Not much damage — not much extra damage, anyway — but not much extra impetus either, and it wouldn't be using the chamber again. The acceleration went on, building slowly. What else? Think!
The Affronter ship didn't bother to set off in pursuit of the drone; Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 dropped its plan of leaving a few nanomissiles scattered like mines behind it. (Who am I trying to kid, anyway? Think; think!)
Space seemed to buckle and twist in front of it, and suddenly it was no longer heading straight away from the Affronter ship; it was parallel to it again. Those animal pus-bags are playing with me!
A flicker from near the Affronter ship's nose. A centimetre-diameter circle of laser light blinked onto the drone's casing and wavered there. The drone instructed the nanomissile engines to shut off and flicked on its mirror shields; the laser beam tracked it unsteadily and narrowed until it was a millimetre in diameter, then its power suddenly leapt by seven orders of magnitude. The drone coned its protesting mirrorfield and turned rear-on to the ship again, presenting the smallest possible target. The laser modulated, stepping up to the ultraviolet. It started strobing.
Playing with me, just fucking playing with me… (Think! Think!)
Well, first…
It popped the clamps around its two upper-level minds and raised the bit of its casing that would let the two components — AI core and photonic nucleus — free. The casing shuddered and grated, but it moved. Once it was clear of the main casing, the drone nudged the two mind components with its maniple field. Nothing happened. They were stuck.
Panic! If they remained intact and the Affronters captured them and weren't a great deal more careful than they were notorious for being… It pushed harder; the components duly drifted out, losing power the instant contact lapsed with the drone's body. Whatever was inside them should be dead or dying now. It blasted them with its laser anyway, turning them into hot dust, then vented the powder behind it round the edge of the mirrorshield, where it might interfere with the laser a little. A very little.
It readied the core inside its present substrate; that would have to be dumped and lasered too.
Then the drone had an idea.
It thought about it. If it had been a human, its mouth would have gone dry.
It turned round inside the tight confines of its pummelled shield and fired all two hundred of the nanomissile engines. It shook off the remaining loose nanomissiles and fired thirty of them straight at the Affronter ship. The other nine it left tumbling behind it like a handful of tiny black-body needle-tips, with their own instructions and the small amount of spare capacity in their microscopic brains packed with coded nonsense.
The nanomissiles fired at the Affronter ship accelerated towards it in a cloud of sparkling light ahead of the drone; they were picked off, one by one, over the course of a millisecond, in a dizzy flaring scatter of light-blossoms, their tiny warheads and the remains of their anti-matter fuel erupting together; the last one to be targeted by the Affronter's effector and forced to self-destruct had closed the range to the ship by less than a kilometre.
Behind, all nine of the tumbling nanomissiles must have been picked out by the effector as well, because they detonated too.
And with any luck you'll think those were my messages in bottles and that was my neat idea, Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 thought, decoupling the core with its twin's mind-state in it. The core de-powered. Whatever was in there died. It had no time to mourn; it rearranged its internal state to shunt the core to the outside, then let its body settle back to normal. It pushed the core back down over its blistered, cracked casing, to the top of the rear panel, near where the wreckage of the cobbled-together and blown-apart reaction chamber hung, then it let the core fall into the livid plasma and sleeting radiation of the nanomissiles" exhausts; it flared and disintegrated, falling astern in a bright trail of fire.
The laser targeted on the drone was heading into the X-ray part of the spectrum; it would break through the mirror shield in a second and a half. It would take the drone four and a half seconds to get within range of the ship.
Shit. It waited until the mirrorshield was a couple of tenths of a second from failing, then signalled: ~ I surrender!, and hoped that it was talking to another machine; if it was relying on Affronter reactions it'd be fried before the message got through to their stupid animal brains.
The laser flicked off. The drone kept its EM shields up.
It was heading towards the Affronter vessel at about half a klick a second; the ship's be-bladed, swollen-looking bulk drifted closer.
— Turn off your shields!
— I can't! It put expression into the signal, so that it came across as a wail.
— Now!
— I'm trying! I'm trying! You damaged me! Damaged me even more! Such weaponry! What chance have I, a mere drone, something smaller than an Affronter's beak, against such power?
Nearly in range. Not far. Not far now. Another two seconds.
— Drop your shields instantly and allow yourself to be taken over or suffer instant destruction.
Still nearly two seconds. It would never keep them talking long enough…
— Please don't! I'm attempting to shut off the shield projector, but it's in fail-safe mode; it won't let itself be shut off. It's arguing; can you believe that? But, honestly; I am doing my best. Please believe me. Please don't kill me. I'm the only survivor, you know; our ship was attacked! I was lucky to get away. I've never seen anything like it. Never heard of anything like it either.
A pause. A pause of animal dimensions. Time for animal thoughts. Loads of time.
— Final chance; turn off-
— There; turning shields off now. I'm all yours.
The drone Sisela Ytheleus 1/2 turned off its electromagnetic mirrorshield. In the same instant, it fired its laser straight at the Affronter ship.
An instant later it released the containment around its remaining stock of anti-matter, detonated its in-built self-destruct charge and instructed the single nanomissile it still carried within its body to explode too.
— Fuck you! were its final words.
Its last emotion was a mixture of sorrow, elation, and a kind of desperate pride that its plan might have worked… Then it died, instantly and forever, in its own small fireball of heat and light.
To the Affronter ship, the effect of the tiny drone's laser was rather less than a tickle; it flickered across its hull and barely singed it.
The cloud of glowing wreckage the drone's self-destruction had caused passed over the Affronter ship, and was duly swept by analysing sensors. Plasma. Atoms. Nothing as big as a molecule. Likewise the slowly expanding debris from the two groups of nanomissiles.
Disappointment, then; that had been a particularly sophisticated model of Elencher drone, not far behind the leading-edge of Culture drone technology. Capturing one would have been a good prize. Still, it had put up a reasonable fight considering, and provided a morsel of unexpected sport.
The Affront light cruiser Furious Purpose came about and headed slowly away from the scene of its miniature battle, carefully scanning for more nanomissiles. They posed no threat to the cruiser, of course, but the small drone appeared to have tried to use some of the tiny weapons to place information in, and it might have left others behind which were not inclined to self-destruct when effector-targeted. None showed up. The cruiser back-tracked along the course the drifting drone appeared to have taken. It discovered a small cooling cloud of matter at one point, the remnants of some sort of explosion apparently, but that was all. Beyond that; nothing. Nothing everywhere one looked. Most dissatisfying.
The Furious Purpose's restless officers debated how much more time they should spend looking for this lost Elencher ship. Had something happened to it? Had the small drone been lying? Might there be a more interesting opponent floating around out here somewhere?
Or might it all be a ruse, a decoy? The Culture — the real Culture, the wily ones, not these semi-mystical Elenchers with the
ir miserable hankering to be somebody else — had been known to give whole Affronter fleets the run-around for several months with not dissimilar enticements and subterfuges, keeping them occupied, seemingly on the track of some wildly promising prey which turned out to be nothing at all, or a Culture ship with some ridiculous but earnestly argued excuse, while the Culture or one of its snivelling client species got on — or away — with something else somewhere else, spoiling rightful Affronter fun.
How were they to know this was not one of those occasions? Perhaps the Elencher ship was under contract to the Culture proper. Perhaps they had lost the Explorer craft and a GCU — trailing them as they had been trailing the Elench craft — had slipped in to take its place. Might this not be true?
No, argued some of the officers, because the Culture would never sacrifice a drone it considered sentient.
The rest thought about this, considered the Culture's bizarrely sentimental attitude to life, and were forced to concede the point.
The cruiser spent another two days around the Esperi system and then broke away. It returned to the habitat called Tier with a trivial but niggling engine fault.
III
Technically, it was a branch of metamathematics, usually called metamathics. Metamathics; the investigation of the properties of Realities (more correctly, Reality-fields) intrinsically unknowable by and from our own, but whose general principles could be hazarded at.
Metamathics led to everything else, it led to the places that nobody else had ever seen or heard of or previously imagined.
It was like living half your life in a tiny, stuffy, warm grey box, and being moderately happy in there because you knew no better… and then discovering a little hole in one corner of the box, a tiny opening which you could get a finger into, and tease and pull at, so that eventually you created a tear, which led to a greater tear, which led to the box falling apart around you… so that you stepped out of the tiny box's confines into startlingly cool, clear fresh air and found yourself on top of a mountain, surrounded by deep valleys, sighing forests, soaring peaks, glittering lakes, sparkling snowfields and a stunning, breathtakingly blue sky. And that, of course, wasn't even the start of the real story, that was more like the breath that is drawn in before the first syllable of the first word of the first paragraph of the first chapter of the first book of the first volume of the story.
Metamathics led to the Mind equivalent of that experience, repeated a million times, magnified a billion times, and then beyond, to configurations of wonder and bliss even the simplest abstract of which the human-basic brain had no conceivable way of comprehending. It was like a drug; an ultimately liberating, utterly enhancing, unadulterably beneficial, overpoweringly glorious drug for the intellect of machines as far beyond the sagacity of the human mind as they were beyond its understanding.
This was the way the Minds spent their time. They imagined entirely new universes with altered physical laws, and played with them, lived in them and tinkered with them, sometimes setting up the conditions for life, sometimes just letting things run to see if it would arise spontaneously, sometimes arranging things so that life was impossible but other kinds and types of bizarrely fabulous complication were enabled.
Some of the universes possessed just one tiny but significant alteration, leading to some subtle twist in the way things worked, while others were so wildly, aberrantly different it could take a perfectly first-rate Mind the human equivalent of years of intense thought even to find the one tenuously familiar strand of recognisable reality that would allow it to translate the rest into comprehensibility. Between those extremes lay an infinitude of universes of unutterable fascination, consummate joy and absolute enlightenment. All that humanity knew and could understand, every single aspect, known, guessed at and hoped for in and of the universe was like a mean and base mud hut compared to the vast, glittering cloud-high palace of monumentally exquisite proportions and prodigious riches that was the metamathical realm. Within the infinities raised to the power of infinities that those metamathical rules provided, the Minds built their immense pleasure-domes of rhapsodic philosophical ecstasy.
That was where they lived. That was their home. When they weren't running ships, meddling with alien civilisations or planning the future course of the Culture itself, the Minds existed in those fantastic virtual realities, sojourning beyondward into the multi-dimensioned geographies of their unleashed imaginations, vanishingly far away from the single limited point that was reality.
The Minds had long ago come up with a proper name for it; they called it the Irreal, but they thought of it as Infinite Fun. That was what they really knew it as. The Land of Infinite Fun.
It did the experience pathetically little justice.
… The Sleeper Service promenaded metaphysically amongst the lush creates of its splendid disposition, an expanding shell of awareness in a dreamscape of staggering extent and complexity, like a gravity-free sun built by a jeweller of infinite patience and skill. It is absolutely the case, it said to itself, it is absolutely the case…
There was only one problem with the Land of Infinite Fun, and that was that if you ever did lose yourself in it completely — as Minds occasionally did, just as humans sometimes surrendered utterly to some AI environment — you could forget that there was a base reality at all. In a way, this didn't really matter, as long as there was somebody back where you came from minding the hearth. The problem came when there was nobody left or inclined to tend the fire, mind the store, look after the housekeeping (or however you wanted to express it), or if somebody or something else — somebody or something from outside, the sort of entity that came under the general heading of an Outside Context Problem, for example — decided they wanted to meddle with the fire in that hearth, the stock in the store, the contents and running of the house; if you'd spent all your time having Fun, with no way back to reality, or just no idea what to do to protect yourself when you did get back there, then you were vulnerable. In fact, you were probably dead, or enslaved.
It didn't matter that base reality was petty and grey and mean and demeaning and quite empty of meaning compared to the glorious majesty of the multi-hued life you'd been living through metamathics; it didn't matter that base reality was of no consequence aesthetically, hedonistically, metamathically, intellectually and philosophically; if that was the single foundation-stone that all your higher-level comfort and joy rested upon, and it was kicked away from underneath you, you fell, and your limitless pleasure realms fell with you.
It was just like some ancient electricity-powered computer; it didn't matter how fast, error-free and tireless it was, it didn't matter how great a labour-saving boon it was, it didn't matter what it could do or how many different ways it could amaze; if you pulled its plug out, or just hit the Off button, all it became was a lump of matter; all its programs became just settings, dead instructions, and all its computations vanished as quickly as they'd moved.
It was, also, like the dependency of the human-basic brain on the human-basic body; no matter how intelligent, perceptive and gifted you were, no matter how entirely you lived for the ascetic rewards of the intellect and eschewed the material world and the ignobility of the flesh, if your heart just gave out…
That was the Dependency Principle; that you could never forget where your Off switches were located, even if it was somewhere tiresome. It was the problem that Subliming dispensed with, of course, and it was one of the (usually more minor) reasons that civilisations chose Elderhood; if your course was set in that direction in the first place then eventually that reliance on the material universe came to seem vestigial, untidy, pointless, and even embarrassing.
It wasn't the course the Culture had fully embarked upon, at least not yet, but as a society it was well aware of both the difficulties presented by remaining in base reality and the attractions of the Sublime. In the meantime, it compromised, busying itself in the macrocosmic clumsiness and petty, messy profanity of the real galaxy while at the
same time exploring the transcendental possibilities of the sacred Irreal.
It is absolutely the-
A single signal flicked the great ship's attention entirely back to base reality:
xRock End In Tears
oGSV Sleeper Service.
Done.
The ship contemplated the one-word message for what was, for it, a very long time, and wondered at the mixture of emotions it felt. It set its newly manufactured drone-fleet to work in the external environments and re-checked the evacuation schedule.
Then it located Amorphia — the avatar was wandering bemused through kilometres of tableaux exhibition space that had once been accommodation sections — and instructed it to re-visit the woman Dajeil Gelian.
IV
Genar-Hofoen was distinctly unimpressed with his quarters aboard the Battle-Cruiser Kiss The Blade. For one thing, they smelled.
— What is that? he asked, his nose wrinkling. ~ Methane?
— Methane is odourless, Genar-Hofoen, the suit said. ~ I believe the smell you find objectionable may be a mixture of methanal and methylamine.
— Fucking horrible smell, whatever it is.
— I'm sure your mucous membrane receptors will cease to react to it before long.
— I certainly hope so.
He was standing in what was supposed to be his bedroom. It was cold. It was very big; a ten-metre square — plenty of headroom — but it was cold; he could see his breath. He still wore most of the gelfield suit but he'd detached all but the nape-part of the neck and let the head of the suit flop down over his back so that he could get a fresher impression of his quarters, which consisted of a vestibule, a lounge, a frighteningly industrial-looking kitchen-diner, an equally intimidatingly mechanical bathroom and this so-called bedroom. He was starting to wish he hadn't bothered. The walls, floor and ceiling of the room were some sort of white plastic; the floor bulged up to create a sort of platform on which a huge white thing lay spread, like a cloud made solid. ~ What, he asked, pointing at the bed, ~ is that?
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