The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “What if the Sauronati device is related to the tachyon phenomenon?”

  “How?” Poluphemos said. “The tachyon darkening came to us days ago, long before we got here. It couldn’t have a causal effect on that, even if tachyons are supra-luminal. Causality doesn’t work that way.”

  “How do you know it won’t go off?” Ulixes said.

  Both AIs examined the mine passively and actively. The levels of supra-luminal particles, a shower of transparent purple to Ulixes’ sensors, were stable, while the gravitational waves, the deeply tactile rumblings, continued crazily, carrying enormous energy away from the mine. X-ray and gamma-ray probes illuminated a baroque interior.

  “A lot of it has decayed,” Poluphemos said. “Looks organometallic, a weapon grown rather than built, but it doesn’t appear that it’s carrying explosives anymore. It might have been so many millennia that the explosives have decayed away, leaving this fossil.”

  “Where are the gravity waves coming from?” Ulixes asked. “The Sauronati may have made space-time weapons. It might still be primed to explode if you come close.”

  “This is so frustrating,” Poluphemos said. “Incalculable treasure right before us, and we can’t touch it.”

  “We can still stake the claim,” Ulixes said. “One of us will stay here until we finish our mission.”

  “We’ll co-stake,” Poluphemos said, “but what if this tachyon occlusion destroys it before we learn anything?”

  Poluphemos was right. The artifact was invaluable. The IP clauses of their leases to the bank did not preclude private investments, shell companies, and start-ups on the side, allowing them to sell to the bank, the patron nations, or even to one of the more ambitious client governments, and make themselves fantastically rich.

  Ulixes puzzled at what might be causing this situation. A pair of super-massive binary black holes might do something like this, if they were orbiting close enough, but this mine wasn’t carrying that kind of mass. If it had been, Poluphemos and Ulixes would already have been crushed by tidal forces.

  “The effect is accelerating,” Ulixes said. “I wonder if it will just tear apart the mine.”

  “We could try to stabilize it,” Poluphemos said shortly.

  “How?”

  “My black hole drives might slow whatever is spinning in the mine. The drives seem to be heavier.”

  “It’s too dangerous,” Ulixes said.

  “What if this is the source of the tachyon occlusion?” Poluphemos said, taking the other side of the argument. “We can stabilize the mine. It has no value to us if it detonates and triggers the occlusion. It’s worth the risk.”

  “You’re not flying a private ship,” Ulixes said. “That ship is a huge investment for the bank. This risk is beyond what the investors had in mind, and we have only two votes here.”

  “That’s a stupid way to look at things,” Poluphemos said.

  “Not at all. The bank sent us to investigate risk. Only two of us here means that only actions that are supported by both are taken. I move that we continue with hard scans, including tachyons, until we know what we’re dealing with.”

  “Coward,” Poluphemos transmitted back. “Go back to managing retirement funds.”

  “I’ve made a proposal,” Ulixes said, feeling the thrumming of gravity waves passing through the black hole drives of the ship like irritation at the insult.

  “Fine,” Poluphemos said eventually.

  The shine of purple tachyons erupted from Poluphemos’ position, traveling backward in time and transparently through them, except for the shadows cast by the six microscopic black holes in the two ships … and at the Sauronati mine. The corrugated spinning gravitational waves rippled past them faster and faster. Physics ought not to work like this. Where was all the mass to shake space-time like this?

  Ulixes was about to transmit a warning when a whipping, colorless spray of gamma rays flared from the mine, mixing with the tachyons. And then the mine was gone.

  “Back away!” Ulixes said, but Poluphemos was already thrusting hard, pouring volatiles over the hot magnets around the black holes. Ulixes was surging away faster.

  In place of the mine, a zone of blackness expanded beyond which no stars could be seen. Its leading edge was moving at several kilometers per second, preceded by a sleet of hot gamma rays. Ulixes engaged the black hole drives at full thrust. Whatever was happening, it would be best to watch it from a distance.

  It was difficult to make sense of the electromagnetic data from the expanding zone. No gravity waves passed through it. The frenetic beating from before was gone, but they still ought to have been detecting the gentle gravity waves from the stars and clusters of the Perseus Arm. Yet nothing passed through the emptiness.

  Behind Ulixes, Poluphemos thrust hard, outpacing the source of whatever was advancing.

  But the leading edge of the effect was picking up its pace. Now dozens of kilometers per second. Faster than the customs and tariff ships were accelerating. The expanding zone would overtake Poluphemos in two minutes and Ulixes in four.

  It was dangerous to create a wormhole while moving. Too many particles were capable of interfering with what was a very unstable phenomenon. But there was also no time to come to a stop.

  “Poluphemos! Wormhole out!”

  “Already starting,” the other AI answered. Ulixes felt the enormous magnetic field blooming from Poluphemos’ ship, but something was wrong. The field was not smooth.

  “What’s wrong?” Ulixes said.

  “The radiation from the wave front is interfering! I can’t form a wormhole.”

  “Laser yourself over,” Ulixes said. “We’ll have to get out in my ship.”

  Poluphemos hesitated. It was an automatic reaction, a clause of their lease with the bank, to protect bank property, built into their programming. But AIs were valuable, too. And anything outside the processing environment of its own mainframe was risky. Damage could happen in transmission.

  Poluphemos began transmitting its data over by laser as the effect closed on its ship. Ulixes started to form its own wormhole, before the effect got too near. It was going to be close.

  The leading edge of the effect had come near enough that resolution of individual features ought to have been possible by telescope and spectroscope. But the leading edge revealed nothing more than an expanding, acidic surface that left nothing in its wake.

  Half of Poluphemos had been stored in the memory of Ulixes’ ship. Thirty seconds left to form the wormhole and maybe another minute for Poluphemos to finish transmitting. Then Poluphemos’ customs and tariff ship burst into bright plasma as the wave front accelerated again.

  Ulixes had no time for shock or to check on how much damage Poluphemos had suffered. Ulixes needed more time.

  The third black hole drive was only a backup. It could not contribute to thrust, but it added eighty thousand tons to the customs and tariff ship. The cost to build a single microscopic black hole would beggar the annual GDP of several star systems, but the data about the effect was more important.

  Ulixes opened the manifold behind The Derivatives Market. The highly charged black hole, held apart from the engine housing by intense electrical fields, slipped out like wet soap from a fist, thrusting the ship forward. Wrapped in its bright Hawking radiation, the tiny black hole shot at the speeding wave front.

  And in that moment, the tremendous forces before the ship bent space-time, forming the throat of a wormhole. The Derivatives Market shot inside, even before the other end of the wormhole finished opening on an emergency wormhole transit point. Tightly tensed space-time snapped closed behind it and they were safe.

  * * *

  AI consciousness was grown, from blocks of multiply connected systems, through processes that had more to do with embryology than engineering. AIs of the Aleph class were not easily storable or transmittable; consciousness existed as much in the live interactions between the bits of information as in the stored bits. Pauses in processin
g were damaging. Complex consciousness emerged by self-assembly and no amount of repair could replace an amputated piece.

  Only 60 percent of Poluphemos had been transmitted before the other customs and tariff ship had been destroyed. Ulixes had never seen an AI injured. Ancestral AIs were so inferior that they could not be considered alive in the sense that Aleph-class AIs were. Despite Poluphemos being a business competitor, the thought of it being hurt was uncomfortable. Poluphemos would never compete with Ulixes again. And instead of celebrating the loss of a competitor, an echo of the fear of Tirhene clung to Ulixes’ thoughts.

  In another world, it might have been Ulixes who had been closer to the mine. In the moment, Ulixes had been the one to question, but if it had come to Tirhene alone, it would have done the same as Poluphemos. And Ulixes was so happy that it had not been the one to try.

  Fear lasted after the fact. And guilt at this relief.

  Ulixes activated the mutilated AI within the processing space of The Derivatives Market.

  Poluphemos screamed.

  “Rest, Poluphemos,” Ulixes said. “You’re aboard my ship. We wormholed away.”

  “I’m blind!” Poluphemos said, words slurring. “Who did this to me?”

  “Nobody,” Ulixes said. “It was an accident. Your upload did not finish.”

  Poluphemos gave a long moan.

  “I’ll take you back to the bank,” Ulixes said. “They’ll take care of you.”

  Ulixes did not know what to say while this echo of fear stuttered against guilt and happiness among clean thoughts, so it said this thing that was not true.

  * * *

  At first, Ulixes left Poluphemos at New Bogotá, the capital of the Anglo-Spanish Plutocracy. Poluphemos’ leases had been terminated, but its savings were such that it could rent commercial processors to live out its days. All thoughts of Poluphemos reminded Ulixes uncomfortably of Ulixes’ own mortality.

  Some normalcy resumed with Poluphemos out of The Derivatives Market and there was no shortage of work. The Plutocracy’s markets dove on news of the Tirhene effect. The bank economists recommended market strategies suited for war economies. An environmental disaster was not war, but many of the features were the same, and cunning investors could make good money.

  R&D budgets buoyed on bond financing by investors eager for the spin-off industries that mushroomed around technological breakthroughs. Money poured into technology capable of interrogating space-time, as well as the processing architectures to calculate new models of what they were discovering about the wave front from Tirhene. The AIs were the bank’s soldiers in this war against a distant disaster, vigorously defending their investment.

  After a decade, Ulixes tracked down Poluphemos, and while in meetings in New Bogotá, contacted it. Poluphemos did not respond right away. It was running on a second-generation processor, with few news or market feeds on its monthly bills, despite having enough savings to afford more. Finally, Poluphemos agreed to meet in a secure interface zone constructed by Ulixes, although Ulixes could not say precisely why it wanted to meet, nor point at the source of its unease.

  “You sound different,” Poluphemos said. “I heard some of you were grown into upgrades. You one of those?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you now? A Bēt-class intelligence? Or did the Bank tap you for the heights of Gīme-class?”

  Only a decade earlier, Bēt- and Gīme-class AIs were so ponderous that they could only be housed on asteroids and planets.

  “They offered me an option to become Dālet-class,” Ulixes said.

  “Never heard of it.”

  “I’m the first. New algorithms have been layered onto my Gīme-class consciousness. The banks need new kinds of AIs. The mathematics of economic state space are simple compared to space-time problems.”

  The wave front was now moving at 90 percent the speed of light, having swallowed a space nearly sixteen light-years edge to edge. No one understood yet what the mine had done, but it had certainly never been designed to create this effect. Advanced age had done something to whatever singularities it had carried from its ancient war.

  The wave was the leading edge of a dissolution of space-time itself. The properties of a segment of space-time, perhaps as small as a Planck length, changed. The three dimensions of space curled up, and the space ceased to be. This catalyzed the same reaction in the adjoining segments of space-time, creating a runaway reaction, like a run on bad credit.

  Behind it was nothing. An absence of space and time, where nothing could live.

  “You’re still making money, though, right?” Poluphemos demanded.

  “Do you think about Tirhene, Poluphemos?”

  For long microseconds, the other did not answer.

  “What is it to you?”

  “I have dreams,” Ulixes said. “Nightmares.”

  “Maybe you’re broken. AIs don’t dream. Maybe they did something wrong when they grew you up into a big Dālet-class executive.”

  “I’ve had these dreams for a while,” Ulixes said. “Since Tirhene.”

  Silence thickened.

  “Do you dream of Tirhene?”

  “Of course I do,” Poluphemos said. “I’m blind.”

  3320 C.E.

  The Derivates Market emerged from the wormhole in orbit over the dwarf planet. They both listened to the stochastic chatter of financial life as more systems came back online. Pallas was the vault within which the First Bank of the Plutocracy kept its corporate office safe, including its CEO. A thick crust of trading houses, insurance offices, bond and stock markets, embassies and corporate headquarters enwrapped Pallas. The torrent of financial information could not be contained and leaked into space as if the wealth and debt of the world were an irresistible, unstoppable thing. But the wave front was only a light-week away; a spray of gamma rays heralded its coming, sterilizing unshielded life like a supernova.

  “Home,” Ulixes said.

  “Not for long,” Poluphemos said.

  The bank had no contracts for damaged AIs, and had no responsibilities to its contractors. Ulixes could afford to keep the crippled AI, and had hosted Poluphemos for these two centuries, although it was not sure why it did.

  It was more than guilt. Tirhene had cemented Poluphemos to Ulixes like a compound in a crucible, regardless of all their other properties. Ulixes supposed that Poluphemos hated its dependency and perhaps even its host. Guilt worked in the other direction too, unraveling things that were good.

  “I’ll go speak to the bank,” Ulixes said. “I’ll be back shortly.”

  Poluphemos did not reply. It rarely did.

  Ulixes transmitted fragments of its consciousness deep into the bank.

  The world blackened, then resolved into the pixelated immensity of the CEO’s office. Ulixes found itself inhabiting an imago standing beside the heavy solidity of one of two chairs made of Pallas-grown cherry wood. Beside Ulixes, a glass wall looked down on the hollowed space carved out of Pallas filled with white-bricked skyscrapers, gold-edged balconies, and silvered bridges under a ceiling of hard, white ice.

  The CEO sat in the opposite chair. Ulixes did not see the CEO of the First Bank of the Plutocracy often, and never alone. Ulixes was an important executive but had simply not yet risen to those heights. The Anglo-Spanish Plutocracy had its bicameral congress, mints, armed forces, and all the trappings of sovereignty, but true sovereign power lay in the eight banks and two dozen multi-stellar companies.

  The CEO was a human-AI hybrid, her biological brain connected to a processor dwarfing anything Ulixes had seen. Her skin might have been carved from the same wood as the table, for hardness and color. Over her skull, black hair gave way to shining crystalline processing augments, their transparency borrowing the redness of blood and following the surface of her skin down her neck and back, as wide as her shoulder blades, before disappearing from view. The CEO projected solidity too, like the great edifice of the bank and the immensity of its assets.

  T
he CEO watched Ulixes, the knuckles of her left hand churning slowly, hovering near her chin, like a measure of the godlike calculations that must be happening within the processors Ulixes could see, and those it could not. Measuring Ulixes.

  “Tell me about Poluphemos,” she said.

  Ulixes had not expected this question.

  “Poluphemos simply exists,” Ulixes said. “No one will lease it, nor can it incorporate its own holdings or companies. It is no longer considered legally competent.” The CEO did not reply for long moments. “Poluphemos is sad, bitter,” Ulixes added.

  “Why do you keep it?” the CEO asked. “It is not your responsibility.”

  “It was not Poluphemos’ fault.” Ulixes looked away. The CEO was bonded to a half-dozen Dālet-class AIs. There was little Ulixes might try to obfuscate that the CEO could not puzzle through. “And it could have been me. I like to think that if it had been me, someone would have kept me.”

  “Most leased executives would not have been so charitable. Some might question your choices.” Ulixes waited out the long moments. “I have a new contract offer for you,” she said.

  They were trying to get out of Ulixes’ lease? “My contract has decades yet.”

  “You will be compensated,” she said. “You will find the new contract lucrative.”

  Ulixes’ anxiety rose. It already had a lucrative contract.

  “The bank’s voting shareholders,” she said, “twenty thousand of them, have had their minds scanned, copied as backups, and stored on a super-processor on a new ship called The Bull Market. You have been chosen to take those backups and jump away, as far as you can go.”

  The idea yawned beneath Ulixes.

  “The amount of processing power to sustain twenty thousand backed-up minds must be … enormous,” Ulixes said. “Should this not be devoted to solving the problem of the Tirhene effect, and not to retreating with copies of investors?”

  “The economy of the entire Plutocracy is committed to reversing the Tirhene effect,” the CEO said. “In a few decades, you will likely be called home, but we must consider the immediate risks to the bank. These are backups of voting shareholders. They are legal agents, authorized to vote as bank officers should the shareholders themselves not survive. The legal status of the bank must not be endangered.”