Free Divergence by Tony Ballantyne Page A

ship. I had to shut them down. Being asleep wouldn’t have protected those passengers; the Dark Seeds can infiltrate dreams. They can cut right down to your subconscious mind.”
    Maurice gave a cold laugh. “They say the worst thing is to have one of the seeds come upon you in your dreams. To be sleeping in your bed while a plant grows nearby, feeding on your nightmares…”
    “Do they look for us?” asked Edward nervously.
    “No,” said Judy, staring at Maurice. “Definitely not, Edward. But we seem able to sense them, no matter what we do. The AIs on the planet Gateway committed suicide rather than face them, do you know that? They were too frightened of what the seeds would become if they were allowed to grow.”
    Saskia opened her mouth; Judy held her hand up to quieten her.
    “Grainne’s upper mind was shut down in sleep, and yet still there was a part of her deep subconscious sensing the world. Do you know what the plants are made of, Saskia? I’ll tell you: nothing. They aren’t really there; they are a recursively defined space, like the Sierpienski Gasket. The seeds look like cubes, but their fascinating structure draws your attention in, as it is intended to. You look at a cube and you can see little holes in its structure. So you look closer at the structure around the holes and you see that it is made of holes, too. Everywhere you look you see holes, never actually the seed itself. You look closer and closer and the stuff that makes up the seed is always tantalizingly out of your reach, and you begin to suspect that the seed itself isn’t actually there.”
    “What’s so bad about that?”
    “Do you believe in the soul, Saskia?”
    “No. Do you?”
    “No. And yet those who have ever looked at the plants all say the same thing. They felt as if their soul had become lost amongst the intangible substance of the plants. I’ve known people who have been saved from the plants—pulled back from the brink. They walk and eat and…and that’s about it, and…”
    Judy gazed at her hands, remembering her fear on the ship. She was trying to feel something, anything, more than just the effects of the mechanism that made up her brain. “…and all the time the seed is growing and growing. Making a plant out of nothing. And that plant is even more fascinating, and it is pulling at the fabric of the universe, inflating loops of cosmic string larger and larger to make BVBs…”
    “They’ve used the Sierpienski Gasket as decoration on the walls over there,” said Maurice quietly.
    Maurice saw Edward turn to look where he was pointing, at the white shape like a square split into nine little squares by a Tic-Tac-Toe grid.
    “See how it’s made, Edward?” he said. “Take away the middle square and then split each of the remaining squares into nine, and take away the middle squares again, and repeat that process forever.”
    Judy was looking at the shape, too. “More connections,” she whispered. She turned back to find Saskia looking at her.
    The other woman blinked. “Did you kill the others on that ship as well?” she asked blandly.
    Judy blinked in turn.
    “Only four. Then the rescue arrived.”
     
    Judy felt the life ebb from the fourth passenger. It rattled out from her empty body, skittering away with the sound of a metal ball in a plastic cup, and Judy felt nothing at its passing. She had told herself not to.
    Jesse felt the change first; he had to shout to make himself heard above the rising buzz of the plants growing from the Dark Seeds.
    —Judy, something is in here with us.
    Judy, her eyes tightly closed, could still see by grey light. The outlines of fabulous plants danced behind her eyelids, her optic nerves somehow registering their presence.
    “I can’t see anything,” she muttered. “Jesse, I’m not going to have time to kill them all…”
    —We’re leaking air. Open your eyes so I can see, Judy. There is something down the corridor, and it’s coming towards us.
    “I