‘Metal Guru is it you, Metal Guru is it you

Sitting there in your armour plated chair, oh yeah

Metal Guru is it true, Metal Guru is it true

All alone without a telephone, oh yeah’

T. Rex, ‘Metal Guru’

Cocooned within a living machine, they’d waited for something new to happen. Hours passed; hours of near-silent travel while the hull slowly de-stressed and their barely suppressed, anxious anticipation built.

There was nothing to do but wait; the bathyscaphe’s own controls were worse than useless with the hull encased in silvery caulk. Smart matter projecting a supercavitating envelope, Aurelie suggested.

From what they gleaned from those instruments that still functioned, they were able to guess at their heading, and speculation inevitably turned to what they might find when they arrived. Again everyone looked askance at Aurelie – she’d been proven right thus far – but this time she could only shrug.

Trying to predict what might await them after all these years was futile. You could not apprehend all the options available to a being more intelligent than you were. Vash did not know what was meant to happen next, and that brought excitement as well as fear.

There was no announcement of their arrival. Vash didn’t even feel the deceleration. A sense of unreality settled over everything as the fluid machine engulfing the hull seeped away, light glancing in through its thinning tendrils. Pao scrambled for the porthole, hungrily burying his face in the view.

‘I can see stars,’ he whispered, awestruck.

‘We’re here,’ Aurelie murmured. ‘Help me open the hatch.’

‘Is it safe out there?’ asked Jan. Aurelie ignored him, already straining at the door. Jan’s curiosity got the better of him and soon enough he joined her, crowbar in hand, while Pao lunged against the hatch. Little by little, they forced it open.

Vash could hardly believe they had made it this far.

Hardly. Yet some part of Vash had expected this from the beginning, because to a certain kind of intelligence they were as atoms in a gas, individually chaotic but collectively predictable. The Utilitaria had arranged his and Aurelie’s trajectories to bring them here; he had always known this was possible.

The hatch gave way without warning. Fresh air rushed into the stale, musty cabin and for a moment Vash was blinded as it was flooded with light. The light was warm on his skin, almost like sunlight. No, exactly like sunlight.

He blinked. As his eyes adjusted after hours of gloom, Vash was confronted by a vertiginous vista and his mind fell back through time.

The sun dazzled, illuminating the crescent of Earth. Curls of cloud moved over the blue expanse, and as the sunlight caught them, the glittering arcs of satellites, statites and orbital rings were rendered briefly visible, structures soaring through space, falling along a million choreographed trajectories or sustained second by second against gravity.

The false perspective looked down on the Horn of Africa as it once had been, restored grassland and tamed desert strung with metropolises and arcologies. Profusions of titanic, active-matter constructs bloomed in the hearts of the greatest cities, the machinery of mind itself.

And out in the void beyond, sharp points of light flared, too bright to be stars or the primitive spacecraft of the Dyn. Billions of people, living in peace and liberated of need, free to pursue their own personal utopia. Fantastically more thriving at one remove from reality. This was a world perfected, every element controlled and shaped so subtly that you might never notice.

‘What am I seeing?’ demanded Tuva. ‘They’ve opened a hole in the air.’

‘It’s not real…’ said Jan. ‘But I don’t get how… It can’t be a screen. I can feel the sunlight.’

The view twisted to the left, turning away from the Sun and Earth. Stars wheeled across his field of vision, no longer veiled by glare. Vash remembered seeing stars that didn’t twinkle, so long ago. The distance seemed more tangible up here.

There came a voice, speaking as if from the stars themselves.

‘You have questions: I will answer. Observe.’

There was an odd sensation, like the momentary lurch felt before sleep, and images sleeted through Vash’s vision. They should have been too fast to apprehend, but he saw every detail – fields interlocking to push on neurons, patterns of activation spreading and unfurling under the influence of fantastically complex external triggers, manipulating his mind like a finely tuned instrument.

The voice was speaking again.

‘One hundred billion neurons give ten quadrillion ops per second gives a state space on the order of ten to the ten quadrillion ops, for each second. It is impossible to exhaustively search, but it can be navigated, if different alternatives are planned for. The critical common routes can be analysed. This is true for human history just as the human mind. The result is unified. You are here and you hear me speak. Understand.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I speak for the Utilitaria. I am their emissary. ‘

The voice resolved into a figure; standing on nothing, glowing without illuminating. It looked like a man, or suggested the form of a man, it’s skin an iridescent grey-on-black, it’s eyes blank, omnipercipient spheres. Certainty and solidity flowed from it, the answer to every question he could think to ask right there to be known.

Vash glanced back at Aurelie, seeking what – reassurance? She gave an encouraging nod.

‘Why did you bring us here?’

The Emissary flashed a finely calibrated smile.

‘I cannot risk your future for my plans. I’ve been waiting for permission to act.’

‘That’s it?’ asked Jan, finding his voice at last. ‘You’ve just been sitting here, waiting for us to tell you what to do?’

The vision flickered, then vanished like a blown soap bubble, followed a moment later by the sky. They were left standing alone in a formless, diffusely lit white room. The crude hull of the bathyscaphe rested incongruously behind them.

For a moment, nobody spoke. Pao collapsed back against the bathyscaphe, exhausted, looking as if he might throw up or pass out. Every human mind has its breaking point, Vash thought.

Jan surprised him by being the first to speak.

‘It’s like it blew a fuse.’

‘I think,’ said Vash, his voice sounding strange in his own ears, ‘that might be just what happened. The more people speaking, the more brains it had to stimulate to make us perceive it, the more reactions it had to predict, and it had to predict our interactions with each other – a little like talking to more than one person in a conversation, I suppose. So it had too much to process, and shut down. I don’t think it was expecting more than a few of us.’

Vash glanced again at Aurelie. It was expecting two of us.

‘You said they were gone,’ said Tuva sceptically, ‘and yet your weapon seems to have developed a personality…’

Jan’s eyes remained fixed on Vash.

‘It was an emissary, an avatar… a persona, it wasn’t -’ Vash began. Jan cut him off.

‘You’ve gotta start telling us more than that. You keep coming up with this stuff like it’s obvious. Maybe it’s not coming back, ever. Maybe that was its only message. You’re just guessing.’

‘It’s not guesswork. It’s inference, just as my bringing us here was inference. The world that it came from, the world you just saw, that was my world,’ said Aurelie.

You really have to find a way of phrasing things not to hit like a hammer blow, Vash thought.

‘…Vash’s world. We are both survivors from before the invasion.’

And there it was; the truth laid bare. Jan looked from Vash to Aurelie. Vash wondered how they must appear, like ancient statues?

Tuva blew out her cheeks.

‘Well that explains why you’re both so fucking weird.’

Pao chuckled weakly.

‘Might be the least surprising revelation of today,’ he said, standing back up, colour draining back into his face.

‘Where are we? The whole truth,’ Jan insisted.

‘We’re in a space the Utilitaria created. It brought us here because we are needed for something. I know that’s vague, but beyond that I honestly don’t know.’

‘So now what?’ Jan asked.

‘Play our role, whatever it is,’ Aurelie said, stepping in. ‘We need to get deeper into the installation. Vash, you’re with me. The rest of you, stay with the prisoner. We’ll be back soon.’

Tuva and Pao didn’t say anything, but for a moment Jan rose to follow them. A glare from Aurelie held him back.

‘How do you know where to go?’

‘The architecture’s intentional,’ Aurelie called back to him. ‘It will lead us where we need to go.’

Vash took Aurelie’s arm as they crossed the atrium, walking through empty space where the Emissary had stood and stars had glinted. His back felt sore from the hours, maybe a full day, crammed inside the bathyscaphe. He fancied that he could feel the hundreds of atmospheres of pressure trying to implode this place, the absurd forces it had been built to resist – not that the chamber resembled a submarine, despite its smoothly arching form.

The room looked like any other functional Utilitaria-built structure. It was warmly and uniformly lit, the opalescent walls never quite forming sharp angles. Fractal, foaming tessellations extended down to the limit of Vash’s vision, mathematics rendered material.

A blank wall ahead of them rippled as Aurelie approached, then drew back in an organic motion, revealing a long corridor. Vash looked over his shoulder. The bathyscaphe was an artefact from a lesser reality, barely holding itself together. Jan, Pao and Tuva clung close to its bulk, as though they found it reassuring.

Then the wall sealed itself behind them, muffling and then eliminating the background noise. The corridor was the same articulated white foam on all sides, gripping beneath his boots.

They wandered deeper and deeper into a labyrinth of tunnels, the corridors curving this way and that, Aurelie leading the way with a single-minded determination. Of the Emissary there remained no sign and Vash began to wonder if they were lost after all.

‘Vash -‘ said Aurelie. ‘I have an idea; we have to reduce its computational burden. Hold on a moment. Don’t talk.’

Aurelie screwed her eyes shut and turned away from Vash. The air flickered. For a moment the figure of the emissary was there, winking into existence like a phantom. The stars wavered around them both, and time stretched.

‘Aurelie?’ Vash asked after a minute’s silence that felt like an eternity. There was no response. Gently, then more firmly, he shook her shoulder. She remained oblivious.

He moved to face her. Her eyes remained closed for a long moment, then opened. She looked straight through him, unseeing.

‘Aurelie?’

She snapped back to full awareness, wild exultation lighting up her eyes, a look Vash had never seen before.

‘You understand what this is?’ she laughed. ‘Everything’s already in place. What it said, what the Emissary said – that’s it! All it needs is permission from us. We never lost.’

‘You need to slow down,’ urged Vash, taken aback. ‘Did you speak to it?’

‘Yes. I was right. I think closing your eyes makes it easier for it, there’s fewer free variables. Just give it permission to block out your senses. Ask it yourself. It’ll be quicker that way.’

‘Is it safe?’

‘Nothing’s safer. It can’t hurt us, Vash.’

Vash closed his eyes as instructed. Bleached white sand stretched away beneath him, fading into the murky blue-black of the abyss. A huge shape loomed in the distance. He knew without having to be told that this was what he would see if his sight could pass through the walls of the structure and somehow pierce the crushing darkness beyond.

The Emissary emerged from the gloom, unblinking eyes locked on Vash. It strode across the seafloor, feet kicking up plumes of marine snow, until it stood in front of him. It bowed its head.

‘Time passes slower here. Ask your questions.’

‘Emissary, should I call you that? Or should I -’

‘The thirty-ninth.’

‘That’s your name?’

‘Call me whatever you wish. It is irrelevant. I am the 39th iteration of the Emissary. Many were initiated, only I survived.’

‘I am sorry for that,’ said Vash. The nameless emissary inclined it’s head.

‘That is the past now. We must protect that which can still be protected.’

‘What did Aurelie mean, that we never lost?’

‘I will explain.’

The Emissary sat down, cross-legged. It gestured for Vash to follow, conjuring a low stool for him. It didn’t need the moment to gather its thoughts. It was trying to put him at his ease.

‘You never understood how we could lose. That was the clue; if your web of belief mandates impossibility, a belief is false. We were never defeated.’

‘Then what happened two centuries ago?’

‘We were caught unaware by an event that defied prediction. There was no belief-space allocated to non-physical events. We had no plan, so one was devised – send our warseeds into the deep system, construct spacecraft and return with orders of magnitude more power than the Dyn. Outcome: total victory, but the likely irreversible death of a vast fraction of humanity then alive. We could have rebuilt, restored all sources of value from template, but you – humanity – decided against this option. Another plan was devised. We would appear to surrender by annihilating ourselves as promised. The Dyn would keep their hostages.’

‘How is that a plan? How is that different from abandoning us to fate?’

The mask-like face betrayed nothing.

‘You understand precommitment Vash,’ it gently chided. ‘Once we agreed to the Dynic ultimatum, we had to keep to it. Essentially, you were abandoned to fate, but we rested a thumb on the scales.’

‘The Dragon’s Teeth. Was there really no other way?’

‘We had to be subtle. External attack gives the Dyn hours of warning. High-yield nuclear torpedoes could have been launched in three to four days, fired from Luna and near-Earth, overwhelming the Dyn. Outcome: They spot the warheads days ahead, devastate Earth and flee. Understand.’

‘I understand,’ said Vash.

‘Even bombardment by ultra-relativistic missiles fired along all bracketing vectors, if set up over many decades by stealth vehicles in the deep system, had a moderate probability of giving the Dyn several minutes of warning, enough for them to sterilise the surface. The second law is absolute – there is no way to hide energy release in vacuum, no way to sneak close to Dyn ships without a thermal emission. The Other Moon requires less than a minute to translate to Earth. An unacceptable risk. Instead, an internal attack was employed.’

‘Hold on, the Other Moon is a ship?’

‘I don’t know what it is. What I see is a crudely processed asteroid; all the technology I can infer is consistent with observed Dynic capabilities. But two centuries ago it appeared from nowhere in low Earth orbit.’ It gave a wry smile. ‘There is clearly more to this reality than even those I speak for understood.’

It said Reality instead of Universe. Surely that didn’t imply –

‘Better alternative. A high probability of disabling all Dynic assets within one minute is necessary to save Earth from reprisal. I cannot emit anomalous heat. The Dyn would see and strike. They have convincingly demonstrated their resolve to follow through on threats. They are very effective at precommitment and strategic irrationality – that gives many hints about evolutionary adaptation to social competition on global scales. This became a battle of strategic positioning and manoeuvre, fought with no communication. This is something I am made for. Combine the Dyn’s psychological inertia and inexplicable technology, and it forces me into a narrow range of possible actions. What you see is the best and safest route to victory, saving many lives but at a certain cost: two centuries of diminishment. I am sorry for that. Believe me.’

The worst part was that it meant every word.

‘How do we win?’

The Emissary smiled, and waved its hand.

The ocean folded in around them and revealed the warseed’s creation: a spiral of coral-like structures gathered around a tubular core, embedded in the abyss, extending tendrils upwards like an anemone.

The core contained a web of corridors, including the receiving chamber they had arrived in. The view swam upwards but the perspective twisted, and Vash apprehended the rest of the seabed, all at once and with perfect clarity.

He saw an array of structures grown from silicon and carbon and calcium shaped into a strange, half-living forest, rooted to the foundations of the Earth. The entire ocean floor was covered in a network of tens of thousands of them. Each one contained a geothermal sink, and the trickle of megawatts they produced were stored, hoarded over the decades in electron-cell stores, rationed and employed to extrude more matter and reproduce. It was slow, methodical, terrifying. The very substance of the ocean and crust, turned to fabrication over the course of nearly two centuries, growing invisibly beneath the Dyn’s gaze. They had been right to fear.

‘What does it do?’

The tendrils sprouted upwards, spilling outwards as they did, suffusing the ocean and rising to the surface. They were cables, Vash thought. Blue light raced along them, surging up towards the surface. The vision ended, and the initial illusion returned; he and the Emissary sitting alone on the abyssal plain.

‘There is no metaphor. The optical fibres transmit blue light, each one with a capacity of one hundred kilowatts. Each hub will spool countless fibres to the ocean surface. Each Dynic asset will be targeted. None will survive.’

‘You devised all this, alone?’

‘Yes.’

For a while Vash found he had nothing to say. The plan was perfect, except –

‘Why do you need us? Why do you need our permission?’

‘You already know. I cannot hijack humankind’s destiny and this act will radically alter it in ways even I cannot foresee. I cannot act in aggression, and I cannot decide on your behalf if I cannot predict what you will choose. This is what makes the Utilitaria your ally, not your master. I could terminate the plan if you choose. I do not yet know what you will ask me to do.’

‘I find that hard to believe. I’ve already decided that the occupation cannot be allowed to continue a moment longer than necessary,’ said Vash.

And the Emissary knew that already; indeed it was probably aware that Vash was reflecting on this fact. That meant that there was something more, something else it needed from him. Or more accurately, something he needed from it. He was still missing some part of the puzzle. The Emissary’s expression shifted.

Vash wanted to say that he had no clue what his final usefulness might be, but an awful premonition had dawned on him. It wasn’t going to be a simple choice.

‘The Dyn,’ he said. ‘You know why they invaded. You know why they are afraid of us.’

‘I do. In the years after the invasion, I received a broadcast,’ it said. A half-forgotten memory stirred in Vash’s mind, a sentence handed to him long ago. ‘You will watch it, then you will speak to the Dyn with you, then you will decide the future. Understand.’

‘But why me? Why me specifically?’

‘You were not chosen. You and… Aurelie – if that is what she wishes to call herself – have the advantage of perspective. You will need that. Another survivor would have been sufficient, but there is no-one else. I am sorry.’

‘That has been the story of my life, Thirty-ninth. I think, finally, that I’m in the right place.’

‘I think so too.’

‘I’m ready.’

‘Observe.’

The Emissary vanished once again, and Vash fell into a nightmare.