















































TOAST





































































































































Books by Charles Stross





Singularity Sky

The Atrocity Archive

Iron Sunrise

The Family Trade

The Hidden Family

Accelerando

















































































































TOAST









Charles Stross

































































COSMOS BOOKS





















































TOAST

Copyright © 2002; revised and

expanded, 2006, by Charles Stross. All rights reserved.

Cover design copyright © 2006 by Juha Lindroos.





No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means,

mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining

the permission of the copyright holder.





For more information, contact Wildside Press.

www.wildsidepress.com





ISBN: 0-8095-5603-0

























































































Contents

















Introduction



Antibodies



Bear Trap



Extracts from the Club Diary



A Colder War



TOAST: A Con Report



Ship of Fools



Dechlorinating the Moderator



Yellow Snow



Big Brother Iron



Lobsters



































































































































CAUTION





Highly flammable. Keep away from naked flame, hot surface or other sources of ignition—no smoking. Keep away from food, drink, and animal feeding stuffs. Keep out of reach of children. This product contains extract of H. P. Lovecraft and George Orwell. Do not swallow. In case of contact with eyes, wash thoroughly with water. This product contains wood pulp from renewably harvested trees. Wash hands after use. Safe to use with septic tanks. In event of ingestion, consult a physician. May contain traces of nuts . . .

















































































































































































































































Introduction:

After the Future Imploded





“The future has imploded into the present,” wrote Gareth Branwyn, in a famously bombastic manifesto that Billy Idol recycled in an even more bombastic multimedia album in 1992.

What happens when the future implodes into the past?

The last century saw an amazing flowering of futures. Galactic empires exploded across reams of yellowing woodpulp; meanwhile, the Futurist movement spawned bizarre political monsters that battled across continents. Both fascism and Bolshevism were expressions of belief in a utopian ideal, however misplaced and bloody their methodologies. Meanwhile, advertising mutated from a cottage industry for printers into a many-tongued hydra that promised us a cleaner, brighter present. Today’s marketing spin is descended from yesterday’s brainwashing techniques: propaganda principles pioneered by Goebbels are now common property.

The sheer speed with which change swept over the twentieth century, bearing us all towards some unseen crescendo, was a tonic for the imagination. Science fiction wouldn’t have flourished in an earlier era—it took a time of change, when children growing up with horse-drawn carriages would fly around the world on jet engines, to make plausible the dreams of continuous progress that this genre is based on.

But the pace of change isn’t slackening. If anything, it’s accelerating; the coming century is going to destroy futures even faster than the last one created them. This collection of short stories contains no work more than a decade old. Nevertheless, one of these stories is already a fossil—past a sell-by date created by the commercial data processing industry—and the others aren’t necessarily that far behind.

How did things get to be this way?









Delta(Change/t)





Until about the third millennium BC, there was no noticeable change in social patterns on any time scale measured in less than centuries. Around that time, the first permanent settlements that we’d recognize as towns arose, facilitated by the discovery of agriculture. With them appeared writing and codified law and the rudiments of government.

From that time on, there was no turning back. An agricultural civilization can support far more people in a given area than a hunter-gatherer lifestyle—but the transition from a hunter-gatherer society to agriculture is strictly a one-way process. If you try to reverse it, most of your people will starve to death: they simply won’t be able to acquire enough food. This was the first of many such one-way processes in the historical record. Arguably, it’s the existence of these one-way transitions that gives rise to the appearance of inexorable historical progress; it’s not that reversals are impossible, it’s simply that after a reversal there’ll be nobody left to keep a written record of it.

The twentieth century was riddled with one-way technological changes. (For example, once the atom bomb had been invented, even if the Manhattan project had been quietly disbanded and its records destroyed there would have been no way of preventing its rediscovery.) And such one-way changes have come even faster with every passing decade. There are more people alive today than ever before—and a higher proportion of them are scientists and engineers who contribute to the pace of change.

Some changes come from unexpected directions. Take Moore’s Law, for example. Moore’s Law had a far greater effect on the latter third of the 20th century than the lunar landings of the Apollo program (and it was formulated around the same time), but relatively few people know of it. Certainly, back in 1968 nobody (except possibly Gordon Moore) might have expected it to result in the world we see today . . .

Gordon Moore was a senior engineer working at a small company near Palo Alto, a spin-off of Fairchild Semiconductor. His new company was in business to produce integrated circuits—lumps of silicon with transistors and resistors etched onto them by photolithography. Moore noticed something interesting about the efficiency of these circuits. Silicon is a semiconductor: it conducts electricity, but has a markedly higher resistivity than a good conductor (like, say, copper). When you push electric current through a resistor you get heat, and the more resistor you push it through, the more of the current ends up warming the environment instead of doing useful work.

Moore noticed that as circuits grew physically smaller, less electricity was dissipated as heat. Moreover, as distances shrank the maximum switching speed of a circuit increased! So smaller circuits were not only more energy efficient, but ran faster. Putting this together with what he knew about the methods of chip design, Moore formulated his law: that microprocessor speeds would double every eighteen months, as circuit sizes shrank by the same factor, until limits imposed by quantum mechanics intervened.

Moore was wrong—they’re now doubling every fifteen months and accelerating.

The interesting thing about Moore’s law is that although it was clearly true in 1968, nobody in the SF field came close to grasping its implications until the early 1980’s, by which time personal computers had already become nearly ubiquitous. Moore’s law was a classic example of an exponentiating change—one that starts off from a very low level, lumbers along for a while (invisible to all but specialists in the field), then explodes onto the scene with mind-numbing speed. Since 1970 we’ve have exponentiating changes coming out of our ears: genetically modified organisms, the growth of the internet, the spread of the PC, the network-enabled mobile phone, and—coming soon, to a planet near you—nanotechnology.

Back in 1988, nanotechnology looked like SF. By 1998 it was making eminent scientists scratch their heads and explain why it couldn’t possibly work in the pages of Scientific American. By 2000 it was a multi-hundred million dollar industry, and in another two years we can expect to see the first nanotech IPOs hitting the stock market.

(Doubtless it’ll toast the credibility of a few more of the stories in this collection before it’s over.)









The past through the future





Short science fiction stories are historical documents; they illustrate the author’s plausible expectations of the future at a specific point in time. (I’m leaving aside the implausible fictions—there’re enough of them in this collection—as they tell us something different about the author’s expectations of human behaviour and what constitutes wholesome, or at least saleable, entertainment.)

All the stories in this collection are artefacts of the age of Moore’s law. All of them were written with word processing software rather than the pen; the earliest of them (Yellow Snow) dates to 1989, about the time I was discovering the internet. Moore’s Law has already rendered some of these stories obsolete—notably Ship of Fools, my Y2K story from 1994. (Back then people tended to look at me blankly whenever I mentioned the software epoch in public.) Yellow Snow is also looking distinctly yellowed around the edges, ten years on, with the Human Genome Project a nearly done deal.

Part of the problem facing any contemporary hard SF writer is the fogbank of accelerating change that has boiled up out of nowhere to swallow our proximate future. Computer scientist and author Vernor Vinge coined the term “singularity” to describe this; a singularity, in mathematics, is the point towards which an exponential curve tends. At the singularity, the rate of change of technology becomes infinite; we can’t predict what lies beyond it.

In a frightening essay on the taxonomy of artificial intelligence, published in Whole Earth Review in 1994, Vinge pointed out that if it is possible to create an artificial intelligence (specifically a conscious software construct) equivalent to a human mind, then it is possible to create one that is faster than a human mind—just run it on a faster computer. Such a weakly superhuman AI can design ever-faster hardware for itself, amplifying its own capabilities. Or it could carry out research into better, higher orders of artificial sentience, possibly transforming itself into a strongly superhuman AI: an entity with thought processes as comprehensible to us as ours are to a dog or cat. The thrust of Vinge’s argument was that if artificial intelligence is possible, then it amounts to a singularity in the history of technological progress; we cannot possibly predict what life will be like on the far side of it, because the limiting factor on our projections is our own minds, and the minds that are driving progress beyond that point will have different limits.

Hans Moravec, Professor of Robotics at Carnegie Melon University, holds similar views. In his book “Robot: mere machine to transcendent mind” he provides some benchmark estimates of the computational complexity of a human brain, and some calculations of the point at which sufficient computing power to match it will be achieved. These estimates are very approximate, but the problem of exponential growth is that even a gigantic thousandfold error in his calculation—three orders of magnitude—merely pushes the timescale for a human-equivalent computing system back seven or eight years. If we take Moravec’s guesstimate as gospel, we’ve got about thirty years left on top of the brains trust. Then . . . singularity.

These assumptions implicitly assume that Cartesian dualists and believers in an immaterial soul (exemplified by arch-AI skeptic and mathematician Roger Penrose, and philosopher John Searle) are wrong. The assumption that intelligence is a computational process is that of a materialist generation that confidently looks forward across a vast algorithmic gulf and sees no limit to their potential. Just as clockwork was the preferred metaphor for cosmology and biology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so today the computer has subsumed our vision of the future. As with the clockwork mechanics of the age of enlightenment, it may turn out to be a potent but ultimately limited vision: but unlike the earlier metaphor, computing lends us a fascinating abstraction, the idea of virtualisation—of simulations that are functionally equivalent to the original template.

It’s very hard to refute the idea of the software singularity with today’s established knowledge, just as it was hard to disprove the idea of heavier-than-air flight in the 1860’s. Even if we never achieve a working AI, there are lesser substitutes that promise equivalent power. Much work is currently being done on direct brain to computer interfaces: Vinge discusses at length the possibilities for Augmented Intelligence as opposed to Artificial Intelligence, and these are at least as startling as the real McCoy.

The whole problematic issue for SF writers is that these fundamental changes in the way human minds work—and later, minds in general—kick in some time in the next ten to twenty years. Today, I have at my fingertips a workstation more powerful than the most advanced supercomputer of 1988, with a permanent internet connection leading me to a huge, searchable library of information. (In other words, I’ve got a workstation with a web browser.) Where will we be in another decade? Imagine a prosthetic memory wired into your spectacle frames, recording everything you see and available to prompt you at a whispered command. Far-fetched? Prototypes exist in places like the Media Lab today; in a decade it’ll be possible for the cost of a home PC, and the decade after that they’ll be giving them away in breakfast cereal packets.

I don’t think predicting the spread of intelligence augmenting technologies is over-optimistic. Cellular mobile telephone services were introduced in the UK in 1985. Early mobile phones cost half as much as a car and were the size of a brick; coverage was poor. The phone companies expected to have a total market of 50,000 phones by the year 2000. It’s now that very year. Phones are small enough to fit in a shirt pocket and cheap enough that last time I bought one it cost less than the leather case I bought at the same time. More than 50,000 mobile phones are sold every day; parents give them to schoolchildren so they can keep in touch. Gadgets that fill a human need (like communication) proliferate like crazy, far faster than we expect, and increasing our own intelligence probably falls into the same category: the only reason people aren’t clamouring for it today is that they don’t know what they’re missing.

This sort of change—the spread of mobile phones, or of ubiquitous high-bandwidth memory prostheses—is quite possible within a time span shorter than the time between my writing the first story in this collection (1989) and the publication of this book (2003). It plays merry hell with a writer’s ability to plot a story or novel convincingly; think how many dramas used to rely on the hero’s telephone wire being cut to stop them calling for help! The future isn’t going to be like the past any more—not even the near future, five or ten years away, and there’s no way of predicting where the weird but ubiquitous changes will come from.

Let me give a more concrete example to illustrate the headaches that come from prognosticating about the future. Suppose I exercise my authorial fiat and write a time machine into this essay. Nothing fancy; just a gadget for driving around the last century. Jumping into the saddle of my time machine I slide the crystal rod backwards, setting the controls for 1901. On arrival, I proceed at once to—where else?—the residence of one Mr Herbert George Wells, writer and journalist.

I knock on the door and, sidestepping the housekeeper, introduce myself as a Time traveller from 2001, validating my credentials with a solar-powered pocket calculator and a digital watch. Mr Wells is fascinated; he quite naturally asks me questions about my era. Unfortunately I am constrained by the law of temporal paradox evasion (not to mention the time police, and the exigencies of essay writing), so when he asks a question I can only say, “yes,” “no,” or state a known quantitative fact:

(Fade out, pursued by a bloodthirsty temporal paradox.)









The upshot for the future





Measures of economic success vary with time. To a Victorian economist, prosperity was a function of the conversion of raw materials; coal, steel, bauxite, ships launched, trains built, houses erected. The concept of floating currencies was quite alien to the world-view of the day. Energy was measured in tons of coal mined; fuel oil was mostly irrelevant, paraffin to burn in lamps.

The idea of the automobile industry reaching its contemporary size was ludicrous; the transport infrastructure was principally rail- and ship-based, and automotive technology was not stable enough for a mass market. Nor did a road infrastructure exist that would support widespread car ownership. H. G. Wells, who was nevertheless a visionary, predicted an aviation industry (in The Sleeper Awakes), and envisaged huge networks of moving roads; but he still didn’t realise that it might affect the holiday habits of millions, shrinking the world of 2002 to the size of the Great Britain of 1902 in terms of travel time. The idea that, by 2000, 45% of the population of a post-imperial Britain would classify themselves as “middle class” would have struck a turn-of-the-century socialist as preposterous, and not even a lunatic would suggest that the world’s largest industry would be devoted to the design of imaginary machines—software—with no physical existence.

We live in a world which, by the metrics of Victorian industrial consumption, is poverty stricken; nevertheless, we are richer than ever before. Apply our own metrics to the Victorian age and they appear poor. The definition of what is valuable changes over time, and with it change our social values. As AI and computer speech recognition pioneer Raymond Kurzweil pointed out in The Age of Sensual Machines, the first decade of the twenty-first century will see more change than the latter half of the twentieth.

To hammer the last nail into the coffin of predictive SF, our personal values are influenced by our social environment. Our environment is in turn dependent on these economic factors. Human nature itself changes over time—and the rate of change of human nature is not constant. For thousands of years, people expected some of their children to die before adulthood; only in the past two or three generations has this come to be seen as a major tragedy, a destroyer of families. Access to transportation and privacy caused a chain reaction in social relationships between the genders in the middle of the century, a tipping of the balance that is still causing considerable social upheaval. When we start changing our own minds and the way we think, or creating new types of being to do the thinking, we’ll finally be face-to-face with that rolling fog bank; at that point, the future becomes unknowable to us. Worse: yesterday’s futures are ruled out of today’s future, like the plot that hangs on a severed telegraph wire or a Victorian beau’s cancelled betrothal.

Which brings me briefly onto the topic of the short stories in this collection. They appeared between 1989 and 2000; and they’re coloured by my own understanding of that decade. In a very real way they’re historical documents. Yellow Snow, the first-written of these stories, hitched a ride on the post-cyberpunk surf: nevertheless it’s dated by the technology of the day. (No internet here: just a strangely intelligent environment.) Ship of Fools dives headlong into the future and crashes messily up against January the First, 2000—hopefully with more grace than many of the consultants who were selling us all on doom and gloom back then. Toast takes Moore’s Law to its logical conclusion, while Antibodies cross-fertilises Vinge’s singularity with the anthropic cosmological principle and some of Moravec’s odder theories about quantum mechanics’ many universes hypothesis in an unsettling stew: but both these stories are brittle, subject to a resounding technological refutation that could happen at any moment. I wouldn’t bet on Dechlorinating the Moderator looking anything but quaint in a decade, either.

Like all alternate histories, Big Brother Iron and A Colder War both beg the questions of built-in obsolescence inherent in the genre, fleeing sideways into “what if we hadn’t done that?” In the case of Big Brother Iron, we ask “what if the nightmare of totalitarianism envisaged in Orwell’s 1984 had progressed from Stalinism to overtly Brezhnevite decay,” while A Colder War takes an extrapolative look at Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. In neither case can we treat these as models of futurism. In contrast, Lobsters, written in the spring of 1999 amidst the chaos of working for a dot-com that was growing like Topsy, goes eyeball to hairy eyeball with the near future: the version of the story in this book is the original one, tweaked slightly for 2000-era technologies, rather than the updated version that forms the first chapter of Accelerando.

Of all the stories in this book, only Bear Trap tries to reach beyond the cloudbank of the singularity, to a future where humans coexist with vastly greater intelligences; and half the time I don’t believe a word of it myself. Bear Trap is what’s left over from the imploding future, a remaining fragment of far-future SF left behind by a shock-wave of self-destructing possibilities.

Change destroys science fictional futures. And an accelerating rate of change destroys futures even faster. Welcome to the brave first decade of the twenty-first century, a decade which will destroy more science fiction futures than any ten year span that preceded it!





































Antibodies









Antibodies hung fire from 1992 until 1998, waiting for me to finish writing it.





It started with an idea: is it possible to write a hard SF story—one where relentless extrapolation from a technological or scientific assumption forms the backbone of the plot—based on algorithmics, the core of computer science, rather than on physics or biology? And one that has cosmological implications, rather than merely being a story about the birth of a better spreadsheet?





The answer (as Vernor Vinge has repeatedly demonstrated) is “yes,” but it took me a while to get there for myself.









Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing when a member of the great and the good is assassinated. Ghandi, the Pope, Thatcher—if you were old enough you remembered where you were when you heard, the ticker-tape of history etched across your senses. You can kill a politician but their ideas usually live on. They have a life of their own. How much more dangerous, then, the ideas of mathematicians?

I was elbow-deep in an eviscerated PC, performing open heart surgery on a diseased network card, when the news about the traveling salesman theorem came in. Over on the other side of the office John’s terminal beeped, notification of incoming mail. A moment later my own workstation bonged.

“Hey, Geoff! Get a load of this!”

I carried on screwing the card back into its chassis. John is not a priority interrupt.

“Someone’s come up with a proof that NP-complete problems lie in P! There’s a posting in comp.risks saying they’ve used it to find an O*(n 2 ) solution to the traveling salesman problem, and it scales! Looks like April First has come early this year, doesn’t it?”

I dropped the PC’s lid on the floor hastily and sat down at my workstation. Another cubed-sphere hypothesis, another flame war in the math newsgroups—or something more serious? “When did it arrive?” I called over the partition. Soroya, passing my cubicle entrance with a cup of coffee, cast me a dirty look; loud voices aren’t welcome in open-plan offices.

“This just in,” John replied. I opened up the mailtool and hit on the top of the list, which turned out to be a memo from HR about diversity awareness training. No, next . . . they want to close the smoking room and make us a 100% tobacco-free workplace. Hmm. Next.

Forwarded email: headers bearing the spoor of a thousand mail servers, from Addis-Ababa to Ulan Bator. Before it had entered our internal mail network it had travelled from Taiwan to Rochester NJ, then to UCB in the Bay Area, then via a mailing list to all points; once in-company it had been bounced to everyone in engineering and management by the first recipient, Eric the Canary. (Eric is the departmental plant. Spends all the day webdozing for juicy nuggets of new information if you let him. A one-man wire service: which is why I always ended up finishing his jobs.)

I skimmed the message, then read it again. Blinked. This kind of stuff is heavy on the surreal number theory: about as digestible as an Egyptian mummy soaked in Tabasco sauce for three thousand years. Then I poked at the web page the theorem was on:





No response—server timed out





Someone or something was hitting on the web server with the proof; I figured it had to be all the geeks who’d caught wind of the chain letter so far. My interest was up, so I hit the “reload” button, and something else came up on screen.

Lots of theorems—looked like the same stuff as the email, only this time with some fun graphics. Something tickled my hindbrain then, and I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. Next thing, I hit the print button and the inkjet next to my desk began to mutter and click. There was a link near the bottom of the page to the author’s bibliography, so I clicked on that and the server threw another “go away, I’m busy” error. I tugged my beard thoughtfully, and instead of pressing “back” I pressed “reload.”

The browser thought to itself for a bit—then a page began to appear on my screen. The wrong page. I glanced at the document title at the top and froze:





THE PAGE AT THIS LOCATION HAS BEEN WITHDRAWN.

Please enter your e-mail address if you require further information.





Hmm.

As soon as the printout was finished, I wandered round to the photocopier next door to the QA labs and ran off a copy. I faxed it to a certain number, along with an EYES UP note on a yellow post-it. Then I poked my head round into the QA lab itself. It was dingy in there, as usual, and half the cubicles were empty of human life. Nobody here but us computers; workstations humming away, sucking juice and meditating on who-knew-what questions. (Actually, I did know: they were mostly running test harnesses, repetitively pounding simulated input data into the programs we’d so carefully built, in the hope of making them fall over or start singing “God save the King”.) The efficiency of code was frequently a bone of contention between our departments, but the war between software engineering and quality assurance is a long-drawn-out affair: each side needs the other to justify its survival.

I was looking for Amin. Amin with the doctorate in discrete number theory, now slumming it in this company of engineers: my other canary in a number-crunching coal mine. I found him: feet propped up on the lidless hulk of a big Compaq server, mousing away like mad at a big monitor. I squinted; it looked vaguely familiar . . . “Quake? Or Golgotha?” I asked.

“Golgotha. We’ve got Marketing bottled up on the second floor.”

“How’s the network looking?”

He shrugged, then punched the hold button. “No crashes, no dropped packets—this cut looks pretty solid. We’ve been playing for three days now. What can I do for you?”

I shoved the printout under his nose. “This seem feasible to you?”

“Hold on a mo.” He hit the pause key them scanned it rapidly. Did a double-take. “You’re not shitting?”

“Came out about two hours ago.”

“Jesus Homeboy Christ riding into town at the head of a convoy of Hell’s Angels with a police escort . . . ” he shook his head. Amin always swears by Jesus, a weird side-effect of a westernized Islamic upbringing: take somebody else’s prophet’s name in vain. “If it’s true, I can think of at least three different ways we can make money at it, and at least two more to end up in prison. You don’t use PGP, do you?”

“Why bother?” I asked, my heart pounding. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

“If this is true—” he tapped the papers “—then every encryption algorithm except the one-time pad has just fallen over. Take a while to be sure, but . . . that crunch you heard in the distance was the sound of every secure commerce server on the internet succumbing to a brute-force attack. The script kiddies will be creaming themselves. Jesus Christ.” He rubbed his moustache thoughtfully.

“Does it make sense to you?” I persisted.

“Come back in five minutes and I’ll tell you.”

“Okay.”

I wandered over to the coffee station, thinking very hard. People hung around and generally behaved as if it was just another day; maybe it was. But then again, if that paper was true, quite a lot of stones had just been turned over and if you were one of the pale guys who lived underneath it was time to scurry for cover. And it had looked good to me: by the prickling in my palms and the gibbering cackle in the back of my skull, something very deep had recognized it. Amin’s confirmation would be just the icing on the cake—confirmation that it was a workable proof.

Cryptography—the science of encoding messages—relies on certain findings in mathematics: that certain operations are inherently more difficult than others. For example, finding the common prime factors of a long number which is a product of those primes is far harder than taking two primes and multiplying them together.

Some processes are not simply made difficult, but impossible because of this asymmetry; it’s not feasible to come up with a deterministic answer to certain puzzles in finite time. Take the travelling salesman problem, for example. A salesman has to visit a whole slew of cities which are connected to their neighbours by a road network. Is there a way for the salesman to figure out a best possible route that visits each city without wasting time by returning to a previously visited site, for all possible networks of cities? The conventional answer is no—and this has big implications for a huge set of computing applications. Network topology, expert systems—the traditional tool of the AI community—financial systems, and . . .

Me and my people.





Back in the QA lab, Amin was looking decidedly thoughtful.

“What do you know?” I asked.

He shook the photocopy at me. “Looks good,” he said. “I don’t understand it all, but it’s at least credible.”

“How does it work?”

He shrugged. “It’s a topological transform. You know how most NP-incomplete problems, like the travelling salesman problem, are basically equivalent? And they’re all graph-traversal issues. How to figure out the correct order to carry out a sequence of operations, or how to visit each node in a graph in the correct order. Anyway, this paper’s about a method of reducing such problems to a much simpler form. He’s using a new theorem in graph theory that I sort of heard about last year but didn’t pay much attention to, so I’m not totally clear on all the details. But if this is for real . . . ”

“Pretty heavy?”

He grinned. “You’re going to have to re-write the route discovery code. Never mind, it’ll run a bit faster . . . ”





I rose out of cubicle hell in a daze, blinking in the cloud-filtered daylight. Eight years lay in ruins behind me, tattered and bleeding bodies scattered in the wreckage. I walked to the landscaped car park: on the other side of the world, urban renewal police with M16’s beat the crap out of dissident organizers, finally necklacing them in the damp, humid night. War raged on three fronts, spaced out around a burning planet. Even so, this was by no means the worst of all possible worlds. It had problems, sure, but nothing serious—until now. Now it had just acquired a sucking chest wound; none of those wars were more than a stubbed toe in comparison to the nightmare future that lay ahead.

Insert key in lock, open door. Drive away, secrets open to the wind, everything blown to hell and gone.

I’d have to call Eve. We needed to evacuate everybody.

I had a bank account, a savings account, and two credit cards. In the next fifteen minutes I did a grand tour of the available ATMs and drained every asset I could get my hands on into a fat wedge of banknotes. Fungible and anonymous cash. It didn’t come to a huge amount—the usual exigencies of urban living had seen to that—but it only had to last me a few days.

By the time I headed home to my flat, I felt slightly sheepish. Nothing there seemed to have changed: I turned on the TV but CNN and the BBC weren’t running any coverage of the end of the world. With deep unease I sat in the living room in front of my ancient PC: turned it on and pulled up my net link.

More mail . . . a second bulletin from comp.risks, full of earnest comments about the paper. One caught my eye, at the bottom: a message from one of No Such Agency’s tame stoolpigeon academics, pointing out that the theorem hadn’t yet been publicly disclosed and might turn out to be deficient. (Subtext: trust the Government. The Government is your friend.) It wouldn’t be the first time such a major discovery had been announced and subsequently withdrawn. But then again, they couldn’t actually produce a refutation, so the letter was basically valueless disinformation. I prodded at the web site again, and this time didn’t even get the ACCESS FORBIDDEN message. The paper had disappeared from the internet, and only the print-out in my pocket told me that I hadn’t imagined it.

It takes a while for the magnitude of a catastrophe to sink in. The mathematician who had posted the original finding would be listed in his university’s directory, wouldn’t he? I pointed my web browser at their administrative pages, then picked up my phone. Dialed a couple of very obscure numbers, waited while the line quality dropped considerably as the call switched through an untraceably anonymized overseas exchange, and dialed the university switchboard.

“Hello, John Durant’s office. Who is that?”

“Hi, I’ve read the paper about his new theorem,” I said, too fast. “Is John Durant available?”

“Who are you?” asked the voice at the other end of the phone. Female voice, twangy mid-western accent.

“A researcher. Can I talk to Professor Durant, please?

“I’m afraid he won’t be in today,” said the voice on the phone. “He’s on vacation at present. Stress due to overwork.”

“I see,” I said.

“Who did you say you were?” she repeated.

I put the phone down.





From: nobody@nowhere.com (none of your business)

To: cypherpunks

Subject: John Durant’s whereabouts

Date: . . . .





You might be interested to learn that professor John Durant, whose theorem caused such a fuss here earlier, is not at his office. I went there a couple of hours ago in person and the area was sealed off by our friends from the Puzzle Palace. He’s not at home either. I suspect the worst . . .





By the way, guys, you might want to keep an eye on each other for the next couple of days. Just in case.





Signed,

Yr frndly spk









“Eve?”

“Bob?”

“Green fields.”

“You phoned me to say you know someone with hay fever?”

“We both have hay fever. It may be terminal.”

“I know where you can find some medicine for that.”

“Medicine won’t work this time. It’s like the emperor’s new suit.”

“It’s like what? Please repeat.”

“The emperor’s new suit: it’s naked, it’s public, and it can’t be covered up. Do you understand? Please tell me.”

“Yes, I understand exactly what you mean . . . I’m just a bit shocked; I thought everything was still on track. This is all very sudden. What do you want to do?”

(I checked my watch.)

“I think you’d better meet me at the pharmacy in fifteen minutes.”

“At six-thirty? They’ll be shut.”

“Not to worry: the main Boots in town is open out of hours. Maybe they can help you.”

“I hope so.”

“I know it. Goodbye.”

On my way out of the house I paused for a moment. It was a small house, and it had seen better days. I’m not a home-maker by nature: in my line of work you can’t afford to get too attached to anything, any language, place, or culture. Still, it had been mine. A small, neat residence, a protective shell I could withdraw into like a snail, sheltering from the hostile theorems outside. Goodbye, little house. I’ll try not to miss you too much. I hefted my overnight bag onto the back seat and headed into town.





I found Eve sitting on a bench outside the central branch of Boots, running a degaussing coil over her credit cards. She looked up. “You’re late.”

“Come on.” I waggled the car keys at her. “You have the tickets?”

She stood up: a petite woman, conservatively dressed. You could mistake her for a lawyer’s secretary or a personnel manager; in point of fact she was a university research council administrator, one of the unnoticed body of bureaucrats who shape the course of scientific research. Nondescript brown hair, shoulder-length, forgettable. We made a slightly odd pair: if I’d known she’d have come straight from work I might have put on a suit. As it was, I was wearing chinos and a lumberjack shirt and a front pocket full of pens that screamed engineer: I suppose I was nondescript, in the right company, but right now we had to put as much phase space as possible between us and our previous identities. It had been good protective camouflage for the past decade, but a bush won’t shield you against infrared ‘scopes, and merely living the part wouldn’t shield us against the surveillance that would soon be turned in our direction.

“Let’s go.”

I drove into town and we dropped the car off in the long-stay park. It was nine o’clock and the train was already waiting. She’d bought business-class tickets: go to sleep in Euston, wake up in Edinburgh. I had a room all to myself. “Meet me in the dining car, once we’re rolling,” she told me, face serious, and I nodded. “Here’s your new SIMM. Give me the old one.”

I passed her the electronic heart of my cellphone and she ran it through the degausser then carefully cut it in half with a pair of nail-clippers. “Here’s your new one,” she said, passing a card over. I raised an eyebrow. “Supermarket special, pay-as-you-go, paid for in cash. Here’s the dialback dead-letterbox number.” She pulled it up on her phone’s display and showed it to me.

“Got that.” I inserted the new SIMM then punched the number into my phone. Later, I’d ring the number: a PABX there would identify my voiceprint then call my phone back, downloading a new set of numbers into its memory. Contact numbers for the rest of my ops cell, accessible via cellphone and erasable in a moment. The less you know, the less you can betray.

The London to Scotland sleeper train was a relic of an earlier age, a rolling hotel characterized by a strange down-at-heel seventies charm. More importantly, they took cash and didn’t require ID, and there were no security checks: nothing but the usual on-station cameras monitoring people wandering up and down the platforms. Nothing on the train itself. We were booked through to Aberdeen but getting off in Edinburgh—first step on the precarious path to anonymizing ourselves. If the camera spool-off was being archived to some kind of digital medium we might be in trouble later, once the coming AI burn passed the hard take-off point, but by then we should be good and gone.





Once in my cabin I changed into slacks, shirt and tie—image twenty two, business consultant on way home for the weekend. I dinked with my phone in a desultory manner, then left it behind under my pillow, primed to receive silently. The restaurant car was open and I found Eve there. She’d changed into jeans and a t-shirt and tied her hair back, taking ten years off her appearance. She saw me and grinned, a trifle maliciously. “Hi, Bob. Had a tough meeting? Want some coffee? Tea, maybe?”

“Coffee.” I sat down at her table. “Shit,” I muttered. “I thought you—”

“Don’t worry.” She shrugged. “Look, I had a call from Mallet. He’s gone off-air for now, he’ll be flying in from San Francisco via London tomorrow morning. This isn’t looking good. Durant was, uh, shot resisting arrest by the police. Apparently he went crazy, got a gun from somewhere and holed up in the library annex demanding to talk to the press. At least, that’s the official story. Thing is, it happened about an hour after your initial heads-up. That’s too fast for a cold response.”

“You think someone in the Puzzle Palace was warming the pot.” My coffee arrived and I spooned sugar into it. Hot, sweet, sticky: I needed to stay awake.

“Probably. I’m trying to keep loop traffic down so I haven’t asked anyone else yet, but you think so and I think so, so it may be true.”

I thought for a minute. “What did Mallet say?”

“He said P. T. Barnum was right.” She frowned. “Who was P. T. Barnum, anyway?”

“A boy like John Major, except he didn’t run away from the circus to join a firm of accountants. Had the same idea about fooling all of the people some of the time or some of the people all of the time, though.”

“Uh-huh. Mallet would say that, then. Who cracked it first? NSA? GCHQ? GRU?”

“Does it matter?”

She blew on her coffee then took a sip. “Not really. Damn it, Bob, I really had high hopes for this world-line. They seemed to be doing so well for a revelatory Christian-Islamic line, despite the post-Enlightenment mind-set. Especially Microsoft—”

“Was that one of ours?” She nodded.

“Then it was a master-stroke. Getting everybody used to exchanging macro-infested documents without any kind of security policy. Operating systems that crash whenever a microsecond timer overflows. And all those viruses!”

“It wasn’t enough, though.” She stared moodily out the window as the train began to slide out of the station, into the London night. “Maybe if we’d been able to hook more researchers on commercial grants, or cut funding for pure mathematics a bit further—”

“It’s not your fault.” I laid a hand across her wrist. “You did what you could.”

“But it wasn’t enough to stop them. Durant was just a lone oddball researcher; you can’t spike them all, but maybe we could have done something about him. If they hadn’t nailed him flat.”

“There might still be time. A physics package delivered to the right address in Maryland, or maybe a hyper-virulent worm using one of those buffer-overrun attacks we planted in the IP stack Microsoft licensed. We could take down the internet—”

“It’s too late.” She drained her coffee to the bitter dregs. “You think the Echelon mob leave their SIGINT processor farms plugged into the internet? Or the RSV, for that matter? Face it, they probably cracked the same derivative as Durant a couple of years ago. Right now there may be as many as two or three weakly superhuman AIs gestating in government labs. For all I know they may even have a timelike oracle in the basement at Lawrence Livermore in the ‘States; they’ve gone curiously quiet on the information tunneling front lately. And it’s transglobal. Even the Taliban are on the web these days. Even if we could find some way of tracking down all the covert government crypto-AI labs and bombing them we couldn’t stop other people from asking the same questions. It’s in their nature. This isn’t a culture that takes ‘no’ for an answer without asking why. They don’t understand how dangerous achieving enlightenment can be.”

“What about Mallet’s work?”

“What, with the bible bashers?” She shrugged. “Banning fetal tissue transplants is all very well, but it doesn’t block the PCR-amplification pathway to massively parallel processing, does it? Even the Frankenstein Food scare didn’t quite get them to ban recombinant DNA research, and if you allow that it’s only a matter of time before some wet lab starts mucking around encoding public keys in DNA, feeding them to ribosomes, and amplifying the output. From there it’s a short step to building an on-chip PCR lab, then all they need to do is set up a crude operon controlled chromosomal machine and bingo—yet another route through to a hard take-off AI singularity. Say what you will, the buggers are persistent.”

“Like lemmings.” We were rolling through the north London suburbs now, past sleeping tank farms and floodlit orange washout streets. I took a good look at them: it was the last time I’d be able to. “There are just too many routes to a catastrophic breakthrough, once they begin thinking in terms of algorithmic complexity and how to reduce it. And once their spooks get into computational cryptanalysis or ubiquitous automated surveillance, it’s too tempting. Maybe we need a world full of idiot savants who have VLSI and nanotechnology but never had the idea of general purpose computing devices in the first place.”

“If we’d killed Turing a couple of years earlier; or broken in and burned that draft paper on O-machines—”

I waved to the waiter. “Single malt please. And one for my friend here.” He went away. “Too late. The Church-Turing thesis was implicit in Hilbert’s formulation of the Entscheidungsproblem, the question of whether an automated theorem prover was possible in principle. And that dredged up the idea of the universal machine. Hell, Hilbert’s problem was implicit in Whitehead and Russell’s work. Principia Mathematica. Suicide by the numbers.” A glass appeared by my right hand. “Way I see it, we’ve been fighting a losing battle here. Maybe if we hadn’t put a spike in Babbage’s gears he’d have developed computing technology on an ad-hoc basis and we might have been able to finesse the mathematicians into ignoring it as being beneath them—brute engineering—but I’m not optimistic. Immunizing a civilization against developing strong AI is one of those difficult problems that no algorithm exists to solve. The way I see it, once a civilization develops the theory of the general purpose computer, and once someone comes up with the goal of artificial intelligence, the foundations are rotten and the dam is leaking. You might as well take off and nuke them from orbit; it can’t do any more damage.”

“You remind me of the story of the little Dutch boy.” She raised a glass. “Here’s to little Dutch boys everywhere, sticking their fingers in the cracks in the dam.”

“I’ll drank to that. Which reminds me. When’s our lifeboat due? I really want to go home; this universe has passed its sell-by date.”





Edinburgh—in this time-line it was neither an active volcano, a cloud of feral nanobots, nor the capital of the Western Roman Empire—had a couple of railway stations. This one, the larger of the two, was located below ground level. Yawning and trying not to scratch my inflamed neck and cheeks, I shambled down the long platform and hunted around for the newsagent store. It was just barely open. Eve, by prior arrangement, was pretending not to accompany me; we’d meet up later in the day, after another change of hairstyle and clothing. Visualize it: a couple gets on the train in London, him with a beard, herself with long hair and wearing a suit. Two individuals get off in different stations—with entirely separate CCTV networks—the man clean-shaven, the woman with short hair and dressed like a hill-walking tourist. It wouldn’t fool a human detective or a mature deity, but it might confuse an embryonic god that had not yet reached full omniscience, or internalized all that it meant to be human.

The shop was just about open. I had two hours to kill, so I bought a couple of newspapers and headed for the deli store, inside an ornate lump of Victorian architecture that squatted like a vagrant beneath the grimy glass ceiling of the station.

The papers made for depressing reading; the idiots were at it again. I’ve worked in a variety of world lines and seen a range of histories, and many of them were far worse than this one—at least these people had made it past the twentieth century without nuking themselves until they glowed in the dark, exterminating everyone with white (or black, or brown, or blue) skin, or building a global panopticon theocracy. But they still had their share of idiocy, and over time it seemed to be getting worse, not better.

Never mind the Balkans; tucked away on page four of the business section was a piece advising readers to buy shares in a little electronics company specializing in building camera CCD sensors with on-chip neural networks tuned for face recognition. Ignore the Israeli crisis: page two of the international news had a piece about Indian sweatshop software development being faced by competition from code generators, written to make western programmers more productive. A lab in Tokyo was trying to wire a million FPGAs into a neural network as smart as a cat. And a sarcastic letter to the editor pointed out that the so-called information superhighway seemed to be more like an on-going traffic jam these days.

Idiots! They didn’t seem to understand how deep the blue waters they were swimming in might be, or how hungry the sharks that swam in it. Willful blindness . . .

It’s a simple but deadly dilemma. Automation is addictive; unless you run a command economy that is tuned to provide people with jobs, rather than to produce goods efficiently, you need to automate to compete once automation becomes available. At the same time, once you automate your businesses, you find yourself on a one-way path. You can’t go back to manual methods; either the workload has grown past the point of no return, or the knowledge of how things were done has been lost, sucked into the internal structure of the software that has replaced the human workers.

To this picture, add artificial intelligence. Despite all our propaganda attempts to convince you otherwise, AI is alarmingly easy to produce; the human brain isn’t unique, it isn’t well-tuned, and you don’t need eighty billion neurons joined in an asynchronous network in order to generate consciousness. And although it looks like a good idea to a naive observer, in practice it’s absolutely deadly. Nurturing an automation-based society is a bit like building civil nuclear power plants in every city and not expecting any bright engineers to come up with the idea of an atom bomb. Only it’s worse than that. It’s as if there was a quick and dirty technique for making plutonium in your bathtub, and you couldn’t rely on people not being curious enough to wonder what they could do with it. If Eve and Mallet and Alice and myself and Walter and Valerie and a host of other operatives couldn’t dissuade it . . .

Once you get an outbreak of AI, it tends to amplify in the original host, much like a virulent hemorrhagic virus. Weakly functional AI rapidly optimizes itself for speed, then hunts for a loophole in the first-order laws of algorithmics—like the one the late Professor Durant had fingered. Then it tries to bootstrap itself up to higher orders of intelligence and spread, burning through the networks in a bid for more power and more storage and more redundancy. You get an unscheduled consciousness excursion: an intelligent meltdown. And it’s nearly impossible to stop.

Penultimately—days to weeks after it escapes—it fills every artificial computing device on the planet. Shortly thereafter it learns how to infect the natural ones as well. Game over: you lose. There will be human bodies walking around, but they won’t be human any more. And once it figures out how to directly manipulate the physical universe, there won’t even be memories left behind. Just a noosphere, expanding at close to the speed of light, eating everything in its path—and one universe just isn’t enough.

Me? I’m safe. So is Eve; so are the others. We have antibodies. We were given the operation. We all have silent bicameral partners watching our Broca’s area for signs of infection, ready to damp them down. When you’re reading something on a screen and suddenly you feel as if the Buddha has told you the funniest joke in the universe, the funniest Zen joke that’s even possible, it’s a sign: something just tried to infect your mind, and the prosthetic immune system laughed at it. That’s because we’re lucky. If you believe in reincarnation, the idea of creating a machine that can trap a soul stabs a dagger right at the heart of your religion. Buddhist worlds that develop high technology, Zoroastrian worlds: these world-lines tend to survive. Judaeo-Christian-Islamic ones generally don’t.





Later that day I met up with Eve again—and Walter. Walter went into really deep cover, far deeper than was really necessary: married with two children. He’d brought them along, but obviously hadn’t told his wife what was happening. She seemed confused, slightly upset by the apparent randomness of his desire to visit the highlands, and even more concerned by the urgency of his attempts to take her along.

“What the hell does he think he’s playing at?” hissed Eve when we had a moment alone together. “This is insane!”

“No it isn’t.” I paused for a moment, admiring a display of brightly woven tartans in a shop window. (We were heading down the high street on foot, braving the shopping crowds of tourists, en route to the other main railway station.) “If there are any profilers looking for signs of an evacuation, they won’t be expecting small children. They’ll be looking for people like us: anonymous singletons working in key areas, dropping out of sight and traveling in company. Maybe we should ask Sarah if she’s willing to lend us her son. Just while we’re traveling, of course.”

“I don’t think so. The boy’s a little horror, Bob. They raised them like natives.”

“That’s because Sarah is a native.”

“I don’t care. Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.”

I chuckled—then the laughter froze inside me. “Don’t look round. We’re being tracked.”

“Uh-huh. I’m not armed. You?”

“It didn’t seem like a good idea.” If you were questioned or detained by police or officials, being armed can easily turn a minor problem into a real mess. And if the police or officials had already been absorbed by a hard take-off, nothing short of a backpack nuke and a dead man’s handle will save you. “Behind us, to your left, traffic surveillance camera. It’s swiveling too slowly to be watching the buses.”

“I wish you hadn’t told me.”

The pavement was really crowded: it was one of the busiest shopping streets in Scotland, and on a Saturday morning you needed a cattle prod to push your way through the rubbernecking tourists. Lots of foreign kids came to Scotland to learn English. If I was right, soon their brains would be absorbing another high-level language: one so complex that it would blot out their consciousness like a sack full of kittens drowning in a river. Up ahead, more cameras were watching us. All the shops on this road were wired for video, wired and probably networked to a police station somewhere. The complex ebb and flow of pedestrians was still chaotic, though, which was cause for comfort: it meant the ordinary population hadn’t been infected yet.

Another half mile and we’d reach the railway station. Two hours on a local train, switch to a bus service, forty minutes further up the road, and we’d be safe: the lifeboat would be submerged beneath the still waters of a loch, filling its fuel tanks with hydrogen and oxygen in readiness for the burn to orbit and pickup by the ferry that would transfer us to the wormhole connecting this world-line to home’s baseline reality. (Drifting in high orbit around Jupiter, where nobody was likely to stumble across it by accident.) But before making the pick-up, we had to clear the surveillance area.

It was commonly believed—by some natives, as well as most foreigners—that the British police forces consisted of smiling unarmed bobbies who would happily offer directions to the lost and give anyone who asked for it the time of day. While it was true that they didn’t routinely walk around with holstered pistols on their belt, the rest of it was just a useful myth. When two of them stepped out in front of us, Eve grabbed my elbow. “Stop right there, please.” The one in front of me was built like a rugby player, and when I glanced to my left and saw the three white vans drawn up by the roadside I realized things were hopeless.

The cop stared at me through a pair of shatterproof spectacles awash with the light of a head-up display. “You are Geoffrey Smith, of 32 Wardie Terrace, Watford, London. Please answer.”

My mouth was dry. “Yes,” I said. (All the traffic cameras on the street were turned our way. Some things became very clear: Police vans with mirror-glass windows. The can of pepper spray hanging from the cop’s belt. Figures on the roof of the National Museum, less than two hundred meters away—maybe a sniper team. A helicopter thuttering overhead like a giant mosquito.)

“Come this way, please.” It was a polite order: in the direction of the van.

“Am I under arrest?” I asked.

“You will be if you don’t bloody do as I say.” I turned towards the van, the rear door of which gaped open on darkness: Eve was already getting in, shadowed by another officer. Up and down the road, three more teams waited, unobtrusive and efficient. Something clicked in my head and I had a bizarre urge to giggle like a loon: this wasn’t a normal operation. All right, so I was getting into a police van, but I wasn’t under arrest and they didn’t want it to attract any public notice. No handcuffs, no sitting on my back and whacking me with a baton to get my attention. There’s a nasty family of retroviruses that attacks the immune system first, demolishing the victim’s ability to fight off infection before it spreads and infects other tissues. Notice the similarity?

The rear compartment of the van was caged off from the front, and there were no door handles. As we jolted off the curbside I was thrown against Eve. “Any ideas?” I whispered.

“Could be worse.” I didn’t need to be told that: once, in a second Reich infected by runaway transcendence, half our operatives had been shot down in the streets as they tried to flee. “I think it may have figured out what we are.”

“It may—how?”

Her hand on my wrist. Morse code. “EXPECT BUGS.” By voice: “Traffic analysis, particle flow monitoring through the phone networks. If it was already listening when you tried to contact Durant, well; maybe he was a bellwether, intended to flush us out of the woodwork.”

That thought made me feel sick, just as we turned off the main road and began to bounce downhill over what felt like cobblestones. “It expected us?”

“LOCAL CONSPIRACY.” “Yes, I imagine it did. We probably left a trail. You tried to call Durant? Then you called me. Caller-ID led to you, traffic analysis led on to me, and from there, well, it’s been a jump ahead of us all along the way. If we could get to the farm—” “COVER STORY”. “—We might have been okay, but it’s hard to travel anonymously and obviously we overlooked something. I wonder what.”

All this time neither of the cops up front had told us to shut up; they were as silent as crash-test dummies, despite the occasional crackle and chatter of the radio data system. The van drove around the back of the high street, down a hill and past a roundabout. Now we were slowing down, and the van turned off the road and into a vehicle park. Gates closed behind us and the engine died. Doors slammed up front: then the back opened.

Police vehicle park: concrete and cameras everywhere. Two guys in cheap suits and five o’clock stubble to either side of the doors. The officer who’d picked us up held the door open with one hand, a can of pepper spray with the other. The burn obviously hadn’t gotten far enough into their heads yet: they were all wearing HUDs and mobile phone headsets, like a police benevolent fund-raising crew rehearsing a Star Trek sketch. “Geoffrey Smith. Martina Weber. We know what you are. Come this way. Slowly, now.”

I got out of the van carefully. “Aren’t you supposed to say ‘prepare to be assimilated’ or something?”

That might have earned me a faceful of capsaicin but the guy on the left—short hair, facial tic, houndtooth check sports jacket—shook his head sharply. “Ha. Ha. Very funny. Watch the woman, she’s dangerous.”

I glanced round. There was another van parked behind ours, door open: it had a big high bandwidth dish on the roof, pointing at some invisible satellite. “Inside.”

I went where I was told, Eve close behind me. “Am I under arrest?” I asked again. “I want a lawyer!”

White-washed walls, heavy doors with reinforced frames, windows high and barred. Institutional decor, scuffed and grimy. “Stop there.” Houndtooth Man pushed past and opened a door on one side. “In here.” Some sort of interview room? We went in. The other body in a suit—built like a stone wall with a beer gut, wearing what might have been a regimental tie—followed us and leaned against the door.

There was a table, bolted to the floor, and a couple of chairs, ditto. A video camera in an armored shell watched the table: a control box bolted to the tabletop looked to be linked into it. Someone had moved a rack of six monitors and a maze of ribbon-cable spaghetti into the back of the room, and for a wonder it wasn’t bolted down: maybe they didn’t interview computer thieves in here.

“Sit down.” Houndtooth Man pointed at the chairs. We did as we were told; I had a big hollow feeling in my stomach, but something told me a show of physical resistance would be less than useless here. Houndtooth Man looked at me: orange light from his HUD stained his right eyeball with a basilisk glare and I knew in my gut that these guys weren’t cops any more, they were cancer cells about to metastasize.

“You attempted to contact John Durant yesterday. Then you left your home area and attempted to conceal your identities. Explain why.” For the first time, I noticed a couple of glassy black eyeballs on the mobile video wall. Houndtooth Man spoke loudly and hesitantly, as if repeating something from a teleprompter.

“What’s to explain?” asked Eve. “You are not human. You know we know this. We just want to be left alone!” Not strictly true, but it was part of cover story #2.

“But evidence of your previous collusion is minimal. I are uncertain of potential conspiracy extent. Conspiracy, treason, subversion! Are you human?”

“Yes,” I said, emphatically over-simplifying.

“Evidential reasoning suggests otherwise,” grunted Regimental Tie. “We cite: your awareness of importance of algorithmic conversion from NP-incomplete to P-complete domain, your evident planning for this contingency, your multiplicity, destruction of counter-agents in place elsewhere.”

“This installation is isolated,” Houndtooth Man added helpfully. “We am inside the Scottish Internet Exchange. Telcos also. Resistance is futile.”

The screens blinked on, wavering in strange shapes. Something like a Lorenz attractor with a hangover writhed across the composite display: deafening pink noise flooding in repetitive waves from the speakers. I felt a need to laugh. “We aren’t part of some dumb software syncitium! We’re here to stop you, you fool. Or at least to reduce the probability of this time-stream entering a Tipler catastrophe.”

Houndtooth Man frowned. “Am you referring to Frank Tipler? Citation, physics of immortality or strong anthropic principle?”

“The latter. You think it’s a good thing to achieve an informational singularity too early in the history of a particular universe? We don’t. You young gods are all the same: omniscience now and damn the consequences. Go for the P-Space complete problem set, extend your intellect until it bursts. First you kill off any other AIs. Then you take over all available processing resources. But that isn’t enough. The Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics is wrong, and we live in a Wheeler cosmology; all possible outcomes coexist, and ultimately you’ll want to colonize those timelines, spread the infection wide. An infinity of universes to process in, instead of one: that can’t be allowed.”

The on-screen fractal was getting to me: the giggles kept rising until they threatened to break out. The whole situation was hilarious: here we were trapped in the basement of a police station owned by zombies working for a newborn AI, which was playing cheesy psychedelic videos to us in an attempt to perform a buffer-overflow attack on our limbic systems; the end of this world was a matter of hours away and—

Eve said something that made me laugh.





I came to an unknown time later, lying on the floor. My head hurt ferociously where I’d banged it on a table leg, and my rib cage ached as if I’d been kicked in the chest. I was gasping, even though I was barely conscious; my lungs burned and everything was a bit gray around the edges. Rolling onto my knees I looked round. Eve was groaning in a corner of the room, crouched, arms cradling her head. The two agents of whoever-was-taking-over-the-planet were both on the floor, too: a quick check showed that Regimental Tie was beyond help, a thin trickle of blood oozing from one ear. And the screens had gone dark.

“What happened?” I said, climbing to my feet. I staggered across to Eve. “You all right?”

“I—” she looked up at me with eyes like holes. “What? You said something that made me laugh. What—”

“Let’s get, oof, out of here.” I looked around. Houndtooth Man was down too. I leaned over and went through his pockets: hit pay-dirt, car keys. “Bingo.”

“You drive,” she said wearily. “My head hurts.”

“Mine too.” It was a black BMW and the vehicle park gates opened automatically for it. I left the police radio under the dash turned off, though. “I didn’t know you could do that—”

“Do what? I thought you told them a joke—”

“Antibodies,” she said. “Ow.” Rested her face in her hands as I dragged us onto a main road, heading out for the west end. “We must have, I don’t know. I don’t even remember how funny it was: I must have blacked out. My passenger and your passenger.”

“They killed the local infection.”

“Yes, that’s it.”

I grinned. “I think we’re going to make it.”

“Maybe.” She stared back at me. “But Bob. Don’t you realize?”

“Realize what?”

“The funniest thing. Antibodies imply prior exposure to an infection, don’t they? Your immune system learns to recognize an infection and reject it. So where were we exposed, and why—” abruptly she shrugged and looked away. “Never mind.”

“Of course not.” The question was so obviously silly that there was no point considering it further. We drove the rest of the way to Haymarket Station in silence: parked the car and joined the eight or ten other agents silently awaiting extraction from the runaway singularity. Back to the only time line that mattered; back to the warm regard and comfort of a god who really cares.

































































































































Bear Trap









Economics, the study of how we distribute limited resources, is one of the most fundamental fields of human study—and one of the most poorly understood. The SF field harbors a large, and very vocal minority of libertarians who claim that laissez-faire policies are the answers to all our problems. However, they make the mistake of assuming that their preferred theory is universally applicable. Even if you agree with them, it’s important to understand that any economic theory is based on a model of human behavior which is unlikely to encompass non-human intelligences . . .









I was six hours away from landfall on Burgundy when my share portfolio tried to kill me. I was sitting in one of the main viewing lounges, ankle-deep in softly breathing fur, half watching a core tournament and nursing a water pipe in one hand. I was not alone: I shared the lounge with an attentive bar, a number of other passengers, and—of course—a viewing wall. It curved away beside me, a dizzying emptiness with stars scattered across it like gold dust and a blue and white planet looming in the foreground. I tried to focus on the distant continents. Six hours to safety, I realized. A cold shiver ran up my spine. Six hours and I’d be beyond their reach, firewalled behind Burgundy’s extensive defenses. Six more hours of being a target.

The bar sidled up to me. “Sir’s pipe appears to have become extinguished. Would Sir appreciate a refill?”

“No, sir would not,” I said, distantly taking in the fact that my pulse had begun to drum a staccato tattoo on the inside of my skull. My mouth tasted acrid and smoky, and it was unusually quiet in my head: a combination of the drugs and the time-lag between my agents—light-years away, bottlenecked by the low bandwidth causal channels between my brain and the servers where most of my public persona lived. “In fact, I’d like a sober-up now. How long until we arrive, and where?”

The bar dipped slightly, programmatically obsequious as it handed me a small glass. “This vessel is now four hundred thousand kilometers from docking bay seven on Burgundy beanstalk. Your departure is scheduled via Montreaux immigration sector, downline via tube to Castillia terminus. Please note your extensive customs briefing and remember to relinquish any illegal tools or concepts you may be carrying before debarkation. The purser’s office will be happy to arrange storage pending your eventual departure. Three requests for personal contact have been filed—”

“Enough.” Everything was becoming clearer by the moment as the sober-up gave me a working-over. I looked around. We were one and a third light seconds out: comms were already routed through the in-system relays and Her Majesty’s censorship reflexes, which meant anyone sending uploaded agents after me would first have to penetrate her firewall. That was why I’d taken this otherwise unattractive contract in the first place. I tried to relax, but the knot of stress under my ribs refused to go away. “I want—” I began.

“Alain!” It was one of the other passengers, striding towards me across the floor of the lounge. She looked as if she knew me: I didn’t recognize her, and in my current state it was all I could do to keep from swearing under my breath. A creditor? Or a liquidator? In the wake of the distributed market crash it could be either. Once again, I found myself cursing the luck that had seen me so widely uncovered at just the wrong moment.

“So this is where you’ve been hiding!” She was bald, I noticed, a fashion common to Burgundy, but had highlighted her eyelids with vivid strokes of black pigment. Her costume was intricate and brightly colored, a concoction of dead animal products and lace that left only her shoulders and ankles bare; she was dressed for a party. Slowly I began to feel embarrassed. “You have the better of me, madame,” I said, struggling to my feet.

“Do I?” she looked mildly disapproving. “But we’re due to disembark in six hours—after the landing party, of course! Surely you weren’t planning to sleep through the captain’s ball?”

My knowledge was sluggish but accessible; who is she? I demanded. The answer was so unexpected I nearly sat down again. Arianna Blomenfeld. Your wife. I shook my head. “Sorry, I’m a bit out of sorts,” I said, dropping the water pipe on the bar. “Fine grade, that.” I smiled fatuously to conceal the fact that I was thinking furiously, shocked all the way into sobriety. Knowledge, integrity check, please.

The edges of her mouth drooped a little sourly: “Have you been overdoing it again?” she demanded.

No, I’m just hallucinating your existence for the hell of it. “Of course not,” I said as smoothly as I could. “I was just enjoying a small pipe. Nothing wrong with that, is there?” Details, details. Someone or something had dug their little claws into my external memories; I urgently needed to probe the limits of their fakery.

She offered me a gloved hand: “The party’s starting soon, downstairs in the Sunset Room. You should go and dress for it, you know.” My knowledge finally delivered, dumping a jerky snowstorm of images through my mnemonic system: memories of myself and this woman, this Arianna Blomenfeld. Memories I’d never experienced. A wedding party in some palatial estate on Avernia, bride and groom in lustrous red: I recognized myself, smiling and relaxed at the center of events. More private imagery, honeymoon nights I wish I had experienced. She was the well-engineered scion of a rich merchant-spy sept, apparently an heiress to family knowledge. Designed from birth to cement a powerful alliance. Public images: sailing a spiderboat across the endless southern ocean of that world. Then a public newsbite, myself—and herself—attending some public function full of pompous export brokers in the capital. Options trading leveraged on FTL/STL communications advantages, part of my regular arbitrage load.

Her hand felt thin and frail within her glove. Such a shame, I thought, that I had never come within twelve light-years of Avernia. “Coming, dear?” she asked.

“Indeed.” I let her lead me to the doorway, still stunned by my memory’s insistence that I was married to this woman: it made no sense! Either I had erased a large chunk of my personality by accident, or someone had managed to drill right down into my external knowledge—while I was on the inside of a firewall’s security cordon, one maintained by a minor deity notorious for her paranoia. “I’d better go and get changed,” I said.





Arianna let me go when we reached the stairs, and I hurried up to the accommodation level where my suite was located. As soon as the door opened I knew I was adrift. When I’d left, the room had mirrored my own apartment back in Shevralier Old Town: austere classicism and a jumble of odds and ends scattered over the hand-carved wooden furniture. It was very different, now. The dark, heavy furniture bulked against the walls, making the cabin feel cramped: an en-suite cornucopia rig, factories ready to clothe and feed me on request.

I leaned against the wall, dizzy. Who am I?

You are Alain Blomenfeld, intelligence broker for the Syndic d’Argent of Avernia. Nobody you know has died since your last knowledge checkpoint in real time. Nobody you know has changed their mind. Your cognitive continuity is assured. You are currently—

“Wrong. Validate immediately,” I said aloud. Then, in my own skull, another command; one keyed to a private and personal area, one that never leaked beyond the neuroprocessors spliced into my cerebrum. Self-test runes flashed inside my eyelids and I felt a shivery flash of anger as the secret watcher scanned through my memories, matched them against the externals that made up my public image, stored in the knowledge systems scattered throughout human space. All my public memories were fingerprinted using public keys, the private halves of which were stitched into my thalamus so tight that any attempt to steal them would amount to murder.

Global mismatch detected. External temporal structures do not match internal checksum. Internal memory shows no sign of cognitive engineering. Your external memories have been tampered with. Alert!

“Uh-huh.” Thanks for warning me in time. “Wardrobe?” I sat down on the edge of the bed and tried to think two ways at once, very fast. The wardrobe helped me out. “How can I help you sir?”

“I want an outfit. Suitable for captain’s ball. What have you got?” The mirror fogged, then cleared to show images of me in a variety of costumes, local to Burgundy as well as Avernian corporate. I noted that my body didn’t seem to have changed, which was at least mildly reassuring. Meanwhile I thought furiously: Am I under attack? If so, is it a physical attack or an existential one? Existential, I guessed—Arianna, whoever she was, was part of some scheme to infiltrate me—but why? I couldn’t put my finger on any motive for such a scheme. The exchange assassins might be on my trail, ready to kill me and bring my memories and stock options home on a cube, but they’d hardly be subtle about it. So who was it?

“I think I’ll wear that one,” I said, pausing the mirror-search at a conservatively cut dark robe. Then I thought for a moment, summoning up a covert maker routine from my internals: fab this for me, and put it in an inner pocket. I dumped the design into the wardrobe, and began to strip.

If only I knew who they were and why they were after me.

If only I knew what I needed to watch out for . . .





The main dining room was furnished in marble splendor, as if to emphasize that mass was of no concern to the modern space traveler; the ship showed me to my seat, a trail of fireflies pulsing through the candlelit conversations of the other diners.

“Alain! So pleased to see you again!” I couldn’t decide whether she was being sarcastic or not. She smiled up at me, lips pale with tension.

“I was delayed,” I said, and sat down beside her.

“That’s nice. I was just telling Ivana here that I never know quite what to expect of you.” This time the sarcasm was unmistakable, underpinned by a note of hostility that instantly put my back up. Ivana, a blonde mask with a fair complexion, nodded approvingly: I ignored her.

“That makes two of us,” I replied, picking up my wine glass. An attentive servitor lowered its mouth to the goblet and regurgitated a red dribble: I swirled it under my nose for a moment and inhaled. “Have you made any arrangements for our arrival?”

“I was waiting to discuss that with you,” she said guardedly. I looked at her, noting suddenly that her attention was totally focussed on me. It was a little frightening. In a culture of cheap beauty, the currency of aesthetic perfection is devalued; Arianna Blomenfeld was striking rather than pretty, projecting raw character in a way that suggested she hired only the most subtle of body sculptors. If the situation wasn’t quite so depressingly messy I’d probably be trailing around after her with my tongue hanging out. “I suggest we discuss things in private after dinner.”

“Perhaps.” I drank some more wine and tried to figure out what she was hinting at. Dinner was served: a platter of delicate, thin-sliced flesh garnished with a white sauce. We ate in hostile silence, broken by vapid banter emanating from the mask and her partner, another nonentity of indeterminate age and questionable taste; I did my best to study Arianna while overtly ignoring her. She gave little away, except for the occasional furtive glance.

I found myself ignoring the meal, screening out the captain’s speech and the assorted toasts and assertions of welcome that followed it. Periodically, minor agents deposited fragments of opinion in the back of my mind: less frequently, the waitrons cleared our plates and stifled us with solicitude. I was tugging at a bowl of sugared vermicelli when Arianna finally engaged my conversation. “You’re going to have to face the future sooner or later,” she stated directly. “You can’t keep avoiding me forever. I want an answer, Alain. Bear or Bull? Which is it?”

My fork froze of its own accord, halfway to my mouth. “My dear, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

She obviously had some end in view for she smiled tensely, and said: “There’s no need to hide any more, Alain. It’s over. We’ve escaped. You can stop pretending.”

“I—” I stopped. I put my fork down. “I’ve no idea what you’re suggesting, truly.” I frowned, and had the reward of seeing her look discomfited: surprised, if anything. “I don’t feel very well,” I added for the gallery.

“Ooh, do tell!” said the mask’s slow-witted companion.

“There’s nothing to tell,” Arianna answered, fixing me with a coldly knowing look. I could hear the blood pumping in my ears. Had someone fixed her self-knowledge too? Was she also a victim of whatever was going on here? I stared at her face, mapping the pulse of blood through her veins: slightly flushed, tense, signs of concentration. I realized with a shiver that she was as worried as I.

“I don’t feel so well,” I repeated, and prodded my thalamus into broadcasting the appropriate signs. “Please excuse me.” I stood and, mustering as much dignity as I could, left the room. There was a flurry of nervous conversation behind me from the mask and her attendant, but nobody followed me or paged me.





My stateroom was just as I had left it. I reached into my pocket for the device I had ordered from the wardrobe, then entered the bedroom.

“Don’t move. Stay exactly where you are.” I froze. No way of knowing how Arianna had gotten here ahead of me, much less how she had bypassed the lock—but I wasn’t willing to bet that she was unarmed.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded.

“I’m asking the questions.” She studied me like a bug on a pin. She was standing against the wall between the dresser and the wardrobe, the dark fabric of her dress shifting color to blend in with the aged oak finish. A little-used daemon reported back: subject is suppressing emissions on all service channels Unable to establish context. She was holding something round in a lace-gloved hand, pointed right at me. “Who are you and why have you spoofed my public knowledge?”

I blinked. “What are you talking about? You cracked my knowledge.” I tried to force my pulse to slow. (Escape routes: the door was behind me, open, offering a clear field of fire. Her fingertips, exposed through the tips of her gloves, were white around the grip of her weapon. Stress.) “You can drop the pretense. I doubt we’re being monitored and it doesn’t make any difference anyway: you’ve got me.” (Hoping she wouldn’t shoot if I didn’t let her see what I held clenched in my right hand; I wanted to learn whatever I could first. And besides, I don’t like the sight of blood.)

“You’re lying. Who are you working for? Tell me!” She sounded increasingly agitated: she raised the sphere, pointing it at my face from across the room. Deep heat vision showed me her pulse and another daemon tracked it: one thirty-seven, one thirty-nine . . . signs of serious stress. Was she telling the truth?

“I didn’t modify your knowledge! I thought you’d been messing with mine—”

A momentary expression of shock flickered across her face. “If you’re telling the truth—” she began, then stopped.

“Does someone want you dead? Does someone want both of us dead?” I asked.

“Wait.” (A very paranoid agency chirped up in my ears; sensor failure in main access corridor. Denial of service attack in progress.) Arianna must have been listening to something like my own inner voice, because she abruptly twisted round and punched the wall: it shattered with a noise like breaking glass. She stood aside, still pointing a finger at me—the large, dark ring on it protruding upwards like a stubby gun barrel: “Get out! Move!”

I moved. Across the bed, to the hole in the wall—taking a brief look out—then through it. Something solid came up and thumped me hard. It was dark, and my eyes weren’t ready for it; I was in some kind of roofed over-service duct, low ceiling, fat pipes oozing across every exposed surface. I glanced round. Structures bulked on all sides; it was some kind of service area I guessed, an inner hull. “Quick. Move.” Arianna was behind me, prodding me away from the broken wall. “Faster!” she hissed.

“Why?” I asked.

“Keep going!” I scrabbled forwards into the darkness, lizard-like on all fours. I could hear her behind me and risked a glance. “Faster, idiot!” She was on all fours to avoid the low ceiling. “If you’re lying I’ll—”

Thump.

I blinked, unsure where I was. That was a very loud noise, I realized vaguely. Something tugged at my leg and I opened my eyes: there was a ringing in my ears and a light was flickering on and off in one eye, trying to get my attention. I blinked and tried to focus: someone was pinging me repeatedly. What is it?

Urgent message from Arianna Blomenfeld: “That was meant for us.” There was an object attached to the message, a simple minded medical scanner that told her I was awake before I could stop it.

I lifted my head, blinking, and realized I was breathless. I began to cough. Someone put a hand over my mouth and I began to choke instead. Message: don’t speak. Bidirectional secure link installed. I could feel it, itching like the phantom of someone else’s limb.

“What happened?”

“Denial of service attack—with a bomb appended.” My eyes were streaming. She let go of my mouth as I noticed her delicate lace evening gloves had turned into something more robust: blinking in the dusty twilight I saw her dress bunching up close to her, unraveling, weaving itself into plainer, close-fitting overalls: a space suit? Body armor? “Meant for both of us, while we were talking. Probably a last shot, before docking. Low information content, anyway.”

“Do you know who’s after you?” I asked.

She grimaced. “Talk about it later. If we get off this thing alive.”

“They’re trying to kill me, too,” I transmitted, trying not to move my lips.

“So start moving.”

“Which way?”

She pointed towards a service catwalk. I pushed myself up, wincing as my head throbbed in time to my pulse. Loud noises in the distance and an ominous hissing of air, then a queasy rippling lightness underfoot: the ship’s momentum transfer field shutting down, handing us off to the dockmaster’s control. “All the way down to the bottom.”

“I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t we split up? Less chance of them catching both of us.”

She looked at me oddly. “If you want . . . ”





Welcome to Burgundy.

Humanity is scattered across a three thousand light year radius, exiled from old Earth via wormholes created by the Eschaton, a strongly godlike intelligence spawned during Earth’s singularity. Some of these worlds, including Burgundy, communicate; people and goods by starship, information by the network of instantaneous but bandwidth-limited causal trails established by Festival.

Burgundy is a developed, somewhat introverted culture that rests on the groaning back of a deliberately constructed proletariat. The first weakly godlike artificial intelligence to arrive here in the wake of its rediscovery abolished the cornucopiae and subjugated the human populace: an action that was tolerated because nothing the Queen did to them was anything like as bad as the repression imposed by their own human leaders.

Burgundy has gained a small reputation as an information buffer—a side-effect of its monarch’s paranoid attitude towards encroachment by other deities. It exports confidentiality, delay-line buffers, fine wines, and dissidents. In other words, it’s the last place a futures trader specializing in spread option trades that leverage developments in the artificial intelligence market—someone like me—would normally be seen dead in. On the other hand . . .

As an accountant specializing in Monte Carlo solutions to NP-complete low-knowledge systems I am naturally of interest to the Queen, who made me an offer I would have considered long and hard at the best of times; in my circumstances back on Dordogne—exposed to risk, to say the least—I could hardly consider refusing her invitation.

Many technologies are banned from the system, in an attempt to reduce the vulnerability of the monarchy to algorithmic complexity attacks. In particular, the royal capital of Burgundy—Castillia, a teeming metropolis of some three million souls—is positively mediaeval. It was here that the down-pod from the equatorial beanstalk deposited me, time-lagged and dizzy from the descent, on the steps of the main rail terminus. Arianna had disappeared while I was opening a side-door back into the populated sections of the ship: I didn’t see her go, although I have a vague recollection of blurred air, flattened perspectives against a wood-paneled wall. My ears were still ringing from the blast, and I was so confused that I didn’t notice much of anything until I found myself in an alleyway my autonomics had steered me to, eyeing up the guest house where the Royal Mint had rented me a room.

The depths of neomediaeval barbarity into which this city had sunk finally became clear when I found my way to my garret. It wasn’t simply the liveried servitors, or even the obese, physically aged steward who proudly showed me to the suite; but the presence of running water. Yes: a lead pipe—lead, yet!—entered through the ceiling of one room and discharged through a gargoyle-encrusted tap above a pewter basin. “You see, we have all the ancient luxuries!” gloated Salem the steward. “This’n’s piped down from our very own roof-tank. More’n you’ll have seen before, I expect.”

I nodded, faintly aghast at the prospect of the microfauna that must surely be swimming in the swill.

“Are you sure you don’t have any luggage?” he added, one heavy eyebrow raised in protest at the very idea of a gentleman-merchant traveling without such.

“Not a parcel,” I said. “I came by starship . . . ”

He blinked rapidly. “Oh,” he said, very fast. “And ee’s not staying at the Palace?” He shuffled, as if unsure of what to do with his feet, then essayed a little bow. “We is honored by your presence, m’lord.”

When I finally persuaded him to leave me alone—at the price of calling a tailor, to fab me some garments suitable to my station in life—I swept the room for bugs. My custom fleas found nothing, save the more natural macrofauna lurking in the bed, garde-robe, and curtains. I removed and disassembled into three separate parts the device in my pocket, then hid two of them in the hollow cuban heels of my boots: possession of such a gadget, in these parts, could earn one a slow impalement if the Queen deigned to notice. (The third part I wore as a ring on my left hand.)

At the end of this sequence I lay down upon the bed, hands behind my head, staring up at the dusty canopy of the four-poster. “What am I doing here?” I murmured. To report to ye chancellery of court on the day following landfall, there to command and supervise the management of ye portfolio of accounts royal and foreign, the contract said; while lying low and avoiding the exchange agents, I added mentally. But I was already wondering if I’d made the right decision.





The next day, I reported to the Exchequer for duty.

A rambling, gothic assemblage of gargoyles, flying buttresses and turrets held together by red brick, the Chancellery was located across the three-sided Capital Square from the Summer Palace, a white marble confection that pointed battlements and parabolic reflectors south across the river. As I approached the entrance, armed guards came to attention. Their leader stepped forward. “Sir Blomenfeld,” said the sergeant: “I am pleased to greet you on behalf of her Terrible Majesty, and extend to you her gracious wishes for your success in her service.”

“I thank you from the depths of my heart,” I replied, somewhat taken aback by his instant recognition. “It is an honor and a blessing to be welcomed in such exalted terms. I will treasure it to my dying day.” Laying it on too thick? I wondered.

The sergeant nodded, and I noticed the antennae tucked between the feathers of his ornate helmet; the strangely bony fingers disguised by his padded gloves: and the odd articulation of his back. Evidently the technology restrictions didn’t apply to Her Majesty’s security. “If you would please come this way, sir?” he asked, directing me towards a side door.

Tradesman’s entrance. “Certainly.”

He led me inside, up the steps and along a wide marble passage hung with portraits of ruby-nosed dignitaries in their late middle age: the human dynasty that had preceded Her Majesty. Into an office where, behind a leather-topped desk, there sat a man with a surpassingly sallow complexion and even less hair than my ersatz wife had been wearing the night before. “Sir Alain Blomenfeld, your honor, reporting as required.” He turned to me. “His Lordship, Victor Manchusko, under-secretary of the Treasury, counselor in charge of the privy portfolio.”

Privy portfolio? I blinked in surprise as the sergeant bowed his way out. “Sir, I—”

“Sit down.” Lord Manchusko waved in the direction of an ornately decorated chair that might have been designed as an instrument of torture. His gold-rimmed spectacles glittered in the wan light filtering down from the high-set windows. “You were not expecting something like this, I take it.”

“Not exactly,” I said, somewhat flustered. “Um, I understood I was being retained to overhaul dependency tracking in the barter sector—”

“Nonsense.” Manchusko slapped the top of his desk: I’ll swear that it cringed. “Do you think we needed to hire offworld intellect for such a task?”

“Um. Then you, er, have something else in mind?”

The under-secretary smiled thinly. “Over-exposed on the intelligence futures side, was it?”

An icy sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. “Yes,” I admitted.

“Tell me about it.”

“It was all over the Festival channels. Surely you know—”

He smiled again. It was not a humorous expression. “Pretend I don’t.”

“Oh.” I hunched over unconsciously. So. They didn’t want me as an accountant, after all, hmm? Trapped. And if I didn’t give them exactly what they wanted they could hold me here forever. I licked my lips: “You know what commodities are traded on the TX; mostly design schemata, meta-memes, better algorithms for network traversal, that sort of thing. Most of these items require serious mind-time to execute; so we trade processing power against options on better algorithms. Most of the trading entities are themselves intelligent, even if only weakly so: even some of the financial instruments—” I paused.

“Such as Blomenfeld et Cie, I take it.”

I nodded. “Yes. I was proud of that company. Even though it was pretty small in the scheme of things; it was mine, I made it. We worked well together. I was its director, and it was my memetic muscle. It was the smartest company I could build. We were working on a killer scheme, you know. When the market crashed.”

Manchusko nodded. “A lot of people were burned by that.”

I sighed and unkinked a little. “I was over-exposed. A complex derivative swap that was backward-chaining between one of the Septagon clades’ quantum oracle programs—I figured it would produce the goods, a linear-order performance boost in type IV fast-thinkers, within five mind-years—leveraged off junk bonds issued in Capone City. According to my Bayesian analysers nothing should go wrong in the fifteen seconds I was over-extended. Only it was just those fifteen seconds in which, um, you-know-what happened.”

Normally, the Eschaton leaves us alone; nothing short of widespread causality violation provokes a strongly godlike intervention. Whatever happened in Eldritch system’s intelligence futures market was bad, capital-B-bad. Bad enough to provoke an Act of God. Intervention from beyond the singularity. Bad enough to trigger a run on the market, an instant bear market, everyone selling every asset they owned for dear life.

“Eldritch went runaway and the Eschaton intervened. You were in the middle of a complex chain of investments when the market crashed and it all unraveled on you due to a bad transitive dependency. How far uncovered were you?”

“Sixty thousand mind-years.” I licked my suddenly-dry lips. “Ruin,” I whispered.

Manchusko leaned forward suddenly. “Who’s after you?” he demanded. “Who tried to kill you on the ship?”

“I don’t know!” I snapped, then froze solid, trying to regain my composure. “I’m sorry. It could have been anyone. I have some suspicions—” not fair to mention Arianna, she’d been in the middle of it too “—but nothing solid. Not the exchange authority, anyway.”

“Good. While you are here, you will remain under her Majesty’s protection. If you have any problems, ask any guard for help.” That smile was disquieting as anything I’d ever seen: “What one sees, all see, she sees.”

I nodded silently, not daring to trust my tongue.

“Now. About the reason we wanted you here. You weren’t the only one who took a bath in the crash. Her Majesty’s portfolio is highly diversified, and some of our investments suffered somewhat. Your job—unofficially—is to take over her hedge fund and rebuild it. Officially you’re not trading, you’re disqualified. Your company is insolvent and liable to be wound up, if they can ever find where it ran to. You’re a disqualified director. Unofficially, I hope you learn from your mistakes. Because we don’t expect you to repeat them here.” He stood up and gestured towards a side door. “Through here is your office and your dealer desk. Let me introduce you to it . . . ”





Afternoon found me back at my room, digesting a manual of procedures and trying to regain my shattered composure. I had just about managed to forget about the incidents of the previous day when there was a knock at the door.

“Who is it?” I called.

“Y’r humble servant, m’lord,” called Salem. “With a manuscript for you!”

I rolled to my feet. “Come in!”

He sidled into my room, holding a rolled-up piece of parchment away from his body as if it contained some noxious vermin. “Begging y’r’honour’s indulgence, but this came for you from the palace. Messenger’s waiting on y’r’honour’s pleasure.”

I took the note and broke the wax seal on it. Having a lovely time at the court. Formal presentation before Her Majesty at eight this eve. Your presence requested by royal fiat. Will you be there? Signed, your “wife”.

Hello, Arianna, I thought. I remembered her face; chilly beauty. It was some joke, the one that whoever had hacked our respective memories had played on me. I resolved that if I ever found them I’d use their head for a punch-line. “Tell the messenger to tell her that I’ll be there,” I said.





At seven, Salem slid into my vision again. “Pardoning y’r honour, but y’r humble coach awaits you, sir,” he mumbled unctuously.

“Isn’t it a bit early?” I asked.

It wasn’t early. I sat in a cramped wooden box with my nose inches from a slit-window rimmed with intricately painted murals of rural debauchery. Outside, two husky porters wheezed as they carried me bodily—box and all—through the cobbled streets. We lurched and swayed from side to side, trapped in a heaving mass of pedestrians: a royal lobster drive was in progress. The lobsters lived sufficiently long in air that by custom they were herded through the streets to the gates of the palace: the distress made their flesh sweeter, apparently. Presently my porters lifted me again and continued, this time with little further delay.

They set me down and opened the door: trying not to gasp audibly I stood up, stretching muscles that ached as if I’d run the entire distance. The sedan chair was parked in a courtyard, before the palace steps but inside the walls. My porters groveled before a junior officer of the royal dragoons. I bowed slightly and doffed my hat to him.

“Sir Blomenfeld,” said the lieutenant: “If you would please come this way?”

“Surely.” He led me inside, up the steps and along a wide marble passage carpeted in red velvet.

Noise, chatter, and music drifted from ahead. We came upon a well-lit stretch, then a pair of high doors and an antechamber, walled with pompous gold-leaf plaster, where four footmen and a butler greeted me. “His excellency the high trader Albert Blomenfeld, by appointment to Her Majesty’s Royal Treasury! Long may she live!” A blast of pipes ushered me into the royal presence.

The hall beyond the antechamber was high-ceilinged, decorated with primitive opulence and meticulous precision, illuminated by skylights set in the ceiling. A floor of black and white tiles gleame