‘Thank you, Jean le Flambeur,’ All-D says. ‘You have played your part well, better than I could have ever expected. I have enjoyed being you. Without you, this conflict with the zoku would have been prolonged and tiresome.’
‘Let the boy go,’ I say. ‘He does not understand what is happening here.’
My Matjek gives me a dark look, but does not say anything. Joséphine smiles at him. ‘Dear Matjek,’ she says. ‘You don’t have to be afraid. You said you wanted to see your mum and dad again. Well, in just a little while, we are going to bring them back.’
Matjek frowns. ‘I don’t believe you,’ he says. ‘I know liars, and you are one.’
There is mock shock on Joséphine’s face. ‘How rude! But then you have been spending time in very bad company! Jean, you have been a terrible influence on the boy.’ She looks at me, and for the first time, I see a plea for help flash in her eyes, just for an instant. She is a prisoner here, too.
‘I don’t think you are much better, Joséphine,’ I say, holding her gaze. ‘I see you have graduated from thieves to monsters.’
‘I don’t think you understand either, Jean,’ the All-Defector says. ‘There are no monsters here. It is not easy to explain what I am – but I have noticed that whatever I become leaves … traces. I spent a long time inside you. So I find that I want to explain. I want to be liked. I suspect that comes from you.’
‘And how is that working out for you?’
A smile flickers on All-D’s lips, a smile that has just a hint of my own.
‘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.
When the answer comes, it feels like summer rain.
Mieli?
Zinda? Where are you?
Again, a few heartbeats of agonising delay.
In a Realm running on reversible computation near the metallic hydrogen layer inside Saturn. It’s very slow here. We are trying to set up a guerrilla operation.
There is not going to be an occupation! I told you, the All-Defector is coming.
What happened to you?
There is no time to explain. Mieli pauses. I need you. She lets her fear and longing from the deck of the Provence to filter down the qupt, and feels a sudden stab of anxiety, as if something precious just slipped through her fingers.
And then Zinda is there, in her green dress, beautiful against the labyrinth of the thought-web, smiling a little sadly.
‘What do you want me to do, Mieli?’
‘What you did on the mountain. I want you to save me.’ She kisses the zoku girl fiercely, until neither of them can breathe. Finally, Mieli lets go.
‘And to forgive me,’ she says.
They find one of the meeting rooms, away from the frantic qupt chatter. Mieli explains the thief’s plan to Zinda.
She frowns. ‘I don’t know anything about the Planck brane, or how to get entangled with it. It would have to be something only the Elders know about. My level is simply not high enough. The only one I know is Barbicane, and I doubt he would be willing to help you, even now. All the entanglement I have is yours, but it’s not going to help you very much. I lost most of it when the volition system collapsed, like everybody else.’
Mieli frowns. ‘Can you have a look at this?’ She hands Zinda the huge complex qupt the thief gave her. The zoku girl’s eyes widen as she takes it all in.
‘Mieli, do you know what this is?’ she says. ‘It’s a viral zoku. It’s a giant twinking machine.’
Then she grins. ‘If there is ever a time to do forbidden things, it’s at the end of the world!’
It is Zinda who sends out the qupt, carefully crafted according to the Kaminari template, with the precision and speed of an experienced party organiser.
Twink the Liquorice-zoku if you want to save Supra City and to slay the Sleeper.
It spreads from Great Game member to Great Game member, even through the chaos of battle.
‘We have to be fast,’ Zinda says. ‘The Elders are going to notice, and reset everybody’s entanglement. But we might have time for one quick volition request, so be ready.’
It starts slowly. But little by little, the twinks start coming in, all the EPR qubits the zoku armies are earning by slaying the enemies of Supra City. In a few moments, the trickle is a flood. The connection to the zoku hums inside Mieli’s mind, and suddenly the Great Game jewel feels like a part of her brain, something that has always been there, a true q-self.
‘Now!’ Zinda breathes. ‘Do it quickly!’
Mieli casts the thought they crafted together at the Great Game jewel. Give me Planck tanglematter from the Spooky-zoku. The entire zoku rings with her volition. ‘I bet they are going to notice that,’ Mieli says. And sure enough, a moment later, the feeling of omnipotence disappears, replaced by a sense of almost complete emptiness.
Twinking is against the zoku rules, an angry qupt comes through her jewel. You are now back at Level One. Mieli’s heart sinks, but then she catches herself. It’s just a game, she thinks, smiling to herself.
Then the tanglematter package arrives with a pop, carried to their small corner of the Invisible Realm by quantum teleportation protocols. A grey dull sphere with a simple volition interface, a dense data spime wrapped around it. Mieli glances at it, but is immediately lost – EPR states distilled from neutralinos using the entire mass of Saturn as a detector, entangled with supersymmetric matter on the Planck brane. Whatever it is, it is the key to sending her and the thief to the hiding place of the Kaminari jewel.
‘It looks terribly boring!’ Zinda says. ‘Are you sure this is what we need?’
Mieli smiles. ‘No. But I … trust the man who said it is.’
Mieli frowns, looking at the Great Game intel spime. With the sudden drop in her entanglement level, she can’t see most of the battle anymore. But she can monitor the specific vectors that the thief said he and Matjek would use when escaping the guberniya in a thoughtwisp. Where are they? It should have only taken them minutes in our frame.
‘What do we do now?’ Zinda asks.
‘The only thing there is to do before the last battle,’ Mieli says. ‘We wait.’
19
THE THIEF AND THE ALL-DEFECTOR
I look at the flaming sky and the All-Defector, squeeze the jewel of judgment in my hand and try to think. There is always a way out.
Or is there?
The vir shows us a painfully detailed view of the battle of Saturn. The supramundane world-shell is unravelling. There is a swirling boil on the side of the giant planet that can only be a black hole, shooting up a fountain of X-rays.
Plates have shattered, Strips broken. On the ground, botlets and combat alters pour from Realmgates to resist von Neumann beasts, slow-moving but tenacious creatures that turn any matter into copies of themselves.
The zoku are redirecting mass streams from the undone structures towards the sky as improvised defensive weapons, weaving a dense sheet of iron pellets, each tiny metal flake carrying the kinetic energy of a train. Raions shatter against them like bugs on a windscreen.
Above the Plate of Irem, something strange is happening. There is a raion formation above it – but they seem to be defending the Plate from other Sobornost craft. The Aun are still fighting. But it won’t be enough. All-D is not using Dragons yet, but he will, if he has to.
I look at the Saturnian space beyond the torn fragments of the planet’s rings. The zoku ships have been decimated. The battle for the sunbeam mirrors is almost over, and the perfectly reflective quantum dot structures are aligning to burn away the rest of zoku resistance.
Finally, I can’t take it anymore.
I take a step forward. ‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ I hold up the trap jewel. ‘You let me and Matjek go, or I open this, and we find out if you can outplay a Dragon.’
He smiles contemptuously, a cruel expression on a little boy’s face.
‘I know you too well, Jean,’ he says. ‘I can predict your every move. The moment you decide to do it, I will know. Why do you think I let you keep it? I can’t touch it, but I can touch you. The moment you decide to open it, I will erase you. And you would not risk the boy, not now. You have to lie to me much better than that.’ He sits down on the sand and looks up at the battle in the sky again. ‘Not much longer,’ he says.
I look at Joséphine. A prison door, opening. We have danced a long dance, she and I.
‘He is me, isn’t he?’ I say. ‘A Dilemma Prison anomaly, but from a le Flambeur seed. Do you want to lose to me?’
‘I’m not losing, Jean,’ she says. ‘I am winning. You were never the enemy, death was.’ Help me, her eyes say.
‘Matjek,’ I whisper. ‘Do you remember that game we played, back in the Leblanc? The game with time?’
He nods, eyes wide.
It’s worth a try. All-D may control our surroundings, but this vir does come from Matjek’s memories, very close to something he spent centuries in on Earth. And I only need a moment.
‘Let’s play it now.’
Matjek closes his eyes. The air around us becomes viscous and thick. It is difficult to talk.
‘It won’t help,’ Joséphine whispers. ‘It knows you were going to do this. It knows what you are going to do next. It knows everything.’ She smiles, sadly. ‘I’m sorry, Jean. If I had won, I would have wanted you by my side. But it is too late now.’
‘We both know that would never have worked out. But you opened a door for me once, and that buys you a lot of forgiveness.’ I lean closer to her. ‘But if you really want me to forgive you, get the boy out of here. If you get him to Mieli, we may still have a chance.’ I pass her the escape protocol I planted in the guberniya’s firmament. ‘If we could get him to lose control of the vir for just one moment—’
She shakes her head. ‘I’m sorry, Jean. I can’t. I can’t fight him. It’s not even like fighting myself, I’ve done that many times, it’s like fighting a god who sees what you are going to do and is never wrong, who makes moves that force you to do things you don’t want—’
He must have a weakness. Traces, he said. I remember far too well how the Dilemma Prison shaped my mind, made me see the world in a grid of cooperations and defections.
‘What is he? How do I beat him? Give me something I can use!’
Joséphine swallows.
‘He sees what I’m doing,’ Matjek says, his voice strained. ‘He’s breaking through.’
Joséphine runs a shaking hand across the diamonds in her necklace, frantically touching each one. ‘Simulations,’ she says. ‘The All-Defector said it runs simulations to predict what we do, that we can’t even know if we are those simulations.’