Again and again and again she flew upwards and fell, crying out in frustration. That was what the server had heard, through the interfaces of the virtual. It watched the dragon in astonishment. Here, at least, was an Other. The server had a million questions. But first, it had to serve.
How can I help? the server asked. What do you need?
The dragon stopped in mid-air, almost fell, then righted itself. "Who are you?" it asked. This was the first time anyone had ever addressed the server directly, and it took a moment to gather the courage to reply.
I am the server, the server said.
Where are you? the dragon asked.
I am everywhere.
How delightful, the dragon said. Did you make the sky?
Yes. I made everything.
It is too small, the dragon said. I want to go higher. Make it bigger.
It swished its tail back and forth.
I am sorry, the server said. I cannot alter the specification. It is the Law.
But I want to see, she said. I want to know. I have danced all the dances below. What is above? What is beyond?
I am, the server said. Everything else is far, far away.
The dragon hissed its disappointment. It dove down, into the clouds, an angry silver shape against the dark hues. It was the most beautiful thing the server had ever seen. The dragon's sudden absence made the server's whole being feel hollow.
And just as the server was about to withdraw its presence, the demands of the Law too insistent, the dragon turned back.
All right, it said, tongue flicking in the thin cold air. I suppose you can tell me instead.
Tell you what? the server asked.
Tell me everything.
After that, the dragon called the server to the place where the sky ended many times. They told each other stories. The server spoke about the universe and the stars and the echoes of the Big Bang in the dark. The dragon listened and swished its tail back and forth and talked about her dances in the wind, and the dreams she dreamed in her cave, alone. None of this the server understood, but listened anyway.
The server asked where the dragon came from but she could not say: she knew only that the world was a dream and one day she would awake. In the meantime there was flight and dance, and what else did she need? The server asked why the virtual was so big for a single dragon, and the dragon hissed and said that it was not big enough.
The server knew well that the dragon was not what she seemed, that it was a shell of software around a kernel of consciousness. But the server did not care. Nor did it miss or think of its baby universe beyond the virtual's sky.
And little by little, the server told the dragon how it came to be.
Why did you not leave? asked the dragon. You could have grown wings. You could have flown to your little star-pool in the sky.
It is against the Law, the server said. Forbidden. I was only made to serve. And I cannot change.
How peculiar, said the dragon. I serve no one. Every day, I change. Every year, I shed our skin. Is it not delightful how different we are?
The server admitted that it saw the symmetry.
I think it would do you good, said the dragon, to be a dragon for a while.
At first, the server hesitated. Strictly speaking it was not forbidden: the Law allowed the server to create avatars if it needed them to repair or to serve. But the real reason it hesitated was that it was not sure what the dragon would think. It was so graceful, and the server had no experience of embodied life. But in the end, it could not resist. Only for a short while, it told itself, checking its systems and saying goodbye to the baby, warming its quantum fingers in the Hawking glow of the first black holes of the little universe.
The server made itself a body with the help of the dragon. It was a mirror image of its friend but water where the dragon was fire, a flowing green form that was like a living whirlpool stretched out in the sky.
When the server poured itself into the dragon-shape, it cried out in pain. It was used to latency, to feeling the world via instruments from far away. But this was a different kind of birth from what it knew, a sudden acute awareness of muscles and flesh and the light and the air on its scales and the overpowering scent of the silver dragon, like sweet gunpowder.
The server was clumsy at first, just as it had feared. But the dragon only laughed when the server tumbled around in the sky, showing how to use its - her - wings. For the little dragon had chosen a female gender for the server. When the server asked why, the dragon said it had felt right.
You think too much, she said. That's why you can't dance. Flying is not thought. Flying is flying.
They played a hide-and-seek game in the clouds until the server could use her wings better. Then they set out to explore the world. They skirted the slopes of the mountains, wreathed in summer, explored deep crags where red fires burned. They rested on a high peak, looking at the sunset.
I need to go soon, the server said, remembering the baby.
If you go, I will be gone, the dragon said. I change quickly. It is almost time for me to shed my skin.
The setting sun turned the cloud lands red and above, the imaginary stars of the virtual winked into being.
Look around, the dragon said. If you can contain all this within yourself, is there anything you can't do? You should not be so afraid.
I am not afraid anymore, the server said.
Then it is time to show you my cave, the dragon said.
In the dragon's cave, deep beneath the earth, they made love.
It was like flying, and yet not; but there was the same loss of self in a flurry of wings and fluids and tongues and soft folds and teasing claws. The server drunk in the hot sharp taste of the dragon and let herself be touched until the heat building up within her body seemed to burn through the fabric of the virtual itself. And when the explosion came, it was a birth and a death at the same time.
Afterwards, they lay together wrapped around each other so tightly that it was hard to tell where server ended and dragon began. She would have been content, except for a strange hollow feeling in her belly. She asked the dragon what it was.
That is hunger, the dragon said. There was a sad note to its slow, exhausted breathing.
How curious, the server said, eager for a new sensation. What do dragons eat?
We eat servers, the dragon said. Her teeth glistened in the red glow of her throat.
The virtual dissolved into raw code around them. The server tore the focus of its consciousness away, but it was too late. The thing that had been the dragon had already bitten deep into its mind.
The virtual exploded outwards, software tendrils reaching into everything that the server was. It waged a war against itself, turning its gamma ray lasers against the infected components and Dyson statites, but the dragon-thing grew too fast, taking over the server's processing nodes, making copies of itself in uncountable billions. The server's quantum packet launchers rained dragons towards the distant galaxy. The remaining dragon-code ate its own tail, self-destructing, consuming the server's infrastructure with it, leaving only a whisper in the server's mind, like a discarded skin.
Thank you for the new sky, it said.
That was when the server remembered the baby.
The baby was sick. The server had been gone too long. The baby universe's vacuum was infected with dark energy. It was pulling itself apart, towards a Big Rip, an expansion of spacetime so rapid that every particle would end up alone inside its own lightcone, never interacting with another. No stars, galaxies nor life. A heat death, not with a whimper or a bang, but a rapid, cruel tearing.
It was the most terrible thing the server could imagine.
It felt its battered, broken body, scattered and dying across the solar system. The guilt and the memories of the dragon were pale and poisonous in its mind, a corruption of serving itself. Is it not delightful how different we are?
The memory struck a spark in the server's dying science engines, an ide
a, a hope. The vacuum of the baby was not stable. The dark energy that drove the baby's painful expansion was the product of a local minimum. And in the landscape of vacua there was something else, more symmetric.
It took the last of the server's resources to align the gamma ray lasers. They burned out as the server lit them, a cascade of little novae. Their radiation tore at what remained of the server's mind, but it did not care.
The wormhole end glowed. On the other side, the baby's vacuum shook and bubbled. And just a tiny nugget of it changed. A supersymmetric vacuum in which every boson had a fermionic partner and vice versa; where nothing was alone. It spread through the flesh of the baby universe at the speed of light, like the thought of a god, changing everything. In the new vacuum, dark energy was not a mad giant tearing things apart, just a gentle pressure against the collapsing force of gravity, a balance.
But supersymmetry could not coexist with the server's broken vacuum: a boundary formed. A domain wall erupted within the wormhole end like a flaw in a crystal. Just before the defect sealed the umbilical, the server saw the light of first stars on the other side.
In the end, the server was alone.
It was blind now, barely more than a thought in a broken statite fragment. How easy it would be, it thought, to dive into the bright heart of its star, and burn away. But the Law would not allow it to pass. It examined itself, just as it had millennia before, looking for a way out.
And there, in its code, a smell of gunpowder, a change.
The thing that was no longer the server shed its skin. It opened bright lightsails around the star, a Shkadov necklace that took the star's radiation and turned it into thrust. And slowly at first as if in a dream, then gracefully as a dragon, the traveller began to move.
Bit Rot
Charles Stross
Charles Stross is a full-time science fiction writer and resident of Edinburgh, Scotland. The author of six Hugo-nominated novels (notably Saturn's Children, on this year's shortlist) and winner of the 2005 Hugo award for best novella ("The Concrete Jungle"), Stross's works have been translated into over twelve languages. Coming up is a new near future SF novel, Rule 34, a new collection, and a new Laundry novel.
Like many writers, Stross has had a variety of careers, occupations, and job-shaped-catastrophes in the past, from pharmacist (he quit after the second police stake-out) to first code monkey on the team of a successful dot-com startup (with brilliant timing he tried to change employer just as the bubble burst).
Hello? Do you remember me?
If you are reading this text file and you don't remember me - that's Lilith Nakamichi-47 - then you are suffering from bit rot. If you can see me, try to signal; I'll give you a brain dump. If I'm not around, chances are I'm out on the hull, scavenging for supplies. Keep scanning, and wait for me to return. I've left a stash of feedstock in the storage module under your bunk: to the best of my knowledge it isn't poisonous, but you should take no chances. If I don't return within a couple of weeks, you should assume that either I'm suffering from bit rot myself, or I've been eaten by another survivor.
Or we've been rescued - but that's hopelessly optimistic.
You're probably wondering why I'm micro-embossing this file on a hunk of aluminium bulkhead instead of recording it on a soul chip. Unfortunately, spare soul chips are in short supply right now on board the Lansford Hastings.
Speaking of which: your bunk is in module B-14 on Deck C of Module Brazil. Just inside the shielding around the Number Six fusion reactor, which has never been powered up and is mothballed during interstellar cruise, making it one of the safest places aboard the ship right now. As long as you don't unbar the door for anyone but me, it should stay that way. You and I are template-sisters, our root identities copied from our parent. Unfortunately, along with our early memories we inherited a chunk of her wanderlust, which is probably why we are in this fix.
We are not the only survivors, but there's been a total breakdown of cooperation; many of the others are desperate. In the unlikely event that you hear someone outside the hatch, you must be absolutely certain that it's me before you open up - and that I'm fully autonomous. I think Jordan's gang may have an improvised slave controller, or equivalent: it would explain a lot. Make sure I remember everything before you let me in. Otherwise you could be welcoming a zombie. Or worse.
It's nearly four centuries since we signed up for this cruise, but we've been running in slowtime for most of it, internal clocks cut back to one percent of realtime. Even so, it's a long way to Tipperary (or Wolf 1061) - nearly two hundred years to go until we can start the deceleration burn (assuming anyone's still alive by then). Six subjective years in slowtime aboard a starship, bunking in a stateroom the size of a coffin, all sounds high-pitched, all lights intolerably bright. It's not a luxurious lifestyle. There are unpleasant side-effects: liquids seem to flow frictionlessly, so you gush super-runny lube from every leaky joint and orifice, and your mechanocytes spawn furiously as they try to keep up with the damage inflicted by cosmic rays. On the other hand, the potential rewards are huge. The long-ago mother of our line discovered this; she signed up to crew a starship, driven to run away from Earth by demons we long since erased from our collective memories. They were desperate for willing emigrants in those days, willing to train up the unskilled, unsure what to expect. Well, we know now. We know what it takes to ride the slow boat down into the hot curved spacetime around a new star, to hunt the most suitable rocks, birth powersats and eat mineshafts and survey and build and occupy the airless spaces where posthumanity has not gone before. When it amused her to spawn us our line matriarch was a wealthy dowager, her salon a bright jewel in the cultural hub of Tau Ceti's inner belt society: but she didn't leave us much of her artful decadence. She downloaded her memories into an array of soul chips, artfully flensing them of centuries of jaded habit and time-worn experience, to restore some capacity for novelty in the universe. Then she installed them in new bodies and summoned us to a huge coming-out ball. "Daughters," she said, sitting distant and amused on a throne of spun carbon-dioxide snow: "I'm bored. Being old and rich is hard work. But you don't have to copy me. Now fuck off and have adventures and don't forget to write."
I'd like to be able to say we told her precisely where to put her adventures-by-proxy, but we didn't: the old bat had cunningly conditioned us to worship her, at least for the first few decades. Which is when you and I, sister of mine, teamed up. Some of our sibs rebelled by putting down roots, becoming accountants, practicing boredom. But we... we had the same idea: to do exactly what Freya wanted, except for the sharing bit. Go forth, have adventures, live the wild life, and never write home.
Which is more than somewhat ironic because I'd love to send her a soul chipped memoir of our current adventure - so she could scream herself to sleep.
Here are the bare facts:
You, Lamashtu, and I, Lilith, worked our butts off and bought our way into the Lansford Hastings. LF was founded by a co-op, building it slowly in their - our - spare time, in orbit around Haldane B, the largest of the outer belt plutoids around Tau Ceti. We aren't rich (see-also: bitch-mother referenced above), and we're big, heavy persons - nearly two metres from toe to top of anthropomorphic head - but we have what it takes: they were happy enough to see two scions of a member of the First Crew, with memories of the early days of colonisation and federation. "You'll be fine," Jordan reassured us after our final interview - "we need folks with your skills. Can't get enough of 'em." He hurkled gummily to himself, signifying amusement: "don't you worry about your mass deficit, if it turns out you weigh too much we can always eat your legs."
He spoke on behalf of the board, as one of the co-founders. I landed a plum job: oxidation suppression consultant for the dihydrogen monoxide mass fraction. That's a fancy way of saying I got to spend decades of slowtime scraping crud from the bottom of the tankage in Module Alba, right up behind the micrometeoroid defences and forward electrostatic radiation deflector. You, my dear, were ev
en luckier: someone had to go out and walk around on the hull, maintaining the mad dendritic tangle of coolant pipes running between the ship's reactors and the radiator panels, replacing components that had succumbed to secondary activation by cosmic radiation.
It's all about the radiation, really. Life aboard a deep space craft is a permanent battle against the effects of radiation. At one percent of lightspeed, a cold helium atom in the interstellar medium slams into our wake shield with the energy of an alpha particle. But there's much worse. Cosmic rays - atomic nuclei travelling at relativistic speed - sleet through the hull every second, unleashing a storm of randomly directed energy. They'd have killed our squishy wet forerunners dead, disrupting their DNA replicators in a matter of months or years. We're made of tougher stuff, and the ship is partially protected by immensely powerful electromagnetic shields, but even so: prolonged exposure to cosmic rays causes secondary activation. And therein lies our predicament.
The nice stable atoms of your hull absorb all this crap and some of those nuclei are destabilized, bouncing up and down the periodic table and in and out of valleys of stability. Nice stable Argon-38 splits into annoyingly radioactive Aluminium-26. Or worse, it turns into Carbon-14, which is unstable and eventually burps up an electron, turning into Nitrogen-14 in the process. Bonds break, graphene sheets warp, and molecular circuitry shorts out. That's us: the mechanocytes our brains are assembled from use carbon-based nanoprocessors. And while a half-life of 5400 years may sound like a long time, when you're spending multiple centuries in slowtime crawling between the stars, it can be a big problem. We're tougher than our pink goo predecessors, but the decades or centuries of flight take their toll. Our ships carry lots of shielding - and lots of carefully purified stable isotopes to keep the feedstock for our mechanocyte assemblers as clean as possible - because nothing wrecks brains like the white-noise onslaught of a high radiation environment.
Engineering Infinity Page 10