“My lady, when you and I stood together, the two of us together on that wrecked, dying ship, I promised you solemnly that I could get you safely away, across the airless gap to my ship, even though you had no suit. Because I knew that your poor, hurt body could be fitted neatly inside my suit; and that is exactly how I did it.”
“Two people in one suit? I didn’t think—”
“Two people, Lady Genevieve, yes, but only one body. Yours. You see, even then I had no body of my own. No solid arms with which to rescue you, or anyone.” His waving hands seemed to deny their own existence. “No anything of flesh and bone.” His voice was low, underplaying the string of disclaimers like a man who admits that he is at the moment inconveniently missing a leg, lost in some accident and not yet medically regrown.
“You seem to be telling me that you have nobody. No—”
“No fleshly body. Nor have I ever had one. To achieve useful solidity I need a spacesuit, or some other hardware subject to my control. What you see before you here and now is an image. Mere information. I am, you see, I have always been, an optelectronic artifact. Fundamentally, no more than a computer program.” Once again Nicholas Hawksmoor made an expansive gesture with his imaged arms.
The lady stared at him for a long time—somewhere time was jerking ahead in subtle electronic increments—and hardly a line of her face moved by so much as a millimeter, for however long she stared.
Finally she said, “You were telling me about my—rescue. Go ahead. I want to hear the details. Everything.”
“Of course. The moment I came aboard the courier where you were trapped, and looked around, I could see that few of your fellow passengers would benefit from any help that I might give … but no, that’s wrong. Let me be truthful with you, always very truthful. The truth was that I cared very little about those people. I didn’t worry about them. It was you I had come to save.
“You—welcomed me aboard. And—just at that point, another blast engulfed us.”
“Yes. Yes, there was another explosion. I remember that.”
In a strained voice Nick whispered: “I am afraid that you were injured rather severely then.”
“Ah.” Both her hands were taken, engulfed, in both of his. She could close her eyes, and did, but nothing she could do would make the strangeness of his touching go away.
“Yes. I had to work very quickly. Your body fit neatly inside my suit, which, as I have tried to explain, is in a way also my body—”
The lady gasped.
“—and which, therefore, in terms of mass and physics, was very nearly empty. And I, dwelling for the time being in the suit’s electronics, working the servos that drive the arms and fingers of the suit, sealed you into the body cavity with my own metal hands, and I, being in effect the spacesuit, acting through the spacesuit, fed you air, made you breathe, though by that time your lungs were scarcely working.
“Then I carried you back safely across the gap of cold and emptiness and death, safely into my own little ship which was standing by. Then out of the suit with you, and right into the medirobot. And now … now here you are.”
The lady was staring at him. She did not appear to be breathing. Now that she thought about it, she seemed to have no need to breathe.
Into the silence, as if he found her silence frightening, her rescuer said: “I don’t suppose you remember my little ship at all. You haven’t really had a chance to see her. I call her the Wren, that’s a sort of pun, she’s named for my namesake’s mentor, Christopher Wren, he was yet another architect. I don’t know if he was any kind of a pilot, in the sailing ships they had those days. I don’t suppose he was—”
She broke in with a reaction of shattered horror. “You are only an image?”
“In a sense, yes. An image appearing in a mode of virtual reality. Technically I am an optelectronic artifact, basically a computer program …”
“Then what in all the hells have I become?What have you done to me?”
Nick, who had been dreading this moment more and more, did his best to explain. His voice was kindly and muted and logical. But before he had said ten more words, the lady began to scream. He tried to talk above the breathless screaming, but that was useless, so for the sake of her own sanity, and his, he exercised a certain control function and turned her off.Only temporarily, of course.
SIX
One of the yacht’s junior officers, who was perhaps really trying to be helpful, said to Kensing, who was standing in one of the yacht’s corridors looking thoughtful: “You really don’t get it about Nick yet, do you?”
Kensing stared at him. “I’ve had other things to think about. So what the hell is it about Nick that I don’t get, assuming his problem has any relevance?”
The man looked defensive. “I didn’t exactly say he had a problem.”
“What, then?”
“Hawksmoor’s a computer program.”
“Oh.” Suddenly several things that had been puzzling Kensing made sense. He had heard of the thing being done before, the optelectronic creation of a close analogue of a human personality. It wasn’t done often, though technically such procedures had been feasible for a long time. In a society that had developed and was still developing while locked in an age-long struggle against machines, the anthropomorphizing of hardware or software was definitely unpopular and uncommon. Such constructions were also illegal on many worlds, among folk who, with the hideous example of the berserkers always before them, lived in dread of their own computer artifacts somehow getting out of hand.
Kensing asked: “You don’t mean a recorded person?”
“Nope. Mean just what I said. The fact doesn’t get much publicity, but the boss has developed a definite interest in electronic personalities over the last few years.”
Kensing nodded. Anthropomorphic programs designed from scratch, as opposed to those recorded from organic human brains, were deeply interesting to many students of psychology, politics, and control. But the few examples extant were generally kept hidden.
There existed a closely related class of programs, actual recorded people, which were sometimes very useful tools but tended to be subject to even more widespread restrictions. Kensing had once met one of them, the program Hilary Gage, which—or who—had played a key role in one particularly famous fight against berserkers. Kensing, meeting the Gage program long after that battle, had enjoyed a lengthy conversation with him—or with it. Even after the long talk, Kensing wasn’t sure which pronoun best applied.
Today, only minutes after discovering the truth about Hawksmoor, Kensing happened to bring up the subject with Frank Marcus. He learned that Frank had met Gage, too; and Frank, like many other people, remained perfectly sure that in meeting a recorded person he had encountered nothing but a program.
At the moment Kensing and Marcus were inspecting the latest VR mockup of the kidnapped station, put up by Eidolon‘s computers. All the members of the crew were taking turns in visiting the ten-cube to see this display when they had the chance; they all wanted to know in detail the nature of the prize they were pursuing, and what sort of military operations might be feasible if and when they got close enough to think of attempting a recovery.
But Kensing, inspecting the model’s beautifully realistic image, was suddenly sure the whole enterprise was doomed to futility. Berserkers killed. That was the function for which they had been designed and built, and that was what they did. The possibility that Annie might be still alive was really small, in fact infinitesimal …
There was an interruption on holostage. Nick Hawksmoor was suddenly present. He appeared standing to one side and slightly behind the modeled cylinder of the station, resting one forearm on the flat disk of the upper end. The weightless image perfectly supported his weightless body.
“Excuse me, gentlemen, but I really couldn’t help overhearing. I’m touching up some of the life support in these compartments at the moment, and on occasion conversations just come through.”
“
Quite all right,” said Kensing, feeling odd.
Hawksmoor acknowledged the declaration with a slight smile. But it was evident that he was mainly interested in talking to Frank, for his eyes turned in that direction. “Perhaps you are aware that I myself am an electronic person, Colonel?”
Frank was already looking at the Hawksmoor image through two of his front-box lenses. A third now swiveled around that way, as if he wanted a better look. “Are you, now?” he commented.
Kensing, listened, was struck by the fact that the voice of the fragmented, augmented man in boxes sounded less human than Nick’s, though both of course were being generated by mechanical speakers.
“Indeed I am.”
Marcus made no further comment.
Nick pressed on, sounding both curious and somehow determined. “Does my revelation make you angry? Do you consider that you have been deceived?”
A metal forelimb gestured lightly. “I admit you took me a little by surprise. Maybe I would be angry if I thought a human had been deceiving me. But getting mad at a tool doesn’t make a lot of sense. Are you a good tool, Nick?”
“I work at being a good tool, usually to the best of my ability. If you are not offended, Colonel, and if you have a little time to spare, let me pursue the subject a little further.”
“Go ahead. Shoot.”
“You will probably not be surprised to hear that I find the topic deeply interesting. Actually I had not expected you to accept my revelation so quickly, without discussion. Without at least some faint suspicion that I was joking.”
All three of Frank’s boxes moved, slightly adjusting their relative positions; Kensing got the impression that their occupant was somehow making himself comfortable. Marcus said: “I said you took me a little by surprise. But maybe not entirely.”
“Indeed. Not entirely? I would like to know what it was about me—about my persona on the holostage, which you have encountered several times—that suggested to you that I lack flesh.”
“Maybe we can go into it sometime. Right now I’ve got other things to do.” End of conversation.
Kensing, at his next opportunity to talk with Premier Dirac, said something about how realistic Nick Hawksmoor appeared to be, what a good job the programmers had done in putting him together. “He’s a relatively new version, I presume?”
Dirac nodded. “Yes, only about a year old. They did do a good job, didn’t they? It took them several months. The truth is I was growing less and less happy with the product I was getting from human architects—that biostation, for example. So I decided to try what a state-of-the-art optelectronic mind could do.”
“I’d say a matter of only months is quick work for a program of such complexity, Premier. I’d have thought years. How was his name chosen, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“My engineers had certain building blocks of programming ready,” Dirac explained vaguely. “That speeded things up. As for his name, Nick picked it himself. Adopted it from some eighteenth-century builder—I’ll tell you the story sometime. Did you get a good look at the station model?”
It seemed to Kensing, who had the chance to observe some of the interactions between Premier Dirac and Hawksmoor, that normally the organic creator got along well enough with his artificial creation.
But the Premier’s feelings toward any optelectronic personalities he encountered tended to be complex and intense.
Once Kensing heard Dirac declaim: “Those transcribed spirits who have retired from flesh into electronic modality generally enjoy a higher social status, if one can put it in those terms, than those who have never possessed a red blood cell in their lives.”
Kensing was unsurprised to hear that he was not the only one who had been fooled for some time by Nick. Others were more upset, on discovering the truth, than he had been. Some of the crew members, like a great many people elsewhere, voiced or at least had some objection to or felt some uneasiness about a computer artifact that looked and sounded so much like a person. It was not of course Hawksmoor’s calculating power—or call it intellect—to which most objected; it was the semblance of humanity possessed by this thingwith which (or whom) the Premier consulted, argued (sometimes joyfully), and upon whom (or which) he seemed to depend so heavily.
* * *
Now that the squadron was ready to pull out from Imatra, Nick was being forced to leave behind his Wren—he thought of the little ship as his. The place on the hangar deck usually occupied by that often useful but unarmed vessel had been taken by an armed military scoutship, the last fighting craft of any kind left in the Imatran system. The recent fighting had ended before the scoutship was able to reach the scene. Dirac had overawed the overmatched local authorities and simply taken it away from them.
But abandoning the Wrenposed more problems for Nick than his creator/employer realized. Now, with the squadron on the verge of departure, Hawksmoor had been supervising, among his other duties, the robot workers busy removing certain equipment from the Wrenand reinstalling it on the newly acquired scout.
During this operation Nick moved himself about, aboard ship or in space, in spacesuit mode. His chief job was supervising the robots that did most of the physical work—these were mostly dog-sized metal creatures with nothing organic in their physical appearance and nothing outstanding in their brains.
While conducting this work openly, Hawksmoor had a desperate need to see that another task was performed also, and in the strictest secrecy—he had to arrange the transfer, from his own small craft to somewhere aboard the yacht, not only of the physical storage units in which he himself resided most of the time, when he was not working in suit-mode, but also of those containing Jenny.
It had turned out, as he had more or less expected, that the physical volume needed to store the recording of a once-organic person—in this case, the Lady Genevieve—under current technology (which incorporated, in solid lumps of heavy metals and composite materials, the latest subquantal storage systems) was just about the same as that required to house Nick himself: about four thousand cubic centimeters, a capacity approximately equivalent to that of three adult human skulls.
The suit Nick had chosen to animate for this particular transfer job happened to be the same one he’d used to rescue Lady Genevieve from the doomed courier. It had sustained some minor damage at that time, damage he was going to be hard put to explain if anyone ever noticed it and queried him about it. He had what he thought were several good explanations ready, and intended to choose what seemed the best one when the moment of truth arrived.
On one of Nick’s suited passages across the hangar deck of the Eidolonhe encountered Kensing, himself spacesuited at the moment. The fleshly man was taking an inventory, and making a hands-on inspection of the small craft aboard, upon which it would be necessary to depend if boarding operations were contemplated.
Nick felt somewhat amused at Kensing’s reaction to the appearance of Nick’s physically empty suit. For some reason this struck the young systems engineer, as it did many other people, as particularly creepy and disturbing.
After meeting Kensing, Hawksmoor considered snatching a few moments from his assigned duties—he had no authorized time for rest, since he was not supposed to need any—to visit Jenny, to make sure she had come through the physical transfer without any problems. Actually there was no reason to think she had even been aware that it was going on, but he wanted to make sure.
In the privacy of his own thought, Hawksmoor had by now begun to ponder very seriously several important questions raised by his new relationship with the Lady Genevieve.
One of the first tasks he had undertaken in these latest intervals of secret work had been to adjust (verytentatively and cautiously!) some of the lady’s peripheral programming, hoping thus to help her recover from the shock of realization of her new state of existence. He had been careful not to overdo the adjustment, and soon as he had awakened the Lady Genevieve again, she had begun at once to implore, to demand, that he tell her exact
ly what had happened to her.
On revisiting Jenny as soon as possible after her transfer to the yacht, Hawksmoor resumed his efforts to explain the new situation to the lady, as gently as he could.
Within a few minutes after he’d rescued the Lady Genevieve (whose spirit at the time had still maintained a tenuous hold upon her native flesh) from the doomed courier and succeeded in carrying her aboard his little ship, the Wren‘s own medirobot had diagnosed her injuries as certainly fatal. Even with deep-freezing until the best in medical help could be obtained, the prognosis was abysmally poor.
At that point he, Nick, as he recounted now, had had no choice. Regardless of what heroic measures he and the medirobot might have taken, the lady’s brain was soon going to be dead—and once that happened, no physician or surgeon, human or robotic, would be able to restore her personality.
As Nicholas—or his image in virtual reality—told this story now, Jenny—or her image—stood staring at him helplessly, her small mouth open on white teeth. At the moment they were, to Jenny’s best awareness, near the very center of the Abbey, halfway down the football-field length of the west nave and strolling east, enjoying the pastel glories painted on stone and wood by an afternoon sun coming in behind them through the stained glass of the great west window. Not as glorious a rose window, Nick thought to himself, as that of Chartres was said to have been—but still impressive.
“Therefore, my lady,” Hawksmoor concluded, “as I have been trying to explain, I did the only thing I could. I recorded you. I saved the patterns of your consciousness, the essence of your personality, practically your entire memory.”
Thanks to the subtle adjustments Nick had very recently made in her peripheral programming, the lady was soon able to calm down enough to reply. Her next words, spoken with the politeness ladyship demanded, were to thank Nick once more for saving her; her next words after those comprised an urgent plea, demand, for a more thorough explanation of her situation.
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