Xeelee: Endurance (30 page)

‘A supernova,’ Five said. ‘That’s what you’re talking about, isn’t it? You’re going to turn the Boss into a supernova.’

‘We believe it will be the first
artificial
detonation of its kind in the evolution of the universe. A supernova used as a cannon to fire out a neutron star, directed as we please! History is watching us, Donn Wyman.’

The Silverman comically raised its stump of an arm. ‘Magnificent!’

Donn paced around. ‘You’re insane.’

‘Now you do sound like Jack Raoul,’ said the Ambassador.

‘You will devastate worlds—’

‘Actually, stars too,’ said the Ambassador. ‘Nearby
stars
will be boiled away.’

‘And the Reef,’ Donn said grimly. ‘Surely we’re too close to survive.’

Five said, ‘The Reef is a bunch of ships joined up together. Isn’t it? Something like that. You could just fly away.’

‘We don’t have hyperdrive,’ Donn said. ‘Our units were confiscated by the Coalition for their Navy ships. I don’t imagine they will be handing them back.’ He turned on the Ambassador. ‘This is mass murder. Why are you doing this?’

‘Because of the Seer.’ The new voice was a woman’s: Eve Raoul’s. Donn heard her words moments before a cloud of pixels popped into existence, and coalesced into her thin form.

She stepped to the edge of the platform. ‘My. Quite a view. Quite a drop, too . . .’ She reached out absently, but none of them had a Virtual hand to offer her, and she stepped back.

‘I wasn’t expecting to see you again,’ Donn said.

‘Well, I didn’t expect to be revived again,’ she said with a trace of bitterness. ‘At least I’m not in any pain this time. I guess it’s good to be useful.’

‘Useful how?’

The Ambassador said, ‘Eve is helping us understand an entity of our own creation. An entity whose wishes have brought us all here today.’

Donn’s heart thumped. ‘You mean the Seer.’

‘Turn around, Five, Donn.’

They turned. The Silverman was holding, in his one hand, a box, a tetrahedron ten centimetres or so to an edge. It seemed to have clear walls, and its interior was black and full of stars, stars that swarmed – that, at any rate, was Donn’s first impression. Five and Donn both stepped closer to look. Behind the box’s triangular faces, the ‘stars’ were no more than dust motes, pushed to and fro by random currents in whatever air filled the box.

Donn said, ‘It’s like a toy. What is it?’

‘The Seer,’ Eve said.

The Ambassador said, ‘The control of the core of a giant star during a catastrophic explosion is ferociously difficult. Even modelling it was beyond our processing resources. So we devised a new generation of
AI
.’

Five said, ‘This box of dust?’

‘This box of dust,’ Eve said, ‘is the most advanced AI we’re aware of. For a machine like this, physically you need components that are small enough to be influenced by quantum effects, yet large enough to feel the effects of gravity. A swarm of smart microprobes – dust motes.’

‘A machine like what?’

‘A quantum gravity
AI
. . .’

‘On the
Miriam
we have quantum
AIs
,’ Donn said.

‘Right,’ Eve said, nodding. ‘And that gives you an edge in processing speed. A simple switch can only be in one state at a time – on or off. A quantum switch holds information about
all
possible states of the switch at any one time. And so you can use it to do parallel processing. Many inputs, many outputs. You get a speed advantage, and a significant one.

‘But a quantum
gravity
machine goes one step further. You abandon causality altogether . . .’

The blurring of position and velocity in quantum mechanics made traditional causality problematical. And in relativity, too, light-speed limits ensured that causality was more an aspiration than an iron law.

Donn started to see. ‘And if you put quantum mechanics and relativity together—’

‘In a quantum gravity computer, cause and effect are thoroughly mixed up. Time loops are commonplace . . . You can guess where this is going. You don’t even need to have input before output, causally.’

‘You get the answer before you’ve even asked the question.’

‘That’s it. In practice, I think, the Seer is able to glimpse the outline of a solution to a given problem
even before it has begun its calculation
, and so can guide its processing efficiently to that outcome. Its thinking must feel like guesswork, an unlikely series of inductive leaps. But it’s always right, and very very fast.’

‘The Seer really can see the future,’ Five said. ‘Just as the rumours say.’

‘But its visions are limited, to the outcomes of computing algorithms a few microseconds ahead – or to the furthest future, millennia or more away.’

Five glared at the Ambassador. ‘So why the tetrahedron, fatball? Why is this ultimate brain in a box the shape of the symbol of human freedom?’

‘A tetrahedron was the most suitable shape for—’

‘It’s a totem, that’s what I think,’ Five snapped. ‘Some of the Samples say Ghosts are starting to worship us humans, because we’re becoming so good at killing you. So, the Silvermen, walking human statues. So, the tetrahedral box.’

The Ambassador said evenly, ‘We Ghosts do have a propensity for worshipping that which destroys us, it is true. But you are not yet a goddess, Sample 5A43.’

Donn said sharply, ‘Enough. Eve, you said how the Seer’s thinking
feels
. How can you know that?’

‘Ah. Good question. Because, not for the first time, the Ghosts created an artificial AI which ended up not performing
quite
as specified.’

‘Like the Silverman.’

‘Well, yes. And, not for the first time, I, or an avatar of myself, was asked to help interpret for it . . .’ She looked at Donn, her grey hair shining in the light of the stellar core. ‘The Seer sees the future, Donn. And it is afraid.’

Donn watched Eve. Her eyes were unfocused, and he thought her representation was degrading, her skin smoothing from lack of definition, a lock of her grey hair flickering. He wondered how it must be to
be
her, a representation every bit as sentient as he was, and yet having endured multiple lives already – and now bonded with a consciousness like no other.

She said, ‘The Seer is sentient, born of dust into a baffling, acausal universe. But it is a Ghost artefact. And so it shares Ghost values, Ghost assumptions. The Ghosts survived the death of their world through symbiosis, dissimilar life forms gathering together as their sun failed. The Ghosts have faith that the life forms of this era of the universe, a transient age of light and water-based chemistry, will similarly use cooperation and symbiosis to survive the transition to the new cold age to come when the last star dies.’

Five shuddered. ‘How can you
think
like that?’

‘This has happened already, in the universe’s history,’ Eve said. ‘There are life forms extant now, in this age of matter, which are survivors of earlier epochs, the age of radiation and of annihilation and of superforces. But when this age ends, when dark energy comes to predominate and the fabric of spacetime is torn apart – when this happens, and the Seer can
see
it – there will be no Ghost left alive to witness it, and no symbiotic descendant of the Ghosts.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because of us,’ said Five savagely. ‘Because of humans.
We win
. I don’t need a quantum-gravity computer to tell me that. And we drive the Ghosts to extinction.’

‘You must understand,’ the Ambassador said. ‘The detonation of this sun – we do this because we, this Ghost enclave, have been cut off from our home range by the forces of your Coalition. Billions of individuals, a whole world, trapped behind the lines. We were desperate. We looked for a way to change the parameters – the rules of the game. That is our way of resolving problems. We were looking for a way out. Now we see we must do more than that; we must take the Seer and its dreadful counsel to our home ranges. We need time to consider what must be done.’

‘Such as what?’ Five asked.

‘Such as escape.’

Escape to where? Donn wondered. Where could the Ghosts go to escape a rampant, Coalition-led mankind? Out of the Galaxy? Out of the
cosmos
altogether?

He tried to focus on his own situation. ‘Then why have you brought us here? Why tell us this?’

‘Because of me,’ said the Silverman. He stepped forward, still cradling the Seer. ‘You made me smart in order to punish me. But I am human enough to guess how you would feel about an exploding star.’

The Ambassador said, ‘We did not mean to engineer this star as an act of war, only as a means of escape. We understand now that humans might not see it that way.’

‘You really don’t get human psychology, do you?’ Donn said.

‘No,’ said the Silverman cheerfully. ‘Donn Wyman, you must warn your people. Make them believe, as we could not. Persuade them to flee. And make them believe the Ghosts did not mean war.’

‘That’s a tall order.’

‘You are our only hope,’ the Ghost said simply. ‘You, who have shown empathy for our kind before, where others have turned away.’

Donn thought he ought to feel proud. He felt empty. Could it be true that so much was pivoting on this moment? Because if so, he thought, I am not strong enough to deal with it.

‘You don’t have much time,’ said the Ambassador. It floated towards the lip of the platform.

Donn followed, and looked down at the engineered moon. Ghosts swarmed, pinpricks of dazzling light against the worked regolith. ‘How long?’

‘The mathematics is uncertain.’

‘There are human colonies scattered through the Association,’ Donn said, thinking. ‘Many of them still have hyperdrive, I think. But the main human concentration is the Reef. And we no longer have hyperdrive—’

‘Ask your father,’ the Ambassador said.

‘What?’

‘I too approved of the Silverman’s wish to contact you personally, Donn Wyman. Because
I
know that your family has resources. We will send you home now, Donn Wyman.’

They pulled back and stood in a row, the Silverman with the tetrahedral box, the looming Ghost, and the Virtual of Eve, gradually disintegrating.

Eve raised her hand. ‘There is more,’ she said solemnly. ‘Human and Ghosts must both join the great confluence of mind in the far future, join with the rest. That is the only way the next transition can be survived
by either of us
.’

Donn was shocked by this latest bit of bad news. ‘And if humans destroy the Ghosts—’

‘Then
neither
will survive. Remember,’ she said, her voice scratchy. ‘Remember . . .’

Five ran towards the Silverman, who stood stock-still, slow to react. She raised her fists and slammed them down on the Seer. Her hands passed through its substance, scattering pixels.

Donn pulled her away.

‘Just an avatar,’ she said, breathless. ‘Worth a try. To strike such a blow . . . It would have been magnificent.’

The Ghost and its companions were surrounded by a cloud of pixels now. The star’s light flickered.

And Donn was home.

His mother ran up to him and grabbed him. ‘Oh, Lethe, Donn! I never thought I’d see you again.’ He let her weep on his shoulder. ‘Benj is back too,’ she whispered. ‘He’s back!’

Here was Samm, his father, grinning hugely, grabbing onto Benj as hard as his mother was to Donn. The Commissary, Elah, was here too. She looked as shocked as any of them at Donn’s sudden appearance, but she was looking up into the sky with some alarm and muttering into the air, evidently communicating with her Coalition colleagues. And Donn saw Five, still in her bloodstained Ghost-hide suit, looking even more scared and bewildered than in the centre of the star.

Donn found his brother. Benj was wearing a plain white bath robe; all his hair had been shaved off. ‘Benj. What happened to you?’

‘I’ve been a stark-naked lab rat for a day. If it really was you who got me out—’

‘It was. You owe me.’

‘I was afraid of that. Damn.’

There were twin concussions, soft explosions, and a breeze of displaced air, as Hama Belk and Kanda Fors returned, coalescing under the lifedome. Grubby, scrawny, they both staggered in the sudden change of gravity, and clung to each other in shock. Then they realised where they were, and their clinging turned to a hug of joy. Then Hama spotted Elah, standing apart in her black Commissary’s robe, and he went over to her immediately.

And Kanda, recovering her composure quickly, came forward to Donn and Rima.

Donn gently disengaged his mother. ‘Mother – you have guests.’

Rima turned. ‘Do I know you?’

‘Kanda Fors. Food tech, from the
Harry Poole.
We met a couple of times, I think . . . I’ve been lost for a number of years.’

‘It’s a day of shocks for us all.’ Rima stepped forward, and the women clasped hands.

Amid more soft concussions, more of the ragged rats from Ghostworld started to appear, many naked, bewildered. One woman cradled a baby.

Five still stood alone, Donn saw, scared, resentful.

Donn went over, took Five by the hand, and led her to his mother. ‘Mother, this one’s called Five. Long story. I think she’d appreciate some help, her and her people. Some clothes for a start.’ But Five flinched back. ‘She’s been living wild,’ Donn murmured. ‘It will take some time . . .’

‘We’ve all the time in the world. Come, child. And, Kanda, you’ll be wanting to tell your family you’re back?’

‘I feel nervous about it. Yes, of course . . .’

‘And you – Five, was it? What about your family?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘I’m sure we can trace them. Come on, we’ll sort it out.’

Now Donn approached Samm. ‘Father. I need to talk to you. We’re in trouble. The Boss—’

‘I know. Look at this.’ He showed Donn an image, returned by faster-than-light inseparability links from a Coalition drone observer close to the giant star. The Boss was spitting, flaring, ejecting knots of plasma large enough to swallow Earth’s sun whole. ‘It’s becoming unstable.’