Free Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross Page B

off if he'd into a seizure. Or he might have wanted something worse. Another bottle appeared, and she poured half of it over her left hand and thigh. "I need a shower. Antibiotics.
    Lots of antibiotics. How long does that shot put him out for?"
    "How long?" MacDougal sounded puzzled, then spotted the insects: she straightened up, tried to look severe, and went into press-management mode. "Laughing Joker Security takes WMD incursions extremely seriously.
    In accordance with our zero tolerance of nuclear sidearms policy, we deployed a destroyer payload targeted on the offender's reticular activating system. He hasn't got one anymore—he'll stay asleep until the rest of his cerebellum fails." Which, judging from the way she glanced at the erratically snoring figure, would be sooner rather than later. Impromptu art happenings involving nuclear weapons tended to get a bad press even in the laid-back Republique et Canton Geneve.
    There was a shrill beeping from the pile of discarded clothes near the doorway. Rachel was leaning over it and fumbling for her interface rings before she realized she'd moved. "Yes?" she said hoarsely.
    "You haven't heard the last of this!" Judging from her hectoring tone, Madam Chairman had been following events on multicast, and she was royally pissed off at something—probably the fact that Rachel was still alive.
    "I know about you and your cronies in the enforcement branch! Don't think you can get out of the audit hearing the same way!"
    "Oh, fuck off!" said Rachel, killing the call. I'll get you later, she thought dizzily, leaning against the doorframe. Find out what your game is and beat you … She tried to get a grip, paranoia running out of control. "Inspector, can you see I get home? I think I'm about to collapse." She slid down the wall, laughing and crying at the same time. On the other side of the room a naked lady held up something like a fat shotgun cartridge in both hands, triumphantly. Everyone else seemed to be cheering, but for the life of her Rachel couldn't see why.
    MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR
    More than a year earlier, in the middle of a field mission that was rapidly falling apart in all directions simultaneously, Rachel had struck a bargain with the devil. She'd made a deal with something that was indeed perfectly capable of destroying worlds: and much to her disquiet, she discovered afterward that she did not regret it.
    In the wake of the singularity, the Eschaton had apparently vanished from the Earth, leaving behind a crippled network, depopulated cities, the general aftermath of planet-shaking disaster—and three commandments engraved on a cube of solid diamond ten meters on a side: I am the Eschaton. I am not your god.
    I am descended from you and I exist in your future.
    Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.
    Some people claimed to understand what this meant, while others said they were imbeciles or charlatans. The First Reformed Church of Tipler, Astrophysicist, battled it out in the streets with the Reformed Latter-Day Saints. Islam mutated out of recognition, other religions curled up and died.
    Computer scientists—the few who were left; for some reason the Eschaton seemed to select them preferentially—came out with crazy hypotheses.
    The Eschaton was a chunk of software that had, by way of who-knew-what algorithm, achieved computational sentience. It had rapidly bootstrapped itself across the Internet, achieving in minutes or hours as much thinking time as a human might attain in a million years. Then it had transcended, achieving a level of intelligence that simply could not be speculated on, an intellect that compared to human thought as a human might compare to a frog. What it did then, it did for motives that no human being was likely to guess, or understand. How it opened macroscopic wormholes in space-time—something human scientists had no clue how to do—remained a mystery.
    Bizarre references to the light cone made no sense