Wizard, Cabalist, Ascendant

Seth Dickinson

Inequality is inevitable. Someone always wins.

If you’re really so transcendently smart, Tayna, you would’ve known that from the beginning.

These are the things Connor’s geist says to chase her down off the Rockies, back out into the world she remade. Tayna thinks he means well, as he did in life. It’s not his fault he’s a prick, or that he’s blind to it.

Just another victim of structural forces.

Connor walks with her under blizzard skies. You tried to fix the world, he says. You thought you knew how to do it better than me. (His laugh doesn’t exist outside the machine caucus alloyed into her skull, but still she hears it echo off the peaks around her, rebound, diminish. When did she decide to make Connor’s voice thunder and geology?) But you only made it worse. You stole Haldane from me crying utopia but you fucked it all up.

The wind’s picking up. Tayna fastens herself to the mountain face, skin sealing to stone, and starts metabolising hydrocarbons for warmth.

Connor, she says. You’re kind of an asshole.

Coming from the woman who destroyed human civilization.

I saved the world.

From me. From my dream. (It’s been twenty-two years since she betrayed him, and Connor’s geist still sounds so hurt.) I could’ve avoided this. With Teilhard.

Yeah, Tayna says, downregulating the instinct to shiver. I saved it all. From you.

Connor’s geist puts a comradely hand on her shoulder, where her paramuscle deltoid tethers to laminated bone. Look at this, he says, gesturing downslope, down the range. You wouldn’t be going back down to visit if you weren’t afraid I was right.

It’s just a checkup, she says.

The very first people you meet, Connor says, are going to prove me right. They’re going to prove your whole ecosystem, your brave new post-structures world, is fucked. Irreparably, fundamentally, mathematically fucked. And I’m going to be the only way out.

Tayna hangs onto the Rockies and grits her teeth.

Not for the first time, she considers deleting Connor’s geist. She won’t do it—she’s better than that. But it feels good to think about. She’s not better than that.

Lillian, she says. Lillian.

The other geist coalesces out of the wind, keyed-up pareidolia summoning her face from blown-snow noise. Hey, she says, and then, with concern: You look cold.

Tayna can’t smile, because she’s sealed up her face against the wind. But Lillian’s only real inside her head, so she can probably feel the sentiment.

I’m afraid, she says.

She wants Lillian to hold her. This is sort of emotionally onanistic, since Lillian is part of her, built of old memory and bootstrapped simulation. (A special guilt she’s grappled with—when you have the ability to regulate and modify every aspect of yourself, to snuff or satiate every need, do you have a right to want anything?)

So what does it mean that Lillian frowns, draws back, and, exhaling lovingly rendered frost, says:

Oh. I can see why you’re scared. Things are going wrong.

Connor and Lillian know everything she knows. The Haldane network that ate her brain has room for the sweep of Tayna, and a few merely human minds too.

But they don’t usually agree on anything.

Ten years ago, in the days of post-civilizational convulsion and the rise of tentative new paradigms, Tayna visited with a little mountaineering collective near Kremmling, Colorado. They kept to themselves, eschewing the headnets coalescing around Colorado Springs. But like everyone they still used Haldane, still gave their bodies and brains over to the new power.

In theory, everyone had a choice. Tayna and Lillian’s subterfuge shattered Connor’s dream of monolithic engineered transcendence (Teilhard, her dreams still whisper, when she lets herself dream: Teilhard was the other way . . . ) and set the Haldane nanomech infrastructure loose, open-source, freely transmissible. Conversion was voluntary.

But, in retrospect, the choice was so one-sided it might as well have been coercion. The new breed didn’t need the systems that made baseline life possible, the states, the economies—and so those systems collapsed. Old shackles broken. A new world enabled.

Maybe, Connor and Lillian seem to think, just a chrysalis for something worse.

Tayna heads back towards Kremmling. She follows the old California Zephyr railway southwest through canyons cut in banded gneiss. The train doesn’t run now. The winter thaws into an early spring.

Do you miss trains? Connor asks. Governments? Civil society? Organized human achievement? I expect not, since you ruined them.

I made them unnecessary.

You balkanized the species.

I liberated them.

Tauntingly: Them?

Get new material, Connor.

One apocalypse isn’t enough for you, is it? You’re not going to be satisfied until you get the God job full-time.

In Gore Canyon, where the kayakers used to play, she finds people from Kremmling gathered in a rowdy knot up on the cliffs. They leap from the canyon walls on wings of paramuscle grown wrist to ankle and ride the rapids down through rock and hole until the chaos spits them out into calm water and they come up whooping.

Tayna sits down to watch for a while. They’ve diverged farther from the baseline, but that’s all right. That was really the whole idea. Ensure diversity. Avert Connor’s singularity—the monolithic future exploding out of a single stifled point.

They’re playing a computation game, for the joy of it. Watch the rapids, plot a course, and leap. Whitewater turbulence is a tough problem. Ten years ago nobody in Kremmling could’ve managed that.

The very first people you meet are going to prove me right.

She gets up from her roost and lights her antenelles to send a greeting.

Warmth comes back her way: welcome to a stranger. And the photon caresses of a millimeter-wave scan as a bunch of them team up to search her for guns or combat organs.

“Is Mariam here?” she calls. “I’m looking for my friend Mariam, if she’s still around—”

“Tayna!” Mariam calls, and sends a little pulse of happiness. “I thought you weren’t coming back.”

You never told me about her, Lillian’s geist says. Old friend?

The truth is that there are ten thousand Mariams in ten thousand communities Tayna’s visited, people who cherish Tayna as a dear friend, because Tayna’s incredible cognitive firepower lets her look on them and understand them and make herself someone they can trust with a fluency that can’t in all honesty be distinguished from manipulation. And that makes her guilty, like the friendships are just instrumental, like she’s just a water-bug on the surface of the human experience. Too smart to swim.

You’re lying, Connor says. That’s not the truth.

Fuck you.

But Lillian’s brow furrows and she says: He’s right. Fuck him, still! But . . .

The truth is that Tayna’s been gone so long, deep in the self-catalysis trance, that she’s not sure she can relate to anyone else on Earth as more than a child. It’s the wizard syndrome, the weight of age and power, and it’s coming on hard.

She has the ability, via the Haldane backdoor, to do nearly anything she wants to anyone she meets. And if she does find something deeply wrong out here, some fundamental inequity rising . . . she already knows she’ll use that power.

But she smiles, and waves, and sends her own happiness back, a stutter of brain activity jacketed in peer-to-peer protocols, scrubbed of any complication.

The Kremmling cliff-divers rest a while in the sun. Mariam spreads her wings to catch the light and waits, smiling, for Tayna to say something.

She hasn’t aged, of course. Tayna inhales one of Mariam’s dead skin cells from the mountain wind, sequences it, and compares it to a decade-old reference. Finds CAS9 touchups all over Mariam’s genome: gentle rewrites where Haldane has repaired oncogenes, extended telomeres, laid the metabolic groundwork for her beautiful new wings. And, engraved in the chromatin, little signatures and signs—developers who wrote some of the packages Mariam has adopted. There will be others, elsewhere in the body and brain. The power of Haldane’s programmable tissue goes far beyond the genetic.

A cluster of strangers pop up on Tayna’s inferentials, coming in from the west. She checks them out, decides they’re not important, and goes back to Mariam.

Hey—look here. A sequence that pops up again and again: trust certificate by the Lillian Banning Cabal. Execution-safe.

Looks like you remain a going concern, Young Miss Banning, she tells Lillian’s geist. Still camped out in Chicago, screening the ecosystem for pathologies.

Happy to hear it. Shouldn’t you talk to your friend? She looks so happy to see you.

Tayna’s just putting it off, Connor interjects. She already knows.

Knows what?

That the moment she starts asking questions, she’ll see the disintegration of this anarchic world-wide interregnum on the horizon. The rise of the new and final class of power structure.

Lillian kneels to marvel at Mariam’s wings. I don’t know, she says. Is anything inevitable, now? They can change so much . . .

Connor makes a mockingbird sound, an ostrich sound. You two enabled a dire new kind of inevitability, he says. And it’s right here. I’ll bet my simulated life on it.

“Mariam,” Tayna says. “I need to ask you for something. It’s personal, and it’s big.”

The newcomers are closing in, opening into a loose perimeter. But none of the Kremmling cliff-divers seem concerned. Tayna’s sure they’re unimportant.

“Anything,” Mariam says, brow furrowed. “Why even ask, Tayna? I know how much you’ve done for us. I know—”

The awe and reverence and fear coming through say: I know you can have whatever you want.

Tayna hesitates. She doesn’t want to know yet. Once she has the data, the engines of her intellect will render it down to a conclusion and that will be that, irrevocable. “Do you ever want things to . . . go back?” she asks.

“To the old world?” Whisper of emotion, voluntarily disclosed: an absence of doubt, a pre-emptive certainty.

“Yeah.”

“There’s nothing important we had then,” Mariam says, “that we don’t have now. And now I’m happy.”

“Because you can tweak your brain chemistry.” Tayna smiles wryly, to take the edge off. “Hardly objective.”

Mariam leans back on her hands. The new arrivals have circled them, dark, angular, closing. Not urgent. “You think that’s not important? Choosing when to be happy, why? What higher freedom could you ask?”

Connor makes an impatient gesture.

“I need performance profiles,” Tayna says. Is it really asking, when you know you’re going to get it, one way or another? “I need to know everything you’re thinking about, and how hard, and what it’s for. And who. Who it’s for, too.”

Something like the crack of a cable stunner sounds from somewhere close, but Tayna knows it can wait. Especially because—

 Mariam’s facial muscles slam into self-paralysis. Sweat glands shut down. Armoring herself against analysis of her microexpressions. It’s a conditioned defensive response, a trigger to guard a secret.

Every this-is-critical heuristic wakes up and shrieks.

Mariam’s consciousness catches up to the reflex an instant later. “I don’t know,” she says, clearly torn. “If it were just about me, of course, of course, but—Tayna, there’s trouble in Kremmling. Headnets out of Colorado Springs keep trying to compromise us. We had to start a planning committee . . . they asked us to keep some things private . . . ”

Go on, Connor says. Go get it. One way or another she’s going to tell you. Don’t waste time pretending you have ethics.

Lillian holds up her hands in caution. Tayna, don’t—she has a right—

But Tayna, high wizard of the new world, opens the Haldane backdoor and steps into Mariam’s head.

It’s always been there. Tayna was lead architect, so of course she knew the risks of leaving an intentional vulnerability in the ecosystem, but she guarded it so cleverly—with an agnosia, a shield against awareness. Elegant, right? You have to be Haldane-smart to figure out the backdoor, and if you’re running Haldane, you’re vulnerable to the agnosia that guards it. You can see the backdoor but you’ll never be able to integrate the information into awareness.

Tayna alone has this power: access to any and every transhuman mind on Earth. Unilateral. Devastating. But she knows herself like no other system on the planet. Trusts herself, mostly. She’ll exercise her power, just this once, in the name of proving Connor wrong.

She grabs the information she needs from Mariam’s metafaculties and steps back out.

And on her way out, glimpsing the gray angular strangers and their weapons through Mariam’s innocent eyes, something inside Tayna un-breaks. Repairs a crucial disconnect.

Agnosia. You process the information, but you can’t assemble it into awareness.

You see them coming. Hear the cableguns fire. But you don’t think it’s important.

Motherfucker.

Tayna rises. Aegisware floods her mind, venom in every synapse and soma, burning out the intruder: the agnosia they slipped in to hide their approach. The wool they pulled over eyes as old and keen as hers.

Her antennelles light up at full warload. Mariam stares up at her in awe and terror.

Tayna addresses the faceless gray commando-morphs all around them, their brain-stealth stripped away. “One chance. Surrender.”

“Tayna Booker.” The voice comes out of them in one collective radio susurrus. “Simulate the situation. You will find no viable options. Open your mind to our control, or we will use force.”

The problem with being the oldest smartest Haldane user on the planet is this: you’re still not bulletproof. So—the nuclear option.

For the second time in as many seconds, Tayna broadcasts the Haldane backdoor key, knowing, even as she does, that it’s exactly what Connor wants.

When she’s done pithing and resocializing the warmorphs she gives them to Mariam. “It wasn’t about you,” she promises. “I’m sorry. I have to go.”

Northeast now. Towards Chicago. She has to find Lillian—the real Lillian and her mighty Banning Cabal. Lillian who promised to keep an eye on the world.

The soldiers were Connor Straylight’s, the real Connor, and if Connor came for her now, it’s not just about revenge. Connor doesn’t think that small. No, Connor must be grasping for a second chance at his own apocalypse: Teilhard, the unilateral re-engineering of all human consciousness towards a more rational design.

Connor’s geist trails her all the way, grinning.

Yes, Tayna says. You’re very clever.

I really am, aren’t I? I made you broadcast the backdoor key. Made you tip your hand. The real me, of course—I can’t take any credit for him—

This is part of why Tayna maintains the geists. By speaking to them, she understand what the real people behind them will do. She says: So you sent your warmorphs to bait me into using the backdoor. They listen to the key I transmit and pass the data back to you in San Francisco. But that won’t be enough. It’s not a static password, not even single-factor authentication.

But now I have a start. And if I’m smart enough, if I have enough brainpower in my arsenal, I can crack the rest.

Access to every Haldane-operating human on Earth.

At Tayna’s side Lillian purses her lips and exhales in two growling steps. I hate him, she says. So much. He’s like I’d be, if hadn’t had a scrap of self-awareness growing up.

What do you want? Tayna asks.

I’d guess, Connor’s geist says, that I’m trying to solve the same problem you are. The one you don’t want to talk about. The fundamental unsustainability of the world you built.

Engines of specialized thought centrifuge Mariam’s performance data into its component pieces. Feed the slag into hungry, sealed subsystems eager to render verdict.

Northeast still.

Tayna shelters with a bugbreeder collective under the arches of the defunct Denver Mint. They grow dragonflies, bathing the pupae in Haldane nanomechs, whispering the naiads towards adulthood. “We dance,” they explain. “There are other uses. Agriculture. Defense. But first we dance.”

The neutrois performer who plays welcome for her can see through the jeweled eyes of their swarm and dance the mass of them as a single whirlwind of silver odonata shining in the firelight. Some of them have razor wings and when the dancer cuts theirself shoulder and brow Tayna smells the trick of carbon chemistry in the blood and oohs even before a few of the dragonflies land, spark, ignite the bleeding rivulets into pale fire that glows on armored skin.

“Beautiful,” she says, meaning it.

It’s here too, Connor’s geist says. The defect. Down deep.

Even Lillian’s grown impatient. Tayna, she says, sitting and arranging herself. I know how fast you think. You must have an answer. Small acts of light mark her, the rendered reflections of passing dragonflies.

Do you remember, Tayna asks, addressing both of them, when we argued about capitalism?

They remember. Lillian first: You said capitalism was an inevitability. That human civilizations converged on it. Because it was an effective algorithm to distribute resources and organize labor.

Tayna interjects: Only because of the limitations—

Of the individual, Connor finishes. Each actor’s only got a little information. There’s no centralized control. So you need an algorithm that operates locally.

Lillian, her eyes young as the day they met: And of course I said—capitalism’s a historical event. Predicated on certain decisions, certain structures. And you said, no, no, capitalism is a technological solution to the limitations of the human mind, the inability to process large structures.

Funny, Connor says, smiling at Tayna. When we met, you were on Lillian’s side of this argument.

What you’re both afraid of, Tayna says, is the rise of another inevitable system. Another hegemonic algorithm, born out of the logic of this new world I made. Not about capital, but cognition. Right?

They watch her, waiting. A dragonfly settles briefly on her brow. The circled audience claps for the dancer, kindled to a full-body torch.

I’ve analyzed Mariam’s performance data, Tayna says. She’d volunteered nearly a third of her headspace to the Kremmling Planning Committee. Everyone in her collective—they were all pitching in to solve a distributed problem, trying to figure out a way to beat the Colorado Springs headnet and keep their independence.

What was the problem, exactly? Lillian asks. But Connor already knows. This was his specialty, the terrain of his dreams.

The same thing I spent my retreats on, Tayna answers. The same thing any self-interested party spends their time on: recursive self-improvement. Use your intellect to build more intellect. Smarts make you smarter.

And she goes on, while the dancer burns and the audience cheers and whirring dragonflies sparking with coronal discharge flick past in the lucid bullet-time of her upclocked cognition: To secure your own interests, you need to understand the opponent. You need to compute her and predict her tactics. So they’re going to design better brains for the members of their planning committee. And those members are going to use those brains to make better brains still, because it’s that or fall behind the opponent. But they’ll always need more labor, so some part of that burden will be offloaded to—

The working class, Lillian finishes. The rest of them.

And this is going to happen again and again. All around the world. The payoff for the winner is the ability to model and control competitors.

An arms race, Lillian says. And it’s not just the smartest system that’ll win. It’s the system that most aggressively disrupts the competition . . . or subverts and incorporates them. Zero sum payoffs.

You saw this coming, Connor says. You must have. I know I’m not the smartest person inside this skull. You must have known.

I thought that it wouldn’t be inevitable. We gave people a lot of new choices. I thought they’d find another way.

There are rules, Connor says, that no one ever chose. Like: someone loses. Someone wins.

It’s okay, Lillian says. It’s okay. It’s okay.

It is?

I would’ve figured this out—the real me in Chicago. That was what I promised to do. I’ve got to be working on a solution. So find me.

Tayna exhales. Nods.

I wouldn’t let you down, Lillian says.

Chicago has been swallowed by a voluntary tyranny.

The Second City’s new order keeps outposts as far out as Galesburg. They make the rules pretty clear: Service is elective. You volunteer for work. We reprofile you to like it. Fulfillment guaranteed.

Please evaluate your decision carefully. After the fact, you will be too content to reconsider.

The signs point towards the old university in Hyde Park. Lillian reads this, pale, chewing on her lip, and Tayna gives her friend’s geist an intangible squeeze.

Sometimes it’s hard, meeting yourself. Finding out what you’ve done.

A leveler colony in West Lawn takes her in for the night. The dedicants run elective agnosias, jamming their ability to process race, age, beauty. Tayna wonders, with old cynicism, whether their minds just fill in the emptiness with people who look like them.

All of this is going to fall apart. The world will coalesce into states, like it did before—states of mind, racing to outthink each other, until one finally bursts into singularity and claims the future.

In the night she wanders the empty streets of her childhood city. Stares into the hollowed husk of an old laundromat, burnt by riot, cleaned and consigned by reprofiled labor. She thinks: This is still the world I wanted. People making their own choices. Even choices I don’t like.

But it’s not going to last.

She senses motion behind her, considered, stealthy. Straylight’s warmorphs? No—just a drifter, wary, staring her way with glinting cat eyes. Humans slipping into one more niche in the ecosystem. “No harm,” Tayna promises.

The drifter broadcasts wary curiosity.

“I grew up in Chicago. I thought I’d . . . see what we’d made of it.”

Pulse of compassion, shading into inquiry. An inarticulate question: What have you seen out there?

“All kinds of evil,” Tayna says. What an easy heuristic, that word. What trouble it’s caused. She’s spent so long untangling it, what it really means—but she stills come back to it. “Coerced homogeneity. Cults of neural purity. Headnets that burn their members down to seizure. And the really dangerous stuff, more subtle, more insidious—free-rider strategies no one designed. Broken incentive structures. Feedback loops spiraling off towards self-destruction.”

Very sad, the itinerant feels. Not your fault. Hard world.

“Everything,” Tayna says, “is my responsibility. I set Haldane loose. I stole it from Connor Straylight’s company.”

Regrets?

“I think I like this world better than the alternative.”

Better than Teilhard. The engineered monoculture. One rich white man’s dream of perfection.

But at least it would’ve been clean—

“Tayna,” the itinerant says, in a clear new voice, sent from somewhere not far off. “Please come with me. We’ve been waiting for you.”

“Hey, Lil,” Tayna says. But her friend’s geist has retreated, so it’s only the voice behind the drifter that hears the greeting, only the real Lillian.

When they were undergrads here the Regenstein Library stood like a concrete battleship, bunkered down against the premonition of some uncertain end of days. Now that apocalypse has come and passed and the Reg still keeps station. Someone has planted a forest of antennae on the roof, filled the ivy with frosty thermal pipes—but the building only seems fulfilled. The Reg has always felt like it might be a machine.

Lillian Banning waits alone on the steps, round-cheeked, heavy, biting her nails with nervous precision. Tayna looks at her with modest old senses: no millimeter-wave, no inferentials. Like she’s afraid that all her higher faculties would find the mass of history between them and just give up, burn out.

“Hi,” she says, waving a little.

Lillian starts. “Jesus,” she says, and smiles. “You’re early.”

“I wanted some time to be friends,” Tanya says. “Before we had to talk about—all this.”

Lillian pats the stone. Inside Tayna the Lillian geist peeks out shyly. “How’s it been?” the real one asks. Worlds of computation in each of them, modeling each other, and so all that’s left to speak is the residue, the comforting old banalities.

Tayna sits a little way off, a haven’t-seen-you-in-while-are-we-still-cool? kind of distance. “Ups and downs, I guess. You?”

They don’t have to say anything important right now, even though by sundown they’ll probably have altered the course of history (again). That feels really good. Tayna doesn’t take it apart.

“You know how it is.” Lillian shrugs. “I’ve got a thing going here. I’m still in social work, I guess.”

You’re wasting time, Connor’s geist murmurs. I’m cracking the Haldane backdoor right now. I’m getting ready to open every human mind on the planet and remake them all.

They talk a while first. Connor, the unspoken agreement goes, can fuck right off.

Finally Lillian says: “You’re here because of the recursive self-improvement problem. The emergence of elite dynamics from the cognitive arms race.”

“That,” Tayna says, “and Straylight. He’s trying to crack the Haldane backdoor. Do you have an answer?”

She does. Tayna can tell that much. But it’s nothing she’s going to like.

“Come on.” Lillian draws her through the old rotating door, into the Reg. “I’ll tell you everything you haven’t figured out already.”

Obelisks of thought, down here. Ranks of machines tended by silent profiled labor. The cold is absolute, penetrating. The laborers are silent, Tayna realizes, because they’re slaved to the network too. Their heads are full of distributed thought. Like Kremmling, ten years further along.

Lillian’s cabal is probably the single most powerful nexus of computation outside San Francisco and Straylight.

They walk down cabled passages between pools of soft blue light. “It’s a think tank,” Lillian explains. “We used to scrub the Haldane ecosystem for malicious packages. When I realized things were going wrong, I rebuilt the collective into a prediction machine.”

“Profiled workers,” Tayna murmurs. “Labor and elite.” She doesn’t have to speak the condemnation, or ask the question: What happened to you? What drove you to this?

Lillian purses her lips. “The optimal arrangement. It was this, or give the world to Straylight.”

“You’ve accepted his institutional logic. You’re exploiting the desperate in the name of an ideological end.” Old words, from their old arguments. “There wasn’t any other way?”

“No,” Lillian says, unqualified, and the weight of thought above and around them gives her refusal weight. She has the firepower to know.

“How far along is he?”

“He has an embryonic singularity building in San Francisco. He’s been marshalling computational assets to crack your backdoor. Once he has it, he rewrites every transhuman on the planet with his new logic and gives birth to a transcendent coalescent intellect.”

“Teilhard.”

The same disgust in Lillian’s voice that Tayna feels. “Once Connor gives birth to his transcendent mind, it dominates the future of all systems by main cognitive force. Death by monoculture. The extinction of every alternative mode of existence. We can’t see past that.”

“I kept a geist of him.” Tayna glances at the spectral Connor, moving in her periphery. He waves. “And you, too. You were better company.”

“Did you ever disagree?”

“Of course.” Tayna catches what Lillian’s really asking a moment too late: “And you? What did you tell your geist of me?”

“My solution. You hated it.”

Uh-oh. “Lillian. Tell me.”

Lillian stops. “I need you to understand something.” Her face is cryptic, jagged, unreadable even when Tayna puts her full weight into it. Lillian’s distributed Cabal gives her spectacular capabilities: she’s doing something to her muscles, an injection of noise that jams analysis. “You hated the idea. But when I gave your geist access to the simulations here—when I let her think as enormously as I had—she changed her mind. She agreed with me. It was the only solution.”

“Okay.” Tayna accepts this, for now. “And?”

“It’s pretty bad news.” Unspoken: This is your last chance to walk.

Tayna waits.

“We found proof,” Lillian says. “Mathematical. Robust. Egalitarian societies are fundamentally unstable. Inequality always emerges, entrenches itself, and remakes the system to preserve itself. A power elite emerges. Unless the game has very specific rules, or a very proactive referee.”

It’s big and abstract and it hits Tayna like a shotgun slug. She takes a physical step back. This is the end: the death of the dream, written in the only language that always speaks true.

“The future always points that way.” Lillian won’t stop. Maybe she doesn’t know that she’s speaking all of Tayna’s darkest fears. No: of course she does. “Systems capable of recursive self-improvement always dominate the competition. Anything self-directed, bottom-up—democracy, markets, any arena where agents interact by rules—ends up dominated by strategies that can magnify their own power at the expense of others. Haldane makes that easier than ever.”

“So you’re going to do something about it.” Tayna can already see it. “You’re going to change the rules.”

“Straylight is the inevitable outcome of the system you built. Explosive self-catalysis towards godhood. Total hegemony over all other players in the game.” Lillian shuts her eyes and her geist hisses in Tayna’s ear in wordless alarm, terrified of her divergent parent. “So I’m going to make recursive self-improvement impossible. I’m going to bring the Banning Cabal online, interface with every other Haldane-using organism on the planet, and change the rules to prevent Straylight’s strategy from dominating.”

“How?”

“Systematic agnosias. Implanted in every mind on Earth. I’m going to render recursive self-improvement of intelligent systems literally unthinkable.”

“I know that.” Tayna’s got a model going, and the strategy seems obvious, robust, sound. Horrifying. “But how?”

Lillian’s eyes narrow, in surprise, in trepidation, in pain. “I need the Haldane backdoor,” she says. “Before Straylight cracks it, and makes his own move. The only way to beat him is for you to give it to me. Please.”

The Banning Cabal’s infrastructure needs time to ready itself. Not much time—not at the speed everything thinks here—but enough. Tayna goes up to the roof and lies down among the antennae. There are no stars, but she conjures up a dream of night.

Lillian’s geist lies down beside her. She’s warm.

I’ve been talking to my original’s geist of you, she says. You’re very different. It’s strange.

I missed you so much, Tayna says. And I found you again, but it’s still all about the fight. The revolution. I wish we’d ever had a time that wasn’t about—

The political difficulties of a rich, self-loathing Marxist girl trying to be friends with a black Hyde Park transhumanist?

Tayna smiles. That part was all right, she says. And look, here you are. Giving up on anarcho-syndicalism. Telling me that justice is impossible in the real world. We’ve traded places: now you’re the techno-utopian pushing a program of internalized coercion.

So? geist-Lillian asks. Physics is the only law we inherit. We make the rest. The world never gave us justice—we built it and we enforced it. This is just another law we’re writing, in another kind of book. All law is coercion.

But you want to write this law so deep it’ll never come out. There’s no rebellion when you can’t think about the king.

It’s the only way.

She’s defensive of herself. This makes Tayna chuckle. So you’re convinced the other you is right, she says. You’re ready to hardwire your safeguard into the basic logic of human thought. Make the inevitable unthinkable.

A long silence.

No, geist Tayna says. But she’s so much smarter than me. She must know something I don’t.

She knows a lot of things she hasn’t told us, Tayna says. And I understand why. She wants me make the choice. She still thinks I’m the right one to decide.

Of course, Lillian whispers. She’s always trusted you more than she trusts herself.

The signal comes. The Banning Cabal is ready.

The interfaces pierce Tayna’s scalp. The Banning Cabal waits in silent readiness around them, machines and slaved minds alike. All that potentiality, ready to think. To deliver Lillian’s program of systemic salvation into every mind on Earth and avert a future of warring intelligence explosions.

All Tayna has to do is be the conduit.

“Lillian,” she says.

Wings of virtual light close around them. Earth’s noosphere, captured on the Cabal’s loom, spun out in radiant threads of data. Ready to weave.

“I’m here.” Lillian’s hand on hers. “I know you want to find a third way. I spent years looking, Tay. There’s nothing. It’s this, or Straylight.”

“I know. I trust you.” And she does. Lillian wants to shackle every higher intelligence on the planet, because the alternative is worse. Explosive development of a weakly godlike and acataleptically incomprehensible all-mind, at the expense of all diversity in the system.

There’s no third way. Only her way, or Connor’s. And Lillian Banning will never look to Connor, because deep down, Lillian doesn’t believe she and Connor are different at all. They walked different roads, but they came from the same place, the same tarnished tower.

“I never really agreed with you, did I?” Tayna says. She’s been pretty sure about this for a while now. “Your geist of me. You never convinced her.”

The antennae are live. Satellites checking in from their cold apoapses like soldiers in distant winter posts.

Lillian’s hand tightens. “No,” she says. “I never did. I lied. I’m sorry. I thought she might be divergent from the real you. That you’d accept my plan where she refused.”

“Lillian. You knew me better than anyone.” Tayna smiles as she says it, because she knows it’ll be good to hear. “And she did this instead, didn’t she? What I’m about to do?”

Softly, because Lillian knows what’s going to happen now: “If you do this, how are you any better than Straylight?”

“That’s the idea, isn’t it?” The engines of her cognitive subsystems are catching the strands now, drawing them in. Binding the world to her. Making it ready. “That I’m better than him.”

Lillian’s lips tremble: laughter, or the beginning of tears.

“Lillian, come with me.”

“No. Not me.” Lillian tries to draw away, and stops herself. Holds Tayna’s hand as the virtuality closes around them, the world brightening towards one connective dawn. “Of course I thought about it. But I didn’t trust myself. You, though—”

The wizard syndrome. Lonely power in a high fastness, looking down over it all, arrogant and proud. Maybe it’s finally gotten to Tayna.

“You’re the best person I ever knew,” Lillian says. “Maybe you can do this. Maybe this is the right way.”

When she looks at herself with Lillian’s eyes, Tayna believes.

Her best friend lets go. Steps back, out of the light.

Tayna broadcasts the Haldane backdoor key. Saturates the globe. Opens every mind in the world, the engines of the Banning Cabal incendiary with thought around her, and leaps inside.

With me, she says, a single summons, a geas. Let’s go to San Francisco.

Connor Straylight’s nascent singularity towers over the noosphere landscape, a pinnacle of might-yet-be, a cognitive rocket not quite ready to launch. Tayna rolls down on it with the summed computational power of every Haldane-able organism on the planet. Connor’s security lasts a little longer than a pillow fort. Not much.

Connor Straylight meets her in the road, a mote of light, contemptuous of embodiment. Tayna, he says. Please. Don’t do this. You can’t interdict the future.

She doesn’t have to say anything. Her mind is geological, vast. Her geist of Connor comes up from within her and tells himself:

Stand down, man. She beat us. I can see it now.

She has a better future?

The geist opens his hands. Not one future, he says. All of them. She keeps the way open. That’s all.

Thank you, Tayna says.

The geist tips his head. You wouldn’t be here without me, he says. But I wouldn’t be me without you.

Tayna puts her hands on the rock and ice of Straylight’s tower and starts to climb. (The algorithms firing, rewriting themselves, firing again, smarter and faster each time—the cycle building—) She doesn’t know what she’ll find at the top of this metaphor, when she’s finished the journey that Straylight meant for himself. She’ll be a power like nothing known to man: ready, maybe, to kindle new universes, with kinder rules.

Or to watch over this world, and enforce a more compassionate logic. A law for the system—a curb for nature, red in nerve and algorithm.

Tayna, Lillian’s geist calls. I can’t go. I don’t deserve it.

You do, Tayna says. You do.

But she knows Lillian will not believe her and so she cuts the geist free. Feels, for the last time, the sting before tears.

Take care, friend, she says. Find yourself. I’ll be watching over you.

She turns her eyes back starward, and climbs.