Realms of Light

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “Remove them?” Yoshio asked.

  “Upload them,” the desktop said eagerly. “Just the way you uploaded me. They’ve signed away so much control that I believe Seventh Heaven can legally remove them from their bodies entirely.”

  “Against their will?”

  “No, no, of course not! We would ask them, and offer them a choice—stay in the dreamtanks until they die of old age or systems failure, or transfer to electronic form where they can live forever, where they can, if they want, be removed from Epimetheus entirely so that they don’t need to worry about what will happen if Nightside City is abandoned and left derelict. And they can go right on dreaming—we would transfer their dream libraries with them, and set those up in the same nets that their minds would be in. They wouldn’t need to interact with the outside world at all, any more than they do now; they could have dedicated systems. They could exist in their imaginary worlds, in realms of light, worlds of bliss, untroubled by any lingering concerns about their original flesh.”

  My skin crawled slightly at that idea; these disembodied intelligences would be so isolated, so pointless.

  I didn’t say anything, though; this was between the two of them.

  “But they would be dead,” Yoshio said.

  “What? No, they would be just as alive as I am, living electronically, and their bodies would be inhabited by me, and Shigeru, and Momoko, and Hideo, and Kazuo—and you, if you want. You could be younger, Father—you’re two hundred years old, and even the best doctors can’t keep you alive as you are forever, but you could start over in a younger body, one the original owner doesn’t want anymore.”

  “Shinichiro...” The old man looked desperately unhappy. He stared at me for a second before saying, “No. Shinichiro is dead. You are a recording. You are not my son.”

  “Father, what are you saying?” The desktop’s tone was quite convincingly shocked. “I am Shinichiro!”

  “You are a piece of software that thinks it’s my son. And if you were downloaded into a new body, even one cloned from your own genes, you would still not be my son. My son is dead. You would only be a copy.”

  “But Father, what difference does that make?” The desktop’s voice was baffled and angry—and, I thought, frightened. “I’m still me. A copy is as good as the original.”

  Yoshio shook his head. “If I scan something, the copy may be indistinguishable from the original, but it is not the original.”

  “But there’s no difference! I remember everything, and what makes us who we are, but our memories? I remember growing up with Kumiko and Shigeru, and you came to see us every night and put us to bed, and I made you tuck in my bunny—how can I remember that if I’m not your son?”

  Yoshio did not answer immediately; he sat in his big black chair, staring at me, with the desktop floating by his shoulder.

  “Father, I am Shinichiro, and I want to be human again. I want my rights back.” It sounded desperate. “Your shielding worked, so I don’t know what Hsing has told you, and I don’t know how she found out something was going on with Seventh Heaven, but I promise you, I don’t mean anyone any harm. I just want to be human again, and I couldn’t think of any other way to do it. It’s her fault I even thought of this one—I got the idea when I did a background check on her for you, when she found out what Sayuri was doing. I found out where her father was, and that it was the same company you had looked at, and I realized that there were all those bodies going unused, zipped up in Nightside City where no one would ever notice if they were recycled. I wasn’t going to steal them; I would ask for volunteers, and trade eternal life for humanity. I wasn’t doing anything terrible. I wasn’t going to hurt Guohan Hsing.”

  “You hacked his medical exam.”

  “It was a perfect chance to see just what condition the dreamers are in!”

  “You faked my death.”

  “I... no, I didn’t.” I had never heard an electronic intelligence hesitate like that before; it was the most human thing the Shinichiro upload had done in the entire conversation.

  “A copy of you did,” the old man said.

  Something here didn’t yet fit, I realized. If Shinichiro had been the power behind Corporate Initiatives, which intended to buy Seventh Heaven, why had it used the back door to explore the company files? Why not just wait until it had legal control? It had just said that it knew the old man had looked at Seventh Heaven, so it did know the back door was there and that a Yoshio-kun could get it in, but why bother? Why was it worth faking Grandfather’s death?

  Why bother hacking my father’s exam, instead of just demanding medical data as a condition of the planned purchase?

  And why had it been our attempt to talk to Chantilly Rhee that forced the upload to hack in and talk to the old man?

  The upload talked about wanting human rights. It hadn’t said a thing about wanting a body for its own sake. It hadn’t mentioned wanting to feel human again. It hadn’t said anything about food or sex or physical sensations of any kind, and those were the things that the other uploads I’d talked to or heard about associated with being human, the things they thought they had lost. Shinichiro had been dead for twenty years; it might not even remember those. Yes, it remembered the bedtime bunny, but did it remember lust or pain or hunger? It hadn’t mentioned them.

  It had talked about the right to own stock, instead. But what did it want to own? Seventh Heaven was just a means to an end, not the ultimate goal—buying Seventh Heaven in order to be able to buy Seventh Heaven didn’t make any sense, so there had to be more.

  And it had apparently tried to murder the old man first, before it started hacking into Seventh Heaven.

  It didn’t want Seventh Heaven; it wanted Nakada Enterprises. I was sure of it. When I first heard that someone had tried to kill Grandfather Nakada, and that he suspected his own family, that was the obvious motive.

  But an upload couldn’t inherit anything; it wasn’t human.

  If Shinichiro had been behind the entire thing, you might think he wouldn’t have wanted the old man dead until after he was human again, and able to inherit—but that assumed that Yoshio would have named the new Shinichiro as his heir, and I knew he wouldn’t have. The upload must have known it, too. There was no legal link between Grandfather Nakada and some dreamer’s corpse with a new personality imprinted on it; any inheritance would need to be set up by Yoshio himself, and he wouldn’t have done it.

  But someone else might have. Someone might have agreed to help take over Seventh Heaven, and help put Shinichiro into a new body, and even share control of Nakada Enterprises, in exchange for disposing of Yoshio.

  And that someone might have changed her mind when the first attempt failed. She might have lost her nerve, or decided that Shinichiro wasn’t as competent as she had thought.

  And then the Shinichiro upload would have had to act on its own, trying to get control of Seventh Heaven, or maybe just get enough data to convince its co-conspirator to come back on screen.

  If I was right about this, then copying itself to Epimetheus, faking the old man’s death, and breaking into Seventh Heaven had all been a back-up plan, something it did because the assassination failed and its partner backed out.

  I had looked at Grandfather Nakada’s will, of course. It was a complicated thing, befitting the patriarch of one of the great corporate clans, but it had also been very traditional in some regards, and one of those was that it left control of Nakada Enterprises, along with holdings worth billions of credits, to the old man’s surviving children.

  Three of his five children were dead. The survivors were Kumiko and Hideo, and Chantilly Rhee worked for Kumiko.

  She must have been in on it all initially, but dropped out and left Shinichiro on its own. Then everything fit. The upload must have diverted Rhee out of fear that she would tell the old man of Kumiko’s involvement, and Kumiko would try to clear her own name by incriminating her uploaded brother. By popping up with its own version of events the upload w
as forestalling that—or trying to.

  It occurred to me that maybe Kumiko had dropped out not because of any doubts, but because she simply didn’t have the money to buy Seventh Heaven without that inheritance. A little check into Kumiko’s financial situation might be in order once we were out of this room and the old man was back in control of the household systems.

  “It was a mistake, Father,” the upload said. “I am most heartily sorry for it.”

  I thought the old man was going to ask whether hacking the dream enhancer was a mistake, too, but he didn’t.

  “We will need to issue a correction,” he said.

  “Of course,” the upload agreed.

  “You will need to release control of the household systems.”

  “In due time, Father, but I’m sure you’ll understand if I wait until I’m certain we have reached agreement about my future.”

  The old man frowned. “I suppose that’s acceptable for now.”

  The door behind me suddenly slid fully open, and the black floaters backed away. “I regret holding you this way until we could talk,” the desktop said. “Now that we understand the situation better, though, perhaps it’s time for Mis’ Hsing to go.”

  I certainly understood the situation. The upload wanted me out of the way so it could kill Yoshio.

  It hadn’t killed him while I was on Epimetheus because he was on guard, and besides, it didn’t want to give Kumiko everything she wanted without some assurance that she would hold up her end of their bargain. It had been keeping its options open. Now that it had been beeped, though, and the old man knew who was responsible, the risk of leaving him alive was too great.

  Killing him while I was there, though, meant it would need to kill me, too, which was too suspicious. If it could get me to leave, then it could go ahead and dispose of the old man, and take care of me later. I didn’t know whether it might try to bribe or blackmail me, or whether it would go straight to assassination, but I knew that it would want me out of the way, and my life expectancy would plummet.

  That was how I read the situation, anyway. Oh, it was pretending to believe that kindly old Grandfather Nakada was willing to make peace, to forgive its little peccadillos, but I wasn’t buying it. Shinichiro knew his father, surely, and knew what the old man was capable of, how hard he could be. It had been willing to kill him before, when he had been completely unsuspecting, so why would it hesitate now? To the upload, after all, it wasn’t really death—Yoshio was backed up on several coms. Losing his human body wasn’t the end, merely a temporary inconvenience, and that body couldn’t last much longer anyway.

  The old man, of course, saw it differently, and had no intention of dying any time soon. He was playing along with the upload, but I knew he didn’t believe it—he hadn’t asked about the dream enhancer, or about a dozen other things that he would have wanted explained if he really thought the upload was sincere.

  I was pretty sure he knew it intended to kill him, too.

  “Perhaps, Mis’ Hsing, I might have Ukiba fly you back to Alderstadt?” he said.

  “I’d appreciate that,” I said. “My stuff is aboard the ship; I can pack it up on the way.”

  “I will accompany you to the ship, then,” the old man said, getting to his feet. “I have a few matters to discuss with Captain Perkins, in any case.”

  “I can provide a link,” the desktop said.

  “I think I prefer to speak to him in person,” Yoshio insisted.

  “Honestly, Father, I won’t interfere with the connection. I won’t even listen in.”

  “Thank you, Shinichiro, but the exercise will do me good.” He waved to me, and to the blue-and-silver floater. “This way.”

  I knew the way; I don’t need a guide for a route I’ve followed once. I didn’t say that, of course. I let the old man take the lead as we made our way back out to the landing field.

  Shinichiro let us go; a direct attack would be too obvious, and he didn’t know what defenses we might have. The floaters made no move to stop us, or interfere at all as we walked back out to the field together.

  I barely knew what to expect when we emerged into the open air and that ghastly sunlight, but everything was much as I’d left it. The field was mostly deserted. The ship was still there, and the airlock’s outer door was open.

  I didn’t think Shinichiro had compromised the ship’s systems. I thought that if we could get aboard, we might get away. I’d already made one illegal hot launch; another wouldn’t bother me.

  I hadn’t dared call ahead, though; Shinichiro was almost certainly listening. The drive wouldn’t be run up. We’d need a few minutes to get Ukiba spaceworthy.

  There was also the issue of where we would land. The two copies of Shinichiro had probably infiltrated systems all over Prometheus and Epimetheus, not just in Nightside City and American City. That fake death report had been completely convincing. It hadn’t tripped any scam filters anywhere. That might mean Shinichiro had done a perfect job generating it and just got lucky that no one wanted more details and was willing to dig for them, or it might mean that it had subverted all the systems that might have tried to verify the story. The latter seemed more likely.

  So the two inhabited planets were compromised, and Cass II wouldn’t work; we didn’t have the equipment to survive on the molten surface, and the pitiful little colony there wouldn’t have any room to spare for us, or anywhere we could hide. Cass I wasn’t even as viable as Cass II—it was a tiny, airless ball of radioactive slag that barely qualified as a planet, too close to Eta Cass A to be any use to anyone. If we couldn’t find a friendly port on Epimetheus or Prometheus, we’d need to leave the Eta Cassiopeia system entirely. Ukiba did have a full Wheeler drive, but I didn’t know whether it was ready for interstellar flight.

  I didn’t know whether I was ready for interstellar flight, either; I’d never given it any serious thought. I never had a reason to.

  I didn’t know how long it would take to reach an inhabited system; I didn’t know Ukiba’s specs. The possibility of spending half a year with the old man and Perkins and Singh, not to mention Yoshio-kun, was not appealing, but it might be the only way for Grandfather Nakada and me to survive.

  Whether the old man could ever regain control of Nakada Enterprises was another program entirely, and one I wasn’t going to worry about yet. I had enough grit to deal with.

  At least Dad and ’Chan were off the ship.

  I realized I didn’t know whether Singh and Perkins were still aboard or not. If Perkins had gone off duty, this might get complicated.

  I smiled wryly at the thought. It already was complicated; Perkins’ absence would just make it more so. But the old man had said he was coming out here to talk to Perkins, so the roundeye was presumably still on the ship.

  The old man’s blue-and-silver floater had followed us, and an entire swarm of other floaters had collected as well; I didn’t think any of those others were on our side.

  We climbed the ramp with floaters all around us; in fact, a couple of small ones followed us right into the airlock. Apparently Shinichiro was not about to leave his father unattended.

  We both saw them, but didn’t say anything. Any protest would either be ignored or make matters worse.

  I hit the manual button to close the outer lock door—ordinarily I would have signaled the ship to do it, but right now I wasn’t trusting anything with a net link. I looked at my client, hoping to improvise some sort of communication that the floaters wouldn’t catch.

  The old man wasn’t looking at me, though; he was looking at a panel on the airlock wall. I hadn’t particularly noticed this one before; the ship was full of panels and displays, and most of them weren’t any of my business.

  It wasn’t my ship, though; it was Yoshio’s. He tapped something, and the three floaters that had accompanied us aboard the ship abruptly dropped out of the air to the metal deck.

  “It’ll notice,” I said. “We need to get off the ground as fast as we can.�
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  “I’m not leaving,” the old man said. “This is my home, and that feeble copy of my son is not going to take it away from me.”

  “I think it is,” I said. “It’s clearly hacked every important system in the place. If we get out of here we can come back later...”

  “We are not leaving,” he said. “Is your copy of me aboard?”

  I decided not to argue any further, at least not yet. I would be looking for a chance to get Perkins alone, though; if I pissed the old man off by kidnaping him he might ruin my life, but if I stayed here that damned murderous upload was almost certainly going to kill me. “It’s here,” I said.

  “Show me,” he said. “And then arm yourself.”

  When he said that I decided I was definitely going to get killed, but at least it would be interesting, and we might do some damage first.

  “This way,” I said.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I missed most of the conversation between Yoshio-sempai and Yoshio-kun, but I probably couldn’t have followed it anyway. They understood each other in a way no one else ever could. They didn’t need explanations, they didn’t even need sentences—a single word or gesture would carry all the associations they needed. By the time I got back with the HG-2 powered up in my hand, Yoshio-kun was talking to the Shinichiro upload over the ship’s regular com channel, negotiating terms for a surrender.

  I knew that surrender wasn’t going to happen, though, not the way they were discussing. It was a decoy. Shinichiro didn’t know we had a copy of the old man running; he thought he was talking to Yoshio-sempai, and as long as they were talking, the upload wouldn’t expect to find the old man anywhere else.