The Folded Sky (White Space, 3) - Softcover

Bear, Elizabeth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1668078112 ISBN 13: 9781668078112

Verlag: Simon & Schuster Nederland B.V., 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Dr. Sunya Song embarks on an interstellar journey across the Milky Way to connect with the artificial intelligence known as Baomind, a moon-sized entity that holds the key to humanity’s survival amidst cosmic challenges and unforeseen threats in Hugo Award–winning author Elizabeth Bear’s next epic science fiction novel.

Information doesn’t want to be free. Information wants to vanish without a trace.

Sunya Song’s job is to stop that from happening.

She’s an archinformist: a specialist historian whose job usually involves sitting at a console at her university job near the Galactic Core, sorting ancient documents and restoring corrupted files.

But now, the research opportunity of a lifetime has sent her—along with her teenage children and alien wife—halfway across the galaxy to preserve the data and aid in the retrieval of the archaeological find of the century: an ancient alien artificial intelligence called Baomind. As vast as a stellar system, the Baomind orbits a dying red giant, and the star’s time has nearly ended.

The isolated research station and its small fleet of ships come under attack by fanatic Freeport pirates who believe that artificial intelligence is an abomination that must be destroyed, putting the lives of Sunya and her family at risk.

Tens of thousands of lightyears from home, isolated from all help, Sunya is the only one who can save them all.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Elizabeth Bear won the John W. Campbell award for Best New Writer in 2005 and has since published fifteen novels and numerous short stories. She writes in both the science fiction and fantasy genres and has won critical acclaim in both. She has won the Hugo Award more than once. She lives in Massachusetts. Visit her on X @Matociquala.

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Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1
THE SKY OUTSIDE THE PORTS resembled a brindled jewel. Bands of light alternated with void-black as crumpled space-time hurtled past our ship’s stationary warp bubble. Over the past five months I’d watched the patterns grow dimmer and farther apart. We were leaving behind the dense starfields of the galactic core, bars, and arms. We were headed into darkness.

It was an awe-inspiring artifact of the intersection of nature and engineering. I was sick to death of looking at it. The novelty of white space had worn off. Cabin fever was setting in.

Every kid wants to travel in space, right? Well, I’m here to tell you most of it is boring.

Admittedly I was cargo and the ship I was on never let me forget it. We had traveled almost the entire radius of the Milky Way to reach a system-sized archaeological site previous explorers had called the Baomind: a vastly ancient, vastly interesting, sentient artifact swarm left behind by the Koregoi, our forerunners and transcenders as a galactic civilization.

My goal—the proposal that the Synarche had accepted when they authorized my trip out here—was to build a preliminary catalogue of the information held in the Baomind. I wouldn’t have time to do much more, I thought—but once we moved it to a safer location and it had reassembled itself, knowing what it knew and what kinds of expertise and experience it could share would be tremendously useful.

Possibly useful enough to win me a spot on the permanent research team.

I’m an archinformist. My name is Dr. Sunyata Song. My friends call me Sunya. My kids call me Mom. My wife, Salvie, calls me Sun.

I had spent the past half year in transit and in preparation. Because I was just a passenger, I had no responsibilities except to exercise, build my algorithms, and catch up on my reading. The crew were glorified long-haul truckers. They were also a docked clade: essentially one person spread out over five bodies. Their name was Chive, and being around them gave me the creeps.

The shipmind was called Dakhira, and he might have offered companionship and conversation. Except he had no use for me at all and was possibly the rudest sentient I’d ever been forced to work around.

Suffice it to say, crew and shipmind were no more thrilled with me at this point than I was with them. Anyway, we were getting close now.

I would have spent more time in my cabin, only it was essentially a rack recessed into the bulkhead, with a walkway alongside the rack exactly one human butt-width (slimmer than mine) wide. I could set the wall to show an outside view, but there were no windows and no place to work.

I was the only passenger on a ship designed to carry an entire research crew, so Dakhira could have reset the space to give me more room and, say, a desk. But that would have required the ship to be something other than a complete and total gnoll.

So I spent most of my time in the lounge or the forward observation deck that doubled as a bridge when the crew was actually navigating. I don’t know how I would have survived six months of that nonsense if not for a lot of rightminding.

The rightminding also helped with missing my wife, and Luna and Stavan, my kids. I occasionally felt like a monster for leaving Salvie behind with a couple of teenagers, and I occasionally felt like a monster for the moments when I recollected what it had been like to be footloose and fancy-free. But mostly I just missed them with a dull ache that could have been incredibly distracting if I let it.

And, truth be told, I worried that while I was gone they might discover they didn’t need me.

Forward suited me pretty well as long as Dakhira and the Chives were leaving me alone. Once I had gotten my space legs—or lack of legs, maybe—I felt I was as agile as anybody without afthands could hope to be. Over the past months, I had enjoyed floating there amongst the ports and screen walls, letting the universe go by while I processed data. I had asked Dakhira to bring along all the available recordings of Baosong, the complex and beautiful communication protocol the Baomind used to talk to itself and others. Getting a feel for it, letting it integrate in my mind, building parsers and algorithms to sort it was the first step in my preparations to process and preserve as much of its knowledge and history as possible, once we got there.

I thought I was going to have a pretty good jump on it once I got access to the complete databases.

I wasn’t a musician or a mathematician, just an archinformist. Which was why I was wearing the recorded memories of a couple of world-class musicians and mathematicians as ayatanas. That was probably part of what was making me feel so trapped: it’s rarely pleasant sharing your head with copies of several different strong personalities, especially when they disagree with one another. Disagreement is good: if standard protocol for long-term ayatana use were for everybody to wear the one acknowledged expert in a field, innovation would soon stagnate.

I had also loaded my fox—my internal hardware—with as much Baosong as it would hold. I’d written parsers (90 percent of archinformation is writing parsers) that would assimilate and compare all of it, pick out patterns, and sort information into categories. I hoped this would result in my having the entire logic structure in place by the time we reached the Baostar and I got access to the main body of data.

I should be thinking about the recovery and preservation of information. In the case of a vast constructed intelligence, the recovery and preservation of information was indistinguishable from the recovery and preservation of life. Including engineered life, such as Dakhira. Such as the Baomind.

This was our only chance to study the Baomind in situ. The Baostar was in its senescence, enduring a hospice that would end with its collapse into a black hole. Whether that collapse happened next week or next millennian… well, they were not much different, from the perspective of a star.

Work was under way to evacuate the tesserae to a stable but uninhabited star closer to the Core, white ships hopping back and forth in endless round trips from here to there, the loops of their white coils filled with chips of Baomind. Like swans ferrying cygnets from place to place on their backs, though in this case the cygnets were far older than the swans.

I was no physicist, but I was given to understand that by removing the Baomind we were further destabilizing its primary. The artifact and the star each were life support for the other. The star provided radiation that fueled the Baomind. The Baomind used its gravity-manipulating technology to postpone the star’s overdue collapse.

Postpone, not avert. Even the Koregoi couldn’t engineer Death away forever. And we were removing an incalculable amount of mass from an unstable system.

Incalculable by me, anyway. The AIs handling logistics probably knew it to a gram.

But that was a problem for when we arrived. In the meantime, it was pleasant to float in Forward, listening to strange harmonics and allowing the parser, a translation protocol, and several recorded experts process them while I monitored the process and made judgment calls. Bands of starlight only flickered past every few seconds now, and I had dimmed the lights. Forward’s interior was carpeted with greenery growing in a sterile mesh to help with carbon and water exchange. The effect was something like...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster Nederland B.V.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1668078112
• ISBN 13: 9781668078112
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 483
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar