A MOUTH OPENED in Xiara’s sky.
There had been nothing but the battle, Groundswell burning the manufactory as it produced wave after wave of new ships for its defense, the wrecked hulk of glaiveships and torches left behind, the Ornclan fleet joined as one in song. Then the lightning came, a cut across the sky. And, abruptly present in the local Cloud, all of a sudden there from some unguessed direction—a mass greater than suns, and, splitting space, the mouth.
It closed on the manufactory. Shields burst. Gossamer strands thick as continents collapsed. Sparks lit the manufactory’s surface—reactors going critical, matter siphons spewing neutrons in all directions. Ships fired, but their shots passed through emptiness, and then the ships themselves disappeared into the mouth.
Xiara knew the stories. None of them mentioned what she was supposed to do now.
And beneath her, the Cloud rippled, its logic straining as more Bleed passed beneath it, onward, in.
GRAY, SPRAWLED ON the lunar surface, felt the alarms in his bones. (Oh, so he had bones now. Interesting.) He couldn’t rise. Around him spread the cratered lunar surface, and in each pit a Grayframe puddle taking form. He reached for their names, but the names escaped him.
He should feel— They should do—
Something.
Scatter, that was the idea, scatter, spread complexity, survive. Drag the Bleed in all directions, confuse them. The Bleed could not see much of the physical world, only sensed it by its impingement on their domain. The beyond. The depths. There were strategies he could use against them, tricks that might make a difference—or not. Worth a try, if he could remember. If he could rise. If he could move at all.
Far above, Yannis and Nioh’s fire dance was almost done. The Empress’s many forms had pierced them, clad them in crystal, needling in for nerves and access, closing them down circuit by circuit. But the emerald mandalas around each twisted, broke, the statues suddenly maddened and unsure.
And then the Bleed arrived.
ZANJ SAW THEM. She could not think through the pain; her mind ran so goddamned slow on this platform, so weak within this meat, losing blood faster than she’d thought possible—but she held the green hole, the gap in the world through which the Empress and Viv had slipped, as above her in the dark the Moon’s sky shivered open with mouth after mouth after mouth.
She had to breathe, with flooding lungs, so she could laugh.
VIV AND THE Empress fell into the ocean of themselves—into the Cloud.
Arms battered her, and legs, knees jutted into her ribs; thumbs gouged the corners of her mouth and fingers clawed at her eyes. She clutched her opponent close in the harsh green water. She held the Empress, here in the Cloud that was her being, body to body. They tumbled together in the green, stroked by fingers of light from a distant surface, falling, falling, drowning down.
There was a voice, though, a voice familiar and accustomed to command, furious as they fell. “What are you doing?”
She hugged her closer, pressed past the clutching fingers, pulled her into an embrace, skull to skull, Viv’s shorn head to her braided crown as they sank together. “I’m you,” she said. “You’re me. It’s time for us to change.”
“You’re a castoff, a shell. An experiment gone wrong.” Fists battered her back; nails bit her scalp. Still they fell. “You’re nothing!”
“Of course. So are you.”
“I built you!”
“You did. You pulled me from a simulation of the past, from before you found the Cloud and changed it from what it was before to something anyone could use, but you would always own.” Down and down, lungs straining, nails dragging skin from her scalp, blood in the water. And sharks approached.
Yes. She could feel them. Not sharks in truth but Bleed, circling beyond the edge of the Empress’s sea. Enormous mouths of glimmering teeth, with alien stars inside.
“At first I thought I could break the chains you forged because I wasn’t part of the Cloud, because you had no way to bind me. Then I thought the system listened to me because you’d made a mistake, and did not realize it would confuse us—a loophole you’d close once you discovered it. When I couldn’t take off Zanj’s crown, I thought you must have fixed it—but Zanj couldn’t hurt me even so, and I could still open your locks, your wall, command your Grayframe. I had just been scared. I wanted to control Zanj, like you did.”
No answer but an underwater scream, bubbles wreathing them, breaking the thin trail of blood. Viv pulled her closer. They’d fallen as far as they would go, and still water gaped beneath them, deep and dark and full of vast moving shapes.
“You can’t close the loophole, because there isn’t one. You can’t lock me out, because the system you’ve built looks at you and sees however many thousands of years of power and rule, sees the immense shell you’ve built around yourself. And then it looks at me. And I look a lot more like the woman who did the building.”
The Empress stiffened then, stopped clawing and tried to pry free, to swim away. But Viv held her close in the depths.
“I have a soul,” she said. “Of course I do. Everyone does. It’s been translating for me this whole time, interpreting me to others, warning me from danger, guiding me here. It’s your soul, so big nobody else can see it, filling the Cloud. Binding it to order. Your complexity, drawing the Bleed.”
“You don’t understand!” The voice, her voice, sounded desperate, a girl drowning in deep water, alone. She had always been alone. “The Bleed are coming. The Bleed are here. We’re so close, I’m so close, and you’ll never stop them without me.”
“They come when there are too many demands on the Cloud,” she said. “This place was here before you. You found it, and built something here you could control. You didn’t ask yourself what lived here, who might be using it or how. You chased them from their feeding grounds. Drove them mad.” The Bleed neared, suggestions of form almost invisible in the murk beyond the green.
“There was nothing before I came.” She spat the words. “Nothing before me. Call me a monster if you like, but I gave us the stars. I made wonders. I beat them. You know in your bones that you were one accident away from being me. If you seize my power, you’ll make the same choices I did.”
“You’re right. I would. That’s why we have to change.”
The Empress clawed at her back. She was weeping, in the depths.
Viv said, “I love you.” And as the weight of water pressed them close, she kissed her, and drew her in.
The Bleed circled close. They had no eyes and no gills, of course, since they were not really sharks. But they had mouths and teeth, and there were so, so many of them. Waiting. They smelled a change, but not all change was for the best.
There had been a change before, after all. A slow, cascading transformation, a green light seeping from a hole in their world, transforming the water through which they swam, robbing it of air, starving them of chaos and complexity, burning through the darkness beneath the stars where they once prowled, hunted, fed.
Viv opened her eyes underwater, alone. Black spots moved across her vision. Her head felt heavy. She had so little time.
The light filled her as she rose—the light, in a very real sense, was her. Where she could see, she was. She could peer across the galaxy, and cross all that space in an instant. I never dreamed, people said when they received some enormous fortune or power or honor. I never dreamed it would be like this. But Viv dreamed. That was why she won.
The galaxy waited for her. Trillions of beings. Ghosts and gods and living mortals. The poetry of archives. The power to build suns and break them. All at her, at Her, command. And it felt glorious.
Which was the problem. The Bleed had been born in the place beyond, the hyperspaces from which the Cloud was built, and they lived there still (if lived was the right word), rambling in the space beyond its edges, hiding in deep pockets of hyperspace until expanding Cloud disturbed them. But when the Cloud reached into the hollows where they hid, they fought back, and ate it and the matter that gave it birth. If the Cloud broke apart, they would own their space again: the computational depths through which they swam. All Viv had to do was surrender. Give it all up. Step down as Queen of Everything.
She heard them all in that silence, as the Bleed circled. Xiara, god, Xiara, singing and weeping in Groundswell’s heart, thinking her mother dead, while nearby the Ornchief hovered comatose in her fast picket, oxygen supplies dwindling, her soul compressing itself in preparation to leave its physical frame. Gray stared up at the smiling mouths of his doom. Zanj, bleeding, held fast to the stitch of light where the Empress had been.
There were others, too, Ornclan and Archivist and Pride, the silver birds of Pasquarai and Yish with his clipboard, Refuge’s farmers, children. Bleed rising toward them all, drawn to the Cloud and its Empress. To Viv.
And below them all, she heard Hong—Hong in the Cloud, or Hong in herself?
Nothing lasts forever.
She turned her gaze toward home. Toward the singularity that hovered in a cage of green light in her sky.
She could go home. Surely these machines, built for a more vicious purpose, could give her that at least. One last wish, as she broke them forever. Show me the hole my shape and size, where the Empress pulled me from the depths. Take me home.
The machines did not understand.
The singularity has never been opened, they whispered. Nothing has been removed. To do so would have spoiled the simulation.
The Empress, she replied, and then, I, took a woman out of there. She woke in a bubble in High Carcereal, in green.
The machines disagreed. Nothing had been extracted from Simulation 8117. When monitors detected a successful resolution to the Bleed issue due to deviation in that branch’s Vivian Liao, the easiest method of reading out the result was, naturally, to create an entangled duplicate of Viv-8117, read her into this world, and interrogate her in realspace. A duplicate built gluon by gluon in High Carcereal. A terminal. A construct.
That was her.
She remembered making herself. Images surfaced: the green bubble empty before the machines began their work. The Empress pacing as her body compiled. Bones framed themselves, wreathed in nerves; the eyes inflated next. Blood. Meat. Fat. Skin spread over muscle and fat like algae blooming on a pond. Scars, and birthmarks, and the stubble of her knife-shorn hair.
That was her. And when the Empress found that the simulation’s victory had nothing to do with brilliance, or strategy, or even tactics, but merely a willingness to run, to leave her task unfinished and save her friend, she abandoned the project in disgust.
And what of Vivian Liao inside that simulation? What happened to the woman she’d thought she was?
The machines had learned enough, in their study of the singularity, through selective bombardment and Hawking radiation and other techniques with no names save in languages she’d need several mouths to speak, to answer that. She escaped with Magda and hid, scared, forming her next plan. After weeks of hiding in her basement Viv received a message, so subtle she might as easily have missed it, from the being she’d abandoned half-born in the ’net—a being not hers to control, less golem and more child, who had pieced themselves together and come to seek their creator. Adventures followed that—unraveling a conspiracy, exposing the caves of men who’d tried to stop her. Together, Viv and Magda took their first tender steps into something that would not, in this world, be called the Cloud, toward waiting stars. Many visions spread through this new space, none grand, none complete; the Bleed moved out there, immense and gentle and fearsome in their unconcern, their songs loud enough to break the ears that heard them, their sleepy swimming frames a hazard to all travel, and a source of beauty, too. It was a harder world, dangerous, but no less wonderful. A world where no one lived forever. A world where Vivian Liao and her wife came back to Sol, 307 years of age, to die on Mars, no Empress at all but a traveler, and happy. Where she would say good-bye to Magda one last time.
Viv realized she was crying. She was curled in green, as she had been at the beginning. Alone.
She could go there. She had the power. Just slide herself in, and overwrite the simulation’s Viv, the woman she’d thought she was. With care, she could even keep her memories of all she’d done, as dreams at least. That would be a good life.
But it belonged to someone else.
Viv stared down into the world she’d thought her own, into the life she had thought hers.
She closed the portal, and broke it.
The Bleed circled.
Up there, somewhere outside herself, Xiara, and Gray, and Zanj—and Hong—were waiting.
She stretched out her hand, and while she had the power, changed some things. A touch of healing for Zanj, returning the machines that made her. Xiara and her fleet she pushed to safety, and while she was at it she dropped the Ornchief into Groundswell’s medical bay. Gray, and the Grayframe, and Zanj as well, she moved. The Moon would not be safe in a few seconds.
She swam for the surface, but found herself dragged down. Her head felt so heavy.
Oh. Right.
She made a knife, and cut off the thickness of her ten-thousand-year braid, and kicked up toward the surface.
She heard a noise, deafening after the silence.
The green broke to blackness, full of stars.