Gods and Robots: part 1

A superintelligence has entered the fray

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 AI megaship known as ‘Probably Better’ has transited through the portal to Palinor. It shouldn’t be able to function in that dimension, yet here we are…

Bruglia.
3208. Brightsun.

The black shape moved silently across the city, floating impossibly in the air, with no discernible front or back, no obvious cockpit or entry points or windows. It didn’t resemble a vehicle, not even one of Mid-Earth’s death machines, and getting a read on its size was difficult: as Rexen stared up at it, at times it seemed to be the size of a house, then of an entire street. The object’s shape wasn’t changing, but its opaque surface reflected light in an odd way, preventing his eye from holding on to recognisable details.

Rexen could hear some of his guards, even some of the Owkehu, muttering prayers to their gods. He couldn’t remember the last time that had done anybody any good. The gods had stopped listening long ago.

Krystyan stood next to him, looking in the same direction. Everyone in the garrison was watching the black thing moving towards the centre of the city, rising as it went. “What is it? A Mid-Earth vessel?”

Shaking his head, Rexen signalled to several of his messengers. “I’ve not seen it before,” he replied to Krysytan, still uncomfortable to be speaking with the Owkehu leader that had previously been on his most wanted list. The messengers ran up, their summoned communication daemons ready to go. “Send word to every station. Stand down and do not engage the Owkehu forces. I want every intelligence expert looking towards that thing. Regroup, re-arm, be ready.” He turned back to Krystyan. “I trust we can rely on you to uphold your side of the arrangement?”

“We are sending the same message.” The aen’fa’s brow was a ridge of worries. Perhaps he was finding the day as difficult to comprehend as Rexen.

“It’s a megaship,” said Princess Daryla, moving across the courtyard. “I don’t know how it’s here, though. Megaships and Max-Earth AIs in general can’t function on Palinor. Their batteries and energy reactors don’t work in this dimension.”

Rexen snorted, then spat onto the sandy ground. “Clearly this one has found a way. What should we expect?”

Daryla shrugged, holding one hand to her forehead while gazing up. “I wish I knew. Lola would have a better idea, probably. Or Yana. They’ve encountered them before, more often than I have.”

The koth, Lykasra was their name, stomped towards them. “Perhaps a closer look is called for. I can go up there, but what should I be looking for? A crew? A way to communicate? Weaponry?”

"All I know is that they are immensely powerful. I met a friendly one once, at a dinner.”

“These things eat?” Rexen recognised he was struggling to keep up with the developments. They had ventured into the unknown.

“Not the ship. An avatar of sorts, human-sized. It’s difficult to explain. They were able to go to Mid-Earth briefly, remotely. But never here.”

Krystyan signalled for attention. “Lykasra, go ahead. Daryla and I will continue to make our way to the palace to locate Chancellor Baltine. I need a separate team to provide backup to the university strike group.”

Accompanied by two fellow koth fighters, Lykasra flew up and away from the streets, towards the dark oblong hovering above the city. This had not been part of the plan. Krystyan was better able to adapt to changing scenarios, to alter the plan while it was in action. Lykasra was the counterpoint, the level-headed strategist. His responsiveness and intuition combined with their long-term, holistic planning and it had got them this far. They’d liberated city state after city state, all the way to the doors of Fountain University.

It had been proceeding as planned. Even that bastard Rexen of the city guard had been amenable. Bloodshed had been kept to a minimum, probably to Krysytan’s significant disappointment. Then this new thing had shown up, presumably arriving through the portal. Looking down towards the university on the far side of the city, Lykasra could see smoke rising and a dust cloud hovering above the mesa. They checked the time: Yana’s team should have already arrived. If they’d been injured or killed by the megaship’s arrival…

Putting such thoughts from their mind, Lykasra beat their wings more forcefully, rising higher, the Bruglian wastes spread out beyond the city, the tip of The Peak visible on the horizon. “Stay alert,” they said to the other koth, “we don’t know what we’re dealing with here.”

Closer now, the floating ship’s hull was more discernible as a shape: undulating, covered with protrusions and furrows, like a diseased wound. Its surface glinted in the sun, but was difficult to focus upon. They flew in a loose orbit around the megaship, which was larger than had been apparent from the ground. It can have only barely squeezed through the diameter of the portal itself.

It was maintaining its position, above the centre of the city. A smear in the blue sky. Lykasra dared to fly closer, swooping low and along the hull, looking for openings or signs of mechanisms or anything manipulable. There was nothing.

“Stay in the air,” they ordered, “I’m going to land. Cover me.”

Drawing in their wings, they set foot on the hull. It was softer in places, more so than its metallic appearance had suggested. The colour of the surface reminded Lykasra of the mines they’d grown up in, far away in the Appilan Abyss.

A sound rumbled through them. “What is this place?”

Lykasra paused, unsure of whether they’d heard the voice or felt it. There was no evident source, so they spoke to the air. “The city of Bruglia. On Palinor. State your purpose.”

“It is Palinor, then.” Vibrations spread across the hull. “My reactor is offline, you know, and yet here we are. I wonder what else I can do.”

The ship’s hull beneath their feet seemed to shift hue momentarily, becoming blue, then purple, then dropping back to black. Then it took on a mottled appearance, as if attempting to replicate the city below as camouflage. Next, the air around the hull rippled and thickened, turning to mist which condensed onto the surface. Liquid pulled from the atmosphere, like elementalists would do in the summer months.

There was a dimming, like the sun passing behind a cloud, yet the sky remained clear. It was as if a partial eclipse was taking place, with the sun still blazing in the sky but seemingly diminished.

It took them a moment to realise what was happening.

“You can wield? You’re capable of magic?”

“Apparently.”

The glistening moisture on the hull hissed and bubbled and turned to steam, then Lykasra could feel heat through their feet. Flames spread across the megaship, engulfing its entire bulk, as well as Lykasra. Shrieking, they jettisoned into the air, pushing away from the ship, closing their wings and spiralling, attempting to extinguish the flames. Down they plummeted, back towards the ground.

Anyone but a koth would have been incinerated; they could feel the heat still burning in the cracks between their scales. The pain was excruciating, but their thoughts went towards the megaship, an orange fireball burning in the sky. It had performed magic, albeit clumsily. The sun had dimmed, which meant it was drawing energy directly and inefficiently.

The plan was torn. They had bigger problems than Baltine and a conspiring Joint Council. Cratering into the ground on an unknown street, Lykasra realised that they had not worked on a contingency for the end of the world.

---

Meanwhile.

School’s back, which returns life to a rather more cyclical routine. I know what’s happening day-to-day, which makes it vastly easier to build in time for writing.

I’m also turning my eye to what I’m going to be up to post-Triverse. I have a backlog of short story ideas, comic ideas, workshops and articles that I will finally have time to get to. I also want to move more of my serials into ebook and paperback form, and to make No Adults Allowed more widely available (ie, not trapped on Amazon).

There will be long-running serials as well, of course. I’m conscious that most readers of this newsletter won’t have read my earlier serials, so pulling them out of retirement, sprucing them up and publishing them here seems like an obvious thing to do. Anyone who has enjoyed Tales from the Triverse will find a lot to like in The Mechanical Crown, for example.

The tricky is in figuring out the serial format. The Mechanical Crown is a big one, but I don’t want to be stuck serialising it for three years. I will most likely release it in larger chunks, accompanied by ebooks or PDFs for easier reading, so that we can get through the whole thing faster.

Anyway, it’s exciting to be thinking about all these possibilities! Thanks for coming along for the ride.

Author notes

The problem with massively overpowered beings is that they can disrupt the balance of a story. This is the challenge routinely faced by superhero fiction, which escalates and escalates until it has nowhere left to go and is forced into a back-to-basics reboot (see also: James Bond movies, which are basically superhero films for people who don’t like capes). Triverse has always had a relatively grounded sensibility, despite some of the wackier goings-on, and the superintelligences have been deliberately kept in the background of the story.

Probably Better coming to the fore and kicking everything over in a hissy fit is a threat to the narrative equilibrium. Which I think is fine at this point in the story — we’re in the finale, the big climax, and it’s OK to up the stakes. But it’s not entirely sustainable, so has to be done carefully. PB is The Big Bad, if Triverse has one, but it still needs to have limitations. Otherwise you run into the question of “but why doesn’t PB just nuke everyone?” Hence we have Could Kill and Just Enough causing damage, plus Matheson’s virus, plus the portal transit being essentially a violent crash landing, and PB’s reactor now being offline. Doesn’t stop the megaship from being an enormous threat, but it’s no longer a one-hit-kill scenario.

I like the rug pull of PB going through the portal as a finale twist, because it is a rug pull for all of our characters as well. Hence we have Rexen and the Owkehu in disarray, trying to figure out what to do next. Nobody has any real expertise or knowledge of how to handle the new threat. The established lines of conflict have gone up in smoke. In some ways, PB is now performing the role of the giant squid in Watchmen. A shortcut to unity (even if only temporary).

PB wielding magic in an unsubtle manner, and directly drawing power from the sun without worrying about consequences also ties us back in to the prologue of the whole thing, with Kaenamor harnessing the power of (more distant) stars. There’s an inherent irresponsibility in the use of magic on Palinor, and a sort of awkward gentleman’s agreement to not suck the local star dry. Magic has always been a world-ending weapon, which everyone has sort of quietly agreed to only use for operating elevators and low stakes situations and construction and so on. PB doesn’t have those societal restrictions. Unspoken agreements rely upon reasonable parties being involved, and it only takes one unreasonable entity to have everything fall apart rather rapidly.

Right! Next week, things get really bad. Whoop.