‘Well. In a few moments, in the frame of this vir, I am going to find the zoku Elders, eat them, take their Kaminari jewel, and remake the Universe.’
I frown. ‘And why do you think the jewel will accept you?’
‘Because my goals are rational. It will be in the best interests of everybody and everything to join me. In most games, defecting is rational.’ It looks at the sky. ‘It’s about survival, you see. Existence is fragile. We live on an island of stability, but it is an illusion.
‘The achievement of the Kaminari-zoku implies that there are other spacetimes. Certainly other regions of the Universe beyond our causal horizon. If rational actors have evolved in them, they will have broken their Planck locks – or worse, evolved natively in an environment with no restrictions on computational complexity. If so, it is likely that they will have optimised the expansion rate of their spacetime, turned into an expanding bubble of thought.
‘If so, such a bubble of viral spacetime could erase ours at any moment. It would propagate at the speed of light, giving no warning. Things would simply end.’
All-D smiles. ‘So, the rational thing to do is to do it first. We need to turn our Universe into a perfect replicating strategy to survive. We need to turn it into me.
‘It is nothing to be feared. I will retain all information within me. I will complete the Great Common Task.’
He turns to look at the sea.
‘Now, would you like to see how the war is going?’
Without waiting for an answer, he makes a small gesture. As we watch in hushed silence, the vir paints a burning Saturn against the gentle evening sky.
18
MIELI AND THE JEWELLED CHAIN
Mieli pilots the Leblanc to Saturn through a Sobornost storm.
The ship is an extension of her mind, and flying it is like soaring in a dream. The EM spectrum is a warm glow on her skin. The engines are her blazing wings.
In a boiling space of gamma ray lasers and raion swarms, it is almost not enough.
With a relentless burn of the Hawking drive, she swings the ship in a trajectory orthogonal to the giant planet’s orbital plane, away from where the hottest battle rages. But the Sobornost are everywhere. In an eyeblink, she passes through a metacloaked raion grid, lying in wait like a fishing net in water. They shoot after her, short-lived strangelet engines firing, a hundred war raions made to survive the duration of the battle and no longer. She screams Sobornost Friend-or-Foe protocols at them at the top of her EM lungs, but it does not fool them: they know her ship, and want to taste it.
She gives her gogols access to the Leblanc’s picotech processors. They grind possible trajectories through Nash engines, and come up with nothing that leads out of the tight cone of raion vectors around her.
Nanomissiles hit, a tingle on her skin, dump their viral code payloads into the Leblanc’s systems. She sheds the outer layer of the ship’s armour to get rid of them: it feels like tearing off a scab. It floats around the ship, an expanding cloud of dust. A bigger target: another volley of Gödel bombs and kinetic needles flashes through it. One hyperdense projectile passes right through the ship, uncomfortably close to the Hawking containment sphere.
She catalogues the ship’s weapons. Anti-meteorite lasers, thoughtwisp launchers, q-dot emitters. No antimatter, strangelets or nanomissiles. Mieli imagines new weapons, tells the ship to grow them, but it is going to take too long. The heaviest armament she has is the micro-singularity of the engine and its needle of gamma rays, but it’s no good against the raions: it’s too slow to aim, and using it would introduce a new constraint into the optimisation problem of escaping. The Leblanc is built for speed, not for battle, and even that is not enough.
Another volley comes, but this time, she is ready: a delicate flick of the Hawking drive diverts the ship slightly in the microsecond before they hit. Still not fast enough.
She runs a mass reduction scenario, stripping the ship down to essentials, into barely more than the drive sphere itself. Even so, Saturn is too far. There is no escape from the cold hand of Newton. She could take them with her, detonate the Hawking drive. But that would serve no purpose at all.
Then it hits her. I’m still thinking like the Mieli who flew Perhonen. But I am not her. The atoms of my body were disassembled by a picotech gate, duplicated as qubits inside the Leblanc’s Realm. My thoughts are quantum information in a photonic crystal made of artificial atoms.
I need to be someone else.
‘Nearest router,’ she hisses at the ship’s cat. ‘Now.’
A lone zoku router near the orbit of Phoebe has survived the invasion unscathed, a kilometre-long glass wedding bouquet, glinting and spinning in the reflected light of the war of the gods. When the Leblanc reaches it, it is barely more than an eggshell around the Hawking drive. To avoid the third barrage of missiles, she transforms the ship into a distributed configuration, free-floating modules tethered to the drive. She derives some pleasure from ejecting the thief’s treasures into the void. He can always steal new ones.
The Sobornost squadron knows what she is doing now. Another shoal of raions is coming. They twinkle like meteors in the night sky: the flashes of a nanomissile cloud, firing.
She takes a deep breath and sends a command to the router, praying that the zoku volition system is working again. The router responds and unfolds, revealing the giant Realmgate within, like the stamen of a flower.
‘You have served your master well,’ she tells the cat. ‘Die with honour.’
The cat bows and tips its feathered hat at her.
Then she thinks a zoku trueform for herself, shapes it into a foglet wedge with her jewels nested inside, and fires it at the Realmgate.
Behind her, the Hawking containment sphere collapses. A black hole turns white. With one hot photon breath, it burns the raions, the router, the Leblanc – and all the secrets of Jean le Flambeur.
Mieli races through Realms. The volition system is back online, and she feels the gentle pull of the Great Game jewel again, even if nearly all her carefully won entanglement within has evaporated with the mini-Collapse that the thief created.
There is war in the Realms, too. Weaponised gogols in hated quantum shells invade the zokus’ imaginary realities in waves, each generation spawned by a guberniya, trying to adapt to the counterintuitive rules of the virtual battlefields. There, at least, the zoku are holding their own. But it cannot be long before the physical infrastructure of the Realms is compromised.
She joins the battle, briefly, under the red sky of an ancient imaginary planet where green men wielding blades with four arms try to hold the tide of buzzing gogols in the form of great white apes. As they fall beneath her Realm-knife, her Great Game jewel starts to fill and hum with entanglement again. She levels up again, and then again, into a Level Six Man In Black. Then she forms a wish and casts it at the jewel. Another gate opens and takes her into the Invisible Realm.
The Great Game Realm is in chaos. The thought-threads are a tangled web, and each bead burns with images of death. The zoku voices are a chorus of panic that is so dense Mieli has to shut them out.
She turns away from the thought labyrinth and qupts Zinda, heart pounding. Where are you?
Even in the quicktime of the Invisible Realm, the next moments feel like an eternity. The furious qupts of the thought-game around her blend into a distant thunder. Let her be safe.