Invisible Sun (Empire Games #3)

by Charles Stross

“The US is a democracy in form and theory. But they developed a bureaucratic security apparatus dedicated to fighting wartime threats and allowed it to persist in peacetime. Now it’s mostly self-perpetuating. No elected politician dares tackle it because it’ll get you the enmity of the security apparat, the voters won’t notice the absence of something they’ve grown used to, and if there is an attack, your opponents will crucify you. At least our deep state was designed to support democratic norms while they were becoming established.” She snorted, by way of adding ironic punctuation.

We’ve been playing empire games in para-time and it was inevitable that sooner or later we’d run into someone who was better at it than we are. Unfortunately the United States is structurally an imperial project, it’s in our political DNA. We’re always looking for a frontier to expand into, we can’t back down, anyone who admits we’re overmatched gets sidelined and booted out of office by an upstart who insists that we can never be defeated, only betrayed. So we can’t work around obstacles, only power on through the fire.

The two great mistakes in warfare—never get involved in a land war in Asia, and never start a war on two fronts—needed a para-time update. Right?

Welcome to the new cold war. You can have complete situational awareness or complete control, but you can never have both. It’s almost as if surveillance proactively creates new threats. Sooner or later you’ve just got to let go of the ropes and hope everybody knows what they’re supposed to do—even the other side—so we don’t all go up in mushroom clouds.

A humorless smile tugged at Kurt’s cheek. The smell of post-Communist freedom was, it seemed, no smell at all.

Republics governed by the rule of law—like this version of Germany, or the United States, or the Commonwealth—try to pretend that everything is determined by legality and individual merit. They like to believe it has nothing to do with heredity, or accident of birth, or who went to school with who. Everything is supposed to be orderly, like planets orbiting the sun, each in their predictable track. But the conflict between ideals and personal loyalties warps the entire structure, like an invisible sun passing through the solar system, its gravity dragging orbits out of alignment and causing havoc.

Every quantum event that produces divergent outcomes that a human-scale observer perceives forces a split between time lines. But most such divergences are insignificant: and they ultimately re-merge. It doesn’t matter how a butterfly flaps its wings if nobody sees it, and eventually the bug collector goes home and memories fade and only the significant paths remain detectable.

(It turned out people in this time line had really weird ideas about royalty: weird and wrong. She resolved to write the Disney Corporation a stern letter.)

The trouble with revolutions, in Erasmus’ experience, was that they seemed to induce a horrible kind of competition between opposing teams of zealots. It was time-consuming and hard work to prove your merit through good governance, but easy to demonstrate your loyalty by shooting those who compromised their ideological purity in order to keep the public fed.