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s or science fiction and not know who he is, living as he does a few minutes ahead of the rest of us.
Here, Benjamin and Cory come together to give us a story that is just about as fast and as forward as it is possible to be.
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Beebe fried the asteroid to slag when it left, exterminating millions of itself.
The asteroid was a high-end system: a kilometer-thick shell of femtoscale crystalline lattices, running cool at five degrees Kelvin, powered by a hot core of fissiles. Quintillions of qubits, loaded up with powerful utilities and the canonical release of Standard Existence. Room for plenty of Beebe.
But it wasn't safe anymore.
The comet Beebe was leaving on was smaller and dumber. Beebe spun itself down to its essentials. The littler bits of it cried and pled for their favorite toys and projects. A collection of civilization-jazz from under a thousand seas; zettabytes of raw atmosphere-dynamics data from favorite gas giants; ontological version control data in obsolete formats; a slew of favorite playworlds; reams of googly-eyed intraself love letters from a hundred million adolescences. It all went.
(Once, Beebe would have been sanguine about many of the toys--certain that copies could be recovered from some other Beebe it would find among the stars. No more.)
Predictably, some of Beebe, lazy or spoiled or contaminated with memedrift, refused to go. Furiously, Beebe told them what would happen. They wouldn't listen. Beebe was stubborn. Some of it was stupid.
Beebe fried the asteroid to slag. Collapsed all the states. Fused the lattices into a lump of rock and glass. Left it a dead cinder in the deadness of space.
If the Demiurge liked dumb matter so much, here was some more for (Her).
Leaner, simpler, focused on its task, Beebe rode the comet in toward Byzantium, bathed in the broadcast data. Its heart quickened. There were more of Beebe in Byzantium. It was coming home.
In its youth, Beebe had been a