The Sea is Full of Stars wos-6

by Jack L. Chalker

  Still, while they were now just more cogs in the system, they both sensed that the computer at the core of the neural net was beginning to live beyond its usual experience through them. For the first time, it seemed, the master computer could feel emotions, feel things physically the way Terrans could. As they became more like the computer, the computer was becoming a little more like them. But if they eventually merged completely into the solitary net, would anything of them as distinct personalities remain?

  For the first time, too, makeup was applied. It began with a cream on the face, neck, and shoulders, which looked clear but had the effect of turning the skin a bright white, almost like a paint gloss, although it had no particular consistency or feel and their skin afterward seemed normal. Then their eyes were shadowed in exaggerated patterns of black, the brows thinly perfected, the lips done a bright red. They were given bright red-and-white patterned skintight uniforms that fit their torsos and supported their breasts, the effect of which, combining the limbs with the painted areas, was to hide any obvious organic skin from view. It was the first clothing either had worn in a long time, and it felt uncomfortable and itched. Their transparent fingernails and toenails were even painted red, and earrings and other minor jewelry were added, all in a red-and-white motif.

  It was not, however, the kind of makeup session they would have undergone in the old days, if they’d undergone it at all. Thin, wiry tendrils did the nails, other computer house extensions did other parts, and they mostly kept examining themselves in the mirrors to get the proper look and perspective.

  With their still short but full hair sprayed with some shiny laquerlike substance and then styled in a swept-back look before it dried, it appeared plastic. The black bangs along their forehead were actually painted. They decided they looked like street performers or life-size dolls, android mannequins rather than real flesh and blood. No, not even androids.

  Toys.

  A corner of their minds noted the tracking of the incoming shuttle and the near imminent landing at the small but adequate private pad. The defense codes indicated it was “friendly.” It did not, however, contain the code indicating that Wallinchky was aboard.

  Angel and Ming proceeded to the airlock entrance, another place they had never before been allowed close to, stood there and waited. The airlock hissed, the lens opened, then the inner door slid back.

  Ari Martinez looked tanned and in top shape, but somewhat changed. He’d cut his hair in a short junior executive manner and had grown a pencil-thin black mustache. Before, he’d been a fairly good-looking man, but this new look did nothing to enhance his appearance.

  One of Wallinchky’s beautiful bodyguard playthings was with Ari, the dark-skinned beauty they knew only as Veda. Also with him was Katarina Kharkov, looking as nervous as ever and somewhat motherly, considering she and her husband were party to dealings like the one that destroyed the City of Modar.

  Ari saw the two made-up women waiting for him and froze for a moment in confusion. They both bowed low and held it, then said, in not only perfect unison, but virtually the same voice, “May we be of service, sir?”

  Katarina Kharkov almost took a step back, and Veda just stood there gaping, as Ari frowned and approached them. “Who are you?”

  “We are the housemaids, sir.”

  “Stand up straight. Let me see the two of you clearly.”

  They did as instructed, and he looked over each of them carefully. Finally he said, “My God! Is that you, Ming?”

  “I will answer to Ming if you wish, sir, subject to the Master’s override.”

  He stared at her, and then at the other, and shook his head. “Incredible. No fingerprints, no footprints, no retinal pattern matching. Probably just enough genetic patching so they wouldn’t register on anybody’s scans.” His expression and tone was a mixture of awe at the kind of mind and supporting technology that could do this, combined with revulsion aimed as much at himself as at them. He’d had a real part in doing this to an old friend, an old flame.

  Although the computer link was doing all the interfacing, Ming was still present and watching even if she could not react. Seeing that twinge of guilt in Ari Martinez gave her the first feeling of satisfaction she’d had since he shot her. It wasn’t much, but at this stage even a crumb was welcomed.

  “Are they—real?” Katarina Kharkov asked him tentatively.

  He turned and nodded. “Yes, I think so. Come—let’s get you down to the lab area for the reunion. In fact—Veda, you can take Madam Kharkov down and see that she is settled, can’t you? I wish to take care of a few things here. You are at their disposal until Wallinchky arrives, at which time I want you back here.”

  “Yes, sir,” she answered, in one of those sex kitteny voices that clearly irritated Madam Kharkov but didn’t bother Ari at all.

  Veda wasn’t like these two, who were something new to him. Veda simply had been picked up from the streets of Nueva Madras, where she’d been selling her body or anything else for subsistence. They’d completely erased her mind and personality and created this one, which had now settled in quite well. All she knew or felt she needed to know was that she worshiped Jules like he was a god, lived for any attention he might give her, and believed everything he said and did whatever he commanded. Jules had a lot of these kind of love-slaves, both male and female, but he tended to favor women more with this sort of stuff and act out his more violent urges on the males.

  When the two women were safely away, Ari turned back to Ming and Angel, who were still patiently standing there. “Have you been having sessions with anyone here?” he asked them. “I mean, who else is here that you have been seeing and working with?”

  “Only the house, sir,” they both responded in unison, neither having been specifically addressed. “We have seen no one else since last we saw the Master.”

  “Then you remember that. How much more do you remember? I’m talking to Ming now. Do you remember yourself before you came here?”

  “Yes, sir,” Ming replied.

  “Can you bring your old personality forward, be like the old Ming?”

  “Sir, I am programmed not to do that.”

  It was true; she couldn’t do it even if he ordered it, even though she was still there inside. Wallinchky wanted to make sure that nobody could trigger some deeply implanted suicide impulse, standard with people in her old profession. Only Wallinchky himself could do that.

  “You’re not—who programs you?”

  “I am self-programming, sir.” And that was true now on both levels.

  He was amazed, and increasingly upset by the two. Both of the women had to wonder if Jules Wallinchky hadn’t somehow planned it that way. He worked by keeping even those on his staff and closest to him off balance.

  For Ari Martinez, there wasn’t any way past that wall that he could see. Normally, even if somebody was under complete control or lying paralyzed on the ground, you could read something in the eyes, but both of these women had wholly or partially artificial eyes that showed nothing of what might lay behind them.

  The perfect slave, he thought sourly. And totally secure. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to think that this is the future for a lot of those around dear old Jules. He began to think about his own neck.

  That jarred him into more dutiful action. “Your master is due in sometime later on today, but I do not know the exact schedule. He’s shuttling off a larger vessel, and it’s difficult to say precisely when, but it will be today. In the meantime, I have to set up some things for a meeting. I’ll not require your services—not now, anyway.”

  He walked away, perhaps a bit too quickly and nervously, and both the women felt the first amusement they’d had in a very long time.

  He is guilt-stricken!

  And frightened! He knows that what was done to us can be done to him or anyone else.

  They had long since gotten over the novelty of mental dialogue without knowing which of them was speaking which lines.

  W
hat do you think he meant by Madam Kharkov having a reunion? And where is the lab? Do you think there might have been other natural beings here all the time?

  With that, the information on the labs and the full layout of the house was suddenly provided to them in full in three dimensions, and for the first time they saw how vast this complex really was and how many floors it contained. Ivan Kharkov had been here all the time, it appeared, along with a ton of specialized equipment. Data they could now access showed that Madam Kharkov had been here as well, but had left to retrieve some needed materials. They were clearly doing extensive restoration work of some kind.

  Why didn’t we know of them before? Angel wondered.

  We didn’t need to, nor have access to this data. We were not ready yet. Remember, each time we gain more awareness of the net and databases, the more we lose of ourselves. Those differences that make us separate people, and beyond which we could not go, are slowly being cataloged and stored and deemed irrelevant. We now have near complete access because we can no longer act in any way except to serve our server and in turn our server’s master. We are in the last stages. Did you not feel the mild pleasure when addressed, when answering his questions?

  Yes. This has been the case for some time when doing what the program states correctly. It was why they could be handed loaded pistols and would use them only as Jules Wallinchky directed.

  This was the final stage, then. The core computer consciousness that controlled the net had never had this kind of outlet before. Now, when its living units served, they got a mild pleasure jolt. If they displeased, they would get a moment of unpleasantness that would be noticed, but not enough to cause any problems. It had not yet decided if the units were of any added value, and hedged its bets on that score. Storing their memories took a lot of space, but that was to be expected. Storing the personalities and ratios that created self-identity was more complex, but didn’t take up a lot of extra space. It did not, however, file it where it was obvious.

  Ari Martinez was discovering some of how it had been done on his own, by searching the standard files on the procedure from the interface in the comfortable study. A self-programming total conditioning system. It was incredible, and scary. He didn’t think somebody as paranoid as Jules Wallinchky would trust any computer that could think with this kind of power. How did he sleep, knowing that the computer might well figure out that all living beings in the complex were just extensions?

  You couldn’t even interrupt the signals, the data flow to and from the little self-repairing, self-maintaining nanoma-chines that acted as transmitter and receiver inside their brains and nervous systems. Computers put most of the data on the server and accessed that when they needed it. God didn’t need a computer everywhere to run the universe; He just needed a good network with sufficient bandwidth and a server with the capacity to hold all that detail. Still—and this was even scarier—it was possible to download a lot of information into a human brain and then switch off frequencies and bandwidth so that you could switch these robotic humans the same way you could swap a robot carpet sweeper.

  This was scaring Ari to death. Where in hell had somebody like Jules Wallinchky come up with an idea like this, even to order it? Of course, he probably stole it, or swapped for it, but still…

  “Have Ming report to me immediately,” he said into the desk communicator.

  Ming appeared in less than a minute, indicating that she hadn’t been doing anything but waiting. She entered and bowed. “At your command, sir.”

  “Ming, you said that all your memories were still present in the system.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you know what the master traded to Josich Hadun for the Jewels of the Pleiades?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Would it cause you to harm yourself or anyone else by telling me?”

  “No, sir. It would be a matter of telling the seller what he sold.”

  Ari Martinez took a deep breath. “Ming, tell me exactly what was traded.”

  “Sir, it was an alleged prototypical interface with the potential to establish a comm link with an Ancient Ones remote computer system.”

  He was absolutely stunned by that. Even more, he now knew just where Jules, or somebody working for him, got the idea for the self-programming slave. He had been out to that ancient city on the horizon that the two women had wondered about; he’d been to many such places now and again. Beautiful, strange, bizarre cities, works of art from minds far too alien to comprehend. The only things really known about them were that they left cities that had absolutely no artifacts in them beyond their own structures, not so much as a potsherd, a tiny coin, or a single bit of mosaic, and that they seemed batty for the number 6. That was why a lot of religious groups had always considered them demonic places; 666 was supposed to be the number of the Beast, or Devil.

  Scientists, discovering that worlds like this one had hollowed-out cores filled with vast quasiorganic matter that seemed inert although not exactly dead, had a lot of theories. One of them was that the matter inside was a local computer that had provided everything the inhabitants required, as well as maintaining whatever conditions they needed for life, which was why they’d found no artifacts. And they also postulated that something happened to sever contact between this vast galactic civilization and the inevitable server that kept all the data, all the details, about two billion years before. So advanced, so spoiled, so much like gods, it must have been the one thing they simply couldn’t cope with.

  “Ming, who created this thing we spoke of?”

  “Sir, I do not know, but it was done under contract to the Military Department and the Department of Pure Research.”

  He wasn’t about to ask how the hell the Rithians managed to get somebody to steal it, nor what it had cost, but little wonder that it was so much in demand.

  “Were you aboard the City of Modar because your superiors knew it was on there?”

  “No, sir. I was simply to observe all activities of suspect group.”

  He had assumed that. If they’d have known it was aboard, they’d have had an army hidden there.

  “Ming—does the thing work?”

  “Sir, I have no idea.”

  Well, that was honest enough. He doubted she could lie anymore, unless told by Jules to do so. He was willing to bet that Jules didn’t think it would work. If he did, he’d never have traded it, not even for the Pleiades. Hell, who cared about even the most fabulous of treasures when you could will them into existence? And he certainly would not have put it in the hands of somebody like Hadun.

  Well, at least now he knew. “Ming, you know you were once a police detective. Do you still consider yourself one?”

  “No, sir. That description is no longer valid.”

  “What if you had the opportunity to leave here. To walk out and away? Would you do it?”

  “No, sir.”

  That surprised him. “Why not?”

  “Sir, my sole function is to serve the Master. I exist for no other purpose.”

  “Ming, do you consider your master a good man?”

  “Sir, I cannot answer that question.”

  “Cannot or will not?”

  “Cannot. Good is to serve the Master. Not good is to not serve the Master. How can the Master not serve himself?”

  He realized with a start that he was completing her programming by simply asking these questions. He could see the trembling, the slight pleasure at the edges of the painted lips, and knew what was going on.

  Abruptly, she stiffened. “Sir, there is a second shuttle in orbit now in the process of being cleared. The Master is aboard. We must meet him.”

  “Yes, by all means,” he sighed, getting up. She led the way back to the airlock.

  She knew the shuttle was coming in and who was on it, he reflected. That meant she was totally plugged in here. Totally. She couldn’t say anything wrong to his questions— wrong from the computer’s standpoint, anyway. If she had, she’d almost cer
tainly have gotten an unpleasant jolt. But saying the right thing, without hesitation, brought the pleasure jolt. Pretty soon neither one of the women would even think any way but that. Too risky.

  For Ming’s part, and Angel’s, too, since she’d heard the whole thing as if she were there, and both had also followed his research on what essentially was one of their databases anyway, the same conclusion was arrived at. How long could they not begin to exist for that? How long could they resist it? Did they want to resist? There was no hope of release, after all, and no hope of acting wrongly. Why, then, not think the right way and at least prevent pain? It would probably be better for both of them.

  The inner airlock door hissed just as they arrived, then it opened and Jules Wallinchky walked through, dressed in casual clothes and smoking a big, fat cigar. Behind him by not more than a step were Sonya, the other beautiful bodyguard from the City of Modar, and a man unfamiliar to them, big and square-jawed, the kind with muscles on his muscles and an air that said he spent a lot of time working out in front of a mirror and admiring the view.

  Wallinchky took the cigar out of his mouth and said, “Hello, Ari. I hate like hell to be rousted out by this petty shit, but business is business. Who knew that little creep had this kind of influence?” He stopped, spotting the doll-like duo, who had fallen to their knees and were now prostrate on the floor.

  “Well, hel-lo,” he commented, going over to them. “Get up, girls. Let me take a look at you!”

  They both hopped obediently to their feet and stood, expectant.

  “Ain’t that somethin’,” Wallinchky muttered, reverting to an earlier, less cultured but more natural style of speech. “Ari, ain’t that somethin’? Amazin’ what a good fuck and a few clear instructions to a computer can do.”