by Kalina, Mark
She had no time for any reflection, though. Her attack hadn't shut down the enemy's lasers. There was just enough time, maybe, to get a comm-laser back to her mother-ship and get out before the interceptor melted and vaporized. She established the laser link and let go of the interceptor, momentarily surprised she was not more scared. It was all too likely she would die in the next second. All sensorium ceased.
And returned. Her mind probed and queried. She was still in the interceptor. She felt a fractional moment of regret; she was about to die. She tried to prepare herself for it, not really knowing how.
Nothing happened for a long second, and then memory came back.
It was a simulation. Not a real battle. She was in the interceptor, true, but the interceptor was in its bay aboard the Conquering Sun. It was just an exercise. She detected a hard-link out, and took it. There was a feeling of discontinuity and her eyes opened.
"Well, look who's still with us." Interceptor Commander Rikard Shank's voice was a bit hectoring, but not hostile.
"Argh," said Interceptor Pilot Alekzandra Neel, feeling her voice. She looked at herself and saw her own biosim avatar, dressed in the Fleet's skintight black duty uniform. Straight blond hair fell to slim shoulders. The rest of her was slim too, small breasted and long limbed. She had chosen the shape of the biosim avatar to be close to her own original body. Some people took the chance to don idealized or exotic forms, but Zandy had limited herself to nothing more exotic than legs that were a little longer than the ones her birth body had developed. She had copied her birth-body's face as closely as possible; most people agreed that her birth face had needed no enhancements.
"Argh. That was bad," she said.
"Yup. You almost made it back, Zandy. About a quarter second too slow. As it is, you're a 'regret-to-inform-you hero.'"
"Would have been, if it was real," said Zandy, trying to keep her voice casual. "Damn. What's the deal with yanking my beam, though?" She stretched, feeling the biosim body move at her will. It was a good simulacra of her original body, and after almost twenty thousand hours, two "tenkays," it was seamlessly comfortable to inhabit.
"Simulation dictated that the 'Sun had to do a priority defensive launch and too many of the PLAs were overheated."
"OK. Shit. I hate that. If I'd have had the beam, I could have saved time setting up the comm-link, transferred myself back from the interceptor faster... At least did my attack succeed? If I just died, I want to take an enemy assault-ship with me."
"You got a piece of it; simulation ran two hits from your spread, but neither one was fatal. You did manage about a sixty percent mission kill, though. Took out a lot of sensors and a couple of the bad guy's PLA turrets." Shank wore a real bio-avatar, a clone of his birth body. He was a broad shouldered man, but shorter than average. His short hair and precise, close-trimmed beard were fiery red.
Shank was a telestos and damn rich. A hetairos like Zandy, two full noble ranks lower, rarely had that sort of wealth, but she liked her biosim avatar. And not all of the few who could afford cloned bio-avatars chose to indulge. The captain wore a biosim himself.
"So I set up a kill for who?"
"Lersen."
"What? He's in Second Wave. What about the rest of my wave?"
"You were the last interceptor alive in First Wave. Katerzi and Wimms bought it from the enemy PLAs; they targeted our interceptor launch and those two were boosting at a steady acceleration and hadn't deployed their bow-shields. Rookie mistake and easy meat. They wanted to maximize tracking time for their main sensors and figured they were out of killing range from the enemy secondary arrays... and who wastes a primary laser array on shooting at an interceptor, right?"
"Shit," said Zandy. "The Captain's going to make them wish they'd died for real. Or you are."
"Right," said Shank, with a half-smile. "Tanner and Slobo both got zapped by an enemy 'ceptor. The sim coded one of the enemy interceptors to be a shit-hot ace pilot. And Handric got so energetic evading the 'hostile ace' that he unmasked from his bow shields and got cooked by an enemy secondary laser array."
"Fuck," said Zandy. Handric was the First Wave Leader, a long service pilot who had seen real combat in the last war. "So we lost the whole First Wave?"
"So we did. Second Wave lost a couple too. Fourth Wave did the emergency defensive launch; they came through OK. But the captain's not going to be happy," said Shank, sounding not too upset.
"No shit, Commander. My brain hurts."
"You ain't got one, Zandy. Neural nets can't hurt."
"Well, my head hurts anyway. Call it an atavistic response. Mind remembering when it used to be held in a brain, or something."
"Right... sure. If you want, you can say that where the medical officer can hear you, and Medbay will have you linked up and be digging around inside your head before end-of-shift," said Shank
"No thank you, Commander. Mind-fuck is not my recreation of choice."
"You did score a kill on an enemy interceptor. That was a good snap-shot you made."
"Thanks, for what it's worth. What about you, Commander? Let me guess, were you that 'enemy ace?'"
"No comment," said Shank, with a hint of a smile.
The two Fleet officers made their way back from the avatar holding chamber together, headed for the Captain's briefing room. The ship was in orbit and Zandy tried to relax as she held on to a hand grips that pulled her along one of the zero-gee people-mover rails. The corridors of the Hegemonic Assault-Ship Conquering Sun were broad and well lit, designed to be navigated as easily in free-fall as under acceleration. When she had reported aboard, Zandy had been surprised by the seeming waste of volume and mass. But it was bad for crew morale, and bad for mental stability, to live in cramped or cluttered spaces for prolonged durations, possibly for several tenkays at a time. So the ship had space devoted to human-shaped avatars, and all of the crew spent their free time in those avatars.
A daemon could go irrevocably mad if it spent too much time inhabiting an avatar that was too different from a human body. A daemon was a human mind.
But not a human brain. There were no biological brains aboard the vast assault-ship. The Conquering Sun carried a crew of more than a five hundred minds, each of them housed in neural networks and transferable between avatars: bodies that could be biological clones with neural nets in place of meat brains, or biosim androids that were almost indistinguishable from humans, or armored combat avatars that had a humanoid shape only to aid in the taking and holding of places that were built for humans. Or interceptors: sleek, armed parasite missiles that were hurled across space to fight and defend and kill.
The huge ship itself could be an avatar as well, or rather several. Each of its core systems could hold a daemon, and that mind would become that part of the ship.
But no human-born mind could live inside an inhuman avatar for too long. A few hundred hours without a break could lead to serious psychological stress. By a thousand hours, severe psychological harm was almost a certainty. A few more hundred hours on top of that and the harm would all too likely be irreparable, leaving the daemon with severe, dysfunctional psychosis, or, more likely, just irretrievably catatonic.
And no daemon could be in two avatars at once. Because a daemon was more than just data. A mind was a quantum data singularity. That discovery had eluded scientists working on artificial sentience and human mind emulation for generations. A sentient mind operated on a quantum level. A human brain was a naturally evolved biochemical quantum computer, and the mind it held was a complex quantum-state singularity. It could only be in one place at one time.
A mind could be uploaded from meat-brain to neural net, once; it destroyed the meat to do it. That was the irrevocable change that one accepted to join the Fleet and become one of the noble aristokratai. But once that change was made, a mind still could not be copied. A copy of the quantum singularity transferred it to a new location, but at the instant the new "copy" was made, the "old" copy collapsed into indeterminac
y.
A rough map could be made of the non-quantum-state structures of a mind, coarse memories and general traits of personality, but the actual living mind, the daemon, could not be duplicated. A neural network could hold the mind's quantum state, and a hyper-bandwidth connection could transmit it, but at any moment, the mind, the daemon, was in one place only, and the best copy or backup was no more than a memory photo-album, almost unreadable to any other daemon.
Zandy's biosim avatar body had a mind-map pre-loaded, making it comfortable to inhabit the body. Had the neural net been blank, it would have taken her longer to "possess" that avatar, and the disorientation would be severe. Her interceptor was likewise imprinted to her, along with a backup interceptor; it wasn't always possible to retrieve an interceptor in battle and the Conquering Sun carried hundreds of the tiny fighter-missiles, several for each pilot. A pilot could find herself forced to abandon one interceptor and then be sent out again in another one in the same battle.
Zandy could exist in any of them, interceptors or biosim avatar, trading between them as quickly as a hyper-bandwidth connection could be made. But if the fight had been real, she would have died, her daemon destroyed when the interceptor burned too quickly for the quantum state that was her to be transmitted back to the assault-ship.
It was a shock to be moving, carried along by the freefall people-mover, feeling the faint breeze of her passage against her avatar's face. It was a shock to be alive. She had really expected to die, in the last seconds of the sim. It was a standard trick to try to suppress the memory that a simulation was a simulation. It did not always work; memory was tricky to interpret and even harder to manipulate. This time it had worked; the exercise had been real, as far as she had been concerned... right up to the moment of her "death." Zandy suppressed a small shudder and tried to focus on the physical sensations she felt in her biosim avatar. The faint breeze on her face was pleasant.
Before she had joined the Fleet, when she was a demos, a commoner, with her mind in a biological brain inside her biological birth-body, Zandy had assumed that Fleet ships had no room for walking; she pictured them as solid, full of equipment and weapons, with their crews living in virtual reality and donning physical avatars only when they left the ship. That wasn't the case; the Conquering Sun had large internal spaces; she was big enough to afford the volume, but more, she, and her crew, needed those spaces.
Along with the un-copyable nature of daemons, the enormous resource cost of high fidelity virtual reality had been one of the unexpected truths of mind uploading.
Even the most powerful computers, even the massive computer systems that were the nerves of the Conquering Sun, were hard pressed to replicate all of reality to the point that a mind could not tell the difference. Mimicking reality perfectly, mapping all the trillions of actions and interactions of atoms and photons that defined every instant, was simply impossible; the universe itself was the only "computer" that could do that. But even coming close, close enough that a mind couldn't tell the difference, required a computer to model every stimulus for every sense and sensory nerve ending, for everybody in the simulation; a level of detail that used so much computing power that the cost was prohibitive. Coarse virtual reality simulations were easy, but, somehow, they always felt wrong. A human mind, meat or neural net, could subliminally detect the falsity of it. Always. A low-rez VR might be entertaining, but it was never real. It could simulate to a point, but never to a lifelike point. One always knew it was VR.
That was one of the reasons a daemon could not exist in a bodiless avatar, could not live in VR. A physical avatar interacted with the universe directly. It felt, heard, saw, smelled and tasted what was actually there; the nerve ending might be artificial, but there was no need to simulate all the myriad stimuli that they received; the sensations were real. Whereas even in the best VR, there was a falsity that would grow more and more clear, becoming more and more of a strain on the mind. And a simulation good enough to fool a daemon, even briefly, was enormously computer-processor intensive. The Conquering Sun had been forced to operate in a reduced capacity mode while they ran today's simulation.
The simulation had been a fiasco for First Wave, Zandy's unit. It could have been worse, Zandy thought. It could have been a simulation against another ship of the Fleet. Then there would be a winner to crow about it. As it was, it was just an internal sim; only a few minutes long, but then, for an interceptor pilot, a battle was always just a matter of minutes. This one had been sixteen minutes. If it had been real, it would have been the last sixteen minutes of her life.
All six of the First Wave pilots who had been in the simulation were at attention in the captain's briefing room. Interceptor Commander Shank had come in with Zandy, but had taken a seat, leaving her to stand before the captain. Captain Kai Ari-Kani and Executive Officer Lyn Psan were seated at the briefing table as well. It looked like this was going to be quite an inquisition.
Zandy stood at attention, one foot hooked under a stanchion to keep her from floating in freefall, and spared a little of her thoughts to be amused by the ritual; an uploaded mind in a biosim android body "standing" at attention in zero gravity in front of another android. On the other hand, such rituals were good for morale and discipline. The Fleet had tried to operate without them once, to no great success. The other pilots were at attention as well, some a bit unsteady in their biosim avatars. Getting "killed" in a high fidelity VR sim was hard on the "deceased." It was supposed to be, Zandy thought.
As a Junior Pilot Officer, she was the lowest rank here, a fact clearly shown by the sparse gold markings on the left shoulder of her uniform. The senior officers' uniforms bore streams and constellations of gold rank and status glyphs.
Captain Kai Ari-Kani wore a biosim avatar, but it was a custom piece, a perfect model of the biological body he would have had at his current age, if he had never been uploaded. He was a handsome man in an exotic manner, with pale skin, dark eyes, and a wide nose and mouth in a high-cheekboned face framed with a cap of wiry, curly dark hair. More than good looks, he had a presence that one sometimes saw from senior officers and some of the highest social-rank aristokratai. His eyes tracked along the faces of his First Wave pilots.
"I can't say that I'm happy with these results, telai," said the captain, formally polite, "in spite of the fact that we 'won' that battle." His voice was very smooth, though not at all soft.
"The simulation put us against a Coalition 'Victory' class assault-ship in a simple intercept scenario. Had it been real, we would have won. But interceptor pilot losses would have been high. Excessive."
"100% for First Wave," said Executive Officer Psan. Lyn Psan was a striking woman, broad shouldered, tall, with long space-black hair, held down in free-fall with an elegant pattern of silver mesh, and pure blue eyes that made the cliché about "eyes like lasers" seem plausible. Even so, Zandy thought that her beauty were almost as much a matter of her carriage and posture as her actual appearance. Zandy had no idea if her birth body had been as attractive as her current avatar. Even for a biosim avatar, Psan was notably beautiful; a matter of art that defied mass production.
The captain was facing Interceptor Commander Shank just then, who was sitting conspicuously straight backed and still, an unnatural posture in free-fall. Shank was the coordinating officer of all eight interceptor waves aboard. He was also, Zandy thought, very likely to have been the "enemy ace" who had so devastated their wave.
The captain kept his gaze moving over the pilots and the Interceptor Commander for a moment, and then nodded.
"Please, pilots, take seats. Take a moment if you need to, I know that getting 'killed' in a high fidelity simulation can be disorienting." The captain's gaze met Zandy's for a moment and he gave her a small sympathetic smile before continuing. "And now, tell me why you think things happened the way they did," said the captain.
An hour later, Zandy made it back to her quarters aboard the Hegemonic Assault-ship Conquering Sun feeling drained and edgy. H
er biosim body was not at all fatigued. It was a close analog of a biological human body and it could get tired, but her avatar had done nothing more strenuous than moving a few hundred meters through the ship in zero gravity. Her mind, though...
"Argh," Zandy said as she entered the small main room of her quarters.
"'Argh' is right," replied Jessa, pausing to give Zandy a measuring glance. "You look half... no, you look about three-quarters done in," she said judiciously.
Zandy looked down at her quarters-mate. Jessa Amnir was one of the three assault-ship primary pilots aboard; her duty was to control the entire massive assault-ship. In Zandy's estimation, calling herself and Jessa both a "pilot" implied a similarity that was simply not there. Fully loaded and at full power, with the engines on the verge of melting, the Conquering Sun could just manage three gees of acceleration, while Zandy's interceptor rarely spent a moment at under fifty gees.