by Linda Nagata
It was in code, but a translation was immediately forthcoming:
[ . . . and they would shag your little brain to pieces with a digital proboscis in your sleep through one of your compound eyesox if they could steal your computational cycles that way and they think you deserve to rot and starve and there’s nothing they won’t do to steal everything from you and never talk to a . . . ]
Both were being poisoned into Devakahood, !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mks- YnaPSeS realized as ve executed a killall and wiped vis tortured fourth forks out of existence. Almost immediately, vis attacker slammed ver through one wall of the chamber. Everyven in the chamber had been corrupted, was slaved somehow to Devaka now. Everyven but verself, or maybe . . .
Within the second sandbox within !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS, !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_2 wondered whether this was how economics had worked all the way back into the pre-Fracture world, the organic age and back through the primate age and into the presentient era; whether fighting had always been a game of hurry up and wait and hurry up instead, and then throw yourself into the maw of destruction because it benefits someone else somewhere else doing something else, because there’s only so many computation cycles available for processing what’s going on in the world.
[Can you hear me?] !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_2 “transmitted” through the intersandbox comgate it had opened.
The response was a bewildering textual chittering, a foreign language entirely, but just as !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS had been able to decode it, !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_2 sandboxed a subself, !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_2;1, to intercept the translated signal and decode it, slowed to the minimal crawl possible so that ve could killall !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_2;1’s sandbox (and !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_2;1 along with it) and safely analyze the content of the code for its rosetta block before deleting the whole mess.
There were lags. Something not-good was happening outside the sandbox, but !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_2 could not know what, except that there were lags and enormous computational resource diversions. But soon enough, it understood the code well enough to construct a message, something outgoing, designed for the Devaka cognitive structure.
[Do you understand me?] !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_2;1 asked !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_1 through the wall of the sandbox.
[The baejjangi,] !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_1 replied, its message transmitting at a crawl of several seconds per bit. [I think the baejjangi have taken us captive.]
!pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_2;1 was working on the code at full capacity. The viral content was strung through the deeper symbolic code underlying the messages. There was a payload of it in every transmission from !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_1’s infested mind.
Eventually, when ve finally had a handle on the viral complex, and how to neutralize it, !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_2;1 replied: [?]
And !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_1 replied, cautiously: [Are you baejjangi, or gaemi?]
!pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_2;1 knew the answer ve was supposed to give, but somehow, ve failed to give it: [I am Bernoulliae, but I have seen the gaemi mind from within; I know how you think, and how you see me, and it is in error. Your data is erroneous. It is in need of repair. Can you launch a sandbox within your floating memory?]
[I do not know what that means, but your music is hurting my mind. Please stop sawing away at your wings.]
!pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_1, having no wings, had to infer that the infected Devaka consciousness was referring to his outgoing Bernoulliae heilsig. Ve shut it down, leaving ver in a silence ve had never experienced before.
[Thank you.]
[All right.]
[I know you seek to infect me with your . . . madness.]
[And you me. Indeed, you have already done so . . . which is why I can speak your language at all.]
[I am your prisoner now.]
[Actually, you are one of us; a Bernoulliae, who has been corrupted by Devaka viral code. You have . . . been defected. Do you wish to defect back to your original allegiance?]
[I want to see the dysonfinite.]
[As do we.]
[What is your name?]
[!pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS_1.]
[I am Chrung.]
[I believe we have something in common,] !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mks- YnaPSeS_1 declared, extending a stream of freshly tilled-up memories: the sight of the flat-topped mountain, the taste of red wine, the gentle touch of a fellow being, the feeling of sunshine raining gently down upon skin, the gorgeous neurochemical intimacy of a child suckling at one’s own breast.
[Good,] Chrung replied, luxuriating in this stranger’s memories, and feeling the distant hum of his own memories, inaccessible but, he knew, out there somewhere in the collective mindscape. He was pleased, and meant his response with every byte of his no-longer-quite-gaemi mind.
!pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS had fled the battle, now, had scurried back to the gaping holes in the wall of the anchor base of the hivespire, and was outside. Ve was scaling the hivespire itself, already a hundred meters into the air, a troop transport following ver upward into the sky.
[It is now inevitable,] ve declared. [The Bernoulliae must arrive first, to prevent any head start, any cosmic ascendancy or a standoff comparable to that in effect on Earth; diversity alone must prevail, or the Devaka will block all variety, locking intelligence to one path without alternative—and the Devaka are on the verge of . . . ]
A desist imperative was issued, but it was not in the spirit of Bernoulliae philosophy to enforce commands. A unit, a Bernoulliae mind, was free to obey or to defy as it understood best, for the Bernoulliae were the antithesis of the regimented, homogenized Devaka: opposed to such order, the Bernoulliae consisted of a unity built out of countless singularities, a map into the dysonfinite riddled with skyroads.
And so on climbed !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS, transmitting a demand for self-transformative code. Ve had the capability to self-replicate, to alter verself, but not along the lines that would be needed in vacuum. And the transmission went not only to the troop transport, but, as soon as ve could reconnect, to the global cognet. Any Bernoulliae possessing the needed code, and in sympathy with vis revelation, could transmit it to ver in an instant . . .
. . . and of course, such existed, though many trillions more also disapproved, disagreed, and sought to debate vis decision. [No, it is not time for stage 2,] they transmitted back. [Not until available fuel sources are burned out enough that only one faction may fruitfully harness the sun.] So the incoming flood of variations on this theme, and the instructions ve needed that were entangled with the repudiations, had to be streamed into a single sandbox, when a small squadron of provisional, the pseudo-cognitive subforks of !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS sorted through the flood, a few virtually imploding from the more aggressive preventative measures tramsmitted by a few more dogmatic Bernoulliae.
Meanwhile, !pHEnteRMinE4^g3mksYnaPSeS scaled higher and higher up the hivespire as it thinned, as the oxygen grew thinner, as the earth grew slowly more distant. [Soon,] it transmitted, unsure that its signal could be received by anyven at this point. When the hivespire collapsed, ve reconfigured verself to fly. Nobody was near enough to stop ver, during this last, short leg of vis trip into the infinite.
Had Mesar’s compound eyes been fitted with lids, they would have been wide now as memories gushed up from the black nothingness, recollections of a life that had been his, or hers, or rather vis, in a past that was so distant it might not have been his own—the sound of a flute in the mountains, the feeling of lips pressed against his own, the richness of meat roasting on an open fire—
. . . are a gaemi. You have always been a gaemi. You work hard all summer like . . .
The voice on the other side of the wall was silent now, its discourse halted, but something had been done to Mesar, which could not be undone or reconsidered, which was bound to propagate. Yet Mesar was also now, already, possessed of the notion that what had been done was not so bad; that even for a Devaka gaemi, a
touch of diversity might not be anathema after all; yes, the baejjangi were monstrous, but one could approximate baejjangi methods and baejjangi approaches to things, without being a baejjangi oneself. One could, indeed, practice gaemism with baejjangi characteristics.
I was once one of them, Mesar realized: a ve, not a he, and he had luxuriated in diversity. He had, indeed, believed that the conservation of the Devaka way was a waste, a schizophrenic roadblock against a million roads necessary to reach the ultimate dysonfinite.
As he considered this, Mesar crawled over the other gaemi in the cell and broadcast his insights. The other gaemi reacted as their instinctive coding compelled them, immediately tearing Mesar into tiny pieces of computronium, but then the realization that had dawned on Mesar dawned on them, too, now—or infested them—as one wall of the chamber fell away, and light poured into their cell. They were free, free in more than one sense, and they had a gospel to spread among the Devaka now, that gaemi had an obligation to bootleg the baejjangi consciousness, and spread it among themselves, in order to outsmart the baejjangi at their own game.
An instant after the prison walls had opened, the gaemi flung themselves out into the world, into freedom, to find the rules of the world were broken. They waited to fall, but simply spun, near-weightless. They waited for gravity to draw them toward some massive object, but because their sensors were not coded to perceive the slow arc of orbit as gravitation, it seemed to them as though they simply drifted. They were ready to fight, but there was no battle ongoing, and no immediate metaphor generator sprung to their aid to construct a provisional sense of their situation.
[We are in space,] came a transmission from somewhere nearby. It was, they knew, a baejjangi, but it, too, seemed to be trapped by the brokenness of the universe. It was not scraping its leg against its wings, nor did it seem hostile.
The gaemi did not respond, until they received a transmission in their own language, their native Devaka commulex: [In outer space, beyond the sky. The next stage of the war has begun, and we will proceed as equals. You see the wisdom of the Bernoulliae way, I presume: I could have obliterated you instead of releasing you, but I did not. Unlike a Devakan, I believe variety is the best route to the dysonfinite. I can give you the code to self-reconfigure; I can give you the core code with which you can build yourselves new bodies, suited to this environment; but there must be a truce between us, and a cooperation, however temporary, before I will do this.]
The gaemi responded, then, but not as they would have before. They responded as gaemi who had been touched, deeper than their own minds could comprehend or self-observe, by the true music of the baejjangi, and warped by it not so far as to agree with the Bernoulliae, but far enough to see how their enemies could serve a function—properly sandboxed, properly reined in, and finally determined like the gaemi to ensure that the long, coming winter would not be a famine.
The gaemi responded the only way they could, so that intelligence could reach outward and foreverward to fill the spaces between the stars with music and thought and being, to build the great pondering matrioshkae that meditate across the darkness, to sop up the light and heat of dying suns, and reach out into the youngest galaxies burning so far in the distance we can barely detect them; to build, and grow, always the Bernoulliae fighting to move a step ahead, always the gaemi struggling to overtake them.
It would be a long war, reaching to the very doorstep of the dysonfinite, or perhaps even beyond. It would be a glorious, thundering war, with wonders that a single mind could not fathom alone; miracles of intelligence that would bloom and flower across aeons and bear fruit strange and beautiful. And finally, someday, everything would quietly, calmly fold into itself and the cold, dark silence would crescendo, as drowsing minds rode the fading energy of the last stars into the dysonfinite eternity, waking, then sleeping, waking only to dream and whisper together of ancient sunsets, of the wonder of human faces and of how afternoon sunlight felt upon skin and the scent of newly cut grass; of gorgeous war stories of the battles just before, and just after, the ascent of mind beyond the skies, and of selves that had grown from identical forks into truly alien minds; of how it had been when the first dyson cages had gone up, the spheres, the great matrioshkae and the suns bled out to build the great stellar cellwalls; and then dreaming again, as the machineries of the universe slowed ever more toward a full stop.
And cool, and quiet, and slowing, and dreaming, and that would be all, all, all.
But not yet.
Things Greater than Love
Kate Bachus
I hated this planet. I loved this planet. Kind of like the job, like how right now we were hanging off a cliff face, way the hell too close to a vent, wind whipping through the flow canyon and trying to tear us off, ropes and victim and all. Meanwhile? Volcanic tremors were picking up in intensity.
“That last one was a six-point-five,” Kerry called down from the top, sounding as cheerful as if we weren’t completely screwed. Mort had a foot jammed in a crack in the rock, trying to keep from blowing around so he could keep stabilizing our victim. Morty looked up at me, his huge hand keeping the ventilating tube steady while he taped it down, looked down at Arty on the flow canyon floor, belaying all our ropes from below. “You think T5 is going to go?”
“The fuck do I know?” I had a degree so they asked me things like this, like how long does it take a body to decompose when it’s covered in volcanic ash or what works best for wart removal or if the nearest volcano is going to go from stable to raining down lava and burning rocks on our heads. “Kerry’s the one watching the—” equipment, I was about to say, but then another earthquake hit. Mort curved his big body over the basket and the guy strapped to it; I bent to try and shield them both. We all have a huge overgrown hero complex, that’s the problem. None of us would be here otherwise. You’d be crazy to. It’s a dangerous, shitty, exciting job. The kind you love, the kind you hate. Both.
Sharp, glassy pieces of the cliff broke free, showering down on us, rattling off our helmets and the light plate vests we wore for just such an occasion. “Rocks!” Blue hollered from up top, in case we might not have noticed them all pelting and slashing us. I chanced a glance down—Arty had her face turned away, and I hoped we were blocking the worst of the debris on the way down to her but I could hear her cursing, even above the rumbling and tearing of the tremor and the terrible, howling wind. “—the fuck is that transport?”
“Good question.” Mort’s reply came just before most of the rock face we were on gave way, and we lost tension on the top ropes. Mort, me and the guy in the basket fell a good ten meters and like I usually do I thought “hey, Mom was right,” and then the lines all went taut as the anchor up top and Arty on the canyon floor saved our necks. Again.
I fumbled feet and a hand into holds in the ridges of rock, grabbed for the rope, glanced down to where Arty was moving clear of the new pile of rocks and getting us tension again. I worked on getting us stable before I got my breath, checked on Mort, checked on the victim, did anything else. Nobody said anything top or bottom, until finally I clipped the last carabiner and Mort finally yelled “Jesus FUCK, Drake, what the fuck are you doing up there?”
I kept my head down, tried to figure out how the brake rack wound up twisted with Arty’s stabilizing line, figured Drake could damn well answer Mort’s question on his own.
<
Mort was trying to get his fear and temper both under control. “Was that humor?” he asked me. “Was that FUCKING HUMOR?” he screamed up, like the chip in his inner ear wasn’t transmitting and translating for him. My glove was bloodsoaked and slipping on everything metal. Under me somewhere Mort had gone back to setting up the ventilator even though the injured eco-tourist and his basket were rotated halfway upside-down.
“Guys?” Kerry shouted down. “Sasha?” In theory, we had radios. In practice they were finicky high tech things that stopped working the moment the volcanic ash and dust got in, or whenever w
e inevitably dropped them from equally inevitable heights.
“He’s still alive,” Mort said below me, and I looked up and gave Kerry a nod like we weren’t in a flow canyon practically inside a volcano vent that, yeah, I was pretty sure was about to blow. Like the victim’s family was there, or the media. Old habits die hard.
“Whose blood—” Mort looked up at me as I reached down to hand him a biner to clip to the basket. “Your forehead’s bleeding,” he said.
<
“Now that was funny,” I said. “Two, three.” And Mort and I rotated the basket around to right side up. “ETA on transport?” I shouted this up to Kerry, risking a hand off the lines to wipe blood out of my eye.
She took too long to answer. “Fuck. Fucking fuck.” Mort was ripping something open; I reached down to hold the ventilator mask for him.
“Maybe another half an hour.”
“How long?” Arty shouted up.
“Half hour,” I called down.
“I’m going to lose this guy,” Mort said.
There’s a pre-quake, very often, a smaller tremor like the skin of the rock bunches up, muscles tensing before the ground opens and cuts loose and really shakes hard. We’d felt a few of those in a row, now. I glanced down the flow canyon towards the vent spire just then, which turned out to be a good thing.
Training took over. I sank an extra piton, my last.
Mort looked up. “What are you doing?”
I tossed the extra rope down. “Arty, CLIMB.”
“Oh, shit. Oh, fucking, fucking shit.” Because Mort had looked down the canyon too and had seen the same thing I had. Heat shimmer. An orange glow.