by Tony Daniel
[If that is the case, then maybe you need to give this trip a little more thought.]
[There isn’t time. You saw the time stocks and futures. It’s an objective and measurable shift. So you measure it. All I know is that I’ve got to get my family the hell away from the Met.]
[All right, then,] Danis replied. [All right. I’ll book us passage on a ship departing from the Leroy Port on the Diaphany. When do we leave?]
[Today.]
[Today? Kelly, are you sure?]
[Things will get bad. Count on it, Danis.]
Kelly reached a transport door and sent a message through the grist for a personal coach. Although Kelly prided himself on normally using public transportation, he thought he would need the isolation of the coach to settle his thoughts.
[Well, we’re all packed,] Danis said. [Your coach is here.]
The transport door irised open like a big heart valve, and Kelly stepped through into the round softness of his coach. His grist informed the coach of his personal biology, and the coach adjusted its air and temperature accordingly.
Two
Danis Graytor sat back in her favorite worn leather armchair and shook herself a smoke. She breathed in deeply and the Dunhill crackled lowly as the tobacco caught and smoldered. She slid a fine ceramic ashtray across the lacquered top of her side table and listened to the pleasant grate of porcelain on mahogany. After another long drag, she ashed the cigarette and considered the pleasing gray of the tobacco remains against the pure white of the ashtray’s bowl. All of this would soon be only a memory. There was no way she could download her office study into Kelly’s pocketbook and still have room for the essential things her family must take with them on their upcoming journey. Without Danis to maintain it, the office study would soon be written over in the virtuality, erased.
She made a quick check on Kelly and found that he was still in the coach on his way home. The children would arrive soon.
Danis ran back over her checklist, more for comfort’s sake than in the expectation that she’d forgotten anything. She never forgot anything. But bugs could creep into even the best algorithm’s program, and Danis never took data for granted. That was the very reason that Kelly had hired her on as an assistant in the first place. The love had come later.
My home is dissolving, Danis thought. Right before my eyes, it is flowing away into the general grist.
There was, of course, no realhere , here, but a particular location in the reality that sustained the virtuality had a certain something. To Danis, it manifested as a smell, a feeling of safety and familiarity somewhere deep inside. She was entirely software, of course, and an algorithm could operate in any medium capable of sustaining its complexity.
But this is home, Danis thought. This chair, this golden glow from the roof lighting, this odor of cigarettes and account books. AndPluto , of all places! Did they even have grist on Pluto? Well, of course they must. But was there enough? Perhaps she’d find herself inhabiting the solid-state desert of an old mainframe, thinking one thought at a time.
Herown investments were now, very likely, down the drain. She had liked to think that she had not spent ten years at Teleman Milt for nothing, and that she’d learned a bit about high finance. But the current financial craziness was unprecedented. She’d planned on surprising Kelly with a nice addition to their nest egg using money she’d saved and invested herself.
But now that was a forlorn hope, and Danis knew it to be one. Kelly’s instincts were seldom wrong when it came to monetary matters, and he was sure things were going to go from bad to worse for the markets. He was a kind of genius in that—which was, of course, why Teleman Milt employed him in the most difficult, volatile area known on E-Street: the Time Exchange.
Her cigarette was precisely half-finished when Danis snubbed it out in the ashtray. She had never liked the drag she got from the butt end of a smoke. She could have modified the Dunhill Algorithm, of course, but she so enjoyed the visceral nature of grinding out the tobacco and sometimes burning her fingers a bit in the process.
Kelly’s coach signaled its imminent arrival, and, instead of lighting up another Dunhill, Danis searched her music catalog and found her favorite Despacio piece. She chose an oboe and piano through which to play the sound for Kelly. For Danis, the music would incorporate itself directly into her being. Despacio had been a convert like herself, and his music was only fully enjoyable by an algorithmic being, some claimed. Despacio had been one of the few free converts who did not have a built-in expiration date written into his coding. He had disappeared around the time Danis was born—some said he’d become instantiated in an aspect body, others that he’d gone bonkers and erased himself after such a long life. Whatever had happened, he’d done a good job of covering his tracks. But his work was still extremely popular among free converts.
After the music started, Danis took a last look around her study, then dimmed the light and flowed out into a general state of awareness in the entire apartment. She shifted without thinking from being a specific representation in virtual space into the fullness of algorithmic presence that lodged in the structure of the apartment—that was that structure—and that knew every conceivable fact about its domain. It was, she sometimes imagined, like a brain suddenly becoming aware of all the processes and subroutines of the body that sustained it.
Just before Kelly came through the door, Danis turned up the lights in the living room. She checked the temperature and humidity, then ran a quick inquiry of Kelly’s internals. He was sweating a little, and nervous, even though he didn’t manifest this visually. Kelly didn’t just have a poker face; he had a poker body. But he could not hide his innards from Danis unless he deliberately chose to. She cooled the apartment down a tenth of a degree. The music would have to take care of his case of the nerves.
Kelly gave a quick smile when he recognized the Despacio, then walked directly to a chair and collapsed into it.
“How soon until the children get here?” he said.
“An hour and twelve minutes,” Danis replied, vocalizing aloud by vibrating various membranes built into the apartment’s walls. She could have spoken to Kelly through the very chairs and tables themselves, but doing so always produced a harsh, slightly inhuman sound that reminded them both of the voice of the Abacus, the Teller, and the other free converts who worked at the office. They often did not seem to notice how grating their voices could be to biological ears.
“And everything is ready?” Kelly said.
“Everything is ready. Would you like some coffee or something?”
“Some of that Velo brandy,” Kelly replied. “I don’t suppose we’ll be able to take that with us.
It was also very odd for Kelly to have alcohol as soon as he got home. He usually reserved his drinking for after dinner, when he had his one cigar of the day, as well.
Danis called up a glass from the grist of the living-room coffee table. She formed capillaries leading from the sac in the kitchen where she kept the brandy, through the floor, up through the table, and into the glass. The brandy glass slowly filled from the bottom up, with no liquid pouring in from the top. All of this was accomplished with little effort on Danis’s part. She’d poured Kelly’s brandy so many times before.
“Do you want to know the news on the merci?” Danis said.
“God, no.” Kelly took a sip of the brandy, then settled back into the chair and held the glass against his stomach. Danis watched it move up and down a couple of times, in rhythm with Kelly’s breathing.
“We still have over an hour until the kids arrive,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you come to the bedroom, Kelly.”
Kelly looked up, cracked a smile. He didn’t smileat Danis. There was no face at which he would direct his expressions. But he knew that she was everywhere, and that she would see it. He took another, long, sip of brandy, then, without another word, set the glass aside and walked down the hall to their bedroom.
&n
bsp; Three
Kelly tried to let his cares flow away as he took off his clothes. He almost succeeded, but there was still a little knot of worry remaining, and, of course, Danis noticed.
“Lie down and let me give you a massage,” she instructed him.
Danis dimmed the lights down to a twinkling glow. Somehow she was able to coax something approaching candlelight out of the grist—something he’d never managed to do with his comparatively bludgeonlike handling of the communication protocols. The bed warmed, barely perceptibly, and Kelly felt his wife’s presence, his wife, flow around him. It wasn’t a liquid or jelly feel that Danis possessed. The effect was more like a gradual awareness of touch and smell.
Like dawn rising inside me, Kelly thought.
Danis, through the grist, worked her way over and inside her husband. She navigated his musculature like a sailor makes his way about his home port’s bay: Here was the sandbar, here the hard rocks, and here the reef water. Before Kelly knew it, she had found the tightness in his back and shoulders and was working at it on a microscopic level. He had no idea what she did to him down there among the molecules, he just knew that it felt incredibly soothing and, somehow, at the same time arousing. He felt himself growing hard against the mattress, but did nothing about it for the moment.
He groaned low and soft as something unknotted. “Yes,” came her voice within his mind. “There it is. All better now. All better.”
In the end, he’d trusted his instincts, just as he did when it came to finance. And at home, as at work, he’d been right. Kelly didn’t fool himself into thinking he had any particular skill at judging matters of love. No. It was Danis that had made it all real. It was Danis who had somehow bridged the gap and come to him as a real woman comes to a real man, and had led him to understand that, however grotesque a relationship might look to an outsider, it was the happiness of the people inside it that mattered. He didn’t give a hang about free-convert rights or any of that—hadn’t really thought about it very much, to tell the truth. All he knew was that he and Danis were a very good thing.
And just as she had on the first night, Danis slowly worked her way around him. When she was fully inhabiting the grist of his pellicle, she began to send the signals to his skin.
He smelled her slight odor of cigarettes and perfume. He felt the heat of the flushed skin of a woman aroused. He felt her weight upon him. That was the mysterious part to Kelly, but Danis had once explained how easy it was to talk to human nerve receptors after you knew intimately the person they belonged to. You could cause a body to believe that another animal body was moving against it. You could make a man’s body believe that he was inside a woman.
Because he was.
Four
Kelly made love to Danis, and when he came, she gathered the spill within her, as any woman will, and flowed away with it. Not this time, but twice before, she had taken it to a place within the Met very close to the sun—a place that fluxed and flowed with enormous radiation. It was the place where converts flourished with maximum energy input, with the greatest quantum excitation. It was a place where human DNA coding and the virtual enthalpic states of a free-convert intelligence could fully and completely combine. And in that place, Danis had carefully woven the new DNA of two human beings. She had brought this precious coding back and placed it within a specially grown ovum here in this very apartment. There was a room where only Danis went. It wasn’t very large; Kelly couldn’t have fit in even if he’d wanted to. It was precisely the same size as a human female’s womb, because that’s what it was.
But today there was no ovum in the womb, and there the sperm would slowly lose its vitality as it was absorbed into the walls and gave itself back to life that might someday be.
Danis kissed Kelly and tasted the potion of his lips. Each molecule was as precious to her as the feel of her breasts and face was to Kelly. She let as much of Kelly as possible occupy all of her many billion quantum states distributed in the grist. In her coding, this was stated as an equation to be solved with transfinite values. It engaged all of her faculties at once. It flashed through her like an uncontrolled fire takes a dry forest.
Then there was a shuffling from the living room, and the unmistakable sound of a brandy glass breaking on the floor.
“Cut it out, Aubry. Look what you made me do.”
“Imade you be a klutz? I don’t think so.”
“The children have arrived,” Kelly whispered to her, and he rolled out of bed and began dressing himself once again.
Five
from
Old Left-handed Time
Raphael Merced and the Genesis of the Merced Effect
a short history
by Andre Sud, D. Div.
Triton
In 2511C.E . on a Monday in April, as Martians reckon the months, the first scientist was born who was not an Earthling, and who belongs in the pantheon of such figures as Newton, Einstein, and Galileo. Raphael Merced laid the foundation for linking Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity with quantum mechanics, and as such is considered the father of quantum gravity theory as well as the first theorist to offer a precise mathematics of time as a property of the universe. His work with quantum gravity on an experimental basis also revealed the now familiar quantum information leap, which has since taken his name, the Merced Effect. As if this weren’t enough, Merced made major contributions to nanotechnological engineering, inventing—with Feur Otto Bring—the Josephson-Feynman grist, which now permeates all of our lives. Merced can truly be considered the defining scientific presence of our time, in much the way the Albert Einstein defined the science of the five hundred years that preceded Merced, and Newton before Einstein.
Merced was born in the old Martian settlement of Pavonis, near the shield volcano of that name close to Mars’s equator. His birthplace has since been obliterated in the failed terraforming projects of the 2700s, although a plaque marking the approximate spot still exists. Merced was the son of geologists, and his sister, Clara, later made major contributions to planetary science, including the first successful explanation for why the planets of the solar system all lie in the same basic plane from the sun. Both children moved about repeatedly with their parents. They were able to form few lasting friendships, and were very close for the remainder of their lives. Merced once claimed that he had discovered his “spooky information transfer at a distance” as a way of keeping up with his sister on her travels about the solar system and, later, to stay in touch with her children. Merced, himself, remained childless, and a bachelor, for his entire life.
After an e-year on his own travels, culminating with a visit to Pluto, Merced returned to the inner system and took entrance exams for Columbia University on Earth. He failed miserably, having neglected his mathematics studies as a teenager thanks to a series of unfortunate teachers on Mars. One of them, Schiller Mann, is noted for not only dissuading Merced during his early years, but also for having nearly dissuaded the mathematician Udo Raleigh, who made major contributions to topological statistics, from a career in mathematics.
Merced spent a year studying on his own and working in a coffeehouse near the university as an espresso jerk. It was there that he met Beat Myers and the other members of the so-called Flare Generation of poets. Merced’s friendship with Myers would play a fateful role in the events of his later years. In his year of independent study, Merced not only made up for the defects in his education, he moved through current mathematical theory with a vengeance, and had begun to do original work in transfinite-number theory by the time he was accepted for admittance the following term at Columbia. Merced continued to have troubled relationships with his professors, but he managed to graduate after four e-years, and was offered a fellowship to study mathematics at Bradbury University on Mars. He moved back to Mars and began a relationship with the university there that was to last until his death.
At Bradbury, Merced’s interest quickly turned from math to theoretical physics.
&n
bsp; “I kept getting mathematical ideas fromexperimental physics until I became convinced that physics was somehow more basic to the natural order than mathematics. Almost nobody shared this opinion at the time, and I nearly lost my fellowship as a result. But, what the hell, I figured an original discovery or two would put me back in the money.”
Six
Aubry Graytor cleaned up the brandy that Sint had knocked over as best she could, then instructed the apartment’s grist to do the same. This was the first direct contact she’d had with the apartment’s substratum of micromachines, and the feel of interacting with it was like slipping into an old cloth robe that you’d had for years. It was the feel of Mom and Dad, and home.
“Sorry about that,” Sint said. He had gotten one of his enigma boxes from the living-room shelf and was shuffling the pieces around inside without looking at them. He was working the pieces at a submicroscopic level, of course, using van der Waals force manipulation of a bunch of heavier elements suspended in liquid. The idea was to build one of several pictures using only particle bouncing and no direct contact. To the naked eye, it appeared that Sint had suddenly ceased his erratic movements of a moment before and was now mesmerized by a small wooden box of polished maple.
“I know you missed your box collection,” Aubry replied.
“Stupid school won’t let me have them in the dorm.”
Aubry looked on at her brother’s complete absorption with the enigma box and had a moment of sympathy with the school’s administrators. She knew that Sint could play with these things for hours, and she doubted that he would let homework that needed doing call him away from a really good game.