Mieli sighs. To all appearances, Zinda has been sincere in her attempts to help Mieli settle in. When Mieli accepted the Great Game jewel, she expected to be sent to some strange Realm where she would be rewarded or punished for answering questions about Sobornost. Instead, Zinda arranged her to join the Loom-zoku as a part of her cover identity – a zoku devoted to the intersection of music and matter, translating sound into physical shapes, who count several expatriate Oortians amongst their members. Conveniently, the Loomers devote a lot of time to individual projects, and the volition flashes tend to be requests for brief musings about what sort of Universe would arise from thread-theoretic particle states if you converted a symphony into the Fourier components of creation-annihilation operators. For the last two weeks, she has mostly been left to her own devices.
No thanks.
I’m not a bad cook, I swear!
Maybe another time.
Suit yourself. Remember to eat, though. You’ll need your strength soon.
Why is that? Mieli qupts.
Wait and see! A wink comes down the quptlink, the feeling of Zinda’s eyelid moving. It makes Mieli wince, and then the presence of the zoku girl is gone.
Mieli sighs. What is left of the garden has been cleared, revealing mounds of soil, battered pumptrees and a few angry anansi peeking out of the holes in the ground. At least it will keep me busy for a while.
She kicks at the loose dirt. She is wasting time. Perhaps she should have accepted Zinda’s dinner invitation, to get closer to her, to find out more about the Great Game and the Kaminari jewel. Pretending to be someone she is not, infiltration – that was always the thief’s domain, not hers.
She feels grimy and dirty from the rain, and finds herself desperately missing a sauna. Perhaps she should ask the Plate-zoku to make one, somewhere in the microgravity levels, higher up.
The volition flash comes suddenly. In an instant, she becomes aware of her Great Game jewel pulsing. Before Mieli can tell her metacortex to buffer the thought, it is as if a sudden insight has occurred to her after wrestling with a problem for a long time. Of course. She has to go to the Irem Plate, in twenty subjective minutes.
The Great Game needs her.
The compulsion to obey the call is like a toothache in her mind. Unlike the whispers of the Loom or the Plate-zoku, the demands of the Great Game are not gentle. Mieli fights it long enough to take a quick foglet shower. She immerses herself in a hazy cloud of nanobots that scrub her clean. It leaves her feeling tender and red, but more alert.
Then she fabs herself a new toga and summons her q-self to her. Her jewels alight from the nooks and crannies where she left them lying around like a flock of bright, startled birds, and form a modest diamond solar system around her head. Collectively, they are a quantum extension of her, containers for slow entangled light that encodes her relationships with other zoku members. From the zoku point of view, it is the jewels and their unique quantum states that constitute who she really is, not her replaceable flesh. Mieli finds the Sobornost notion of endless, identical self-copies almost preferable. I should have allowed the pellegrini to make a gogol of Perhonen.
But the Great Game does not allow her time for regrets. She shakes her head and tells the Plate to seal up her hex and take care of the anansi and the few remaining plants. Then she looks at her Tube-zoku jewel – a white disc surrounded by a red ring, with a blue bar across it – and wishes to be taken to Irem, with the caveat that she wants to avoid travel through Realmgates and stay in the physical world as much as possible.
In an instant, the air around her comes alive with a tingling feeling, and she floats up, as if carried by a gentle tide. A q-dot transport bubble flashes into being around her. There is a tickle in her stomach, and then she is flying, faster than even her wings could ever carry her.
First, the bubble accelerates at several dozen G, cushioning her every cell against the crushing force in a gentle but unbreakable nanobot grip. Yet she feels safe, her mind cocooned in the comforting presence of the Tube-zoku. For a few seconds, the varied hexes and Circles and Farseer stairway architecture that is like mathematics rendered into matter flash past her, until the paintbrush of speed smears them into a flickering tunnel around her.
Then, suddenly, it all vanishes, and she is below the Plate. The bubble follows a brachistochrone mass stream that takes a shortcut through the vacuum gulf between Saturn’s upper atmosphere and the main shell of Supra City. It is a phosphorescent cylinder inside which iron oxide particles flow at an incredible speed in a constant loop. The bubble grabs the stream with EM fields and reaches its intra-Plate velocity of twenty thousand kilometres per hour in moments, while Mieli looks at the scenery.
Above is the inverted world of the Farseer Plate underside – the crumpled depressions of artificial mountains and the plateau of the Basement Sea. It crawls with tentacled zoku kaijubodies, worn by zokus who want to play at being ancient alien gods. The mass stream pillars that support the vast structure are a glowing forest of filaments that vanish into the haze of Saturn below. Traffic flows along them, ranging from a myriad transport bubbles to the feral spider-cities of the Underpirate-zoku. Fortunately, the only one of the latter in sight is thousands of kilometres below her route. It is a black, spiky, many-limbed monstrosity that houses hundreds of thousands of zoku alters; it swings from stream to stream and shoots Underpirate jewels at careless travellers, to entice them to join their crew and to look for quantum booty in Saturn’s endless depths.
She joins a cloud of bubbles travelling along the same stream. They are full of zoku trueforms and alters, humanoids of every hue, shape and description. A blue-skinned giant with a grinning sapphire skull and streamlined armour carapace qupts her an invite to join a Stormrider-zoku that is on its way to dive into the hexagon of the South Pole. Shivalimbed lovers entwined in an impossible tangle of flesh ask her to join a zoku that intends to develop a tantric language. She turns them all down, tells her q-self to block further qupts and keeps going.
At last, Mieli approaches the Irem Plate, and the bubble begins a gentle climb up the curve of the stream. It is a new Plate, and the act of creation is still in progress. The bright glow of continent-scale fabbers shines through seams between the hexes. There are so many mass streams feeding the growing artificial continent that they look like threads hanging from a loom, weaving a new landscape into being.
When the bubble passes a gap in the structure, Mieli catches a glimpse of the complex self-assembly inside the Plate’s cross-section: snakelike piping that folds itself into polygons and complex shapes that become the bones of mountains and hills. Briefly, it reminds her of the Great Works of Oort that she crafted in her youth, chains of tethered comets that gravity folded into convoluted shapes like proteins.
But the scale of this work is beyond her. Mieli wants to close her eyes, but forces herself to keep them open. She has to remember where she is. And she has to remember that she matters. The Dark Man could swallow this bauble of a world with one gulp, but she does not fear him. Even one note in a song can make a difference. A butterfly can change the course of a storm, even one the size of a planet, like the great eyewalls of Saturn, swirling and boiling in the depths, ready to swallow the Plate of Irem, should it ever fall.
The bubble leaves her in the middle of an empty continent, on a vast grey plain lit by wan soletta-light. The ground beneath her feet is made of notchcubes, uniform, gunmetalhued bricks slightly larger than her fist. They are almost too warm to stand on, but they sense Mieli’s presence and cool down, conducting their waste heat elsewhere. They are the macroscopic equivalent of q-dots, basic building blocks of many Supra City megastructures.
The landscape is featureless, except for a gargantuan statue in the horizon: a blocky, rough-hewn image of a man holding a pickaxe, a signature of some Notch-zoku maker who has left their mark on the newborn Plate. Every now and then, there is a booming echo of giant machinery, a brief earthquake somewhere far below. A soft wind blows, bri
nging a faint smell of burning metal dust.
The grid of the cube seams makes Mieli feel like she is a piece standing on some vast chessboard, waiting for a hand to descend from the sky and move her. What am I doing here?
Her systems send out a brief alert. Another transport bubble arrives in a rush of air. Mieli glimpses the glowing medusa of a zoku trueform. But the newcomer quickly assumes an alter that is something even stranger, a collection of silvery spheres with red-lipped female mouths. The orbs grow and vanish and disappear at irregular intervals. The mouths are speaking, a constant, faint chatter of feminine voices that blur into a cacophony. Yet, the creature feels somehow familiar, an instinctive recognition that they belong to the same zoku.
Identity: Anti-de-Sitter-times-a-Sphere, it qupts, followed by a burst of dizzying geometrical concepts that Mieli has no names for, like the output of mathematics gogols.
‘Hello,’ Mieli says. ‘My name is Mieli.’
The spheres swirl frantically and electricity crackles between them.
One-to-one mapping: Metis. Termination: timelike geodesic. Valence-intensity spectrum: anger. This time, there is an emotion in the qupt: a wave of loathing that makes Mieli reel.
Shit. The Protocol War. It knows me from the Protocol War.
Before she can respond, there is a sound like a giant popping its mouth with a finger, and another transport bubble arrives.
The newcomer is a Quick One – a tiny man on the back of a four-legged, red-eyed, winged creature. His mount is barely the size of an anansi, and he himself could stand on Mieli’s palm – if he was not wearing black, spiky metal armour. He takes a bow without dismounting.
‘GreetingsMyLady! SirMikAtYourService!’ he says in a rapid-fire, tinny voice.
The Anti-de-Sitter creature crackles again, and Mieli senses rapid qupts passing between the strange duo.
‘Fiend!ChallengetoaDuel!’ pipes Sir Mik, brandishing his sword, a tiny sliver of bright metal. One of Anti-de-Sitter-times-a-Sphere’s orbs begins to glow bright.
Mieli activates her combat systems.
There is another pop.
‘Good,’ Zinda says. ‘You have met the team already!’ The zoku girl stands next to Mieli. She is wearing the samurai gear and carrying the naginata from the mountain Realm where they met, although her rabbit mask is pushed up over her head. ‘I am very excited about this – our first mission together!’
‘Kuutar and Ilmatar! What exactly are we doing here?’ Mieli asks, not taking her eyes off the three zoku members.
‘The jewel did not tell you? Not enough entanglement levels yet, I suppose, or best for the volition that I explain it. You are going to like this, Mieli.’ Zinda smiles. ‘We are going to kidnap a Sobornost Founder mind.’
*
I told you they would hate me, Mieli qupts Zinda.
Oh, shush, it’s just they don’t know you. It will be better after the briefing, I promise.
Briefing? I thought you were just a sleeper agent.
Oh, I was! But I seriously levelled up when I recruited you, she replies with a wistful sigh. Now I barely have time for my old primary zoku anymore. And you are right: I should have made a new alter for this, but I thought I would be better if I came along looking like when we met. It makes me feel brave!
‘All right, everybody,’ Zinda says aloud. ‘Settle down. I am going to make a Circle so we can talk more easily. Mieli joined only recently, and is not comfortable with qupting. Let’s all try to be considerate, now.’
Sir Mik scowls at Mieli. Anti-de-Sitter-times-a-Sphere’s many mouths are hard red lines.
Zinda gestures, and a silver circle appears on the notchcube ground around them: Mieli sees a flash of the rules through her connection to the Huizinga-zoku. No violence. Baseline bodies only. Verbal conflict resolution. Qupting allowed for data exchange only. Points for successful team bonding. The Schroeder locks kick in, and Mieli feels a strange phantom ache where her combat systems should be. She wonders briefly how good the locks really are: they must work through the Huizinga-jewel’s connection to her brain, and her metacortex should be able to disable them if necessary.
At least her new teammates play by the rules. Anti-de-Sitter-times-a-Sphere becomes a woman with a small pouty mouth and angular, classical features, wearing a loose rust-coloured gown and flowers and ribbons in her ash-blond hair. Sir Mik increases in size to slightly-smaller-than-baseline proportions, retaining his large eyes, spiky hair, pointy ears and mistrustful expression.
Zinda twirls her naginata experimentally.
‘That’s better! Now, I’m going to qupt you some data in a moment, but let’s cover the basics. The zoku volition has brought you here because you have the right combination of skills for this mission: cryptography’ – she points at Anti-de-Sitter – ‘spatial coordination and navigation, transportation’ – with a nod to Mik – ‘and finally, and most importantly, in-depth knowledge of Sobornost tactics and communications protocols.’ She touches Mieli on the shoulder. ‘We all have a reason to be here.’
She takes a deep breath, and there is a brief flash of uncertainty in her eyes. She is very young, Mieli thinks. Or perhaps it’s just an act, a part of this alter.
‘Does anyone here have a problem with that?’ Zinda says.
There is a deep silence. Mik smiles sarcastically, sits down and folds his hands across his chest. Anti-de-Sitter-times-a-Sphere closes her eyes and rocks back and forth on her feet.
‘No? All right. Then I guess it’s time to go over the plan.’
‘Let me show you what is happening in the Inner System at the moment,’ Zinda says. She qupts a spime at them. A complex diagram in the centre of their small circle: a three-dimensional tangle of coloured regions, flows and vectors.
It takes Mieli a moment to realise that it is a full spime of the Great Game’s estimate of the current power structure in the System, fine-grained detail updated in real time from the Game’s intelligence assets in the zoku router network. Information is easily available in Supra City: like for every imaginable quantifiable resource, there is a zoku devoted to gamifying it. But during the last few weeks, Mieli has deliberately avoided looking into the events in the Inner System, and this is the first time she sees the full extent of the conflict.
The pellegrinis, vasilevs and hsien-kus are at war. Their guberniyas are centres of raion flows, all pumping out vast amounts of waste heat and matter. Major battles and exotic weapon events concentrate around sunlifter mines and Highway hubs. The lines of conflict extend all the way to the Belt and beyond, to Jovian trojans and even the chaotic space near the Spike remnants. The other Founders are biding their time, fortifying their territories and laying low. The chen guberniya is still in the Lagrange point between the Earth and Moon – but the spime is notably patchy on chen oblasts and raions, relying on sensory observations rather than direct intelligence sources.
‘I think you can all see the problem,’ Zinda says. ‘We used to have assets inside all the Founder copyclans. Well, not anymore. We lost everybody inside the chens. And that is a problem: so far, they have stayed neutral, but they are going to decide this thing one way or the other. We expected them to support the pellegrinis, but that did not happen. We are blind to the biggest internal Sobornost conflict since the Dragon Wars. The Spooky-zoku claim that there is something anomalous about the entire conflict, but they are unsure as to exactly what.
‘So we are going to find out. At the moment, our beloved zoku has several thousand intelligence-gathering operations at work, aimed at the chens. But we, dear friends, have a chance to win entanglement and glory for our zoku.’ She turns to Mieli. ‘Mieli, could you tell us what is the power structure on a Sobornost warship?’
Mieli frowns. ‘Most gogols will be branched for whatever mission the ship is fabbed for: warminds and turks. There will be a commanding gogol of an older generation, depending on the importance of a mission. And there will be a—’
‘A chen gogol, as an observer, to protect
the interests of the Sobornost as a whole even during Founder conflicts, ever since the Dragon Wars.’ Zinda smiles. ‘If the ship is destroyed, the chen is usually evacuated in a thoughtwisp. So, there we have it: we will monitor a civil war battle – a skirmish between raions, that is all we need – and look for thoughtwisps we can intercept. Mik here will lay out a q-dot net and take care of navigation. Mieli will convince the wisp that we are a Sobornost ship. Anti-de-Sitter-times-a-Sphere will use Mieli’s protocols and Box the chen.’ She looks at their faces eagerly. ‘Any questions?’
Mik gets up slowly. ‘My lady Zinda, I deem this course of action most unwise,’ he says. At normal speed, his voice is a deep baritone, at odds with his boyish face. ‘You yourself are strong in entanglement, and known to us all. But our new companion? I like her not.’ He takes a step forward and looks up at Mieli. ‘She is a member of our zoku, aye; but in level, barely more than a lowly squire. Her will is not yet bound to the Great Game like ours is. I have fought the Sobornost: there is often another will within their will that can hide true intentions. And is it not true that she was the truedeath of many a friend of our lady Anti-de-Sitter-times-a-Sphere, in the War of Protocols?’
Mik shakes his head. ‘Were it not for the zoku’s volition, I would take my leave now, and I have a mind to pluck the Great Game jewel from the hilt of my blade rather than go forth on a dangerous quest with such a dark companion.’
*
Zinda looks at each of the trio in turn. ‘Mieli is a part of our zoku, like it or not, and the zoku has made up its mind. You are free to disagree. And you always have your freedom to leave. Now, we have heard from Mik. What do you think, Anti-de-Sitter?’
‘Filtered Markov chain state: doom,’ says Anti-de-Sitter-times-a-Sphere in a gentle, singsong voice.
‘Although the law of Hospitality binds me, as all those in my order,’ Mik says, ‘a Sobornost warrior with bloodstained hands will not enter my faithful ship, the Zweihänder. This I swear, by my blade.’