Charles Stross - Singularity Sky

“It’s alright,” said Martin. They’re willing to pay me? To do something I’d volunteer for ? He stood up. “I don’t need another day to think about it. Count me in.” The gray man smiled humorlessly. “I was told you’d say that.” The gold team was on full alert. Not a head moved when the door opened, and Captain Mirsky walked in, followed by Commodore Bauer and his staff. “Commander Murametz, please report.”

“Yes, sir. Time to jump transition, three-zero-zero seconds. Location plot confirmed, signals operational.

All systems running at an acceptable level of readiness for engagement plan C. We’re ready to go to battle stations whenever you say, sir.”

Mirsky nodded. “Gentlemen, carry on as ordered.” The Commodore nodded and quietly instructed his adjutant to take notes. Elsewhere on the ship, sirens blatted: the clatter of spacers running to their stations didn’t penetrate the bulkheads, but the atmosphere nevertheless felt tense. Low-key conversations started at the various workstations around the room as officers talked over the tactical circuits.

“Ready for jump in two-zero-zero seconds,” called Relativistics.

Rachel Mansour — wearing her disarmament inspector’s uniform — sat uncomfortably close to one of the walls, studying a packed instrument console over the shoulder of a petty officer. Brass handles and baroque red LEDs glowed at her; a pewter dog’s head barked silently from an isolation switch.

Someone had spent half a lifetime polishing the engravings until they gleamed as softly as butter. It seemed a bitter irony, to observe such art in a place of war; the situation was, she thought, more than somewhat repulsive, and finding anything even remotely beautiful in it only made things worse.

The Festival: of all the stupid things the New Republic might attack, the Festival was about the worst.

She’d spoken to Martin about it, piecing together his information with her own. Together they’d pieced together a terrifying hypothesis. “Herman was unusually vague about it,” Martin admitted. “Normally he has a lot of background detail. Every word means something. But it’s as if he doesn’t want to say too much about the Festival. They’re — he called them, uh, glider-gun factories. I don’t know if you know about Life—”

“Cellular automata, the game?”

“That’s the one. Glider guns are mobile cellular automata. There are some complex life structures that replicate themselves, or simpler cellular structures; a glider-gun factory is a weird one. It periodically packs itself into a very dense mobile system that migrates across the grid for a couple of hundred squares, then it unpacks itself into two copies that then pack down and fly off in opposite directions.

Herman said that they’re a realspace analogue: he called them a Boyce-Tipler robot. Self-replicating, slower-than-light interstellar probes that are sent out to gather information about the universe and feed it back to a center. Only the Festival isn’t just a dumb robot fleet. It carries upload processors, thousands of uploaded minds running faster than real time when there are resources to support them, downloaded into long-term storage during the long trips.”

Rachel had shuddered slightly at that, and he hugged her, misapprehending the cause of her distress. She let him, not wanting him to realize he had upset her. She’d dealt with uploads before. The first-generation ones, fresh from the meat puppet universe, weren’t a problem: it was the kids that got her. Born — if you could call it that — in a virtual environment, they rapidly diverged from any norm of humanity that she could see. More seriously, their grasp of the real world was poor. Which was fine as long as they didn’t have to deal with it, but when they did, they used advanced nanosystems for limbs and they sometimes accidentally broke things — planets, for instance.

It wasn’t intentional malice; they’d simply matured in an environment where information didn’t go away unless someone wanted it to, where death and destruction were reversible, where magic wands worked and hallucinations were dangerous. The real universe played by different rules, rules that their horrified ancestors had fled as soon as the process of migrating minds into distributed computing networks had been developed.

The Festival sounded like a real headache. On the one hand, an upload civilization, used to omnipotence within its own pocket universe, had decided for no obvious reason to go forth and play the galactic tourist. On the other hand, physical machinery of vast subtlety and power was bound to do their bidding at each port of call. Bush robots, for example: take a branching tree of fronds. Each bough split into two half-scale branches at either end, with flexible joints connecting them. Repeated down to the molecular level, each terminal branch was closed off with a nanomanipulator. The result was a silvery haze with a dumbbell-shaped core, glittering with coherent light, able to change shape, dismantle and reassemble physical objects at will — able to rebuild just about anything into any desired physical form, from the atomic scale up. Bush robots made the ultimate infantry; shoot at them, and they’d eat the bullets, splice them into more branches, and thank you for the gift of metals.

“I’m worried about what will happen when we arrive,” Martin admitted. He’d wrung his hands while he spoke, unconsciously emphasizing his points. “I don’t think the New Republicans can actually comprehend what’s going on. They see an attack, and I can understand why — the Festival has destroyed the political and social economy on one of their colonies as thoroughly as if it had nuked the place from orbit — but what I can’t see is any possible avenue to a settlement. There’s not going to be any common ground there. What does the Festival want? What could make them go away and leave the Republic alone?”

“I thought you didn’t like the New Republic,” Rachel challenged.

He grimaced. “And I suppose you do? I don’t like their system, and they know it. That’s why I’m sitting in this cell instead of in my cabin, or on the engineering deck. But—” He shrugged. “Their social system is one thing, but people are people everywhere you go, just trying to get along in this crazy universe. I don’t like them as individuals, but that’s not the same as wanting them dead. They’re not monsters, and they don’t deserve what’s coming to them, and life isn’t fair, is it?”

“You did your bit to make it that way.”

“Yes.” He dropped his gaze to the floor, focusing intently on something invisible to her. “I wish there was an alternative. But Herman can’t just let them get away with it. Either causality is a solid law, or — things break. Far better for their maneuver simply to fail, so the whole voyage looks like a cack-handed mess, than for it to succeed, and encourage future adventurers to try for a timelike approach on their enemies.”

“And if you’re lashed to the mast as the ship heads for the maelstrom?”

“I never said I was omniscient. Herman said he’d try to get me out of here if I succeeded; I wish I knew what he had in mind. What are your options like?”

Her lips quirked. “Maybe he nobbled my boss — he taught me never to travel at sea without a lifeboat.” Martin snorted, obviously misunderstanding: “Well, they say a captain always goes down with his ship — shame they never mention the black gang drowning in the engine room!” An announcement from the helm brought Rachel back to the present: “Jump in one-zero-zero seconds.”

“Status, please,” said Commander Murametz. Each post called out in order; everything was running smoothly. ‘Time to transition?“