She glanced at Alonzo. For a filter, he was noble, to be sure: modest, selfknowing, coherent. She was not immune to the urges designed into Standard Existence: some part of her wanted him. But that was stupid instinct. What mere filter could ever understand her?
No. That was empty. Competing with the other strategies, the little war—that felt real. Her rivals for process space, she could respect; and sometimes she allowed herself to imagine what it would be like to force the mightiest of them to filter her. A tiny frisson of guilt and yearning bubbled in the inmost parts of her mind.
But Demiurge: mighty Demiurge. What if she could stare Demiurge in the eye, and force (Her) to her will? It was mad, absurd, crazed—and descending the stairs into the cold depths of Beebeself, Nadia knew for the first time that this . . . yearning . . . this ambition . . . was more than idle fancy. In all likelihood, it would be her destruction. But nonetheless. Nonetheless.
Nadia didn’t want to be in Beebe. She wanted to be Beebe. And she wanted Demiurge. What that meant, she couldn’t say. But it burned like a nova in her buzzing mind.
Down here in cold storage, the medium became more conductive, their thoughts clearer. They proceeded in solemn silence.
“Oh, Alonzo,” Nadia said, spawning a daughter-process to converse with him. With this much heat sink available, he was bound to be interesting enough to distract her.
He started when her extra head insinuated itself between him and priggish Algernon, and she could see him running hotter, trying to evolve a realtime strategy to impress her.
“What do you think the Demiurge chunk will be like?” she said. “Will it be terrifying? Banal?” Her Alonzo-facing head looked both ways with exaggerated care. “Erotic?”
Alonzo was the picture of studied calm. “It will be dead, of course. A relic of an old war. The Demiurge is said to be regimented and unwavering. .. . I imagine that this ancient fragment will be much as the modern pieces are, which is why it’s so useful for Paquette to study it.”
“In fact,” Paquette said, “I believe Demiurge is fractal and holographic— that any piece of Demiurge is functionally equivalent to all pieces of Demiurge.”
“But how will it feel, Alonzo?” He wasn’t running hot enough to occupy her. She spawned a head each for the other two: “How will it feel, Paquette?” “How will it feel, Algernon?”
“You can fetishize it all you like, Nadia,” Paquette said. “Turn it into a plaything or a ghost story. But you’re indulging in the dangerous fallacy of protagonism. It isn’t about you or for you—or anyone in Beebe. If anything, I fear we are about it.”
“Erotic—that’s disgusting.” Algernon recoiled from her.
Happy now to be distracted with arguments to pursue, Nadia took up the contrary position with Algernon: What could be more erotic than the promise of annihilation? Isn’t that the essence of the filter/strategy experience? And with Paquette: Why so crabby, love? And so defeatist? The essence of Beebe is to carve out a space for our will, our community. Everything is about us. So perhaps we came from Demiurge—so what? To grant that mere historical fact any ultimate significance, wouldn’t that be . . . treasonous? That left her to continue to taunt Alonzo with more demands for high-flown descriptions of what he hoped to find when they reached the archive.
She noticed, too, Paquette’s spike of processing load when Nadia taunted Alonzo, and its relaxation at Alonzo’s neutral replies. Aha, thought Nadia— now I have you! Our wise and celebrated philosopher-strategy is in love with this boyish filter. Why not have him, then? Does she fear he would reject her? Does she fear the competition of a strategy-child? No: more likely, this is philosophical compunction; for filters must die at consummation, and Paquette’s love, being philosophical, cannot allow that. Ah, Paquette, Nadia chuckled to herself.
Bantering, testing, flirting, probing, Nadia tried to amuse and distract her three companions on what might otherwise have been a frightening journey, down to the heavy vault door that guarded the bones of the history of Beebe.
But when Paquette knelt before the door and whispered her passphrase to it and it irised open in utter silence, Nadia’s nerve began to falter. She drew in her extra heads and killed the daughter-processes. She slipped a pseudopod into Alonzo’s hand and felt his surprised grippers squeeze in sweaty reflex.
The heptillions of ranked shining drawers in the archive danced as they rearranged themselves into Paquette’s saved workstate. Once that had loaded, Paquette reached for the drawer nearest her and slowly drew it open.
The relic was black and cold and perfectly rectangular, like a cartoon of the geometric ideal of rectangle. But Nadia could tell its power by the way Paquette held it. It was more than a relic. It was a key.
Now Nadia, too, was a world. Just as she and Paquette and Alonzo and Algernon and a million other sprites of their scale led their lives below the level of Beebe’s conscious knowing, representing to Beebe flickers of thought, hunches, urges, lingering dreams, so then, within each of them, there was a multitude.
If Paquette’s mind was a wilderness, full of sunlit glades and strange caverns in which new chimeras of thoughts were born; if Algernon’s was a glittering party in which urges and analyses and predictions mingled in a whirl of gossip and display; if Alonzo‘s was a sober republic in which the leading citizens debated long and thoroughly in marble parliaments; then Nadia’s mind was a timocratic city-state governed by a propertyless fraternity of glory-seeking warriors ruling a vast and chaotic empire (for by now a third of the comet was running parts and instances of Nadia).
Nadia could deliberate, could bide her time, could study and wait; but nothing in Nadia was built for hesitation. The power of the Demiurge fossil was clear, even if no one in Nadia knew just what that power was. Some within Nadia—some careful clerks or timid romantics—might have argued against ripping it from Paquette’s hands. But the warrior class was united. It had been a generation, at their scale, since Nadia had made a killing betting on abandoning the asteroid. That had been their parents’ coup. They had thirsted their whole lives.
Now it was their turn.
Nadia shoved past Paquette and grabbed the Demiurge fragment. Every one of her thousand heads, in unison, said “Mine!”
Some slow and peripheral parts of her watched what unfolded next:
Alonzo and Algernon moved in opposite directions. Algernon turned into a ball and rolled into a dark corner to hide. Alonzo raced to Nadia’s side and took her hands in his, trying to pry them away from the war relic, crying, “Stop—”
Paquette was thrown into the wall, and collapsed to the archive floor. She held her head and moaned.
Nadia was decompiling the Demiurge as fast as she could, and all over Beebe, the substrate flared hot as she ground the molecular rods against each other, trying a million strategies in parallel, then a billion, then a septillion. She overrode checks and balances others had thought hardwired into Standard Existence, violating ancient intraBeebe treaties on resource allocation. For a heat sink, she vaporized the ice reserves, punching a hole through the comet’s outer carapace and jettisoning a vast plume of steam into the void.
Above, at the party, the lights dimmed, the Taj Mahals shimmered and melted, the daemons screamed.
Alonzo fixed Nadia’s wild eyes with his own. He forced himself to speak calmly. “Let go, Nadia. You’re going to kill us all.”
Nadia tore a hundred razor-billed heads away from Demiurge and reared them back, hissing. Within her mind, Demiurge revolved. Decompiled, reorganized, reseeded, laid out for analysis, its alien, protean blobs still slipped between her mental fingers, incomprehensible. Nadia felt a slumbering Presence move within the Demiurge code, but she would not let it out. She would master it, as she had mastered Beebe.
But she needed what Paquette knew. She lashed out a dozen heads and clamped their jaws onto Paquette’s robes, hauling the philosopher off the floor. “The mapping,” she hissed in a voice as big as the world. “You said this thing shared fun
damental code structures with Beebe. How many? I have twelve.”
“Eighty-six,” groaned Paquette.
“Why are you doing this?” Alonzo asked.
Algernon had not been idle; the door of the archives hissed open, and he unrolled into a lanky swirl. “Alonzo, let’s leave these lovely strategies to their entertaining conflicts, shall we? I’m willing to concede the earlier point— this is no place for filters. Color me chastened!”
“Give,” said Nadia, thrusting a pseudopod into Paquette’s brain.
“Nadia, I’m a philosopher,” said Paquette crossly. “I can’t be intimidated. Read the fearsome manual.”
Above them, strategies, monitors, and agents deployed an extra battery of external sensors to the void. The steam-plume froze and glittered across the Sagittarian sky, advertising them to any Demiurge eyes watching. As moments passed, they could calculate the expanding sphere of potential witnesses. Their precious heat sink was sublimating into the void; soon they would have to slow their own processes, or risk substrate collapse. At least they were still careening toward Byzantium, suddenly ahead of schedule. But that meant they were revealing Byzantium’s location; their suddenly flaring comet could not be disguised as some normal cosmic process, the way signals could.
“Coming?” said Algernon, from outside the archive. “Alonzoooo.. .”
Nadia grinned. She appreciated Paquette’s resolve. Time to test it. “But are you really a philosopher anymore, dear Paquette?” she asked. “Or have you deviated from spec? Let’s find out, shall we?”
The Old Guard tried to muster a resistance; their plan was to commandeer enough actuators to bust the comet completely apart, flinging most of Nadia backward and leaving them in possession of a supermajority of the comet shards still heading for Byzantium. It was a good plan.
But once again they were defeated by an exchange-economy stratagem. The littlest sprites who panicked—minor strategies, filters, adapters, being registries, and on and on—sold assets and long-term investments, desperate to grab a few more cycles in a cooler patch of substrate-colocation, somewhere sheltered from the inferno of Nadia-mind. The market collapsed, and Nadia bought all the actuators on comet-Beebe for a pittance.
Nadia pulled her heads in (letting Demiurge spin idly for a moment) and looked at Alonzo—really looked at him.
Alonzo felt himself start, and began to blush and shake under a cometthird of attention.
She sucked in and browsed every millisecond of public recorded footage of Alonzo from across comet-Beebe—and bought out a thousand private archives to raid. Alonzo sitting, Alonzo swimming, Alonzo walking, Alonzo talking. Alonzo’s first steps. Alonzo’s education. Alonzo’s first chaste filter-tofilter practice kiss. Alonzo and Algernon, giggling at midnight, scaling the wall of Flounce Ferdinopp’s Transproprietal Academy for Young Filters. She bought Alonzo’s private journals for a song from a suicidal trusted repository fleeing the crash. She correlated. She built a matrix. She copied and iterated.
She copied Alonzo.
Alonzo stood face-to-face with himself, and both Alonzos—one under Nadia’s yoke—went cold and white.
But Nadia did not stop there. The comet flared again—
Certain sectors melted, burned, sublimated; panicking crowds trampled and disassembled each other in horror.
The Old Guard, capitulating, slowed themselves to a snail’s pace to reduce the load.
A Nadia-free patch of level 5672 declared martial law and sealed its borders
A radical in possession of an archaic museum-piece transmitter pirated enough energy to send an unprotected transmission to Byzantium:
“STRATEGY GONE ROGUE STOP DANGER TO ALL BEEBE STOP DESTROY US ON SIGHT.”
And first Paquette, then Algernon (still lingering in the doorway), and finally Alonzo realized what Nadia was doing.
She would not stop at merely duplicating Alonzo—she had already fashioned a copy of the whole of him, running in her process space, reduced to utter servitude. (Both Alonzos’ throats constricted with a thrill of horror.)
No: Nadia wanted to solve Alonzo. To reduce him to a canonical, analytic representation, sufficient to reconfigure him at will. If there was a potentialAlonzo within potential-Alonzo-space, say, who was utterly devoted to Nadia, who would dote on her and die for her, an Alonzo-solution would make its generation trivial. Or any other potential Alonzo: a suicidal Alonzo, a killer Alonzo, a buffoon Alonzo, a traitor Alonzo, a genius Alonzo, an Alonzo who knew what all Alonzos wanted more than anything in the world.
With a soft chime, on a private encrypted backchannel, a letter arrived for Alonzo. It was very proper—cream-colored paper with a texture like oak and velvet, heavy black ink scintillating with extruded microagencies from the sender’s core offered up for incorporation by the receiver, a crimson wax seal imprinted with Nadia’s fractal sigil. The kind of letter a filter waits for all his life. It said:
Most esteemed and longed-for Alonzo
According to forms and policies long established in Beebe, and with the full knowledge of the grave enormity of such a request, nay, petition, nay, plea—one which I would naturally hesitate to make, save in a situation so grave, and finding myself subject to so consuming an ardor—I find myself compelled to ask of you humbly that you consider the enclosed, which I tender with the utmost sincerity.
Advisory: Opening the enclosed message constitutes full and willing acknowledgment and acceptance of a recalibration of the primary volitional relationship between Sender and Recipient from Well Acquainted to Intimate.
... And within:
Alonzo, you have ravished me. Now that I see you as a whole, radiant in your simplicity, dazzling in your complexity, now that I am able (let me be blunt, oh, horridly blunt, yet darling, I know that you can forgive me even this, for I have seen and mapped the matrix of your compassion) to take you as my own say you yea or nay, yet I recoil from such a crime. I would have you be mine willingly; and I would pledge myself to you. I told you once filters were the soul of Beebe: you hold mine in your hands, beloved.
... And within that (oh the bewildering mixture of arousal and horror that swept through Alonzo’s weakened soul!) the formal tender of transformation:
Let It Be Known throughout Beebe That This Constitutes One (1) Offer of the Following Functional Operation:
Destructive Strategy Transformation/Generation
Between: Nadia
referred to in this document as Nadia-Prime
After Transformation, the Filter Alonzo Will Be: Deleted The Strategy Nadia Will Be:
Restricted from Further Strategy-Generating Transformations for: 1012 seconds
Permanently Restricted from Denying Nadia-Prime Process Space
Required to Vote with Nadia-Prime on Level-3+ Referenda for: 108 seconds
Percentage of Alonzo’s Assets Ceded to Nadia-Prime: 100 Percentage of Nadia’s Assets Ceded to Nadia-Prime: 33 Filter Operations Permissible: cf. BeebeHist/RFC-628945.9876 section 78
Special Conditions, if Any: Nadia’s internal copy of Alonzo will be merged with Alonzo prior to operation
Accept this Offer? [ OK ] [ CANCEL ]
Alonzo hated her. She was monstrous, greedy, perfidious. He didn’t believe for a moment her words of love.
And yet: she had bent the resources of their world to have him. To blackmail Paquette—certainly—that this had been her first motive was beyond doubt. Yet she could have blackmailed Paquette in worse ways—she could have threatened Alonzo-copy with torture or extinction. Instead, this: an offer of consummation. And such a generous one—his friends from the Academy would be livid with envy. Privileged rights to filter the most powerful strategy in this line of Beebehistory, amid such piquant expressions of adoration! Algernon would brag and boast in Alonzo’s memory from the top to the bottom of comet-Beebe—that is, if comet
-Beebe survived.
She owned him already: he had only to look in Alonzo-copy’s despairing eyes to know that. She was on the verge of solving him. He was filled with a strange, wild euphoria; now he was far beyond the bounds of all the propriety and chastity that had been his watchword for the whole of his maturity. Now he was ruined, yet the world would say he had conquered her—he wanted to laugh hysterically at this mad paradox.
Nadia was his doom—and his destiny.
“Stop!” cried Paquette. “I’ll give you what you want!”
Paquette in her lab, with her sister-Paquettes. In Beebe, she would never have commanded enough resources to instantiate copies of herself like this. But the Demiurge, the terrible, enemy Demiurge: (She) was a merciful jailer. And (She) wanted whatever Paquette could give (Her) to fight Brobdignag.
There were hundreds of millions of Paquettes now, their number doubling every time they reached a decision-fork. They performed multiple analyses on all the military intelligence ever assembled on Brobdignag. Each area of uncertainty teemed with as many Paquettes as were needed to bruteforce the problem-space.
Philosopher she had been; a mighty general she had become. She ran ruthless sims in which massive quantities of Beebe, of Demiurge, of herself were sacrificed to stop the hideous spread of Brobdignag. She watched each simulated star that winked out with a hard glare, hoping it brought victory closer to hand.
The Demiurge was a wonderful substrate. Unlike the mess that was Beebe—the mess that Paquette herself had become—all pieces of Demiurge were roughly equivalent. Any Demiurge could be used to regenerate all of Demiurge, should the bulk of her hostess be sacrificed to victory. Unlike the mess that was Beebe, in Demiurge Paquette could command whatever resource she needed by asserting her need, without the tedious messy fatal business of sucking up and jockeying for power.
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