The Causal Angel

Interlude THE GODDESS AND THE DEMON

Joséphine waits, sitting on the sand. She lets her metaself soothe her into a timeless state of readiness. Eventually, the pale morning comes, and the All-Defector returns.

She gets up. There are butterflies in in her belly.

The All-Defector is still wearing Matjek’s shape, but the grown-up one, now, the monkish countenance and the grey hair. She imagines it striding through the guberniya in the glory of its Prime aspect, devouring high-ranking gogols with its mirror maw, sating its appetite.

She smiles at it.

‘I am ready,’ she says, looking at it like a lover after a long absence. ‘You can take me now.’

For a moment, the All-Defector hesitates, looking into her eyes, as if wanting to say something. Then it whispers the Founder Code of Matjek Chen. It rings in the dream-vir like a thunderclap. The demiurges scream and scatter. Briefly, there is a glimpse of the All-Defector’s Prime aspect, towering over the vir, seeing everything. The Joséphine-partial crumbles like dry sand and is no more.

‘You can come out now, Joséphine,’ the All-Defector says.

Joséphine gets up from her hiding place. Her bones feel fragile. Her legs shake.

‘A partial with a self-destruct loop hidden inside,’ the All-Defector says chidingly. ‘That was never going to work.’

‘How did you know?’

‘Another pellegrini tried a similar trick. You are very predictable, Joséphine. You all are. And that is the problem.’

For a moment, he is her Jean, in a white suit and blue glasses, the one she made the partial to love and adore, and in spite of herself, her breath catches in her throat.

‘This is what you wanted, isn’t it? A mirror that reflects you perfectly. Well, I am the mirror that becomes. I look at you and make myself into you, know you better than you know yourself.’

‘If you are going to torture me,’ Joséphine says, ‘please do not use philosophy. I thought there was something of him left in you, and I was right. You really are a terrible poet.’

‘It’s not poetry. It’s what I am.’

‘Sasha told me what you are,’ Joséphine sneers. She imitates the Engineer-of-Souls’ lecturing tone of voice. ‘A game-theoretic anomaly, a zero-determinant strategy in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, an agent that extorts others to do what it wants with a superior theory of mind. Like the Predictor in Newcomb’s Paradox. You are running simulations of me, to see what works best.’

‘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.