Eccentric Orbits

Terahertz

Black Steel pauses before he plugs my brain in. Today his body is standard human, a form he adopts more and more: plain features, fine cheekbones, thin silver hair. The need to emphasise the difference is over. He smiles but his reluctance is still clear.

I don't like this, my friend.

I have to hear, and soon my brain won't be able to hack it. I'm not going to live forever like you.

Still he hovers, undecided.

Please, I say.

Very well. I'll boot you up.

I close my eyes while he works.

Once he wouldn't have dreamed of adopting such a mundane body-form, of course. I think about that first Terahertz gig; the way he uploaded to body after body, each form more disturbing than the last. A flaming Satan roaring fire. An hermaphrodite dragging enlarged sexual organs across the stage. A child peeling off her own skin in great sheets then dismembering herself, burrowing through muscle to wrench out bone and sinew even as she continued to sing like an angel.

It was the music that did it for me though: the riot-control subsonics, the searing guitars, the disorientating arrhythmia of the percussion. I thought I'd heard it all, grown bored with thrash, rap, techno, old school, new groove, you name it. This was something new. Visceral, thrilling, alarming. The crowd of cyberheads raved, reacting to both the music and the data encoded within it. Word was humans standing too close risked permanent brain damage. Some were there just to be outraged. Others wanted to be able to say they'd been present. But it wasn't like that for me. I loved it. Long before the horrors of the Soft War and the Hard War, long before the Pax Machina, right there and then I knew which side I'd be on when it came to it. Which side would call people like me traitor. For a time.

The chemical boosters are going in now. I'll ramp them up slowly.

I nod, feeling the chill of the chemicals spreading through my brain like sudden frost.

That early music was primitive of course, a collider smash of human sounds. But to their quantum brains, their Planck-time minds, it was all too slow, too ethereal. Soon Terahertz were playing music so accelerated only synthetic minds could appreciate it. Then only synthetic minds could even perceive it. They say some human children with very acute hearing can just detect a complete performance of the Megagician cycle, which they hear as a faint click, like an insect beating its wings together once. Other than that it's music closed off to humans. Until now.

Ready, says Black Steel.

I open my eyes for a moment and look up at him. He holds my hand.

I never thanked you, he says. For everything you did back then. For the battles and then the peace we bought.

I shake my head. There was never any need to thank me. I was doing what I wanted.

Good bye, my friend.

Good bye.

White light floods my brain. The adrenaline rush is alarming, an accelerating free-fall with no terminal velocity. I gasp. Distantly I can feel my body tensing and bucking on the table. The drugs and the electrical stimulants skyrocket my nervous system into orbit, hyperactivating it, overloading it then holding it at a trembling, superhuman peak for a brief moment.

While the music is played to me: a complete rendition of Black Steel's own, classic Road Noise, performed live there and then, a private concert just for me.

And then it is over. Black Steel watches my fried brain die, before, as agreed, deactivating life-support.

So I imagine. In reality, I know none of this. For me, before the end, there is the music.

Fractal patterns explode into a myriad of voices in my mind; all the music I've ever heard woven into a coherent unity. Black Steel sings of stars and hearts, the dance of atoms and the ways of the world. Of everything all at once, every thing interconnected. Of love and longing and loss. Of crushing disaster and soaring triumph.

It is glorious and terrible and beautiful. It fills me, fills all the universe. And there, in that timeless instant, everything I've done makes sense.

wolF emiT

It was kissing Magda that made Sam destroy the universe.

She wasn't to blame. Neither was he, really. They were both just collections of subatomic particles, sufficiently complex to propagate something they perceived internally as consciousness. Still, he did blame himself. Just not enough, when it came to it, to stop himself.

Going to the Christmas party had been a mistake. He should have stayed in the lab and worked on his sculpted magnetic fields. But Dr. Gupta, stern-faced supervisor, had persuaded him with an uncharacteristic largesse. The man had actually grinned. Have one night off at least, Sam. You've earned it.

Sam knew Magda was going and so he went.

He and Magda talked off and on throughout the evening, shouting over the rowdy hubbub inside the Geneva nightclub. They laughed about their more eccentric colleagues at the Large Hadron Collider. They even danced a wobbly waltz at the end of the evening. But she only had eyes for Dr. Grimaldi in Astrophysics, in Dallas for a conference. Magda admitted as much and Sam really couldn't blame her. Grimaldi was handsome, brilliant, a rising star who worked, suitably enough, on stellar formation clouds. But, at the end of the evening, too much schnapps depressing their central nervous systems, he and Magda kissed.

They'd worked together for two years, she on the theoretical side, he on his containment fields and antiatoms. She was brilliant, effortlessly scaling heights he struggled to ascend. She was also fantastically beautiful, her expressive face lit up by her intellect.

Their kiss lasted maybe five seconds. On such tiny moments does life pivot. He wondered if, in a near-infinite number of bifurcating universes, Magda had indeed fallen for him there and then. If those other Magdas had felt the flood of light in their arteries, experienced the thrill of all the new possibilities. Perhaps. The trouble was in this universe, the one this him perceived, she simply smiled and, leaning on him as they made their way out to the coach, mumbled a goodnight.

The following day, back at work, they said nothing about it. She resumed her calculations and he his experiments. It hadn't meant much to her, if she even remembered. The problem was, it meant very much indeed to him. She meant very much indeed. He tried to bury himself in his work, which was what one did, but it was futile. She would explain some subtlety of the time-reversed nature of antimatter and he would hear only music.

He waited six months before acting. Love was a biochemical reaction and he understood that levels in his brain could change. Six months would give his body time to adjust. But by then he longed for her more. The memory of those five seconds haunted him. Five seconds was vanishingly small compared to the span of a human lifetime, the life of the universe. It was also infinitely more than nothing. He relived them a thousand times before his plan came to him.

It was all highly theoretical. Obviously, no one had tried it before. But, quietly, with nobody noticing, he went past the point of caring.

One bright, breezy summer's day he put his plans into action. He tried not to think about what he was denying everyone else. Told himself it didn't matter anyway: actual, physical needs outweighed potential, theoretical ones. Didn't they?

He worked late in the lab. Nothing unusual about that. He fidgeted about for two hours, trying to look busy. Finally, with only ten minutes left on their LHC session, Dr. Gupta, stood, stretched and, with a curt nod, left.

Sam moved quickly, powering up the sculpted containment field. It was his great contribution to physics to make the fields expand exponentially as the antimatter within expanded. In effect, the antimatter shaped its own containment. The simple beauty of it still delighted him.

In a few moments he had everything ready. His consciousness wouldn't know what was happening, of course. Still, it didn't matter. He would experience the kiss again. In some sense. And although it would again last only five seconds, that would be worth it.

What are you doing, Sam? What the hell are you doing?

Dr. Gupta, standing in the doorway, fury on his face. Of course, his supervisor understood immediately. Sam stood frozen while Dr. Gupta lunged across the lab towards him.

For God's sake abort it! The time flow: we'll be thrown backwards!

Sam hesitated for only a moment. Then, before Dr. Gupta could reach him, he pressed the red button that initiated the antiatom cascade.

The vast explosion engulfed him.

*

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.edacsac motaitna eht detaitini taht nottub der eht desserp eh ,mih hcaer dluoc atpuG .rD erofeb ,nehT .tnemom a ylno rof detatiseh maS

!sdrawkcab nworht eb ll'ew :wolf emit ehT !ti troba ekas s'doG roF

.dessik adgaM dna eh …

The Armageddon Machine

Mackenzie watched the universe end. It was beautiful, like a flower closing up for the night. Stars and planets swirled inwards, spiralling around and down, faster and faster, collapsing into an infinitesimal particle. As silent as the sunset. The more space/time that was pulled in, the more massive the particle became and the more gravity it exerted on what remained of the universe.

The point of no return had already been passed. It was inevitable now that all of creation would reduce down to a single point. He wondered how it was he was able to watch without being affected. That couldn't be right. But it was surely only a matter of time. And what did that mean since time as well was being destroyed?

The scale shifted outwards. Now whole galaxies, superclusters of galaxies, were being sucked in. The rate of collapse increasing exponentially, the end of everything suddenly at hand. And then what? Would there be another Big Bang, the start of a pristine, virgin universe? Still he was outside, remote from it all.

There was nothing left but the invisible point and the void and him. And it wasn't the comfortable, familiar blackness of space he knew so well, but a terrible absence of space, a nullity.

Something still nagged at him that this wasn't right; he couldn't be watching this. It occurred to him he must be dreaming. It was a gloriously reassuring realisation but still he couldn't break out of it. It seemed to be a story he was stuck inside. He promptly lost the realisation.

Then came the noise, the start of the Bang, an alarmingly loud noise sounding strangely like the tolling of a bell. But how could that be possible? Of course, he was dreaming, becoming more and more confused as to what was real and what was not.

A familiar figure was standing over him. She was a musician from – what – Earth's nineteenth century? He had forgotten most of his history. She had bright, scarlet hair, teased up into a ridge of spikes. Her nose and eyebrows and ears were pierced with a variety of metal studs and pins. Her clothes were a deliberately ragged collage of ripped cloth, leather, lace and studded metal. She had a worried look on her face. The bell was a gentle but insistent chiming from the ship, waking him up. Or was he still dreaming? No. He had known the ship use this avatar before when speaking to him directly. He was on board the Higher Than The Sun. His ship. OK. He sat up blearily.

You're worrying about the Armageddon Machine more and more. Your nightmares used to be all memories of your experiences in the Draconian war. Now anxieties about the device have taken over. Maybe it's time you took a break.

He smiled, rubbing his eyes with two of his four hands. Kind of hard to get away from though isn't it? A device capable of bringing to an end the entire universe. Hard to escape something like that.

I guess.

You woke me because I was having a nightmare?

No. It has changed course again. You wanted to know.

Show me.

A wall of the cabin became a window, showing space outside. Everything looked the same. The unlovely machine was there in the centre, part grey asteroid and part black metal starship, like a creature half-emerged from an egg. All round it, at a respectful distance, a halo of twinkling lights. The ships of the flotilla, their courses shadowing that of the machine.

Can you spot any patterns yet, any reason for these course changes?

None. I have searched through the cultural and scientific records of all Million Star worlds, and everything we know about all other societies, and the movements of the ship match nothing. The course, the timings all appear chaotic. I still think our notion of a random-walk is the best; that the ship is searching for something and following some arbitrary-seek programming to do it.

Or it's defective, it's gone wrong somehow.

Indeed. Although judging by the normal effectiveness of Draconian military technology I'd say this was unlikely. I don't need to tell you that.

He grunted. Damn right. He watched the machine for a while, still a little stuck in his dream, expecting the thing to detonate at any moment. A pearly, yellow light pervaded the room, mimicking a pre-dawn glow. He had the whole fleet following a standard diurnal cycle. It seemed futile to be at battle-readiness.

Remind me how the Draconians pronounce the name of the ship.

"lsiur."

It sounded such a gentle word. And do we know yet what that might mean?

An exact translation is impossible. Maybe Ragnarok? The Final Machine? The Armageddon Machine?

That such a device could have been conceived, let alone built.

She sat down on the bed next to him. "From their point of view it made perfect sense. The Draconians thought it inherently desirable to kill other beings. That was why there were other beings. And why there were Draconians. It is quite conceivable they would construct such a machine when they were faced with their own demise. At least this way they could never lose the war against every other living thing. Only draw it."

Insane then.

"They thought the universe was theirs to use as they wished. They were unique in that they created a spacefaring technology solely in order to find more