by Zack Jordan
[In a standard F environment, sure], says the proprietor of the shop, an imposing intelligence who seems to be made mostly of legs xerself. Xe has a two-dimensional screen for a face, which is currently pulling double duty as a Network display.
Roche examines the legs with every sense he possesses. These are luxury racers, their central joints folding backward from his current pair. They gleam gold and black, and his aural sensors pick up absolutely no noise as they extend and retract. They are, in a word, gorgeous. [You know], he says to the proprietor. [I was thinking of leaving legs behind entirely. I finally earned my grav license not long ago and, well, walking just doesn’t have the appeal it once did.]
[Well, sir], says the proprietor’s face, [then you’ll be glad to learn that these legs have grav attachments. Of course they are not exactly cheap, but…you seem like an android who appreciates quality.] The attached emotions are mainly variants on sincerity.
Xe’s excited, says Phil, drawing Roche’s attention to one of the proprietor’s many limbs. It trembles, just enough for Roche’s sensors to notice.
I thought you were watching the arboretum.
I am. Starting now.
[Legs with grav attachments?] Roche gasps, in apparent wonder, as if he’s never heard of such a thing, as if the attachments in question are not slowly rotating in a display case mere meters away.
[Oh, yes!] says the trader, clearly sensing possibilities.
Ask if they come in gold, says Phil, highlighting the gold trim on several of the proprietor’s limbs. Xe’ll like that.
You are a terrible sentry.
I can do more than one thing at a time!
Roche runs a finger up one leg. [Oh, I shouldn’t], he says, as if to himself. [But I’m sure they don’t come in gold…do they?]
[An android of taste!] says the proprietor, and now the quiver has spread to two more limbs. [I have a gold pair right in this very shop!]
[You don’t!]
[I do!]
Roche gazes at the twitching proprietor with innocent yet eager lenses for a carefully calculated space of time, then pulls himself back, ostensibly with effort. He murmurs something to himself.
[Pardon?] says the shopkeeper, screen inclining forward.
[Oh, I’m just being ridiculous], Roche says. He looks directly into the tiny lenses at the top of the proprietor’s glowing screen. [I mean, just because I came into a few credits doesn’t mean I have to spend them all at one time, in one shop…right?]
No way is that going to work.
If you are critiquing my approach, you are not watching for the Human.
He keeps his innocent lenses on the proprietor’s for several seconds, packing his gaze with every milliliter of sincerity he can possibly manufacture.
[Sir], says the shopkeeper, every leg springing into action. [I think we should see how you look with gravs on.]
Roche is careful to keep the hunger out of his lenses as he watches the installation of a shining grav assembly to each smooth leg. He watches, with rising excitement, as they are activated. They come online one at a time, making him feel almost unbearably asymmetrical until they finish integrating into his intelligence. They are, admittedly, the finest he’s ever worn. They can weigh him down for traction or lift him off the ground entirely. His body is a tiny starship now, a miniature version of Riptide or even the big Interstellars.
[Very flattering], says the shopkeeper.
Making a show of testing out the gravs, Roche rises a half meter off the floor. Smoothly, he turns and glides toward the open front of the shop. He floats there in midair, gazing longingly at the open air out in the Gallery.
[Please], says the shopkeeper behind him, pleasant emotions attached all over the message. [Feel free to take them for a spin.]
That is exactly what Roche was waiting for. [Why, thank you], he says. [I believe I will.]
With a mighty leap, he is airborne. He rockets straight upward like a starship leaving its dock, the wind whistling through his antennae. And then, because racing legs are made for acceleration, he puts them through their paces. He spirals toward the distant ceiling, carefully giving wide berth to bridges and the orderly files of drones that pass through the air between them. They are his brethren, fellow Network-provided intelligences, but of course they act nothing like him. They are sub-legal and content to be so. They don’t rocket around on racing gravs, testing Network limits. They don’t flirt with the idea of smacking into the underside of a bridge at two hundred kilometers per hour—
We’ve already tried that one, says Phil. That was death number forty-five.
That sounds right. Number forty-five, of fifty-nine total. Roche and Phil have lived a punctuated existence, distributing their time in the universe into sixty uneven lives…so far. Some are long, like this one. Some are comically short. The record for brevity is just under eleven minutes—thanks to Phil’s sudden inspiration in a magnesium foundry—but they later agreed that was really too short. But then, Roche is beginning to feel that this one is too long.
That’s the beauty of being a Network mind. Not just a mind on the Network; any of the millions of intelligences in this space can claim that. But they are not natural members. They are not native. They require a buffer, a tiny intelligence in their Network implant to mediate between their biology and the power of the Network. That drone he just passed, on the other hand—it is a real Network mind, like him. Sooner or later, it will likely end up damaged, destroyed, or simply used up. If it was a non-Network mind, that would be the end of its story. Immortality, for the non-Network mind, is unattainable—or at least illegal. But for that tiny disregarded drone, death is not the end. If its body is destroyed, that small intelligence is simply pulled back into the Network itself, ready to be installed in another drone at some future time. The Network is a sea of intelligence, a wild foam of intellect where every mind is simply a bubble adrift on the endless surface of—
You’re becoming quite poetic in your old age, says Phil.
Six years in one body is a long time, agrees Roche. Plenty of time to wax philosophical.
You’re sure our next body is lined up?
Of course I’m sure. It’s lying in our quarters on the ship, ready to go. The beacon has been active for days.
Of course, Roche is an exception. The vast majority of Network minds are sub-legal, lacking the foresight to plan out their futures. They don’t choose their next bodies, let alone lovingly construct them. Roche, on the other hand, has gone to great lengths to retain complete control over his life…and death…and next life…and so on. Each time he dies, his next body is ready. His—and Phil’s—last conscious moment flits across the Network like a delicate insect, coming to rest in its new home. There it experiences a beautiful awakening: for it is made new, filled with verve and vigor. The old body, meanwhile, is free to be ripped apart by a panicking beast of burden or disassembled and sold to pay a debt, blown into homogenous protons or pounded into a thin metal sheet. All of these things have happened at least once. The mind, this dual pattern that calls itself Roche and Phil, has gleefully survived them all.
And I wouldn’t trade it for anything, says Phil.
Let’s not get sentimental, thinks Roche.
And now the borrowed gravs have brought Roche within a hundred meters of the ceiling. This is, quite possibly, pushing the limits of what take them for a spin could be construed to mean. He drifts here for a moment, just enjoying the precariousness of his current position. He’ll have to return to the shop eventually, but for now he spreads his senses over the cubic kilometers of the Visitors’ Gallery. Up here, interestingly enough, the crowd is more homogeneous. The top dozen balconies—each of them twenty kilometers in circumference, at least, are almost entirely filled with members of a single species. They are small, bipedal, all dressed identically—actually, now that he takes a closer l
ook, they are completely identical. High-tier group mind, most likely; they always get the best apartments.
Uh oh, says Phil. We might have missed it. There was a Network response over a minute ago. Guess where.
Missed it? How could we miss it?
I…got distracted.
Roche is not angry at Phil, exactly; he is angry at himself. Some might say that works out to be the same thing. Here he is, full kilometers from where he should be: the arboretum. He prepares to dive. He could be there in minutes, even if he sticks to the speed limit. He feels the tickle of his gravs powering up—
And then something happens that Roche and Phil have never, in any of their sixty lifetimes, witnessed. From the ceiling meters above to the floor almost invisible below, every light is extinguished. In Roche’s head flashes a warning, danger-colored.
[Network not found.]
With fingers she no longer possesses, she holds on to her sanity. Her mind floods with sensations. She cannot even begin to organize this information; it’s pure white noise. Her mind is overloaded, a snowflake in a solar flare, an insect in a supernova. She is deluged with color; these are infinities of tint and hue that she’s never imagined. She is crushed by sound, a billion cacophonies compressed together and shoved into ears she doesn’t have. She is being touched, caressed, stabbed, stroked in a billion spots. She is stationary. She is spinning a million times per second. She is hungry, thirsty, sated, nauseated, dizzy, solid, liquid, gas, plasma—and then a trillion information feeds snap into focus, and she screams.
You asked Me to blow your tiny little mind, I believe? says Network. Did that do the trick? Welcome to My mind, little one. This is what it feels like to be an unimaginably small percentage of Me, the largest intelligence ever to grace this galaxy.
For a moment she is sure her mind is broken. She waits, frozen, as more information than she suspected existed in the universe blows through her. The Blackstar is laid out before her, larger than she ever comprehended. She saw it as a point once, in that gigantic display at the top of the Visitors’ Gallery. It was a pinpoint in a web so large that her Human mind refused to process it, linked to a million other pinpoints by uncountable strands of information. She was aware at the time that she did not come close to grasping its complexity, and yet her mind shrank from it. Now she knows without question that she is amplified a billionfold, her mind running at an unimaginable scale, and she has just realized that this one single point of that vast web contains more complexity than the web itself. She has become intelligent enough to realize how limited she really is.
And yet she is a goddess. No secret is hidden from her. Three hundred ten trillion, one hundred forty billion, sixty-one million, fifty-three thousand, nine hundred six—now five…four…back to five—legal intelligences walk, fly, roll, crawl, float, swim, drive, and otherwise motate through the Blackstar’s corridors. A thousand times that number of sub-legal intelligences fill the spaces between them. Out beyond the station, in this pocket of spacetime, trillions of starships dance. More incredibly, every single one of them is connected. Everywhere she looks, shimmering lines of information leap from mind to mind. Even at her current tier, whatever that could possibly be, the complexity is astounding.
And it’s alive. She’s never seen something so filled with light and life. It’s a colossal living root system, from the hairlike threads that connect individual sub-legal minds to the thicker high-bandwidth segments between higher tiers. Even those are nothing next to the hundreds of solid trunks of light that lead from the Blackstar itself out to the subspace tunnels, one for each connected solar system. And even that is not the largest thing she can see. One of those trunks is as thick as the rest of them put together. It glows like a sun, a rod of light that leads from the Blackstar to the largest tunnel of all. On the other side of that tunnel, she knows, are things that make this Blackstar look like nothing at all.
If she still had a body, she is sure she would be nearly weeping by now, Widow and Human or not. She has never felt so small. She has never imagined such beauty could exist. This is Network, her mind sings. This is Network.
You are quite impressed, I know, says Network, and for the first time she detects a tiny bit of warmth in Its thoughts. Pride, perhaps? But of course you are: you have been low-tier your entire life. Now you run in parallel, your mind spread across a billion tiny slices of a billion tiny minds. From each, you borrow enough processing power to give you life but not enough for that smaller mind to notice. You bring them together. You motivate them. You are what I am: Network.
She gazes outward, into the vast web of light. Can I—?
Of course you can. Go. Explore.
Sarya does not wait for a second invitation. She seizes the nearest thread and pulls herself along it, toward the nearly four trillion starships that hang in a frozen tide outside her. She chooses a vessel at random and instinctively uses millions of its neighbors’ sensors to inspect it. It rests upon the void like a jewel on a black backdrop, gleaming in the wide spectrum of frequencies she’s bouncing off it. She runs one of a billion virtual fingers over it, feeling its contours, the shallow depression it makes in spacetime, the faint buzz of its gravs finding traction against reality. This is Wandering Nightfall, barely seven thousand tons, registered at a port that she somehow instantly knows is nearly forty thousand lightyears distant. She knows which of Ol’ Ernie’s trillions of siblings is in charge of this ship, because she knows every member of that gigantic family by name, pronouns, motivations, and goddess-damned hobbies.
Now she tries something different. She follows a shimmering thread inside the next ship, the Frequency 65536. She touches its pilot intelligence, one of the trillions of Ol’ Ernie’s siblings, and suddenly her mind is flooded with what it sees and hears and feels. Its internal sensors show her sixteen occupants frozen in various poses, a cross-section of sixteen separate existences—all brought together for this moment. Four of them are melded in a living space, and she instantly understands what they are doing and what their offspring will look like. Two more are communicating outside the ship’s cargo bay, and she observes the symbols between them. The metaphor being expressed is opaque for only a split second, and then she understands intuitively; her mind has reached into its massive self and recalled the entire history of this species. The square root of five, very funny, that’s profanity in this culture, and actually quite clever in this context if you take into account their species history, these particular individuals’ relationship and—
A sudden curiosity overrides her interest in that particular species and she moves on, instantly. But how far, exactly, can she go? This Blackstar, unbelievably massive as it is, makes up only an infinitesimal part of the Network. Can she…leave it behind? She feels herself grow outward, moving along those shimmering lines like electricity through a superconductor. She moves from gauzy threads to those that are merely insubstantial, follows those to where they merge into thick cables, on up until finally she is flying along one of the colossal roots toward a subspace tunnel. Thousands of ships are almost frozen here, half crawling in and half departing, all of them bound together with those gleaming threads, but they do not interest her. No, she is staring at the tunnel itself, the place where this massive, glowing trunk disappears from the universe, to re-enter it at a solar system an impossible distance away. This is the mouth of subspace, the roiling surface of higher dimensions, and it strains her massive mind to even look at it. But still she approaches. She reaches out slowly. She touches it, instinctively using nearby ship sensors to run her virtual fingers over its complex surface…and then, with absolutely no transition, she is through. She has been translated through subspace, pulled out of the universe and set back down somewhere else.
I know what you’re here to see, says Network.
It’s true: she did not choose a tunnel by chance. She has been flipped across the lightyears, but not randomly: she landed mere
millions of kilometers from the star she orbited for most of her life. Five lighthours outward from the tunnel’s mouth, a familiar gas giant burns in its orbit. She follows the threads, reaching through the frigid void with every available sensor of every station, ship, drone, and mind in the region. She feels the planet’s rotund warmth in the palm of her nonexistent hand. She runs sensors over its rings—and yes, there’s a new one. It’s so faint it’s nearly invisible, asymmetrical, heavily weighted on the far side. That was Watertower, a water-mining station where the only Human she ever heard of spent her childhood. New habitats have already been hauled into place and welded together where the station once drifted. They hang there, unfamiliar, gleaming in the double light of the sun and the planet. Life has gone on.
She heaves a sigh—or some mental analogue of one—but she’s not sure exactly what she expected. And now that she’s here, she notices that one other thing is gone. Observer’s ice ships have departed, and a few nanoseconds ago she might have said without a trace. But that’s not true; there is a trace. She has access to every measurement ever made by every sensor in this entire solar system. She could rewind time here, for all intents and purposes, and watch Him leave. She could extrapolate a course, compare it against some massive database or other, and find that little desert world He plans on turning into a charming paradise. Without a trace, indeed; she could track Him to the ends of the galaxy.
Well, what do you know, says Network around her. You stumbled onto the problem yourself, though nearly a nanosecond after I hoped you might.
I did?
Oh. Perhaps I was thinking too highly of you. The problem is that spacetime is cold and empty, tiny one, and its information crawls at lightspeed. You realize you are looking at the past right now, I hope? Five hours in the past, give or take, because that is how long it took that information to get to My mind. Gaze out farther, and you are looking at a portrait smeared across billions of years. What’s happening out there? How does it affect Me? Even I can only guess, and I assure you that My guesses are better than yours.