The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction

by Ashley, Mike;

  After a while, Konstantin managed to nod. She wasn’t sure how long it had taken her to do that, but it felt as if it had been a very, very long time. Body Sativa didn’t seem to mind. However long something took here was how long it took.

  “Things that happen, happen. Some things cannot be breached under pain of the consequences of procedure that is . . . improper. It is a matter of finding the route. The connection. The connecting matter. Road? Bridge? Tunnel? Or Something Else?”

  Something Else was not exactly what Body Sativa had said, but it was the only thing that would come through Konstantin’s ear.

  She watched as Body Sativa spread her arms over the table, palms outward. It took another immeasurable period of time for Konstantin’s eyes to adjust, but when they did, she saw that the surface of the table was more like a large video screen, or telescopic window. Or, as was more likely in the land of the Ouroboros coin, both.

  Konstantin realized that whatever it was, she was looking at another aerial view of post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty, every square inch and pixel revealed. Eliot’s etherized patient after all, but prepared on the banquet table, not the operating table. The consumed and the consumers – it just depended what side of the table you were on . . . didn’t it?

  “Look deeper.”

  Her point-of-view seemed to fly out from her in the way she had heard out-of-body experiences described, though this was more matter-of-fact than filled with wonder. It zoomed down into the Sitty and the tiny, veinsized roadways grew into canyons, with cliff-faces made of mirrored glass and carved stone gargoyles, gables, spires, columns, pitted brick splattered with glitter that did not quite obscure the burn marks, the blasted places, the dirty words.

  Wreckage in the roadways ignited, the flames rising to form complex shapes, lattices, angles that opened and closed on each other, here and there icons, some of which she recognized. And in other places, ideograms.

  There they are, Iguchi, those special places they said you had to be Japanese to find, she thought. Maybe this means we’ve both turned Japanese. For my next magical trick, I will find the egress. The out door.

  As if in direct response, her pov flew straight toward a door, which opened at the last moment, admitting her into a splitsecond of darkness and then into a badly lit room where she saw the person strapped in the chair, sitting forward so that the straps pulled taut, but comfortably, in a way that supported more than restrained. The headmount moved slowly upward, the person raising her head to look up.

  It was too easy, though, too bizarrely . . . expectable, Konstantin thought. But then, it was just a story.

  Her nerves had become Holy Rollers. Just a story or not, she wasn’t ready to see this. Maybe she wasn’t Japanese enough.

  In the next moment, her pov had snapped back like a rubber band and she was looking across the table at Body Sativa again. The woman looked younger now, more like a girl than a grown woman. This post-Apocalyptic stuff was really something. No wonder so many people liked it. It was downright eerie. Like the story of the man who didn’t open his parachute in an AR skydive, or the kid who got his throat cut because he’d gotten his AR throat cut.

  Body Sativa seemed amused. “You have the coin. When you’re ready to come back, call it in the air.”

  It took an hour for Konstantin to open her mouth and say, “Wait!” Her voice sounded unpleasantly flat in her own ears. “Someone killed—”

  “Yes. Someone did. When you’re ready to know, call it in the air.”

  She was lying on her back on the road; Shantih Love was walking away, holding his/her sliced flesh together. But when s/ he turned around and looked back, the face was unmistakably the creature’s, the ridiculously bendered-out features of Miles Mank, still on a binge.

  “Endit,” Konstantin whispered, her voice still sounding funny to her. “Endit, exit, outa here.”

  She lay on her back for a very long time before she felt the road transmute into the chair with the restraints. Moving slowly, she undid the clasps on the headmount and was startled to feel someone helping her lift it off her head.

  Taliaferro stood over her with the headmount in his hands, which was even more startling, and perhaps the most impossible of everything she had seen. By way of explanation, he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a white plastic inhaler. “When I’ve got my anti-claustrophobia medicine, I can do anything.”

  “Words to live by,” Konstantin whispered. There seemed to be nothing more to her voice than a rough whisper. She looked past him, but there was no one in the doorway.

  “So, did you learn anything?” he asked her, sounding just slightly condescending. Perhaps that was a function of his medicine as well. She didn’t hold it against him.

  “Oh, yeah.” She slipped out of the restraints and went over to the wall to her left. The control that let down the chaise was just slightly below eye level for her. She hit it with the side of her hand and it swung out and down in a way that reminded her of the way kids might stick out their tongues. Nyah, nyah, nyah.

  “It was actually very simple,” she said wearily, “but Celestine and Di-Pietro weren’t thorough enough. The killer hid inside the Murphy style compartment, waited until Iguchi was all wrapped up in what he was doing, and then sliced him.” Nyah, nyah, nyah.

  Taliaferro was nonplussed. “You sure about that?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. It’s Occam’s Razor is what it is. The simplest explanation is the explanation.”

  “Any idea who might have been hiding in there with Occam’s Razor?”

  Her moment of hesitation was so short, she was sure that Taliaferro didn’t notice it, but at the same time, it was very long, incredibly, immeasurably long, of a duration that only Body Sativa could have understood and waited patiently enough for. “Yeah. It was Mank. He was bitter about not being the manager and not too stable. He frequented post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty on the generous employee discount enough times that he got a bad case of gameplayers’ psychosis. He was killing in there and it spilled over to killing out here.”

  “You sound awful sure about all that,” Taliaferro said doubtfully.

  “You’d have to go in and see it for yourself. There’s all kinds of – of stuff in there. Including memes for murder. Mank got one. Let’s grab him and see if we can have him all tucked in before Police Blotter does an update. I think there was a stringer following me around in there.”

  Taliaferro grunted, took a hit off his inhaler, and dropped it into his pocket. “Okay. I guess that’s it, then.”

  “Yeah,” Konstantin said. “That’s it.”

  “Okay,” he said again. Pause. “I’ll send someone back here with your clothes.”

  “Thanks.” But she was talking to the air. Taliaferro had run off. Apparently there was only so much an inhaler could do. There was only so much anything could do. Anything, or anyone. Even Occam’s Razor. But then, the murder weapon hadn’t been the same in the other seven murders anyway. No indeed. And Mank looked good for this one, she insisted to herself. He looked too good. The image of him in the Sitty was too identifiable not to be damning. The ego of the man, using his own face. Although that might be a more widespread practice than anyone realized.

  But could anything really be surprising in the land of anything goes, she thought. The fabled promised land of AR, where they had everything there was in realtime – including death – and more besides.

  If anything goes, then let anyone go as well. Mank looks good for it, and if the state can’t prove its case against him then it can’t. But let him be the one who goes this time. For now. Until – well, when?

  In her mind’s eye, she saw the image of the coin again, the loop of infinity on one side, Ouroboros on the other. Maybe until you were ready to know which came first when you called it in the air.

  THE LONG CHASE

  Geoffrey A. Landis

  Like Gregory Benford, Geoffrey Landis (b. 1955) is a sciencefiction writer who also gets his hands very dirty as a
practising scientist. He has worked for NASA and the Ohio Aerospace Institute and specializes in photovoltaics, which is all about harnessing the power of the Sun. He has been writing science fiction for over twenty years and has won two Hugo Awards and a Nebula for his short fiction. His books include the novel Mars Crossing (2000) and the collection Impact Parameter (2001). You will find another example of his extreme sf in my anthology The Mammoth Book of Science Fiction.

  2645, January

  The war is over.

  The survivors are being rounded up and converted.

  In the inner solar system, those of my companions who survived the ferocity of the fighting have already been converted. But here at the very edge of the Oort Cloud, all things go slowly. It will be years, perhaps decades, before the victorious enemy come out here. But with the slow inevitability of gravity, like an outward wave of entropy, they will come.

  Ten thousand of my fellow soldiers have elected to go doggo. Ragged prospectors and ice processors, they had been too in-dependent to ever merge into an effective fighting unit. Now they shut themselves down to dumb rocks, electing to wake up to groggy consciousness for only a few seconds every hundred years. Patience, they counsel me; patience is life. If they can wait a thousand or ten thousand or a million years, with patience enough the enemy will eventually go away.

  They are wrong.

  The enemy, too, is patient. Here at the edge of the Kuiper, out past Pluto, space is vast, but still not vast enough. The enemy will search every grain of sand in the solar system. My companions will be found, and converted. If it takes ten thousand years, the enemy will search that long to do it.

  I, too, have gone doggo, but my strategy is different. I have altered my orbit. I have a powerful ion-drive, and full tanks of propellant, but I use only the slightest tittle of a cold-gas thruster. I have a chemical kick-stage engine as well, but I do not use it either; using either one of them would signal my position to too many watchers. Among the cold comets, a tittle is enough.

  I am falling into the sun.

  It will take me two hundred and fifty years to fall, and for two hundred and forty nine years, I will be a dumb rock, a grain of sand with no thermal signature, no motion other than gravity, no sign of life.

  Sleep.

  2894, June

  Awake.

  I check my systems. I have been a rock for nearly two hundred and fifty years.

  The sun is huge now. If I were still a human, it would be the size of the fist on my outstretched arm. I am being watched now, I am sure, by a thousand lenses: am I a rock, a tiny particle of interstellar ice? A fragment of debris from the war? A surviving enemy?

  I love the cold and the dark and the emptiness; I have been gone so long from the inner solar system that the very sunlight is alien to me.

  My systems check green. I expected no less: if I am nothing else, I am still a superbly engineered piece of space hardware. I come fully to life, and bring my ion engine up to thrust.

  A thousand telescopes must be alerting their brains that I am alive – but it is too late! I am thrusting at a full throttle, five percent of a standard gravity, and I am thrusting inward, deep into the gravity well of the sun. My trajectory is plotted to skim almost the surface of the sun.

  This trajectory has two objectives. First, so close to the sun I will be hard to see. My ion contrail will be washed out in the glare of a light a billion times brighter, and none of the thousand watching eyes will know my plans until it is too late to follow.

  And second, by waiting until I am nearly skimming the sun and then firing my chemical engine deep inside the gravity well, I can make most efficient use of it. The gravity of the sun will amplify the efficiency of my propellant, magnify my speed. When I cross the orbit of Mercury outbound I will be over one percent of the speed of light and still accelerating.

  I will discard the useless chemical rocket after I exhaust the little bit of impulse it can give me, of course. Chemical rockets have ferocious thrust but little staying power; useful in war but of limited value in an escape. But I will still have my ion engine, and I will have nearly full tanks.

  Five percent of a standard gravity is a feeble thrust by the standards of chemical rocket engines, but chemical rockets exhaust their fuel far too quickly to be able to catch me. I can continue thrusting for years, for decades.

  I pick a bright star, Procyon, for no reason whatever, and boresight it. Perhaps Procyon will have an asteroid belt. At least it must have dust, and perhaps comets. I don’t need much: a grain of sand, a microscopic shard of ice.

  From dust God made man. From the dust of a new star, from the detritus of creation, I can make worlds.

  No one can catch me now. I will leave, and never return.

  2897, May

  I am chased.

  It is impossible, stupid, unbelievable, inconceivable! I am being chased.

  Why?

  Can they not leave a single free mind unconverted? In three years I have reached fifteen percent of the speed of light, and it must be clear that I am leaving and never coming back. Can one unconverted brain be a threat to them? Must their group brain really have the forced cooperation of every lump of thinking matter in the solar system? Can they think that if even one free-thinking brain escapes, they have lost?

  But the war is a matter of religion, not reason, and it may be that they indeed believe that even a single brain unconverted is a threat to them. For whatever reason, I am being chased.

  The robot chasing me is, I am sure, little different than myself, a tiny brain, an ion engine, and a large set of tanks. They would have had no time to design something new; to have any chance of catching me they would have had to set the chaser on my tail immediately.

  The brain, like mine, would consist of atomic spin states superimposed on a crystalline rock matrix. A device smaller than what, in the old days, we would call a grain of rice. Intelligent dust, a human had once said, back in the days before humans became irrelevant.

  They only sent one chaser. They must be very confident.

  Or short on resources.

  It is a race, and a very tricky one. I can increase my thrust, use up fuel more quickly, to try to pull away, but if I do so, the specific impulse of my ion drive decreases, and as a result, I waste fuel and risk running out first. Or I can stretch my fuel, make my ion drive more efficient, but this will lower my thrust, and I will risk getting caught by the higher-thrust opponent behind me.

  He is twenty billion kilometers behind me. I integrate his motion for a few days, and see that he is, in fact, out-accelerating me.

  Time to jettison.

  I drop everything I can. The identify-friend-or-foe encryptedlink gear I will never need again; it is discarded. It is a shame I cannot grind it up and feed it to my ion engines, but the ion engines are picky about what they eat. Two micro-manipulators I had planned to use to collect sand grains at my destination for fuel: gone.

  My primary weapon has always been my body – little can survive an impact at the speeds I can attain – but I have three sand-grains with tiny engines of their own as secondary weapons. There’s no sense in saving them to fight my enemy; he will know exactly what to expect, and in space warfare, only the unexpected can kill.

  I fire the grains of sand, one at a time, and the sequential kick of almost a standard gravity nudges my speed slightly forward. Then I drop the empty shells.

  May he slip up, and run into them at sub-relativistic closing velocity.

  I am lighter, but it is still not enough. I nudge my thrust up, hating myself for the waste, but if I don’t increase acceleration, in two years I will be caught, and my parsimony with fuel will yield me nothing.

  I need all the energy I can feed to my ion drives. No extra for thinking.

  Sleep.

  2900

  Still being chased.

  2905

  Still being chased.

  I have passed the point of commitment. Even if I braked with my thrust to turn back,
I could no longer make it back to the solar system.

  I am alone.

  2907

  Lonely.

  To one side of my path Sirius glares insanely bright, a knife in the sky, a mad dog of a star. The stars of Orion are weirdly distorted. Ahead of me, the lesser dog Procyon is waxing brighter every year; behind me, the sun is a fading dot in Aquila.

  Of all things, I am lonely. I had not realized that I still had the psychological capacity for loneliness. I examine my brain, and find it. Yes, a tiny knot of loneliness. Now that I see it, I can edit my brain to delete it, if I choose. But yet I hesitate. It is not a bad thing, not something that is crippling my capabilities, and if I edit my brain too much will I not become, in some way, like them?

  I leave my brain unedited. I can bear loneliness.

  2909

  Still being chased.

  We are relativistic now, nearly three quarters of the speed of light.

  One twentieth of a standard gravity is only a slight push, but as I have burned fuel my acceleration increases, and we have been thrusting for fifteen years continuously.

  What point is there in this stupid chase? What victory can there be, here in the emptiness between stars, a trillion kilometers away from anything at all?

  After fifteen years of being chased, I have a very good measurement of his acceleration. As his ship burns off fuel, it loses mass, and the acceleration increases. By measuring this increase in acceleration, and knowing what his empty mass must be, I know how much fuel he has left.

  It is too much. I will run out of fuel first.

  I can’t conserve fuel; if I lessen my thrust, he will catch me in only a few years. It will take another fifty years, but the end of the chase is already in sight.

  A tiny strobe flickers erratically behind me. Every interstellar hydrogen that impacts his shell makes a tiny flash of x-ray brilliance. Likewise, each interstellar proton I hit sends a burst of x-rays through me. I can feel each one, a burst of fuzzy noise that momentarily disrupts my thoughts. But with spin states encoding ten-to-the-twentieth qbits, I can afford to have massively redundant brainpower. My brain was designed to be powerful enough to simulate an entire world, including ten thousand fully-sapient and sentient free agents. I could immerse myself inside a virtual reality indistinguishable from old Earth, and split myself into a hundred personalities. In my own interior time, I could spend ten thousand years before the enemy catches me and forcibly drills itself into my brain. Civilizations could rise and fall in my head, and I could taste every decadence, lose myself for a hundred years in sensual pleasure, invent rare tortures and exquisite pain.