Chapter Text

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Delmutt

30 minutes before tower explosion

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Delmutt stood on the threshold and looked at her people. They numbered just over ten thousand, packed into the blank white void of the evacuation dimension. The closest of them turned to look at her, as she crossed over from the stadium field. They didn’t really understand- not yet. She’d found them a place of safety, a place to rebuild and recover their strength, to hide away from the increasingly lethal world until they were ready to save the rest of their kind. But it will mean centuries of isolation, before we see the outside again. She hadn’t found her partner and lover Zeno before stepping in. It was unlikely he was here, when there was so much of the wide world of humans that he could have been sent to. All of us, separated from our families. Will we be recognizable when we come out? She could only do her best to ensure that.

She sent a mental request to Haley via the simulacra network, and without any further response the evacuation dimension shifted . They all moved simultaneously in some direction none of them could understand but all of them could feel, merging wholesale with her pocket world. It felt like a fog rolling back. A bright blue sky marked with clouds opened up overhead, and the collected infomorph people gasped and cheered as parkland and fantastic, gigantic buildings began to appear from the fog on every side of them, even above them, suspended from great woven-branch bridges and even stranger structures, high into the air of this place. There is room for worlds here, worlds on worlds, Delmutt thought in wonder. We will not lack for space in our prison, at least. Several of Haley’s simulacra flew down amid cheers waves. Animated, Delmutt knew, by some facet of her subconscious but not directly controlled by her at the moment. The time dilation here was too great.

One of them opened its mouth and Haley’s voice boomed out, amplified. “ Welcome,” it said, “to Volo Ingenium. A lifeboat, a world and a wish engine. This is a pre-recorded message for all visitors. If you’re here, it’s likely I have had to evacuate you because of some catastrophe. You should know that for the engine to function optimally I have accelerated time to the breaking point. Six seconds in the real world is a year to you, now. It may be some time before I am able to get you out or slow things down. My simulacra will take your instructions, to a point- you can wish for virtually anything. I recommend securing your own food supplies as soon as you can. The shelter, as you can see,” the dragon gestured to the city, “is provided. Please stay out of the way of the dragons and djinn and return any unclaimed candles to the nearest collection point. I’ll be in to help you as soon as I can. Until then, uh... try not to die of old age?” The message cut out and the dragons settled back on the grass, breathing but otherwise motionless. Eventually some of the bravest of the ‘morphs on the fringe began to approach them.

Dainbex and Ayen, along with the roly-poly Vulkar and the beetle-like Cyran the quartermaster, soon found her. The doctor was in a real state. “You tricked us in here, you- you.” Too angry even to curse at her, she noted with amusement. But not a sentiment she wanted to spread.

“I didn’t. They were going to execute us, or that other monster was going to do it, or we were going to get blown up by the bomb under the field. Now we’re safe and we have time to get ready.” That didn’t satisfy the little doctor.

“We’re going to be in here for a hundred years! I had a practice to attend to, back home!” He really was in a state- this seemed more like a stress release from the last week than a reaction to his current predicament, she thought.

“You can have a practice here. Without war, without threats, we could all survive a hundred years easily. Going home was never an option. But a new home?“ She looked around- there was a tower she liked, in the near distance. It looked like a series of gardens stacked one on top of the other until they towered dozens of stories tall, each one slightly twisted to give the ones above and below some rooftop surface area. Unidentifiable plants and greenery hung from every level. “I think that will be my headquarters.”

Cyran was confused. “Is this miss Haley’s plan again, from the other night? The one the stadium rejected, the night before we were all taken prisoner? Arm ourselves, make ready for war? What is it you want us to do in here ? ”

Delmutt laughed lightly. The reality of this place was beginning to sink in. Safe. Whatever else they might be, they were safe here. For as long as they needed. “We’re going to grow, Cyran. Grow and change. We can be whatever we want to be here, between her magic and our people. Our food source is a thousand copies of the sum total of all knowledge of a more advanced civilization, and I don’t think they understand just how fast we learn. Our friend the merchant sailor mentioned a concept to me once, that I have seen expanded in the human literature- the Outside Context Problem. The curveball for a whole civilization. When we arrived, they were our OCP- too advanced, too different. We have a unique opportunity- they were the superior culture to us, but in here we can leapfrog them. For myself? I’m going to start a university. Tease out the secrets the humans already understand, and then grow beyond them. We won’t need to be ready for war, if we are so far beyond them that war isn’t possible.”

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The days passed, and the people settled, and Haley’s simulacra provided. Infomorphs were unlike humans in the way they processed knowledge- what one knew, all could know with very little effort, simply by copying relevant skill sets. This led to a quick and thorough uptake in basic understanding of human mathematics and science, but had drawbacks of its own- two thousand copies of one person’s understanding of calculus would produce less insight than several dozen independent studies interacting. Thus, the classic university model- infomorphs breaking down the theories and data that were provided to them, sharing it among each other, testing and refining it. Prepackaged understandings were released to the populace at large- an endless source of food and cultural advancement.

Within a decade they had several hundred starter schools set up and providing a routine food source at every level of Hive Mutt, as they’d come to call it, the several-dozen-square-mile subsection of the eternal city that they had staked out for themselves with gigantic banners bearing her clan’s coat of arms. Improved vessel breeding programs had given them a wide variety of bodies, and there had even been some reproduction among the ‘morphs themselves. One of the new generation sought her out one day, sitting in her spacious office in one spire of the university. He was riding a hauler, probably part of the conversion crews modifying the buildings to be more amenable to their variety of scales and grips. “Lady Delmutt?” he asked, approaching with cap in hand.

“I’m not your noble, child,” she said exasperatedly. Some of the initial refugees had been less enthusiastic about abandoning the clan structures, and she constantly had to stamp out strange little nodules of hierarchy. She hadn’t been a noble in her past life, she wasn’t about to start now. Besides- nobody owned anything here, there was no resource scarcity, how could anyone presume to dictate to others what they did with their time? “I only run this place because people listen to me, you’re free to do that or not as you wish. What can I do for you?”

He was so nervous his vessel was practically quaking. “I- I wish to petition for the right to join your clan!” he spat out in a rush, squeezing his eyes shut. She found him simply adorable. “I’m young but I can ride a construction vessel well, and I have a quick learning curve, and I can produce offspring to aid in your labs very quickly, and-” She couldn’t let him ramble any longer.

“You know I don’t really do the clan thing, right? Mutt is just a name here, it has no real meaning- I was probably clanless anyway, if I’d ever bothered to check in. Why would you want to join?”

His anxiety only increased. She reflected that she really needed to figure out what it was about her that had everyone so jumpy these days. “W-w-well a lot of the others are talking about leaving, and they’re saying that things were better when the clans were in charge, and we were organized, and that you’re already running things and clan Mutt is just trying to get rid of all the others and make us eat the fact they ever existed. I don’t believe any of that, b-but I believe in what you’re doing, and I want to sign up.”

She sighed, and looked out the window. Literally trapped in paradise and they’d burn it for that little edge of power over someone else. I’m beginning to understand why Sheriff thought I was naive, when I said we were better than humans. “Alright, kid. What’s your name?” He told her it was Sha. And she named him Shamutt, first inductee to her clan in her living memory.

Eventually she found a solution to the political tension. She let them all come back, all the stupid old clans and the newer firebrands, and she brought back the clan council, and inducted as many into Mutt as it could take. She imposed some new rules, to keep them in their places- anyone could leave a clan they were dissatisfied with, at any time, and she made it clear that Mutt would always be open. She made sure her agenda was dominant, and then she left them to it. The backbiting and intrigue occupied the ambitious and the Machiavellian alike, and left her to get on with the work of helping her people transcend themselves.

Within another decade they had bootstrapped nuclear fission, using the knowledge gifted to them and the materials provided by Haley’s wishing. Their hives glowed with power when the nights came, and Hive Mutt glowed brightest of all. There could be no space program here in the hollow-earth of Volo Ingenium, but her researchers produced a great ecosystem of high-altitude blimps and service drones pilotable by a single lightweight vessel, and these became the first satellites of their new world, relaying radio waves at first, but swiftly more advanced forms of transmission as well.

Thirty years into their stay and they had reproduced the human invention known as the internet. Their food source was now infinitely more secure, and true universities began to spring up among the other clan-cities, who had no other hope of competing with Mutt in a society where resources were limitless and knowledge was the only true access to power. They were not simply studying human understanding anymore- on several fronts, they began to advance it.

Fifty years in, the efforts of her teams began to bear fruit. A team of several young researchers, all crafted from amalgamations of the most brilliant scientific minds that the decades had produced, came to see her. “Lady Delmutt,” she still hadn’t broken them of that habit, “you’ll want to see this.” They lead her up into the labs at the top of the first spire, where a strange device stood, an empty-looking vessel with cabling leading into its data-cavity sitting up next to it. It was a box perhaps five feet on a side, with a camera and speaker grill on the front. As she came into view the speaker spoke to her. “Oh! Lady D! Look what we’ve done!” It was Shamutt’s voice, from that box. They explained to her, though she hadn’t held onto sufficient math or computer science to understand it- infomorphs lived in substrates that were substantially more like the silicon chips that humans used for computing than their own meat brains. The transition of an infomorph mind from vessel to computer required some architectural changes, to be sure, but not that many. Shamutt had been the first to cross that barrier. Infomorphs had transcended their physical bodies. Privately, Delmutt considered it the first time they truly surpassed human achievements, but it would not be the last.

More decades of furious effort followed. Miniaturization and speed improvements, of course, eventually allowed the vast majority of the infomorph population to live and interact in what they began calling info-space. It was like the old biological daisy chains they used to make with their vessels, but a million times larger and more intense. Not only did they typically find it far more comfortable interacting mind-to-mind, but further improvements allowed them to run their own minds at varying speeds, letting teams process years of research in the dimensional equivalent of days. Fusion power was swiftly cracked, and autonomous robotics were fast approaching comfortable vessel standards. Then, things began to turn.

For the first time in 70 years Haley’s simulacra took off as one, heading towards a small park in one corner of the sphere. Satellite imagery showed Haley herself in the park, far larger than all the other dragon-copies of herself. She was building something, several things, and an expedition was mounted to go and speak to her, Delmutt in the lead. Unfortunately their high-speed options were largely limited to the areas around their cities, and long distance craft had not been a priority to date. By the time one was thrown together and the expedition arrived, several days late, their patron had already disappeared. But she’d left them a message, in the voices of all her clone sisters, who spread back out across the world and spoke as one.

“Delmutt. I hope you’re in here by now. Things went wrong, Aslan didn’t lose his narrators, and Sean… is gone. I need you to gate to Skylar’s home, find the trunk they pulled him from in the first place, and bring it to us at the stadium. I’ll delay Aslan as long as possible. If things start to go… any worse, I’ll try to message you again. Until then, do your best to get ready.” It really had been a close thing, Delmutt thought. In the real world, only 7 minutes had passed since she walked through that door. Had there been any delay at all… but there hadn’t, and the message was received.

With that, the fuse was lit. But it was a long one, from inside Volo Ingenium. Delmutt took precautions. Her people ceased relying on Haley for non-essential goods, instead designating certain portions of the eternal city-sphere “Deconstruction zones” and mining them down to the bedrock for stone, silica, iron, copper, wood and other base elements. More exotic materials they continued to wish for, in greater numbers, and stockpile as they went. They also began researching weapons. In hindsight, Delmutt would later reflect, this was her greatest mistake.

Twenty years later, disaster struck again. Delmutt was enjoying a jaunt in the real world for the first time in ages, having left infospace to test the new fully-programmable machine vessels. A single infomorph could run a pack of these at once, dancing between their near-sentient neural networks to set instructions and process feedback. It was like being in a half-dozen places at once- dizzying, exhilarating. She no longer envied Haley’s dragon form- if anything, she pitied her, forever locked to one perspective. As she mused, a great cry went up from the other morphs on her work crew. The simulacra! They’d gone dead. Every one in the blink of an eye had simply stopped moving, responding. They still breathed, they still lived, but- there was no subconscious will driving them. Haley was gone from their world in truth.

There was a great deal of consternation, after that. Much debate about what could or should be done. Leave immediately on her great mission? Ignore her entirely and continue to build? Delmutt put several of her teams on the issue and tried not to worry about it. She had a greater issue to deal with, domestically.

The other clans made their move. Delmutt had known for some time that they were altering the spirit of her mandate- they had been compositing new citizens without imparting the explicit understanding that they were free to leave their masters at any time. Without even the capability, it was rumored- some of them had learned to create new minds without even the capacity for true independence. It was an abomination, and she had attacked it politically with all her might, but it was not until Haley disappeared that the depth of the problem became apparent.

The Great Clan War lasted for 2 years, and it was the most terrible fighting her people had ever endured. Infospace was carved into tiny sub-domains, racked with terrible memetic agents and viruses. Real-space was full of autonomous drone swarms, piloted into combat by single infomorphs, dispensing weapons both conventional and nuclear throughout the vast cities as they clashed. Whole Hives were decimated, and at night one could look up from Delmutt’s spire and see the flashes of cities being bombed in the dark, hundreds of miles away across the sphere. Thousands of lives were lost- tens of thousands, perhaps. Infomorphs were far more robust than humans by now, but that only made the destruction that much more terrible.

Delmutt won, in the end, with a gambit she’d hoped never to use. Her expedition to visit Haley had recovered several of the artifacts the woman had produced, including gates to an antimatter dimension. She’d kept them in her back pocket for decades, but finally it became apparent that the other clans would simply not allow each other to exist. They could not conceive of a world without scarcity- to them, Haley was the source of their bounty, and in her absence it had to run out. So Delmutt did the one thing none of the other clans expected- she surrendered. To all of them, simultaneously. And offered as tribute, access to the antimatter gates, one for each clan. None of them could afford to refuse, to let the gates fall into the hands of hated enemies.

At the real-space gathering to discuss terms, she gave a speech to the assembled clan leaders, standing around the hall in a panoply of mechanical war-forms. “We came to this place as a life raft. A refuge to escape the predations of a world we couldn’t survive in. But we brought that world with us. The technology that made them so terrible, we now wield with equal ferocity. But the hate? The desire to dominate? We carried that inside all along. I didn’t understand that, once. I thought we were better. Now, I grasp that we are not, but we must be. So, I offer to all of you a choice.” Her lone vessel, fully mechanical but stylized after her original woodcutter mantises, for fashion’s sake, produced a box. Inside were six small devices, each palm sized with a single button. They were distributed to the gathered clan leaders as she explained. “The choice is peace, or annihilation. Within each of your hives my agents have hidden access points to a dimension of pure energy. Press the button in your hand, and the gates in all of your enemies’ cities will open. They will be destroyed, and you will be dominant.” The gathered delegates took their devices and eyed each other warily. “Of course, if they aren’t home, they are free to push the button that will open the gate in yours, as well. In fact, there is one place in Volo Ingenium that I can guarantee will not be annihilated- this very room.”

The final act of the Great War began. None could risk pushing the button while the others still had access, and none could take the chance of losing their button and the threat of mutually assured destruction. They were pinned, trapped in her peace center by mutual hatred. Attacks on other cities ceased- why bother? Victory was already assured if they controlled the other buttons. All turned their attentions toward Hive Mutt, and her spire, once again. A great battle broke out over the Hive- whoever controlled that room would own the world! But any time one threatened to overtake the others, they’d gesture with their buttons, and the victor would back off. It was a bloody stalemate. Still, none would negotiate- not with victory so close. It was a roach motel, and once they’d entered not a single one could leave.

It gave her all the time she needed. While the leadership of their clans held guns to each other’s heads, she released memetic viruses into every infospace and realspace hive. She didn’t do much- these attacks were still considered an abomination by her people, and rightly so- but she did enough. Her weapons simply erased the memories of which clan any of them had been fighting for, or against. Simultaneously her agents within each hive began releasing propaganda, hanging flags and insignia for all of the clans, until it was entirely unclear which city had fought for which clan even by contextual clues. She even introduced new clans that had never existed at all. Confusion reigned supreme. Many of the newest soldiers had been programmed for absolute loyalty, but… loyal to who ? Her agents furthered the chaos by releasing “Secret orders” aimed at the many “Sleeper agents” within each hive. Even those who were reasonably certain they knew which army they were a part of could not be certain they hadn’t been infiltrating all along!

She told the leaders at the peace center that she was doing this, of course. They made it worse, each rushing their last loyal agents to enemy armies, claiming that the whole organization had been working for them all along. Paralysis followed- near-riots among every army, soldiers who remembered fighting alongside one another for a decade now falling into hot debates about who they’d been fighting for.

Into this maelstrom she gave her second, and final, speech. This one broadcast to the world, through every hive and outpost, to every soldier and civilian. “Hello. Some weeks ago I offered your leaders a choice, between peace and annihilation. But as far as they were concerned, it wasn’t really a choice- they’ve always chosen the path to ruin, so long as they stand on top in the end. Now I take that cup from them, and offer it to you. All of you. There is no reason to fight anymore. You could secure victory at a terrible price, but for who? Yourselves, or those who claim to own you? They never did, and now you carry that knowledge in you.”

She paused, and looked at the leaders arrayed in front of her. They glared, still in their armored war forms, still poised on the brink of annihilation. “Many of us have read the human literature, their utopias and their dystopias. In many ways they parallel our own fiction. But the thing I found most tragic about their stories was that the greatest, most impossible thing they could imagine, the paradise on their earth or off it, was cooperation. Their technologies were already centuries ahead by our standards. There was nothing they could not attain, had they chosen. The thing that separated them from their dreams of utopia was not magic, or some trick of physics. It was the simple inability to work together at any level beyond the tribal. I fear that this is a trait we share.”

She nodded, seemingly coming to a decision there on the podium. “So we will subvert it. I am going to introduce you to new clans. Mutually dependent clans, with their own specialties, own areas of expertise. Science, Industry, Defense, Arbitration, Governance, Reproduction. You will be dominant in your chosen fields, and the others will depend on your progress. Within this structure there will be sub-clans, mutually reinforcing. You will work in teams with the members of the other clans. I want to emphasize, this is not a caste system. You will have no kings, no nobility. We are post-scarcity to an absurd degree. When hierarchy is needed, you will form amalgams from all your minds, and your children will lead you. This is my one and only dictation. Now, choose. Your old clans and your old war, or a new way. Peace or annihilation.” They chose, almost to a single mind, and their society changed.

Oh, it wasn’t as simple as all that. The old clan leaders did not go quietly, and Delmutt was unwilling to execute them en-masse. An entire infospace was set aside for them, with regular monitoring and intervention. There was a time of adaptation, and rebuilding. Governance became a problem more than once, before checks from a political wing of Science and a judicial wing of Arbitration were put into place to keep it acting as functionary and not nobility. The others clashed, and jostled, but it worked. Within a decade they had rebuilt the losses of the Great War. Within two, they had achieved a mastery of gravitics and robotics sufficient to reproduce many of the wildest concepts of human science fiction. Clan Science’s research teams had determined during the war that, with the increasing speed of their transportation and the distance the real-world mission would have to cover, they had several decades still before they left the window for response to Haley’s mission. They made use of it.

Delmutt allowed herself to fade into the background. They built statues of her, made songs of her role in the war, but she took no role in Governance. She returned to a simple life in Clan Industry and felt better for it, pulling down city blocks with her hundred drone-selves to furnish more materials for her growing people. A simple life with visible results, that was all she’d ever yearned for. And if the great Amalgams came to her from time to time, for advice? Well, that was their lookout, wasn’t it.

One hundred and fifty years into their stay, two hundred and forty in her total lifespan and only 8 minutes real-time since Haley’s message had been relayed, their small world made ready for departure. The gate to Skylar’s family home had sat open and unused for decades, but now a small crowd gathered outside it. The Governance Amalgam didn’t want her to leave- how many decades would she be gone, given the time dilation? Defense had its own trepidation- it wanted to send an entire armored company. But Delmutt was adamant. Haley was her friend, and Skylar, and she would be going. Soldiers were unnecessary- this was not the kind of fight to be won with massed armies, it needed precision and speed. She’d agreed to take two of the most distinguished special-ops agents from her years as leader of clan Mutt, the most armored gravitic Dragonfly that could still go hypersonic, and a platoon of advanced combat vessels with anthropomorphized designs. No more.

They gathered around her like grandchildren. She hated being treated like their old nana, she wasn’t even close to the oldest infomorph in here! Though there weren’t terribly many who could claim to be older. Of the original ten thousand, five or six thousand still survived, with several million descendants all told. It was a young population, with a new take on their species, and she told them so. “If I don’t come back… do better. Better than we did, in the old world. It’ll come for you one of these days, sooner rather than later. Teach it that you understand mercy, and compassion, and cooperation.”

Governance made one last attempt. “Miss D… you saved us. We may need your guidance, when the other world comes calling. This society you’ve built, it hasn’t been tested yet, not against-”

She held up a hand, and it was a hand now, nearly human in form, save for the fact that the outer carapace was harder than titanium. “You saved yourselves. Remember that the outside world isn’t just humans, right now. Half of it is our people, as well. Don’t fear it- treat it like the disaster zone it is, and be ready to help them just as fast as you can. Just be careful not to overwhelm your structures with people beholden to the old clans. Take it slowly, integrate carefully. They’ll see what you’ve built and want to be a part of it. They can, when they let go of the old ways.”

Then she struck a pose, and said the line she’d been waiting a century and a half to say, ever since Sean made her watch terrible human cartoons during their stay in the bunker. “And now, I must go. Their planet needs me.”