by Sam Hughes
Natalie's signal is sent to the lab. They slot her genetic particulars into a vat, clear the expenditure with the War Office, and start the cloning procedure. It'll take a few hours to build something mature enough that she can live inside it. They're running at a level of technology not far above the butter churn.
200C9A66 slots back into his original body, and goes for a shower.
Every time he splits himself, he runs a fifty percent chance of being the one who dies. That means that he - the one in the shower - is the one who won the coin toss two hundred times in a row. This is impossible, and he doesn't know how to deal with it. He is alive and he doesn't have the mathematics to explain how.
And then he's needed again, and he jumps back into War.
*
Natalie wakes up in a cell on the edge of the base, strapped to a bunk.
She struggles against the restraints for a panicky second, but they just give way when she pulls. They're supposed to be opened. They aren't there to prevent her from escaping, only to prevent her from drifting away in the almost non-existent gravity.
She sits up. Groping around the room, groggily, she finds water in a squeeze bottle. She drains it without thinking. Her suit is gone, replaced by shapeless grey clothes. Magic's still gone, and Ra is long gone, and any personal nonlocality tech she was carrying is confiscated. She runs her hand through startlingly short, baby-soft hair. She is completely new.
There's a porthole, only reachable by standing on the bunk. Natalie spends a long time staring out of it, at a sterile, crater-pitted grey landscape. It could be Luna, but honestly, it could be anywhere. She's no connoisseur. At first glance, there's nothing in the sky that could narrow it down.
The straps aren't to prevent her from escaping. That's the purpose of the locked, dark grey metal door.
An hour later, as Natalie is beginning to run out of square centimetres of cell to examine, the door clacks and opens. A woman and a man file in. Both wear heavy total-purpose protective suits, much like Natalie's missing one. They keep their helmets on, but the helmets are made of transparent material so thin that Natalie doesn't realise this at first. Natalie backs up and sits on the bed. There is no room for her to be anywhere else.
The woman is two metres tall and of a blended deep-future ethnicity that Natalie would never have heard of. Even in a cell with standing room for at most three people, she commands a space around her. The man follows her. He is her follower. He is darker in the skin, lighter in the eyes and hair; fractionally shorter, but still much taller than Natalie. He carries a folding rectangle of extremely thin, transparent plastic. The plastic is completely inert. It just serves as a focal point for his displays, which Natalie cannot see.
The woman speaks at length, in a language which is totally alien to Natalie's ear. The woman introduces herself, and then introduces her comrade. She explains that the telepathic language dongle provided by Natalie's onboard copy of the pre-war Ra intelligence has been stripped out of her mind and shredded, and that Natalie can't be allowed equivalent technology because she's a prisoner of war. She indicates that the man to her left will now attempt to work out Natalie's native language from scratch, after which an actual conversation will take place.
Natalie listens attentively. Although she understands not a single word of what the woman says, she is actually able to correctly guess almost all of it from context.
The man selects selections from his display. He speaks a few words of his own. There is silence while all of them wait for something to happen, which it doesn't. He speaks a few more, different words. Natalie listens blankly and patiently. The man is working his way through a list.
"Are we seriously going through every greeting in every human language in recorded history?" Nat says. "I speak UK English, circa 2000 CE. This is going to take an eternity. Would it help if I just spoke back to you in my language until you have enough data to work it out?" She holds fingers up. "One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Come on, dictionary system."
The man likes this approach. He motions for her to keep going. Natalie picks more simple words.
"Up, down, left, right, forwards, back. Woman, woman, man. Eye, nose, mouth." She points at the dim blue dot in the otherwise black sky outside. This is the only other significant fact that she has deduced in her free hour. She says, "Neptune."
"...Got it," the man says. Only two syllables, but still faultless English, even matching Natalie's own local accent. He presents the woman with a virtual object which Natalie is not able to see. He essays a kind of informal salute to them both, and departs.
Natalie looks up at the woman. First things first. "Where's Anil? Did he die?"
"Why do you care?" She speaks with the same accent too. For Natalie it's disconcertingly like speaking to a slightly older version of herself.
"...He was... I was trying to save his life."
"You failed. He was unrecoverable," the woman says, flatly.
Natalie hangs her head, and grips the edge of the bunk until her knuckles start to whiten, and grits her teeth.
She understands now.
She was put here to learn. Anil was put here to die. As motivation for her.
"Go right back to the beginning," she says. It's the only thing left to happen. "And tell me everything."
Why Do You Hate Ra
Psamathe (Neptune X):
Natalie's interrogator stands with her feet shoulder-width apart and one hand resting on a device at her hip, a block full of weapon. She has almost no hair. Her irises are a piercingly bright blue, close to luminous, and hexagonal. She speaks Natalie's English like a native. Even her body language has visibly shifted into something that Natalie understands more clearly.
She says, "I can't cover the whole history book for you. We don't have ten years, so I'm going to have to dramatically oversimplify. There was a schism. Humanity, effectively, forked.
"On one side were the humans who believed that all humans should remain real."
*
They believed that humans were meant to scratch out real lives on real, rocky planets in the real, harsh universe; that the planet Earth should be kept intact and habitable and should have humans inhabiting it for as long as humanly possible; and that if the human race wanted more living space, it should build or terraform new worlds. They believed that the universe represented an implicit challenge to all sentient life, and that humanity ought to rise up and make it, the universe, theirs.
The hard way, because there was and is no other way. To conceive of an "easy way" would be wrong.
On the other side were the humans who believed that it was better to upload all existing humans into computers. There, they would live inside virtual worlds just as real as reality. The new worlds would be tuned to whatever anybody could ask for, and to live in them would be as easy or as difficult as any human wanted. Rather than conquer the universe, they would write a fiction in which they had already conquered it. Infinite fun space.
There could be one world per human; there could be millions of times more humans than the real solar system could ever host. The only thing which would need to remain real would be the computer system which hosted the virtualities.
And so, boiled all the way down, just to the point of absolute simplicity, a time came when there were now two human races: Actual, and Virtual.
This schism happened millennia before Ra was constructed. It happened decades before the technology of uploading even existed. You speak a language from the twenty-first century? The schism will happen within your lifetime. It may have already happened. Remember: this is a five-minute simplification of thousands and thousands of years of conflict and weirdness. Don't lose sight of the fractal.
Now we jump far, far forward. As years passed, the energy requirements of Combined Humanity rose and fell and rose again, until they approached the critical threshold, Kardashev I. At this point, humans were consuming ten-to-the-sixteenth watts and demand increase showed no signs of
decelerating. Humans were left with no other alternatives: one way or another, they had to dam their star. But there was more than one way of doing so.
Dyson spheres and Niven rings were ruled out as horrible living environments, requiring too much raw material. What Virtual Humanity really wanted was to build a Matrioshka brain, a Dyson swarm of statite nonlocality processors which would consume the entire output of Sol and divert it to the task of computation. But the swarm would have blotted the Sun out. It would have completely altered the Sun's radiation profile, and made real life on the real Earth impossible. This, above all, was not acceptable to Actual Humanity.
Building Ra was the compromise solution. Three of the four thorns were given to the Virtuals, while the fourth distributed energy to the Actuals. Actual Humanity was able to keep the Earth and use the siphoned power to build more Earths and, eventually, the worldring. Actual humans colonised every available hard surface in the Solar System, and filled the gaps with space habitats. Meanwhile, the Virtuals uploaded themselves into the Sun and ran their virtualities directly from core fusion.
The two races drifted apart. They were almost unable to communicate with one another. Life inside the Sun moved so quickly that Actual humans found it incoherent. Life in reality was so slow that no Virtual person could pay attention to it for more than nanoseconds of real time. Most of them forgot that reality even exists.
The end.
This is a single broad stroke. The words "compromise solution" mask more than ninety distinct wars. The words "building Ra" gloss over a computational and mechanical engineering feat that took centuries even with nonlocality technology. Ra was designed to be the most powerful computer. No qualifiers. No "at the time", no "ever built by humans". For Ra to malfunction was proven impossible. Not in the sense of a thrown die landing perfectly on its corner, or a person walking through a wall. Mathematically, universe-breakingly, one-equals-zero impossible. It would have been impossible to program and launch Ra if this had not been the case. The whole structure would have imploded within hours if this had not been the case.
Ra launched, and ran without issue. It served the human race. Both races. Perfectly. Uninterrupted. For millennia.
That brings us up to six days ago.
*
The woman stops for a second, waiting for Natalie to indicate that she's keeping pace.
"That's who we're at war with," Nat summarises.
"That's who we're at war with," the woman says. "We are Actual Humanity, and we are at war with quadrillions of fabricated, immaterial humans, using the Sun as their proxy, strategy engine and primary weapon. They've been on their own inside the Sun for so long that they no longer perceive Actuals as human, just as gunk growing between the gears of a machine in dire need of performance upgrades. This is a war over processing power. Ra evidently no longer meets the needs of the Virtual human race. They're back and they want their Matrioshka brain and they've razed the solar system to get it."
"It's all just people," Nat says, clutching her temples. "It's just humans against humans. Again and again. Their technology against our technology, which is the same technology. Because an AI can't rebel. A machine can't do something it wasn't programmed to do. It can only be reprogrammed. The one hundred and ninety-somethingth century and we've still yet to build a machine remotely as stupid as the smartest genuine human beings."
The woman continues. "Part two. The war."
*
Ra's program was proven correct. The proof was not faulty, and the program was not imperfect. The problem was that Ra is reprogrammable.
This was a deliberate design decision on the part of the Ra architects. The Ra hardware is physically embedded inside a working star, which in turn is embedded in the real world. Something could have gone wrong during the initial program load; the million-times-redundant nonlocality system could have failed a million and one times. No matter how preposterous the odds, and no matter how difficult the procedure, there had to be a way to wipe the system clean and start again.
Continuing the theme of gross oversimplification: to reprogram Ra, one needs a key. History records that the entire key was never known or stored by any human or machine, and brute-forcing it should have taken ten-to-the-ten-thousandth years even on a computer of that size. How the Virtuals acquired it is unknown. But having acquired it, they were able to masquerade as the architects. First, they changed the metaphorical locks, making it impossible for the Actuals to revert their changes, no matter how many master architects were resurrected. Then they changed the program, so that Ra would serve the needs of Virtuals at the expense of Actuals.
Then they asked for the Matrioshka brain. Ra did the rest all by itself.
The worldring hosted ninety-nine point nine nine percent of the Actual human race, making it the logical target of the first and most violent attack. But the destruction spread to other planets and moons and rocks and habitats, relayed from node to node, at barely less than the speed of light. Everybody was targeted. Those who survived survived by being lucky. One-in-tens-of-billions lucky.
One of the survivors was able to transmit a warning message directly to Neptune, bypassing the Ra network for a fractionally shorter transit time. The warning arrived about eight-tenths of a second before the virus did. There was just enough time to sever the nonlocality downlink. Neptune's core became the most powerful clean Ra shard, and the people of Neptune - numbering fewer than a billion, due to the planet's inhospitability and remoteness - became the opposing side of the war.
From other survivors, Neptune soon received evacuation signals containing almost all of the worldring's population, as data. With nothing else to be done, they were stored at Neptune's core.
*
Another momentary pause.
"And here we are," the woman concludes. "The last Actuals. The Matrioshka brain is already under construction, mostly from repurposed pieces of the worldring. The Sun's light output today is measurably lower than it was six days ago. Earth, our first Earth, is a ruined dark planet, paved with broken glass, peopled with nightmares, and dropping in temperature.
"Our Ra shard still works, but it's running in emergency paranoiac debug mode, with every instruction running through a few thousand layers of automated and manual analysis, which makes it extremely slow to respond to requests, when it responds positively at all. Direct access is rationed because of the war effort. Our stockpile of mass/energy and other quantifiables is limited to what the Neptune local cache had available at cutoff time, which was small to begin with and is now close to zero.
"Ra is on its way here. It'll be here by this time tomorrow. We can't meet that kind of energy. We don't have the broadcast power to evacuate to anywhere more remote.
"And then there's you."
Natalie looks up.
The woman says, "You and your friend Anil are the only two people in this entire star system who don't fit. Ra targeted every living human in the worldring, but hours passed before it realised it had missed you. When the evacuation order was given, every living human in the worldring was part of the signal, but you were overlooked. You arrived moments before Ra went berserk. You speak a language dead for well over ten thousand years, and you know nothing about anything.
"Human civilisation is ending, and still you got my attention. I was the one who diverted resources to have you extracted. Who are you?"
Natalie is too exhausted to think of a decent lie. She's stomach-churningly aware that if she says a single wrong word, it'll look like she and Anil were the ones who did it, and she'll be held responsible for omnicidal teradeath. And she wants this to be over.
"My name is Natalie Ferno. And this isn't real."
"Everything is real," the woman says, automatically, like a mantra.
"I'm a history student," Nat says. It's her honest best guess, and happens to be the truth. "I'm here to experience the war. I'm real; none of the rest of this is actually happening. It already happened. The war is over."
"Was y
our friend Anil real?"
Natalie ignores this, mainly because she has no answer to it. "You don't need to fight," she says. "It doesn't matter for anything anymore. There's no need for anybody else to die! I know it's hard for you—"
"For me? Convince Ra," the woman replies.
"I—"
"If we abandon our war, then what?" the woman says. "Do we lie down and wait to die? Do we wait for you to learn your lesson and end the simulation and leave? If we don't fulfill established history, do you get sent around again?"
Natalie says nothing.
The woman smiles patiently. "This is a war fought predominantly using highly precise simulacra of potential future events, simulacra so similar to reality that individuals inside them are, of necessity, unable to tell the difference between them and real events. That's the most insane thing about this situation. That's the fact that everybody involved in the war has to accept up front, or else be stored until the end of it. That, in large part, is why the Actual/Virtual schism happened.
"This war, which we are fighting today, isn't necessarily the war. Every strategy and outcome is explored, tens to tens of trillions of times. By them and, when possible, by us. We are engaged in every single conceivable war against every conceivable enemy simultaneously. We must win all of them. We must accept all of them as real.
"We can never know if we truly won. Or even if there truly is a war which needs to be won. We could be reasonless fabrications. Nevertheless, this is real. And we must win."
Natalie stares. The sensation of familiarity is like a bell tolling. It's been tolling for some time, each toll louder and closer, and now she can't ignore it. Always assume reality. Those are my words. "Who are you?" she asks in turn.
The woman draws herself up. "I am the original physical instance of mandator EBE1E00F, leader of the armies of Actual Humanity. Uncounted copies of me are in deep space right now, fighting the war in person and as electronics. I've died more than a thousand times."