Scratch Monkey

by Charles Stross

  Now we have reached the present, we can watch the process at first hand. It's happening all around us, on every side. A landslide of sentience, eating entire worlds ...

  The Ultrabrights turn first to gas giants with greedy arms of steel and silicon. Orbiting fusion reactors pulse down, kicking churning storms of methane away from the core. A spongy diamond the size of a planet swings through a planetary nebula; nanorobots riddle it, busy etching many-dimensional networks of simple processors into its delicate filigree of surfaces. Meanwhile, other constructors fashion condensing hydrocarbons into strange, lacy structures in deep orbit through the star's Kuiper belt, the distant realm of the ice dwarfs that circle beyond the farthest gas giants. Halos and rings a million kilometres across flutter like huge parasols, strobing with the excrement of a billion billion optical processors.

  And it still isn't enough.

  The Ultrabrights, lusting for the power to transcend their information-flow bounded existence, turn their attention to the star. But it's too young, too small; too well embedded in the Main Sequence. The ultimate goal of claiming the greatest mass in the solar system is inadequate. Gatecoders pulse informational effluent out across the light years, but bandwidth is limited. Space is vast, and Von Neumann's limit – the bandwidth bottleneck on the rate at which information can be transferred – is biting at the heels of the new Ultrabright system.

  Human and Dreamtime space has been expanding in a sphere for centuries. The innermost colony systems are already saturated, their own Ultrabrights unwilling to shoulder the timeburden of the home systems. Mere humans are long since confined to the outer colonies, where information swirls endlessly into the entropic wastes of the future. Soon a vicious war will break out between stellar intelligences: a war for which the prize is spacetime – all the spacetime a world-sized simulation processor can offer. The losers will be suspended, NP-static: the number of processors available to them drops below a critical level, they can't get enough connections, can't run in anything like real time, can't even complete a thought. The fate of an NP-static Dreamtime is to be sent on a one-way trip into the distant future, a long but subjectively rapid journey into the heat-death of the universe – unless somebody physically reboots the world, consigning its frozen inhabitants to oblivion.

  The Ultrabrights collectively face this dilemma: they are confined to the systems at the centre of known space. They will die unless they can find a way to break out of the trap, side-step their confinement and establish a line of communication with the twilight zone beyond. Build fast warships to eliminate the troublesome vermin cluttering up the outermost dreamtimes. Expand into newly available empty mind-space, to reduce the density of their thoughts. Unless they can do all of this, and more, the Ultrabrights of the inner sphere, the worlds which once (but no longer) belonged to humanity, will –

  Begin to feel the heat.

  Oshi had a lot of tasks, all of them pressing. Environmental integrity, systems maintenance with a workforce of one, the problem of how to keep the axial redoubt biome balanced: these were the immediate survival issues she faced. But then there were the other worries. The Dreamtime, rebooting itself laboriously on Pascal (a process that took days rather than seconds), needed guidance: and there was the desperate fact that she needed the minds and help of the uploaded colonists. Finally there was the Ultrabright attacker, lurking at the back of her nightmares. It was not a care-free time.

  Small multipurpose telefactors were at work in the sectors of the colony that lay below the core redoubt. Their motors whined as they dismantled the corpses of animals slain by the radiation burst from the black hole, in a vain attempt to create a sterile zone that would hamper the tapeworm's progress. Oshi avoided looking at them on the surveillance wall; as they chiseled away at their task they resembled so many spindly mass-murderers, hacking at fused bone and decaying flesh with rotary saws and multigrippers. They squittered in an obscure modemspeak that filled the microwave bands with static. Even if the colony managed to stabilize without breaking up, for a year or more to come the largest lifeforms were going to run on legs of plastic and ceramic, watching their world with electronic eyes. This, even if the tapeworm could be stopped – and Lorma had indicated that she thought it couldn't be. Oshi shuddered at the thought, then put it aside as she moved every available food container into the core's forward storage area.

  Taking stock was heavy work and left her wrung out, damp as a discarded towel. She spent two days at it without any real rest – a time came, some ages after she had experienced her moment of enlightenment in the factory, when she had to relax. She forced herself to leave off the audit, and made her way to the bathroom: she waited impatiently while the compact cubicle filled with hot water sweated through porous ceramic walls. Staying awake without any set task in mind was an effort. When the zero-gee tub was full she donned a breather mask and sank gratefully into the water, letting it suck her towards the centre of a pale blue bubble that might have been metres or light-years in diameter. Her vision dimmed then cleared into a view of somewhere else –

  Interfacial manifestation. Please hold.

  “What's going on?” she demanded, heart pounding with sudden terror. Paranoid fears struck her; a vision of her body put to asleep in the bath by remote control, some devious afterthought of Anubis: don't let this be so ...

  Incoming communiction: point of origin Pascal Dreamtime.

  The ocean trench cleared to a stratospheric blue. There was no visible floor; it was a total void on all sides. A flat planar surface appeared beneath her, flashed away in all directions even as she realised it was there. Her guts loosened with anticipation; she tried to access her wisdom but found it obscurely slow. Of course, she realised, this is all happening via downlink. Something had locked into her senses, feeding a virtual reality straight into her brain. The terror redoubled; that was a security function! Final control of violent cases.

  “Come on, Boris!” she yelled into the emptiness. Then she was no longer alone. Boris stood facing her.

  “No need to panic,” he said. “How's the world doing?”

  Oshi glared. “How do you think? Why are you doing this?”

  “I wanted a private channel,” he said. A mild-mannered shrug, subtly self-satisfied: “this seemed the best way.”

  “Best way, shit!” Oshi turned away to conceal the shaking of her shoulders. “You know what I thought when I blanked out?” Agitation lent a veneer of immediacy to the scene around her.

  Boris looked annoyed. “Go easy! We're only just waking up out there. There's a delay, by the way. Notice anything? A gap whenever I speak?”

  Oshi stared at him. “No. Where's you're point of presence? Here or on Pascal?”

  Boris nodded. “Pascal. Light-seconds away. This is a quantum-locked link: no listening in possible, and you're sleeping by seconds between packets. I got your message. Looks interesting. I don't know ... it's a question of planning.” He looked haunted. “I'll be frank. You figure that attacker is a dumb robot, and I am inclined to agree. You say there'll be a broadcast upload coming soon, and it'll be an Ultrabright: well, I guess maybe. But the rest of it –”

  “You've got brains. Why don't you use them?” she snapped, finally giving rein to her anger at being taken by surprise. “Item! An Ultrabright attacker zaps every unshielded Expansion processor and carbon-based lifeform in the system. Item: Ultrabrights are worse than Superbrights for hogging dataflow. They need input or they go insane, like Anubis. So there's no Ultrabright on board that thing – it's a dumb attack robot, a berserker. But here's another item: they need to occupy this system fast, unless they want it to be retaken by the Superbrights.

  “So they must have beamed an Ultrabright out here before the attack began. It's already on its way, I'll bet, due to arrive real soon. Months, across tens of light-years. But they can't trust the local Gatecoder – it might be sabotaged, and then where would the Ultraright be? We can therefore infer that there's a Gatecoder and a small expansion pr
ocessor on board the attack ship – a kind of lifeboat, takes one Ultrabright in event of emergency. Right? Which leads to the obvious conclusion –”

  Boris froze, grew translucent for a moment.

  “You there?” Oshi demanded.

  “I'm here.” He blinked, solidifying again. Shook his head: “you make sense. But to gamble everything on hijacking a starship –”

  “How else are we going to get out of this rat-trap?”

  They stood for a frozen moment, locked in their own thoughts. Oshi paused, helpless, wishing he'd say something. Anything. She wanted so badly to hear it: to have somebody else take responsibility. Because then she could begin making plans, and that would take her mind off the worst question that had begun to trouble her since she had realised that they might be able to escape: the question of what she could do with her life.

  “Whose instincts do you trust?” she asked.

  The question hung in the air for long seconds, until she wondered if she'd made a terrible mistake in asking.

  “A long time ago,” Boris said slowly, “I made a mistake. I'm still paying for it.”

  He didn't say anything more until Oshi prompted: “yes?”

  Suddenly his eyes were burning, burning through her like drills. “I assumed that ignorance was a sufficient defense. We knew what was going on in the Kuiper belt, battles between Ultrabright factions, Superbright complexes going NP-slow, big energy-intensive restructuring in the Oort halo around the outer system. But it didn't seem to effect us: it had been going on for decades, after all. We humans, huddling close to the sun, we weren't going to be effected, were we?”

  Oshi shook her head, dumbly. A horrible sense of déja vu overtook her as he continued.

  “I was young at the time, part of a conservative faction. We advocated neutrality, as if it was some kind of defense. We wanted to stay clear of the warfare raging above our heads, out in the dark spaces on the edge of the system. We managed to get the military budget reduced to a sensible level, of course – not that our missiles and attack warships would have done any good, not against the kind of tactics the 'brights were using. We were mice, I'll freely admit. But when the ultimatum came – well. I was young at the time. I thought there was room for negotiation. I didn't think it was possible, or necessary, to try to understand the enemy. I thought they'd keep their distance.”

  “Didn't they?”

  “They used some kind of insurgency strike. Belweathers, I think the term is – trained goats, used to lead their peers to the slaughterhouse door – only these ones were human beings carrying death lists and intelligent weapons.” He stopped again, then continued as if nothing had happened, voice a measured monotone that concealed unmeasured depths of anger and pity: “I was lucky. Listed as a useful idiot, I suppose, and in the opposition groupings – I thought the ancient paranoids running the government were out of touch with reality, ossified. Learned better, after they were all dead. By that time things were going to hell in a zeppelin, it was all we could do to set up an emergency team to handle the exodus – and even then, some of us couldn't adapt. I lost a lover, two children, that way. Because they wouldn't face up to ...” He looked at her mutely.

  Oshi said nothing. She didn't trust herself to speak.

  “Never again,” said Boris: “ never again. Half-measures are no solution; we can't share a solar system, a galaxy even, with these aliens. They are aliens, as unlike us as any organism we've ever met or created. Whatever we may think is reasonable, it's fair to assume they don't think the same way. And I owe it to their memory not to make the same mistake again. Not to underestimate what needs doing. Nor to underestimate their malevolence.” At which point he looked right at Oshi, giving her a chilly feeling that he could see right through her. “They are our enemies, the way a dirtworld farmer is the enemy of his sheep. If we give them a chance they'll kill us. I'm not going to give them any more chances.”

  “I asked Mik about your plan,” he said abruptly. “He says you're right, in principle. But there are other issues. We may have enough ships here, enough drones to mount an attack fleet. Lock onto the berserker and crack its control wetware. But how do we control it? The thing's millions of kilometres away. Lightspeed lag alone would mean we'd need a point of presence right close by it ...”

  “That's a technical issue,” she said, stupefaction and satisfaction vying for expression. “Are you going to do it?”

  “Yes,” Boris admitted. He stared at Oshi for a moment that seemed to stretch. “I was hoping you'd agree to show us how it's done. You're the nearest thing to a field officer we've got here. Nobody else has your depth of experience ...”

  “Don't overestimate me,” Oshi said, biting back bitterness. Was that a subtle double-meaning she caught in his voice, or her own guilty conscience? Belweathers – or maybe scratch monkeys. ”I'm just another grunt who wants out of this mess.” She shrugged. “What do you think we can do if we succeed? Where would you go?”

  Boris ran one hand over his bare scalp, calculating. “There's a system about twenty light years from here. Rich – no Superbrights, this isn't a Dirtburner farm world – if we can fuel up the Ultrabright ship it should be able to make the crossing. Especially with a mass conversion drive like it seems to have.” He stopped and looked down, then met Oshi's eyes. “It had better be big enough for an Ultrabright,” he said slowly. “Do you know what we found in the Dreamtime when we arrived?”

  “What?”

  “The entire second colony wave. The broadcast that followed us. All eighty million of them, neatly archived in frozen storage ...”

  “A very unwilling colony,” Oshi said drily.

  Boris's face crinkled in disapproval. “We've got to look after them. It's our responsibility.”

  “Yes, well.” Oshi looked away, suddenly embarrassed. And that's a better mission than I ever had, she thought. All this time, nothing but killing. “Isn't that what you always wanted?”

  “No,” Boris said softly. “That kind of responsibility's not something I'd wish on anyone. See you tomorrow ...”

  Suddenly Oshi was floating in the bath, breathing through a hollow tube, warmth on every side. She shook her head, felt the slow tug of turbulence through her hair. Damn it! Disbelief and a sense of nervous anticipation crowded together in her mind. They're all alive! And we're going to try to do it?

  An inchoate mass of worries caught her up and made her heart thud between her ribs. Anticipation: a cute body, a woman who'd stirred an unexpected lust in her. Still alive somewhere. Fear: I'm going to have to die and upload before this is over. Hope the Boss isn't waiting for me on the other side. Paranoia: what if Anubis left an insurance policy, a time-bomb? A zombie programmed for revenge, concealed among eightly million minds in a nation-sized shell game. Excitement: we're going to hijack a starship! And finally, something approximating remorse. Maybe this is my chance to set the tables right without killing anyone ...

  Why can't there be peace, for once? she wondered. Individuals who stood out from the crowd; they all succumbed to love or bullets eventually. Ivan, Anubis, Marat Hree – they all coexisted in her minds eye. Suddenly she felt the ashy, grey futility of it, with an acuity born of despair: her years of dancing to the Superbright's song. How much longer will I have to feel this guilt? she wondered. What if I've made a terrible mistake? She shook her head, half-blinded by tears. It was a heavy burden, finally bearing responsibility for her own actions. She straightened up and reached for the rim, letting the tub drain and clean itself unattended. I wonder if this is what Boris meant; never quite being sure if you're doing the right thing. Alone and very much aware of it, the last of the heroes dried herself and covered her nakedness before she went outside to face an uncertain future.

  Nightfall was the time of the small blinding. It always reminded Oshi of her own human weakness. Now, an evening later, she looked at the ceiling and wondered whether she was ready to face the darkness in her heart. She felt drained. Wisdom was still mostly off-line
, as were all comms in and out of the Redoubt. A sour cloud of discarded ration wrappers floated behind her – she couldn't be bothered to collect them. Leave it to the drones. She felt slightly sick, but not from free-fall vertigo. The toilet facilities ran on a centrifugal-suction system, otherwise she might have seen the blood in her stools.

  She suited up, letting her climb-spider lock itself into place around her and jack into her spinal reflexes. It felt eerie to own ghost limbs again, two arms poised behind her to sting machine death into anything that got in her way. She burrowed into the body-bag she'd had the axial factory prepare, forcing herself to breathe steadily despite the polythene claustrophobia wrapped all around her. It was an impermeable membrane, transparent, tough and airtight. Not a space-suit; an environmental precaution. There was no telling what the tapeworm could have grown into with six days of unsupervised ontological recombination.

  Oshi wanted to get out very badly. She'd woken up eight hours ago from a dream of nameless terror and realised what was going on. Days of enclosure weighed her down; the thought of what was to come was even worse. There was one critical part to her plan, that Boris hadn't even alluded to: retreiving the gatecoder from the colony medicentre. It wasn't a standard inventory component, and the construction schematics for it weren't part of the general database she had. If she couldn't find it she might as well cut her wrists now and get things over with, rather than wait for the Ultrabright death machine to download the mind of its master program and go to work on the colony. When she charged up her suit backpack, switched to her internal air supply, and powered up the door motors, she was acting on cool-headed necessity rather than random impulse; but her motive was still a hollow dread.

  She used the reconstructed airlock in what had been the entrance lobby to Anubis' castle. The doors hummed and slid out mechanically, exposing a view like a diseased eyeball. Oshi stood in the opening, unable to take in the perspective. A twilit red abyss opened beneath her feet, swooping into a dizzying space that somehow closed up into a pinprick pupil far away. A few metres overhead the grey bulk of the redoubt support plunged outwards, a dim red glow suffusing its surface from the light tubes high above. The veins of the eye were picked out in roadways and access routes between forests; in the dim reflection of running water and the blood-clot of a lake hanging overhead. Dim lights sketched out the habitats and houses of this world, the stumpy blocks of the life-support centres and transit nodes. But it was too quiet; the normal microwave chatter of the cyborgs and drones that populated it was gone. And a strange grey fungus was creeping outwards from a focal point in what had once been the necropolis at Memphis. If the view was of the inside of an eyeball, then its owner was very definitely dead.