Dreaming Metal

by Melissa Scott

  Jian said, “I told you at the time it was different.” She looked back at Jones. “I told bi’ Fortune this, but I don’t think she believed me. Someone has been unduly interested in that construct. Newcat Garay said he’d been asked one too many questions, and he was taking off for the deep desert. The same people have been asking about us, me and Red in particular, and we’re looking for offworld work—we’re FTL pilots, if you don’t know what Imre does.”

  “I know who you are,” Jones said. He took a deep breath, seemed to come to a decision. “You’re that serious about this?”

  “You better believe it, sunshine,” Vaughn said.

  Jones seemed not to hear. “So who are these people asking about you? It’s not Dreampeace, Shadha—that’s our drummer—she’s been Dreampeace for years, and they don’t want anything to do with AI right now. They couldn’t cope, so they don’t want to find it. And if Realpeace had any idea of it, they’d be putting the story on all the connections whether they had anything real or not.”

  He’d made the same connection they had, and Jian said, carefully, “I don’t know. We—it hasn’t gotten close enough for us to find out. But it might be one of the Cartel Companies.”

  Jones nodded, unsurprised. “Lousy timing.”

  “So what else is new?” Vaughn said.

  “Will you tell bi’ Fortune?” Jian asked.

  “Yeh.” Jones nodded again. “She—she’s not unaware of the problem. I mean, I think she took you seriously before. But I’ll tell her again.”

  “Thanks,” Jian said, and was surprised at the relief she felt. Fortune was really none of her concern—but the SHYmate was. Celeste, Jones had called it, and the name conjured the memory of the icon that was Fortune’s face made young and serene. I should have named it, Jian thought, and flinched at the memory. Jones managed a still-wary smile, and glanced over his shoulder toward the stage door.

  “Be careful.” Red’s voice was as soft as ever, but it carried. Jones turned sharply, his expression for an instant unguarded, relief and something like regret, but then the moment vanished.

  “I will be,” he said, and turned back toward the Empire. Jian watched him go, wondering what had been between the two of them, and when—not that I could ever ask, not Red, and most certainly not Imre—and then shook the thought away.

  “Well,” she said aloud, and Vaughn tapped her gently on the shoulder.

  “You did what you could,” he said. “Now let’s get the fuck out of here before Security takes an interest.”

  The plaza was almost empty now, except for the last two vendors and the FPG floater still grounded in front of the shuttered cookshop. “Haya,” she said, and followed them into the lift station.

  She took the long way back to Hawkshole, riding Shaft Three all the way down to the Zodiac before transferring to the ‘bus for Dzi-Gin and the lift station there. Once she was below the Zodiac, officially in the midworld, she felt herself relax a little, and was annoyed at herself for allowing those fears to surface. The streets in Hawks-hole were quiet, glistening still with the damp of street cleaning, and she was glad to reach the Little Paradis block where her flat lay. She let herself in through the main gate, crossed the courtyard where the gardens flourished in the full spectrum light of the grow-tubes, and went down the quarter level to her flat, grateful for the quiet.

  A light was flashing on the media wall, the only light in the darkened room. She eyed it for a long moment, gesturing to the room to bring up the main lights, but finally reached across to key the playback. The Persephonet screen lit and windowed, and to her surprise Peace Malindy’s face appeared in the center of the image.

  “Reverdy. I put in a bid on the Caizene job I told you about, and we’ve got the job—delivery run to Crossroads, combination freight and passenger ship. It’s a major haulage company, I think after Crossroads they pack it off to the Rim somewhere, but that’s not our problem, thank all the gods. The bad news is, it won’t be ready to lift for another two weeks, maybe three. The worse news is, the pay’s lousy, basic rates, no bonus or incentive. I took it because you said you wanted off-world, but there’s a bail-out clause if you’ve changed your mind. I did get passenger rights if you want to try and sell them, but that’s up to you. Let me know tomorrow what you think. And, of course, if anything better comes in, I’ll bid on it, but not much is moving right now.” He paused, considering something on his invisible desktop, and the image vanished.

  Jian found the room remote lying discarded beside the bed, worked its controls to close Persephonet and light one of the newschannels. The image that appeared was all too familiar, the Han-Lu Interchange and the puff of smoke; and she made a face, killed the channel with a gesture. It would be very good to get off-world—even if they didn’t make money, and they wouldn’t at the basic rates, getting off Persephone was the best thing they could do right now. For a moment, she considered offering tickets, using the passenger cabins to make a little extra money, but rejected it almost instantly. It was too much work, not something she or Vaughn enjoyed or were good at. Better just to take the chance to get off Persephone, get safely into the Urban Worlds, away from this muddle of Realpeace and Dreampeace and all the rest of it. Right now, that should be payment enough.

  16

  Fanning Jones

  It was too late to call even Fortune by the time I got back to the goddow, but I called the next morning a little before noon. That was the earliest I thought I could expect her to be awake, and I still woke her. She didn’t complain, though, just listened while I told her what had happened and passed on Jian’s warning. Fortune snorted at that, but it was a perfunctory protest.

  “I can believe almost anything these days. Did you hear what happened?”

  I shook my head. “The minders hustled us out pretty quick.”

  “There was a clip in the system, set to project on the curtain once the show ended—they didn’t know about the new curtain call, that messed up their timing. A fire, and blue glyphs raining down to stop it, but I don’t think anyone would’ve stuck around for that ending.” She stopped to pull the neck of her yukata back together. “Look, do you still have any of the messages you’ve been getting?”

  I glanced at the file list, saw a broken icon sitting at the bottom of the screen. We were supposed to forward them to Security, but I was the only person who seemed to bother anymore. “I think so. Why?”

  “I want to see if your program is being written by the same people.”

  “If you could figure that out,” I said, “I think a lot of people would be grateful.”

  Fortune gave a tight smile. “Let me run some tests first, then I’ll be over. Say, two hours? And I’m bringing Celeste.”

  “Celeste?” I couldn’t stop myself from sounding surprised, and Fortune’s smile widened to genuine amusement.

  “Have headbox, will travel. Seriously, Fan, she’s the one who stopped it at the Tin Hau, so she really knows that architecture. She can tell us for sure if it’s the same people.”

  “That would be great,” I said. “I really appreciate it, Fortune.”

  “Oh, it’s very much our pleasure,” she answered, and broke the connection. I heard someone sigh behind me, and looked over my shoulder to see Tai watching from the kitchen alcove. I started to tell her the plan, but she spoke first.

  “Our?”

  “Um.” I had told the rest of the band about Celeste’s music, the way she’d explored the audiot’s capabilities—and Shadha was still riding me about it—but I hadn’t said anything about the construct’s other talents. “That was Fortune—she’s bringing Celeste over, to take a look at the messages we’ve been getting.”

  “I heard.” Tai looked at me, eyebrows raised under the multicolored mane of her hair. “She takes it very seriously. People-seriously.”

  I wasn’t going to lie to Tai, not about this. “Yes.”

  She didn’t say anything for a long moment, her face expressionless, only the flicker of her eyelid
s as she blinked once, then twice, giving her away. “And you think so, too.”

  “I told you about the music,” I answered. “I don’t know, but she’s the closest I’ve ever seen.”

  “Like you’ve seen so many constructs.”

  Tai had worked surface assembly for a year or two, like Jaantje; they’d both dealt with more Spelvin constructs than I’d seen in my entire life. “I know,” I said. “But she feels—yeh, I think she’s people, Tai.”

  “Gods above,” Tai said, and shook her head. “What a time for it, Fan.”

  “I know.”

  Fortune arrived exactly on time, Celeste’s headbox slung over her shoulder in a padded carrier. She nodded a greeting to Tai and to Jaantje, hovering in the door of his room, and set the box on the floor beside the media wall. “I haven’t had any trouble,” she said, “but then, I run some pretty heavy security.”

  “No scratches on the virtual locks?” Tai asked, and Fortune gave her a cool smile.

  “Not on mine. So what have you got here?”

  The headbox telltales were glowing green, and I could see the bright pinpoint of an active link: Celeste was alert and listening, too. “It’s the incomplete icon,” I said. “It’s just been vocal, before, and usually nasty.”

  Fortune nodded, absently, then held out her hand for the remote. “Do you mind?”

  “Make free,” I answered, and the others murmured their agreement as well. “You want a chair?”

  “Thanks.” Fortune was already deep in concentration, the playback mercifully directed into the virtual, so we didn’t have to listen, but she took a chair when I brought it, sat down close to the screen. I saw Tai and Jaantje exchange glances, somewhere between amused and irritated, and then Jaantje said, “Want a beer?”

  I made a face. “Too early. Juice?”

  “Haya.”

  Fortune ignored us, absorbed in the numbers now flickering past on the screen—checksums and other stuff I didn’t recognize—and Jaantje reached into the coolbox, brought out three boxes of the cheap mixed fruits. I took one, unfolded the corner, and was about to drink when a light flickered on the headbox.

  “Fortune,” Celeste said. “I want to play with the audiot.”

  For a second, I thought Fortune wasn’t going to answer, but then she leaned back from the controls to lock eyes with the transmitter. “I need your help here.”

  “After that?”

  “It’s up to Fanning,” Fortune answered, and broke the link to give me a look of pure mischief. “What do you say, Fan?”

  I glared at her—I’d taken a lot from Shadha lately—and Jaantje said, “After what you told us, Fan, I’d love to hear it.”

  Tai nodded. “Seriously.”

  “Fine, then,” I said. “Once you’re done, I’ll bring it out.”

  “Haya.” Fortune reached into the carryall, produced a length of cable. “You don’t mind if I hook her in?”

  I shook my head, and Jaantje said, “Make free.”

  Fortune nodded, and reached under the control board to fit the cable into the input socket. The transceiver flickered and went out, and then a new window opened on the media wall. Celeste—the copper karakuri Celeste, the face that looked so much like Fortune—looked out at us, smiling slightly. I wondered if that was a programmed resting state, or a genuine emotion.

  “Elvis Christ,” Tai said, not quite under her breath, and the face turned to look at her.

  “Who are you?”

  Tai blinked. “Li Niantai.”

  “Yes…”

  Before Celeste could say anything more, Fortune said, “I need your help now; Celeste.”

  “Yes?” The face swung toward her, pulling back a little so that it seemed to be looking down at her. It was just the karakuri’s faceplate, without the top of the skull or any hint of neck, so that it seemed paper-thin from some angles, but what was there was perfectly molded, copper skin over bones at once strong and delicate, impeccably modeled except for the empty eyes.

  “You cleaned out the Tin Hau systems. Is this code similar enough to have been written by the same people?”

  There was a moment of silence, the face hanging suspended against the warm black of the live screen, and then Celeste said, “The code is similar, but not identical. However, there are points of congruence. Standard analysis suggests a 73 percent probability of the same or a closely related constructor.”

  “What do you think?” Fortune asked.

  “I—it feels the same to me,” Celeste answered.

  It was a weird question, and a weirder answer, and I closed my eyes, trying to imagine what it would be like to be Celeste—to be a construct, native to the connections, the virtual rather than the real. What is the self, when there’s no physical body? Celeste was made of code, code that could be reconfigured, but that knew itself as distinct from the code that surrounded it—or did Celeste really understand herself to be someone? I rejected that doubt as soon as it formed: if there was one thing I was sure of, it was that Celeste had a sense of self. It was different, absolutely different from any human sense—so different that we were all, Celeste and the rest of us, groping for translations for concepts that maybe couldn’t exist in the other’s language except by the crudest and least accurate of metaphor—but it was self-consciousness by any definition that meant anything. For a second, I thought I had a glimpse of what Celeste might be, a collectivity of code that was nonetheless distinct and bounded—what human beings might be if their bodies were transparent on the microscopic level, so that we were constantly aware of all the various specialized cells, the immune system, the bloodstream, all the rest, even the mitochondria within the cells, as distinct parts of a tenuous whole. But then I tried to factor in time, the multiple cycles of the connections and the individual systems as well as the ebb and flow of shutdown, sleep, and activity, and that momentary vision vanished completely.

  “So what do we do about it?” Tai asked. “Should—can we go to Security with this?”

  I shook my head. “It’s only, what did she say, a 73 percent probability. I don’t think that they can do much with something that low.”

  Tai shook her head. “Since when was three-quarters—all right, almost three-quarters—low?”

  Jaantje shrugged, and looked at Fortune. “So should we tell Security?”

  “I’ll pass it on to Binnie, if you want,” she said. “Let him decide.”

  Jaantje nodded. “I—we’d be grateful.”

  “May I play with the audiot now?” Celeste asked, sounding more than ever like a polite child.

  “Why not?” Tai murmured.

  I’d had the box out the day before, plugged into my practice fx; it didn’t take long to drag the rig into the main room and couple it to one of the power nodes. I hestitated then, trying to remember how I’d had it set up in Fortune’s workshop, and Fortune said, “Run a standard cable to the three port on the headbox.”

  “Haya.” I made the connection, and flinched as light and sound exploded from the fx. I saw Jaantje’s lips move, swearing, and reached up to keep the noise from overloading my ear. Before I could touch the controls, the noise eased, focused on a single heavy chord, then cut out. The wild light steadied to a simple test pattern, a random file I kept to calibrate my projectors.

  “This is different,” Celeste said.

  I adjusted my ear anyway, heard my own voice faint and distant when I spoke. “The audiot is running through my fx. You have control of images as well as the sound.”

  “Can I ignore the images? Yes, I see I can.”

  The sound that came from the speakers was rich and complicated, bass-heavy—some of it was probably down below the threshold of human hearing, just from the feel of it in the air—but with a clear high end like nothing I’d ever heard before. It wasn’t any of the standard sounds, and not any of my custom patches, either, not even the two I hadn’t installed yet. I glanced at the display panel, and wasn’t surprised to see the custom lights glowing. Cele
ste walked that voice up through a couple of octaves, a standard pentatonic pattern, then switched to another—this one thinner, clearer in the high end—and kept going. She switched to a third voice, a familiar one, this time, a breathy wood-flute sound, as the notes got higher, kept going until the notes trembled at the edge of what was painful. Tai made a face, and I remembered that she could hear the mountain bats’ thin squeals: some of Celeste’s notes were definitely edging into the supersonic. Then, as abruptly as she’d started, she reversed the pattern, letting the voices slide back down the scale again, so fast that the notes and even the changing voices blurred into something that was very nearly a single sound. And then she began to play.

  I’d heard some of this before—she was still learning, still feeling out the machine’s parameters as well as the parameters of the form itself—and I looked at Tai and Jaantje. Jaantje’s mouth was open slightly, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing, but Tai was listening with that particular intensity she saved for things that mattered. Mostly it was just experimenting, playing with chords and sharp little riffs that sounded like metal breaking, but then she slid suddenly into something we all knew. Or that we thought we knew: Hati’s “Piece of the Grave” had never sounded quite like that. She’d taken it down an octave, sliding back into the bassy voice she’d used at the start, and she slowed it down a little, but you could still recognize the familiar melody. I lifted my hands and started to sign almost in spite of myself.

  *One foot on hot sand, one hand on the rock—* The last time I’d seen the next line signed was at the funeral, the ghost image of Micki Tantai dancing in a holodrum, and my movements faltered and died.

  Celeste slowed it even farther, began adding embellishments, the same sort of broken-metal riffs she’d used before, but darker, massy, the notes falling like stones. I heard Tai murmur something, and Jaantje shushed her, staring now with narrowed eyes at the headbox and the lights flickering on the audiot. And then it was over, and Celeste drifted off into something else, switching voices, turning to something I didn’t recognize.