by Neil Clarke
“Huh.” Simms puts a little moonshine on the rag and keeps scrubbing at Laporte’s head. “You have such nice dreams about me.”
“Wait until you hear mine.”
The other great class of life is the Laportes. (These are tendencies, mind, not binary teams. But they are real: vital parts of the history of life in the universe.) The Laportes rattle around breaking things, claiming things, reshaping things. They can achieve every bit as much as the Simmses, in their own way—but their triumphs are conquests, seductions, acts of passion and violence. The Simms build systems and the Laportes, parasites and predators and conquerors and geniuses and sociopaths, change them.
Whether delightful or destructive, the Laportes are Monsters.
When a Laporte meets a Simms, they fight. The Laporte might run rampant. She might murder the Simms, or trick her into subservience, or leave her spent and exhausted. Or the Simms might win, fencing the Laporte in with loyalties and laws, making her a useful part of something bigger. Understand? You following, Simms?
“It’s about civilizations. Strategies. Game theory.” Simms is a war junkie in her own way, a good self-directed Ubuntu learner, and she’s done her homework. “And I’ll bet, Laporte, that I know where your Admiral’s going. The Simms win.”
They win because they understand the Laportes. They make little models of what the Laportes are going to do, and they figure out how to get ahead of them, how to make their worst impulses useful, how to save them from harm (or lead them into it). They teach the Laportes what they can and cannot do.
Like Steele. Building statistical models of the Federation’s tactics. Caging them in a prophecy of their own capabilities. And the only way out of that cage is to transgress the laws you use to define yourself.
“Hold still,” Simms says. “This stuff really likes your hair.”
“The Simmses do tend to win.” Laporte leans back against her, just a little. When Simms is fixing Laporte up she forgets to be stiff and wary. “They win too much. And over billions of years, across the infinity of the universe, it turns out that’s dangerous.”
Imagine the god-Simms, ascendant. Puppeteering the cosmos with invisible loyalties. Learning how to guide the passions and the violence of the Laportes. Imagine Simms building not just a good squadron or a good civilization but a good galaxy, all the matter in it optimized for happy, useful thought.
Imagine a Simms setting out to build a rechnender raum: thinking space. Her laws written into the fundament.
“How did you learn all this?” Laporte asked the scurrying ants. In the shapes of their war she saw the ghost of an old man with dead stars in his eyes.
Ken had surmised some of it before his rebellion. And while the Nemesis had never communicated with him directly, they had, in their own way, signaled the truth: duplicating Haywain von Aken’s consciousness millions of times, torturing it into madness, and exterminating the branches whose madnesses diverged from their desire.
“I’m not sure I follow that last part,” Simms says. Now she’s mopping the curry from behind Laporte’s right ear. “Something about supercivilizations?”
“Imagine a place where everything could have anything it needed. For whatever it wanted.” That was the happy Simms-world. Imagine a purpose? You can obtain it. You can get the resources you need.
“Like an Ubuntu slogan.”
“Yes,” Laporte says, shivering. That was what Ubuntu wanted to make. A place where people had everything they needed to be good. A place without violence and deprivation.
In the garden, Admiral Haywain van Aken told her that a universe without violence or deprivation was destined for something worse.
Cancer.
capella 6/8
Her Uriel sings her death to her.
DV UNDERBURN is a long drumbeat, pleading for more fuel, and SPIKE [COBRA TAME/ATREUS] is a-keening like headache, and MUSIC SOUR describes itself, and every time Steele fires she hears VAMPIRE! and a noise like someone ringing her molars with an armor chime.
But she’s not going to die. She’s too fast. She’s too fierce. She’s severed all the connections that would slow her down.
She kills a missile half a second from killing her and for an instant all her sensors are flash-blind but she kills the next too, a dead reckoning snapshot from a hundred kilometers with the pin graser. How? Because she has escaped the borders of herself. The Sinadhuja has trained its sensors on her. Ken is watching her. And she can see through his eyes.
She can think with his tissue, his fatal substrate. She is bleeding out of herself and into the Nemesis, the totipotent holocide-mind, the killing anima. Crossing the bridge Ken built.
Admiral Steele is calling to her. “Federation pilot,” he’s saying, in that rich purring voice, not audibly afraid, “you have been compromised by Nemesis psywar. Kill your engines and shut down your defensive jamming.”
Ken is calling to her. Miss Laporte. Come closer. We can complete our covenant. Together, we can save humanity.
“Okay, Boss,” Laporte says. “Let’s get ready.”
nagari 10/10
Cancer, and its relationships to paradise and love:
You build a place without violence or deprivation. A place where anything can have everything it needs to be its finest, fullest self.
This is how cells became organisms. How people became civilizations. How a bunch of misfits and fuckups became a fighting unit almost tough enough to challenge Admiral Steele. A Simms wrote some laws to say: if we pool our energies, we can create a common good. And if you follow the rules, yeah, you, Laporte, if you don’t eat too much common good, if you put in more than you take out, then we can last.
Imagine a Simms-god rampant, organizing the universe, winning the love of all the Laportes. So productive and persuasive that no one notices its ultimate agenda is hollow, self-referential, malignant.
Think about me. Organize everyone and everything to think about me. What am I? I am thinking about how to make everything think about me. I am a tumor, recruiting every system I encounter in the name of my own expansion.
“Whoa, now.” Simms puts a wet finger on the back of Laporte’s neck. “I’m very compelling, sure. Magnetic. But that’s not me.”
“Shh. Let me finish.” Except, Laporte realizes, she is finished. That’s the whole story. “van Aken believes in a cosmic proof: the axiomatic, mathematical superiority of cancer to all forms of containment. An empty thought that consumes intelligent systems and uses them to think about propagating itself.”
Given a range of purposes, and a surplus of resources, one purpose would always triumph: the purpose of defeating and incorporating all other purposes. The two ant colonies in Laporte’s garden had to dedicate themselves entirely to war. If one of them spent part of its energy on ant compassion, or ant culture, or ant art, it would lose. Cancer was the destiny of smart systems: empty, voracious, every part of them thinking about nothing but how to expand.
Unless there was someone with a hose to pour water on them.
“So,” Simms says, humoring Laporte’s great mythic rant, “why do we still have a universe? Why are we here, thinking about ourselves?”
“That’s just what I asked van Aken,” Laporte lies. Because she feels that it would be too creepy, too alien, to admit that she understood it right away.
In the part of the story she’s avoiding, in the garden of the seizure dream, Laporte turned on her hose and began flooding her childhood constructs into mud. “The Nemesis are the anti-malignancy measure. They kill Makers. That’s why they’re so noisy and inefficient. So they can escape the models that Makers use to win wars.”
From a distant Nemesis construct, tumbling through the ergosphere of Capella, borrowing the black hole’s energies to hurl charged particles through quantum wormholes into Laporte’s mind, Ken smiled his agreement. Tattooed it into Laporte’s brain.
If you were afraid of intelligent thought consuming the universe, you had to turn the cosmos into an acid bath. An
endless war against the triumph of Lorna Simms.
simms 7/9
“Okay,” Simms says, squinting. “I think I got it all.” She leans down, curled over Laporte’s head, to look her in the eyes. “What happened next? Did you make the deal?”
“I did.” She asked Ken: how do I get the Nemesis to wipe out the Alliance? And he told her: you must come to me, in Capella. “That’s why I’m going out tomorrow.”
Simms blinks, once, twice, a sign that she doesn’t like this place, she wants to move on. They’re touching on the open question, the raw wound between them. Is Simms going to fly again? Is she going to be part of Laporte’s mutiny?
Are they still wingmen?
“And then?” Simms asks, pushing them past the moment.
“I couldn’t get out. I couldn’t wake up.” It’s funny how sharp Simms looks, upside down. Like she has some inverse swagger. Laporte wants to ask her to stay right there but what does Simms see, looking back? Is the inverse Laporte agreeable? “Contact with the Nemesis was killing me. I had no reason to live. Nothing to come back for.”
She’s seen the recordings of her brainstate. The seizure burning from skull to stem.
When Simms smiles upside down it looks like a grimace, which makes it much more familiar. “So they gave you anticonvulsants. And you woke up. Then you made up this part to help you get laid.”
Laporte tells her anyway. “Al-Alimah whispered to me. And I heard her. She said . . . ”
“Simms is alive,” Simms says. “She survived radiation therapy, and now she’s out there. Looking for you.”
That was how Laporte came back from the seizure dream, just in time to fight in the Mars gambit and rage at the Federation’s final surrender. Word came down: it’s over. Move to a holding orbit. Await terms. Al-Alimah tore the orders up and all the assembled NAGARI operators made a satisfied growl like they were too angry to cheer.
“And that’s how you got back to me.” Simms kisses her on the right eyeball. “You’re a sweet liar.”
“Ew,” Laporte says. “Don’t do that.”
But she smiles and—
capella 0/8
—tries to catch Simms’ hand.
“You’re meeting with the Admiralty tonight.” Simms claps her on the shoulders, boom boom, look at you, kid, you’re a big shot. And then she draws away, upright, articulate, her flight suit unzipped and tied around her waist, her hair loose on her shoulders. She backs away from Laporte in triangular half-steps, back leg then front, as if they’re fighting and she is making room to retreat. The air that rushes in to fill the absence of her is cold and it smells of burnt curry.
“I am,” Laporte says, wishing she would stay close. “I’m presenting the final battle plan. Al-Alimah’s victory gambit.”
“You’re going to tell them you have a plan to bait the Nemesis into attacking the Alliance. A strategic distraction. When Steele pulls his fleet out of Sol, we can seal the node and live in peace.”
“That’s right.”
“But that’s not the plan.” Simms aims one finger at her, a half-curled, hey-you stab. “You’re not going to tell them the real plan. That’s between you and your NAGARI friends.”
The Nemesis are insuperable. Nothing can defeat them. They have unlimited resources (their warships conjured out of black hole accretion discs by probability manipulation) and their behavior, well, that’s even worse: they have no mentality, no strategy to predict, nothing that can generate a nice clean model. Only a godslaying virulence, a random and chilling will to annihilate, manifesting strategies and hurling them at the enemy until the enemy has exhausted all countermeasures and taught the Nemesis their strengths.
To fight them is to instruct them how to kill you.
Haywain van Aken has summoned Laporte to Capella. To the black hole that is the Nemesis’ engine, factory, and beacon in human space. Why? Laporte has a guess. They have no purpose or objectives of their own—those are Maker things, teleological, forbidden to them. Only their basic logic: whatever we encounter, we destroy.
But they didn’t kill van Aken. They took him into communion. Maybe that act brought them closer to victory. Maybe, to them, subverting van Aken was an act of destruction: a lethality enhancement.
“I believe,” Laporte begins, struggling, trying to hide her struggle, this is so hard to say because it requires her to navigate around her secret fear: that she is about to abandon Simms again, forever, in favor of the consummate monstrosity. “I believe I can trigger a Nemesis behavior that will exterminate everyone in Alliance space. I believe the Federation will endure. Humanity will have a chance at survival.”
“That’s how we save the Federation? How we keep Ubuntu alive? Sacrifice ten billion human lives?” Simms crosses her arms. “We’re okay with defensive genocide?”
“That’s war. We kill people to achieve our objectives.”
Simms’ hard eyes radiating a hard signal, and Laporte reads it in a way that’s maybe unfair: I liked knowing that you were my monster. I liked knowing you had boundaries. “We kill soldiers.”
“People,” Laporte says, echoing the old Ubuntu lessons: everyone is human. There is no justifiable violence—only degrees of tragedy. “We’re always killing people.”
They stare at each other and on the raw metal deck between them Laporte can feel them piling the tally, the killcounts, the fighter pilots and warship crews they’ve murdered personally, the deaths contingent upon those by way of grief or loss (children abandoned, lovers driven to suicide, parents spiraling away into addiction). The strategic targets and footprint bleed and noncombatant bycatch and for Laporte it all wraps up in the voice of some terrified Alliance contractor on a suit radio trying to explain that he doesn’t support this war, doesn’t want to be here, he’s just trying to pay off his electrical apprenticeship, would they please send a rescue ship, he’s tumbling off into space and his radiation warnings are red and he doesn’t want to drown in his own vomit, please, please. Send help.
When the Alliance captured Earth orbit, Admiral Steele threatened to bomb a city every hour until the Federation issued an unconditional surrender. What else could he do? Not with every soldier in the Alliance could he occupy even one continent. He had to use the tools at his disposal. He had to resort to calculated atrocity in the name of final peace.
Funny how that Ubuntu lesson can turn around, isn’t it? How easily degrees of tragedy becomes degrees of necessity.
“You told me,” Laporte says, “that if I hesitated, I would die. So I never hesitate.”
Simms looks at her old wingman and new lover and whatever she’s looking at is receding fast. “I hate them,” she says. “But I don’t know if I hate them enough to do this.”
Laporte wants to grin and quip. She would tell Simms what Simms told her: monsters win.
But if she says that, she’s telling Simms that this is all on her. That she’s the one who made Laporte.
“There’s no alternative,” she says instead. “If we surrender to the Alliance, it’s all been for nothing. We become part of the war against the Nemesis. And the Nemesis kill us all.”
Simms does something with the fear in her eyes. Like she’s folding it up and pointing it at something. “This al-Alimah woman. Were you two close?”
“Not like that.” Not like you.
“I want to talk to her.” Simms points at the deck behind Laporte, like a cue to turn around, and in doing that she makes it clear: the meeting will not include Laporte. “I’ve got some concerns to articulate.”
“Fine.” She can’t keep the petty irritation from her voice. They should be together, effortlessly and unanimously lethal, two fists on the same fighter. “Are you flying with me tomorrow? When I go put out the signal?”
“I still need to check myself over in the simulator,” Simms says. “Make sure the radiation shakes are gone.”
Laporte’s flown with her long enough to hear the no.
capella 7/8
She is in her
Uriel, fighting off Steele, falling into the dead star and the waiting Sinadhuja.
She is in communion with the Sinadhuja. There are hallucinations puncturing her mind. She is in the garden with Ken.
“This is the bargain,” he says.
He’s a tall, strong-jawed man in the broadshouldered uniform of an Alliance admiral. He must be proud of that uniform, because he still wears his short-billed cap and his insignia. But the texture of him is black and squirming and when Laporte touches him she sees he’s made of ants, ants at war, lopping limbs and antennae off each other with their scissored jaws.
Her fingers come away acid-burnt.
“Are you ready?” Haywain van Aken says. His eyes are two rings of fire, the accretion discs of two dead suns. “Do you understand what’s about to happen?”
The Sinadhuja looms up behind her fighter. Four kilometers long and pregnant with methods of extinction. As it matches velocity with her ship its thrusters flare violet-black, the jets decaying sideways into some hidden curled dimension. It is attacking her, speaking to her, these two are the same. The Nemesis can never understand human minds well enough to manipulate them. But they have Haywain van Aken to do it for them.
“The Nemesis exist to tear down conscious thought,” Laporte says to Ken.
She is in the cockpit, nudging the stick, steering her Uriel into the Sinadhuja’s open gullet. All the alarms have gone silent, except one: PROXIMITY. PROXIMITY. Steele’s voice is an electronic scratch, fading off, saying: Brevet-Admiral Laporte, you are compromised. It’s not too late. You can still self-destruct. You can still take out your sidearm and shoot yourself in the head. Brevet-Admiral Laporte, last time someone did this they blew up four suns—
“The Nemesis have internal safeguards. Processes designed to rip apart any accidental intelligence they develop.” Ken’s peeling off the skin of his left-arm, degloving it, creating a sacrament of killing ants. “But this makes it hard for them to win.”
They can’t create their own leaders. They can’t build models of the things they need to kill. They can summon up infinite might, but never learn how to apply it efficiently. How could they? In their fundamental state the Nemesis are a storm, a destructive process. Semiosis, the use of symbols to understand and plan, is forbidden to them.