Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

A Rapture-fucker to the end, Carlyle thought. She had little doubt that Higgins, with nothing left to lose, would be off in the cave like a kid in a toyshop. On the other hand, she was right: doing something had to be better than waiting to die. Already she felt feverish and nauseous, but that could just have been the shock.

Aye. The shock.

H

iggins went back up to the crane’s cabin, retrieved a remote control for the winch, and they attached themselves to the cable and descended together into the hole.

‘Wow,’ said Higgins. ‘This place is fucking magic . All those little lights, like it’s all alive!’

‘Aye, whatever. No doubt we’ll make a fortune off it someday. Any ideas about how we go about finding the gate?’

‘You’re the Carlyle. I thought you knew these things.’

‘I’ll let you in on a family secret,’ said Carlyle. ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

‘Oh!’ said Higgins. ‘Well, in that case …’

‘What?’

‘I’d do it logically.’ She began turning around, her helmet beam and her handheld halogen spotlighting one uncanny thing after another. ‘There are passageways through the machinery, aisles between the machines. That means that physically shifting stuff must have been a consideration. One of these aisles must lead to the gate.’

‘No shit.’

‘Ah, but look at what we can see from here, of the angles and the layout. Which way are the paths converging?’

‘Hard to tell, with perspective and all.’

Higgins drew her Webster and thumbed the laser sight on. She squatted on her heels and again turned around, more slowly, sending the beam down each of the visible corridors. It glowed a faint red in the dusty air, picked out bright red spots where it met objects. The lights on the objects moved in a way that suggested a response. Then she stood up. ‘That way,’ she said confidently.

Carlyle didn’t share her confidence, but she was past caring. ‘OK,’ she said. After a few hundred metres and several turns, she shared it even less. The only thing she was sure of was that she was thoroughly lost. She might be able to literally retrace her steps. The thought made her stop and glance back. Sure enough, their tracks were easily visible in the dust: two distinct sets of prints, sometimes crossing each other, slightly scuffed. Ten metres behind her, at the side of a thing that looked like a gigantic silver sculpture of a lighthouse-sized melted candle, was the end of a third set of prints.

She must have yelled. Higgins was back beside her in a moment.

‘There,’ said Carlyle.

The third set of prints stretched into the distance as far as their lights could reach. They were of bare feet.

There was some kind of reassurance in that she and Higgins had drawn and levelled their pistols without conscious thought.

Carlyle switched on her suit’s external speaker.

‘Come out,’ she said.

Nothing happened.

She was about to step forward when Higgins caught her elbow. ‘No.’

‘What?’

‘Leave it. If it wants to be seen, it will be.’

‘Aye, that’s reassuring.’

They walked on. Higgins never looked back, but every so often Carlyle did. The footprints were there behind them every time, always ending approximately the same distance away. After a while Carlyle began to hear, or imagine, stealthy pacing steps, approaching right up to behind her shoulder. She whirled, gun drawn, but still the prints ended ten or so metres behind. She wondered if whatever was following them was invisible. This thought was not reassuring either.

What overtook them eventually was weariness. They slumped, in wordless agreement, against a shining wall and sucked recycled water and greasy fruity-tasting paste from their helmets’ tubes.

‘White cell count right down,’ Higgins observed, with something like anxiety. ‘Not much longer to go.’

‘To the gate?’

‘Till we die.’ She looked around and shivered, her shoulder shaking against Carlyle’s. ‘I don’t want to die here.’

‘Why not?’ Carlyle had a metal taste in her mouth, but it was only her gums beginning to bleed.

‘I can’t swear that would guarantee extinction. There are some very sensitive devices in this place. They might … take us up.’

‘I know that,’ Carlyle said. ‘But is that no what you want? Rapture?’

‘Oh, Christ, no.’ It sounded like a prayer, not a profanity. ‘There’s no guarantee of becoming something better than human. You might become worse: a trapped consciousness in a treadmill, with no chance of upgrade. Hell. And even if you can avoid that, you still don’t want to be taken up, even to heaven. You might lose yourself entirely.’

‘So why do you people risk that by lightning-chasing?’

Higgins sighed. ‘It’s the getting close to … the sublime and the beautiful, yeah? You can look over the top of a cliff or look up at it and be, like, ravished, but you wouldn’t want to fall off it.’

‘I don’t understand the attraction at all,’ Carlyle said. She waved a hand. ‘I’ve been in places like this. Weirder and more beautiful places, like crystal jungles, like iron coral. And I’ve crunched a search engine right over them and through them tae get what I want. I mean, fuck, it isnae like it’s nature or anything. It’s just artificial.’

‘You don’t understand,’ said Higgins. ‘What the posthumans created was—when you can see it up close, inside, in virtuality, not this’—she waved dismissively—‘ hardware , it’s more wonderful than anything in nature. What you’re seeing here is like brains. Grey matter, whorls, fissures, big fucking deal. What I’ve seen is thoughts. Art and science. Creations.’

‘Mair wonderful than the real world? Greater than God or Nature?’

‘Yes!’ said Higgins explosively. Then, perhaps sensing the stiffening in Carlyle’s muscles, she retracted: ‘A greater insight into the reality than we have, anyway.’

‘Hah!’ said Carlyle. ‘Tossers. I mean that. That’s whit the Raptured were when ye get right down tae it. Nerds. Wankers. This is aw’—it was her turn to wave dismissively—‘pornography. Because if it wisnae, how come they burned out so fast? How come they arenae around any mair? Wanked theirsels tae death if you ask me.’

‘You couldn’t be more wrong,’ said Higgins. ‘They loved the universe far more than we ever can. There are infinitely many modes of existence of which we can’t conceive: not space-time, not thought, not mind, or matter. They began to conceive them before they left. They went below the Planck length, and away. Into the fine grain of the world. And there they still are, and far beyond it. The whole of space-time is now riddled with their minds. Or rather, with minds far less than theirs but far greater than ours. It is these minds that enforce the CPC and make FTL travel possible and time-travel paradoxes impossible.’

Carlyle had heard such conjectures before. ‘You know all this?’

Higgins laboriously stood up. ‘I know. I’ve seen it. Seen them. The quantum angels. Come on, let’s find the gate.’

T

he gate was in the direction Higgins had taken. Higgins’s face looked twisted and strained, warped away from human semblance, as if resisting the deterioration of the rest of her body was becoming a major preoccupation for her metal head. You expected to see beads of mercury running down it. Her glass eyes had cracks in them.

Carlyle gazed at the gate incuriously. Its absent shape was outlined by a gold filigree frame beaded with crystals that flickered in elusive patterns. She had walked past greater and stranger things in the past hour. Her mind was jaded with wonders.

‘Brilliant,’ she said. ‘You got us here.’