The Fractal Prince

‘This vir comes from my memories,’ he says. ‘I put a lot of detail into it. Good avatars. Nerves, muscles, veins.’ He tests the edge against his thumb, draws a red line of blood like a tiny smile. ‘The others always forget about the flesh. But you should never forget about the enemy. It’s always there, even when you are not looking. The quantum filth know that.’

The laugh bubbles up before I can stop it, comes out from my lips with droplets of spittle and blood.

‘You always had a sense of humour, le Flambeur,’ he says. ‘Maybe we can make this short, if you tell me what that bitch Pellegrini wants from me this time.’

‘It’s not that,’ I say.

‘Well, if laughing makes it easier for you—’ He reaches out with the knife, presses it against the corner of my eye, starts making the first cut—

‘You know, I wanted to give you a chance,’ I say, blood running down my face. ‘That’s why I left the Realmgate open. I thought you had good reasons to do what you did. But now I really think you just like hurting people.’

His eyes widen and he takes a step back. My features start flowing. My body changes. His Code echoes in my mind – soft cold dead skin under my fingers. I smile a tiger smile. I dissolve the chair with a thought and get up.

‘What did you do?’ he growls.

‘I may be smaller and weaker and younger, but that does not mean I’m not smarter. Like you said: you should not forget about the enemy. I made a firmament vir. Yes, it should be impossible. Unless you have Oortian hardware running Sobornost software. She is a good ship.’

He slashes with the knife, but I am already a ghost, outside the laws of the vir. ‘You should have gone through the gate,’ I say. ‘The monkey does not always lie.’

I freeze the vir and cut my link to it. A discontinuity takes me back to the dark forest. The tiger is frozen in mid-leap. I pick up my sword and walk past it, through the Realmgate.

The gate slams me back into a physical body, inside the swirling madness of the router. I grab the Box and tear it away from the router’s delicate machinery, just when the rain of Hunters starts.

Mieli watches as the butterfly avatars become still. The sneering face of the box god slowly dissolves as they drift apart.

‘Perhonen?’ she whispers.

Here, the ship’s voice says.

‘Are you all right?’

I think so. I feel strange. I think I fell asleep.

‘If that bastard did something to you, I’m going to—’

Mieli. The hunter thing. It’s coming.

The spimescape goes crazy. Vectors rain upon Perhonen like the scrawls of an angry child. Mieli starts to summon combat autism, but the ship’s systems are sluggish after the Box god infection. And it is already too late.

The hunters surround the ship like a shoal of fish, thousands and thousands of them, a river of tiny stars flowing through and past the ship. Their upload beams crisscross the central cabin in a deadly spiderweb, but just brushing lightly, not burning this time. They ignore Perhonen and converge towards the router like a giant arrowhead.

The router vanishes in a blaze of antimatter, piranhas tearing a wedding bouquet apart. Space is full of pions and gamma rays. In an eyeblink, the zoku machine is gone, replaced by a slowly expanding cloud of debris and fragments. The hunter swarm passes through it and is gone, heading back towards the main vein of the Highway at a considerable fraction of lightspeed.

And then everything is still and dark, and the space around Perhonen is empty. The awakened Oortian vaki in its walls starts glowing with a familiar blue-green light.

Mieli, it says. I’m still getting Jean’s signal. He’s still out there.

Feeling numb, Mieli reels in the ship’s wings and modules into a more compact shape and steers them into the debris cloud, burning a way through with anti-meteorite lasers. They bring the thief in with a q-dot bubble, a helmeted, quicksuited figure, clutching a small black box against his chest, unmoving.

Mieli tells the helmet to open. The opaque metamaterial bubble vanishes, revealing the face the butterflies made.

Bastard. Mieli extrudes a q-dot blade from her hand and pushes it against the creature’s throat—

‘Wait!’

The voice is the thief’s. But that doesn’t mean anything.

‘Mieli, wait, it’s me!’

It does sound like the thief. She pulls back but does not let go. ‘What happened?’

The scarred face blurs and becomes the thief again, charcoal-dark eyebrows and hollow temples, covered in sweat. ‘I got Sumanguru’s Founder codes. The song I embedded in the zoku jewel – it was the same trick I tried before with Chen, except that this time it worked. A vir that pretends to be firmament, a trap. The hunters thought I was him. I told them to leave me alone. It worked.’ He talks fast, breathlessly.

‘You are not making any sense, you bastard,’ Mieli says.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ the thief says. ‘We won. And I have a plan.’

Mieli stares at him. She takes the Box from the thief. He does not resist. She crushes it slowly in her hand. Black shards spread in all directions like the negative of a slow, tiny nova.

‘You used Perhonen as bait,’ she says.

‘I did.’

‘You nearly got us all killed. Or worse.’

‘I did.’

She pushes him away. He floats across the cabin, a guilty look on his face.

‘Get the hell away from me,’ she says.

Mieli hides herself in the pilot’s creche, exhausted, nursing her anger and mapping out Perhonen’s systems to ensure every last trace of the box god is gone.

‘How do you feel?’ she asks the ship.

Strange. Parts of me rebelled. I could not feel them anymore. All the gogols did what Sumanguru said. And there was a part that went into the Box and did not come back.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Mieli says.

But that was not the worst thing. That was when I saw you almost giving up, twice. You came very close to pulling the strangelet trigger, Mieli. And it was not a bluff.

Mieli says nothing.

You have been stretching yourself too thin. Keeping your promises and protecting me and letting the pellegrini change you. This time, you almost fell. And I was not there to catch you.

For a moment, Mieli is unable to speak. She is used to the ship always being there, always offering warmth, ever since the day she made her. But now there is a cold edge in Perhonen’s voice.

‘The thief did this to you,’ Mieli says. ‘He went too far this time. I’m going to—’

I will deal with the thief, Perhonen says. You don’t have to fight my battles for me. Just because you made me does not mean I did not exist before. You brought me back from the alinen, and I will always love you for that. You made me into a new being and you will always have my loyalty for that. But I am not only what you sang into me. Some things you can’t fix with words or a song like Karhu did with your tooth when you were little. Or by taking it out on the thief.

The ship’s voice resonates through its sapphire hull, all around Mieli.

So what if the pellegrini can make gogols of you? it says. Nothing has