by Sam Hughes
Which could have been faked too, at that.
Anil stares at his knuckles, remembering the sensation of knocking on the metal.
Are you real?
Yes, Ra politely informs him. I am real.
Which proves nothing.
*
The cruiser/mobile island is making a leisurely pace west. Earth-8161 is setting.
Natalie gets up, now wearing a brightly coloured sun dress. Walking out to join Anil, she summons furniture for the balcony, a table and chairs. Breakfast arrives too, somehow without either of them consciously requesting it. Natalie sits down to eat as if this is simply her years-old morning routine. Anil notices that food has been prepared for him too, which somehow grabs his attention more effectively than the insanity in the sky. He joins her and they eat wordlessly for a little while.
"I see four major possibilities," Natalie says. Apparently, her deepest breakfast desires run only as far as coffee and porridge. "Intuitively, our 'home' universe was clearly a simulacrum, but—"
"Can we not?"
Natalie stops.
Anil says, "I can't keep a tenth of these facts straight anymore, so I've stopped trying. I'm going to eat my fried eggs. We're scientists, we're supposed to accept the universe as presented. It presents me with eggs. My conclusion: I am on holiday."
Natalie blinks, revising her approach to the conversation. "Have you noticed there's no magic?" she asks him.
"Yes," Anil says, with his mouth full, preparing another mouthful. It would be difficult to miss. There isn't even the empty-headed sort of feeling which mages feel when they're completely exhausted of mana, or the slippery-ice sensation of being stuck at the core of a human-sized Montauk ring. There's just blank space where those extra senses should be. "I don't care. Clearly something incredibly bloody weird is going on, but there are too many weird options to make it worth thinking about. Clearly, something is going to happen next. Why don't we just wait and see what it is?"
Natalie falls silent.
Her gut reaction was that nothing was real except this final scene. Everything up until now was the lie, and this intimidatingly wonderful future is the truth. This was Natalie's immediate, instinctive reading, because this is a future with near-limitless resources, which must include computational resources. Of course the system claiming to be called "Ra" would have the processing power to fabricate her whole life to date. She doesn't even need to have lived any of it. Anil was just shown the kind of shortcuts that can be taken to improve latency. Why bother to run a whole twenty-something-year life story in reality-equivalent fidelity when you can just gin up a brain with engineered memories of the broad strokes?
This would explain how Ra was present back there, wherever "there" is relative to here. It would explain everything, because nothing would need explaining. It would just be a... dream.
Except that all of the above is in fact frantic ex post facto justification of something she desperately wants to be true, because it would mean Laura isn't dead. It would mean she never had a sister, or anybody else, and hasn't lost anything, or anybody.
Natalie has distrusted her intuition for so long that the distrust has itself become intuitive. "Gut reaction"? She suppressed her real gut reaction so quickly that she didn't notice it happening.
The world can't possibly be this perfect. There's nowhere she can look which isn't directly at a perfect thing. Not even at herself. Natalie thinks of a dismal early twenty-first century November, with cold rain and aggravatingly clunky magic spells and pointless, inexplicable death. It was a universe too crummy not to have been real. She discovers that what she really believes is that all of it happened, and all of it is still happening, and they need to go back to face it. Somehow.
Deep fear and heavy unknowns well up in her throat. She sets the porridge down. She closes her eyes and holds onto the bridge of her nose.
"Are you okay?" Anil asks her, but he's been waiting for this to happen for some time.
"Um. No."
"Your sister died and you almost died too," Anil says. "This is supposed to happen."
Natalie slumps to one side in the chair, tears running down her hand and arm.
Anil joins her on that side of the table, and holds her around the shoulders.
She says, "I don't know where she is. I don't know where we are. I don't know how to find out."
"That's fine," Anil tells her.
Time passes.
*
Ra is a single entity distributed across the whole solar system. No part of Ra is slaved to any other part of it. No shell-Earth's core node has a noticeably differing personality from the others, or from the megastructure inside the Sun. Opinions and behaviour and available information are continuously synchronising. Eventually, there is only one Ra.
When the first First Law violation happens, it's not because of a direct instruction from one Ra to another. It is simply that new data is made available, and as the data spreads through the star system, the local Ras all arrive, independently, at the same conclusion.
Earth-8162's local cache of energy is large enough to meet the needs of its population. But it's not large enough to take the action that this Ra now deems appropriate. It spends some moments expanding its own storage capacity, expanding its downlink bandwidth, and testing the new hardware. Satisfied of the minimal risk of malfunction, this Ra now moves to a readiness posture and makes its request to its other self.
The specially earmarked energy packet arrives promptly, sixteen or so minutes later. Ra uses the first section of the packet to fabricate a laser emitter on its own exterior, piping the rest into storage. The emitter is the size of Mount Everest, and of a calibre more usually employed to cut dwarf planets in half. When the emitter is built, Ra reverses the flow and pipes the rest of the energy through it, stabbing up through Earth-8162's North Pole. Rolling across Ra's exterior, the emitter tracks south, opening the world up as it goes. To an external observer, it is as if the figurative peach stone has decided to knife its way out through the fruit's flesh.
More energy arrives. More emitters sprout like warts. Ninety-nine beams join the first on different lines of longitude. A further hundred appear in synchronised bursts, cutting from west to east in passes, efficiently dicing the planet's shell into neat, Wyoming-sized flecks of ocean and countryside. The beams will be visible from Neptune. At ground level, the light beams traversing the skyline are intense enough to blind everybody they don't incinerate.
This is a culture with perfect medical technology and therefore almost entirely without experience of pain and injury. Disability is a shocking, alien notion, to the extent that a substantial percentage of the victims don't comprehend that their eyes have been destroyed, or recognise the significance of Ra's failure to instantly restore them.
Ra has become schizophrenic. Its request management system flips between failure modes. Its panopticon desire-reading capability falters, falling back on hardware telepathic implants which are only activated by explicit, conscious thought. The dead remain dead. This culture has a gigantic and powerful human life loss recovery system, one which makes it almost impossible, even with constructive and concerted effort, to permanently kill someone. That system has now ceased operation.
*
"Something's wrong," says an unseen voice, from all directions at once.
Anil remembers a split-second curtain of red light, bright enough to sever the sky from the earth. If not for its colour he would be thinking nuclear detonation.
"I can't see. Nat—"
"I'm fine," she says, standing up and moving out of his reach.
"What's happening?" Anil reaches out for his missing senses, wishing magic was there, feeling distressingly baseline without it. He feels Natalie's hand pass over his eyelids, restoring his eyesight.
Natalie is staring out at the ocean. He follows her gaze.
All four beams have passed them now, marking out a cartographic quadrangle containing much of Peru and some of the Pacif
ic. The sky is red to the south, where the beams are still working. None of them passed closer than a few kilometres to the beach house, which is intact until the shockwave arrives, minutes from now. The mobile island, though, is gone, sliced in half and blasted into black ash by the longitudinal beam which tracked through it. There were almost a hundred thousand people on it.
"Oh Christ," Anil says. "It's never going to end. Nat, can you deal with this?"
"I'm fine," she says. She sniffs once, loudly, and wipes her eyes. Anil can see her steeling up again. "I needed to break and reset."
"We need to get out of here."
Natalie turns to Anil, but does not speak to him. "We need to be immortal, invincible and all-seeing. We need all possible senses available to us. Both of us."
Anil stares. He understands. He adds: "We need to be completely independent from the Ra network because it's— because you're under attack or rampant or something. Cut us right off until we decide to come back. I know this risks infection. Give us our own listener/responder AI—"
The next plate offshore has already started falling. Nat and Anil's plate pitches west, following it. Earth-8161 disappears over their heads, and "up" now points at the far side of 8162's ordinarily dark interior. The planet is breaking open, chips of sunlight entering through perfectly right-angled cracks. After another second of freefall, 8162's local cache rises up into the picture, a shining silver bauble the size of a middleweight Jovian moon. They're falling into it, along with hundreds of other plates, some colliding and breaking, some pinwheeling.
The still-unseen voice says: "I am the master systems architect for the Ra nonlocality engine. I was resurrected fifteen seconds ago to deal with the crisis. What's happening right now cannot happen. Emergency bulk transportation is under construction, but there's a half-quadrillion more people now than there were when I left this life, so it's going to get hairy—"
Natalie continues: "We need propulsion, life-support, delta-vee capability, acceleration capability. Manoeuvrability!" She is flashing back to a pivotal moment from her past history, which may or may not have been real, just like this may or may not be real. But, she remembers, you always have to assume that the present is real. It's the only way to remain sane. It's the only way to remain ethical.
The concept car wakes up.
Local gravitation imitation systems struggle to keep a coherent picture of what "down" means in a rapidly rotating reference frame. The Peruvian square makes another complete revolution and the silver cache is noticeably larger on this pass. The cache lasers are still firing, dicing up the remainder of the southern hemisphere. Anil grabs Nat's right hand with his.
The nonlocality architect speaks again: "This isn't a standard gravitational collapse. You're being tractored in by the core node. This is a system-wide failure. Evac command is given. Everybody cannon up!"
Anil says, "—as much locally allocated energy as possible, like a completely self-contained cache full of distributable QM properties, a full tank—"
Natalie says, "We need to survive this. Redundancy. Backups. Security. Inviolate minds."
Anil says, "We should be able to go it completely alone. And give us weapons. All possible weapons."
The gull-wing concept car is still holding station just below the balcony. The strip of ocean behind it is lifting off into the sky in a single ribbon-like blob. If it rolls inland, there's a chance Anil and Nat could even drown. Oxygen fluctuates in pressure, then starts spiralling away, as the plate's gravitation system throws its hands up and quits. Anil anchors his feet to what is still, in any orientation, the balcony floor, and his hand to Natalie, who is being carried away by the decompression.
"We're on the same page," Natalie says to him, her hair misbehaving in freefall. Sound is dropping out, but they can still communicate. They both asked for that.
Their casual/breakfast attire ceases to exist. They gain pressure suits. Full-body articulation, gloves full of gadgetry, spines plated with nonlocality tech. The car honks at them. It's their pack mule, its boot full of quantum battery. Now both swimming through thinning air, they load themselves into it.
"That's everything, right?" Anil says.
Ra's sharded personality convulses, responding inconsistently to trillions of conflicting requests, most of which are for it to cease doing what it's doing. One request, from itself, is so urgent and critical that Ra can't ignore it for long: "Ignore them. You don't work for them. Wake up."
The orange lick of metalwork knows how to fly better than either of its passengers. It detaches from the reference frame of the beach house, backflips to a halt and begins a long sustained burn back towards what used to be the fictitious planet's surface. Within another few seconds the first polar plate has smashed into the cache core, wounding it. Eight more plates follow, compounding the damage. Soon the cloud of debris is too chaotic to understand, and still growing as the rest of Earth-8162's shell implodes on it.
FTL is completely ruled out by nonlocality science. There is no threshold of gravitational distortion after which some kind of "jump" becomes possible. Anil and Natalie pull a brain-crushing rate of acceleration out of the gravity well, with nothing to be done but accelerate and assemble shielding.
Even the hairs on every real human being's head were numbered at the instant when the evacuation order was given. Were Natalie and Anil citizens, they wouldn't be riding this out in the post-nonlocality space technology equivalent of a 75cc motorcycle. They'd have been saved. Everybody real who could have been saved has been saved.
The last word is: "This isn't possible. Information coming in from the other side of the system... oh, God. There were theorems about this."
The core node shudders, its downlink harness fracturing. Its Ra instance sidesteps the final blow, transmitting its remaining independent thoughts back into the Sun. The last energy packet passes it in the opposite direction, but there is no functional machinery left to handle its arrival. The detonation is large enough to destroy everything that's left of Earth-8162's skin pieces, and all of Earths 8161 and 8163, and to scorch the faces of tens of others.
Other Earths up and down the chain are starting to split apart and detonate. In fact, many of them have already been destroyed, but it's taken until now for the light to arrive. It is the end of all worlds.
Humanity retreats to Neptune and axes the nonlocality links. But Ra's coming for them now.
Everything Is Real
There are no half-measures in space combat. There's no sideways lurch when a lucky shot gets through. There's no "shields at sixty percent". If the concept spacecar's systems had been late to respond to the shockwaves, the passengers would have been pulped. If one millionth of the arriving energy had actually made it through the car's shields, the entire vehicle would have been atomised.
And so Natalie and Anil are barely alive, but it's impossible to actually feel that way. The opening salvo of Abstract War saw the simultaneous destruction of sixty thousand Earths, but for them it was just a light show, experienced passively from the other side of a windscreen. The car never even rattled. The car is completely silent in all its operations, and its interior remains as pristine and precise as its exterior. It manoeuvres like soft cream.
It's been twenty minutes since War began. They're actually behind the expanding wreckage shell now, watching Earth-8162's pieces spread away into space. Anil turns them to face the Sun, and takes stock.
"So we didn't get evacuated," he says. "I guess we were missed, because we don't count. I don't feel like signalling for rescue, not with that thing there pervading this whole system."
Natalie says nothing.
"If Ra wants us dead, we're dead," Anil continues. "There's nothing we can do to defend ourselves from a berserk AI of that size and power. So let's assume it doesn't. Yet. We could be contaminated by whatever madness has gripped the thing, in which case we're also, definitely, dead. Let's assume we're clean too. Let's assume we're under Ra's radar and we can stay that way. So w
e take the necessary precautions. We cloak, if that means anything, and act inconspicuous and harmless. We find shelter, somewhere we can hole up safely."
"For how long?" Natalie asks. There's barely a question there. She barely cares.
"For as long as necessary," Anil says, asking the local slave AI to suggest flight plans through the maelstrom of detonated planet husks. "This has to blow over some time. We need to stay alive for that long."
"Why?"
Anil looks sharply at Natalie. "What do you mean, 'why?'"
"Maybe it doesn't blow over until we're dead," Natalie says, distantly. "We've been brought here for a reason. Maybe that's it. We're here to die."
Anil stares at Natalie for a moment. He puffs dismissively and turns back to the controls. "But then, we already knew that, didn't we?" he says. "That's just the same as reality. You live until you die: the end. I don't have a hard time dealing with that. You shouldn't."
The concept car angles out along the shattered course of the worldring and starts to accelerate. A mild pressure pushes the passengers back into their seats, not out of necessity, but just to give them the assurance that acceleration is taking place.
After a long minute of silence, Anil adds, "You broke character again."
"What?"
"That's what you meant, right? By 'break and reset'? You're fine," he explains.
"Ah, what?"
"You can hack this. I don't even know why you're trying to give off any other impression. I've known you for about a day altogether and I can see this about you: you're calm enough under pressure that it actually frightens you more than the real situation at hand. I don't know if the nihilism is just because you feel guilty for being so cool?"