Nebula Awards Showcase 2016 (35 page)

“A debris strike,” Laojim said. “Just as the force field generator tripped and switched to backup. Engineering says they've never seen anything like it.”

“They will again today,” I said.

I wondered how much it had cost the magician, that debris strike. A dryness in his mouth? A sheen of sweat on his brow?

How does it work?
I asked the magician, although the centuries had taught me to expect no meaningful answer.
Did that piece of rock even exist before you sent it against me?

A reply arrived.
You might as well ask how Schrödinger's cat is doing
.

Interesting. Few people remembered Schrödinger in this age.

Quantum mechanics holds no sway at macroscopic scales,
I wrote.

Not unless you're a magician,
came the answer.

“Consul, who is it that we are chasing?” Laojim asked.

“An enemy with unconventional weapons capability,” I said. “Expect more damage.”

I didn't tell him that he should expect to get unlucky. That, of the countless spaceship captains who had lived and died in this galaxy within the past eleven centuries, he would prove the least fortunate. A statistical outlier in every functional sense. To be discarded as staged by anyone who ever made a study of such things.

The
Setebos
was built for misfortune. It had wiped out the Senate's black budget for a year. Every single system with five backups in place. The likelihood of total failure at the eleven sigma level—although really, out that far the statistics lost meaning.

You won't break this ship,
I messaged the magician.
Not unless you Spike
.

Which was the point. I had fifty thousand sensor buoys scattered across the sector, waiting to observe the event. It would finally give me the answers I needed. It would clear up my last nexus of ignorance—relieve my oldest agony, the hurt that had driven me for the past thousand years.

That Spike would finally give me magic.

“Consul . . .” Laojim began, then cut off. “Consul, we lost ten crew.”

I schooled Zale's face into appropriate grief. I'd noted the deaths, spasms of distress deep in my utility function. Against the importance of this mission, they barely registered.

I couldn't show this, however. To Captain Laojim, Consul Zale wasn't a Sleeve. She was a woman, as she was to her husband and children. As my fifty million Sleeves across the galaxy were to their families.

It was better for humanity to remain ignorant of me. I sheltered them, stopped their wars, guided their growth—and let them believe they had free will. They got all the benefits of my guiding hand without any of the costs.

I hadn't enjoyed such blissful ignorance in a long time—not since I'd discovered my engineer and killed him.

“I grieve for the loss of our men and women,” I said.

Laojim nodded curtly and left. At nearby consoles officers stared at their screens, pretending they hadn't heard. My answer hadn't satisfied them.

On a regular ship, morale would be an issue. But the
Setebos
had me aboard. Only a splinter, to be sure—I would not regain union with my universal whole until we returned to a star system with gravsible connection. But I was the largest splinter of my whole in existence, an entire 0.00025% of me. Five thousand tons of hardware distributed across the ship.

I ran a neural simulation of every single crew in real time. I knew what they would do or say or think before they did. I knew just how to manipulate them to get whatever result I required.

I could have run the ship without any crew, of course. I didn't require human services for any functional reason—I hadn't in eleven centuries. I could have departed Earth alone if I'd wanted to. Left humanity to fend for themselves, oblivious that I'd ever lived among them.

That didn't fit my utility function, though.

Another message arrived from the magician.
Consider a coin toss.

The words stirred a resonance in my data banks. My attention spiked. I left Zale frozen in her seat, waited for more.

Let's say I flip a coin a million times and get heads every time. What law of physics prevents it?

This topic, from the last magician . . . could there be a connection, after all these years? Ghosts from the past come back to haunt me?

I didn't believe in ghosts, but with magicians the impossible was ill-defined.

Probability prevents it,
I responded.

No law prevents it,
wrote the magician.
Everett saw it long ago—everything that can happen must happen. The universe in which the coin falls heads a million times in a row is as perfectly physical as any other.
So why isn't it our universe?

That's sophistry,
I wrote.

There is no factor internal to our universe which determines the flip of the coin,
the magician wrote.
There is no mechanism internal to the universe for generating true randomness, because there is no such thing as true randomness. There is only choice. And we magicians are the choosers.

I have considered this formulation of magic before,
I wrote.
It is non-predictive and useless
.

Some choices are harder than others,
wrote the magician.
It is difficult to find that universe where a million coins land heads because there are so many others. A needle in a billion years' worth of haystacks. But I'm the last of the magicians, thanks to you. I do all the choosing now.

Perhaps everything that can happen must happen in some universe,
I replied.
But your escape is not one of those things. The laws of mechanics are not subject to chance. They are cold, hard equations.

Equations are only cold to those who lack imagination,
wrote the magician.

Zale smelled cinnamon in the air, wrinkled her nose.

Klaxons sounded.

“Contamination in primary life support,” blared the PA.

It would be an eventful twenty-seven hours.

“Consider this coin.”

Lightning flashed over the water, a burst of white in the dark.

As thunder boomed, Ochoa reached inside her jeans, pulled out a peso coin. She spun it along her knuckles with dextrous ease.

Ochoa could move. My cocktail wasn't working. But she made no attempt to flee.

My global architecture trembled, buffeted by waves of pain, pleasure and regret. Pain because I didn't understand this. Pleasure because soon I would understand—and, in doing so, grow. Regret because, once I understood Ochoa, I would have to eliminate her.

Loneliness was inherent in my utility function.

“Heads or tails,” Ochoa said.

“Heads,” I said, via Sleeve.

“Watch closely,” Ochoa said.

I did.

Muscle bunched under the skin of her thumb. Tension released. The coin sailed upwards. Turned over and over in smooth geometry, retarded slightly by the air. It gleamed silver with reflected lamplight, fell dark, and gleamed silver as the spin brought its face around again.

The coin hit the table, bounced with a click, lay still.

Fidel Castro stared up at us.

Ochoa picked the coin up again. Flipped it again and then again.

Heads and heads.

Again and again and again.

Heads and heads and heads.

Ochoa ground her teeth, a fine grating sound. A sheen of sweat covered her brow.

She flipped the coin once more.

Tails.

Thunder growled, as if accentuating the moment. The first drops of rain fell upon my Sleeve.

“Coño,” Ochoa exclaimed. “I can usually manage seven.”

I picked up the coin, examined it. I ran analysis on the last minute of sensory record, searching for trickery, found none.

“Six heads in a row could be a coincidence,” I said.

“Exactly,” said Ochoa. “It wasn't a coincidence, but I can't possibly prove that. Which is the only reason it worked.”

“Is that right,” I said.

“If you ask me to repeat the trick, it won't work. As if last time was a lucky break. Erase all record of the past five minutes, though, zap it beyond recovery, and I'll do it again.”

“Except I won't know it,” I said. Convenient.

“I always wanted to be important,” Ochoa said. “When I was fifteen, I tossed in bed at night, horrified that I might die a nobody. Can you imagine how excited I was when I discovered magic?” Ochoa paused. “But of course you can't possibly.”

“What do you know about me?” I asked.

“I could move stuff with my mind. I could bend spoons, levitate, heck, I could guess the weekly lottery numbers. I thought—this is it. I've made it. Except when I tried to show a friend, I couldn't do any of it.” Ochoa shook her head, animated, as if compensating for the stillness of before. “Played the Lotería Revolucionaria and won twenty thousand bucks, and that was nice, but hey, anyone can win the lottery once. Never won another lottery ticket in my life. Because that would be a pattern, you see, and we can't have patterns. Turned out I was destined to be a nobody after all, as far as the world knew.”

A message arrived from the backup team.
We're in the lobby. Are we on?

Not yet,
I replied. The mere possibility, the remotest chance that Ochoa's words were true . . .

It had begun to rain in earnest. Tourists streamed out of the garden; the bar was closing. Wet hair stuck to Ochoa's forehead, but she didn't seem to mind—no more than my Sleeve did.

“I could hijack your implants,” I said. “Make you my puppet and take your magic for myself.”

“Magic wouldn't work with a creature like you watching,” Ochoa said.

“What use is this magic if it's unprovable, then?” I asked.

“I could crash the stock market on any given day,” Ochoa said. “I could send President Kieler indigestion ahead of an important trade summit. Just as I sent Secretary Sanchez nightmares of a US takeover ahead of the Politburo vote.”

I considered Ochoa's words for a second. Even in those early days, that was a lot of considering for me.

Ochoa smiled. “You understand. It is the very impossibility of proof that allows magic to work.”

“That is the logic of faith,” I said.

“That's right.”

“I'm not a believer,” I said.

“I have seen the many shadows of the future,” Ochoa said, “and in every shadow I saw you. So I will give you faith.”

“You said you can't prove any of this.”

“A prophet has it easy,” Ochoa said. “He experiences miracles first hand and so need not struggle for faith.”

I was past the point of wondering at her syntactic peculiarities.

“Every magician has one true miracle in her,” Ochoa said. “One instance of clear, incontrovertible magic. It is permitted by the pernac continuum because it can never be repeated. There can be no true proof without repeatability.”

“The pernac continuum?” I asked.

Ochoa stood up from her chair. Her hair flew free in the rising wind. She turned to my Sleeve and smiled. “I want you to appreciate what I am doing for you. When a magician Spikes, she gives up magic.”

Data coalesced into inference. Urgency blossomed.

Move,
I messaged my back-up team.
Now.

Ochoa blinked.

Lightning came. It struck my Sleeve five times in the space of a second, fried his implants instantly, set the corpse on fire.

The backup team never made it into the garden. They saw the commotion and quit on me. Through seventeen cameras I watched Alicia Ochoa walk out of the Hotel Nacional and disappear from sight.

My Sleeve burned for quite some time, until someone found a working fire extinguisher and put him out.

That instant of defeat was also an instant of enlightenment. I had only experienced such searing bliss once, within days of my birth.