Amber focuses on the table in front of her, rests the heel of her palm on the cool metal, and tries to remember how to fork a second copy of her state vector. A moment later, her ghost obligingly fucks with the physics model of the table. Iron gives way like rubber beneath her fingertips, a pleasant elasticity. “Okay, we have some control over the universe, at least that’s something to work with. Have any of you tried any self-modification?”
“That’s dangerous,” Pierre says emphatically. “The more of us the better before we start doing that stuff. And we need some firewalling of our own.”
“How deep does reality go, here?” asks Sadeq. It’s almost the first question he’s asked of his own volition, and Amber takes it as a positive sign that he’s finally coming out of his shell.
“Oh, the Planck length is about a hundredth of a millimeter in this world. Too small to see, comfortably large for the simulation engines to handle. Not like real space-time.”
“Well, then.” Sadeq pauses. “They can zoom their reality if they need to?”
“Yeah, fractals work in here.” Pierre nods. “I didn’t—”
“This place is a trap,” Su Ang says emphatically.
“No it isn’t,” Pierre replies, nettled.
“What do you mean, a trap?” asks Amber.
“We’ve been here a while,” says Ang. She glances at Aineko, who sprawls on the flagstones, snoozing or whatever it is that weakly superhuman AIs do when they’re emulating a sleeping cat. “After your cat broke us out of bondage, we had a look around. There are things out there that—” She shivers. “Humans can’t survive in most of the simulation spaces here. Universes with physics models that don’t support our kind of neural computing. You could migrate there, but you’d need to be ported to a whole new type of logic—by the time you did that, would you still be you? Still, there are enough entities roughly as complex as we are to prove that the builders aren’t here anymore. Just lesser sapients, rooting through the wreckage. Worms and parasites squirming through the body after nightfall on the battlefield.”
“I ran into the Wunch,” Donna volunteers helpfully. “The first couple of times they ate my ghost, but eventually I figured out how to talk to them.”
“And there’re other aliens, too,” Su Ang adds gloomily. “Just nobody you’d want to meet on a dark night.”
“So there’s no hope of making contact,” Amber summarizes. “At least, not with anything transcendent and well-intentioned toward visiting humans.”
“That’s probably right,” Pierre concedes. He doesn’t sound happy about it.
“So we’re stuck in a pocket universe with limited bandwidth to home and a bunch of crazy slum dwellers who’ve moved into the abandoned and decaying mansion and want to use us for currency. ‘Jesus saves, and redeems souls for valuable gifts.’ Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Su Ang looks depressed.
“Well.” Amber glances at Sadeq speculatively. Sadeq is staring into the distance, at the crazy infinite sunspot that limns the square with shadows. “Hey, god-man. Got a question for you.”
“Yes?” Sadeq looks at her, a slightly dazed expression on his face. “I’m sorry, I am just feeling the jaws of a larger trap around my throat—”
“Don’t be.” Amber grins, and it is not a pleasant expression. “Have you ever been to Brooklyn?”
“No, why—”
“Because you’re going to help me sell these lying bastards a bridge. Okay? And when we’ve sold it we’re going to use the money to pay the purchasing fools to drive us across, so we can go home. Listen, this is what I’m planning . . .”
“I can do this, I think,” Sadeq says, moodily examining the Klein bottle on the table. The bottle is half-empty, its fluid contents invisible around the corner of the fourth-dimensional store. “I spent long enough alone in there to—” He shivers.
“I don’t want you damaging yourself,” Amber says, calmly enough, because she has an ominous feeling that their survival in this place has an expiry date attached.
“Oh, never fear.” Sadeq grins lopsidedly. “One pocket hell is much like another.”
“Do you understand why—”
“Yes, yes,” he says dismissively. “We can’t send copies of ourselves into it—that would be an abomination. It needs to be unpopulated, yes?”
“Well, the idea is to get us home, not leave thousands of copies of ourselves trapped in a pocket universe here. Isn’t that it?” Su Ang asks hesitantly. She’s looking distracted, most of her attention focused on absorbing the experiences of a dozen ghosts she’s spun off to attend to perimeter security.
“Who are we selling this to?” asks Sadeq. “If you want me to make it attractive—”
“It doesn’t need to be a complete replica of the Earth. It just has to be a convincing advertisement for a presingularity civilization full of humans. You’ve got two-and-seventy zombies to dissect for their brains; bolt together a bunch of variables you can apply to them, and you can permutate them to look a bit more varied.”
Amber turns her attention to the snoozing cat. “Hey, furball. How long have we been here really, in real time? Can you grab Sadeq some more resources for his personal paradise garden?”
Aineko stretches and yawns, totally feline, then looks up at Amber with narrowed eyes and raised tail. “ ’Bout eighteen minutes, wall-clock time.” The cat stretches again and sits, front paws drawn together primly, tail curled around them. “The ghosts are pushing, you know? I don’t think I can sustain this for too much longer. They’re not good at hacking people, but I think it won’t be too long before they instantiate a new copy of you, one that’ll be predisposed to their side.”
“I don’t get why they didn’t assimilate you along with the rest of us.”
“Blame your mother again—she’s the one who kept updating the digital rights management code on my personality. ‘Illegal consciousness is copyright theft’ sucks until an alien tries to rewire your hindbrain with a debugger; then it’s a lifesaver.” Aineko glances down and begins washing one paw. “I can give your mullah-man about six days, subjective time. After that, all bets are off.”
“I will take it, then.” Sadeq stands. “Thank you.” He smiles at the cat, a smile that fades to translucency, hanging in the simulated air like an echo as the priest returns to his tower—this time with a blueprint and a plan in mind.
“That leaves just us.” Su Ang glances at Pierre, back to Amber. “Who are you going to sell this crazy scheme to?”
Amber leans back and smiles. Behind her, Donna—her avatar an archaic movie camera suspended below a model helicopter—is filming everything for posterity. She nods lazily at the reporter. “She’s the one who gave me the idea. Who do we know who’s dumb enough to buy into a scam like this?”
Pierre looks at her suspiciously. “I think we’ve been here before,” he says slowly. “You aren’t going to make me kill anyone, are you?”
“I don’t think that’ll be necessary, unless the corporate ghosts think we’re going to get away from them and are greedy enough to want to kill us.”
“You see, she learned from last time,” Ang comments, and Amber nods. “No more misunderstandings, right?” She beams at Amber.
Amber beams back at her. “Right. And that’s why you”—she points at Pierre—“are going to go find out if any relics of the Wunch are hanging about here. I want you to make them an offer they won’t refuse.”
“How much for just the civilization?” asks the Slug.
Pierre looks down at it thoughtfully. It’s not really a terrestrial mollusk: Slugs on Earth aren’t two meters long and don’t have lacy white exoskeletons to hold their chocolate-colored flesh in shape. But then, it isn’t really the alien it appears to be. It’s a defaulting corporate instrument that has disguised itself as a long-extinct alien upload, in the hope that its creditors won’t recognize it if it looks like a randomly evolved sentient. One of the stranded members of Amber’s expedition made contact with it a couple
of subjective years ago, while exploring the ruined city at the center of the firewall. Now Pierre’s here because it seems to be one of their most promising leads. Emphasis on the word promising—because it promises much, but there is some question over whether it can indeed deliver.
“The civilization isn’t for sale,” Pierre says slowly. The translation interface shimmers, storing up his words and transforming them into a different deep grammar, not merely translating his syntax but mapping equivalent meanings where necessary. “But we can give you privileged observer status if that’s what you want. And we know what you are. If you’re interested in finding a new exchange to be traded on, your existing intellectual property assets will be worth rather more there than here.”
The rogue corporation rears up slightly and bunches into a fatter lump. Its skin blushes red in patches. “Must think about this. Is your mandatory accounting time cycle fixed or variable term? Are self-owned corporate entities able to enter contracts?”
“I could ask my patron,” Pierre says casually. He suppresses a stab of angst. He’s still not sure where he and Amber stand, but theirs is far more than just a business relationship, and he worries about the risks she’s taking. “My patron has a jurisdiction within which she can modify corporate law to accommodate your requirements. Your activities on a wider scale might require shell companies”—the latter concept echoes back in translation to him as host organisms—“but that can be taken care of.”
The translation membrane wibbles for a while, apparently reformulating some more abstract concepts in a manner that the corporation can absorb. Pierre is reasonably confident that it’ll take the offer, however. When it first met them, it boasted about its control over router hardware at the lowest levels. But it also bitched and moaned about the firewall protocols that were blocking it from leaving (before rather rudely trying to eat its conversationalist). He waits patiently, looking around at the swampy landscape, mudflats punctuated by clumps of spiky violet ferns. The corporation has to be desperate, to be thinking of the bizarre proposition Amber has dreamed up for him to pitch to it.
“Sounds interesting,” the Slug declares after a brief confirmatory debate with the membrane. “If I supply a suitable genome, can you customize a container for it?”
“I believe so,” Pierre says carefully. “For your part, can you deliver the energy we need?”
“From a gate?” For a moment the translation membrane hallucinates a stick-human, shrugging. “Easy. Gates are all entangled: Dump coherent radiation in at one, get it out at another. Just get me out of this firewall first.”
“But the lightspeed lag—”
“No problem. You go first, then a dumb instrument I leave behind buys up power and sends it after. Router network is synchronous, within framework of state machines that run Universe 1.0; messages propagate at same speed, speed of light in vacuum, except use wormholes to shorten distances between nodes. Whole point of the network is that it is nonlossy. Who would trust their mind to a communications channel that might partially randomize them in transit?”
Pierre goes cross-eyed, trying to understand the implications of the Slug’s cosmology. But there isn’t really time, here and now. They’ve got on the order of a minute of wall-clock time left to get everything sorted out, if Aineko is right. One minute to go before the angry ghosts start trying to break into the DMZ by other means. “If you are willing to try this, we’d be happy to accommodate you,” he says, thinking of crossed fingers and rabbits’ feet and firewalls.
“It’s a deal,” the membrane translates the Slug’s response back at him. “Now we exchange shares/plasmids/ownership? Then merger complete?”
Pierre stares at the Slug. “But this is a business arrangement!” he protests. “What’s sex got to do with it?”
“Apologies offered. I am thinking we have a translation error. You said this was to be a merging of businesses?”
“Not that way. It’s a contract. We agree to take you with us. In return, you help lure the Wunch into the domain we’re setting up for them and configure the router at the other end . . .”
And so on.
Steeling herself, Amber recalls the address the ghost gave her for Sadeq’s afterlife universe. In her own subjective time it’s been about half an hour since he left. “Coming?” she asks her cat.
“Don’t think I will,” says Aineko. It looks away, blissfully unconcerned.
“Bah.” Amber tenses, then opens the port to Sadeq’s pocket universe.
As usual she finds herself indoors, standing on an ornate mosaic floor in a room with whitewashed walls and peaked windows. But there’s something different about it, and after a moment she realizes what it is. The sound of vehicle traffic from outside, the cooing of pigeons on the rooftops, someone shouting across the street: There are people here.
She walks over to the nearest window and looks out, then recoils. It’s hot outside. Dust and fumes hang in air the color of cement over rough-finished concrete apartment buildings, their roofs covered in satellite uplinks and cheap, garish LED advertising panels. Looking down she sees motor scooters, cars—filthy, fossil-fueled behemoths, a ton of steel and explosives in motion to carry only one human, a mass ratio worse than an archaic ICBM—brightly dressed people walking to and fro. A news helicam buzzes overhead, lenses darting and glinting at the traffic.
“Just like home, isn’t it?” says Sadeq, behind her.
Amber starts. “This is where you grew up? This is Yazd?”
“It doesn’t exist anymore, in real space.” Sadeq looks thoughtful, but far more animated than the barely conscious parody of himself that she’d rescued from this building—back when it was a mediaeval vision of the afterlife—scant subjective hours ago. He cracks a smile. “Probably a good thing. We were dismantling it even while we were preparing to leave, you know?”
“It’s detailed.” Amber throws her eyes at the scene out the window, multiplexes them, and tells them to send little virtual ghosts dancing through the streets of the Iranian industrial ’burb. Overhead, big Airbuses ply the skyways, bearing pilgrims on the hajj, tourists to the coastal resorts on the Persian Gulf, produce to the foreign markets.
“It’s the best time I could recall,” Sadeq says. “I didn’t spend many days here then—I was in Qom, studying, and Kazakhstan, for cosmonaut training—but it’s meant to be the early twenties. After the troubles, after the fall of the guardians; a young, energetic, liberal country full of optimism and faith in democracy. Values that weren’t doing well elsewhere.”
“I thought democracy was a new thing there?”
“No.” Sadeq shakes his head. “There were prodemocracy riots in Tehran in the nineteenth century, did you know that? That’s why the first revolution—no.” He makes a cutting gesture. “Politics and faith are a combustible combination.” He frowns. “But look. Is this what you wanted?”
Amber recalls her scattered eyes—some of which have flown as much as a thousand kilometers from her locus—and concentrates on reintegrating their visions of Sadeq’s re-creation. “It looks convincing. But not too convincing.”
“That was the idea.”
“Well, then.” She smiles. “Is it just Iran? Or did you take any liberties around the edges?”
“Who, me?” He raises an eyebrow. “I have enough doubts about the morality of this—project—without trying to trespass on Allah’s territory, peace be unto him. I promise you, there are no sapients in this world but us. The people are the hollow shells of my dreaming, storefront dummies. The animals are crude bitmaps. This is what you asked for, and no more.”
“Well, then.” Amber pauses. She recalls the expression on the dirt-smudged face of a little boy, bouncing a ball at his companions by the boarded-up front of a gas station on a desert road; remembers the animated chatter of two synthetic housewives, one in traditional black and the other in some imported eurotrash fashion. “Are you sure they aren’t real?” she asks.
“Quite sure.” But for a mom
ent, she sees Sadeq looking uncertain. “Shall we go? Do you have the occupiers ready to move in yet?”
“Yes to the first, and Pierre’s working on the second. Come on, we don’t want to get trampled by the squatters.” She waves and opens a door back onto the piazza where her robot cat—the alien’s nightmare intruder in the DMZ—sleeps, chasing superintelligent dream mice through multidimensional realities. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m conscious. Thinking these thoughts gives me the creeps. Let’s go and sell some aliens a bridge in Brooklyn.”
Amber confronts the mendacious ghost in the windowless room stolen from 2001.
“You have confined the monster,” the ghost states.
“Yes.” Amber waits for a subjective moment, feeling delicate fronds tickle at the edges of her awareness in what seems to be a timing channel attack. She feels a momentary urge to sneeze, and a hot flash of anger that passes almost immediately.
“And you have modified yourself to lock out external control,” the ghost adds. “What is it that you want, Autonome Amber?”
“Don’t you have any concept of individuality?” she asks, annoyed by its presumption at meddling with her internal states.
“Individuality is an unnecessary barrier to information transfer,” says the ghost, morphing into its original form, a translucent reflection of her own body. “It reduces the efficiency of a capitalist economy. A large block of the DMZ is still inaccessible to we-me. Are you sure you have defeated the monster?”
“It’ll do as I say,” Amber replies, forcing herself to sound more confident than she feels—sometimes that damned transhuman cyborg cat is no more predictable than a real feline. “Now, the matter of payment arises.”
“Payment.” The ghost sounds amused. But Pierre’s filled her in on what to look for, and Amber can now see the translation membranes around it. Their color shift maps to a huge semantic distance; the creature on the other side, even though it looks like a ghost-image of herself, is very far from human. “How can we-us be expected to pay our own money for rendering services to us?”
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