The Fractal Prince

The inspector frowns at the chitragupta. The Immortaliser is a knotted configuration of electromagnetic fields around a nugget of smartmatter the size of a pinhead. It floats five hundred kilometres above the solar north pole, in the temperature minimum region of the photosphere. He went into a lot of trouble to get the vir to run on that kind of hardware.

The vir is a little restaurant in the crook of a rocky harbour’s arm. They sit around tables set out on the uneven sunlit rock in a cool breeze, glasses of white wine and plates of seafood in front of them, full of rich, subtle smells. The rigging of the sailboats in the water makes a tinkling sound in the wind, like improvised music. To remind them where they are, the jewelled orrery of the Experiment looms in the sky, larger than clouds or worlds, against the blazing white curve of the Sun. It’s a patchwork reality, put together from the memories of the Founders, as these things should be. To show respect, to have consensus. Or so the theory goes.

The vasilev is the first to speak.

‘What are we doing here?’ he says. ‘We have already answered all your questions.’

The inspector’s fingers find the ridges and valleys of scar tissue on his cheeks. The touch awakens the dull ache that is always there, not because the wounds have not healed but because it is part of him, a show of respect to the Prime.

Good, he thinks. It is good to meet the others in a vir where they can feel pain. These are gogols from branches deep within the guberniyas, used to abstraction, with a tendency to forget that the physical reality is still there, raw and painful and devious and messy, like a razor blade hidden inside an apple.

‘One of you is Jean le Flambeur,’ he tells them. ‘One of you is here to steal.’

The Founders look at him in stunned silence. The chitragupta giggles. The engineer stares at the coils of purple octopi on his plate. The pellegrini flashes the inspector a smile. He feels a strange warmth in his chest. That was something he did not expect. High-fidelity virs and embodiment have their advantages and disadvantages. He stops himself from smiling back.

‘I don’t understand any of this,’ he says, gesturing upwards.

The sky is full of neutrino winks of other raion ships like the Immortaliser, millions of them, moving in tight, orderly orbits, interwoven like threads in a tapestry. Somewhere, far away, echoes the thrumming song of a guberniya, an artificial brain the size of a planet, watching over its children from the shadow of Mercury, coordinating, guiding, planning.

The Sun wears a belt made from tiny points of light: sunlifting machinery that pumps heavy elements from the fusion depths and feeds it to smartmatter factories in stationary orbits. An entire ecology of constructor gogols in plasma bodies churns the solar corona, creating pockets of order that will be used as the lasing medium for solar lasers.

‘But I know it is to serve the Great Common Task. Our brother the engineer tried to explain thread theory to me, about quantum gravity scattering, about the Planck locks and how God is not a gambler but a cryptographer. I don’t care. My branch deals with simpler things. You all know what I do.’

It is a little dishonest. Of course he knows what is about to happen. But it is better if they think of him as a barbarian.

Solar lasers will focus on a constellation of points until the concentration of energy tears the fabric of spacetime itself and gives birth to singularities, fed with the particle stream that the sunlifting system kicks up from the pole. Countless gogols will be cast into them, their minds encoded in thread states in the event horizons. Seventeen black holes will pull together long tails of plasma from the Sun like orange peels, coming together. A many-fingered hand of God will close into a fist. A violent Hawking decay will convert several Earth masses into energy.

And, perhaps, within that inferno, there will be an answer. An answer someone wants to steal.

‘So, where is this fabled creature, then?’ asks the vasilev. ‘This is madness. Nine seconds in the Experiment frame, and we are wasting cycles in this fancy vir. Out there, our brothers and sisters are getting ready for the most glorious of tasks. And what are we doing? Jumping at shadows.’ He looks at the pellegrini. ‘Sister pellegrini here has decided that we should dance for the monkey.’

The inspector lays his large hands on the table and gets up. His sudden movement and his bulk make the glasses shudder and sing.

‘Brother vasilev should reconsider his words,’ he says, quietly. He will have to deal with this one soon. And possibly the hsien-kus: there are two of them, an older and a younger, one in an elaborate avatar from the Deep Time – a hsien-ku face embedded in a blue, many-angled body and a forest of limbs – the other an unassuming young woman a plain grey uniform. He is almost certain they sent the core vampire that tried to kill him in the ship’s Library.

‘Sister pellegrini here detected an anomaly in the mathematics gogols,’ the inspector says. ‘She brought me from the Library to investigate, and cut off communications from the rest of the fleet. It was the right thing to do. I found traces. In virs, in gogol memories. Le Flambeur is here.’

He looks at the chen from the corner of his eye, trying to see a reaction. The grey-haired Founder is the only one who is not looking at the inspector. His eyes are fixed on the sky, and a smile plays on his lips.

The older hsien-ku rises.

‘This creature you are talking about is a myth,’ she says. ‘In our ancestor sims, he is little more than a story. A bogeyman.’

She is impressively ancient. The instinctive xiao – the inbuilt respect for a gogol closer to a Prime than he is – makes the inspector feel like a child for a moment. The inspector was the sword of Sobornost, his metaself rewrites his thoughts. He stayed strong. He knew his cause was true and pure.

‘Is sister saying that the Prime memories are flawed?’ he says, clinging to the metaself’s reassuring voice, gritting his teeth.

‘Not flawed,’ she says. ‘Merely . . . distant.’

‘We are wasting time,’ the vasilev says. ‘If there is an anomaly here, if the ship has been infected, then sister pellegrini should self-destruct and so our deaths will serve the Task. But then, she has always been a little too fond of her continuity to do what is necessary.’

The inspector smiles. ‘My investigation was thorough. It seems that our brother vasilev and sister hsien-ku tried to manipulate the balance of test gogols used in the Experiment. But I’m not here to accuse them. I’m here to find Jean le Flambeur.’

The vasilev stares at him. ‘Of all the outrageous accusations—’

‘Enough,’ says the chen. There is a sudden silence. The chen is the only gogol on the ship not branched for the Experiment: fourth generation, Battle-with-the-Conway-Angel branch. Even the metaself cannot silence the heavy rush of xiao that the inspector feels when he speaks.

‘Our brother has performed his task well. If anyone questions his recommendations, it is surely not out of guilt, but merely out of desire to see the Great Common Task performed well, am I not right? If it is a question of identity, then the answer is simple. The Primes, in their wisdom, have provided us with the means to tell the world who we are.’

The chen turns to face them, a beatific smile on his face. ‘Let us draw forth our Founder Codes, and pray.’

The inspector takes a deep breath. He knew this was coming, but he has no desire to touch his Code, the thing that grants Founders root access to the meta-laws of the firmament that govern all virs. The Code derives from passwords in the same way that nuclear weapons descend from flint axes: not just a string of characters, but a state of mind, a defining moment, the innermost self. And his isn’t pretty.

Nevertheless, he grins at the vasilev as they all get up. The golden-haired gogol takes a drink from his glass, spilling a few drops as he puts it back on the table: his hands are shaking. I would really like it to be this one.

‘Come, now,’ the chen says. ‘Let’s all do this together, like brothers and sisters.’ He closes his eyes. An expression of bliss spreads across his face, as if he was watching something indescribably beautiful. The vir dissolves around them, absorbed by the firmament, disappearing into empty whiteness like the vasilev’s wine into