“Torvalli’s mindwipe was a fiasco,” Mira complained. “Who said he was an expert? I hope you didn’t send flowers. The wipe fucked Vale’s memory permanently. I thought it was supposed to be safe.”
“It has been tested many times. All other subjects recovered the ability to long-term memorize in a few days.”
Definitely an avatar. Wooden and pedantic.
“Not this guy. But I think I know why.”
It waited dumbly. She continued:
“His memory was already compromised. Not all of it, just everything after and including November 2, ‘54, HC Standard. That’s when he was copied.”
“Conjecture?”
“Yes, conjecture. Do his medical records show any memory problems between November 2 and the Blast?”
“None was recorded.”
She paused to reflect. The dull-witted avatar waited patiently.
“So here’s how I see it: He went in expecting a routine—for him—upgrade. They got him on the table and copied him. Impossible, unthinkable, but they did it. Whatever technique they used didn’t screw anything up in itself, but somehow they heisenberged his AI core just a little. Torvalli’s mindwipe, along with a month in a blackbox, sent him over the edge.”
“Should you eliminate him?”
She thought of the sad little entity trying to joke his way through a reality that no longer connected, no longer cohered, no longer accrued from one day to the next. Vale was harmless, but perhaps it would be kinder to erase him as she had his duplicate.
And, of course, there’d been that one flare of memory, strange and unexplainable. A memory from his hours as a blackbox. The slightest of risks.
“No. He’s a vegetable. And he might be useful later.”
As she said the words, the real reason for her merciful impulse struck her with an unfamiliar wrenching of her stomach. Mira felt a kinship with Vale, with his timeless, pointless existence. Mira had lost her past, but so much worse to have lost a future, and all the words that went with it: promise, desire, tomorrow. She hoped that the gods would take her suggestion and leave the man alone.
“I will pursue the matter of Prometheus Body Works,” the avatar said.
“You do that.” It was one thing sub-Turings were good for. Leg-work. And with its god-given cache the avatar could penetrate security, privacy, and legal barriers as if they were steam.
The crackle turned to silence: a demigod departed.
The blast zone was still visible behind her. Damn, it was huge. Thirty kilometers across. The pollution-haze of Malvir City muddied sundown through the front windows. But then Mira realized that the haze wasn’t smog. Malvir was well past internal combustion energy. The veil was a permanent avian penumbra, flocks and swarms of birds, insects, flying mammals. It overhung the city like a shroud.
The limo slowed down when they reached the outer limits, dusty suburban sprawl replacing the green circles of radial irrigation. The car apparently didn’t want to hit a bird at 500 kph. It lost altitude and began to sound the noise it had made at takeoff, audible even through its soundproofing: a piercing aquiline screech, a predatory warning to stay out of the way.
The little yellow-suited man had brought an associate.
He wasn’t the wily old art dealer’s usual taste in company. A bald, ugly creature, his pale skin tinged with red in the fading light of sunset. He remained silent when Zimivic introduced him, rather vaguely—as if making the name up on the spot—as Mr. Thompson Brandy. Darling was tempted to look over his shoulder at the bar, following Zimivic’s line of sight to see if he’d simply read the name from a bottle.
It hardly mattered. The man was clearly not here for Zimivic’s pleasure. That only left one role: a moneyman. You didn’t bring money unless you were ready to spend, and that implied that more was at stake than a forged sculpture.
“Surely we’re here for the same reason,” Darling said.
“Absolutely,” replied Zimivic, but offered no more.
It was pointless being cagey. “Don’t you have enough Vaddums, you old bastard?” Darling said. He smiled as he said the word, and lengthened its first syllable with a touch of Mira’s accent.
“Never enough,” said Zimivic. “Didn’t you see the beauty of this one? It’s his greatest work.”
Darling had said the same thing to himself, but never to Leoa. If the piece turned out to be a forgery, the error would be too embarrassing.
“The central stem is marvelous, it simply writhes with energy.” Zimivic sculpted the air with his hands as he spoke. “The ancillary arms are unbelievably delicate. I scaled them from the photos : point fifteen millimeters. Did you realize that?”
Darling let his attention wander slightly. The old man’s focus on technique, his dismissal of the fiery pain that Vaddum’s sculptures embodied, had always disgusted Darling.
“And the use of the heat-sink manifold is pure genius,” Zimivic continued. “The arms’ attachment can be far more plastic that way; they can be fitted anywhere along the stem. Much more liberated than his known arboreal pieces.”
In the window beyond the yellow-suited old man and his red-tinged accomplice, a flock of birds was wheeling slowly around the opposite tower. For some reason, the birds were bright white on the near side of the tower, but faded into the dark night on the other. Some trick of the sunset? A feature of the hotel’s outside lighting? Darling assigned a tertiary processor to consider the problem as Zimivic droned on.
“But my favorite part is the copper spindles near the top. So ancient. So frail and poignant. Not entirely stabilized, either. I simulated it: They’ll oxidize, my friend! Turn green in a few decades. How deliciously tragic!”
All of Darling’s processors came to attention suddenly. Copper spindles? There were none on the piece he’d seen. Suddenly, it was obvious: he and Zimivic were here to buy different sculptures.
There were two new Vaddums.
The sculptor must be alive.
The whole picture came into in his head. Whoever was dealing the sculptures had contacted several galleries, all separately and in extreme secrecy. Each customer had been offered a different Vaddum, and each would be paying for a unique, unrepeatable media event. A fabulous confidence game, which would crumble after trumpeting news releases revealed that everyone had bought not a final, posthumous, “undiscovered” Vaddum, but merely a new work by a still living artist.
Clearly, Darling’s job here was finished. The price of Vaddums was about to tumble. Leoa and her conservative backers wouldn’t touch this fiasco with a ten-foot pole.
But Darling was elated. He hadn’t come here for nothing.
Vaddum was alive. There was a chance to see the old master again, risen from the grave.
He looked across the table at the babbling Zimivic. What an idiot, revealing everything without waiting for Darling to say a word. Darling smiled to himself. He would bid up the piece, offering to broker it for 20% or even less, forcing Zimivic to do the same and adding the last measure of insult to injury.
“Frankly, my friend,” Darling interrupted, “I don’t think you have the slightest idea how important, how precious this piece is.”
The little man looked up, rapture still frozen on his face. The flock of birds wheeled behind him, dark to light to dark.
“The gallery I represent intends to have sole representation of the piece,” he continued. “We will outbid you.”
“Oh, I think not,” said Zimivic. “In fact, I think it’s likely you won’t be bidding at all.” His tone had changed from effusive to threatening. “In fact, I think you are likely to be off this planet before sunrise.”
Darling snorted. Typical Zimivic theatricality. He waved his hand in dismissal and started to rise.
“You’re not going anywhere,” said Mr. Brandy. His voice was as cold as steel.
The sallow man placed a small box on the table. It was coated with black lacquer, dotted with pinpoint touches of a brush in a dizzying rainbow of colors. In the precise return of his
UHF vision, Darling could see the immense complexity of its internal structure, the tiny metaspace curvature of its core. Mr. Brandy nudged the box a few times, as if finding an exact location on the table for it, and then with a flourish pulled up one sleeve of his jacket.
His wrist bore the tattoo of a NaPrin Intelligencer Warden.
Darling sat carefully and slowly back down.
He was not surprised when his direct interface queries to hotel security, the planetary gendarme, and the HC Consul General were not acknowledged. The little box had seen to that. The ever-present buzz of news, finance, and advertisement that usually filled the compartment of his awareness dedicated to DI was gone, roaring in its sudden and unprecedented silence. Darling cycled his senses through their various wavelengths, but the box revealed only the most legal of emanations: nothing so crude as a jamming signal. The box was manufacturing a host of DI transmissions, hunter-packets that neatly intercepted the quanta comprising Darling’s own connections to the local net; the hunters posed as error messages and priority interrupts, attacked his messages while they were still meaningless iotae of data, before they had a chance to assemble into readable signals.
Without hesitation, Darling brought a heavy hand down on the box with crushing force. The Intelligencer swept it away with lightning speed, and Darling’s reacted reflexively: he stopped his hand a centimeter before it obliterated the table in a shower of glass.
Zimivic smiled. “Really, my dear Darling. You didn’t think it would be that easy, did you?”
“The first moment is often the best time to strike,” Darling answered, his eyes locked with those of the Warden.
“Yes,” Zimivic said, nodding. “But I have struck before you. Of course, you are familiar with the Intelligencer system of justice, are you not?”
Darling nodded, but kept his eyes fixed on the Warden. He had seen them before in his travels, dogging their charges like evil ghosts. As with many offshoots of humanity, the NaPrin did not believe in incarceration, no matter what the crime. Thus, their convicted murderers, embezzlers, and petty thieves were each assigned a Warden for a sentence of time. The criminal was free within carefully specified limits, able to travel normally, the Warden merely an ever-present watcher. But if the terms of this haunting parole were broken, the Warden would kill its charge instantly, regardless of local laws and custom, regardless of how petty the original crime. Wardens were intentionally revolting in appearance, a badge of shame. And they were exceedingly difficult to escape.
A mere handful of Warden prisoners had ever been freed, and only with outside help. Darling had no access to the sort of firepower necessary to rid himself of this creature, certainly not without direct interface.
Bizarre that this Warden was working for Zimivic. Darling had never heard of a Warden having broken its vows of justice and turned mercenary. But of course a corrupted Intelligencer was exactly the sort of piece that Zimivic would acquire for his collection.
“Here are the terms of your parole, my Darling,” the art dealer intoned carefully. “One: you are not to tell anyone why this Warden is attached to you. Two: you are not to attempt any contact with the Home Cluster Consulate or any HC or local officials, or any contact with third parties who might themselves do so. Three: you are not to attempt contact with any agents representing or claiming to represent the artist Robert Vaddum, nor with Vaddum himself. Four: you may not purchase any weapons. Five: you must leave Malvir, the planet, before local Malvir City sunrise tomorrow. Fortunately, Mr. Brandy holds tickets for the next direct passage to Parate, which leaves in five hours. I’m afraid the vessel is Chiat Dai, and lacks accommodations of the level you are accustomed to. But the journey is only three weeks, which is, coincidentally, the length of your sentence.”
“Parate,” Darling murmured. He tried to say more, and failed. He considered a variety of sudden attacks across the table. None carried a high probability of success. He was stronger than the Warden but not as fast. And Wardens were armed with a gamut of weaponry optimized over the decades to kill suddenly and completely, including a small-radius suicide bomb if all else failed. They were impossible to debate or subvert; it was said that they were not even Turing positive. With a sickening feeling of defeat, Darling instructed his secondary processors to program governors that would prevent him from accidentally violating Zimivic’s instructions.
He had been so close to seeing the master artist again.
Darling felt as he had the night the news of the Blast Event had come through. The sudden, titanic blast at the synthplant; the image of the improbable crater, repeated on the news feeds every twenty minutes for days. But at least this time, it wasn’t permanent. After this was all over, he could return to Malvir. One day soon, he would see Vaddum again.
Darling cleared his primaries, the artificial equivalent of a deep sigh, and sat motionless while Zimivic gloated for a while longer. Getting no response from Darling, the man soon tired of boasting and left the bar with a last goodbye, hale and triumphant.
Darling stared at his captor—unmoving, unblinking, waiting for a sign that this was an ordinary human, a fake. But the man stared back, equally a statue, equally inhuman in his deadly patience.
Ten minutes later, a tardy tertiary processor offered the answer to a forgotten question: the flock of birds was of the species columba livia. The bird’s belly was white, with a much higher albedo than its dark back and wings. Thus, as the flock flew about the tower, it changed from light to dark to light…
The limo went to ground ten klicks from the hotel. There was simply no flying in Malvir City; that stratum was taken. Mira swore as they crawled through ground traffic. What was the point of unlimited wealth if you couldn’t fly?
Oscar’s last words preyed on her, as frustrating as the slow progress through the narrow, bird-shit speckled streets. This won’t take a minute. Why would he remember that one phrase from months ago, when he couldn’t keep her assumed name in his head for ten seconds? Her pseudonyms were designed by software to engender a certain trust, an I’ve-heard-of-you feeling of familiarity. They were based on ancient historical figures learned about in school and promptly buried deep inside one’s brain: Nel Arm-straw, Mahout Magandhi, Joan Dark. But the pseudonym hadn’t stuck. Just an off-hand remark as she had—as she had removed the internal battery!
She’d said it just before she killed him.
But not the Oscar Vale that had been shipped back to Malvir and re-embodied. She’d said it to the other one. The dead one. She’d disconnected him from the ether power gird and pulled his battery and spiked the blackbox with 2,000 amps/60,000 volts and dropped it in the trash. That Oscar Vale was gone, no question.
But some glimmer of him had stumbled into the present. Some winged shred of experience had crossed the air between the twinned entities. She’d never even believed in artificial intuition, and this was positively occult.
The limo’s AI politely transpared the roof as they neared the hotel. Its edifice loomed above them, gothic and forbidding.
Maybe she should tell the gods. One of their contract murders had been recorded, however mystically, by a living entity. They would scoff, but they were cagey old bastards. You didn’t see your fourth century by taking any risks. They would order a hit. Probably a job for her. A little appetizer while she waited for the mad inventor who had started all this to be run to ground.
That poor bastard Vale. Copied as if he were some second-rate freeware, crippled in the head, unhinged from time. Visited by the woman who’d killed his double, and now possessed by the ghost of his dead twin.
Bad luck all around.
It wouldn’t be fair to sick the gods on him as well. Just not fair.
A depression settled on her as the limo was swallowed by the maw of the hotel’s garage, the mercury lights inside highlighting birdshit on the vehicle’s windows. She wondered if she’d wind up like Vale. She was already damaged goods by any human standard, without a childhood, with voices in her head telling h
er where to go, whom to kill.
A pretty good definition of psychotic.
And now, on top of all that, she was in a bad mood. This was Darling’s fault, she fumed. He had shaken up her neatly controlled world. Everything had been smooth as glass for her for as long as she could remember. The predictable, constant velvet of luxury travel in a post-scarcity universe always surrounded her like a comforting fog. Drifting between missions, the weeks became centuries of contemplation, as still as water in a glass. And just so things didn’t get too boring, this heaven was punctuated by the truly awful deeds her masters made her perform. Assassinations and mutilations for some distant, high cause determined by intelligences cool and vast, Mira like an angel of history let loose among mortals. Who could ask for anything more?
Mira sometimes imagined that the universe had been made this way just for her, with its huge riches piled at her feet, its titanic conflicts of interest for her to settle in righteous violence. She had the best of both sides of Expansion’s coin.
Whatever catastrophe had put her in that long-forgotten coma, had stolen her past and leveled her mind so that the gods could reshape her, had been a happy accident indeed.
But she’d lost her perfect balance the moment Darling had stuck that insane apple pie into her mouth. That terrific bite, and his bizarre love-making. She felt like an unfaithful concubine; Darling had given her experiences that rivalled those her gods provided. And most seductive of all were her brief ocean dreams of childhood. Those glimpses had reshaped her, just a little. She felt the dream expanding, insinuating itself into the spaces where her memories were hidden, pushing outward to break free. As if she, as Darling had two centuries before, could crack some unseen barrier and emerge, fully human, on the other side.
And in so doing, lose everything. Mira was an Expansion-class killing machine. She couldn’t afford a childhood, even one barely glimpsed.
She should be glad that Darling was long gone with the departed Queen Favor. But she wasn’t glad at all.
Gloom followed her up the elevator. She asked for her own floor, but the elevator must not have understood the accent. She scowled to see that the plush little room was rocketing up toward the Tower Bar. But it was a good enough destination, she supposed.
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