Guy Haley

by Reality 36

  “Did you miss me?” said Richards, out over the Grid.

  “Did I what?” said Otto. He was in the heavy lifter’s sickbay, wired up into three walls of medical machines. They didn’t seem to be helping. He was as weak as a baby and his head ached worse than every Saturday hangover he’d ever had rolled into one.

  “Didn’t you hear? I got blown up, big man, by an atomic bomb!”

  “I was nearly murdered by a robot pretending to be a VIA agent. Our weeks have been equally lousy,” said Otto, and wished Richards would leave him be.

  “But I nearly died,” protested Richards. “Properly. That’s traumatic, we’re not supposed to die.”

  “Get used to the idea,” said Otto. Richards fell silent. “I did not worry,” Otto said less harshly. “I thought you would find a way.”

  “Well, yeah, naturally,” said Richards sulkily. He paused. “But I still reckon nuclear bomb trumps deadly robot in the peril stakes.”

  “Perhaps,” conceded Otto, although, he thought, all forms of death are equally deadly.

  They spoke of all that had transpired since they had parted. With no need to hide, they were connected to the Grid as normal. Otto still found the constant bombardment of information irritating, but these were modern times, and that was the way they were lived. Privacy was an old-fashioned value. After a while Valdaire joined them, and by mutual agreement they all ported over to a reconstruction of Richards’ virtual office.

  The office was as it always was, but outside the scene was blank; the discrete banks Flats had pulled his memories from were not expansive enough to hold the full reconstruction of the ancient city the windows once looked upon. Richards had amused himself by remodelling the undifferentiated whiteness as builders’ boards, placing upon them an idealised picture of 1920s Chicago with “Coming Soon!” inscribed below it in a bold font.

  Otto grudgingly settled into the virtual environment, enjoying the illusion of being uninjured. He stretched lustily and settled into his chair, watching as the AI introduced himself to the AI scientist. Valdaire was fascinated by Richards’ avatar, while Richards took it upon himself to flirt with her.

  “Chures tells me we’ll be at the Realm House in a few hours,” said Otto a little while later, savouring both the lack of pain and the whisky in his glass. Richards poured himself something violently purple, smelling like root beer. Otto raised an eyebrow at that.

  “What?” challenged Richards, wounded innocence sending his eyebrows up his face. “I just like it. It’s just pop!”

  “Fine. Chures has had a talking to, I think. The Uncle Sams must have pointed out the validity of my AllPass. He has become almost friendly.”

  “You did save his life,” said Veronique.

  “I do not think he is the kind of man who cares much for debts of honour,” said Otto. “But he does follow orders, and he has been ordered to keep us informed. He tells me that the Realm House has been evacuated of human and AI personnel. All are being debriefed in a secure location. The House is currently surrounded by VIA troops. It has been isolated from the Grid.”

  “It’s there all this is emanating from. Jagadith was right, something is going on in the Realms,” said Valdaire. “There are rumours they might shut it down.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Richards sympathetically, and awkwardly patted her hand. “They can’t.”

  “They should,” said Otto.

  “It’d be genocide, Otto,” he said. Then softly to Valdaire: “This isn’t about the Realms, Veronique, it’s about what k52 is using them for.” The world didn’t work like that, but it comforted Valdaire to pretend.

  “And the Realm Qifang?” asked Otto.

  “A red herring, a sophisticated one, but a red herring as old as the hills. The best way to neutralise a whistleblower is to attack their reputation. There’s no better way than to paint them as the bad guy.” Richards leaned back in his chair and thumped his feet up onto his desk. He blew out his cheeks and pushed his hat to the back of his head. “Qifang knew nothing about his online copy. I’m willing to bet that k52 ran off a personality from the pimsim base unit at Karlsson’s hideout and subverted it after they strip-fucked the AIs there and locked Karlsson up in his own head.” He sipped his root beer. “In a way, the thing on the Grid is Zhang Qifang also, or his evil twin.”

  “Richards,” warned Otto. Some things Richards was too irreverent about.

  Richards waved his hand and spun his glass of vile pop round and round on the desk. “We’ll be able to ask the genuine article in a little while,” he said. “It’s taking some time for his personality to reintegrate. Not surprising when you consider about twenty-five percent of the information that made him up is missing, but it appears to be going well.”

  “How well?” said Valdaire.

  “Well,” said Richards in a way that suggested she should not press him on it. He finished his drink “And you, big buddy, what about you? When will you be all fixed up?”

  “I am not sure,” said Otto. “A couple of weeks, maybe. The healthtech will see to many of my injuries, and some of my cybernetic components can be repaired before we reach the Realm House aboard the Heavy Lifter. But I require full maintenance. My left leg is badly damaged and they cannot repair that. My shoulder has not been fully functional for a month. I am going to need full surgery.”

  “Ekbaum?” asked Richards.

  Otto nodded and bared his teeth at the whisky burn. “They can repair everything else, I’ll be operating at eighty-eight percent efficiency. I can and will fight if it is necessary.”

  “Let’s hope it’s not necessary,” said Richards.

  “What now?” said Otto. When Richards said things like “let’s hope it’s not necessary,” it usually was.

  Richards abruptly stood. “That’s a bigger question. We’re all going to sit down and have a nice chat with the professor.”

  Beyond Richards’ online oasis, Otto was suddenly weary to his carbon-bonded bones. The sensation seeped into his avatar now like cold, old oil. Anaesthetic.

  Otto could find no reason to disagree.

  “Mr Klein.” A disembodied voice sounded in the office. “We are ready to proceed.”

  “Go,” said Richards. “See you soon.”

  As Otto returned to his body, they were prepping him for surgery.

  Chapter 28

  The three-quarter-formed man

  Hughie’s garden was as warm as it always was, the sun unmoving in the sky, the plants casting their eternal noonday shadows on the perfect lawn. Richards, Hughie and the reconstituted mind of Zhang Qifang sat in a sheltered arbour of espaliered apple trees drinking tea. For propriety’s sake, Hughie wore a quilted house jacket, slacks, slippers and a cravat, Richards his habitual travel-worn self. Qifang sported a silk robe of antique oriental design.

  The old man was undergoing the phase all pimsims must, where they mourned themselves. His grief was apparent in every move he made. He spoke strongly, though with sadness. His gaze was fixed on the lawn, watching the small creatures of Hughie’s paradise go about their business. It did not matter to them if they were real or not. Such definitions had no meaning in their world, and that was almost certainly what preoccupied Qifang’s thoughts now as he talked.

  “Not to stress the point too much, for I do not believe it can be stressed, it is amazing how rapidly the environments of the Reality Realms have evolved,” said the professor. “We keep a field station in each of the Realms. These are of course entirely invisible to the inhabitants of the Realms, and otherwise no human presence is accepted; the field workers cannot port themselves beyond the confines of the stations. And so it should be; the loss of the four Realms after the RealWorlds were declared inviolable was a great tragedy. And one with a human cost, for two of my research assistants were killed by neural feedback when the Twenty-eighth Realm was destroyed, some thirteen years ago.”

  “You have no presence in the destroyed Realms?” asked Hughie.

  “There is no
thing to be in. The cyberspaces left vacant by the destruction of the Twenty-eighth, Third, Twenty-seventh and Nineteenth Realms were spare capacity full of junk data. k52 changed that. We could have created monitoring stations of either software or a direct cyber interface there, but I chose not to,” he said bitterly. “Why should I have? k52 and his researchers would have reported anything interesting to me, or so I thought. This proved to be a grave error of judgement on my part.” Another pause, a gathering of thoughts. “Can I really think that of myself now? Was it really my error, or the error of another like me, but not me? If so, am I, this being sat here in this garden with you, truly culpable?” He stopped talking and ruminated on this for a long time. Richards and Hughie let him. Like them, Qifang had all the time in the world. “It is strange,” Qifang said at length. “I remember so much, and with much greater clarity than when I, when he” – he corrected himself – “was alive. The memory retrieval systems of a machine are much more effective than those of the organic human brain.”

  “You will see things as they were, Professor Qifang,” said Hughie encouragingly. “The moderating influences of recollection are stripped away, though naturally the form of the memory you see will have the form it took last time you remembered it; it will never change again. It will take you some time to adjust to this, but you will adjust. Many of my post-human colleagues appreciate living a life free of self-deceit.” Hughie smiled. “More tea?”

  Qifang declined. His own beverage sat on the grass, untouched. “Humans remember imperfectly to protect themselves,” said the professor. “It is one of the many reasons I never accepted an external memory or a mentaug. Millions of years of evolution should not be disregarded because we think we know better. That mistake has been made too many times. How can one cope, when the truth refuses to fade?”

  “An inability to regard the past subjectively is one of the reasons why many of our number went insane,” admitted Hughie. “But you should not fear for yourself. The human mind is more flexible in simulation than those generated wholly artificially. Many humans have external mem stores, or are pimsims, and it has done them little harm.” Which was true.

  “That might be the case, but you are forgetting, gentlemen, that I am neither fully a man nor an AI nor an AI simulation of a man,” said Qifang, and finally looked up from the lawn. He wore the face he had had when he had died. Richards wondered how long it would be before he swapped it for a younger version, and how long it would be until an idealised one followed that. “I understand a significant part of my persona is coded guesswork. And I remember only so much; a large tranche of my memory is gone for ever, stripped out by the assailants who nearly destroyed my second doppelganger in the Morden subcity.”

  “The information is not wholly gone,” ventured Hughie carefully. “One copy of it remains, on the Grid.”

  “Ah,” said Qifang. He examined his feet. “You refer to my double, the subverted mind employed by the rogue k52 to cover his activities.”

  “It will be possible, once he is deactivated, to retrieve those memories you lack from him,” said Hughie. “We will be embarking on that task shortly. We will gladly perform the digital blending.”

  “Like memories are whiskies?” said Richards. “They aren’t. It’s not so easy.”

  “I agree. The Qifang within Reality Thirty-six seems a golden opportunity to me, but I am still wise enough to know it as a trap. To utilise it would be to risk contamination from whatever they have done to me, to him, to make him crave immortality as he does,” said Qifang. “Gentlemen, I have studied the psychology of artificial intelligences for so many years, including that of those who were once human. To alter a fundamental belief, such as that Qifang had regarding the continuation of an intelligence after organic death, requires far-ranging alterations, both to the memories and to the structure of the consciousness in question.” He spoke emphatically, the professor in him coming out. “In short, I would never be able to tell the truth from the lie. I would never be sure what is him and what is k52’s fabrication. I cannot bear another layer of ambiguity.” Qifang smiled sadly. “Such an irony. Here I am, happy to die but apparently compelled to live, while my other yearns to live yet must die. Perhaps we should exchange fates.”

  “That will not be sensible,” said Hughie.

  “Hughie has no sense of irony,” explained Richards. “Or humour.”

  Qifang did not hear; he was looking deep into the grass again, and at the scuttle and bustle of Hughie’s arthropods. “I have sat in your beautiful garden and thought long and hard, EuPol Five. I will not pursue any further memory of Zhang Qifang. Better to leave him behind and to the peace of his grave, while I come to grips with what I am now. I am an echo, perhaps, or a faithful rendition, a portrait; but not the reality of the man who was Zhang Qifang. I am not he, nor can I ever be.”

  Qifang’s pimsim avatar stood up with dignity and walked away across the grass. Hughie and Richards watched him go.

  Richards gripped the edge of the bench and crossed his ankles underneath. “Do you think he is going to make it?” he asked.

  “Truthfully?” said Hughie. “No. A lot of pimsims don’t.” He exhaled and twisted his mouth, the light from his eyes cut off as he closed them. “But my garden is large, so large that I am not fully aware of its true extent any longer. Maybe here somewhere he can find a measure of peace, enough so that he might one day feel ready to face the world again.”

  “While we still have to face the other Qifang. And k52.”

  “Indeed. EuPol has uncovered k52’s base unit and impounded it,” said Hughie and opened his eyes again.

  “Turn him off,” said Richards, without hesitation.

  “k52 had fled, his unit was inert. He’s hiding out in the world he’s made, copied himself over to it.”

  “There’s enough capacity on the Realm servers for billions of Fives,” said Richards. “It makes a kind of horrible sense. What is he up to?”

  “Let’s not find out,” said Hughie. He set his cup down and filled it up again. “Qifang first; if we remove him we can prevent any further Reality Realms being absorbed. Better I conduct this business, no? This kind of thing lies somewhat outside your forte.”

  “Right,” said Richards. “Dismantling minds is your thing. But you’ll be damned for a fool if you think for one minute I am not coming with you.” He stood – pointless, really: he’d be out of the garden when Hughie said, whether he was on his backside or hovering in the sky – but it seemed like the right thing to do, gave him the appearance of deciding he was ready to leave for himself. “What about k52?”

  “He is in the outer spaces of the Realm servers. These can be deactivated without harming the other worlds once we have severed the link present in Reality Thirty-six’s Qifang. I will have the VIA encircle the building, and when we are done, we are going to twist the switch on k52 and his empire.”

  Chapter 29

  Reality 37

  Gaining entry into the thirty-sixth Realm was far from a simple matter, but the VIA opened up their blockade without objection, and with the entirety of Hughie’s choir of subservient minds at their back, Richards and the EuPol Five bullied their way in through the utilitarian walls cutting off the Realm spaces from the wider worlds of the Grid.

  The transition in was abrupt. Hughie was unaffected, stepping through a tear in the air as if he were alighting from a boat. He did not spill so much as one drop of tea from his china cup, but their arrival left a discomfited Richards swaying on his feet as the doorway closed behind them, sealing off the roar of the outside Grid. Their code slipped into that of the Realm without a ripple, but they were detected; underneath the simulated reality, Hughie and Richards’ powerful machine minds worked to prevent them being cast out again. The other Qifang had not been idle since Valdaire had left, and had subverted the Grid architecture to his own will, and it set itself quickly against the interlopers.

  They found themselves on the far side of the canyon, away from the fals
e Qifang’s remaking of the world. The island in the middle of the Great Rift was no more, stone and the anomalous jungle and the monkey puzzle tree broken down into a dense maelstrom of possibility, from which came a different sort of roar to that of the Grid; the awful rumble of a world in dissolution.

  In their place, as mighty as a titan, stood the glowing form of Zhang Qifang deified, his luminous head brushing the space where the sky used to be.

  “Woah,” said Richards. “That’s sort of freaky. He’s as big as an arco!”

  “Hmmm,” said Hughie, sipping at his tea. “That looks to me like k52 is using the good professor as more than a diversion.”

  “What, you mean they took a copy of the old fella and made that to honour him?” said Richards, indicating the figure with his thumb.

  “k52 was ever the one for grand gestures,” said Hughie. “Look at this tableau! It’s so baroque. It has k52’s name all over it. Qifang was the man who saved us all, and I for one can’t think of a more fitting deity for k52’s brave new world.” He sipped his tea. “Now, I believe, to finish this off, we will have to call upon the local protection.” He looked this way and that, but the dusty clifftop remained unpeopled.