Charles Stross - Love me

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4: Will you still love me ...

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The radiation storm passes, watched only by impassive sensors mounted on the hub of the

colony cylinder.

The eye of the storm is a small black hole: a spark of evil light in the abyss. It burns with a

cold heat, blasting a sleet of hard gamma radiation out into the darkness of space. The

hole itself is smaller than a protein molecule, a tiny knot of tortured spacetime that weighs

as much as a mountain range. A halo of decaying matter swirls around it, dragged ever

inwards by a force of gravity turned in on itself. As it closes in on the sump at the bottom

of the gravity well the accretion disk heats up, until atoms split in the incandescent glare

of an on-going explosion. A hot spray of high-energy radiation floods off it, hosing across

the plane of the gas giant's system of moons. The hole is being used as a synchrotron

source, an energy weapon bright enough to shine across interplanetary distances. A dark

shape hides behind it, indistinct but almost as large as the colony: the physical body of the

Ultrabright attack drone. The drone is a dumb killing machine, unmotivated -- as yet -- by

the cool and unsympathetic mind of its maker. Given time, this will change ...

Its path takes it a long way from icy Turing or airless Pascal, but that makes no difference

to their fate. A steady stream of exotic particles sprays out, bracketing Pascal and the L5

colony quite neatly. It's hotter than a solar flare, hotter than a nova: the radiation

temperature is astronomical, hot enough to boil lead.

Closest approach is ten million kilometres. Drifting at under two percent of light-speed,

the hole falls onward through the stellar system. In sixteen hours time it will reach the

orbit of Wirth, the terraforming candidate that circles close in around Ridgegap-47.

The neutral particle beam that bathes the hole in exotic matter shuts off abruptly. Unseen

moderators clamp down, damping the postron/electron reactions in the accretion disk. The

hole continues to digest its halo of matter for a few scant minutes, but the dinner is over.

Now it will starve until it reaches Wirth and the terraforming station Anubis abandoned

years before. It is already a small hole, dangerously close to the lower bounds of stability.

Small holes are hot, decaying by emitting Hawking radiation; this one is already toasting

in the millions of degrees. When it explodes, the flash will be visible light years away.

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4: Will you still love me ...

That event is due in just over sixteen days time, some kilometres beneath the crust of the

doomed planet ...

Oshi only really grasped the immensity of what had happened on the third day after the

storm.

Awakening had been hard. She'd struggled up from the depths of a nightmarish dream in

which she recapitulated the events of her early adulthood: condemned to relive the horrific

awakening on Miramor Dubrovnic, then to undergo the hardening of the cynical shell that

had protected her until the fateful mission on New Salazar. It was like sleep-walking

through hard-setting clay, or struggling for breath beneath the cool suffocation of an

avalanche. Remembering when she'd had Ivan was the least of it: his loss was somewhat

faded now, a sepia photographic memory with edges too blunted to cut deep. (Her

childhood, by contrast, remained the only thing that could easily break through the armour

she wore.)

But on the third morning she had opened her eyes gasping, her arms outstretched before

her in the idiot zombie-posture of free fall relaxation. "Where is --" she began.

Axial redoubt command bunker. Status report available.

"That's --" she stopped and blinked, the thick encrustation of sleep heavy on her eye-

lashes. She could feel the uncomfortable intrusions of her exoskeleton, tubes probing deep

within to irrigate and clean and feed her body. " How long have I been asleep?"

Two days.

Two days. She felt as if it had been two hours. "What's happened?"

Radiation levels decreased to normal. External life support

remains down. External colony support is on criticality

rung seven of eight. Prognosis: this station will cease to

be habitable in the near future.

"Oh."

It was all she could think of to say. She glanced round, taking in the survival gear lockers,

the airlock leading up and out towards the manufacturing and docking complexes of the

hub: the huge monitor that covered the end-wall of the command bunker. "External

sensors," she mumbled. "Give me what rim coverage you can manage: I want to take a

look."

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4: Will you still love me ...

Affirmative. Viewport on main screen ...

Over the next hour, Oshi learned that she was alone. The radiation had killed off most of

the higher life forms in the colony. Insects survived, thriving on the corpses, but nothing

else above the level of a mouse had survived for long, except the tapeworm.

The biological weapon was unstoppable. After taking root, it had erupted from the corpse

to wage systematic warfare on the entire colony. It ran wild through the residential

sectors, hyphae digesting the putrefying bodies that dotted the complex. Although it had

started as a mere parasite flatworm, it was now the most elaborate predator in the colony.

It cannibalised the genetic heritage of its victims, absorbing the data via an elaborate

nanoscale assimilation engine; a post-Lamarckian organism, it evolved by integrating and

expressing characteristics usually associated with other species. Fat cords and furry ropes

of fungus lay, corpulent and glistening, in pools of purulent fluid that contained anything

it couldn't digest. It randomly interpreted the DNA of dead people and animals, sprouting

random experiments derived from homoeobox control sequences. Strange phalloid

structures towered over the bulbous buildings, the bones of humans and deer and Goon

Squad meat machines scattered around their omnivorous trunks. An arm coated in fur

waved feebly from a bush of throbbing viscera near the medicentre. A cylindrical, dark-

skinned mushroom, its cap a wrinkled topology looted from some other species,

overlooked the wreckage of the Administrator's office with an expression of murine horror

on its flattened rodent face. Dying landpussies -- aerobic octopi, customised for low-gee

harvesting -- hung like purulent fruit from the mycotic trees, their skins strobing through

silvery-green panic hues as they died. Strange, rodent bushes whirred and chittered among

the branches, chained to their parent organism by long umbilical cords that resembled

everted intestines.

Oshi had no desire to share her biosphere with such a runaway horror. She had more than

a suspicion that if it caught her it would treat her as just another parcel of protein: in any

case, there was much that demanded attention in the core. The airlock doors stayed

resolutely shut, the axial redoubt running on canned air. There would be time to explore

later.

Oshi spent the next two days exploring her twilight domain, checking over resources and

making a comprehensive inventory. She didn't stop to think: somehow she knew that if

she stopped she might never start again. She worked with the feverish single-mindedness

of a crash survivor stranded in a desert far from civilization. She paused only to swallow

some meagre rations, or to close her eyes for an hour of exhausted sleep. The colony

central planning methodologies were intact, she discovered, dumped to static store before

the radiation attack. The robot factories, extending from the long axis of the colony like a

string of garlic bulbs attached to a medicine ball, could be powered up and reconfigured to

produce anything she desired. Resources were limited -- only a few megatons of raw

materials were on hand -- but Oshi could hardly see how that mattered. Three things could

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4: Will you still love me ...

happen in the near future. The ultrabright presence (she shuddered at this thought, which

rose to meet her in eerie dreams) might come to the colony; the colony itself might

disintegrate before the depradations of the ontological weapon chewing away at its guts:

or her own survival plan might succeed. Not that she held much hope for it, but it seemed

to her that the third option was little better than the other two. After all, she was twenty

light-years from the nearest other civilized world. And when she got there, if she got

there, the Boss would be sure to notice ...

When these worries assailed her she shook her head impatiently, laughed -- somewhat

dementedly -- and felt a transient sorrow. If only I'd kept my mouth shut in front of the

Boss none of this would have happened, she rationalised. If only the superbrights hadn't

trusted the entire system to one dangerously unstable AI, she would not have been needed

here. If only the escapists hadn't deployed that incredibly stupid biological weapon, or if

only they'd managed to follow her up to the redoubt ... this entire fiasco might have been

avoided by any number of gamits. Oshi felt a vast and tenuous sense of guilt, aggravated

by a sense of failure. It did not strike her as inappropriate. After all, in a very real way she

had failed.

The event that finally broke through her frail shell of obsession occurred on the fifth day.

That morning, Oshi awakened in the core control room with a sense of purpose. The night

before she had planned her day in advance; she was going to enter the factory zones,

locate certain items of equipment that were being assembled to her specification, and

move them to the docking bay. The items were specialised and deadly; lengths of

monofilament cable, refurbished attitude-thrusters, life support components for one of the

docked shuttlecraft.

Almost without thinking she found herself in the factory unit. It was a geodesic sphere

lined with robots that hurled components from one side to the other, guided by sonar and

timing interrupts. There was something organic about the process, like cilia lining the wall

of the gut of some primitive organism. Oshi waited impatiently, having arrived too early.

She floated in the main cargo entrance, keeping well out of the way; she had no desire to

be pulped between a flying thruster-chassis and a blind drone. It was there that she saw

something floating in the twilit centre of the room, not moving despite the barrage of

components drifting past on all sides. She frowned.

The object was asymmetric, lumpy, almost unrecognisable as it slid out of shadow, into a

harsh cone of light cast by a welding torch that illuminated its features mercilessly. Its rag-

doll face was withered and sunken; limbs flopped randomly where slowly-contracting

tendons had pulled them in gravity-free rigor.

Yes, she thought. Even here. Is there no end to it? A wave of depression swept over her.

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4: Will you still love me ...

Yes, that's right. Run away from it. Run away from reality! What else is there to do? Oshi

turned away, unable to express her sense of disconnected despair verbally -- she had a

morbid fear that if she started talking to herself she would slip slowly into a breakdown.

There seemed to be nothing around her but death on all sides; past, present, future.

Turning her face away from the accusing corpse, she made the connection; and she made

another one, via wisdom uplink, to the core communications buffer.

" Tell me your status," she sent. " List uploads in progress."

Status: functional following self-repair self-test

sequence. Pascal gatecoder responding but isolated.

Diagnostics indicate that a terminal Dreamtime fault

occured four days ago. No other gatecoders on line. All

uploads queued pending fault resolution. Total two thousand

three hundred and nineteen uploads in progress. Loading

nominal.

Oshi's eyes widened. "You're holding more than two thousand uploads! What happened

on Pascal?"

The literal-minded comm supervisor paused for a moment before answering. Query in

progress. Please wait. Please wait. Please wait --

confirmed. At T minus three hundred and sixty thousand

seconds Pascal monitors registered unacceptable distributed

degradation on all networked processes. Radiation induced

damage exceeded local emergency resources' ability to

offload processing at T minus three hundred and fifty-seven

thousand seconds. At T minus three hundred and fifty-six

thousand seconds approximately, Pascal Dreamtime entered a

distributed panic status and lost real-time synch. At T

minus infinity, Pascal Dreamtime went NP-incomplete.

The Dreamtime is down. Do you want to restart?

It took a moment to hit her. But when she understood, Oshi began to giggle

uncontrollably. She curled in on herself and floated into the maze of light and shadow and

drifting components, sailing on a stately waltz with the mummified corpse of the dead

engineer: and she laughed hysterically, sobbing when the breath came hard to her burning

ribs, then sobbing more slowly and rhythmically when she understood the magnitude of

what had happened.

Something bumped into her. She came to rest in mid-air, face to face with the wizened,

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Charles Stross - Love me

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