Exodus

by Alex Lamb

  ‘No. There are still limits to the kinds of surface we can create. The surfaces are prone to an analogue of Ricci flow once established. Spheres and tori are simple to maintain. More complex shapes require the careful application of beryllium doping to the base matrix.’

  ‘I see,’ said Nada. ‘Can we then expand to use the technique with some element other than lithium? Lithium is difficult to acquire.’

  ‘Not obviously,’ said Fojelig. ‘The element has convenient electromagnetic and nuclear properties.’

  ‘That is disappointing.’

  The meeting was interrupted by the sky turning white. Fojelig, who had been facing in the wrong direction, let out an agonised shriek and crumpled to the floor, her eyes ruined. Her trembling hands cupped over the blinded orbs.

  Nada felt the burn on the back of her head and neck even through the rover’s rad-shielded glass and knew that something bad must have happened. During the seconds that followed, a wave of torment filtered into her mind as thousands of her sisters suffered from the same blast.

  Nada forced herself to concentrate and checked the mind-temple, where a picture of events assembled out of chaos. Her orbital science station was not responding to hails and according to some sources had ceased to exist. It appeared that the humans trapped inside it had triggered some kind of explosion, vaporising Leng and hundreds of her other siblings. Their threads were gone along with their bodies, losing her valuable expertise.

  Nada shook with fury. Not content with cowering away from her loving embrace, the humans had turned their hiding place into a weapon. Typical.

  The temple updated. Two ships were heading down towards the planet: a large one on a fatal dive path and another smaller craft under controlled descent.

  [Focus on the small craft and intercept it,] she told her sisters. [Track both.]

  She wished she hadn’t sent her new boser away. As it was, she’d have to make do with the experimental weapons she had on hand. She pulled her science-sister upright to examine her tear-streaked face.

  ‘Are you capable of self-repair?’ she demanded.

  ‘No,’ Fojelig keened.

  ‘Do not self-destruct at this time,’ Nada warned her. ‘Not until the expertise deltas in your thread can be securely backed up. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fojelig. ‘It is painful but I will desist.’

  At least the humans were out now. They would feel her anger before the day was over, along with all of her other emotions.

  20.2: IRA

  Ira fired the engines again, burning what precious power they had left in a desperate attempt to stabilise their dive. The ark kept plunging towards New Panama, its vector little improved.

  ‘No luck,’ he told the others.

  They floated around him on the bridge, their expressions grim. Judj looked positively ill.

  ‘The ship can’t break up,’ said Clath, glancing at him nervously. ‘And warpium doesn’t care about re-entry heat. So we’ll impact.’

  ‘Then what?’ said Ira.

  ‘Everything inside will be pulverised, I guess. Smashed flat in an instant. It’ll be an event on the scale of a small nuclear war for the planet. That’s the good option.’

  ‘What’s the bad option?’ said Ira.

  ‘If we overcome the threshold energy for the exohull shielding, the ship will ignite,’ she said.

  ‘What happens then?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Clath. ‘Presumably a runaway cascade, blowing out the rest of the warpium in the ship, probably resulting in a redefinition event for the planet.’

  ‘So what you’re saying is that we have to get out,’ Palla suggested.

  ‘That would be good,’ said Clath. ‘Out and as far away from this thing as possible. Preferably several million kilometres.’

  ‘The spheres,’ said Ann. ‘In the next chamber. My initial analysis showed that they were designed to secure the contents against gravity-well descents.’

  ‘Is there any point?’ said Judj bleakly. ‘The only place we can go is a world crawling with Photes that’s about to experience a major impact event.’

  ‘There’s always a point,’ said Palla. ‘Let’s check them out.’

  They propelled themselves to the next chamber where the three spheres waited like ball bearings the size of houses. The only feature on each object was a small circular hatch less than a metre across; other than that, they were flawless silver. Ira held his breath as he looked them over. The idea that escape pods might just be waiting for them felt too good to be true.

  It was. As soon as Judj’s robots got one open, it became clear that the objects were crammed full of smart-foam that separated thousands of tiny compartments. Each held a minuscule, glassy warpium object like a baby jellyfish, so clear and small as to be almost invisible to the naked eye.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ said Clath in desperation. ‘What kind of species pre-packs their life rafts with so many fucking machines that there’s no room left for passengers?’

  ‘I’m looking at the control-harness for this system,’ said Judj. ‘Those glass things are automata. Each one comes with compact surgical tools and about fifty metres of monomolecular conducting filament wound up inside. In any case, I should be able to remove them. We just need to scoop out the foam. It’s a passive system.’ He set his waldobots to the task.

  Ira shook his head. Why would the Subtle send an army of near-invisible surgical robots down to a planet instead of their own crew? He gasped as he clued in.

  ‘They’re brain-control devices,’ he said. ‘The Subtle had no idea what they’d find on the other side of the Zone. They couldn’t expect a compatible biosphere and they didn’t have smart-cell technology. But they did have warpium. This was how they were going to rebuild their civilisation.’

  ‘With jellyfish?’ said Clath.

  ‘They made robots to ride whatever fauna they found,’ said Ira, ‘just like their own people did. The tools are for burrowing in. The filament is for nerve hijacking. Maybe those animals were going to be new steeds for the Subtle, or bred to the point of sentience while the isopods lived in fast-time. Or maybe the crew were just going to download their minds into these machines and live for ever. Who knows? But they were planning to build a brave new world on our side of the wall, one enslaved brain at a time.’

  It was the kind of survival solution that would never occur to a human, but it was perfectly Subtle. He shivered as he realised that the biosphere they might have ended up at was Earth.

  The robots motored through the packing material, shooting a continual jet of white foam and glassy, dead robots out into the air around them. Or at least, he hoped they were dead. He noticed Ann regarding the tiny machines warily. If touching Mark had changed her, the effects weren’t visible.

  ‘How’s it going?’ she said, batting the stuff away from her face in disgust.

  ‘Not good,’ said Judj. ‘Even with all that crap gone, it’ll still be super-snug in there.’

  Ira bounced off the wall as the ship shook wildly. Palla shielded Mark’s limp body with her own and grunted from the impact. The hull around them started to ring like a cello string. It wasn’t a sound they were used to hearing from a ship, but it kept coming.

  ‘What was that?’ said Clath.

  Ira checked. ‘We’re bouncing off atmosphere,’ he said. ‘That’s shedding a lot of our velocity, which is good and bad. It means we’re not dead yet, but we have to get off this ship fast. We have maybe twenty minutes. The next time this hulk hits, it’s headed through.’

  20.3: WILL

  Will hurtled into the planet’s carbon-dioxide atmosphere at about eight kilometres per second in a body shaped like a torpedo. He was, he decided, about as far from human as he’d ever been. With his conversion to Meta status had come belated appreciation of the fact that his pseudo-life substrate could take just about any form it wished. So now he inhabited a virt that looked like a shuttle’s cockpit while his mental denizens piloted the blob
of smart-matter that comprised him into the atmosphere.

  Despite the madness of it all, he managed to find a little room for excitement. He was out of Snakepit. His prison for so many years lay far behind, and ahead was the planet he dearly wanted to hit. Or rather, needed to hit.

  The problem with pseudo-life was that it didn’t regenerate. You needed smart-cells to manufacture it and he’d already sacrificed a lot of his material just building a heat shield. With each gram of himself that he lost, another Will-thread died and he had no way to back up. So unless he wanted to spend the rest of his life as a black slug the size of a human fist, he was going to need new bodies.

  Fortunately, New Panama was the perfect place to find them. The planet appeared to have a working defensive node, which was about as good fortune as he could possibly have hoped for. Will manipulated his stubby wings, dodged the missiles the Photes threw at him and dived straight for it.

  As he bore down on the surface, one of his instances yelled in horror. It had been tracking the ark and spotted that it was now on course to smash itself against the surface. Will cried out in chorus. When he’d encouraged them to make a reference-frame bomb out of their own warp field, he’d calculated the likely spread of exit vectors. This was one of the worst possible outcomes.

  He had no way to help them. His projectile didn’t have thrust, only the ability to flex itself in the dead air. Will dearly hoped that his first act as a merged super-intelligence hadn’t been to kill everyone he cared about.

  Still, he couldn’t save them by fretting. While guilt clawed holes in his respective virtual stomachs, he concentrated on doing what little he could. Mark and the others would either escape the gravity well or die. He had to assume they’d find a solution and make his planned distraction in any case.

  While still travelling at a healthy fraction of the speed of sound, Will slammed through the side of the node. He screamed over the surreal interior landscape of convection cilia and jellied baby drones, targeting the base of the accelerator tower. He crashed himself with pinpoint accuracy through one of the upper ducts and buried himself in a fluid-transport conduit like an assassin’s bullet.

  Will swapped his virt for an old-fashioned war room filled with his instances and maps of his pseudo-life structure. As soon as his environment had cooled enough for work, he extended tendrils out into his surroundings. He tasted the smashed machinery on all sides, hunting for a control signal, and extended a tap-root towards the nearest data artery.

  With a collective cheer, Will punctured the artery and went to work. Nineteen milliseconds later, the strangeness of the data packets he encountered sent his threads into gasps of surprise. Will focused his attention and tried to understand what had them so wound up.

  He recoiled in amazement. The world he’d hit wasn’t running the Phote Protocol. Instead, its control system was much closer to his own.

  Why? What could possibly convince the Photurians to abandon their beloved hierarchy? And how was it even an option? Weren’t they forbidden from even wanting such things? He had no clue how his own social structure could have reached this place without being ferried in on the carrier that had brought the ark. Which meant that something very strange had happened to these Photes while he was trapped in slow-time.

  With the caution of a soldier traversing a canyon full of snipers, Will extended another probe, checking for evidence of anchor-hacks that might destabilise his identity. He found none – just a framework for exclusively hosting Nada Rien, the same Phote who had screwed up his civilisation on the Willworld. The rest of them had apparently been devoured by her in some act of wholesale cognitive cannibalism. She’d taken his architecture and turned it into a tool for butchery. He shivered at the obscene scale of it.

  So far as he could tell, Nada had the rules of the Phote Protocol written into the fabric of her personality but had implemented no sanity checks beside that. Was she crazy? Wasn’t she even vaguely worried about toxic belief conflicts? Of course not, Will realised. As Balance, it had taken him years to get savvy about such stuff. Nada was still learning how to manage all that she’d consumed. She’d probably rip herself apart as soon as her instances grew too different, but he didn’t have time to wait around for that.

  Will used Balance’s knowledge of defensive nodes to quickly subvert the biomatrix surrounding his body. Thirty-three seconds later, he had full control of the entire node – a feat less impressive than it should have been. While the structure was operational, he was disappointed to discover that only one and a half of the five factory arms still functioned. The rest had been deactivated due to resource cutbacks of some kind. It would have to do. On the plus side, the planet wouldn’t be launching fresh drones, at least not without his say-so. Better still, Nada hadn’t yet noticed what he’d done.

  All drone-birthing stopped dead. Will released the blueprint for his pseudo-life architecture into the factory tissues around him and started producing more of it as fast as he could. Now his remaining instances weren’t going to die. With the node at his command, he had plenty of thread-processing capacity to store them in. And within minutes he’d have enough material to build them some bodies of their own.

  He set his less-sophisticated manufacturing equipment to work constructing atmospheric drones, tanks, walkers and anything else that might help defend his new home. Fortunately, he was also surrounded by an almost inexhaustible supply of drone parts, which meant more particle accelerators than he could use. He hurriedly began converting them into gun emplacements.

  With construction of defences under way, Will extended his reach into the habitat-tunnel fabric that ferried biological material to his site. He identified as many locally manifested subsystems as he could and co-opted them in parallel.

  Pain filled his virtual head as a wave of error reports overwhelmed him. While the main planetary data network was running Nada-OS, the local tunnel-mesh definitely wasn’t. In fact, so far as he could tell, it was barely running anything. Those data pipes were crammed with lost packets, crippled return reports and millions of requests for help. Instead of feeding more material into his node, some of Will’s osmotic transfers started going into reverse.

  He fought down the blur of noise and struggled for calm as he came to understand just how badly damaged New Panama was. Most of the individual minds he touched felt rotted, like overripe fruit. And by reaching out to reactivate parts of that mess, he’d created an instant traffic nightmare for himself. He struggled to extricate himself from the damaged systems but moved too slowly. Nada caught him in the act.

  [You!] she messaged him. [You should not be here!]

  Her words appeared on the main display screen of his war room in ugly red capitals.

  [Nice to see you again, too,] Will sent back, while hurriedly consolidating his control.

  [Why do you still exist?] she demanded. [How?]

  [It’s a secret,] Will told her.

  [It matters not. You will desist from this madness. You have no orbital power so you cannot win. Submit to me immediately to prevent further damage to my node.]

  [Sorry,] said Will. [Not going to do that.]

  [I require that node for drone production. Vacate it at once!]

  [Make me.]

  Nada closed the channel. Will got ready for pain. He’d seen no ships in orbit and no g-ray installations, but that didn’t mean she was short of other weapons up there. And a single faltering node wasn’t likely to last long against a concerted assault with space-based weapons. On the other hand, he was prepared to bet that Nada wanted her weapons factory intact. She wouldn’t get that if she blasted him into smithereens.

  For twenty whole minutes, she didn’t attack. Will hastily built a pseudo-life army and branched his threads as fast has his substrate would allow. He doubted the quiet was due to her deciding to leave him alone.

  Nada first appeared as squadrons of heavy-lifters stealing in low across the desert from multiple directions. The lifters set down macrodozers and surface-
use titan mechs. Clouds of atmospheric attack drones thousands strong followed behind. Evidently, she had plenty of defensive capability on the planet that wasn’t tied to the node.

  While he watched wave after wave of her forces surround his citadel, Nada delivered the test-shot Will had guessed was coming. She used an orbital rail gun to fire a slug at his accelerator tower, blasting a dirty great hole in the side of it. In the wake of her demonstration, Nada tight-beamed him on thirty different channels at once, asserting her primacy along with all the associated Photurian pomp and circumstance.

  [Your world has already fallen,] she told him. [Now you will fall to me, too, and treasure that experience.]

  [On the other hand, you could go fuck yourself,] Will told her cheerfully.

  [Then die, vile mutant!] she raged and advanced on his position, firing as she came.

  Will might have had the best weapons factory on the planet, but she had everything else. He erected defensive screens made of exohull plating to protect his delicate cilia-fields from being mashed. At the end of the day, though, Will didn’t care much what Nada did, so long as he held her attention and gave his friends a chance. He fought back a jag of despair and prayed they were still alive.

  20.4: ANN

  They pulled as much material out of the landing spheres as they could, but it still wasn’t enough. Meanwhile, the impact-timer in Ann’s visor ticked down.

  ‘So we have escape pods for three people,’ Judj said grimly.

  ‘No,’ Rachel insisted. ‘We can all squeeze in.’

  ‘You’re forgetting that we’ll need suits on the surface,’ said Judj. ‘There’s no oxygen.’

  ‘Just environment suits,’ Rachel insisted. ‘Not full space rigs. We can do this.’

  Ann peered into one of the gaps. The occupants would have to hunch together, utterly dependent on the Subtle cushioning technology to prevent them from being pulped the moment they hit the ground. She wished she hadn’t let Galatea’s political consultants convince her to gain so much height.

  ‘Rachel is right,’ said Ann. ‘We can fit two per pod. Just.’