The set-set paused to catch its breath. <i was reviewing old records like the mason asked me to. this database doesn’t just track the cars, it tracks the people, patterns and relationships, everyone on earth, utopian and not, so it can predict when people will call cars. but it can predict a lot more than that. i was looking for times when a single point got deleted and had a conspicuously good impact on the rest.>
“Good impact?”
<the system gets tense sometimes, clusters of internal pulls that make masses of points twist or clash. remove just the right point and millions of ugly tensions vanish at once. what’s a comparison you’d understand? it’s like you’re listening to a symphony, and it’s all tense and agitated, then suddenly one discordant note stops, and all the harmonies fall into place. someone’s been detecting these points, and deleting them.>
“Guildbreaker showed me your initial report from earlier this morning.” Papa shooed a Salamanderfly out of his face. “You’d found eighty-one murders by then.”
<points,> the set-set corrected, <please call them points.>
“Hiding from the label won’t help. I’ve looked into those eighty-one. Half were killed in car crashes, some were suicides, the rest were the kinds of random incidents that look like accidents until you dig too deep, but they were murdered, every one of them. At my age, the nose knows.”
The set-set clung tighter to Martin’s arm. <this morning’s list was partial. these points are hard to spot, even for me. i mostly work investment trends, sanling clients. i didn’t realize the points were people. i had no idea deleting a live datapoint would kill someone.>
“Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble. But you’ve found more murders since, yes? More deleted points than the initial eighty-one?”
<yes.>
“How many more?”
<some.>
“I’m not a dentist and I don’t like pulling teeth. How many?”
<9.4 per year, like i said before. actually, it starts out at 9.1, then goes up to 9.4 later.>
Papa’s nose twitched. “After how long?”
<the first thirty years or so are 9.1, the rest are 9.4.>
“Thirty years?” Papa looked to Martin, who met him with equal pallor. “That’s a lot more than seven years.”
<you know what, i refuse to do this. i don’t care what you do to me. i won’t be complicit in wrecking everything for everyone forever.>
In seventy years of service, how many attempts at self-sacrifice to save a friend has Papa watched, and watched fail? “You can’t save Sidney and Eureka.”
<you think it’s sidney and eureka i care about? you’re a european, you must see the consequences for you, too!>
“European?” It was Aldrin who repeated it, but that steely tone might as easily have risen from any of the digital faces that ringed the set-set. “You can’t masquerade here. You recognized this data. Ten billion points in seven groups with two percent floating, you know the proportions as the Hives. You know which Hive is which by size, so you know which are the masterminds, which benefited.”
The skin of sensors shifted over the set-set’s trembling limbs.
“Tell me,” Aldrin pressed, “when you tried to delete a point yourself just now, were you trying to save the whole, or the Mitsubishi?”
<lies! i didn’t know!> The set-set groped for Papa, unused to judging distance with their eyes. <you must believe me, commissioner general, i didn’t know anything!>
“I don’t give a goat’s crap if you knew or not. Somebody tell me how many murders are on that list before I confiscate every hard drive in the building, furry or otherwise!” Papa swatted at the Techupine, which lumbered to safety behind its master’s knees.
<you won’t get it from me. ask them, the spying utopians. they know everything already. they’re the ones that want this. let it come from them, not me.>
Rarely in my history, reader, have I been tempted so to lie. It was Utopia who supplied this last inch of fuse which let the spark reach the powder keg. They were innocent, as innocent as the Emperor who had sent Martin on this quest with no motive but justice, but you will not believe that. You distrust Utopia already. You distrusted them the instant the name ‘Apollo’ made you shout inside: A cult! A cult! You have hungered these many chapters for some evidence to let distrust mature into suspicion. Even when I prove another guilty, when I put a name to that gloved hand which dropped the Seven-Ten list in Ockham’s back room, you will still believe Utopia consented, knew, as shamans know what sky will turn to storm, or what village boy will grow into a monster. They didn’t know. I don’t care if you don’t believe me. Utopia knew nothing of O.S., Apollo knew nothing, and if the Mardis knew enough of human nature to sense a predatory darkness pent up by these years of peace, they did not know to call that sin O.S.
“We have been tagging the points the set-sets focused on.” At Aldrin’s nod one of the other Utopians, shrouded in a nowhere future where Earth and her sister planets had been disassembled rock by rock and spread into a shell to catch every last drip of daylight leaking from our dying sun, brought up the list. Martin made it through the first hundred names, then fell back into his seat, the data thundering on him like a waterfall. Papa took it standing up, though not in silence, the blood of a Greek and of a grandparent making him too much a storyteller to resist reading the juiciest parts aloud.
“Death of Akker Anaba in a car crash in 2392 enabled the Greenpeace-Mitsubishi merger? That’s more than sixty years ago!”
<keep scrolling.>
“Death of Gillian Joiner Dao in a car crash in 2262 enabled the Olympian-Hollyworld merger which created the Humanists. That’s … how far back does this go?”
The set-set sighed surrender. <all the way.>
“What do you mean, ‘all the way’? To the Paleolithic period?”
<to 2210. that’s when the sanling developed cartesian set-sets. that’s when the olympian-run saneer-weeksbooth bash’ started using us on the transit network. that’s when the system’s natural crash rate dropped from 96 per year to 9. actually it dropped from 96 to 4, but they told the public it was 9, so they could use the extra 5 for this.>
“2210.” Papa repeated with a long whistle. “That’s two hundred and forty-four years. Five crashes a year, plus four or five extra deaths carried out by other means than crashes, we’ll say nine victims per year, so … over a thousand victims?”
<two thousand, two hundred and four.>
We reach a breach here, reader: which are you, my near contemporary who breathed these troubled days alongside me, or remote posterity? If you lived through it, you must remember vividly when you first heard that number, where you were—out shopping, sharing dinner—who first told you, what the wind smelled like. Tens of thousands of days fade into memory’s melting pot, but not the day Death first took someone you loved, nor that day. If, on the other hand, you join me from remote posterity, then the picture must be altogether different. Two thousand, two hundred and four: in the coldness of a history book it must seem like nothing—Stalin killed as many in one weekend—and it must fade too beside the millions of the World Wars. Not so for us. For three centuries we had lived out our rose-tinted daydream, convinced that we were peaceful creatures, good at heart, like Locke or Jean-Jacques’s Noble Savages; now we woke to find ourselves still brutish humans in the thrall of Hobbes.
Papa took a breath and held it, one last pause. “Mycroft was right, then.”
“What?” Martin asked, already pale.
“To smear blood all over the Altar of Peace in Romanova. Three hundred years of world peace. Don’t you see it, Martin? This is why.”
“No. No, it can’t—”
<it’s true. i ran sims where those points weren’t deleted. it’s exquisite what sidney and eureka have been doing. if all those discords had been left in place, it would have fallen into chaos, all of it, a dozen times at least. they saved the world.>
“Made the world, more like,” Papa corrected. “They made this world. Two thousand, two hundred and four deaths buy one golden age.”