“Please,” Helen said. Reflexively she felt for her console, but it was no use; Kevin had taken it away when he had first pushed her into this place.
The man giggled. “Say it again,” he said. “Say please and I might be nice.”
Helen felt something inside herself harden. She pushed herself upright against the wall, gazing at the man’s fingers as she did so. He didn’t look so strong, really. Maybe she could get behind him, hold his blue-stained hands away.
Too late. With a speed that took her by surprise, he lashed out, brushing his fingers against her cheek. She felt her legs give way.
The man stood back and looked down at her thoughtfully.
“Now,” he said. “Where shall we start?”
“How about with a profile readjustment?”
The man jumped at the voice.
A woman stepped into the room. Black hair, black lips, white face. The sight of her terrified the man.
“No,” he croaked. “You don’t understand. This is not what it looks like…”
The woman smiled. “Hello, Helen. Hello, James. My name is Judy. I’m-”
The man’s face crumpled. “How did you know my real name? They told me that my anonymity would be assured.”
Judy rolled her eyes. “James, they are running illegal personality constructs. They are collaborating in the torture and murder of said constructs. I think it may be a fair assumption that they are not the sort of people to be trusted when they tell you that your anonymity is assured.”
The man stared at Judy, trying to understand the full import of what she had just said.
Helen was a lot quicker on the uptake. “You mean this isn’t real? I’m a personality construct?”
“I don’t know about real,” Judy said. “It is true that you are a personality construct. According to your time frame, you were copied by a Marek Mazokiewicz two days ago. You’re being run, illegally and without your consent, so that people like James here can get their rocks off torturing you.”
Helen wasn’t listening. She was still focused on the first part of the sentence. “According to my time frame…” she said slowly. A yawning feeling opened up in her stomach.
Judy shook her head sadly. “According to atomic time, you were copied seventy years ago. You’re just the latest in a long line of Helens. I’m sorry.”
Helen felt a pang inside her. She forced down the welling nausea for the moment.
“Why?” she asked.
“Why were you copied? As I said, so that people like James here could play with you. Torture you. Isn’t that right, James?”
“No,” said James. He began to wring his hands. “I wasn’t going to do anything like that. I just wanted to know…wanted to know…what it would be like…”
Helen felt contempt rising inside her. She dismissed James from the conversation.
“What happens now?” she asked Judy.
Judy tilted her head. “That all depends.”
“On what?”
Judy looked at James. “The people who run this place know that their cover is blown. They’ll want to destroy the evidence. What happens now depends on whether they manage to wipe the processing space in which we reside, or whether my atomic self manages to stop them.”
Helen licked her lips. “Do you think you will?”
Judy smiled and nodded. “I always do. We’ve been dealing with the Private Network for some time now. One of my digital alter egos is hot on the trail of Kevin-one of the Private Network’s leaders-right now. They won’t do anything to harm the simulation while he’s still in here.”
James slumped hopelessly into a corner of the room.
Helen gazed at Judy. “Digital alter egos? You’re going to have to explain that…”
Judy fingered the black sleeve of her kimono.
“There are twelve of us,” she said. “Twelve digital Judys. And then there is our other sister, living out in the atomic world. For the sake of convenience, I’m sometimes called Judy 3.”
“Judy 3?” said Helen.
“You can call me Judy.” She tilted her head, listened to her console, which was set in the form of the black rod threaded through her hair. “Here we are. My sister has just caught up with Kevin…”
Level Three, Variation B
Judy 4 stepped into the isolation room. Kevin was already here, struggling with Helen. Calypso, the woman who had booked the session in the trap, was lying on the floor, feebly trying to get up. Judy paused by the door, letting events run their course. As she watched, Helen slumped to the floor. Kevin noticed Judy and gave her a smile.
“Hello again,” he said. He nodded to Helen on the floor. “She’s very clever,” he said. “She grabbed hold of Calypso’s hands and rubbed the relaxant on me. She couldn’t know that the simulation is programmed to exclude me from the effects.”
Judy’s face was deliberately impassive.
“She’s very tenacious, Kevin. I’m really coming to admire her.”
“That’s why we pick her for the traps. Big favorite with a certain sort of man.” He looked down at Calypso. “And a certain sort of woman,” he added.
“Fk ff,” Calypso murmured.
Kevin rubbed his chin, thoughtfully. “I don’t seem to be able to exit from this space at all.”
“We’ve got your measure now,” Judy 4 said.
“I didn’t think that was possible.” Kevin frowned.
Judy pulled a little blue pill from the sleeve of her kimono and swallowed it.
“It is possible,” she said, “if we isolate the space completely. Nothing gets in and out now. Not even me.”
Kevin shrugged his shoulders. “Ah, well. There is still one way out.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Watch me,” whispered Kevin. His smile froze as he slumped slowly to the ground.
Judy 4 stared at him for a moment, her white face motionless. Only the slight widening of her black eyes displayed the horror she felt.
“Wht? Wht s it?” Calypso said. She was gazing up from the floor where she lay. “Wht dd he do?”
Level Three, Variation A
“What’s the matter, Judy?”
Helen leaned close to Judy 3 and took hold of one of her white hands. For something that seemed to be barely there, the hand felt very warm.
“Judy, what is it?”
“He killed himself,” she whispered. “Overwrote the personality space he inhabited with null events.”
James spoke up from his corner in a whining voice. “So what? Let him die. Who cares?”
Judy 3 turned and gave him a sweet smile. “You should care, James. Now that Kevin has left this processing space, there is no reason for the Private Network to maintain it. Let’s just hope my atomic friends get an exit into here before we’re all wiped.”
Helen moved her lips, thinking aloud.
“Surely they will have a backup of this processing space? Couldn’t they just run that?”
Judy 3 had been gazing at her reflection in the mirrored walls of the isolation room. She turned and gave Helen a significant look.
“Ah, now you’ve hit on the crux of the matter, Helen.”
Level Four
Judy 11 stepped into the isolation room on Level Four and held her breath, expecting the worst. The scenarios on this level did not bear contemplating. To look at them awoke a boiling anger that slowly cooled into thoughts that left her feeling weak and ashamed.
In this room there was a table, a little tray of silver instruments at one side of it. A man was looking at the instruments thoughtfully. He turned as Judy appeared.
“Hello, Judy,” he said.
“Who are you?” Judy 11 asked. “Where’s Helen?”
“Never mind that,” said the man. “We need to talk, and quickly. I’ve been trying to get a message to your atomic self, undetected, for months now. This may be my last chance.”
Judy 11 laughed sardonically.
“You could have picked a better place. T
his processing space is going to be shut down at any moment, with all of us in it. I’m doing a last sweep for anyone who may be trapped in here, in the vain hope that we may be able to get them out in time.”
“Never mind that,” the man said again. “What I’ve got to say is far more important.”
“I doubt it,” Judy said.
The man took hold of Judy’s hands and gazed into her black eyes.
“Judy, listen to me. When word of this gets out, it could bring down Social Care, the EA, even the Watcher. It changes everything we’ve been led to believe. There’s been a murder.”
The edge to the man’s words touched something in Judy. He believed in what he was saying.
“Who has been murdered?” she asked crisply.
“That’s not the problem. The problem is the murderer. They’ve killed once; they’re going to kill again. The murderer has to be stopped, and I don’t think that that’s possible.”
Judy 11 was calm.
“Nothing is impossible. Who is the murderer?”
The man swallowed. He looked around the room, as if afraid of who might hear his words. When he spoke, it was in a hoarse whisper.
“The Watcher.”
Justinian 1: 2223
Only three weeks had elapsed since his arrival on Gateway, but Justinian was increasingly wondering why he was still there. At 5 A.M. subjective time his frustration was the only thing that could compete with his exhaustion. Standing at the rear of the flier, the exit ramp slowly dropping away into the early morning, he gave a half yawn, half sigh as he shifted the baby on his hip. His son pointed at the darkness revealed by the opening ramp and turned to face him.
“Bah buh bah,” said the baby earnestly. “Bah buh bah!” A stinking breeze twisted into the cabin through the widening gap, scattering grass seeds before it: a bad-breath yawn that matched Justinian’s.
As the ramp dropped further, the flier’s exterior lights came on, illuminating a long sloping finger of mud that slid down into black water. Justinian wiped his sticky eyes with one hand and set off down the exit ramp. Outside of the calming yellow glow of the cabin that had been his home for the past three weeks lay a psychedelic world. The flier’s lights cast garish highlights and shadows on the red mud; white light reflected off the dark mirror of the water. The whole became a jumble that jangled his tired mind. The green bean shape of the AI pod lay half buried about thirty meters away, white grass seeds blown all around it.
Halfway down the ramp, Justinian realized he was alone.
“Aren’t you coming, Leslie?” he said, turning to face the grey smudge of the robot who was watching from just inside the ship’s doorway.
The robot’s voice was apologetic. “Sorry. I can’t get a grip on the mud with these feet.”
A grey blur of movement was the robot’s arm pointing to its foot. It was difficult to make out anything for sure about Leslie through his fractal skin, the ten-centimeter region around the construct that could neither properly be described as robot, nor the rest of the world, either. Leslie claimed that it served as a cordon sanitaire; Justinian darkly suspected it was just another excuse for avoiding work.
“Fine,” he said sharply, walking quickly back up the ramp. “I’ll go alone. You stay and watch the baby.”
Justinian dumped his son into the robot’s arms, then slipped and slithered his way out onto the red mud, the bright light and dark red surroundings making him feel as if he was still dreaming. Iridescent patterns bent and warped as he placed his feet on the slick surface, splashing up reddish drops that slipped rapidly from the frictionless surface of his clothes. The rich organic stench in his nose matched the farting of his feet in the mud. Up till now Justinian had visited fourteen pods around the planet, and this one was in by far the most unpleasant location.
The AI pod rested in a little indentation in the bank. It seemed almost unchanged from its dormant state: a smooth fluorescent green kidney bean the size of Justinian, had he taken it into his head to curl up in the fetal position there in the stinking mud. Three Black Velvet Bands had wrapped themselves around its surface and a few Schrödinger boxes were scattered across the mud before it.
“Hello,” said the pod.
“Hello, I’m Justinian.”
“Hello, Justinian.” The pod’s voice was eager, like a child fascinated by the world. “Have you seen these little boxes? As soon as you take your eye off any of them, they jump to another position. But as long as you are looking at them, they stay put.”
“I’ve seen them,” said Justinian, fed up with the pod already. He had been conducting interviews all over the planet, asking the same questions over and over again, each time receiving exactly the same answers. It was getting tedious beyond belief. For this pod, of course, it was all new.
“Do you know what they are?” it asked. “They’re amazing!”
“They’re called Schrödinger boxes,” Justinian said carefully. The pod wasn’t fooled.
“Ah! So you don’t actually know what they are either. Maybe you can tell me about these bands wrapped around my shell. Do you know what they are, or do you simply have a name for them?”
Justinian was too tired to be insulted. Besides, it was all part of the script.
“We call them Black Velvet Bands, BVBs for short,” he replied. “Look, I’ve got one in here.”
He pulled the plastic rod from the thigh pocket of his passive suit and waited a moment for the pod to scan it.
“Very interesting,” it said. “Where did you find it?”
“The plastic rod is a table leg. One of the other colonists found the BVB wrapped around it as they were sitting down to breakfast one morning.”
“One of the other colonists? How many are there now on Gateway?”
“Still just a hundred. And me, of course.”
Justinian gave an involuntary shiver as he said these words. It reminded him how far he was from home, and Justinian felt doubly alone. Here he was, standing on a remote mud slick, lost on a planet that floated between galaxies, and yet he felt himself an outsider to the only group of humans for millions of light years. The bright blue belt of M32 rose into the dark sky behind the pod. The Milky Way was a monochrome rainbow in the other direction.
Justinian rubbed a finger across the fuzzy surface of the BVB and wondered at the strangeness of this place. As far as he was concerned, reality was a force that diminished the further one traveled from home: the hundred colonists were treading in a place of dreams where nothing worked as it should. Neither should it be expected to.
The pod spoke in a thoughtful tone. “I don’t remember anything about BVBs. I wonder why that is?”
“Probably because they weren’t known when you were conceived. They were only discovered on this planet.”
Justinian crouched down before the pod, looking for external sense cluster formations. There seemed to be nothing. That implied the pod was still operating on internals. Just like all the other pods, in fact.
“BVBs are similar to the Schrödinger boxes,” he continued, his hands glowing fluorescent green as he felt the rubbery surface of the pod. Red mud squelched under his feet and he grabbed onto the pod to maintain his balance. “BVBs only form in spaces that are not being observed, and then they immediately begin to contract.”
“How do you know?” the pod interrupted.
“How do I know what?”
“How do you know that they begin to contract immediately if the space in which they form is not being observed?”
Justinian smiled wearily.
“Good point,” he said. “I hadn’t thought of that before.” He was struck by how much like children the AIs here on Gateway had become. Innocent, but with a sharp eye for detail.
“Someone probably did; they just didn’t explain that part to you.”
Justinian gazed coolly at the pod. And like children, he thought, they could be incredibly tactless. They quickly figured out that Justinian wasn’t part of the scientific survey team
and then equally quickly lost all respect for him.
His legs were getting tired from crouching, so he straightened up and began to circle the pod, treading carefully on the slippery mud. One careless step and he could end up rolling down the slope into the dark water below.
“Anyway,” he said, “BVBs form in empty spaces. We believe they begin to contract immediately. Sometimes they get tangled around an object, like a pipe or a tree branch. The slightest touch on their inside surface stops them contracting; nothing can make them expand again. And they’re unbreakable. Nothing can cut through them.”
“Oh…” The pod’s voice was almost wistful. “What does BVB stand for?”
“Black Velvet Band. Named after an old song, apparently.”
Justinian rested a hand on the warm surface of the pod. He looked at the three BVBs that had formed on its supple skin. “If you rearrange your external structure to make your skin frictionless, they’ll slip right off.”
There was a moment’s pause before the pod spoke.
“…I can’t.”
“You can,” Justinian said. “All AI pods have multiform integuments. Yours is just set to dormant mode at the moment. Wake it up.”
“I can’t,” the pod said. It sounded embarrassed. “I don’t understand how to work the mechanism. I can see the potentials arranged before me, but I don’t understand how to achieve them.”
Justinian yawned again, looking out across the water. A pale glow had appeared over there as dawn approached. He wondered if he could make out the shape of another mud bank, slowly materializing from the blackness.
“You’ve heard all this before, haven’t you?” the pod said shrewdly. “Who are you? Why are you here? You’re obviously not one of the regular surveyors.”
There it was again: all the pods so far had figured this out. They might be acting like children, but they still had intelligence at least equal to his own. And, stripped down though their intelligences were, they still had access to vast libraries of data. Data that covered many, many subjects. How to read body language would be just one of them.
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