Night now, and waves hissing on the beach, though there is no beach, just the impression of a beach and a mosaic of borrowed detail.
Closing his eyes, Thales sees all the fragments of information drifting by like innumerable particles of sediment—there’s the immigration hall’s clamor, Akemi’s dream, Irina’s conversation with a demon on a cliff. There are motes of Irina’s experience, Akemi’s, his, others’; there’s the memory of a girl, Lillian, sitting on the marble lip of a fountain in her garden, her smilodon kitten a warm, struggling mass on her lap—her father had given it to her, had said it was hormonally locked into kittenhood, the species having just been brought back from the dead—running her fingers through its coarse, tawny fur, she wonders if he’ll try to bring her back too. There, nearly whole, is the mathematician’s trick for writing death out of life, which it withheld from Cromwell, who by now is past the need of it, and all of it is dispersing.
He feels like he’s floating in an ocean of recent history.
He reminds himself he has a few things left to do.
He looks out into the net, finds Cromwell’s estate going into probate, the lawsuits just getting started. The flux of conflicting writs and contested jurisdictions creates openings that make it easy to slip into one of Cromwell’s accounts in Iceland and channel a fraction of his net worth first to the orbital bank that’s the sole relict of the Cayman Islands, then to a technically stateless financial services company hosted on servers in a strip mall in New Jersey and finally to the seventeen investors who hold the paper on Masamune’s forge.
He emails the smith:
Dear Sir:
I am a stranger, but I’ve just taken the liberty of paying off all your debts.
In exchange, I’d like you to take on my protégé as an assistant. He’ll appear on your doorstep in a few days. His work ethic defies description, but I ask only that you try him.
I regret all the mystery, but I must remain …
Anonymous
He imagines the smith’s consternation, relief, wonder.
He turns his attention to the shipping on the seas around the space elevator. The AIs’ fleet seems to have vanished, and traffic is sparse in the equatorial waters, but among the handful of freighters and research subs he finds an Australian naval search-and-rescue drone. He slips past its security and reroutes it toward the island of the elevator, reprogramming its navigation system to send Canberra a steady stream of lies.
With that, his obligations are fulfilled.
Before him is the mountain that was also a tower, the wind foaming the wood on its lower slopes where Akemi is now sleeping. When she wakes she’ll believe she’s on an indefinite hiatus but that happiness is waiting for her whenever she goes back to her old life.
His attention settles briefly on the wall Irina raised on the mountain’s heights—it’s intact, and its gate is locked, but what’s beyond is hidden.
Now what?
He could join Akemi in her manicured delusion, and let eternity slip by.
He closes his eyes again, and now he’s aware of Irina’s glimpses of the future, the spiking temperatures, the storms, the wars, the floods, the dying cities, how different the Earth will look from space. Better to be here than in the world, and to have all the time he wants to read and to think. Maybe he and Akemi will become friends. He can choose to forget his circumstances, maybe let himself remember the truth for an hour every year, or every century.
And yet.
No one else knows what’s going to happen, except possibly Irina, who is in problematic health, and no one else is in a position to intervene.
It’s not clear that this is his problem, but he thinks of his family, still out there, and exposed, and of Kern, who has no other protector.
It occurs to him he’s sitting in the midst of most of the computational power in the world, all idle now.
It would be a simple matter to shape it to his will.