Dreaming Metal

by Melissa Scott

  “Fortune. I’d like you to meet Reverdy Jian. She’s a friend of Chaandi’s.”

  I held out my hand automatically, wondering what she—or Chaandi—wanted, and why that name was so familiar, and the big woman took it in an easy grip.

  “Good to meet you.”

  “And you,” I answered, and waited. Something was nagging at the back of my mind, something about her name and Chaandi, and Jian smiled, showing even teeth.

  “I asked Bi’ Terez to introduce us—asked Chaandi to introduce me to her—because of something that happened last night.”

  “To do with the bombing?” I asked, in spite of myself, and Jian shook her head.

  “Not exactly, anyway. Look, I’m an FTL pilot, I work a lot with Spelvin constructs—”

  “Manfred,” I said aloud, and Jian lifted an eyebrow. “I remember. You were one of the people involved with Manfred—one of the ones who found it.”

  “And killed it,” Terez said.

  Jian said, “That’s right. Manfred was—well, it wasn’t true AI, but it was built to mimic it, and working with it felt a lot like what AI ought to feel like.” She paused, as though she was choosing her words carefully, and I guessed that she might be in range of one of the stage’s contact nodes. She was wired, of course—all FTL pilots were—and I wondered for an instant what she’d make of Celeste.

  “I bought a new Spelvin construct recently,” Jian went on, “that felt—different—from the others. I sold it again because I didn’t like that difference, and last night the man who bought it came to me to warn me that somebody, he wouldn’t say who, was after it, was making trouble for him. He said they knew I had owned it, and that I might be in trouble because of it, and he recommended that I go off-world, just as he was heading into the desert.” She paused then, watching me as though she was expecting some response, but I kept my expression neutral. “I found out that you have the construct now, and I figured you should know what was going on.”

  I took a deep breath, swinging my legs over the stage edge to try and hide my thoughts. So one of Celeste’s components had been something special to begin with—the SHYmate, obviously, the one that had been optimized for FTL; connecting it to a second construct would only have intensified that effect. But the last thing I wanted to do was to acknowledge that Celeste was something special, for both our sakes—not even to Jian, maybe especially not to Jian, after the Manfred Riots. She’d been badly injured by the construct—it had tried to kill her, had almost succeeded, if I remembered correctly; there was no reason to think she’d feel any more fond of Celeste, particularly since her first reaction had been to sell her.

  “I bought two constructs from a man called Garay,” I said, playing for time, and Jian nodded.

  “This was a SHYmate. SHYmate 294.”

  “Yes. I bought that one.” I brought my feet back up onto the stage. “Look, I appreciate your coming here—the way things are, I don’t want to run any unnecessary risks—but I’m afraid I haven’t noticed anything unusual about the SHYmate. I’m using it in my act, though, so I probably wouldn’t.”

  Terez gave me a sharp look at that, and I hid a grimace. The stage manager knew perfectly well that I had to work closely with my constructs, that I would certainly have noticed if I was dealing with something that felt like AI, and I made myself meet Jian’s eyes guilelessly. At least the pilot didn’t seem to notice anything; she nodded thoughtfully, and looked at Terez.

  “I thought you should at least know what Garay said. Bi’ Terez, I appreciate your bringing me here—and I’m glad to have met you, bi’ Fortune. I’ll look forward to seeing your act some time.”

  “Come backstage if you do,” I answered, and hoped she wouldn’t take me up on the invitation. “Rez, I need to talk to you about codes once I’ve gotten the act broken down. Will you be in your office?”

  Terez nodded. “Binnie mentioned. I have it ready.”

  “We’ll leave you to it, then,” Jian said, and turned away. I watched them disappear into the shadows, wondering if I’d done the right thing. Jian had come to warn me, had dealt with Manfred—if anyone would know what to do about Celeste, she might—but at the same time, her first response had been to sell the SHYmate. I’d keep Celeste to myself, at least for now.

  12

  Reverdy Jian

  Crossing the Decani Interlink toward the stand-still interchange that led up to the lowest level of the Rooks, Jian was very aware of eyes following her passage. Realpeace glyphs gleamed from nearly half the storefronts, flashing from the tightbeam transmitters and painted directly on glass or stone, and nearly everyone was wearing the Freyan sarang, not just the old people clustered in the spill of cool air from the main vents in the center of the square, but the shopkeepers as well, and even the trio of older adolescents lounging in the window of the cookshop. There was even a Realpeace crèche, tucked into a converted storefront—the place had been a Dreampeace office, too, she remembered. It looked more successful in this guise: a tall woman in full traditional dress was herding a mixed group of children, ranging in age from toddler to a few who might be as old as twelve or thirteen, toward the open door. As she passed them, heading for the interchange, she saw one of the younger children point to her, and saw the teacher stoop to answer. Jian could hear neither the question nor the answer, but their laughter followed her up the interchange stairs.

  It was probably nothing, probably her own misunderstanding, she told herself, but she found herself relaxing as she reached the Rooks. Even in its best days, it had been cheap housing—and since then, the stack-flats had been recut and subdivided to cram more and more renters into the narrow buildings—and it hadn’t been considered a good neighborhood at any time in her memory, but at least in the Rooks she knew that if she had trouble, it would be robbery, not politics. She smiled at the thought, and a thin young man, neither coolie nor yanqui, face as indeterminate as most of the midworld, stepped sideways, giving her wary room. In the same instant, a trio of piki-bikes whined past, deliberately hogging the middle of the road; she caught a brief glimpse of silvered faces, and one silver arm rose in defiant salute. The young man lifted a hand in answer, and passed her smiling. His lip was swollen, the obvious aftermath of a fight.

  The main door of Vaughn’s building was locked and barred, but for once the intercom was working, and she climbed the standing stairs to the next landing. Red was waiting at the security door, opened it silently at her approach, and she stepped past him, heard the triple click as he resealed the locks behind her.

  “So what’s up?” Vaughn called from the open doorway of his flat, and Jian lifted a hand in greeting. “How’d you come?”

  Jian blinked, and he stepped aside to let her into the single room. It was cramped, the air warm and a little stale, a fan moving sluggishly in one corner to supplement the ventilators; the connection board was on and muted, the single screen showing one of the newschannels, but Vaughn gestured with the room remote and the picture vanished before she could identify the image. Most of the room was filled with a sturdy loft, and the curtains that hung between the posts made the room look even smaller.

  “I came through Decani,” she said. “Why?”

  “I should’ve warned you,” Vaughn answered, and swung himself up the ladder that led to the loft platform. Behind him, Red closed and locked the room door, moved to the niche that held the coldbox. “It’s better to come through Avery, these days, Decani’s not the safest anymore.”

  “Yeh, you should’ve warned me,” Jian said, and followed him up the wide-runged ladder. The platform was furnished, and reasonably comfortable, but only if one didn’t expect to stand upright. She lowered herself cautiously onto one of the truncated chairs—it wasn’t much more than a thick foam pad with a thinner back—and shook her head at Red’s silently offered beer. “I didn’t have any trouble, though.”

  “Good,” Vaughn said, and took the bottle Red extended toward him. “Thanks, bach. So what’s going on?”


  Jian laughed. “I wish I knew.”

  “Funny.” Vaughn took a long swallow of the beer, but his eyes never left her. “So what are you doing here, then?”

  “I think we have a problem,” Jian said.

  “I’ve been telling you that.”

  “Look, Imre, do you want an answer, or not?”

  Vaughn spread his hands in apology, and Jian nodded.

  “Right. I assume you watched the news last night.”

  Vaughn nodded. “Yeh.”

  “I was up on the Zodiac when the reports started coming through,” Jian said. “With Chaandi, which didn’t make it better. But then that guy Red fixed me up with, Garay, showed up, warned me people were taking too much interest in the construct I sold him because it was just what I said it was all along, a little too close to people. He said he was heading into the deep desert, and suggested I do something similar—”

  “What about the construct?” Vaughn asked.

  “He sold it. To a conjurer, the one at the Tin Hau Empire,” Jian said. “You know, the one who has all the humaniform karakuri.” She took a deep breath. “I got Chaandi to get me an introduction, she knows the stage manager at the Tin Hau, and I went over there to talk to her. I wanted to let her know what Garay said, I figured she deserved that much warning.”

  “And you wanted to know what she thought about the construct,” Vaughn said.

  “That, too.” Jian nodded.

  “And?” Vaughn prompted, after a moment. “Elvis Christ, you can’t just leave it there.”

  “And that’s it,” Jian answered. “She—her name is Fortune, it’s her real name, apparently—she basically said thank you very much, but she hadn’t noticed anything funny about it.”

  “I find that hard to believe,” Vaughn said, and Red, sitting cross-legged on the floor beside him, nodded once.

  “So do I,” Jian said, “but what am I supposed to do, call her a liar with nothing at all to back me up?”

  “I suppose not.” Vaughn leaned back in his chair. “I still think we should do what this Garay said, and get the hell out of here. Maybe permanently.”

  “Permanently?” Jian stared at him, startled, and he gave a one-shouldered shrug.

  “We’ve been talking about it, Red and me, we’ve got the credentials, we can get work—”

  “You’ve been talking about it,” Red said.

  “I don’t want you dead or in jail,” Vaughn said. He reached out, tangled his fingers in the other’s thick hair, dragging him sideways until his head rested against Vaughn’s chest. “Nobody hurts you but me, sunshine.”

  Red didn’t move, and after a moment Vaughn released him, swearing under his breath. Jian said, “It might not be a bad idea, but I’d still like to know what the hell is going on here first.”

  “Good question.” Vaughn took a long swallow of his beer, his eyes still fixed on the other man.

  “You said people have been asking questions,” Jian said. “About the construct, about us. What kind of people?”

  Vauhgn shrugged. “It’s thirdhand—people I know, pilots, a couple of constructors, friends, telling me people have been asking them what I’m doing, what Red’s doing. Mostly if Red’s back in business.”

  “So not hard-hackers, then,” Jian said, “because they’d know he wasn’t. And probably not Realpeace, either, because your friends wouldn’t have that kind of connection.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Vaughn said. “Who else would want to know about this construct?”

  “The Cartel,” Red said, softly.

  Jian stared at him for a long moment. That did make sense—the Cartel Companies had done most of the research on AI and near-AI; they were the ones who stood to lose, or gain, the most if true AI were discovered. More than that, they were the most likely to underestimate the depth of coolie anger, and the strength of Realpeace.

  “Elvis Christ,” Vaughn said. “You know, that does make sense—they’re based in the underworld, all of them, they wouldn’t have a fucking clue what they were stirring up.”

  Jian nodded slowly. “So, assuming for now that it is the Cartel, would they be looking to steal it, or to destroy it, I wonder?”

  “Kagami would want to get it back,” Vaughn said. “It was theirs to begin with, right?”

  “Their matrix,” Jian said. “They built it.”

  “And they’ve always been big into near-AL” Vaughn said. “They’re the ones who built Aster, after all.”

  Aster had been a controversy years before Manfred, the first Spelvin construct anyone claimed had broken the Turing Barrier. It had been a Kagami project, and Kagami had proved to the courts’ satisfaction that Aster was not true AI. Dreampeace had called it a cover-up—and Venya Mitexi had taken that old matrix, Jian remembered, and built Manfred from it. But Kagami had also paid for her own long stay in rehab, for the new skinsuit and her artificial eyes: nothing was ever simple. She shivered in spite of the warmth, and hoped Vaughn hadn’t seen. He went on as though he hadn’t noticed.

  “If it’s not Kagami, well, I’d expect them to want to suppress it. Nobody else has put the kind of money into AI that Kagami has.”

  “You mean kill it,” Jian said. “If it is AI.”

  “If.” Vaughn rubbed his forehead with the beer bottle, leaving a trail of moisture. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? And I don’t think it’s our problem.”

  “I sold it,” Jian said. “I sold it because I thought it might be, well, not AI, exactly, but something out of the ordinary. If I’d kept it, I wouldn’t have gotten Red involved, and we’d be able to sit quietly and figure out what to do with it—maybe take it off-world, like you said. Fortune wouldn’t be involved, and I’m worried that she didn’t believe me, that she’s going to get hurt.”

  “She’s not your responsibility,” Vaughn said, with surprising gentleness.

  Jian snorted, managed a wry smile. “You know me. Hell, I could even worry about that guy from Motosha, the one you were hassling at the Nighthawk.”

  “You know, he’s in the band that was playing at the Oasis last night,” Vaughn said, and Jian sighed.

  “Don’t change the subject.

  “Haya.” Vaughn fixed her with a cold stare. “Then I say we pull rank, we pack up, and we get out of here. Leave this construct, and Fortune, to their own business—she’s supposed to be fantastic, let her disappear herself, or something. But we need to take care of ourselves.”

  Jian shook her head. “And what if it’s not Al?”

  “We do exactly the same thing.”

  “No.” Jian sighed again, and managed a wry smile. “Well, maybe we should talk to Peace again, I’m with you on that one. But I shouldn’t have sold that construct.”

  Vaughn shrugged. “It’s done.”

  “Thanks.” Jian looked sideways, at the connection board just visible over the edge of the loft. The screen was empty, but in her imagination she could still see the warehouse in Gamela where Manfred had made his last stand—could see, too, the scenes from the previous night, the Zodiac harsh in the emergency lights, all the signs darkened, the buildings stripped to mere stone. “I can’t believe any of the Cartel is this stupid—this isn’t the time to be bringing up the AI question.”

  “Believe,” Vaughn said, sourly. He looked at the man beside him. “We haven’t heard from you, bach. Are you with us on this?”

  For a moment, Jian thought Red would ignore him, but then the technician nodded.

  “Good,” Vaughn said, and reached for the room remote. “Let’s call Peace now.”

  Malindy was immediately available and willing to take the call—not a good sign, Jian thought, and was not surprised when the co-op manager shook his head.

  “Imre, if I had anything going out-system, I’d be happy to let you take it, and the hell with what Binli Dai thinks.”

  “That’s a change,” Jian said, in spite of herself, and Malindy spread his hands.

  “The situation’s changed. But, anyway, I
haven’t got anything.”

  “Do you expect anything?” Vaughn asked.

  “I don’t have anything on the books except local,” Malindy said, “and I haven’t had any inquiries. I’ve heard a rumor that Caizene Ltd. will have a packet ship going to Razhul or Crossroads—somewhere Urban, anyway—and if the job comes up, I’ll bid for you. But it’s not your usual run.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d bid,” Jian said, and Malindy nodded.

  “Haya. But you won’t make money on it.”

  “We’ll survive,” Vaughn said, and cut the connection.

  “So we wait,” Jian said. She stared for a moment at the cracked plaster above the kitchen niche, wondering what to do. She knew she should simply lie low, do her best to stay out of sight, out of the way of whoever it was who was trying to find this construct, but the memory of the conjurer nagged at her. She could still see her, thin and dark, perched on the edge of the stage like a child, the woman-shaped karakuri—who looked weirdly like her, Jian realized, deliberately like her—standing ranked behind her. Why would someone who obviously reveled in blurring that boundary pretend she hadn’t noticed that the SHYmate was something unusual? “I want to see the show,” she said, and Vaughn looked at her.

  “What?”

  “I want to see Fortune’s act—I want to see what she does with it,” Jian said. “Want to join me?”

  Vaughn sighed. “If I have to.”

  “Aren’t you at all curious?” Jian asked, and the other pilot shook his head.

  “Not when my neck’s at stake.”

  Jian smiled, knowing she’d won. “We’ll set a time,” she said. And I’ll see what this construct can do.

  13

  Fanning Jones

  After the trouble at the Middle Oasis, nobody really wanted us in their clubs, especially not in the upperworld. The few midworld clubs that booked fusion bands didn’t want us either—not only didn’t we have a big enough following, but the people who did like us were mostly metalheads, and nobody wanted to attract Realpeace’s attention that way. It hurt us: with the cutbacks at the Tin Hau, we were already losing money, and without outside gigs, we were going to have trouble paying the bills. I was already getting as many hours as I could at Motosha, and Tai was scrounging day work on the local assembly lines, but even at the best estimates, we’d be living on brick noodles for the rest of the month. Fortune knew, and offered to loan me what she could, but she didn’t have that much to spare, what with the bills for the new illusion. It was enough to pay Persephonet, anyway, which was good because if we were ever going to get bookings again, that was how they would come in, and I took it, but next month wasn’t looking any better. Timin’s family—he still lived with them, in a cavern campong over in Lower Gamela—offered us the occasional meal, too, which made a nice change from noodles.