Engine City

Ken MacLeod

To Carol, with love

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Carol, Sharon, and Michael, as always; to Andrew Greig for listening about light-years; and to Farah Mendlesohn for reading and commenting on the first draft.

There is no middle path between these two, for a man must either be a free and true commonwealth’s man, or a monarchical tyrannical royalist.

Kingly government governs the earth by that cheating art of buying and selling, and thereby becomes a man of contention, his hand is against every man, and every man’s hand is against him; and take this government at the best, it is a diseased government, and the very city Babylon, full of confusion.

—Gerard Winstanley,
The Law of Freedom in a Platform
(1651)

C
ONTENTS

• PROLOGUE: STATES OF MIND
  

• PART ONE: THE VERY CITY BABYLON
  

• 1 THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING
  
• 2 HARDY MAN
  
• 3 RTFM
  
• 4 THE MODERN PRINCE
  
• 5 TIDAL RACE
  
• 6 BRIGHT STAR CULTURES
  
• 7 THE MODERN REGIME
  

• PART TWO: THE HUMAN AS ALIEN
  

• 8 NEW EARTH (POLITICAL)
  
• 9 THE HANGING LIBRARIES
  
• 10 HIGH STRANGENESS INCIDENTS
  
• 11 LITHOMANCER
  
• 12 ROCKET SCIENCE
  
• 13 BLOOD OF SPIDERS
  
• 14 THE NEW MOON’S ARMS
  
• CODA: STATE OF PLAY
  

Prologue: States of Mind

THE GOD WHO
later became known as the asteroid 10049 Lora, and shortly afterwards as the ESA mining station
Marshal Titov,
was not unusual of its kind. Around the Sun, as with most stars, gods swarm like flies around a sacrifice. Life arises from states of matter. From some of these states of matter arise states of mind.

In the asteroids and cometary bodies the units of life were extremophile nanobacteria. Regulating their ultra-cold molecular processes, the vanishingly tiny temperature differentials, detecting the quantum signature of usable energy—over millions of years, these and other selective advantages drove the development of delicate networks adapted to processing information. Random variations in the effects of their activities on the asteroid’s outgassings and on the glacially slow transport of mass within it were selected for whenever they resulted in more stable orbits and fewer collisions. Increasingly complex networks formed. Subjectivity flickered into being on trillions of separate sites within each life-bearing asteroid or cometary mass.

Those within 10049 Lora found themselves in a society of other such minds, exchanging information across light-hours. They had much to learn, and many to learn from. Billions of years of evolutionary fine-tuning had given the cometary and asteroid minds an exquisite sensitivity to the electromagnetic output of each other’s internal chemical and physical processes.

Communication, exchange of information and material between cometary clouds, became rumor that ran around the galaxy’s outer reaches, which ring like residential suburbs its industrial core where the heavy elements are forged.

Just as minds are built from smaller information exchangers—neurons or bacteria or switches—so from the vast assembly of intercommunicating minds within the asteroid emerged a greater phenomenon, a sum of those minds: a god. It was aware of the smaller minds, of their vast civilizations and long histories. It was also aware of itself and others like itself. Its component minds, in moments of introspection or exaltation, were aware of it. In moments of enlightened contemplation, which could last millennia, the god was aware of a power of which it was a part: the sum of all the gods within the Solar System. That solar god, too, had its peers, but whether they in their turn were part of some greater entity was a subject on which lesser minds could only speculate.

On Earth, evolution worked out differently. On its surface, the multicellular trick took off. Beneath the surface, the extremophile microorganisms that riddled the lithosphere and made up the bulk of the planet’s life formed extensive interacting networks which became attuned to the electromagnetic fields of the planet and its atmosphere. Constantly disrupted by processes far more violent than those of the smaller celestial bodies, they attained the level of symbolic thought, but never quite intelligence. Earth’s mind—Gaia—was like that of a pre-verbal child or an animal. Its thoughts were dreams, afterimages, abstractions that floated free and illuminated like sheet lightning.

The large squid of the genus
Architeuthys,
which men later called krakens, were the first real intelligences on Earth, and the ones whose outlook on life was closest to that of the gods. They communicated by varying the colored patterns of the chromatophores on their skins. The minute electrical currents thus generated interacted with the electromagnetic flux of the planet and were amplified by it to come to the cometary minds’ acutely sensitive attention. Responses tickled back from the sky. As the gods began to make sense of the squids’ sensoria—a research project which kept the equivalent of a billion civilizations’ worth of scientists happily occupied for several centuries—they modified their own internal models accordingly. The visible spectrum and the visual field burst upon astonished inner eyes. Sight dawned for the gods, and enlightenment for the squid. Mega-years of happy and fertile intellectual intercourse followed.

Towards the end of the Cretaceous period, alien ships emerged from nowhere. Their occupants were warm-blooded, eight-limbed, eight-eyed, and furry. Celestial minds were already familiar phenomena to them. They swarmed across the Solar System, cracking memetic and genetic codes as they went. They talked to the gods with their noisy radio systems, gibber, jabber, boasting in technical detail of the lightspeed drive and the antigravity engine. Their discoid skiffs scooted through the skies of all the planets. They flashed banks of lights at the kraken schools. They listened to the collective voice of the Martian biosphere, which in all its long dying never rose above a sad, rusty croak.

They made friends. They found a promising species of small, bipedal, tailless dinosaurs and fiddled with their genes. The new saurs were intelligent and long-lived. The octopods taught the saurs how to fly skiffs. (Gaia took the saurs and skiffs into her dreams, and spun shining images of them in plasma and ball lightning, but nobody noticed back then.) They dangled the prospect of space travel before the kraken. Many of the squids pounced at the chance. The octopods designed ships and skiffs; the saurs built them and flew the skiffs; the krakens embraced the algorithms of interstellar navigation. Long ships, whose pilots swam in huge aquaria, blinked away.

By this time, one thought in the baffled minds of the gods resonated from one side of the Oort cloud to the other: KEEP THE NOISE DOWN! The radiation noise and the endless blether of information were not the worst irritations. Despite all appeals, the octopods persisted in digging on the surfaces of asteroids and comets. They itched like nits. Some saurs and kraken began to see the gods’ point of view, but they were unable to convince the octopods. The cometary minds made small, cumulative changes in their orbits, nudging a metallic asteroid onto a trajectory that ended on the octopods’ single city and brought the Cretaceous epoch to a cataclysmic close.

The destruction appalled even the gods. The octopods and their allies fled, while the saurs and krakens who remained behind labored to repair the damage done. They still had skiffs and ships. Laden with rescued specimens and genetic material, light-speed ships traveled to the other side of the galaxy. The saurs selected a volume about two hundred light-years across and seeded scores of terrestrial planets—some hastily and blatantly terraformed—with the makings of new biospheres. Saurs and kraken settled the new planets, originally as ecological engineering teams, later as colonists. Others returned to the Solar System, to bring more species. The traffic was to continue for the next sixty-five million years.

Echoes and rumors of other conflicts circulated around the galaxy. The kraken picked them up from the gods in the newly settled systems and passed them on to the saurs. In those multiple translations, subtleties were lost. Knowledge of the past became tradition, then religion. Gradually, the saurs, in what they came to call the Second Sphere, diverged from those in the Solar System. Meetings between the two branches of the species became mute, and matings sterile.

In the Second Sphere, a quiet and contented civilization was held together by the kraken-navigated starships that plied between its suns. It assimilated new arrivals at intervals of centuries. Some fast, bright mammals increasingly reminded the saurs of the octopods. Lemurs and lorises, apes and monkeys, successive species of hominid; bewildered, furious bands of hunters, tribes of farmers, villages of artisans, caravans of missing merchants, legions of the lost. The saurs’ patient answers to their frequently asked questions became the catechism of a rational but zealous creed. Yes, the gods live in the sky. No, they do not listen to prayers. No, they do not tell us what to do. Their first and last commandment is: Do not disturb us.

Slowly, with the help of the saurs and the two other surviving species of hominid, the transplanted humans built a civilization of their own, whose center was a city that never fell.

For the gods in the Solar System, the human civilization of the Second Sphere was a history too recent for them to have heard of. They knew only that the saurs’ snatch-squads continued their work with ever-increasing caution as the human population grew. The clutter of images generated by Gaia’s excitable response to the saurs’ presence provided the perfect cover for their activities. The gods had real aliens to worry about. The starships might bring back news from the Second Sphere a hundred thousand years out of date, but they collected much more recent news in their occasional stops on the way back. From these the gods learned that the octopods were a few tens of light-years away, and heading toward the Solar System.

The god in 10049 Lora had already lived a long life when it and its peers noticed the rising electronic racket from Earth. It volunteered to swing by for a closer look. It absorbed the contents of the Internet in seconds, and then found, microseconds later, that it was already out of date. It was still struggling with the exponential growth when the European Union’s cosmonauts arrived. To them, it was a convenient Near-Earth Object, and a possible source of raw materials for further expansion.

The humans had plans for the Solar System, the god discovered—plans that made the past octopod incursion seem like a happy memory. But the coming octopod incursion might be still worse. If the humans could expand into space without the devastatingly profligate use of resources that their crude rocket technology required, an elegant solution could be expected to the presence of both species of vermin.

Bypassing the local saurs, who were quite incapable of dealing with the problem, the god scattered information about the interstellar drive and the gravity skiff across the Earth’s data-sphere. Several top-secret military projects were already apparently inspired by glimpses of skiff technology, but their sponsors unaccountably failed to take the hint. (In their mutual mental transparency, the celestial minds found the concepts of lies, fiction, and disinformation difficult to grasp.) The minds within 10049 Lora opened communication with the cosmonauts on its surface, where the ESA mining station
Marshal Titov
was giving the god a severe headache.

Having their computers hacked into by a carbonaceous chondrite came as a surprise to the cosmonauts. In the sudden glut of information, they failed to notice the instructions for a radical new technology of space travel until it was almost too late. Politics dictated first that the contact should be secret, then that it should be public. Political and military conflicts resulted in a mutiny on the station. Before the space marines of the European People’s Army could arrive to suppress it, the cosmonauts built a lightspeed drive that took the entire station away. They thought they had understood how to navigate it. They had not. It returned to its default setting, and arrived at the Second Sphere.

Before their departure, one of the cosmonauts made sure that the instructions distributed by the god would not be ignored, and could not be hidden. The gods approved. Soon the noisy humans would be somebody else’s problem.