Charles Stross - Singularity Sky

“The big bang. Not, by any chance, an unscheduled fissile criticality excursion, was it?” She said it deadpan, trying to deflect him with humor.

“Hardly. There were no licensing bodies in those days — at the start of space-time, before the era of expansion and the first appearance of mass and energy, about a billionth of a billionth of a millionth of a second into the life of the universe.”

“Surely the Eschaton can’t have been responsible for that. It’s a modern phenomenon, isn’t it?”

“Maybe not responsible,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “But maybe circumstances arising then formed a necessary precondition for the Eschaton’s existence, or the existence of something related to but beyond the Eschaton. There’s a whole school of cosmology predicated around the weak anthropic principle, that the universe is as it seems because, if it was any other way, we would not exist to observe it. There is a … less popular field, based on the strong anthropic principle, that the universe exists to give rise to certain types of entity. I don’t believe we’ll ever understand the Eschaton until we understand why the universe exists.”

She smiled at him toothily, and let a Prussian diplomat rescue her with the aid of a polite bow and an offer to explain the fall of Warsaw during the late unpleasantness in the Baltic. A year or so later, the polite cosmologist had been murdered by Algerian religious fundamentalists who thought his account of the universe a blasphemy against the words of the prophet Yusuf Smith as inscribed on his two tablets of gold. But that was typical of Europe, half-empty and prey to what the formerly Islamic world had become.

Somewhere along the line she, too, had changed. She’d spent decades — the best part of her second, early-twenty-second-century life — fighting the evils of nuclear proliferation. Starting out as a dreadlocked direct-action activist, chaining herself to fences, secure in the naive youthful belief that no harm could befall her. Later, she’d figured out that the way to do it was wearing a smart suit, with mercenary soldiers and the threat of canceled insurance policies backing up her quiet voice. Still prickly and direct, but less of a knee-jerk nonconformist, she’d learned to work the system for maximum effect. The hydra seemed halfway under control, bombings down to only one every couple of years, when Bertil had summoned her to Geneva and offered her a new job. Then she’d wished she’d paid more attention to the cosmologist — for the Algerian Latter-Day Saints had been very thorough in their suppression of the Tiplerite heresy — but it was too late, and in any event, the minutiae of the Standing Committee’s investigations into chronological and probabilistic warfare beckoned.

Somewhere along the line, the idealist had butted heads with the pragmatist, and the pragmatist won.

Maybe the seeds had been sown during her first marriage. Maybe it had come later; being shot in the back and spending six months recovering in hospital in Calcutta had changed her. She’d done her share of shooting, too, or at least directing the machinery of preemptive vengeance, wiping out more than one cell of atomic-empowered fanatics — whether central-Asian independence fighters, freelance meres with a bomb too many in their basement, or on one notable occasion, radical prolifers willing to go to any lengths to protect the unborn child. Idealism couldn’t coexist with so many other people’s ideals, betrayed in their execution by the tools they’d chosen. She’d walked through Manchester three days after the InterCity Firm’s final kickoff, before the rain had swept the sad mounds of cinders and bone from the blasted streets. She’d become so cynical that only a complete change of agenda, a wide-angle view of the prospects for humanity, could help her retain her self-respect.

And so to the New Republic. A shithole of a backwater, in her frank opinion; in need of remodeling by any means necessary, lest it pollute its more enlightened neighboring principalities, like Malacia or Turku.

But the natives were still people — and for all that they tampered with the machineries of mass destruction in apparent ignorance of their power, they deserved better than they’d receive from an awakened and angry Eschaton. They deserved better than to be left to butt heads with something they didn’t understand, like the Festival, whatever it was: if they couldn’t understand it, then maybe she’d have to think the unthinkable for them, help them to reach some kind of accommodation with it — if that was possible. The alarming aspect to the UN’s knowledge of the Festival — the only thing she hadn’t told Bauer about — was that antitech colonies contacted by it disappeared, leaving only wreckage behind when the Festival moved on. Just why this might be she didn’t know, but it didn’t bode well for the future.

Nothing quite concentrates a man’s mind like the knowledge that he is to be hanged in four weeks; unless it is possibly the knowledge that he has sabotaged the very ship he sails in, and he — along with everyone else in it — will be hanged in three months. For while the execution may be farther away, the chances of a reprieve are infinitely lower.

Martin Springfield sat in the almost-deserted wardroom, a glass of tea at his hand, staring absently at the ceiling beams. A nautical theme pervaded the room; old oak panels walled it in, and the wooden plank floor had been holystone-polished until it gleamed. A silver-chased samovar sat steaming gently atop an age-blackened chest beneath a huge gilt-framed oil painting of the ship’s namesake that hung on one wall. Lord Vanek leading the cavalry charge at the suppression of the Robots’ Rebellion 160 years ago — destroying the aspirations of those citizens who had dreamed of life without drudge-labor in the service of aristocrats. Martin shivered slightly, trying to grapple with his personal demons.

It’s all my fault , he thought. And there’s nobody else to share it with .

Comfortless fate. He sipped at his glass, felt the acrid sweet bite of the rum underlying the bitterness of the tea. His lips felt numb, now. Stupid , he thought. It was too late to undo things. Too late to confess, even to Rachel, to try to get her out of this trap. He should have told her right at the beginning, before she came on board. Kept her out of the way of the Eschaton’s revenge. Now, even if he confessed everything, or had done so before they tripped the patch in the drive kernel controllers, it would only put him on a one-way trip to the death chair. And although the sabotage was essential, and even though it wouldn’t kill anyone directly—

Martin shuddered, drained the glass, and put it down beside his chair. He hunched forward unconsciously, neck bowed beneath the weight of a guilty conscience. At least I did the right thing , he tried to tell himself. None of us are going home, but at least the homes we had will still be there when we’re gone . Including Rachel’s unlived-in apartment. He winced. It was next to impossible to feel guilt for a fleet, but just knowing about her presence aboard the ship had kept him awake all night.

The mournful pipes had summoned the ship to battle stations almost an hour ago. Something to do with an oncoming Septagonese carrier battle group, scrambled like a nest of angry hornets in response to the fiasco with the mining tugs. It didn’t make any difference to Martin. Somewhere in the drive control network, an atomic clock was running slow, tweaked by a folded curl of space-time from the drive kernel. It was only a small error, of course, but CP violation would amplify it out of all proportion when the fleet began its backward path through space-time. He’d done it deliberately, to prevent a catastrophic and irrevocable disaster. The New Republican Navy might think a closed timelike loop to be only a petty tactical maneuver, but it was the thin end of a wedge; a wedge that Herman said had to be held at bay. He’d made his pact with a darker, more obscure agency than Rachel’s. From his perspective, the UN DISA people merely aped his employer’s actions on a smaller scale — in hope of preempting them.