Элиезер Юдковски - Three Worlds Collide

stunner - the weapon which he alone on the ship was authorized to use, if he made a determination of outright mental breakdown. With a sudden motion, his arm swept outward -

- and anesthetized the Lord Akon.

Akon crumpled almost instantly, as though most of his strings had already been cut, and only a few last strands had been holding his limbs in place.

Fear, shock, dismay, sheer outright surprise: that was the Command Conference staring aghast at the Confessor.

From the hood came words absolutely forbidden to originate from that shadow: the voice of command.

"Lord Pilot, take us through the starline back to the Huygens system. Get us moving now, you are on the critical path. Lady Sensory, I need you to enforce an absolute lockdown on all of this ship's communication systems except for a single channel under your direct control. Master of Fandom, get me proxies on the assets of every being on this ship. We are going to need capital."

For a moment, the Command Conference was frozen, voiceless and motionless, as everyone waited for

someone else do to something.

And then -

"Moving the Impossible now, my lord," said the Lord Pilot. His face was sane once again. "What's your plan?"

"He is not your lord!" cried the Master of Fandom. Then his voice dropped. "Excuse me. Confessor -

it did not appear to me that our Lord Administrator was insane. And you , of all people, cannot just seize power -"

"True," said the one, "Akon was sane. But he was also an honest man who would keep his word once he gave it, and that I could not allow. As for me - I have betrayed my calling three times over, and am no longer a Confessor." With that same response, the once-Confessor swept back the hood -

At any other time, the words and the move and the revealed face would have provoked shock to the

point of fainting. On this day, with the whole human species at stake, it seemed merely interesting.

Chaos had already run loose, madness was already unleashed into the world, and a little more seemed of little consequence.

"Ancestor," said the Master, "you are twice prohibited from exercising any power here."

The former Confessor smiled dryly. "Rules like that only exist within our own minds, you know.

Besides," he added, "I am not steering the future of humanity in any real sense, just stepping in front of a bullet. That is not even advice, let alone an order. And it is... appropriate... that I, and not any of you, be the one who orders this thing done -"

"Fuck that up the ass with a hedge trimmer," said the Lord Pilot. "Are we going to save the human species or not?"

There was a pause while the others figured out the correct answer.

Then the Master sighed, and inclined his head in assent to the once-Confessor. "I shall follow your orders... kiritsugu ."

Even the Kiritsugu flinched at that, but there was work to be done, and not much time in which to do it.

In the Huygens system, the Impossible Possible World was observed to return from its much-heralded expedition, appearing on the starline that had shown the unprecedented anomaly. Instantly, without a clock tick's delay, the Impossible broadcast a market order.

That was already a dozen ways illegal. If the Impossible had made a scientific discovery, it should have broadcast the experimental results openly before attempting to trade on them. Otherwise the

result was not profit but chaos, as traders throughout the market refused to deal with you; just

conditioning on the fact that you wanted to sell or buy from them, was reason enough for them not to.

The whole market seized up as hedgers tried to guess what the hidden experimental results could have been, and which of their counterparties had private information.

The Impossible ignored the rules. It broadcast the specification of a new prediction contract, signed with EMERGENCY OVERRIDE and IMMINENT HARM and CONFESSOR FLAG - signatures that

carried extreme penalties, up to total confiscation, for misuse; but any one of which ensured that the contract would appear on the prediction markets at almost the speed of the raw signal.

The Impossible placed an initial order on the contract backed by nearly the entire asset base of its crew.

The prediction's plaintext read:

In three hours and forty-one minutes, the starline between Huygens and Earth will become

impassable.

Within thirty minutes after, every human being remaining in this solar system will die.

All passage through this solar system will be permanently denied to humans thereafter.

(The following plaintext is not intended to describe the contract's terms, but justifies why a probability estimate on the underlying proposition is of great social utility:

ALIENS. ANYONE WITH A STARSHIP, FILL IT WITH CHILDREN AND GO! GET OUT OF

HUYGENS, NOW!)

In the Huygens system, there was almost enough time to draw a single breath.

And then the markets went mad, as every single trader tried to calculate the odds, and every married trader abandoned their positions and tried to get their children to a starport.

"Six," murmured the Master of Fandom, "seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven -"

A holo appeared within the Command Conference, a signal from the President of the Huygens Central

Clearinghouse, requesting (or perhaps "demanding" would have been a better word) an interview with the Lord Administrator of the Impossible Possible World.

"Put it through," said the Lord Pilot, now sitting in Akon's chair as the figurehead anointed by the Kiritsugu.

" Aliens? " the President demanded, and then her eye caught the Pilot's uniform. " You're not an Administrator -"

"Our Lord Administrator is under sedation," said the Kiritsugu beside; he was wearing his Confessor's hood again, to save on explanations. "He placed himself under more stress than any of us -"

The President made an abrupt cutting gesture. "Explain this - contract . And if this is a market manipulation scheme, I'll see you all tickled until the last sun grows cold!"

"We followed the starline that showed the anomalous behavior," the Lord Pilot said, "and found that a nova had just occurred in the originating system. In other words, my Lady President, it was a direct effect of the nova and thus occurred on all starlines leading out of that system. We've never found aliens before now - but that's reflective of the probability of any single system we explore having been colonized. There might even be a starline leading out of this system that leads to an alien domain - but we have no way of knowing which one, and opening a new starline is expensive. The nova acted as a common rendezvous signal, my Lady President. It reflects the probability, not that we and the aliens encounter each other by direct exploration, but the probability that we have at least one neighboring world in common."

The President was pale. "And the aliens are hostile."

The Lord Pilot involuntarily looked to the Kiritsugu.

"Our values are incompatible," said the Kiritsugu.

"Yes, that's one way of putting it," said the Lord Pilot. "And unfortunately, my Lady President, their technology is considerably in advance of ours."

"Lord... Pilot," the President said, "are you certain that the aliens intend to wipe out the human species?"

The Lord Pilot gave a very thin, very flat smile. "Incompatible values, my Lady President. They're quite skilled with biotechnology. Let's leave it at that."

Sweat was running down the President's forehead. "And why did they let you go, then?"