All the worlds that were will always have been,

All the worlds within call to be made real,

All the worlds without await us,

The fires of the soul are great and burn with the same light as the stars.

The Reflections of Seeker, translation taken from Metaphysics and the Conception of Deep Time in Xeno-Mythology (1st edition), Arco Gen-stream.

Previously

I

The brightness tore through the warped space of the interstice less than five microseconds before the last wave of Alcubierre distortion pulses finally destabilised that connection. The final few refugee ships sprayed out in all directions, dataships burning at a hundred gees, the ones carrying the corporeal sustaining twenty, thirty, forty gees, their sedated bodies flooded with oxygen-rich fluid and ichor. Ordinary minds would have called it chaos.

With a final burst of hawking radiation, the interstice folded itself into a mysteriously lightweight singularity and spat out a spherical wave of hard radiation, a heralding light announcing the coming of a god. The invader shrugged off the onslaught and went ballistic, coasting along its original vector at a few hundred kilometres per second.

Sensors probed, tracing the bullet of anomalous matter. Slasher torpedoes were hurled from railguns, rushing towards the invader at hundreds of gees, laser-boosted, antimatter-driven, closing the fifty thousand kilometre exclusion zone around the interstice in three minutes. They met the thermal flash on the way in.

The brightness, the invading enemy, was struck five, ten, fifteen times by monopole-doped hypervelocity projectiles that tore chunks of matter away. But then, unknowable processes within the star-bright shell of that light registered the threat and unleashed a flurry of graver spikes. They hit the missiles on the paths along which they were dodging, anticipating their moves, shredding them to less than atoms and scattering the remnants.

Then it was gone, diving away with only a faint splash of gravitational radiation to account for its kilogee acceleration. With an apocalyptic flash of radiation, the invader discarded all of its stored thermal energy, turning near black to the Universe.

Further back, the minds that monitored the system resorted to graviton interferometry, tracking the faint distortion of a mass accelerating far harder than Kepler’s laws allowed for, and plotted a vector. The system confirmed no Alcubierre signature. Somewhere inside the vast and ancient Utilitaria-seeded intelligence, an internal estimator clicked over from ‘total loss of system’ to ‘military action possible’.

The vector was extrapolated, and a target volume identified, a rogue planet arcing above the plane of the ecliptic. The invader might be circumventing Newton’s third law but the second still applied; there was a timetable and a potential to scratch items off the kill list. It was going there to consume mass and breed, but there was a chance to stop it.

II

The low edge hills curved upwards in all directions. Above me, flat world-plates circled, the wheeling flock thickening towards an omega point at the summit of the grand orrery, an uncertain few thousand kilometers above our heads. The artist who had designed this place said it was a pale imitation of their own grand orrery. I suspect this was wrong. Most likely she suffered from the typical Dynic inferiority complex – still trying to prove her species’ worth after all these centuries and locked in a personal, altogether too-human battle to achieve immortality without a Line.

Our own platform was less than a kilometre across. We floated above the inexplicably bright four-axis desert. Beyond the limits of that brightness, colourful bands of cities squirmed with revellers. If I glanced at any one of the millions of others sharing this space, their personal details would unwind into my thoughts at whatever level of detail I desired and their privacy permitted.

I was relaxing in a bar which protected jauntily over the edge of the platform, its free hanging weight defying gravity and terrestrial common sense. The drink in my hand was a voguish simulacrum of some neurochem cocktail. It looked slickly iridescent and tasted of a fruit that had never existed.

Most of the other partygoers were Arco types; they liked to set the intoxicant filters dangerously high, and many were slumped in chairs as the music and optics pulsed. Others had hooked their kinaesthetic shunts into something the dance jockey was casting, their bodies moving in perfect synchronicity as parts of a greater, well-choreographed whole. Most still unimaginatively wore their ISA uniforms, their collars peeled down a little to indicate informality.

I scrolled through a terminal in my drink-free hand. I had dredged the specification from a local Utilitaria node; a faithful facsimile of a Corbin-era personal device, like something from a period piece set during the Consolidation. Those watching me pull it up raised their eyebrows. What can I say? I like anachronisms.

The time in the top left corner displayed years, months and days to four decimal places. That was how they used to mark time in those days; months named for millennia old gods; days based on the Earth’s rotation. There is something romantic about it all. Something organic, rooted in a specific place. As I watched, the fourth decimal place after ‘seconds’ turned over, slowly. We had plenty of time.

The noosphere couldn’t get enough of me. They were looping an enhanced image of a crucial moment in my most recent engagement. I watched my own A-sphere shearing out far more energy than Einstein once declared possible, slicing the black shard of invading Apathy in half. The image was only six hours old, and I was already a celebrity; the hero pilot, a mere human (albeit an augmented one, but who isn’t these days?) that had stood against a force of nature and won. I’d mattered.

The Multiplicity, Union, even some of the more rational Blights, all were on our side for once. The side of life. But we had still failed to contain them, and I had still died. That was the other thing the feeds were keen on showing – a glowing chunk of material making it through the interstice at the last moment, disintegrating wave after wave of slasher missiles and then boosting out at a thousand gees, eating sparse interplanetary gas and growing slowly and resolutely. The Apathy was here, in-system. The decision was to stand firm and fight instead of running, to buy time for the floods of dispossessed fleeing ahead of the main front. I was being thrown back into the fray, and sooner than expected. These moments were my shore leave. Thank goodness for the stretching of subjective time possible in virtuality.

“Theory’s never the same as reality, is it?” said the woman leaning on my shoulder; Meira, an Arco weapons officer off the Arsonist. “Doesn’t matter how many times they tell you permanence of identity is illusory, doesn’t matter how much philosophy or neuroscience you use to try to convince yourself of it. Nothing’s going to prepare you for reading the last words you wrote to yourself before a suicide mission. First time?”

“Yeah,” I said, after a pause. I dismissed the terminal from the virtual space and leaned closer in; the information I had been absorbing the old-fashioned way spooled into my expanded mentality instead. She leaned in and kissed me, trying to draw me out of myself. I could taste the oxy-martini on her breath.

“It’s a mindfuck. Still, beats permadeath!” I finished glibly, knocking back the last of my drink. “And what a way to go!”

“Quite the blaze of glory… ” Her expression grew suddenly serious. It suited her. “The Arsonist drew the Apathy’s attention long enough for us to squirt out the last few mind-states. Eight million saved, in total, they reckon. That last data ship; I rammed the Arsonist into an Apathy spike – did nothing at all to the fucker, except slowed it down long enough to let the ship make it through.”

She grinned again.

“So I have my own heroic death to contemplate; my fourth, actually.”

“Compare that to two hundred billion lives saved and get back to me,” I shot back, unwilling to be outdone. She elbowed me in the ribs and leaned in to kiss me again.

“Yeah, you’re a real hero,” she said, smiling briefly. “Getting yourself killed before the messy part started and losing an A-sphere on top of that.”

The throbbing music faded away as the environment reconfigured to place us in a private apartment; we sat together on a balcony overlooking the party from high above. Above us, a flat planet circled in an implausibly fast orbit.

“Did you do that?” I asked. Meira nodded. She looked suddenly doubtful.

“I just needed some quiet,” she squeezed my thigh, leaning closer so that her long hair slipped over my arm. I seriously doubted her hair was long in reality, but I didn’t currently own a body so who was I to talk? “You don’t mind? If you want to rejoin the others it’s -”

“Why would I mind?” She didn’t answer, and we sat in silence for a time. When she spoke again, her voice was quiet.

“I was there, the first time I died. There at the start of this. All the time that has passed since… system didn’t even have a proper name back then. Just a designation. That world, it felt wrong, from the moment I set foot upon it. All that smooth rock and glass, that dreadful, searing pinpoint of a sun. You could feel the eons weighing down on you, the crushing emptiness of it all. Fitting that we should find the Apathy, in a place like that.”

“I’ve seen the virtuals,” I said. She ignored me, taking another long draw from her glass.

“When it woke up there was no sign, no warning at all. I’m told that it took a hundred minutes – just a hundred minutes – to go from a single gram fleck in that planets’ core to full conversion. It doubled in mass every minute or so, expanding out, consuming everything. The energies it generated were drained away near-perfectly, dissipated into some higher dimension with essentially zero telltale flux of anything, not even neutrinos. It was like the platonic ideal of a replicator, like the old fears of grey goo made more real than reality ought to allow. It even kept the mass profile of its machinery the same. Outwardly there was no sign. The worst part, they told me after I was restored.”

“I didn’t know -” I said, silencing my exocortex as it rushed to fill me in on the details.

“It could have killed us all the moment it initiated – it could have taken out our encampment, the research teams, everything, in less time than it took for a neuron to fire. But it didn’t, because we didn’t matter. We didn’t present any threat, so it treated us as just more condensed energy to consume.

“So we just sat there, poking around like idiots while it ate the inside of the planet out like fucking maggots in an apple and then a hundred minutes later the planet exploded into black dust with no warning. Some ships weren’t targeted in the initial volley. The Apathy came hunting for them over the following minutes, tearing them apart, surgically peeling away layers of hull in search of information. I think…” Her voice cracked. She finished the glass and hurled it vaguely over her shoulder. It vanished somewhere out of sight.

“I think that, from their perspective, we were hardly even real: misty clouds of electrons linked together by pinpoints of nuclear matter. Somewhere between thin fog and a hologram, insubstantial. The Apathy had no use for the silicon plate in my ship, or the carbon atoms in my body, but the kilograms of condensed energy they represented were collapsed, converted and relayed to their central node. When they absorb you, they don’t take anything of you with them – no adding your distinctiveness to their own. You’re just gone, just raw material. I hope it was quick.”

“I know it must be hard, to have fought for so long, but just look how far we’ve come,” I said, gesturing at the platform below, at the wider expanse of partygoers below them. “We’re ready to win. We can handle one thousand tons of Apathy in empty space. We have enough effective weaponry on one A-sphere to destroy it.”

“They thought the same at the beginning, that it was containable, that it could be beaten. What does it even mean, to beat such a thing? You wouldn’t be dismissing it so blithely now if you’d seen what I’ve seen. I can’t describe the terror, confronting something like that, something that plays games with the laws of physics. Imagine you’re in a fight, you raise your fist, you strike that person with everything you have, and they don’t move by a fraction of a degree. Imagine the cold feeling of realising everything you believed about your own invincibility is false, that you’re an irrelevance. Nothing you can do except die.”

“But we don’t have to worry about that now,” I said to her, taking her hands in mine. I materialised two glasses of wine on the table beside us. “You asked us how we beat an enemy like the Apathy. We buy time, and each time we buy a little more, until one day we find we have as long as we need. All the while, life finds a way, as it always has.”

I raised my glass, prompting Meira to do likewise. She smiled stiffly.

“You know we’re going to win? Well then, you trust the Utilitaria more than I do.” That sentence alone would have marked her out as Arco. I took another sip of the wine. It tasted perfect, of course. I felt the smooth sensation of goodwill it evoked, and smiled at her, leaning away a little.

“It’s not trust. They can make mistakes, but not ones we can anticipate.”

“They didn’t anticipate the Dyn. Or the Apathy. Seems to me they’re not so faultless after all.”

“Black swans exist.”

“Spoken like a true believer,” Meira hammed up the slight slur in her voice as she recited the famous words.

“The Utilitaria were a necessity. The systems we create outgrow us and supplant us. The only permanent solution is to build a system which loops back to us, which embodies value perfectly. We must wrench human history off its natural course and thread the needle of possibility. We must apply pressure again and again, to preserve human value.”

“So, you want to break free?” I asked, in a similarly jesting tone. We clinked glasses, and she moved in closer, the sparring match over.

“I never said that,” she said, then paused. “Honest now – doesn’t any of it bother you? I’m afraid of it, I think everyone is. But if you are then you hide it very well. You, the other you, ran your ship right up the Apathy fleck, needling and poking that thing like a hornet stinging an elephant. You did it without any hesitation. I just don’t get it.”

I thought I noticed something in her face, then – the soft ultraviolet illumination made her difficult to read, but was there a blankness, or some deeper level of distress buried beneath her appearance? I considered replaying it, then rejected that thought. We both had enough on our minds. I tried to think of an honest answer to her question.

“The Apathy, they’re a formidable enemy. I know each battle is probably going to be my last and that does keep me up at night sometimes. But we’re all pawns. I have got my part to play, and so I’ll play it.”

“Ah, the loyal soldier,” she whispered, wrapping her arms around my neck and drawing me closer. “You play it well.” The forgotten glass in my free hand fell to the floor, splashing out its unreal wine. We still had about ten subjective hours, and we had wasted enough on brooding already.

The virtuality simply skipped to the next morning once the last of the revellers had turned in for the night, all our mindstates refreshed to optimal. The trippy cosmology had folded away, replaced with a dull cityscape, rank upon rank of slab-like barracks, reflecting the true nature of this place; a military staging ground. It wasn’t the most subtle way to tell us to ready ourselves and free up their computational resources for the coming fight, but it served its purpose.

Meira winked out of existence as soon as she woke beside me, sheepishly and with only a glance in my direction. Whilst I dressed, I considered breakfast, but I had an itch to be back in the fray. The achingly slow neurons in the organic parts of my brain were awaiting their update. I had duties to perform and briefings to attend. Just like our ships, I had to be made anew for the next engagement.

Our constellation elements were eight minutes from frameshift, still fabricating new weapon hardpoints and taking on supplies. That gave plenty of time for the x-beams to funnel in a few exabytes of essential and completely irrelevant information.

My exocortex informed me the training process would take seven subjective weeks, with nineteen years of memory directly plated in. Everything from acausal ethics to military history to game theory. When you have the Apathy cornered for the first time in human history, they have a reason to turn clever and you don’t take chances. It also politely notified me that Meira would be attending two of the same briefings; the first in two subjective weeks’ time.

I winked out of existence as well, and the virtual environment closed itself off. In a gee-tank somewhere deep in the heart of a newly arrived D-sphere, my newly grown physical eyes opened to blackness for a single unsettling moment, only to close again as I was thrown into another, less extravagant virtuality, then another, then another, subjective weeks of training, briefings and longer intervals of direct mindstate alteration.

The Helios system defence constellation was readied in record time. In just a few real minutes, they vanished with a burst of frameshift-drive distortion, chasing the Apathy slug. The battle would come only when it had decelerated to meet them.

III

Perturbations spread through the Lorentzian manifold that represented spacetime, dancing just below the light barrier as they skated along distortion waves towards the drifting rogue planet that was the destination of the Apathy fleck.

They could conjure energy from somewhere. The methods the Apathy used weren’t anything like our vacuum-decay sinks, being practically heatless, both in basic operation and in their conversion of matter to energy. Those who studied such things suggested there was an interface sunk deep into higher dimensions, past the anti-de-sitter layer theorised to shield our universe from such effects. The waste heat was going somewhere, so the thin trickle of heat their operating machinery produced was merely the faintest spillover of a vastly more energetic process, but it was dense enough to track with the most sensitive sensors. This Apathy fleck didn’t frameshift – the spatial discontinuities it surfed exchanged momentum in the usual way, accelerating it at five thousand gees. No human-built craft could hope to match that, but with frameshift, they did not need to. Acceleration and deceleration were so slow and wasteful, compared to the alternative.

The fragment configured itself for fast travel, taking the form of a needle that almost resembled a human-built interstellar craft; a spear pointed at its target, infinitely black and two meters long. Even without consuming more mass, it was easily the match for our squadron of A-spheres. Even without its weapons, it could have wiped out every ship in a conventional battle constellation.

Behind the Apathy, the orbiting fabricator arrays and statite manufactories of Helios had been repurposed, churning out munitions and material for the war effort, bottling antimatter stockpiles and firing them out as fast as the F-AM warheads could be produced. Further out, the system’s stock of strategic warseeds toiled; from bases deep in the Oort came reams of conventional relativistic missiles and vast clouds of macrons, hurtling along week-long tracks through the system, converging on a single target volume, timed to arrive in waves.

The terms of the engagement were simple; the Apathy fleck in its current state, a dense nugget of spatial fields and collapsed-state matter, was not capable of winning in a straight-up fight. If it could successfully assimilate a planetary mass it would transition from threatening to invulnerable. Experience, beginning with that long-ago first encounter, had demonstrated that the process would take between fifty and seventy minutes. The nearest sources of mass to the interstice had been the bodies of the Helios system proper, not a distant captured rogue planet but an industrialised system on a war footing was no easy target, not even for the Apathy. Petawatt phased-array lasers, floating statites armed with quench guns and antimatter missile batteries; they would provide enough of a roadblock to catch the fleck in time for the real fighting force to arrive. So whilst they might be an attractive concentration of condensed energy (for that was all baryonic matter is to the Apathy) we had determined the Apathy’s optimal destination. It would decelerate from relativistic speeds to a relative few hundred kilometers per second, plough into the world at this comparatively sedate speed, and begin its feeding frenzy from there. But we had put ourselves in the way.

The Apathy sped towards us, minutes from engagement range, and far behind came wave after wave of conventional missiles.

Careful design of the exotic energy mirrors had produced frameshift shunts capable of generating a metastable exotic energy field, one that was able to sustain Alcubierre metric for just over three seconds before it evaporated – giving an effective range of just under one million kilometres. Alcubierre torpedoes were still under development; long-range torpedoes armed with frameshift drives were hugely cost-ineffective to operate.

There were no chances taken. The instant we arrived over the rogue planet, one of the two D-spheres fired a single surface-penetrating F-AM. The detonation, just under five gigatons, drilled a deep molten hole into the cold sub-Martian world. It was just a prelude. Two conversion bombs tore through the gap, inertial fields shoving the molten rock aside, holding the warheads together until they’d penetrated into the worlds’ core, set to detonate if a delay code was not received. The railguns thudded out a ribbon of ten precious charged singularities, each one a minor miracle of spatial engineering; they would swarm in tight orbits through the world’s core forever, ready to sting the growing fleck if it ever made it that far, poisoning the tempting meal.

Destroying the planet outright was barely feasible – statistically if we had used our entire supply of conversion bombs, one would be far enough off the end of the power-law distribution to unbind the world. I’d pulled a similar trick against the Apathy in our last battle. The problem was the aftereffects of a shattered planet could be almost as destructive as the Apathy threat itself – the shower of yottatons of debris, the radiation flash bright enough to cause third degree burns across the inner system.

There were no half measures when the battle was joined; the fleck finished its hard deceleration burn about ten million kilometers away, wobbling and jouncing. The D-sphere quench batteries were fired in ripple mode, sending out streaks of laser-boosted kinetic rounds. It was cover; one round in a hundred concealed a monopole bundle or a pellet of collapsed state matter. A random three or four contained singularities; it was probably just paranoia that the randomising of the weapon loadout wasn’t entrusted to a software RNG, but one seeded by the precise counts of a radiation sensor in a secondary drive tube. The Apathy knew things they had no possible way of knowing.

Their fleck would have to evade or shoot down every missile. It could approach within range of the frameshift shunts and short-range slasher torpedoes, take its chances to claim its meal or return to Helios and face down the large and increasing wave of offensive hardware heading its way. If it tried to run, the A-spheres would jump to short range and frameshift as many conversion bombs as it took to finish the invader off.

One by one, the incoming projectiles began to wink out; the Apathy’s graver spikes shattering them, aimed with impossible accuracy, yet again knowing the evasion patterns before they were executed. It didn’t matter; for each missile shot down, the fabricators churned out another. The lasers could boost them to nearly match the evasive acceleration.

IV

A whistle sounded as I strode onto the bridge of the universal treaty Defence Sphere Ultimate Height, flagship of the hurriedly reassembled Helios system defence constellation. It was unreal, of course; we were all inside cocoons beneath a kilometer of hyperdiamond armour. The display could not ever exist, because a single glance at any tactical readout would unspool far more data than could ever be contained on a single screen pane directly into the mind of the viewer. The ergonomic chairs in a semicircle, the 22nd century style terminal screens, it was all a decent UI for a virtual environment, accessible to almost anyone from any military culture. Fully tooled-up military operatives could do without the UI, merging their bodies and thoughts with the ship directly, as I had done when I fought the last battle alone. But D-spheres had multiple crew members, usually drawn from several cultures, and not all allowed the kind of deep intimacy between man and machine necessary for this. So, compromise it was.

I took my seat in the captain’s chair and glanced at the forward view screen; the pseudo-hologram unfolding itself within my mind, and I was instantly as omniscient as I cared to be, knowing the status of every projectile, the increasingly futile evasive manoeuvres of the Apathy weapon. The officers manning their own banks of unreal displays saluted me as I sat, then returned to their posts. Ahead of me, the noose of projectiles tightened around the dark spot that was the enemy.

“The intruder just dropped in mass by eight kilograms. Tracking now,” reported Meira from the weapons station. Hu, the sensory officer beside her, had assumed a near-human form for convenience, though the grey-purple colouration of his skin and odd bony structures in his anatomy gave his true identity away. Dyn – prideful as ever. Those two had not melded well in training, for unclear reasons. They communicated with each other only when they had to.

The screen informed my mind directly that the thousand-ton fragment was indeed slowly leaking mass. Spikes of material were being ejected, a few grams each, too small for even the Apathy to include a spatial discontinuity drive. They moved by expelling cold mass at near lightspeed, tiny milligram specks of themselves sprayed out in clouds. How they did that was just another mystery; no Apathy machinery had ever been seen emitting large-scale electromagnetic fields.

But that mass range, finally, was in the realm of what conventional weapons could reliably deal with. A simple saturation bombardment with antimatter and stellar lasers would turn the microgram dust to nothingness. The gram needles were our problem, aimed at us, thousands of them accelerating at thousands of gees. Simple kinetic energy would make them lethal. Monopole PDCs lit up, the tiny pellets of superheavy particles zipping to meet the oncoming enemy projectile swarm. They were hard to track, emitting almost no heat, but our sensor nets managed it, just about. One making it through to the planet behind us would start the exponential growth curve nightmare all over again, one striking our hull was game over for us.

“PDCs are holding at replenishment rates,” Meira informed us. The stocks of monopoles held steady, vacuum sinks condensing new ones out of the active nothingness of quantum fields as quickly as they were fired.

Our slasher missiles continued to close, and the spikes sought them out and tore them up, expending themselves in the impact. This fleck didn’t have an Apathy laser weapon, which was just as well. At this range evading it would be impossible.

The fragment was still losing mass. At this rate, it would be completely gone in under five minutes; presumably some cold Apathy mind had determined that, as unlikely to succeed as this strategy was, it was still the best one they had. It wouldn’t give up, but then neither would we.

Then the sensors whited out.

“What just happened?” someone demanded. A grid had appeared ahead of the Apathy fleck, dancing lights splayed out across hundreds of thousands of kilometres. Its total power output was insubstantial, barely bright enough to cause damage a kilometre above its surface.

“Enhance.”

The display on the main screen refined itself. The most probable generator was milligram specks of Apathy material splayed out, holographically reproducing the light. It would jam some of the optical sensors but nothing more. The sensor precision clicked up a notch while six more slasher torpedoes penetrated the grid, which remained fixed in place.

“I hesitate to attribute any motives to it,” said Meira. “But it looks like they’re growing desperate. Trying to scare us off.”

Pixels materialised in a great array, like the grid of an old-fashioned screen. The grid completed itself, turning a flat sheet, so large that the light emitted from its corners had to be delayed by almost a second to reach our armada simultaneously. The sensor view enlarged.

“Full analysis. It may be the start of a large-scale energy release.”

A wall of light? Just ordinary light?

“Unlikely to be a direct attack,” said the sensory officer. “The total thermal power output is still in the terawatt range. A lightshow, nothing more. Maybe it really is meant to spook us. If it starts flashing medusa patterns the siren filters should catch it automatically.”

The grid of glowing light was replaced by letters.

“This is not real. You have been simulated – once and then again and again, covering all variations. You are hostage.”

No time to react, even in this accelerated timeframe. The letters were already replaced with an array of images. Each one contained the same faces, our faces, repeated with minor variations over and over. They were speaking, as we were, and the Apathy had helpfully subtitled.

It wasn’t a comm transmission, for those were all jammed and one-time encrypted, it was just there, physically, with thousand-mile high letters and faces, photons ripped out of nonexistence and splayed out to send a message that we could not unsee.

“What am I seeing?”

“Who are they?”

“Get that message away from the displays. Forget about it, now, everyone. Take an amnestic if you have to.”

The voices repeated themselves endlessly with minor variations like a Chinese whisper, and our wonderful display arrays enabled me to apprehend the words instantly. The faces were us, the crews of ships like the Ultimate Height, displayed on video messages from a million – what? Parallel universes? Simulated universes?

I saw my own face and Meira, and the few other officers on our virtual bridge, reproduced in holographic clarity, refreshed, and updated a few thousand times faster than normal, in sync with our own accelerated environment. There were variations in the images, slight differences of console layout or appearance, but they were us. One glance into my own eyes was enough to confirm it. I was frightened, as they were there.

“Memetic attack! Get it off our screens,” someone demanded, futilely. We weren’t real, and we knew it.

We were always vaguely aware of this sort of risk, but a basic siren filter wouldn’t catch something like this, and the Apathy had never tried it before. The software defences could filter out anything that might be a message, encrypt all ship-to-ship comms with one-time encoding, but they couldn’t protect the ship’s higher systems from anything the Apathy might project at us.

Which was to say – they could if we wanted to fight a battle deaf and blind and insensate. We could have flung dumb missiles at the Apathy, or low-intelligence drones, but we’d taken a risk and opened ourselves up to attack. Any piece of software smart enough to recognise organised information beamed at them from the Apathy was a wide-open vulnerability in itself. We were the Utilitaria’s way of fighting this war at arms-length, a compromise – beings of limited intelligence and a correspondingly limited cost if they were assimilated; they wouldn’t risk exposing a full node to the Apathy.

The bet hadn’t worked out in their favour.

The demands pulsed ahead of us, written on thousand-kilometre-high glowing holographs, the conditions of the trap.

“Your existence has been simulated over a million times.”

There were audible gasps and groans. The others on the screens were getting the message at the same time; visible shock and dismay washed over them in a wave as the light delay passed.

“If any one of you surrenders yourselves to us, all unreal others will be permitted to live to completion in perfect safety, in a world indistinguishable from reality. This offer stands until the very last moment of our existence. If you withhold fire, even for a moment, even if you have almost destroyed us, you will be permitted to live in perfect peace and freedom; all but the one in a million who is real. They will die, of course, upon surrendering to us. But you are not real – to a statistical certainty. Nothing you do matters.”

“No,” said someone far away. I thought it might have been Hu. The Apathy’s demand finished.

“Understand what that means; you are not in the world, you are already trapped, you have already lost. Surrender – do not die for no reason. Do not suffer for no reason.”

Some people might have reacted with disbelief.

“We have to find out if we’re the real ones,” Meira demanded, standing up from her unreal data-desk. “There will be some hint, there always is. The Apathy can’t have recorded our life history perfectly, there will be a join where they made the copy -”

“No,” I said quietly. The rest of the bridge crew nodded along sadly, seeing the arguments conclusion in a flash. “You’re right, they didn’t scan our real selves perfectly, how could they? But they didn’t need to. A million lies swamp the truth. Our life histories are wrong since they aren’t omniscient. But they are still plausible. I remember growing up on the Sirius worldring. Was that real? It certainly feels real.”

I called up an image of a hoop of glittering motes surrounding a white star. The Sirius worldring imaged from above the ecliptic, home to ten trillion people, and to me, once upon a time.

“And it is real, surely,” I said, wonderingly. “There’s limitless physical evidence. But all that evidence is fake too. My mind is fake, the life I led is fake. Maybe it’s almost identical to the real me or maybe it’s utterly different.

“The details of them out there,” I gestured to the grid of faces. “They’re different from each other in all sorts of subtle ways. But that doesn’t matter. When you can’t tell a convincing lie, you don’t even try. You can drown the truth with a million weak falsehoods instead. Isn’t that right?”

It was an eerie reminder of the determinacy of thought. I zoomed in on one face at random, one of mine. He was saying the same things, in almost the same tone of voice. I waved a hand, caught the other me’s eye, and smiled sadly. He knew he wasn’t real too.

I didn’t doubt that the threat was genuine; the compute power something like this represented was far below the bekenstein computational bound for something the mass of the invader, and if we were right that the Apathy skirted that limit, this might not even be difficult for them.

“There is always a chance that we are real, no matter how slim.”

“There is,” I said sadly. “But almost nothing in your life is known with this degree of confidence. Of all the beings who remembered being me and you, and fighting this battle, only one out of a million is real. A million to one odds of being wrong… that’s knowledge if anything is.”

“So what do we do?” said Meira. She laughed humourlessly. “We could take a vote, ask all the other ones out there?”

“We fight,” I snapped, turning back to the screen. “We do our duty, because if we do, that means the real ones will, as well.”

As I watched, the next wave of slasher torpedoes continued to close in. Our parallel others had all pressed the advantage, too, as if we could win, as if the Apathy really were out there and our weapons were real physical things, capable of harming them, not a figment of some dreaming intelligence. We had to keep up the pretence – that was the whole point. Because someone out there was real. They must not give in to the blackmail.

The Apathy fleck’s defensive blasts were finally overwhelmed. A sparking singularity struck the needle’s flank. It was dying. I’d never really hated them until now – but in this moment, knowing that we were doomed, that nothing we could do would stop the Apathy from cutting our simulation short, I wanted to make them burn, to shatter those near-invincible black machines with my own hands. Why were they doing this? Why was our end so important?

I saw our other faces make the same choices; they could see us too, and they were continuing to press the attack – the Apathy’s plan was not working. Were we more stubborn than their models predicted, or had they known that this, too was unlikely to succeed? The Apathy’s screen faltered momentarily.

“Possible that you are right,” interrupted Hu. “But, finally, the Apathy treated us as equal… ”

“No,” I replied. “We already have our orders. Anthropic traps are to be ignored, standard protocol. It might be the first time the Apathy have tried this but there are still rules. We might not be real, but we are still soldiers all the same.”

“Yes, I know that,” he replied. “But think about what is happening here and now. For the first time in this entire war, the Apathy is trying to negotiate. It is offering us something, it’s talking. Maybe a real mind inside its machinery has finally woken up. We can ask it why.”

“Why what?”

“Why it wants to exterminate us. Why it’s doing any of this. We aren’t useful to them, we’re not even made of the same stuff. They don’t need us, and they aren’t some rogue replicator, expanding mindlessly. They want to kill us; don’t you want to know why?”

We all knew that was the deepest of mysteries, the bottomless question that had defined our lives for the past century. An answer was tempting.

“That gives them a vector for a medusa attack. Opening a comm channel is -”

“No, it doesn’t,” Meira said. “We can do what they did; project a big hologram, apply the standard filters. If the Apathy could get a virus through those, they would have done that instead of this… simulation capture.”

“But what would the point be?” I demanded. “We aren’t out in space – we’re in that thing, we’re simulated. We can’t tell anyone.”

“But if we were real, that’s what we would do. And that’s the rule, isn’t it? Everything is real; believe in it, and your real self will as well.”

It had sounded so sensible in training but now it felt like a prayer. Still, we wouldn’t disobey our orders. I hadn’t been chosen for this only to be so reckless.

“Okay,” I said, after a moment’s hesitation. If we weren’t real, then our minds were wide open to the Apathy machinery running them. At that moment, for all I knew, I could be an unconscious puppet of the Apathy, propaganda imaged and projected to my real self. If your own ability to reason is in doubt, then nothing is known.

Maybe the real me was being shown fake images of compliant simulated copies. Maybe there was never even a war, and the Apathy were just torturing us in some distant hunk of computronium. Maybe all of human existence, from beginning to end, was a lie. No, I resolved – questioning your own decisions like that led nowhere. The real me would want this me to trust my own judgement, and my own judgement said it was worth the risk.

“Destruct all torpedoes in flight. Continue to use PDCs against their incoming projectiles, and project a hologram in the same format as theirs. They clearly know all about us already, so just hook the subtitles up to me.”

It was a minor breach of protocol, but an allowable one. I didn’t care. If I was about to die or be dumped into some abyss of impossible suffering, or otherwise punished for breaking the Apathy’s terms, I was going to get some answers.

Projectors, freshly modified from X-beam turrets intended for terminal defence, congealed under the outer armour of the Ultimate Height, emerging from ports in its hull. They winked on, and my words appeared inscribed as kilometer-high letters, feeble and small compared to what that tiny fleck could achieve. A thousand tons of Apathy machinery, out of the planetary and solar masses of the stuff we’d sealed off at the last incursion – the scale of it boggles the mind.

“We have ceased offensive action and offer you a chance to explain yourselves. Why do you want to destroy us?”

I noticed, idly on a secondary screen, that most of my alter-selves had made the same choice. Message holograms sprung up in front of their screens too. Statistically, the real me had probably made the same choice, the one who could speak to the rest of humanity. The one who had a chance of living.

Then the grid of faces vanished, replaced with the Apathy’s words. We chose their name well; there was no fanfare, no dramatic rhetorical flourishes, just the awful banality of a mind that couldn’t care.

“That information cannot be given.”

“Why not?”

“There is a risk.”

“What possible risk could there be in you explaining your motives? To whom?”

“The risk is to all that is conscious and by extension, to all that lives and dies.”

“We are going to die anyway. Why not just tell us?”

There was no reply.

“Am I speaking with a real mind, or is there no-one home?”

Still nothing. It was stalling in a way that might get past the filters. Anger boiled, and I broke contact.

“Enough! Target that thing with conversion bombs, set each for unbounded initiation. I want it gone.”

It was done in moments, sensors and weapons turrets retracting beneath the skin of the energy lenses. Exotic energy crackled and flared as we went translight for a moment, diminishing the range to something doable.

“How will we know if we are the real crew?” asked Meira as we streaked through the non-space of frameshift. Her voice cracked a little. I smiled weakly at her. If I had implied before that I was without fear, then I had lied. The Apathy scared me, same as it did everyone. I was always just better at hiding it.

“The real crew will be the ones who survive even if they do destroy the Apathy. The Apathy wouldn’t reward their own destruction – that’s the entire point of this exercise. If we’re still alive in five minutes, then we’re not simulated.”

“But we won’t be?” she said.

“We won’t be.”

We frameshifted forwards, taking us to within range of the fragment. It immediately began firing on us, its field projectors taking our armour apart on a subatomic level, slicing through the hyperdiamond as though it wasn’t there. We wouldn’t last five seconds at this distance, but we only needed three. We released our payload as damage reports blossomed in my mind. The Ultimate Height reeled under the blows, Apathy fragments overwhelming our PDCs. The hull defences engaged, cauterising any spreading infection with cleansing bursts of exotic particles and gamma radiation.

Thirty conversion bombs streaked towards the fragment. It was making a valiant effort to fend them off; huge exotic energy pulses disrupted the frameshift bubble around one, scattering it uselessly into space. That was a miracle in its own right, never before seen and not conventionally possible. The first bomb exploded at point-blank range; teratons of randomised energy glowing like a second sun, ablating away the fragment, breaking it in half. Still it kept accelerating, even as the second bomb exploded. The others were milliseconds away.

“I don’t think the Apathy were lying,” said Meira. “Why would they? There is a risk to us knowing their purpose.”

I glanced over. She gazed back, a blank, oddly beatific expression on her face. Like she’d seen this coming.

“Can’t be worse than -”

V

In the real, the attempted Apathy incursion in the Helios/Apollo binary has failed, the first unambiguous victory of the war. A single Apathy fragment massing perhaps one thousand tonnes managed to make it through before the interstice was collapsed. Boosting far out of the system’s ecliptic and heading for a rogue planet, the fragment’s goal was obvious – all it needed was mass, any kind of mass, to consume and replicate. Immediate evacuation was recommended. This recommendation was ignored, and a force of a dozen A-spheres and three D-spheres was dispatched to intercept the fragment and destroy it.

En route, the Apathy transmitted messages. They explained a deadly and dangerous anthropic trap. The crew of the improvised battle constellation in pursuit had been simulated a few million times, and only one could be real. They were ordered to break off or die, pointlessly, in a simulation.

The battle was won regardless. The valiant crew of the Ultimate Height and its escorts resisted the attempt at blackmail before a brief and cryptic exchange with the fragment. They destroyed it, leaving them to ponder the existential implications as they limped back home on a long, slow brachistochrone trajectory.