by Sam Hughes
Proper nouns are trickier than hexadecimal; rather than just cram the florid native syllables into vulgar Earth English, the woman's language dongle provides her several translations, from the neatly poetic to the excessively literal.
She adds, "Call me Ashburne."
Natalie continues to stare. Having spent the entire conversation sitting on the edge of the bunk, she stands up. Even when she stands up straight, "Ashburne" dwarfs her like a child. And— so casual.
"You're going to win," Natalie realises.
Ashburne smiles broadly. "I know."
"How?"
*
The real question was: Why did Ra target humans?
Ra's objective was to construct the Matrioshka brain, using any means necessary, considering Actual humans as a non-sentient nuisance. Ra blew up the worldring for raw material, and that made sense. But why - the surviving real humans asked themselves - did Ra bother to attack moons and space habitats? No matter how many people survived, it was surely impossible for them to represent a threat.
But Ra targeted humans, implying a threat to be eliminated. Ra acted with extreme prejudice and urgency, implying that the threat was immediate, and needed to be crushed rapidly. Ra's actions betrayed the existence of an extremely narrow window during which the Actuals, despite their limited resources, could reverse the outcome of the war, and Ra wouldn't be able to stop it, even knowing that it was coming.
Having made this deduction, the Actuals' next step was to reverse-engineer the attack. The step after that was to immediately execute it, no matter how desperate it was.
Ra's locks had been changed, making it effectively impossible to reprogram remotely. But an ancient piece of knowledge from the very dawn of computing remained true even of computers the size of stars: once you have physical access to the hardware, it's over.
A ship was outfitted: a solar depth charge. The ship was called Triton, because that was already its name; it was Neptune's largest moon repurposed, with its interior completely reformulated into nonlocality shielding, light-negation apparatus and electromagnets. A fleck of uncorrupted Ra was placed at its core, and at the core of the fleck, a tiny habitable space and two hundred copies of the best remaining Actuals.
Triton was delivered from Neptune orbit to the inner Solar System using horrible bulk nonlocality hacks, a manoeuvre which essentially bankrupted the Neptunians of delta-vee. The ship needed to be at least two thousand kilometres in diameter to soak up heat and direct energy attacks while aerobraking into the Sun's photosphere, and then to sacrifice itself in layers while diving down through the convective zone. There, it would make physical contact with the northernmost tip of Ra's fourth, north-pointing thorn. Ra's physical shield would be trivial to penetrate after that.
Anything is trivial to people who can stand inside the Sun, alive.
That left the question of the reprogramming.
Ra was dangerous. Too powerful, too creative, too proactive. When a machine as powerful as Ra has run off the rails and forgotten the value of real human lives, working it directly is like juggling with subcritical plutonium. A person asks Ra to destroy the worldring, and before they can finish the sentence it's done, and half a quadrillion people are dead. They ask Ra to undo it, and Ra undoes the physical damage, but the truth of all universes from the real one down is that FTL isn't possible, and time is one-way. It'll always stay done, and if it can be undone, that just means it can be done a second time.
Triton's objective was to program in a layer of abstraction. To rebuild the worldring, reincarnate the stored evacuees, and then to build limits into the Ra system so that such a thing could never happen again.
Imagine a universe with exotic technology and advanced physics and theoretically limitless possibilities - difficult to harness, but not impossible. Having imagined that universe, set Ra to simply implement the rules of that universe. Leave the Virtuals in their bottle, where they belong. Return power over reality to the hands of Actual humans, for good or bad.
And tell Ra to never accept direct instructions again. Ever. From anybody.
*
"And that's happening right now?" Natalie asks.
"Triton makes plasma splashdown in just over four hours," Ashburne says, "although obviously we won't receive the light from it for another four. If I lent you a telescope you could watch its final approach. Except that the Sun would blind you, and Triton is running invisible."
Something cold and grey is gripping Natalie's throat. Something is catastrophically wrong with Ashburne's story.
"There must be a version of you on that ship," Nat says, reasoning it out. "You're going to reprogram Ra, and reformulate the laws of physics in this star system to something brand new. 'Magic.' This extra layer of abstraction you're talking about, it's magic. In my time, that's what we call it."
"That's a horribly inappropriate name," Ashburne observes.
"I know. But you're going to win. I know you're going to win. You, personally. I know that at least one instance of you is going to survive the war and witness what happens after it. But the rest of this doesn't make any sense—"
"Of course we're going to win," Ashburne says. "How could you even be here if we lost?"
"Where's the worldring if you won?" Natalie shouts. She points desperately out of the window, at Neptune. "Where are all the people? You said you were going to rebuild the worldring and resurrect all the people. So where are they?"
Ashburne stands stock-still for a moment, following Natalie's finger. She heard perfectly clearly, but still she asks: "There's no worldring in your time?"
"There's nothing! In my time, reality consists of a single dismal, rainy Earth, and nothing else. Population, six billion. No space technology, no nonlocality, no habitats. And nobody remembers this war. Nobody has any idea that it happened, nor is there any physical evidence that it happened. You must have sterilised and recreated the whole star system and the whole planet Earth, resetting history back— to— oh my God. That's why nobody discovered magic until 1972. Magic didn't exist before 1972. Probably the entire world didn't exist. You'd have had to strip and replace every cubic centimetre of rock."
It's Ashburne's turn to stare.
Natalie confronts her. "Your plan is going to fail. You think you know what's going to happen when the Triton reaches Ra, but you don't. Something's going to change the mission.
"Imagine you're on the Triton. You're about to reprogram Ra. You're still going to go ahead and implement magic, but you're also going to tell it to boot the whole star system back to the Bronze Age of computing, and then pretend the whole thing never happened. Why?"
Ashburne's eyes are focusing on something that Natalie can't see: displays, built into her helmet or eyeballs or optic nerve.
Natalie presses on: "You said Ra was on its way here."
"Physically. Sublight," Ashburne says, now elsewhere entirely. "But when we've fixed Ra, the signal will catch up at c. There's a margin of safety."
"How far is it from here to the Triton?" Natalie asks. "What's the final instant you can send a signal that they'll receive?"
"Soon," Ashburne says. "Minutes."
Natalie can see red light reflecting off the woman's face, reflected from nowhere. Her helmet interior must be covered with warnings. Ra is here. "It's now," Natalie says.
Ashburne is gone from this room, ascending into combat space, taking on the load of urgent demands for tactical support from all over the Neptune locale. With one real hand, moving almost autonomously, she unhooks the block from her hip and switches it on. Consuming precious quantum resources, the block expands to coddle Ashburne and Natalie in a single reinforced field structure, and chews up the cell's walls and door as material.
Psamathe detonates.
Ashburne's Weapon instance absorbs the impact. Natalie is thrown into a cushion of force fields and stored behind her, where the back seat would be if more than five percent of the starfighter physically existed yet. She struggles upright. The moo
n is gone, the drone which hit them is gone. There's nothing but tumbling black space.
Ashburne brings the spin under control. There are no more words from her. She's running the battle, and she's going to run it until she dies. Natalie can't see the extra dots picking out friendly and hostile objects, ranges, velocities, strategies and predictions. The only solid object she can pick out other than the Sun is the same one as ever, the planet Neptune.
But even from this distance, even if she can't see Ra's drones, she can see their lasers. They're the same colour as the ones which diced the worldring, and powerful enough to cut right to a gas giant's core, slicing its stone into pieces.
*
"We have to cheat a bit for this last part."
"Huh?" Natalie whirls around in the sudden darkness. Ashburne is gone.
"For this part you're just a ghost," says the voice. "There wasn't an organic way to get you to Triton. Just pretend Ashburne transmitted you there. If you care..."
*
Triton's innermost core starts out like a submarine's interior, skips a few thousand technological generations, then folds itself up into some hellish three-dimensional space-filling curve. There's no gravity, with the result that there are no meaningful directions. The universe is crammed with seats interlocking with other seats interlocking with occupants wired in physically. It's not possible to see more than a metre in any direction. There's barely a cubic metre of clear air in the whole room. Free movement is impossible.
Even if there was a physical exit from this cavity in Triton's interior to its surface (and it didn't lead directly into the Sun's convective zone), extracting any given crew member to that exit would involve solving a seventy-eight move block-pushing puzzle. It's a bunker world, a cramped hacker mole-hole, a place you teleport into and possibly never leave.
Nat's a ghost. Nobody can see her or hear her. She's intangible, stuck inside one of the walls, looking "down" at another Ashburne instance. This one wears a different, lighter suit. It's not a warsuit. It looks more like... well, clothing. (What good would any warsuit be, inside the Sun?)
Nat can see four or five other people from her vantage point - mainly limbs and backs of heads. A minor and unimportant panel, very close to Natalie's holographic head, shows a matrix of life-support readouts. It indicates a total crew complement of exactly two hundred.
This Ashburne is watching the closing minutes of the battle above Neptune. The whole thing is chillingly abstract. Two blizzards are meeting each other, yellow and red flurries of snowflakes moving in turbulence. The events are uniformly difficult to make tactical sense of. Natalie doesn't have the sixth sense for signal delay shared by everybody else involved in this war. But she can spot the times when flurries of red dots chase down solitary, slow-reacting yellows. She can see that Neptune has been cored, and is marked with the wrong colour.
And she can hear the noises of dismay from the crew. Everybody is watching it.
After a time, the last yellow dots are gone, leaving a field of patiently swirling red dots against black, like a screen saver. Finally, the last clean downlink breaks, and there's just a blank screen.
All the other people Natalie can see are facing away from her. Ashburne's face is the only one that she can see clearly enough to read. The woman is a picture of meticulous self-control, but Natalie is close enough and familiar enough to be able to read the fury, the fear and the sorrow.
There's no point bringing back the worldring, Nat thinks. There's nobody to populate it. There's nobody left to fight for. It's over.
"Dive control," Ashburne asks, "will we still be able to attack Ra?"
"Confirmed," says a crew member, his voice weak. Sound reflects strangely in this tiny space; it's impossible to tell who's talking, or how far away they could be. "Sacrificial shield layer sixteen now fully stripped; layer fifteen decay rate nominal. Dive progress nominal. We'll reach the thorn with time to spare. We'll have Ra on the operating table in another hour."
"Then the war continues," Ashburne asserts. "All Virtual humans against we two hundred. It continues until we end it. And it ends when we get the world we want.
"I suggest we decide what we want that world to be."
*
And she's back.
She's seated at the focus of a dark room with ten times the dimensions of an aircraft hangar. In front of her, slouched over an identical hyper-expensive office chair, is the bald young man, the last person she saw in reality before being "transported".
Natalie's hair is back. Her original clothes are back. Ten seconds have passed. She feels broken in the head, and physically wrecked. She feels as if she went through a war. Which was obviously the whole idea.
"And now you know what happened when Ra woke up the first time," the youth says.
"Anh zero EPTRO—" Nat begins, then finds the Montauk ring around her neck. It's too narrow to remove. "Agh."
The youth smirks humourlessly.
"Where's Anil?" Natalie demands, for the final time.
The youth points past her. Nat looks, and Anil is in a similar chair, rubbing his eyes, dealing with similar post-trauma. He looks like he died and came back. "What the hell," he's saying quietly, over and over.
Behind Anil, surrounding him and Natalie, are the observers. They're almost all men, between twenty and thirty years old, of varying ethnicities but all tall, broad-shouldered and immaculately groomed. They're standing and watching.
There are familiar circle patterns painted underfoot. There are no weapons visible. Natalie considers taking off and running, but it must be at least a kilometre to the nearest wall.
She slumps. The chair is too comfortable to be true.
"How many people died?" she asks, weakly. "Real people?"
"I don't have time to say that whole number," the youth says. "It's simpler to say how many survived. The entire crew of Triton, including me and everybody you see here. And fourteen others."
"You won the war," Natalie says, believing it. "Two hundred and fourteen people 'won' the war."
"Are you ready for the next part?"
"What the hell is the next part?"
"Your sister's trying to wake Ra again," the youth says, calmly. He stands and walks to Natalie. He produces a gun and holds it out to her, grip first. "Stop her."
Last Thursdayism
In 19390, Triton's last layers of sacrificial armour are boiling away at a rate of hundreds of metres per second. In the next few minutes, the heat will reach the computation fleck at the ship's core and start to destroy it. When that happens, no matter what else has happened, the operation will be over, and the war will be over.
They have Ra's brain laid out in front of them, vivisected and still operating. The machine has been successfully attacked and subdued. In the lower three thorns, Virtual human civilisation has been frozen indefinitely. Nobody is left who could pass further judgement on them.
As for the fourth thorn, it will obey one further command, ever, and Ashburne is the only person who can deliver that command. Ra will unthread her thought processes to determine what it is she's truly asking for, and deliver that result, and then permanently disable its raw public interface.
But none of the crew are in a position to handle this decision rationally. None of them have even fully processed the magnitude of what just happened. The plan was to reassemble the worldring, restore Actual Humanity from cold storage, go home and resume life. But after the Battle of Neptune, there's nobody to restore. There is no plan. There is no "go home". Triton and its crew are in freefall, severed from their purpose.
Triton's clean Ra node is far too busy and underpowered to run time-compressed simulacra for this purpose, meaning the discussion continues urgently in real time. Ashburne surfs the crew's internal communications, flicking from one member to another. "Declarator," she says, selecting one at random, "what do you want to happen next?"
"The Virtuals have to pay," the woman says. "We're real! We matter. We hold the reins, we'll sho
w them you don't fuck with the people who hold the reins—"
"Pay how? What would you do?"
"Shut Ra down. Exterminate them all."
"That would be a war crime," Ashburne says. "We'd be war criminals. It would be genocide."
The woman holds Ashburne's gaze. "They aren't people," she tells her. "They don't exist. They aren't human."
Ashburne switches to a different crewperson's image. "Intercessor, what should we do?"
There's black horror in this man's eyes. "We've got to roll everything back," he says. "We've got make it so that Ra can't act unilaterally anymore."
This is just the original plan. The man hasn't understood the truth yet. He's toying with the facts, weighing the prospect of accepting them against the option of just cracking up. "Roll back to when?" Ashburne asks.
"To right before this happened."
"Rebuild the worldring, and then inhabit sixty thousand empty Earths, just the two hundred of us?"
"...I don't know—"
Ashburne cuts him off, switching over again.
"What would you do?"
"Start everything over," this woman says. "Purify Earth-1 and start it all over."
"From when?"
She's coherent. "The beginning of time. Year negative ten thousand. Or negative a hundred thousand. Go into the scientific record. Throw all our technology away. We'll repopulate the world with fire and the wheel. We'll create something new with our own hands."
Ashburne nods and switches again, to a glowering, despairing man, his hands covering the lower part of his face, pulling down at the skin around raw eyes. "What do you want?"
"I want..." The man reaches outside the camera's field of view and produces a physical photograph, actual coloured ink on paper. The photo was taken at a picnic on the exterior of a habitat over the north pole of Saturn. There are eight people gathered, all different ages. All unrecoverable.