Server Extant

‘All Religions began as an attempt to explain the weather.’

-Ace

Morghain waited in her lion’s crouch, mind-calmed and half dreaming, staring through the flexing ribbons of light and text, the neon alchemist’s sigils, commercial, mystical and obscene, towards the firewall gate. The city’s eerie soundscape, reverbed ebbing and flowing, a sound as familiar to her as her own blood. Like many deep and unreformable Knet addicts, she seldom really slept, descending, instead, to a place of trancing, half-wakefulness, a surreal continuity that lost track of normal time. Especially here, in the city of the Kysairons, over which lay night eternal.

Into the corner of her peripheral vision, a new figure pressed its way up the street of zoo-ish enigmas and uncanny denizens. It was a small, simple humanoid, sparse and low-poly. Its face was a glowing blue screen, like an old cathode-ray tube TV. Morghain’s mind noted and tracked the new object without being drawn to it. Long immersion in the twitch-reaction existence of the deathmatcher’s creed had thoroughly reprogrammed her brain to regard all moving objects as potential decoys. It looked like an Ormist preacher, but it could be anything. A distraction, an Id-cloned enemy, a bomb.

The figure took up position in the crook of the canyon street and began to hold forth.

‘My friends! My friends! My friends! My friends! My friends!’ It began.

An irritated passerby shot it in the head, the TV screen face went dark, explosively exhaling a jet of glowing gas, as if the thing’s internal life force, some form of essential illumination, had been released by the bullet. It collapsed against the wall and slumped, trailing a black splatter on the wall that might be some form of simulated blood. The street traffic continued, indifferently.

If it died that easily, Morghain, considered, idly, it wasn’t a ranked Id and, if it didn’t blow up, it wasn’t a bomb. So it had probably been what it had looked like, a cheap skin run by one of Father1000’s fanatics.

Father1000 was a K-net viral phenomena and public nuisance. No one knew if ‘he’ was a prophet, an A.I or just some fantastically dedicated troll, but his minions, real and artificial, had spread, like subtle tendrils, throughout the servers. His gnomic pronunciations, along with a lot of sophistic noise, formed a sort of weird, open-source religion, codified in the Book of Orm, named in accordance with Father1000’s doctrine of randomly generating three letter words to denote concepts not expressed by any conventional word or term. ’Orm’, for example, meant ‘a universal consciousness expressed as the renunciation of itself’. Because of the Book of Orm, People called them ‘Ormists’, but they called themselves Ayd, which meant ‘a body of information that degenerates into noise the more it is accessed.’ Morghain had to admit the term was appropriate.

She waited, in the gamer’s trance. Minutes passed, ticking off the little yellow chronometer in the corner of her vision. Then a small figure pushed though the crowd. It was the screen-faced Ormist, born again from some nearby respawning point.

It returned to its place, in the elbow of the street, and continued the sermon.

‘My friends! Consider the mystical realm in which all religions dwell!’ it declared, ’Discredited in the rationalist’s eye, because those rules do not comport with the physics of the observable world! But all realities are virtual realities! Consider the color red! Could any of us explain it to someone who had been blind from birth? How? We would lack a vocabulary of common experience! What is ‘red?’ A sensation generated in our brains to register a wavelength of light. The machine, in which this sensation is generated, exists in total darkness, surrounded by the shell of our skulls. ’Red’ is an informational property, within the machine, our brain, a world-modeling computer that lives at the center of its own perceptions. Such is all things! Red is not physical, it is virtual!’

Morghain sighed. She idly considered shooting the thing herself but pure habit restrained her from revealing her location.

‘Now,’ it continued, ’with the advent of new tools, technology and science, we are able to simulate our own realities. They are crude because they are primitive, and lack the processing power to become indistinguishable from physics. But what if they weren’t? In the outer reaches of our universe, an oblong structure, about two billion light years across, and inhabited by a trillion galaxies, was recently observed. The stars in this region are twenty percent dimmer than the surrounding galaxies and shift more towards the red spectrum. Now let me propose a thought experiment. Say those dimmer, redder galaxies were darked because every sun in them has a Dyson sphere, constructed around it, harvesting twenty percent of its energy. What use could any civilization have for twenty percent of the combined energy output of a trillion galaxies? To power planet-sized computers, each linked, at a quantum level, with trillions of its peers, into a colossal network. Again, this is a thought experiment, a means of conceptualizing a scale incomprehensible to human perspective. Why would these aliens need so much computational power? Consider that it might be to run an immeasurably vast simulation, so perfect it models the physical world to the molecular level, that it is, indistinguishable from base-line reality. Consider that this might be the end point destination for all intelligent life. If reality can be digital,’ said the preacher, it’s voice rising to an ecstatic height, ’then it might be, which means that all things are possible! All things are possible! All things are possible! All things are-!’

Another irritated passer blasted the thing with blue lightning. It vaporised, unlike the previous version, which merely collapsed. Six hundred, plus, energy effect emitter, thought Morghain, idly rating the spec.

For a few minutes, the canyon street was bare, again, of theological ornament. Then, again, the small, screen-faced figure pushed its way up the street and resumed its place.

‘-possible!’ it concluded.

No one resumes a harangue at the exact same inflection point as the interruption, Morghain thought. The ‘preacher’ was a bot, not even a real Id. That made it slightly more annoying. But tagging the thing was pointless. It would keep respawning, keep wandering back to its spot on the street, keep resuming its exposition.

‘If all things are possible,’ it continued. ’All religions may be true, in essence, if not detail. How do we know that, as soon as we ‘die’ we don’t awaken, on the beach of a vastly larger frontier? An unknown continent, a new world of terrors, tests, joys and difficulties. A great upward journey, for uncounted entities, through increasingly miraculous lands. How do you know? You can’t. And considering the vast improbability of our existence, how can you say what possibility is more bizarre? If all reality is virtual, nothing can be known, only experienced! We are all alone and unknown to ourselves, but deeply connected in the essence to each other, being made of the same stuff, perception, and that alone! Friends, I invite you to a larger threshold! In every sense that truly matters, all reality is a simulation, all reality is virtual!’

It occurred to Morghain that cycling cim crap like the preacherbot was banned in the city. If the Ormists were able to proselytize inside the strip, it meant someone in the block sympathized with them enough to turn a blind eye. It was an uncomfortable reminder that the rule of law on Extant existed on the thinnest foundations, a mutual agreement between armed camps. The hum of the city churned around her, like water in some deep cavern calming her mind to watchfulness.

Her chronometer now read 15:10.

* * *

’They might be going to stack,’ said DeLuca, as M0nsterbra1ns took his finger off the comm.

‘Who stacks anymore?’ snorted Bowral. ‘Go back to frontier times, grandma’.

’Just set the dogs on ‘em!’ said Permanence, ’Get after ’em and keep ‘em busy. It’s only another thirty minutes until the picket gets here, then the sky will be full of our guys. There’s no way they can put any serious bite on the Depot, let alone the vault, in that time.’

‘Not with a breaker crew,’ agreed Bowral.

’We don’t know that it is just breakers,’ insisted DeLuca. ‘We don’t know how many rankers they got, how big their force is, until we find their landers! That’s why we need the K-bees, to-’

She was interrupted by the terse voice of one of the battle managers. ‘Multiple contacts’.

The little groups of green icons, still forcing their way through the city clutter to the site of the overseer crash, were now flashing red. For a while, they watched in near silence.

‘Lotta shooting down there,’ came an uneasy voice, from down-board.

‘Fuck it’ muttered M0nsterbra1ns. He hit the commander’s all-comm and his voice went out to every fighting unit in the city. ‘All units pursue’ he ordered, ’kill ‘em all.’