Singularity Sky

by Charles Stross

  “What do you need?” Lieutenant Kossov peered at him, owlish behind his pince-nez.

  “Need to tie this chair down. Then—where are we landing? Is there a doctor aboard this boat? My master really needs to be taken to a hospital, as soon as possible. He’s very ill.”

  “Indeed.” The Lieutenant glanced at him sympathetically, then his gaze wandered to the somnolent Admiral. “Give me that.”

  Robard passed him the other end of the cable, and together they secured the wheelchair to four of the eye bolts that dotted the floor. Around them, the other surviving officers were taking stock of the situation, neatly unfolding emergency deceleration hammocks from overhead lockers and chatting quietly. The atmosphere aboard the lifeboat was subdued, chastened; they were lucky to be alive, ashamed not to be aboard the stricken battlecruiser. The fact that most of the survivors were officers from the admiral’s staff didn’t go amiss; the real warriors remained at their posts, trying valiantly to halt the plague that was eating the ship around them. In one corner, a junior lieutenant was sobbing inconsolably at the center of an embarrassed circle of silence.

  The Admiral, oblivious to everything around him, mumbled and coughed querulously. Kossov leaned forward attentively. “Is there anything I can do for you, my Admiral?” he asked.

  “I fear he’s beyond our help,” Robard said sadly. He rested a gentle hand on Kurtz’s shoulder, steadying the Admiral in his chair. “Unless the surgeons can do something—”

  “He’s trying to talk,” Kossov snapped. “Let me listen.” He leaned close to the old warrior’s face. “Can you hear me, sir?”

  “A-a—” The Admiral gargled in the back of his throat.

  “Don’t excite him, I implore you! He needs rest!”

  Kossov fixed the servant with a baleful eye. “Be silent for a minute.”

  “—Aah, arr—we—’oing?”

  Robard started. “Humbly report we are on our way down to the planetary surface, sir,” said the Lieutenant. “We should be arriving in the capital shortly.” Nothing about the rest of the fleet, the disposition of which was anything but likely to arrive in the colonial capital.

  “’Ood.” The Admiral’s face relaxed, eyelids drooping. “’Amprey. ’Ive’m wha’ for.” He subsided, evidently exhausted by the effort of speaking.

  Robard straightened up: his eyes met those of the Lieutenant. “He never gives up,” he said calmly. “Even when he ought to. It’ll be the death of him one of these days . . .”

  riding a chicken-legged hut through a wasteland that had recently gone from bucolic feudalism to transcendent posthumanism without an intervening stage, Burya Rubenstein drifted through a dream of crumbling empires.

  The revolutionaries were ideologically committed to a transcendence that they hadn’t fully understood—until it arrived whole and pure and incomprehensible, like an iceberg of strange information breaking the surface of a frozen sea of entropy. They hadn’t been ready for it; nobody had warned them. They had hazy folk memories of Internets and cornucopiae to guide them, cargo-cult assertions of the value of technology—but they hadn’t felt the elephant, had no sense of the shape the new phenomena took, and their desires caused new mutant strains to congeal out of the phase space of the Festival machinery.

  Imagine not growing up with telephones—or faxes, video conferencing, on-line translation, gesture recognition, light switches. Tradition said that you could send messages around the world in an eyeblink, and the means to do so was called e-mail. Tradition didn’t say that e-mail was a mouth morphing out of the nearest object and speaking with a friend’s lips, but that was a more natural interpretation than strange textual commands and a network of post-office routers. The Festival, not being experienced in dealing with Earth-proximate human cultures, had to guess at the nature of the miracles being requested. Often, it got them wrong.

  Burya knew all about communications; his grandfather had dandled him on his knee and passed on legends his own grandfather had told him, legends about management information systems that could tell the management everything they could possibly know about the world and more, legends about the strange genii of human resources that could bring forth any necessary ability at will. Some of the more wired dissidents of Novy Petrograd had cobbled together something which they, in turn, called a management information system: cameras squatted with hooded cyclopean eyes atop the garrets and rooflines of the city, feeding images into the digital nervous system of the revolution.

  Before he’d left Plotsk, Burya had spent some time with Timoshevski. Oleg had applied the leeches to Burya’s engorged sense of importance, reminding him that he was only a high official within the Novy Petrograd soviet, that the soviet, in turn, was only a benign parasite upon the free market, a load-balancing algorithm that would be abandoned when the true beauty of the level playing field could be established. Oleg had also applied the worms, which itched furiously (and occasionally burned) as they established contact with Burya’s nervous system. He’d had to inquire pointedly as to the origins of Burya’s strange sense of bourgeois incrementalism in order to goad his erstwhile colleague into accepting the upgrade, but in the end, Rubenstein had seen no alternative. Given his currently peripatetic occupation, he’d be sidelined by the Central Committee if he stayed out of touch much longer. And so it was that his head itched abominably, and he was plagued by strange visions as the worms of the Committee for State Communications forged a working relationship with his brain.

  When Burya slept, he dreamed in rasterized false-color images, scanned from the rooftops of the capital. The revolution, eternally vigilant, multitasked on his lateral geniculate body, rousting slumbering synapses to recognize suspicious patterns of behavior. Burya found it both disturbing and oddly reassuring to see that the city, for all the changes wrought by the revolution, continued. Here a youth darted from shadow to shadow, evidently on a midnight assignation with his sweetheart; there a grimmer kind of conspiracy fomented, dogs fighting over the bones of temporal responsibility as a block warden stalked a resented houseowner with murder in his eye. Houses grew and fissioned in slow motion, great sessile beasts prodded hither and yon by their internal symbionts. It was all unspeakably alien to him: an eerie half-life crawling over the once-familiar city, echoes of the way he’d lived for years, lying like a corpse in an open casket. Even the searing light of a nighttime shuttle landing at the field outside the city couldn’t bring it back to a semblance of the life he’d known.

  Burya dreamed, too, of his own family; a wife he hadn’t seen in fourteen years, a five-year-old son whose chubby face blurred with distance. (Internal exile was not a sentence of exclusion from family, but she came from solid middle-class stock, had disowned him upon hearing of his sentence and been granted a legal separation.) A helpless, weak loneliness—which he cursed whenever he noticed it in waking life—dogged his heels. The revolutionary junta had barely affected the course of events; it provided a nucleus for the wilder elements to coagulate around, a lens to focus the burning rays of resentment on the remains of the ancien régime, but in and of itself, it had achieved little. People suddenly gifted with infinite wealth and knowledge rapidly learned that they didn’t need a government—and this was true as much for members of the underground as for the workers and peasants they strove to mobilize. Perhaps this was the message that the Critic had been trying to drum into him ever since his abduction from the offices of the revolutionary soviet—the revolution he had been striving for didn’t need him.

  On the second morning of the search for Felix, Burya awakened exhausted, limbs aching and sore, feet half frozen, in one corner of the walking hut. Sister Seventh was else- where, snuffling and crashing in the undergrowth beside the path. Bright polymer-walled yurts clung to the fringes of the clearing they’d camped in. A growth of trees around them struggled defiantly beneath huge shelf fungi that threatened to turn them into many-colored outcroppings. All around them grew gigantic ferns and purple-veined cycads, interstellar colonis
ts planted by the unseen gardeners of the Festival fleet. Small mouselike creatures tended the ferns, bringing them scraps of decaying matter and attaching them to the sundew- like feeding palps that sprouted from their stems.

  According to the presingularity maps, they should have passed a village two kilometers ago, but they’d seen no sign of it. Instead, they’d passed beneath a huge drifting geodesic sphere that had turned the sunset to flame overhead, making one of the cyborg militia shout and fire wildly into the air until Sergeant Lukcas yelled at him and took his gun away. “It’s a farm, pighead,” he’d explained with heavy-handed irony, “like what you grew up on, only rolled into a ball and flying around the sky. And if you don’t stop shooting at it, we’ll use your head the same way.” Some of the guards had muttered and made signs to avert the evil eye—in one case using a newly functional set of mandibles—and the rabbit walked with his ears laid flat along his head for half a kilometer before they made camp, but there were no further untoward incidents before the end of the road. But now the road had definitely come to an end.

  The posse had made good progress along the Emperor’s metaled highways to reach this point; but ahead of them, the Lysenkoist forest was attempting to assimilate the road. Small, eyeless rodents with fine pelts gnawed mindlessly at the asphalt surface, extruding black pellets that were swarmed over by not-ants the size of grasshoppers. Tall clay structures not unlike termite mounds dotted the open spaces between the ferns: they hummed quietly with a noise like a million microscopic gas turbines.

  The campfire crackled ominously and belched steam as Mr. Rabbit threw scraps of dead, fungus-riddled wood on it. Burya yawned and stretched in the cold air, then stumbled off to find a tree to piss behind. Bedrolls stirred on the ground, militiamen grumbling and demanding coffee, food, and sexual favors from a nonexistent cook. There was a gout of flame and the rabbit jumped backward, narrowly missing a soldier who howled curses; the road castings were highly inflammable.

  After pissing, Burya squatted. It was in this undignified position that Sister Seventh, in an unusually avuncular mood, found him.

  “Greetings of morning and good micturations to you! News of outstandingness and grace bring I.”

  “Harrumph.” Burya glared at the giant rodent, his ears meanwhile flushing red with the effort of evacuation. “Has anybody told you it isn’t polite to stare?”

  “At what?” Sister Seventh looked puzzled.

  “Nothing,” he muttered. “What’s this news?”

  “Why, of importance nothing.” The Critic turned away innocently. “Of pleasing symmetry—”

  Burya gritted his teeth, then began fumbling about for leaves. (This was something that had never been mentioned in the biographies of the famous revolutionaries, he noted vaguely; being attacked by bears and pursued by bandits or Royal mounted police was all very exciting and noteworthy, but the books never said anything about the shortage of toilet paper in the outback, or the way there were never any soft leaves around when you needed them.) “Just the facts.”

  “Visitors! My sibling’s nest overflows with a bounty of information.”

  “Visitors? But—” Burya stopped. “Your siblings. In orbit?”

  “Yes!” Sister Seventh rolled forward and over, waving her stubby legs in the air briefly before tumbling over with a loud thud. “Visitors from space!”

  “Where from?” Burya leaned forward eagerly.

  “The New Republic.” Sister Seventh grinned amusedly, baring huge, yellowed tusks. “Sent fleet. Met Bouncers. There were survivors.”

  “Who, dammit!” He gritted his teeth angrily as he yanked his trousers up.

  “Ambassador from Earth-prime. One other-else-who component-wise is part of her hive. And ambiguosity. They inquire for you, yourself. Want to meet?”

  Burya gaped. “They’re coming here?”

  “They land at our destination. Soon.”

  the lifeboat was dark, hot, and stank of methane; the waste gas scrubber had developed an asthmatic wheeze. By any estimate, the life-support loop was only good for another day or so of breathable air before they had to retreat into their suits—but long before then, the passengers would have to face the perils of reentry.

  “Are you sure this is safe?” asked Vassily.

  Rachel rolled her eyes. “Safe, he asks,” muttered Martin. “Kid, if you wanted safe, you should have stayed home when the fleet left port.”

  “But I don’t understand—you’ve been talking to those aliens. They’re the enemy! They just killed half our fleet! But you’re taking orbital elements and course correction advisories from them. Why are you so trusting? How do you know they won’t kill us, too?”

  “They’re not the enemy,” Rachel said, patiently prodding away at the autopilot console. “They never were the enemy—at least, not the kind of enemy the Admiral and his merry band expected.”

  “But if they’re not your enemy, you must be on their side!” Vassily glanced from one of them to the other, thoroughly spooked now.

  “Nope.” Rachel carried on prodding at the autopilot. “I wasn’t sure before, but I am, now: the Festival isn’t anything like you think it is. You guys came out here expecting an attack by a foreign government, with ships and soldiers, didn’t you? But there are more things out in this universe than humans and their nations and multinational organizations. You’ve been fighting a shadow.”

  “But it destroyed all those ships! It’s hostile! It—”

  “Calm down.” Martin watched him cautiously. Ungrateful little shit: or is he just terminally confused? Rachel’s easy conversation with the Critics had unsettled Martin more than he liked to admit, almost as much as her unexpectedly successful rescue attempt. There were wheels within wheels here, more than he’d expected. “There are no sides. The Critics aren’t enemies; they aren’t even part of the Festival. We tried to tell your people to expect something totally alien, but they wouldn’t listen.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Festival isn’t human, it isn’t remotely human. You people are thinking in terms of people with people-type motivations; that’s wrong, and it’s been clear that it’s wrong from the start. You can no more declare war on the Festival than you can declare a war against sleep. It’s a self-replicating information network. Probe enters a system: probe builds a self-extending communications network and yanks the inhabited worlds of that system into it. Drains all the information it can get out of the target civilization, then spawns more probes. The probes carry some parasites, uploaded life-forms that build bodies and download into them whenever they reach a destination—but that’s not what it exists for.”

  Vassily gaped. “But it attacked us!”

  “No it didn’t,” Martin replied patiently. “It isn’t intelligent; analyzing its behavior by adopting an intentional stance is a mistake. All it did was detect an inhabited planet with no telephone service at a range of some light-years and obey its instructions.”

  “But the instructions—it’s war!”

  “No, it’s a bug fix. It turns out that the Festival is just a—a telephone repairman. Like a robot repairman. Only it doesn’t repair mere telephones—it repairs holes in the galactic information flow.” Martin glanced sideways at Rachel. She was wrestling with the autopilot, getting the landing burn sequence keyed in. It was a bad idea to distract her at a time like this; better keep the young nuisance occupied.

  “Civilizations rise and fall from time to time; the Festival is probably a mechanism set in place a few millennia ago to keep them in touch, built by an interstellar culture back in the mists of time. When it detected a hole in the net it maintains, it decided to fix it, which is why it set up to do business in orbit around Rochard’s World, which is about as isolated and cut off as it’s possible to be.”

  “But we didn’t ask for it,” Vassily said uncertainly.

  “Well, of course not. Actually, I think it’s strayed outside its original maintenance zone, so every system it discovers in this sec
tor warrants a repair job: but that’s not necessarily all there is to it. Part of the repair process is a rapid exchange of information with the rest of the network it connects to, a flow that runs in two directions. Over time, the Festival has become more than a mere repair service; it’s become a civilization in its own right, one that blooms like a desert flower—briefly flourishing in the right environment, then curling up into a seed and sleeping as it migrates across the deserted gulf light-years between oases. Telephone switches and routers are some of the most complicated information-processing systems ever invented—where do you think the Eschaton originally came from?

  “When the Festival arrived at Rochard’s World, it had a 250-year communications deficit to make good. That repair—the end of isolation, arrival of goods and ideas restricted by the New Republic—caused a limited local singularity, what in our business we call a consensus reality excursion; people went a little crazy, that’s all. A sudden overdose of change; immortality, bioengineering, weakly superhuman AI arbeiters, nanotechnology, that sort of thing. It isn’t an attack.”

  “But then—you’re telling me they brought unrestricted communications with them?” he asked.

  “Yup.” Rachel looked up from her console. “We’ve been trying for years to tell your leaders, in the nicest possible way: information wants to be free. But they wouldn’t listen. For forty years we tried. Then along comes the Festival, which treats censorship as a malfunction and routes communications around it. The Festival won’t take no for an answer because it doesn’t have an opinion on anything; it just is.”

  “But information isn’t free. It can’t be. I mean, some things—if anyone could read anything they wanted, they might read things that would tend to deprave and corrupt them, wouldn’t they? People might give exactly the same consideration to blasphemous pornography that they pay to the Bible! They could plot against the state, or each other, without the police being able to listen in and stop them!”