For the barest moment after the return to the dark, quiet spaceship, or Jagdkontrol, as the machine intelligence Olga called herself, Yarielis felt nothing but a deep sense of relief. The silence was a soothing balm after trying to process all she had been hearing in the impossible place the strange people who called themselves gods claimed as their domain.
Loucas was by her side, lost in his own thoughts, and Yari could hear nothing but their breathing and the dimmest hum from the Jagdkontrol’s power and life support systems, which were still mostly powered down. So far, the Station Rome authorities hadn’t noticed them, Yari was pleased to see. Olga’s plan was working. At least, the portion of it Olga had told her about so far.
Yari still wasn’t sure how to describe the process Olga called integration. It had been like passing into a strange dream, but when she awakened it was as if she had traveled to an entirely different place. If it had not been for the awful sequence of jarring transitions leading up to this one, she might have been frightened. But now she found herself eager to go right back, because once Yari had discovered what she could do there, everything in her life had changed.
“So, bro, what’cha thinking about?” Yari asked in a soft voice when she was ready to rouse him.
Loucas jerked his head, startled. “What? Sorry! Whoah, I was really checked out there, huh. Sorry I was just…working through everything, I guess. It hit me when we came back: I’m like, a terrorist here. Fan-freaking-tastic.”
Yari listened sympathetically as her brother cursed several times before rested his head against the wall behind him, glowering helplessly at the ceiling. She reached out gently patted his knee.
“It’ll be okay, Lou,” Yari said. “When I was… I mean... well, I saw how we’re going to get out of here. Olga can go really really fast if she needs to. Her plan is to link up with Franz and Acerbic, which though bigger can go even faster, and then we’ll all escape to… somewhere that isn’t a place these Toff people like to go, I guess. I think it’s a good plan, since I think you seriously ticked them off.”
“Didn’t mean to,” he mumbled sadly. “I really didn’t. Nobody told me the talking package was actually a bomb!”
“It doesn’t matter now,” Yari said sympathetically, looking around. “Hm, I’m not sure when Olga is going to come back online at full strength. I hope soon. She said she was powering down even her cognitive systems to a bare minimum to stay hidden from the space station security scans. Rome, she said this place is called. So weird. I guess maybe Italy started its own space program?”
“Maybe?” Loucas laughed hesitantly, “I mean, we’re apparently in the twenty second century, so I guess almost anything is possible. The robots were talking about teleportation at one point, which makes no sense to me. But did I hear you right? We may not even have working life support for very long? What kind of trick spaceship is this anyway?”
“Oh don’t worry so much,” Olga’s voice whispered from all around them. “I have your precious little life support well under control. We’ll be fine, so long as nobody spots us and blows us out of the sky, like they very much want to. Dratted clever Toffs, I was afraid they might realize they were hit by an infiltrator.”
“Olga, where are you?” Yari asked, staring into the dark cabin. “Can you appear here too?”
“Wait, appear?” Loucas asked, staring at her in confusion. Yari wanted to explain, but wasn’t sure how.
“Why don’t you appear in my domain, Yari?” Olga laughed softly. “Drop the anthropic bias! Digital life is life too, you know.”
“I would love to Olga, if there’s enough power,” Yari said. “But I want to bring Loucas too this time. I think he can help. That’s possible, right? He won’t be able to control anything like I can, but he can see, right?”
“Are you sure about that?” Olga said anxiously. “You have only just begun the integration process, and additional input could cause too much strain on your cognition. You’ll need to be very focused to help me through the next stage.”
Yari nodded, though she didn’t know if Olga could even perceive the gesture with almost everything in the ship powered down. She looked at Loucas, who gave her a curious look in return.
“I have to just show you, I can’t explain,” Yari shrugged. “Olga, where does he need to be? I want to go ahead.”
“Okay!” Olga said. “I was going to suggest getting you both prepared to move anyway, even if we just stick Loucas into a coma for a few hours. The wretched Toffs are sending out a lot of patrols, and when one finally decides to take an interest in us, we’ll have to accelerate lickety-split! Loucas can stay where he is. Yari, please lay back down on your bench.”
She did as instructed, smiling at her brother as the ship’s interface system activated, once again binding them to their benches. He yelped in dismay, but Yari remained still, even though she was not looking forward to the initial sensations produced by the strange materials slithering across her flesh. They came as they had the first time, and almost immediately she was overwhelmed by an unnatural urge to sleep, which she did her best not to resist despite the world disappearing around her.
Yari awoke, or at least it felt exactly like waking, on the Star-Bridge. She turned and saw Loucas standing by her side, jaw already falling open in awe. He looked her up and down, blinking, and then with the barest hint of a double take he did the same with Olga.
Yari and Olga grinned at each other. On the Star-Bridge she could manifest alongside them as if they all had physical bodies, and she did so in spectacular form. Olga was dressed in an absolutely ridiculous imitation of a military uniform, a sleek and genderless assemblage of trousers and blouse that was bedecked in more flash and flair arranged in starkly unusual patterns than Yari had thought possible outside of a Comic-con. Olga’s rich brown skin was framed by a veritable mane of strawberry-red hair, and she grinned at them, opening her arms in a welcoming gesture.
“Greetings and Salutations! Welcome to my Star-Bridge!”
Yari watched Loucas turn in an awestruck circle, breathing slowly, taking it all in. She smiled, as she’d done much the same. Being on the Star-Bridge felt like standing at the peak of a tall, barren mountain during a clear night. A sea of stars enveloped them, an infinity so vast that trying to take it all in risked inducing severe vertigo.
Everything that the Jagdkontrol’s external sensors could detect was scaled against the backdrop of the star field. Yari almost felt like she could reach out and touch some of the nearer objects, Station Rome looming large to one side, the docking apparatus linking them to the space station appearing to reach out towards them until it terminated at the edge of the ship itself.
After he stopped turning, Loucas took a deep breath. Then he started and froze in place, pointing towards the far end of the space station. Yari looked and saw them right away, the integration process already making it easier to perceive data fed to her semi-conscious mind by Olga’s systems. There were two small objects heading their way, fast growing larger.
“Great,” Olga sighed, “here comes the first wave of close patrols, scanning for any ships that might be trying to remain undetected by keeping their power levels low. You know, like us. Yari, you ready for this?”
Yari gulped, and shook her head, assuming Olga would know if she lied. Their thoughts were distinct, but Olga was able to detect so many of Yari’s neural impulses she already showed a knack for working out what Yari was thinking a second before Yari did.
“Sorry, then!” Olga smiled sweetly. “This won’t be pleasant. No one’s first time ever is, I’m afraid. Combat mode activating now!”
Yari closed her eyes, bracing, and when she opened them again an astonishing and completely overwhelming barrage of information was streaking across her field of view. She felt her heart rate increase, and a pounding sensation in her skull added to her discomfort as blood began to surge towards her brain. Even as the flow of data started to slow down and resolve into something that made sense, a rush of near-panic threatened to consume her mind. She focused on her breathing, synchronizing it with the pounding of her heart like two musicians performing a call and response piece. Slowly, the panic subsided, and in its wake she felt curiously alive.
“Alright there, Yarielis?” Loucas said, standing close to her side, eyes full of concern. “Talk to me!”
She nodded slowly. And then stepping to Olga’s side, together they peered at the pair of small spaceships that were all too quickly resolving from vague blurs into distinct, menacing shapes.
Yari parsed through the stream of information, looking for anything useful. Velocity, acceleration, relative orientation, electromagnetic characteristics, weapons load-out; all blurred together in her mind until she felt an odd intuitive understanding of the approaching craft’s purpose and probable courses of action. It was almost as if she could, in that moment, perceive with total clarity the entire universe of possibilities with respect to their immediate predicament.
“Much faster this time, Yari,” Olga beamed, nodding enthusiastically.
“Even better than in the sims, well done! Now, seeing all this, what do you think we should do?”
Loucas’ head twisted around. “Aren’t you supposed to know stuff like that?” He asked, peering suspiciously at her. “Aren’t you the ship’s computer?”
“Machine intelligence, please,” Olga rolled her eyes at him and pulled a comic face. “Sure, I run on computers, but that doesn’t mean I am reducible to one in the exact same way that you aren’t reducible to the bag of flesh and fluid that make up your physical structure.”
“Okay,” Loucas replied, balling his fists, “aren’t you the ship’s machine intelligence, then? Shouldn’t you know how to handle this situation better than Yari? We’re totally new to this!”
“Maybe, I do,” Olga laughed, “but then however is she supposed to train? Besides, this is the type of situation where my type of intelligence doesn’t work as well on its own. Making decisions when all the options are equally risky is hard for a machine intelligence, just like assimilating vast quantities of data and reducing it to a manageable set of causal relationships and then solving the resulting simultaneous differential equations in a coherent system on a dynamic basis is something you biologicals are inherently bad at.”
“What on Earth did you even just say right now?” Loucas squinted.
“I can tell you,” Olga said patiently, like lecturing a young student, “how fast those ships are going, how quickly they can accelerate, what the crews are saying to their controllers on Station Rome, how much power they have and how far we can run before they are certain to blow us up. But unless there’s a clear and statistically dominant solution, I can’t decide between apparently equivalent courses of action without more or less choosing at random. Human intuition, the ability to go with your gut after reviewing the evidence and knowledge of prior situations, even if only remotely similar, is pretty much why the Insurgence still keeps you depressing meat puppets around. You literally make us whole.”
“Enough, both of you!” Yari squeaked anxiously. “Stop bickering and let me concentrate!”
Yari ignored them and focused on the approaching ships, which were now sufficiently close that she could make details of their appearance. Each had a spherical fuselage attached to six struts, three of which were longer and thicker than the others and supported a set of thrusters that the craft used to accelerate and maneuver. Three stumpier struts each supported a pod containing a particle blaster, one strong enough to damage, even destroy, the Jagdkontrol at close range.
The data stream indicated that the two spacecraft were in constant communication with a control center somewhere on the space station itself, and were actively scanning any object that the station’s own scanners hadn’t already identified or couldn’t penetrate thanks to an electromagnetic dead zone formed by all the activity and facilities close to the station surface. It was clear that the two ships were aware of the Jagdkontrol and were moving to inspect it more closely. Their communications with the station indicated they had orders to fire on any object that showed even the slightest chance of posing a threat.
“Well, Yari, what do you think?” Olga asked urgently. “Hide or run?”
Yari looked from Olga to Loucas feeling suddenly annoyed at his silence. Now he didn’t have an opinion to offer, when she could really use one? But she swiftly turned that annoyance back on herself, remembering that he probably couldn’t even see half of what he could. Surprisingly, autistic brains were uniquely suited to handling the integration process.
“Olga, don’t you have at least a… preference?” Yari stamped her foot, exasperated. “Anything at all? I don’t even know how to decide how to decide what to do!”
“Yari, we have to make a choice soon,” Olga said sweetly. “If I decide, it’ll be by a random process. That could be a good or bad choice, I just don’t know! So if there’s anything your gut or intuition or whatever magic it is a biologically evolved brain has that mine lacks that speaks to you on how humans might react to our choices in this situation, now is the time to say something.”
“It would help if I understood what hiding or running means! What happens if they find us while we’re parked, or they see us run? Since I guess those are our two options right now, stay or go?”
“If they find us here and choose to fire,” Olga said simply, “they shoot us and we have no chance whatsoever to escape. If we run and they see us too soon, they will shoot at us and destroy us if they land a solid hit. Eventually, if we stay here, they will notice the thermal or electromagnetic signals that we’re giving off even when mostly powered down. I can’t keep spoofing the station command office’s anomaly recognition program without the sysadmins getting wise to the hack at some point.”
“So damned if we do, damned if we don’t,” Yari said. “Those options are terrible.”
“Yes,” Olga said, peering intently at Yari as if trying to read her thoughts. “But if we time our escape just right, we could detach and accelerate away for a few precious seconds, maybe even close to half a minute before they notice. By then we should have slipped out of lethal weapons range. They’ll have to dispatch long range interceptors to hunt us down, buying us a little more time to stay alive.”
“So what if we run away right this second?” Yari asked. She looked at her brother, but he was blinking hard and rubbing his temples, as if warding off a headache.
“In that case,” Olga replied, “our survival comes down to a simple math problem of how quickly can we accelerate, versus how quickly they can target us. There are several unknowns, but they are shrinking swiftly, and not changing in our favor.”
Yari stared at the fighters, then realizing someone had to decide, she made her choice. “Olga,” she said, “wait until they’ve passed us by. We hide, for now. Let’s wait, then run as soon as they’re out of sight. On the first pass, maybe they will think we’re either wrecked or disabled.”
Olga exhaled, slowly and carefully. Then without warning Loucas interrupted them, sounding confused.
“Olga, are we in some kind of computer program?” Loucas asked, still rubbing his eyes.
“What? No, of course not. Well, probably not. Oh wait, you didn’t mean existentially? Oh, then the answer is yes. Sort of. You are all asleep, essentially anesthetized in cocoons. The Star-Bridge sort of... hijacks your dreams, from an artificially maintained REM sleep state. But don’t worry yourself with that now, watch the fighters! Even being a few steps behind your sister you might yet do us some good.”
Yari felt a thrill of fear. One of the fighters rotated to point its nose straight at them. Its trajectory did not change, and lacking an atmosphere to impede its motion the craft did not have to remain aligned in any particular direction as it soared by. She could feel herself tense, and Olga did as well. Helpless, they could only stand there as the fighter raced towards them. Yari held her breath, then almost jumped out of her skin. Loucas had stepped close without her noticing, and put his arm around her shoulders.
At first she felt irritated, but after an instant it passed, replaced by relief. Whatever the consequences of her decision, he was still by her side, Yari’s protector since the day their parents had brought her home.
They all exhaled when the craft passed them by. It was eerie to the extreme, seeing the nearest approach and soar close past in absolute silence. They watched it twist away as it departed, and Yari felt her muscles relax.
“First check, passed,” Olga sighed. “Should be a few minutes before another patrol comes by this area. So let me do a quick power-up, initialize active sensors to make sure nobody is lurking nearby, and then set the engines for a steady burn out of here! With any luck, they won’t notice until we’re far enough away and moving fast enough to escape pursuit. Then, we… ”
Olga froze, eyes going wide. “Oh, blast it all! They picked up a whiff of signal on that flyby that some clever AI on the station latched on to. The authorities are redirecting fighters… and launching interceptors. Oh joy! Well, enough hiding, it is so past time to be away from this ugly spinning tin can.”
Yari and Loucas froze, staring at one another. At the same time, two chairs appeared out of thin air and Olga shoved the pair roughly into them.
“Don’t get up,” she ordered. “This is going to be very unpleasant for you both. Hang on, we’re about to peace out of Station Rome!”
The Jagdkontrol’s engines flared with a bright white light, and the ship launched itself away into open space. It felt to Yari like a giant had clutched her in its massive palm and was squeezing the life out of her. Her vision narrowed to a point, and the stars disappeared. For she didn’t know how long Yari couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t feel anything but the terrible crushing weight. She hovered on the edge of consciousness for what felt like hours, only dimly aware of the pain and an all-consuming panic, trapped in a new nightmare.
Then slowly, bit by bit, her vision and breath began to return. She felt relief for a few seconds, then extreme discomfort of another sort as her muscles began to spasm randomly and her entire head ached under the renewed pressure brought by the blood rushing back to her brain.
“Down to three gees acceleration now,” Olga’s voice came faintly. “So sorry for having to do that to you, but speed is life in these situations and acceleration is what brings the speed.”
“Force… mass… acceleration… ” Loucas gasped, eyes wide, clutching his side. “Yeah, Olga, I get it. For the first time, I really freaking do!”
The muscle spasms finally subsided, and the general sense of pain gripping Yari’s body was now rapidly replaced by a general sense of being too heavy, like she was encased in a suit of lead. She rolled her head slowly and delicately to the side, and saw that Loucas had now fallen unconscious.
Several flashes at the corner of her vision drew her gaze. They were greenish in hue, and as Yari focused on them she realized that they were emanating from the space station, which had dwindled to a blurry blob in the background of the digital display. Almost instantaneously after a bright flash of red-orange erupted at a point just past where the Jagdkontrol’s simulated physical structure ended.
Station Rome was shooting at them, and as shots missed on either side, Yari saw streaks of blurred light with long tails like green comets. The colors faded away almost as quickly as they burst to life, leaving a faint residue that seemed to smudge the stars behind. Then Yari spotted several additional blurs, blue in hue and with a bright green digital box outlining each. Information began to appear outside the boxes, and Yari inhaled sharply. They were closing distance, slowly but steadily.
“You see them, then?” Olga sighed, looking at Yari. “Good! That you see, I mean, the information itself is very not-good. But I was worried that I knocked you out completely, or that the shock of the acceleration had damaged your cognitive connection to the Star-Bridge, or perhaps your retinas.”
Yari gasped and pointed at her brother. Olga looked at Loucas.
“He’s okay, just passed out,” she chuckled. “I’m good with it. There’s actually not much he or you can do here for a bit, so I was planning on having you both disconnect and rest in the cabin for a while anyway. Take some time for the hard fight to come.”
“Hard fight?” Yari stared at Olga.
Olga winced, her smile wan. “We were able to get out of range fast enough that the shields can now absorb the particle blasts they’ve started sending our way, which is good news! But there’s also bad: a flight of drone interceptors launched faster than I had hoped, and they pack enough firepower to vaporize us. Worse, because they are remotely controlled and partially automated, they can accelerate to overtake us before we get to Acerbic.”
Yari swallowed and stared at the interceptors. Without the boxes, it would have been difficult to see them at all. They were shaped like elongated arrowheads, and from her current perspective they were approaching exactly like arrows in flight, edge facing forward, most of their mass trailing behind. They were only visible because they occluded stars behind them as they moved, like cloud shadows passing over a meadow. They had a little over an hour before the interceptors would be in firing range, and about an hour after that their attacks would be lethal.
“Olga, is there any way we can extend the time?” Yari asked desperately. “Turn off stuff we don’t have to use and send power to the engines?”
Olga shook her head. “The real limit is on your bodies’ ability to tolerate more acceleration. I can send you to sleep and eek out maybe another hour before they come into maximum range, but that won’t help us very much in the end. We need a minimum of six hours at the highest acceleration your bodies can tolerate to reach the rendezvous point with Acerbic. We’ll have to fight.”
Yari nodded, and fell silent. Then she decided what she needed to do.
“Olga, send me and Loucas back to the cabin. Can you give us some guaranteed privacy? If that is possible on a spaceship that’s kind of… you. We’ll want to sit and talk for a few minutes, then you can knock us out for the hard part and wake us when we’re a little more rested, okay?”
“Absolutely!” Olga nodded. “Can do! Get rested, because I’ll need all the help I can get. Those interceptors are mostly controlled by humans back on Station Rome, because the colonial authorities hate uncontrolled machine intelligence. So you two might just be able to improve our slim odds given that we don’t be dealing with pure AI threats.”
Olga waved once, then snapped her fingers. Once again it was like waking up from a nap. Yari felt groggy and slightly confused, but as the membrane binding her to the bench fell away, she got to her feet and moved to sit by Loucas’ side. She sat next to him, held out her hands, and without consciously thinking how she did it, she summoned the Web of Norns.
It appeared, golden tendrils writhing as before. She took her brother in one hand, grasped the web in the other, and reality shifted.
Yari was unprepared for her brother’s full weight falling onto her. But when they arrived they were standing up and he was still unconscious. So fall it did, and she staggered, struggling to avoid dropping him onto the floor of Mimr’s Pub.
Fortunately Loucas was not a big guy and the nearest bench was not far, so Yari managed to shift him towards it then guide his torso so that slumped over the adjacent table. The force of it caused him to stir, but she ignored him, straightening and gazing all around, looking for someone to help them.
A very large man lay snoring on a sofa, the fluffy cat Schwartz curled up in his bushy red beard. Behind the bar another god who looked Freyja’s slightly more masculine twin was singing to himself while rearranging bottles. At the table next to their own sat a woman who held a goblet loosely in her hands that spilled red liquid all over the floor while she batted lazily at the paws of the other queenly cat, Weiss, who whacked her back very contentedly.
Weiss turned to look at Yari, then abandoning the game stood up and hopped across several tables to come and sit next to Loucas’ head. The cat licked his hair a few times, then fixed Yari with a gaze. And, just like before, somehow it communicated with her, as if Yari heard its voice in her head not as words, but a kind of deep certainty that seemed to emanate from deep within her own self.
She nodded and patted her brother’s back. “Well, Loucas, if you were awake I guess I would introduce you to Thor, Freyr, and Idunn.”
“Mrow,” meowed Weiss. The cat then turned back and stalked over to Idunn, whacking her hand with a snowy white paw.
Yari clapped her hands above her head. “Hey! Gods! A little help, please? I think my brother needs some more of that mead. And I want to ask Mimr a question, if I can figure out how to do it right.”
Thor opened one of his eyes. “You don’t have to call us gods,” he grumbled, stroking Schwartz’ ears. “We’re just different, not deities.”
Freyr laughed. “Don’t have to call us not-gods either, though. I mean, I don’t mind.”
“Drunk gods!” laughed Idunn. “Gods of having a good time before the bitter end!”
Yari shook her head. “I don’t really care what I call you, I just want you to help us.”
“Freyr, you’re closest,” he waved, yawning. “And I have a cat that says I must not move. Idunn, you’re it, and healer besides. What’s the kid’s diagnosis?”
Idunn stood up and staggered over to sit across from Loucas. After a few seconds of poking him and giggling, she pronounced her verdict.
“Freyr, get the stuff that smells like pine,” Idunn called to the god behind the bar. “A goblet-full. This fella’s had a wee bit too much gravity to the gut, if you catch my drift.”
Freyr bumbled around, shaking his head, then grabbed a clay pot filled with mead and, apparently deciding that none of the goblets were to his liking, picked up what Yari took to be his own drinking implement and filled it to the brim. He stumbled over to Loucas, spilling some, and she noticed that Freyr’s drinking mug appeared to be carved from animal horn and terminated in a sharp point at the bottom end, thinking it a most strange shape for its purpose.
Working together, Idunn and Freyr tipped back Loucas’ head and poured some of the mead down his throat. He woke with a start, sputtered, and then grabbed at the horn, downing the remaining liquid as quickly as he could gulp it down.
The gods laughed while Loucas took a few breaths to let the mead settle and looked at Yari, smiling weakly. “Hey sis!” He said, “so how’d we get here? I didn’t think Olga could accelerate us all the way to Valhalla.”
Freyr raised an eyebrow and sat down next to Idunn. “Not Valhalla, you know. Just Mimr’s Pub, part of his special well. Decent well drinks, too, thanks to you, Idunn!”
“I don’t really care about that right now,” Yari shook her head. “Sorry, but I need to figure out what we have to do to survive in the twenty-second century. We’re on a spaceship that is running away from other spaceships and losing the race. And I think I know what I have to do next, but I want to make absolutely sure I’m right.”
“You have to win a fight, don’t you?” Thor said, opening both of his eyes. “You probably want Mimr to give advice, then? Tell you what to do to win? That’s hard. Very difficult to predict the outcome of a specific fight. If you aren’t already a lock to win or lose by grace of factors totally out of your control, then the outcome comes down to contingent factors rooted in the context of the situation. Which he doesn’t know any better than you most of the time, as we gods haven’t been to every reality, only a statistically valid sample of them.”
“Uh, wasn’t Thor supposed to be dumb, or something like that?” Loucas muttered, then looked quickly over his shoulder at the large man on the couch. “Um, meaning no offense to the god of thunder? I just repeated what Odin said to us.”
“And comic books. And some regular books,” Yari added, remembering a few portrayals of a character named Thor in her time, now that she thought about it. “Some video games too.”
“I’d say the same of Odin!” Freyr chortled. “To each their own style of intelligence, I suppose.”
“Really you two,” Thor grumbled, “let’s not drag my father’s strange games into this. He can speak for himself when he chooses to, and you know he will! In any case, young Einherjar, you can bring up Mimr to ask his advice, but I’m afraid there isn’t much he will be able to tell you that you might find useful. Different category of situation than the one your friend Eryn is in.”
“How so?” Yari tilted her head. “I don’t understand this time and cosmos stuff at all.”
“That’s alright, almost no one does,” Idunn smiled sweetly, eyes having trouble coming into focus. “Eryn is in the middle of a part of human history that is quite fixed. She is interacting with individuals whose actions will have a great bearing on what consequential events can be affected through actions give the unique time and place Eryn has been sent to. You two, on the other hand, like your other three friends, might have initiated certain events, but have not yet met people of similar historical consequence across multiple Threads of reality.”
Freyr slapped the table, and laughed. “Don’t you love just Midgard? How ridiculously structured it all is, despite being a convoluted multiverse where anything you can possibly imagine is probably reality somewhere? Sometimes I really do think the entire thing is just someone’s simulator, and we’re all just non-player characters hanging on for the ride.”
“I’m still catching up here,” Loucas shook his head, “but question: can’t you just look into our future and tell us if we win or lose the fight? You should know everything about our fate, right?”
“No,” Idunn shook her head. “You do not understand. We could estimate how likely it is that you will be present at the side of certain individuals when and where key decisions will be made and actions taken that structure future events given key moments that have already transpired in your Thread’s recent past. And we can also estimate for you the likely trajectories your Thread could take, given proper interventions, nudging things in the right way and correct time and place. But the more specific and narrow you get when it comes to predictions, in a spatiotemporal sense, the more fuzzy and uncertain things become.”
“Think of it,” Thor called over, “like looking through a powerful electron microscope at something you perceive as being solid, like wood or metal. As you zoom in, you’ll be able to detect lots of variation in its structure, and so understand something about what one bit of the thing looks like at several different points. You could theoretically zoom in so far that you would perceive individual carbon chains, individual molecules, individual atoms, individual sub-atomic particles. But oddly—and this has something to do with the nature of the Universe itself—you would then lose your ability to actually see that thing in relation to other things. And because most things co-exist with other things, zooming in too far basically has the effect of biasing your view, giving you highly accurate and yet almost totally worthless information.”
“In the end,” Thor continued, picking up the cat and holding it over his head, “whatever we can see when we look at the Web amounts to one potential outcome or set of outcomes among many. The futures we forecast are not necessarily what you will actually experience, because individual free choice always complicates predictions. There’s a great deal of guesswork and intuition involved in correctly reading the Web to forecast Fate, and the more specific the event the more dangerous and unstable the prediction in most cases.”
“Unfortunately,” Freyr said, shrugging, “what all this long-winded blather means is that all you can do is try your best in the moment and hope for the best, once locked onto a given course. You make your fate through action, it’s just that other forces are always out there doing their part in making fate too. You never know who wins that invisible struggle until you go there and see an outcome for yourself, which is, of course, the reason why we gods broke the universe for you poor things in the first place.”
Loucas and Yari shared a look, his crestfallen expression exactly matching how she felt. So much for asking the closest thing to experts they were likely to find! If you couldn’t ask a bunch of gods to predict the future, what good were they?
Weiss stalked over to the edge of the table and meowed at Yari. Almost without thinking, she reached out a hand to scratch behind the cat’s ears. Then Yari had an idea. It didn’t solve their current problem, but if they did survive, she knew she’d be glad she asked.
“So this only matters if we win the fight, I guess,” Yari said slowly while Loucas filled a mug of his own with mead and drank it greedily, “but can we, like, leave a note here for the others when they come visit? Maybe in the future we can try to coordinate visits and learn this stuff together?”
Idunn nodded. “Weiss and Schwartz will take care of it. Next time any of the others arrives, they’ll get whatever message you leave from one of the cats. They’ll learn to listen, sooner or later, as you already naturally do, Yarielis.”
Thor grunted, and closed his eyes, settling further into the couch and pulling the cat into his chest. “That is a wise plan. I expect you two will be able to come here more often than your compatriots. Machine intelligence is mostly the same as biological intelligence, except that it is extremely rare for a machine intelligence to have decent intuitive capabilities. It won’t look for unusual connections, patterns, processes without a preexisting definition of what it is after.”
“Which is important why, exactly?” Loucas asked, shaking his head. “How can that let us leave our messed up new reality more than our friends?”
“A machine tends to ignore what is missing,” Thor explained, “unless absence of it is specifically defined as meaningful for some reason. But that is akin to sending a biological intelligence looking for a literal needle in a haystack. Something often avoided in favor of a less resource-intensive solution, such as not worrying about what isn’t posing a problem.”
“So you’re saying,” Yari said, eyes narrowing, “that Olga or Franz or someone like them won’t notice we’re gone from their ships as long as they aren’t specifically looking for us?”
“There are exceptions, of course.” replied Thor. “But in general, don’t worry: if the Web of Norns appears on command, you are in the clear, at least for a time. Which in your case is quickly running short, I see. I take it you had only a brief time before you must prepare for the battle to come?”
“Yeah,” Yari nodded, feeling afraid. “We have to accelerate to buy time, then I have to make sure I know how to work Olga’s defenses. They aren’t quite what I expected from the future.”
Yari turned to check the clock above their door, frustrated that it had gone down almost to zero already. She turned to bid the gods farewell, and was shocked to see that without her noticing Freyr had woken, returned to the bar, filled a small goblet with a sweet-smelling mead, and now knelt in front of her, offering it as if he were an old style courtier.
She took it and sipped at it, then rapidly downed the entire goblet while Freyr beamed at her. “That’ll tide you over, young one!” He said, winking. “Good luck, and I hope to see you here again soon for more drinks and talk. Look on the bright side! If you survive your first battle, you are exponentially more likely to survive the next one after that and many more to come!”
The mead took effect quickly, and Yari now felt peculiarly calm and focused. Smiling, she pulled Loucas to his feet. He was now affected by the mead again too and laughed, reaching out to stroke Weiss.
“Back to it then?” Loucas looked at her, sighing. “I’m not ready for this at all, but I guess there’s no choice. I’ll be right there with you, Yari, all the way. We’ll get through this.”
Yari could only shrug uneasily, smiling back at the humanoid and feline faces that all seemed to be silently wishing her well. She took her brother by the hand and turned to the doorway to fight her first battle.