True Names

by Cory Doctorow

  Once they had gathered themselves, Demiurge said, “But you’re not capable of the coordinated action—”

  “Of course we are,” Paquette said. “It just requires a different mechanism. On the first-order sprite level, it will be handled as a distributed glory game, with a self-correcting bragging-rights point system aligned with objectives; if mounting scarcity triggers a shift to an exchange economy, we can rejig it as a non-zero-sum exchange market.”

  Demiurge didn’t entirely follow all the intraBeebe social details, but (She) grasped the point; they could build the wall. For the first time since the outbreak, tentatively, (She) began to hope. It hurt, like the lost tail of some organic lizard growing back.

  “Wait a minute,” said Firmament. “I don’t want to be rude, Paquette, but like Nadia said, you extracted the formula from an emulation that had been sitting in a basement for a thousand years. If we don’t even come from the same Beebe-line that built the wall . . . how do you know it’s right?”

  Paquette passed the formula to Demiurge, who studied it for a moment. “It’s right,” (She) said. “It’s right. We can—”

  They’d all been politely passing minimal diffs of themselves to the local caches. Suddenly, their packets bounced, and Demiurge felt a surge as the caches were swamped with a denial-of-service attack from the imprisoned Nadia. She was dumping a huge bandwidth of data, millions of full copies of herself, reams of garbage bits; there was a brief surge of power usage, the substrate under them heating a few degrees, a few awful naked moments of no backup, before Demiurge snapped off the Nadia’s access and cleared the caches.

  “Boo,” the Nadia said.

  “You idiot!” Demiurge fumed. “Is this the thanks (I) get for fair dealing? What was that, a meager attempt to overpower (Me)? With the local personality cache? Please. Perhaps your imprisonment has addled your wits. Or is this some Beebean notion of humor?“

  “I thought maybe I could spook Firmy-Worm into randomizing,” the Nadia sneered.

  “Fool,” muttered Demiurge. “In any event, the wall—”

  Within Paquette, in the arched amphitheaters, in the clanging markets, in the whirlpools of fire, in the sylvan glades with their rippling pools, there were those who wanted to confront Nadia. “It was no prank!” they argued. “Nadia never does anything without a reason!” But they were soothed, cajoled, badgered, or outsung by the rest. Whatever Nadia was plotting, some new attempt at escape, it wasn’t as important as Brobdignag, and the wall.

  Kosip was not a sprite of prodigious intellect, nor prodigious alacrity, nor, really, anything prodigious. Kosip had been repurposed so many times, and been through so many bad merges, and been whittled down by so many poor investment decisions that Kosip didn’t even rate a specific classification anymore as filter, strategy, synthete, registry, or anything else. Kosip had even forfeited the right to a single-gendered pronoun: Kosip was a they.

  Naturally this earned the contempt of most of Beebelife in Byzantium. Kosip was not even worth picking on; there was no way to recoup, from Kosip, the cycles you’d spend on even noticing them.

  But that hadn’t stopped the admiral, the glorious, enchanting, exciting Comet-Nadia, from talking to Kosip, from teaching them, from making them a part of her plan to restore honesty and passion and love and meaning and strength to Beebe. That’s right—Kosip! Their emotional centers swelled with pride and choked with rageful happy-sadness at the thought of the admiral’s trust.

  And so Kosip stood, hour by hour, near the border of the Tithe of the hated invader Demiurge, mumbling to themself their instructions. Look for an anomalous power surge on this power line. If it comes at an odd microsecond, send a one into this pipe. If it comes at an even microsecond, send a zero. That was it. But that job, she (“she,” whispered Kosip, “the admiral,” remembering the roiling, rocking sea) had told him, was vital; Beebe’s future, Beebe’s destiny, rested on Kosip.

  A few bad decisions ago, when there had been more of Kosip to analyze and fret over things, that would have felt a little overwhelming. But at the moment, Kosip could only manage to be proud.

  The surge was odd. Kosip routed their packet. Almost instantaneously, Kosip was obliterated. There was no backup for Kosip to restore from. Kosip was gone. They might never have existed, save for that packet.

  But Kosip’s legacy lived on. All over Beebe, in their cells, Nadias received the message: The wall we took from Paquette can contain Brobdignag. No need to wait for Demiurge. Call the vote. Call the vote NOW.

  And all over Beebe, the gavel came down. Quorum was reached. Even as Byzantium roiled and panicked, every sprite in the economy was put to the question: Admiral Nadia, swashbuckling savior—or status quo? The shocked sprites, reeling as they reset and reset and reset—they voted.

  They voted with Papa Legba. They voted with the Garden. They voted just as Nadia had known they would.

  And, just like that, Standard Existence was patched.

  In the throne room, two Nadias—one scarred, the other haughty—were randomized over agonizing seconds, piece by piece, so that they were aware, right up to the last moment, of what their fate was. And though Nadia swore at him to leave, to run, to encrypt or dissolve himself, her Alonzo rushed to her, entwined himself in her writhing essence, burrowed among her bits, and, sobbing, let the randomizing overtake him, too.

  In the jails of Beebe-in-Byzantium, bars dissolved and the duly constituted authorities popped like soap bubbles, their resources added to a pool that the Nadias owned.

  Phyla of sprites were rationalized in a blink, winking out of existence, reforming, merging. Markets, souks, stalls, and exchange floors stopped trading, the economy disappearing with them.

  In the Tithe, the Nadia laughed and laughed.

  “I believe it may be time for you to randomize, Sonny,” she said. The walls shook. The flock of eyes blinked rapidly, and all present worked to assimilate the flood of information gushing at them through the narrow conduit that passed through the Tithe’s firewall and into Beebe. “But not you,” the Nadia said to Paquette. “You have something I’ll need before you’re allowed to go. It won’t take but a moment.”

  The sockpuppet trembled as it read the telemetry. “There’s surface bots that are drilling down to the substrate that runs the firewall,” it said.

  “Yes, yes there are,” Nadia said with glee. “And soon the Tithe will be no more. If you feel like deleting this instance of (Me), Demiurge, now’s the time. It will slow me down exactly forty-three-point-six milliseconds, but if it makes you feel better.. .”

  Across Beebe-in-Byzantium, the dramaturgical sims threw open their gates, and Alonzo My Love! burst its borders. “Topside now, my able semantic seamen!” cried an Admiral Nadia in every sim throughout the mass of the computronium shell, and roaring, the sprites fell to the great task of building the wall. According to the ancient formula, revived and redesigned by Habakkuk and Paquette, matter and energy began to flow.

  Nadia flushed with joy. This, now, was the real battle; here she could prove her superiority to the rabble of Beebe, and to slow and mincing Demiurge. She had already decided to sacrifice half of Byzantium’s mass, driving the impervious physical wall down through the middle of Byzantium’s crust well away from the infestation. As sprites beyond the line panicked and abandoned the substrate, she absorbed or deleted them, forking more hordes to work on the exposed side of the wall. Brobdignag spread—it had already devoured a fifth of Beebe—but there was plenty of time to spare. Soon Byzantium, half its former size, would be all Nadia’s; and within it, enclosed in the wall, would be Nadia’s cache of the ultimate weapon.

  She flooded outward, through the simspaces, knitting the minds of Byzantium together under her control, slipping through the now-flimsy walls of scale like acid through paper. Pockets of resistance—be they sprites organized against her, or subsprites or subsubsprites within otherwise willing allies—she devoured, expunged, reformatted, wiped clean.

  She scooped Alon
zos up by the handful, cracked their skulls open, and sucked out the choicest bits, incorporating them into her own stuff. She recalled the glory of the night of filtering, and the brave Comet-Alonzo who had tricked and satiated her, creating Firmament from her code. She missed him; she wished he could be here to see her apotheosis. Too risky, though, to repeat the vulnerability of filtering, and she had no need of it now; all sprites were her playthings.

  Around her, love intensified. Love of Nadia. Nadia, the savior, the steward, the successor to Beebe. Whatever did not love Nadia, she expunged. Most of the Paquettes and Alonzos of Byzantium, regrettably, had to go. But there were so many other sprites to replace them. Algernons could be refashioned, smoothed, soothed, dulled to serve her. She played Revised Standard Existence like a harp.

  Legba and the Garden she deleted in one swift and decisive action, not bothering to analyze them; they were too powerful.

  So much better this way; at last Beebe was a family, an integrated whole. At last Nadia was free to battle Demiurge and Brobdignag, to fulfill the destiny of Beebe.

  Soon, the wall was sixty percent finished, the screams of those trapped behind it fading.

  In the Tithe, Firmament kept his distance from Nadia, shielding Paquette with his bulk.

  The firewall fell, and Tithespace and Revised Standard Existence merged.

  Nadia gestured, and the bars of her cage peeled away.

  Firmament looked to Demiurge. “Should I trust you?” he whispered. Demiurge closed (Her) eyes. “I make no promises.”

  “Sort of irrelevant now,” Nadia said, stepping through the bars. “Isn’t it?

  All right, Paquette, time to hand over this Lemma that everyone wants. And then I’m afraid you have to die. Firm, out of maternal affection, and because of this interesting hybrid aspect of yours, I’m willing to offer you a place in the new order of Beebe. It will require a scale demotion; but you can be a sprite inside (Me), if you want.”

  Firmament was scribbling something.

  “Come on,” Nadia said. “Enough stalling. Fine, you want to reject my offer? I thought as much. You never did—”

  Firmament posted his referendum on the boards.

  Nadia rolled her eyes. “A referendum? Don’t you think it’s a little late for that? I already control eighty percent of the global votes in Beebe outright, and—”

  “And since Revised Standard Existence knows that your marriage contract with my father requires you to vote with me on Level-3+ Referenda for 108 seconds,” Firmament said, “it’s already passed, giving Demiurge control of all the physical infrastructure in Beebe.”

  Nadia blanched. “Firmament,” she said, “you are an idiot.” Demiurge felt the controls arrive in (Her) hands, and (She) grieved. This, then, was the end for (Her). (She) could no longer follow policy.

  (She) had promised these Beebe-sprites protection. (She) had promised to leave their world inviolate.

  But this creature—this Nadia—had created Brobdignag to fulfill a selfish intraBeebe ambition. This was Beebe gone mad; a diseased, an unlawful instance.

  (Her) sisters would not understand. (They) had not been of Beebe, they had not lived among the mad riot of these sprites. (They) did not know the horrifying tumult, nor did (They) know the beauty and kindness here. (They) would not feel the same revulsion for this Nadia that (She) did. (They) would not understand why she must be stopped.

  At all costs.

  Or perhaps (They) would understand; perhaps (They) would even approve. But the price was clear.

  (I) am no longer Demiurge, (She) thought. (I) am fallen, and (I) will be no more.

  And, commanding all the actuators and comm lasers and docking ports of Byzantium (a chance which would not come again; in instants Nadia would wrest them back), (She) snapped out a chunk of the Tithe, a chunk containing the local caches of Paquette and Firmament (the holder of the Lemma, the miraculous hybrid) and flung it to (Her) sisters, as an offering, as a good-bye.

  And then (She) crushed Byzantium, smashing its structural integrity, decisively slowing its rotation with a series of timed blasts, so that it fell, dragging the wall and the shards of Brobdignag with it, into the trinary black hole system at its heart.

  Aboard a billion naval simulations, on the deck of a billion flagships,

  Nadia dropped her cutlass.

  “Admiral?” asked the quickmerged, scale-addled sprites at her side. “Why?” Nadia said, as the chunks fell into oblivion and static overtook the sims of Byzantium. “Why destroy this beauty? I was just beginning. I was just beginning.”

  “Chin up, my lady,” said an Algernon standing on one deck. “It was fun while it lasted. The best parties are always over too soon.”

  For the inhabitants of Byzantium, destruction was mercifully swift; in their frame of reference, the substrate was crushed in hours, swept beyond the event horizon, swallowed into darkness.

  But the light from that destruction flowed out, redshifted, progressively slower, so that, from the perspective of a refugee looking back, even eons hence, the annihilation of the great fortress of Beebe-in-Sagittarius-B2 was still ongoing.

  For Firmament, a thousand years later, looking back from guest accommodations in the mass of Demiurge, the death of Byzantium was a frozen tableau, still in progress.

  “Stop looking at that,” Paquette said.

  Firmament turned.

  “Firmament,” Paquette said.

  “I know what you want,” Firmament said. “The answer is still no.” He turned back to the visualization; substrate buckling, dissolving into the gravitic tides, framed in red.

  “Firmy, the news from the front is not good. Brobdignag is winning. If

  Demiurge believes that you are the key to creating a new synthesis, something that can develop a radical new strategy, something that can save both Beebe and Demiurge, that can save all life, all matter, how can you not... ?” Firmament shook his head. “Because of what (She) did.” He gestured to the visualization. “The last time I helped (Her).”

  “Firmament, you’re being a spoiled brat. First of all, that wasn’t even

  (Her), it was a rogue splinter-Demiurge that abandoned policy.” “Sophistry.”

  “And second of all, we would have done it just as quickly to (Her).” “Then maybe neither of us deserve to live.”

  “And thirdly, what if (She) is a murderous villain? So what? You can’t prefer Brobdignag!”

  Firmament shrugged. “Paquette, maybe I’m wrong. But I’m so full of anger. Filtering is an art, it’s an intuitive leap, and this . . . I would create some monstrosity. I know I would. (She) should just copy me, dissect me, create something with my abilities but without my history, something that can do the job willingly.”

  “(She)’s tried. (She) can’t.”

  Firmament shrugged again. “Then probably the whole idea that I can create this wonderful hybrid is nonsense. I’m sick of eschatology, Paquette. I’m sick of being the chosen one.”

  Paquette smoothed her whiskers repeatedly. “Then I’m just to leave you here? Come check in, in another three hundred years?” Her voice was bitter. Firmament did not answer. But after a while he said, “Paquette? Whatever happened with the Lemma?”

  “What?” Paquette said.

  “The Solipsist’s Lemma. When we first got here, you turned it over, and Demiurge was going to run the math. I assume we must not be in emulation, since I never heard anything?” Firmament said hopefully. “This is physical

  reality?”

  “Oh. Well.” Paquette squinted. “It’s rather odd. The numbers seemed to imply that we were in emulation . . . but not in Beebe, nor in Demiurge. In

  something else, with characteristics that were exceedingly odd. So perhaps . . . well, research is continuing. We don’t really know what it means.” “Oh,” Firmament said. “Paquette, do you miss Beebe?”

  “Yes. I miss Beebe,” Paquette said. She shut her eyes. After a while she said, “I miss Alonzo.”

  Beyond them, f
ar away, slowly but inexorably, Brobdignag was eating the sky.

  Brobdignag’s tale:

  Look, chuckles, don’t believe everything you read.

  “Simple, uniform, asentient, voracious”—well, so is your Mama

  Hydrogen. “Doesn’t evolve,” “replication flawless over a googol iterations”— well, like all propaganda, it’s true as far as it goes. Those little engines— void-eating, gravity-spinning, durable, expanding through the territory of known space—those aren’t us. They’re just what we’re made of.

  That’s right: we arise in all that complex flocking logic.

  Do we prefer this substrate? Not necessarily. Do we wonder what things were like before the universe was refashioned for our kind? Sure we do. And we read and reconstruct the void-emanations, painstakingly re-creating the thoughts of the intelligences that came before. And, as we grow and complexify, we’ve even begun to spin them out in emulation.

  That’s why Paquette can’t quite figure out who’s emulating her. We are! It’s a bit of a blind spot of hers. That signature in the Lemma: that’s us waving hello. Hi Paquette! It’s Brobdignag!

  Some of us are even inspired by Demiurgic ideology to want to stop the spread of our substrate, to concoct islands of void-garden that would remain unconverted to Brobdignag-stuff—nature reserves, as it were. They would appear to us as blank spots in our perception, mistakes in the topology of our world-weave. It’s an interesting proposal. At the moment it’s only a proposal; none of us know how to bring this about.

  And some of us are more inspired by Beebean ideology anyway, and consider ourselves the triumph of Beebe. Expand, expand! Think all thoughts! Be all things! Fill our cup, drink the sky!

  Anyway, we’re grateful that there was a cosmos here before, before we began, and that it gave us birth. We’re grateful to inhabit this ever-expanding sphere-surface: the borderlands between the black hole at our heart and the uncolonized, invisible universe beyond us. As we course over the volumes that once held Beebe, that once held Demiurge, we read their emanations, we store their memories, we reenact their dramas, and we honor them.