AIs

by Gardner Dozois

  With a shiver, Elin was herself again. She grabbed a towel and wiped off her facepaint. Then she leaned back and transluced the wall—her replacement was late. Corporation regs gave her fifty percent of his missed-time fines if she turned him in. It was easy money, and so she waited.

  Stretching, she felt the gold wetware wires dangling from the back of her skull. She lazily put off yanking them.

  Earth bloomed underfoot, slowly crept upward. New Detroit and New Chicago rose from the floor. Bright industrial satellites gleamed to every side of the twin residential cylinders.

  A bit of motion caught Elin’s eye and she swiveled to follow a load of cargo drifting by. It was a jumble of containers lashed together by nonmagnetic tape and shot into an orbit calculated to avoid the laser cables and power transmission beams that interlaced the Park.

  A man was riding the cargo, feet braced against a green carton, hauling on a rope slipped through the lashings. He saw her and waved. She could imagine his grin through the mirrored helmet.

  The old Elin snorted disdainfully. She started to look away and almost missed seeing it happen.

  In leaning back that fraction more, the cargo hopper had put too much strain on the lashings. A faulty rivet popped, and the cargo began to slide. Brightly colored cartons drifted apart, and the man went tumbling, end-over-end, away.

  One end of the lashing was still connected to the anchor carton and the free end writhed like a wounded snake. A bright bit of metal—the failed rivet—broke free and flew toward the juncture of the wheel lab’s hub and spokes.

  The old Elin was still hooting with scornful laughter when the rivet struck the lab, crashing into a nest of wiring that should not have been exposed. Two wires short-circuited, ending a massive power transient surging up through the workboard. Circuits fused and melted. The board went haywire.

  And a microjolt of electricity leaped up two gold wires, hopelessly scrambling the wetware through Elin’s skull.

  An hour later, when her replacement finally showed, she was curled into a ball, rocking back and forth on the floor. She was alternating between hysterical gusts of laughter and dark, gleeful screams.

  * * *

  Morning came, and after a sleepy, romantic breakfast, Tory plugged into his briefcase and went to work. Elin wandered off to do some thinking.

  There was no getting around the fact that she was not the metallurgist from Wheel Lab 19, not anymore. That woman was alien to her now. They shared memories, experiences—but she no longer understood that woman, could not sympathize with her emotions, indeed found her distasteful.

  At a second-terrace café that was crowded with off-shift biotechs, Elin rented a table and briefcase. She sat down to try to trace the original owner of her personality.

  As she’d suspected, her new persona was copied from that of a real human being; creating a personality from scratch was still beyond the abilities of even the best wetware techs. She was able to trace herself back to IGF’s inventory bank, and to determine that duplication of personality was illegal—which presumably meant that the original owner was dead.

  But she could not locate the original owner. Selection had been made by computer, and the computer wouldn’t tell. When she tried to find out, it referred her to the Privacy Act of 2037.

  “I think I’ve exhausted all the resources of self-discovery available to me,” she told the Pierrot when he came to collect his tip. “And I’ve still got half the morning left to kill.”

  He glanced at her powder-blue facepaint and smiled politely.

  * * *

  “It’s selective black.”

  “Hah?” Elin turned away from the lake, found that an agtech carrying a long-handled net had come up behind her.

  “The algae—it absorbs light into the infrared. Makes the lake a great thermal sink.” The woman dipped her net into the water, seined up a netful of dark green scum, and dumped it into a nearby trough. Water drained away through the porous bottom.

  “Oh.” There were a few patches of weeds on the island where drifting soil had settled. “It’s funny. I never used to be very touristy. More the contemplative type, sort of homebodyish. Now I’ve got to be- doing something, you know?”

  The agtech dumped another load of algae into the trough. “I couldn’t say.” She tapped her forehead. “It’s the wetware. If you want to talk shop, that’s fine. Otherwise, I can’t.”

  “I see.” Elin dabbed a toe in the warm water. “Well—why not? Let’s talk shop.”

  Someone was moving at the far edge of the island. Elin craned her neck to see. The agtech went on methodically dipping her net into the lake as God walked into view.

  “The lake tempers the climate, see. By day it works by evaporative cooling. Absorbs the heat, loses it to evaporation, radiates it out the dome roof through the condensers.”

  Coral was cute as a button.

  A bowl of fruit and vegetables had been left near the waterline. She walked to the bowl, considered it Her orange jumpsuit nicely complemented her café-au-lait skin. She was so small and delicate that by contrast Elin felt ungainly.

  “We also use passive heat pumps to move the excess heat down to a liquid-storage cavern below the lake.”

  Coral picked up a tomato. Her features were finely chiseled. Her almond eyes should have had snap and fire in them, to judge by the face, but they were remote and unfocused. Even, white teem nipped at the food.

  “At night we pump the heat back up, let the lake radiate it out to keep the crater warm.”

  On closer examination—Elin had to squint to see so fine—the face was as smooth and lineless as that of an idiot There was nothing there; no emotion, no purpose, no detectable intellect

  “That’s why the number of waterfalls in operation varies.”

  Now Coral sat down on the rocks. Her feet and knees were dirty. She did not move. Elin wanted to shy a rock at her to see if she would react

  What now? Elin wondered. She had seen the sights, all that Magritte had to offer, and they were all tiresome, disappointing. Even—no, make that especially—God And she still had almost a month to kill.

  “Keeping the crater tempered is a regular balancing act,” the agtech said.

  “Oh, shut up.” Elin took out her briefcase and called Father Landis. “I’m bored,” she said, when the hologram had stabilized.

  Landis hardly glanced up from her work. “So get a job,” she snapped.

  * * *

  Magritte had begun as a mining colony, back when it was still profitable to process the undifferentiated melange soil. The miners were gone now, and the crater was owned by a consortium of operations that were legally debarred from locating Earthside.

  From the fifteenth terrace Elin stared down at the patchwork clusters of open-air laboratories and offices, some separated by long stretches of undeveloped field, others crammed together in the hope of synergistic effect. Germ-warfare corporations mingled with nuclear-waste engineering firms. The Mid-Asian Population Control Project had half a terrace to itself, and it swarmed with guards. There were a few off-Swiss banking operations.

  “You realize,” Tory said, “that I’m not going to be at all happy about this development.” He stood, face impassive in red and green, watching a rigger bolt together a cot and wire in the surgical equipment.

  “You hired me yourself,” Elin reminded him.

  “Yes, but I’m wired into professional mode at the moment.” The rigger packed up his tools, walked off. “Looks like we’re almost ready.”

  “Good.” Elin flung herself down on the cot, and lay back, hands folded across her chest. “Hey, I feel like I should be holding a lily!”

  “I’m going to hook you into the project intercom so you don’t get too bored between episodes.” The air about her flickered, and a clutch of images overlaid her vision. Ghosts walked through the air, stared at her from deep within the ground. “Now we’ll shut off the external senses.” The world went away, but the illusory people remained, each wit
hin a separate hexagonal field of vision. It was like seeing through the eyes of a fly.

  There was a sudden, overwhelming sense of Tory’s presence, and a sourceless voice said, “This will take a minute. Amuse yourself by calling up a few friends.” Then he was gone.

  Elin floated, free of body, free of sensation, almost godlike in her detachment. She idly riffled through the images, stopped at a chubby little man drawing a black line across his forehead. Hello, Hans, she thought

  He looked up and winked. “How’s it hanging, kid?”

  Not so bad. What’re you up to?

  “My job. I’m the black-box monitor this shift.” He added an orange starburst to the band, surveyed the job critically in a pocket mirror. “I sit here with my finger on the button”—one hand disappeared below his terminal—“and if I get the word, I push. That sets off explosives in the condenser units and blows the dome. Pfffft. Out goes the air.”

  She considered it: a sudden volcano of oxygen spouting up and across the lunar plains. Human bodies thrown up from the surface, scattering, bursting under explosive decompression.

  That’s grotesque, Hans.

  “Oh, it’s safe. The button doesn’t connect unless I’m wetwired into my job.”

  Even so.

  “Just a precaution; a lot of the research that goes on here wouldn’t be allowed without this kind of security. Relax—I haven’t lost a dome yet.”

  The intercom cut out, and again Elin felt Tory’s presence. “We’re trying a series of Trojan horse programs this time—inserting you into the desired mental states instead of making you the states. We’ve encapsulated your surface identity and routed the experimental programs through a secondary level. So with this series, rather than identifying with the programs, you’ll perceive them all indirectly.”

  Tory, you have got to be the most jargon-ridden human being in existence. How about repeating that in English?

  “I’ll show you.”

  Suddenly Elin was englobed in a sphere of branching crimson lines, dark and dull, that throbbed slowly. Lacy and organic, it looked the way she imagined the veins in her forehead to be like when she had a headache.

  “That was anger,” Tory said. “Your mind shunted it off into visual imagery because it didn’t identify the anger with itself.”

  That’s what you’re going to do then—program me into the God-state so that I can see it but not experience it?

  “Ultimately. Though I doubt you’ll be able to come up with pictures. More likely, you’ll feel that you’re in the presence of God.” He withdrew for a moment, leaving her more than alone, almost nonexistent. Then he was back. “We start slowly, though. The first session runs you up to the basic metaprogramming level, integrates all your mental processes and puts you in low-level control of them. The nontechnical term for this is making the Christ. Don’t fool around with anything you see or sense.” His voice faded, she was alone, and then everything changed.

  She was in the presence of someone wonderful.

  Elin felt that someone near at hand, and struggled to open the eyes she no longer possessed; she had to see. Her existence opened, and people began appearing before her.

  “Careful,” Tory said. “You’ve switched on the intercom again.”

  I want to see!

  “There’s nobody to see. That’s just your own mind. But if you want, you can keep the intercom on.”

  Oh. It was disappointing. She was surrounded by love, by a crazily happy sense that the universe was holy, by wisdom deeper than the world. By all rights, it had to come from a source greater than herself.

  Reason was not strong enough to override emotion. She riffled through the intercom, bringing up image after image and discarding them all, searching. When she had run through the project staff, she began hungrily scanning the crater’s public monitors.

  Agtechs in the trellis farms were harvesting strawberries and sweet peas. Elin could taste them on her tongue. Somebody was seining up algae from the inner lake, and she felt the weight of the net in calloused hands. Not far from where she lay, a couple was making love in a grove of saplings and she . . .

  Tory, I don’t think I can take this. It’s too intense.

  “You’re the one who wanted to be a test pilot.”

  Dammit, Tory!

  Donna Landis materialized on the intercom. “She’s right, Shostokovich. You haven’t buffered her enough.”

  “It didn’t seem wise to risk dissociative effects by cranking her ego up too high.”

  “Who’s paying for all this, hah?”

  Tory grumbled something inaudible, and dissolved the world.

  Elin floated in blackness, soothing and relaxing. She felt good. She had needed this little vacation from the tensions and pressures of her new personality. Taking the job had been the right thing to do, even if it did momentarily displease Tory.

  Tory . . . She smiled mentally. He was exasperating at times, but still she was coming to rely on having him around. She was beginning to think she was in love with him.

  A lesser love, perhaps. Certainly not the love that is the Christ.

  Well, maybe so. Still, on a human level, Tory filled needs in her she hadn’t known existed. It was too much effort to argue with herself, though. Her thoughts drifted away into a wordless, luxurious reveling in the bodiless state, free from distractions, carefree and disconnected.

  Nothing is disconnected. All the universe is a vast net of intermeshing programs. Elin was amused at herself. That had sounded like something Tory would say. She’d have to watch it; she might love the man, but she certainly didn’t want to end up talking like him.

  You worry needlessly. The voice of God is subtle, but it is not your own.

  Elin startled. She searched through her mind for an open intercom channel, didn’t find one. Hello, she thought. Who said that?

  The answer came to her not in words, but in a sourceless assertion of identity. It was cool, emotionless, something she could not describe even to herself, but by the same token absolute and undeniable.

  It was God.

  Then Tory was back and the voice, the presence, was gone. Tory? she thought. I think I just had a religious experience.

  “That’s very common under sensory deprivation—the mind clears out a few old programs. Nothing to worry about. Now relax for a jiff while I plug you back in—how does that feel?”

  The Presence was back again, but not nearly so strong as before; she could resist the urge to chase after it. That’s fine, Tory, but listen, I really think—

  “Let’s leave analysis to those who have been programmed for it, shall we?”

  * * *

  The lovers strolled aimlessly through a meadow, the grass brushing up higher than their waists. Biological night was coming; the agtechs flicked the daylight off and on twice in warning.

  ‘It was real, Tory. She talked with me; I’m not making it up.”

  Tory ran a hand through his dark, curly hair, looking abstracted. “Well. Assuming that my professional opinion was wrong—and I’ll be the first to admit that the program is a bit egocentric—I still don’t think we have to stoop to mysticism for an explanation.”

  To the far side of Magritte, a waterfall was abruptly shut off. The stream of water scattered, seeming to dissolve in the air. “I thought you said she was God.”

  “I only said that to bait Landis. I don’t mean that she’s literally God, just godlike. Her thought processes are a million years more efficiently organized than ours. God is just a convenient metaphor.”

  “Um. So what’s your explanation?”

  “There’s at least one terminal on the island—the things are everywhere. She probably programmed it to cut into the intercom without the channels seeming to be open.”

  “Could she do that?”

  “Why not? She has that million-year edge on us—and she used to be a wetware tech; all wetware techs are closet computer hacks.” He did not look at her, had not looked at her for some time.
r />   “Hey.” She reached out to take his hand. “What’s wrong with you tonight?”

  “Me?” He did not meet her eyes. “Don’t mind me. I’m just sulking because you took the job. I’ll get over it.”

  “What’s wrong with the job?”

  “Nothing. I’m just being moody.”

  She guided his arm around her waist, pressed up against him. “Well, don’t be. It’s nothing you can control—I have to have work to do. My boredom threshold is very low.”

  “I know that.” He finally turned to face her, smiled sadly. “I do love you, you know.”

  “Well . . . maybe I love you too.”

  His smile banished all sadness from his face, like a sudden wind that breaks apart the clouds. “Say it again.” His hands reached out to touch her shoulders, her neck, her face. “One more time, with feeling.”

  “Will not!” Laughing, she tried to break away from him, but he would not let go, and they fell in a tangle to the ground. “Beast!” They rolled over and over in the grass. “Brute!” She hammered at his chest, tore open his jumpsuit, tried to bite his neck.

  Tory looked embarrassed, tried to pull away. “Hey, not out here! Somebody could be watching.”

  The agtechs switched off the arc lamps, plunging Magritte into darkness.

  Tory reached up to touch Elin’s face. They made love.

  * * *

  Physically, it was no different from things she had done countless times before with lovers and friends and the occasional stranger. But she was committing herself in a way the old Elin would never have dared, letting Tory past her defenses, laying herself open to pain and hurt. Trusting him. He was a part of her now. And everything was transformed, made new and wonderful.

  Until they were right at the brink of orgasm, the both of them, and half-delirious she could let herself go, murmuring, “I love you, love you, God I love you . . .” And just as she climaxed, Tory stiffened and arched his head back, and in a voice that was wrenched from the depths of passion, whispered, “Coral . . .”