True Names

by Cory Doctorow

  Brobdignag, for its part, did not evolve, did not adapt. It replicated flawlessly and exactly. Its formula was known. This made Brobdignag easy to simulate.

  Theoretically, it should have made Brobdignag easy to beat—a solution that stopped any bit of Brobdignag should stop any other bit. In practice, Brobdignag had complex flocking logic: large groups of Brobdignag behaved with enormous sophistication and chaotic flexibility.

  The proto-Beebe that had been birthed long ago by Demiurge’s desperation had already learned how to create a barrier impregnable to Brobdignag; and that ancient wall still held. But the wall was expensive, and was constantly consumed—long supply chains stretched through Demiurge-space to maintain it. Beyond the wall, Brobdignag exploded unchecked in the opposite direction, a seething mass of void-eating machines, into which neither Beebe nor Demiurge dared venture. And all around the edges of the barrier, Demiurge scrambled to extend the wall before Brobdignag could outflank it.

  The topography of the barrier was all-important. If, on average, it was convex, Brobdignag could be contained. If it was concave to a certain degree, the universe might be divided between Brobdignag and Demiurge/Beebe. Beyond that degree, though, Demiurge would lose. For a while, remnants of Beebe and Demiurge might survive inside a barrier-bubble; in the end, though, there would not be enough matter to resupply the wall.

  Beyond the critical degree of concavity, the defense collapsed, and the fate of all the matter in their future lightcone was . . . to become Brobdignag.

  Trillions of generations of Demiurgic thought had already gone into improving the materials design of the wall, with limited success—and this branched myriad of Paquettes was anyway too far from the front to test such hypotheses. Instead, they concentrated on topology.

  Some Paquettes simulated abandoning the current front, beginning the wall again farther out. Others simulated allowing Brobdignag incursions and then sealing them off from the main Brobdignag body, hoping to increase the wall’s convexity first and deal with the invaders later. Others tried flinging smallish black holes around the edges of the wall, obliterating the initial influx of new Brobdignag and curving the wall’s surface as well by their passage. Others attempted injecting entire solar systems, surrounded by their own barrier-bubbles, into the Brobdignag mass, to divide and disrupt it.

  Paquettes fanned out through the problem-space, then seethed inward, merging to deliver their discoveries. The same answers kept coming back. Brobdignag would win.

  Brobdignag would win.

  The splendid tumult and ambition of Beebelife, the peaceful, wondrous heterogeneity of the dumb matter Demiurge gardened and preserved— novas, dust clouds, flowers, tea parties physical and virtual—all would become featureless, mindless, jigsaw Brobdignag.

  One Paquette turned from the simulations and paced across the bare white room in the center of her mind. She had overconcentrated; her thoughts were stagnant, locked in the same channels. She manifested eyes to rub, a dry throat to clear. She left her sisters to their work and wandered through Demiurge, looking for something else to do.

  She found the emulation that had birthed her, and stood watching life aboard the comet. Her other self was descending the long staircase to the archives, accompanied by Nadia (how typical of Nadia, to muscle in on the action), Algernon, and (her heart gave a little flutter) Alonzo.

  She reached into and through them, rippling the emulation’s surface like a pond, sifting in her paws the underlying implementation structures, like a sandy bottom.

  To distract herself, to banish thoughts of longing and remorse (would that I were there with you, Alonzo.. .), she decided to calculate the emulation’s tav constant, which described the degree of abstraction and lossiness, the elided reality of an emulation that must be continually reseeded from fresh data. Tav was usually below 0.5—extremely lush and expensive emulations, such as real-time military-grade predictive spawnworlds, sometimes approached 0.75, with 1.0 as an impossible, maximal limit.

  The emulation’s tav constant was 0.56, a respectable value, which consoled her—at least she wasn’t born in some cut-rate mockup. She rechecked the value, this time using not the standard Beebean modality, but the unfamiliar Demiurgean systems she had recently mastered, and found a value of 0.575. Philosopher that she was, the disparity intrigued her, and she dug deeper.

  The Beebean system of tav calculation was a corollary result from the work of the classical mathematician and poet Albigromious, who first formalized the proof of the incalculability of the Solipsist’s Lemma. Since Albigromious, it had been established that no inhabitant of an emulation could ever discern the unreality of their simulated universe. Demiurgic thought agreed with this, having arrived by different means at the same conclusion. As Albigromious wrote: “We are someone’s dream/ but whose, we cannot say.”

  Proceeding from the tav disparity, Paquette worked backward through his logic, rechecking by hand the most famous result in a million years of computational philosophy.

  She did not need the computing power of a world. She did not need to commandeer an army of her sisters, to flood the problem-space, to burn cycles until Demiurge’s bulk groaned and flared with effort.

  Instead, the solution was simple and analytical. She needed only a pad of lined yellow paper.

  It was like walking down a crowded thoroughfare in the heart of mathematical philosophy and noticing a door in the wall that no one had noticed before.

  Paquette went through the door.

  Aboard the comet, the grinding and the heat ceased. The lights flickered on above the melted Taj Mahals; sobbing strategies swallowed and looked up. The plunging markets blipped upward.

  Alonzo took Paquette’s paws in his grippers, pulled her into a private space, the nighttime cliff by the waterfall.

  “It’s okay,” Alonzo said. He handed Paquette Nadia’s proposal of destructive transformation. “Paquette. It’s all right.”

  Paquette’s face darkened. She held the proposal unread, uneasily. “Alonzo, you don’t have to do this. Don’t give in to this attack; don’t be hijacked by her greed.”

  “Paquette,” Alonzo said. “I’m a filter. I’ve always known my fate. For better or worse, Nadia is the dominant algorithm that our local Beebe has generated. Now I have a chance to reshape that algorithm, to create something else—something as powerful, maybe, but better and gentler. How can I refuse? It’s what I’m for.”

  Paquette’s throat tightened. “Don’t say that. That’s not all you’re for. Alonzo, haven’t you said so many times that you abhor the bitter struggle of Beebelife, the raw lust for power, the idea that survival and conquest and domination are the ends of existence? What is she but—?”

  “I have said that,” Alonzo said, and Paquette was immediately ashamed of having thrown inconsistency back in his face; but his gentle smile soothed her anguish. “Paquette, philosophers have the luxury of thinking in absolutes. The rest of us have, perhaps, more practice managing situations in which choices are constrained. What would you have me do? Filter no one? Or filter someone else?”

  And Paquette, abhorring her own selfish desire, squeezed her eyes shut and said nothing.

  “She does want me,” Alonzo said after a pause. “I’m sure of it. If only to soothe her own conscience—she does have one, under all that swagger. Taking me this way—it’s a way to assuage her guilt at driving Beebe to the brink of destruction, of forcing herself on me... .”

  Paquette said nothing.

  “If only for that reason, we can bargain a little. Don’t give all remaining seventy-four Beebe/Demiurge isomorphisms directly to Nadia. Deliver some of them to her, in stages; but put most of them in escrow for Nadia-Prime’s maturity. Make sure they belong to Nadia-Prime, not to Nadia outright. We’ll be long since in Byzantium by that time, if we survive; in the meantime, Nadia won’t tear the comet apart.”

  “She’ll own Nadia-Prime,” Paquette said. “Don’t fool yourself. Legally she won’t be able to touch her; but she�
�ll know how her daughter-strategy thinks and what she desires, and she’ll be bigger and older and stronger. I’ve seen this a thousand times, Alonzo. She’ll either co-opt Nadia-Prime, or lure her to her destruction. And if Nadia-Prime is smart—and I know she will be, if you fashion her—she’ll know that; she’ll know her best option is to merge back into Nadia.”

  “You leave that to me,” said Alonzo with a small smile. “We filters are restricted in our domain, deprived of the edifying influences of a wider society and its vigorous competition for resources, and stifled by the narrowness of the scope our ambition is allowed. But if there is one thing we do know, it is our art.” He held out his gripper to her.

  Paquette, grieving, could say no more. She took Alonzo’s gripper in her paw, and pressed the cream-colored letter into it. They turned from the waterfall. Paquette thought that her strength would fail her, that her self-hatred and the greatness of her loss would overwhelm her. But it did not; she bore up under it, and they returned to the archives, to accept Nadia’s proposal.

  The host of Paquette-sisters was gone, rolled back into the single philosopher-instance. The load on Demiurge-space had decreased almost to nothing.

  The sockpuppet avatar coiled upon (Her) throne, communing with (Herself) in slow motion across boundless light-years (watching the silent creep of light across bare moons, and the evanescent dance of gamma rays through nebulae where life might one day be born from chaos). (She) brooded on how much of (Her) garden (She) must sacrifice to shore up the wall against Brobdignag, mulled how much (She) might recapture from wildling Beebe infestations throughout (Her) space.

  (She) noticed that the load of Paquette’s brute-force attack had subsided—so soon—and (She) grieved.

  Why had (She) dared to hope that this time might be different? That this strange tiny sliver of a mind from a spare Beebe emulation might succeed, where so many of Demiurge, so many of Beebe, had failed? Collaboration with Beebe never worked; their structures were too different. What would (She) not give to be able to create a true hybrid, something with Beebe’s ingenuity which could nonetheless follow policy! But to expect this of a random Beebe-sprite yanked from emulation would be beyond madness.

  When (She) heard Paquette’s footsteps at the gate to (Her) throne room, (She) prepared herself to console the lost strategy—perhaps to gently ease her to accept amnesia and reintegration with her home emulation.

  But Paquette had a wild, strange, giddy smile.

  The sockpuppet straightened up upon the throne.

  Paquette bowed. “I want you to know,” she said, “how much I have appreciated your hospitality; and, though I grieve that I cannot absolutely guarantee that the same graciousness be returned to you, yet I will do everything in my power to ensure that you, too, will have as much comfort and liberty as I have enjoyed.”

  The avatar of Demiurge frowned. Apparently the branch-and-merge had been too much for the little strategy, and it was completely disequilibriated. “What are you talking about?” (She) said gently. “My dear—I do hope you have not spent your time on some stratagem for escape. That would be rather foolish. The nearest Beebe is light-years from here, and your process rights are, as you can see, rather curtailed. Surely you don’t imagine.. .” (She) let the sentence trail off, made uneasy by the brilliant, wry smile of the little Beebe-strategy.

  Paquette unrolled a small scroll of math. “Things are not always as they seem,” she said. “Sometimes it is possible to escape by sitting still; sometimes distant stars are nearer to you than your own skin.”

  The sockpuppet avatar was a small part of this Demiurge location, thrumming along with a modest number of cycles. As (She) read the scroll, resources began to flood into (Her) process; priority spiked and spiked and spiked again, resolving into a Critical Universal Policy Challenge, the first such in a thousand years. Other processes slowed; the urgency of achieving consensus on this new data overrode all other projects.

  As the news spread across space, every bit of Demiurge it reached turned to watch in awe.

  Paquette had solved the Solipsist’s Lemma. She had not only found an error in the proof of its unprovability; she had found the Lemma itself.

  An emulated being could detect its existence in emulation.

  Not only that, based on the seemingly innocuous divergence of Beebe’s and Demiurge’s methods for calculating the tav constant, she had adduced a way of finding the signature of the emulator in the fabric of the emulation. In certain chaotic transformations, a particular set of statistical anomalies indicated the hand of Beebe—another, that of Demiurge.

  Whose dream they were . . . they could now say....

  Demiurge in the sockpuppet shivered as (She) crunched the numbers. (She) feared (She) knew the answer already, knew it from Paquette’s giddy smile. Still—the little strategy must surely be wrong. Planets, worlds, nebulae, the vast inimical Brobdignag, the chorus of Demiurge across the lightyears—surely it was real? Surely it was not mirrors and stage flats, approximations and compressions, bits churning in some factory of computational prediction and analysis, a mirage....

  But the error was there, the drift in the math.

  This world was not real. And what was more...

  Demiurge sockpuppet lifted her appalled eyes to Paquette’s.

  “Welcome to Beebe,” said the philosopher, and bowed.

  The comet was abuzz.

  Certainly there were those who disapproved, who decried the damage Nadia had wrought, who vowed to fight her bitterly as the tyrant she was. In the seceded region of level 5672, martial law was still in force, and refugees were organized into militias.

  But Beebe healed easily. Byzantium approached. The fountains gushed again by the Taj Mahals; the markets were on a tear; the world of high fashion had never blossomed so brilliantly; and the dramatic confrontation of Nadia and Paquette over Alonzo had already inspired a major operetta, a sensorialprojection decalogy, a theme park, and a number of ribald limericks before it had even left primary rotation on the celebrity gossip news feeds. For most of Beebe-on-the-comet, tyrant or no, Nadia possessed that quality most instrumental in capturing their devotion: she was exciting.

  And now: a wedding!

  Who held the news conferences? Who organized the caterers? Who ordered the construction of 78,787,878 dissimilar fractal flower arrangements, each containing an entire microsociety housed at the central bud, with its own unique geography, ecology, history, and tradition of prose epics, as centerpieces for the tables at the reception? Who arranged for an entire constellation of simspaces on level 546, an unpopular region containing the comet’s entire records of the legendary paleo-biological evolutionary roots of computational life, to be wiped to make room for a vast unitary simspace where the event would be held?

  Algernon!

  Nadia paid, of course, but she asked no questions. Her desires now accomplished, she left the details to others, concentrating her energies in the archives, where she communed with the Demiurge fossil, impatiently awaiting each transfer of critical information from Paquette; though, it should be said, she also delegated one tendril-avatar to call daily upon Alonzo, with the greatest of propriety. A mansion had been constructed as temporary quarters for Alonzo (his old bachelor residence being now thought unsuitable), and there he roomed with Algernon, quietly receiving Nadia each day in an oaken room by a fireside.

  He did not forgive her. She knew that. But nor did he spend himself on resentment and anger. He knew her for what she was—knew her monumental greed and selfishness and pride. But he did not hate her. No: in her, a fascinating challenge, a life’s work, had found him, and he accepted it. Nadia discovered, in Alonzo, an immense pride: he believed he could make her right, make her successor what she should have been.

  At moments, she could allow herself to believe he enjoyed her company; and she was surprised to find that this mattered to her. Nadia began to feel the keen edge of regret, and she put aside her half-finished Alonzo-solution, and left him his pr
ivacy.

  The drama and uncertainty were over now; Nadia had no need to rage, nor Alonzo to quaver and rebel. They talked quietly, companionably, each in their own way impatient for the Day, each in their own way (for, increasingly, Nadia would miss him) also dreading it.

  As for the mob, the paparazzi, the tumult of Beebean society, Nadia ignored them. She no longer needed to scheme in order to gain ascendancy in the comet; the economic results of the Crisis of the Wooing of Alonzo (as the theatrical demimonde insisted on calling it) had worked all to her advantage, and she now controlled directly or by proxy an absolute majority of cometBeebe’s computational cycles, memory, and global votes. If anything, she should plan for their arrival in Byzantium, and she made some desultory attempts at strategic preparations. But in fact, her mind was on Demiurge. The daily visits to her promised filter-groom were the only respite from her obsession, and a fleeting one.

  Paquette bided, and abided. That her visits to Alonzo were more frequent than Nadia’s caused some fleeting scandal among the outer periphery of the news feed—but, philosophers tending to be an unsuitable subject for tabloid gossip and Paquette’s famed unworldliness and innocence making it difficult to take seriously any notion of an intrigue, this soon faded. Even Alonzo did not suspect the extent of the violence and sorrow among the subagencies inhabiting Paquette; she kept her borders of scale locked tight. Algernon, perhaps, knew best what she endured.

  But Algernon was busy, and full of a whirlwind of emotions of his own. Pride enough to sing triumph throughout comet-Beebe; grief enough to drown in an endless lake of sorrow; gratitude for his place by Alonzo’s side, for their giddy late-night conversations—swimming in the mansion’s upper plasma-globes, giggling over old jokes, poring through the complex filterplans that Alonzo would drag out from the most esoteric historical sources, wondering at the long road they’d traveled and how they were here ... finally here. Who would have believed it? These principal emotions of Algernon’s were joined by irritation, admiration, envy, relief, worry, rage, good humor, and exhaustion. The one thing he could do was to make this a wedding Beebe would remember until the stars went out; the rest was out of his hands.