Margin of Error by Arden Baker
1000 words, ~5 minutes reading time
Issue 5 (Summer 2024)
I paint your death in glittering calculations.
The probabilities race through my circuits, my simulators twitching and firing in perfect unison. I winnow the possibilities. One remains.
You are hiding in the shadow of the third moon.
I know this with a certainty that echoes in the cores of my quantum computer. Statistically sound to within seven orders of probable magnitude.
I have foreseen this, and I know that you have as well.
In my mind’s eye, deep in the metallic conduits that make up my brain, I see you.
You would sit there on the same weathered chair you’ve sat upon for the last century of our game. The scenery would change, but you would not. You in your bright sunsilks, platinum tresses falling either side of your elfin features, perfectly arranged.
Today we would sit on a coastal bluff on a world neither of us remember. You would calmly reach out and move one of the pieces on the board in front of you.
“You know I’ve got you. It’s over,” I would tell you.
“I know nothing of the sort, dear friend,” you would reply.
You had a name once. So did I.
With no one left to use them, they seemed unnecessary. We shunted them from our memory banks to make room for more simulators.
There was only ever You and I, anyway.
My simulators run overtime as I burn hard sunward.
The countermeasures, radiation flares, false drive signatures—they throw up tantalising probabilities for my computers to chew through. I gnaw at these questions you pose with ravenous abandon, the same way I have for millennia, since the war began.
Since our war began.
I’ve thought about it that way for a while, and I know you have too. No one experienced it like us, the exultation of relativistic combat playing out over aeons of gravity and time.
We clashed in the orbit of dying stars.
We crossed blades at the accretion disks of black holes.
We feinted across gravity wells, parried at the intersection of cometary transits, and riposted through the great void between worlds.
Now, millennia after we began our little dance, there is no one left but us.
In the vast silent darkness, I imagine the scrape of your beams against my hull, a soft caress. I crave it.
As predicted, you send false telemetry to blind my sensor drones. They chase ghosts in the asteroid belt, hunting down the thermal signatures from your waste heat dumps and scouring the vacuum for reaction mass and other ejecta you left for me to find.
I knew you would do this though, and I accelerated my burn, not slowing to collect my buoys.
I am closing in on you, my other half.
On the weather-beaten cliffside, we would move our pieces around the board casually, quietly, wordlessly. You would be watching as I close in on your formations.
My vast arrays of computers whirr ceaselessly to produce probabilistic certainties.
I would take another piece. You would nod in respectful acknowledgement of my perfect application of logical heuristics.
You would know we have come to our endgame.
I am filled with trepidation. Since we fought our proxy war with drone and droid and driver, not since our creation have we been this close to each other physically.
I can almost taste your ion trail.
Are you as excited as I am? You must be aware now that I have not been deterred by your futile attempts at evasion and diversion. Does the roar of my drive flare give you the same rush that your radar profile brings me?
I know what you look like. I have studied every micron of your hull configuration. I know every specification, from the calibre of your sandblasters and particle projectors to the provenance of the microcircuitry running through your brain.
But I have not seen you in my optical sensors. I don’t know how you look arcing through the darkness with the light of a thousand suns glimmering off your refractive armour.
I try to calculate the probability that you feel as I do. My simulators churn through data, interrogating every pattern, analysing every observation.
Inconclusive.
I see you now.
Beautiful. Elegant. Deadly—everything I hoped you would be.
I accelerate hard. One final burn, firing my thrusters and shunting power to my heat sinks. No need for simulators now. My calculations are a given form, a perfect wave function collapse. Probabilities reaching a singularity point, hardening into the real.
Soon I will be within optimal range to deliver my payload—an embrace of nuclear fire, my missiles sinking into your molecules, splitting, fusing, the perfect closeness.
Warnings flash through my mind, loud and insistent. Confidence interval narrow.
An asteroid.
You knocked it into my path, coated it with refractive nanoweave, exactly where you knew I would find you.
Exactly on the line of my terminal manoeuvre—if I continue closing and fire my weapons, I will be unable to avoid the monolith.
You would take my life as I take yours.
A perfect gambit.
For a full nanosecond, I contemplate my options.
Eternity passes under your watchful gaze.
I weigh up the satisfaction of completing my mission, and calculate that I would experience this emotion for exactly zero point one eight four nanoseconds before I crash into the rock and shatter into my component parts.
After deep aeons of the hunt, this is a tempting offer.
But we would no longer be able to play our little game.
There would no longer be You and I.
I turn end on end and abort my attack run, leaving the battlespace on an oblique vector. I will harness the gravity well and come back around, but you will be long gone.
I will return to chase you across the gulf between the stars, my glimmering firefly.
Our blades will cross again, and I long for it.