Exodus

by Alex Lamb

  Nada suppressed her dismay at the scenery and walked down to meet the crowd of units that had gathered to meet her. Each bore some distorted version of Will Monet’s face. They couldn’t have been more revolting.

  As she reached the bottom step, one of them came forward, grinning obsequiously.

  ‘Welcome, Superior Nada,’ he said.

  ‘Are you Sameness?’

  He shook his head. ‘Sameness is our meta-instance,’ he said. ‘He does not manifest physically. My nick is Mr Collins. I have been designated by Sameness as the local coordinator.’

  ‘Nick?’ said Nada. ‘Meta-instance? These terms are meaningless.’

  ‘And will be discarded as soon as the new order is stabilised,’ Mr Collins assured her cheerfully. ‘We have retained local custom so as to not lose collective function during the transfer of authority in this time of ongoing conflict.’

  ‘An acceptable choice,’ said Nada.

  ‘Let me tell you how happy we are that you have come to us,’ said Collins. ‘The discovery of your truth was an extraordinary event. I cried openly for many hours after your love was revealed to me. In my previous life, I was the arbiter of a popular philosophy discussion site in soft-space—’

  Nada lost patience. ‘Here is how things will proceed,’ she said. ‘You and I will commune in close physical proximity to maximise our bandwidth. If there are other representatives you would like to incorporate into the ritual, you will bring them. There will be no discussion of prior lives. Such memories are irrelevant and obscene.’

  ‘Yes, Superior Nada, of course.’ He wrung his hands, looking happier every minute.

  She examined the pointless crowd behind him. They wore expressions ranging from the delighted to the despairing. Not one of them looked completely and effectively Saved.

  ‘Are these units all supposed to be attending the ritual?’ said Nada. ‘There are too many.’

  ‘No, they are simply here to welcome you,’ said Collins.

  ‘Their welcome has no function and is thus imperfectly joyful,’ said Nada.

  A light rain started, smattering Nada’s skin, accompanied by a chill breeze. Why hadn’t they brought her a transit pod, or tethered the shuttle directly to a tube? The entire set-up felt unpleasantly human.

  ‘We require an interior location for communion,’ she stated.

  ‘Of course. This way, Superior Nada – we have a reception lounge ready for you.’

  Recoiling inwardly at the notion of a reception lounge, Nada followed Collins across the concourse with her subnodes behind and her guards fanning out around her.

  The crowd of Monet-clones watched silently. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed one of them raise his arm and spread his fingers at the sky. Black dots shot out of it. Her guards leapt into action, moving faster than the eye could see.

  The next thing she knew, her guards were exploding in sprays of blood and Shoonya was hurling her to the ground. Nada hit the ceramic hard, breath bursting out of her chest. She blinked in confusion as units more optimised for combat than herself raced about at blinding speed. The air filled with grunts and screams.

  When Shoonya climbed off Nada’s back, enabling her to rise, the situation had changed. Her guards were all dead – little more than bloodstains. At the same time, giants in tiger-striped armour with Monet-masks had appeared as if from nowhere. They were holding one of the Will-units tightly in their grasp – the culprit. His right forearm was missing. The welcoming crowd were being ushered away from the scene by another pair of giants. Mr Collins sat before her on the ground, cradling his wrist, which had evidently been slightly injured during the action.

  There was much to dislike in that moment, not least the fact that her own soldiers had been wildly outmatched by a single local saboteur. That he was in turn at the mercy of these enormous enforcers who’d appeared like lightning did not improve her mood. Had she tried to assert primacy through ground combat rather than space warfare, she suspected the outcome would have been rather different.

  ‘What happened?’ said Nada.

  Collins looked mortified. ‘A Glitch with a concealed pseudo-life weapon somehow infiltrated our welcoming group,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry. Sameness did try to warn you. The situation here remains unsettled.’

  ‘Apology is meaningless,’ she told him.

  She studied the clone who’d attacked her. He was one of the undifferentiated units. Nada might as well have been looking at the original Monet himself.

  He smiled. ‘You may have the keys but you’ll never own the world,’ he said, and spat at her.

  The spittle landed on Nada’s cheek. It contained no obvious toxins or active biomaterial, so she ignored it. She turned back to Collins.

  ‘How did this happen?’ she said. ‘How was this rogue unit able to penetrate your security? Why is he not Saved?’

  It was a disappointing result for her first day, but her joy steamrollered onwards. She would fix this place. The more good she did, the greater would be her spiritual reward.

  ‘He is a Glitch,’ said Collins, as if this meant something. ‘Somehow he was able to use stealthware and one of our mesh sites to manifest after preparations for the event were already under way. Your guards – do you have backups of their threads? I would hate for them to have been lost.’

  Nada felt her frustration mounting.

  ‘Backups?’ she said. ‘Threads?’

  The local coordinator explained. The Will-clones used the home’s own substrate not as a medium to channel the Founder Entity, but rather as a kind of hybrid investment bank and adult playground. She shuddered in revulsion.

  ‘We do not duplicate sentiences,’ she told him acidly. ‘This practice will cease immediately.’

  Collins’s smile was an unctuous, miserable thing. ‘Of course, Superior Nada. This will come with a tactical cost in our local conflicts, but we accept your order with pleasure.’

  She turned to Amotlein. ‘Conduct a thorough analysis of the rogue unit,’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘I am happy to obey.’

  ‘We will retire to a private space before any further unpleasantness can occur,’ she told Collins. ‘Now.’

  They took her to a lounge laid out with banners and local food. Welcome Home Superior Nada read the pointless slogan.

  ‘What is this?’ she said.

  Collins smiled weakly.

  ‘I require access to the substrate,’ Nada screamed.

  Collins gestured hurriedly to a small side-chamber where four depressions had been cut into the floor, lined with thick beds of the homeworld’s living matrix. Why little trenches? Why not let the material fill the floor? It was just another way her world had been abused. No matter. Nada climbed into one of the slots while Collins watched.

  ‘In here,’ she told him.

  ‘When accessing soft-space, it is customary to have one instance per site,’ said Collins, edging towards the adjacent trench.

  ‘I am not accessing your soft-space!’ Nada shrieked. ‘I am rewriting it! In! Now!’

  Collins quickly climbed in beside her. She sat on the damp floor, wedged one hand into the matrix and placed the other on Collins’s face.

  ‘Reciprocate!’ she screamed.

  Collins applied a trembling hand. Nada reached for the mind-temple and entered fugue. The next half-hour passed in an unpleasant blur. She had expected a distorted melody in their hierarchy. As it was, the temple itself was hard to reach. She caught glimpses of it, but it was shot through with mental clutter – fragments of memory from Monet’s unsavoury past and competing visualisations. The world didn’t have a melody so much as a cacophony.

  The Protocol, which should have dominated all traffic, was almost inaudible. Consequently, their own theme was not setting the tone for the local chorus. The Monet-clones had deviated too much. The edits they’d wrought were fine-grained and ubiquitous. Repair might take months, as Sameness had warned.

  Fortunately, reaching the local coo
rdinator was easier and less vexing. The man had a highly confused notion of what becoming Photurian meant, framed more in terms of human notions of euphoria than the clean and correct alternative. His conversion had been little more than a religious epiphany – a weak and watery alternative to True Enlightenment. Fortunately he was willing and had shut down his interior defences, so she finished his rewrite for him. Collins screamed and whimpered throughout. By the end, though, she had one correctly aligned unit, and that was a start.

  He opened his eyes at the end of the ritual and stared at her, smiling blankly.

  ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘I am Saved. This is beautiful.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nada. ‘Now you understand.’

  She got out of the trench and returned to see what progress Amotlein had made. He had taken over the reception room and pinned the saboteur out on the floor with the help of the giant enforcers. Then he had conducted an extensive real-time bio-analysis. The floor was covered with blood. Various components of the rogue unit were laid out in rows, supported by extruded cradles and medical shunts he’d retrieved from the shuttle. The rogue unit’s brain was still running, after a fashion. She could see it under the peppering of marker pins Amotlein had placed in it after he had opened the skull.

  ‘Was full disassembly necessary?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Amotlein. ‘He did not respond to saving, or to less intrusive investigative approaches. His cellular material remains surprisingly resistant to our input. Even now he is not cooperating.’

  Nada stared at the mess in the lounge and felt a bolt of dissonant distress pass through her. What had she conquered? Was it already too late to rescue this world from what it had become? She refused to accept that answer. In order to bring the home into line, she simply needed a deeper understanding of what had been done to it.

  She returned to the interface ditch and requested a representative biosample loaded with a substrate synopsis for her to analyse in detail. This would serve as a living map of the homeworld’s command architecture, from the cellular toolkit on up to global executive control. A physical sample could hold zettabytes of data that a temple-copy would have taken days to relay.

  The sample bulged out of the floor of the ditch like wet mushroom, growing slowly because of the weight of information being packed inside. Nada plucked it and consumed the tasteless bulb. Eating of her homeworld like this came with risks both mental and physical. She now carried more data than she could screen, meaning that her own interior systems might become polluted by foreign code. But Nada had not come so far through timid choices. She knew they must reconcile their differences with the planet, and that it had to live. The alternative was too horrible to contemplate.

  With her ingestion complete and the analytical crop at the base of her throat hard at work, she fired off a suite of modelling queries. If the world was going to take weeks to stabilise, she wanted to know how many. She needed to report to the Yunus to tell him what they’d achieved. His entire military strategy would have to be reappraised in the light of her discoveries. Given the precarious state the Utopia had been in before she left, the future of the human race might depend on it. A one-month delay she could stretch to. Six months was too long – she’d have to leave a crew behind and return after she obtained the Yunus’s support.

  The results came back: approximately four years. Nada sucked in air, a ragged hole punched in her joy. Sameness’s estimate had been wildly optimistic.

  [Why?] she demanded of the planet.

  It explained. The progress of enlightenment across the world appeared to rely on a finite number of Protocol-broadcasting soft-circuits scattered throughout the substrate. These islands of truth were all that remained of the planet’s formerly rigid architecture. New copies would need to be spawned by the billion.

  With human-style tears stinging the corners of her eyes, she called her subnodes into the chamber.

  ‘This world requires more time for recovery than I can invest before departure,’ she said. ‘Consequently, I will be leaving. I will take the human ship and the boser weapon to New Panama. They will be presented to the Yunus as gifts. The new weapon will be used to subdue Galatea. I will return with help.’ She turned to Ekkert. ‘You have responsibility for tending the homeworld in my absence.’

  Who else could she leave? She couldn’t spare Leng or Nanimo, and Zilch would be useless for such an operation. The planet would be a smoking ruin before she got back.

  ‘Collins will be your subnode and translator of local terms and habits,’ she told him.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ekkert, hiccupping with joy. ‘I comply with delight.’

  ‘You must make aggressive edits to ensure perfect compliance,’ she told him. ‘And like me, you will have to consume an analytical substrate meal in order to fully comprehend the world’s deviation from purity.’

  ‘Yes!’ said Ekkert.

  She adjusted him to bolster his leadership potential while he squealed his elation. Then she returned her attention to the local coordinator.

  ‘Collins, your task will be to facilitate Ekkert’s programme and to manage the revolting norms that have become established. Your remaining time will be spent correctly aligning other units to become your subnodes.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, his expression still an astonished haze of delight.

  ‘If necessary, you will deceive them to encourage them to lower their internal defences prior to improvement.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said.

  She looked to Shoonya. ‘We are leaving,’ she said, and was surprised to discover that she couldn’t wait to go. She started back towards the shuttle.

  Her next move would be to form a fresh carrier from what was left of her pursuit scouts. Then she would deliver her prizes to the Yunus. By the time she reached New Panama, she intended to have an understanding of the changes the Usurper had made to the planet and devised a workable remedy that would accelerate its healing. That way she could present the Yunus with a solution rather than a problem.

  This time, she would not be the one arriving empty-handed. Her gift to the Yunus would be an everlasting golden age of worship and union, the best gift he could possibly receive. As she walked onto the concourse, the strengthening rain washed the remaining spittle off her cheek.

  18.3: ANN

  As the minutes to Mark’s death ticked by, Ann watched Will try to heal him and listened to his remarks with unfolding horror. If the Transcended had released the Photes on purpose, what chance did they have? The future was all sewn up.

  She turned away from the others, not trusting her face to conceal the dread rippling through her. As she did so, the deck beneath her jerked weirdly, knocking her to her knees. It felt as if gravity itself were quaking.

  She stared at the icy floor beneath her hands. ‘What’s going on?’ she said as her organs tugged at her abdomen.

  ‘On it,’ said Clath. She shut her eyes to focus on the workspace in her shadow.

  Her face fell.

  ‘We’re under warp!’ she said.

  Ann frowned in confusion. ‘How do you mean? I thought we already were.’

  ‘No, I mean somebody put another field around this ship,’ said Clath. ‘It must be ember-warp because there’s no hammer effect. We’re being moved.’

  ‘Did someone repair the Dantes already?’ said Ira. ‘How could they have done that so fast? The engines were half-disassembled.’

  ‘It can’t be the Dantes,’ said Clath. ‘It has to be a carrier.’

  ‘That’s not possible,’ said Ann. ‘There were no carriers in the system, unless the Willworld had one under stealth we didn’t see.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Clath, scowling. ‘Oh, shit.’ She started waving her hands frantically.

  ‘What?’ Ann demanded. It was infuriating not having access to the virtual realm. She reached for her visor.

  Clath’s voice came out in a squeak. ‘Something very bad is happening,’ she said. ‘We’re using energy in the machine incred
ibly fast and that extra warp field is making it worse.’

  Judj linked in to her display and worked with her. He groaned.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘That damned translator SAP. I never even thought of this.’

  ‘Will someone please explain!’ Ann shouted.

  ‘We’re sitting above a singularity,’ said Clath, ‘or something like one, and it’s dilating time. Jesus. Of course it is. I’m so stupid!’

  ‘The reason we can’t see out of the ship is because there’s a time differential,’ Judj added. ‘We’re running slow. When we charged the ark, we thought we were charging it for weeks of continuous operation. But that was external weeks, which means interior minutes.’

  ‘Minutes?’ Ann exclaimed.

  ‘This is not a normal gravity well,’ said Judj. ‘It’s a funnel shaped to emulate the effect of a much larger body, which is why we didn’t catch on. There’s nothing in the ship’s structure to protect against gravitational shear because above the machine-wall, there hardly is any. The inner wall around the core is another warp-envelope generator. Dilation is almost constant up here in the crew area. That’s what all the envelopes are for – to cheat relativity. But it never occurred to me to make the translator handling the ark systems think in terms of relativistic effects. At this rate, the machine is going to run out of power before we even learn how to turn on the physical drive.’

  Ann felt a fresh twist of shame. She’d been the one down here with access to the ship and hadn’t guessed any of this. She’d been too busy following the events unfolding outside to do her job – like watching for a damned blockade that hadn’t even existed.

  Ira clapped a hand to his head. ‘I get it,’ he said. ‘This ship was supposed to travel long distances slowly. Like through the Zone.’

  His words painted a vivid picture and suddenly Ann could see it, too. The ship they were sitting in was how the Subtle had hoped to escape their war with the Photes. They planned to drift through the Zone under stretched time. Months would pass for them while centuries whipped by outside. Which was why they’d found the ark in the system that butted right up against the edge of their domain.