Kiln People

by David Brin

  “Over here!”

  The yell echoes, both in my ear and across the loading bay. I spy a version of myself, dyed UK Orange, bearing a weasel-like creature on his shoulder. Both dittos bear wounds, still smoking from recent combat.

  “Are we glad to see you!” shouts the four-legged mini-Pal. “We had to fight our way inside this place, past some nasty — Hey!”

  No time to stop and compare notes. Running by, I share a split-second glance with my other self and recognize this morning’s greenie. Looks like I found something more interesting to do today than clean toilets. Good for you, Green.

  The churning in my gut is nearing some climax, feeding my crude golem-organs to a chemical frenzy. Some hell is about to burst. I need something massive to contain it.

  Shall I dive into the packaging machine? No. Airgel won’t do.

  So I choose a nearby forklift instead, grunting and farting as it burns extra fuel loading big crates onto a truck. Its diplodocus-head turns, resembling the human who imprinted it.

  “What can I do for you?” the low voice rumbles, till I dash under its legs. “Hey, buddy, what’re you—”

  Below the tail, a repellent exhaust spills high-octane fumes, a quivering moist enzyme flatulence from the hardworking clay body. Ignoring all instinct, I plunge both arms between pseudoflesh lips, forcing the waste-sphincter apart in order to …

  … in order to climb within.

  The forklift bellows. I sympathize but hold on as he jumps and swerves, trying to shake me out of the worst place I’ve ever been.

  To the best of my knowledge, that is. Some of my other dits may have seen worse. The ones who never made it home … though somehow I doubt it.

  Worming my way deeper, I hope my built-in recorder survives. Maybe this final act of sacrifice will free Albert from blame. It’s a good thing he won’t inload any of this. I’d be traumatized for good.

  The poor forklift writhes. Pulses of foul gas try to blow me out. But I hold on, punching and grabbing fierce handholds. One big contortion culminates in lancing agony as my right foot comes off! Bitten by the frantic golem.

  I can’t blame him, but it only drives me deeper, holding my breath against the stench, using a final burst of emergency élan to climb the sickening cloaca, trying for its heavy center.

  Meanwhile, I’m being consumed from within. Used as feedstock for some awful reaction as the fulminating contents of my midriff prepare to erupt.

  Am I deep enough? Will the huge clay body contain whatever-it-is?

  Man, what a day I’ve -

  20

  Too Much Reality

  … as realAlbert learns you can’t go home again …

  Suburbia.

  Man, what a wasteland.

  Half an hour from Ritu Maharal’s place, taking the east ribbonway out of town, we got snagged by a guide beam that took over the Volvo, slaving its engine, rolling us along at a “maxyficient” crawl through a zone of high-density traffic. Cyclists sped past us for much of the way, given priority by computers that prudishly favor real human muscle power over mere dittos in a car.

  Beyond and below the ribbonway, a series of ’burbs flowed by, each one garish in its own colorful architectural vogue — from gingerbread castles to Twentieth-Century Kitsch. Village rivalry helps distract people from two generations of high unemployment, so locals and their dittos toil like maniacs to create lavish showpieces, often focusing on an ethnic theme — the hometown pride of some immigrant community that long ago dropped in to join a cultural bouillabaisse.

  Some liken Skyroad Ten’s elevated carbonite ribbon to some exponentiated version of It’s a Small World, stretching for more than a hundred kilometers. Globalization never ended human cultural diversity, but it did transform ethnicity into another hobby. Another way for people to find value in themselves, when only the genuinely talented can get authentic jobs. Hey, everyone knows it’s phony, like the purple wage. But it beats the alternatives — like boredom, poverty, and realwar.

  I felt relieved when we finally made it past the final city greenbelt, plunging into the natural, bone-dry air of actual countryside. Ritu’s gray didn’t talk much. She must have been in a mood when she imprinted. Hardly surprising, with her father’s corpse not even cool yet. Anyway, this trip hadn’t been her idea.

  To make conversation, I asked her about Vic Aeneas Kaolin.

  Ritu had known the tycoon ever since her father joined Universal Kilns, twenty-six years ago. As a girl she used to see the mogul often, until he went hermit, one of the first aristos to stop meeting people in the flesh. Even close friends hadn’t seen the man in person for a decade. Nor did most people care. Why should it matter? The Vic still kept appointments, attended parties, even played golf. And those platinum dittos of his were so good they might as well be real.

  Ritu, too, must use her UK connections to get high-quality blanks. Even in the dim light, I could tell her gray was supple, realistic, and well textured. Well, after all, I had asked her to send a first-rate copy to help in my investigation.

  “I’m not sure which pictures you’re talking about,” she answered, when I enquired about the missing photos in her father’s house — the ones that Kaolin’s ditto stole from the wall. Ritu shrugged. “You know how it is. Familiar things become part of the background.”

  “Still, I appreciate your effort to recall.”

  She closed her eyelids, covering the uniform blue of her golem-orbs. “I think … there may have been a picture of Aeneas and his family, when he was young. Another showed him and my father standing before their first non-humanoid model … one of those long-arm fruitpickers, if I recall right.” Ritu shook her head. “Sorry. My original may be more help. You can have your rig ask her.”

  “Maybe.” I nodded. No need to let on that the Albert Morris original was sitting right next to her. “Can you tell me how Kaolin and your father were getting along recently? Especially just before Yosil disappeared.”

  “Getting along? They were always great friends and collaborators. Aeneas gave Dad plenty of leeway for his idiosyncratic behavior and long disappearances, and a permanent waiver from the lie-detector sessions the rest of us take, twice a year.”

  “Twice a year? That must be unpleasant.”

  Ritu shrugged. “Part of the New Fealty System. Usually they just ask, ‘Are you keeping some big secret that might harm the company?’ Basic security, without getting nosy, and the screenings apply equally to all levels in the company.”

  “To all levels?”

  “Well,” Ritu’s graydit acquiesced, “I can’t recall anyone insisting that Aeneas himself come take a scan in person.”

  “Out of fear?”

  “Courtesy! He’s a good employer. If Aeneas doesn’t want to meet other people in the flesh, why should anybody in the UK family choose to question his reasons?”

  Why indeed? I pondered. No reason … except old-fashioned flaming curiosity! Clearly, it’s another case of personality matching your career path. Folks like me just aren’t cut out for this new world of fealty oaths and big industrial “families.”

  We lapsed into silence after that and I didn’t mind. In fact, I needed an excuse to shut down … that is, pretend to go into dormant mode. The car would drive itself toward the distant mesa where her father’s cabin lay. During those hours, I ought to get some good old organic sleep.

  Fortunately, Ritu herself supplied a justification. “I gave this ditto some net research to do during the drive. Would you mind if I proceed now?”

  On her lap lay a chador portable workstation, doubtless very sophisticated, with an opaque hood that could be tossed over the head, shoulders, and arms.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Do you want a privacy screen, in addition to the chador?”

  She nodded, repaying me with the same appealing smile that I saw when we first met. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  Some people think courtesy is wasted on dittos, but I never understood their reasoning. I
sure appreciate it when I’m clay, or when I’m pretending to be. Anyway, her needs coincided with my own.

  “Sure. I’ll set the screen for six hours. We should be getting close to the cabin about then, with dawn coming up.”

  “Thank you … Albert.” Her smile took on higher wattage, making me flush. I didn’t want it to show, so with no more ceremony than a friendly nod, I touched the PS button between our seats, releasing a sheet of nanothreads from overhead, creating a black curtain that quickly solidified into a palpable barrier, separating the car’s occupants. I stared at it for a minute, briefly forgetting the real reason why I had impulsively decided to take this trip in person. Then I remembered.

  Clara. Oh yeah.

  I pulled a sleeping cap out of my valise, laying it over my temples. With its help, a few hours should do just fine.

  Ideally, ditRitu would never know.

  The interrupt call yanked me out of a dream. A true meat-nightmare in which an army of dark figures struggled across a blasted moonscape, too sere to support any life. Yet there I stood, rooted in place like a dying tree, unable to move as towering metallic forms stomped all around me, flourishing blood-drenched claws.

  One part of me clenched in terror, wholly subsumed in the mirage. Meanwhile, a more detached portion stood back, as we sometimes do in dreams, abstractly recognizing the scene from a sci-fi holofilm that scared me spitless, back when I was seven. One of the few deliberately cruel things my sister ever did to me, when we were young, was to play that creepy thing for me late one night, despite a “Toxic for Preteens” warning label.

  I woke, floundering in the brief disorientation that comes from getting torn out of REM sleep, wondering where I was and how I got there.

  “Wha — ?” The induction cap fell off as I sat up, heart pounding.

  Glancing left, I saw a moonlit desert landscape flowing gently past as the Volvo cruised a two-lane highway, without another vehicle insight. Spiky Joshua trees cast eerie shadows across the dry realm of rattlesnakes, scorpions, and maybe a few hardy tortoises. To my right, the privacy screen stood intact, swallowing light and sound. Fortunately. It kept Ritu from witnessing my undignified and undittolike wakening.

  “Well? Are you up?”

  The voice — low and directional — came from the car’s control panel. A homunculus stared at me with a face like my own, only glossy black, wearing an expression that fell just short of insolent disdain.

  “Uh, right.” I rubbed my eyes. “What time izzit?”

  “Twenty-three forty-six.”

  So. About three and a half hours since I curled up for a nap. This had better be important.

  “What’s up?” I croaked with a dry mouth.

  “Urgent matters.”

  Behind the ebony duplicate I saw my home workroom. Every screen was lit, several tuned to news outlets.

  “There’s been an accident at Universal Kilns. Looks like industrial sabotage. Someone set off a prion-catalyst bomb.”

  “A … what?”

  “A cloud of organic replicators designed to spread and permeate the facility, ruining every synthetic soul-mesh in the place.”

  Blinking in surprise, I must have stared like an idiot.

  “Why would anyone—”

  “Why isn’t our chief concern right now,” my jet golem interrupted, sharply and typically. “It appears that two of our own duplicates were inside UK headquarters at the time. ‘Behaving suspiciously’ is the phrase I sifted out of a police decrypt. They’re arranging warrants right now to come over and seize our records.”

  I couldn’t believe it.

  “Two of them? Two of our dits?”

  “Plus a couple of Pal’s.”

  “P-Pal? But … I haven’t even spoken to him in … there must be some mistake.”

  “Perhaps. But I have a bad feeling about this. Both logic and intuition suggest that we’re being set up. I suggest you drop present concerns and return at once.”

  Appalled and mystified, I could only agree. This had much higher priority than nosing around Yosil Maharal’s old cabin — or my other impulsive aims for this trip.

  “I’m turning around,” I said, reaching for the controls. “At top speed I should reach home in about—”

  The jetto cut me off abruptly, raising a glossy hand.

  “I’m picking up Citywatch — a realtime alert. Unauthorized pyrotechnics, five klicks east of here …”

  A dreadful pause, then -

  “A missile launch. The spectrum matches an Avengerator Six. They’re tracking …”

  Dark eyes met mine.

  “It’s coming here. ETA ten seconds.”

  I stammered: “B-but …”

  With ineffable calm, ebony fingers danced. “I’m spilling everything to external cache twelve. You concentrate on saving our hide. Then find out who did this and get the bas—”

  Like a doomed mirror, my dark reflection abruptly shattered into millions of glittering shards that swirled briefly in front of me. Then, one by one, they rapidly winked out till only a faint stir of air remained.

  The Volvo spoke up with the dull voice tones of silicon.

  “YOU ASKED TO BE TOLD OF ANY NEWS EVENTS EXCEEDING PRIORITY LEVEL FIVE THAT AFFECT YOUR HOME NEIGHBORHOOD. I AM PICKING UP FLASH REPORTS OF A LEVEL NINE EMERGENCY ON YOUR BLOCK, CENTERED AT YOUR ADDRESS.”

  How I envied our ancestors, who were sometimes spared bad tidings for a few hours or days, back in technologically benighted eras when news traveled much slower than light and was channeled through journalists or bureaucrats. I didn’t really want to see. I barely managed to choke out:

  “Show me.”

  A series of holo images erupted, showing instanews from half a dozen publicams and private voyeur-floaters, programmed to zoom like vultures toward anything unusual, selling their feeds directly to the Net. In this case, the attractive novelty was a conflagration. A house — my house — burning wildly and with such heat that a flame funnel had already formed, tipping any unwary cams that fluttered too close.

  Stunned, I worked for a while on pure reflex, paying top rates for pan-spectral composites till a clear picture converged out of darkness and flames.

  “Damn,” I muttered, hating whoever had done this. “They burned my garden, too.”

  I took the car offbeam and turned around, gunning it back toward the city. If I drove at thirty above the speed limit, I figured I could purge all the micro-fines with a public necessity plea. You know, rushing home to help authorities clear up this mess. Anyway, an act of good faith might help convince someone to listen when I proclaim my innocence.

  Innocent of what? I still had no clear picture of what happened at Universal Kilns.

  Two copies of me … and several of Pallie. But which copies? The one that disappeared at Kaolin Manor, presumably. And the gray that cut off communication after accepting a closed contract? Whatever job it took, things must have gone sour in a big way.

  News began filtering out of UK headquarters. A prion bomb had gone off, but preliminary reports were optimistic. Employees jabbered among themselves about an exceptional stroke of luck. The affected area was small because a brave forklift operator sat on the saboteur at the last moment, quenching the explosion with its huge golembody, limiting the poison’s dispersal.

  Great, I thought. But what does it all have to do with me?

  I got no answer on Pallie’s phone, or via our secret drop box. Not one of the four dittos I had made Tuesday replied to my ultra-urgent pellet flash. I could only account for one of them — the loyal jetto who stayed at his post, striving until hell plummeted into his lap, converting his damp clay body into drifting ceramic flakes.

  I glanced at the privacy screen — the curtain separating me from the car’s passenger cell. Should I dissolve it and inform Ritu’s gray? But surely, as a senior UK employee, she must have already received an alert about something amiss at her company. Or was her project so narrowly focused that she banished all distractions, like news
?

  Maybe she did know, and preferred to keep the curtain up. Rumors, spreading across the Net, already named me as a likely suspect in the sabotage at Universal Kilns. I debated whether to dissolve the privacy screen from this side and try to explain. Practice my innocent plea, before trying it on the police …

  Just then a pair of sharp glints caught my eye. Headlights. Reluctantly, I ratcheted down the Volvo’s hell-bent speed … then brought it down some more. Something struck me as wrong about the lights. Their position on the road was odd. Maybe the highway swung a bit to the right, up ahead …

  Only it didn’t seem about to. I kept edging rightward, instinctively planning to pass the headlights on that side, but unexpectedly the road drifted the other way, slightly left! Tapping the brake, I slackened speed some more, hoping to consult the nav computer.

  The other car was close!

  Expecting to finally avoid him on the right, I nearly plowed into the other fellow before comprehending the situation in an instant. The imbecile had pulled onto the shoulder on my side, pointing his high beams at oncoming traffic! Only a last-second left swerve took me back onto the road, missing the fool by inches!

  The swerve turned into a spin, tires squealing and smoking as the world reeled. I had time to regret a life spent blithely ignoring basic traffic safety rules. No wonder Clara insisted on doing the driving, whenever we went somewhere together. My wonderful, fierce Clara … and no ghost of mine to console her.

  I envisioned ending up like Yosil Maharal, crumpled at the bottom of a ditch … till the whirling spin finally ended with the Volvo squat and safe, sitting in the middle of the two-lane highway, shining its twin beams back at the idiot who almost caused a wreck.

  A dark figure stepped from the other car, hard to picture amid the glare. I was about to get out too, and have some choice words with the fellow. Then I saw that he carried something long and heavy. Shading my eyes against the dazzle, I watched him raise the bulky, tubelike thing to his shoulder.

  “Pulp!” I cursed, slamming into second gear and pounding the accelerator. Instinct urged me to turn the wheel, frantically swerving to flee whatever weapon he was bringing to bear! Only Albert’s forebrain knew better.