by John Meaney
Maybe more.
She laughed at her own greed.
From among all the Luculenti she had dealt with in the past, she chose the top eight, ranked according to another algorithm devised on the spot. All of them were highly ranked, successful in business and in learning; all lived in Lucis City or the environs; and all were here on Fulgor right now.
Yes. Do it.
Rafaella loosed her code.
In Lucis City, Chen Hu-Seng stopped what he was doing to gape at the shocking intrusion in his mind. Two kilometres away, Dianne O’Mara dropped five simultaneous corporate takeovers in mid-transaction, then severed all links in Skein - all save the one she could not close, the ultra-high-bandwidth channel linking her to Rafaella Stargonier.
Arne Svenson suddenly fell as he was demonstrating a somersault to his gymnastics class. Typically he composed poetry in three simultaneous languages while he taught them tumbling skills. His attention was already engaged fully; when Rafaella snapped her link into him, he was done for.
Stephanie Argentum and Yukiko Kaku were in the same physical room, checking over the suborbital flyer Yukiko had designed for aurora research over the south pole. They jerked, stared at each other, then fell, their plexwebs already overwhelmed by vampire code.
Dev Boaz was arching back in orgasm when the code struck. His non-Luculenta partner whimpered at the unexpected strength of her own climax. But Dev continued to shudder and moan before giving a final exhalation, then slumping.
And then the woman was screaming, as her world turned awful.
Scott Talwin was in contemplation, kneeling in seiza, buttocks on heels. His consciousness roamed through abstract mathematical spaces, exploring theorems in social topopsychology, the emergent laws that governed thinking driven by the spatial relationships of real and virtual cultural settings.
His model predicted increasing behavioural flexibility from a certain segment of the population who were most comfortable with the latest morphing architecture, driven by the quickglass floating cities of Molsin, now increasingly popular on Fulgor. So far the data matched his predictive model.
At the edge of his awareness was a hint of—
No!
—darkness, pain and chaos magnifying to total agony.
Then death.
While all this was happening, Hailey Recht, the final chosen victim, was fighting back.
She was a Skein designer, an associate of the Via Lucis Institute who knew the LuxPrime protocols - even the ultra-secure financial interface, the bedrock of all transactions, each amount a vector in multidimensional space. All parts of her conscious, subconscious and superconscious minds were in alignment, like a fully committed athlete with exact technique. She braced herself against the attack, holding back the ravening code.
Furiously, she worked in Skein. The virtual world depended on a physical substrate of a trillion billion processors across the face of Fulgor: inlaid in quickglass walls and quickstone floors, every smart artefact sharing its power. If Skein was an ocean of computation, then Hailey Recht was a dolphin, a virtuoso.
Suddenly she was blinded. Rafaella’s code - already Hailey knew the identity of her attacker - slammed through every plexweb portal, cutting her off from Skein. This was devastating, but not the end. She was still a code designer extraordinaire; and she retained the computational arena that was her own mind.
Milliseconds passed.
Still she fought, for an entire tenth of a second. And kept on fighting.
Half a second elapsed.
By now she had pushed back the advance but the bulwarks were straining, and it was hard to keep shoring up the barriers. The vampire code grew stronger and smarter by the picosecond. She was going to die. Reaching out in the physical world, desperate to write Rafaella Stargonier’s name, she trembled and—
Two seconds.
—fell back, eyes rolling up, and her corpse slumped.
Now, on the floor in Mansion Stargonier, Rafaella truly writhed and howled, filled with painful joy, the torture of ecstasy, memories and awareness of eight more minds - such superb minds - torn apart and blended with her own dark core, her intentions strengthening with every second, her evolving self faster and more powerful.
Call her Rafaella; call her human. These are approximately true. Labels attach to referents more complex than the words.
Reality changes.
The part of her that was Rafael flowed like howling blood throughout her; the part that had been Rashella added pitiless ambition; while the part that once was Hailey Recht remembered expertise the others never dreamed of, a mastery of Skein.
Powerful and different, vastly complex, there was only one simple categorisation that applied to the emergent gestalt.
She/it was a predator.
TWENTY-TWO
LUNA, 502013 AD
Gavriela slept, and stared at her surroundings: a high-sided hall, a glistening table surrounded by high-backed chairs . . . and two beings of living crystal, a woman and a man, watching her.
—I’ve dreamed of you before.
The woman’s smile was a gleam of fluid transparency.
—Welcome back, Gavriela.
—And your name is Kenna. I recall.
Then she re-examined the hall, while tuning in to the feelings of her own crystalline body, noting the lack of breathing.
—We’re in a vacuum?
—On your Earth’s moon. Of course.
The other being was a man, lean and muscular, a scar along one crystal cheek.
—I don’t recall you, I’m sorry. I’m Gavriela.
—My name is Ulfr, good lady. So you are a warrior?
—I hardly think so.
She was asleep somewhere, and yet this was real.
—Not somewhere, somewhen. Half a million years ago.
Could Kenna read her mind?
—No, but I understand what you need me to understand.
All of this was impossible; yet all of it contained an immediacy, a heightening of every sensation that told her it was happening.
—I’d forgotten my previous time here. Will I remember this one?
—Perhaps, but the part of your mind engaging in this conversation is not the part that controls your most conscious waking thoughts.
—Could you explain that more fully?
—Wait. We’re not all here yet. Ah . . .
The vacuum shimmered as if refracting light, rainbow spectra washed and flowed, and for a second Gavriela thought she saw two outlines, one of them odd - antlers? - then the other solidified into a crystalline man while the first was gone.
—Roger ?
—Gavriela?
Kenna stepped between them, reflections sliding across her body, looking from one to the other.
—You’ve interacted directly already? This is a good sign, my friends. And our comrade here is Ulfr, a warrior.
Roger held out his fist; Ulfr grasped his crystal forearm. Roger understood, and returned the clasp. Then he turned to Kenna.
—How can we be here now, and yet alive in the past?
To Gavriela this was impossible, despite her acceptance of the situation.
—Can our timelines criss-cross without paradox? I can’t see how.
It seemed obvious that if they communicated across time and remembered in the past, any number of paradoxes became enabled.
—Our meetings here will always occur in the same sequential order, as experienced by each of us individually. Call it a form of temporal tensegrity.
Roger was nodding, but Gavriela did not quite understand.
—I don’t . . .
—It’s a concept that will make sense in your personal future, else the thought would not have resonated at all.
That sounded like a paradox, except that their communication was not via sound; but Gavriela noticed how Ulfr had made a sign with his fist. Suddenly it came to her that Ulfr understood the words via his own frame of reference, using concepts that she would consider superstit
ious - because that gesture was to ward off evil, she was sure of it.
None of her own reactions were making sense. Why wasn’t she panicking, filled with hysteria?
Then Kenna added:
—No one in your lifetime will discover a basic equation that distinguishes future from past. Only the qualified generalisation you call the second law of thermodynamics even attempts the task, and it is not fundamental. There is no such thing as a closed system.
Gavriela blinked her transparent eyelids. For sure, if you described a particle’s motion via an equation, whether in mechanics or electromagnetism - such as a billiard ball floating through space - and then replaced t with minus t, you now had a picture of the same thing moving backwards, with time (or maybe just electric charge) reversed. The new situation would not appear to violate any physical laws; it would just run backwards. So the basic equations did not explain why you cannot unbreak an egg or grow younger by the day.
Roger touched Gavriela’s shoulder, and there was a spark of light, perhaps some odd reflection of the hall’s illumination.
—Don’t worry, I don’t understand either. And I’m alive much later than . . . Kenna, how can I know this? My life is centuries later than Gavi’s.
—You have good intuition.
—Is that an answer?
—It’s deeper than you think.
Gavriela looked at Ulfr. Clearly the warrior was content to stand apart from the conversation for now. Perhaps he considered it the realm of wizardry.
—Our brains are centuries in the past, yet we’re interacting with here and now. Is that what you’re saying?
—Partly, for sure.
—Therefore information is propagating backwards in time.
Kenna smiled at her and Roger.
—In terms that are common to both of you . . . If you stare at a star that is a hundred lightyears away, how long has that photon been travelling?
—A century, of course.
—And how much time has elapsed as far as the photon is concerned?
Gavriela checked for Roger’s reaction, but it was no more than a raised transparent eyebrow. Perhaps the new relativity of her time remained intact for Roger’s generation.
—No time at all.
—All that energy in the universe, more than the so-called matter, and it comprises splinters of timeless space. A photon is born and dies, travels perhaps across the universe, yet the duration of its life is zero.
That was what the equations said. Gavriela did not expect to understand the concepts intuitively, for she was a human being exploring realms beyond the macroscopic world, beyond the environment humanity evolved to cope with.
—How does that account for what we’re experiencing?
—It doesn’t, but symmetry is one of the most powerful concepts of all. Consider this possibility: splinters of spaceless time, orthogonal to photons. Call them orthons for now.
Gavriela shook her head, trying to incorporate the concept in her understanding.
—I need to think about it.
—That’s one way of formulating our interaction. At least part of it. Enough to work with for the time being.
Roger smiled. Perhaps there was more subtle humour here than Gavriela recognized. Or perhaps it was his different knowledge of physics that made his comprehension more sophisticated. If only she could learn from him!
Then her fear of paradox returned.
—We’re doing something dangerous here, aren’t we?
—Yes.
This seemed to be what Ulfr was waiting for.
—So what is our plan of battle, Lady Kenna?
—We devise a campaign, a war, not a single conflict . . . whatever it may boil down to in the final days. Have you identified the enemy?
Gavriela shared glances with Roger and Ulfr.
—Those touched by darkness?
—That’s part of it.
Kenna waved towards the table, but it was not an invitation to sit.
—We will share knowledge and strength, remembering some consciously. Our first task is to observe, to identify the enemy truly.
Ulfr was looking at the spears upon the walls.
—And then we fight.
This was scaring Gavriela. However much she accepted what was occurring, she was no fighter, and talk of warfare made her sick. Then she realized that Roger must feel the same way, as he asked:
—How? And what for?
But Kenna’s answer was directed more towards Ulfr.
—First we observe, then we deduce the enemy’s intentions.
Ulfr bowed his head.
—You speak wisdom, Lady Kenna.
Roger was looking at Gavriela, and she felt sure his thoughts followed hers. Of the three of them, it was this Ulfr who most closely accepted what Kenna was saying, and was most closely in tune with her intentions. Gavriela and Roger’s sophisticated understanding counted for little.
Perhaps Kenna sensed the same thing.
—We are all important. Every one of us.
—Are we?
—Immensely more than you think, good Gavriela. Immensely more.
Roger raised his crystal hands.
—So what do we do now?
—Why . . .
Kenna’s smile was a rainbow sculpture.
—You wake up, of course.
It was ended.
TWENTY-THREE
FULGOR, 2603 AD
In their quickglass bubble-capsule, they moved along a low Fulgor orbit - the planet fat and full, creamy-looking below them - heading for the apex of Barleysugar Spiral. Roger was lost in strange recollections of dreaming in Labyrinth, wondering whether the shock of being in another universe had done strange things to his brain, to his subconscious mind.
Mum kept her voice low as she talked to Dad.
‘Varlan didn’t want us to hang around, did he?’
‘Probably Helena was giving him a hard time.’
‘So when you and Varlan talked in private . . . Was there anything Roger and I should know?’
‘No. Maybe.’
He looked bereft. For a moment, Roger came out of his reverie, wondering how Dad could bear to part from his ship and return to his quotidian existence down below, to his life that was one long acting performance.
After leaving the ship wearing quickglass suits as before, they had jetted to Varlan Trelayne’s orbital, where Varlan was quiet and his wife Helena once more did not appear. Meanwhile Dad’s ship returned to mu-space, to do whatever it did while waiting for his call.
‘Xavier Spalding is an interesting character,’ said Dad finally. ‘And some of his merchandise could be classified as weapon systems, in the right context on the right world.’
Roger pulled himself into the conversation.
‘You’re saying Alisha’s father is an arms dealer?’
‘That’s exaggerating Varlan’s findings. Let’s say he has more clout and more connections with interesting parts of society than you’d expect, given his respectability.’
Then Dad’s expression compressed with concentration, his gaze defocusing. An incoming private call. His throat moved with subvocalized speech. Then he spoke aloud.
‘Since this affects my family, I want them in on this.’
A real-image holo sharpened before them: the shaven head of Xavier Spalding.
‘That’s fine. If Alisha were at risk, I’d forgo all other considerations.’
‘I’m not clear what you’re offering, or the price.’
‘Future friendship is enough.’
‘That’s not specific, but anyway, in return for what?’
‘There have been certain serious crimes among Luculenti recently. Nothing made public.’
‘And you think I’m involved?’
‘If you were, Carl, I wouldn’t be warning you.’
‘Warning me about what?’