The Fractal Prince

loyly steam in an Oortian sauna.

Her metacortex reacts. Her subdermal smartmatter armour kicks in. Third-degree burns become damage statistics. Quicktime freezes the world into a slideshow of still frames.

In the combat autism, the world always makes sense.

Zoom in.

In the heart of whiteness, there is a machine, a fraction of a millimetre long: a sleek thing like a dagger, with delicate petals protruding from its hilt. Faces, carved around the needlelike tip. A Sobornost device—

The knife-flower moves. Even in quicktime, it is like a wasp, dancing a deadly dance amongst Perhonen’s butterfly avatars. Its strobing beam sweeps along the cabin’s wall, dancing in a random pattern, leaving behind a fiery scrawl. It turns towards Mieli.

Perhonen slams a q-dot bubble around it and pumps the binding energies of the artificial atoms up. The mirrored sphere bounces around the cabin and starts to glow.

Lasers, Mieli thinks at the ship, arming her own weapons. Get ready to throw it out and burn it. She positions herself between the knife-thing and the thief, who is floating motionless, eyes closed, puts up another q-dot wall to keep him safe.

Tactical gogols feed analysis results into her metacortex. The thing’s beam is scanning, like an aggressive version of a zoku Realmgate, capturing information but destroying the source, sending the results to someone. The heat is bandwidth.

Killing it all, letting the gods sort it out.

‘Mieli,’ the ship says. ‘It’s not going to—’

The bubble shatters. The thing comes straight at Mieli like a bullet. She fires her ghostgun at it, a thick cloud of nanomissiles, but already knows she is too slow. The thing is a bright serpent, dodging the tiny projectiles.

Its scanning beam rakes across Mieli’s torso like a claw. Her armour goes mad and deploys active countermeasures. Her skin erupts in tiny fireworks. It doesn’t do much good. Her intestines boil and burst – pressures and temperatures and recovery times – and the beam comes up, towards her head, swinging from side to side to a staccato rhythm of damage reports.

She expected a kind of detachment from the battle, with the knowledge that another Mieli will survive her death. Instead, a keen edge of fear presses down on her mind even through the blanket of combat autism.

She welcomes it.

The knife from the void changes direction, brushes her cheekbone, swings around her, towards the helpless thief. The metacortex Nash engine gives her three options, all of them bad.

Mieli ignores them and lets the thief loose from his chains.

Between one eyeblink and the next, just before the diamond thing hits, I become a god. A small god, but still: with an omniscient awareness of the contents of my smartmatter shell that pretends to be a human body, and the raion computer that is its brain.

It is only the second time that I have had root access to it. I wonder at the intricacies of its synthbio cells in a diamonoid frame, the fusion power source at the base of the spine and the nifty q-dot emitters. I get lost in the brain for a while. My mind is a tiny thing in its vast labyrinth, and for a time, it is good just to wander through the cool corridors of logic and to think. The plan that the pellegrini unwittingly gave me is there, too, a mosaic of interlocking pieces. I study it from every angle, humming to myself. Something is missing.

Then I hear the zoku jewel, an eager receptacle for thought and desire. I tell it what I need and it makes itself into something that completes the pattern, clicking into place. A part of me says that it is wrong, that I should feel guilty, but it fits too well. Surely there can be no harm in something so beautiful?

I feel like a little boy who has found pretty rocks on a beach. I hum to myself. I could happily stay inside my mind forever.

Except that there is a distant voice shouting that my flesh is boiling away and the bright, bright light weaving back and forth in front of me like a hypnotist’s watch has something to do with it.

I start moving. It feels like I’m wearing an oversized robot costume, huge and clumsy and slow. My mind is racing much faster than the body can react. My left hand disappears in white flame: fake skin, bones and flesh, consumed. The metaself informs me calmly how long it will take to grow it back. It puts together a picture of the tiny machine that is burning me alive: a hungry Sobornost creation, with a zigzag trajectory through the wreckage of Perhonen’s central cabin, now aimed straight at my brain.

Cops. No matter how much things change, they always stay the same.

And then it happens. I’m not much of a chess player, but there is an aspect of the game that I find fascinating. After a while, you can almost see lines of force between the pieces. Areas of danger where it is physically impossible to move pieces into. Clouds of possibility, forbidden zones.

That’s what it’s like, watching the diamond cop. Suddenly, it is as if there is a mirror image of the thing inside me, full of single-mindedness and purpose—

Good hunter fast hunter nice hunter if you find it there will be a treat—

That’s it. Mirrors. Silently, I shout commands at my alien body. It obeys.

The q-dot layer beneath my burning skin turns into metamaterials. An improvised invisibility cloak. I become a quicksilver statue. The hungry white light is bent around me. It takes out a set of tribal statues in Mieli’s gallery of comet ice. The cop keeps blasting, confused, stationary just long enough for me to tell Perhonen what to do—

A q-dot bubble blinks into being around it, a shiny billiard ball that shows a distorted reflection of my face. Sudden electromagnetic fields make my skin tingle. And then Perhonen blasts the intruder into space along the cabin’s axis like a bullet from a gun, leaving a streak of ionized air behind.

The ship’s lasers flash. There is a blinding antimatter explosion in the distance. A torrent of gamma rays and pions gives me a headache.

The locks of my Sobornost body snap back to place. Mieli floats next to me, tendrils of black blood around her like Medusa’s hair. Then the pain of the hand comes, and I scream.

Mieli takes care of the thief’s hand as the fires die away and the ship seals the tears in the hull. The cabin is full of the sickly sweet smell of burnt synthbio flesh, mixed with ozone and smoke and ashes from the bonsai trees. A bubble of liquorice tea floats near Mieli like a grey, stinking ghost.

‘That hurt,’ says the thief, looking at his stump with distaste as the tissue seals itself. ‘What the hell was that? It was not made by gogols who deal with cuddly slowtime monkey people.’

He is a miserable sight. The left side of his face is a red ruin, and burn craters make his upper torso look like a planetary surface. Mieli does not feel much better. She is drenched in sweat and her stomach and head throb as the repair nanites of her body work overtime. Except for her brain, her biological parts are almost redundant, but they are a part of her, and she’s not going to let them rot.

‘Whatever it was,’ Perhonen says, ‘I’m afraid there is more. It dumped a lot of bandwidth. I traced the vector. There is something else out there. Something that does not follow the Highway protocols. Something big. A whole swarm of the little bastard’s brothers, thousands of them, and by the looks of it they plan to intercept us.’

‘How long?’ the thief asks.

‘A day or two, maybe three if we really push it,’ Perhonen says. ‘They are fast.’

‘Damn,’ Mieli whispers. ‘The pellegrini warned me. I need to talk to her.’ She reaches for the goddess in her mind, but finds nothing.

The thief looks at her with his one good eye.

‘My guess is that she is going to be hiding until we get rid of our tail,’ he says. ‘This is big, bigger than either of us. Maybe even bigger than I used to be. To be completely honest, if I were you, I’d be looking for another line of work. It’s going to get ugly.’

Mieli raises an eyebrow. They both look like broken dolls. Her garment is in tatters and stained in blood. The thief’s face is still red and raw. Only clumps of white medfoam excreted by his body’s repair systems hide the terrible burns on his torso, legs and arms.

‘Well, uglier,’ the thief says. The undamaged side of his face grows serious. ‘I’ve got something to tell you. I