the pellegrini is doing to you? Promises and vows and servitude, and where did that ever get us? Why should we—’
‘Enough,’ Mieli says. ‘You have no right to question her. I am her servant, and I am no traitor. Don’t make me regret making you.’ Here, without the steady breath of meditation or candlelight to anchor her, the words and anger come out easily. ‘I am not your child. I am your maker. You have no idea what—’
And then, neutrino rain, gentle as a breeze. Anomalous.
She stops. The ship says nothing. The spimescape is silent.
Mieli scans the sky again. Synthbio seeds, thoughtwisp shells, and much further away, a lonely Sobornost raion in the main vein of this Highway branch. Still, her neck bristles.
Maybe I should apologise , she thinks. Perhonen is trying its best to watch over her. That’s what it has been doing ever since she brought its spirit up from the alinen—
A bright line splits the spimescape in two like lightning. The ship and her words vanish in white noise. The scape goes down.
Mieli comes back to her body with a force like a thunderclap. Around her, Perhonen rings like a bell. A ragged tear in the hull shows blackness and stars. Air rushes out.
In the middle of the cabin, there is a bright, dancing dot. White beams flash from it in all directions, like from a lighthouse gone mad. The bonsai trees next to Mieli burst into flame.
Never pray to the Dark Man , Mieli thinks.
It takes me a long, long time to come back from the memory of the arrest.
There is blood in my mouth. I have been biting my tongue, and it hurts. The taste of failure is worse. I spit. Droplets of spittle and blood float in front of me like a string of glistening pearls, white and dark red.
It was dangerous to play the pellegrini like that. A high roller’s luck. She had to be in Mieli’s body, like last time. Sobornost gogols get confused in the flesh, easy to read, easy to manipulate, no matter how godlike they are in the virs. She gave me exactly what I needed. The door in the memory castle is open. I remember Earth. I remember the prince in the jannah. And in spite of the pain, the plan is now whole in my head.
And that’s when the diamond policeman from space hits me in the face.
Mieli is still holding the coral drinking bulb in her hand when the beam sweeps over her. The liquid inside boils, and the bulb shatters with a mournful note, swallowed by the roar of the vacuum. For a moment, the heat is almost gentle, welcome after the chill of the spimescape. Then it comes down on her like the fiercest löyly steam in an Oortian sauna.
Her metacortex reacts. Her subdermal smartmatter armour kicks in. Third-degree burns become damage statistics. Quicktime freezes the world into a slideshow of still frames.
In the combat autism, the world always makes sense.
Zoom in .
In the heart of whiteness, there is a machine, a fraction of a millimetre long: a sleek thing like a dagger, with delicate petals protruding from its hilt. Faces, carved around the needlelike tip. A Sobornost device—
The knife-flower moves. Even in quicktime, it is like a wasp, dancing a deadly dance amongst Perhonen ’s butterfly avatars. Its strobing beam sweeps along the cabin’s wall, dancing in a random pattern, leaving behind a fiery scrawl. It turns towards Mieli.
Perhonen slams a q-dot bubble around it and pumps the binding energies of the artificial atoms up. The mirrored sphere bounces around the cabin and starts to glow.
Lasers , Mieli thinks at the ship, arming her own weapons. Get ready to throw it out and burn it . She positions herself between the knife-thing and the thief, who is floating motionless, eyes closed, puts up another q-dot wall to keep him safe.
Tactical gogols feed analysis results into her metacortex. The thing’s beam is scanning , like an aggressive version of a zoku Realmgate, capturing information but destroying the source, sending the results to someone. The heat is bandwidth .
Killing it all,
‘Enough,’ Mieli says. ‘You have no right to question her. I am her servant, and I am no traitor. Don’t make me regret making you.’ Here, without the steady breath of meditation or candlelight to anchor her, the words and anger come out easily. ‘I am not your child. I am your maker. You have no idea what—’
And then, neutrino rain, gentle as a breeze. Anomalous.
She stops. The ship says nothing. The spimescape is silent.
Mieli scans the sky again. Synthbio seeds, thoughtwisp shells, and much further away, a lonely Sobornost raion in the main vein of this Highway branch. Still, her neck bristles.
Maybe I should apologise , she thinks. Perhonen is trying its best to watch over her. That’s what it has been doing ever since she brought its spirit up from the alinen—
A bright line splits the spimescape in two like lightning. The ship and her words vanish in white noise. The scape goes down.
Mieli comes back to her body with a force like a thunderclap. Around her, Perhonen rings like a bell. A ragged tear in the hull shows blackness and stars. Air rushes out.
In the middle of the cabin, there is a bright, dancing dot. White beams flash from it in all directions, like from a lighthouse gone mad. The bonsai trees next to Mieli burst into flame.
Never pray to the Dark Man , Mieli thinks.
It takes me a long, long time to come back from the memory of the arrest.
There is blood in my mouth. I have been biting my tongue, and it hurts. The taste of failure is worse. I spit. Droplets of spittle and blood float in front of me like a string of glistening pearls, white and dark red.
It was dangerous to play the pellegrini like that. A high roller’s luck. She had to be in Mieli’s body, like last time. Sobornost gogols get confused in the flesh, easy to read, easy to manipulate, no matter how godlike they are in the virs. She gave me exactly what I needed. The door in the memory castle is open. I remember Earth. I remember the prince in the jannah. And in spite of the pain, the plan is now whole in my head.
And that’s when the diamond policeman from space hits me in the face.
Mieli is still holding the coral drinking bulb in her hand when the beam sweeps over her. The liquid inside boils, and the bulb shatters with a mournful note, swallowed by the roar of the vacuum. For a moment, the heat is almost gentle, welcome after the chill of the spimescape. Then it comes down on her like the fiercest löyly steam in an Oortian sauna.
Her metacortex reacts. Her subdermal smartmatter armour kicks in. Third-degree burns become damage statistics. Quicktime freezes the world into a slideshow of still frames.
In the combat autism, the world always makes sense.
Zoom in .
In the heart of whiteness, there is a machine, a fraction of a millimetre long: a sleek thing like a dagger, with delicate petals protruding from its hilt. Faces, carved around the needlelike tip. A Sobornost device—
The knife-flower moves. Even in quicktime, it is like a wasp, dancing a deadly dance amongst Perhonen ’s butterfly avatars. Its strobing beam sweeps along the cabin’s wall, dancing in a random pattern, leaving behind a fiery scrawl. It turns towards Mieli.
Perhonen slams a q-dot bubble around it and pumps the binding energies of the artificial atoms up. The mirrored sphere bounces around the cabin and starts to glow.
Lasers , Mieli thinks at the ship, arming her own weapons. Get ready to throw it out and burn it . She positions herself between the knife-thing and the thief, who is floating motionless, eyes closed, puts up another q-dot wall to keep him safe.
Tactical gogols feed analysis results into her metacortex. The thing’s beam is scanning , like an aggressive version of a zoku Realmgate, capturing information but destroying the source, sending the results to someone. The heat is bandwidth .
Killing it all,
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