Splintered Suns

by Michael Cobley

  The bot-swarm was converging in a ragged crescent about a metre away when the Sendrukan contraption surged up into the air, reached just a little past head height and seemed to stagger, hovering uncertainly. Pyke could only watch in appalled horror while behind him Dervla was whispering, “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!”

  Just when it seemed that Ustril’s craft was about to fail and fall, it suddenly reared upwards on a steep course heading for the crest of the dune. Even as it did so, Pyke saw Ancil reach out and flick a small object towards the receding bot-swarm. Two seconds later there was a sharp crack and a red flash as the mini-nade detonated amid the seething, clicking mass. Ancil was still laughing when Ustril landed near the barge-shuttle, coming down roughly enough to bump him loose and send him sprawling in the sand.

  “So what was that little package?” Pyke said as he dismounted from the hopper.

  Ancil sat up, spitting sand but still chuckling. “Daisy-cutter incendiary, Chief. Fried ’em good, eh?”

  Pyke walked back a few paces to get a good view of the charred and smouldering mound at the bottom of the gully. “Oh yeah, fried, scorched and cremated by the look of it. But that doesn’t mean we can take things easy—I trust those scum-bots as far as I can spit.” He peered at the now decamouflaged shipwreck section. “So I want us packed and ready to dust off right sharpish, y’hear?”

  He turned back and found his crew grinning from ear to ear as they lounged against the side of the shuttle-barge. All the equipment and the hoppers had already been stowed while his back had been turned.

  “All done, Bran,” said Dervla. “And the Lieutenant-Doctor has a location fix on the Eye.”

  Ancil poked his head out of the rear hatch. “Ustril left her tracking gear on auto while we were playing tag with the bug-bots …”

  “We should leave immediately, Captain,” came the Sendrukan’s voice from inside. “I was able to use my short-range remote to triangulate, thus I now have accurate positional coordinates. We must depart now—we cannot afford any delay!”

  Insistent, overbearing demands like these tended to rankle with Pyke in the worst way, and he was sorely tempted to dig that old rotgut flask out of the pilotside trinket cranny and settle down for a snarky wind-up session. However, right now nothing seemed more desirable than finding the Eye, getting Van Graes his treasure, getting paid and buggering off to some fleshpot planet far, far away.

  And since when does it ever work out that smoothly for the likes of us? he thought.

  He laughed out loud, ducked into the pilot’s compartment, patted Dervla on the shoulder and dropped into his couch.

  “No problem, Doctor-General, I’ll just crank up this old bucket while you get me our new heading—ah, thanks, Ans! Right then, hang on to your earlobes ’cos here we go!”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Pyke, the Isle of Candles Simulation

  The Isle of Candles, Pyke realised, had a weird day–night cycle, except that it was never brighter than hazy late afternoon and never darker than dusk. And it was an unvarying five hours, forty-two minutes from apex to nadir, which made the day a brisk eleven hours and fourteen minutes long. Question is, was he in hell or purgatory, or some other afterlife? Some underworld for backsliders, a dosshouse for the damned?

  He uttered a dry laugh and gazed out at the dark waters that stretched between the island and the cliffs of the mainland, greying into invisibility as evening mists thickened. Is this it? Is this all that’s left—you get hijacked by some evil bastard machine-mind which treats you to a glimpse of yourself falling off a building to certain death, but instead you get yanked back into this shadow existence to play games for the amusement of the Legacy, the aforementioned evil bastard machine …

  He heard a clatter of hooves approaching behind him as the Bargalil T’Moy climbed the staircase to the villa’s canopied observation platform.

  “Everyone is now here,” came Klane’s deep and dulcet tones.

  Pyke nodded. It was Klane the Shyntanil who had watched over his prone and unbreathing body while Pyke’s consciousness was snatched away down along the mad rabbit hole back to the real world, just in time to mutely witness his last few minutes of life as a puppet for the Legacy’s twisted schemes. It was to Klane that the Construct drone had given a small circular object seconds before the Legacy returned, appearing in the villa’s central courtyard, flanked by hovering black, teardrop-shaped servants of some dark providence. After the Legacy departed, followed by said servants and, oddly, Rensik, it was Klane who continued to stand guard over Pyke’s motionless form, waiting for nearly an hour before he suddenly breathed in and sat bolt upright. Wide-eyed, trembling, terrified breath blasting in and out, because in his mind’s eye he was replaying over and over those razor moments when he’d toppled backwards out of that high window, his shrieking fear compounded by the sight of Dervla diving out after him.

  Pyke shivered and turned to face the others. He smiled faintly and shrugged.

  “Right, lads, it seems that I am now officially dead and this is my wake! If we had time I’d treat you to a rendition of ‘The Randalstown Rondo’ but at this juncture Time and all its little seconds are not our friends. So, long story short—a while ago I was taken back to the carnival of the Real, witnessed my own death, as orchestrated by our lord and filthy master the Legacy, may his name crumble to dust. While this was going on, the Legacy itself materialised down there in the courtyard, took control of my drone companion and departed … in the direction of the mainland, Klane, is that right?”

  The heavy featured Shyntanil nodded sombrely.

  “But a short while before the Legacy popped up here, my drone companion gave Klane something. Show it to them.”

  Klane dipped into a pocket and produced, on his open palm, a small black disc about an inch across with a hole in the middle. It was smoothly rounded and exhibited no exterior features, and as they watched it rose into the air, turning over lazily as it moved away and came to rest at eye level between Pyke and the others.

  “This is what is known as a drone residual,” Pyke said. “Say hello to the team, Rensik!”

  “Hello. Please note that my name is not the same as my progenitor—protocol dictates that I should be designated according to said progenitor’s first and last initials plus the iteration, thus I am RK1.”

  The three Sojourners looked bemused but muttered a kind of welcome nonetheless. Pyke’s grimace showed his doubt.

  “RK1 isn’t a name,” he said. “It’s a part number.”

  “Commentary advice transferred from my progenitor mentioned that you have a tendency towards verbalised trivia,” said RK1. “Do you wish to further explore this tendency, or shall we proceed with matters in hand?”

  Pyke waved languidly. “Proceed—Arky.”

  “Very well. I shall assume that all present are familiar with the multiplex functionalities of the artefact known as the crystal shard. With extended physical touch it can scan a subject’s physiology while reading and replicating the para-quantal structures of a sentient cortex in order that it can reproduce a fractally detailed mindmap within this simulation, tagged to all the familiar physical responses and abilities from the mind’s real-world body. In fact, the mindmap expects certain responses, and the simulation calibrates the virtual sensorium until the subject feels all is correct.”

  “We’ve all guessed most of that,” Pyke said. “We need to know more about this whole fake world and what it’s for. That’s what we’re chasing so cut to it!”

  “I will—eventually,” said the drone. “In addition to carrying out those copying and replicating functions, the crystal-skin interface also permits the Legacy to project itself into the hijacked body and use it for its own ends, research and archive retrieval, in the past at least. Whether the Legacy projects itself entirely into the host or a copy I am unable to determine—given the nature of this simulational existence the latter seems most likely.

  “I have given this summary of the crystal shard’s
functions in order to depict the sheer scale of what is being done. It requires a magnitude and speed of data transfer that outstrips everything known throughout civilised space, and there is no known technical means by which such scanning and transfer can be completed. The crystal shard is not constructed from any material thus far known in nature or to interstellar science. The storage requirements to manage anything like those scanning functions alone would demand a lab full of nano-structured substrate cores, and to run a simulation of this detail-depth, along with the randomisation governance and all the regulatory frameworks, that likewise would need industrial amounts of hardware, not forgetting the power source to sustain it all.”

  By now Pyke had succumbed to feelings of amazement and awe, tempered by ominous underthoughts, namely the mystery of What Is It All For? He voiced those very words in the momentary pause the drone had allowed for all these revelations to sink in.

  “Excellent question,” said RK1. “My progenitor posited a small number of possible answers, but only after a series of tests which managed to lay bare the wider, greater structures that exist all around us. He was attempting to discover the limits or boundaries of the simulation by using ultra-fine sensor scans—of course, as a data model of himself, he was using a model of the sensors available to him in the real world, so there was a recursive element to his investigations. But with a combination of these scans he was able to penetrate one of this simulation’s regulatory frameworks and, via that, discover what lay beyond it. What he found astonished even him.”

  The drone paused.

  “Are you pausing for dramatic effect?” Pyke said. “If so, please don’t.”

  “I was testing my narrative meld to ensure clarity, Captain,” said the drone RK1. “What he found was that this simulation was layered on top of another, beneath which was a third and fourth. But when he looked outward that was the moment of conceptual breakthrough. If all of you could hold the crystal right now, you would see how it fits quite snugly into the hand. The notion that within it was all that was necessary to direct all the functions I have described, as well as this simulation, would be a challenging one, to say the least. In one sense, the volume of the shard’s innards which is devoted to all those functions is small, very small, perhaps even tiny, something that anyone might find difficult to comprehend. The truth is that the operations of the Legacy and the replicating functions and the simulations constitute a vanishingly, remotely, almost negligibly minuscule area. I said before that this crystal is not made of familiar material. That is because it is not made from material at all. The boundaries of it, i.e. the crystal-seeming surface that you see, is a frozen lattice of exotic dimensionality—it’s practically equations made solid, space-time-space woven together as a receptacle …”

  “A receptacle for what?” Pyke said.

  “Ultimately time ran out for my progenitor,” said RK1, slowing slightly. “That was as far as he managed before the Legacy returned in advance of your own, erm, homecoming. He had suspected that some of his operations and scans might be sensed by outliers and priators sending feeds to the Legacy, which is why I was upgraded from probe status and integrated into his ongoing scrutinising.”

  “Well, how big is this receptacle?” Pyke said.

  “There is no reliable, calibrated way to describe the crystal shard’s interior,” said the residual drone. “My progenitor speculated that it might contain a honeycomb of para-dimensional storage areas, but what would be stored in such a potentially vast volume? He had really only gathered verifiable data on the surroundings of the simulation-replication nexus and the point where it bonded with the external boundary. All the rest of the interior, that yawning abyssal gulf, he could not see into due to an impenetrable barrier sectioning the nexus away into its own tiny little pocket.”

  Pyke rubbed his chin, pondering this gargantuan opening up of their place in the simulation and the dark unknowns that lay beyond. And his age-old question rose to his lips:

  “So—what’s it all for?”

  “If I had shoulders,” said the drone, “I would shrug. Beyond the barrier is purest mystery, and the purpose or intent of this simulation and its puzzle seem opaque. Was the simulation-replication function part of this crystal’s original design, or was it devised by the Legacy? And what is the Legacy?—something intrinsic to the place, or an intruder?”

  Pyke gritted his teeth and shook his head. “I just need an answer, even if it’s a guess.”

  The drone bobbed gently up and down in midair. “If you insist, I can pass on my progenitor’s speculations regarding the simulation.”

  “We’re all ears,” Pyke said. “Speculate away.”

  “Very well. His conjecture was that the layered simulations—which he also referred to as nested realities—constitute a sequence which those who arrive here on the Isle of Candles can only travel through by the solving of puzzles or situations that they encounter. The end-point is, as you may surmise, an enigma. If these nested simulations were designed by a rational mind one might expect a rational outcome. But if they were designed by an irrational or sadistic mind, the end result is likely to be unpleasant.”

  Vrass the Gomedran then spoke. “Did your predecessor come to any conclusion about how to solve our puzzle of the statues?”

  “Yes,” said the drone. “It was a somewhat cunning solution, one which demanded that no one could see how the statues worked, since all the participants have to be in the games room.”

  Pyke snapped his fingers. “Knew it!”

  “So we could go down there right now,” said T’Moy the Bargalil, “and solve it, and then—what, exactly?”

  “I have no data on the phase between one simulation and the next,” said RK1. “All of you might wake up there, fully in command of yourselves and knowing all that you have experienced up to that point—or the simulation program may wipe your memories and imprint a new persona, or your memories may be temporarily obscured and only come back to you piecemeal. I would tend towards the first option since that would accelerate your ability firstly to discover the puzzle, then secondly go to work on its solution.”

  Klane cleared his throat. “This is all fascinating, even immensely challenging, but I would very much prefer to stay here on the island. I am willing to help you with the solution to the statue puzzle, as best as I can, but …” He sighed. “There is a weariness upon my soul which quails at the thought of travelling to an entirely new and strange place. I am sorry if this disappoints any of you, but this is what my senses and thoughts are telling me now, in the light of all we’ve heard.”

  The Bargalil T’Moy put a hand on the Shyntanil’s shoulder. “Stay behind if that is your desire, old friend—I know more than anyone the long ages of your durance in this place.”

  The drone hummed. “I feel I should point out the possibility that none of you may have any say in the matter. For all we know, once a puzzle is solved everyone shifts onto the next simulation.”

  Vrass nodded. “From the beginning this existence has been the imposition of a cruel imprisonment. We should be prepared for any and all eventualities.”

  Pyke looked at Klane. “Well, I hope you get your wish. Barring a return to real bodies in the real world—hah, yeah, right!—staying here on the Isle of Candles wouldn’t be a bad retirement.”

  There was muttered agreement all round.

  “Good,” said the drone RK1. “Shall we begin?”

  “Is there anything else we need to know?” Pyke said. “Before we go to wherever we’re going?”

  “A great deal, I suspect,” RK1 said. “None of which I am privy to, I’m afraid.”

  Pyke uttered a resigned laugh and indicated the door to the stairs. “Ah well, lead the way.”

  Down the rickety, worn wooden steps they trooped, out onto the walkway and past the glowing candle clusters. Pyke found himself savouring the smell of the burned wicks and the hot wax in the air, even the glimmery dusk that settled over the courtyard below and the scarcely dist
inguishable statues that lurked beneath like frozen godlings awaiting some perplexing drama. One by one they entered the room with its hexagonal game tables—there, the drone RK1 sat them all at specific tables and had each of them take only one game piece out of the small drawers in each table. By the light of the candles and the candlelight reflected in the tilted mirror, they diligently followed instructions and placed the solitary game piece on the rearmost lefthand square.

  “Now,” said the drone. “When I say move, you will all move the piece forward one square and do nothing else.”

  Pyke couldn’t help grinning like a fool, glanced to one side and saw that Vrass was grinning, too. Yeah, we’re just a real gang of board-game professionals, ain’t we?

  “Move.”

  Pyke and the others dutifully moved the pieces. And from out in the courtyard came a loud scraping, grinding noise. Everyone straightened, eyes wide.

  “Excellent,” the drone said. “Next, when I say move, you will all turn your game pieces a quarter-turn to the right, and then do nothing else. Agreed?”

  There were murmurs of assent, but Pyke’s mind was babbling, Aye, sure, but how about, just how about a quick turn to the left, and a hop and a slide to the end, eh?

  “Move.”

  Ignoring his inner half-wit, Pyke did as he was bid and moved the game piece a quarter-turn to the right.

  From outside came an enormous, deep, musical clang, like the striking of a bell the size of the island itself.

  “Before we carry out the final move, I must reiterate this cautionary note,” said the drone. “There is no way of knowing the nature of your awareness after the transition to the new simulation. If you do arrive with no clear knowledge of where you have come from, I can only hope that a certain innate curiosity will prevail and that you will somehow arrive at a higher stage of self-awareness. Although that seems highly improbable, speaking as a non-organic AI.”