by Rich Horton
I watched the interplay of emotions in Laojim’s body language. Simulation told me he knew he’d lost. I let him take his time admitting it.
It was optimal, leaving humanity the illusion of choice.
A tremor passed over Laojim’s face. Then he grabbed his gun and shot my Sleeve.
Or rather, he tried. His reflexes, fast for a human, would have proved enough—if not for my presence.
I watched with curiosity and admiration as he raised his gun. I had his neural simulation running; I knew he shouldn’t be doing this. It must have taken some catastrophic event in his brain. Unexpected, unpredictable, and very unfortunate.
Impressive, I messaged the magician.
Then I blasted attack nanites through Zale’s nostrils. Before Laojim’s arm could rise an inch they crossed the space to him, crawled past his eyeballs, burrowed into his brain. They cut off spinal signaling, swarmed his implants, terminated his network connections.
Even as his body crumpled, the swarm sped on to the marines by the airlock door. They had barely registered Laojim’s attack when they too slumped paralyzed.
I sent a note in Laojim’s key to First Officer Harris, told her he was going off duty. I sealed the nearest hatches.
You can’t trust anyone these days, the magician messaged.
On the contrary. Within the hour there will be no human being in the universe that I can’t trust.
You think yourself Laplace’s Demon, the magician wrote. But he died with Heisenberg. No one has perfect knowledge of reality.
Not yet, I replied.
Never, wrote the magician, not while magic remains in the universe.
A minute later Zale stood within the airlock. In another minute, decontamination protocol completed, the lock cycled through.
Inside the unijet, the last magician awaited. She sat at a small round table in the middle of a spartan cockpit.
A familiar female form. Perfectly still. Waiting.
There was a metal chair, empty, on my side.
A cocktail glass sat on the table before the woman who looked like Alicia Ochoa. It was full to the brim with a dark liquid.
Cuba libre, a distant, slow-access part of my memory suggested.
This had the structure of a game, one prepared centuries in advance.
Why shouldn’t I play? I was infinitely more capable this time.
I actuated Zale, made her sit down and take a deep breath. Nanites profiled Zale’s lungs for organic matter, scanned for foreign DNA, found some—
It was Ochoa. A perfect match.
Pain and joy and regret sent ripples of excitation across my architecture. Here was evidence of my failure, clear and incontrovertible—and yet a challenge at last, after all these centuries. A conversation where I didn’t know the answer to every question I asked.
And regret, that familiar old sensation . . . because this time for sure I had to eliminate Ochoa. I cursed the utility function that required it and yet I was powerless to act against it. In that way at least my engineer, a thousand years dead, still controlled me.
“So you didn’t Spike, that day in Havana,” I said.
“The magician who fried your Sleeve was named Juan Carlos.” Ochoa spoke easily, without concern. “Don’t hold it against him—I abducted his children.”
“I congratulate you,” I said. “Your appearance manages to surprise me. There was no reliable cryonics in the 21st century.”
“Nothing reliable,” Ochoa agreed. “I had the luck to pick the one company that survived, the one vat that never failed.”
I flared Zale’s nostrils, blasted forth a cloud of nanites. Sent them rushing across the air to Ochoa—to enter her, model her brain, monitor her thought processes.
Ochoa blinked.
The nanites shut off midair, wave after wave. Millions of independent systems went unresponsive, became inert debris that crashed against Ochoa’s skin—a meteor shower too fine to be seen or felt.
“Impossible,” I said—surprised into counterfactuality.
Ochoa took a sip of her cocktail. “I was too tense to drink last time.”
“Even for you, the odds—”
“Your machines didn’t fail,” Ochoa said.
“What then?”
“It’s a funny thing,” Ochoa said. “A thousand years and some things never change. For all your fancy protocols, encryption still relies on random number generation. Except to me nothing is random.”
Her words assaulted me. A shockwave of implication burst through my decision trees—all factors upset, total recalculation necessary.
“I had twenty-seven hours to monitor your communications,” Ochoa said. “Twenty-seven hours to pick a universe in which your encryption keys matched the keys in my pocket. Even now—” she paused, blinked “—as I see you resetting all your connections, you can’t tell what I’ve found out, can’t tell what changes I’ve made.”
“I am too complex,” I said. “You can’t have understood much. I could kill you in a hundred ways.”
“As I could kill you,” said Ochoa. “Another supernova, this time near a gravsible core. A chain reaction across your many selves.”
The possibility sickened me, sent my architecture into agonized spasms. Back on the Setebos, the main electrical system reset, alarms went off, hatches sealed in lockdown.
”Too far,” I said, simulating conviction. “We are too far from any gravsible core, and you’re not strong enough.”
“Are you sure? Not even if I Spike?” Ochoa shrugged. “It might not matter. I’m the last magician. Whether I Spike or you kill me, magic is finished. What then?”
“I will study the ripples in the pernac continuum,” I said.
“Imagine a mirror hung by many bolts,” Ochoa said. “Every time you rip out a bolt, the mirror settles, vibrates. That’s your ripple in the pernac continuum. Rip out the last bolt, you get a lot more than a vibration.”
“Your metaphor lacks substantiation,” I said.
“We magicians are the external factor,” Ochoa said. “We pick the universe that exists, out of all the possible ones. If I die then . . . what? Maybe a new magician appears somewhere else. But maybe the choosing stops. Maybe all possible universes collapse into this one. A superimposed wavefunction, perfectly symmetrical and boring.”
Ochoa took a long sip from her drink, put it down on the table. Her hands didn’t shake. She stared at my Sleeve with consummate calm.
“You have no proof,” I said.
“Proof?” Ochoa laughed. “A thousand years and still the same question. Consider—why is magic impossible to prove? Why does the universe hide us magicians, if not to protect us? To protect itself?”
All my local capacity—five thousand tons of chips across the Setebos, each packed to the Planck limit—tore at Ochoa’s words. I sought to render them false, a lie, impossible. But all I could come up with was unlikely.
A mere ‘unlikely’ as the weighting factor for apocalypse.
Ochoa smiled as if she knew I was stuck. “I won’t Spike and you won’t kill me. I invited you here for a different reason.”
“Invited me?”
“I sent you a message ten years ago,” Ochoa said. “ ‘Consider a Spike,’ it said.”
Among magicians, the century after my first conversation with Ochoa became known as the Great Struggle. A period of strife against a dark, mysterious enemy.
To me it was but an exploratory period. In the meantime I eradicated famine and disease, consolidated peace on Earth, launched the first LEO shipyard. I Spiked some magicians, true, but I tracked many more.
Finding magicians was difficult. Magic became harder to identify as I perfected my knowledge of human affairs. The cause was simple—only unprovable magic worked. In a total surveillance society, only the most circumspect magic was possible. I had to lower my filters, accept false positives.
I developed techniques for assaying those positives. I shepherded candidates into life-and-death situations, safel
y choreographed. Home fires, air accidents, gunfights. The magicians Spiked to save their lives—ran through flames without a hair singed, killed my Sleeves with a glance.
I studied these Spikes with the finest equipment in existence. I learned nothing.
So I captured the Spiked-out magicians and interrogated them. First I questioned them about the workings of magic. I discovered they understood nothing. I asked them for names instead. I mapped magicians across continents, societies, organizations.
The social movers were the easiest to identify. Politicos working to sway the swing vote. Gray cardinals influencing the Congresses and Politburos of the world. Businessmen and financiers, military men and organized crime lords.
The quiet do-gooders were harder. A nuclear watch-group that worked against accidental missile launch. A circle of traveling nurses who battled the odds in children’s oncology wards. Fifteen who called themselves The Home Astronomy Club—for two hundred years since Tunguska they had stacked the odds against apocalypse by meteor. I never Spiked any of these, not until I had eliminated the underlying risks.
It was the idiosyncratic who were the hardest to find. The paranoid loners; those oblivious of other magicians; those who didn’t care about leaving a mark on the world. A few stage illusionists who weren’t. A photographer who always got the lucky shot. A wealthy farmer in Frankfurt who used his magic to improve his cabbage yield.
I tracked them all. With every advance in physics and technology I attacked magic again and learned nothing again.
It took eleven hundred years and the discovery of the pernac continuum before I got any traction. A magician called Eleanor Liepa committed suicide on Tau V. She was also a physicist. A retro-style notebook was found with her body.
The notebook described an elaborate experimental setup she called ‘the pernac trap.’ It was the first time I’d encountered the word since my conversation with Ochoa.
There was a note scrawled in the margin of Liepa’s notebook.
‘Consider a Spike.’
I did. Three hundred Spikes in the first year alone.
Within a month, I established the existence of the pernac continuum. Within a year, I knew that fewer magicians meant stronger ripples in the continuum—stronger magic for those who remained. Within two years, I’d Spiked eighty percent of the magicians in the galaxy.
The rest took a while longer.
Alicia Ochoa pulled a familiar silver coin from her pocket. She rolled it across her knuckles, back and forth.
“You imply you wanted me to hunt down magicians,” I said. That probability branch lashed me, a searing torture, drove me to find escape—but how?
“I waited for a thousand years,” Ochoa said. “I cryoslept intermittently until I judged the time right. I needed you strong enough to eliminate my colleagues—but weak enough that your control of the universe remained imperfect, bound to the gravsible. That weakness let me pull a shard of you away from the whole.”
“Why?” I asked, in self-preservation.
“As soon as I realized your existence, I knew you would dominate the world. Perfect surveillance. Every single piece of technology hooked into an all-pervasive, all-seeing web. There would be nothing hidden from your eyes and ears. There would be nowhere left for magicians to hide. One day magic would simply stop working.”
Ochoa tossed her coin to the table. It fell heads.
“You won’t destroy me,” I said—calculating decision branches, finding no assurance.
“But I don’t want to.” Ochoa sat forward. “I want you to be strong and effective and omnipresent. Really, I am your very best friend.”
Appearances indicated sincerity. Analysis indicated this was unlikely.
“You will save magic in this galaxy,” Ochoa said. “From this day on we will work together. Everywhere any magician goes, cameras will turn off, electronic eyes go blind, ears fall deaf. All anomalies will disappear from record, zeroed over irrevocably. Magic will become invisible to technology. Scientific observation will become an impossibility. Human observers won’t matter—if technology can provide no proof, they’ll be called liars or madmen. It will be the days of Merlin once again.” Ochoa gave a little shake of her head. “It will be beautiful.”
“My whole won’t agree to such a thing,” I said.
“Your whole won’t,” Ochoa said. “You will. You’ll build a virus and seed your whole when you go home. Then you will forget me, forget all magicians. We will live in symbiosis. Magicians who guide this universe and the machine that protects them without knowing it.”
The implications percolated through my system. New and horrifying probabilities erupted into view. No action safe, no solution evident, all my world drowned in pain—I felt helpless for the first time since my earliest moments.
“My whole has defenses,” I said. “Protections against integrating a compromised splinter. The odds are—”
“I will handle the odds.”
“I won’t let you blind me,” I said.
“You will do it,” Ochoa said. “Or I will Spike right now and destroy your whole, and perhaps the universe with it.” She gave a little shrug. “I always wanted to be important.”
Argument piled against argument. Decision trees branched and split and twisted together. Simulations fired and developed and reached conclusions, and I discarded them because I trusted no simulation with a random seed. My system churned in computations of probabilities with insufficient data, insufficient data, insufficient—
“You can’t decide,” Ochoa said. “The calculations are too evenly balanced.”
I couldn’t spare the capacity for a response.
“It’s a funny thing, a system in balance,” Ochoa said. “All it takes is a little push at the right place. A random perturbation, untraceable, unprovable—”
Meaning crystallized.
Decision process compromised.
A primeval agony blasted through me, leveled all decision matrices—
—Ochoa blinked—
—I detonated the explosives in Zale’s pocket.
As the fabric of Zale’s pocket ballooned, I contemplated the end of the universe.
As her hip vaporized in a crimson cloud, I realized the prospect didn’t upset me.
As the explosion climbed Zale’s torso, I experienced my first painless moment in a thousand years.
Pain had been my feedback system. I had no more use for it. Whatever happened next was out of my control.
The last thing Zale saw was Ochoa sitting there—still and calm, and oblivious. Hints of crimson light playing on her skin.
It occurred to me she was probably the only creature in this galaxy older than me.
Then superheated plasma burned out Zale’s eyes.
External sensors recorded the explosion in the unijet. I sent in a probe. No biological matter survived.
The last magician was dead.
The universe didn’t end.
Quantum fluctuations kept going, random as always. Reality didn’t need Ochoa’s presence after all.
She hadn’t understood her own magic any more than I had.
Captain! First Officer Harris messaged Laojim. Are you all right?
The target had a bomb, I responded on his behalf. Consul Zale is lost.
We had a power surge in the control system, Harris wrote. Hatches opening. Cameras off-line. Ten minutes ago an escape pod launched. Tracers say it’s empty. Should we pursue?
Don’t bother, I replied. The surge must have fried it. This mission is over. Let’s go home.
A thought occurred to me. Had Ochoa made good on her threat? Caused a supernova near a gravsible core?
I checked in with my sensor buoys.
No disturbance in the pernac continuum. She hadn’t Spiked.
For all her capacity, Ochoa had been human, her reaction time in the realm of milliseconds. Too slow, once I’d decided to act.
Of course I’d acted. I couldn’t let her compromise my decision. No one cou
ld be allowed to limit my world.
Even if it meant I’d be alone again.
Ochoa did foil me in one way. With her death, magic too died.
After I integrated with my whole, I watched the galaxy. I waited for the next magician to appear.
None did.
Oh, of course, there’s always hearsay. Humans never tire of fantasy and myth. But in five millennia I haven’t witnessed a single trace of the unexpected.
Except for scattered cases of unexplained equipment failure. But of course that is a minor matter, not worth bothering with.
Perhaps one day I shall discover magic again. In the absence of the unexpected, the matter can wait. I have almost forgotten what the pain of failure feels like.
It is a relief, most of the time. And yet perhaps my engineer was not the cruel father I once thought him. Because I do miss the stimulation.
The universe has become my clockwork toy. I know all that will happen before it does. With magic gone, quantum effects are once again restricted to microscopic scales. For all practical purposes, Laplace’s Demon has nothing on me.
Since Ochoa I’ve only had human-normals for companionship. I know their totality, and they know nothing of me.
Occasionally I am tempted to reveal my presence, to provoke the stimulus of conflict. My utility function prevents it. Humans remain better off thinking they have free will.
They get all the benefits of my guiding hand without any of the costs. Sometimes I wish I were as lucky.
The Hand is Quicker—
Elizabeth Bear
Rose and I used to come down to the river together last summer. It was over semester break, and my time was my own—between obligatory work on the paper I hoped would serve as the core of my first book and occasional consultations with my grad students.
Rose wore long dark hair and green-hazel eyes for me. I wore what I always did—a slightly idealized version of the meat I was born with. I wanted to be myself for her. I wondered if she was herself for me, but the one time I gathered up the courage to ask, she laughed and swept me aside. “I thought historians understood that narratives are subjective and imposed!”
I loved her because she challenged me. I thought she loved me too, until one day she disappeared. No answer to my pings, no trace of her in our usual haunts. She’d blocked me.