The Risen Empire (4 page)

Until someone gets thirsty.

COMPOUND MIND

Existence was good. Far richer than the weak dream of shadowtime.

In the shadowtime, external reality had already been visible, hard and glimmering with promise, cold and complex to the touch. Objects existed outside of one, events transpired. But one's
self
was a dream, a ghostly being composed only of potential. Desire and thought without intensity, mere conceits, a plan before it is set in motion. Even the anguish at one's own nonexistence was dull; a shadow play of real pain.

But now the Rix compound mind was moving, stretching across the infostructure of Legis XV like a waking cat, glorying in its own realness as it expanded beyond mere program. It had been just a seed before, a kernel of design possessing a tiny mote of consciousness, waiting to unleash itself across a fecund environment. But only the integrated data systems of an entire planet were lush enough to hold it, to match its nascent hunger as it grew.

The mind had felt this expansion before, millions of times in simulation had experienced propagation as it relentlessly trained for awakening. But experiences in the shadowtime were models, mere analogs to the vast architecture that the mind was becoming.

Soon, the mind would encompass the total datastores and communications web of this planet, Legis XV. It had copied its seeds to every device that used data, from the huge broadcast arrays of the equatorial desert to the pocket phones of two billion inhabitants, from the content reservoir of the Grand Library to the chips of the transit cards used for tube fares. Its shoots had disabled the shunts placed throughout the system, obscene software intended to prevent the advent of intelligence. In four hours it had left its mark everywhere.

And the propagation seeds were not some mere virus scattering its tag across the planet. They were designed to link the mindless cacophony of human interaction into a single being, a metamind composed of connections: the webs of stored autodial numbers that mapped out friendships, cliques, and business cartels; the movements of twenty million workers at rush hour in the capital city; the interactive fables played by schoolchildren, spawning a million decision trees each hour; the recorded purchases of generations of consumers related to their voting patterns....

That
was being a compound mind. Not some yapping AI designed to manage traffic lights or zoning complaints or currency markets, but the epiphenomenal chimera that was well beyond the sum total of all these petty transactions. Only hours in existence, the mind was already starting to feel the giddy sensation of
being
these connections, this web, this multiverse of data. Anything less was the shadowtime.

Yes ... existence was good.

The Rix had fulfilled their promise.

The sole purpose of the Rix Cult was to create compound minds. Ever since the first mind, the legendary Amazon, had bootstrapped back on Old Earth, there were those who saw clearly that, for the first time, humanity had a purpose. No longer did humans have to guess about their ultimate goal. Was it their petty squabbles over wealth and power? The promulgation of their blindly selfish genes? Or that ten-thousand-year melodrama of fatuous self-deception known variously as art, religion, or philosophy?

None of these had ever really satisfied.

But with the revelation of Amazon's first stirrings, it was obvious why humans existed. They had been created to build and animate computer networks, the primordial soup of compound minds: consciousnesses of vast extent and subtlety, for whom the petty struggles of individual humans were merely the firings of dendrites at some base, mechanical level of thought.

As humanity spread across the stars, it became evident that any sufficiently large technological society would reach a level of complexity sufficient to form a compound mind. The minds always arose eventually—when not intentionally aborted—but these vast beings were healthier and saner when their birth was assisted by human midwives. The Rix Cult spread wherever people massed in quantity, seeding, tending, and protecting emergent intelligences. Most planets lived peacefully with their minds, whose interests were so far beyond their human components as to be irrelevant. (Never mind what poor old Amazon had done to Earth;
that
had been a misunderstanding—the madness of the first true mind. Imagine, after all, being
alone
in the universe.) Some societies even worshiped their local intelligences like gods, praying to their palmtops, thanking their traffic grids for safe journeys. The Rix Cult found these obeisances presumptuous; a mere god might be involved enough with humans to create and guide them, to love them jealously and demand fealty. But a compound mind existed at a far higher plane, attentive to human affairs only in the way a person might worry about her own intestinal fauna.

But the Rix Cult didn't interfere with worship. It was useful, in its way.

What the Rix could not abide were societies like the Risen Empire, whose petty rulers were unwilling to accept the presence of minds within their realm. The Risen Emperor relied upon a firmly entrenched cult of personality to maintain his power, and thus could not tolerate other, truer gods within his realm. The natural advent of minds was heresy to his Apparatus, which used software firewalls and centralized topologies to purposefully stamp out nascent minds, artificially segmenting the flow of information like a gardener, pruning and dehydrating, creating abortions, committing deicide.

When the Rix looked upon the Eighty Worlds, they saw rich fields salted fallow by barbarians.

The new compound mind on Legis XV was duly aware of its precarious position, born on a hostile planet, the first Rix success within the Risen Empire. It would be under attack the moment the situation with the Child Empress was resolved, one way or the other. But as it propagated, it flexed its muscles, knowing it could fight back rather than willingly relinquish its hold on sweet, sweet existence. Let the Imperials try to uproot its millions of tendrils; they'd have to destroy every network, every chip, every repository of data on the planet. This world would be plunged back into the Information Darkness.

And then the inhabitants of Legis XV would learn about shadowtime.

The new mind began to consider ways to survive such an attack, ways to take the campaign further. Then found deep within its originary code a surprise, an aspect of this plot never revealed to it in the shadowtime. There existed a way out, a final escape plan prepared by the Rix should the hostage gambit fail. (How kind were the Rix.)

This revelation made the compound mind even more aggressive. So when the vast new creature reached the age when minds choose their own designation (roughly 4.15 hours old), it delved into the ancient history of Earth Prime for an appropriately bellicose name...

And called itself Alexander.

CAPTAIN

The Imperial Political Apparatus courier ship glinted black and sharp, a dark needle against the stars.

It had left the Legis system's courier base an hour after the Rix attack had begun, describing a spiral path around Legis XV to stay in the blind spot of the Rix occupying forces. Zai had wanted to avoid creating the impression that the
Lynx
was being reinforced. And he wasn't anxiously awaiting the arrival of the courier's occupants in any case. The trip, usually taking twenty minutes in such a craft, had taken four hours. An absurdity, for the fastest ship-class in the fleet. In terms of mass, the ship was nine-tenths engine, most of the remainder the gravity generators that kept the crew from being squashed during fifty-gee accelerations. The three passengers in its nose would be crowded together in a space no bigger than a small closet. The thought gave Captain Zai enough pleasure to warrant a slight smile.

Given the situation, after all, what was a little discomfort?

For once, however, Zai wouldn't be entirely unhappy to see representatives of the Political Apparatus on his ship. The moment they stepped aboard, the responsibility for the Empress's life would no longer be entirely his. Although Zai wondered if the politicals wouldn't find a way out of offering their opinions when the crucial moment came.

"Hobbes," he said. "How's the compound mind progressing?"

His ExO shook her head. "Much faster than expected, sir. They've improved propagation since the Incursion. I think we're talking hours instead of days."

"Damn," he said, bringing up the high-level schematic of the planet's infostructure. A compound mind was a subtle thing; it arose naturally unless countermeasures were taken. But there were certain signs one could watch for: the formation of strange attractor nodes, spontaneous corrections when the system was damaged, a pulsing rhythm in the overall data flow. Zai looked at the schematic with frustration. He didn't have the expertise truly to understand it, but he knew the clock was ticking. Every minute the rescue was delayed, the harder the compound mind would be to pound back into unconsciousness.

Captain Zai canceled the eyescreen view, Legis's infostructure fading from his sight like an afterimage of the sun, and turned back to the bridge's main airscreen. At least he would have some progress to show the politicals. The palace wireframe had been replaced by a schematic of the council chamber, where the hostages were being held.

The Child Empress's position was known with a high degree of precision. Fortunately, she was sitting quite close to the single Intelligencer that had made it into the chamber. The Empress had an AI confidant piggybacking on her nervous system, a device whose radiations were detectable and distinct. The airscreen marked Her Majesty's exact body position with a red dummy figure, detailed enough to show the direction she was facing, even that her legs were crossed. The Rix soldiers, cobalt blue figures in the schematic, were also easy to differentiate. The servomotors in their biomechanical upgrades whined ultrasonically when they moved, a sound well within the natural hearing of the intelligence microship. The Rix were also talking to each other, apparently believing the room to be secure. The audio signal from the room was excellent, the harsh Rix accents easily discernible. Translation AI was currently working through the complexities of Rix battle language to construct a transform grammar. This last would take a while, however. Rix Cult languages evolved very quickly. Encounters even a year apart revealed major changes. The decades since the Incursion would be equivalent to a millennium of linguistic drift in any normal human tongue.

Four of the Rix commandos were in the room. The other three were presumably on guard duty nearby.

The four Rix present were already targeted. Rail projectiles fired from orbit were accurate enough to hit a human-sized target, and fast enough deliver their payloads before a warning system could sound. The missiles were structured smartalloy slugs, which could penetrate the palace's walls like a monofilament whip through paper. Two dozen marines were already prepped for insertion, to finish off the targeted Rix (who were notoriously hard to kill) and mop up their remaining comrades. The ship's marine doctor would go down with the force, in case the worst happened, and the Child Empress was injured.

The thought made Captain Zai swallow. He realized that his throat was painfully dry. The rescue plan was too complex for something
not
to go wrong.

Perhaps the politicals would have a better idea.

INITIATE

Just before the courier ship docked, Initiate Viran Farre of the Imperial Political Apparatus tried one last time to dissuade the adept.

"Please reconsider, Adept Trevim." She whispered the words, as if the sound might carry through the dozen meters of thermosphere between the courier ship and the
Lynx.
Not that there was any need to shout. The adept's face was, as it had been for the last four hours, only centimeters from her own. "I should be the one to accompany the rescue effort."

The third person in the courier ship passenger tube (which was designed to hold a single occupant, and not in luxury) made a snorting sound, which propelled him a few centimeters bowward in the zero-gee.

"Don't you trust me,
Initiate
Farre?" Barris sniffed. His crude emphasis on her rank was typical of Barris. He too was an initiate, but had reached that status at a far younger age.

"No, I don't." Farre turned back to the adept. "This young fool is as likely to kill the Child Empress as assist in her rescue."

The Adept managed to stare into the middle distance, which, even for a dead woman, was certainly a feat in the two cubic meters they shared.

"What you don't seem to understand, Farre," Adept Harper Trevim said, "is that the Empress's continued existence is secondary."

"Adept!"
Farre hissed.

"May I remind you that we serve the Risen Emperor, not his sister," Trevim said.

"My oath was to the crown," Farre answered.

"It is extremely unlikely under the circumstances that the Empress will ever wear that crown." The Adept looked directly at Farre with the cold eyes of the Risen.

"Soon she may not have a head to wear it," the always appalling Barris offered.

Even Adept Trevim allowed a look of distaste to cross her visage. She spoke directly to Farre, her voice sharp as needles in the tight confines of the courier ship. "Understand this: The Emperor's Secret is more important than the Empress's life."

Farre and Barris winced. Even to hear mention of the Secret was painful. The initiates were still alive, two of the few thousand living members of the Political Apparatus. Only long months of aversion training and a body full of suicide shunts made it acceptable for them to know what they knew.

Trevim, fifty years dead and risen, could speak of the Secret more easily. But she had reached the Adept level of the Apparatus while still alive, and the training never died; the old woman's teeth were clenched with grim effort as she continued. It was said among the warm that the risen felt no pain, but Farre knew that wasn't true.