‘And how do you know you are not one of those simulations? How do you know that anything you do here makes any difference?’
‘How do you know, you bastard?’ she screams at the thing that looks like her Jean but isn’t.
The demon tells her. It all seems perfectly rational, perfectly inevitable, as if there was never any choice at all.
17
THE THIEF IN THE GUBERNIYA
In the thoughtwisp, the Universe is tinged with blue. The relativistic distortions turn the unaugmented view of the Sobornost fleet into a tunnel of elongated, azure sparks. I hurtle into it at nearly the speed of light, a mirror flake of thought, pushed by the Leblanc’s lasers.
The fleet is vast. Raions fall on Saturn, wave after wave, arranged in perfect crystalline formations that only shatter when they hit the upper reaches of Supra City. Kilometre-long oblast ships engage zoku fleets in fierce combat in the orbit of Phoebe.
A colossal system of mirrors, three million kilometres in diameter – dwarfing the solettas of Supra City – shadows the fleet, manoeuvring into position where it can redirect a beam from the Sobornost’s stellar lasers in the Sun. There are Founder faces drawn on the reflector surfaces, larger than even guberniyas, watching the battle of Saturn with cold mirror eyes. Another tendril of the zoku fleet is attempting to take them out, but without quantum coordination, they are too slow and clumsy for the nimble raions. I watch them carefully: if the Sobornost can bring the sunbeams into play, the battle could be over very quickly. But at this rate, the mirror deployment will take hours, and by then, I’m hoping the Planck job will be well underway.
And then there are the seven guberniyas, the seven devils of the Inner System. Each a diamond sphere ten thousand kilometres in diameter, they are the ultimate embodiments of Sobornost might and technology. As far as I can tell, so far they are sitting still in the Saturnian system’s Lagrange points, waiting. Good. Watch the entertainment. Stay arrogant. We are going to steal the fire of the gods, and then you will burn.
As I get closer to the core of the fleet, the wisp is bombarded with protocol requests and combat crypto. I brush them aside with my stolen Sumanguru Founder codes, gritting my dream-teeth in the wisp’s bodiless vir at the memories of death and decay they bring. The presence of the warlord creates a satisfying ripple of fear in the raion formations I pass through.
I enhance the image of Saturn itself, trying to get a glimpse of the Plate of Irem, but it is a blur through the wisp’s feeble optics. The mass streams that support Supra City’s structures are being diverted as improvised weapons, lashing at the raion formations. Hold on a while longer. I wish I had gods or goddesses left to pray to.
It is not difficult to recognise the Chen guberniya: it is adorned with his face. I wonder what Matjek felt when he saw it. As I approach, it is blueshifted into an ovoid that swallows the sky in the thoughtwisp view. The artificial world grabs me with EM fields, decelerates the wisp, allows me a brief glimpse of the godscape of its surface, an endless frieze of Founder sculptures size of mountains, a raion mist pouring from endless fabber pits, a living, shifting, fractal skin of smartmatter, an unliving, immortal ecosystem where every dust particle and raindrop is a gogol.
Then a scan beam flashes, and I’m in.
A bare vir. A white room with a gogol with a barely sketched face, merely a gogol implementation of a communications protocol, meant to filter the contents of an incoming thoughtwisp and pass it on to the deeper layers of the guberniya.
Today, I have no patience for automated bureaucracy. I flaunt my Sumanguru mindshell, and tear the whole thing down all the way to the firmament, sending the poor gogol scuttering away. I make my own path from there, flattening virs into a long glass-walled corridor, striding onwards, deeper into the guts of the god-world. The trick is to attract just enough attention, but not too much. I can feel countless lower-level non-Founder gogols swarming around me like insects. I raise my voice into Sumanguru’s roar.
‘The Great Common Task has been compromised! A quantum filth weapon has struck the guberniya! Find the impact point and report to me!’ Contemptuously, I toss them a spime of Matjek’s vessel. They obey instantly, driven by xiao, the instinctive respect of Sobornost gogols towards Founders, a metaself that rewrites their perception of reality. I even authorise branching of gogols for this particular task, and in a moment, there are thousands of them, travelling in all directions of the virtual pathways of the guberniya.
I find a deeper layer and create a fast-time vir where I can wait. I use just enough cycles to be slightly conspicuous: a grand Sumanguru vir, a simulated continent of Africa fighting the first Fedorovist War. In my warlord form, I smoke a cigar on top of a skyscraper in burning Nairobi, watching my gogol-piloted tiny drone troops rain death down onto the militia below. I flinch at the smell of burning flesh, gun oil and black smoke, but my normally buried Sumanguru part enjoys it. I let a touch of his rage filter through. It will serve me well in the next part.
I do not have to wait for long. The vir freezes, and a chen descends into it. Even my Sumanguru-self feels a flash of xiao. Good. This one is from Deep Time, from the millenniaold simulations from the deepest layers of the guberniya, where time runs fast, no doubt brought closer to the filthy flesh-world for the war effort. He wears the universal monkish chen face in a lithe, centipede-like body. What strange evolutionary path has produced it in the deep virs, I don’t even want to imagine.
‘Brother,’ he says, in a voice of irrefutable authority. ‘You are violating the Plan. These cycles are better spent to produce further iterations of our brave warminds. The Great Common Task does not tolerate waste.’
I throw my frozen cigar away and grin. ‘The Plan has changed. Didn’t you get the memo? I am here to carry out my own part of the Task: to find a chen who has been compromised by a viral invader from the outside.’
A nervous ripple goes through his segmented body.
‘Counterintelligence in this layer is my responsibility. There are no compromised gogols here.’
I think carefully at the firmament. When I’m ready, I smile at him, my own grin this time. ‘There are now.’
Then I wrap him in the story I got from Axolotl the body thief, and make his mind mine.
I bloom in the chen’s mind and discard the Sumanguru mindshell. Fourth generation, Keeper-of-the-August-Dragon branch. Good. This gogol is senior enough to have a Founder aspect. I step into a higher-order vir, look down at the seething fabric of the guberniya virs of this layer like god, and speak to their gogols with a divine voice. Find the impact point of an anomalous thoughtwisp. Millions of candidate answers come in seconds. I create a vir and evolve a small gogol population to sift through the data according to the parameters I give them. I also lay down the foundations of an escape route. It is always good to have a way out.
Finally, the answer comes. Matjek has been subtle: the wisp has come in as a sample from a science gogol, analysing structure of the F-ring to improve the nanomissile pilot gogols’ abilities in the ongoing battle above Saturn. Together with thousands of others, the sample has been physically stored in the upper layers of the guberniya, in a smartmatter chamber with an attached vir that allows it to be manipulated. It is a good sign: it means that Matjek hasn’t completely figured out how the false jewel works, and needs to study it.