Ian McDonald - Ares Express

ROTECH cyber-warriors, the youth elite of the most ancient Technician families, arrowed on their arm-wings through the vastnesses of the orbital habitats, racing for the kill switches on the reality-shapers. A few even made it. Most were arrested or shredded by nano-engineered constructor-bots. Some were probabilised away into indescribable, and naturally lethal, alternative universes, others simply disinvented as the angels picked realities where their grandparents were gay.

“Very few of us ever make a truly original invention,” the traveller commented from his chair.

The AI wars began. Fleets of light-sail battle-yachts swept down out of the sun; suicide-crews of grim-eyed teenagers readied their brain-bombs and logic lasers and fingered their rosaries. Most knew they would never make it back to this reality. The angels, which had already begun to rank themselves into orders and sub-orders according to processing power, met them with point-defence lasers and tight-focus reality warps that dropped ships and crews into a far distant, prematurely nova-ed sun. Broadsides of needle-drones spewed nebulae of nanoprocessors in the paths of the hijacked orbital habitats, the Lorarchs and Cheraphs met them with suites of counterprocessors. Dog ate dog. Near-space became a planetary immune system as the microbe-machines duked it out. A gentle rain of dead and frantically mutating nanoids rained down on the scabby green lowlands of the new world. Brilliant but acned boy-cybermages with unpleasant personal habits jammed code in attempts to plumb ever-deeper mysteries of the eleven dimensions of the vinculum field. A shamanic war of languages with power over reality was fought in the orbital marches and the project housing blocks and underground code-runner sodalities of Paris and Delhi and Montevideo. People vanished, were transformed, met strange and bloody fates, became wonders, defected, were mortified or assumed into heaven, died in savage shootouts or by computer-arranged accidents. The lads loved it, though it ate them like sugar. Governments, under pressure from the globalismes and financial Bunds that were the true lords of the earth, threatened ROTECH with the termination of the New World project. ROTECH reminded the industrials and the money men that if it fell, they fell under it, and it was coming from a very great height.

Sauntering blithely into this war came Kathy Haan, ROTECH payroll number 2821332HSB. No mystery what side she was on. The AIs were the perfect form of life. They were the total mortification. They were the inevitable God made in Man’s image. She had no reservations telling it abroad. “They will win,” she would insist, her skin so tightly drawn over her cheekbones that it was as translucent and luminous as parchment. “They must. They are better than us. They have no meat.”

She was weird and no one took her seriously, but ROTECH on war footing could tolerate no sedition. Kathy Haan, Our Lady of Tharsis emergent, was to have her contract terminated. It was a critical moment in contemporary management practice. Had security pulled her out of the canteen there and then, marched her to the gates, one on each armpit, a thousand years of history would have been radically different. One rumour, one word leaked from on high, sent ripples across the multiverse.

She still had friends. Meat friends she could not bring herself totally to despise and who would not despise her, despite what she had done to herself. They caught the rumour and slow-curved it to her workstation.

That afternoon, while her mind was out at Mars toiling away under skies scored by battle-lasers, Kathy Haan’s meat friends managed to open both wrists from thumb-joint to elbow with two loops of twistlock nanofibre. She bled to death in under two minutes. With no body to come back to, her mind stayed on Mars. She had accomplished her spiritual purpose. She had achieved total mortification. She was pure mind, free from the dross of meat. A minor league spiritual entity, she flitted from machine to machine until one day she bounced into a memory matrix to find new emotions, perceptions, comprehension, memory, speed of analysis, depth of apprehension, memories of other lives, alternative existences rushing away from her like the perspectives of an infinite glass cathedral. She had gatecrashed the neural architecture of an AI.

It could have crushed her like a midge. That the Archangelsk PHARIOSTER did not was initially because it thought this strange new array of perceptions was a subset of itself. By the time it realised that this memory of meat and day jobs and lust for the great sky was an alien , it had come to like the odd memories of embodiment (that Kathy Haan, forty percent on her way to being St. Catherine of Tharsis now, had derided as fleshy and vile) and treated its uninvited guest as an interesting pet. A conversation starter at AI parties. Thus Kathy Haan drifted, like her martyred namesake, into becoming an intermediary between heaven and earth. The AIs laid out their conditions. The attacks would end; in return they would desist from further unsanctioned reality destabilisation. This world they were making would be a sanctuary for their kind, a gift from the people of the Motherworld to this new species it had inadvertently created. In return, they would complete the terraforming and maintain control of the ecosystems. The uploaded consciousness of Kathy Haan was beamed back to gross earth to negotiate. ROTECH, of course, refused to recognise her. She was legally dead. Dead girls don’t do diplomacy. The soul of Kathy Haan was held in a ring of superconducting copper/niobium/carbon ceramic in a Sao Paulo physics faculty, circling endlessly, timelessly at the speed of light. For ten objective years—mere moments subjectively—she orbited there while the AIs tested Motherworld’s keenest and most expensive legal minds. A compromise was thrashed out: humanity would cede recognition of the angel intelligences and cease hostilities, but in return it wanted settlement rights on the new world. The world had never been meant for angels. It had always been meant for humans. What need had disembodied intelligences for a material gob of terraformed mud? Perhaps, but with segregation. Humans the soil, angels the orbital approaches. And they would maintain the planetary control systems. And the planetary defences? Further tusslement. Five years more St. Catherine of Tharsis circled in relativistic oblivion, then woke after what seemed a short, refreshing sleep to find herself…

“Creator, saviour, mediator,” Sweetness said, cutting short the story. “We all know this.” She had never had much patience for courtroom dramas. Her heroes had always been picaresque: prospectors, rogue engineers, dune-bums, travelling wise-men. On the track, they had never been faced with the problem of their mode of transport becoming less and less substantial with every passing kilometre. The deck beneath her boot soles was gooey as taffy left on the ground after a canton fair.

“Yes, we all know you know,” the traveller said testily. “I’d’ve thought you would have had a personal interest in the characters, that’s all. I imagined that a girl of your background would have had some interest in process over destination .”

“I’m a story, I’m all process,” Sweetness said and reminded herself that there was indeed a destination beyond the point at which the traveller and his track-yacht faded into improbability. Out there, up there, Devastation Harx with Little Pretty One in a jar no, she corrected herself. Catherine of Tharsis. The object of this homily. This—shift worker turned patron saint.

“One thing,” Sweetness asked. “Why’d she do it?”

“To which of the many events in the life of Our Lady of Tharsis might you be referring?” the doctor asked. Sweetness could see the light through him, like a bright-coloured milk-smoothie in an oddly shaped glass.