The Fractal Prince

3 THE THIEF AND THE ARREST

I enter the main cabin hesitantly. If the ship is worried, Mieli might really be in a bad mood, and I hate getting beaten up by an Oortian warrior when I’m tired.

I don’t have to look far. She floats in the middle of the cabin, eyes closed, dark, almond-shaped face illuminated by soft candlelight, wrapped in her usual dark toga-like garment like a caterpillar in her cocoon.

‘Mieli, we need to talk,’ I say. No response.

I pull myself along the cabin axis and orient myself to face her. Her eyes are closed, and she barely seems to be breathing. Great. She must be in some sort of Oortian trance. Figures: live on berries in a hollowed-out comet lit by artificial suns long enough, and you start to have delusions about achieving enlightenment

‘This is important. I need to have a word with your boss.’ Maybe she’s in a piloting trance. I once got her out of it by exploiting our biot link, but it took pushing a sapphire dagger through my hand. I have no desire to repeat the experience – and besides, the link is gone. I snap my fingers in front of her face. Then I touch her shoulder.

‘Perhonen, is she all right?’ I ask the ship. But there is no reply.

‘Mieli, this isn’t funny.’

She starts laughing, a soft, musical sound. She opens her eyes and smiles like a serpent.

‘Oh, but it is,’ she says. In my mind, a prison door opens and closes. Not the Dilemma Prison, but another one, a long time ago.

Maybe I should have stayed inside.

‘Hello, Joséphine.’

‘You never called,’ she says. ‘I’m hurt.’

‘Well, on Mars, you seemed to be a little short on time,’ I say. Her eyes narrow dangerously. Perhaps it’s not a good strategy to remind her that I ended our last night together by having her thrown off the planet by Oubliette authorities.

Then again, perhaps it is.

‘Joséphine Pellegrini,’ I repeat her name. There should be memories that come with it, but they, too, are behind the closed door. That is not surprising: she has probably done some careful editing of my memories herself. If you are a Sobornost Founder, you can do that sort of thing.

‘So you figured it out,’ she says.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Oh, that was for your own good, my sweet,’ she says. ‘You’ve spent a couple of centuries running away from me. I didn’t want you to be distracted.’ She touches the middle finger of her left hand, as if adjusting a ring. ‘And do you know what happens when you try to escape your fate?’

‘What would that be?’

She leans closer.

‘You lose yourself. You become a petty thief, a magpie, chasing after shiny things. You need me to be something more.’ She touches my face. Her hand is smooth and cold.

‘I gave you a chance to steal yourself back. You failed. You are still the little thing from the Dilemma Prison, good for nothing except guns and games. I thought you could be a seed for something greater. I was wrong.’ Her eyes are hard. ‘You are not Jean le Flambeur.’

That stings, but I swallow it. Her tone is soft, but there is a glint of genuine anger in her eyes. Good.

I brush her hand away.

‘Then we are two,’ I say, ‘because I don’t think you are Joséphine Pellegrini. You are just a gogol. Maybe from one of the older branches, sure. But you are not a Prime. You would never send an important part of yourself to do a job like this. You are just a low-level Founder ghost, running a rogue operation. I want to talk to the Prime.’

‘And what makes you think you deserve that?’ she says.

‘Because you need me to steal a Spike fragment from Matjek Chen. I know how to do it. And I want a better deal.’

She laughs. ‘Oh, Jean. You failed, last time. All you were— Oh my, I can’t even tell you— Cognitive architectures stolen from the zoku and us alike. Machines made with a sunlifting factory. The perfect disguise. And still you were like a child compared to him, the father of Dragons. And you are telling me you know how to do it now? Oh, my sweetheart, my little prince, you are amusing.’

‘Not as amusing as watching the other Founders eat you. It’ll be the vasilevs and hsien-kus, right? They never liked you. You need a weapon against them. That’s why you got me out.’

Her eyes are two green pearls, cold and hard. I take a deep breath. Almost there. I must not forget that she can read at least my surface thoughts. There are ways to obfuscate them. Associative images. Pearls and planets and eyes and tigers. She frowns. Better distract her.

‘And I do wonder how they caught me in the first place, if I was that good,’ I say. ‘Could it be that you had something to do with it, lover?’

She stands up in front of me. Her mouth is a straight line. Her chest is heaving. She opens Mieli’s wings. They quiver in the candlelight like two giant flames.

‘Maybe I’ve been running away from you,’ I say. ‘But when you get desperate, you always find a way to catch me.’

‘Desperate?’ she hisses. ‘You little bastard.’

She grabs my head and squeezes so hard that it feels like a yosegi box about to pop open, pulls me up so our faces are close together. Her breath is warm. It smells of liquorice. ‘I’m going to show you desperate,’ she says.

‘No.’ Yes.

Her eyes are pale green at first, then impossibly bright, like looking right into the Sun. The world goes white. My face flows like wax beneath her fingers.

‘This is how they caught you,’ she says.

The inspector catches that bastard Jean le Flambeur in the photosphere of the Sun.

Before he begins, he takes his time to look at them, the Founders aboard the good ship Immortaliser. The bearded engineer-of-souls rocks slowly back and forth in his chair. The pellegrini in her white-and-gold naval uniform stares at him intently, waiting. The vasilev leans back in his chair, swirling the golden wine in his glass. The two hsien-kus, inscrutable. The chen, still and quiet, looking at the sea. The chitragupta pokes holes in the structure of the vir with its finger, making tiny, glowing singularities that vanish with a popping sound as soon as they appear.

The inspector frowns at the chitragupta. The Immortaliser is a knotted configuration of electromagnetic fields around a nugget of smartmatter the size of a pinhead. It floats five hundred kilometres above the solar north pole, in the temperature minimum region of the photosphere. He went into a lot of trouble to get the vir to run on that kind of hardware.

The vir is a little restaurant in the crook of a rocky harbour’s arm. They sit around tables set out on the uneven sunlit rock in a cool breeze, glasses of white wine and plates of seafood in front of them, full of rich, subtle smells. The rigging of the sailboats in the water makes a tinkling sound in the wind, like improvised music. To remind them where they are, the jewelled orrery of the Experiment looms in the sky, larger than clouds or worlds, against the blazing white curve of the Sun. It’s a patchwork reality, put together from the memories of the Founders, as these things should be. To show respect, to have consensus. Or so the theory goes.

The vasilev is the first to speak.

‘What are we doing here?’ he says. ‘We have already answered all your questions.’

The inspector’s fingers find the ridges and valleys of scar tissue on his cheeks. The touch awakens the dull ache that is always there, not because the wounds have not healed but because it is part of him, a show of respect to the Prime.

Good, he thinks. It is good to meet the others in a vir where they can feel pain. These are gogols from branches deep within the guberniyas, used to abstraction, with a tendency to forget that the physical reality is still there, raw and painful and devious and messy, like a razor blade hidden inside an apple.

‘One of you is Jean le Flambeur,’ he tells them. ‘One of you is here to steal.’

The Founders look at him in stunned silence. The chitragupta giggles. The engineer stares at the coils of purple octopi on his plate. The pellegrini flashes the inspector a smile. He feels a strange warmth in his chest. That was something he did not expect. High-fidelity virs and embodiment have their advantages and disadvantages. He stops himself from smiling back.

‘I don’t understand any of this,’ he says, gesturing upwards.

The sky is full of neutrino winks of other raion ships like the Immortaliser, millions of them, moving in tight, orderly orbits, interwoven like threads in a tapestry. Somewhere, far away, echoes the thrumming song of a guberniya, an artificial brain the size of a planet, watching over its children from the shadow of Mercury, coordinating, guiding, planning.

The Sun wears a belt made from tiny points of light: sunlifting machinery that pumps heavy elements from the fusion depths and feeds it to smartmatter factories in stationary orbits. An entire ecology of constructor gogols in plasma bodies churns the solar corona, creating pockets of order that will be used as the lasing medium for solar lasers.

‘But I know it is to serve the Great Common Task. Our brother the engineer tried to explain thread theory to me, about quantum gravity scattering, about the Planck locks and how God is not a gambler but a cryptographer. I don’t care. My branch deals with simpler things. You all know what I do.’

It is a little dishonest. Of course he knows what is about to happen. But it is better if they think of him as a barbarian.

Solar lasers will focus on a constellation of points until the concentration of energy tears the fabric of spacetime itself and gives birth to singularities, fed with the particle stream that the sunlifting system kicks up from the pole. Countless gogols will be cast into them, their minds encoded in thread states in the event horizons. Seventeen black holes will pull together long tails of plasma from the Sun like orange peels, coming together. A many-fingered hand of God will close into a fist. A violent Hawking decay will convert several Earth masses into energy.

And, perhaps, within that inferno, there will be an answer. An answer someone wants to steal.

‘So, where is this fabled creature, then?’ asks the vasilev. ‘This is madness. Nine seconds in the Experiment frame, and we are wasting cycles in this fancy vir. Out there, our brothers and sisters are getting ready for the most glorious of tasks. And what are we doing? Jumping at shadows.’ He looks at the pellegrini. ‘Sister pellegrini here has decided that we should dance for the monkey.’

The inspector lays his large hands on the table and gets up. His sudden movement and his bulk make the glasses shudder and sing.

‘Brother vasilev should reconsider his words,’ he says, quietly. He will have to deal with this one soon. And possibly the hsien-kus: there are two of them, an older and a younger, one in an elaborate avatar from the Deep Time – a hsien-ku face embedded in a blue, many-angled body and a forest of limbs – the other an unassuming young woman a plain grey uniform. He is almost certain they sent the core vampire that tried to kill him in the ship’s Library.

‘Sister pellegrini here detected an anomaly in the mathematics gogols,’ the inspector says. ‘She brought me from the Library to investigate, and cut off communications from the rest of the fleet. It was the right thing to do. I found traces. In virs, in gogol memories. Le Flambeur is here.’

He looks at the chen from the corner of his eye, trying to see a reaction. The grey-haired Founder is the only one who is not looking at the inspector. His eyes are fixed on the sky, and a smile plays on his lips.

The older hsien-ku rises.

‘This creature you are talking about is a myth,’ she says. ‘In our ancestor sims, he is little more than a story. A bogeyman.’

She is impressively ancient. The instinctive xiao – the inbuilt respect for a gogol closer to a Prime than he is – makes the inspector feel like a child for a moment. The inspector was the sword of Sobornost, his metaself rewrites his thoughts. He stayed strong. He knew his cause was true and pure.

‘Is sister saying that the Prime memories are flawed?’ he says, clinging to the metaself’s reassuring voice, gritting his teeth.

‘Not flawed,’ she says. ‘Merely . . . distant.’

‘We are wasting time,’ the vasilev says. ‘If there is an anomaly here, if the ship has been infected, then sister pellegrini should self-destruct and so our deaths will serve the Task. But then, she has always been a little too fond of her continuity to do what is necessary.’

The inspector smiles. ‘My investigation was thorough. It seems that our brother vasilev and sister hsien-ku tried to manipulate the balance of test gogols used in the Experiment. But I’m not here to accuse them. I’m here to find Jean le Flambeur.’

The vasilev stares at him. ‘Of all the outrageous accusations—’

‘Enough,’ says the chen. There is a sudden silence. The chen is the only gogol on the ship not branched for the Experiment: fourth generation, Battle-with-the-Conway-Angel branch. Even the metaself cannot silence the heavy rush of xiao that the inspector feels when he speaks.

‘Our brother has performed his task well. If anyone questions his recommendations, it is surely not out of guilt, but merely out of desire to see the Great Common Task performed well, am I not right? If it is a question of identity, then the answer is simple. The Primes, in their wisdom, have provided us with the means to tell the world who we are.’

The chen turns to face them, a beatific smile on his face. ‘Let us draw forth our Founder Codes, and pray.’

The inspector takes a deep breath. He knew this was coming, but he has no desire to touch his Code, the thing that grants Founders root access to the meta-laws of the firmament that govern all virs. The Code derives from passwords in the same way that nuclear weapons descend from flint axes: not just a string of characters, but a state of mind, a defining moment, the innermost self. And his isn’t pretty.

Nevertheless, he grins at the vasilev as they all get up. The golden-haired gogol takes a drink from his glass, spilling a few drops as he puts it back on the table: his hands are shaking. I would really like it to be this one.

‘Come, now,’ the chen says. ‘Let’s all do this together, like brothers and sisters.’ He closes his eyes. An expression of bliss spreads across his face, as if he was watching something indescribably beautiful. The vir dissolves around them, absorbed by the firmament, disappearing into empty whiteness like the vasilev’s wine into the cotton tablecloth.

One by one, the other Founders follow. The chitragupta’s face is full of serenity. The pellegrini looks afraid. The engineer’s forehead is furrowed by furious concentration. The plain faces of the hsien-kus are made beautiful by expressions of wonder and awe. The vasilev is pale and sweating. He gives the inspector one more look full of hate and closes his eyes.

And then it is the inspector’s turn.

In the firmament, closing your eyes does not bring darkness, only white. The Founders are stark silhouettes against it. Hesitantly, the inspector touches his Code. It aches like his scars, only a hundred times worse, an unhealed gash inside him that reeks and oozes pus like a

bedsore. It opens when the gunfire wakes him up. His sister lies next to him. Flies walk on her open eyes. He tears out the wires in his scalp. There is a squelching sound and a lightning bolt of pain. Blood runs down his face. He touches her forehead. Under his fingers, the skin is clammy and soft.

He casts it at the firmament, eager to be rid of it. The hungry whiteness claims it and swallows. Suddenly, it is no longer white but a mirror that shows him six reflections.

He touches his face to feel the scars and sees the others do the same. The scars are not there: his cheeks are smooth. His mirror images are young men with coal-black hair and pencil-stroke eyebrows, dimpled temples and heavy eyelids. They wear slim velvet jackets and white shirts and look like they are on their way to a party. They brush invisible dust from their lapels, look at each other, blinking, as if they had just woken up from a dream.

As he watches them, there is a sharp crack inside him. Another self hatches like a bird from an egg. I smile at the confusion in my other selves’ eyes as we shake off the heavy shell of the inspector.

Next to me, the chen starts clapping.

‘Wonderful!’ he says, grinning like an excited child. ‘Wonderful!’

We all look at him. He alone is unchanged, a small grey figure against the firmament white. Something is wrong. I look for his Code in the vir trap we have created and find nothing.

The chen wipes his eyes and his expression becomes a serious mask again. Now that the xiao of my Sobornost disguise is gone, it is easier to look at him. A short, stocky Asian man with unevenly cut grey hair, barefoot, wearing a monkish robe. His face is younger than his eyes.

‘A vir that emulates the firmament,’ he says. ‘I did not think such a thing possible. And all this drama, just for me, just to steal my Codes. Better than going to the theatre. Very entertaining.’

The six of us take a bow, all together. ‘Surely you can figure out how I did it,’ we chorus. I can see it in my other selves’ eyes: trying to find a way out. But the vir is sealed around us, tight as a bottle.

‘Of course,’ he says, looking us up and down, hands behind his back. ‘I remember the first sunlifter factory you broke into, a century ago. So you did it again. The old compiler backdoor trick. Basic cleptography. The only part I can’t figure out is where you got my old friend’s Codes. From Joséphine? I will need to have a word with her.’

I am rather proud of it: hacking the ultimate trusted computing platform, by inserting a few choice things into the hardware of the Immortaliser when the sunlifter factory compiled it and its sister ships, four minutes or so ago in the Experiment reference frame.

So of course, I also made an escape route.

‘A gentleman never tells. And there is a reason why classics are called classics,’ we say, a slight disharmony in our chorus now as we diverge.

There. The vir is sealed tight like a bottle, but he missed one of my firmament back doors. Just have to keep him talking.

‘Indeed. And betrayal is one of them, isn’t it? The oldest of them all.’ He smiles a thin smile. ‘You should have known better than to trust her.’

I didn’t. But we only shrug.

‘It was always a gamble. That’s what I do.’ We gesture at the whiteness. ‘But you are gambling, too. This whole thing, the Experiment. It’s just to distract the others, isn’t it? You don’t need it. You already have the Kaminari jewel. The key to Planck locks.’

He raises his eyebrows. ‘And can you think of anyone else who deserves to have it?’

We laugh. ‘With all due respect, Matjek,’ we say, ‘you should really leave jewels and locks and keys to the professionals.’

‘Respect. I see.’ He crosses his arms. ‘You treat this as a game. Do you remember the first time we met? I told you it was not a game to me.’

That was not the first time we met. But it’s good you don’t remember that.

‘Then why is it,’ we ask, ‘that I always won?’

One of us – I’m no longer sure who – activates the escape protocol. The others self-destruct, flooding the white vir with noise. The software shell that contains my mind dumps its contents into thoughtwisps, launches them from the Immortaliser at other raion ships.

I jump from node to node in the Sobornost communications network, splitting, merging, sending out self-sacrificing partials. The chens come after me, tenacious, relentless. But it doesn’t matter. A few milliseconds and I will reach one of my getaway ships, beautiful Leblancs built by the Gun Club zoku, with their warm Hawking drives, ready to make my getaway at the speed of light—

Then the raions start self-destructing. The photosphere is full of antimatter blooms as they burn my bridges, sacrifice billions of gogols to contain me like a virus. The destruction spreads like a wildfire, until there is only one of me left.

I try to hide in the firmament processes, become a slow, reversible computation. But in vain: they hunt me down. The chens and the engineers come, swarm over me like lilliputs over Gulliver, trapping me.

Then the mind-blades come, invisible and hot.

They take me apart. The metacortex goes first: the ability to self-modify to sculpt my neural matter. Fixed, dead, no longer changing personalities at will, imprisoned. But they make sure to leave the knowledge that something is gone.

A voice asks questions.

I don’t answer and die.

A voice asks questions.

I don’t answer and die.

A voice asks questions.

I don’t answer and die.

Finally, the blades touch a trap I built inside myself a long time ago. My secrets catch fire and consume themselves in my head.

In the end, I am naked, in a cell made of glass. There are phantom pains in my mind where the god parts have been cut away. There is a gun in my hand. Behind each of the four walls, there is somebody else, waiting.

Cooperate or defect?