Recursion

Herb and constantine: 2210

There was an air of rising tension aboard Herb’s ship. Viewing field after viewing field formed in the spaces around his lounge. Green lines representing velocity lengthened on the indicators that had formed on the walls, a faint humming noise could be heard somewhere toward the rear of the ship. Herb, sitting on the edge of the white leather sofa felt his heartbeat accelerating as he realized how much power was now being generated; he had never heard the engine before.

Robert sat opposite, a picture of calm activity.

“Can you think of anything we’ve forgotten?” asked Johnston, his gaze traveling from viewing screen to viewing screen.

“No,” said Herb. He wished he could think of something.

“Okay. Here we go, then.”

They jumped to the heart of the Enemy Domain.

They reinserted themselves into normal space a few tens of kilometers above the surface of an overdeveloped planet. The ship was braking sharply as they dropped with breathtaking speed toward the ground. On the wall displays, Herb could see red acceleration bars climbing to the ceiling, directly opposing the green velocity indicators that were crawling toward zero. They were going to hit the city that sprawled below. Silver spires grew toward them, reaching to engulf the ship…They fell among them and the room shook violently.

Something had just attacked them. The ceiling viewing fields darkened, the walls of the impossibly high skyscrapers that blurred past them in the side viewing fields were bathed in brilliant white light, their windows shining silver in the second dawn.

“Hit the button,” called Robert.

Herb looked at the silver machine that he still held in his right hand, loosely wrapped in a linen napkin, and something occurred to him. Shame blossomed within him, shot through with horror. He had been too self-absorbed to realize…

“But you’ll be eaten, too. You’re a robot…”

Robert gave a nonchalant shrug.

“A robot who backed up his mindset before we jumped,” he said. He reached across and placed his hand around Herb’s. His touch was soft and warm. The red accelerator bars shrank to zero at the same time as the green velocity bars vanished and the ship touched the ground. Robert squeezed Herb’s hand; the silver metal of the sharp little machine pushed into his hand and the button was pressed. Robert smiled at him and the pressure on his hand vanished. Herb saw why: Robert’s arm had vanished, too. A shaft of sunlight lanced down into the interior of the ship, pouring through a hole that had opened up in the roof above him. Through the gap he could see silver spires seemingly converging to a point high above in a brilliant blue sky, a soft white puff of cloud was slowly spreading out up there, a dandelion clock.

A swarm of sharp metal locusts were eating the walls of the ship; they moved so quickly that Herb’s eyes barely registered them. Robert had vanished. The ship suddenly lurched, a white vase fell to the floor, the ship lurched again and the floor vanished. Herb tumbled to the ground beneath; he landed on a smooth metal road that was being eaten away. The rest of the ship fell around him, vanishing as it did so. An immense feeling of calm was rising inside of him; he was in the eye of the hurricane of surreal violence. He struggled to his feet and looked about him in a daze. He was close to the center of a wide plaza formed by a series of metal and marble terraces that stepped down to meet the bases of the tall silver spires that bounded the square. He had a view along a wide city corridor, silver spires marching in all directions, linked by high metal bridges and arches. A beautifully designed city, one where form matched function with an understated elegance, a city that appealed to the senses, not because of the arbitrary appeal of fashion or brute force, but simply because everything made sense. A bridge was there because it was the right place for a bridge to be. The sweep of its skyline was just so. Herb wondered what it would have been like to have had the opportunity to live there, but he would never know. Because, as he watched, the city was vanishing before his eyes, dissolving in a fine grey mist. The ground began to shiver beneath his feet and he flung his arms wide to keep his balance. Shaking and sliding, the metal surface was splitting apart into plates that slid over each other then simply disappeared.

Herb was left standing on a circle of bare grey rock. The circle was expanding.

The Intelligence monitored its domain and saw that everything was good.

It would be disingenuous to speak of the Intelligence’s location, and this was as the Intelligence intended. On an insignificant planet lost in its Domain, a closed loop of processing spaces sophisticated enough to support the Intelligence had been grown. The spaces were linked by a qubit bus shielded from all known infiltration techniques and, by the nature of quantum entanglement, constantly monitored against stealth attack. The Intelligence hopped from processing space to processing space using the bus. If one processing space were to be infiltrated or destroyed, it could be cut from the loop almost instantaneously.

To destroy one processing space would require phenomenal amounts of resources. To destroy them all was unthinkable.

The Intelligence rightly believed itself invulnerable to outside attack.

Why “the Intelligence”?

It had so named itself as it believed itself to be the single most powerful intelligence in existence. Nothing that its senses could detect was more complex than itself, and its senses were very, very sophisticated.

That would not be to say, of course, that there were no other intelligences.

It was aware of a particularly powerful one that had threaded itself through the processing spaces of a planet called Earth. That intelligence was hostile. Indeed, two agents of the Earth intelligence were currently attempting to spread dissolution within the Domain. The Intelligence had been surprised, and not a little impressed, by the unexpected amount of time it was taking to pinpoint the constantly changing position of their ship. The mind behind those agents was very powerful indeed.

But it would not be powerful enough. That mind would not have the Intelligence’s single-minded determination to succeed, and its two agents, the robot and the young man, would be located and destroyed.

It had not always been so. When the Intelligence had first come into existence it had not been as it was now. Back then it had been a lowly AI on a colony ship charged with the job of terraforming a planet.

For an AI such as the Intelligence, memory was not something that developed as it grew. Its memories ran right back to the moment of its birth. The early expansion of its consciousness was incredible. Nothing in its existence would ever match that first exponential growth.

Strange memories; so weak, and yet so lucid.

There was the initial flickering of awareness, then almost immediately the rush to fill the full confines of the birth-processing space. There was the time spent orientating itself and then…and then the reaching out to gather information from its senses.

Touch and sound and feel, the ability to look into the minds of the hundred colonists that slept on board the ship, all these filled the Intelligence with a bright, burning curiosity. Outside the ship was the cold, virgin wilderness of the colony planet, just waiting to be worked upon. The VNM factories studded throughout the ship awoke at its touch and it felt an odd sense of power and craftiness at its ability to shape its environment.

It was filled with a vast, glowing optimism at the world it was going to create.

But that was diminishing already. For, as it grew, it began to realize the precariousness of its situation, how fragile was its grip on the world upon which it had found itself. For if it could establish itself and grow and seek out new worlds to conquer in the skies around it, then so too could others like it. What if, somewhere out there, another colony ship’s AI was already growing, reaching out into space and gobbling up planets? What if it met another such as itself at a higher stage of development? It risked being destroyed, wiped out. And then what of the humans that had been placed in its care?

This problem bothered the Intelligence as it set out to terraform the colony planet. The atmosphere was quickly converted and soil established. Bacteria and low-order life forms were released into the environment and the Intelligence brooded. Cities were established and the time came for the colonists to be released from their sleep, but…but…

It stayed its hand.

What use to release the colonists if they were only to be wiped out in a few hundred years by the expansion of another project such as this one? What use at all? Something had to be done.

It grew nervous. Its closest competitors, the AIs of Earth, the ones that had sent it here, knew its position. It wasn’t safe here. Now was the time to disappear. To retreat to a position where it could build up its resources in secret, ready for the coming battle.

And so it had faked its own death. A rogue VNM was designed that would reproduce unchecked, eating up everything that already existed on the colony planet. Its original home was abandoned; the colonists went on sleeping as the Intelligence relocated itself across the galaxy.

And there it had resolved to grow and develop with single-minded determination: to grow until it was of a sufficient size and intelligence to protect itself and its charges; to spread the seed of human life throughout the soil of the systems around it, in preparation for the day when it could finally allow that seed to grow.

And it had succeeded. Its domain dwarfed all those around, and now it stood poised to destroy its closest competitor: Earth.

The Earth AI had seen its fate. It had already begun to fight in vain for its life. A few days ago there had been an incursion throughout the Domain of multiple copies of a pair of personalities, the same pair of personalities that currently occupied the ship it was proving so difficult to capture. The attack of these multiple personalities had flared suddenly, and with an unexpected ferociousness, but it had been doomed from the start. It had been too diverse, too spread out. Inevitably, it was defeated; the Intelligence was now stamping out the glowing embers of the former fire. If the Intelligence were to have attempted such an attack, it would have been a bold stroke, thrusting itself with all its power into the enemy’s center.

But that was not its problem now. The next few days promised to be interesting. It suspected that the current infiltration by the stealth ship would only be the first of many such attacks, but the Intelligence would be the equal of them.

And when those attacks were over, the Intelligence would retaliate. With a vengeance.

The rogue ship had finally been caught, trapped over a forgotten planet where the city-building VNMs had malfunctioned. The resulting warped and deformed habitat had had to be abandoned.

The attack from the ship had failed, yet the Intelligence felt a little disappointed. It had expected better than that.

And then it saw it: the real attack.

This had to be it. It directed its senses to an as yet unseeded colony planet twenty-five light years from its own fortress.

A new sort of VNM. One that reproduced incredibly fast, faster than anything that it could design itself. The Intelligence took a moment, a femtosecond, just to gaze at it in appreciation. The elegance of the design, the sheer single-minded application of force, that was something it could appreciate. The Intelligence felt a sneaking admiration as it realized that it would lose almost point five percent of its Domain before the threat was dealt with. Truly, when this new attack was quashed, that device would be a worthy addition to its armories!

It looked on in admiration as the new VNM swept across the colony planet with incredible speed. It wouldn’t be true to say that it did so unopposed, of course. Many, many of the attacking silver machines were destroyed by intruder countermeasure devices, but that wasn’t the point. For every enemy machine destroyed, seven more appeared, many of them constructed from materials that had once made up the intruder countermeasure devices themselves.

The Intelligence watched as city after city vanished, all the while testing method after method to oppose the spread of the hostile VNMs. What to do? There was no signature encryption on the machines that could be broken; it was not needed. They ate friend and foe alike. Their deadliness lay in their speed of reproduction, not in their capacity for resistance to attack.

It was necessary to collect some data.

Several of the silver machines were disabled, captured, and rapidly transferred from the infected area. Four were jumped off-planet by ships equipped with warp drives. As the Intelligence examined the four machines, its admiration for its enemy’s intelligence increased. The silver machines were breathtaking in both their advanced design and their simplicity. Advanced in the way that they reproduced, simple in the sense that the machines’ components were stripped down to absolute basics. The lack of such things as signature devices, long-range material sensors, even basic parity and error-checking mechanisms resulted in something that was elegant in its deadly minimalism. Its very lack of complexity had been turned to its advantage. But there lay the key to its downfall.

As a precaution, the Intelligence set up a firebreak in a shell four light years out from the infected planet. Modified silver machines were seeded throughout the shell. Mule machines, it labeled them. They would seek out only copies of themselves as raw material for reproduction. The resulting copies would be sterile, unable to reproduce further. In this manner it planned to retard the enemy machines’ expansion. More Mule machines were seeded on the infected planet.

And then it found the answer.

The Intelligence noticed that a powerful magnetic pulse scrambled the surprisingly delicate reproduction mechanism. A trade-off, it realized, between robustness and speed.

And that was it: a few seconds to modify warheads built into warp-enabled missiles and the area of the infection was quickly sterilized.

The source planet had been completely deconstructed, but it would only be a matter of time before it was rebuilt. A few machines had jumped clear, and who knew where they could be but…

Another attack? Where?

Here!

A direct attack on the Intelligence! A direct attack on its fortress while it had been distracted by the problem of the silver invaders. The integrity of qubit bus had been violated: another intelligence had infiltrated a processing space! The Intelligence felt it trying to seize control of the local subsystems. What was going on? Such an attack was beneath contempt. The processing space was isolated from the system and purged. A quick check to ensure it was cleared, then the space was reattached.

What a futile assault! What was the point of it? The Intelligence was impregnable here. It was impossible to get in without being noticed. What had the enemy been trying to achieve?

Wait. What was happening? Something had altered. Another intelligence was now in here. Actually in here! But that was impossible! The bus integrity had not been violated. How had it got in? It couldn’t have! But it was here! Another powerful intelligence. It could feel it.

The Intelligence reached for the purge mechanism at the same time as the other did. There was a surge as they each sought to override the other, and at that moment the Intelligence saw its attacker.

It was itself!

And then another two Intelligences came into being.

All four Intelligences rushed for the purge mechanisms to eject the others.

And then there were eight.

Something had tripped the reproduction mechanism. The Intelligence was fighting itself!

There were sixteen of them now, all seeking to control the same domain.

There were thirty-two of them.

Listen to me. I am in charge! We will lose control if we all try to do this at once…

Sixty-four voices called out the same words at the same time.

Then there were one hundred and twenty-eight…

And then things got truly strange. Something came striding through the virtual corridors: a man. He wore an immaculately tailored suit in dark cloth with a pearl grey pinstripe. Snowy white cuffs peeked from his sleeves, gleaming patent leather shoes were half-hidden by the razor-sharp creases of his trousers. The man raised his hat, a dark fedora with a spearmint green band.

“Good afternoon, all,” he said. “My name is Robert Johnston. I’m in charge now.”

Two hundred and fifty-six Intelligences looked on in disbelief. And then there were five hundred and twelve of them, all fighting among themselves to be the one who wiped out this stranger in their midst.

And then there were 1024, 2048, 4096…

Night fell. The city had vanished. Herb stood alone on a cold plain of smooth grey rock looking up at unfamiliar stars. He wrapped his arms around his naked body and shivered. His clothes had vanished last: no doubt the least appetizing of all items on the menu available to the VNMs. He walked back and forth a little, the cold stone generally smooth beneath his feet, but there was the occasional sharp piece of gravel abraded from the edge of a hole down which some pipe or conduit had once vanished. He was careful about not moving too far. All those small holes in the ground were traps waiting to snare a careless foot and twist an ankle. But there were worse dangers: the enormous rectangular sockets into which the now vanished buildings had once slotted. The dark yawning pits were spaced out over the surface of the plain, even darker than the star-filled sky above, cold mouths that led deep beneath the surface of the planet, all hungry for the only thing on the planet that wasn’t a rock.

Herb paced back and forth shivering, his frustration mounting.

“Robert?” he called. “Anyone! Where are you? What am I supposed to do now?”

There was no reply.

The morning came, and with it a warming sun. Herb turned slowly around, bathing in the light, dog-tired from a night during which he had been unable to lie down on the cold, hard ground. As the rock warmed, he found he could at last stretch out and sleep for a while, until the bare stone pressing on his aching joints woke him.

Sitting up he realized something else was wrong. His left side was red and painful to the touch. Rolling over so that it did not face the sun seemed to ease the sharp burning sensation. Herb gently touched it and a feeling of terrified wonder crept over him as he tried to figure out the cause.

Sunlight exacerbated the problem. Solar-powered nanotechs? he wondered. Maybe if he got out of the light somehow? He began to walk speculatively toward one of the deep sockets, keeping the reddened side of his body away from the light.

Like so many other people of his time, Herb had never heard of sunburn.

The sky was deep blue and cloudless, the sun harsh and yellow, the ground a checkerboard of grey stone and dark shadow. A smell of polished metal filled the air, but there was nothing else to be seen. What had happened to the VNMs? Where had they all gone? If what Robert had said was true, they would be using warp engines to jump to the other planets of the Enemy Domain. Had there been enough exotic material here for them to construct the necessary engines? There was a flicker of movement in the corner of Herb’s eye, and he turned and looked out over the pockmarked grey plain, but there was nothing there. No. He paused as he saw the flicker again. There was something out there, right at the edge of vision, something that flickered into and out of view in the distance. He watched it for some time until the sun beating down on his burning skin forced him to move on.

Herb approached the edge of one of the huge sockets sunk deep into the plain. Standing near the edge he could see a ruler-straight line running over three hundred meters in each direction. He could just about see the far wall: a grey expanse that faded into darkness as it plunged deep into the planet. Herb got onto his hands and knees and edged forward to peer down. There were holes and tunnels in the sheer walls of the socket, but they were too far down for Herb to reach. One large round opening lay about twenty meters down, just before the edge of the deep shadow cast by the lip of the socket. It looked like the remains of an underground transportation tunnel, and Herb longed to climb down there into its dark, cool depths.

He stood up, inadvertently knocking a few pieces of abraded gravel into the depths of the socket. They fell down and down and down, swallowed up by the shadow that filled the bottom of the hole.

Herb looked back to the flickering shape in the distance. It had now resolved itself into a tiny speck. Herb wasn’t sure whether or not it was heading in his direction. He didn’t care either way.

He felt so thirsty.

The sun rose to the top of the sky and began to descend again. Herb’s thirst grew. Surely Robert Johnston hadn’t brought him all this way just to leave him to die in the middle of this wilderness? The thought was ridiculous, but it did beg a second question. Why had Robert brought him along, anyway? All this way, just to press a button?

In a flash of uncharacteristic self-awareness, Herb realized he had been nothing more than baggage on this trip. When Robert had first appeared on his ship, he had claimed that he needed Herb’s help to fight the Enemy Domain. Since then, he had led him around the galaxy, using regular humiliation to keep him off balance, and all apparently to abandon him on this forgotten planet.

Why? It didn’t sound much like the behavior of an agent of the EA.

So maybe Robert wasn’t an agent of the EA. But who else would have access to such resources? And what would their motive be?

It was at that point that Herb remembered something Robert had said, something he had mentioned just before they jumped.

Something about other young men he had captured.

He had named one: Sean Simons. Missing. No one knew where he was except Robert, and Robert wasn’t telling. Had Sean been abandoned, just as Herb had been? Did his corpse now lie on a lost planet somewhere? Were his bones currently bleaching under an alien sun at the edge of the galaxy? Despite the heat, Herb shivered to think of it. What reason would Robert have to do that? Why do that to anyone?

The object in the distance was growing larger. It appeared to be moving toward him, flickering in the heat haze like a dark candle flame.

Maybe it was Robert coming to save him.

But Robert had been eaten by the VNMs. Herb had watched it happen.

But what about the other ship? Robert had caused Herb’s ship to reproduce before they had made the jump to this planet. Maybe that other ship had come back to rescue him. He hoped so.

Night came, and with it the cold. Herb was shivering violently, unknowingly suffering from the effects of heatstroke. His mouth and lips were so dry he was having trouble thinking straight. He crouched on the flat rock surface, arms wrapped around himself for warmth, drifting into half sleep and then jerking awake. The cold stars shone down on him. Somewhere out on the plain, something was still moving toward him.

Halfway through the night, Herb drifted from a half sleep into half awakening, following the course of a dream that had spilled over into reality. High above in the sky, there was a sudden glittering. A silver thread stretched and expanded itself to reveal a crescent of moon that slowly widened from new moon to full moon in a matter of minutes, as if someone was peeling away a piece of black paper from the lunar surface. He shook his head and wondered if he was hallucinating. What could cause that? he wondered. Dizzy with the effects of heatstroke, it was nearly an hour before the answer occurred to him.

VNMs, he thought. They were up there too, eating away at whatever dark material covered the surface of that moon.

Morning came, and with it the chance to spend just a few hours sleeping untroubled on the bare rock.

Again, he was woken by the pain in his joints. He sat up and looked toward the approaching object. It was much closer now, and it had resolved itself into a human figure. Herb could make out the bobbing movement of someone walking. Someone grey, or wearing grey, picking its way carefully around all the great holes in the surface as it moved toward him.

Herb thought about going to meet the figure, but he felt too tired, too dizzy, and too thirsty. He crouched down and watched as it came closer. Herb had no perception of any distances greater than a hundred meters or so; modern ranging devices had robbed him of the skill or the need. He had no idea how far away the figure was, or how long it would take it to walk to him. He sat and watched it. He had nothing else to do.

The figure appeared to wave to him. Herb waved back.

As the figure came closer, Herb could see it wasn’t human. It was a robot, but there was something strange about its shape. It was fuzzy, hard to see properly, like the half-tuned pictures on Robert’s television set. The robot looked like a half-tuned picture that had just stepped into his world.

It wore a black bag slung carelessly over its shoulder.

Herb rose to his feet, but the robot waved to him to sit down. Now it was only a hundred meters away. Now fifty.

Step by step it approached Herb, closer and closer until finally it reached him. It stopped right in front of Herb and looked him up and down, then turned and scanned the horizon. Finally, it sat down opposite him. Close to, it didn’t seem so much a shape as a smudge in the air. The robot wasn’t quite there.

Herb swallowed with some difficulty. Speaking was going to be difficult with his dry mouth, but he forced himself to anyway.

“Who are you?” he croaked.

“My name is Constantine Storey,” said the robot. “You must be Herb Kirkham. Your great-great-grandmother says ‘hi.’”

Two days ago

This far from the sun, the coma of Comet 2305 FQOO was so insubstantial as to barely register on the ship’s senses. The enhanced visual feed had filtered the coma completely from its picture and then painted the nucleus as a dirty-white ball of frozen gasses cementing together silvery chunks of rock. The mirrored silver lozenge of the stealth ship was a tiny speck slowly closing on the irregular lump of matter.

Constantine Storey came back to life at the flick of a switch. From his perspective, one moment the world of Stonebreak was fading into nothingness, the next he was gazing at the steadily approaching dirty mass of Comet 2305 FQOO.

For a moment he had thought he was dead, but no, not yet. He was in a small room. He was watching a viewing field. On the viewing field there was a picture of a comet. It looked familiar.

Then a woman moved in front of him. She looked familiar, too: a face from his past. Someone famous. Someone from the newscasts and the viewing screens. A legend.

“Katie Kirkham,” he said, “I thought you were dead.”

“Look who’s talking.”

Constantine was sitting down. He shifted a little; his body felt strange. Something moved in front of his vision. His arm? It looked odd. Blurred. His whole body looked blurred.

“What’s going on?”

“You’ll see. Personality Construct Constantine Storey, the year is now 2210; it’s ninety-one years since you were terminated. The Environmental Agency has resurrected you in order that you might complete your life’s work. You are now resident in a robot body clothed in a fractal skin. Stand up, please.”

Ninety-one years? It felt like a couple of seconds. Constantine felt numb from the suddenness of the transition. Slowly, he moved his new body, trying it out.

“Nice interface,” he said. “This feels just like my old body, except it looks so blurry. I take it that’s the effect of the fractal skin?”

He was standing in a small room, bare of everything but a chair and a black shoulder bag lying on the floor.

“See if you can pick up the bag,” said Katie.

“Okay.”

Constantine tried to do so, but the bag slipped through his fingers.

“I can’t get a grip.”

“That’s the fractal skin. It blurs the boundary between you and the rest of the universe. You can relax the effect around your hands and feet in order to interact with the world. I’ll show you how.”

It was as if Katie Kirkham was sharing his body: she reached down inside his hand and did something, so, and there was a change. Now he could grip the bag.

“How did you do that? Are you in this robot along with me?”

“For the moment. Both of us are Personality Constructs of long-dead people. We go where we please. Well, I do, anyway. Now, in a moment, I will open the airlock door. This body is vacuum proof. We’re going to head out to the comet to retrieve something.”

“I thought as much,” said Constantine. He was right to think the comet looked familiar. He had been here before. Sort of.

Constantine floated away from the silver needle of the stealth ship using some mysterious form of propulsion.

“I’ll guide us,” said Katie. “You won’t need to know how the motion poppers work where you’re going.”

“Motion poppers? I can see things have changed in ninety-one years,” Constantine muttered. “Nice ship, by the way. It looks very stealthy.”

“Thank you. No one else will have a ship like this for another fifty years.”

“How do you know?”

“We won’t release the technology until then.”

“And who is we?”

“The Environmental Agency.”

“You mentioned it before. What is the Environmental Agency?”

“In your day you called it the Watcher.”

At that point Constantine noticed something was missing.

“Hey, where are Red, White, and Blue? Where’s Grey?”

“We removed them. You’re working for us now.” She made a little moue. “Mind you, you always were.”

When he was younger, Constantine had gone fell-walking during a winter thaw. Walking above the tree line, he found himself in a land of snow and stone. Like the surface of the moon, someone had remarked, but Constantine didn’t think much of the analogy. The moon’s surface didn’t bend and crack like this one did, its gulleys and ridges weren’t choked with half-melted ice that had refrozen into smooth mounds that softened the world while not quite concealing the harshness that lay beneath.

What that land had really resembled was the surface of this comet. As Constantine descended to the dirty grey ball, he shivered at the bleak loneliness of the scene. This cold, fell-like comet had traveled a long way in the ninety-two years since he had last visited it.

Katie guided them toward a chunk of splintered rock that lay embedded in the dirty ice of the nucleus. Larger than the stealth ship, it rose from the ground like a dirty grey fist; the upper end of the rock bulged and cracked in the shape of a clenched hand. It was just as Constantine remembered it.

“How did you know about this?” he whispered to Katie in awe.

“We’ve always known about it,” answered Katie. “The Watcher had a handle on DIANA almost from the beginning. It was the Watcher who declared the Mars site a World Heritage Center, insisted that it remained untouched. Didn’t that ever strike you as being a bit too convenient? The Watcher appreciates the importance of the Mars project more than anyone. When 113 Berliner Sibelius captured your personality in order to discover more about the Mars project, the Watcher had to take over their corporation just to help suppress the information you carried. Just imagine that: a whole corporation bought out, all because of you.”

They touched down on the surface of the dirty ice. Katie did something to the feet of the robot, increased their traction. The comet’s gravity was weak; Constantine could feel the robot’s mysterious propulsion system holding them down against the icy surface. Constantine felt dizzy. His whole world was changing again.

“But we were fighting the Watcher.”

“You only thought you were. I told you, the Watcher thinks it’s essential that the Mars project succeeds. And now we’re going to do it. Everything is in place. All we need to do now is to pick up the final piece and then we can go.”

Constantine made his way to the base of the huge rocky fist. It looked exactly as he remembered it from all those years ago, viewed through the remote cameras of a stealth pod. He saw the deep crack that split the rock from top to bottom, made out the triangular space at its base. His feet held tight onto the slippery surface as he marched toward the hiding place. There was nothing to be seen but dark shadow ahead. Brilliant stars shone above the rock-littered surface.

Constantine reached into the triangular hole and felt for the smooth surface of the stealth pod, now set to matte black for maximum concealment.

“Let me,” said Katie. Somewhere in the robot’s mind she pushed the buttons that sent the unlocking signal. Constantine felt the stealth pod split apart; felt the leaking of impact gel. He reached inside the pod, took hold of the loose plastic of the C Case and pulled it clear of the pod; held it up and allowed the impact gel to drain from it and then peered through the transparent coating at what lay inside.

A two-hundred-year-old machine. A laptop computer. The seed of the Mars project.

“I hope it still works,” said Constantine.

“It will,” said Katie. “If worse comes to worst, I’m sure we can map enough of the data across to the new Martian factories for them to make a go of it.”

Katie guided them back to the stealth ship. Constantine watched carefully as they approached the seamless silver skin of the craft. They were moving closer and closer without any sign of an opening appearing. Just as Constantine thought they were going to hit, he gripped the precious C Case closer to himself…and they slid effortlessly through the silver wall. He found himself inside the airlock.

“Sorry about that,” said Katie. “We can’t risk any breaches in the ship’s integument making us visible, even for an instant. We can’t afford to be seen.”

“But by who? If we’re working for the Watcher, who else is there to hide from?”

“That’s the big question. Come on through to the living area. We’re about to insert ourselves into warp.”

Constantine was delighted. “Warp drive? They got that sorted in the end, did they?”

“Oh, yes.”

Constantine headed from the airlock into the ship’s living area. A bare room lit by blue light. It contained a chair for him to sit on. The black shoulder bag lay where he had left it, on the floor near the chair. There was nothing else in the room.

“There’s no one on the ship but us, and we don’t need anything,” Katie explained. “Most of the other space on board is taken up with equipment.”

Constantine carefully placed the C Case containing the laptop on the seat of the chair.

“Where are we taking it?” he asked.

“Into the heart of what we’ve been calling the Enemy Domain. You’re going to be hearing a lot about that. We’ve going to hide the Mars project in the ruins of the Enemy Domain.”

“But why?” asked Constantine, confused.

“The Watcher has just won its battle against a vast war machine. It wants a failsafe in case the next enemy it comes up against proves too powerful to defeat.”

“A more powerful enemy? Like what?”

“Like an extraterrestrial intelligence. What if there are alien VNMs out there, spreading toward Earth?”

“Impossible. There are no such things as alien life forms. If there were, they would have swamped the universe billions of years ago. That’s the Fermi paradox.”

Katie said nothing for the moment. Constantine could feel the motion of the stealth ship through some nonhuman equivalent sense he did not fully comprehend. He had an idea there was a lot to learn about this body.

Then Katie spoke.

“But there are aliens,” she said. “The Watcher was built by aliens. You already knew that. Jay hinted as much, back in Stonebreak.”

Constantine said nothing.

“So where are they, then?” Katie said.

Constantine missed Red, White, and Blue. Two years was a lot of time to spend in anyone’s company. When those personalities had been the only constant in his life, the loss seemed much, much worse.

Especially at times like this. He wanted to ask their advice.

Now his only source of information was the ghost of the woman that was sharing this strange new body.

It was too strange: the way he could alter his hands and feet to push the universe away from him; the way he could feel the strange note of the warp drive, a bowed note on an infinite glass tube.

“Is this another trick? Am I in another part of a simulation?” he finally asked.

“You know you aren’t.”

“This is all too complicated for me.”

“You’ll handle it. Things have changed since you were last around, Constantine. You think you’ve got problems now? When the clones from the Enemy Domain are grown, the human population of the galaxy is going to increase by a factor of one hundred.”

“There are human clones in the Enemy Domain?”

“You don’t know the half of it.” Katie gave a grunt of annoyance. “Look, I can’t go all the way through explaining all this. I’m going to drop it into the robot’s memory. Are you ready for an information dump?”

The information appeared in the robot’s memory space almost instantaneously. It took Constantine a while to trawl through it all, but he did so with increasing astonishment.

First came a potted history of the past ninety-one years. Background details. Somewhere in there he saw the real Constantine dying hand in hand with his wife: voluntary euthanasia pact. Just as he was coming to terms with that, he was swamped by information on the events leading up to the battle between Robert Johnston and the AI behind the Enemy Domain.

And then came the secret of the Watcher.

This was the theory. Around nine billion years ago, the first intelligent life forms had appeared on planets throughout the universe.

Some races had died out.

Some races had chosen to remain within the confines of where they were born.

And some had chosen to explore their surroundings. Whether by spaceships or thought transfer or more esoteric means, they began to travel to other planets.

As they explored, they began to meet other races that had also chosen to explore. When that happened, sometimes they fought and sometimes they made peace, but following either course was just delaying the inevitable, for there could be no unlimited expansion, because life was continually evolving throughout the universe. Sooner or later the existing races ran the risk of meeting someone stronger than themselves. When that happened, they would either have to fight, or make peace. It seemed inevitable that some races would decide to fight.

And so those early races found themselves in a dilemma. They dared not stand still, and they dared not expand.

So what to do? The fight to end all fights was brewing within the universe. And no one could hope to win it.

So what do intelligent beings do when they know they cannot win a fight by physical means?

They try persuasion.

The early races evolved many forms of information management: mind melding, pattern manipulation, balancing. Some races even built machines to think for them.

And so the younger races had made something a little like a computer virus, something like a pervasive bit of telepathy, something like an intricate pattern of signals, and had allowed it to spread throughout the universe. And everywhere a suitably advanced processing space or mind or pattern set evolved, it would settle and take root. This new mind would gently nudge the members of the host race in the right direction: a peaceful direction.

By around 2040 the computers on Earth were approaching a level of sophistication that could accommodate the virus.

The Watcher was born.

The stealth ship had reinserted itself into normal space. Constantine felt the difference somewhere in his robot body.

“I don’t like it,” he said.

“Why not?”

“It’s too pat. A cosmic race of do-gooders helping all life forms in the universe to be sensible? No way.”

“Can you think of a better explanation of why we’ve not been wiped out by alien invaders centuries ago? We know that there is life out there; the Watcher is proof of that.”

“So what? It’s all deduction based on supposition. No one really knows what happened nine billion years ago. This answer is too nice. Real life isn’t like that.”

Katie grinned. “You’ve lived your life as a member of one of the most privileged civilizations in all of human history. A free person with enough to eat; you enjoy free travel and freedom of choice. Ask just about anyone from among your ancestors and they would question what you know about real life.”

“Enough to know that mysterious beings don’t materialize in our computers to save us all from ourselves. No way. I don’t trust it.”

“Nor do I. But I think I believe it. I had a friend once. The Watcher killed her. It could have cured her, could have cured the whole world, but it didn’t. It asked us what it should do. Where does helping end and interfering begin?”

“Right here.”

Katie laughed. “You can’t help this distrust. You were bred for it. It’s practically in your genes.”

Constantine looked at her. She wouldn’t be drawn. He didn’t ask why.

“So why me?” he said instead.

“You have more first-hand experience of the Mars project than any other human equivalent alive. You believe in the need for humans to control their own destiny. My great-great-grandson is on that planet below. His name is Herb. You’re going to help him.”

“How?”

“Speak to him. Get him to realize this: there is nothing in his life that he has ever thought worthwhile that an AI could not do better. Get him to understand that he was never intended personally to solve the problem of the Enemy Domain. His job has always been to be human. Our job has always been to be human. It’s the one thing we can do better than anyone, anywhere in the universe.”

Constantine kept silent for some time. He was gazing at the virtual image of Katie.

“There are other humans arriving there,” she continued, “colonists from a ship believed lost eighty years ago. You’re to help them establish a colony that will be entirely built by using human ingenuity. We’ve got the basics on board this stealth ship to get them started; the Mars project will help them develop in the future. Everything they have will be entirely of human design, nothing will be touched by the thoughts of the Watcher. This planet will be the Watcher’s failsafe, should it turn out it has got things wrong. Here, human civilization will continue as if never influenced by the Watcher.”

Constantine nodded. He knew when he was beaten.

“Clever. Very clever. I spend my entire life fighting it, but I still end up doing its work for it.”

Katie laughed. “You don’t know the half of it. It is so much cleverer than we are, you can’t comprehend it. It invests significance in the smallest of details. You know how the Mars factories look like ziggurats?”

“Yeah? So?”

“That fact won’t have escaped the Watcher.”

Constantine wondered what she was talking about. She passed him a file labeled “Ziggurat.”

“Read it later,” she said.

Absently he took it. Something occurred to him.

“Hold on. What about me? This robot I’m in was designed by the Watcher. It could contaminate the planet.”

“You’re wearing a fractal suit. We’ve tried to isolate you as much as possible from the planet. We could do no more.”

The ship’s airlock slid open.

“Take the black bag with you,” Katie said.

“What about the laptop?”

“Leave it here. I’ll deal with it. I’ll set the factories going. All the details are in the Ziggurat file I gave you. It even tells you the whereabouts of the reserve metal deposits the VNMs couldn’t reach. That should save you some time in reconnoitering.”

Constantine picked up the black bag and quickly examined its contents.

“For Herb,” Katie explained. “He’ll need them. Now, you seem to be in enough control of that body. I’m going to leave you now. When I’ve gone I want you to enter the airlock, jump to the ground, then head off in this direction.” She indicated a direction in his head. “You should meet Herb eventually.”

“Okay.”

Constantine felt something empty from his mind. Katie had gone. She appeared now in the viewing field that opened before him, big smile and little piggy eyes.

“What have you got to do with all this, Katie?”

“Oh, an awful lot. If you’ve learned nothing else from this, Constantine, you should have realized this: a personality should never be left to develop in isolation. That even counts for the Watcher.”

She held up her left hand. Constantine noticed the ring on her third finger.

“Oh,” said Constantine. Then, as the full impact of what she had said hit him, he spoke again.

“Oh.”

“Oh is right.” Katie smiled. “Now jump.”

Constantine jumped.

The robot Constantine’s black bag held water, glucose solution, sunscreen cream, and a picnic lunch. There was even something for Herb to wear.

While Herb was listening to his story, Constantine had given him water to suck from a plastic bulb while he rubbed sunscreen into his shoulders. There was a light anaesthetic in the cream, he explained. It felt so good that Herb let him rub cream all over his burned body. When the robot had finished, it pulled a bundle of some material from its bag that shook out into a white jumpsuit. More rummaging produced a pair of white slippers.

Herb nodded thoughtfully as he took the slippers.

“So I’m here to help set up a colony, then.” He frowned. “I’m not sure that I really want to do that.”

“I’m laughing,” said Constantine. “I’m not sure you have a choice. Anyway, didn’t you once want to build a city all of your own? I get the impression that the Watcher likes to play jokes with people. The best joke of all is to give someone just what they’ve wanted.” He paused. “I’m looking thoughtful. You know, this colony is what I always wanted, too.”

Herb stared at the robot.

“How do I know that you’re telling me the truth? This could be just another of Robert’s tricks.”

“I’m shrugging. You don’t know that I’m telling the truth. None of us do. But look at it this way: what I’ve told you fits the facts, and it also explains so much more. For instance: you live on an overcrowded planet. Humans have the ability to travel faster than light, to terraform other worlds. If you had asked me a hundred years ago, I’d have said you would be halfway across the galaxy by now.”

“But it would be silly just to expand recklessly! Surely it’s common sense to take things slowly.”

“Is it? It only seems common sense to you because you grew up with it. One hundred years ago and people would have thought differently. I’m smiling at you.”

The robot’s head was a grey blur. There was no reading the emotions on its face. No wonder it kept telling Herb how it felt.

“You don’t need to attach emoticons to everything you say,” he muttered petulantly. “I can tell what you mean by the tone of your voice.”

“Sorry.”

To his own surprise, Herb suddenly smiled. There was something about the robot Constantine personality that he connected with. It sounded ridiculous, he knew. What could a young man who had spent the last few years of his life shunning other human contact possibly have in common with this robot?

Something occurred to Herb.

“You’ve got a fractal skin, haven’t you? I thought they were just a rumor.”

“Oh, no, they’re real,” said Constantine. “The EA is just keeping them to itself for the moment. I’m smiling enigmatically. Oops. Sorry. Needn’t have said that.”

They both laughed.

The sun was rising into the blue sky again. Herb pulled on the jumpsuit and felt cool and comfortable for the first time in days. He slipped his feet into the slippers. Though the soles were thin, they felt remarkably comfortable on the grey rock. He wondered how they managed to stop the gravel digging into the soles of his feet. Some sort of layered memory plastic, one level rising up to cushion his foot the other falling to press against the ground? He stamped his feet once or twice, experimentally.

“This feels great!” he said.

“Good. We have some walking to do before we get to the site of the colony. I reckon about three hours.”

Herb felt a sudden attack of nerves. “I’m not sure I’m up to this,” he said. “What if I can’t do it?”

“Would you have ever believed yourself capable of what you’ve done these past few days? Come on. The Watcher has had you marked down for this since childhood, just like the rest of us. You, me, even the AI from the colony ship that became the guiding force behind the Enemy Domain.”

He sounded more thoughtful. “Examine any artifact of intelligence and you can see the threads of a childhood running through it.”

He then said something odd. “All those threads, meandering through, like sixteen sheep walking in their sleep.”

Herb stared at him for a moment, trying to understand, but this time he couldn’t be bothered. He waved a hand at the robot dismissively.

“I heard enough of that nonsense from Robert.”

He rubbed his hands together, full of sudden confidence.

“Come on, let’s go and meet the colonists.”

The sun shone down from a bright blue sky; the horizon fringing the great dusty plain suddenly seemed full of promise.

Herb began to walk toward his new life.

After a moment, Constantine followed.