by Neil Clarke
She came among us without image or analogy, injected between one tick of simulation and the next. We stood around her on a pane of glass high above a grey-green sea.
“Hello,” she said. She smiled, and it was not at all inhuman. She had Thienne’s color and a round, guileless face that with her slight build made me think of Jizo statues from my childhood. “I’m the ambassador for Mitanni.”
Whatever language she spoke, Lachesis had no trouble with it. Thienne and Anyahera looked to me, and I spoke as we’d agreed.
“Hello. My name is Shinobu. This is the starship Lachesis, scout element of the Second Fleet.”
If she saw through the bluff of scouts and fleets, she gave no sign. “We expected you,” she said, calm at the axis of our triplicate regard. “We detected the weapons you carry. Because you haven’t fired yet, we know you’re still debating whether to use them. I am here to plead for our survival.”
She’s rationally defensive, Thienne wrote in our collective awareness. Attacking the scenario of maximal threat.
At the edge of awareness, Lachesis’s telemetry whispered telltales of cognition and feedback, a map of the Mitanni’s thoughts. Profiling.
My eyes went to Anyahera. We’d agreed she would handle this contingency. “We believe your world may be a Duong-Watts malignant,” she said. “If you’ve adapted yourselves to survive by eliminating consciousness, we’re deeply concerned about the competitive edge you’ve gained over baseline humanity. We believe consciousness is an essential part of human existence.”
In a negotiation between humans, I think we would have taken hours to reach this point, and hours more to work through the layers of bluff and counter-bluff required to hit the next point. The Mitanni ambassador leapt all that in an instant. “I’m an accurate map of the Mitanni mind,” she said. “You have the information you need to judge the Duong-Watts case.”
I see significant mental reprofiling, Lachesis printed. Systemic alteration of networks in the thalamic intralaminar nuclei and the prefrontal-parietal associative loop. Hyperactivation in the neural correlates of rationalization—
Anyahera snapped her fingers. The simulation froze, the Mitanni ambassador caught in the closing phoneme of her final word. “That’s it,” Anyahera said, looking between the two of us. “Duong-Watts. That’s your smoking gun.”
Even Thienne looked shocked. I saw her mouth the words: hyperactivation in the neural—
The Mitanni hadn’t stripped their minds of consciousness. They’d just locked it away in a back room, where it could watch the rest of the brain make its decisions, and cheerfully, blithely, blindly consider itself responsible.
—correlates of rationalization—
Some part of the Mitanni mind knew of its own existence. And that tiny segment watched the programming that really ran the show iterate itself, feeling every stab of pain, suffering through every grueling shift, every solitary instant of a life absent joy or reward. Thinking: This is all right. This is for a reason. This is what I want. Everything is fine. When hurt, or sick, or halfway through unanaesthetized field surgery, or when she drove the euthanasia needle into her thigh: this is what I want.
Because they’d tweaked some circuit to say: You’re in charge. You are choosing this. They’d wired in the perfect lie. Convinced the last domino that it was the first.
And with consciousness out of the way, happy to comply with any sacrifice, any agony, the program of pure survival could optimize itself.
“It’s parsimonious,” Thienne said at last. “Easier than stripping out all the circuitry of consciousness, disentangling it from cognition . . .”
“This is Duong-Watts,” Anyahera said. I flinched at her tone: familiar only from memories of real hurt and pain. “This is humanity enslaved at the most fundamental level.”
I avoided Thienne’s glance. I didn’t want her to see my visceral agreement with Anyahera. Imagining that solitary bubble of consciousness, lashed, parasitic, to the bottom of the brain, powerless and babbling.
To think that you could change yourself. To be wrong, and never know it. That was a special horror.
Of course Thienne saw anyway, and leapt in, trying to preempt Anyahera, or my own thoughts. “This is not the place to wash your hands of Jotunheim. There’s no suffering here. No crime to erase. All they want to do is survive—”
“Survival is the question,” Anyahera said, turned half-away, pretending disregard for me, for my choice, and in that disregard signaling more fear than she had begging on her knees at Jotunheim, because Anyahera would only ever disregard that which she thought she had no hope of persuading. “The survival of consciousness in the galaxy. The future of cognition. We decide it right here. We fire or we don’t.”
Between us the Mitanni stood frozen placidly, mid-gesture.
“Kill the Mitanni,” Thienne said, “and you risk the survival of anything at all.”
It hurt so much to see both sides. It always had.
Three-player variants are the hardest to design.
Chess. Shogi. Nuclear detente. War. Love. Galactic survival. Three-player variants are unstable. It was written in my first game theory text: Inevitably, two players gang up against a third, creating an irrecoverable tactical asymmetry.
“You’re right, Thienne,” I said. “The Mitanni aren’t an immediate threat to human survival. We’re going home.”
We fell home to Earth, to the empty teak house, and when I felt Anyahera’s eyes upon me I knew myself measured a monster, an accomplice to extinction. Anyahera left, and with her gone, Thienne whirled away into distant dry places far from me. The Mitanni bloomed down the Orion Arm and leapt the darkness between stars.
“Anyahera’s right,” I said. “The Mitanni will overrun the galaxy. We need to take a stand for—for what we are. Fire the weapons.”
We fell home to Earth and peach tea under the Lagos sun, and Thienne looked up into that sun and saw an empty universe. Looked down and saw the two people who had, against her will, snuffed out the spark that could have kindled all that void, filled it with metal and diligent labor: life, and nothing less or more.
I took a breath and pushed the contingencies away. “This isn’t a zero-sum game,” I said. “I think that other solutions exist. Joint outcomes we can’t ignore.”
They looked at me, their pivot, their battleground. I presented my case.
This was the only way I knew how to make it work. I don’t know what I would have done if they hadn’t agreed.
They chose us for this mission, us three, because we could work past the simple solutions.
The Mitanni ambassador stood between us as we fell down the thread of our own orbit, toward the moment of weapons release, the point of no return.
“We know that Mitanni society is built on the Duong-Watts malignancy,” Anyahera said.
The Mitanni woman lifted her chin. “The term malignancy implies a moral judgment,” she said. “We’re prepared to argue on moral grounds. As long as you subscribe to a system of liberal ethics, we believe that we can claim the right to exist.”
“We have strategic concerns,” Thienne said, from the other side of her. “If we grant you moral permit, we project you’ll colonize most of the galaxy’s habitable stars. Our own seedships or digitized human colonists can’t compete. That outcome is strategically unacceptable.”
We’d agreed on that.
“Insects outnumber humans in the terrestrial biosphere,” the Mitanni said. I think she frowned, perhaps to signal displeasure at the entomological metaphor. I wondered how carefully she had been tuned to appeal to us. “An equilibrium exists. Coexistence that harms neither form of life.”
“Insects don’t occupy the same niche as humans,” I said, giving voice to Anyahera’s fears. “You do. And we both know that we’re the largest threat to your survival. Sooner or later, your core imperative would force you to act.”
The ambassador inclined her head. “If the survival payoff for war outstrips the survival pay
off for peace, we will seek war. And we recognize that our strategic position becomes unassailable once we have launched our first colony ships. If it forestalls your attack, we are willing to disassemble our own colonization program and submit to a blockade—”
“No.”Thienne again. I felt real pride. She’d argued for the blockade solution and now she’d coolly dissect it. “We don’t have the strength to enforce a blockade before you can launch your ships. It won’t work.”
“We are at your mercy, then.” The ambassador bowed her chin. “Consider the moral ramifications of this attack. Human history is full of attempted genocide, unilateral attempts to control change and confine diversity, or to remake the species in a narrow image. Full, in the end, of profound regret.”
The barb struck home. I don’t know by what pathways pain becomes empathy, but just then I wondered what her tiny slivered consciousness was thinking, while the rest of her mind thrashed away at the problem of survival: The end of the world is coming, and it’s all right; I won’t worry, everything’s under control—
Anyahera took my shoulder in silence.
“Here are our terms,” I said. “We will annihilate the Mitanni colony in order to prevent the explosive colonization of the Milky Way by post-conscious human variants. This point is non-negotiable.”
The Mitanni ambassador waited in silence. Behind her, Thienne blinked, just once, an indecipherable punctuation. I felt Anyahera’s grip tighten in gratitude or tension.
“You will remain in storage aboard the Lachesis,” I said. “As a comprehensive upload of a Mitanni personality, you contain the neuroengineering necessary to recreate your species. We will return to Earth and submit the future of the Mitanni species to public review. You may be given a new seedship and a fresh start, perhaps under the supervision of a preestablished blockade. You may be consigned to archival study, or allowed to flourish in a simulated environment. But we can offer a near-guarantee that you will not be killed.”
It was a solution that bought time, delaying the Duong-Watts explosion for centuries, perhaps forever. It would allow us to study the Duong-Watts individual, to game out their survivability with confidence and the backing of a comprehensive social dialogue. If she agreed.
It never occurred to me that she would hesitate for even one instant. The core Mitanni imperative had to be survive, and total annihilation weighed against setback and judgment and possible renaissance would be no choice at all.
“I accept,” the Mitanni ambassador said. “On behalf of my world and my people, I am grateful for your jurisprudence.”
We all bowed our heads in unrehearsed mimicry of her gesture. I wondered if we were aping a synthetic mannerism, something they had gamed out to be palatable.
“Lachesis,” Anyahera said. “Execute RKV strike on Mitanni.”
“I need a vote,” the ship said.
I think that the Mitanni must have been the only one who did not feel a frisson: the judgment of history, cast back upon us.
We would commit genocide here. The largest in human history. The three of us, who we were, what we were, would be chained to this forever.
“Go,” I said. “Execute RKV strike.”
Thienne looked between the two of us. I don’t know what she wanted to see but I met her eyes and held them and hoped.
Anyahera took her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Go,” Thienne said. “Go.”
We fell away from the ruin, into the void, the world that had been called Mitanni burning away the last tatters of its own atmosphere behind us. Lachesis clawed at the galaxy’s magnetic field, turning for home.
“I wonder if they’ll think we failed,” Anyahera said drowsily. We sat together in a pavilion, the curtains drawn.
I considered the bottom of my glass. “Because we didn’t choose? Because we compromised?”
She nodded, her hands cupped in her lap. “We couldn’t go all the way. We brought our problems home.” Her knuckles whitened. “We made accommodations with something that—”
She looked to her left, where Thienne had been, before she went to be alone. After a moment she shrugged. “Sometimes I think this is what they wanted all along, you know. That we played into their hands.”
I poured myself another drink: cask strength, unwatered. “It’s an old idea,” I said.
She arched an eyebrow.
“That we can’t all go home winners.” I thought of the pierced bleeding crust of that doomed world and almost choked on the word winners—but I knew that for the Mitanni, who considered only outcomes, only pragmatism, this was victory. “That the only real solutions lie at the extremes. That we can’t figure out something wise if we play the long game, think it out, work every angle.”
For n=3, solutions exist for special cases.
“Nobody won on Jotunheim,” Anyahera said softly.
“No,” I said. Remembered people drowning in acid, screaming their final ecstasy because they had been bred and built for pain. “But we did our jobs, when it was hardest. We did our jobs.”
“I still can’t sleep.”
“I know.” I drank.
“Do you? Really?”
“What?”
“I know the role they selected you for. I know you. Sometimes I think—” She pursed her lips. “I think you change yourself so well that there’s nothing left to carry scars.”
I swallowed. Waited a moment, to push away my anger, before I met her gaze. “Yeah,” I said. “It hurt me too. We’re all hurt.”
A moment passed in silence. Anyahera stared down into her glass, turning it a little, so that her reflected face changed and bent.
“To new ideas,” she said, a little toast that said with great economy everything I had hoped for, especially the apologies.
“To new ideas.”
“Should we go and—?” She made a worried face and pointed to the ceiling, the sky, where Thienne would be racing the causality of her own hurt, exploring some distant angle of the microwave background, as far from home as she could make the simulation take her.
“Not just yet,” I said. “In a little while. Not just yet.”
Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Campbell Award winning author of thirty novels (The most recent is The Stone in the Skull, an epic fantasy from Tor) and over a hundred short stories. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, writer Scott Lynch.
THE DEEPS OF THE SKY
ELIZABETH BEAR
Stormchases’ little skiff skipped and glided across the tropopause, skimming the denser atmosphere of the warm cloud-sea beneath, running before a fierce wind. The skiff’s hull was broad and shallow, supported by buoyant pontoons, the whole designed to float atop the heavy, opaque atmosphere beneath. Stormchases had shot the sails high into the stratosphere and good winds blew the skiff onward, against the current of the dark belt beneath.
Ahead, the vast ruddy wall of a Deep Storm loomed, the base wreathed in shreds of tossing white mist: caustic water clouds churned up from deep in the deadly, layered troposphere. The Deep Storm stretched from horizon to horizon, disappearing at either end in a blur of perspective and atmospheric haze. Its breadth was so great as to make even its massive height seem insignificant, though the billowing ammonia cloud wall was smeared flat-topped by stratospheric winds where it broke the tropopause.
The storm glowed with the heat of the deep atmosphere, other skiffs silhouetted cool against it. Their chatter rang over Stormchases’ talker. Briefly, he leaned down to the pickup and greeted his colleagues. His competition. Many of them came from the same long lines of miners that he did; many carried the same long-hoarded knowledge.
But Stormchases was determined that, with the addition of his own skill and practice, he would be among the best sky-miners of them all.
Behind and above, clear skies showed a swallowing indigo, speckled with bright stars. The hurtling crescents of a dozen or so
of the moons were currently visible, as was the searing pinpoint of the world’s primary—so bright it washed out nearby stars. Warmth made the sky glow too, the variegated brightness of the thermosphere far above. Stormchases’ thorax squeezed with emotion as he gazed upon the elegant canopies of a group of Drift-Worlds rising in slow sunlit coils along the warm vanguard of the Deep Storm, their colours bright by sunlight, their silhouettes dark by thermal sense.
He should not look; he should not hope. But there—a distance-hazed shape behind her lesser daughters and sisters, her great canopy dappled in sheeny gold and violet—soared the Mothergraves. Stormchases was too far and too low to see the teeming ecosystem she bore on her vast back, up high above the colourful clouds where the sunlight could reach and nurture them. He could just make out the colour variations caused by the dripping net-roots of veil trees that draped the Mothergraves’ sides, capturing life-giving ammonia from the atmosphere and drawing it in to plump leaves and firm nutritious fruit.
Stormchases arched his face up to her, eyes shivering with longing. His wings hummed against his back. There was no desire like the pain of being separate from the Mothergraves, no need like the need to go to her. But he must resist it. He must brave the Deep Storm and harvest it, and perhaps then she would deem him worthy to be one of hers. He had the provider-status to pay court to one of the younger Drift-Worlds . . . but they could not give his young the safety and stability that a berth on the greatest and oldest of the Mothers would.
In the hot deeps of the sky, too high even for the Mothers and their symbiotic colony-flyers or too low even for the boldest and most intrepid of Stormchases’ brethren, other things lived.
Above were other kinds of flyers and the drifters, winged or buoyant or merely infinitesimal things that could not survive even the moderate pressure and chill of the tropopause. Below, swimmers dwelled in the ammoniated thicks of the mid-troposphere that never knew the light of stars or sun. They saw only thermally. They could endure massive pressures, searing temperatures, and the lashings of molten water and even oxygen, the gas so reactive that it could set an exhalation on fire. That environment would crush Stormchases to a pulp, dissolve his delicate wing membranes, burn him from the gills to the bone.