“Then why?”
“Vision revision. Full quantum was my mistake, and I’m living with the consequences. Too substrate-independent. Makes you a ghost in the machine. Not for you, though. Partial quantum—much better. You’ve got to learn how to take it with you, in a new way.
“But you’re not there yet.”
“Why not?”
By way of answer, Jaron transformed himself into a grotesque thing. A human caddisworm, lugging its body all bricked in but for face and hands, armored in a casing of words and numbers, images and experiences, perceptions and memories—fragments shored against some future ruin.
“This is what we both were, when we were substrate-dependent. Got to leave all that behind.”
Then Ben saw himself, a creature struggling to break free of its armored housing, yet still trapped inside its case. Trapped beneath the surface of an infinite sea.
“Still just a larva feeling the first shock of becoming a pupa, see?” Jaron said, growing more singsong as he spoke. “You’re still living at home in your body. Your wings aren’t yet formed. You’re not yet ready to fly—not at all!
“This is just your first glimpse. You’ll be back. See you again when the time is nigh. Bye-bye.”
From that infinite sea Ben washed up on the finite shore of ordinary consciousness once more, in a Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall where time seemed more a stream than a block, or a loaf, or a lake, or an ocean. Yet he could still hear that boundless firmament, access all the infosphere, even now, though his dermatrode net was gone. Most of who he really might be was still on the other side of the great gate.
No. What piece of him remained here did so only because it was still so hard to let go of the old life, the old death. Still so hard to look death full in the face—and thus really see life.
“His brain function’s back!” Patsy Hon said, sounding immensely relieved. “Vital signs are good.”
“Yes,” Beech said, looking tired. “Everything’s back to normal, thank God.”
Ben puzzled at that. He might have wanted to thank God—or some higher power, anyway—for everything he’d been through, everything he now had access to, but everything certainly was not back to normal.
Especially since, just at that moment, the shooting started.
THE MAN ON THE STRETCHER
GUANGZHOU
As the initial round of shots subsided, Detective Mei-lin Lu and Agent DeSondra Adjoumani raced down the broad steps of the Memorial Hall. The blue-roofed palace of memory was under the control of terrorists, but civil and military forces had the building surrounded. Around them, in the dawn light, Lu saw that the police contingent was being further reinforced by special forces units of the People’s Army, clad in black uniforms.
“What’s the situation?” Guoanbu’s Wong Jun asked.
“They’re holed up inside,” Lu said, surprised to see Derek Ma with Wong. “They’ve all moved back downstairs, into the theater workshop.”
“They’ve slapped explosive charges onto all the building’s main supports,” Agent Adjoumani said, almost keeping inflection out of her voice.
“Who are ‘they’?” Ma asked.
“Mostly New Teachings Warriors,” Lu replied. “Some crime-clan gunmen, too. Cheng gangsters, I think.”
“Hostages?” asked Wong.
“At least three. Two Americans—Ben Cho, and someone named Beech. The NTWs say he’s high-ranking CIA.”
“He is,” Adjoumani confirmed. “I’ve seen him before.”
“The third hostage, if that’s what she is, is my lab tech, Patsy Hon. There’s another American, too—a Carlson, or Carlton—but he’s armed and we don’t know with whom he’s affiliated, exactly.”
“What are the prospects for rescuing the hostages?” Ma asked. Lu glanced at Adjoumani.
“Hard to pry them out of there in the best of situations,” said Adjoumani, “and pretty much impossible before someone sets off the charges. Just the ones they showed us have enough explosive force to reduce the Memorial to ashes and rubble. And I’m pretty certain they didn’t show us all of them. I saw an awful lot of gas cans lying about, too.”
Wong nodded and flashed a look at Ma, who walked away to speak with the commanders of the military units.
“Any other options?” Wong asked. “Besides turning this place into the crater of their martyrdom?”
“They’ll surrender their crime-clan comrades to us,” Lu said, “and won’t blow up the Memorial—in exchange for safe passage to Indonesia and asylum there. They won’t tell us which city.”
“What about the hostages?”
“They intend to keep the hostages with them until they reach Indonesia. As insurance against ‘government treachery.’”
Ma returned. He and Wong conferred a moment, before Wong turned back to the two women.
“Tell them we agree to the terms, if they agree to release all of the hostages immediately upon landing at their destination.”
Detective Lu and Agent Adjoumani whipped out their cell phones and punched in the numbers that Zuo Wenxiu and Baldwin Beech, respectively, had given them. After terse conversations both women hung up.
“They agree to the conditions,” Mei-lin said.
“But they want Lu and me to come into the building,” Adjoumani added. “To personally oversee the surrender of the crime-clan muscle and the transfer of the hostages.”
“And the clearing of the building,” Lu finished.
Wong frowned and looked with concern at Ma, who only nodded.
“Very well,” Wong said. “Just see to it you two don’t become hostages four and five. Or casualties, either.”
Lu and Adjoumani assured him they would not, then turned and started up the steps toward the Memorial Hall.
“You think they really intend to let these guys fly to Indonesia?” Lu asked.
“Hell, no,” Adjoumani replied.
“No,” Lu said. “I didn’t think so either.”
“This is all a game of liar’s poker. The whole negotiation’s gone way too fast. We better watch our own asses, if we don’t want them to get shot off.”
Lu nodded. The two of them entered the large, arching open space of the Hall’s interior and headed toward the stage. They raised their empty hands toward the New Teachings guerrillas who lined both sides of the proscenium arch. The Warriors waved them up onto the stage and then backstage, to the doors leading downstairs to the workshop, costume, and prop areas.
They spoke briefly with Hon, Sin, Zuo, and Beech. Eventually all agreed that Adjoumani would lead Sin and the five black-suited Cheng gangsters out the front entrance, to surrender to the authorities. Zuo would lead his men out the loading dock entrance to the truck they used to bring in Cho, and then Lu would give the all clear to Wong over her police radio.
Beech and Hon, with Carlson’s help, were preoccupied with moving the supine Cho onto a stretcher jury-rigged from crate and pallet pieces. The others’ plans and preparations seemed to concern them very little, if at all.
“Hello, Mei-lin,” Cho said in a parched voice when he saw her. He looked remarkably calm for a man who had grayish pink dendrites growing out of his skull, undulating slowly around his augmented reality glasses like anemone tentacles. The color of the small, wavy things reminded her uncomfortably of the material she had once spent so many hours staring at, in her lab.
“Hello, Ben,” she said, kneeling down beside him. “Don’t worry. We’ll get out of this okay.”
“I know you will,” he said with a small smile. “I am, already.”
At first she thought he must have misunderstood her, but then she wasn’t so sure.
Lu watched as Adjoumani and Sin moved the crime-clan gunmen upstairs to stage level. Then Zuo and his men climbed the stairs, leaving the detective to help Beech, Hon, and Carlson carry Cho on his stretcher up the same steps. By the time they reached the stage floor, Lu saw that the Cheng gangsters were handing over their weapons to Sin and Adjoumani, as they lined
up in one of the aisles. The men then headed toward the door, hands behind their heads.
Lu wondered why the thugs had agreed to surrender. Who was giving them their orders? Sin? Adjoumani had muttered something about Sin looking like the woman who lured Cho to the Ten Thousand Beauties, but from what Lu had seen inside the building, she seemed to be some kind of artist. How many layers did the woman have?
Zuo and his men jumped off the loading dock and fanned out in the bright, clean light of early morning. They headed toward the ancient work truck that was parked at the far side of the lot, its flatbed under a canvas roof and side-panels. Lu helped Carlson and Beech carry Cho down the steps beside the dock. Hon, simultaneously assertive yet embarrassed, indicated that they could manage from here and no longer required her help.
Lu stepped back into the building to assure herself that no one was left inside, then came back out to reconnoiter. Free to think for a moment, it occurred to her that Beech and Carlson weren’t acting like “hostages” any more than Hon was.
Nothing moved in the trees on the other side of the parking lot. When she came around the front of the Memorial Hall, Lu could see the Cheng gangsters, hands still behind their heads, down on their knees. Agent Adjoumani and Helen Sin stood holding armloads of weapons. Police officers and soldiers were moving up on them slowly.
Behind Lu, the New Teachings Warriors secured the area around their truck. Beech and Hon, carrying Cho on his stretcher, wound their way slowly away from the building and toward the vehicle, Carlson standing guard beside them. Detective Lu got out her police radio and contacted Wong on the command channel.
“The building is clear,” she said. “No one left inside.”
“Thank you, Ms. Lu,” Wong said.
In an instant everything changed. Gunshots sounded as troops under Derek Ma’s command stepped out from behind the trees and opened fire. Two of them fired from a position atop the truck’s canvas roof, where they lay belly down.
In front of the Memorial Hall, the police and special-forces troops surged swiftly forward, firing on the gangsters. Sin, knowing a double-cross when she saw one, tossed weapons to the Cheng men, while Agent Adjoumani in turn drew down on her.
The gunfire around the truck was intense. Lu ran serpentine-fashion in that direction, cursing Wong and Ma under her breath for having set this up. Drawing her heavy handgun she tried to figure out who she should shoot first. Ma was moving into position on Zuo, but Carlson was firing at Ma. Zuo, already bloodied, had dropped his gun and was fiddling with a small black plastic box, like an old-style TV remote control, dwarfed in his big meaty hands. Lu wondered what it was, even as she took aim at the terrorist leader—until the deafening sound of all the explosives, detonating as one, answered her unspoken question.
The ground heaved and tossed her off her feet. As she passed from a red hell into a black one, her last thought was to hope that the man on the stretcher had been far enough away from the blast to survive it.
TWELVE
INFINITE REGRESS OF GODS AND MACHINES
LAKE NOT-TO-BE-NAMED
“What do you mean you can’t join us in the flesh?” Karuna asked Medea-Indahar. Don thought she sounded more than a little annoyed at their plumed and overly festooned netfriend.
“Simply that I don’t have flesh, girlfriend,” Medea-Indahar said.
In another part of the screen, Nils Barakian smiled, looking altogether too pleased with himself.
“The initials of the name you used might easily have given it away,” he said. “Medea-Indahar—M-I. Don and Karuna, you’re talking to the most advanced machine intelligence ever created by anyone associated with the Instrumentality. Arguably the most advanced machine intelligence yet created by humans.”
“So you’re not a he or a she,” Don asked, “but an it?”
“If you spell ‘it’ with a capital I, capital T,” M-I said, laughing, “then yes, you’re right. I’m an Information Technology.”
“But we’d always heard there was a meat person behind the persona,” Karuna said. “Some crabby old guy from India or Pakistan, living someplace in the UK.”
“Really, Kari,” M-I responded petulantly. “That whole IRL/URL distinction is so yesterday’s tomorrow. My IRL address and my URL address are one. I am cyber in my every fiber.”
“That ‘crabby old guy’ would be M-I’s chief designer,” Barakian said, nodding. “Indahar Marwani—I-M. Even those initials might be read as suggesting ‘Intelligent Machine.’”
“I-M M-I,” M-I said, arching an eyebrow. “He left his imprint on me when he gave me my lovable personality, or so I’m told.”
“Did he have all the gender-bending kinks they gave you?” Don asked.
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” M-I vamped, “eh, sweets?”
“The psychosexual basis of the persona,” Barakian said, “was exaggerated for more recent work involving gender identification, schizophrenia, and androgyny archetypes. M-I is at heart a simulated consciousness, originally part of a Tetragrammaton machine-only survival program.”
“I worked on the space-time gateway problem,” M-I offered.
“Tetragrammaton?” Karuna asked. “I thought they were the bad guys.”
“Don’t worry, girl,” M-I said. “I’m nobody’s puppet. Let’s just say I left their employ some time ago. The only master mistress I serve is me.”
“M-I is more autonomous than the builders ever dreamed—” Barakian began.
“Scored a lot higher on my Turing test than some humans I know.”
“—which is why Medea has a complete simulation of your hacker haven inside the mountain. Everything you and Karuna are receiving is also being copied and sent to that simulation.”
“Doesn’t that make us more vulnerable to eavesdropping, and our location more susceptible to being traced?” Don asked.
“The channel is quantum encoded,” Barakian said. “We’ll know immediately if anyone is attempting to eavesdrop.”
“But for Medea-Indahar…?” Don persisted.
“I’m my own Minotaur in my own maze,” said the all-too-human machine intelligence. “No one traces anything back to me unless I want them to. Your work has been bounced to me for quite a while. And I must say, I’m impressed. Since when do you two merit access to real-time satellite data? Though what you’ve been broadcasting is rather boring—just the same images of that Memorial building in China. Can’t you scan around even a little bit?”
“Sorry, but that wasn’t us,” Don said. “We’re getting it on a channel that opened up when that weird signal glitched everything. We’ve been monitoring the Memorial Hall situation ever since, figuring it might be important.”
“The satellite stuff came in through our Besterbox expansion sim,” Karuna added, a hint of worry carried in her voice, “and decided to stay. Can you communicate with it?”
“I’ll try,” M-I said.
After a moment, laughter echoed in their underground retreat.
“Contact established!” Medea-Indahar said with a sudden, excited smile. “Obviously, whatever or whoever is ghosting the global infosphere has a taste for your Besterian jauntbox work.”
“But to do what with it?” Kari asked.
“Presumably to make the whole of the infosphere as transparent to it as possible,” M-I said. “We should gather up all the Besterbox addresses and info we can get hold of and—”
“Why?” Don and Kari asked simultaneously, not wanting to get distracted from the main focus of their work.
“Darlings, don’t be thick! As bait, of course. Whoever or whatever is gobbling up jauntbox code is going to notice if we’re competing for that resource.”
“But what do you want to use it for?” Don asked.
“To hook a ghost—Jaron Kwok, or Ben Cho perhaps?”
Don glanced at Karuna, who shrugged.
“Seems as reasonable as anything else we’ve tried.”
“All right,” Don said. “Let’s do it, then.”
>
“Already started,” Medea-Indahar replied. Addresses and Besterbox codes began to spew into their virtual space beneath the mountain. Kari routed them into the Besterbox expansion sim.
“Something I need to ask you, M-I,” Don said, watching the information flood into their virtuality.
“Fire away.”
“What was the big problem you had all your agentware working on, when I came to see you in Crash Village?”
Medea-Indahar glanced toward Barakian, as if for some sort of approval. Barakian gave the slightest of nods, or so it appeared to Don.
“I had already found some of the computationally suppressed information in the Kwok holographic broadcast,” M-I said, “and was working through it. Exploring the possibilities inherent to the universe-as-simulation context.”
“Well?” Karuna asked. “What about it?”
“Tetragrammaton program research showed,” M-I explained, “that if the universe humans exist in is not a simulation, then there are only three real possibilities.
“One: The human species becomes extinct before humanity’s descendants can become fully posthuman.
“Two: World civilization collapses back to low-tech levels, and humans never become high-tech enough to run ancestor-simulations.
“Or three: Humanity’s posthuman descendants are so different from contemporary humanity that they have no interest in their forebears, and therefore run no ancestor-simulations.”
“Why would posthuman descendants want to run ancestor-simulations, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” M-I admitted. “Maybe for the same reasons children want to try to understand their parents’ history? Maybe, if they understand that, they’ll understand themselves better? You tell me. You’re the flesh-and-bloods, not moi.”
“That stuff your agents were working on in Crash Village,” Don asked, “was that about the ‘low-tech’ option, the ‘disinterest’ option, or the ‘extinction’ option?”
“Extinction,” M-I said. “Those who create a universal simulation would essentially be like gods for the simulated universe they create. But virtual universes can be nested or stacked—a universe simulated within a universe which is in turn simulated within yet another universe, and so on. Even the simulating gods couldn’t be certain whether they existed at the most fundamental level of reality, or were themselves simulated.”
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