‘cause it wasn’t worth dick. Thing is, the manufact’rer charged so much for parts, it was worth their while to buy whole machines’n’strip them. To bits. And sell the bits. Hell, they got an enterprise award for ingenuity! All ‘cause they knew that disassembly was the wave of the future.”
“What happened to the factory?” asks Donna, unable to tear her eyes away.
Glashwiecz waves an empty bottle at the starbow that stretches across the ceiling: “Ah, who gives a fuck?
They closedown round about” (hic) “ten years ‘go. Moore’s Law topped out, killed the market. But disassembly -
production line cannibalism – it’sa way to go. Take old assets an’ bring new life to them. A fully ‘preciated fortune.” He grins, eyes unfocussed with greed. “‘S’what I’m gonna do to those space lobsters. Learn to talk their language an’ll never know what hit ‘em.”
*
The tiny starship drifts in high orbit above a turbid brown soup of atmosphere. Deep in the gravity well of Hyundai +4904/-56, it’s a speck of dust trapped between two light sources: the brilliant sapphire stare of Amber’s propulsion lasers in Jovian orbit, and the emerald insanity of the router itself, a hypertoroid spun from strange matter.
The bridge of the Field Circus is in constant use at this time, a meeting ground for minds with access to the restricted areas. Pierre is spending more and more time here, finding it a convenient place to focus his trading campaign and arbitrage macros. At the same time that Donna is picking the multiplexed lawyer’s strategy apart, Pierre is present in neomorphic form – a quicksilver outline of humanity, six-armed and two-headed, scanning with inhuman speed through tensor maps of the information traffic density surrounding the router’s clump of naked singularities.
There’s a flicker in the emptiness at the rear of the bridge, then Su Ang has always been there. She watches Pierre in contemplative silence for a minute. “Do you have a moment?”
Pierre superimposes himself: One shadowy ghost keeps focused on the front panel, but another instance turns round, crosses his arms, waits for her to speak.
“I know you’re busy -” she begins, then stops. “Is it that important?” she asks.
“It is.” Pierre blurs, resynchronizing his instances. “The router – there are four wormholes leading off from it, did you know that? Each of them is radiating at about 1011 Kelvins, and every wavelength is carrying data connections, multiplexed, with a protocol stack that’s at least eleven layers deep but maybe more – they show signs of self-similarity in the framing headers. You know how much data that is? It’s about 1012 times as much as our high-bandwidth uplink from home. But compared to what’s on the other side of the ‘holes -” he shakes his head.
“It’s big?”
“It’s unimaginably big! These wormholes, they’re a low-bandwidth link compared to the minds they’re hooking up to.” He blurs in front of her, unable to stay still and unable to look away from the front panel.
Excitement or agitation? Su Ang can’t tell. With Pierre, sometimes the two states are indistinguishable. He gets emotional easily. “I think we have the outline of the answer to the Fermi paradox. Transcendents don’t go traveling because they can’t get enough bandwidth – trying to migrate through one of these wormholes would be like trying to download your mind into a fruit fly, if they are what I think they are – and the slower-than-light route is out, too, because they couldn’t take enough computronium along. Unless -”
He’s off again. But before he can blur out, Su Ang steps across and lays hands on him. “Pierre. Calm down.
Disengage. Empty yourself.”
“I can’t!” He really is agitated, she sees. “I’ve got to figure out the best trading strategy to get Amber off the hook with that lawsuit, then tell her to get us out of here; being this close to the router is seriously dangerous! The Wunch are the least of it.”
“Stop.”
He pauses his multiplicity of presences, converges on a single identity focused on the here and now. “Yes?”
“That’s better.” She walks round him, slowly. “You’ve got to learn to deal with stress more appropriately.”
“Stress!” Pierre snorts. He shrugs, an impressive gesture with three sets of shoulder blades. “That’s something I can turn off whenever I need to. Side effect of this existence; we’re pigs in cyberspace, wallowing in fleshy simulations, but unable to experience the new environment in the raw. What did you want from me, Ang?
Honestly? I’m a busy man, I’ve got a trading network to set up.”
“We’ve got a problem with the Wunch right now, even if you think something worse is out there,” Ang says patiently. “Boris thinks they’re parasites, negative-sum gamers who stalk newbies like us. Glashwiecz is apparently talking about cutting a deal with them. Amber’s suggestion is that you ignore them completely, cut them out, and talk to anyone else who’ll listen.”
“Anyone else who’ll listen, right,” Pierre says heavily. “Any other gems of wisdom to pass on from the throne?”
Ang takes a deep breath. He’s infuriating, she realizes. And worst of all, he doesn’t realize. Infuriating but cute. “You’re setting up a trading network, yes?” she asks.
“Yes. A standard network of independent companies, instantiated as cellular automata within the Ring Imperium switched legal service environment.” He relaxes slightly. “Each one has access to a compartmentalized chunk of intellectual property and can call on the corrected parser we got from that cat. They’re set up to communicate with a blackboard system – a souk – and I’m bringing up a link to the router, a multicast link that’ll broadcast the souk’s existence to anyone who’s listening. Trade…” his eyebrows furrow. “There are at least two different currency standards in this network, used to buy quality-of-service precedence and bandwidth. They depreciate with distance, as if the whole concept of money was invented to promote the development of long-range network links. If I can get in first, when Glashwiecz tries to cut in on the dealing by offering IP at discounted rates
– “
“He’s not going to, Pierre,” she says as gently as possible. “Listen to what I said: Glashwiecz is going to focus on the Wunch. He’s going to offer them a deal. Amber wants you to ignore them. Got that?”
“Got it.” There’s a hollow bong! from one of the communication bells. “Hey, that’s interesting.”
“What is?” She stretches, neck extending snakelike so that she can see the window on underlying reality that’s flickered into existence in the air before him.
“An ack from…” he pauses, then plucks a neatly reified concept from the screen in front of him and presents it to her in a silvery caul of light.”… about two hundred light-years away! Someone wants to talk.” He smiles. Then the front panel workstation bong’s again. “Hey again. I wonder what that says.”
It’s the work of a moment to pipe the second message through the translator. Oddly, it doesn’t translate at first. Pierre has to correct for some weird destructive interference in the fake lobster network before it’ll spill its guts. “That’s interesting,” he says.
“I’ll say.” Ang lets her neck collapse back to normal. “I’d better go tell Amber.”
“You do that,” Pierre says worriedly. He makes eye contact with her, but what she’s hoping to see in his face just isn’t there. He’s wearing his emotions entirely on the surface. “I’m not surprised their translator didn’t want to pass that message along.”
“It’s a deliberately corrupted grammar,” Ang murmurs, and bangs out in the direction of Amber’s audience chamber; “and they’re actually making threats.” The Wunch, it seems, have acquired a very bad reputation somewhere along the line – and Amber needs to know.
*
Glashwiecz leans toward Lobster Number One, stomach churning. It’s only a realtime kilosecond since his bar-room interview, but in the intervening subjective time, he’s abolished a hangover, honed his brief, and decided to act. In the Tuile
ries. “You’ve been lied to,” he confides quietly, trusting the privacy ackles that he browbeat Amber’s mother into giving him – access lists that give him a degree of control over the regime within this virtual universe that the cat dragged in.
“Lied? Context rendered horizontal in past, or subjected to grammatical corruption? Linguistic evil?”
“The latter.” Glashwiecz enjoys this, even though it forces him to get rather closer to the two-meter-long virtual crustacean than he’d like. Showing a mark how they’ve been scammed is always good, especially when you hold the keys to the door of the cage they’re locked inside. “They are not telling you the truth about this system.”
“We received assurances,” Lobster Number One says clearly. Its mouthparts move ceaselessly – the noise comes from somewhere inside its head. “You do not share this phenotype. Why?”
“That information will cost you,” says Glashwiecz. “I am willing to provide it on credit.”
They haggle briefly. An exchange rate in questions is agreed, as is a trust metric to grade the answers by.
“Disclose all,” insists the Wunch negotiator.
“There are multiple sentient species on the world we come from,” says the lawyer. “The form you wear belongs to only one – one that wanted to get away from the form I wear, the original conscious tool-creating species. Some of the species today are artificial, but all of us trade information for self-advantage.”
“This is good to know,” the lobster assures him. “We like to buy species.”
“You buy species?” Glashwiecz cocks his head.
“We have the unbearable yearning to be not-what-we-are,” says the lobster. “Novelty, surprise! Flesh rots and wood decays. We seek the new being-ness of aliens. Give us your somatotype, give us all your thoughts, and we will dream you over.”
“I think something might be arranged,” Glashwiecz concedes. “So you want to be – no, to lease the rights to temporarily be human? Why is that?”
“Untranslatable concept #3 means untranslatable concept #4. God told us to.”
“Okay, I think I’ll just have to take that on trust for now. What is your true form?” he asks.
“Wait and I show you,” says the lobster. It begins to shudder.
“What are you doing -”
“Wait.” The lobster twitches, writhing slightly, like a portly businessman adjusting his underwear after a heavy business lunch. Disturbing shapes move, barely visible through the thick chitinous armor. “We want your help,” the lobster explains, voice curiously muffled. “Want to establish direct trade links. Physical emissaries, yes?”
“Yes, that’s very good,” Glashwiecz agrees excitedly: It’s exactly what he’s hoped for, the sought-after competitive advantage that will prove his fitness in Amber’s designated trial by corporate combat. “You’re going to deal with us directly without using that shell interface?”
“Agreed.” The lobster trails off into muffled silence; little crunching noises trickle out of its carapace. Then Glashwiecz hears footsteps behind him on the gravel path.
“What are you doing here?” he demands, looking round. It’s Pierre, back in standard human form – a sword hangs from his belt, and there’s a big wheel-lock pistol in his hands. “Hey!”
“Step away from the alien, lawyer,” Pierre warns, raising the gun.
Glashwiecz glances back at Lobster Number One. It’s pulled its front inside the protective shell, and it’s writhing now, rocking from side to side alarmingly. Something inside the shell is turning black, acquiring depth and texture. “I stand on counsel’s privilege,” Glashwiecz insists. “Speaking as this alien’s attorney, I must protest in the strongest terms -”
Without warning, the lobster lurches forward and rises up on its rear legs. It reaches out with huge claws, chellipeds coated with spiny hairs, and grabs Glashwiecz by his arms. “Hey!”
Glashwiecz tries to turn away, but the lobster is already looming over him, maxillipeds and maxillae reaching out from its head. There’s a sickening crunch as one of his elbow joints crumbles, humerus shattered by the closing jaws of a chelliped. He draws breath to scream, then the four small maxillae grip his head and draw it down toward the churning mandibles.
Pierre scurries sideways, trying to find a line of fire on the lobster that doesn’t pass through the lawyer’s body. The lobster isn’t cooperating. It turns on the spot, clutching Glashwiecz’s convulsing body to itself. There’s a stench of shit, and blood is squirting from its mouthparts. Something is very wrong with the biophysics model here, the realism turned up way higher than normal.
“Merde,” whispers Pierre. He fumbles with the bulky trigger, and there’s a faint whirring sound but no explosion.
More wet crunching sounds follow as the lobster demolishes the lawyer’s face and swallows convulsively, sucking his head and shoulders all the way into its gastric mill.
Pierre glances at the heavy handgun. ” Shit!” he screams. He glances back at the lobster, then turns and runs for the nearest wall. There are other lobsters loose in the formal garden. ” Amber, emergency! ” he sends over their private channel. ” Hostiles in the Louvre! “
The lobster that’s taken Glashwiecz hunkers down over the body and quivers. Pierre desperately winds the spring on his gun, too rattled to check that it’s loaded. He glances back at the alien intruder. They’ve sprung the biophysics model, he sends. I could die in here, he realizes, momentarily shocked. This instance of me could die forever.
The lobster shell sitting in the pool of blood and human wreckage splits in two. A humanoid form begins to uncurl from within it, pale-skinned and glistening wet: vacant blue eyes flicker from side to side as it stretches and stands upright, wobbling uncertainty on its two unstable legs. Its mouth opens and a strange gobbling hiss comes forth.
Pierre recognizes her. “What are you doing here?” he yells.
The nude woman turns toward him. She’s the spitting image of Amber’s mother, except for the chellipeds she has in place of hands. She hisses ” Equity! ” and takes a wobbly step toward him, pincers clacking.
Pierre winds the firing handle again. There’s a crash of gunpowder and smoke, a blow that nearly sprains his elbow, and the nude woman’s chest erupts in a spray of blood. She snarls at him wordlessly and staggers – then ragged flaps of bloody meat close together, knitting shut with improbable speed. She resumes her advance.
“I told Amber the Matrix would be more defensible,” Pierre snarls, dropping the firearm and drawing his sword as the alien turns in his direction and raises arms that end in pincers. ” We need guns, damit! Lots of guns! “
“Waaant equity,” hisses the alien intruder.
“You can’t be Pamela Macx,” says Pierre, his back to the wall, keeping the sword point before the lobster-woman-thing. “She’s in a nunnery in Armenia or something. You pulled that out of Glashwiecz’s memories – he worked for her, didn’t he?”
Claws go snicker-snack before his face. “Investment partnership!” screeches the harridan. “Seat on the board! Eat brains for breakfast!” It lurches sideways, trying to get past his guard.
“I don’t fucking believe this,” Pierre snarls. The Wunch-creature jumps at just the wrong moment and slides onto the point of his blade, claws clacking hungrily. Pierre slides away, nearly leaving his skin on the rough bricks of the wall – and what’s good for one is good for all, as the hacked model in force in this reality compels the attacker to groan and collapse.
Pierre pulls the sword out then, nervously glancing over his shoulder, whacks at her neck. The impact jars his arm, but he keeps hacking until there’s blood spraying everywhere, blood on his shirt, blood on his sword, and a round thing sitting on a stump of savaged neck nearby, jaw working soundlessly in undeath.
He looks at it for a moment, then his stomach rebels and tries to empty itself into the mess. ” Where the hell is everybody?” he broadcasts on the private channel. ” Hostiles in the Louvre! “
He st
raightens up, gasping for breath. He feels alive, frightened and appalled and exhilarated simultaneously. The crackle of bursting shells on all sides drowns out the birdsong as the Wunch’s emissaries adopt a variety of new and supposedly more lethal forms. ” They don’t seem to be very clear on how to take over a simulation space,” he adds. ” Maybe we already are untranslatable concept number #1 as far as they’re concerned.”
” Don’t worry, I’ve cut off the incoming connection,” sends Su Ang. ” This is just a bridgehead force; the invasion packets are being filtered out.”
Blank-eyed men and women in dusty black uniforms are hatching from the lobster shells, stumbling and running around the grounds of the royal palace like confused Huguenot invaders.
Boris winks into reality behind Pierre. “Which way?” he demands, pulling out an anachronistic but lethal katana.
“Over here. Let’s work this together.” Pierre jacks his emotional damper up to a dangerously high setting, suppressing natural aversion reflexes and temporarily turning himself into a sociopathic killer. He stalks toward an infant lobster-thing with big black eyes and a covering of white hair that mewls at him from a rose bed, and Boris looks away while he kills it. Then one of the larger ones makes the mistake of lunging at Boris, and he chops at it reflexively.
Some of the Wunch try to fight back when Pierre and Boris try to kill them, but they’re handicapped by their anatomy, a curious mixture of crustacean and human, claw and mandible against sword and dagger. When they bleed the ground soaks with the cuprous hue of lobster juice.
“Let’s fork,” suggests Boris. “Get this over with.” Pierre nods, dully – everything around him is wrapped in a layer of don’t-care, except for a glowing dot of artificial hatred – and they fork, multiplying their state vectors to take full advantage of the virtualization facilities of this universe. There’s no need for reinforcements; the Wunch focused on attacking the biophysics model of the universe, making it mimic a physical reality as closely as possible, and paid no attention to learning the more intricate tactics that war in a virtual space permits.
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