Then, suddenly, it all vanishes, and she is below the Plate. The bubble follows a brachistochrone mass stream that takes a shortcut through the vacuum gulf between Saturn’s upper atmosphere and the main shell of Supra City. It is a phosphorescent cylinder inside which iron oxide particles flow at an incredible speed in a constant loop. The bubble grabs the stream with EM fields and reaches its intra-Plate velocity of twenty thousand kilometres per hour in moments, while Mieli looks at the scenery.
Above is the inverted world of the Farseer Plate underside – the crumpled depressions of artificial mountains and the plateau of the Basement Sea. It crawls with tentacled zoku kaijubodies, worn by zokus who want to play at being ancient alien gods. The mass stream pillars that support the vast structure are a glowing forest of filaments that vanish into the haze of Saturn below. Traffic flows along them, ranging from a myriad transport bubbles to the feral spider-cities of the Underpirate-zoku. Fortunately, the only one of the latter in sight is thousands of kilometres below her route. It is a black, spiky, many-limbed monstrosity that houses hundreds of thousands of zoku alters; it swings from stream to stream and shoots Underpirate jewels at careless travellers, to entice them to join their crew and to look for quantum booty in Saturn’s endless depths.
She joins a cloud of bubbles travelling along the same stream. They are full of zoku trueforms and alters, humanoids of every hue, shape and description. A blue-skinned giant with a grinning sapphire skull and streamlined armour carapace qupts her an invite to join a Stormrider-zoku that is on its way to dive into the hexagon of the South Pole. Shivalimbed lovers entwined in an impossible tangle of flesh ask her to join a zoku that intends to develop a tantric language. She turns them all down, tells her q-self to block further qupts and keeps going.
At last, Mieli approaches the Irem Plate, and the bubble begins a gentle climb up the curve of the stream. It is a new Plate, and the act of creation is still in progress. The bright glow of continent-scale fabbers shines through seams between the hexes. There are so many mass streams feeding the growing artificial continent that they look like threads hanging from a loom, weaving a new landscape into being.
When the bubble passes a gap in the structure, Mieli catches a glimpse of the complex self-assembly inside the Plate’s cross-section: snakelike piping that folds itself into polygons and complex shapes that become the bones of mountains and hills. Briefly, it reminds her of the Great Works of Oort that she crafted in her youth, chains of tethered comets that gravity folded into convoluted shapes like proteins.
But the scale of this work is beyond her. Mieli wants to close her eyes, but forces herself to keep them open. She has to remember where she is. And she has to remember that she matters. The Dark Man could swallow this bauble of a world with one gulp, but she does not fear him. Even one note in a song can make a difference. A butterfly can change the course of a storm, even one the size of a planet, like the great eyewalls of Saturn, swirling and boiling in the depths, ready to swallow the Plate of Irem, should it ever fall.
The bubble leaves her in the middle of an empty continent, on a vast grey plain lit by wan soletta-light. The ground beneath her feet is made of notchcubes, uniform, gunmetalhued bricks slightly larger than her fist. They are almost too warm to stand on, but they sense Mieli’s presence and cool down, conducting their waste heat elsewhere. They are the macroscopic equivalent of q-dots, basic building blocks of many Supra City megastructures.
The landscape is featureless, except for a gargantuan statue in the horizon: a blocky, rough-hewn image of a man holding a pickaxe, a signature of some Notch-zoku maker who has left their mark on the newborn Plate. Every now and then, there is a booming echo of giant machinery, a brief earthquake somewhere far below. A soft wind blows, bringing a faint smell of burning metal dust.
The grid of the cube seams makes Mieli feel like she is a piece standing on some vast chessboard, waiting for a hand to descend from the sky and move her. What am I doing here?
Her systems send out a brief alert. Another transport bubble arrives in a rush of air. Mieli glimpses the glowing medusa of a zoku trueform. But the newcomer quickly assumes an alter that is something even stranger, a collection of silvery spheres with red-lipped female mouths. The orbs grow and vanish and disappear at irregular intervals. The mouths are speaking, a constant, faint chatter of feminine voices that blur into a cacophony. Yet, the creature feels somehow familiar, an instinctive recognition that they belong to the same zoku.
Identity: Anti-de-Sitter-times-a-Sphere, it qupts, followed by a burst of dizzying geometrical concepts that Mieli has no names for, like the output of mathematics gogols.
‘Hello,’ Mieli says. ‘My name is Mieli.’
The spheres swirl frantically and electricity crackles between them.
One-to-one mapping: Metis. Termination: timelike geodesic. Valence-intensity spectrum: anger. This time, there is an emotion in the qupt: a wave of loathing that makes Mieli reel.
Shit. The Protocol War. It knows me from the Protocol War.
Before she can respond, there is a sound like a giant popping its mouth with a finger, and another transport bubble arrives.
The newcomer is a Quick One – a tiny man on the back of a four-legged, red-eyed, winged creature. His mount is barely the size of an anansi, and he himself could stand on Mieli’s palm – if he was not wearing black, spiky metal armour. He takes a bow without dismounting.
‘GreetingsMyLady! SirMikAtYourService!’ he says in a rapid-fire, tinny voice.
The Anti-de-Sitter creature crackles again, and Mieli senses rapid qupts passing between the strange duo.
‘Fiend!ChallengetoaDuel!’ pipes Sir Mik, brandishing his sword, a tiny sliver of bright metal. One of Anti-de-Sitter-times-a-Sphere’s orbs begins to glow bright.
Mieli activates her combat systems.
There is another pop.
‘Good,’ Zinda says. ‘You have met the team already!’ The zoku girl stands next to Mieli. She is wearing the samurai gear and carrying the naginata from the mountain Realm where they met, although her rabbit mask is pushed up over her head. ‘I am very excited about this – our first mission together!’
‘Kuutar and Ilmatar! What exactly are we doing here?’ Mieli asks, not taking her eyes off the three zoku members.
‘The jewel did not tell you? Not enough entanglement levels yet, I suppose, or best for the volition that I explain it. You are going to like this, Mieli.’ Zinda smiles. ‘We are going to kidnap a Sobornost Founder mind.’
I told you they would hate me, Mieli qupts Zinda.
Oh, shush, it’s just they don’t know you. It will be better after the briefing, I promise.
Briefing? I thought you were just a sleeper agent.
Oh, I was! But I seriously levelled up when I recruited you, she replies with a wistful sigh. Now I barely have time for my old primary zoku anymore. And you are right: I should have made a new alter for this, but I thought I would be better if I came along looking like when we met. It makes me feel brave!
‘All right, everybody,’ Zinda says aloud. ‘Settle down. I am going to make a Circle so we can talk more easily. Mieli joined only recently, and is not comfortable with qupting. Let’s all try to be considerate, now.’
Sir Mik scowls at Mieli. Anti-de-Sitter-times-a-Sphere’s many mouths are hard red lines.
Zinda gestures, and a silver circle appears on the notchcube ground around them: Mieli sees a flash of the rules through her connection to the Huizinga-zoku. No violence. Baseline bodies only. Verbal conflict resolution. Qupting allowed for data exchange only. Points for successful team bonding. The Schroeder locks kick in, and Mieli feels a strange phantom ache where her combat systems should be. She wonders briefly how good the locks really are: they must work through the Huizinga-jewel’s connection to her brain, and her metacortex should be able to disable them if necessary.