John C Wright - Chapter 17: Atkins lyrics

When Eta Carina A and B were driven into each other, both went nova. The explosion was directional: the so-called Dyson scaffolding of the so-called information strand spun up to relativistic speeds. It could focus the explosion by frame-dragging, and concentrate the entire energy output of a supernova into a ray. The beam was visible in deep space where it burned through layers of nebula. Merely the reflection from scattered particles in space was bright enough to damage surrounding unshielded ships and worlds. Her parasol alone saved Twenty-first Earth from destruction. The war fleet of the Silent Oecumene consisted of a single macrostructure, a large and dark Dyson sphere something on the order of the width of Saturn's orbit in diameter built around a black hole. The battle-Dyson was twelve light-years away, shielded and stealthed, and hidden in the fogs of the nebula. It would be twenty-four years before the effect of that shot and its aftermath became visible to observers at planet Ulysses. The events on Twenty-first Earth must have come to a conclusion long before this. We can imagine Ulysses staring in horror at the surface of the Twenty-first Earth as she rises above the seas of her satellite Ulysses. She is enormous—almost four times the apparent size of Ulysses seen from Earth. And she is on fire. The size of the energy discharges, in order to be visible at that distance, are more than even a robust biosphere can tolerate. There fields of fire followed the mountain contours. The green life was fighting the black. Even the Silent One who infiltrated Penelope was surprised by the weapons, now awake and self-aware, hidden throughout her. And he was no longer Ulysses. Let us imagine him standing in his black armor: Atkins, the soldier of the Commonwealth. The information windows appearing around the warlord's head held the last transmission from Penelope. Because her mind was not centralized, parts of her expressed shock and surprise as her new thoughts and new personality template floods into her. The traditional way to picture this scene, albeit it has no basis in fact, is to see her reaching toward her husband with arms outstretched, eyes tormented and wild, but before she can speak a word of love, she and that love are gone; and the arm that reached out now merely performed a crisp salute. The junior Atkins (until then hidden in Penelope) said to the senior, “Your orders, sir?” The battlefield was not just on Earth. There is fighting between the vegetable and animal kingdoms on the surface of Ulysses contaminated by the Silent Lord (also until then hidden in Penelope) and the various remotes and weapons systems, under the control of Atkins (until then hidden in Ulysses) had begun. All of the tenants and their floating cities, of course, took up weapons and charged. They are all Atkins, too. The rocky worlds hanging in the radiation shadow of the information strand were Atkins; the sophotechs occupying the interior of the B-cla** suns were Atkins. The entire Chrysopoeian Oecumene was Atkins. The space- dolphins transformed into black, radar-stealthy shapes, and began to move toward selected targets. The rocky planets surrounding Eta Carina began a slow and inexorable acceleration to relativistic speeds, aimed at the battle-Dyson of the Silent Ones, which was even then starting to unfold into a larger structure and emit remote bodies like miniature suns. The steps by which Atkins lost the battle of Eta Carina are not known. No uncla**ified information exists for either side. But it is not difficult to guess the causes; since the Silent Oecumene expended the energy needed to accelerate and decelerate a black hole across thousands of light-years of space, they had an Infinity Fountain close at hand, rather than languishing back at Cygnus X-1. Even the energy output of a hyper-supernova was insignificant compared to endless, unlimited energy. The Silent One could simply bring more resources to bear, more firepower, and, since energy is related to thinking-system capacity, more intelligence. There is one other small fact we can reconstruct. We know that a fiery hole appeared in the canopy hanging above Twenty-first Earth and her satellite. Some energy beam of immense data-density left the black mountainside of Erebus in Antarctica (which was the Silent One's central node), directed at the information strand-world circling Eta Carina A. Three and a half seconds later, a second hole was burned in the canopy as a download of Atkins's memory-information left the main transmitter at the pole of Ulysses, and also beamed itself toward the information strand. It is not known if Atkins was intercepted in transmission, or if the information strand was already compromised and in the hands of the Lord of the Silence. But Atkins fell into enemy hands.