Federations

A wave of cold washed over us as someone’s swarm sucked the air’s ambient heat. I squeezed my eyes shut for the skull-crushing blow, but instead, I could breathe again. I opened my eyes. Kav stood over what was left of Adam’s corpse, staring at nis blood-soaked hands.

I felt another little stab of Pity, but I told her to get lost. I had a planet to save.

I took a seat at my old control station. The memories came flooding back. Years ago, during the incident that convinced me to tell the U.P. to kiss my ass, Lewyana had pressed a holobutton and bombs had set off tectonic activity. In a matter of hours, four billion sentients had died in the worst earthquakes ever recorded. That was how the U.P. dealt with nonconformist threats.

If it had been bombs again this time, the Humpties would have been screwed, but I knew a thing or two about swarms. I had, after all, grown my AI friends very carefully. The controls and defenses in place in the disassembler were stronger than I had ever seen, but my friends had spent a million generations learning their way around a swarm.

I handed over 60% of my hardbrain’s processing capacity to the AIs. They squeezed inside, ranting and sharing data so fast it made me dizzy. For a brief second, I worried that they would overwrite me completely and take over. But they calmed down and we got to work, cracking codes and hacking back doors in the swarm net. We stopped the swarm only half-way through the disassembling process. I pulled up a spycam onto the data station and looked out on a world that had suffered more chaos in the past hour than it had in the past fifty thousand years. I guess a little evolutionary pressure on the survivors might not be a bad thing, in the long run. But my work was absolutely ruined. I had a record of the Humpty culture as it was, but not a complete one. It would have to do.

Kav was in tears. “I was too late.”

“Get used to it,” I said stiffly. “We’re the bad guys and we almost never win. In fact, not to be a downer, but all I did was buy them a little time. The U.P. will be back here soon and the next time, the Humpties won’t dare refuse.”

“Why do you even try then?” Kav asked, nis voice breaking.

I gave Kav the same speech my culture archivist friend had given me during my recruitment. “One day, some U.P. citizen is going to wake up and feel hollow inside. And they’ll go digging on the net, and they’ll find a hidden datastore I put there, rich with cultural history and practices. And maybe they won’t be a direct descendant of the original species, but with swarms, it won’t matter. They can change as easily as their ancestors became U.P. standard. They’ll sneak off, and the culture will come back from the dead, if only just for a little while before the U.P. stamps it out again.”

“This has happened before?”

I nodded. “It has and it will again. We archivists tend to the process like a garden. We harvest the seeds and plant them in the net. Sometimes it takes a thousand years for them to take root, but when they do, they grow into one hell of a blossom.”

Kav sniffed and wiped at nis eyes. “That’s so . . . bleak.”

“I never said it wasn’t.”

Ne stared off into the middle distance. “There’s a new voice to my swarm,” ne said. “Is that . . . ”

“Sorry—I guess my friends laid eggs.” Which explained the unexpected help in the fight. I was a little disturbed by the news. AI didn’t replicate, they were too complex, or so said the conventional wisdom.

:: HA HA HA I CAN HAS MULTIPLICITY ::

Quiet, you.

“Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t go back now,” Kav said, tone halfway between a statement and a question. “Not without purging my swarm of a sentient mind.”

“You kind of passed the commitment point a few klicks back,” I said.

The lights dimmed as the ship’s systems began to falter. Tied as they were to the captain’s now-deceased Swarm, I was surprised it had lasted as long as it did.

:: WILL LAND SAFELY | WITH RELATIVELY LITTLE HARM | ONLY A FEW BRUISES | ALMOST CERTAINLY 0 FATALITIES ::

I turned back to face Kav’s tear-stained face. “Thanks,” I said.

“For what?” Kav asked. “Leaving the U.P. I could handle, but harboring an illegal AI wasn’t . . . ” Kav paused. “I didn’t plan for that.” Another pause. I listened to the AIs chatter as they merrily hacked through the ship’s systems. “I guess I should thank you too.”

“My turn to ask ‘what for?’ ”

“Without you, I don’t think I would have been able to do it. The U.P. would have forced me to change, eventually, and I can’t go back to who I was.”

I had been planning up until that point to bring up the idea of nim swapping back to female, but decided against it for the time being. I had thought there was some chemistry between us, but maybe I was wrong. I sure as hell have been before.

:: BRACE FOR IMPACT IN T MINUS 10 ::

“Better hold on to something,” I said. “It’s nothing but bumps and bruises from here on out.”

“Goodbye, comfort,” Kav said wistfully.