Bright Light. Ian Douglas

we are living in a simulation, someone up there programmed a piss-poor reality for us.”

      “And that, Lieutenant,” she said cheerfully, “is why Paradise, Inc. is here. Now … you’re currently on active duty?”

      “I am. Two more years before I can resign my commission.”

      “That is not a problem, Lieutenant. We can make a reservation for you, and even begin designing your ideal universe for you before you process.”

      “I’ll need to think about it, ma’am,” he told her. He stood up. “One more question?”

      “Of course.”

      “How do I pay for all this if I’m dead?”

      “You turn over your personal credit when you come for processing, Lieutenant, with a ten-thousand-credit minimum. The more credit you transfer, the larger the field of available universes open to you once you cross over. The cost is applied to the ongoing maintenance of your eschatoverse, to administrative overhead—”

      “Including your own salary, I’m sure.” He grinned at her. “Thank you, Ms. Marukawa. You’ve been most helpful.”

      “We look forward to your new life with us, Lieutenant.”

      Gregory left the office and made his way cross-complex to the Free Fall, a watering hole popular with naval officers enjoying some downtime “ashore.” His conversation with Marukawa had brought up a couple of unpleasant points.

      First and foremost, of course, was the inescapable fact that Meg was dead, that if he shared an artificial reality with her, it would be with an electronic illusion, not with the real person. Okay … he could edit that part out of his memory. But still, the idea was … unpleasant.

      There was also the very real question of eternity. Nothing lasts forever, and that certainly included the computers and AI networks girdling Earth in the various synchorbitals or buried underground on the moon and elsewhere. Granted, someday all of those networks might be subsumed into a larger, more powerful, more advanced electronic infrastructure. He could imagine Humankind building its own Dyson swarm, like the one they’d discovered out at Tabby’s Star … or even a Kardashev-3 galactic Dyson sphere, like the one they’d glimpsed a few million years in the future. If that happened, Paradise, Inc.’s virtual multiverse would likely get picked up and passed along.

      But Gregory had seen what happened when the Rosette entity had descended on Heimdall, just twelve light years from Sol. Uploaded minds occupying artificial realities there had been … eaten. Were they still alive—assuming of course that digital minds in a virtual reality could be thought of as “alive”?

      What if the entity came to earth one day … maybe after he’d turned off his organic body and begun cavorting in a Paradise, Inc. heaven?

      Or … shit. What if the maintenance workers just decided to walk off the job? What if someone pulled the plug?

      He didn’t like the idea that his very existence would be utterly dependent on someone, anyone, else.

      It might be a better idea in the long run, Gregory thought, to come to grips with the universe he was in now.

      TC/USNA CVS Republic

       SupraQuito Yards

       Earth Synchorbit

       1427 hours, TFT

      “Bright Light Module One is on board,” the ship’s executive officer said. Commander Jonathan Rohlwing turned and gave Gray an unfathomable look. “Republic is ready in all respects for departure.”

      “Personnel?”

      “We still have twelve personnel ashore, but all are due back on board by sixteen hundred hours.”

      “Very well.”

      Was there a measure of resentment in Rohlwing’s voice, Gray wondered? Republic would have been Rohlwing’s command, presumably, had they not dragged Gray in off the street, dusted him off, and put him in the command seat.

      Gray wouldn’t have blamed his exec if he did resent what had happened. This whole arrangement—kicking him out of the Navy, then bringing him back as a civilian CO—was ridiculous.

      It wasn’t entirely without precedent, though. Centuries before, in the wet Navy, certain classes of supply and cargo ships had been civilian vessels with civilian skippers … but in an emergency the ships could be activated as military vessels under military command.

      And yet they’d kept their civilian skippers.

      But command of a ship, any ship, demanded absolute trust between crew and captain. That trust ran both ways, too. The ship’s XO had to trust his captain to make the right decisions and give the right commands. At the same time, Gray had to know that he could trust Rohlwing to follow his commands to the letter.

      As always, building that two-way trust would take time.

      Gray just hoped that they had that time.

      USNA CVE Guadalcanal

       Orbiting Heimdall

       Kapteyn’s Star

       1650 hours, TFT

      The Guadalcanal had reached the rest of the small flotilla keeping watch within the Kapteyn’s Star system. Captain Taggart had linked through to Admiral Rasmussen and his staff on board the heavy cruiser Toronto in orbit around the ice giant Thrymheim, the system’s fourth planet.

      For several hours, now, Guadalcanal had drifted in a slow orbit with the rest of the flotilla. On her external feeds, Taggart could see the other five ships of the group—the flagship Toronto, a North Chinese light cruiser Shanxi, and three destroyers. The ’Canal had long since fed the Toronto images of what they’d seen over Heimdall. Now the small squadron was watching and recording the light show taking place sunward, over five astronomical units distant within the inner core of the system. At this distance, almost 9 AUs, the tiny red sun was a sullen-ember pinpoint, one barely visible to the naked eye. The Rosette entity’s construction consisted of a surreal tangle of geometric shapes and lights, and it appeared to be unfolding out of itself, growing rapidly larger and more complex.

      “It’s matching the patterns that were here before the battle,” Taggart told Rasmussen over the tactical link. “I think once those structures are built, they can turn them on or off whenever they please.”

      “The structures are anchored within the spacetime matrix,” Dr. Howard Thornton of Toronto’s xenosoph department observed. “Captain Taggart is right. They store the pattern of those shapes inside 4-D space and summon them when they need them.”

      “How the hell do they manage that?” Rasmussen demanded.

      “If I could tell you that, Admiral,” Thornton said, “I would be from a K-2 civilization. Maybe K-3.”

      Referring to the Kardashev Scale, what Thornton meant was that Humankind was nowhere near the technological level they would need to be to understand what was happening, let alone produce those results. Whatever the Rosette entity was, it was eons ahead of Humankind on the learning curve and was manipulating spacetime in ways that suggested an ability to suck up every erg produced by a star … and quite possibly considerably more.

      Taggart again felt the stirrings of a deep, inward religious awe.

      For years she’d been a member of her former husband’s church, the Ancient Alien Creationists. It had taken her several years to shake that belief set; Trevor Gray’s discussions with her had eventually helped convince her that the AAC’s image of advanced galactic aliens tinkering with the human genome was weak and hopelessly anthropocentric. Beings powerful enough to do that—rewiring spacetime to their own advantage—wouldn’t give any thought at all to a bunch of paleolithic