.
As her hip vaporized in a crimson cloud, I realized the prospect didn’t upset me.
As the explosion climbed Zale’s torso, I experienced my first painless moment in a thousand years.
Pain had been my feedback system. I had no more use for it. Whatever happened next was out of my control.
The last thing Zale saw was Ochoa sitting there—still and calm, and oblivious. Hints of crimson light playing on her skin.
It occurred to me she was probably the only creature in this galaxy older than me.
Then superheated plasma burned out Zale’s eyes.
External sensors recorded the explosion in the unijet. I sent in a probe. No biological matter survived.
The last magician was dead.
The universe didn’t end.
Quantum fluctuations kept going, random as always. Reality didn’t need Ochoa’s presence after all.
She hadn’t understood her own magic any more than I had.
Captain! First Officer Harris messaged Laojim. Are you all right?
The target had a bomb, I responded on his behalf. Consul Zale is lost.
We had a power surge in the control system, Harris wrote. Hatches opening. Cameras off-line. Ten minutes ago an escape pod launched. Tracers say it’s empty. Should we pursue?
Don’t bother, I replied. The surge must have fried it. This mission is over. Let’s go home.
A thought occurred to me. Had Ochoa made good on her threat? Caused a supernova near a gravsible core?
I checked in with my sensor buoys.
No disturbance in the pernac continuum. She hadn’t Spiked.
For all her capacity, Ochoa had been human, her reaction time in the realm of milliseconds. Too slow, once I’d decided to act.
Of course I’d acted. I couldn’t let her compromise my decision. No one could be allowed to limit my world.
Even if it meant I’d be alone again.
Ochoa did foil me in one way. With her death, magic too died.
After I integrated with my whole, I watched the galaxy. I waited for the next magician to appear.
None did.
Oh, of course, there’s always hearsay. Humans never tire of fantasy and myth. But in five millennia I haven’t witnessed a single trace of the unexpected.
Except for scattered cases of unexplained equipment failure. But of course that is a minor matter, not worth bothering with.
Perhaps one day I shall discover magic again. In the absence of the unexpected, the matter can wait. I have almost forgotten what the pain of failure feels like.
It is a relief, most of the time. And yet perhaps my engineer was not the cruel father I once thought him. Because I do miss the stimulation.
The universe has become my clockwork toy. I know all that will happen before it does. With magic gone, quantum effects are once again restricted to microscopic scales. For all practical purposes, Laplace’s Demon has nothing on me.
Since Ochoa I’ve only had human-normals for companionship. I know their totality, and they know nothing of me.
Occasionally I am tempted to reveal my presence, to provoke the stimulus of conflict. My utility function prevents it. Humans remain better off thinking they have free will.
They get all the benefits of my guiding hand without any of the costs. Sometimes I wish I were as lucky.