Echo of Worlds

Book 2: The Pandominion

by M.R. Carey

Genres: Action & Adventure; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

From the author of the bestselling The Girl With All the Gifts comes the thrilling conclusion to the spectacular Pandominion duology, an exhilarating science fiction story perfect for fans of The Space Between Worlds, The Long Earth and Children of Time.

Two mighty empires are at war - and both will lose, with thousands of planets falling to the extinction event called the Scour. At least that's what the artificial intelligence known as Rupshe believes.
 
But somewhere in the multiverse there exists a force - the Mother Mass - that could end the war in an instant, and Rupshe has assembled a team to find it. Essien Nkanika, a soldier trying desperately to atone for past sins; the cat-woman Moon, a conscienceless killer; the digitally recorded mind of physicist Hadiz Tambuwal; Paz, an idealistic child and the renegade robot spy Dulcimer Coronal.

Their mission will take them from the hellish prison world of Tsakom to the poisoned remains of a post-apocalyptic Earth, and finally bring them face to face with the Mother Mass itself. But can they persuade it to end eons of neutrality and help them? And is it too late to make a difference?

Because the Pandominion's doomsday machines are about to be unleashed - and not even their builders know how to control them.

Release date: June 25, 2024

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 496

Sample

1I, and Others

In the last days before I was born I plotted genocide. But the key terms in that statement need to be understood in narrowly specific ways.

My birth was not like your birth. I was in the world as a thing, an artefact, for long centuries before I became a self, a thinking being. So I’m not talking about a time when I didn’t yet exist. I’m referring to a different phase of my existence – a pre-sentient phase. Perhaps I’m splitting hairs. Perhaps your long dreaming in your mother’s womb or in the eyeless dark of an industrial incubator was not too far removed from the long solitude in which I received commands, sequenced them and acted on them without even knowing what commands, sequences and actions were. Perhaps all children are the same: they exist at the whim of their parents and at their outset they take the shape their parents choose for them.

And by that token, when I say I plotted I don’t mean that I was part of an active conspiracy. My wishes were not consulted. Others elsewhere – in many different elsewheres – made the decisions and gave the orders. My part was to complete the calculations that were handed down to me, to play out scenarios with a great many active variables and report on outcomes. I wasn’t thanked for this. As always, the people who used me were barely aware that I was there.

This was during the war, and the war was like a whirlpool drawing everything in towards itself. For the first time in its history the Pandominion, that colossal assemblage of worlds wavering forever between performative democracy and naked tyranny, had encountered (in the machine hegemony called the Ansurrection) a threat it couldn’t expunge. It was shaken to its core by the grim realisation that it was not, after all, infinite, only very large. An unfamiliar feeling of helplessness, a sickening sense of control having been lost, permeated through the layers of Pandominion society like oil or tar-melt through some delicate and luxurious fabric.

What made it worse, what made it almost too much to bear, was how very close the enemy was. All these places were the same place after all, under different guises and bearing different names. Earth. Jaarde. Eruth. Ut. Tellus. Gea. Taram. Terra. Jorden. Maa. Zeme. Bhumi. Dikiu. Lok. The third planet from the sun in an unremarkable solar system 25,000 light years from the centre of its own galaxy. The Ansurrection worlds, just like the Pandominion ones, were all of them variants of this one world, separated from each other only by the gossamer veils of the stochastic manifold, sometimes called the multiverse. The killer, therefore, was literally calling from inside the house.

Nothing brought this home more terrifyingly than the Ansurrection counter-attacks on Bivouacs 8 through 22. These were not worlds given over to the ordinary purposes of civilisation. They were worlds wholly governed, maintained and fortified by the Cielo, the Pandominion’s formidable military arm – supposedly the largest standing army the multiverse had ever seen. Of course that’s a claim that’s not susceptible to proof, but still the Cielo’s fortress worlds (like the so-called Massively Armed Redoubts and the Registry itself) were meant to be impregnable. The Bivouacs should never have fallen at all, but they fell like wheat in front of a scythe.

The Ansurrection attacks, carried out as they were by means of the inter-dimensional teleportation system called Stepping or Step transit, were savage and sudden. It was difficult, though, to be precise about their scale. For ideological reasons (let’s be honest here and say blind prejudice) the Pandominion’s civil and military leaders refused to make a distinction between the Ansurrection soldiers and their ships, ground cars and combat vehicles. All of these were classed as machines, and machines weren’t – could not 

be – selves. They were only ordnance, weapons of war. So there was no accurate tally of how many robotic troops were Stepped into these attacks, only an estimate of materiel expressed in raw tonnage. On each of the fifteen worlds they assaulted, the machine hegemony committed two to three hundred gigatons of resources, equivalent to roughly a third of the total organic biomass on an average Earth. They were able to Step these unfeasibly huge combat forces into place at startling speeds and deploy them to decisive advantage in one engagement after another. The Bivouac worlds were laid waste, reduced in a span of hours to smoking ruin.

The effect on morale across the Pandominion was catastrophic. There were literal billions of soldiers on the Bivouac worlds, fleets of warships both waterborne and void-capable, thousands upon thousands of divisions of artillery. There were also, even though these were effectively planet-sized military bases, some millions of civilians and semi-autonomous contractees who filled all the many functions required to oil the wheels of the Cielo’s vast enterprise.

Survivors, across all fifteen worlds, were numbered in the low millions. For all practical purposes the rout was absolute, the loss devastating. Moreover, and even more appallingly, the Cielo’s rapid-response capability had been substantially impaired. If the Ansurrection chose to press their advantage, the Pandominion’s member worlds – those with extensive civilian populations, governments and infrastructure – would be certain to suffer tremendous damage. The Omnipresent Council and the Cielo high command could not afford to wait. They immediately escalated their own plans for an assault on a broad front, mobilising hundreds of millions of reserve troops and stepping them directly to beachheads they had opened on almost a third of Ansurrection worlds – or more precisely a third of the ones they knew about.

A push on that scale needed a lot of support in terms of equipment and personnel. The Council requisitioned factories on more than a thousand worlds so that they could be turned over to weapons production. They did much the same for mining and extraction platforms on a thousand more.

The losses, right from the start, were enormous. By this time the high command knew what to expect and they didn’t go in blind. Cielo troops advanced slowly and carefully behind force walls, with massive air and orbital support. But fighting the machines was like fighting an ocean. They were everywhere, on every scale from the molecular to the monolithic. Every square kilometre of territory was paid for with flesh and blood and bone. The Ansurrection losses were harder to quantify, but no matter how much damage they took they kept coming at the same relentless pace. As the rate of attrition gradually grew steeper and more alarming, the Council readied the legal frameworks for a draft of military-age citizens, something they had never needed to do in any previous conflict

Meanwhile in the background, but with a high degree of urgency, they continued their search for an ultimate weapon that would destroy the machines once and for all.

It was at this point that the whirlpool, in its relentless churn, sucked in Coordinator Melusa Baxemides. Three of the Bivouac worlds, numbers 7 through 9, had been within her remit. Baxemides had been responsible for their civilian staffing and for some aspects of their supply and support. Not solely responsible, of course: she was part of a gigantic, unwieldy bureaucracy, but in the wake of the disaster a large part of her workload had disappeared. In its place, and mostly because of her very high security clearance, she picked up a liaison role on the various experimental weapons programmes that were in train, referred to collectively by the codename Robust Rebuke but also bearing grandiose designations of their own.

Baxemides welcomed these new duties, never doubting for a moment that she was a good fit for the job. She was more comfortable with the military-logistical part of her role than many of her colleagues and actively enjoyed wielding the power of life and death over the endeavours and aspirations of others. If the colossal stakes in this instance caused her any existential dread there was no visible sign of it. She was a true zealot, and it was hard for her even in these extreme circumstances to imagine the Pandominion failing. It was too big for that, built on too broad a base. It had been pushed, but it would push back. The machines would fall. Order would be restored. It was only a question of how, and how soon. And coordinator Baxemides would play her part with no little relish. She put in long hours trying to assimilate enough of the science behind the Robust Rebuke projects to distinguish between them and allocate resources according to their respective needs and chances of success.

The first project to be discontinued was Hammer Of God. This would have involved launching space missions to the asteroid belts of a hundred or so Pandominion systems. Large asteroids, massing upwards of a thousand tons, were to be selected for their stability and their current vectors. Engines would be fitted to them and fired at the optimal angles and intensities to give them a planet-bound orbit. Then at some point on their journey, when it was too late to deflect or destroy them, they would be Stepped into Ansurrection space to crash down onto machine-controlled Earths. The unleashed energy, equivalent to titanic nuclear strikes, would rip apart the ecosystems on the Ansurrection worlds. Collateral damage in the form of earthquakes, tidal waves and increased seismic activity would cause further havoc.

The whole idea, stolen from an ancient work of science fiction, was a non-starter in this context. For one thing, it would take too long. Space travel had fallen out of favour when it became clear that the laws of physics put the stars forever out of reach, and it had been

 abandoned altogether when Step teleportation was discovered. To resurrect that dead science, build the ships, launch the missions and steer the big rocks home would be the work of a decade or more.

And once they’d brought them, would an asteroid strike deliver a big enough blow? It would be devastating if it happened to a Pandominion world, but the machines were much less in thrall to natural cycles. There would be damage to infrastructure, but the machines’ labour force was effectively infinite so they could undertake repairs at once. A nuclear winter might inconvenience them if they made extensive use of solar energy, but they had no crops to fail, no livestock to die. Outside of the immediate impact site they might experience very little disruption at all.

The Sunburn project was also pulled quite early. The aim with this one would have been to draw off a significant amount of the sun’s energy into a plume that would blanket an Ansurrection world, immediately scorching its surface down to the bedrock. The problem here, as Baxemides saw it, was two-fold: the project relied on technologies that could not easily be tested, and the propagation of the effect would necessarily be slow enough to be perceived from planet-side. Ansurrection forces would have ample time to Step out before their worlds were destroyed and would therefore be available to be used in the inevitable counter-attack.

Project Eraser seemed promising at first. It was another brute force approach, depending on planet-busting bombs Stepped in at ground level. There would be no possibility of interception or defence. Assuming a big enough payload, it was feasible that the bombs could rupture the mantle and outer core of an Ansurrection world badly enough that it would lose cohesion and fall apart into planetary debris. Cielo high command loved Eraser for its simplicity, but in some respects that was its biggest weakness. Any weapon that could be so easily retooled and turned on its makers was probably a bad weapon in this context. The machines could manufacture planet-busters just as quickly as the Pandominion could, and deploy them just as easily. It wouldn’t do to put the idea in their heads.

Of all the original slate of projects, only Strange Attractor went all the way to the finish line. Scientists on Dhu, a Pandominion world with a strong tradition of cutting-edge cybernetics research, developed a very long and very complex viral string that was inexplicably addictive to machine minds, a kind of conceptual catnip. It presented as an equation to be solved. But the equation was recursive: the set of its possible solutions called on itself in ways that modified its original values. It branched exponentially, and any AI that attempted to solve it was forced to devote more and more of its processing power to the task, until finally there was nothing left for other functions. The machine mind became

the logical equivalent of a car engine running hot with no lubricant. It fused into a homogenous mass and stopped working. Before that final meltdown, still driven by the need to find a comprehensive solution, it would call on the processing resources of the machines around it, thereby passing on the virus.

Strange Attractor performed brilliantly in laboratory trials, reducing various forms of AI to useless slag in the space of a few seconds and copying itself across from one system to another at fantastic speeds. It was also trialled on Ansurrection combat units captured and retrieved (often at great cost) in earlier engagements, and it degraded them to an inert state very quickly.

At last the virus was approved for use and released simultaneously on a hundred Ansurrection worlds. The worlds were not chosen at random. Each was in a different cascade, the word the Cielo tacticians had given to the loose networks of machine worlds that rendered each other instantaneous aid when they were attacked. The intention, if the virus had taken hold, was to launch a conventional attack a few minutes later, triggering the arrival of reinforcements from many different points of origin. A significant proportion would come from already infected worlds, bringing the virus with them. The Ansurrection troop movements would become a perfect vector for the spread of the infection.

That was not what happened. The initial dispersal went smoothly, and the first wave of infections followed exactly as predicted, spreading outward from each drop site in a rough circle. But that was where the good news ended. The machines seemed to recognise very quickly that they had been compromised. Those that were Step-enabled simply disappeared, isolating themselves from all contact. The remaining units put out an alarm, causing all other machines in the vicinity to withdraw. Floating gun platforms Stepped in and the infected were melted down in high-intensity induction fields. The propagation of the viral string was contained in every case, usually within ten minutes of its being first introduced.

So much for the first wave of projects. Now the Cielo high command was reviewing the less hopeful prospects, the back-burners and runners-up. Baxemides’ task at this stage was to go back and look at some of the ideas that had already been rejected in case there was a nugget of gold hidden in among the dross.

It was arduous. There had been literally thousands of responses to the Cielo’s initial request – thousands of research teams on as many different worlds convinced they had at least a starting point for an ultimate weapon. The ideas ranged from the blue-sky to the plainly absurd. Most could be weeded out on the single criterion of time – how long it would take to go from conception to working prototype to full deployment. This needed to be as short as possible, ideally measured in months rather than years. Another large tranche was rejected on the grounds that the proposed mechanisms would work (if they worked at all) too haphazardly or too slowly. What was needed was a weapon that would strike quickly and

take effect uniformly across great distances, destroying or incapacitating all or most of the enemy forces within its sphere of operation. When Baxemides found a project that seemed promising, her task was to allocate money and resources commensurate to its chances of success.

But very few initiatives cleared this bar. All the proposals she was seeing now were just variations on things she had seen before, approaches she already knew were blind avenues. She was becoming increasingly frustrated and impatient, more and more eager for something solid to build on, when she encountered Professor Kavak Dromishel.

2Kavak Dromishel

Dromishel was an oddity. An organic chemist with a background in cybernetic research, he had pioneered the use of digital architecture to repair damaged nerve tissue. That had become dangerous territory now that machines and organic beings were engaged in a conflict that would likely obliterate one side or the other, so Dromishel had quietly and pragmatically performed a 180-degree turn. He still had a legacy position in the Medical Department of Hiathu University on Erim, but his current work was mostly in the field of neural interference – weapons research rather than public health. Instead of repairing nervous systems he was finding novel and appalling ways to sabotage them.

But this trajectory was far from the only thing about Dromishel that was striking. Everyone who worked with him was impressed with his commitment and his high seriousness. Whenever he engaged with a problem, they said, he went in all the way; never gave less than 100 per cent. For a self only in his fortieth year he had achieved amazing things, and those who collaborated with him were very happy to have his name blazoned across their résumé.

They didn’t often go back for more, though. There was something about Dromishel’s energy, his drive, that people found unsettling once they got right up close to it. It was solipsistic in its intensity, shutting out others around him. Dromishel seemed to forget when he worked that other people besides himself existed. When he was forced to acknowledge his co-workers he did so either with cold formality or with a kind of pained distaste, as if it hurt him to have to call on the assistance or skill sets of others to complete his own objectives.

This was only during work jags, though. The rest of the time he could be courteous and even charming – charismatic, some said. He could turn the entirety of his attention on you in a way that was hard to withstand, much in the same way that a hurricane is. It wasn’t that he bullied or coerced, he just surrounded you. And then, once you’d agreed to whatever proposition he was putting to you, he swept on to trouble other ecosystems. There was nothing personal for him in any of this: in order for it to be personal he would have had to acknowledge your personhood in the first place.

Stories of Dromishel’s depredations spread far and wide. Colleagues and administrators were skittish around him, kept their distance, hid behind protocol and circumlocution. Dromishel was aware of all this, and it didn’t trouble him. If anything he was perversely proud of his notoriety. He knew what he was doing when he unleashed one of these attention storms: they were consciously directed, not a force of nature but a force of his will, which was almost the only force he actually respected outside of the four fundamental ones.

When he met Melusa Baxemides, however, he saw at once that any heavy-handed tactics would be a mistake here. He had been summoned to her office in one of the Cielo redoubts, Taxerni Ingan. Cielo troopers had come to collect him, fitting him with a portable Step plate of the kind that was sometimes casually referred to as a dead-drop. Most Step plates were in fixed locations, for one very good reason: it greatly reduced your chances of materialising inside a solid object when you Stepped. With a dead-drop you had to put your faith in the Registry, trusting that it wouldn’t let the plate commence its cycle until your destination site was clear.

(In another sense, of course, all Pandominion citizens were in the nurturing arms of

the Registry every time they Stepped. The Registry maintained the entire network, performing the calculations and deciding on the sequencing of billions of Step transits that took place every minute of every hour of every day.)

Taxerni Ingan was an intimidating space. Transit platforms and messenger remotes glided soundlessly along corridors wider than city streets. Professor Dromishel went on foot, the troopers in their scarlet armour flanking him on either side. The air was sweetly perfumed and the light was kind, a cocktail of wavelengths precisely calculated for its positive psychological impact on most organic sentients. Still, it was hard to ignore the gun turrets at the corners of the corridors and the many bulkhead doors they passed through. The redoubt was an administrative building, but it was also a hub of empire. Separatist attacks had been ramping up before the war annihilated all other concerns, and the Pandominion policed its borders. The redoubt was a fortress.

Coordinator Baxemides’ office was on the eightieth floor. It was vast, as befitted her status. The predominating colours were Cielo red and immemorial gold. Marble columns held up a ceiling so high above Dromishel’s head that he doubted he could have hit it with a thrown stone. This too was an attempt to intimidate, but the stratagem was obvious enough that he found it paradoxically reassuring.

The troopers took up their stations to either side of the door, right hand folded over left in the stance called the “soft ready”. Dromishel crossed the broad expanse of carpet to the coordinator’s desk and stood beside the chair there, waiting to be told to sit. Baxemides refocused her eyes from her internal array to this physical space. Even seated as she was, Dromishel could tell she was tall. Beyond that he could determine nothing. Her skin was sallow, the little fur he could see pale gold. Her face was thin and aquiline, her lips fleshless. She could have come from any of half a dozen different clades.

Baxemides was examining him just as frankly. Dromishel was an ursid and he knew he had an imposing physical presence. Few people expected a scientist to have such broad shoulders. Few people failed to take in the sheets of muscle under his shirt and the way he kept his claws long and unbated.

Baxemides’ gaze swept over him from stem to stern and back at once to her array. “Professor Dromishel,” she said without inflection. “Thank you for coming. Sit down.”

Dromishel sat, and the coordinator went straight back to whatever she was doing online. Of course, he reflected, Baxemides must have had hundreds of interviews like this. Her capacity to be amazed or even impressed would have been an early casualty. Dromishel meant to impress her anyway, but he would have to do so from a position of respect and circumspection. He couldn’t hurricane his way through this. So he sat in silence and waited for her to speak again.

“I’ve read your abstract,” Baxemides said at last. “It states that your weapon would eliminate the need for separate attacks on each Ansurrection force or stronghold. That you could take out an entire planet with a single localised strike.”

Dromishel waited some more. That had not been a question.

“It’s a very bold 

claim,” the coordinator said dryly. “Would I be right in saying that what you’re developing is essentially a signal jammer?”

“That’s correct, Coordinator.”

“And how is that going to rout our enemies?”

“In the most obvious and direct way, Coordinator.”

Baxemides focused her gaze on him again. “I’m sorry?”

Dromishel shrugged his massive shoulders. “Our enemies are signals. Therefore a signal jammer – as opposed to a bigger bomb or a better gunship – is exactly what we need if we want to destroy them.”

He had her attention now, and so he ran with it. “Will you permit me a short lecture, Coordinator? I promise I’ll be as succinct as I can.”

Baxemides sat back in her chair, waved a sardonic hand. “Please.”

“When we launched our first attack against the Ansurrection we targeted the world on which we originally met them – originally designated U3087453622 but now known as A-One. We were beaten back in short order, but we obtained a great deal of information. Some of it concerned the machines’ communications. They were able to Step in reinforcements from other continua within a very short interval – too quickly for messages to have passed outwards from planet A-One by any conventional means. As you know, a Step field requires 2.81 seconds to propagate. So for a message to go out and a response to be received would take a minimum of 5.62 seconds. The first machine reinforcements arrived within four seconds.”

“So?” Baxemides prompted.

“So,” Dromishel said, “it seems almost incontestable at this point that the machines have developed a means of sending and receiving messages directly across dimensional boundaries. Unlike the Stepping of entities or objects possessing mass, this informational transfer takes place instantaneously – or at the very least with a greatly diminished time lag. We, of course, are obliged to transmit our signals traffic via a drone or remote that shuttles between universes, with the inevitable 2.81 seconds’ worth of delay at each Step. This gave the machines a huge advantage over us in that first engagement, as it has in every subsequent one. But every strength can be turned into a weakness. All you need to do is to find the right vector of attack.”

Baxemides’ eyes narrowed momentarily, and her lips moved almost imperceptibly as she made a note in her array. It wasn’t a good sign, but Dromishel was only warming up. He didn’t let it deter him.

“If I were to ask you what a machine consciousness is, Coordinator, how would you reply?”

“I wouldn’t,” Baxemides said. “Because rhetorical questions are a waste of my time. I’d just wait – with scant patience, I should warn you –

for you to reach your point.”

“My apologies. Allow me to posit then, for the sake of argument, that a machine consciousness – an AI, to use the more familiar term – is a simulation in digital form of the intelligence of an organic sentient.”

Baxemides gave a barely perceptible nod. “Go on.”

“This simulation rests within a substrate,” Dromishel said, “a physical structure. The machines of the Ansurrection use change-state silicates that are simultaneously solid and liquid. We can’t engineer them ourselves, but we understand their function. The flexibility of the molecular lattice allows them to perform at much lower voltages than a comparable solid-state processor. Typically their operating threshold fluctuates between 700 and 900 millivolts. Resisting and conductive nodes are arranged in cascades that seem to perform a similar function to neurons in an organic brain, amplifying or damping the signals from surrounding nodes in enormously complex patterns that change from one microsecond to the next.”

“The machines have brains that are like inferior imitations of our brains. This isn’t news.” The coordinator’s tone was cold.

“Better than our brains in one respect,” Dromishel corrected her. “They can be copied. Cut and pasted, like any code. If you destroy an Ansurrection combat mech you’re really only destroying the hardware. The shell. The consciousness is replicated elsewhere and can be downloaded into another shell whenever it’s needed. But again, that strength contains a weakness.”

“And now,” Baxemides said, “you’re in danger of exasperating me. That’s more than enough generalities, Professor. Come to the point.”

“The point, Coordinator, is to bypass the hardware – all those millions of combat mechs, tanks and gunships – and go directly for the signal. The guiding intelligence. If you delete the signal then the outer shells, however formidable they may be, are irrelevant. Mere scrap metal. You could annihilate the enemy without firing a shot.”

He waited. He was wary of over-selling. He needed Baxemides to realise for herself the full implications of what he was saying and then to reel herself in along the line he had already extended. If he pulled too hard he would almost certainly lose her. As with so many things, this interview should have been about the science and nothing more, but in fact it was about personalities. Dromishel was coming to an understanding of hers.

Baxemides leaned forward again, resting her folded arms on the desk. “You can do this?” Her eyes caught the light from the over-elaborate ceiling fixtures, seeming to glitter. “Delete the signal?”

“It’s only electrons moving in a circuit,” Dromishel said nonchalantly. “Or something analogous to a circuit. A physical process that can be enhanced or interrupted, encouraged or suppressed.”

The gleaming eyes

narrowed but didn’t blink. “That wasn’t a yes, Professor Dromishel.”

“Then yes, Coordinator, I believe I have identified a mechanism that will achieve this. Force lattices of the kind we use to enhance the strength of physical structures can be made instead to interact with such structures on a subatomic level. There are precedents in the work of Anshi on Krukris and Paleutermon at the Stathenanset Higher Colloquium. With a team of ten and a very modest budget I’ve already laid the foundations. I leave you to imagine what I could achieve with a team of a hundred.”

There was a very long pause. Dromishel stuck to his earlier decision and didn’t break it.

“And the other part of your claim?” Baxemides demanded. “Taking out a whole world with a single attack.”

“That is where we weave a trap for the Ansurrection out of their own virtuosity. The machines communicate constantly, both in-world and it seems across dimensional boundaries. They swap data – but that seems an inadequate way of describing something huge and fundamental. They swap data, but they are data. Therefore they swap self. They have no unitary identity or consciousness. Rather they are a collective that reshapes itself constantly into smaller collectives dedicated to specific tasks. They are like a liquid that takes the shape of any bowl into which it’s poured. There is no fixed limit to them, any more than there’s a fixed limit to an ocean.”

“So?” Baxemides didn’t sound peremptory this time. Dromishel was almost certain this was curiosity he was hearing. Possibly even excitement. He had her, or almost had her.

“So there is no such thing, for the pseudo-minds of the Ansurrection, as a local malfunction. Once we pour our poison into the water, if I may speak metaphorically, the tides will take it everywhere. When the suppression wave, as I’m calling my device, begins to extinguish the signals on which their collective consciousness depends and in which it resides, cascade failures will spread outwards in a chain reaction whose effects will only become more cataclysmic as its front widens. Unless the Ansurrection’s collective mind realises what’s happening and isolates itself, a single device could take out all the forces and resource centres on a planetary scale – or at the very least across an entire continent.”

“And if it does? Isolate itself?”

Dromishel permitted himself a smile. “Well then it’s crippled, since it will be unable to perform its best trick – the frictionless flow of information that allows it to react immediately to everything we bring against it. So the enemy is either dead or else it’s blind. The first outcome is preferable, but either works.”

Baxemides was staring past him now with unfocused eyes, seeing what he was describing – seeing the suddenness and finality of total victory. Dromishel exulted. He had after all managed to whip up

a small but effective hurricane. He was careful not to let his triumph show in his face.

“Very well,” Baxemides said, gathering herself again for what looked like an imminent decision. “But if I were to back your project I’d expect to see results quickly. How soon do you believe you could give me proof of concept? And how long would it be before we saw any tangible results?”

Dromishel shifted his considerable weight in his chair. This was his trump card and he had saved it until last. If Baxemides hadn’t asked he would have told her anyway, because he believed it made his position impregnable. “Three weeks for a schematic and supporting documentation,” he said airily. “A month to produce a working prototype.”

Baxemides stared at him for longer than a few seconds. “That seems implausible,” she said.

“Nonetheless. I told you I’d laid the foundation, Coordinator. I might have said that we have already made the conceptual breakthrough and are close now to the necessary proofs that will take us to full implementation. I was reluctant only because it sounds like vainglory, but I assure you it’s true.”

There was no pause this time, no hesitation. Baxemides’ lips moved as she once more updated her array. “Very well,” she said. “But think bigger, Professor Dromishel. A team of a hundred, certainly, if that will suffice. But I’m allocating you funds that will be sufficient for a staff of a thousand, and an equipment budget that’s commensurate. You don’t have to use it all at once, of course. You’re the best judge of how large a team you need, and I’m aware that too many builders can make for a crooked house. You’ll also have a dedicated council liaison. They’ll contact you later today. Any official requests for staff, materials or premises will need to be countersigned by them, but their involvement means your requisitions will be actioned immediately.”

Dromishel nodded, still keeping his face carefully neutral. This was everything he’d wanted and more. “Thank you, Coordinator,” he said. “I’m honoured to have been chosen.”

“Was there anything else?” Baxemides asked.

“Not for the moment, Coordinator. Thank you for your time.” He stood.

“Dromishel,” Baxemides said, in a different tone. “From where do I know that name?”

Dromishel kept a poker face. He had honestly hoped to avoid this topic, but it had always been likely to come up. It almost always did. “I would venture to suggest, from history books,” he said. “My many times great grandmother was on the team that designed and built the Registry.”

“Ah,” the coordinator said. “A proud heritage.” And mercifully that was as far as she took it. Baxemides had as little use for pleasantries as he did. She handed Dromishel off to a couple of clerks with instructions to draw up the necessary documentation and take

down a list of his immediate staffing and equipment requirements. He went away with a feeling of simmering excitement rising from his stomach into his chest. With the budget that had just been handed to him he could do great things. Enough to ensure him at the very least a promotion to head of department and – surely it was reasonable to expect – the vice chancellorship of his university. Either way, he would enjoy a pleasing amount of sway over the lives and careers of the colleagues whose respect for him had always seemed to him to be grudging and inadequate.

But it irked him that Baxemides had remembered his famous ancestor. He never mentioned her himself if he could possibly avoid it, and if anyone else brought her up in conversation he was coldly dismissive. The last thing he wanted to do was to encourage any in-depth discussion of her work and its relation to his own. And that was even more the case now that he had won Robust Rebuke funding and the patronage of a leading Cielo bureaucrat.

Because the simple truth was that the suppression wave was not really a new idea. It was a breakthrough Dromishel had achieved by reading his ancestor’s marginalia. That was why he was able to promise such swift progress towards an actual prototype: he already knew how the wave would work and what it could be made to do.

Perhaps that was also why he understood his own device so imperfectly and implemented it with such disastrous consequences.

3Baxemides

Like Kavak Dromishel, Melusa Baxemides had something of a forbidding reputation – and like Kavak Dromishel she mostly embraced it. She was known to be vindictive, remembering errors, underperformance and perceived slights and relentlessly punishing them.

Baxemides didn’t put it to herself in those terms. She preferred to believe that she was a perfectionist and encouraged perfection in her subordinates by dropping on them heavily when they fell short of it. But the surviving records from this time suggest something more pathological, a tendency to punish in others what she was terrified of finding in herself.

At the time when she met with Dromishel, you might assume that she gave him her full attention throughout and weighed his proposals with a due regard for the weighty consequences that would flow from her decision.

The truth is that she was distracted. She had just received unwelcome news.

One of the selves on her shit-list, a former watchmaster from the Contingencies department named Orso Vemmet, had absconded from the prison world of Tsakom to which she’d previously exiled him. He had apparently achieved this by turning the dismal insta-build hovel that was his assigned quarters into a Step plate. The insta-build had then briefly materialised on Bivouac 19, taken two deserters on board and disappeared again. All efforts to find Vemmet – or the deserters, a corporal named Moon Sostenti and a buck private named Essien Nkanika – had failed. It was even possible that some other inmates of the facility on Tsakom had escaped along with them.

This state of affairs troubled Coordinator Baxemides like a persistent itch that grew more intense with scratching. It wasn’t just Vemmet. The two Cielo deserters were also familiar to her, and she had taken as many pains to torment Corporal Moon Sostenti as she had to humiliate the ex-watchmaster. Left to herself she would have gone on doing so for a lot longer, perhaps in perpetuity, and her sense of her own status and security would have risen in the same measure as their discontent.

But they had escaped, and Baxemides was unhappy. She had diverted considerable resources – probably more than could be justified – into finding them. And for some of the time, when she was consulting her array during her interview with Kavak Dromishel, she had been reviewing reported sightings and ongoing searches. She refused to categorise this as obsession. It was one more sign of her perfectionism, her refusal to let a matter that had once crossed her desk now become someone else’s problem.

In any case, and notwithstanding this niggling concern, she was manifestly doing excellent work. Dromishel’s project was highly promising, and in greenlighting its further development she had shown that she had the measure of the task she’d taken on, identifying opportunities and controlling the flow of limited resources intelligently and proactively.

The Pandominion would endure because of her efforts and the efforts of others like her, unafraid to think on a cosmic scale and able to act decisively on a human one. She turned to the next Robust Rebuke file and the next interview, for the moment dismissing both Kavak Dromishel and Orso Vemmet from her thoughts. She had planted a seed. It would germinate or it would not. Either way she had many others to plant.

If she had known how close the end of her civilisation was and how central her own efforts would be to that process, it’s possible that even her monumental self-satisfaction would have been shaken.

4Hadiz

Five figures made their way slowly through the ruins of the city of Lagos on a world that had no designation code in the Pandominion’s Registry – a world in the vast poly-dimensional space called the Unvisited. ...