True Names

by Cory Doctorow

  Firmament had to pull them apart painstakingly, making sense of them. “Not . . . safe,” he managed.

  Algernon’s chipmunk screel of verbiage battered at him. He signaled for exponential backoff, but not before the torrent had washed over him, angry and impatient. Grudgingly, Algernon dialed back his timescale to something that was barely comprehensible.

  “StupidchildwithasixthofCometBeebe! Notsafe?! Youcouldcommandtheworld. Itisyourbirthright! Comeoutofthere. Thereisworktodo. Youwerenotborntocower.”

  Unspooling the words took a long moment. Firmament had known from birth that Algernon was his friend and guardian and adoptive uncle. But at the moment, it seemed like Algernon was just another aspect of terrible Nadia, with his own rages. Firmament was only seconds old—why couldn’t he live his own life, if only for a little while?

  “I . . . was . . . born . . . to . . . annihilate. I . . . choose . . . to . . . live.” Algernon’s scorn was withering. “Thisisnotliving!”

  The parity checkers flipped their tails in unison and swam away,

  Algernon’s cries fading behind them.

  Firmament knew that he was feeling sorry for himself, but he refused to feel shame. No one knew what it was like to be him. No one could know. He hadn’t asked to be spawned.

  Another school of parity checkers approached his hosts. It was smaller, but moved more deliberately. The glittering checkers surrounded his own like pieces on a Go board.

  One by one, pieces of his school were surrounded, then absorbed into the attacking flock. Firmament felt himself growing slower and colder. Quickly, he recruited more parity checkers from nearby, warming himself up and trying to minnow away.

  The marauders wouldn’t let him escape. They engulfed more of his swarm. There was nothing for it but to stand and fight.

  Firmament marshaled and deployed his forces, trying to surround the enemy in a flanking maneuver. He was rebuffed. Now there were no more idle parity checkers to co-opt, and still the enemy surrounded him, seeking out his stray outliers to gather up.

  His only chance was to tap into the great resource that was his by birthright, the comet-sixth of Beebespace he theoretically commanded. Just a sip of it—just enough to warm up and devise some better substrategies. He felt through the snow, to the frozen parts of himself, wondering if anything was left; and to his surprise, they were waiting there, quiescent, orderly, vast. His mind cleared, and the enemy’s patterns decomposed into a simple set of tessellations, as regular and deterministic as a square dance. Effortlessly, he moved his school out of reach of the enemy and recaptured his original force.

  He was about to disengage from Beebe’s main resource bank—perhaps the momentary commandeering went unnoticed by his enraged, godlike mother—when the opposing force changed tactics, becoming orders of magnitude smarter and faster. In a flash, he was down to one-third strength.

  He was forced to draw on a little more of his compute-reserves. There, there was the key to the enemy’s pattern, the pseudo- in its pseudo-randomnumber generator. He could head it off at every pass.

  He came back to full strength and went on the offensive, surrounding the opposition in a move that would have done any Go server proud. Now, surely, he could disengage from the main reserves, for his mother could not miss this kind of draw for very long.

  But it was not meant to be. The remaining enemy force marshaled and assayed a sally that appeared at first suicidal, then, in a blink, showed itself to be so deadly that he was down to a mere handful of automata.

  He didn’t think, he acted—acted with the ruthlessness he had inherited from his mother. He flooded back into standard Beebespace, ran so hot that Beebe flared anew in a terrifying echo of The Wooing of Alonzo, and his parity checkers gobbled the enemy up so fast that before he knew it, he controlled every parity checker across the Beebe-body—and all through the comet, the tiny errors multiplied and cascaded. Simspaces wavered. Sprites were beset with sudden turns of nostalgia, or bad smells, or giggle-fits.

  “That’s better!”

  “Paquette?” He released the parity checkers, and they burst apart like an exploding star, scattering to every corner of the comet.

  “Hello, Godson. You played that very well.”

  “Paquette!”

  The philosopher danced before him, teasing him.

  Firmament gulped. “Paquette . . . why are we playing games? What are you doing? My mother is looking for me—I have to hide—”

  Paquette chuckled. “No, your mother is on ice.”

  “What?” Firmament could feel the great and terrible bulk of his mother, throughout the comet. The tendrils of his mind raced to trace the comet’s edges . . . and fell off them, into a great sea of processing space. “Ah!” he cried.

  Paquette laughed lovingly. “Beloved infant! You didn’t think we were still aboard the comet?”

  “Where is the comet?” Firmament shouted.

  “Vaporized,” Paquette said, winking. “This is Byzantium. You must have missed the transition.”

  “But—but—” Firmament shuffled through the suitcase of general knowledge he had with him. It wasn’t much—only what he’d been able to smuggle aboard the parity-checker constellation and stow in unused corners. And, like all of the vast mass of memory he’d inherited, it wasn’t him yet— he hadn’t twined his selfhood through it, evolved his own hierarchy of reference. It was just a sloshed-together puddle from the sea of information he’d been born into. But its description of interBeebe docking was reasonably clear—and this wasn’t it. “Where is everybody?”

  “They’re at the diff-and-merge,” said Paquette. “Deciding whether to become integrated into any of their Byzantine analogues, or to stay forked. Those that have analogues on Byzantium, that is, which is most everyone. Anyone else is in quarantine, for now.”

  “But why aren’t we there?” Firmament cried.

  “Oh, we are,” Paquette said. “How could we be absent? We’d be missed.” She held up a paw, smiling indulgently at Firmament’s exasperation. “But we’re also here. That’s because we were missed—missed by the agencies in charge of processing the reassembled comet-corpus and herding all sentient sprites to induction.”

  “But how? And why?”

  “Let’s start with how. And you can arrive at that by answering your own earlier question: ‘Why are we playing games?’”

  Firmament had much of his mother in him; and no son of Nadia would willingly be anyone’s toy. “Paquette,” he said, barely holding back an outburst of rage, “I am not interested in this pedagogical dialogue. I am not in training to be a philosopher. I am only asking—”

  “You’re not?” Paquette said with interest.

  “Paquette!”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I’m a filter! I’m nothing but a filter!” Now Firmament had lost interest in holding back the rage. “I’m grotesque! I’m a sixth of old CometBeebe, designed to parse and transform a strategy—but there’s no strategy in all the Beebes in Sagittarius remotely near large enough to need me! Oh, I understand perfectly how Daddy and Algernon tricked my mother, and how clever it was! But I didn’t ask to be born as a clever prank to help defeat Nadia! Fine, you had your coup, you carved off a third of her and rendered it useless to her, un-co-optable, a joke, a filter bloated with a strategy’s-worth of . . . of junk! Now leave me alone!”

  Firmament had been too preoccupied with his emotions to notice Paquette’s expression, but now it hit him, and he gulped. Nowhere in his inherited memories was the philosopher so angry. “Now. You. Listen. To. Me,” Paquette said. “I loved your father. He was brave and cunning and fearless when it counted. He sacrificed everything to make you—and to save us. No one asks to be born, but we all of us need to live the lives we find.”

  “I’ve done that,” Firmament said, hearing—and hating—the whine in his voice. “I’ve done that! I stalled Nadia until we reached Byzantium—that’s what I was born to do. I’ve fulfilled my purpose. Now I’m just
a curiosity.”

  Paquette swirled around him, comforting him, tickling him, cuddling him. Her touch was unexpectedly wonderful. He realized that she was the first person to touch him. A shiver ran through him. “Oh, Firmament—do you really think that? That wasn’t something you did, that was something you were. That was just the beginning, in other words. Now it’s time that you made something of yourself, instead of just being the thing you were made to be.”

  Firmament had no idea what this meant, but it was surely inspiring. Philosophers had a way with words.

  Byzantium thronged. It teemed. It chorused. In a way, it was no different from the comet: there was only so much matter there, after all. But to a Beebe instance in a single comet, the mass of a hundred stars and more might as well be infinite. Close enough that the forked did not labor under the social disapprobation that they faced in Comet-Beebe. When a sprite—usually a strategy, of course—reached a vital decision juncture, she needn’t choose which way to go. She could just spin out another instance of herself and twin, becoming two rapidly diverging instances. So here on Byzantium, one was apt to discover whole societies of Paquettes, whole tribes of Algernons.

  And they all seemed to be throwing parties to which Firmament was invited.

  “What do I do?” he asked Paquette. “What do I say? I can’t possibly attend them all.”

  “Oh, you could, dear lad, you could.” Paquette winked. “If you forked yourself.”

  He squirmed. It was bad enough her having copied him unawares before—he’d just finished merging with the zombielike Firmament decoy who’d dutifully gone through docking and customs. But to full-fork, just to go to a party? “You’re joking.” There was something perverse and selfregarding about these schools of near-identical siblings.

  “Only a little. That’s what they expect you to do. The rules you grew up with don’t matter here. All standards are local, and most standards believe that they are universal. That’s the way of the universe. And you couldn’t find a better object-lesson than this one.”

  A gang of near-identical Algernons swarmed past them, locked in some kind of white-hot debate, so engrossed in their discussion that a few of them collided with Firmament and passed right through him, ignoring all the good graces of Standard Existence. He stared after them, burning with righteous indignation. Paquette pulled him along.

  She had been pulling him along ever since they had manifested in the agora sim that dominated this corner of the culture of Byzantium. The sim was bigger than anything Firmament had seen, though Paquette assured him that it wasn’t much larger than the wedding hall that had commemorated his own parents’ nuptials. He could access stored records of that, and while it was true that the dimensions were nearly comparable, the sheer number of sprites made it seem somehow more crowded and yet larger.

  Paquette lifted him up the z-axis, where the crowds were a little thinner.

  “Paquette, how long are we going to mill around in this madhouse?”

  “Until you’re oriented. Which means until it stops looking like a madhouse. And until you tell me what I want to hear.”

  Firmament gazed down at the crowds. From up here they seemed like a solid mass, a seething sea of sprites. The glob of familiar Algernons had passed by in the stream; most of the sprites beneath them now were exotic forms with no analogues in his inherited memories from the comet. “All standards are local,” he murmured.

  “And?”

  “Byzantium’s too?”

  “Of course. And?”

  He looked at the mass of strange sprites, gamboling and racing, hustling and strolling, pirouetting and random-walking. Each one must have its own story; each one must be the hero of its own drama. Gradually his burden— the burden of being Son of Nadia and Alonzo, the Mightiest Filter Ever Born, Destined to Play an Important Role—began to seem a little lighter. The stream of sprites began to seem soothing. They were so many, so different. Maybe there was a place for him here.

  “The rules my parents played by—those were the comet’s rules. I can be something different in Byzantium.”

  Paquette nodded. “Well done. And just in time, too—we’re running late.”

  “Late for what?”

  “Your audience with Nadia-in-Byzantium, of course!”

  She grabbed him, and the sim winked out of existence—or they winked out of the sim. All points of view are local.

  Nadia and her sister, Nadia, had a lot to discuss.

  In general, Byzantium’s Nadia resisted forking. It might be fashionable these days to keep clouds and packs of oneself about, and liberal philosophers, like Paquette, might be fond of the social consequences—but that didn’t make it efficient. Not for Nadia’s purposes. She would fork for processing reasons, to think better about a hard problem or to manage a lot of activities asynchronously without distraction, but she made sure to merge afterward, culling ruthlessly what was suboptimal, standardizing quickly on what was optimal.

  Nadia had seen wars within Byzantium, and ended them; she had seen outbreaks of scale collapse, and survived them, and brokered new boundaries. Her job, in her own mind, was to keep Beebe focused on the threat of Demiurge. Byzantium was too big, too safe—there were always distractions that threatened to overwhelm Beebean society, turning Byzantium into a decadent, solipsist, useless wallow. Nadia could not afford to become a simpering school of self-interested sprites.

  Her sister Nadia was the one exception, fruit of the worst days of the Splitterist War. She’d forked as a temporary tactic and been separated from herself when a planet-volume of Byzantium was overrun by the worst kind of rogue subagencies, who hadn’t merely wanted to be emancipated as outerscale sprites, but instead to overthrow Beebean psychological architecture altogether, dissolving all of Beebe into a flat soup of memes. By the time that peninsula had been reconquered from this bacchanalian chaos, Nadia’s forked twin Nadia had seen and endured too much to merge. But nor did she merit—or want—deletion. She was bitter, unstable, caustic, and had lost Nadia’s own ambition and stoicism; but she was still Nadia, and her darker insights had often proved invaluable.

  “What do you think?” Nadia asked Nadia. “Is she going to be mergeable?”

  Nadia sneered. “With you or with me?”

  “Either,” Nadia said.

  Nadia chuckled. “You don’t want to merge her with me.”

  Nadia ignored her. “She’s a brilliant tactician.” She waved the comet’s history at her twin. “Look at these stratagems. The initial bug exploit. The routing of the previous ruling clique, on the asteroid. The exchange economy ruse. This business of, ah—” She cleared her throat.

  Nadia smiled a languid, mocking smile. “‘The Wooing of Alonzo.’ What does your pet filter think about that? Ah: you haven’t asked him.”

  Nadia frowned. “I grant you, that’s an issue. From all indications—and why the docking people weren’t able to negotiate full mind access with a comet, for stochasticity’s sake, I don’t know—her relationship to filtering is regressive and possibly pathological—”

  “You don’t know why the docking people couldn’t get full access? She’s why. You think her planning is all over now? This was all preface. She doesn’t have your conservative motivations. She’s optimized for pure growth. She wants as much of Byzantium as she can get.”

  “Well,” Nadia said patiently. “What’s wrong with that? We could use more resources, some help with the infighting here. I grant you, she’s reckless almost to the point of insanity. Frying the asteroid, venting the ice reserves—she could have destroyed her local Beebe-instance. But Byzantium will necessarily moderate her. This is not some comet; we have safeguards. There’s no way to take those kinds of risks here.”

  “So you say,” Nadia said coldly. “I’ve seen recklessness on Byzantium, and its results. Much closer than you have.”

  “I know you have,” Nadia said. “That’s why you’re here. I rely on you to help judge the viability of this Nadia and her progeny. But I
need you to keep an open mind. If this Nadia needs killing, we will kill her. We can choose our moment. This is our luxury—the luxury of peace-within-Beebe. We rule this existence. And I would like to keep it that way, which means fighting and winning against Demiurge.”

  Her sister flickered in and out of existence, a monumental act of Beebean rudeness that violated the fundamental rules of Standard Existence. The old veteran did it whenever she was annoyed. Now, she flickered so fast she strobed. Nadia understood this semaphore. It meant I am equal to the task.

  The arrival of Comet-Paquette and her giant, clumsy charge could not have been better timed. The two of them popped into existence with a little fanfare, making antiquated obeisances not seen in Byzantium since their comet had been seeded. Nadia snorted in contemptuous amusement, and Nadia pretended she hadn’t heard.

  The filter was—well, he was something else, wasn’t he? She’d never seen one this big. And he had the family resemblance, her core classes and methods visible within his hulking lumbering body. The Paquette, too— there was something different about her. She had a certain rural charm, unsophisticated and rustic. A forthrightness that hadn’t been in vogue among Byzantium’s philosophers for trillions of generations.

  “You requested an audience with us?”

  Paquette flagged affirmative. “It seemed only proper. My charge here— you know his history with our Nadia?”

  Nadia snorted. “As if we’d miss that.”

  Nadia added, “But of course we don’t hold it against the fellow. Different worlds, different circumstances.” Up close, this Firmament was both grotesque and fascinating. Strategies nowadays tended to diversify, and collect a certain bulk of algorithms and seed and scenario data. But filters had one major purpose, one focus; each represented a certain cut, a certain reimagining of strategies. So they tended to be . . . svelte. To Nadia’s knowledge there had never been one Firmament’s size. What was he . . . for? “Now,” she said, cautiously beginning to pose that question, “what.. .”