“You killed her. I don’t believe you can just sit there and describe it so coldly.”
Saskia didn’t sound disbelieving. Judy had a well of anger rising in her stomach that she could have ridden to the heights of self-righteous satisfaction, but one look at the mechanism in Saskia’s mind—as viewed by the meta- intelligence—and she forgot all that. What did it all matter, anyway?
“Saskia, what do you know of how the Dark Plants propagate?” Judy said, her voice distant and serene.
“Only the rumors…”
Judy shook her head. “No one really knows, Saskia. We don’t know if they evolved or if they were made, if they are real or virtual. They seem to contradict themselves at every level. They exist in the quantum world but are visible in our world: their seeds behave more like electrons than macroscopic objects; they drift through space having no fixed position or direction until they are observed. That’s Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. And when a suitable intelligence observes them, and fixes them in position in space, they germinate.”
“Yes, I know that. We all know that.”
“And then come the BVBs. Black Velvet Bands. Black loops that just form in unobserved space and shrink down to nothing. They catch around your arm or leg, and they can’t be cut. One could form around your lungs, and you would breathe out and it would shrink along with them, and then you’d find you couldn’t breathe in again….”
“You killed the girl.”
“I had to. There were too many intelligent observers on that ship. I had to shut them down. Being asleep wouldn’t have protected those passengers; the Dark Seeds can infiltrate dreams. They can cut right down to your subconscious mind.”
Maurice gave a cold laugh. “They say the worst thing is to have one of the seeds come upon you in your dreams. To be sleeping in your bed while a plant grows nearby, feeding on your nightmares…”
“Do they look for us?” asked Edward nervously.
“No,” said Judy, staring at Maurice. “Definitely not, Edward. But we seem able to sense them, no matter what we do. The AIs on the planet Gateway committed suicide rather than face them, do you know that?
They were too frightened of what the seeds would become if they were allowed to grow.”
Saskia opened her mouth; Judy held her hand up to quieten her.
“Grainne’s upper mind was shut down in sleep, and yet still there was a part of her deep subconscious sensing the world. Do you know what the plants are made of, Saskia? I’ll tell you: nothing. They aren’t really there; they are a recursively defined space, like the Sierpienski Gasket. The seeds look like cubes, but their fascinating structure draws your attention in, as it is intended to. You look at a cube and you can see little holes in its structure. So you look closer at the structure around the holes and you see that it is made of holes, too. Everywhere you look you see holes, never actually the seed itself. You look closer and closer and the stuff that makes up the seed is always tantalizingly out of your reach, and you begin to suspect that the seed itself isn’t actually there.”
“What’s so bad about that?”
“Do you believe in the soul, Saskia?”
“No. Do you?”
