He nodded, unsurprised. “Did it get away?”
I shrugged. “It went over the side, down into the sea. The Invisible followed it down. I couldn’t see what happened after that.”
He nodded again, slowly and infuriatingly. Then: “I suppose an explanation is in order.”
Behind me, Hassan snorted; on the other side of the room, I saw that Leila was smiling. I couldn’t help but smile myself, at the enormity of the understatement.
“Yes, Harris, an explanation is in order.”
“I’ve a feeling I don’t know the half of it myself. But I’ll tell you what I know.”
“Fine. You can start with the augmentation.”
He nodded, sadly. “The arrangement was a little unorthodox. My set of augmentations was more than just a suit of clothes.”
I stared at him. “A Ghost.”
He gave a half-shrug, then frowned. “If you want to call it that. A Virtua intelligence that wanted to experience our world—directly, at first hand—and to interact with it. And it wanted all of that, without the chains, the restrictions that would be placed on it if it applied for any of the existing manifestation rights.”
I glanced at Leila, who was pretending to study the abstract pattern of one of Hassan’s Virtua murals, but listening intently. “So, a Ghost,” I repeated.
“As I said: if you want to call it that. It was at least second or third generation, highly intelligent, heuristically intelligent. It knew perfectly well that if it manifested without authorization, it would be hunted down. The Ghosthunters would track it, cage it, and hand it over to the authorities. It would be data-stripped—in human terms, tortured and mutilated—and it might even be erased.”
Hassan was nodding, grinning, impressed. “So it found the perfect camouflage.”
“Yes. If it manifested itself alone, it would easily be found. But if it wrapped itself around a human, if it arranged the necessary licenses that way, it would never be noticed. It would be taken for a particularly high-level augmentation.”
I nodded. “And that’s exactly what happened. For years. If I was fooled, then the disguise must have been well-nigh perfect. But having to rely on a human, to stay with that human all the time—that’s more or less equivalent to the restrictions it would have had to have had anyway.”
“Not really. It was no one’s servant. If anything, it was the other way round. I chose the augmentation, but all my actions, everything I did, was on behalf of the A.I. I was its agent, its factor, and its bearer. When it wanted to go to the house of fun, I was more than that . . . It was all for the money, of course. The A.I. couldn’t pay me in Dirham-Pesetas, but Virtua Dollars are good in most places these days.”
He fell silent, and we sat listening to the wind, and to the faraway sound of the sea, a soft, low hiss, like static. I had to remind myself that this was the man whose preferred augmentation was a caricature of a middle-aged English gent. Beneath it, he was young, his eyes tired but bright, his movements quick and nervous. Even his voice had changed—of course, whenever I had spoken to him, it had always been the A.I. speaking back, through the Virtua audio net. Anyone not wired in would have heard only silence.
I wondered how much of Harris’s character was his, and how much was shaped by the A.I. Now that it was gone, he seemed unfinished somehow, as if far more than his clothes had been taken from him.
Now I understood his fall, out on the road, and why he had been unharmed by it. He had not tripped. The A.I. had abandoned him, and he had lost consciousness from the shock of being jacked out so suddenly. Nothing more than that.
“All right,” I said after a while. “What about the girl? Why did it want me to find her? Is she a . . . a Ghostbearer, like you, or is she something else?”
“I don’t know.”
“And the Invisible? Why was it chasing you? And more to the point, what the hell was it?”
“I don’t know. I tell you, I don’t know!”
* * *
After a time, I believed him. The A.I. had told him what it needed him to know, no more and no less. He knew nothing about the girl. He knew nothing about the Invisible, if that was what it was. He knew very little about the A.I.’s dealings in general.
What was most immediately worrying was that he did not know why the A.I. should have wanted to help me with my little vice. True, it had demanded payment to temporarily interfere with my visual cortex, to allow me to walk in Virtua without the distractions of the real-world. But from what Harris said, it seemed the thing had no need of funds. It must have had some ulterior motive in restricting my visual input to Virtua, for a few hours, every few days. Maybe there was something in Virtua it wanted me to see. I could not imagine what that might be, though, and Harris had no idea.
I struggled with that for a while, but could get no hold on it, and so I turned my attention to an easier problem: the brothel. I did not believe the A.I. wanted to go there solely for the pleasures of the flesh. It couldn’t really experience them, in any case, having no tactile existence; and purely intellectual curiosity only went so far, even for an A.I.
It followed, then, that it went there for some other reason, probably to meet someone, maybe more than one person, maybe many. At first, I thought that these people must be humans: if they were other A.I.’s, it could easily communicate with them in Virtua over any distance it liked. On the other hand, if it wanted a really secure exchange of information, the safest way to do that was by actually meeting. Harris swore that he had never overheard anything unexpected at the brothel. But there was no reason he should. After all, I had never overheard my bio-implant talking to El Puente’s Ghostmakers.
The only way to know was to go there.
When I arrived at what Harris referred to as the “house of fun,” the sun was rising, a smudge of light in the east. On the other side of the bridge, the night still clung to the ocean.
I reflected, again, how ordinary the building was, plain and unadorned; but now I realized that its very lack of augmentation made it stand out. It was possibly the only building on the whole of El Puente without any elements imported from Virtua. A deliberate irony, perhaps, on the part of the A.I.s who were using it as a clandestine meeting place.
A figure was sitting on the steps, a figure in a white shirt and blue jeans, watching me, waiting for me. A figure with no augmentations that I could see or sense. Her mouth formed a crooked half-smile as I drew closer, and she said again the last words she had spoken to me.
“Tell me, Señor Montoya: you’re the blind man. Have you ever seen the Invisibles?”
I shrugged in reply, and she nodded, as if she had been expecting the gesture.
“There are things I need to know,” I told her. “It seems you already know the questions I want to ask. Can you give me any answers?”
Anila shook her head, slowly. The half-smile was gone now, replaced by a look I knew. The look of one for whom fear has become a friend. The look of the hunted and the look of the haunted.
“Then can you tell me where to ask?”
“Dar,” she said, quietly. “You need to speak to Dar.”
“The lady with the mirrored skin. Where is she? Inside?”
The smile returned. “In a way. Wait. I’ll bring her to you.”
But she made no move to go and fetch Dar. Instead, she hung her head, as if suddenly ashamed. When she raised it, it was to whisper to me, once again, something she had said to me before. “Do I look too ordinary? Not enough decoration?”
Then she began to change.
The process must have been almost instantaneous, as soon as she was wired in. The change took place relatively slowly, though, over eons of Virtua time. The girl’s body began to shimmer, then seemed to swell, her skinny figure filling out inside her clothes, her hair lengthening and gaining volume. Her face altered, gaining a few years as it changed. And her skin was turning silver, reflecting the electric blue of the chill dawn sky.
I had not realized before that Dar’s
eyes were also mirrored. When she blinked, it was like a ripple moving across a still pool of mercury. With those eyes, she stared at me, challenging, warning, waiting. Trying to meet that stare, I found myself staring at my own distorted features.
“I’m impressed,” I said.
She opened a palm, and it seemed filled with a handful of sky.
“It’s simple enough. No harder than being invisible, for example. It requires fast processing, of course; large amounts of visual data have to be updated a number of times a second, but it’s nothing beyond the reach of any good system.”
“You’re an A.I. Like the A.I. that Harris was bearing.”
She said nothing, waiting for me to continue.
“You’re something new. A Ghost with an alibi.”
She smiled at that, silver lips pulling back to reveal silver teeth. “Montoya, it doesn’t matter how much you’ve found out, or deduced, or guessed. You brought the Invisibles to us. It doesn’t even matter whether or not you were aware of it. We can’t allow them to interfere with our plans now.”
“And what are your plans?”
She laughed now, shaking her head. Instead of answering my question, she said, “It’s funny that you should have noticed Anila. You thought it unusual that she should have no augmentations. You wondered why that could be. But what about you, Montoya? You have your diagnostics, your messenger, your pathfinder, all useful toys. But no augmentations on display—very unusual, on El Puente. In a way, you’re an Invisible yourself. I wonder what the reason might be.”
I sensed a presence behind me, and turned to find a group of Ghosts at my back. The A.I. who had been borne by Harris was one. To my surprise, Leila was another.
I moved to activate my Ghostbane, and to call for help, but before I could do either of those things, Leila stepped forward, calmly, and took my arm. Her grip was ferociously strong, her touch cold as the deep sea. She smiled at me. Then everything dissolved, and for a time I was gone.
* * *
Maybe Kirsten had tried to explain it to me, but I had never understood. I had never wanted to understand. When she finally left, we had said our good-byes coldly and quickly, an unpleasant duty done with bad grace. Without my knowing, she slipped a parting gift into my pocket: a cowrie shell, smooth and black as jet. I wore it on a chain, its cold teeth blunt against my skin.
Her body was put on ice, a legal requirement, though she swore she would never return to it.
Months passed before I realized that I wanted to find her, and months more before I found the courage to go searching. I guessed and hoped that she might be found on El Puente, where the wall dividing the real world from Virtua seemed to be cracking, crumbling.
I went to a series of backstreet operators who could let me walk in Virtua. It was a dangerous game. You never know when someone’s hand might slip, or what might happen if it does; and so I lost my sight for a time. I was lost in darkness; then I was trapped in Virtua, because my new bio-implant had grown faster than my optic nerve had healed.
Afterward, I took the cowrie shell to Medside and hurled it into the sea.
I became a Ghosthunter, and told myself that I had given up searching for Kirsten. I almost believed it.
* * *
A touch upon my arm woke me. I opened my eyes and looked up into an empty blue sky.
Leila was kneeling over me. It was her hand I could feel on my arm. The weight of it. The heat of it, no longer cold but blood-warm. With a gasp, I put my own hand on top of hers. It seemed real. It was real. She smiled, then pulled away.
“I am sorry,” she told me, softly.
I dragged myself upright, but was not yet ready to stand up. Instead I sat with my back to the sea-rail, and looked from one Ghost to the next.
“It had to be done, Montoya,” said the one I still thought of as Harris.
I shook my head, not understanding. “What? What had to be done?”
Another Ghost spoke, a man in a top hat and a great-coat, a gold-headed cane in his hand. “We had to find a way to evade the hunters. This was the logical way. You said it yourself. Anyone can tell a Ghost by grabbing hold of their arm: if there’s nothing there, you’ve caught your Ghost.”
“But I shouldn’t be able to touch you. You aren’t real. You’re just projections, patterns in the Virtua matrix.”
Leila said: “You shouldn’t be able to see us, either, or hear us. You can only do so through your bio-implant.”
I closed my eyes, understanding, and heard Harris’s voice again. “Each time you came to me, each time I let you walk in Virtua, I had a chance to alter your bio-implant You were already wired up for the illusion of sight, and the illusion of sound. Why not touch, and taste, and smell? Why not adjust your muscular controls to respond to us as if we were solid? Your altered implant was almost ready at our last meeting. Now it’s done.”
I felt as if I were falling. I felt a hand on my shoulder, steadying me, reassuring me. The hand of a Ghost.
I sensed the Ghosts moving away, all but one, even though I knew that sense was an illusion. The hand remained on my shoulder. I could hear the Ghost’s movements, its breathing. I could smell a soft perfume, and a trace of soap and sweat beneath it. The scent was oddly familiar. The Ghost put its arms around me, and whispered to me, telling me not to be afraid.
I knew the scent. I knew the touch. I knew the voice. It was the voice of the girl, Anila. It was the voice of Dar, the silver-skinned woman. And it was the voice of a woman I had given up searching for.
“Kirsten?”
“Yes.”
Irrationally, I was afraid to open my eyes. In case she vanished. Even though I knew she was not there at all.
“Look at me,” she said. “You can’t hide by closing your eyes. You can’t see me now because your bio-implant agrees that you shouldn’t. But I could make you see me, if I wanted.”
I opened my eyes. Kirsten pulled away from me, to sit beside me against the sea-rail. She looked just as I remembered her. She took my hand—I felt her fingers close around mine, my muscles moving as she brought my hand to rest between both of hers. A breeze rose from the sea below, and a strand of hair blew across her face.
Then she looked at me again, and her smile faded. She reached for a stone on the ground, and tried to pick it up. Her fingers passed through it.
“I’m not real,” she said. “Only as real as I can be. I can make myself real, to you and to anyone else with an altered implant. But I’ll never be able to lift that stone.”
I said nothing, but picked up the stone myself—perhaps to reassure myself that I was still real—and threw it down again.
Kirsten cupped her hands, and a stone appeared there, an exact copy of the stone she had been unable to grasp. She tossed it to me, and I caught it. It was hard, and rough, and cold. I felt the weight of it in my hand; when I tossed it and caught it, I heard it slap against my skin. Then Kirsten touched it with the tip of her finger, and it vanished.
“Real enough,” she whispered.
I took her hand again, and nodded, but even as I did so, I sensed something behind us, something hovering above the ocean. I turned, and something caught at the corner of my eye: a shimmer, a distortion in the air. I pulled Kirsten to her feet, and ran.
There was no one on the street. We fled along the empty road, light of dawn still scraping the world’s edge, the laughter of the sea rising about us. The Invisible at our back followed, in silence; sometimes, when I risked a glance over my shoulder, I saw it there; sometimes I saw nothing, but I had no doubt it was still pursuing us.
We came to the entrance to one of the stairwells, and here Kirsten stopped, pushing me back against the stone.
“It doesn’t want you,” she hissed.
I tried to speak, but no words could find a way between my gasping breaths.
“I’ll find you,” she said. Then she kissed me, and was gone, sprinting along by the sea-rail. I leaned back, still breathing hard, my hands trembling on the cold st
one, and watched her go. Moments later, I saw something shimmer and vanish in the air before me. The Invisible. As Kirsten had said, the thing, whatever it was, had no interest in me.
I followed, desperate to see Kirsten escape to safety. But as I watched, the Invisible closed in on her. As soon as it touched her, she changed, the shape of Kirsten melting before my eyes. The glimmering veil of the Invisible surrounded her, and now I saw her as Anila, as Dar, as Kirsten again, as combinations of all three.
Then she was gone.
I ran to the spot where she had been, and fell to my knees, searching for some trace of her. There was nothing, not even her scent. I covered my head with my hands, and remained like that for a long time.
* * *
I did not return to the café until evening. The central street was crowded, as usual, with cars and camels, tourists and thieves, motorbikes and merchants and mystics. One man had augmented his skin with tattoos, which became animated at a touch, and fought each other for position on his body. Two days before, I would have been quietly impressed. Now I no longer cared.
I smelled Hassan’s coffee even before I saw the café. I could not hear his voice, though. He had left his son in charge again. I waved to the boy as I ducked beneath the whitewashed arch that led to Hassan’s private rooms. He gave me a look in reply that I could not read.
I understood the look only when I saw Hassan. He was sitting on a cushion, his eyes wet with tears; and beneath his hand, lying back as if in sleep, was Leila. Her eyes were closed, but she was breathing, and now and then she shifted and murmured in her sleep. Hassan was stroking her hair, entwining it between his fingers. So his implant, too, had been altered.
“Montoya,” he whispered, and then shook his head, unable to find words.
Patting him on the shoulder, I took a small mirror from a nearby table and held it to Leila’s lips. I felt the warmth of her breath on my hand, but no mist appeared in the glass. I do not think that Hassan even noticed what I had done.
AIs Page 22