The Fractal Prince

communication infrastructure through the System. She only needs to wish and the zoku’s serendipity engines will weave her desire into the zoku’s fabric – to be satisfied if the resources are available, in a way that is optimal to all the collective’s members.

Still, there is a price: the zoku may ask something of her in return – without her knowing. An idea may flash by, possessing her for a moment, consuming all her attention. Or she may feel a compulsion to be in a particular place, seemingly random, to meet a stranger who has a problem she can help them with.

Within the router, the thief is opening the Box. She takes a deep breath and lets the plan take over.

The metacortex passes her wish to the jewel: a complex, canned thought she crafted with the thief and Perhonen, a request for the router to run a very specialised quantum algorithm. The jewel seizes her volition eagerly. Perhonen’s modified wings, emulating a zoku communication protocol, pass it to the router. Slowly, the wedding bouquet starts to change shape, like origami, unfolded by invisible hands.

Mieli carries out her part perfectly, as I knew she would. I wish I could high-five her as the mirror headache around me comes to life. But time is of the essence: there could be a new traffic spike any second, and we are going to need everything the router can give us. Through Mieli’s connection to the router zoku, Perhonen is feeding it instructions.

You had better move, the ship says. Here is the latest traffic heatmap. The suit spimescape flashes into a three-dimensional contour image, like a brain scan. Intricate multicoloured shapes change and pulse in front of my eyes. I stare at the butterfly avatar inside the helmet. It looks comfortably normal against the madness in the background.

I grit my teeth, feed the map to the suit’s pilot gogols and fire the ion drives.

It is like swimming through invisible currents of fire. At the back of my mind, the clock is ticking. After tense seconds of sweat-drenched manoeuvring, I reach the Realmgates.

They are where we figured they would be, a large chamber-like space near the centre of the router, close to the power source, in a blissfully bandwidth-free zone, eye of the storm. A cluster of cubes, glowing with a faint tinge of purple in my spimescape vision, each two metres to the third power. Realmgates: the universal zoku interface between physical and virtual. They translate you into the language of the Realms going in, and back into physics and matter coming out. Picotech disassemblers that take the quantum information of any substance, convert it into qubits and teleport it into simulated gameworlds full of magic and dragons.

Or in this case, dark war gods with a grudge.

‘That’s more like it,’ I whisper to Perhonen. The plan clicks back into place in my head, and suddenly everything is sharp. ‘How is Mieli doing?’

All ready to go.

I merge my quicksuit gloves together to allow freedom of movement and lift up the Box with my right hand – the left is still a tingling clump of regenerating flesh. I detach a part of the suit’s q-dot field and let go of it, keeping a sensory link so it feels like I’m still holding it, guiding it into position next to the Realmgates.

Forty seconds to the predicted traffic minimum, Perhonen says.

The router weaves complex machinery into being around the Box. It runs the non-demolition measurement algorithm that the gogols claim will keep the cats alive – tricks that would have taken thousands of years with the improvised quantum gates in Perhonen’s wings. Then my field of vision explodes into an abstract cloud of colourful zoku language followed immediately by a translation by Perhonen’s gogol helpers.

You were right, Perhonen says. There is a Realm inside. It’s in the router memory now. You should be able to go in.

Imaginary wood whispers beneath my fingers. Or perhaps it is just the phantom itch of my missing hand. ‘You know, ship,’ I say, ‘in case this does not go well, it was nice knowing you.’

You too.

‘And I’m sorry.’

Sorry for what?

‘For what’s about to happen.’

I fire the ion drives and start moving towards the Realmgate.

The jewel’s touch becomes an iron grip in Mieli’s brain. And suddenly, a song unfolds in her mind. It ignites parts of her brain she has not used in nearly two decades, the parts which make matter dance. The words start flowing from her lips, unbidden.

The vaki in Perhonen’s hull responds to her. The song is almost as complex as the one she sung when she made the ship, the one that kept her up for eleven koto nights. But this one is a sharp song, a dead song, full of chilly abstraction and code, the song of a thief. She tries to stop herself, clamp fingers across her mouth, bite her tongue, but her body refuses to obey. In the end, she spits it out, word by word, hoarse voice rasping.

The changes the song makes are subtle, but she can feel them, in the very core of the ship, rippling outwards along its spiderweb structure and modules, all the way to its wings.

Mieli! the ship shouts. There is something wrong—

Cursing the thief, Mieli sends the command that shuts him down.

Jean, what the hell are you talking about? The butterfly goes frantic in my helmet.

All my limbs freeze. Mieli is using the Sobornost body’s remote control. But she can’t control Newton’s laws: I’m still going towards the gate.

The Realmgate is a wall in front of me, black like a thundercloud. There is a flash. And then I’m both alive and dead.

‘Perhonen?’ Mieli whispers.

Perhonen’s butterflies alight from their perches on the walls and dance, a storm of white motion, like Lorenz attractors. The fluttering whiteness converges into a dense cloud and forms a face.

‘Perhonen is not here anymore,’ it says, with a voice made of wings and whispers.

8 TAWADDUD AND SUMANGURU

The Sobornost Station is large enough to have its own weather. The ghost-rain inside does not so much fall but shimmers in the air. It makes shapes and moves, and gives Tawaddud the constant feeling that something is lurking just at the edge of her vision.

She looks up, and immediately regrets it. Through the wet veil, it is like looking down from the top of the Gomelez Shard. The vertical lines far above pull her gaze towards an amber-hued, faintly glowing dome almost a kilometre high, made of transparent, undulating surfaces that bunch together towards the centre, like the ceiling of a circus tent, segmented by the sharply curving ribs of the Station’s supporting frame.

Forms like misshapen balloons float beneath the vault. At first they look random, but as Tawaddud watches, they coalesce into shapes: the line of a cheekbone and a chin and an eyebrow. Then they are faces, sculpted from air and light, looking down at her with hollow eyes—

What am I doing here?

The jinni yearn for bodies: that she understands. But the Station is the body of Sobornost, thinking matter, flesh of the true immortals. There are gogols everywhere, big and small, even in the rain, in the smart dust particles around which the raindrops form.

She breathes it in, sticky and oily, with a faint, sweet scent, like incense. The droplets cling to her clothing