Accelerando

Chapter 6: Nightfall

A synthetic gemstone the size of a Coke can falls through silent

darkness. The night is quiet as the grave, colder than midwinter on

Pluto. Gossamer sails as fine as soap bubbles droop, the gust of

sapphire laser light that inflated them long since darkened. Ancient

starlight picks out the outline of a huge planetlike body beneath the

jewel-and-cobweb corpse of the starwhisp.

 

Eight Earth years have passed since the good ship Field Circus slipped

into close orbit around the frigid brown dwarf Hyundai +4904/[-56].

Five years have gone by since the launch lasers of the Ring Imperium

shut down without warning, stranding the light-sail-powered craft

three light-years from home. There has been no response from the

router, the strange alien artifact in orbit around the brown dwarf,

since the crew of the starwhisp uploaded themselves through its

strange quantum entanglement interface for transmission to whatever

alien network it connects to. In fact, nothing happens; nothing save

the slow trickle of seconds, as a watchdog timer counts down the

moments remaining until it is due to resurrect stored snapshots of the

crew, on the assumption that their uploaded copies are beyond help.

 

Meanwhile, outside the light cone -

 

*

 

Amber jolts into wakefulness, as if from a nightmare. She sits bolt

upright, a thin sheet falling from her chest; air circulating around

her back chills her rapidly, cold sweat evaporating. She mutters

aloud, unable to subvocalize, “Where am I - oh. A bedroom. How did I

get here?” Mumble. “Oh, I see.” Her eyes widen in horror. “It’s not a

dream …”

 

“Greetings, human Amber,” says a ghost-voice that seems to come from

nowhere: “I see you are awake. Would you like anything?”

 

Amber rubs her eyes tiredly. Leaning against the bedstead, she glances

around cautiously. She takes in a bedside mirror, her reflection in

it: a young woman, gaunt in the manner of those whose genome bears the

p53 calorie-restriction hack, she has disheveled blonde hair and dark

eyes. She could pass for a dancer or a soldier; not, perhaps, a queen.

“What’s going on? Where am I? Who are you, and what am I doing in your

head?”

 

Her eyes narrow. Analytical intellect comes to the fore as she takes

stock of her surroundings. “The router,” she mutters. Structures of

strange matter orbit a brown dwarf scant light-years from Earth. “How

long ago did we come through?” Glancing round, she sees a room walled

in slabs of close-fitting stone. A window bay is recessed into them,

after the style of the Crusader castles many centuries in the past,

but there’s no glass in it - just a blank white screen. The only

furniture in the room, besides a Persian carpet on the cold

flagstones, is the bed she sits upon. She’s reminded of a scene from

an old movie, Kubrick’s enigma; this whole set-up has got to be

deliberate, and it isn’t funny.

 

“I’m waiting,” she announces, and leans back against the headboard.

 

“According to our records this reaction indicates that you are now

fully self-aware,” says the ghost. “This is good. You have not been

conscious for a very long time. Explanations will be complex and

discursive. Can I offer you refreshments? What would you like?”

 

“Coffee, if you have it. Bread and hummus. Something to wear.” Amber

crosses her arms, abruptly self-conscious. “I’d prefer to have

management ackles to this universe, though. As realities go, it’s a

bit lacking in creature comforts.” Which isn’t entirely true - it

seems to have a comprehensive, human-friendly biophysics model, it’s

not just a jumped-up first-person shooter. Her eyes focus on her left

forearm, where tanned skin and a puckered dime of scar tissue record a

youthful accident with a pressure seal in Jovian orbit. Amber freezes

for a moment. Her lips move in silence, but she’s locked into place in

this universe, unable to split or conjoin nested realities just by

calling subroutines that have been spliced into the corners of her

mind since she was a teenager. Finally, she asks, “How long have I

been dead?”

 

“Longer than you were alive, by orders of magnitude,” says the ghost.

A tray laden with pita breads, hummus, and olives congeals from the

air above her bed, and a wardrobe appears at one side of the room. “I

can begin the explanation now or wait for you to finish eating. Which

would you prefer?”

 

Amber glances about again, then fixes on the white screen in the

window bay. “Give it to me right now. I can take it,” she says,

quietly bitter. “I like to understand my mistakes as soon as

possible.”

 

“We-us can tell that you are a human of determination,” says the

ghost, a hint of pride entering its voice. “That is a good thing,

Amber. You will need all of your resolve if you are going to survive

here …”

 

*

 

It is the time of repentance in a temple beside a tower that looms

above a dry plain, and the thoughts of the priest who lives in the

tower are tinged with regret. It is Ashura, the tenth day of Muhurram,

according to a realtime clock still tuned to the pace of a different

era: the one thousand, three hundred and fortieth anniversary of the

martyrdom of the Third Imam, the Sayyid ash-Shuhada.

 

The priest of the tower has spent an indefinite time in prayer, locked

in an eternal moment of meditation and recitation. Now, as the vast

red sun drifts close to the horizon of the infinite desert, his

thoughts drift toward the present. Ashura is a very special day, a day

of atonement for collective guilt, evil committed through inactivity;

but it is in Sadeq’s nature to look outwards toward the future. This

is, he knows, a failing - but also characteristic of his generation.

That’s the generation of the Shi’ite clergy that reacted to the

excesses of the previous century, the generation that withdrew the

ulama from temporal power, retreated from the velyat i-faqih of

Khomenei and his successors, left government to the people, and began

to engage fully with the paradoxes of modernity. Sadeq’s focus, his

driving obsession in theology, is a program of reappraisal of

eschatology and cosmology. Here in a tower of white sun-baked clay, on

an endless plain that exists only in the imaginary spaces of a

starship the size of a soft drink can, the priest spends his processor

cycles in contemplation of one of the most vicious problems ever to

confront a mujtahid - the Fermi paradox.

 

(Enrico Fermi was eating his lunch one day, and his colleagues were

discussing the possibility that sophisticated civilizations might

populate other worlds. “Yes,” he said, “but if this is so, why haven’t

they already come visiting?”)

 

Sadeq finishes his evening devotions in near silence, then stands,

stretches as is his wont, and leaves the small and lonely courtyard at

the base of the tower. The gate - a wrought-iron gate, warmed by

sunlight - squeals slightly as he opens it. Glancing at the upper

hinge, he frowns, willing it clean and whole. The underlying physics

model acknowledges his access controls: a thin rim of red around the

pin turns silvery-fresh, and the squeaking ceases. Closing the gate

behind him, Sadeq enters the tower.

 

He climbs with a heavy, even tread a spiral staircase snaking ever

upward above him. Narrow slit-windows line the outer wall of the

staircase. Through each of them he sees a different world. Out there,

nightfall in the month of Ramadan. And through the next, green misty

skies and a horizon too close by far. Sadeq carefully avoids thinking

about the implications of this manifold space. Coming from prayer,

from a sense of the sacred, he doesn’t want to lose his proximity to

his faith. He’s far enough from home as it is, and there is much to

consider. He is surrounded by strange and curious ideas, all but lost

in a corrosive desert of faith.

 

At the top of the staircase, Sadeq comes to a door of aged wood bound

in iron. It doesn’t belong here: It’s a cultural and architectural

anomaly. The handle is a loop of black metal. Sadeq regards it as if

it’s the head of an asp, poised to sting. Nevertheless, he reaches out

and turns the handle, steps across the threshold into a palace out of

fantasy.

 

None of this is real, he reminds himself. It’s no more real than an

illusion conjured by one of the jinni of the thousand nights and one

night. Nevertheless, he can’t save himself from smiling at the scene -

a sardonic smile of self-deprecating humor, tempered by frustration.

 

Sadeq’s captors have stolen his soul and locked it - him - in a very

strange prison, a temple with a tower that rises all the way to

Paradise. It’s the whole classical litany of medievalist desires,

distilled from fifteen hundred years of literature. Colonnaded

courtyards, cool pools lined with rich mosaics, rooms filled with

every imaginable dumb matter luxury, endless banquets awaiting his

appetite - and dozens of beautiful un-women, eager to fulfill his

every fantasy. Sadeq, being human, has fantasies by the dozen, but he

doesn’t dare permit himself to succumb to temptation. I’m not dead, he

reasons. Therefore, how can I be in Paradise? Therefore, this must be

a false paradise, a temptation sent to lead me astray. Probably.

Unless I am dead, because Allah, peace be unto him, considers a human

soul separated from its body to be dead. But if that’s so, isn’t

uploading a sin? In which case, this can’t be Paradise because I am a

sinner. Besides which, this whole setup is so puerile!

 

Sadeq has always been inclined to philosophical inquiry, and his

vision of the afterlife is more cerebral than most, involving ideas as

questionable within the framework of Islam as those of Teilhard de

Chardin were to the twentieth-century Catholic church. If there’s one

key indicator of a false paradise in his eschatology, it’s

two-and-seventy brainlessly beautiful houris waiting to do his

bidding. So it follows that he can’t really be dead …

 

The whole question of reality is so vexing that Sadeq does what he

does every night. He strides heedlessly across priceless works of art,

barging hastily through courtyards and passageways, ignoring niches in

which nearly naked supermodels lie with their legs apart, climbing

stairs - until he comes to a small unfurnished room with a single high

window in one wall. There he sits on the floor, legs crossed,

meditating; not in prayer, but in a more tightly focused

ratiocination. Every false night (for there is no way to know how fast

time is passing, outside this cyberspace pocket), Sadeq sits and

thinks, grappling with Descartes’s demon in the solitude of his own

mind. And the question he asks himself every night is the same: Can I

tell if this is the true hell? And if it is not, how can I escape?

 

*

 

The ghost tells Amber that she has been dead for just under a third of

a million years. She has been reinstantiated from storage - and has

died again - many times in the intervening period, but she has no

memory of this; she is a fork from the main bough, and the other

branches expired in lonely isolation.

 

The business of resurrection does not, in and of itself, distress

Amber unduly. Born in the post-Moravec era, she merely finds some

aspects of the ghost’s description dissatisfyingly incomplete. It’s

like saying she was drugged and brought hither without stating whether

by plane, train, or automobile.

 

She doesn’t have a problem with the ghost’s assertion that she is

nowhere near Earth - indeed, that she is approximately eighty thousand

light-years away. When she and the others took the risk of uploading

themselves through the router they found in orbit around Hyundai

+4904/[-56] they’d understood that they could end up anywhere or

nowhere. But the idea that she’s still within the light cone of her

departure strikes her as dubious. The original SETI broadcast strongly

implied that the router is part of a network of self-replicating

instantaneous communicators, spawning and spreading between the cold

brown dwarf stars that litter the galaxy. She’d somehow expected to be

much farther from home by now.

 

Somewhat more disturbing is the ghost’s assertion that the human

genotype has rendered itself extinct at least twice, that its home

planet is unknown, and that Amber is nearly the only human left in the

public archives. At this point, she interrupts. “I hardly see what

this has to do with me!” Then she blows across her coffee glass,

trying to cool the contents. “I’m dead,” she explains, with an

undertone of knowing sarcasm in her voice. “Remember? I just got here.

A thousand seconds ago, subjective time, I was in the control node of

a starship, discussing what to do with the router we were in orbit

around. We agreed to send ourselves through it, as a trade mission.

Then I woke up in bed here in the umpty-zillionth century, wherever

and whatever here is. Without access to any reality ackles or

augmentation, I can’t even tell whether this is real or an embedded

simulation. You’re going to have to explain why you need an old

version of me before I can make sense of my situation - and I can tell

you, I’m not going to help you until I know who you are. And speaking

of that, what about the others? Where are they? I wasn’t the only one,

you know?”

 

The ghost freezes in place for a moment, and Amber feels a watery rush

of terror: Have I gone too far? she wonders.

 

“There has been an unfortunate accident,” the ghost announces

portentously. It morphs from a translucent copy of Amber’s own body

into the outline of a human skeleton, elaborate bony extensions

simulating an osteosarcoma of more-than-lethal proportions.

“Consensus-we believe that you are best positioned to remediate the

situation. This applies within the demilitarized zone.”

 

“Demilitarized?” Amber shakes her head, pauses to sip her coffee.

“What do you mean? What is this place?”

 

The ghost flickers again, adopting an abstract rotating hypercube as

its avatar. “This space we occupy is a manifold adjacent to the

demilitarized zone. The demilitarized zone is a space outside our core

reality, itself exposed to entities that cross freely through our

firewall, journeying to and from the network outside. We-us use the

DMZ to establish the informational value of migrant entities, sapient

currency units and the like. We-us banked you upon arrival against

future options trades in human species futures.”

 

“Currency!” Amber doesn’t know whether to be amused or horrified -

both reactions seem appropriate. “Is that how you treat all your

visitors?”

 

The ghost ignores her question. “There is a runaway semiotic excursion

under way in the zone. We-us believe only you can fix it. If you agree

to do, so we will exchange value, pay, reward cooperation, expedite

remuneration, manumit, repatriate.”

 

Amber drains her coffee cup. “Have you ever entered into economic

interactions with me, or humans like me, before?” she asks. “If not,

why should I trust you? If so, why have you revived me? Are there any

more experienced instances of myself running around here?” She raises

a skeptical eyebrow at the ghost. “This looks like the start of an

abusive relationship.”

 

The ghost continues to sidestep her attempts to work out where she

stands. It flickers into transparency, grows into a hazy window on a

landscape of impossible shapes. Clouds sprouting trees drift above a

landscape of green, egg-curved hills and cheesecake castles. “Nature

of excursion: alien intelligence is loose in the DMZ,” it asserts.

“Alien is applying invalid semiotics to complex structures designed to

sustain trade. You know this alien, Amber. We require solution. Slay

the monster, we will give you line of credit. Your own reality to

control, insight into trade arrangements, augmented senses, ability to

travel. Can even upgrade you to you-we consensus, if desired.”

 

“This monster.” Amber leans forward, staring into the window eagerly.

She’s half-minded to ignore what she feels is a spurious offer; it

doesn’t sound too appetizing. Upgrade me to a ghost fragment of an

alien group mind? she wonders dismissively. “What is this alien?” She

feels blind and unsure, stripped of her ability to spawn threads of

herself to pursue complex inferences. “Is it part of the Wunch?”

 

“Datum unknown. It-them came with you,” says the ghost. “Accidentally

reactivated some seconds since now. It runs amok in the demilitarized

zone. Help us, Amber. Save our hub, or we will be cut off from the

network. If that happens, you will die with we-us. Save us …”

 

*

 

A single memory belonging to someone else unwinds, faster than a

guided missile and far more deadly.

 

Amber, aged eleven, is a gawky, long-limbed child loose on the

streets of Hong Kong, a yokel tourist viewing the hot core of the

Middle Kingdom. This is her first and final vacation before the

Franklin Trust straps her inside the payload pod of a Shenzhou

spaceplane and blasts her into orbit from Xinkiang. She’s free for

the time being, albeit mortgaged to the tune of several million

euros; she’s a little taikonaut to be, ready to work for the long

years in Jupiter orbit it will take her to pay off the

self-propelled options web that owns her. It’s not exactly slavery:

Thanks to Dad’s corporate shell game she doesn’t have to worry

about Mom chasing her, trying to return her to the posthuman prison

of growing up just like an old-fashioned little girl. And now she’s

got a bit of pocket money, and a room in the Hilton, and her own

personal Franklin remote to keep her company, she’s decided she’s

gonna do that eighteenth-century-enlightenment tourist shit and do

it right.

 

Because this is her last day at liberty in the randomly evolved

biosphere.

 

China is where things are at in this decade, hot and dense and full

of draconian punishments for the obsolescent. Nationalist fervor to

catch up with the west has been replaced by consumerist fervor to

own the latest fad gadgets; the most picturesque tourist souvenirs

from the quaintly old-fashioned streets of America; the fastest,

hottest, smartest, upgrades for body and soul. Hong Kong is hotter

and faster than just about anywhere else in China, or in the whole

damn world for that matter. This is a place where tourists from

Tokyo gawp, cowed and future-shocked by the glamour of

high-technology living.

 

Walking along Jardine’s Bazaar - More like Jardine’s bizarre, she

thinks - exposes Amber to a blast of humid noise. Geodesic domes

sprout like skeletal mushrooms from the glass-and-chrome roofs of

the expensive shopping malls and luxury hotels, threatening to

float away on the hot sea breeze. There are no airliners roaring in

and out of Kai Tak anymore, no burnished aluminum storm clouds to

rain round-eyed passengers on the shopping malls and fish markets

of Kowloon and the New Territories. In these tense later days of

the War Against Unreason, impossible new shapes move in the sky;

Amber gapes upward as a Shenyang F-30 climbs at a near-vertical

angle, a mess of incomprehensibly curved flight surfaces vanishing

to a perspective point that defies radar as well as eyeballs. The

Chinese - fighter? missile platform? supercomputer? - is heading

out over the South China Sea to join the endless patrol that

reassures the capitalist world that it is being guarded from the

Hosts of Denial, the Trouble out of Wa’hab.

 

For the moment, she’s merely a precocious human child. Amber’s

subconscious is off-lined by the presence of forceful infowar

daemons, the Chinese government censorbots suppressing her

cognition of their deadliest weapons. And in the seconds while her

mind is as empty as a sucked egg, a thin-faced man with blue hair

shoves her in the small of her back and snatches at her shoulder

bag.

 

“Hey!” she yells, stumbling. Her mind’s a blur, optics refusing to

respond and grab a biometric model of her assailant. It’s the

frozen moment, the dead zone when on-line coverage fails, and the

thief is running away before she can catch her balance or try to

give chase. Plus, with her extensions off-line she doesn’t know how

to yell “stop, thief!” in Cantonese.

 

Seconds later, the fighter is out of visual range and the state

censorship field lets up. “Get him, you bastards!” she screams, but

the curious shoppers simply stare at the rude foreign child: An

elderly woman brandishes a disposable phonecam at her and screeches

something back. Amber picks up her feet and runs. Already she can

feel the subsonics from her luggage growling at her guts - it’s

going to make a scene if she doesn’t catch up in time. Shoppers

scatter, a woman with a baby carriage almost running her down in

her panic to get away from it.

 

By the time Amber reaches her terrified shoulder bag, the thief has

disappeared: She has to spend almost a minute petting the scared

luggage before it stops screeching and retracts its spines enough

for her to pick it up. And by that time there’s a robocop in

attendance. “Identify yourself,” it rasps in synthetic English.

 

Amber stares at her bag in horror: There’s a huge gash in the side,

and it’s far too light. It’s gone, she thinks, despairingly. He

stole it. “Help,” she says faintly, holding up her bag for the

distant policeman looking through the robot’s eyes. “Been stolen.”

 

“What item missing?” asks the robot.

 

“My Hello Kitty,” she says, batting her eyelashes, mendacity

full-on at maximum utilization, prodding her conscience into

submission, warning of dire consequences should the police discover

the true nature of her pet cat. “My kitten’s been stolen! Can you

help me?”

 

“Certainly,” says the cop, resting a reassuring hand on her

shoulder - a hand that turns into a steel armband, as it pushes her

into a van and notifies her in formally stilted language that she

is under arrest on suspicion of shoplifting and will be required to

produce certificates of authenticity and a fully compliant

ownership audit for all items in her possession if she wants to

prove her innocence.

 

By the time Amber’s meatbrain realizes that she is being politely

arrested, some of her external threads have already started yelling

for help and her m-commerce trackers have identified the station

she’s being taken to by way of click-thru trails and an obliging

software license manager. They spawn agents to go notify the

Franklin trustees, Amnesty International, the Space and Freedom

Party, and her father’s lawyers. As she’s being booked into a

cerise-and-turquoise juvenile offenders holding room by a

middle-aged policewoman, the phones on the front desk are already

ringing with inquiries from attorneys, fast-food vendors, and a

particularly on-the-ball celebrity magazine that’s been tracking

her father’s connections. “Can you help me get my cat back?” she

asks the policewoman earnestly.

 

“Name,” the officer reads, eyes flickering from the simultaneous

translation. “To please wax your identity stiffly.”

 

“My cat has been stolen,” Amber insists.

 

“Your cat?” The cop looks perplexed, then exasperated. Dealing with

foreign teenagers who answer questions with gibberish isn’t in her

repertoire. “We are asking your name?”

 

“No,” says Amber. “It’s my cat. It has been stolen. My cat has been

stolen.”

 

“Aha! Your papers, please?”

 

“Papers?” Amber is growing increasingly worried. She can’t feel the

outside world; there’s a Faraday cage wrapped around the holding

cell, and it’s claustrophobically quiet inside. “I want my cat!

Now!”

 

The cop snaps her fingers, then reaches into her own pocket and

produces an ID card, which she points to insistently. “Papers,” she

repeats. “Or else.”

 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Amber wails.

 

The cop stares at her oddly. “Wait.” She rises and leaves, and a

minute later, returns with a thin-faced man in a business suit and

wire-rimmed glasses that glow faintly.

 

“You are making a scene,” he says, rudely and abruptly. “What is

your name? Tell me truthfully, or you’ll spend the night here.”

 

Amber bursts into tears. “My cat’s been stolen,” she chokes out.

 

The detective and the cop obviously don’t know how to deal with

this scene; it’s freaking them out, with its overtones of emotional

messiness and sinister diplomatic entanglement. “You wait here,”

they say, and back out of the cell, leaving her alone with a

plastic animatronic koala and a cheap Lebanese coffee machine.

 

The implications of her loss - of Aineko’s abduction - are sinking

in, finally, and Amber is weeping loudly and hopelessly. It’s hard

to deal with bereavement and betrayal at any age, and the cat has

been her wisecracking companion and consolation for a year, the

rock of certainty that gave her the strength to break free from her

crazy mother. To lose her cat to a body shop in Hong Kong, where

she will probably be cut up for spare circuitry or turned into soup

is too horrible to contemplate. Filled with despair and hopeless

anguish, Amber howls at the interrogation room walls while outside,

trapped threads of her consciousness search for backups to

synchronize with.

 

But after an hour, just as she’s quieting down into a slough of raw

despair, there’s a knock - a knock! - at the door. An inquisitive

head pops in. “Please to come with us?” It’s the female cop with

the bad translationware. She takes in Amber’s sobbing and tuts

under her breath, but as Amber stands up and shambles toward her,

she pulls back.

 

At the front desk of a cubicle farm full of police bureaucrats in

various states of telepresence, the detective is waiting with a

damp cardboard box wrapped in twine. “Please identify,” he asks,

snipping the string.

 

Amber shakes her head, dizzy with the flow of threads homing in to

synchronize their memories with her. “Is it -” she begins to ask as

the lid comes apart, wet pulp disintegrating. A triangular head

pops up, curiously, sniffing the air. Bubbles blow from

brown-furred nostrils. “What took you so long?” asks the cat, as

she reaches into the box and picks her up, fur wet and matted with

seawater.

 

*

 

“If you want me to go fix your alien, for starters I want you to give

me reality alteration privileges,” says Amber. “Then I want you to

find the latest instances of everyone who came here with me - round up

the usual suspects - and give them root privileges, too. Then we’ll

want access to the other embedded universes in the DMZ. Finally, I

want guns. Lots of guns.”

 

“That may be difficult,” says the ghost. “Many other humans reached

halting state long since. Is at least one other still alive, but not

accessible for duration of eschatological experiment in progress. Not

all were recorded with version control engine; others were-is lost in

DMZ. We-are can provide you with extreme access to the demilitarized

zone, but query the need for kinetic energy weapons.”

 

Amber sighs. “You guys really are media illiterates, aren’t you?” She

stands up and stretches, feeling a facsimile of sleep’s enervation

leaching from her muscles. “I’ll also need my -” it’s on the tip of

her tongue: There’s something missing. “Hang on. There’s something

I’ve forgotten.” Something important, she thinks, puzzled. Something

that used to be around all the time that would … know? … purr? …

help? “Never mind,” she hears her lips say. “This other human. I

really want her. Non-negotiable. All right?”

 

“That may be difficult,” repeats the ghost. “Entity is looping in a

recursively confined universe.”

 

“Eh?” Amber blinks at it. “Would you mind rephrasing that? Or

illustrating?”

 

“Illustration:” The ghost folds the air in the room into a glowing

ball of plasma, shaped like a Klein bottle. Amber’s eyes cross as she

looks at it. “Closest reference from human historical database is

Descartes’s demon. This entity has retreated within a closed space,

but is now unsure whether it is objectively real or not. In any event,

it refuses to interact.”

 

“Well, can you get me into that space?” asks Amber. Pocket universes

she can deal with; it’s part and parcel of her life. “Give me some

leverage -”

 

“Risk may attach to this course of action,” warns the ghost.

 

“I don’t care,” she says irritably. “Just put me there. It’s someone I

know, isn’t it? Send me into her dream, and I’ll wake her up, okay?”

 

“Understood,” says the ghost. “Prepare yourself.”

 

Without any warning, Amber is somewhere else. She glances around,

taking in an ornate mosaic floor, whitewashed walls set with open

windows through which stars twinkle faintly in the night sky. Her

clothing has somehow been replaced by sexy lingerie under a nearly

transparent robe, and her hair’s grown longer by about half a meter.

It’s all very disorienting. The walls are stone, and she stands in a

doorway to a room with nothing in it but a bed. Occupied by -

 

“Shit,” she exclaims. “Who are you?” The young and incredibly,

classically beautiful woman in the bed looks at her vacantly, then

rolls over on her side. She isn’t wearing a stitch, she’s completely

hairless from the ears down, and her languid posture is one of

invitation. “Yes?” Amber asks. “What is it?”

 

The woman on the bed beckons to her slowly. Amber shakes her head.

“Sorry, that’s just not my scene.” She backs away into the corridor,

unsteady in unaccustomedly high heels. “This is some sort of male

fantasy, isn’t it? And a dumb adolescent one at that.” She looks

around again. In one direction, a corridor heads past more open

doorways, and in the other, it ends with a spiral staircase. Amber

concentrates, trying to tell the universe to take her to the logical

destination, but nothing happens. “Looks like I’m going to have to do

this the hard way. I wish -” she frowns. She was about to wish that

someone else was here, but she can’t remember who. So she takes a deep

breath and heads toward the staircase.

 

“Up or down?” she asks herself. Up - it seems logical, if you’re going

to have a tower, to sleep up at the top of it. So she climbs the steps

carefully, holding the spiraling rail. I wonder who designed this

space? she wonders, and what role am I supposed to fit into in their

scenario? On second thoughts, the latter question strikes her as

laughable. Wait till I give him an earful …

 

There’s a plain wooden door at the top of the staircase, with a latch

that isn’t fastened. Amber pauses for a few seconds, nerving herself

to confront a sleeper so wrapped in solipsism that he’s built this

sex-fantasy castle around himself. I hope it isn’t Pierre, she thinks

grimly as she pushes the door inward.

 

The room is bare and floored in wood. There’s no furniture, just an

open window set high in one wall. A man sits cross-legged and robed,

with his back to her, mumbling quietly to himself and nodding

slightly. Her breath catches as she realizes who it is. Oh shit! Her

eyes widen. Is this what’s been inside his head all along?

 

“I did not summon you,” Sadeq says calmly, not turning round to look

at her. “Go away, tempter. You aren’t real.”

 

Amber clears her throat. “Sorry to disappoint you, but you’re wrong,”

she says. “We’ve got an alien monster to catch. Want to come hunting?”

 

Sadeq stops nodding. He sits up slowly, stretching his spine, then

stands up and turns round. His eyes glint in the moonlight. “That’s

odd.” He undresses her with his gaze. “You look like someone I used to

know. You’ve never done that before.”

 

“For fuck’s sake!” Amber nearly explodes, but catches herself after a

moment. “What is this, a Solipsists United chapterhouse meeting?”

 

“I -” Sadeq looks puzzled. “I’m sorry, are you claiming to be real?”

 

“As real as you are.” Amber reaches out and grabs a hand: He doesn’t

resist as she pulls him toward the doorway.

 

“You’re the first visitor I’ve ever had.” He sounds shocked.

 

“Listen, come on.” She tugs him after her, down the spiral staircase

to the floor below. “Do you want to stay here? Really?” She glances

back at him. “What is this place?”

 

“Hell is a perversion of heaven,” he says slowly, running the fingers

of his free hand through his beard. Abruptly, he reaches out and grabs

her around the waist, then yanks her toward him. “We’ll have to see

how real you are -” Amber, who is not used to this kind of treatment,

responds by stomping on his instep and backhanding him hard.

 

“You’re real!” he cries, as he falls back against the staircase.

“Forgive me, please! I had to know -”

 

“Know what?” she snarls. “Lay one finger on me again, and I’ll leave

you here to rot!” She’s already spawning the ghost that will signal

the alien outside to pull her out of this pocket universe: It’s a

serious threat.

 

“But I had to - wait. You have free will. You just demonstrated that.”

He’s breathing heavily and looking up at her imploringly. “I’m sorry,

I apologize! But I had to know whether you were another zombie. Or

not.”

 

“A zombie?” She looks round. Another living doll has appeared behind

her, standing in an open doorway wearing a skintight leather suit with

a cutaway crotch. She beckons to Sadeq invitingly. Another body

wearing strategically placed strips of rubber mewls at her feet,

writhing for attention. Amber raises an eyebrow in disgust. “You

thought I was one of those?”

 

Sadeq nods. “They’ve got cleverer lately. Some of them can talk. I

nearly mistook one for -” He shudders convulsively. “Unclean!”

 

“Unclean.” Amber looks down at him thoughtfully. “This isn’t really

your personal paradise after all, is it?” After a moment she holds out

a hand to him. “Come on.”

 

“I’m sorry I thought you were a zombie,” he repeats.

 

“Under the circumstances, I think I forgive you,” she says. Then the

ghost yanks them both back to the universe outside.

 

*

 

More memories converge on the present moment:

 

The Ring Imperium is a huge cluster of self-replicating robots that

Amber has assembled in low Jupiter orbit, fueled by the mass and

momentum of the small moon J-47 Barney, to provide a launching

platform for the interstellar probe her father’s business partners

are helping her to build. It’s also the seat of her court, the

leading jurisprudential nexus in the outer solar system. Amber is

the Queen, here, arbitrator and ruler. And Sadeq is her judge and

counsel.

 

A plaintiff Amber only knows as a radar blip thirty light-minutes

away has filed a lawsuit in her court, alleging malfeasance,

heresy, and barratry against a semisentient corporate pyramid

scheme that arrived in Jovian space twelve million seconds ago and

currently seems set on converting every other intelligence in the

region to its peculiar memeset. A whole bundle of multithreaded

countersuits are dragging at her attention, in a counterattack

alleging that the light blip is in violation of copyright, patent,

and trade secrecy laws by discussing the interloper’s intentions.

 

Right now, Amber isn’t home on the Ring to hear the case in person.

She’s left Sadeq behind to grapple with the balky mechanics of her

legal system - tailor-designed to make corporate litigation a pain

in the ass - while she drags Pierre off on a diplomatic visit to

another Jovian colony, the Nursery Republic. Planted by the

Franklin Trust’s orphanage ship Ernst Sanger, the Nursery has grown

over the past four years into a spindly snowflake three kilometers

across. A slow-growing O’Neil cylinder sprouts from its hub: Most

of the inhabitants of the space station are less than two years

old, precocious additions to the Trust’s borganism.

 

There’s a piazza, paved with something not unlike rough marble, on

the side of a hill that clings insecurely to the inner edge of a

spinning cup. The sky is a black vastness overhead, wheeling slowly

around a central axis lined up on Jupiter. Amber sprawls in a

wicker chair, her legs stretched out before her and one arm flung

across her forehead. The wreckage of an incredible meal is

scattered across the tables around her. Torpid and full, she

strokes the cat that lies curled in her lap. Pierre is off

somewhere, touring one or another of the prototype ecosystems that

one or another of the borg’s special interest minds is testing.

Amber, for her part, can’t be bothered. She’s just had a great

meal, she doesn’t have any lawsuits to worry about, everything back

home is on the critpath, and quality time like this is so hard to

come by -

 

“Do you keep in touch with your father?” asks Monica.

 

“Mmm.” The cat purrs quietly, and Amber strokes its flank. “We

e-mail. Sometimes.”

 

“I just wondered.” Monica is the local borg den mother, willowy and

brown-eyed and with a deceptively lazy drawl - Yorkshire English

overlaid with Silicon Valley speak. “I hear from him, y’know. From

time to time. Now that Gianni’s retired, he doesn’t have much to do

downwell anymore. So he was talking about coming out here.”

 

“What? To Perijove?” Amber’s eyes open in alarm: Aineko stops

purring and looks round at Monica accusingly.

 

“Don’t worry.” Monica sounds vaguely amused: “He wouldn’t cramp

your style, I think.”

 

“But, out here -” Amber sits up. “Damn,” she says, quietly. “What

got into him?”

 

“Middle-aged restlessness, my downwell sibs say.” Monica shrugs.

“This time Annette didn’t stop him. But he hasn’t made up his mind

to travel yet.”

 

“Good. Then he might not -” Amber stops. “The phrase, ‘made up his

mind’, what exactly do you mean?”

 

Monica’s smile mocks her for a few seconds before the older woman

surrenders. “He’s talking about uploading.”

 

“Is that embarrassing or what?” asks Ang. Amber glances at her,

mildly annoyed, but Ang isn’t looking her way. So much for friends,

Amber thinks. Being queen of all you survey is a great way of

breaking up peer relationships -

 

“He won’t do it,” Amber predicts. “Dad’s burned out.”

 

“He thinks he’ll get it back if he optimizes himself for

re-entrancy.” Monica continues to smile. “I’ve been telling him

it’s just what he needs.”

 

“I do not want my father bugging me. Or my mother. Or Auntie ‘Nette

and Uncle Gianni. Memo to immigration control: No entry rights for

Manfred Macx or the other named individuals without clearance

through the Queen’s secretary.”

 

“What did he do to get you so uptight?” asks Monica idly.

 

Amber sighs, and subsides. “Nothing. It’s not that I’m ungrateful

or anything, but he’s just so extropian, it’s embarrassing. Like,

that was the last century’s apocalypse. Y’know?”

 

“I think he was a really very forward-looking organic,” Monica,

speaking for the Franklin borg, asserts. Amber looks away. Pierre

would get it, she thinks. Pierre would understand her aversion to

Manfred’s showing up. Pierre, too, wants to carve out his own niche

without parents looking over his shoulders, although for very

different reasons. She focuses on someone male and more or less

mature - Nicky, she thinks, though she hasn’t seen him for a long

time - walking toward the piazza, bare-ass naked and beautifully

tanned.

 

“Parents. What are they good for?” asks Amber, with all the

truculence of her seventeen years. “Even if they stay neotenous,

they lose flexibility. And there’s that long Paleolithic tradition

of juvenile slavery. Inhuman, I call it.”

 

“How old were you when it was safe to leave you around the house on

your own?” challenges Monica.

 

“Three. That’s when I had my first implants.” Amber smiles at the

approaching young Adonis, who smiles back: Yes, it’s Nicky, and he

seems pleased to see her. Life is good, she thinks, idly

considering whether or not to tell Pierre.

 

“Times change,” remarks Monica. “Don’t write your family off too

soon; there might come a time when you want their company.”

 

“Huh.” Amber pulls a face at the old borg component. “That’s what

you all say!”

 

*

 

As soon as Amber steps onto the grass, she can feel possibilities open

up around her. She has management authority here, and this universe is

big, wide open, not like Sadeq’s existential trap. A twitch of a

sub-process reasserts her self-image, back to short hair and

comfortable clothing. Another twitch brings up a whole load of useful

diagnostics. Amber has a nasty feeling that she’s running in a

compatibility sandbox here - there are signs that her access to the

simulation system’s control interface is very much via proxy - but at

least she’s got it.

 

“Wow! Back in the real world at last!” She can hardly contain her

excitement, even forgetting to be pissed at Sadeq for thinking she was

just an actor in his Cartesian theatre’s performance of Puritan Hell.

“Look! It’s the DMZ!”

 

They’re standing on a grassy knoll overlooking a gleaming

Mediterranean city. It snoozes beneath a Mandelbrot-fuzzy not-sun that

hangs at the center of a hyperbolic landscape, which dwindles into a

blue yonder that seems incomprehensibly distant. Circular baby-blue

wells open in the walls of the world at regular intervals, connecting

to other parts of the manifold. “How big is it, ghost? In planetary

simulation-equivalents.”

 

“This demilitarized zone is an embedded reality, funneling all

transfers between the local star system’s router and the civilization

that built it. It uses on the order of a thousandth of the capacity of

the Matrioshka brain it is part of, although the runaway excursion

currently in force has absorbed most of that. Matrioshka brain, you

are familiar with the concept?” The ghost sounds fussily pedantic.

 

Sadeq shakes his head. Amber glances at him, askance. “Take all the

planets in a star system and dismantle them,” she explains. “Turn them

into dust - structured nanocomp, powered by heat exchangers, spread in

concentric orbits around the central star. The inner orbitals run

close to the melting point of iron, the outer ones are cold as liquid

nitrogen, and each layer runs off the waste heat of the next shell in.

It’s like a Russian doll made out of Dyson spheres, shell enclosing

shell enclosing shell, but it’s not designed to support human life.

It’s computronium, matter optimized at the atomic level to support

computing, and they’re all running uploads - Dad figured our own solar

system could support, uh, about a hundred billion times as many

inhabitants as Earth. At a conservative estimate. As uploads, living

in simulation space. If you first dismantle all the planets and use

the resulting materials to build a Matrioshka brain.”

 

“Ah.” Sadeq nods thoughtfully. “Is that your definition, too?” he

asks, glancing up at the glowing point the ghost uses to localize its

presence.

 

“Substantially,” it says, almost grudgingly.

 

“Substantially?” Amber glances around. A billion worlds to explore,

she thinks dizzily. And that’s just the firewall? She feels obscurely

cheated: You need to be vaster than human just to count the digits in

the big numbers at play here, but there’s nothing fundamentally

incomprehensible about it. This is the sort of civilization Dad said

she could expect to live in, within her meatbody life expectancy. Dad

and his drinking buddies, singing, “Dismantle the Moon! Melt down

Mars!” in a castle outside Prague as they waited for the results of a

shamelessly gerrymandered election to arrive in the third decade of

the third millennium. The Space and Freedom Party taking over the EU,

and cranking up to escape velocity. But this is supposed to be

kiloparsecs from home, ancient alien civilizations and all that!

Where’s the exotic superscience? What about the neuron stars, strange

matter suns structured for computing at nucleonic, rather than

electronic, speeds? I have a bad feeling about this, she thinks,

spawning a copy of herself to set up a private channel to Sadeq. It’s

not advanced enough. Do you suppose these guys could be like the

Wunch? Parasites or barbarians hitching a ride in the machine?

 

You believe it’s lying to us? Sadeq sends back.

 

“Hmm.” Amber sets off downslope toward the piazza below, at the heart

of the fake town. “It looks a bit too human to me.”

 

“Human,” echoes Sadeq, a curious wistfulness in his voice. “Did you

not say humans are extinct?”

 

“Your species is obsolete,” the ghost comments smugly.

“Inappropriately adapted to artificial realities. Poorly optimized

circuitry, excessively complex low-bandwidth sensors, messily global

variables -”

 

“Yeah, yeah, I get the picture,” says Amber, turning her attention to

the town. “So why do you think we can deal with this alien god you’ve

got a problem with?”

 

“It asked for you,” says the ghost, narrowing from an ellipse to a

line, then shrinking to a dimensionless point of brilliance. “And now

it’s coming. We-I not willing to risk exposure. Call us-me when you

have slain the dragon. Goodbye.”

 

“Oh shit -” Amber spins round. But she and Sadeq are alone beneath the

hot sunlight from above. The piazza, like the one in the Nursery

Republic, is charmingly rustic - but there’s nobody home, nothing but

ornate cast-iron furniture basking beneath the noon-bright sun, a

table with a parasol over it, and something furry lying sprawled in a

patch of sunlight beside it.

 

“We appear to be alone for now,” says Sadeq. He smiles crookedly, then

nods at the table. “Maybe we should wait for our host to arrive?”

 

“Our host.” Amber peers around. “The ghost is kind of frightened of

this alien. I wonder why?”

 

“It asked for us.” Sadeq heads toward the table, pulls out a chair,

and sits down carefully. “That could be very good news - or very bad.”

 

“Hmm.” Amber finishes her survey, sees no sign of life. For lack of

any better ideas, she ambles over to the table and sits down on the

other side of it from Sadeq. He looks slightly nervous beneath her

inspection, but maybe it’s just embarrassment about having seen her in

her underwear. If I had an afterlife like that, I’d be embarrassed

about it, too, Amber thinks to herself.

 

“Hey, you nearly tripped over -” Sadeq freezes, peering at something

close to Amber’s left foot. He looks puzzled for a moment, then smiles

broadly. “What are you doing here?” he asks her blind spot.

 

“What are you talking to?” she asks, startled.

 

He’s talking to me, dummy, says something tantalizingly familiar from

her blind spot. So the fuckwits are trying to use you to dislodge me,

hmm? That’s not exactly clever.

 

“Who -” Amber squints at the flagstone, spawns a bunch of ghosts who

tear hurriedly at her reality modification ackles. Nothing seems to

shift the blindness. “Are you the alien?”

 

“What else could I be?” the blind spot asks with heavy irony. “No, I’m

your father’s pet cat. Listen, do you want to get out of here?”

 

“Uh.” Amber rubs her eyes. “I can’t see you, whatever you are,” she

says politely. “Do I know you?” She’s got a strange sense that she

does know the blind spot, that it’s really important, and she’s

missing something intimate to her own sense of identity, but what it

might be she can’t tell.

 

“Yeah, kid.” There’s a note of world-weary amusement in the not-voice

coming from the hazy patch on the ground. “They’ve hacked you but

good, both of you. Let me in, and I’ll fix it.”

 

“No!” Exclaims Amber, a second ahead of Sadeq, who looks at her oddly.

“Are you really an invader?”

 

The blind spot sighs. “I’m as much an invader as you are, remember? I

came here with you. Difference is, I’m not going to let some stupid

corporate ghost use me as fungible currency.”

 

“Fungible -” Sadeq stops. “I remember you,” he says slowly, with an

expression of absolute, utter surprise on his face. “What do you

mean?”

 

The blind spot yawns, baring sharp ivory fangs. Amber shakes her head,

dismissing the momentary hallucination. “Lemme guess. You woke up in a

room, and this alien ghost tells you the human species is extinct and

asks you to do a number on me. Is that right?”

 

Amber nods, as an icy finger of fear trails up and down her spine. “Is

it lying?” she asks.

 

“Damn right.” The blind spot is smiling, now, and the smile on the

void won’t go away - she can see the smile, just not the body it’s

attached to. “My reckoning is, we’re about sixteen light-years from

Earth. The Wunch came through here, stripped the dump, then took off

for parts unknown; it’s a trashhole, you wouldn’t believe it. The main

life-form is an incredibly ornate corporate ecosphere, legal

instruments breeding and replicating. They mug passing sapients and

use them as currency.”

 

There’s a triangular, pointy head behind the smile, slit eyes and

sharp ears, a predatory, intelligent-looking but infinitely alien

face. Amber can see it out of the corners of her eyes when she looks

around the piazza. “You mean we, uh, they grabbed us when we appeared,

and they’ve mangled my memories -” Amber suddenly finds it incredibly

difficult to concentrate, but if she focuses on the smile, she can

almost see the body behind it, hunched like a furry chicken, tail

wrapped neatly around its front paws.

 

“Yeah. Except they didn’t bargain on meeting something like me.” The

smile is infinitely wide, a Cheshire-cat grin on front of an

orange-and-brown stripy body that shimmers in front of Amber’s gaze

like a hallucination. “Your mother’s cracking tools are

self-extending, Amber. Do you remember Hong Kong?”

 

“Hong -”

 

There is a moment of painless pressure, then Amber feels huge

invisible barriers sliding away on all sides. She looks around, for

the first time seeing the piazza as it really is, half the crew of the

Field Circus waiting nervously around her, the grinning cat crouched

on the floor at her feet, the enormous walls of recomplicating data

that fence their little town off from the gaping holes - interfaces to

the other routers in the network.

 

“Welcome back,” Pierre says gravely, as Amber gives a squeak of

surprise and leans forward to pick up her cat. “Now you’re out from

under, how about we start trying to figure out how to get home?”

 

*

 

Welcome to decade the sixth, millennium three. These old datelines

don’t mean so much anymore, for while some billions of fleshbody

humans are still infected with viral memes, the significance of

theocentric dating has been dealt a body blow. This may be the

fifties, but what that means to you depends on how fast your

reality rate runs. The various upload clades exploding across the

reaches of the solar system vary by several orders of magnitude -

some are barely out of 2049, while others are exploring the

subjective thousandth millennium.

 

While the Field Circus floats in orbit around an alien router

(itself orbiting the brown dwarf Hyundai +4904/[-56]), while Amber

and her crew are trapped on the far side of a wormhole linking the

router to a network of incomprehensibly vast alien mindscapes -

while all this is going on, the damnfool human species has finally

succeeded in making itself obsolete. The proximate cause of its

displacement from the pinnacle of creation (or the pinnacle of

teleological self-congratulation, depending on your stance on

evolutionary biology) is an attack of self-aware corporations. The

phrase “smart money” has taken on a whole new meaning, for the

collision between international business law and neurocomputing

technology has given rise to a whole new family of species -

fast-moving corporate carnivores in the Net. The planet Mercury has

been broken up by a consortium of energy brokers, and Venus is an

expanding debris cloud, energized to a violent glare by the trapped

and channeled solar output. A million billion fist-sized computing

caltrops, backsides glowing dull red with the efflux from their

thinking, orbit the sun at various inclinations no farther out than

Mercury used to be.

 

Billions of fleshbody humans refuse to have anything to do with the

blasphemous new realities. Many of their leaders denounce the

uploads and AIs as soulless machines. Many more are timid,

harboring self-preservation memes that amplify a previously healthy

aversion to having one’s brain peeled like an onion by mind-mapping

robots into an all-pervading neurosis. Sales of electrified

tinfoil-lined hats are at an all-time high. Still, hundreds of

millions have already traded their meat puppets for mind machines,

and they breed fast. In another few years, the fleshbody populace

will be an absolute minority of the posthuman clade. Sometime

later, there will probably be a war. The dwellers in the

thoughtcloud are hungry for dumb matter to convert, and the

fleshbodies make notoriously poor use of the collection of silicon

and rare elements that pool at the bottom of the gravity well that

is Earth.

 

Energy and thought are driving a phase-change in the condensed

matter substance of the solar system. The MIPS per kilogram metric

is on the steep upward leg of a sigmoid curve - dumb matter is

coming to life as the mind children restructure everything with

voracious nanomechanical servants. The thoughtcloud forming in

orbit around the sun will ultimately be the graveyard of a

biological ecology, another marker in space visible to the

telescopes of any new iron-age species with the insight to

understand what they’re seeing: the death throes of dumb matter,

the birth of a habitable reality vaster than a galaxy and far

speedier. Death throes that, within a few centuries, will mean the

extinction of biological life within a light-year or so of that

star - for the majestic Matrioshka brains, though they are the

pinnacles of sentient civilization, are intrinsically hostile

environments for fleshy life.

 

*

 

Pierre, Donna-the-all-seeing-eye, and Su Ang fill Amber in on what

they’ve discovered about the bazaar - as they call the space the ghost

referred to as the demilitarized zone - over ice-cold margaritas and a

very good simulation of a sociable joint. Some of them have been on

the loose in here for subjective years. There’s a lot of information

to absorb.

 

“The physical layer is half a light-hour in diameter, four hundred

times as massive as Earth,” Pierre explains. “Not solid, of course -

the largest component is about the size my fist used to be.” Amber

squints, trying to remember how big that was - scale factors are hard

to remember accurately. “I met this old chatbot that said it’s

outlived its original star, but I’m not sure it’s running with a full

deck. Anyway, if it’s telling the truth, we’re a third of a light year

out from a closely coupled binary system - they use orbital lasers the

size of Jupiter to power it without getting too close to all those

icky gravity wells.”

 

Amber is intimidated, despite her better judgment, because this

bizarre bazaar is several hundred billion times as big as the totality

of human presingularity civilization. She tries not to show it in

front of the others, but she’s worried that getting home may be

impossible - requiring enterprise beyond the economic event horizon,

as realistic a proposition as a dime debuting as a dollar bill. Still,

she’s got to at least try. Just knowing about the existence of the

bazaar will change so many things …

 

“How much money can we lay our hands on?” She asks. “What is money

hereabouts, anyway? Assuming they’ve got a scarcity-mediated economy.

Bandwidth, maybe?”

 

“Ah, well.” Pierre looks at her oddly. “That’s the problem. Didn’t the

ghost tell you?”

 

“Tell me?” Amber raises an eyebrow. “Yeah, but it hasn’t exactly

proven to be a reliable guide to anything, has it?”

 

“Tell her,” Su Ang says quietly. She looks away, embarrassed by

something.

 

“They’ve got a scarcity economy all right,” says Pierre. “Bandwidth is

the limited resource, that and matter. This whole civilization is tied

together locally because if you move too far away, well, it takes ages

to catch up on the gossip. Matrioshka brain intelligences are much

more likely to stay at home than anybody realized, even though they

chat on the phone a lot. And they use things that come from other

cognitive universes as, well, currency. We came in through the coin

slot, is it any wonder we ended up in the bank?”

 

“That’s so deeply wrong that I don’t know where to begin,” Amber

grumbles. “How did they get into this mess?”

 

“Don’t ask me.” Pierre shrugs. “I have the distinct feeling that

anyone or anything we meet in this place won’t have any more of a clue

than we do - whoever or whatever built this brain, there ain’t nobody

home anymore except the self-propelled corporations and hitchhikers

like the Wunch. We’re in the dark, just like they were.”

 

“Huh. You mean they built something like this, then they went extinct?

That sounds so dumb …”

 

Su Ang sighs. “They got too big and complex to go traveling once they

built themselves a bigger house to live in. Extinction tends to be

what happens to overspecialized organisms that are stuck in one

environmental niche for too long. If you posit a singularity, then

maximization of local computing resources - like this - as the usual

end state for tool users, is it any wonder none of them ever came

calling on us?”

 

Amber focuses on the table in front of her, rests the heel of her palm

on the cool metal, and tries to remember how to fork a second copy of

her state vector. A moment later, her ghost obligingly fucks with the

physics model of the table. Iron gives way like rubber beneath her

fingertips, a pleasant elasticity. “Okay, we have some control over

the universe, at least that’s something to work with. Have any of you

tried any self-modification?”

 

“That’s dangerous,” Pierre says emphatically. “The more of us the

better before we start doing that stuff. And we need some firewalling

of our own.”

 

“How deep does reality go, here?” asks Sadeq. It’s almost the first

question he’s asked of his own volition, and Amber takes it as a

positive sign that he’s finally coming out of his shell.

 

“Oh, the Planck length is about a hundredth of a millimeter in this

world. Too small to see, comfortably large for the simulation engines

to handle. Not like real space-time.”

 

“Well, then.” Sadeq pauses. “They can zoom their reality if they need

to?”

 

“Yeah, fractals work in here.” Pierre nods. “I didn’t -”

 

“This place is a trap,” Su Ang says emphatically.

 

“No it isn’t,” Pierre replies, nettled.

 

“What do you mean, a trap?” asks Amber.

 

“We’ve been here a while,” says Ang. She glances at Aineko, who

sprawls on the flagstones, snoozing or whatever it is that weakly

superhuman AIs do when they’re emulating a sleeping cat. “After your

cat broke us out of bondage, we had a look around. There are things

out there that -” She shivers. “Humans can’t survive in most of the

simulation spaces here. Universes with physics models that don’t

support our kind of neural computing. You could migrate there, but

you’d need to be ported to a whole new type of logic - by the time you

did that, would you still be you? Still, there are enough entities

roughly as complex as we are to prove that the builders aren’t here

anymore. Just lesser sapients, rooting through the wreckage. Worms and

parasites squirming through the body after nightfall on the

battlefield.”

 

“I ran into the Wunch,” Donna volunteers helpfully. “The first couple

of times they ate my ghost, but eventually I figured out how to talk

to them.”

 

“And there’s other aliens, too,” Su Ang adds gloomily. “Just nobody

you’d want to meet on a dark night.”

 

“So there’s no hope of making contact,” Amber summarizes. “At least,

not with anything transcendent and well-intentioned toward visiting

humans.”

 

“That’s probably right,” Pierre concedes. He doesn’t sound happy about

it.

 

“So we’re stuck in a pocket universe with limited bandwidth to home

and a bunch of crazy slum dwellers who’ve moved into the abandoned and

decaying mansion and want to use us for currency. ‘Jesus saves, and

redeems souls for valuable gifts.’ Yeah?”

 

“Yeah.” Su Ang looks depressed.

 

“Well.” Amber glances at Sadeq speculatively. Sadeq is staring into

the distance, at the crazy infinite sunspot that limns the square with

shadows. “Hey, god-man. Got a question for you.”

 

“Yes?” Sadeq looks at her, a slightly dazed expression on his face.

“I’m sorry, I am just feeling the jaws of a larger trap around my

throat -”

 

“Don’t be.” Amber grins, and it is not a pleasant expression. “Have

you ever been to Brooklyn?”

 

“No, why -”

 

“Because you’re going to help me sell these lying bastards a bridge.

Okay? And when we’ve sold it we’re going to use the money to pay the

purchasing fools to drive us across, so we can go home. Listen, this

is what I’m planning …”

 

*

 

“I can do this, I think,” Sadeq says, moodily examining the Klein

bottle on the table. The bottle is half-empty, its fluid contents

invisible around the corner of the fourth-dimensional store. “I spent

long enough alone in there to -” He shivers.

 

“I don’t want you damaging yourself,” Amber says, calmly enough,

because she has an ominous feeling that their survival in this place

has an expiry date attached.

 

“Oh, never fear.” Sadeq grins lopsidedly. “One pocket hell is much

like another.”

 

“Do you understand why -”

 

“Yes, yes,” he says dismissively. “We can’t send copies of ourselves

into it, that would be an abomination. It needs to be unpopulated,

yes?”

 

“Well, the idea is to get us home, not leave thousands of copies of

ourselves trapped in a pocket universe here. Isn’t that it?” Su Ang

asks hesitantly. She’s looking distracted, most of her attention

focused on absorbing the experiences of a dozen ghosts she’s spun off

to attend to perimeter security.

 

“Who are we selling this to?” asks Sadeq. “If you want me to make it

attractive -”

 

“It doesn’t need to be a complete replica of the Earth. It just has to

be a convincing advertisement for a presingularity civilization full

of humans. You’ve got two-and-seventy zombies to dissect for their

brains; bolt together a bunch of variables you can apply to them, and

you can permutate them to look a bit more varied.”

 

Amber turns her attention to the snoozing cat. “Hey, furball. How long

have we been here really, in real time? Can you grab Sadeq some more

resources for his personal paradise garden?”

 

Aineko stretches and yawns, totally feline, then looks up at Amber

with narrowed eyes and raised tail. “‘Bout eighteen minutes,

wall-clock time.” The cat stretches again and sits, front paws drawn

together primly, tail curled around them. “The ghosts are pushing, you

know? I don’t think I can sustain this for too much longer. They’re

not good at hacking people, but I think it won’t be too long before

they instantiate a new copy of you, one that’ll be predisposed to

their side.”

 

“I don’t get why they didn’t assimilate you along with the rest of

us.”

 

“Blame your mother again - she’s the one who kept updating the digital

rights management code on my personality. ‘Illegal consciousness is

copyright theft’ sucks until an alien tries to rewire your hindbrain

with a debugger; then it’s a lifesaver.” Aineko glances down and

begins washing one paw. “I can give your mullah-man about six days,

subjective time. After that, all bets are off.”

 

“I will take it, then.” Sadeq stands. “Thank you.” He smiles at the

cat, a smile that fades to translucency, hanging in the simulated air

like an echo as the priest returns to his tower - this time with a

blueprint and a plan in mind.

 

“That leaves just us.” Su Ang glances at Pierre, back to Amber. “Who

are you going to sell this crazy scheme to?”

 

Amber leans back and smiles. Behind her, Donna - her avatar an archaic

movie camera suspended below a model helicopter - is filming

everything for posterity. She nods lazily at the reporter. “She’s the

one who gave me the idea. Who do we know who’s dumb enough to buy into

a scam like this?”

 

Pierre looks at her suspiciously. “I think we’ve been here before,” he

says slowly. “You aren’t going to make me kill anyone, are you?”

 

“I don’t think that’ll be necessary, unless the corporate ghosts think

we’re going to get away from them and are greedy enough to want to

kill us.”

 

“You see, she learned from last time,” Ang comments, and Amber nods.

“No more misunderstandings, right?” She beams at Amber.

 

Amber beams back at her. “Right. And that’s why you -” she points at

Pierre - “are going to go find out if any relics of the Wunch are

hanging about here. I want you to make them an offer they won’t

refuse.”

 

*

 

“How much for just the civilization?” asks the Slug.

 

Pierre looks down at it thoughtfully. It’s not really a terrestrial

mollusk: Slugs on Earth aren’t two meters long and don’t have lacy

white exoskeletons to hold their chocolate-colored flesh in shape. But

then, it isn’t really the alien it appears to be. It’s a defaulting

corporate instrument that has disguised itself as a long-extinct alien

upload, in the hope that its creditors won’t recognize it if it looks

like a randomly evolved sentient. One of the stranded members of

Amber’s expedition made contact with it a couple of subjective years

ago, while exploring the ruined city at the center of the firewall.

Now Pierre’s here because it seems to be one of their most promising

leads. Emphasis on the word promising - because it promises much, but

there is some question over whether it can indeed deliver.

 

“The civilization isn’t for sale,” Pierre says slowly. The translation

interface shimmers, storing up his words and transforming them into a

different deep grammar, not merely translating his syntax but mapping

equivalent meanings where necessary. “But we can give you privileged

observer status if that’s what you want. And we know what you are. If

you’re interested in finding a new exchange to be traded on, your

existing intellectual property assets will be worth rather more there

than here.”

 

The rogue corporation rears up slightly and bunches into a fatter

lump. Its skin blushes red in patches. “Must think about this. Is your

mandatory accounting time cycle fixed or variable term? Are self-owned

corporate entities able to enter contracts?”

 

“I could ask my patron,” Pierre says casually. He suppresses a stab of

angst. He’s still not sure where he and Amber stand, but theirs is far

more than just a business relationship, and he worries about the risks

she’s taking. “My patron has a jurisdiction within which she can

modify corporate law to accommodate your requirements. Your activities

on a wider scale might require shell companies -” the latter concept

echoes back in translation to him as host organisms - “but that can be

taken care of.”

 

The translation membrane wibbles for a while, apparently reformulating

some more abstract concepts in a manner that the corporation can

absorb. Pierre is reasonably confident that it’ll take the offer,

however. When it first met them, it boasted about its control over

router hardware at the lowest levels. But it also bitched and moaned

about the firewall protocols that were blocking it from leaving

(before rather rudely trying to eat its conversationalist). He waits

patiently, looking around at the swampy landscape, mudflats punctuated

by clumps of spiky violet ferns. The corporation has to be desperate,

to be thinking of the bizarre proposition Amber has dreamed up for him

to pitch to it.

 

“Sounds interesting,” the Slug declares after a brief confirmatory

debate with the membrane. “If I supply a suitable genome, can you

customize a container for it?”

 

“I believe so,” Pierre says carefully. “For your part, can you deliver

the energy we need?”

 

“From a gate?” For a moment the translation membrane hallucinates a

stick-human, shrugging. “Easy. Gates are all entangled: Dump coherent

radiation in at one, get it out at another. Just get me out of this

firewall first.”

 

“But the lightspeed lag -”

 

“No problem. You go first, then a dumb instrument I leave behind buys

up power and sends it after. Router network is synchronous, within

framework of state machines that run Universe 1.0; messages propagate

at same speed, speed of light in vacuum, except use wormholes to

shorten distances between nodes. Whole point of the network is that it

is nonlossy. Who would trust their mind to a communications channel

that might partially randomize them in transit?”

 

Pierre goes cross-eyed, trying to understand the implications of the

Slug’s cosmology. But there isn’t really time, here and now: They’ve

got on the order of a minute of wall-clock time left to get everything

sorted out, if Aineko is right. One minute to go before the angry

ghosts start trying to break into the DMZ by other means. “If you are

willing to try this, we’d be happy to accommodate you,” he says,

thinking of crossed fingers and rabbits’ feet and firewalls.

 

“It’s a deal,” the membrane translates the Slug’s response back at

him. “Now we exchange shares/plasmids/ownership? Then merger

complete?”

 

Pierre stares at the Slug: “But this is a business arrangement!” he

protests. “What’s sex got to do with it?”

 

“Apologies offered. I am thinking we have a translation error. You

said this was to be a merging of businesses?”

 

“Not that way. It’s a contract. We agree to take you with us. In

return, you help lure the Wunch into the domain we’re setting up for

them and configure the router at the other end …”

 

And so on.

 

*

 

Steeling herself, Amber recalls the address the ghost gave her for

Sadeq’s afterlife universe. In her own subjective time it’s been about

half an hour since he left. “Coming?” she asks her cat.

 

“Don’t think I will,” says Aineko. It looks away, blissfully

unconcerned.

 

“Bah.” Amber tenses, then opens the port to Sadeq’s pocket universe.

 

As usual she finds herself indoors, standing on an ornate mosaic floor

in a room with whitewashed walls and peaked windows. But there’s

something different about it, and after a moment, she realizes what it

is. The sound of vehicle traffic from outside, the cooing of pigeons

on the rooftops, someone shouting across the street: There are people

here.

 

She walks over to the nearest window and looks out, then recoils. It’s

hot outside. Dust and fumes hang in air the color of cement over

rough-finished concrete apartment buildings, their roofs covered in

satellite uplinks and cheap, garish LED advertising panels. Looking

down she sees motor scooters, cars - filthy, fossil-fueled behemoths,

a tonne of steel and explosives in motion to carry only one human, a

mass ratio worse than an archaic ICBM - brightly dressed people

walking to and fro. A news helicam buzzes overhead, lenses darting and

glinting at the traffic.

 

“Just like home, isn’t it?” says Sadeq, behind her.

 

Amber starts. “This is where you grew up? This is Yazd?”

 

“It doesn’t exist anymore, in real space.” Sadeq looks thoughtful, but

far more animated than the barely conscious parody of himself that

she’d rescued from this building - back when it was a mediaeval vision

of the afterlife - scant subjective hours ago. He cracks a smile:

“Probably a good thing. We were dismantling it even while we were

preparing to leave, you know?”

 

“It’s detailed.” Amber throws her eyes at the scene out the window,

multiplexes them, and tells them to send little virtual ghosts dancing

through the streets of the Iranian industrial ‘burb. Overhead, big

Airbuses ply the skyways, bearing pilgrims on the hajj, tourists to

the coastal resorts on the Persian Gulf, produce to the foreign

markets.

 

“It’s the best time I could recall,” Sadeq says. “I didn’t spend many

days here then - I was in Qom, studying, and Kazakhstan, for cosmonaut

training - but it’s meant to be the early twenties. After the

troubles, after the fall of the guardians; a young, energetic, liberal

country full of optimism and faith in democracy. Values that weren’t

doing well elsewhere.”

 

“I thought democracy was a new thing there?”

 

“No.” Sadeq shakes his head. “There were prodemocracy riots in Tehran

in the nineteenth century, did you know that? That’s why the first

revolution - no.” He makes a cutting gesture. “Politics and faith are

a combustible combination.” He frowns. “But look. Is this what you

wanted?”

 

Amber recalls her scattered eyes - some of which have flown as much as

a thousand kilometers from her locus - and concentrates on

reintegrating their visions of Sadeq’s re-creation. “It looks

convincing. But not too convincing.”

 

“That was the idea.”

 

“Well, then.” She smiles. “Is it just Iran? Or did you take any

liberties around the edges?”

 

“Who, me?” He raises an eyebrow. “I have enough doubts about the

morality of this - project - without trying to trespass on Allah’s

territory, peace be unto him. I promise you, there are no sapients in

this world but us. The people are the hollow shells of my dreaming,

storefront dummies. The animals are crude bitmaps. This is what you

asked for, and no more.”

 

“Well, then.” Amber pauses. She recalls the expression on the

dirt-smudged face of a little boy, bouncing a ball at his companions

by the boarded-up front of a gas station on a desert road; remembers

the animated chatter of two synthetic housewives, one in traditional

black and the other in some imported Eurotrash fashion. “Are you sure

they aren’t real?” she asks.

 

“Quite sure.” But for a moment, she sees Sadeq looking uncertain.

“Shall we go? Do you have the occupiers ready to move in yet?”

 

“Yes to the first, and Pierre’s working on the second. Come on, we

don’t want to get trampled by the squatters.” She waves and opens a

door back onto the piazza where her robot cat - the alien’s nightmare

intruder in the DMZ - sleeps, chasing superintelligent dream mice

through multidimensional realities. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m

conscious. Thinking these thoughts gives me the creeps. Let’s go and

sell some aliens a bridge in Brooklyn.”

 

*

 

Amber confronts the mendacious ghost in the windowless room stolen

from 2001.

 

“You have confined the monster,” the ghost states.

 

“Yes.” Amber waits for a subjective moment, feeling delicate fronds

tickle at the edges of her awareness in what seems to be a timing

channel attack. She feels a momentary urge to sneeze, and a hot flash

of anger that passes almost immediately.

 

“And you have modified yourself to lock out external control,” the

ghost adds. “What is it that you want, Autonome Amber?”

 

“Don’t you have any concept of individuality?” she asks, annoyed by

its presumption at meddling with her internal states.

 

“Individuality is an unnecessary barrier to information transfer,”

says the ghost, morphing into its original form, a translucent

reflection of her own body. “It reduces the efficiency of a capitalist

economy. A large block of the DMZ is still inaccessible to we-me. Are

you sure you have defeated the monster?”

 

“It’ll do as I say,” Amber replies, forcing herself to sound more

confident than she feels - sometimes that damned transhuman cyborg cat

is no more predictable than a real feline. “Now, the matter of payment

arises.”

 

“Payment.” The ghost sounds amused. But Pierre’s filled her in on what

to look for, and Amber can now see the translation membranes around

it. Their color shift maps to a huge semantic distance; the creature

on the other side, even though it looks like a ghost-image of herself,

is very far from human. “How can we-us be expected to pay our own

money for rendering services to us?”

 

Amber smiles. “We want an open channel back to the router we arrived

through.”

 

“Impossible,” says the ghost.

 

“We want an open channel, and for it to stay open for six hundred

million seconds after we clear it.”

 

“Impossible,” the ghost repeats.

 

“We can trade you a whole civilization,” Amber says blandly. “A whole

human nation, millions of individuals. Just let us go, and we’ll see

to it.”

 

“You - please wait.” The ghost shimmers slightly, fuzzing at the

edges.

 

Amber opens a private channel to Pierre while the ghost confers with

its other nodes. Are the Wunch in place yet? she sends.

 

They’re moving in. This bunch don’t remember what happened on the

Field Circus, memories of those events never made it back to them. So

the Slug’s got them to cooperate. It’s kinda scary to watch - like the

Invasion of the Body Snatchers, you know?

 

I don’t care if it’s scary to watch, Amber replies, I need to know if

we’re ready yet.

 

Sadeq says yes, the universe is ready.

 

Right, pack yourself down. We’ll be moving soon.

 

The ghost is firming up in front of her. “A whole civilization?” it

asks. “That is not possible. Your arrival -” It pauses, fuzzing a

little. Hah, Gotcha! thinks Amber. Liar, liar, pants on fire! “You

cannot possibly have found a human civilization in the archives?”

 

“The monster you complain about that came through with us is a

predator,” she asserts blandly. “It swallowed an entire nation before

we heroically attracted its attention and induced it to follow us into

the router. It’s an archivore - everything was inside it, still frozen

until we expanded it again. This civilization will already have been

restored from hot shadows in our own solar system: There is nothing to

gain by taking it home with us. But we need to return to ensure that

no more predators of this type discover the router - or the

high-bandwidth hub we linked to it.”

 

“You are sure you have killed this monster?” asks the ghost. “It would

be inconvenient if it were to emerge from hiding in its digest

archives.”

 

“I can guarantee it won’t trouble you again if you let us go,” says

Amber, mentally crossing her fingers. The ghost doesn’t seem to have

noticed the huge wedge of fractally compressed data that bloats her

personal scope by an order of magnitude. She can still feel Aineko’s

goodbye smile inside her head, an echo of ivory teeth trusting her to

revive it if the escape plan succeeds.

 

“We-us agree.” The ghost twists weirdly, morphs into a

five-dimensional hypersphere. It bubbles violently for a moment, then

spits out a smaller token - a warped distortion in the air, like a

gravityless black hole. “Here is your passage. Show us the

civilization.”

 

“Okay ” - Now! - “catch.” Amber twitches an imaginary muscle, and one

wall of the room dissolves, forming a doorway into Sadeq’s existential

hell, now redecorated as a fair facsimile of a twenty-first-century

industrial city in Iran, and populated by a Wunch of parasites who

can’t believe what they’ve lucked into - an entire continent of

zombies waiting to host their flesh-hungry consciousness.

 

The ghost drifts toward the open window. Amber grabs the hole and

yanks it open, gets a grip on her own thoughts, and sends Open wide!

on the channel everybody is listening in on. For a moment time stands

still, and then -

 

*

 

A synthetic gemstone the size of a Coke can falls through the cold

vacuum, in high orbit around a brown dwarf. But the vacuum is anything

but dark. A sapphire glare as bright as the noonday sun on Mars shines

on the crazy diamond, billowing and cascading off sails as fine as

soap bubbles that slowly drift and tense away from the can. The

runaway Slug-corporation’s proxy has hacked the router’s firmware, and

the open wormhole gate that feeds power to it is shining with the

brilliance of a nuclear fireball, laser light channeled from a star

many light-years away to power the Field Circus on its return trip to

the once-human solar system.

 

Amber has retreated, with Pierre, into a simulation of her home aboard

the Ring Imperium. One wall of her bedroom is a solid slab of diamond,

looking out across the boiling Jovian ionosphere from an orbit low

enough to make the horizon appear flat. They’re curled together in her

bed, a slightly more comfortable copy of the royal bed of King Henry

VIII of England. It appears to be carved from thousand-year-old oak

beams. As with so much else about the Ring Imperium, appearances are

deceptive; and this is even more true of the cramped simulation spaces

aboard the Field Circus, as it limps toward a tenth the speed of

light, the highest velocity it’s likely to achieve on a fraction of

its original sail area.

 

“Let me get this straight. You convinced. The locals. That a

simulation of Iran, with zombie bodies that had been taken over by

members of the Wunch. Was a human civilization?”

 

“Yeah.” Amber stretches lazily and smirks at him. “It’s their damn

fault; if the corporate collective entities didn’t use conscious

viewpoints as money, they wouldn’t have fallen for a trick like that,

would they?”

 

“People. Money.”

 

“Well.” She yawns, then sits up and snaps her finger imperiously:

Down-stuffed pillows appear behind her back, and a silver salver

bearing two full glasses of wine materializes between them.

“Corporations are life-forms back home, too, aren’t they? And we trade

them. We give our AIs corporations to make them legal entities, but

the analogy goes deeper. Look at any company headquarters, fitted out

with works of art and expensive furniture and staff bowing and

scraping everywhere -”

 

” - They’re the new aristocracy. Right?”

 

“Wrong. When they take over, what you get is more like the new

biosphere. Hell, the new primordial soup: prokaryotes, bacteria, and

algae, mindlessly swarming, trading money for plasmids.” The Queen

passes her consort a wineglass. When he drinks from it, it refills

miraculously. “Basically, sufficiently complex resource-allocation

algorithms reallocate scarce resources … and if you don’t jump to

get out of their way, they’ll reallocate you. I think that’s what

happened inside the Matrioshka brain we ended up in: Judging by the

Slug it happens elsewhere, too. You’ve got to wonder where the

builders of that structure came from. And where they went. And whether

they realized that the destiny of intelligent tool-using life was to

be a stepping-stone in the evolution of corporate instruments.”

 

“Maybe they tried to dismantle the companies before the companies

spent them.” Pierre looks worried. “Running up a national debt,

importing luxurious viewpoint extensions, munching exotic dreams. Once

they plugged into the Net, a primitive Matrioshka civilization would

be like, um.” He pauses. “Tribal. A primitive postsingularity

civilization meeting the galactic net for the first time. Overawed.

Wanting all the luxuries. Spending their capital, their human - or

alien - capital, the meme machines that built them. Until there’s

nothing left but a howling wilderness of corporate mechanisms looking

for someone to own.”

 

“Speculation.”

 

“Idle speculation,” he agrees.

 

“But we can’t ignore it.” She nods. “Maybe some early corporate

predator built the machines that spread the wormholes around brown

dwarfs and ran the router network on top of them in an attempt to make

money fast. By not putting them in the actual planetary systems likely

to host tool-using life, they’d ensure that only near-singularity

civilizations would stumble over them. Civilizations that had gone too

far to be easy prey probably wouldn’t send a ship out to look … so

the network would ensure a steady stream of yokels new to the big city

to fleece. Only they set the mechanism in motion billions of years ago

and went extinct, leaving the network to propagate, and now there’s

nothing out there but burned-out Matrioshka civilizations and howling

parasites like the angry ghosts and the Wunch. And victims like us.”

She shudders and changes the subject: “Speaking of aliens, is the Slug

happy?”

 

“Last time I checked on him, yeah.” Pierre blows on his wineglass and

it dissolves into a million splinters of light. He looks dubious at

the mention of the rogue corporate instrument they’re taking with

them. “I don’t trust him out in the unrestricted simspaces yet, but

he delivered on the fine control for the router’s laser. I just hope

you don’t ever have to actually use him, if you follow my drift. I’m a

bit worried that Aineko is spending so much time in there.”

 

“So that’s where she is? I’d been worrying.”

 

“Cats never come when you call them, do they?”

 

“There is that,” she agrees. Then, with a worried glance at the vision

of Jupiter’s cloudscape: “I wonder what we’ll find when we get there?”

 

Outside the window, the imaginary Jovian terminator is sweeping toward

them with eerie rapidity, sucking them toward an uncertain nightfall.