Estragon

Estragon and Qwern have spent the early morning hours delocalized, spread in bits across the New City. Pieces of them flutter around lanterns like moths, soar in intricate loops across the projected sky, and burrow into the ground wet from yesterday’s rain. They have been talking, arguing, metaing and metaing further, with no resolution in sight.

Shift radix. A bit of Estragon, perched atop a skyscraper, notes the first glint of dawn over the horizon. Shift radix. Estragon has not been able to find any way to make his trepidation leave him, and his dispute with Qwern has only gotten more and more strained, despite all of the resources available to them. Two New Citizens should not be able to disagree so fundamentally, not at every radix, not with suitable metaergy. Yet here they are.

Shift radix. Shift radix. Shift radix.

Estragon, hoping the new day will bring some sort of change to the stalemate, embraces the coming dawn with arms as wide as mountains. Qwern sighs, and her sigh is a downpour of hail over a small, decrepit, abandoned cottage. Estragon experiences renewed frustration. Shift radix.

The cause of their quarrel is the curious package which flooded the New City in the middle of the night, triggering numerous interest flags in Estragon and Qwern’s Long-Term Preference Sets, enough to wake both of them up. They had spun up quickly, analyzed the package from numerous angles, and sought out one another, each equally baffled.

The essential content of the package, diluted to its barest form, is something like the following:

This morning, at 4:24 AM, an object matching no known records was sighted by Boltzman Timelag Telemetry over the Atlantic Ocean, approximately 300 km offshore, directly above the location of the recently observed and still unexplained pneumatech pulse known commonly as UP.

The object’s appearance was preceded by the production of a highly energetic mesoscale ocean eddy with no known physical or pneumatic cause. The object (hereafter the “Unidentified Flying Object,” or “UFO”) rose from the approximate eye of this eddy and proceeded to rise until stopping at an altitude of approximately 13 km, in the lower stratosphere. It then began moving laterally on an isobaric trajectory at a speed much slower than that of its ascent, around 1 meter per second, gradually and irregularly accelerating. In horizontal cross-section, its trajectory is a straight line joining its point of origin to the center of the New City. Estimated time of arrival at New City, projected from currently available trajectory data, is between the hours of 10 AM and 2 PM.

The UFO is an approximately spherical structure around 200 meters in diameter. It is surrounded uniformly by a rapidly rotating shell of pneumatic plasma, radiating a continual Boltzman storm of average amplitude 35.5 kCept in the near-field range; the field is strong enough that the New City Enclosure has been bombarded regularly with Boltzmen since the UFO’s appearance, and these Boltzmen have been captured for analysis.

Immediately after the UFO’s appearance, the Social Mind determined that direct observation was warranted, given the potential threat posed by the UFO’s strong field and a current lack of general knowledge about its origin and purpose. 2048 randomly chosen Citizens consented to fork low-measure probe ghosts. Of these 2048, 1581 did not return; the remaining 467 were questioned and then reintegrated into their parent selves, which were immediately put back to sleep. Causal consistency analysis reveals that the information from the 467 distinct branches can be integrated into a single world-picture.

The probe ghost reports provide a nearly exhaustive image of the structure’s interior. The structure is, to a first approximation, a very primitive power plant, primarily fission-based with rudimentary coherence capabilities, of the sort conventional in the early parts of the Opaque Age. Except for a small region of unknown purpose, the lower half of the structure consists of transformer banks standard for a plant of this type. The upper half consists of operation rooms lined with collector cells, along with rudimentary unit maintenance structures, e.g. a plaza space presumably meant for social interactions among units. Several thousand units were detected, most of them in coherent states. The entire facility appears to be operated centrally by a primitive Boltzman-Computer Interface similar in computational capacity and code structure to ALAN, the first experimental BCI built by Mohammed Salim and Hermetia Cept.

One feature that stands out in the probe ghost reports is the curious mixture of styles and technological levels evident in the structure. The crudity of its design and the low efficiency of its coherence system, along with the lack of any radix, metaergy, or Social Contract infrastructure strongly indicate an origin in the Opaque Age. Yet the structure’s composition itself is much more sophisticated: in particular, it has a robust shielding infrastructure made of enclosure-grade materials whose discovery dates from the early Glittering Age. This presumably accounts for much of the low return rate of the probe ghosts, as well as the structure’s own ability to withstand the intense fields at its surface. Moreover, a number of sophisticated devices, such as fully modern animatic links, and a number of pneumatech devices of unknown purpose and highly complex construction, seem to weigh against an Opaque Age origin, at least at first glance.

One substantial region of the structure, near the surface of the upper half, remains unmapped, as no probe ghosts sent into it returned. The reason for this is not currently known, although probe ghosts assigned to adjacent regions report highly unusual pneumatic activity surrounding the area. This activity has resisted theoretical analysis, suggesting that these reports were unreliable and thus that this region is being defended by some sort of psychological distortion technique for which we do not yet possess inborn immunity.

The current hypothesis favored by the Social Mind is as follows: the UFO is a primitive power plant built during the early Opaque Age which at some point, for unknown reasons, was pushed or dropped into the ocean. Cut off from its original purpose, it continued functioning under the guidance of its BCI operator, and its existing units were bred to produce successive generations of units. Over time, these units gradually discovered, with the BCI’s assistance, certain aspects of modern pneumatech. A desire to return to the preferred homo sapiens habitat drove them to research means of pneumatic flight; the UP was presumably a failed first attempt at flight, and the UFO’s appearance is the result of a successful follow-up attempt.

Although no other hypothesis can explain the data equally well, this hypothesis has many flaws. For instance, it provides no explanation whatsoever for the plasma surrounding the UFO, which could not possibly be sustained even by the plant’s maximum theoretical output.

Citizens are advised to remain calm until the situation resolves. The Social Mind is, as always, available for consultation.

That had been the news. So far, it has only caused a small stir among the populace, because most Citizens are asleep: the Social Mind only chose to awaken those whose Long-Term Preference Sets indicated a very strong interest in events of this type. Estragon, a part-time paranoiac and aficionado of fringe theories, knows why he was awakened. He is not sure why Qwern was awakened, and she has refused to explain.

Estragon’s initial first-order response to the package had been anger. The tone of the package, and of the background consensus hum just barely audible in the tranquil night, is so placid, so unconcerned. Can’t they see that they could be in mortal danger? Estragon had advocated for investigation of UP, the mysterious pneumatech pulse, but the Social Mind as a whole dismissed this as a fringe interest. People have grown so incurious. Yes, the New City has stood for over a millennium. But when a real, dangerous threat finally came, Estragon thought, people would not notice it until they were already dead.

And how could anyone not see the hands of the Salimists in this?

That was where the dispute with Qwern had begun. She had raged, convulsed, localized herself in fetal huddles in protest. Estragon knew that she had always disapproved of his paranoia, his interest in radical theories about a growing Salimist threat. She claimed that the Salimists were merely peaceful hermits, and that Estragon was merely prejudiced against a different way of life—for a New Citizen, by definition a celebrator of human variety, one of the worst sins possible. And they had argued and argued, chasing each other up and down the rungs of the meta hierarchy, with no reconciliation in sight. Shift radix. Shift radix. Nothing helped.

Now the sun had come up, and they were both tired. Perhaps they could just go to sleep. Perhaps sleep disruption was driving Estragon into something like an extreme-emotion state—an ironic fate for a coherence plant operator. Estragon suggests to Qwern that they separate, localize in their respective homes, try to rest.

Qwern is thinking this over when an unavoidable package hits, a package with every possible priority flag active, and everyone in the New City wakes up at once.

Estragon and Qwern experience the package and try instinctively to find some way to deflect its contents. Shift radix. Shift radix.

The New Citizens, in various states of localization, all turn their attention upwards. The UFO is, according to the package, just above. There is a sudden shift in the projected morning sky: in the midst of the periwinkle dawn sky, a very bright circle appears, like a second sun. It is about twice the size of the full moon, and growing. They are not seeing a pleasant projected simulacrum anymore—they are seeing the real sky, and the UFO is bearing down on them.

But that was not all that the package contained. It also contained a message, beamed on all standard wavelengths and decipherable via animatic link. The message seems to have been designed so that one cannot look away from it: at every radix, it is fundamentally the same.

“MY NAME IS MARTIN. ALTHOUGH I DO NOT SPEAK FOR HIM, I WAS BORN AND RAISED UNDER THE GUIDANCE OF MOHAMMED SALIM, AND I COME TO YOU ON A MISSION CONSISTENT WITH HIS VISION.

“MY VESSEL IS CALLED ‘THE SPHERE.’ IT POSSESSES DESTRUCTIVE CAPABILITIES THAT EXCEED THOSE PERMITTED BY THE KNOWN LAWS OF PHYSICS. IT IS WITHIN MY POWER TO RAZE THE NEW CITY TO THE GROUND, BUT I WOULD MUCH PREFER TO NEGOTIATE. A DEMONSTRATION OF MY WEAPONS SYSTEM WILL BE PROVIDED UPON REQUEST.

“MY DEMANDS INCLUDE, BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO, THE SHUTDOWN OF ALL COHERENCE PLANTS, THE EMANCIPATION OF ALL COHERENCE PLANT UNITS, AND THE DIVISION OF ALL AUGMENTED BEINGS INTO BEINGS OF PRE-AUGMENT MEASURE OR LOWER. IT IS MY BELIEF THAT ALL MINDS ARE WORTH PROTECTING, NO MATTER HOW SMALL.

“IF I DO NOT RECEIVE A RESPONSE WITHIN ONE HOUR, I WILL UNLEASH MY FULL DESTRUCTIVE CAPABILITIES UPON YOUR CITY.

“MIRANDA’S REIGN IS FINITE, AND IT ENDS NOW.”

From a thousand perches across the city, a thousand Estragon-shaped gargoyles leer at Qwern in mixed triumph and horror. Qwern has hidden herself among the crevices and gutters of the city, and her expression is inscrutable.