“I don’t care about that,” snapped Corva. “I mean, you’ve got your family’s biocrypto. You’re coded to be able to operate anything that’s owned by the McGonigal family, right?”
“Well, I was,” he said doubtfully. “Fourteen thousand years ago.”
“Your mother refused to admit you were dead. Everybody knows she made sure you’d always be able to get back into the colony. There’re stories about that—songs, epic poems. The very least of them has you returning from deep space while Sedna’s sleeping and putting your hand on the doorplate and it opens for you.”
“Epic poems,” he said. “That figures.”
“Toby, you can override the dock bots. You can wake the passengers. Just do that, and you’ll never have to see me again. I’ll go back to Thisbe with Halen and you McGonigals can sort things out however you want. Just … let us have our lives, too.”
Had Jaysir told her about the interface they’d found in the data pack from the twentier? Or, more likely, it was Corva who’d put Jaysir up to helping Toby in the first place. As a way of discovering whether Toby really could do what he was rumored to be able to do.
He rubbed his eyes. Was there nobody he could trust? “Maybe I can do it,” he said and shrugged. “I don’t know. And anyway, won’t the local government have something to say about it?”
“You’re a McGonigal,” she said, as if that explained everything. “They can’t stop you.”
CORVA INSISTED HE STAY invisible for the next few days. Maybe nobody could stop Toby once he publicly announced himself, but it was pretty clear that right now he was vulnerable. He could still be killed—or neuroshackled. So for now, he must pay for everything with cash, not take on any jobs that might get him noticed—and of course, tell no one his real name. He didn’t bother to point out that he was already living that way, as per Jaysir’s instructions.
Corva had to “make arrangements.” Something about that made him nervous. Was there more to this than walking into the port authority office and commanding the bots to let her brother’s ship disembark? He could picture himself ordering bots around, but people were another matter entirely. Every time he imagined himself trying to face down the city’s masters, he thought of how easily Ammond and M’boto had kept him under their control. Whatever Corva meant when she used the name “McGonigal,” Toby wasn’t that. The instant he tried to bluff these people, everybody would know it.
So he tossed and turned through the night, and when he wasn’t imagining himself getting thrown in some cell by the local police, he was thinking about Peter. Peter the tyrant.
He kept asking himself, How could Peter do that to Corva’s people? But then he’d remember how Peter and he had built worlds and ruled them with fists iron and otherwise. In Consensus, they had practiced tyranny, rehearsed it. Of course it was just a game, and this was real. Where, though, had the dividing line been for Peter? Had he woken up one day and thought, “I could actually build my perfect society”? Or had the steps shaded into each other so gradually that he never really stopped believing it was all a game?
Hideous thoughts. They chased Toby away from the comfort of sleep, and in the morning Orpheus whined at his haggard appearance.
He felt awful, but he still had to pay for his lodgings, and that meant finding some lazy bot whose job he could do for the day. It wasn’t hard, because the robots that supported Peter’s perfect world had a built-in sense of economy. They also knew, pretty much to the day, when their various systems were due to fail. Toby could stroll into a local factory and just loiter until one came up to him with an offer. This time around he found himself sorting plastic fasteners for four hours, a mind-numbing task that was somehow also soothing—provided you weren’t doing it every day.
While he worked he listened to history lessons from the library. His original plan was to get some sense of what had been going on outside the lockstep, in the wider world that Kirstana had been born into—but that was impossible. Time had been on fast-forward in that world, to such an extent that any history lesson that touched on major events out there had to skip over centuries and even entire millennia, or summarize them with terms like “the gray ages” or “the second transhumanist efflorescence.” You could spend days reviewing the highlights of just one little century out of those thousands of years, because all that history hadn’t unfolded on only one world. There were thousands of planets, so take that original fourteen thousand years and multiply it by that much … Impossible.
All he could really sort out was that humanity and its many subspecies, creations and offspring had experienced many rises and falls over the aeons. Since they had the technology, and lots of motivations, people kept reengineering their own bodies and minds. They gave rise to godlike AIs, and these grew bored and left the galaxy, or died, or turned into uncommunicative lumps, or ran berserk in any of a hundred different ways. On many worlds humans wiped themselves out, or were wiped out by their creations. It happened with tedious regularity. The only reason there were humans at all, these days, was that there were locksteps. They served as literal freezers, preserving ancient human DNA and cultures. All kinds of madness might descend upon the full-speed worlds circling the galaxy’s stars—expansions, contractions, raptures, uploading, downloading, mind control, and body-swapping plagues (quite apart from the usual wars, dark ages, and terraforming failures)—but everybody ignored those useless frozen microworlds drifting between the stars. Their infinitesimal resources and ancient cultures held no interest to the would-be gods of the inner systems. So once those would-be gods had wiped themselves out, the telltale silence from formerly buzzing stars would alert this or that lockstep, and they would send some colonists back. A few millennia later, the human population on Earth and the other lit worlds would again number in the billions or trillions, and some of those would return to the locksteps. And so Peter’s realm survived and, in its own fashion, thrived.
He had better luck researching the lockstep laws; he began to understand why Peter might want to punish Thisbe. Locksteps were a kind of network—specifically, something called a synchronous network, where every node in the mesh sent and received messages at the same time. All the worlds shipped out cargo and passenger ships at the same intervals, and doing this put them all on equal footing. If a couple of worlds doubled or tripled their frequency, they could grow faster than their neighbors. Lockstep worlds were always tempted to do this, and worlds that did often made out very well indeed.
At first, Toby couldn’t see why that mattered. Why shouldn’t everybody just communicate as quickly or slowly as they wanted? Lockstep rates should naturally speed up over time until the whole system collapsed.
There were two reasons. The first had to do with resources.
Part of the reason why Peter’s lockstep was the biggest was that he’d tuned its trading frequency to match the rate of production that the smallest outpost could keep up with. There were tiny colonies that didn’t own even a chunk of cometary ice but harvested the impossibly thin traces of gas found between the stars using modified magnetic ramscoops. In an abyss so empty that there was only one hydrogen atom per cubic centimeter, the scoops filled their vast lungs like baleen whales filtering tenuous oceanic plankton. It could take them decades to fuel a single fusion-powered ship with enough hydrogen to visit their nearest neighbor. Yet even these little starvelings could contribute to the wealth of Lockstep 360/1, because its clock ticks were slow enough for them to keep up.