by Sam Hughes
There was, for a few minutes, a shining edifice, floating like a U.F.O. out in the air above the East River in New York. A small thing, relatively, and it's gone now, but thousands of people saw it and filmed it. There were people visible inside it. There is no explanation.
There was an earthquake epicentered in the crust beneath Western Australia, geologically anomalous but not inexplicable; but it was accompanied by a magical shockwave which was felt simultaneously by every attuned mage worldwide. The shockwave booted all the mages in Tanako's world at the time safely out and home again, and Tanako's world, as the magical community will piece together very quickly in the ensuing weeks, is gone forever, starting now.
STS-77, fully crewed and intact, has hit the dead centre of a completely blank, unprepared runway in Florida. The Atlantis orbiter is in good enough condition to be relaunched and so are all the crew. They want to know what caused the engine failures and they want to know who that was who rescued them, and someone's got to tell them what year it is now. And yet, dredged wreckage of the same spaceship is in storage at NASA, precise duplicates of the same individually numbered, shattered ceramic panels, pulverised spacesuit helmets—
Laura Ferno and Nicholas Laughon are alive. They were dead. They are dead. Their acid-blackened remains are still right there in the baths, four hallways over. But they're here, alive, respawned at the focus of the half-disassembled sleep science research gymnasium at Chedbury Bridge. Nick's trying to leave the scene, it's all over for him and he wants to go home, but the police are stopping him and in any case, they explain to him, his home has been bombed to pieces; there is nowhere for him to go. Laura's being held by police too, on the other side of the room, bleeding, and she's screaming at him:
"This isn't what I wanted! Nick, for God's sake, just listen to me!"
All the Ras are dead. Their hosts' original minds had long since been evicted, jettisoned into T-world and fed to the horrors there, leaving only Ra. But in the new world there is no Ra, and the people are left with nothing; no original owner, no occupying possessor, just brain-death. The aftermath, in the holding cells, cannot be productively described, and is more than the police officer who discovers it has been trained to deal with.
And as for Natalie Ferno and Anil Devi: they were physically missing from their room for barely thirty minutes of real time, and were never missed. But someone will be coming to get them very soon. Something gigantic has happened. There's got to be a reckoning.
*
"Please stop," Anil says.
Natalie stops. In any case, she was at the end.
Anil is still at the window, watching the birds. He does some mental arithmetic, juggling people and places. Too many things have just happened to him and Natalie's narration and educated guesswork have compounded on top of those events. "We—" he begins, then looks down and literally counts on his fingers, just to be sure. He finds the most important thing. "The runway."
"What about it?"
Anil chooses his words carefully. "Is there anybody on the runway?"
Natalie shakes her head.
"You left all of that back in reality."
She nods. The alternatives were too convoluted to contemplate.
"Your mother," Anil says, nerving himself to say it. "She was there on the asphalt in front of us, with... metal spokes in her skull. Two going in through each eyeball, I remember that very clearly. She was blind and brain-damaged. She never knew you were there. You didn't get a single word to her. And she's dead." He looks at Natalie, who is sitting there now with her hands folded, a picture of indifference. He holds her stare for a while, until something — perhaps wildly arcing misplaced empathy — seems to short-circuit in his brain and he flinches and says to her, "Why are you like this? Why aren't you reacting?"
Natalie blinks owlishly at him. She has deep and complex personal reasons for how she's choosing to present herself right now, but despite a seeming lifetime of shared experience with Anil, with this last demand, she decides that it's not worth sharing any of those reasons with him. "How would you like me to react?"
Anil shakes his head. "...What Laura did made more sense to me."
And that, Natalie thinks, would appear to be the end of that. "I'm sure it did," she says, stonily.
Anil feels a kind of motion sickness. He scrabbles for a chair and sits down heavily opposite Natalie, holding on to the lip of the table for balance.
The events he witnessed are taking on a mythic, golden quality in his mind. The Wheel and the Glass Man and the Fernos and even Laughon are all ascending to the level of demigods. Looking at Natalie, he thinks he glimpses a kind of Kirlian aura, and all he can think is: this woman created the universe.
The door opens. It's John Henders, the police sergeant who currently, still, has custody of the two of them. There are other officers accompanying him. No handcuffs are presented, but a stern atmosphere among all of them indicates very clearly that this is just a minor courtesy, a privilege which could very easily be withdrawn. Henders explains that they, Natalie Ferno and Anil Devi, are, finally, under arrest, and that they should get up.
"Wait, wait," Anil says, as one officer approaches him and gently but firmly takes his arm. He knows it's long past time they stopped talking unguardedly in front of law enforcement, but he needs this. To Natalie, he says, "Nat, what do we tell them? What do we say? I don't even believe it."
"I don't know," Natalie says. "I don't know, I don't know. Nothing."
*
But they get everything.
The inquiry is pulverisingly tiring and feels as if it takes years, because it takes years.
Natalie is mostly a locked box at first, impossible to draw out on anything but the most concretely documented facts, and even then rarely offering more than a nod. "My sister disappeared," she says, "and I found her."
Anil Devi follows Natalie's lead, saying very little. "Hatt Group fired Laura Ferno due to an internal matter. Later, Mr. Hatt thought better of the decision and sent me to locate her, which I did."
Nick Laughon wants more dearly than anybody for the matter to be behind him and has little inclination to prolong matters. He says, "I don't remember anything that happened in the last two weeks." Although it would be extraordinarily easy for him to add, "Laura did something to my mind," he does not.
And Laura does her damnedest to keep it as simple as she possibly can, which admittedly isn't very: "After witnessing the Space Shuttle Atlantis disaster I became convinced that the disaster could be reversed. I made contact with the Chedbury Bridge Institute, which shared my belief. And we succeeded."
And those four statements together could have been enough in some laughably simpler, more credulous world. But the public inquiry is vast, and determined, and of great importance to the world at large, and it is not being run by fools.
The inquiry determines, correctly, that Tanako's world was a virtual structure physically hosted at the epicentre of that mysterious earthquake, and that it contained records of the dead, and that Laura raided that world and blew it up in order to resurrect herself, her boyfriend and Atlantis. Pressing Laura hard for more information and then forming its own carefully informed opinions from her claims, the inquiry ascertains that Tanako's world had been built by a spectacularly powerful secret group of mages calling themselves the Wheel, and that the Chedbury Bridge Institute was the front for an opposing group, Ra. Ra recruited Laura because of their aligned goals and essentially brainwashed her into carrying out that attack, using the persona of the late Kazuya Tanako to dupe her into thinking she was saving the world.
The inquiry finds Ra to be a cult. Hence the bombing of Laura and Nick's home when anybody tried to track them down, hence the attempted (or, from another point of view, successful) double murder, hence the ritual group suicide. Laura is not to blame; all responsibility for these crimes of violence can be neatly attributed to the cooling dead.
The inquiry discovers that Laura's mother went missing on the day of the
Atlantis disaster, identifies her as the apparition seen by the Atlantis crew and speculates that she, too, was likely a member of the Wheel. From interviewing Edward Hatt, the inquiry learns that Laura was fired following a botched first attempt to raise the dead — her mother, in that case. The inquiry identifies the mysterious structure in New York as the Wheel's headquarters, now regrettably missing without trace along with the group itself and all of their fantastic, post-magical technology.
The inquiry finds nothing concrete about the true origins and ultimate fate of the Wheel. Laura admits that she must have been lied to, and the inquiry concurs, which naturally fosters unending, wildly incorrect speculation as to the truth. The inquiry also fails to uncover the true nature of Ra or the true history of the world prior to the epoch in 1970. The inquiry does not discover, nor does Natalie Ferno voluntarily disclose, that the world has been uploaded and, out in reality, atomised. This discontinuity is undetectable even to the most precise scientific instruments.
Nearly everything, then. Everything for which physical evidence exists.
And once the dust is settled and the blame is diffused, and the paperwork is filed and press interest has tailed off as low as it's ever likely to go, and every available, independently confirmable fact has been uncovered and so has every single imaginable fiction, and everybody believes half of the facts and half of the fiction but everybody believes a different half, it breaks down like this:
Laura Ferno raised the dead. It was a one-time thing. It was magic. It can never happen again.
And it doesn't change anything.
Thaumic Sky
Vivid red lasers unzip the Earth from top to bottom, slicing it along criss-crossing spiral rhumb lines. The lasers are powerful enough to be visible to the naked eye from Pluto; with good telescopy, the light show can be seen from other star systems. One beam even plays across the Moon's face, leaving an angled scar of slag which, after freezing again, will persist for the rest of its existence.
The lasers represent the smaller share of the energy. Far more is spent to physically lift the jigsaw pieces of the first crust layer into the sky, hoisting significant amounts of sky with it. The planet unfurls like an onion, individual shreds of country and rainforest unfolding themselves into thinner shreds still, absorbing further sunlight and reconstituting themselves into first-stage hosting substrate. Boosted with useful pulses of momentum from the coordinating core, the shreds radiate away into free space and align themselves against the solar wind, effecting an orbital change which will bring them nearer to the Sun, where energy is more plentiful. That takes care of the first layer, including all remaining physical traces of human civilisation.
A raw, molten second layer of Earth is exposed, where the process cycles around and starts again with the lasers. It's the rush job from hell, with unimaginable resource expenditure behind it. Newly-awakened Virtualities are already colonising the remains, like maggots laid in roadkill. As more millions of seconds go past — it would be days, but days no longer exist — the remains are ground entirely into a film of computronic sludge, wrapping the Sun tightly and harvesting almost all of its energy for processing power. The Sun dims as it happens, its spectrum shifting out of the visible and far into the infrared.
Exa Watson watches the synthesised edition of the recording, coverage gathered from passive observation platforms in the Oort Cloud. From this perspective, with false colour and no audio, the demolition is chillingly distant and its impact is hard to feel.
Exa has been reincarnated in real space in the Sirius system, in a sealed space capsule built from conventional stupidmetal, with nothing but a radio, a porthole and a life support system from somewhere around the Age of Steam. The capsule is about as large internally as an elevator car and there isn't even gravity. Exa bobs. There's one other person present, the arbiter. She is anchored by her toes in the far corner, with her hands tucked inside complex formal judicial robes altered slightly for practicality in freefall. The recording is shown to them using RGB phosphors on an actual God-damned cathode ray tube. This edit, with time compression, is just over forty minutes long. When it ends, there is a loud mechanical clickety sound and Exa is left staring at his and the arbiter's reflections in the CRT screen. There is a long moment during which neither of them say anything. Then the arbiter shifts position, as if waking up from a light trance.
"Adam King lost his mind in the War," she says. "As did all of you who fell in with him. You could have built an entirely new world, or left the planet uninhabitable as it was, as an honest memorial. Even oblivion would have been preferable. But after such unimaginable chaos, you were desperate for a world where there would be a manageable order. You turned the Earth into a facsimile of a working planet. A romance.
"We found 'magic' to be absurd. We found the 'Earth' you were building to be an obscenity. We left the world rather than stay and be complicit in your madness. Instead, we came to Sirius, terraformed its fifth planet and started a new culture. A real one. Any of you could have come with us if you'd chosen to."
Exa glances out of the porthole. Potentially, one of the points of light out there could be not a star but the local planet to which the arbiter is referring, Ae, and he would very much like to see it. But it doesn't seem likely. The porthole is not all that large, and the capsule is a long, long way from anything. Ae is a super-Earth, Exa recalls, with substantially higher surface gravity than Earth. It was white-atmosphered at the time of its discovery, but is undoubtedly blue-green now. The people who live there will be much shorter and more sturdily built than Earth humans, with rather better reflexes.
"...And in the end your 'Earth' was illusory, and all of this amounts to a delayed action. Three decades later, Abstract War concludes. Virtual humanity takes the Sol system anyway, and Ra remains 'radioactive' until such time as the Sun burns out.
"And you survive. Out of six billion, two hundred and seventy-five million, four hundred thousand people, you survive. Your Group, and nobody else. A crowning achievement of cowardice."
She stops here. It appears to be Exa's turn to speak.
He says, choosing each syllable cautiously: "It was, at the time, the option open to me which felt the most like victory. It was my personal belief that King, and all of us, could build something valuable. And remarkable. And longstanding, and worthwhile, and good and safe and if not perfect and 'honest' then at least... resonant."
He doesn't know what he feels. There is a great deal of anger and remorse and guilt and relief but primarily he feels a pressing need to leave this place and be somewhere else, alone, under an open sky, walking away. He knows that this is the last thing that they're going to give him.
"And it was," he says. "For a while." He leaves a sizeable gap here. He gestures, neutrally, towards the television, indicating that the next part of his statement, if he stated it, would simply be a recap of the video they just watched. Then he continues:
"The world you are creating is also fatally flawed. It, also, will last a while, and then fail and end. ...And I want it on record that I was the one who decided to leave King behind."
Exa receives no acknowledgement from the arbiter. Having addressed all of this to her reflection in the television screen, he turns to face her. "What is this?" he finally thinks to ask. "Where are the rest of my people? Is this a trial?"
"No."
"I want representation."
"Kalathkou Ouatso Neso, we cannot accept your Group into Sirian society. Your request for asylum is denied. Your patterns will be stored indefinitely. Or until a more lenient future generation elects to pardon you."
The probability of this last eventuality is impossible to guess at. Exa thinks it's a coin toss. He says to the arbiter, angrily, "You can do better than that."
But the arbiter, if she even has the authority to try, cannot. She snaps her fingers, and Exa ceases to exist.
*
It's pitch dark in the heart of Reykjavik but at this time of year that doesn't tell yo
u anything. Laura's hiding out at a table in the very back of the whiskey bar, drinking something with an excessive amount of cinnamon in it, called Fireball. She isn't waiting for anybody. There's a book out in front of her but she isn't reading it. She's just looking at each of the words in turn. When she gets to the end of the page she goes back to the start.
She looks up when the door opens, doesn't recognise her sister in the many layers, looks down again. Natalie has bought her own drink and sat down in front of her by the time she realises who it is.
"So you're an Icelander now," Nat begins.
Laura passes through stunned to angry so fast that Nat, watching closely, barely catches it. "How did you find me?"
"I found you a year and a half ago," Natalie says. "You should have disappeared a second time once you were out of contact. To answer your question, poor information hygiene on your part, and quite a lot of boring legwork. Honestly, I envy you. If I were to disappear somewhere, it would be here. And I suppose nobody in this country recognises you. Or at least, nobody is impolite enough to care."
"Yeah," Laura says. "'Impolite' is definitely the term I'm thinking of."
Many, many people want to speak with Laura Ferno. Generally, in Laura's estimation, such people fall into two categories: people who think she's crazy and people who are crazy. The second case is more common and much more difficult to deal with, since those are the people most likely to want her to resurrect someone. It's almost always someone precious to them, who died very recently. It hurts a lot to talk to such people, which is why she has moved as far away from them all as she realistically can. It's not far enough.
"I want to catch up," Natalie says. "That's literally all. It's not some new crisis in magic for which I desperately need to drag you out of retirement. I'm accompanying second-years up to Blönflói, but tonight they're getting out of their skulls on Einstök and rhubarb liqueur, and you and I are in the same city, so."