Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

When the Stars Are Right

‘You’re a lightning-chaser,’ Carlyle said.

That was the polite term. The rude one was Rapture-fucker. What she’d said still sounded like an accusation. She hadn’t meant it that way. She really wanted Campbell Johnstone on her team. He stared back at her, his gaze peculiarly blank. His retinae were really cameras. The irises didn’t adapt, the photocells did. Carlyle was used to the widening of the pupils when men looked at her. Not on Eurydice, but thank God or Nature she wasn’t there now. Only Winter and, to a much lesser extent, Calder and Armand had responded thus to her in that world of optimal beauty.

‘I am that,’ Johnstone said. It was an English idiom, in a perfect Home Counties American accent, like in an Ealing comedy. He knocked back his whisky, refilled his glass from the bottle, topped up hers. ‘What’s it to you?’

‘I’m in the soul market,’ Carlyle said. ‘I can offer excellent rates.’

The rates hadn’t helped her get any kind of routine crew. The labour exchanges and other recruitment routes had effectively blacklisted her, whether because of Carlyle family old guard pressure or because she was too much of a risk. The only people she could hire would have a worse record than she had. Even the most adventurous freelancers had looked at the DK barter price list and shaken their heads. Hence her going after lightning-chasers.

‘I shouldn’t say this,’ said Johnstone, ‘but the rates aren’t the issue. The risk is.’ He glowered at the bottle. ‘Moths to a flame, my dear. That’s what we are.’

Spare me the self-pity, you fucking drama queen . He seemed to pick up the thought. Maybe he did, you could never tell with lightning-chasers. You didn’t know what enhancements they had.

‘It’s like an addiction,’ he said. ‘To get so close you could touch it, without getting dragged in yourself. It’s hard to explain.’

‘You ever thought of going over to the Knights?’ Carlyle asked, curiosity getting the better of discretion.

‘Oh, sure.’ He sipped whisky. ‘Couldn’t take the puritanism. Besides, their whole thing is, they don’t go up close. Arm’s length, gloves, tongs. Contemplate the mathematics. Complete the calculation. One step at a time. You know the drill. Not my scene at all.’

‘If it’s risk you’re after, I can offer plenty.’

Johnstone sucked his lower lip, eased it out under his upper teeth. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Show me.’

She passed him the DK slate. He read through it impassively while she sat back and kept a wary eye on their surroundings. The Hairy Fairy was a dive so low it passed right under the Carlyles’ radar. Dim lights, sour carpet sticky with spilt drinks, air stiff with smoke. Its clear, curving diamond window-wall overlooked New Glasgow’s lights from two hundred metres up the side of a building crusted with similar bubbles. It was a notorious hangout for Rapture-fuckers, the bane of exploration and hacking teams. They were hard to screen out. Like sociopaths, they knew how to manipulate expectations they didn’t share. In recruitment interviews and tests they came across as normal, knowledgeable, interested types, keen to get on a team. They could restrain their excitement long enough to complete a few missions successfully, often distinguishing themselves with what seemed like bravery. Then, just when you trusted them enough for a really challenging job, they’d let their obsession get the better of them, break away and plunge deep into the works. If they didn’t disappear entirely—into the ravenous tornado of Singularity, or destroyed by the machinery—they came back changed: bodies mutilated or enhanced, minds time-sharing with, or displaced entirely by, other entities. Posthuman processors used human-level minds as subroutines. Some of these minds were eager to escape into other systems. With sufficient care one could trap them—as Shlaim had been—but without it, they could possess the incautious. The best outcome was when the Rapture-fucker was the only victim.

Some of the less autistic wrecks of such adventures were frazzling their neurons further in the corners of this bar. Trying to make the voices go away, or shut up, or speak more clearly; trying to make the fleeting impossible insight come back. A woman with long silver hair leaned against the outward overhang of the window wall, palms and forehead pressed against it, as though contemplating a jump that the diamond plate denied her. Every so often she’d rock back, reach behind her for a bottle on the table, swig, and resume her outward staring without turning around.

‘This is the one you want,’ Johnstone said, pushing the slate across the table and swivelling it at the same time. He’d highlighted the relevant paragraph in the long list of bits of kit DK considered the equivalent of one of their new ships. All of them looked almost impossible to get hold of, with the resources she could muster; this one she’d dismissed entirely.

‘One (1) macroscale quantum teleportation device (transmitter and receiver) fully functioning with human-level interface control enabled; minimum mass transfer capability: two (2) tonnes; minimum resolution scale: atomic; minimum range 10 1y.’

‘This is some kind of joke,’ Carlyle said. ‘The little commie bastards are trying it on. There’s only been one, brackets, one of these ever found, and we sold it to the Knights for a fucking solar system. One with two gas giants and a habitable terrestrial, at that.’

‘There wasn’t only one found,’ said Johnstone. ‘There’s only one been recovered . I know where you can find another, because I’ve seen it myself.’ He laughed. ‘I can even tell you. It’s no secret. It’s just that nobody’s been mad enough to go after it. It’s in the cave system on Chernobyl.’

The name made her shoulders hunch a little. ‘That’s a pulsar planet! And it’s right in the beam!’

Johnstone nodded. ‘Every two point seven seconds. Chernobyl’s tidal-locked to the primary—no rotation, and the gate’s on the day side, if you call getting nuked every two-and-a-bit seconds “day.” The gate’s fifty-odd klicks from the caves—from the known entrance to the cave system, that is. The terrain is rough, the atmosphere’s thick, ionised, stormy … let’s just say you wouldn’t want to fly in it. What light gets through is from the stars and from secondary radioactivity. The machine, the QTD, masses about five tonnes and is as delicate and about as radiation-tolerant as a leaf photometer. It’s only because it’s three hundred metres below ground that it’s survived at all.’ He smiled. ‘And that’s just the transmitter. The receiver is a few thousand kilometres away—still on the day side, worse luck. Heavily shielded with a hundred tons of lead, because it’s in a shallower cave. One that doesn’t have any known entrance. And believe me, the planet’s been satellite-mapped to centimetre resolution.’

‘So how come anyone knows where it is, or even that it exists?’

‘We fired up the QTD transmitter and sent a probe through it. It was possible to deduce its new location by timing the radiation pulses. Some of that shit punches straight through half a klick of rock, and this was maybe ten metres below the surface.’ He shrugged. ‘Of course, you can only do so much with probes. Especially in these conditions. Terribly bad line, you know. So I took a backup and went through myself.’

She tried not to show quite how impressed she felt. ‘What did you find?’

‘Oh, a cave full of very nice kit. Nothing as good as the QTD, though. And no way out, no exit that I could find. No transmitter the other way, either.’