The Fractal Prince

the cotton tablecloth.

One by one, the other Founders follow. The chitragupta’s face is full of serenity. The pellegrini looks afraid. The engineer’s forehead is furrowed by furious concentration. The plain faces of the hsien-kus are made beautiful by expressions of wonder and awe. The vasilev is pale and sweating. He gives the inspector one more look full of hate and closes his eyes.

And then it is the inspector’s turn.

In the firmament, closing your eyes does not bring darkness, only white. The Founders are stark silhouettes against it. Hesitantly, the inspector touches his Code. It aches like his scars, only a hundred times worse, an unhealed gash inside him that reeks and oozes pus like a

bedsore. It opens when the gunfire wakes him up. His sister lies next to him. Flies walk on her open eyes. He tears out the wires in his scalp. There is a squelching sound and a lightning bolt of pain. Blood runs down his face. He touches her forehead. Under his fingers, the skin is clammy and soft.

He casts it at the firmament, eager to be rid of it. The hungry whiteness claims it and swallows. Suddenly, it is no longer white but a mirror that shows him six reflections.

He touches his face to feel the scars and sees the others do the same. The scars are not there: his cheeks are smooth. His mirror images are young men with coal-black hair and pencil-stroke eyebrows, dimpled temples and heavy eyelids. They wear slim velvet jackets and white shirts and look like they are on their way to a party. They brush invisible dust from their lapels, look at each other, blinking, as if they had just woken up from a dream.

As he watches them, there is a sharp crack inside him. Another self hatches like a bird from an egg. I smile at the confusion in my other selves’ eyes as we shake off the heavy shell of the inspector.

Next to me, the chen starts clapping.

‘Wonderful!’ he says, grinning like an excited child. ‘Wonderful!’

We all look at him. He alone is unchanged, a small grey figure against the firmament white. Something is wrong. I look for his Code in the vir trap we have created and find nothing.

The chen wipes his eyes and his expression becomes a serious mask again. Now that the xiao of my Sobornost disguise is gone, it is easier to look at him. A short, stocky Asian man with unevenly cut grey hair, barefoot, wearing a monkish robe. His face is younger than his eyes.

‘A vir that emulates the firmament,’ he says. ‘I did not think such a thing possible. And all this drama, just for me, just to steal my Codes. Better than going to the theatre. Very entertaining.’

The six of us take a bow, all together. ‘Surely you can figure out how I did it,’ we chorus. I can see it in my other selves’ eyes: trying to find a way out. But the vir is sealed around us, tight as a bottle.

‘Of course,’ he says, looking us up and down, hands behind his back. ‘I remember the first sunlifter factory you broke into, a century ago. So you did it again. The old compiler backdoor trick. Basic cleptography. The only part I can’t figure out is where you got my old friend’s Codes. From Josephine? I will need to have a word with her.’

I am rather proud of it: hacking the ultimate trusted computing platform, by inserting a few choice things into the hardware of the Immortaliser when the sunlifter factory compiled it and its sister ships, four minutes or so ago in the Experiment reference frame.

So of course, I also made an escape route.

‘A gentleman never tells. And there is a reason why classics are called classics,’ we say, a slight disharmony in our chorus now as we diverge.

There. The vir is sealed tight like a bottle, but he missed one of my firmament back doors. Just have to keep him talking.

‘Indeed. And betrayal is one of them, isn’t it? The oldest of them all.’ He smiles a thin smile. ‘You should have known better than to trust her.’

I didn’t. But we only shrug.

‘It was always a gamble. That’s what I do.’ We gesture at the whiteness. ‘But you are gambling, too. This whole thing, the Experiment. It’s just to distract the others, isn’t it? You don’t need it. You already have the Kaminari jewel. The key to Planck locks.’

He raises his eyebrows. ‘And can you think of anyone else who deserves to have it?’

We laugh. ‘With all due respect, Matjek,’ we say, ‘you should really leave jewels and locks and keys to the professionals.’

‘Respect. I see.’ He crosses his arms. ‘You treat this as a game. Do you remember the first time we met? I told you it was not a game to me.’

That was not the first time we met. But it’s good you don’t remember that.

‘Then why is it,’ we ask, ‘that I always won?’

One of us – I’m no longer sure who – activates the escape protocol. The others self-destruct, flooding the white vir with noise. The software shell that contains my mind dumps its contents into thoughtwisps, launches them from the Immortaliser at other raion ships.

I jump from node to node in the Sobornost communications network, splitting, merging, sending out self- sacrificing partials. The chens come after me, tenacious, relentless. But it doesn’t matter. A few milliseconds and I will reach one of my getaway ships, beautiful Leblancs built by the Gun Club zoku, with their warm Hawking drives, ready to make my getaway at the speed of light—

Then the raions start self-destructing. The photosphere is full of antimatter blooms as they burn my bridges, sacrifice billions of gogols to contain me like a virus. The destruction spreads like a wildfire, until there is only one of me left.

I try to hide in the firmament processes, become a slow, reversible computation. But in vain: they hunt me down. The chens and the engineers come, swarm over me like lilliputs over Gulliver, trapping me.

Then the mind-blades come, invisible and hot.

They take me apart. The metacortex goes first: the ability to self-modify to sculpt my neural matter. Fixed, dead, no longer changing personalities at will, imprisoned. But they make sure to leave the knowledge that something is gone.

A voice asks questions.

I don’t answer and die.

A voice asks questions.

I don’t answer and die.

A voice asks questions.

I don’t answer and die.

Finally, the blades touch a trap I built inside myself a long time ago. My secrets catch fire and consume themselves in my head.

In the end, I am naked, in a cell made of glass. There are phantom pains in my mind where the god parts have been cut away. There is a gun in my hand. Behind each of the four walls, there is somebody else, waiting.

Cooperate or defect?

4 TAWADDUD AND ABU NUWAS

While Duny waits, Tawaddud puts on a new face in her bedroom.

She looks at her image in the mirror. The fantasy she created for Mr Sen is gone, replaced by a plain woman in a white body stocking that does not flatter her broad hips. Unusual? Not today. She runs her fingers through her unruly hair, refuses to do anything about it and chooses a short, hooded cloak to hide it. After a moment’s hesitation, she puts on her mother’s old athar glasses. Somehow, it is easier to look at the world from behind the round golden lenses.

She picks up her doctor’s bag and joins Dunyazad at the balcony of the palace’s apartment wing, to wait for the elevator. Her sister gives the glasses a disapproving look.