Ra

by Sam Hughes

  Exa responds with patient silence.

  Casaccia is now looking at a single frame with three labelled green pinpricks. "She was one of the two who were blown up."

  "Natalie Ferno gave the police an eyewitness account of the bombing... from beyond the grave?"

  "I'm watching in slow motion," Casaccia says. "They weren't killed. The bomber dies instantly. She and the other man... exit the house at high speed when the detonation takes place. Blown away. A few minutes pass and they get up. Perfectly healthy. ...Could they have been wearing medrings?"

  "Or some kind of shield," Exa says. "We repossessed Rachel Ferno's medring, there's no way she passed anything similar down to her heirs. Without being stupid, could they have survived if they were wearing bomb-disposal gear?"

  "Impossible," Casaccia says.

  "A shield, then," Exa concludes. "They survived using magic."

  Casaccia frowns, winding the feed back and forth. "Erm."

  "'Erm'?"

  "Give me one second."

  There is no chi on the feed.

  Maybe the bomber's akashic scrambler had a wide field effect. Wide enough to blot out everything out to Natalie Ferno's final resting place, on the other side of the street.

  But the bomber dies. Less than a tenth of a second after detonation, he has ceased to exist.

  And there's still no chi on the feed.

  *

  It's months later still and Natalie is flying home from Iceland with her mind racing. Frightening, inexplicable things have just happened. Ra isn't the half of it.

  ("This isn't you, Benj! So who is it?" she had shouted at him. "I told you," he had replied. "I've been telling you and telling you—")

  Her mystery spell - well, subspell - is an odd piece of rough working. She can compute, to any number of decimal places, what it really does. What she can't predict is how reality will react to it, which means she has to try it and see. But if she tried the spell in reality, chi would flood out and give her away, just like it gave Zeck away. It would mark her as a confirmed threat. To whom, she doesn't know. She can't know that yet.

  She could suppress the chi output. That much, she has (with difficulty, in secret) proven. But suppressing the output would require a whole different spell, and that would release its own chi, which could still be tracked. She'd need to suppress the chi output from that second spell using a third. And so on, recursing forever. In theory, it could be done very easily... using a spell which was infinitely long and infinitely complex, because no finite spell can completely describe its own structure.

  Unless, that is, you know the first thing about quines.

  Natalie Ferno thought quine spells couldn't exist. And then, on the mountain a few days ago, she saw a counterexample with her own eyes.

  Natalie doesn't know that Benjamin "Ra" Clarke built his quine with mechanical assistance from an astra, an ungodly dangerous artifact from before the dawn of time; a machine which enables spells to cast spells. With that object in one's hands, building something like an akashic scrambler is made shockingly simple.

  But Natalie also doesn't know that the artifact in question is just a shortcut, a labour-saving device. Like riding a helicopter to the peak of K2, it does nothing that a sufficiently determined human being couldn't do unaided.

  Theoretically.

  All Natalie knows is that it's possible.

  *

  "She's wearing a scrambler as well," Casaccia says.

  "For how long," Exa asks carefully, "has she been wearing it?"

  "I don't know," Casaccia admits, exasperated. "I don't know! I'm working on it. I haven't had five seconds in a row to think about this yet."

  Exa says, "Scott Parajsa acted because of a worst-case scenario in which Natalie Ferno, or Wiktor Czekanowski, or both, had used that oracular spell and had seen the listening post, or the distributor, or both. Or worse, Ra. Nat Ferno found a loophole in magic through which she would be able to see us. But all the evidence suggested that she was dropping the thread. That it was a non-issue. We set tripwires just in case it became one.

  "And now?"

  *

  It's months later, months later, months later again—

  Natalie Ferno, thaumoastrophysicist, is looking for evidence of magic in space. The project is ongoing. It's too early to judge yet, but she already knows what she's going to find.

  You can't prove a negative. It doesn't matter how much data you gather. It will always be possible to rationalise the gathering of additional data for the purposes of confirmation.

  It will always be possible to justify withholding the truth. One more month. Two more months.

  Laura Ferno is a bad scientist— rash and far too reckless. And Natalie Ferno is a bad scientist too, in her own way.

  *

  Exa doesn't let Casaccia get a word in. "Parajsa's bad call made the worst-case scenario happen. We're so far beyond it that we need to recalibrate. Who knows how long she's been hiding from us? Who knows what she's actually seen?"

  *

  It's now.

  In Chedbury Bridge reception, Natalie Ferno has assumed the "thinking king" pose: slouched to one side in an armchair, the fingers of one hand against her temple and cheek, staring directly forwards at something extremely important which nobody else can see. Beside her, her coffee is levelling off at room temperature.

  She and Devi have been locked out. They're off the case now, too close to the source material to be allowed to pass judgement. Certainly, they've been kept separate from any and all instances of Ra. With a little effort, the police will be able to find other, independent mages to pick the pieces up.

  This leaves Natalie with a very small pool of known facts.

  There's a telescope pointed down into the Earth. I walked past it twice. Once on the way in. Once on the way out.

  It had moved. I know it moved, because I was looking for it.

  There is a way to make sense of all of this. Even without access to the evidence that the police are holding, there is a straight line through to the far side. But she can't find it.

  "I'm sorry," Anil Devi says, sitting near her with his own drink.

  Natalie carefully avoids reacting to him.

  "I'm sorry about your sister," Devi continues. "I barely worked with her, but... she was a great engineer. Forceful. Uncompromising. She almost always had the right answer."

  "She and I died once before," Natalie tells him, not moving. She speaks softly and lightly, as if reciting a fairy tale. "We were on a volcanic mountain in Iceland, called Krallafjöll. We were there with a friend named Benjamin Clarke. He had been possessed by Ra. He blew the mountain up below us, and we drowned in lava.

  "We survived inside a shield, perhaps for ninety seconds, or two minutes. Then Laura and I ran out of mana, and the shield collapsed on us, and we were killed. Crushed to ashes and burnt to atoms."

  Devi has no response to this.

  Natalie says, "Before running out of air, we escaped into T-world together. And while inside the dream we watched ourselves die. And then all three of us, Laura and the real Benj and I, walked home from the dream. And I still..." Natalie doesn't finish the sentence.

  "How did you walk home?" Devi asks, gently.

  Natalie ignores the question. "We did it once. Laura can do it again. She's alive."

  "No." Devi takes Natalie's hand. "Your sister's dead. So is her boyfriend. You saw the buckets. You identified what was left." Devi is having to steel himself to say this, because he, too, has seen the buckets, and Jesus Christ.

  "This all began with a conservation violation, Anil," Natalie tells him. "Laura's still alive. She's still in trouble. And we still need to find her."

  Direct Sunlight

  "Wait," says Scin.

  They're hours into the investigation now. There are five mages on the Floor, burrowing separate paths into the problem. Scin has replaced Casaccia at the post of "seer of the Past", has untangled the figurative wires that Casaccia had no clue h
ow to manage, and is pulling data out of the akashic records as fast as the others can request it. Kila Arkov, blond-ish and bearded, is shepherding the akashic records system itself— a system occupying cubic kilometres of reality and metaphorical square light years of virtual space. Ward, "The Future", is the latest to have arrived. He constructs high-definition analyses of the future using a dizzyingly complicated framework whose operation is tantamount to... well, dark magic.

  Casaccia frets about global security and King tells them all what to do. The air is crowded with virtual screens. It almost wasn't worth going paperless.

  "Wait..." says Scin.

  He reaches out for the stadium-sized bank of images and beckons, magnifying a particular news headline. It's the one naming Laura Ferno and Nicholas Laughon as the two found dead at Chedbury Bridge.

  "There's a discontinuity in Laughon's life line," Scin says. He displays the track. "That's where he dies. Acid dissolution. But this dot here is the same man. Hours later, on the other side of the world, Laughon pops out of nowhere—"

  "What?" The last sentence fragment gets everybody's attention.

  "Was he completely dark for that time?" Casaccia asks.

  "Unknown," Scin says. "I don't see how Laughon could have physically travelled that distance in that amount of time. He'd be supersonic. But Caz, that location is here. Just a few klicks from where we're standing right now. It's inside the listening post. Stairwell four zero one one, segment seventy-eight. He pops out of nowhere, barely more than a dot, and then he dies again—"

  Eyes wide, Casaccia dismisses half of the visible displays with a hurried wave of his hand, then summons a deep integrity scan of the listening post's interior.

  It's the same scan he's checked five times today and it shows the same cheerful green response. "We're clean," he says, not believing it. "Nobody in, nobody out, no physical damage. Did you say he just appeared there?"

  "And then died there," Scin repeats. "Probably he's still there."

  Casaccia is already running for the stairs.

  *

  Casaccia passes the next few minutes dredging up half-finished Mark Two integrity scans and balling them up into something functional. The current state of the art is not acceptable to him.

  After ninety seconds of railpod travel, he reaches the station nearest the stairwell. It takes another five minutes of rapid descent on foot to get to the scene of the fight. He brings fluorescent light with him, which turns the stairwell into an antiseptic white autopsy laboratory.

  "There's a version of Exa here," he narrates. "He's been sliced in half. And this man must be Laughon. His face matches what the news was showing. Laughon's been shot in the heart. With... Exa's gun. I think they killed each other. They haven't been dead for long. I can still see the infrared."

  "How the hell did they get there?" King demands.

  "Unknown," Casaccia says, because he doesn't dare say what he really thinks until he can be absolutely certain.

  "How the hell did someone kill Exa?" Arkov asks, mostly out of curiosity.

  "I think... I think it was some kind of blade attack. Or a projected field. It looks like it snapped his kara." Casaccia instinctively clutches his own kara, as does every mage in the conversation. "But that doesn't make sense, because... they've been self-repairing for years..."

  Casaccia wastes no further time on forensic guesswork. He picks up the kara's two fragments and reconnects them with a word.

  Laughon's body resurrects empty. The man breathes in and out, staring up at Casaccia. But there's nobody inside it. The medring can't do anything about the condition. There's no mental record to work from. Casaccia tells the medring to shut Laughon's body down again, and takes it back.

  Exa comes back healthier. Reconstruction takes a second, although the clothes can't be saved. The man is left with no right shirt sleeve and no functioning dinner jacket.

  "Fuck!" is Exa's first waking syllable.

  "Going to need some ID, friend," Casaccia says, backing up to a respectful distance and aiming an attack spell of uncertain effectiveness back at Exa.

  Exa rolls his eyes and recites a highly privileged spell, one which only a Wheel Group member could legitimately cast.

  "Where are you from?" Casaccia asks.

  "The victory party. December thirty-first, nineteen sixty-nine," Exa says. "Someone gatecrashed it."

  "What?"

  "Someone broke into the akashic records," Exa explains. "And then, apparently, they broke out again. Your ship is leaking! Where's the girl? And what year is this?"

  "What girl?"

  "The woman who killed me! I owe her something."

  Casaccia calls in again. "Scin. Find Laura Ferno."

  *

  By the time he returns to the Floor, the full scale of the security apocalypse-in-progress is becoming clear to him. Casaccia refuses direct questions from Exa, who is following him in another railpod, and from the rest of the Wheel. He holds on until he can assemble everybody in front of one screen.

  That screen shows a closed-circuit image of Laura Ferno. She is standing, still with one hand raised, three spines of lightning emerging from it. Entranced.

  "There's bad news, and there's no other news," Casaccia says. "We should have fixed the T-world exploit properly, as soon as we heard of it. I don't care that we would have had to take magic completely offline. I don't care that it would have introduced inconsistencies to the scientific record. We should have found a way."

  "What's 'T-world'?" Exa asks, struggling to keep up with modern terminology.

  "'Tanako's world' is what the magic-using general public calls the akashic records interface," King says. "Named after the scientist, Kazuya Tanako."

  Exa is aghast. "The general public has access to the records? Not thirty minutes ago I was being told that our system was provably perfect. By you!"

  "It was a mistake," says King.

  "It's not deliberately public," says Arkov.

  "Are those supposed to be excuses?" Exa shouts. "What the hell happened?"

  King says, "For the love of God, Ecks, will you merge with the real guy? We don't have time to bring you thirty years up to speed."

  "No. No. I'm not skipping past this to a point where I've grudgingly accepted it. You people will explain yourselves—"

  "This woman can move in and out of T-world almost at will," Casaccia continues, loudly. "I'm reasonably sure that she's been trained to do this, by a group which has been working against us for years plural. Now she's standing at the base ring of this listening post, reclaiming mana from our own battery system at a rate of terawatts. For reasons unknown."

  "I'll get your reasons. Put me down there," Exa says.

  Casaccia looks at King, then at Ward. "Fine," he says, still looking at Ward. "Put him down there."

  No half-measures. Exa has already swapped his 1969-model medring out for a modern one. Now he turns the power up to maximum and puts time compression on his perception, for the maximum possible strategic advantage.

  He shifts perceptual location from the control room of the Floor to a transport pod, which is on the final deceleration leg of the journey to the deep node where Laura Ferno is located. He cracks the pod's shell open and brakes himself to a halt inside the transit tube, letting the pod race away ahead of him. It'll arrive empty. Ferno is almost certainly waiting for it. He doesn't want to be a sitting target. He doesn't want to play into her hands, even if he's invulnerable, even for a split second.

  Deep sub-crustal architecture schemes flash up in his instincts, telling him which parts of the listening post's interior he can and cannot safely destroy. He picks a direction, turns orange-hot, and starts swimming through the metalwork.

  He cannot be hurt. He arcs around, and dives into the stomach-shaped final room through its ceiling, in a cloud of molten listening machinery, at a hundred and fifty kilometres per hour, emitting enough sound and light alone to kill on contact.

  The fight ends so quickly that the proce
ssor inside his medical ring doesn't detect that it began. He and the ring are plasma. It takes less than a tenth of a processor cycle.

  Exa perceives nothing. The universe jumps and he's back at the Floor.

  "What happened?"

  "A 1018-watt laser," Ward explains, showing the group the action replay. "You're dead. The backlash from the laser pulse was enough to unrecoverably destroy Ferno's mind. The entire lower fifth of the listening post has been destroyed, and the rest is imploding and/or flooding with magma.

  "All the hypotheticals end this way. Ferno's plugged directly into the listening post's geomagical production system. Disturb her, and she plugs the other end into a directed energy spell. The spell has no explicit capacity limit and almost no physical components. It's unstoppable in that form. It's enough magic that the gigaspells themselves come close to failure."

  "If we put a Wheel representative anywhere near her, the spell fires," Casaccia adds. "If we try to teleport her out, the spell fires. The spell is already cast, it's on a hair trigger. If we mess with her consciousness, or kill her, or pump gas into the room, the spell fires.

  "And look at what she's casting right now. That's a Dehlavi engine."

  "Dehlavi?" Exa asks.

  "Oh, for God's sake," King says. He snaps his fingers. Exa dissolves into his medring, and his branch of memories are transferred to the other side of the world, to the other Exa.

  There's a stunned pause.

  Exa is fine. He's on the other side of the world, and is suddenly angry and disoriented, but fine. All the remaining mages realise this, one at a time. King can practically count off their facial expressions as they do so.

  "Go on," King prompts Casaccia.

  Casaccia blinks, and recovers. "Uh... Ferno's consciousness is in T-world right now. Even if we kill this instance of her, that instance will still be at work. She's sitting on limitless mana, but she isn't here to blow the listening post up, or she'd have done it already. We've got to find out what she is here to do. And we need to stop her. We need to do both of these things, and we need to do them in that order."