Lockstep

Fourteen

SHYLIF WENT EVERYWHERE NOW with a guard of McGonigal bots. These were entirely under Toby’s control, and Shy knew it, yet he hadn’t complained. In fact, he seemed oddly cheerful, despite the fact that Toby—and the Thisbe government—were keeping him from confronting Sebastine Coley again. Coley’s whereabouts were known, but so far, the Thisbe authorities couldn’t charge him with anything. The alleged crime had taken place on another world, and thousands of years ago in real-time terms. The odds of Shylif achieving actual justice seemed very long indeed.

Yet he’d come to see Toby one morning and said nothing about any of that. On the contrary, he’d volunteered to help Toby catch up on his history. After all, as he’d put it, “I had to do all this reading, too, once.”

Thisbe’s public records were open to Toby, and he’d finally summoned the courage to confront those images and videos of his brother and sister taken after he left. After what he’d just done on Wallop, it seemed silly to keep avoiding a few pictures. Yet as the days passed and he combed through old news stories, he found very little that made the new Peter and Evayne come to life for him.

“Look at this!” he said in exasperation. He and Shylif had their glasses on and were sharing a set of research windows. “Says here about half the original Sedna colonists are still alive—which I kind of figured after meeting Kenani. I mean, it’s been forty years since I left, after all. You’d think they would have written memoirs, made documentaries, said something about the early years.”

“Not if they’re being threatened,” Shylif pointed out reasonably. “Obviously, the Chairman wants to keep his secrets.”

“Yeah.” Toby didn’t try to hide his disappointment. Had Peter learned nothing from Consensus?

“But there’s another reason, Toby,” Shylif went on. “You’re kind of uniquely positioned to not see it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Lockstep time is strange. This history you’re looking for, at one and the same time there’s nothing to it—only forty years!—and way too much of it—fourteen thousand years. Both at once. How are you supposed to think about that?”

Toby didn’t know. The official records were disappointing, being merely a litany of massive immigrations, explosive economic growth and the conquest of new worlds. There were about a million pictures of Peter standing on some podium or other, waving and smiling. It just went on and on.

But he had another source. The archive from the twentier contained chaotic and fragmented records from Carter McGonigal’s surveillance of the Sedna colony. Toby went back to these.

There were two kinds of records. One was the surveillance footage itself, which came in giant terabyte dumps from hundreds of cameras and listening devices, mostly standard bots eavesdropping while they went about their business. Toby assigned this to some game personalities in his local copy of Consensus, telling them to review it for relevant items.

The other kind of record, though, was much more interesting. Carter had recorded family meetings held in a cramped little closet, where he and, initially, just Mother, had talked about their fears and suspicions. Toby’s father was convinced the trillionaires had planted one or more spies or saboteurs among the Sedna colonists. Months went by, and nothing turned up to confirm that worry. Toby watched it all anyway, fascinated and sorrowful at being so close to and still so far from his dearest people.

One day it wasn’t just Mom and Dad meeting. Peter and Evayne were there, too. And Peter wasn’t happy.

“You’re doing what?” He stalked back and forth, his head and eyes turning to remain fixed on the open surveillance windows in the physical control panel at the focus of the room. “Isn’t this what they do? Why are we doing it?”

“Listen,” their father said tightly. “You’re going to have to know how this stuff works. I’m not going to be around … well, for a while. I have to return to Earth, there’s a challenge to our claim. While I’m away, we’re going to be vulnerable. If something’s going to happen, it’ll be while I’m en route, do you understand? You have to be ready.”

“It’s wrong! I’m not doing it!” Peter stopped still and glared at his parents, and Toby found himself smiling. He wasn’t sure of the date stamp, but at this point Peter must be almost as old as Toby had been when he set off for Rockette. That meant he’d be pretty much as old here as Toby was now. A kind of twin, yet Toby could still see the boy in him. He could see the man, too—the density of Peter’s bones was making itself known in the angles of his face, the round solidity of his skull—but he still seemed so young. It made Toby wonder whether he, too, seemed as young to the people around him.

Evayne walked over and put her hand on Peter’s arm. “I get it,” she said. “It’s how things are, Pete, we can’t change it.

“Why don’t … why don’t you just treat this like it was a Consensus scenario? Play it through? I’ll help.”

Toby skipped ahead, taking giant steps through time—weeks, months, a year. After his father left for Earth again, the records became unevenly spaced. At last he came to the final one.

The shot was of Sedna’s landscape. Nearby everything was utterly black, and out at the horizon it was, too, with only the sky blazing with stars to indicate up and down. In the middle distance was a cratered plain, and on it bright flashes of light created a stroboscopic impression of bots—big mining units and smaller, human-formed ones—locked in combat. The flashes were explosions and electrical discharges. The scene was, at first, utterly silent.

Then Peter’s voice came on line, perfect and stereoscopic. “We’re going to be hiding this backup as soon as I’m done. I just wanted to record what’s happening … in case what we’re going to try doesn’t work.

“The trillionaires have made their move.”

The camera pulled back. The image was taken near ground level and had the quality of the twentier’s own cameras. Amplified starlight illuminated a sheltered ring of rocks where several space-suited figures sat, surrounded by bots, butlers, and weapons both makeshift and purpose built. One of the space-suited figures stood in the center of the space, and although its faceplate was blank, it moved with the jittery intensity recognizable as Peter’s.

That suit knelt now in front of the camera. “We woke up today to find the colony bots running amok. They tried to kill us in our beds. Luckily this surveillance network my parents set up isn’t connected to the main Internet. We were alerted by that surveillance system and were able to get out. The bots we’d committed to it are still on our side, who knows for how long? And they’re all fighting it out down there.” He pointed, and the camera obligingly turned to take in the sight of the distant silent battle.

“It’s pretty clear what they’re trying to do. They’ve ruptured the colony’s oxygen tanks, blown up the greenhouse—”

“I saw a pack of them going into the food stores before we got out,” said someone else. The camera turned again, this time revealing who else was on this rise above the battle: everyone, it seemed. There were hundreds of space-suited figures sitting, standing, and pacing here. Only a few bots, mostly twentiers, squatted among them.

“We’ve nearly mopped them all up, but the damage is done,” Peter went on. “They targeted essential life support, in order to take us down as quick as they could. Whoever’s running the operation doesn’t care if all his bots get wiped out in the end, because we’re already good as dead. We can’t survive without those supplies. The plan’s pretty simple, eh, Mom? Destroy our air, water, heat and food supplies, and we die. Call it a tragic accident, hold a big memorial service back on Earth, and after a while drum up support for a new expedition to seed a new colony. That’ll take a few years, but hey, they’ve got time, right?

“It’s a plan so simple it can’t fail. Except that it’s going to, right Mom?”

“As long as they don’t target the cicada beds,” she said.

“And it looks like they haven’t. Whoever they are, they don’t know about your experiments. They certainly didn’t know about the secondary network. So they have no idea what we’re going to do.”

The camera returned to Peter, who now loomed above it, a silhouette whose backdrop was the twisting banner of the Milky Way.

“Dad’s network is still operating, but it was always pretty simple and I was able to take it over long ago. I’m pretty sure they are not able to control it, even if they knew it existed. That network will coordinate the bots we’ve got left while they repair the life-support systems and rebuild our supplies. That could take months or years, but it doesn’t matter. We’ll all be asleep.

“We already proved we could double the size of the colony by having half our people winter over—isn’t that what you’re calling the hibernation, Evie?—while the rest of us are awake. We don’t have enough beds for everybody, so what we’re going to do is cycle through them a few at a time. When those ones are frozen solid, we’re going to store ’em in the hangar and put the next group into the beds. When the crisis is over, the bots will bring us back the same way, one batch at a time.”

Peter gazed in the direction of the battle. “Looks like things are winding down. We might be able to go back soon. We’re not going to broadcast any distress signal. We’ll let ’em think we’re dead. Then, in a few years, we’ll be back up and running, and waiting for them when they send their own colonists.

“Funny thing is, we might be even better off by the time we wake up. The longer the bots have to fix things up, the more resources they’ll have ready when we revive. Everybody ready?”

The camera swung again, showing the colonists standing, turning, gathering together facing Peter and two other suited shapes—Evayne and Mother, no doubt.

Suddenly Peter turned to look into the camera. “You! Twentier! Take this record and hide it. You’re going to ground now, too. I’ll find you when we’re done.

“All right, everybody, single file, and watch out for—”

There was nothing more in the twentier’s memory.

THE KEISHION FAMILY BOTS were repairing each other now. There wasn’t any more work to be done around the house, and the Keishions had settled into something that Corva said was a lot like their normal routine. Supplies and resources were thin these days, but they were industrious people. They were getting by.

Toby spent whole days away from the estate. He could be seen walking in the hills, talking to nobody apparently, but with his glasses on. Sometimes a small swarm of butlers and grippies followed him, and together they would act out dramas and battles in the parkland that wove its way through the city. Corva and Halen stood together one morning watching this spectacle and shaking their heads. Later that day Halen marched out and stepped between Toby and the butler he was talking to.

“Toby, what are you doing?”

“Oh, hi, Halen, what’s up?”

“I dunno. Just a blockade, and all of us aging ten times faster than the rest of the lockstep. Or hadn’t you noticed?”

Toby was holding a grippy like it was a pistol. He let go and it dropped, changing shape and twisting like a cat to land on sudden little legs. He lowered his glasses to look over them at Halen.

“Why don’t you come in here?”

Halen frowned minutely. Then he snapped his fingers and one of the bots that always hung around him walked up and handed him a pair of glasses. He put them on and Toby synced their interfaces.

The hills wavered and were suddenly overlaid with an entire army—thousands of mechs and armed bots, scurrying reconnaissance mice and stilt-legged snipers. Off in the sky, the blued-out shapes of vast rounded forms stood half out of the atmosphere.

Halen peered at one of these. “Nothing like that exists,” he said.

Toby had been wondering how Halen would react to this simulation and decided now that he’d pretty much gotten it right. “Not in the real world, no,” he admitted. “This is Consensus. It’s a game.”

Halen’s lips thinned and he looked away for a moment before saying, in a tightly controlled voice, “You’re playing a game?”

“Yes, I am. You wanna play?”

“No. No thank you.” Toby could see that Halen was working his way up to some sort of outburst, so he decided to stop toying with him.

“It’s called Consensus. Peter and I designed it.”

The air visibly went out of Halen’s anger. “What?”

“After the kidnapping, Peter needed therapy. But we’d come all the way out to Sedna instead, and we didn’t bring any human psychologist. All I had to go on was the ’pedias and psych avatars. So—”

“What kidnapping?”

Toby shook his head sadly. “Something that never made it into the history books, it seems. Peter was kidnapped when we were kids. It was horrible for all of us, but him—he built this shell, and none of us could get through it. So I made Consensus and lured him into it.”

Halen turned around, examining the martial vista. “This is a military sim.”

“I set a challenge for him, I said, ‘Design a world where what happened to us could never happen.’ We were still designing the place when I got lost. This is what a lot of the early versions looked like.”

“Wars? How’s that safe?”

“I played a little trick on Peter,” Toby admitted with a shrug. “I populated the gameworld with nonplayer characters who acted like real people, not like entertainer bots. Pretty easy to do when you can just order your programmer bots to swap out the usual game character minds with libraries of personality types based on centuries of sociology and psych studies. I’d make millions of pseudopeople and then we’d plug in whole new governments and economies and see what they did. It was mostly really bad. Mostly, they ended up like this.” He nodded at the army.

“The thing is, Consensus isn’t perfect. As a simulation of reality, I mean. Nothing is—there’re always assumptions, shortcuts, and if you started with some detailed sim of a particular moment in time and played forward, the game would diverge farther and farther away from what actually happened.

“The point is, if you treat reality like a game, it’s going to show in your decisions. I’m … checking something.”

Halen nodded slowly, but he was frowning again. “You’re studying your brother. That makes sense. But if you’re looking for strategies, Toby … there’s really only one. You know what it is. And Peter and Evayne are terrified that you’ll use it.”

“Wake Mother, you mean?” He shook his head. “I’ll do it for my own sake, but seriously, what’s she going to do? Scold Evayne for becoming a murderous high priestess in the cult of Toby?” He laughed.

“You don’t get it,” snapped Halen. “I knew you didn’t get it. It’s not about you, or her, or Evayne. It’s about what other people believe about you. You’re a god, Toby. Evayne made you into one.”

Toby shook his head. “People in the lockstep can’t possibly believe that. I only disappeared forty years ago. I know thousands of years have gone by outside—”

“Toby, most of the citizens of the lockstep are from outside. The number of people here from your time is so incredibly small that they don’t even register. Three-sixty is a lockstep of immigrants, and almost all of them come from worlds where your cult’s been cultivated for thousands of years.”

“Cultivated…”

He had fully intended to read up on this, but there was so much else to cover, he hadn’t gotten to it yet. Toby did know hints of the story, so he wasn’t entirely surprised when Halen said, “Evayne visits worlds on the down cycle of their civilizations. Postapocalyptic places, failing terraforming efforts, places ravaged by posthumans or tailored plagues or whatever. She lands in a big splash of glory and music and hands out gifts, things like self-reproducing fab printers and med bots. Then she tells the grateful people that she’s the messenger of the boy god Tobias McGonigal. She sticks around long enough to get the right stories stuck in their heads and get them used to the icons—you know, the statues—then she leaves. But she comes back, every few centuries, to reinforce the cult and draft the most fanatical members into her little army.

“Don’t you see? Everything she has is built on you. You’re the god of her religion. If you return, she’s immediately retired, and she knows it. Every single member of her army will go down on their knees to you the instant they find out who you are. All you have to do is announce yourself. What other strategy do you need?”

Toby gazed out over the ranked masses of the game’s latest army, and he felt sick. He and Peter had both tried such gambits in Consensus, and not just once or twice but numerous times. He knew such scenarios could end in absolute triumph, even in societies where Peter’s kidnapping would be impossible. But to get to that, you had to make other things impossible, too—like independent thought, free speech, and self-determination.

You could play through it, and it looked great—but reviewing Consensus now with new eyes, he could see the flaws. It wasn’t just the sheer amorality of it—the bloodbaths and pogroms that necessarily went along with successful religious conquest. Those alone should have ruled out the strategy. Yet on top of that was the simple fact that there was no way to simulate all the many ways that the strategy could go wrong. Just because something worked in Consensus—or in Halen’s imagination—didn’t mean it would work in the real world.

“Evayne can’t afford to have you announce yourself. Or, if you do,” Halen went on eagerly, “she’ll have to make sure that you’re not returning as a messiah.”

Toby appraised Halen. Corva’s brother obviously thought he understood Evayne. What to him was reality, though, sounded like just another Consensus scenario to Toby, and he more than suspected it would be the same for Evayne. But if it wasn’t a game for her anymore; if she had convinced herself that there was only one way things could play out …

Then Toby might have the beginnings of a real strategy.

“Go on.” He crossed his arms, stepping back from Halen’s intensity.

“There’re two ways for a world to end, Toby: in glory or in fire. If Evayne can’t profit from you bringing glory to the people, she’ll make sure they think you’re bringing fire.”

The words hung there, and the moment stretched out. Toby took off his glasses, and the ranked armies vanished; his generals became butlers; his weapons, grippies. There was only him now, standing on a hillside with Halen Keishion.

“So you see,” Halen murmured, almost apologetically, “you can study the past all you like, but it doesn’t matter. You really only have one choice.

“You have to become the god that the people think you are.”

IT CAME AS SOMETHING of a relief when, the next day, Corva told Toby that the courts had agreed to hear Shylif’s case against Sebastine Coley. “I’m going to be a character witness,” she said. “We … haven’t talked about you to the court. I hope that’s all right. But I’d like you to come.”

Law had been one of those ideas Peter detested. “There’s no such thing as two identical acts,” he’d told Toby. “All actions have different outcomes. I steal a diamond necklace from a rich guy who’s forgotten he owns it, nobody cares. You steal a loaf of bread from a factory that makes millions of them every day, and you get sent to prison. It makes no sense. Every act should be judged entirely on its own.”

In the world before artificial intelligence, this had been impossible, so there was law. Justice, however, was one of the few places in Peter’s utopia where he allowed AI, so Shylif and Sebastine Coley found themselves standing in a marble courthouse but not in front of a traditional judge or jury. Toby and Jaysir sat in the visitors’ gallery and watched as the two were made to stand in front of a man who looked for all the world like a real judge. “He’s not,” Jaysir muttered. “He’s a cyranoid. He just recites whatever the AI whispers into his ear. He’s not allowed to speak on his own.”

Court officials read Shylif’s complaint, and character witnesses came forward to speak for him and for Coley. Corva had her turn, and described Shylif’s deep well of sorrow, how he preferred working with bots in the warehouses and factories of the lockstep to spending time with humans. Coley’s family described a loving father and grandfather. It turned out he’d become the patriarch to quite a large clan.

When all of this was done, the judge asked Coley whether Shylif’s accusations were true.

Coley nodded, and the faces of his family members crumpled in shock and disbelief. Toby had never seen anything like this in real life before, and witnessing it was utterly unlike watching a court drama. This was not an entertainment; it was just sad.

“I’m sorry,” Coley said. He hung his head.

Shylif’s lips curled in a sneer. “Is that all you have to say for yourself?”

Now, unexpectedly, Coley raised his head looked Shylif in the eye. “No. No, it’s not.

“I did some terrible things when I was a young man. That’s over sixty years ago now, for me. I know it’s less for you. Either way, it’s time that’s gone, and so much has happened since. I was saved by a woman who became my wife, and she made me into the man I am now. But I know I can never escape who I was or what I did.”

He looked up at the judge, and now Toby understood why the AI that presided over the courtroom was given a human face. Coley knew he was addressing a presence that dwelt behind the man in front of him, but at times like this one needed to put a human face on the moment. “Sir,” he said, “I’ll face justice for this, and for the other things I did. It’s time, I guess. But you have to know”—and now he turned back to Shylif—“what that means.”

Jaysir and Toby exchanged a glance, and both leaned forward to hear better.

“What do you mean?” said Shylif suspiciously.

“I’m not doing this to salve my own conscience,” said Coley. “I’m too old and too much time has passed for remedies like that. And don’t think that any outcome will make you feel better, because we both know it won’t.

“I’ll accept the judgment of the court. It won’t do any good. It won’t bring Ouline back, it won’t right the wrongs, it won’t heal the wounds.

“It’s … just one of those things that have to be done.”

Silence descended on the court. Shylif stood like a statue, while Coley’s family squirmed in their seats. Suddenly, the judge picked up his gavel and its descent made a clap of sound that echoed through the space.

“Sebastine Coley,” he said, “how many descendants do you have?”

Startled, Coley said, “Uh … I have five children, and they’re all married. They’ve each got three or four kids and some of those’ve got kids now, too…”

The judge nodded sharply. “Sebastine Coley, I sentence you to recount the story of what you did to harm the people beloved of the man Shylif, one at a time to each and every member of your family who is old enough to understand the tale. You will do so in the presence of Shylif, the complainant, so that he can be assured that you do not lie or leave out any detail. Every person in your line will know from your own lips exactly what you did.” He banged the gavel again, and the court was dismissed.

A look of horror had come over Coley’s face on hearing these instructions. Now he collapsed to his knees, sobbing. But Shylif, standing over him, lowered his head in thought for a long moment, and then nodded.

“I am satisfied,” he said.