by John Barnes
Roger nodded, emphatically. “I don’t think I have half your compassion and empathy.”
She shrugged. “Hey, I know what it feels like when I feel all alone and like nobody understands me. They say that’s normal for a teenager.”
“It’s normal for a human being,” I said, thinking about Helen and how much I missed the other version of her—and how much she must miss her preferred version of me.
“And is this what it feels like every time you get your feelings hurt?” Iphwin said. “No wonder you all spend so much time on human relations—it’s just sheer self-protection.”
I shrugged. “Most of us got our feelings hurt many times every day when we were children—because we were vulnerable then the way you are now, and not able to defend ourselves. We learned not to feel it so much, or not to admit it, or something. It takes practice to learn to cope with cruelty, but luckily, I guess, human beings will almost always supply enough cruelty to give you all the practice you will ever need. Everyone else here probably experienced things the way you do, once upon a time, but all of us are past it-—or at least we’ve reached a point where we don’t have to be overwhelmed by it.”
“Lyle, I’m really sorry. I had no idea how much disturbance I was causing all of you.”
“Another uncomfortable lesson,” I said, “is that since ‘sorry’ doesn’t fix things, you can really only say it a few times. And you do have to get used to the thought that now and then you are going to hurt somebody’s feelings, and you won’t be able to fix that—you just have to hope to be forgiven sooner or later. Your mechanical progenitor just had no idea what he was going to get you into, did he?”
“Not really.” He splashed the water on his face again. “That really is remarkably refreshing,” he said. “I know that tears carry off some stress-related biochemicals, so I suppose that rinsing the face helps get rid of them.”
“That, and while you’re covered in tears and snot, you don’t have much dignity,” Roger said, practically. “The others are standing outside in the sun, and probably getting bored and angry and cranky and all that. If you’re feeling well enough to talk, maybe we should have Lyle get them in here, in the air-conditioning, where there’s somewhere to sit down.”
Terri added, “It’s called being considerate.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m ignorant about emotions, but I have a great vocabulary.”
I went outside and saw that the bitch session was still going on. “I don’t understand it,” Esmé was saying. “What kind of mission is this? Civilians along for no particular reason anyone can name, except this thing about the mathematics of abduction. No clear-cut job like ‘get to the center of the disturbance’ or ‘find out where everyone went.’ We get shot at and he doesn’t even identify the enemy. I mean, what’s the whole idea?”
“I think we can talk now,” I said.
“Well, fucking great,” Esmé said, and strode toward the bus, Helen at her elbow. The rest sort of shrugged and trailed along.
The story we got out of Iphwin was reasonably simple: the program that had made him wasn’t the only cyberphage that ran in the net as a whole. His job was to reconcile messages, which was why over time he had become concerned with the number of people and places that were disappearing, and set out to find out where so much stuff had gone.
Billie Beard was another cyberphage—in fact, she had brought herself into physical being by copying Iphwin’s process for doing so. “It didn’t bother me to have my work plagiarized when I was entirely a machine intelligence,” he added, “but oddly enough, now that I have a fleshly body, it bothers me. Anyway, you could think of her as the department of pain control. Her job was to prevent things that were too distressing from traveling through the net. Now, as you all well know, the fact that every time you go into contact with the net you come back to a different world is, well, extremely upsetting. The artificial intelligence that was to become Billie Beard spotted this early, since it was part of her job, and began to re-engineer the net to make it harder for people to ‘hurt themselves’ by realizing what was going on.”
“Wait a minute,” Helen said. “She’s also been beating the shit out of us whenever she gets the chance, and she’s tried to kill us—”
“Has killed one of us,” Iphwin agreed. “I think that must have been her, and some assistants, who ambushed us yesterday. As Esmé has pointed out, the behavior didn’t make any sense for bandits but it made perfect sense for someone trying to kill or stop us.”
Helen sighed. “What I’m getting at is, I don’t see how a program that is supposed to prevent pain is doing all this brutality.”
“A little failure of definition,” Iphwin said, sadly, looking down at his feet. “I can see why it’s confusing, but believe it or not, Billie Beard wouldn’t understand what confused you. Her definition of pain is emotional distress you experience while you’re on the net, which is when she can experience your emotions with you. If she kills you or hurts you while you’re offline, she doesn’t experience the pain—and therefore it doesn’t exist, as far as she’s concerned.”
“It sounds as if from her standpoint the world would be a better place if she could kill the whole human race—as long as she did it off-line,” Roger said.
“That’s it,” Iphwin agreed. “When they go mad, machine intelligences go mad in the direction of excessive consistency. She’d need to kill everyone and suppress the news of it, because people receiving the news would feel pain of a kind she could recognize.”
There was a long silence as we thought that over. “Will she be on the other side of the border?”
“Not to my certain knowledge, but if I can get there, she can get there.” Iphwin sat back, folded his arms, and said, “Well, that’s as much really as I know about her. And before one of you points it out, yes, now that I have a body, I have a somewhat better idea of what ‘real’ is, and I know that you don’t much like being in a war between two machine intelligences whose objectives and purposes aren’t as real as the bodies that are being sacrificed to them.”
“True,” Helen said, “but most wars are fought over ideas just as abstract, so let’s not quibble. Now, how was she able to bring along Jesús and Esmé—or versions of Jesús and Esmé— when they already existed here?”
“I myself don’t fully understand the consistency rule,” Iphwin said, “but basically all it says is that the less noticeable a crossover is, the more likely it is. No crossover is prohibited, just more or less likely. I imagine that Jesús and Esmé were two of her best soldiers, and she probably just kept batting at the system till she got a version of them in the place where she wanted them. That’s how I got you all here—leaving a wake of versions of all of you stranded all over trillions of event sequences. Think about the odds of a royal flush in cards, and they ought to be rare. But if you could shuffle and deal a million times per second, and stop whenever you did get a royal flush, you would get them reliably.”
There was a long pause and we all realized we didn’t have any more questions just then, and we had come to the moment of decision.
“Do we have any kind of plan?” I asked. “If the bridge is right ahead ...”
“Well, if something tries to stop us from crossing, we either fight it or run away from it, depending on how strong it is,” the Colonel said. “And if we get to the other side, then if we’re under attack, we fight back, and if not, we group up and decide what to do next. There’s a good chance that Beard and her sidekicks will be guarding that bridge, and that means we really don’t have any options until we either get past them or around them. After that, when we’re on the other side, since we might know something then, is the time to try to figure out what to do next. Till then it’s just theorizing in the absence of data. Let’s see if there’s still a bridge there, and if so, let’s see if we can just drive straight over it. Till we try, we don’t have any way of knowing that we can’t—or why we can’t.”
It was disagreeably true, and
no one had much to add. A few minutes later, we were in the esty at the top of a low rise. I was driving, again, so that Paula could work the top gun. Terri and Iphwin crouched in the center, and I quietly hoped that they didn’t notice that they were on top of spots and spatters of dried blood. Bits of rubbled safety glass from the rear window still lay all around the inside of the bus. I did my best to forget about all that and just drive forward slowly and carefully; meanwhile, Paula kept working the guns around the ninety degrees facing us, looking for anything that moved or was the least bit suspicious.
“Any reason to think they won’t have planted a mine?” I asked Iphwin.
“No reason I am aware of except a pattern in her behavior: she seems to prefer one-on-one killing to blowing up large numbers of people,” he said. “But remember she could have put an atom bomb under the road yesterday and wiped us off the face of the earth—and that’s not what she did. I really hope it isn’t only because she didn’t think of it.”
I drove slowly down the street. There was a bridge there, at least, and nothing obviously between us and it. The river had shifted during the years since anyone had been here—it flowed against the opposite bridgehead and had eroded away most of the road facing it—but it looked like there was still more than enough solid ground to get the truck through. No buildings showed beyond the ridgeline, but there were phone or electric poles, without cables, standing like bare sticks, going up the hillside. For a first sight of the country I had pledged allegiance to all my life, it wasn’t impressive, but no doubt there would be more.
Unlike Torreón, Juárez had not been leveled, and unlike Chihuahua, it hadn’t been burned. It had merely been abandoned, and we had crawled through its empty streets past miles of crumbled and collapsed buildings without seeing anything of note. The road wasn’t even particularly badly potholed, and toward the bridge it was almost decent, as if it had had no traffic at all and been sheltered. I took it slowly all the same.
As we reached the bridgehead, I slowed further.
“Roadbed looks decent,” the Colonel said. “It should take our weight easily.”
There was a huge crash that made my ears ring so hard that I couldn’t hear a thing. The bus slewed sideways as if a giant child had slapped its back end. The motors all stopped dead, and I looked to see what had become of the others. From the way their mouths opened, they were screaming. From the way my throat felt, so was I.
The roof had been torn right off the bus, leaving a rim of jagged metal. The windshield and windows were shattered and the bus stood, its sides peeling away in immense jagged pieces, sideways across the bridge.
I barely heard the Colonel shout, but he pointed, with big violent waves of his cane, across the bridge, shouting “Run! Run! Go! Hurry!”
I jumped off the bus and dashed for the other end of the bridge, running for all I was worth. There was an old painted line, probably the center line of where the river had once been, I thought, in bright green paint—then I saw that it didn’t go all the way across the bridge, stopping just short of the edge. Where it ended there was the shape of a human body printed in the green paint, and an old bucket lying on the other side. Someone had been painting that line when something had knocked him flat; then he had—gotten up and walked off and never tried to paint that line again? died and been carried off? decayed in place? I had no idea.
There was a sort of orange fire dancing all around the bridge, and though I still could not hear, I could sense that there was a loud roar around me, and feel other people running beside me. Not wanting to touch that line, I jumped over it. Things hit the deck and walls around me. Someone was shooting at me. I dashed on, zigging and zagging, trying to present a lousy target, and a few terrifying seconds brought me to the foot of the bridge, where I got behind a column and flattened myself to the ground.
I drew a long breath and exhaled, drew another, peered again. We had some people down on the bridge, and I tried to see if there were any of them that I should be going back to get, but naturally they were lying still—I couldn’t tell if they were dead or playing dead.
Paula jumped in beside me, clutching a rifle, and shot back, shouting to the others to run, run, run, she would cover for them. I tugged her pistol from its holster, rolled to the other side, and started to shoot too, not sure at what, just thinking that perhaps we could draw fire away from any living comrades who were stranded on the other side or lying on the bridge itself.
Then I was nowhere and remembered nothing.
* * * *
I
t was odd that no one else had put a cottage out here. Maybe the landlord owned more of the beach than I thought, but then couldn’t he have made more money by building more cottages? And there was certainly plenty of room out here.
Whatever the reason for its isolation, that was part of what kept us coming back to the cottage, even though we always figured that the next summer, or the one after, there would be miles and miles of new construction going up, and our old refuge would be a refuge no more. As far as I could recall, in thirty years of marriage, Paula and I had been here every summer. Maybe longer. I had memories of being a child here.
Jeff the mailman came by every morning, with replacement groceries and the overnight mail that would contain requests and orders from our employer, a firm named ConTech, about which we knew very little. Apart from Jeff’s visits, we had the house and the beach to ourselves. Of course we had to keep doing the work that arrived, but it always seemed to be easy work and not the least bit time consuming. It was so dull and so easy that we seldom remembered, the next day, what we had done the previous day.
Every so often Paula and I made a little joke that the big nightmare of the job was the total absence of weekends. Packages arrived every day, with a couple of hours of work to be done in them, and we sent them out every day, with the previous day’s work done. There was never a day in which we didn’t put in our couple of hours, so in that sense we had no days off—but there was never a day with much more than two hours of work, three at most on rare occasions, now and then just half an hour, so we didn’t care much. We always made sure we had a pot of coffee the way Jeff liked it on the stove when he came by.
The ocean was ill-suited for swimming, being cold and rough with a beach that dropped off sharply, and it was all stone and gravel out there beyond the gray-black beach sand. The sea air was often cool and there was a great deal of fog most days. We might have been on any coast; it seemed to me that the sun did not always set in the same place, and once or twice I had remarked on that to Paula, without either she or I ever much caring to investigate or to keep a record. The cottage itself was warm and comfortable, not quite large enough for a real estate agent to call it “spacious” nor quite small enough for him to call it “cozy,” neatly kept and well maintained, with gray shingles and a stained brown and gray tin roof that made it blend pretty well into its surroundings.
We had evolved our particular way of enjoying the days there, and we seldom varied it. We never got up before dawn, because we preferred to conserve electricity. The propane generator’s tank was expensive to refill, and we wanted it to last all summer. Paula usually got up a few minutes before I did, just when there was light to see by, and lit the fire I had laid the night before in the woodstove. Insulation on the chimney tank was good enough so that there would be enough hot water left from the day before for her to run some of it into the bathroom shower tank, and take a quick, pleasant shower there before dressing. By the time she would emerge, naked and dripping, to towel off in the kitchen, the fire would be going and it would be pleasantly warm. She’d set the first coffee of the day, in its tin percolator, onto the stove, put on the clothes she had left hanging on hooks by the stove the night before, and climb back up the ladder to our bed loft to give me a hard shake and get me started.
Then it would be my job to pull on clothes, go downstairs, chop up some potatoes and onions, and put on a skillet of bacon. When there was enough grease, the onions
and potatoes would join the bacon and I’d start whipping eggs with some parsley, chopped tomato, and crumbled tinned corned beef. As soon as the potatoes were brown, I’d pour the egg mixture in and stir the whole mess until it was solid, then split it onto plates. I always ate mine with Worcester and Tabasco; Paula took hers with ketchup, salt, and pepper, “the way God taught midwesterners to do it,” she would explain. “On the tablets that Moses brought back from his vacation trip to Florida.”
“Are you a midwesterner?” I would ask.
“My parents were. Or my grandparents. Or then again maybe I was. I don’t know. Anyway, a Farmer’s Breakfast doesn’t taste right without ketchup, salt, and pepper.”
“Maybe not, but this is a Hobo’s Breakfast,” I would say, “which I learned to make from someone who once met a hobo, and Worcestershire and Tabasco are the true and key ingredients, based on that authority.”
Paula would get a curious expression. “I can understand farmers eating a big breakfast, but why hoboes? A long hard day of catching trains and then lying around the railroad yards?”