Engineering Infinity

by Jonathan Strahan

Deep in Azrael’s OS some general learning reflex scribbles numbers on the back of a virtual napkin:

Taranis doesn’t stand a chance. It is antique technology, decades deep in the catalogue: a palsied fist, raised trembling against the bleeding edge. Fiery needles of depleted uranium reduce it to a moth in a shotgun blast. It pinwheels across the horizon in flames.

No one explores the specific pathways leading to Azrael’s solutions. They leave the box black, the tangle of fuzzy logic and operant conditioning safely opaque. (Not even Azrael knows that arcane territory; the syrupy, reflex-sapping overlays of self-reflection have no place on the battlefield.) It is enough that its answers are correct.

“Right... Well, first of all, it seems he really is being chased by the Russians, but not by the country. It’s the Soviet Union Online that’s after him. And the only place their IP addresses are blocked is inside the geographical territories of the Russian and Kazakhstani Republics.”

“They’re gone,” he said, “but they left their trash behind.” Toxic, decaying: nuclear submarines heeled over in the waters off Murmansk, nitrates soaking the soil around the launch pads of Baikonur. The ghosts of old Soviets prowled this dark, as radiation in the groundwater, mutations in the forest, poisons in the all-too-common dust clouds.

Modern society is efficient, you know, Edith, but not very resilient. A fuel strike could cripple us in a week, let alone alien invaders.”

All life is based on the destruction of other life, even on tremendous scales of space and time... Our ancestors understood that right back to the Ice Age, and venerated the animals they had to kill. They were so far above us, the Incoming and the Venusians alike. Yet maybe we, at our best, are morally superior to them.”

OH! THE VANITY! You're proven inferior physically and intellectually, so now you'll attempt to think yourself MORALLY superior!?!?

To be flying along a corridor aligned with the polar jet of a magnetar just when it blows its lid is so unlikely as to be implausible. A local supernova, now that I could understand; when your voyages are measured in centuries or millennia it’s only a matter of time before one of your ships falls victim. But a magnetar nearly ten thousand lights years away – that’s the universe refusing to play fair!

I don’t waste time swearing. I can tell a trap when I stick my foot in one: someone who isn’t brain-dead organized this. But they’ve picked the wrong deck-hand to eat.

I prefer hill workouts while watching history programs from my own library, and one hard hour is usually enough to cleanse a brain evolved to chase antelope across a grassy plain.

The towers are gigantic bones. The root-canopy above is a huge digestive organ, which did its damnedest to digest me. Luckily nothing it excreted was a me-solvent.

“These things rushing up toward the surface are about twenty times as big as the biggest redwood, back before the warming killed them. The safest thing, the almost-Lars-in-its-tepid-chicken-shitness thing, that I can possibly say is, ‘I’m predicting something big.’”