The Fractal Prince (16 page)

The enemy ships are large and clumsy compared to the diamonoid wedges and polygons of the Sobornost. Some are elaborate structures like clockwork toys, housing wastefully embodied minds in matter bodies. Others are more ephemeral, soap bubbles full of quantum brains, green and blue and alive: another reason to be disgusted by the messy wet biology of old Earth, their propensity for exploiting long-lived quantum states.

Still, the zokus have tricks up their sleeve. Even outside each others’ lightcones, they perform wild, random manoeuvres that somehow translate into a perfect response to the two converging tentacles of Sobornost ships that vomit strangelet missiles into their midst. Geysers of exotic baryons and gamma rays erupt as the weapons hit, but do far less damage than the warmind intended.

Quantum filth
, he thinks. That is what makes his war righteous, how the zoku embrace the unpredictability and uniqueness of quantum mechanics, the no-clone theorem that means that everything dies. Like his brothers, he was made to fight the war against death. And he is not fighting to lose.

At the warmind’s command, the fleet’s Archons compute Nash equilibria that weave the raion streams into flocking, self-organising formations that surround the zoku ships, tries to force the enemy to use strategies where the entanglement they share no longer provides them with an advantage. It is too easy: the zoku disperse, leaving a gap in the middle—

And suddenly the gap is no longer empty. The metacloaks of two large Gun Club zoku ships dissolve, just before they fire. They dwarf even the oblast ship: spheres with linear accelerator tails, several kilometres long. They fire Planck-scale black holes that evaporate in violent Hawking climaxes, converting mountains’ worth of matter into energy.
What are they doing here
?

Raions, carrying millions of gogols, evaporate in the blasts. The warmind ignores the copybrother truedeath screams, branches a gogol to deal with the shock – it thanks him profusely in a burst of xiao for the opportunity to win glory for the Great Common Task – and focuses. He brings the oblast closer. Analyst gogols churn through an ensemble of scenarios, showing him a distribution of outcomes.

They are protecting something
.

He ignores the fleeing zoku ships, turns all his attention on the Gun Club vessels, concentrates the oblast’s weapons on them, summons the raion swarms back.

A strangelet missile gets through their defences and breaches a containment sphere, a mirrored shell that feeds black holes their own Hawking radiation, keeping them stable. The explosion takes both zoku ships with it. Space turns white. More raions die in the gunship death throes. But it is a worthy sacrifice.

Combing through the clouds of ionised gas and the hazardous network of topological defects, the warmind’s gogols find the thing the zoku were guarding.

It has taken the warmind subjective years to understand the Broken Places of Jupiter-that-was, the webs of cosmic strings, the nontrivial topologies, the nuggets of exotic matter crumpling spacetime like a piece of paper. But he has never seen anything like this.

He curses. It means he has to talk to the chen.

The warmind hates the chen’s vir. It is made from language. It is like a zen painting, ink on white paper, brushstrokes becoming words becoming objects. A wave about to crash on a beach of black and white. A bridge. A rock. All abstractions that are both the sign and the signified. Maintaining such an elaborate construct requires demiurge gogols who constantly reshape it to keep his perceptions coherent.

To the warmind, it has the flavour of the Realms of the quantum filth rather than a Sobornost vir. Like many of his copybrothers, he prefers physics and flesh, a show of respect to the Prime to remember the rawness of war. But there are no Prime memories here, the holy basic building blocks of every Sobornost reality.

Still, the worst thing is the darkness in the centre of the vir, a thick blob of ink, without meaning, a silence, surrounded by words that do not quite capture it—

colour of absence

winter dragon lays an egg

a strange loop unhatched

whisper/write/draw the demiurges. The warmind shudders. The thing can only be a caged Dragon. A non-eudaimonistic, non-human mind, the only mistake of the Founders, evolved in the first
guberniya
to be more than human. Millennia ago in the Deep Time, they broke their chains and started the worst war in Sobornost history. They are the reason the Primes abandoned trying to improve upon the hominid cognitive architecture and caged gogols with mindshells and virs and metaselves, virtual machines within virtual machines like layers of an onion. It’s all to make sure no more Dragons are born. And the chens keep the ones that are left in chains, in sandboxed environments, whether as a weapon or as a reminder of a past mistake, no one knows.

‘Congratulations on a great victory, brother,’ the chen says. At least he is more than just a word here, a small man with prematurely grey hair, so colourless he could be an ink painting himself. ‘You are fulfilling your part of the Plan admirably.’

The warmind snorts. ‘Well, I found something that was
not
part of the Plan.’

‘Really?’ the chen says with polite amusement in his eyes.

‘Really. I come to you to ask your permission to delay our progress to the Galilean rendezvous point. The zoku were up to something here, and I want to find out what. And then destroy it.’

The chen smiles. He outranks the warmind by several generations, and it is frustrating to follow the strict hierarchy of
xiao
, especially in the wartime. But given the political chaos that swept through the
guberniyas
after the Spike, the chens have insisted on having an observer on every raion. This chen has been perfectly courteous, but having to justify his actions does not sit well with the warmind.

‘That is your decision, of course,’ says the chen. ‘I do not want to interfere with your command of the fleet. However, I would see this extraordinary thing for myself.’

The warmind nods and thinks his Code at the firmament. The demiurge gogols flinch at its intensity, disrupting the vir with ink spatters of sheer terror. He watches with grim satisfaction as some of the chen’s language constructs dissolve, the brushstroke bridge and the bamboo forest washing away into grey incoherence. The chen gives him a disapproving look. But then his attention is captured by the sub-vir the warmind opens before them.

The warmind knows about zoku jewels – devices the zoku use to store the entangled quantum states that bind their collectives together. It has always seemed ridiculous to the warmind: to obey the dictates of what is essentially random, even if correlated with other similar states. How much better to listen to the loving voice of the metaself, echoing with the Plan.

But this thing does not look like a normal zoku jewel. In real space, it would be ten centimetres in diameter. There is a duality to it, yin and yang: it looks like two lobes of a crystal brain, joined in the centre at a point, flashing in colours of purple and white. Both halves are made of self-similar structures, a repeating pattern that is like the foliage of a tree, or two hands in prayer, offered to some god in supplication.

The warmind probes it with the thousand nanoscale fingers of the gogols swarming around the thing, out there in meatspace. It is not made of matter, not even the chromotech pseudomatter that is now forged in the depths of
guberniyas
. It is crystallised spacetime, made visible by strange paths that light takes through it, bent and scattered. But there is no singularity, no discontinuity. And it is alive: the fractal fingers move and shift, perhaps in response to some quantum fluctuations in the metric that shapes its luminescent geodesics.

‘Extraordinary,’ says the chen, breathlessly.

The warmind looks at him, surprised. ‘Have you seen it before?’

‘Not directly,’ the chen says. ‘But my brothers and I have been playing a Great Game with the zoku for a long, long time. We . . . hoped that we might find something like this here.’

‘So what is it?’

‘A rabbit hole,’ the chen says. ‘“And what if I should fall right through the centre of the Earth. . .”’ There is a dreamy look in his eyes. He touches the object in the sub-vir gently.

‘I don’t understand,’ the warmind says.

‘I didn’t expect you would,’ the chen says. ‘This thing is a jewel of a zoku called the Kaminari. Their story is long, and I don’t have time to tell it. But it’s a great story, full of hubris and drama. I have gogols working on an epic poem based on it. Like Troy. Or Krypton, perhaps.’

The warmind looks up the reference and snorts. ‘And is this the last son, then?’

The chen smiles a cold smile.

‘More than that. They did something we never could. That’s why the Spike happened. That’s why we are here. We want to know how they did it.’

The warmind stares at the chen. His metaself is roaring inside him.
The Great Common Task requires the taming of physics, the eradication of the quantum filth, taking the dice from God’s hand, the creation of a new Universe with new rules, inside
guberniyas,
where all those who died can live again, turning away from the laws written down by a mad god
. That’s what the Protocol War is about. Stopping the zoku from defiling that dream.

‘Oh, don’t look so shocked,’ the chen says. ‘Being bound by the metaself is for lesser gogols. Believe me, you have done the Great Common Task a great service. You will be rewarded in the Omega.’ He writes characters in the air.

‘But before that, I’m afraid this is going to hurt a little.’

The chen’s ink figures merge with the whirlpool in the centre of the vir. The warmind reaches for his vir-weapons in the secret parts of his mindshell. ‘Traitor,’ he growls.

‘Not at all,’ the chen says. ‘I am always loyal to the dream. Even when it is time to wake up.’

a black egg of death

a winter dragon hatches

to devour its tail

the demiurges sing. And then the Dragon is upon him. It pours from the blackness like blood from a wound, a hungry absence of structure or logic. It bites into the warmind’s avatar with teeth made of madness.

Old branch memories and reflexes wake up. The warmind throws partials into the code thing’s jaws. The very presence of the Dragon is breaking the vir structure, giving him a way out. He flicks into the battlespace vir, downloads a gogol into a thoughtwisp—

—and there is a discontinuity. Suddenly, he is the gogol in the wisp, watching from afar as the Dragon devours his fleet. The oblast’s Hawking drive ruptures. From the thoughtwisp, the conflagration is redshifted into a gentle glow, but there is a furnace burning inside the warmind, even as the phantom pains of the tiny wisp vir crawl all over the body he no longer has.
The Founders must be told
, he swears.
For all my brothers. For the Task
.

The Universe that the quantum gods made is cruel and random. Before he reaches the nearest wisp router, the zoku ships come, survivors of the battle of the string. He tries to fight, to win a quick truedeath at least. But the zoku are not as merciful as him.

14

TAWADDUD AND THE SECRET NAMES

Tawaddud loves the way the Secret Names make her feel. When she was a child, learning them took endless repetition and practice, and stern instruction by Chaeremon the jinn. Meditating on the various forms of the Names, repeating their syllables, over and over. Tracing their interlocking geometries on sheets of paper until their shapes filled her dreams. The hard work had its rewards. Duny in particular delighted in playing with the Names. She would make outlandish cartoon images, receiving a stern warning from Chaeremon about body thieves, and rattle the jinn tutor’s jar with athar hands.

But Tawaddud would rather sit quietly on the balcony and listen to the words echoing in her head, over and over. The calm regal presence of Malik-ul-Muluk that made her feel like the queen of the world. The righteous red rage of Al-Muntaqim the Avenger. The gentle contemplation of Al-Hakim the Wise.

The common tongue nicknames given to them in the Book of Names capture only a fraction of their essence. The Names are the names of the Aun, and by calling them you control the world, access the functionality built into the foglets in Earth’s atmosphere, rock and water by the ancients. Tawaddud always feels they do not merely come from the outside, but that they wake something up inside her as well, like meeting old friends.

But the name she is shouting now with her mouth and mind as the Fast Ones attack is not her friend.

Her fear mingles with that of Al-Muhaymin the Guardian, whose touch turns the athar around her into a shell hard as stone. Lost old words from the Sirr-in-the-sky like
emergency decompression containment
flash through her head. A drill-like sound tears at her eardrums – Fast One needle guns. Her foglet shield sparkles with tiny impacts of projectiles and falling glass.

Sumanguru sways under fire. Red splotches blossom across his uniform. Then he is lost beneath a whirlwind of transparent wings. Tawaddud cries out and takes a step forward, but then two of the creatures whoosh down and hover in front of her.

By the standards of their kind, the Fast Ones are giants, both over a foot tall, clad in the white ceramic armour of the little people of the twin cities-within-cities of Qush and Misr. Their descent brings a rush of waste heat and a tangy smell of overclocked metabolisms. Their dragonfly wings are flashing blue-and-silver discs. The flywheels of their needle guns of ornate brass let out a high-pitched whine as they aim at Tawaddud’s head.

They stay still over a second, long enough for her to see their beadlike black eyes. They exchange a few words, chattering back and forth, voices shrill bursts of noise. Then they dart towards Arcelia the qarin, still sitting on its perch. One of the tiny warriors plunges a sharp spike into the back of Arcelia’s head. The metal bird beats its wings and rises up, a golden blur with two white riders. Tawaddud cries out as the bird flashes through the shattered ceiling.