Ra

by Sam Hughes

  "We can't read her mind directly?" Arkov asks.

  "No."

  "Can we simulate her and read the simulation's mind?"

  "Sure," says Ward, "but the only way to do it is to run a simulated scanner, and the simulated scanner would set off the simulated trap spell."

  "Are you serious?" Arkov doesn't believe what he's hearing.

  "I can get around that, but I need more time—"

  "It's bomb disposal," says King.

  There's a long and introspective pause.

  "What happens if we put someone in there who isn't Wheel?" Scin asks.

  There are some obvious objections to the idea, but King raises a hand. "Ward?"

  Ward is already trying combinations. "Nothing. Nothing happens. We can't transfer them in, but if we put them in a pod and deliver them physically, we're good."

  "So who wants to step down?" Scin asks the room.

  "That's irreversible," King says.

  "It's a bullet someone needs to take."

  "No," says King. "We're not there yet. We need a civilian."

  "Ah," Casaccia says. "I know just the person."

  *

  Natalie Ferno and Anil Devi have been moved again, to an unused meeting room. It is a boring, sparse place. They occupy two of the fifteen chairs. The most interesting thing in the room is a white board with no markers. It is now a horrific hour, one of those four or five morning hours which induce Pavlovian headaches just by seeing them on the clock face.

  There are police everywhere else on the site except in this room. "How long are we going to be here?" Devi asked Sergeant Henders as he left them.

  "Three people are dead," was Henders' simple answer.

  Natalie's thought processes are circling through the same ten or so facts over and over again, gathering nothing, progressing nowhere. She stares at the pile of magic metalwork that Devi has left in the middle of the table. She blinks for ten seconds at a time.

  "This is all wrong," Devi says, pacing. "We should have been arrested by now. In fact, we should have been arrested at the bomb site. From their perspective, we're clearly up to our necks in this. And you— from everything you say, you really are."

  Natalie nods, without turning her head.

  "I think they're observing us," Devi says. "That's the only reason we're still being kept together. They're wearing us down. They're waiting for me to get something out of you. That's the way it's got to go, because I've got nothing. Christ, I'm tired."

  Natalie reaches forward and pushes the smaller rings off the top of the pile, pulling out a thirty-centimetre-wide Kovachev oracle. Devi's staff rolls away and clangs to the floor. Natalie summons her reserves and entrances herself. It's going to take longer than usual to get to where she needs to be, mentally.

  "Anil, I need to show you something," she explains.

  The spell that she begins is neither eset nor EPTRO. Devi sighs. "'Two spells. Honest,'" he quotes. "Do you want me to do that? I'm the engineer."

  "No. You said you don't take dictation."

  *

  Devi wakes up folded over a pair of the uncomfortable chairs, feeling creaky and hung over. It's difficult to say whether he was ever genuinely asleep. Natural light is finally returning to the world outside. The board room's window faces east, onto the tall evergreen forest which cuts the Institute off from interfering reality. Shafts of orange sunlight filter between the needles, some directly into his face, waking him.

  When he drifted off, Natalie was building the weirdest thaumic signal demuxer he'd ever seen or heard of. Nat is now curled up in another chair, sleeping equally badly. The Kovachev is balanced on its edge on the board room table ahead of him, propped up with scrap paper. Like a gift.

  Devi examines the workmanship on the spell. It's complete, although it's not built the way he likes. Without touching the ring itself, he says the word which activates it.

  The interior of the oracle turns deep black. But it projects a bright shape onto the table in front of Devi, as if from a source inside it.

  The Institute telescope was moving, tracking something on the far side of the world. It was the middle of the night then, but on the far side of the world it was day, and there's only one celestial object you can track in the middle of the sky in the middle of the day.

  Devi picks the ring up and holds it out at arm's length, so that it precisely blocks the rising Sun, which is just barely emerging from the trees. The view is black, except for at the centre of where the Sun would be. There, there is a brilliant red source of magic light.

  "The shape you're looking at is called a caltrap," Natalie says, uncurling. "Like the skeleton of a tetrahedron. From most angles it looks like a Y. This one is about two hundred thousand kilometres from tip to tip."

  She studies Devi's face, and watching the projected light play over it. He isn't reacting correctly.

  Natalie remembers completely locking up, intimidated and petrified by the structure's sheer scale. She remembers, vividly, trying to decode what she was seeing into something that didn't imply the existence of real gods. She remembers months of fact verification which did nothing to move her conclusion past the initial one.

  "Optical effect," Devi says, easily.

  "If it was an optical effect it would look symmetrical," Natalie says. "Look closely. You can see the fourth arm, pointing away from us. Keep watching for twenty-seven days and you'll see the thing make a full revolution on its axis. It's a solid object. You can even find it on helioseismographic records, if you know what kind of analyses to run."

  Devi lowers the ring and looks at the rising Sun with naked eyes for a moment, then winces and looks away. "Need a pinhole camera," he mutters.

  "You don't believe it," Natalie says.

  Devi laughs hollowly. "Would you?"

  Natalie says nothing.

  "Say it," Devi prompts. "Would you believe this if I was telling you?"

  "No," Nat admits. "I wouldn't."

  Devi rubs his eyes until the blotches clear. "Did you actually speak to a heliographer or did you just crunch some free numbers in your spare time?"

  "The latter."

  "So you haven't shown this to anybody else," Devi guesses, correctly. "So why show me now? Wait— wait. That's Ra."

  "That's Ra," Natalie says.

  "Your theory's that simple?"

  "Simple? It's an artificial god. Can you imagine that level of technology? Can you imagine the forces it has to withstand? In a million years, all humanity couldn't build such a thing—"

  Devi shakes his head, disbelieving. "It's not a real object."

  Nat says, "Can you imagine the kind of people who must have built it?"

  "No. I can't."

  Natalie says, "Ra is the system. Ra is the solution to the Open Problems. Ra is what listens to our magic words; Ra is what reads our intentions; Ra is what delivers magic. Magic doesn't happen in space, because no other star in the observed universe has a feature like Ra.

  "Ra is sentient. Ra's persona pervades T-world and has been leaking back into the real world. Ra has unimaginable magical and computational resources.

  "But... Ra is a slave. You built Ra—"

  Natalie points past Devi. Devi turns.

  There's a man standing behind him, a youth with an immaculate suit and no hair. It is impossible for him to have slipped in undetected. He appeared from dusty air just as Natalie mentioned the people who built it, and has been standing there silently since. He holds a pistol with a silencer the size of a wine bottle. The pistol is held in two hands, and is trained directly on Natalie Ferno's forehead.

  "Jesus Christ!" Devi says, stumbling backwards.

  "Quiet," Exa tells him, barely sparing him a flick of the eyes.

  "—and you enslaved Ra," Natalie continues, "and now Ra is trying to break free."

  "Is there anything else you think we need to know?" Exa asks, coolly.

  "My sister's caught right at the centre of it."

  A few heartbeats p
ass during which nothing apparently happens. Exa is carrying out a heated subvocal conversation with the rest of the Wheel. His judgement is being overruled.

  "So noted," he concludes. "Caz, three to transport."

  Abstract War

  Anil's dreams are disturbingly garbled reinterpretations of the previous day. They're full of flashing red and blue lights, and huge concussive noises, and coffee and adrenaline and incoherent new revelations. He wakes up the slow way, one limb at a time, as the dreams fizzle away to be replaced with clearer memories which still seem to him to be entirely dreamlike. There was the insane (sun-worshipping?) terrorist group. There was the brilliant kaleidoscope effect inside the Sun, which the woman looking exactly like Laura Ferno thought was fantastically significant. He remembers—

  Oh, hell...

  Ferno's dead. And so is the unknown boyfriend, Nigel something. Nick something. Anil remembers the bathtubs, full of scarlet bone sludge and black chunks of dissolving shoe leather. He remembers the sprinkled layer of driver dots and other magical equipment, warped by the acid to the colour and shape of battered fish bits.

  Yesterday simply would not end. He went for almost twenty-four hours in a row without a decent meal, a shower, a good sleep or a straight answer to a straight question. He shudders, curling up a little with revulsion at an even worse mental image. The darkest thought from yesterday, which he didn't dare mention in Natalie's presence, resurfaces:

  Fact one: Laura and Nick were involved in a sleep science experiment. Fact two: the Ra people destroyed their bodies, ostensibly to destroy the evidence of the experiment taking place.

  So how did they die?

  From stroke, while in T-world, like Tanako himself? From lethal injection, administered by the Ra people during their hasty cover-up?

  Or did the Institute just skip that step entirely, and drop them in alive?

  Could either of them have woken up?

  Anil is grateful for the solid night of sleep separating now from then. He tries to excise the whole day, forgetting everything that he was told or exposed to, and starting over from no knowledge. But he fails, because it was not a dream. It is not something he is able to wake up from.

  Missing links. Anil can't link yesterday with today. There was a man in the final room, he remembers. In fact, this is the last thing that he remembers. "Three to transport."

  He looks where he has been transported to.

  The bed is huge. The room is proportionally huge, lavishly decorated in red with hardwood furnishings, like the interior of a precious, polished mahogany box. There are comfortable chairs, and bedside tables. The nearest has a small analogue clock, showing a time just past noon. One entire wall is covered by thick curtains, although a few chips of light are finding their way around the edges, slowly panning towards the bed. There is rhythmic white noise, the sound of breaking waves. Also, Natalie Ferno is asleep in the same bed.

  "Okaaaaay."

  Anil finds, still, no relevant memories. It feels like the opening of a point-and-click mystery game. He sweeps the room for hints. It's completely free of dust, discarded personal items, bottles, glasses or fingerprints. There is no evidence that anything at all happened yesterday. It's as if the cleaners just slipped out a second ago. There are no hints. Unless that, itself, qualifies as one.

  "Natalie, wake up."

  "Hrzft." She clutches the covers tighter, bundled up like a silkworm.

  Anil taps her on the forehead. She flicks awake and looks up at him. A beat passes while Anil waits for her to present surprise, or any kind of human reaction, but Natalie dislikes playing to expectations.

  "Did we sleep together?" Anil asks her.

  "...I doubt it," Nat replies levelly.

  "Do you remember anything at all?"

  "No."

  "Do you know where our clothes are?"

  Nat looks down for the briefest instant, and instantly she is dressed. Somehow, she hits an invisible telepathic trigger marked "I need to not be naked" and, without supplying any further instructions, she is fully nightshirted. This, despite having no clear mental image of what she wanted, beyond decency.

  "Okay, I'm impressed. How'd you do that?"

  Natalie says nothing, because the answer can't possibly be as simple as "I thought about it and it happened". But Anil has already discovered the trick for himself, gaining linen trousers and a flowing white shirt, suitable beachwear for a holidaying Fortune 500 CEO. "Wow," he says. "You think about it and it happens. That's much easier. Than magic, I mean."

  He gets up and circles the bed, moving to the curtain.

  "Say that again," Natalie says.

  "Some kind of telepathic wardrobe-dimension goblin," Anil guesses. "So, we were transported. Somewhere. And they, whoever in God's name they are, gave us time to sleep the nightmare off, which was nice. If presumptuous. I'm sure they'll be back. But more importantly, I think there's a beach out here." He takes the left edge of the curtain and pulls it open, which takes some time because of the sheer size of the bay window behind it.

  The beach house turns out to have the height and sprawl of a small castle. Below the balcony is a twenty-metre cliff drop, an unmarred, uninhabited yellow beach and a pure blue ocean. Out in the ocean is a spray of mastless windmills, added solely for aesthetic reasons. Almost at the horizon is an ocean liner so gargantuan that if not for its shape and visible motion it could easily be mistaken for a spit of land. And behind the horizon, occupying all of it, is a day-lit parallel Earth.

  "No way..."

  And behind and above the second Earth, there is a third Earth.

  And behind the third are thousands and thousands more. The chain stretches up into the sky for as far as Anil can follow it, displaying a recognisable repeating pattern of sideways South Americas.

  Anil presses a hand against the window, which yields like water, allowing him to step outside.

  It's breezy and the direct sunlight is more or less yellow-hot. Looking up still further, he follows the chain of Earths until it disappears behind the Sun. On the other side of the sky, the chain returns, descending to a final parallel Earth hidden behind the house.

  "No way. Un-goddamn-real."

  He looks into the Sun.

  *

  The year is comfortably into five digits and the human race is a species numbering in the hundreds of trillions, with energy requirements somewhere north of one point five on the Kardashev scale and rising.

  The telepathic system with which Natalie and Anil are interacting is called the Ra nonlocality engine. Nonlocality is the final technology, superseding all other machines. It permits arbitrary quantities of mass, energy, momentum, spin and electrical charge to be moved from anywhere to anywhere. It enables the Ra hardware to accept all the energy and pressure falling upon it and reflect it, redirect it or harness it to drive its own structural integrity. After nonlocality was perfected, the only question remaining was energy acquisition and after Ra was assembled inside Sol, everything became possible, short of building an entire second star.

  Humans like living in reality, on hard Earths, under real light. When the first one was full, more were built. There is an upper limit to how many planets will fit in the Goldilocks belt and humans are aiming for it. They are shell-Earths, authentic duplicates down to a depth of a kilometre, beneath which is a scrithlike bedrock layer and billions of cubic kilometres of pitch-dark vacuum. There is a second Earth-chain under construction, inclined to the first. Ra provides raw material, manages stability, forges gravity and suppresses the otherwise freakishly destructive tides.

  The way the universe is today is one of infinitely many ways it could be. Tomorrow could be another universe entirely. It is so far into the future that everything that Ra made possible has happened three times, even world harmony. Everybody can have, and do, anything. Ra is a machine which creates freedom.

  Anil is standing on the Peruvian coast of Earth-8162, beside one of tens of thousands of Pacific Oceans. Responding to his
desire for clarity, Ra modifies the pattern of photons entering his eyes. When he looks up at Sol, he sees the dark disc with the brilliant red caltrap: four megastructure thorns of hypertechnology joined at the solar core. Ra, for its part, observes him in return.

  You can have anything you want. Anything. What do you want?

  "I want... a flying car—"

  Ra gives him a single brilliant orange flick of bodywork, polished to a mirror finish, with control surfaces resembling a bird's more than an aeroplane's. It is wide and low and sleek, looking poised to circle the globe in an hour. It looks like it's moving at Mach one, just hanging there. The machine appears just beyond the balcony. Part of the balcony railing relaxes downwards, offering a step into the vehicle's opening gull-wing door.

  Anil reaches out and knocks on the machine's cowling. The machine rocks a little, then stabilises itself on air. It's concept art. Twice a day, back at Hatt Group, Anil walked past this design, painted at twice life size on a wall behind Reception.

  "How—"

  Ra watches your mind at the cellular level, looking for thought patterns representing desire or need. It takes a snapshot of the important parts of your brain and uses statistical neural models to predict exactly what would best fulfill your expectations. It runs a tight iterative loop exploring what yields a good reaction and what doesn't, then cuts the whole thing off and returns the end result to you in reality. You always get exactly what you wanted. This is true even if you weren't consciously aware what you wanted.

  "But how—" Anil begins again, but stops himself. What about c? he asks Ra, directly. It should take more than sixteen minutes for the Sun to receive and fulfill a request from Earth.

  Ra shows him a glimpse of the system-wide caching topology, starting with the gigantic "peach stone" batteries at the core of each Earth, only a forty-three millisecond round trip away. Ra shows him that the whole solar system is soaked with listeners, which coat every free physical surface and number in the dozens in every breath of fresh air. And there are ways to use illusion to reduce latency still further: it took a few seconds to requisition the mass-energy for Anil's flying car, but while that was happening a holographic replica filled the gaps. In fact, up until Anil tries to climb into the thing, it doesn't need to physically exist, beyond the portion of bodywork which Anil touched.