K-Machines

by Damien Broderick

"Indeed. The relationship is dialectical. You understand the term?

  "There's a to-and-fro between them, right? Mutual interaction. I've only just signed up for my philosophy course, Doc."

  "Your definition is admirable. And in the converse case, with those we call deformers? Might they not have their own familiars?"

  "I don't see what any of this has to do with the despoilers." Blood drains from August's face. There is a stretched, terrible moment of strangled silence. He lurches forward from the chair, fists clenched. "You fucking grotesque bastard! She is not one of them! Lune is not a K-machine!"

  No, but—Decius looks upon him from a dozen angles, crystalline heart breaking.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  SgrA*: 2036, Aged Ninety-Two

  Coober Pedy Polis is a nerd city of catacombs beneath a sun-tormented desert at 50°C in high summer, frigid at night. A hundred and twenty years ago, the underground township crystallized around the tunnels that miners dug in search of precious opal gemstone. Now for a hundred kilometers in every direction the desert is matted with microscale solar collectors sucking in the blazing Australian sunlight, making power for the wild venture dreamers and corporate data miners who have transformed the town's traditional industry. On the outskirts, strange lacy constructions of silicon coral hump upward from the desert sand and rock, fantastic filigrees, minarets, frothy transponders massaging the sky's satellites and aerostats.

  He walks in cool air a hundred meters below the surface, surrounded by a sweet-perfumed infusion of freesias, his way to the offices and labs of Other World Realities lighted by quantum dot illuminators speckling the ever so faintly opalescent walls and tunnel ceilings. Through the tortuous corridors, approaching ominously, comes the tedious chanting of the local bunch of Church of Luminous Opacity spikesters. He rounds the corner, finds half a dozen of the crazies in singularity drag, cavorting in full view of the frustrated guards on duty outside the bodega, the cheese store, the fashion boutiques. Program herders, probably. Just enough brains to hold down a tech job. They wear their own fashion utterance, great upcurving silver horns thrusting from their foreheads, the exponential curve of the spiking singularity that seems to recede year by year, always another decade off. Bloody morons. Do they really think their wailing and clapping and stomping will advance the date of the singularity by a single nanosecond?

  But that's not the point, is it? People are driven by impulses and ancient biases having little enough to do with intellect, rational assessment, evaluation of marginal utilities, judicious allocation of effort. He catches himself, mocking the gruesomely abstract Bayes-think that has infiltrated his own intellect for half a century. Hey, it's their trip, man, he tells himself, sardonically conscious of the phrase from his late youth. It's mythology. They're scratching the oldest itch in the world. A notion starter nags at the edge of his babbling stream of consciousness. He lets it settle. It will creep forth timidly at the right moment; he learned that long ago.

  Three turns of the long corridor, and a door recognizes his identity imprint, slides open with a murmur of invitation. He steps inside, lifts an indolent hand to his waiting colleagues. It's not easy to guess how old any one of them is, including himself, but he doesn't have to guess, he knows their resumes by heart. None of them is over thirty. The brilliant kids, he thinks with warmth.

  It's not that he feels especially stupider than they, not any longer, not with the vasculoids running oxygen through his body, pumping up his ancient brain. Still, they possess a kind of innocence, freshness, openness to novelty that he and his clade will never know again, unless the quantum neural emulators finally come onstream and allow him to remodel his brain. He greets them by name, takes his comfortable seat. They are in session. Although an ancient subroutine in his long memory somehow expects it, nobody stands, walks to the front of the room, fiddles with displays, brushes away chalk dust. Mileva Cvijic flicks up into their gaze a depth sim of the latest quantum bean counter. Coherent superposition over 242 regions of the state space under investigation.

  For two hours they converse in the compressed codes of modal logic, F-theory, game structure, and his own groping efforts toward computational ontology and reality engineering. Much of the discourse eludes him, even with a murmured annotational assistant in one ear. It doesn't matter, nobody can know everything, hardly anybody can know very much at all. Knowledge is stochastic, emergent, convergent. Probabilistic truth. Sometimes it depresses him, this epistemology of utter uncertainty, however powerful and insistent the results of any particular science might be. Yet how else might the world be framed? The Tegmark scholium—the fourfold levels of multiple reality—has been the established paradigm for decades. There is no single universe, except for the titanic, ultimately simple ensemble comprising the multiverse.

  And here's their tool, finally, for probing it. He flicks back to the bean counter. A matchbox with a windowpane into all the worlds you want to study. He smiles to himself. To manipulate. To exploit. To colonize? Perhaps that is a step too far. But he has time now.

  An ache takes him behind the knee. He dismisses it from consciousness. In another decade, they'll be able to regrow him a whole new leg. If the devastation in Africa and South America can be contained. His renewed gut clenches. At least Kashmala came back from Somalia, even if she left again immediately to work with the New Settlers in Chittagong South, formerly Arnhem Land, where she is significantly less likely to be raped or slaughtered. Yes, everything will be just fine if the hatreds boiling everywhere around the world can be bottled up for just a few more years, if the acceleration can be sustained, wealth boiled off it to aid the billions of suffering and dispossessed. For a moment, he hears in imagination the inane blitherings and chantings of the devotional spikesters. In a way, they're right, after all. The blinding wall of the future rises ever more opaquely before him, ever more terrifyingly. Something is rushing at them all. A change that will not be gainsaid. Unless it is. Unless the crazies and the desperates bring it down. Unless the future is shunted into some new Dark Age.

  He shudders. It's not impossible.

  They are all looking at him.

  "Sorry," he says. "Woolgathering." But they don't know the expression. Probably most of them don't know what wool is. Christ. Stranded in the future. Well, halfway to the future. He shivers again. Old, old, old. "All right, I've been thinking about a way to tackle the ontological interface. Let's get right away from Hilbert graphs and numericals. Suppose we do something along the lines of an immersion game—"

  There are groans. He is determined to hold firm. His vagrant thought in the corridor recurs, taps him on the shoulder. Sometimes the old ideas are the good ideas, rooted in human nature. When we become posthuman, he thinks, it'll be time enough to forget our roots, revise them out of existence. In the meantime, we're the children of hunter-gatherers striving for existence on the ancient, dangerous, barely supportive veldt. He bares his regrown teeth at them. Let the contestation begin.

  Overhead, the greenhouse Sun burns into the desert's black speckles, blazing energy driving through the fuse into a blossoming torrent of information, building realities undreamed of until now.

  Or, perhaps, for the first time revealing them to human eyes and hearts.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Lune

  Towering dark clouds stood above the Ensemble's Motherhouse, lifted high above Mount Gibraltar at its back. The air crackled with an itchy presentiment of downpour. Custodial Superiore Morgette Smith's Daughter watched from a cool stone seat as Lune paced the cropped, heavy grass, fingers enlaced and twisting. Lune forced herself to halt, drew her hands apart, crossed her arms against her breast. At the verge of vehement tears, she stifled them by main force, breathing hard.

  "You regard yourself as specially chosen in the Contest," Morgette said at last, "or above its strictures?"

  She was shocked. "No! Certainly not." Her voice caught in her tight throat; she swallowed hard. "Except that—"

  "Prec
isely. Except that you are singular among our number. No other has suffered this... special attention... from the enemy."

  "Are you blaming me? I did not seek out this, this privilege." Her lips twisted.

  "Whom, then, do you blame?"

  "Damn it, Morgette, nobody is to blame. Except the thing that selected me in childhood." For a moment she hesitated. "Unless my benefactors and instructors in the Ensemble were complicit in this."

  Morgette looked back at her impassively.

  "I'm sorry, Custodial Superiore. I know that's impossible."

  A cold thing struck her face. Heavy drops, scattered, fell from the darkening sky. A moment later lightning flashed, bright and close, and a shredding blast ripped above them. Lune crouched for an instant, utterly poised for violence. The rain intensified. Startled laughter burst from her. She ran beside Morgette along the curving path to the great building, only partly sheltered by the trees, her thin working garments swiftly sodden. Lights showed already in many round windows. The Motherhouse faced outward like the prow of an immense limestone ship, windows like portholes, the great entrance portico looming like a breach opened in the ship by collision with something larger and more terrible than itself. As they ran, premature night-lights came on inside the portico, casting a soft and welcoming glow onto the already soaked garden beyond.

  The moment she gained the protection of the alcove, Lune peeled off her thin dress, kicked away her sandals. A male acolyte in red and white took it from her, eyes modestly downcast, nostrils wrinkling. It struck Lune that she had been wearing the same working garment on the evening that she had first set eyes on August, recognized him for what he was, laid her trap. Now the wet cloth carried a foul taint of rotting kelp and trapped, dead, sea life. Her hair probably stank of it as well. It seemed all too appropriate; for a moment, her eyelids prickled. A female acolyte in blue and white returned quickly with a deep-green woolen robe and a towel for her wet feet, helped her into the robe.

  Morgette had gone ahead. She followed her through the great doors into an entrance hall paneled in dark polished oak lined with images of ancient mothers superiore and their more recent heirs. Morgette's portrait was not yet hung upon the wall; her time would come. Once Lune had aspired to this station, the typical wistful dream of a young woman in the Motherhouse. Now the dream was utterly broken. She had awakened into the dismal nightmare that was her secret life.

  The office door was ajar. "You probably want something to eat." Morgette sat behind an antique desk at least five centuries old. "And you certainly need a bath, but that can wait. Bring our sister soup and bread," she told a hovering acolyte. "And close the door." When the young woman had done so, Morgette waved Lune to a comfortable chair. "There will be a formal interrogation before you leave." With evident regret, she said, "This means, of course, the end of your involvement with the Ensemble. You do understand the necessity?"

  Lune had expected it; even so, hearing this sentence of exile uttered crushed her spirit. She bent forward for a moment, squeezing her clenched hands against her heart, eyes closed. Somehow she restrained her tears. When she met the Custodial Superiore's gaze, anger had replaced grief.

  "Of course I understand. The Accord has been breached, and I'm an instrument of that breach." It made no difference that she had been trapped in childhood, that her complicity was something forced upon her at a depth of ambivalence no human could be expected to plumb or master. It made no difference that she had no other place to go. She was anathema. No hand would be raised against her; the Ensemble were not cruelly retributive. Neither was there any generosity nor forgiveness in them for betrayal. Once she left this building, no hand would be raised, either, to help her.

  A knock at the door; the acolyte entered with a tray. A large bowl of steaming, meaty soup was set on the desk, with a rack of golden toast and a pale-blue dish of butter. Hunger assailed her despite her misery.

  "Go ahead, tuck in." Morgette watched as Lune ate. The moment she was done, the last crust chewed, the Superiore said, "You brought the creature down upon me. I find that hard to forgive."

  Creature? Oh. The Jammervoch. "Not intentionally, Morgette. I don't think the K-machines were trying to kill us. Not that it's any excuse, but I think they were doing some range-finding."

  "Testing August Seebeck? Checking out the fabled Vorpal upgrade?"

  "That's my guess." She tightened her lips.

  Morgette made a signal; the female acolyte returned for the tray. "Anything more to eat? A drink, perhaps? No?" She dismissed the young woman. "Lune, don't be grudging. Certainly we shall require a full report in the interrogation, but I would appreciate hearing your initial assessment. You have a distinctively privileged angle of witness and testimony in this unprecedented and unhappy situation."

  She felt her face grow warm. "Frankly, since I'm about to be disowned, I think I'd prefer to go and have a hot shower and find some fresh clothing. I've been stuck on that filthy ship for—"

  "Yes, yes. You need sleep, too. We will not throw you out into the street, Lune. You're here of your own free will, don't forget that. After all, there's nothing to stop you from leaving. The Seebecks might welcome you."

  Wretchedly, she said, "I have placed a lock upon access to my Schwelle. I don't want—"

  Morgette nodded. Her sympathetic understanding was unbearable. "You don't want the boy coming here, seeing you. You're ashamed."

  "You can't imagine."

  "Perhaps I can. We've all made errors of judgment in matters of the heart." The Custodial Superiore rose. "Few, it's true, as horrendous as yours." She came around the desk, placed one hand lightly on Lune's arm. "You may stay in our guest quarters tonight. I'll have your clothes and other possessions brought to you. Take a bath, get some sleep." Walking her to the door, Morgette said, "You might consider unlocking the Schwelle. The young man deserves a hearing. Deserves an apology, more to the point. But there is no sense in rushing the thing. Matters will look different in the morning."

  The guest room was comfortable, impersonal, in some respects the ultimate rebuke. She had become an outsider, an intruding visitor. This place and others like it had been her home for half a century. Now she was just passing through. She lay upon the bed facedown. She did not move when the acolyte brought her possessions, placed them quietly, left without a word. The reek of the marine graveyard clung to her pillow. After a time she slept.

  ***

  Slanted eastern light from a high window touched the top of one wall. The storm had passed in the night. Numb with loss, Lune went to the shower, stood beneath hard, cold spray until her teeth chattered and her skin was crepey with gooseflesh. A tendril of glamour touched her consciousness, seeking entry. With weary resignation, beyond denial, she allowed the Schwelle operating system to have access. Through the rattle of the water, she heard a tearing. She closed the faucet, stepped dripping and chilled into the bedroom.

  Trembling with rage, August faced her.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Exegetical Analects

  There is one who asks: Why must one govern one's plans and actions according to the constraints of the Accord?

  One answers: As well ask, Why do birds?

  There is one who asks: Why do birds?

  One answers: One begins to appreciate.

  There is one who asks: One is grateful, if baffled.

  One answers: Here is a more complete answer. Without accord, contest would devolve to accident and random noise. Without the Accord, the three great roots of the Tree Yggdrasil might be gnawed by vermin unconstrained, unemotional, impelled by appetites encoded by no protocol more noble than fecundity and brute survival.

  There is one who asks: One accepts constraints as the lesser of two evils, then?

  One answers: One chooses to concur in the measures of the Accord lest the soulless apparatus of merely evolved life flail entirely out of control, driving all complexity downward into ruin, disorder, disintegration.

  There is one who asks: I
n a universe at contest, how stand the Omega Angels? There has been joy. Will there be joy again?

  One answers: This is the sixty-four thousand dollar question.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  August

  "Why?" I said.

  Lune looked at me with such wretchedness—her lovely face drawn, eyes hooded, mouth dragged down, shoulders sagging—that I felt like weeping. I felt like that anyway. Nothing in my life had prepared me for absolute betrayal, for misery that caught at my heart and dragged at my guts.

  "I had to," she said. She took two steps toward me, stopped. She was shivering, and not just from the cold water beaded on her brown skin. "They've been looking for you for a thousand years, maybe more."

  "Don't be ridiculous, you lying bitch," I said, aghast even as the words tore themselves out of my throat. "What, their bullshit holy book predicted my coming, did it? August Seebeck, predestined scourge of the K-machines."

  I clamped my mouth shut. Fury worked within me, churned acids in my belly. My limbs tingled, and my mad tongue waited to pour forth denunciations and curses and pleas for explanation and desperate offers of forgiveness. I heard my own words echo, and another kind of horror entered me: SgrA* had mentioned my name, and who knew what demented prophecy might indeed be contained inside that fetid thing?

  Lune had been abject; she seemed to rally, draw her dignity about her.

  "Don't speak to me like that, August."

  I looked away. "Put some clothes on."

  Without a word, she went back into the bathroom, toweled herself dry, found a bathrobe, returned to the main room with its large bed, table, and two upright chairs, comfortable armchair beside a standard lamp, desk, and flatscreen. My legs had almost given way at the sight of her; I sat awkwardly on the corner of the bed. Lune pulled out one of the chairs, sat primly at its edge, knees together, hands on her lap. The early morning light splashed from high on the wall, caught in the beads of water in her hair. I hated her for what she was, for her denial of what we had been, no, for the ruin she had made of what I'd thought we had been, and at the same time I wanted nothing so much as to cross the room, lift her up, cover her face with kisses, carry her to the bed. I was powerfully aroused, and loathed myself for it. I shifted uncomfortably.