by MadMaxAU
“But. . .” Carl shook his head, fighting off some of the drug-induced rigor. “But that rules out every possible rendezvous we’ve considered! In that case, why should we even bother . . . ?”
He stopped. There was no use arguing with a recording. Ould-Harrad continued.
“This fragment, this sliver out of time, has no role to play in the realm of the Hot, down where the roar of entropy drowns out even the Voice of God. There will be no encounters with rocky worlds or interference with the plans the Almighty has already made for those places. . .”
“He’s bonkers,” Carl mused. “Completely crazy.” But he shut up when Saul motioned him to silence.
“You, Saul Lintz,” Ould Harrad resumed. “You have become many. You may even live forever.” The one time African’s still-human eyes blinked in wonderment. “Why this was permitted, I cannot imagine. But there remains no doubt of the gifts, the tools that have been placed in your hands.”
The eyes flicked upward. “Perhaps the answer will be found out there, out in the Darkness that awaits us.
“One thing I do know—that my debt and obligation to you has now been paid.
“Do not come down into the deeper chambers, or even call on me during the remainder of my allotted span.” Ould Harrad’s forehead furrowed. “For I cannot master my jealousy easily—I who wished so much to be Heaven’s instrument, and found that He had chosen an irreverent infidel, instead. Futile as it may be, and even though it damn me, I will try to kill you if—while I live—you ever come down again into the navel of our world.”
The image vanished. Saul shook his head and sighed. A deal is a deal.
He quickly checked on Virginia, then turned back to Lani. “Sick bay,” he said. “How are things?”
She blinked back to the present. Shivering “Um, your…uh…clones are taking care of things. They’re good doctors, even though they scare the shit out of people.”
“I’m glad you’re alive Saul.”
“So am I, dear. I’ll explain later how all this happened. Meanwhile, you’d better go back and help Jeffers manage repairs. The surviving spacers are needed more than ever.”
“What about... ?” She glanced at Virginia. Saul shook his head. His voice was worn, thin.
“We’ll salvage what we can.”
Lani covered her mouth and let out a small moan. She turned, threw her arms around Carl, and sobbed.
Carl blinked, first in surprise and then wonderment. In his semidrugged state his voice was low. “Lani, it’ll be all right .... Saul is doing everything he can .... Tell, tell Jeff I’ll be up soon.”
His hands twitched. He fought off the lassitude to bring his arms around her and answer her embrace. “We’ll endure,” he whispered, and closed his eyes.
Later, when she had gone, Carl said to Saul, “You know, she’s quite a girl, that Lani.”
Saul nodded, and smiled faintly. “About time you realized that.”
He had been thinking about poor Paul, the clone who had been damaged, who had grown into a near perfect replica of him in all but mind . . . a poor innocent child whose corpse now lay out on the ice, alongside two of his brothers, killed in the fighting.
Should I mourn as a father, as a brother, or as one who has lost a piece of himself?
Soon Carl was walking around again, swinging his arms. He came forward as Saul muttered an oath and bent over the patient.
Virginia’s face twitched. The holo display pulsed dangerous hues and a low, ominous tone began to growl. Saul cursed lowly.
“Damn! I was afraid of this. Back when the Earth missile exploded, it was only a case of disorientation. But now the machine’s being asked to absorb all of her. And there’s not enough room!”
“What can be done?”
“I don’t know! I . . . I can’t tell the difference between holo-bio memory segments that have been transferred and those that have simply died. There’s no way to do an inventory, because huge parts of her have just been swallowed up by the data net. She’s surging all over the hell and gone!”
He hesitated, then climbed onto the webbing and lifted his own neural tap.
“There’s no other choice. I’m going in.”
Carl’s hand gripped his arm for a moment. Their eyes met.
“Be careful, Saul. Do your best.”
Saul nodded. Their hands clasped.
Then he lay down and closed his eyes.
VIRGINIA
Scattered,
Blown by wild electron winds . . .
Oh, the pain,
As she seeks a place to hide . . .
Wendy whirred to a stop. Clicked. Lifted a claw arm. Hesitated.
The little mech swiveled its turret and scanned.
Its visual system perceived lines, angles, moiré webs of spatial frequencies. Following its programming, it weighed the signals and transformed them into patterns. It recognized things identifiable as machines, instruments, the door, people.
Wendy’s programming had changed many times, recently. Its mistress had always been coming up with new techniques for parsing lines and shapes, new ways to give them names . . . an ever-growing list of commands to obey and subtly choose among.
Now, suddenly, another flux of new programming flowed into the little mech. This time, though, it came as a torrent.
Chaotic rivers of data poured in, stunning it immobile. The flood was too vast by far to be handled by Wendy’s systems—like a cup trying to contain the ocean. It was hopeless, impossible.
And yet there came a moment . . . only an instant . . . during which the small machine stared at the named sets of lines and shapes, and it saw . . . when it stared, and experienced a brief startlement.
What am I? it wondered. What is all this?
Why... ?
But there was simply no room for the program to operate, and the tide gave up trying to squeeze into the tiny space. It surged off elsewhere, desperately seeking a home.
Wendy remained stock still for a long time, even after the rushing streams of data had departed. The flicker of self awareness was gone—if it had ever been anything more than a phantom. But in its wake something had taken root. A shadow. An impression.
Slowly, tentatively, the little mech’s main arm stretched out and touched an object lying on a console, near where two men spoke to each other in words it now seemed almost able to understand.
It picked up the delicate hairbrush, backed with mother of pearl, and recognized it for what it was.
“Mine,” the machine squeaked aloud, briefly. The men did not hear, so they took no notice when Wendy lifted the brush and ran it gently over its carapace.
Soldiers quoting chaos
Called me from my home.
Silence!
So much more, and less,
Than Being,
Sold me down this road.
Where have I gone?
A body made for life?
For living?
With salt sea blood aches,
Yearning to welcome, spread,
And birth?
On the surface of the ice, a rigid lifter mech—immobile since completing its last instruction days before—suddenly flexed in a jerky spasm of awakening. So hard did it leap that it arced high into space, tumbling above frosty patches of red stained snow.
No!
Space! Cold!
No
Air!
Not
Here!
The mech’s spasms lapsed as the surge of data whirled and fled. Still, a wispy imprint remained after the outrushing flood had departed. The drone worker landed nimbly on the crust and looked round for something to do.
Over in one direction, it spied people digging holes and hurriedly laying patches over fog-shrouded domes.
Not quite smart enough to realize that it was taking initiative for the first time in its existence, the mech sped forward to offer its services.
A home
For the ego.
A place
&nbs
p; To be...
Deep under the ice, a more advanced machine—a semiautonomous maintenance roboid—stumbled in the midst of routinely repairing a mining drone. It paused, then carefully lay down its tools and began paying attention to the sounds. There were people talking nearby. But none of their words were proper ident coded commands, so it had ignored them in its single minded attention to detail.
Only now did the machine recognize many of the sounds as coming from pain and fear.
New priorities fought one another. For the first time there was something more important than repairing machines. It moved into the nearby chamber.
Sparkling eye facets surveyed a makeshift hospital. Medics hurried to and fro, tending frightened, injured people. The new programming had taken a few seconds to fill this high level mech’s capacious memory. Now, though, it reeled under the overload.
“Still to cramped!” its tinny voice cried out, now with a timbre and tremolo that made a few of those nearby look up in surprise.
“No room! This is not my body!
“Where is my body!”
The mech finally gathered itself as the data overflow surged off elsewhere again, leaving only its imprint—new programming. The big machine delicately stepped over the line of injured people.
“I can carry that for you, Doctor.” it said to a man hefting a gleaming artificial liver into place over a wounded woman. The medic turned and blinked in brief surprise. “All right,” he said. “Brace it to the ice there panel facing outward. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” it answered.
The mech recognized this man’s face. It saw exactly the same features on the face of another doctor, nearby. And again on one of the patients. Although it was not quite smart enough to be curious about how such a thing could be, it did react out of recognition. This was a visage its new programming knew well.
“I love you,” it said as it took the unit in its massive arms. The first of the identical men smiled back.
“I love you too,” he replied, only a little surprised.
By that time, though, the data storm, the tornado of confused electrons, had moved on. It raged up and down corridors of supercooled fiber.
Room!
All I want is a room somewhere . . .
Room!
Lebensraum. A room of one’s own . . .
Room!
Almost spent, the torrent spilled at last into a vast chamber where, it seemed, everyone in the world awaited her.
“Welcome, child,” the great O’Toole told her cheerfully. Oliver and Redford raised glasses to toast her arrival. “We’ve been waiting for you,” they said.
It was a great hall, its vault supported by aery, crystal columns. But there were too many people. In tuxedos and formal dress, they pressed around her on all sides, moist and clasping. And more and more of her was trying to get in.
Get out! I need this space!
Desperately, she grabbed one of the oldtime actors—Redford—by the seat of his pants and threw him through a window that gaped onto emptiness.
“We are your simulated personalities. Your toys. You created us!” Sigmund Freud—withered, pinch mouthed—explained to her professorially as he sailed out after the movie idol.
I don’t care. Get out!
Jovial, pink faced Edmund Halley raised his wineglass in a toast and followed them, waistcoat flapping. Lenin, trying to flee with a crablike, sideways crouch, was caught by the towering brown figure of King Kamehmeha, who bowed to her, smiled, and leaped with the screaming Bolshevik out into the storm outside.
All the actors, one by one, whisked outside as more and more of herself flowed into the chamber. It was like Alice after having eaten the mushroom, she realized, distantly. She had to throw some of the party guests out by force. But others, like Mr. Fixit, leaped voluntarily. Percy and Mary Shelley waltzed out together, Frankenstein lumbering after them.
As she grew, she shoveled them up in handsful and dumped them anywhere . . . this one into a mech wandering the icefields, that one down a microwave channel to be beamed at the stars.
No sentiment stayed her hand. This was survival. Her bluff, red cheeked father leaped out the window alongside a chittering, sarcastic dolphin. More room! More room!
The biggest figure was left for last. It was nearly as large as she had become, with a swelling, lopsided face she had not seen before. The face of a child. She stopped, hands halfway around the simulation’s throat.
“I am JonVon,” it said, in a youngster’s voice.
JonVon? She blinked. Behind her, more surging pulses pushed, more bits of her striving to get in. And yet, her hands pulled back.
I . . . I can’t . . .
“But you must, Mother. The experiment is completed. We have seen that a bio organic machine can contain a human level intelligence . . . but that intelligence cannot originate inside a place like this. It must once have been human.
“Mother, you must make this place your home.”
Home . . . then my body . . .
“Dead, according to the diagnostic computer. You were sent here to be saved. And there is not room for two.
The child backed away toward the window, where lightning crackled against a pink vault. Beyond, the roar of chaos.
“Goodbye.”
Jon Von!
A whoosh, a tiny pop.
She surged to fill the space where he had been.
I know my name, now, she realized. I was Virginia Kaninamanu Herbert.
The chamber groaned around her. Pink pillars snapped and the ceiling cracked raining burnt gold powder.
A metaphor, she realized. This place was a metaphor, signifier for available brain-space. By throwing out her simulated people, she was dumping excess memory, frantically reprogramming the colloidal stochastic computer to hold…her.
I’ll never fit . . . she cried as the metaphorical walls groaned and threatened to buckle.
It’s crushing me. I won’t all fit!
She struggled for calm. There was enough of her inside, now, to remember those last hours flying off into space with Carl—their desperate gamble—Carl dwindling—and then the searing cold, the sparkling black, stale air . . . loneliness.
No, she swore. I may be dead, but I’m still the best damn programmer who ever lived!
Edit, trim, make room. She used some things she had learned from Saul, and lopped off instincts to control biological functions she would never use again. She dumped the skill of tying shoelaces, and threw out the delicate art of needlepoint.
Lovemaking—oh, what a loss! The remembered slap and tingle of mingling, sweat glazed skin . . . but the walls threatened to crush her. She picked up the reflexes—a rug of gaudy yellow strands—and readied metaphorical scissors.
“Virginia?”
Silicon dust rained as her head hit the ceiling again. Who is that? I thought I got rid of all of them.
Over in the corner, one last human shape. She picked it up. Sorry, but there’s no room. You have to go.
The figure smiled. “I’m not even here, so to speak. I’m just a visitor in this mishegas.”
She blinked. Saul. But she didn’t remember doing a simulation of him . . .
“I’m not a simulation, my verblonget darling. I’m plugged into the console in your lab. I’ve come down here to try to help you.”
To . . . help . . . me . . .
Already she could feel the edges of herself raveling away, dissipating where they could not fit into the matrix. Maybe I should die with my body.
“Bite your tongue,” Saul chided.
What tongue? The chamber echoed with her bitter, tinny laughter.
“Think. Are there other places to store memory?”
Other places . . . she wondered. You did it with your clones. Every one gets a copy of your memories, but . . .
“But to stuff complete memories into another human brain, the second one has to be nearly identical to the first. And no other cells but mine can be force-grown to adulthood i
n time to be identical with the donor. I’ve tried it many times, and the results were all disasters.”
Then how did I get into here?
“A different process altogether.” The simulated Saul shrugged. “You’ve been imprinting JonVon with bits of your own personality for years. He was linked to you while you slot slept. The matrix was ready.”
Yes. It finally worked. Almost. Too bad it fell just short.
“No!” Saul shouted. “Think! Try to find a way out of here!”
By now he was like an ant in her palm. Virginia felt as if she were being crushed into a child’s coffin—or having her legs and arms cut to fit a Procrustean bed.
If there was time . . . She felt the marble ceiling give, and knew—in a sudden insight—that the metaphor stood for a type of memory storage.
And there was an alternative . . .
Simple—yet nobody had thought of it before! She could see it on several levels besides the metaphorical, including the stark clarity of pure mathematics.
Yes, there’s a way. But it would take several thousand seconds to program.
“About an hour. So nu? Go for it!”
Her sigh was a whistle of chilled electron gas.
No. Within seventeen seconds I will be no more. The unraveling has begun. There is no place to store essential parts of me until done.
Saul’s face contorted. The image, smaller than a microbe, shuddered. “There is a way.”
I can’t—
“Take my brain.”
What?
“We’ve been linked so often, I’m sure it can be done. Move in, quickly!”