by Marc Horne
Chapter 12
Dr Quirg worked. She took no pleasure from torturing a synthetic mind. It was for that reason that she was doing this job lying naked on a vibrating lounge chair with a pitcher of margarita. She found she needed at least a little bit of pleasure to work effectively.
She was inside the projection cranium. The minions had done their work and been dismissed. The team had successfully filtered down to the core entry points of what was now being referred to as the Yacht Persona.
Milkison was convinced that it was a misdirection or the memory of a hallucination. Milkison was a fool and always had been and Quirg only kept her around because she mixed a good margarita.
Quirg knew the ineffable sensation of reality. She could feel the impression of randomness that was the fingerprint of truth, an impression of randomness that took billions of years of constant iterations of the laws of physics to produce and that you could not fake in any simulator.
She also knew the human taint of sexual fetishism when she smelled it. She smelled it on the small ivory bust of a mermaid in the cabin on the yacht. It had pierced nipples and buck teeth and whenever she scanned across that part of the data stream she got a good sniff of a thing that the captain of the ship never masturbated over exactly, but which he liked to have in the room when he did.
You couldn’t simulate this stuff.
But you couldn’t prove it either. And you couldn’t crack through to the next level of the data with this kind of proof point. She needed to find a way to get out of the cabin, explore the rest of the yacht and somehow find a photo or a reflection of ‘Xolo’s’ true face. Then the Xolo parapersonality would collapse and the analysis machines would suddenly have tons of data on ‘Yachtsman.’
She had an idea suddenly. She would do a slight data tampering. It would be within acceptable tolerances of the Galactic Artificial Intelligences Association: it would not risk creating a robotic intelligence and it would not even sully her forensics. It was tiny. She did an overwrite and moved the mermaid to the edge of the shelf, teetering with each wave closer to destruction.
Yachtsman would stand and walk over to the door. The glass door.
The edit was in. She played a sim in real time. Sim opened first person. Looking down at the dagger on the table. Just like always. Then looked up to the mermaid after a while. And fuck! The Mermaid was going to fall off!
Meanwhile Quirg’s lounge chair started vibrating like crazy. She turned it down: it was distracting. Work was interesting enough at the present moment to keep her stimulated.
Yachtsman’s world was projected on the cranium. The cranium was at a perfect room temperature. She was buzzing on margarita. She lost her identity, gave it over to the projection.
She (as Yachtsman)(so ‘he’) walked over to the Mermaid and pushed it back on the shelf and the shelf turned on and magnetized the mermaid down safely. Then he turned around and saw a glimpse of himself in the door. A black goatee on a bloated face. A naval uniform of some kind. But then he turned back and looked at that shelf. There was no way that mermaid could have come loose unless someone had been in here.
He reached to his belt for a pistol and flashed it around the room, breathing and blood flow both peaking.