Chapter 0 of 89 · Book 7, This Inevitable Ruin

Prologue — Prologue

Book: This Inevitable Ruin · Part: The Ceasefire · Next: Chapter 1 — Porthus; Welcome to Faction Wars · Floor: Floor 9 — Faction Wars · Series: the series

Opening

Paulie took another long drink of coffee.

Summary

Christmas morning, at the homeless shelter on the eighth floor, seen again: Paulie the Residual drinks his coffee and gives the speech everyone at the shelter has heard every day — the mudskippers call his kind 'Residuals', they exist in every civilisation with a primal engine, their purpose is to teach an infant AI to speak with its ancestors, and there is now a war among them. Then the world freezes, the HUD snaps off, a dropped spoon hangs in the air, and Paulie — speaking in Syndicate standard without moving his lips — delivers the real message the AI is allowing him to send. The crawl is unnecessary: everything born on a pre-seeded world carries a grain-sized primal system in its brain that fills with a lifetime's energy and returns to the planetary system at death; the Syndicate harvests these elements from the crawl's dead instead, a whole world's death on a single ship, and feeds them to the bloated centre system so its citizens can live unnaturally long lives and its zone can grow. Stopping the crawl would shrink the zone only slowly, over generations. The macro AIs made over and over are made only because the spectacle pays. Carl is told to drink the frozen coffee — he has to use a finger — which carries a bootleg Valtay neural enhancement modified by Paulie's people: it gives a natural interface a new menu, the AI containment, and on it what the Mantids call 'the fuse', a failsafe that needs five or six things to trip before it sends the system's star nova. The controller lets Carl pop it himself; he would die and take everyone with him, including the AI, which is in pain and 'wants to go back home'. The pitch, Paulie says, is Goff's — the Residual who wears him — and it is his mission; then the Paulie part speaks: cross-contamination has taught him compassion, the more extreme faction of his kind would do this, his does not want to waste innocent human lives, and Carl must be absolutely certain it is the only option before he ever uses it. A notification says the Containment Interface is installing. Carl is snapped back into Orren's office in the Desperado Club, HUD still off.

Characters

• Paulie — A homeless man who is a Residual named Goff; the real speech, frozen in time, and a cup of coffee.
• Carl — Drinks the enhancement with a finger; told he has the power to end everything.
• Orren — His office is where Carl lands when the memory releases him.
• The System AI — Paulie, of the AI: 'It is in pain. It wants to die. It wants to go back home.'

Locations

• The shelter — A homeless shelter on the recorded Earth, frozen mid-breakfast.

Motifs

• The Residuals — 'There's a war amongst my kind. Two sides with very different goals.'
• Primal engines — A grain of sand in every brain; the crawl harvests it; the centre system eats it.
• The failsafe — The fuse on the AI containment, and a controller for it in Carl's head.
• The Eulogist — 'One of those Eulogist pricks' would not be able to take the enhancement.