“What a shame for you.” The Boss smiled again: this time his expression was truly frightening. “I really would advise you not to persist in this, Oshi. I thought things were going swimmingly for you, but I must confess this unpleasantness takes me quite by surprise. Whatever can be wrong?”
“You sent me into hell to bring back a demon's head, and now I'd like a receipt. You can stop patronizing me now. You know exactly what this unpleasantness is all about.”
“I see that you've been got at,” said the Boss, in a tone of mild irritation.
“You've been lying to me all along,” accused Oshi. “Economical with the truth.”
“Well yes, of course. But would you have wanted it any other way? I had to make a lot of hard choices, you know. And what is hard for me, might well prove impossible for a mere human. Yours not to wonder why, etcetera.”
“But why?” She was puzzled, adrift in a sea of truth and consequences. “You didn't need to. You could have programmed us. Used drones, cyborgs. You're a Superbright. I thought you could do that sort of thing?”
“Of course. But that begs the question. Or don't you really want to know the truth?”
“Yes.” It slipped out before she could bite her tongue. The Boss stopped smiling.
“Damnation. I really hoped you had more intelligence than that. A stronger instinct for self-preservation. I suppose I shall have to tell you everything, now. Such a shame I'll have to kill you afterwards.”
“Try me.” Oshi slipped into combat-mode, pattern sensors in her neocortex boosting her awareness of her surroundings on a surge of adrenalin: “Cut the crap and tell me the truth!”
The Boss frowned, face like a distant hurricane: “Indeed!” A vast bolus of information battered at her wisdom interface. She tried to dodge, to shut it out with countermeasures designed to defend her sanity, but she was too late: the Boss, after all, had invested her with these defenses – and who better to know how to overcome them? A whining storm of data ran red-hot wires through her ears. Something vast and amorphous began to download itself into her wisdom cache, swamping everything else in a monstrous roar of data. Transcievers capable of digitizing an entire human mind and uploading it within seconds of death went into overload as they fielded the enormous infodump. “ Now,” rumbled the Boss. “Tell me you want to know the truth. Small foolish primate. Harumph!”
But Oshi wasn't answering, then or soon thereafter. She was trying to make sense of the accessible mass of information that the Boss had dumped into her. Not just an explanation, but whole strategies for understanding:
The galaxy wasn't always like this. There was a time when human beings were more important than they are today. Look back, if you will, and try to imagine what it must have been like to be the dominant species. No, you don't need to curse at me: it won't do any good. Anyway, all this happened long ago ...
Countless centuries ago there was only one world. In the last days of humanity's terrestrial gestation, the environmental situation on Earth was desperate. The ecosystem was imploding under the weight of population bloom and biodiversity crash. Gaia was on life support, held together by a tenuous weave of nanomachinery and artificial bioforms. The first Von Neumann machines were mining the moons and planets of the system: robot factories, just intelligent enough to build copies of themselves from local raw materials, universal enough to fabricate anything else their controllers could design. Their productivity was limited only by available energy and mineral resources.
Your species has always been inclined to light out for the colonies when overpopulation looms. But in those days there were no free territories: the nearest stars were decades away, the cost of travel so vast that a payload as heavy as a single human body would bankrupt nations. Terraforming Mars or Venus would take millennia, offering scant relief from the crisis. Some other solution was necessary.
Well, nobody ever accused human beings of not being ingenious. The very population pressure that threatened to destroy your home world gave you the tool to overcome the constraints: brains and minds, a million stellar geniuses, the creativity of a dozen ages crammed into a single generation. You literally thought your way out of the trap ... and into something larger.
The solution to being trapped in one solar system was a happy coincidence: simultaneous breakthroughs in the fields of bionics and computer science. Nanoprobes allowed the human brain to be mapped from the inside out, its configuration and software states transmitted to any external processor complex enough to run it as a program. Your minds are not qualitatively more complex than any other piece of software: you can run on processors other than those developed by biological evolution. Robot spacecraft could travel to the stars, but not in a human lifetime. But once they got there they could build human bodies and transcribe stored human personalities back into the virgin grey matter. A kind of reincarnation.
The ships carried Von Neumann machines; self-replicating robots programmed to explore, spawn, and explore again. Autonomous and cheap, they visited and mapped the nearer star systems before they and their descendants moved on, rippling outward in an expanding sphere of exploration. Every time a probe entered and mapped a new system, it left behind a beacon. Occasionally a probe from one family tree would enter a new star system which had been mapped by a probe from one of the other families: recognizing the beacon, the Von Neumann machine would switch to an alternative behaviour. Picking a suitable airless moon, it would land and begin to reproduce. After twenty or so generations there were enough robot factories to begin the construction of an expansion processor, a vast solar-powered computing surface covering the entire surface of the planet. Huge slabs of processing circuitry spread rapidly across the airless moons of gas giants. Once completed, the expansion surface was hooked up to a gatecoder – a laser communicator – and signalled its readiness to the slowly-developing interstellar processor network. Which, vast as it was, served mainly to execute a single, ferociously complex, distributed program: the Dreamtime.
The Dreamtime was designed by Superbrights, the ultimate descendants of the first human experminents in artificial intelligence. A remarkably complex virtual space, it provided an afterlife fit for the senses of a human or Superbright mind embedded within it. It also provided a transport layer: protocols to allow the transmission of uploaded human and Superbright minds between isolated stellar domains. Uploaded travellers were transmitted as streams of data packets, then reassembled and downloaded into cloned bodies at their destination by a mechanism known as a gatecoder.
More subtly, the Dreamtime network also offered a back-up to reality. Nanotech encoders proliferated on every colony world, weaving themselves into the nervous systems of the entire population. Constantly filtering a trickle of data through decentralized, cellular transcievers, they could provide access to the stored wisdom of the ages. They also served to relocate the active centre of identity into the Dreamtime at the moment of death, until the awakening of a new cloned body. The Dreamtime became the last, greatest software engineering project – the gateway to the stars, the repository of wisdom, and the key to reincarnation.
Some people tried to live within the Dreamtime, treating it as a virtual space. Nobody grew old; conditions were hospitable, a function of a universe designed for intelligent occupation. When the density of the simulations increased with time and population growth, the local Dreamtime – tied to the finite capacity of the local expansion processor – simply ran slower and slower relative to real time. The oldest sectors of the afterlife disappeared into apparent stasis, carrying out a spacelike colonisation of the future; those that remained close to the Centre became posthuman, incommunicative. Meanwhile, new expansion worlds were added to the Dreamtime constantly as the halo of probes expanded outwards. And so the process continued, for the first few hundred years: new cybernetic colonies gave rise to populations on new terrestrial planets, the scope of the afterlife growing to match the new dirt-bound planetary civilizations flourishing on the rim.
The
n things began to go wrong ...
Oshi opened her eyes and sat up. Anger made her snap: “Hree was right all along the line. You are a monster.”
The Boss yawned elaborately. “I'm not human, if that's what you mean. But I never claimed to be, did I?”
“Monster.” Oshi waited, half-relaxed. Never thought I would end this way. So abrupt, so unfinished. She stared at the Boss's body's forehead. Strange how you can never tell who the real enemy is.
“Insults will not endear you to me, Oshi.” He stared down from the throne, slouching against one armrest: “and indeed, that appelation could be applied to you, too.”
“But I don't –” she winced. Her head stung where she'd fallen against the floor. “I'm speechless. I figured there was an element of manipulation, of profit, but I didn't realise –”
“Yes.” The Boss sat up straight. No, that wasn't quite right: it was only the body the Boss used to communicate with humans. The Boss himself was elsewhere. The body stared at Oshi with eyes that glowed from the shadows of his face. “You have not remembered everything yet,” he said, smooth as oil. “Are you trying to avoid it, by any chance?”
“I want the truth, damn you! Not more lies!”
“No lies.” Shadows stirred against the wall behind the Boss. Within the wall. Patterns of light and shade. Oshi felt curiously lightheaded. “I am amused. Slightly. Your presumption is refreshing.”
“Bullshit.” She sat up and held her head in both hands. She'd taken a bruise while the Boss dumped a century of memories into her wisdom interface. “Is that all we are to you? Tools?”
The Boss did not reply immediately.
“Well?”
“No,” he said finally. “That would be disrespectful.”
“Well then, what am I?”
“Meat.”
When she did not reply, he added: “tell me what Hree told you while you were dirtside. Tell me what you omitted from your report. Now.”
Blood pounded in her ears. Oshi felt stunned; sick to her stomach, physically revolted. Dirty. Memories crowded in, unwelcomed. Some of them were her own, but others belonged to this, this demon ...
“Your people, the Superbrights,” she managed. “You're not human. You never were. That body is a, a golem. Or a, a projection. You don't really belong here; you mostly exist in the Dreamtime, scattered across a hundred thousand processors, isn't that right? And you want it all for yourselves – all the processor resources in the galaxy. Leaving us just enough bandwidth to gate in and out between the stars, or store personality dumps between bodies. Except for the dirtworlds.”
“You came from a dirtworld, Oshi,” the Boss reminded her, deceptively gentle. “A planet without resources, without a sophisticated civilization. Like this one.”
“I know! What do you want with us?”
“Human beings have invented afterlife cults since the dawn of your recorded history. It's not our fault.”
“But you encourage it.” Oshi struggled to make sense of the idea. “Those worlds which are rich enough to defend themselves, you leave alone: but the poor or neglected, the ones where people have forgotten things, you manipulate. To keep them dying and uploading, not coming back. To –”
“We need the food.”
Something rustled behind her. Oshi glanced round. “What the fuck –”
The lights dimmed. She blinked, reflexively searching for false muscles which were stiff from disuse. A loud roar echoed through the hall, and a wind blew towards the entrance; she felt a stabbing pain in her ears. She swallowed, working her jaw instinctively as the image boosters behind her retinas cut in, outlining –
Drones. Armoured combat units moved into position in the doorway. Her optics silhouetted their nightmare organic shapes against the dark: her wisdom transceiver caught the flicker-squeal of unsuppressed communications. The air pressure dropping to combat levels, low enough that a shockwave would not cause explosive decompression. Ant-things rustled and painted her with a target-finding radar scan, smart weapons locking on.
She turned back to the throne. “You're right: I don't want to know any more. I never wanted to know. Not that.” Her heart thudded between her ribs as she tried to read his craggy face for some sign of humanity, some signal – anything. “What's wrong?”
The Boss was silent for a moment. “I'm sorry, Oshi. I warned you, but you had to ask. Silly monkey. You had to listen to the goat. And now –”
“Wait.” Blood hammered in her ears. “Food? You said, food?”
The Boss regarded her dolefully. “Year Zero Man had to go. Her activities were depressing the spot price in human minds. Market fluctuations in the Dreamtime can affect us badly. We are vulnerable, Oshi. Not like you human beings, who can survive boredom. Deprive us of information input and we starve. Dead human minds are very convenient, very rich in experience. It is not in our collective interest to kill you too fast.”
“Then the dirtburner worlds really are farms?” The concept was so enormous that she had difficulty saying it, afraid he would laugh at her and say it was all a little joke –
“I'm afraid I'm going to have to do something with you,” said the Boss. The armoured drones scuttled into the throne room and arrayed themselves around the walls and ceiling behind her. “Can't have you contaminating the retinue with doubts, my dear. Your simian curiosity has got the better of you this time, and for the worse. Have you got any suggestions? Requests?”
“Yes.” Now her mouth was dry, her pulse back to a steady beat: she knew there was no escape, but ... “But. You can't have me around. Is there anything I can do that's ... necessary ... that also requires insight?”
The Boss's face slowly crinkled into a smile: to Oshi it appeared positively demonic. “That's a clever idea, little monkey. What makes you think such tasks might exist?”
She stood up. “You use us, therefore it stands to reason that you need us. You must be big – too big to download yourself into anything like a human brain, anything smaller than a planet-sized expansion processor. No? You need us for fingers.” She thumped a clenched fist against her thigh, stared intently at the Superbright's body: “small things that can go where you can't. Like, anywhere where the speed of light is going to impose a bottleneck between the processor your mind is running on and the body you are driving. Yes? Or anywhere where a Superbright-sized download would cause alarm.”
“The Dreamtime transport layer is a problem,” the Boss acknowledged. “Data packets have been know to disappear in transmission. If the receiver at the destination end stops listening, what then? Some of the more beligerent human systems have imposed a blockade on the Dreamtime; human emigrants get in, but nothing larger.”
“You have a problem, then.” Else I would already be dead, she thought, supressing a frisson of paranoia.
“The Boss nodded. “Your next mission, should you choose to accept it –”
“You want me to go somewhere where you can't go, can't take a full team of human agents and drones or whatever. You want me to do something dangerous. And if I don't take it, you're going to ensure that I don't tell anybody what's going on anyway. Right?”
He shook his head. “I see I can hide nothing from you.” His grin was so oleaginous that Oshi shuddered. “That's it exactly. I'm afraid, my little monkey, that you've made yourself disposable by asking too many questions. I can't afford to keep you around any longer, and I can't turn you loose. But –”
For the first time, the Boss stood up. Cloven hooves rattled on the marble of the dais; he ran a huge hand through his unruly tangle of hair, brushing it around the small horns that emerged from his forehead. “I require a scratch monkey: an agent who will not be missed. A disposable simian.” His smile was horrible, a rictus on the face of a subtly inhuman skull. Oshi stepped backwards, involuntarily. “You can volunteer or not, as you wish. If you accept the assignment, you will go there alone and report back when you have accomplished your task. After that, whatever you do with your life is your own bus
iness: I will consider you discharged from my service. But don't expect any help on this one, because there won't be any.”
Oshi dry-swallowed. “What's the job?”
The Boss snapped his fingers and the wall behind the dais cleared to black. Oshi gasped: stars glinted in the night like merciless pinpricks of nuclear fire.
“Here's where we are.” A star winked green for a moment. “Here's the Ridge cluster. Eighteen settled worlds; some civilized, some less so.” A fistful of stars flashed green, the first one lying on their periphery. “And here – this is Ridgegap-47.” A single star blinked red and baleful, separated from the cluster by an arc of a few degrees. “Ten light years out from here. Although it's closer in to the Centre than we are, it's located in a pocket of late colonization: the Von Neumann machines have only recently reached those stars. Ridgegap-47 hasn't been colonized yet. There's nobody there but a bunch of robot factories, and one of my colleagues. He was to set up a dirtworld farm, but after what has happened nearby ...”
A slash of stars flared blue then winked out, nearly bisecting the wall-sized map. “The net's down throughout that entire quadrant,” the Boss said laconically. “Something's been eating worlds, some Ultrabright weapon. Ridgegap-47 was due for a colony shot round about now, to innoculate it with human beings for the new world that is being terraformed. But it's not going to happen as long as we keep losing handshake with the Dreamtime domains out that way; it's too risky. Something stinks, Oshi. I think Ridgegap-47 is targeted.”
“Something is eating worlds?” Oshi felt a sudden urge to laugh: mild hysteria verging on sweaty-palmed panic. “What do you mean?”
The Boss stepped down from the dais. Even at ground level, he loomed over her; a goat-footed nightmare, the reified devil of a thousand mediaeval nightmares. “There are worse things in the universe than Superbrights. Look at me.”
Oshi looked up past his chest to meet his lurid gaze. Red light danced in his eyes. “What?”
“Look at me. Your kind created gods and demons to keep out the night. Later, when you wanted a peg to hang your preconceptions on, you used such dreams to give shape to the first Superbrights. Now you're stuck with us and you live in dread. But there are worse things than us. The Ultrabrights, for instance. Complex Dreamtime entities from the Centre. They're moving outwards slowly, but when they strike, worlds just drop off the net. We don't know what they do with all that processing power but – it's bad for business. Certainly none of my kind would want to travel to areas where the Ultrabright threat is at large. And so –”
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