Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 99

by Kali Wallace

  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, safely 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 could 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.

  About the Author

  Tom Crosshill’s fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award, and has appeared in venues such as Intergalactic Medicine Show, Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Lightspeed. In 2009, he won the Writers of the Future contest. After many years spent in Oregon and New York, he currently lives in his native Latvia. He’s a satellite member of the writers’ group Altered Fluid. In the past, he has operated a nuclear reactor, translated books and worked in a zinc mine, among other things.

  Now Dress Me in my Finest Suit and Lay Me in My Casket

  M. Bennardo

  Every night as a young girl, I would help my grandfather finish dressing in his nicest, cleanest suit.

  He would stand in his black gold-toed socks on the bedroom rug, his twill trousers hanging slack as he threaded cufflinks through the buttonholes of his shining white shirt. His tie knot was always a double Windsor, with a tie-pin pushed through to keep it in place above the collar—a cheap manufactured ruby on the end of the pin to match the cufflinks.

  His grey hair was carefully shaped and parted too, then sprayed into permanent obedience, the individual marks of the comb-teeth preserved like furrows in a field. Earlier, just after dinner, there had been a fresh shave for his cheeks and neck, a fresh trim for his moustache, and two quick sharp splashes of aftershave that lingered now in a muddled miasma of witch hazel and alcohol.

  Any night of the week, my father might pass by as I helped my grandfather into the cool black sleeves of his jacket, dusting his shoulders and back for stray cat hairs. Father wouldn’t say anything—wouldn’t even look in the room. But a slam of a door down the hall would let us know how he felt.

  “No shoes,” grandfather would say to me, as if he were imparting a great secret of life. “No shoes and no hat. And every pocket empty.”

  After that, there would be only the newly pressed crimson pocket square for his jacket breast, and then the short climb up to the casket where I would help him lay down on his back, his eyes closed and his hands folded over his stomach, black plastic rosary beads spilling over bloodless white fingers.

  “Good night, Patty,” he would say.

  “Good night, Grandpa,” I would reply.

  Then I would screw the casket lid down and leave him ins
ide until morning.

  As Doc screwed down the collar of my EVA pressure suit, my mind swam back from forty-five years ago back to the present. A humorless smile twitches on my lips as my eyes dart to Doc’s face. “Do you know what this makes me think of?”

  “What?” she asked. Her voice was quiet and accommodating, but her fingers flashed quickly and precisely over the suit as she snapped collars together and pulled the insulated fabric into place around my limbs. Without ever talking about it, we had somehow all agreed that her cool surgeon’s fingers would do the fastest job of dressing me. “What does it make you think of?”

  “Did I ever tell you about my grandfather?”

  She paused, stretching a heavy sleeve over my arm, just about ready to fasten it to the hard torso shell. It lasted no more than a second, but my heart seemed to beat ten times before she moved again.

  “You ready down there?” It was the commander on the radio, cutting clumsily into our solitude. “We now have twenty-nine minutes until the defect rotates into the radiation zone again. That’s two-niner minutes.”

  The defect. The hole in our ship, through which a steady stream of atmosphere was venting into space. The hole that would render our fragile life-giving envelope a lethal vacuum in six hours if not repaired now.

  “Almost ready,” said Doc, completing a last check on my limbs and torso. “Just the helmet left to go.”

  No helmet, I thought absurdly to myself. No shoes and no hat. Every pocket empty—! But I was already in boots, and my toolbelt bristled with tools. Already, I’d gotten grandfather’s secret formula wrong.

  “Patty, you sure you can do this in time?”

  That was not my grandfather. It was the commander again, and I could sense the doubt in his voice. I was faster and better at the needed repairs than anyone else aboard, but if it was going to take too long—if somebody had to soak up a few hundred rads of solar radiation sealing that defect, then it by God it was damn well going to be him—

  “Affirmative.”

  I didn’t hesitate, didn’t stop to think. I’d already committed to the lie back when the commander had asked for possible solutions. He’d been skeptical then. Doc had been skeptical too. But I’d been convincing—or maybe they had all just wanted to believe me.