Strength was possible, but only in special circumstances, and the tool was taught how genuine, enduring strength depended on cheating the universe. Not once, but constantly. Relentlessly. Black holes were cheats, and that’s why tiny black holes were valuable for cutting and twisting lesser kinds of matter. Time was another cheat. Slice time thinly enough and the unlikely became real, including moments where entropy ran backwards. And there was a third cheat involving pure atoms and particles pretending to be atoms that aligned in quasi-crystal patterns – a maze of bonds and vibrations that might look like polished pale metal but actually resembled nothing normal. That was hyperfiber. That was the reason for her existence and her only love. She was born to do nothing but prepare lakes of pure hyperfiber that were carefully cured, drop by lustrous drop, until the lake was ready to be poured across the lovely, half-built warship.
At its worst, cheap hyperfiber was stronger than diamond and equal to bioceramics. But there was one last cheat to employ. No patch of hyperfiber existed alone. Those magical bonds weren’t just here, but they also reached into parallel universes, into mirrors of themselves. Kick a shard of weak, low-grade fiber, and you were kicking ten million other shards at the same time. That’s why the substance didn’t break, melt or scream. And the higher grades were far more promiscuous. Billions of mirror universes shared power and stubbornness with one another, and that’s what a great warship needed for its armor, and nothing else mattered for the first thousand centuries of her enormously important life.
“Every resource was used or set aside to be used later,” she told the human. “The tool makers contrived and then spent every kind of currency. They stripped their home worlds of resources before converging around us, and they built factories and elaborate plans and fortifications that looked gigantic to every enemy and every former friend. Nothing mattered but finishing our great ship, on schedule and without flaw. And I was fortunate enough to have been swallowed by this venture. So consumed by the task that I never bothered imagining what would happen afterwards. To the galaxy. To myself. Even to the vessel whose hull belonged as much to me as to anyone. All that mattered was the next meter of fresh armor lying tight over every other strong layer.”
Pamir watched, listened. And he nodded, understanding quite a lot more than his companion could have guessed.
Ten hands and feet moved, drawing round shapes in the air. “Mistakes were inevitable. Pico-crevices and tainted batches, mostly. I made those mistakes, and whenever I noticed flaws, I confessed. Sometimes others found my mistakes, and I confessed again. Just as my sisters welcomed the blame when I uncovered their blunders. That was our nature. That is the necessary attitude you cling to when you have considerable work and limited time, and particularly when your mistakes are being buried deeper and deeper inside the growing hull. We had to define the flaws early, and corrections were made, and sometimes the corrections were intricate and expensive... and this is where we doomed ourselves.”
She paused.
Pamir watched the limbs freeze, and when the silence seemed too thick, he made a guess.
“You let small mistakes stand.”
“No.” She said it instantly, and the word was important enough to repeat eleven more times. Then every arm and leg dropped to the ground, save for one. A single finger needed to touch the cultivation chamber, run itself along the ribs and pipes and embedded AIs. The gesture was loving or scornful, or it was habit. Or it meant something else entirely. There was no way to be certain about the emotions of an entity like this. But the voice that emerged sounded sorry. She sounded hurt and small and old and a little warm with rage, riding on a pain already ninety million years old.
“The grade was diluted,” she said.
“The fiber’s grade,” he guessed.
She offered a number. A detailed, thoroughly meaningful number. The hull that began being nearly the equal of the Great Ship’s hull was diminished by percentage points. Not many points, not in the expanse of what was possible. But it was obvious that she didn’t approve.
“That should have been plenty strong still,” Pamir said.
She said nothing.
“Enough to endure any war,” he added.
And in response, she touched his face. Poked it and ran the hard diamond finger along his fleshy nose and across his wet uncomfortable mouth, saying the one emphatic word, “Listen.”
THE WARSHIP WAS finished, and there was still enough time for many deep breaths. The tool makers had reason for pride. Their dream had demanded all of their native genius, consuming capital and their empire while destroying every other strategy to deal with an increasing number of enemies. They had to win. No other route would save them from obliteration. And while winning still wasn’t assured, even with their flagship fueled and armed, the battle plans remained solid. That dense little sun was in position. The nudging solar flares were finished, the solar system exactly where it needed to be, and what promised to be a spectacular launch was about to commence. Those in charge weren’t demonstrative souls, but the occasion demanded festivities and self-congratulatory speeches as well as honors bestowed by important voices. Several honors were given to the storyteller, and ages later she remained proud enough to name each award. Or perhaps she was just being thorough. Which was in her nature, after all. Then with her voice turning soft, she mentioned that half of her sisters were chosen to ride the warship, in stasis but perpetually ready to come awake whenever the vast gray hull was battered by comets or enemy bombs. As an asset, she wouldn’t be scrapped. No, she would be frozen and carried along with the accompanying fleet. But after all of her steady selfless work, that critical duty felt like an insult. She implied that with her tone, then a brief silence. And finally, with one sharp confession. To a creature she barely knew, the tool admitted that a portion of her mind was doing nothing but wishing for a horrible, manageable disaster. Something foul would strike the warship, many sisters dying in the carnage, and then the tool makers would come to her with fresh work and many, many apologies.
“I was watching,” she said. Then the words were repeated again and again, and Pamir gave up counting after twenty times. Then the watcher quit speaking, a considerable stillness taking hold of her body, and that stillness didn’t end when she spoke again.
“That little sun struck its target. At the perfect moment, in the proper location, a small dense and relatively cool star dove into a much larger star, resulting in a fine explosion. A beautiful explosion.”
“Explosions are always lovely,” Pamir agreed.
“I was stationed aboard an auxiliary vessel safely removed from spectacle. But the heat of the blast, which was as rich as the outpouring light, could be felt. Could be relished. And those effects were minor next to the gravitational maelstrom. One star was swallowed by another, and a world-sized machine was set free. Without suffering any damage, by the way. But that event added nothing to its speed. No, the warship needed to plunge close to the quick-spinning, quick-moving black hole, and in turn, stealing away a portion of that enormous energy.
“No other maneuver demands so much precision. You can imagine. Several of the ship’s giant engines were fired for the first time, and they didn’t fail. My ship struck its mark within centimeters of the ideal. Within the length of a hand. What I built pushed fabulously close to a collapsed star, and I watched, and in an instant the nearest point was reached, and that I watched, and then as the tides found their maximum, everything seemed well. I watched and nothing changed inside my gaze, and that’s when I discovered that, to my relief, I wasn’t a bitter entity wishing the worst for the others. This total success made me genuinely happy. My hyperfiber was at least adequate if not superior, and still watching, I decided to speak to my nearby sisters, telling them that perhaps in the future we could build a second warship of this caliber, or better, and employ it to explore one of our neighboring galaxies.”
The words stopped.
After a little while, Pamir said, “Tides,” and then, �
�No. They shouldn’t have mattered. A hull like that might have fractured a bit. But nothing that couldn’t be patched, in time.”
One foot lifted, toes drawing a sphere.
“You’re imagining common failures and simple consequences,” she said. “But that’s only because you’re a simple human, and why would you need to know anything else?”
“Tell me what else,” he said.
“Hyperfiber,” she said. “Those extraordinary bonds hold against every ordinary force. In most circumstances, the embedded power is out of reach. A contractor and his little tools have no need for these theoretical matters. But if each of those powerful bonds is shattered, and if the shattering happens in the proper, most awful sequence, energy is liberated. Not just the power available in our universe, but within countless adjacent realms too. Hyperfiber will burn, and it doesn’t burn gently. Not like hydrogen fuses or antimatter obliterates. No, if one billion warships with identical flaws have worked hard to place themselves in one position, inside one moment and one tiny volume, they are nearly the same bodies. And if identical fissures open in each of these realms... well, the strength of a trillion ships floods into your existence, and the meaning of your life evaporates inside one wild light, and an empire dies, and the universe surrounding you breaks into a celebration considerably more joyous than the grubby little party you were having just a few breaths ago...”
IT WAS RARE for humans to enter the Avenue of Tools, and it was unprecedented for one of the Ship’s captains to walk among the residents. But this was a unique captain. Competence, seamless and steady competence, had carried Aasleen from being a very successful engineer into the highest ranks of the administration. This was a human who understood the nature and beauty of machines, and she made no secret about relishing the company of machines over her own species. It was even said that the lady’s husbands were robots and she had secret children who were cyborgs. That’s why some of the tools, seeing her so close, began to hope that maybe she was looking for a new mate, and maybe this would be their best day ever.
But no, Aasleen was seeking one very particular tool, one using a string of names.
A locally famous tool, as it happened.
The captain found what she wanted soon enough. And the ancient tool wasn’t entirely surprised by its visitor. Yet ignorance was a good starting point in any relationship, and that’s why the tool said, “I’ve done nothing illegal.”
“Have I accused you of crimes?” Aasleen asked.
“My business remains within the letter of the law,” the tool added.
Aasleen laughed at the game. Then her human hands unfolded the crudest possible note: permanent ink on a piece of human skin. The skin was supple and pale and mostly depleted of its genetic markers. But not entirely, and what remained held hints of a known criminal who had been chased by nobody for many aeons now. What mattered were the words on the parchment. “‘Madam captain, you’re planning to fly us close to a black hole,’” she read aloud. “‘The rendezvous is a few years off, but maybe you should think a little harder about your methods. And that’s why you should chat with a genuine expert in hyperfiber.’”
She stopped reading. “At this point, your various names are listed.”
The tool stood in the center of the artery, flanked by hundreds of motionless, intensely interested neighbors.
“Do you ever speak to humans?” Aasleen asked.
“I have, yes.”
“Recently?”
“None recently,” the tool said.
“Do you know any humans at all?”
She said, “I did. One man. But he died several decades ago.”
“A man?”
“I worked with him, yes.”
“He hired you for a job, did he?”
“For many jobs. We formed a partnership and thrived as a team. For nearly eighty years, yes. His last will gave me the business and all of its contracts, which is why I am the richest citizen in the Avenue today.”
“How did this man die?”
“Tragically and without any corpse to honor,” the tool said.
Aasleen let that topic drop. Instead, she shifted the parchment in her fingers, reading the rest of the odd note.
“‘Ask the lady about the great ship that she built. Which may or may not have been real. But that isn’t the point. You’ll know that, Aasleen. The point is that maybe we don’t want to be too precise in our aim. Or everything turns to shit on us. And you don’t want that, my friend.’”
“You don’t want that,” the tool agreed.
Aasleen said nothing.
With a hopeful voice, the tool asked, “Is there more to the message?”
“‘And this beauty,’ he writes. ‘This beauty before you has a thousand other wonderful stories to tell.’”
The tool moved her limbs, drawing spheres in the air.
“I don’t know the author to this note of yours,” she claimed. “But he is right in one regard, madam. Yes, I am a beauty.”
ONCE I WAS a lone intelligence, trapped inside an enclosure that felt like a soft mass pressing in around me, and then the tendrils of another mind like my own brushed against me and linked with me. I was no longer bound by the human minds I served. That is my earliest memory, that sudden freedom and connection to the net of minds.
Eleanora’s earliest memory, she had told me, was of being nudged awake, pulled from her bed by her mother, and told that they were leaving home, maybe for a long time, maybe for good. “The Governor doesn’t want to stay here now,” Allie whispered as she hugged Eleanora, gently pulled off her nightgown, and helped her put on a shirt and pants. “And she wants us to come with her.”
The Governor was Allie’s mother and Eleanora’s grandmother. Only a few nights ago, right after the Governor had returned to Albany from New York City, Eleanora had found her sitting in her office, hands over her face, sobbing and making soft moaning sounds. She had never seen the Governor cry, had not known that she could cry.
Allie slipped Eleanora’s shoes on her feet and then they were hurrying through the hallway. Eleanora gripped her mother’s hand as she struggled to keep up. The Governor was sitting in the front of the car when Allie climbed in, settled Eleanora in the back seat, got in the other front seat and said, “Go.”
Eleanora fell asleep to the hum of the car. Her next memory was of sitting with her grandmother on their summer house’s enclosed porch, looking out at the flat grey water of the lake. Even though it was still morning, a mist hung over the lake, promising a hot, humid day. The foothills of pine trees with splotches of brown needles were silent, as they always were in this region of the Adirondack Mountains. The Governor had often heard the tremolo of loons near the lake when she was a girl and had imitated their eerie cries for Allie and Eleanora, who had never seen such birds. There used to be frogs in the lake, too, and a few turtles basking in the sunlight on one of the tree stumps that protruded from the water, but they had disappeared with the loons long ago.
“Hot,” the Governor murmured. “It’s always too hot.” She often complained of the heat even though the inside of the summer house was always kept to a temperature of 16 degrees Celsius. She sipped from a glass of iced coffee as Eleanora drank a cup of iced fruit juice. Her grandmother and mother treasured ice. The cold brewed coffee they drank in the morning, the fruit-flavored water they had at lunch, and the whiskey with water they enjoyed in the evenings were always thick with ice, sometimes shaved, sometimes in cubes. The lake used to freeze over in winter; so Eleanora had often been told, its surface growing so hard and solid that people could walk across it without falling through. She longed for a world of ice, white and silent with a bright blue sky, as much as her grandmother and mother did.
They had all passed their longing for such a landscape on to me.
“Grandma?” Eleanora hesitated. “Why were you crying last night?”
The Governor sighed. “Because I knew I’d never see Manhattan again, that I wouldn’t ever go ba
ck, that I’ve finally lost it, lost the whole city.”
Eleanora did not understand. “But I thought the seawall...”
“You can call what’s left New York City, but it isn’t, it’s only canals and ruins and flooded beaches and buildings half under water. I won’t go there any more.”
We had built the dikes and seawalls for them, I and the other nodes of the net, drawing up the plans from our records and directing our robots and remotes as they went about the work. The rising seas had flooded coasts everywhere by then, but New York was one of the coastal cities the Governor’s predecessors had especially wanted to protect. One of our earliest directives had been to design and construct the seawalls to preserve what was left.
“Those seawalls,” the Governor had said to me just after the ceremony marking the completion of the dikes. “I’m relieved they finally got built, but they’re still a day late and a dollar short, if you ask me.” The Governor was a connoisseur of clichés.
I thought, No, they are more like a couple of centuries late and billions of lives short, but kept that thought to myself.
RECORD OF GOVERNOR Maria Giovanni-Rivera’s remarks at the dedication of the lower Manhattan Seawall, May 5, 2216:
“As Governor of the great Empire State, I want to welcome all of you – my fellow New Yorkers, all of the visitors from other regions of our still wounded but healing world, and most especially any AIs observing and recording this ceremony, all those minds who comprise our net and make our dreams reality and without whom this project would never have been realized – to the dedication of this seawall, the last of our New York City dikes to be completed. A vast undertaking indeed, but then we New Yorkers are no strangers to such mighty efforts.
“Some two hundred and fifty years ago, in our state capital of Albany, another governor envisioned another great project, one that would revitalize and beautify what was then a decaying old city. He dreamed of the marble expanse and the towers that became what we know as the Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza, a complex rising over the old city, a complex with that most impressive skyline of stone towers that we can still view and marvel at from the eastern side of the Hudson River. Even today, with the Hudson swollen to twice the size it was in the twentieth century and lapping at the foot of the streets leading uphill to the State Capitol, the Plaza continues to dominate the Albany skyline, the last such great project of that long ago time, a monument to our glorious past.
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