Divergence

become locked in a dynamic equilibrium. Essentially, they get caught in a loop.”

He seemed to be reciting someone else’s words, Eva noted. Though Ivan’s English was excellent, this was not his usual style of speech.

The machines had now formed a silver pool again in the depression. The middle was beginning to bulge and rise as they headed towards the center, striving to climb to that point three meters up in the air. Ivan continued speaking. “Think of a VNM designed to grow into a building. How might you program its prototype? Like this, I think. If you were the VNM, first, make enough copies of yourself. Next, find the foundations and spread yourself out over them to make a floor.”

He waved his hands in illustration, spreading his fingers wide and drawing a big circle in the air.

“You see? Now, when you have done that, climb up a height of, say, three meters to where the next floor would be. Spread yourself out again, and keep going like this until the building is done. This would work fine if you had other separate VNMs building the foundations and raising a frame for you. But what if those other VNMs are not present, or what if your own VNM should get lost? What if it was to find itself all alone, perhaps here in the RFS?”

The silver stalk had grown considerably now; the bulge was already forming on the top as the VNMs climbed up to a next floor that did not exist. Ivan frowned and looked around the brick-strewn landscape.

“Maybe that same VNM would wander the industrial wasteland, making copies of itself until eventually it had enough. Then it would search for the foundations of a building that did not exist.”

He pointed downwards to the rippled concrete floor of the basement, once again exposed.

“But that floor down there is solid enough. Maybe this is the foundation it has been seeking? So then it searches for the next floor up. There is no frame, so it climbs up over copies of itself, until every creature is climbing over every other one, trying to get as high as possible, but the pedestal becomes too thin, and the machines fall and, believing themselves on the next floor up, spread out to find a space that needs covering. Not finding it they rise yet again, and the process repeats and repeats itself until…”

There was a cracking noise, like ice freezing. The silver flower was changing color, the change rising from the base, the material of the VNMs altering subtly, metal crystals growing and realigning. A few scraps of birch bark fluttered to the ground.

Ivan continued softly.

“…until someone who understands what is going on, having worked with VNMs in his younger days, recognizes the model that has repeated its hopeless task for all these months in the wasteland, then looks up the completion code, and sends it to those hapless machines…”

They all looked at the silver flower, frozen in position, its head rising from the broken black rubble of the basement to reflect the hot yellow sun straight into their eyes. Fiona moved her lips slowly, searching for the right words.

“You’ve killed it,” she said.

Wake up! You keep dreaming of this. Why do you think you are Eva? Who keeps giving you these dreams?

Are they lodged in your psyche? Part of what DIANA did to you? Or are they a reminder of your lost soul? Are you borrowing Eva’s feelings to remind yourself what emotions are like?

Eva stamped her way across the broken ground, heading back to the britzka. She could feel the accusing gazes of Fiona and the rest on her back, and it made her angry. Unfairly, she began taking it out on Ivan.

“They come across here with their big intentions and their rules for how this country should be run, and none of them could even operate a bloody hammer. And when they meet someone who actually knows what he’s doing, someone who can operate machinery, they treat him like he’s some sort of idiot.”

Ivan said nothing; he calmly climbed back into the britzka and gazed down the potholed road ahead.

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” said Eva. “Aren’t you going to say something?”

“Please don’t patronize me, Eva,” said Ivan. “Do you think I am not aware? Do you think I need you to point all this out to me?”

Eva blushed.

But I’m not Eva, I’m Judy. Why do I keep dreaming of this woman? Now I’m even on a ship that bears her name. I used the meta-intelligence to look around the Eva