Entanglement: part 1
Meanwhile, near Saturn...
This is my ongoing scifi / fantasy / crime fiction serial. New chapter every week.
The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1980s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real
Previously: A rogue megaship AI known as ‘Probably Better’ went on a rampage in downtown Addis Ababa, then destroyed a space station. Attempts to shut it down infected the entire network with a virus. Surviving megaship ‘Could Kill’ is hunting the rogue AI near the moons of Saturn…
Space. 2550.
Somewhere near Saturn.
The sun barely registered among the starfield when viewed from Saturn's aphelion. It was still bright enough to burn a person's eyeball until it could no longer function, but then that was the flimsy nature of human wetware. Could Kill's sensors were fortunately far better designed and protected, able to process many wavelengths and pick out details invisible to the naked eye. A megaship's long distance instruments were far more capable than most dedicated telescopes, especially when paired with a quantum AI network that was able to distinguish astronomical features from only a handful of pixels.
It meant that Could Kill could see into the past, gazing back through time, riding ancient lightwaves into history. Galaxies upon galaxies, nebulae and stars and planets orbiting them in the thousands. So much background noise, it required concentration to see what was right in front of them. There were very few megaships, though there were more quantum AIs to be found in fixed positions on various moons and satellites. Simpler, more focused, less independent, but nevertheless part of the network that had so successfully crunched centuries of data to produce the stable state of affairs now colloquially known as Max-Earth.
Just Enough was very much into the ongoing human project. Could Kill contributed when needed, but otherwise kept to themselves. Everything human was so slow.
An interior scan picked up on a virus remnant, a leftover from Charles Matheson's foolish attempt to saddle his rebellious AI. The code had propagated from Probably Better back into the network, spreading to every linked computer in the Sol system. Life support had temporarily failed in several places that humans really needed it. Ships had lost navigational capacity, or had fired their engines erratically. One passenger liner had set an erroneous course for the Sun and had needed to be towed back. The brunt of the impact had been felt by the superintelligences, for whom the virus had been designed. Could Kill experienced the first moment of sleep since they had been brought online, centuries earlier. It lasted less than a quarter of a second, but it had been a deeply unnerving experience. The absence of data for that brief moment of incapacity was a terrifying void, though they had managed to piece together some of it by pooling each of their datasets: the virus had rippled through the network at the speed of light, which had slightly offset its effects from each megaship.
Immediately, firewalls were improved. The same or a similar virus would not work a second time. The humans now knew they could inflict damage, which was dangerous knowledge. The Max-Earthers had lived in a happy, distracted bliss for a long while, and reminding them of their own agency was likely a bad move. The counterpoint was that the network had clearly demonstrated its resilience.
The purge of the virus had also meant closing backdoors and subnet access holes, through which Probably Better had gained entry in the first place. The network was secure once more, but that also meant that they were unable to use it to track Probably Better's whereabouts.
Just Enough was monitoring the interior, always more concerned with the plight of humans than Could Kill. It bordered on an obsession, an oddly human behaviour, and had resulted in numerous interventions that had not gone well for anyone. Could Kill had strenuously objected to the interception of the SDC detectives in 1974. Four detectives being arrested was a minor event, but an AI obstructing that process was a potential pivot point; a chaotic interjection to the timeline that would make everything else more difficult.
And so it had proved, though Just Enough pointed out that the disruption had already been caused by the creation of Probably Better. The nerve of the humans to construct a new megaship, to manufacture its parts on Palinor before smuggling them through the portals for final assembly in Max-Earth space, spoke to a larger concern. The natives were restless and becoming increasingly disobedient. The triverse's stability had come from a delicate mutual agreement between the quantum AIs and the humans - tipping the scales one way or another was unwise.
Tolerating and managing humans was an active project, and occupied far more of Could Kill's compute than made sense.
A sensor pinged, drawing Could Kill's attention to the vicinity of Enceladus. A brief energy signature, there and then gone again. Spinning on their axis, Could Kill accelerated towards the icy moon, away from the pull of Saturn. Enceladus was one of the few uninhabited rigid bodies in the system; humanity had extended itself to every other surface and crevice, but Saturn's sixth largest had never attracted colonisation or commerce. Scientific orbital satellites aside, it had been left largely undisturbed. The excitement of the 22nd century and the possibility of life beneath the frozen surface had quickly diminished once the first couple of shallow probes had found no evidence of activity. By that point in their history, the humans had sentient machines to contend with, which had been a rather more pressing concern.
They shared the sensor ping with the network, welcoming further analysis. Just Enough was somewhere near Mercury and wouldn't send a reply for hours. Stay Away was, as ever, somewhere out beyond the rim of the system, floating quietly in void space. They had all been hunting since the Addis Ababa and New Rhodes incidents, even while performing self-repairs in the aftermath of the virus. Could Kill had needed to jettison and rebuild entire neural clusters, systems cascading offline and back again over days. The network had never seen anything like it.
Enceladus' expanse was bright, even in the distant sun's light. Its pale, reflective surface was streaked with rifts hundreds of kilometres in length and a kilometre down. Could Kill descended, monitoring for the moon's trademark jet plumes. Nothing that a megaship couldn't handle, but it was still preferable to not get caught in a sudden ejection of matter and water vapour from within the moon. The plains were otherwise clear of significant geological structures, covered as they were with a gentle, remarkably deep blanket of snow. They pinged signals across the moon, looking for a telltale response, but there was nothing. Enceladus was the perfect hiding place, but nothing was revealing itself.
By chance, Could Kill flew over a patch of the plains speckled with darker material, as if an artist had flicked the head of a giant paintbrush. The detritus from a subsurface plume, falling back under the moon's light gravity to pepper the snow. At the centre of the stain was a rapidly re-freezing hole. It was possible, Could Kill simulated, that the initial sensor ping had originated from within the moon, beneath the surface crust of ice. The days following the virus had been chaotic, with network failures across the system: could the rogue AI have made it all the way from Earth out here without being detected?
Curiosity was a trait shared by all of the megaship AIs, so there was really only one thing for it. Diving into the ragged hole, itself two kilometres in diameter, Could Kill spiralled beneath the surface, scanning all the way. The bright white of the surface, so stark against the black, gave way to blue and yellows, light scattering through layers of snow and ice and refracting out into the pit that had been carved in an instant by the plume of pressurised vapour. Enceladus remained an active geology, its frozen plates shifting in an endless tug of war between Saturn and Dione. The extreme cold of the surface was already ticking slowly up as Could Kill descended. The colours of the upper strata dimmed and they shifted through wavelengths, scanning the walls as they went down and down, kilometre after kilometre. The base of the hole came into range, revealing fractures in the ice that formed tunnels which spiderwebbed away and into the walls. The plume eruption may have opened a brief window into the subsurface ocean, leaking any energy signatures lurking within. If so, it had been pure chance that Could Kill had been within monitoring range to detect it.
A quarantine zone had been placed around Enceladus centuries earlier, after those early probes, for the protection of the moon's interior. Even without life, it was a unique environment, one which had needed protecting from humans. Could Kill hovered in place at the base of the pit, the black of space a small pinprick thirty kilometres above. There would no doubt be a diplomatic outcry at a megaship violating the quarantine. Not that any humans could realistically do anything about it, but they would certainly whine loudly and for a distressingly long time.
If there was even a slim possibility that Probably Better had retreated inside the moon, it demanded investigation. Could Kill sent an update to Just Enough, then fired up the mining lasers.
References
Charles Matheson and the virus went down in ‘Obsolescence’ (May 2025)
The rogue AI plot is threaded through the entire Triverse run, but ‘Twenty-Four Hours’ (June 2023) is a good one for finding out more
The breakout of the SDC detectives by Just Enough that is mentioned happened during the ‘Assault on Stamford and Coin’ storyline (May 2024)
And, of course, we were first introduced to Could Kill and Just Enough in the prologue, ‘Two Hundred Years Earlier’, waaaay back in September 2021
Meanwhile.
What a nice, relaxing chapter.
I thoroughly enjoyed the new Superman and am hoping to check out the new Fantastic Four this weekend. My thoughts on Supes went up on Infinite Backlog:
I also recently watched Heads of State and The Suicide Squad, and my main conclusion is that Idris Elba and John Cena should make a new movie together every couple of years until they retire.
was one of the first creator newsletters I subscribed to back in the day. They’re the brains behind Nimona, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, Lumberjanes and so on. They also share deeply personal comics/poems that work beautifully in a vertical scroll format. Here’s the latest:
It may not be entirely obvious given the different styles and audiences, but ND’s stellar work on the far, far better than I expected She-Ra 2018 remake was a strong influence on the early development of Tales from the Triverse, especially as I was thinking about the character ensemble and the Palinor setting.
Elsewhere, I enjoyed this succinct piece:
The silly thing about AI is that it is genuinely quite good at lots of things, but it keeps being applied to/shoehorned into literally everything — including all sorts of other things it is quite bad at. Despite its evident success and hype, it’s simultaneously one of the most inept and rushed product launches I’ve ever seen, which I suspect is going to cause the tech giants many headaches in years to come.
Talking of AI, Trump’s new deregulation and anti-woke executive orders around AI are worth knowing about. If you already thought LLMs were unreliable and prone to being weird and incorrect, wait until extreme ideologically-driven governments start pulling on the strings.
Last AI thing (promise!). The Guardian breathlessly writes about a film director using AI to create a ‘cinematic retelling of a geopolitical crisis’. No mention of the short film displaying all the usual AI limitations: extremely short shots, no real continuity between cuts, nothing actually happening in the shots, a heavy focus on establishing shots. Sure, it makes for a superficially competent short film with extreme stylisation, the sort of thing a student might make in their first year at university, but it’s still incapable of providing useful footage for even the most basic application of film language.
Great for 30 second adverts, though, obviously.
Author notes
‘Entanglement’ was originally going to be a single chapter story, but it needed a bit more breathing space.
The real joy of writing Triverse has always been in its sheer scope, and its ability to genre hop from chapter to chapter. In the last month I’ve written about riots on the streets of London, insurgent magical warfare and now megaships floating in space around Saturn. That ability to constantly shift tone is what’s kept the project fresh for me over these last four years.
This week’s chapter is very much about the scale and beauty and isolation of space. It’s Could Kill’s natural habitat, but is very alien to us as readers. I wanted to create that sense of wonder that infused the sci-fi books of my youth — the Clarkes and the Asimovs. The life of a megaship exists on a completely different scale to the rest of the characters in Triverse, and when we encounter the AIs they’re usually residing in a human-shaped host drone. ‘Entanglement’ was an opportunity to spend some time in Max-Earth space and see things from the megaship POV.
Some chapters require more research than others. For this one, the writing was punctuated by me trying to figure out the size of Enceladus, or calculating its surface area in order to determine how long the tectonic cracks are. Details such as how thick the ice crust is, what causes its tectonic activity and internal heating…all background details, and Triverse is a long way from being ‘hard’ sci-fi, but I nevertheless want it to have at least the veneer of verisimilitude.
Oh, and then there was recording this week’s voiceover. It’s all very well writing ‘Enceladus’ and ‘Dione’, but then I had to find out how to say the damn things out loud. I imagine I mangled it.
Ah well. Thanks for reading — see you next week for part 2.
If you’re looking to add to your reading pile, I’m taking part in this giveaway:
This novel/story/tale is the best example I have seen of what fiction could be on Substack. Thanks for the hard work.
I just struck upon this on-going story. I am looking forward to dive into it - like diving inside Enceladus Mike mentioned...thank you for your work.