Fine Structure

by qntm

It was going to take twenty thousand years, using "brute force" (a subtle form of brute force, admittedly: an incredibly complex and unearthly powerful and mind-bogglingly resilient self-programming supercomputer), to unravel enough of the Script to successfully "earth" all of Mitch "Xio" Calrus' remaining power. Thanks to Zhang's sacrifice, humanity had now bought that time, and Anne Poole, for one, was almost certain to live long enough see the calculation through to the end. Mitch Calrus, though, was not. And Xio's mind had to be there, alive and operational in a capable shell, to receive the power at the end of the calculation. At that moment, the New Cosmology could be undone, Oul would attack, Xio would defeat Oul, and the story would be over. So, conscious of his present shell's mortality, Mitch Calrus had himself backed up. Those backups were distributed as far across the world as he could finance. When Calrus inevitably died, which would happen hundreds of times before the calculation was complete, Anne Poole would arrange for him to be resurrected. In turn, whenever Anne Poole was abducted, buried, lost, stranded or marooned - and this, too happened dozens of times over the next twenty-odd millennia - Mitch Calrus sought her out, pulled her out of her prison using his four-dimensional powers and restored her mind to normal as well. And so they found one another, over and again. They kept one another sane, and together on their shared path. In the mid-21st century...