The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [88]
"Only partly. That's why the artilects came back to us: not to report on the absolute nature of reality, but to persuade us that we needed to act. Everything that we see around us, every event that happens in what we think of as reality, has a basis in the Realm." She pointed with the nearly dead stub of her cigarette. "This rig, that wave ... even that seagull over there. All of these things only exist because of computational events occurring in the Realm. But there's a cost. The more complex something is, the greater the burden it places on the part of the Realm where it's being simulated. The Realm isn't a serial processor, you see. It's massively distributed, so one part of it can run much slower than another. And that's what's been happening in our part. In your time there were eight billion living souls on the planet. Eight billion conscious minds, each of which was more complex than any other artefact in the cosmos. Can you begin to grasp the drag factor we were creating? When our part of the Realm only had to simulate rocks and weather and dumb, animal cognition, it ran at much the same speed as any other part. But then we came along. Consciousness was a step-change in the computational load.
And then we went from millions to billions. By the time the artilects reported back, our part of the Realm had almost stalled."
"We never noticed down here."
"Of course not. Our perception of time's flow remained absolutely invariant, even as our entire universe was slowing almost to a standstill. And until the artilects penetrated the Realm and made contact with the others, it didn't matter a damn."
"And now it does."
"The artilects can only defend our part of the Realm if they can operate at the same clock speed as the enemy. They have to be able to respond to those military-arithmetic attacks swiftly and efficiently, and mount counter-offensives of their own. They can't do that if there are eight billion conscious minds holding them back."
"So we sleep."
"The artilects reported back to key figures, living humans who could be trusted to act as effective mouthpieces and organizers. It took time, obviously. The artilects weren't trusted at first. But eventually they were able to prove their case."
"How?"
"By making weird things happen, basically. By mounting selective demonstrations of their control over local reality. Inside the Realm, the artilects were able to influence computational processes: processes that had direct and measurable effects here, in base reality. They created apparitions. Figures in the sky. Things that made the whole world sit up and take notice. Things that couldn't be explained away."
"Like dragons in the sea. Monsters that appear out of nowhere, and then disappear again."
"That's a more refined form, but the principle is the same. Intrusions into base reality from the Realm. Phantasms. They're not stable enough to exist here forever, but they can hold together just long enough to do damage."
Gaunt nodded, at last feeling some of the pieces slot into place. "So that's the enemy doing that. The original artilects, the ones who were already in the Realm."
"No," Nero said. "I'm afraid it's not that simple."
"I didn't think it would be."
"Over time, with the population reduction measures, eight billion living people became two billion sleepers, supported by just a handful of living caretakers. But that still wasn't enough for all of the artilects. There may only be 200,000 of us but we still impose a measurable drag factor, and the effect on the Realm of the two billion sleepers isn't nothing. Some of the artilects believed that they had no obligation to safeguard our existence at all. In the interests of their own self-preservation, they would rather see all conscious life eliminated on Earth. That's why they send the dragons: to destroy the sleepers, and ultimately us. The true enemy can't reach us yet; if they had the means they'd push through something much worse than dragons. Most of the overspill from the war that affects us here is because of