Charles Stross - Iron Sunrise

Bizarre references to the light cone made no sense at all for more than a hundred years, until the first successful construction of a faster-than-light spacecraft. Then it began to fit into a big picture. The universe was seething with human-populated worlds, the dumping grounds where the Eschaton had deposited the nine billion or so people it had abducted in the course of a single frantic day. The wormholes covered immense distances in time as well as space, opening a year back in time for every light year out in distance. Astrophysicists speculated blatantly about the computational implications of causality violation, until silenced in a bizarre jihad by a post-Christian sect from North Africa.

The human consequences of the singularity reverberated endlessly, too. The exiles hadn’t simply been dumped on any available world; in almost all cases, they’d been planted in terrain that was not too hostile, showing crude signs of recent terraforming. And the Eschaton had given them gifts: cornucopias, robot factories able to produce any designated goods to order, given enough time, energy, and raw materials. Stocked with a library of standard designs, a cornucopia was a general-purpose tool for planetary colonization. Used wisely, they enabled many of the scattered worlds to achieve a highly automated postindustrial economy within years. Used unwisely, they enabled others to destroy themselves. A civilization that used its cornucopia to produce nuclear missiles instead of nuclear reactors — and more cornucopias — wasn’t likely to outlast the first famine, let alone the collapse of civilization that was bound to follow when one faction or another saw the cornucopia as a source of military power and targeted it. But the end result was that, a couple of hundred years after the event, most worlds that had not retreated to barbarism had achieved their own spacegoing capabilities.

Military strategists puzzled endlessly over the consequences of being able to attack an enemy with total surprise, until reminded of the third commandment. One or two of them, it transpired, had tried just that; the typical consequence was that a bizarre accident would befall whoever planned such an attack. Interestingly, even the most secretively prepared attempts to use time travel as a military tactic seemed to be crushed, just before they could actually take place.

Rachel had discovered the hard way just why this was the case. The Eschaton was still a factor in human affairs; reclusive and withdrawn it might be, but it still kept a watchful eye open for trouble. It intervened, too, for its own reasons. Causality violation — time travel — if allowed to flourish without check, offered an immediate threat to its existence; sooner or later somebody would try to grandfather it out of history. Various other technological possibilities also threatened it. AI research might generate a competitor for informational resources; nanotechnology developments might achieve the same results through alternative pathways. Hence the third commandment — and the existence of an army of covert enforcers, saboteurs, and agents of influence working on its behalf.

Two years before, Rachel had met one of those agents. She’d been politically-compromised, a witness to his activities: a fifteen-microsecond induced error in a clock which sealed the fate of a fleet and the interstellar empire that had dispatched it to recapture a planet that hadn’t been lost in the first place. She’d stayed quiet about it, tacitly accepting the abhuman intervention in diplomatic affairs. The Eschaton hadn’t destroyed a civilization this time; it had simply caused an invasion fleet to arrive at its destination too late to alter history, and in so doing had triggered the collapse of an aggressive militaristic regime. It was the job she’d been sent to do herself, by her controllers in the Black Chamber.

In fact, it had been a very happy coincidence from her point of view, because not only had she met an agent of the Eschaton: she’d married him. And sometimes, on good days, on days when she wasn’t being hauled over the coals by bureaucratic harridans or called in to deal with hideous emergencies, she thought that the only thing she was really afraid of was losing him again.

On good days …

Rachel had been lying in bed for an hour, showered and bathed to squeaky cleanliness and dosed up with a wide-spectrum phagebot and a very strong sedative, when Martin came home.

“Rachel?” she heard him call, through a blanket of thick, warm, lovely lassitude. She smiled to herself. He was home. I can come down now, she thought, if I want. The thought didn’t seem to mean anything.

“Rachel?” The bedroom door slid open. “Hey.” She rolled her eyes to watch him, feeling a wave of semisynthetic love.

“Hi,” she mumbled.

“What’s—” His gaze settled on the bedside stand. “Oh.” He dropped his bag. “I see, you’ve been hitting the hard stuff.” The next moment, he was sitting beside her, a hand on her forehead. “The polis called,” he said, face clouded with worry. “What happened?”

Time to come down, she realized reluctantly. Somehow she dredged up the energy to point at the A/D patch sitting by the discarded wrapper. It was the hardest thing she’d ever done, harder than wrapping her fingers around -

“Oh. Yeah.” Nimble digits, far nimbler than hers, unpeeled the backing and smoothed the patch onto the side of her neck. “Shit, that’s strong stuff you’re on. Was it really that bad?”

Speech was getting easier. “You have no idea,” she mumbled. At the edge of her world a tidal wave of despair was gathering, ready to crash down on her as the synthetic endorphin high receded before the antidote patch. Dosing herself up had seemed like a good idea while she was alone and his flight was in plasma blackout on the way down, but now she was coming out from it she wondered how she could have done something so stupid. She reached out and grabbed his wrist. “Go. Fetch a couple of bottles of wine from the kitchen. Then I’ll tell you.”

He was gone a long time — possibly minutes, although it felt like hours — and when he came back he’d shed most of his outerwear, acquired a bottle and two glasses, and his face was pale and drawn. “Shiva’s balls, Rachel, how the fuck did you let yourself get roped into something like that?” Clearly the media had caught up with him in the kitchen. He put the glasses down, sat beside her, and helped her sit up. “It’s all over the multis. That fucking animal—”

His arm was round her shoulders. She leaned against him. “Lunatic squad,” she said hoarsely. “Once in, never out. I’m a negotiator, remember? There was nobody else here who could do it, so—” She shrugged.

“But they shouldn’t have called you—” His arm tensed.

“You. Listen.” She swallowed. “Open the bottle.”

“Okay.” Martin, wisely sensing that this wasn’t a good place to take the conversation, shut up and poured her a glass of wine. It was a cheap red Merlot, and it hadn’t had time to breathe, but she didn’t want it for the flavor. “Was it true you were the only one they could call? I mean—”

“Yes.” She drained the glass, then held it out for more. He poured himself one, then refilled hers. “And no, I don’t think there was anyone else who could do the job. Or any other way. Not with the resources to hand. This is a peaceful ’burg. No WMD team on twenty-four-by-seven standby, just a couple of volunteers. Who were on a training course in Brasilia when the shit hit the fan.”

“It was—” He swallowed. “There were camera flies all over the place. I saw the feed downstairs.”

“How was Luna?” she asked, changing the subject pointedly.

“Gray and drab, just like always.” He took a sip, but didn’t meet her eyes. “I’ve … Rachel, please don’t change the subject.”