THE TRANSFORMATION PROBLEM
Nick Mamatas
Chakravarty was only the executive vice president (propulsion) of Danneskjöld, but perhaps that is why she perceived the issue first. There was nothing wrong with the plasma collectors, and the ship’s deceleration was on pace, but something was missing, specifically from Chakravarty’s lunch. And this wasn’t the first time such a thing had happened either. Chakravarty was down by nearly a pound, as her pre-paid were consistently short. One less handful of rice here, two percent milk where it should have been whole milk there. The Wagyu beef clearly was not programmed to taste like grass-fed.
Something was draining the processing power from the food synthesizers, she was sure of it. Fuming with dissatisfaction, she sent in a complaint and ate her lamb karahi, which featured the wrong ratio of lamb to the tomato-chili stew. But life on Danneskjöld was not supposed to entail dissatisfaction—those feelings were left behind on Earth, where the oppressors and their guns, or their softer but no less violent ideologies, had oppressed Chakravarty and her people for eons. Their property had been stolen from them, their children dragged off to fight in unjust wars, their lovers torn from their arms, the right to make basic decisions about medicine and food and drink and clothing remanded to a malevolent bureaucracy. But her people were smart, brilliant even, with IQs four or more standard deviations from the norm. It was this intelligence that allowed Chakravarty and people of all genders and races and neurotypes like her to realize that their lives were entirely unfree.
And she and her polycule didn’t spend fifteen years writing code, financing the construction of their ship through a complex series of shell companies set up to organize ablation cascade mitigation missions with uncrewed prototypes of Danneskjöld, having the ship surreptitiously built from captured space debris, investing heavily in post-WWIII insurgent movements in Uzbekistan in order to reduce the payload price of Baikonur Cosmodrome to proper market rates so they could actually afford to fly up to Danneskjöld, and nearly dying when the ship began to spin, just so she could be shorted on food.
At 2000 hours, in the low-g ballroom—a literal spherical room moving through a tube in the opposite direction of Danneskjöld’s rotation—Chakravarty was just strapping Koen into the bondage blob when he said, “Have you noticed that the lights are at ninety-three percent luminance during notional daylight hours?” She inserted the phallic gag, pulled the strap tightly, as he liked it, and said, “No, I haven’t, pig,” and then tugged lightly on his testicles. The session went well enough—Chakravarty did everything Koen wanted: stimulating his prostate, floating to the top of the ball room and stepping on his neck so he could masturbate with his free hand, then ungagging him and sitting upon his face for him to provide services. It was enjoyable enough, and the video would be fun for the rest of the polycule to enjoy, but Chakravarty couldn’t maximize her pleasure. She was just a bit peckish, and annoyed.
Back in normal gravity, Chakravarty’s head swam slightly more than it would have. Low blood sugar, according to her watch, and a sour stomach that her technology could not directly detect. She was . . . upset. Koen had to steady her, as they walked back along the outer ring to their respective rooms.
“The lights are dimmer,” Chakravarty said. “How’s your meal plan?”
“Fine, I guess,” said Koen. “I’m constantly refining it, you know.” He self-consciously patted his flat stomach. Koen was the executive VP for logistics, food synthesis, and culture.
“Help me,” Chakravarty said, tugging at her French braid. Long hair was always annoying during playtime, and doubly so in low g, but Chakravarty didn’t fuck off into deep space to wear her hair up all the time. Koen carefully removed the rubber band at the base of the braid and nudged his fingers within the plait to ease the strands free. Chakravarty sighed, contented for the first time in weeks.
A moment later, agitated again. Her watch chimed. So did Koen’s. So too did the watch on the other side of the door they were standing before. A moment later the rimlights of the hallway pulsed.
An all-hands meeting. At 2300 hours. Freedom never sleeps. Chakravarty and Koen headed to the nearest tube, and got shot into the conference hall.
Danneskjöld was a total monkeysphere—ninety-nine people, and no problems as there were no strangers among them. Social life trended toward panmixia, but enough people were ace to mitigate drama. The firm was neither flat nor pyramidal, but instead a series of mutually blended working groups. There were only four executive vice presidents, and always the possibility of promotion. Everyone was gratefully, almost neurotically, childfree, but life-extenders and the possibility of a future upload resolved even vestigial anxiety about the inevitability of death.
Surely the universe would not continue to exist without the crew and residents of Danneskjöld to observe, harness, and critique it.
Carlos Emerson Ong, who indeed did select their name to create the initials CEO, offered a perfunctory welcome to everyone except for Chakravarty, whom they glared at—even Koen got a lip-twitching smile—and immediately turned on the displays.
“We’ve been seeing some unexpected Hawking radiation about three AUs out,” they said. “We’ve now confirmed it’s a micro black hole. Smaller than any human has seen before. Maybe two suns of mass, and seventeen kilometers in diameter,” Ong said, mostly for their own benefit. Everyone could read the displays faster than Ong could speak, but they were the ones who had set up the visuals. “How did we not notice this?”
“It unfolded into realspace from a microdimension,” Szymanska, EVP of pure science, offered.
“There’s no black hole. AI fuckup,” said Thomasen, not a VP. Skunk-works type. He didn’t like job titles, or all-hands meetings. “Why wouldn’t the black hole have spilled out from another dimension two million years ago, or two weeks from now? We happen to just be sailing past an inexplicable one-chance-in-a-quadrillion event, that sure, might happen all the time in an infinite universe, but we’re not perceiving infinitely. We’re just looking out a window at where it happened to be happening? Bullshit. Sensor error.”
“We caused it,” said Chakravarty. “Or we are causing it, more precisely.” On the whiteboard in her mind, the equations were only just forming, but there was something to it. Thomasen was right that it was too much of a cosmic coincidence that the only ship of humans tooling out past the edge of the Oort Cloud would happen to stumble upon a black hole with a necessarily short life span. But Szymanska was also correct—a micro black hole could and would emerge via unfolding from a subatomic dimension, which would also explain why sensors hadn’t detected any stellar mass or spatial warping any time in the past four years in the black hole’s location. “Drawing in the plasma may have snagged exactly the wrong particle, which might have been entangled with a muon in a tiny dimension, and we pulled the black hole out into realspace like a great black fish out of the sea.”
“That’s just as unlikely as randomly passing by just as the black hole emerged spontaneously,” said Ong.
“Not with the amount of charged particles we’re sucking down,” Chakravarty said.
“So, we’ll be summoning more black holes as we continue our journey?” Szymanska asked. “That could be a problem.” She ran her tongue over her teeth, contemplative. Others muttered with their affinity groups, checked their tablets or watches, shouted random questions that Chakravarty couldn’t answer, swam toward the display to get a closer look at the data streaming in, and Thomasen’s entire working group started hauling themselves, as one, toward the exit.
“We’ll get the AI on it,” said Ong. “Perhaps this is a good thing, not a bad thing. I’m sure there are plenty of ways to fruitfully exploit the ability to generate micro black holes.”
Propulsion, Chakravarty thought. She liked thinking about propulsion.
Faced with the new demands placed upon it, the AI shit the bed. Or rather, the fraction of the AI dedicated to determining whether Chakravarty’s hypothesis had any merit shit the bed.
Something bad was happening. She quickly made a series of trades with Koen’s virtual assistant, offering increased velocity in exchange for increased and more exotic rations—real flash-frozen meat from extinct uncloned animals. Nanoinjectors for her tastebuds to make water and coffee and semen and vaginal fluid more interesting tasting. Hallucinogenic gravy for Sunday afternoon’s spaghetti and meatballs with Beccaria, that old nostalgist.
It was a good trade, recorded on the blockchain, and delivery was supposed to be immediate in exchange for thirteen nanoseconds at .1c thirty-six ship-days from the placement of the order. What Chakravarty got was a slice of rancid bacon, what appeared to be an old-fashioned tab of acid on a Mickey Mouse postage stamp, and a cup of black coffee loaded with sugar.
She addressed the AI directly, which was always risky. Though the AI could comprehend idiomatic natural language, its ability to encode messages of its own into a human language was rather more limited.
“What have I done to deserve this?” she asked room.
p=m
It read like a joke. Of course, the actual joke answer to the question “What have I done to deserve this?”—at least aboard Danneskjöld—was “A=A.” Value for value. You got out of the economy, and the community, and yourself, what you put into it. Everything came from A being equivalent to A, the ultimate axiom. What made it a joke answer to the plaintive wail of “What have I done to deserve this?”
Well, there was a second joke embedded within the straightforward universal fact, the equation of freedom, the expression A=A.
It’s funny because it’s true.
Chakravarty couldn’t trust the AI to explain its joke, and a joke explained is never amusing anyway, so she went to her personal databases and ran P=M through them until she found that P, supposedly, was “profit,” and M was . . .
Surplus value?
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Chakravarty exclaimed aloud. “Surplus value” was war talk. World War III talk. The War was as long as it was bloody, which was to say it was nuclear and most fatalities simply vaporized. That was one way to resolve an intellectual dispute about the nature of the political economy. The irony was that the free world, Chakravarty’s side, won the war . . . and then lost it by creating bureaucracies and regulations and the granting of special rights to the incompetent and the weak while robbing the productive members of society to pay for it all. The supposed “externality” of radioactive fallout required a massive state and the suppression of human ingenuity, just because the seas had boiled away and the air was poison. Well, projects such as Danneskjöld demonstrated that humanity would never be crushed; if the planet was poison, leave the planet. It was the fault of the second-handers anyway, for not letting the ninety-nine ex-gaiaists live their lives in peace. Without the ninety-nine, the Earth had probably already descended into a new dark age, the Communism of the club-wielding cannibal mob, swinging weapons through the blackened, sour air.
The air, Chakravarty thought. She inhaled deeply, like she was about to dive to the bottom of a pool, but her lungs wouldn’t expand. The air, the air . . . what happened to the air!
Chakravarty woke up in the ball room, tied to her own bondage blob. She spit her hair out of her mouth, shook it from her face. Floating above her was Thomasen and his affinity group.
“Hello,” said Thomasen. They’d never been in the ball room together before. He was clothed. She was clothed. The other three members of the working group were clothed. Whatever was happening, or about to happen, it was probably limited to kidnapping.
“Could one of you please put my hair up,” she said, her gaze flitting from one to the other of the two women in Thomasen’s group. One of them, Reed, smiled, kicked off the curved wall of the bondage blob, and, quickly put Chakravarty’s hair in a ponytail then tucked it away between Chakravarty’s shoulder blades. Reed’s hair was short, little more than a buzz cut. She had shaved her head for this encounter.
“I guess you’re wondering—” said Thomasen.
“You’re Communists,” Chakravarty interrupted. “You reprogrammed the AI to distribute food, power, and even sensor power and data processing according to Marx’s sick ideas that equate profit with exploitation. You’ve been starving me. You’ve been dimming the lights in the hallways, because they don’t belong to anyone in particular. You all look pretty well fed though. Let me guess, under the new regime, now you’re the most productive and get the most food, the most oxygen in your quarters. You tried to kill me!”
“No—”
“Yes!” said Reed, with a glare for Thomasen.
“Yes, we are Communists,” said Thomasen, “but no, we didn’t reprogram the AI.”
“And we didn’t try to kill you. We saved you,” said Reed. “I do environment, life support. When the AI revealed P=M, we were all pinged, so I started monitoring your room. The AI didn’t like what you were saying, so . . .”
“And you didn’t program the AI to kill me? Then who did?”
Thomasen nodded over toward Kim, who raised his eyebrows at the gesture, then caught himself.
“Oh yeah, uhm . . .” Kim said. “Best we can determine, the AI reprogrammed the AI. You know that old Milton Friedman joke, about China taking over the entire world, bringing about a golden age of full Communism to the four corners of the Earth, except for Hong Kong?”
“I only know one joke,” Chakravarty said.
“Oh. Well, the punchline is this: The Chicoms didn’t take over Hong Kong so they could monitor its economy and thus know how to price capital goods for the rest of the world,” Kim said. Nobody laughed.
“I guess you had to be there,” said Thomasen. “But best we can determine, the AI is doing that, except reversed. It’s doing perfect market-based distribution and the market continually clears. It’s real-time equilibrium, but to double-check itself, it also scrutinizes inputs based on, uh”—Thomas shrugged, extravagantly—“volume three of Marx’s Capital. And when it first perceived the black hole, the AI started prioritizing those results over distribution patterns based on marginal utility.”
“Which turned out to be very good for this particular working group,” Reed said. “We have been benefitting, significantly. Frankly, it’s because we do all the work around here. You like breathing, don’t you?”
“So now we’re Communists,” said the other woman in the group. “You like being able to take a shit, don’t you?” Xenakis or something, Chakravarty remembered. She was in charge of waste management and environmental recycling. Also not an EVP. None of these people are executive vice presidents of anything!
“What do you want from me?” Chakravarty asked.
“The only thing the AI isn’t redistributing is propulsion,” Xenakis said. “The ship is headed toward the black hole as if it cannot perceive it, even though it clearly can, and has reacted to its existence in other ways.”
“The black hole is like something having come from nothing,” Kim said. His eyebrow twitched again. “Hmm.”
“You figured out the AI, or at least it confided in you,” Thomasen said.
“After a fashion,” Reed said.
“We want to know if you have any bright ideas, anything to say, about what the AI might want from the black hole,” said Thomasen.
“More precisely, what each AI might want from the black hole,” said Xenakis. “Does the market AI want to explore and exploit it, does the Marxist AI want it to eliminate scarcity?”
“Something from nothing!” Kim said.
“I do have something to say,” Chakravarty said. She cleared her throat, and doing her best impression of Koen’s lilting tenor, shouted, “Pumpernickel!”
It was close enough to Koen’s safe word to work. The ball room stopped rotating. Gravity returned, hard, and the working group fell against the walls of the spherical room. The bondage blob’s restraints snapped open, and the ball room’s door dilated. Chakravarty leaped for it, and wiggled through the hole, shut it behind her, then hit the general alarm on her watch.
Ong almost solved the problem by ejecting the ball room, with Thomasen’s group in it, out of the ship and into the black hole. If they’re so curious about it, after all. But the toilets stopped working. The temperature started rising and every screen and bit of glass started fogging over from the exhalations of ninety-five individuals. The AI opened the ball room itself and ushered the Thomasen group out. Ong would have remanded them to their quarters, but the four of them now had the best quarters aboard Danneskjöld, so it wouldn’t have been much of a punishment anyway.
The AI wanted the black hole, that much was certain. Resources had been so thoroughly dedicated to a close flyby that perhaps both AI wanted the black hole. Koen could only hand out the dry protein cakes with vitamin-sauce packets the AI decided everyone was going to eat, and shrug about it.
Then something new happened. Another black hole. Chakravarty was right. The plasma drive—which sucked in charged particles from the interstellar medium, ran them through the ship, and spit them out the back—was somehow generating microscopic black holes. The microdimension from which the first had emerged was twisted into a superstring, one spread out across realspace like a lattice, a net. Three of them now. Four. They were still hours out from the flyby past the first one. Though tiny, it was stable. All these black holes were stable. All five.
“Seven,” said Ong. Another all-hands meeting, in the conference room. Several people had brought guns they’d printed themselves. “This is for you,” Szymanska said, as she held the barrel of hers under Thomasen’s nose. Beccaria was open-carrying too, and drifting menacingly toward Kim and Xenakis.
“Oh, is it a present?” Thomasen asked, and that was a joke because of course nobody exchanged gifts aboard Danneskjöld, but only Chakravarty laughed at the punchline. Everyone else was keenly observing the displays, watching tiny black holes the size of small towns and the mass of small stars form before them.
It was foolish to look up into the sky and discern patterns, to give meaning to them. The constellations as seen from Earth were arbitrary assortments, culturally overdetermined patterns based on the superstitions of primitives and fools eager for something to worship. And yet, even the ninety-nine travelers couldn’t help but peer at the formations on the displays now, hoping to determine . . . what?
“Kind of like a web,” Koen said to Chakravarty.
“Hmm,” Chakravarty said.
He sought out her hand under the table.
Determine what the AI, the smartest of them all, a thing that they had built but that wasn’t remotely human, that may not even be rational despite its ability to calculate, believed to be true.
Were the black holes property—values created from the aether by a value-valuing being? Were the black holes free stuff, an infinite supply of energy that could be distributed evenly and forever according to the needs of sentient beings?
Koen’s hand felt warm in Chakravarty’s. She squeezed it tight.
“You know something,” Chakravarty said, right before everything—and yes, we do mean absolutely everything from muons to galactic clusters—stopped and went black, “from this vantage point, those eight black holes . . . they’re arranged in a familiar pattern. Sort of like, no, exactly like, the eight eyes of a giant cosmic spider.”