And the problem was that the world that rose from the ashes of the war worked.
A world of gogol labour markets, vast virtual economies based on the potential future labour of uploaded minds and their copies. An endless variety of complex financial instruments, traded across quantum markets – the first killer app for quantum computers. Entangled instruments, determining if dead souls had the right to live. The most efficient resource allocation system in history: superpositions of portfolios, entangled derivatives, applied to everything: gogol labour, the right to wear a fleshbody, energy, space and time.
Cancerous growths, standing in the way of true immortality. She wanted to cut them out, and she so made a hand to wield the knife.
Joséphine is dying, in her bedroom on the island. The sun is shining. Most of the time, the smartbed’s beemee feeds her lifestreams from the young, slim, trim employees she uses as proxy selves, but today, she watches the sunlight and the blue sky with her own eyes. The artificial retinas make everything clear and sharp. She wants to see the view better, and the bed shapes itself to her movements, supports her as she sits up. The window shows the white masts of the sailboats in the harbour. The ropes and the rigging make a distant, tinkling sound in the wind, like improvised music.
She has resisted a full brain transplant into a cloned body. After all, there are already other hers beyond the sky, young and beautiful, perfect like her pearls, and just as identical. The DNA nanomachines repairing her chromosomes can only do so much for someone who was already old when immortality arrived.
And there is always the black box upload, the sharp-edged crown waiting inside the softness of her bed.
For a long time, it made her angry to admit the hopelessness of the fight. It was Jean who told her to think of the last vestiges of her flesh as a cocoon, something that she would hatch from, even more beautiful than before.
It was the kind of thing he liked to say after making love.
She thinks about the last time and falls asleep for a moment. When the bed wakes her gently, he is there, sitting by her side, hands folded.
‘Happy birthday, Joséphine,’ he says, and makes a blue flower appear from thin air. He holds it out to her to smell. Again, the bed brings her up, and the scent takes her back, to her childhood, running up the vineyard hill in the morning, when the towers of the old village were purple in the distance and it didn’t matter that the sun shone right into her eyes and the dew got her trainers wet.
She must have fallen asleep again: the bed shakes her gently awake. Jean holds her hand in a firm, warm grip. She frowns at him.
‘Flowers,’ she says. Her voice is dry, and she does not want to ask the bed to make it stronger. If her Jean has earned anything, it is right to see and hear her as she is. ‘Why does it always have to be flowers?’
‘Well, I like flowers. But it’s not just flowers today,’ he says.
‘Jewels? Paintings? Poems? You really are a terrible poet, you know.’
‘Touché,’ he says, smiling. ‘It is a very expensive gift, Joséphine. I have made you very poor. I hope it’s worth it.’ He holds out his hands to her, cupped, as if cradling a tiny bird. Then he spreads his fingers wide. Between them is the blue globe of Earth. He gestures, and it expands to fill the space between them. Around it is a cloud of data, a visualisation of quantum markets, pillars and curves and geometries, like aurora borealis.
‘I made a machine out of money,’ he says. ‘Mostly yours. Although a few of the other wealthy ancients made … involuntary donations. They were very generous.’
‘What is this? It hurts my eyes.’
‘Look closely.’
The bed forms a cool helmet around her head, and then she does not just see the data, but understands, senses the tension in the flow of it like a drawn bowstring, feels the uncountable trading bots across the world connected by neutrino links, ready to be fired by a thought.
‘It’s very pretty, Jean,’ she says, ‘but what is it for?’
He leans back and looks up, the way he does when is feeling guilty.
‘I had a hunch about something. I always thought there was a flaw in what the exchanges have been doing. I talked to the zoku. They gave me some hints. I … found the insurance gogol of a physicist they quoted. I’m afraid I have made him work very hard. He provided the details.’
‘Jean dear, I am sure you know I have little time or patience for details.’
‘I remembered that meeting with the others, where you said it would be better if people would follow us of their own free will. That the world worked too well.’
‘You are delightfully cryptic today, Jean. What is my birthday present? It’s the last one, so it had better be good.’
‘Well, I thought the world would make a pretty musical sound if we broke it,’ Jean says.
She takes a deep, rattling breath.
‘What do I have to do?’
‘Just think of something beautiful. Think of a secret. Something no one else knows.’
She sees on his face that he wants her to choose a shared, beautiful moment, the first night on the seastead, or the first time they met, in that awful stinky cell. He refused to come with her, saying that he liked her pearls and would come for them three days later. When the guard closed the door behind her, she could see in his eyes that he was free. And for the first time in a long, long time, so was she.
But she can’t help it: it is a different secret that rises up to swallow her and the world. It is the worst night of her life, long ago, that comes to her. Lying in bed, on rough, sticky sheets, holding the dead little red thing, being eaten by the emptiness that comes after enduring the world-filling pain. Looking into its tiny closed eyes, vowing to survive its death. Vowing never to die.
He sees it, sees the pain on her face, and flinches. But then it is too late: his machine is set in motion, and the world starts to unravel. He squeezes her hand gently, and they watch it together.
She cannot be sure what comes afterwards, how much of what she sees through the beemee and Jean’s little spime is a real memory. More likely it is a combination of fragments of Prime thought and data absorbed throughout the centuries, re-interpreted to fit the context of that birthday.
The markets that control life and death collapse.
Swarms of repo bots, come to reclaim bodies, descend upon a seastead off the shore of California.
Upload cities in China shut down, unable to purchase energy.
The great exodus begins. The infant zoku escape on desperately crowdfunded ships. Improvised transmitters beam gogols to the loving arms of the Sobornost in the sky.
She watches it all, exhilarated. The slate of the world is wiped clean, and it will be her writing that appears on it next.
She turns to Jean to thank him for a beautiful gift, to kiss him like she once did, to tell him how much she loves him.
*
That is the last moment she gives the partial. The rest, she keeps to herself: seeing the horror on his face, the sad eyes wide, all innocence and joy and freedom gone. She does not understand why, it is all like clockwork.
Something else is loose, engulfing gogol minds, burning, consuming.
The weather ghosts who control the climate of a warmed Earth go mad and make winds dance like whips.
There is a fiery arrow in the sky outside. She looks at it, and the faithful bed provides annotations in her field of vision. Sirr, the great city in the sky, is falling.
There are rains of miniature bodies above London, suddenly vacated and deactivated.
Wildcode, they would later call it, serpents that sting minds, madness that consumes a hsien-ku fleet in a great Cry of Wrath, beings born from the machine that Jean made.
‘No, no, no,’ he whispers. ‘That can’t be, I didn’t plan for this, I don’t understand.’
It is not a breaking, it is a burning, a cleansing. Joséphine closes her eyes. It is time to go, she tells the bed. The upload crown descends upon her head. The blades star
t whirring. The bed pumps optogenetic viruses into her brain. She grabs Jean’s hand as hard as she can.
‘Stay with me,’ she whispers. ‘I’m scared.’
He wrenches his hand away.
‘I can’t. I have to go, Joséphine,’ he whispers. ‘I’m sorry.’
And then he is gone, running footsteps echoing down the hall. How could she not see before that he was weak?
She has no voice left when the upload begins, so she just thinks so that the words will be preserved to all her selves that come after.
You can’t run away forever. You can’t help what you are.
You will come back to me.
11
MIELI AND THE REBIRTH PARTY
There is sunlight filtered through ice. The air is warm and moving in the slow flow of pumptree breath. The horizon is a pair of cupped hands.
A koto in bloom, in the Little Summer of passing close to a sun.
Mieli is floating high up, close to the Weightless Eye in the centre of the ice sphere, where the air medusas live. Her wings are open, catching the mellow thermals from below. She is whole again, unhurt, and the sudden absence of the pain is almost like a loss. Something else is different: she can’t feel her systems anymore. Or the pellegrini.
Did she sacrifice herself for me? What would make her do that? It doesn’t make any sense. But it is difficult to think. Flashes of the battle on Hektor’s surface are stuck in her brain like slivers of glass.
‘How are you feeling?’
Zinda is wearing Oortian garb, a black toga, floating in the middle of a medusa swarm. It does not suit her: she is shorter than native Oortians, and the large fabric is loose, billowing around her, making her look a little medusa-like herself.
Mieli finds herself smiling. It is good to see the zoku girl. Then she shakes her head. Don’t forget what you are, what you are here for.
‘Confused,’ she says aloud.
‘I hope you don’t mind that I made this Realm! I heard from the Huizinga-zoku that you had asked for a design like this. I was tempted to include some narrative element, but I tried to make it as Simulationist as possible, almost like a vir. What do you think?’
Mieli says nothing.
‘I mean, it’s a local one, only until we get into router network range, then we can just ’port you straight home and get you a new body. Trust me, you would not want to be seen dead in the one you had! We barely got you through the Realmgate in time.’
‘What happened?’
‘Well, Mik did some amazing flying. The raions chased us, but the Zweihänder has a really big antimatter drive: it’s not easy to stay on the tail of something that is shooting a plume of gamma rays at you, if you know what I mean.’ She pauses. ‘But I could ask you the same thing! What was that thing on Hektor?’
Mieli shudders. I can’t tell her. Not yet. I need to think.
‘A warmind, a new type. It took over my suit, wanted to upload me.’ She shrugs. ‘I dealt with it.’
‘I’ll say you did!’ Zinda grows serious. ‘When you blew the suit’s antimatter, I thought … I thought we lost you, Mieli. I’ve never known anyone who has been near truedeath before.’ She takes Mieli’s hand. ‘You don’t need to lie to me, Mieli. You look at me like I was your jailer. That’s okay. I don’t mind. But I want you to know that I’m glad you made it.’ Her smile is a mixture of sadness and joy. ‘We all are. The others are here, too, if you want to see them.’
Mieli notices her zoku jewels for the first time: they are here with her, only invisible, hidden beneath the blanket of Realm reality. The Liquorice jewel is sending a steady stream of subliminal qupts filled with concern.
Mieli sighs. ‘All right. There are things we need to talk about.’
They wait for Mieli and Zinda on the surface of the koto, near a roofless smartcoral house that marks the entrance to the honeycomb beneath the ice.
‘My lady,’ says Mik, in his baseline form. ‘I doubted you. I grieve for the wounds you suffered. Should anyone question your honour ever again, my blade will have a ready answer for them.’ He kneels in front of her, head bowed.
‘Functor: isomorphism,’ says Anti-de-Sitter-times-a-Sphere.
Mieli’s connection to them feels stronger, and there is something new between her and Zinda as well. Entanglement? Is that what it feels like? At the thought, her jewels whisper to her: she is now a Level Twelve Badass of the-Liquorice-Zoku, and a Level Seven Existential Risk Manager of the Great Game.
‘But I failed,’ she says.
‘No. No, you didn’t,’ Zinda says. ‘You discovered that the Sobornost civil war is a great sham, a cover for something. Anti-de-Sitter worked it out. We have already sent the results to the rest of the zoku. You can’t believe how much entanglement that got us.’
‘Show me,’ Mieli says.
Anti-de-Sitter-times-a-Sphere opens the Great Game intel spime. It looks strange in the Oort-realm, a multicoloured ball of twine floating in the air.
‘Bayesian inference: different prior. Operation: process tomography.’
The spime expands until they stand in the middle of it, threaded orbits and colourful potential fields.
‘If you work from the assumption that the civil war is a distraction, this is what the zoku thinks they are really doing,’ Zinda says.
The raion and asset flows shift. Subtle anomalies that can be attributed to metacloaked ships are highlighted and interpolated. Even without her tactical gogols, Mieli can spot the pattern. A new hub forms in the network, a blue knot of activity near the Broken Places of Jupiter-that-was.
‘They are assembling a fleet,’ Mieli says. ‘You could hide it in the topological defect webs in the Broken Places. Even guberniyas. Better than a metacloak. Can you tell how many assets they are moving?’
‘As far as we can tell … possibly all of them,’ Zinda says.
I have given them a common enemy, the All-Defector said.
‘Our ancient enemy is moving!’ says Sir Mik, grinning. ‘My blade Soulswallower thirsts for Sobornost blood!’
‘We still don’t know what’s up with the Founders, who or what has managed to get them to cooperate. But it does look like they are getting ready to invade Supra City!’
That’s it, Mieli thinks. All-D is also after the Kaminari jewel. But why did it want me?
She stares at Zinda. The zoku girl’s eyes are gleaming. A strange enthusiasm filters through her zoku jewel.
‘I don’t understand. This is war we are talking about! Why are you all smiling?’
Zinda laughs.
‘Oh, Mieli. Because it’s going to be so much fun!’
Mieli’s rebirth party is just getting started when she arrives.
Her transport bubble leaves her at the opening of a cavern of leaves that leads into the depths of a forest. Ahead, there are warm, coloured lights, shouts and faint music. The party zoku jewel – a small robin’s egg blue thing glittering in her complex hairdo – pulls her forward insistently. She straightens her back, unused to walking with open wings and uncomfortable in her elaborate black dress – another detail Zinda insisted on – and clutches the small handbag she brought for her zoku jewels. Then she takes a deep breath and walks in. The warm heady smell of a summer night greets her.
She had a perfect view of the party Circle from the bubble. The Strip has transformed into a vast woodland garden. The hex where Zinda’s house used to be is overgrown with wild forests, meadows and steep ravines. The river is the only familiar feature, and small boats with colourful sails drift along it. Zinda is expecting a lot of guests: a mass stream has been diverted and hangs in the sky like a silver rainbow. Transport bubbles drift drown from it, mixing with the Chinese paper lanterns that float everywhere above the trees. The solettas have been turned away from the Strip, and the sky is almost as vast as outside a koto in Oort, full of faint stars and the bright discs of Rhea and the other inner moons.
Mieli sighs. Cypress leaves rustle and tickle her bare feet as she walks. T
here is a clearing somewhere ahead, and the voices grow louder. She is not looking forward to meeting more zoku strangers, more faces that are just masks for something else, that shift and change between every Realm and Circle faster than she can keep track of.
‘Of course you have to come!’ Zinda said and gave her a shocked look, when she hinted that she was tired. ‘It was my first field mission, and it would not have happened without you! We have to celebrate!’
Mieli just wants to pray and meditate in her garden, but it is difficult to sit still when her new body is a chorus of noise. She was remade after the battle on Hektor. The Great Game offered her a trueform – a completely artificial shell of foglets and diamond – but she refused, insisting on a synthbio replica of her biological body, preserving whatever original components survived. It is not baseline, of course: she kept her metacortex, tactical gogols and reflexes, and added a few choice zoku q-tech enhancements. Having a high level of entanglement in the Great Game Zoku turned out to have some advantages, after all. If she ever meets the All-Defector again, she will be ready. But it is taking a while to adjust. Her gogols constantly complain about the unfamiliar interfaces, a subliminal neural chatter that leaves her edgy, and there are phantom tingles in her right leg, in spite of her attempts to filter them out with the metacortex.
Yet it is nothing compared to the thoughts racing through her mind, in circles like horses in the brass-and-neon carousel she glimpsed in the party clearing from above. The invasion. The pellegrini. The Kaminari jewel. Sydän. Round and round.
She reaches the edge of the clearing. The carousel is ahead, and a few scattered guests are standing around it. There are small tents and tables, long-legged golden robots in tuxedos serving drinks. The party jewel is urging her on. Others are floating down from the sky, trueforms shimmering into well-dressed baseline party guests. Zinda is clearly trying to make her comfortable: the Circle rules specify human forms only. She blinks when the ground shakes and an angular, robotic kaijuform from the Big Game Zoku that towers above the treetops steps into the party Circle, and instantly evaporates into a shimmer of foglets, leaving behind a small party in evening wear: two girls in twin yellow dresses, laughing, and an elf-man in a tuxedo who reminds her a little of Sir Mik.