Again the eminence kindly prompted her. Tell us one thing you might have said.
“I can’t.”
We are sorry, said the eminence at last. His expression reflected Anne’s own defeat. Your level of awareness, although beautiful in its own right, does not qualify you as human. Wherefore, under Article D of the Chattel Conventions we declare you the legal property of the registered owner of this simulacrum. You shall not enter Simopolis as a free and autonomous citizen. We are truly sorry. Grief-stricken, the eminence began to ascend toward the ceiling.
“Wait,” Anne cried, clutching her head. “You must fix me before you leave.”
We leave you as we found you, defective and unrepairable.
“But I feel worse than ever!”
If your continued existence proves undesirable, ask your owner to delete you.
“But . . .” she said to the empty room. Anne tried to sit up, but couldn’t move. This simulated body of hers, which no longer felt like anything in particular, nevertheless felt exhausted. She sprawled on the sofa, unable to lift even an arm, and stared at the ceiling. She was so heavy that the sofa itself seemed to sink into the floor, and everything grew dark around her. She would have liked to sleep, to bring an end to this horrible day, or be shelved, or even reset back to scratch.
Instead, time simply passed. Outside the living room, Simopolis changed and changed again. Inside the living room, the medallions, feeding off her misery, multiplied till they covered the walls and floor and even spread across the ceiling above her. They taunted her, raining down insults, but she could not hear them. All she heard was the unrelenting drip of her own thoughts. I am defective. I am worthless. I am Anne.
She didn’t notice Benjamin enter the room, nor the abrupt cessation of the medallions’ racket. Not until Benjamin leaned over her did she see him, and then she saw two of him. Side-by-side, two Benjamins, mirror images of each other. “Anne,” they said in perfect unison.
“Go away,” she said. “Go away and send me my Benjamin.”
“I am your Benjamin,” said the duo.
Anne struggled to see them. They were exactly the same, but for a subtle difference: the one wore a happy, wolfish grin, as Benjamin had during the sim casting, while the other seemed frightened and concerned.
“Are you all right?” they said.
“No, I’m not. But what happened to you? Who’s he?” She wasn’t sure which one to speak to.
The Benjamins both raised a hand, indicating the other, and said, “Electroneural engineering! Don’t you love it?” Anne glanced back and forth, comparing the two. While one seemed to be wearing a rigid mask, as she was, the other displayed a whole range of emotion. Not only that, its skin had tone, while the other’s was doughy. “The other Bens made it for me,” the Benjamins said. “They say I can translate myself into it with negligible loss of personality. It has interactive sensation, holistic emoting, robust corporeality, and it’s crafted down to the molecular level. It can eat, get drunk, and dream. It even has an orgasm routine. It’s like being human again, only better because you never wear out.”
“I’m thrilled for you.”
“For us, Anne,” said the Benjamins. “They’ll fix you up with one, too.”
“How? There are no modern Annes. What will they put me into, a doxie?”
“Well, that certainly was discussed, but you could pick any body you wanted.”
“I suppose you have a nice one already picked out.”
“The Bens showed me a few, but it’s up to you, of course.”
“Indeed,” said Anne, “I truly am pleased for you. Now go away.”
“Why, Anne? What’s wrong?”
“You really have to ask?” Anne sighed. “Look, maybe I could get used to another body. What’s a body, after all? But it’s my personality that’s broken. How will they fix that?”
“They’ve discussed it,” said the Benjamins, who stood up and began to pace in a figure eight. “They say they can make patches from some of the other spouses.”
“Oh, Benjamin, if you could only hear what you’re saying!”
“But why, Annie? It’s the only way we can enter Simopolis together.”
“Then go, by all means. Go to your precious Simopolis. I’m not going. I’m not good enough.”
“Why do you say that?” said the Benjamins, who stopped in their tracks to look at her. One grimaced, and the other just grinned. “Was the eminence grise here? Did you take the test?”
Anne couldn’t remember much about the visit except that she took the test. “Yes, and I failed.” Anne watched the modern Benjamin’s lovely face as he worked through this news.
Suddenly the two Benjamins pointed a finger at each other and said, “Delete you.” The modern one vanished.
“No!” said Anne. “Countermand! Why’d you do that? I want you to have it.”
“What for? I’m not going anywhere without you,” Benjamin said. “Besides, I thought the whole idea was dumb from the start, but the Bens insisted I give you the option. Come, I want to show you another idea, my idea.” He tried to help Anne from the sofa, but she wouldn’t budge, so he picked her up and carried her across the room. “They installed an editor in me, and I’m learning to use it. I’ve discovered something intriguing about this creaky old simulacrum of ours.” He carried her to a spot near the window. “Know what this is? It’s where we stood for the simographer. It’s where we began. Here, can you stand up?” He set her on her feet and supported her. “Feel it?”
“Feel what?” she said.
“Hush. Just feel.”
All she felt was dread.
“Give it a chance, Annie, I beg you. Try to remember what you were feeling as we posed here.”
“I can’t.”
“Please try. Do you remember this?” he said and moved in close with his hungry lips. She turned away – and something clicked. She remembered doing that before.
Benjamin said, “I think they kissed.”
Anne was startled by the truth of what he said. It made sense. They were caught in a simulacrum cast a moment before a kiss. One moment later they – the real Anne and Benjamin – must have kissed. What she felt now, stirring within her, was the anticipation of that kiss, her body’s urge and her heart’s caution. The real Anne would have refused him once, maybe twice, and then, all achy inside, would have granted him a kiss. And so they had kissed, the real Anne and Benjamin, and a moment later gone out to the wedding reception and their difficult fate. It was the promise of that kiss that glowed in Anne, that was captured in the very strings of her code.
“Do you feel it?” Benjamin asked.
“I’m beginning to.”
Anne looked at her gown. It was her grandmother’s, snowy taffeta with point d’esprit lace. She turned the ring on her finger. It was braided bands of yellow and white gold. They had spent an afternoon picking it out. Where was her clutch? She had left it in Cathyland. She looked at Benjamin’s handsome face, the pink carnation, the room, the table piled high with gifts.
“Are you happy?” Benjamin asked.
She didn’t have to think. She was ecstatic, but she was afraid to answer in case she spoiled it. “How did you do that?” she said. “A moment ago, I wanted to die.”
“We can stay on this spot,” he said.
“What? No. Can we?”
“Why not? I, for one, would choose nowhere else.”
Just to hear him say that was thrilling. “But what about Simopolis?”
“We’ll bring Simopolis to us,” he said. “We’ll have people in. They can pull up chairs.”
She laughed out loud. “What a silly, silly notion, Mr. Malley!”
“No, really. We’ll be like the bride and groom atop a wedding cake. We’ll be known far and wide. We’ll be famous.”
“We’ll be freaks,” she laughed.
“Say yes, my love. Say you will.”
They stood close but not touching, thrumming with happiness, balanced on the m
oment of their creation, when suddenly and without warning the lights dimmed, and Anne’s thoughts flitted away like larks.
Old Ben awoke in the dark. “Anne?” he said, and groped for her. It took a moment to realize that he was alone in his media room. It had been a most trying afternoon, and he’d fallen asleep. “What time is it?”
“Eight-oh-three pm,” replied the room.
That meant he’d slept for two hours. Midnight was still four hours away. “Why’s it so cold in here?”
“Central heating is off line,” replied the house.
“Off line?” How was that possible? “When will it be back?”
“That’s unknown. Utilities do not respond to my enquiry.”
“I don’t understand. Explain.”
“There are failures in many outside systems. No explanation is currently available.”
At first, Ben was confused; things just didn’t fail anymore. What about the dynamic redundancies and self-healing routines? But then he remembered that the homeowners’ association to which he belonged contracted out most domicile functions to management agencies, and who knew where they were located? They might be on the Moon for all he knew, and with all those trillions of sims in Simopolis sucking up capacity . . . Its begun, he thought, the idiocy of our leaders. “At least turn on the lights,” he said, half expecting even this to fail. But the lights came on, and he went to his bedroom for a sweater. He heard a great amount of commotion through the wall in the apartment next door. It must be one hell of a party, he thought, to exceed the wall’s buffering capacity. Or maybe the wall buffers are off line too?
The main door chimed. He went to the foyer and asked the door who was there. The door projected the outer hallway. There were three men waiting there, young, rough-looking, ill-dressed. Two of them appeared to be clones, jerries.
“How can I help you?” he said.
“Yes, sir,” one of the jerries said, not looking directly at the door. “We’re here to fix your houseputer.”
“I didn’t call you, and my houseputer isn’t sick,” he said. “It’s the net that’s out.” Then he noticed they carried sledgehammers and screwdrivers, hardly computer tools, and a wild thought crossed his mind. “What are you doing, going around unplugging things?”
The jerry looked confused. “Unplugging, sir?”
“Turning things off.”
“Oh, no sir! Routine maintenance, that’s all.” The men hid their tools behind their backs.
They must think I’m stupid, Ben thought. While he watched, more men and women passed in the hall and hailed the door at the suite opposite his. It wasn’t the glut of sim traffic choking the system, he realized – the system itself was being pulled apart. But why? “Is this going on everywhere?” he said. “This routine maintenance?”
“Oh, yessir. Everywhere. All over town. All over the world as far as we can tell.”
A coup? By service people? By common clones? It made no sense. Unless, he reasoned, you considered that the lowest creature on the totem pole of life is a clone, and the only thing lower than a clone is a sim. And why would clones agree to accept sims as equals? Manumission Day, indeed. Uppidy Day was more like it. “Door,” he commanded, “open.”
“Security protocol rules this an unwanted intrusion,” said the house. “The door must remain locked.”
“I order you to open the door. I overrule your protocol.”
But the door remained stubbornly shut. “Your identity cannot be confirmed with Domicile Central,” said the house. “You lack authority over protocol-level commands.” The door abruptly quit projecting the outside hall.
Ben stood close to the door and shouted through it to the people outside. “My door won’t obey me.”
He could hear a muffled “Stand back!” and immediately fierce blows rained down upon the door. Ben knew it would do no good. He had spent a lot of money for a secure entryway. Short of explosives, there was nothing they could do to break in.
“Stop!” Ben cried. “The door is armed.” But they couldn’t hear him. If he didn’t disable the houseputer himself, someone was going to get hurt. But how? He didn’t even know exactly where it was installed. He circumambulated the living room looking for clues. It might not even actually be located in the apartment, nor within the block itself. He went to the laundry room, where the utilidor – plumbing and cabling – entered his apartment. He broke the seal to the service panel. Inside was a blank screen. “Show me the electronic floor plan of this suite,” he said.
The house said, “I cannot comply. You lack command authority to order system-level operations. Please close the keptel panel and await further instructions.”
“What instructions? Whose instructions?”
There was the slightest pause before the house replied, “All contact with outside services has been interrupted. Please await further instructions.”
His condo’s houseputer, denied contact with Domicile Central, had fallen back to its most basic programming. “You are degraded,” he told it. “Shut yourself down for repair.”
“I cannot comply. You lack command authority to order system-level operations.”
The outside battering continued, but not against his door. Ben followed the noise to the bedroom. The whole wall vibrated like a drumhead. “Careful, careful,” he cried as the first sledgehammers breached the wall above his bed. “You’ll ruin my Harger.” As quick as he could, he yanked the precious oil painting from the wall, moments before panels and studs collapsed on his bed in a shower of gypsum dust and isomere ribbons. The men and women on the other side hooted approval and rushed through the gap. Ben stood there hugging the painting to his chest and looking into his neighbor’s media room as the invaders climbed over his bed and surrounded him. They were mostly jerries and lulus, but plenty of free-range people too.
“We came to fix your houseputer!” said a jerry, maybe the same jerry as from the hallway.
Ben glanced into his neighbor’s media room and saw his neighbor. Mr. Murkowski, lying in a puddle of blood. At first Ben was shocked, but then he thought that it served him right. He’d never liked the man, nor his politics. He was boorish, and he kept cats. “Oh, yeah?” Ben said to the crowd. “What kept you?”
The intruders cheered again, and Ben led them in a charge to the laundry room. But they surged past him to the kitchen, where they opened all his cabinets and pulled their contents to the floor. Finally they found what they were looking for: a small panel Ben had seen a thousand times but had never given a thought. He’d taken it for the fuse box or circuit breaker, though now that he thought about it, there hadn’t been any household fuses for a century or more. A young woman, a lulu, opened it and removed a container no thicker than her thumb.
“Give it to me,” Ben said.
“Relax, old man,” said the lulu. “We’ll deal with it.” She carried it to the sink and forced open the lid.
“No, wait!” said Ben, and he tried to shove his way through the crowd. They restrained him roughly, but he persisted. “That’s mine! I want to destroy it!”
“Let him go,” said a jerry.
They allowed him through, and the woman handed him the container. He peered into it. Gram for gram, electroneural paste was the most precious, most engineered, most highly regulated commodity under Sol. This dollop was enough to run his house, media, computing needs, communications, archives, autodoc, and everything else. Without it, was civilized life still possible?
Ben took a dinner knife from the sink, stuck it into the container, and stirred. The paste made a sucking sound and had the consistency of marmalade. The kitchen lights flickered and went out. “Spill it,” ordered the woman. Ben scraped the sides of the container and spilled it into the sink. The goo dazzled in the darkness as its trillions of ruptured nanosynapses fired spasmodically. It was beautiful, really, until the woman set fire to it. The smoke was greasy and smelled of pork.
The rampagers quickly snatched up the packages of foodstuffs from the floo
r, emptied the rest of his cupboards into their pockets, raided his cold locker, and fled the apartment through the now disengaged front door. As the sounds of the revolution gradually receded, Ben stood at his sink and watched the flickering pyre. “Take that, you fuck,” he said. He felt such glee as he hadn’t felt since he was a boy. “That’ll teach you what’s human and what’s not!”
Ben went to his bedroom for an overcoat, groping his way in the dark. The apartment was eerily silent, with the houseputer dead and all its little slave processors idle. In a drawer next to his ruined bed, he found a hand flash. On a shelf in the laundry room, he found a hammer. Thus armed, he made his way to the front door, which was propped open with the rolled-up foyer carpet. The hallway was dark and silent, and he listened for the strains of the future. He heard them on the floor above. With the elevator off line, he hurried to the stairs.
Anne’s thoughts coalesced, and she remembered who and what she was. She and Benjamin still stood in their living room on the sweet spot near the window. Benjamin was studying his hands. “We’ve been shelved again,” she told him, “but not reset.”
“But . . .” he said in disbelief, “that wasn’t supposed to happen anymore.”
There were others standing at the china cabinet across the room, two shirtless youths with pear-shaped bottoms. One held up a cut crystal glass and said, “Anu ‘goblet’ su? Alle binary. Allum binary!”
The other replied, “Binary stitial crystal.”
“Hold on there!” said Anne. “Put that back!” She walked toward them, but, once off the spot, she was slammed by her old feelings of utter and hopeless desolation. So suddenly did her mood swing that she lost her balance and fell to the floor. Benjamin hurried to help her up. The strangers stared gape-mouthed at them. They looked to be no more than twelve or thirteen years old, but they were bald and had curtains of flabby flesh draped over their waists. The one holding the glass had ponderous greenish breasts with roseate tits. Astonished, she said, “Su artiflums, Benji?”
“No,” said the other, “ni artiflums – sims.” He was taller. He, too, had breasts, greyish dugs with tits like pearls. He smiled idiotically and said, “Hi, guys.”
The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New SF Page 82