The Causal Angel

17 THE THIEF IN THE GUBERNIYA

In the thoughtwisp, the Universe is tinged with blue. The relativistic distortions turn the unaugmented view of the Sobornost fleet into a tunnel of elongated, azure sparks. I hurtle into it at nearly the speed of light, a mirror flake of thought, pushed by the Leblanc’s lasers.

The fleet is vast. Raions fall on Saturn, wave after wave, arranged in perfect crystalline formations that only shatter when they hit the upper reaches of Supra City. Kilometre-long oblast ships engage zoku fleets in fierce combat in the orbit of Phoebe.

A colossal system of mirrors, three million kilometres in diameter – dwarfing the solettas of Supra City – shadows the fleet, manoeuvring into position where it can redirect a beam from the Sobornost’s stellar lasers in the Sun. There are Founder faces drawn on the reflector surfaces, larger than even guberniyas, watching the battle of Saturn with cold mirror eyes. Another tendril of the zoku fleet is attempting to take them out, but without quantum coordination, they are too slow and clumsy for the nimble raions. I watch them carefully: if the Sobornost can bring the sunbeams into play, the battle could be over very quickly. But at this rate, the mirror deployment will take hours, and by then, I’m hoping the Planck job will be well underway.

And then there are the seven guberniyas, the seven devils of the Inner System. Each a diamond sphere ten thousand kilometres in diameter, they are the ultimate embodiments of Sobornost might and technology. As far as I can tell, so far they are sitting still in the Saturnian system’s Lagrange points, waiting. Good. Watch the entertainment. Stay arrogant. We are going to steal the fire of the gods, and then you will burn.

As I get closer to the core of the fleet, the wisp is bombarded with protocol requests and combat crypto. I brush them aside with my stolen Sumanguru Founder codes, gritting my dream-teeth in the wisp’s bodiless vir at the memories of death and decay they bring. The presence of the warlord creates a satisfying ripple of fear in the raion formations I pass through.

I enhance the image of Saturn itself, trying to get a glimpse of the Plate of Irem, but it is a blur through the wisp’s feeble optics. The mass streams that support Supra City’s structures are being diverted as improvised weapons, lashing at the raion formations. Hold on a while longer. I wish I had gods or goddesses left to pray to.

It is not difficult to recognise the Chen guberniya: it is adorned with his face. I wonder what Matjek felt when he saw it. As I approach, it is blueshifted into an ovoid that swallows the sky in the thoughtwisp view. The artificial world grabs me with EM fields, decelerates the wisp, allows me a brief glimpse of the godscape of its surface, an endless frieze of Founder sculptures size of mountains, a raion mist pouring from endless fabber pits, a living, shifting, fractal skin of smartmatter, an unliving, immortal ecosystem where every dust particle and raindrop is a gogol.

Then a scan beam flashes, and I’m in.

A bare vir. A white room with a gogol with a barely sketched face, merely a gogol implementation of a communications protocol, meant to filter the contents of an incoming thoughtwisp and pass it on to the deeper layers of the guberniya.

Today, I have no patience for automated bureaucracy. I flaunt my Sumanguru mindshell, and tear the whole thing down all the way to the firmament, sending the poor gogol scuttering away. I make my own path from there, flattening virs into a long glass-walled corridor, striding onwards, deeper into the guts of the god-world. The trick is to attract just enough attention, but not too much. I can feel countless lower-level non-Founder gogols swarming around me like insects. I raise my voice into Sumanguru’s roar.

‘The Great Common Task has been compromised! A quantum filth weapon has struck the guberniya! Find the impact point and report to me!’ Contemptuously, I toss them a spime of Matjek’s vessel. They obey instantly, driven by xiao, the instinctive respect of Sobornost gogols towards Founders, a metaself that rewrites their perception of reality. I even authorise branching of gogols for this particular task, and in a moment, there are thousands of them, travelling in all directions of the virtual pathways of the guberniya.

I find a deeper layer and create a fast-time vir where I can wait. I use just enough cycles to be slightly conspicuous: a grand Sumanguru vir, a simulated continent of Africa fighting the first Fedorovist War. In my warlord form, I smoke a cigar on top of a skyscraper in burning Nairobi, watching my gogol-piloted tiny drone troops rain death down onto the militia below. I flinch at the smell of burning flesh, gun oil and black smoke, but my normally buried Sumanguru part enjoys it. I let a touch of his rage filter through. It will serve me well in the next part.

I do not have to wait for long. The vir freezes, and a chen descends into it. Even my Sumanguru-self feels a flash of xiao. Good. This one is from Deep Time, from the millenniaold simulations from the deepest layers of the guberniya, where time runs fast, no doubt brought closer to the filthy flesh-world for the war effort. He wears the universal monkish chen face in a lithe, centipede-like body. What strange evolutionary path has produced it in the deep virs, I don’t even want to imagine.

‘Brother,’ he says, in a voice of irrefutable authority. ‘You are violating the Plan. These cycles are better spent to produce further iterations of our brave warminds. The Great Common Task does not tolerate waste.’

I throw my frozen cigar away and grin. ‘The Plan has changed. Didn’t you get the memo? I am here to carry out my own part of the Task: to find a chen who has been compromised by a viral invader from the outside.’

A nervous ripple goes through his segmented body.

‘Counterintelligence in this layer is my responsibility. There are no compromised gogols here.’

I think carefully at the firmament. When I’m ready, I smile at him, my own grin this time. ‘There are now.’

Then I wrap him in the story I got from Axolotl the body thief, and make his mind mine.

I bloom in the chen’s mind and discard the Sumanguru mindshell. Fourth generation, Keeper-of-the-August-Dragon branch. Good. This gogol is senior enough to have a Founder aspect. I step into a higher-order vir, look down at the seething fabric of the guberniya virs of this layer like god, and speak to their gogols with a divine voice. Find the impact point of an anomalous thoughtwisp. Millions of candidate answers come in seconds. I create a vir and evolve a small gogol population to sift through the data according to the parameters I give them. I also lay down the foundations of an escape route. It is always good to have a way out.

Finally, the answer comes. Matjek has been subtle: the wisp has come in as a sample from a science gogol, analysing structure of the F-ring to improve the nanomissile pilot gogols’ abilities in the ongoing battle above Saturn. Together with thousands of others, the sample has been physically stored in the upper layers of the guberniya, in a smartmatter chamber with an attached vir that allows it to be manipulated. It is a good sign: it means that Matjek hasn’t completely figured out how the false jewel works, and needs to study it.

Good. I am not too late.

I step into the firmament and tell it to carry me there.

‘Matjek.’

The vir is a stark black space, with the jewel in the middle. It looks like a pair of folded, glowing hands. Matjek is surrounded by a flurry of partials of himself, all manipulating tactile software constructs and networks of graphical zoku language in the air.

For a moment, he stares at me in horror. I realise my mistake and let my features melt back into my own.

‘Matjek, this isn’t right.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I came to stop you. You don’t have to do this. Whatever you are trying to do, it won’t even work. Mieli told me—’

‘Who cares what she told you! I never wanted to be this! Have you seen this place? It’s like a giant cancer wearing my face.’ His eyes are bright and hard. ‘I’ve almost got this thing figured out. It’s meant to be opened by a chen. There is a recursively self-improving algorithm inside. It’s meant to overwrite all the data it finds with zeroes. I just need a remote trigger so I can open it from afar.’

I swallow. A recursively self-improving algorithm. It sounds an awful lot like a Dragon, only a Dragon that does not recognise a chen as its daddy. I remember that poor Chekhova was working on weapons like that. Barbicane, what have you done? There is no telling what the thing will do if Matjek or anybody else lets it loose.

‘Matjek, give it to me.’

I search for words. What can I possibly tell him to make him understand?

‘No! Get out of here, or you can die with them!’

I take a step forward and grab him by both shoulders. His partials back off. He blurs in my grasp for a moment, trying his time-speedup trick, but this time, I’m ready, and I have a Chen Founder code. He stares at my face, defiantly. He has never grown up. His parents were a distracted quantum trader and a beemee star. He was so lonely that his only friends were imaginary, and he made them real.

And he is being an insufferable brat.

‘Matjek Chen!’ I say firmly. ‘You stop playing with that doomsday weapon right now and listen to me!’

He blinks, astonished, and suddenly I’m sure that no one has ever used that tone with him before.

‘You don’t have a right to hurt people just because you don’t like them. Not even if they are you. I know you don’t really know what truedeath is, and I hope you don’t have to find out very soon. But you don’t want to inflict that on anybody, not unless there is no other way to protect others. Like your mum and dad wanted to protect you. But if you do this, you become the opposite of that. Something much worse than this evil Matjek Chen of the future you hate so much.

‘Trust me, I know about hating myself. But this is not going to fix things. It won’t make you feel better. You want to hurt the other Matjek, the old Matjek?’ I let my face flicker into his stern visage for a moment. ‘Do something he would never do. Help me to help people who are dying out there, dying truedeaths, not like in your games, dying and never coming back. Help me to take away what he wants. It’s not dying that hurts him, Matjek. It’s losing.’

He looks up at me. There are tears streaming down his face.

‘I just want my mum and dad,’ he says in a small, choked voice.

I squeeze him tight for a moment, unsure what to do. He grabs my neck with surprisingly strong arms and clings onto me. It takes a while before he lets go.

I smile at him, and suddenly I’m all out of words.

‘Can we go home now?’ he asks.

I take the false jewel spime carefully.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘But we still have work to do, and I will need your help.’

‘All right,’ he says, and takes my hand.

‘He is lying to you, Matjek,’ says a female voice. ‘It’s not losing that hurts the most, it’s losing people. And Jean should know all about that. Isn’t that right, Jean?’

Joséphine. I hurl my mind at the firmament to trigger the escape route I prepared, but something is locking the vir’s structure, trapping us inside, a higher-generation Founder code. A Prime. Despair tears at my chest. The ground sinks beneath my feet.

And then we are standing on a beach of soft sand, looking at a clear blue sea. There are footprints on it, small ones, and far away, a little boy is making wild splashes in the waves. When he sees us, he stops to look, and comes up running.

Joséphine Pellegrini smiles a serpent smile at me and Matjek both.

‘Don’t worry,’ she says softly. ‘We are going to make sure that no one loses anyone, ever again.’

Joséphine looks old. It is a cruel joke to force her into such a mindshell, all bones, and strained, stretched skin. She plays with her diamond necklace with dark, mottled fingers.

‘You were a fool to come here, Jean,’ she whispers.

Matjek is staring at the other Matjek, the smaller one from the sea. The new boy has an aura that betrays him as the Prime here. But in his eyes, there is an infinite hunger that does not belong to Matjek Chen. The last time I saw it was in the Dilemma Prison, and the eyes were my own.

I lay a hand on my Matjek’s shoulder.

‘You are not me,’ Matjek says. ‘What are you?

‘All-Defector,’ I say, nodding. ‘It’s been a while.’ I squeeze the false jewel in my hand, mind racing. I know only fragments of Prison legend about its true nature. A game-theoretic anomaly that becomes you, that predicts what you are going to do and always wins. And I am in a vir it controls: it can probably see every neuron firing in my brain. Fear makes my chest heavy. It is difficult to breathe.

‘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.