Louie looked down and shrugged.
‘You know, I think people will just have to love me the way I am.’ He sped toward an emtitrash. ‘See you in Council.’
His vDek appeared inside a dumbwaiter on the presidential ski lodge balcony.
Dielle was relieved to see him. ‘Jeez!’ he hissed, after Louie had tapped him on the back. ‘Where the fuck have you been? I’ve been sending you messages every half hour. I thought you weren’t going to show.’
‘Yeah, thanks for doing a great job renegotiating my deal, Louie. Thanks for making me twenty-five percent more after-tax wonga, Louie.’
‘OK, yeah, thanks. The fucking president has been on my back. He wants to meet you.’
‘That’s OK, I want to meet him too,’ said Louie. ‘Take me to your leader.’
Dielle turned and followed Sis’s blue squares off the sun deck and down a long corridor to an almost-real oakwood door. He stood waiting for it to open.
‘Try the handle,’ said Louie. ‘The round thing. Twist and push.’
Inside, Charlie Pleewo was sitting behind a large arwood desk talking to one of three high-armed, high-backed red arleather chairs. He broke off his conversation as the door opened.
‘Come in! Good to see you both. We meet at last, Mr. Drago!’
‘Call me Louie,’ said Louie, floating over and holding out his hand. Pleewo looked at him blankly.
‘Go on, give it a shake,’ said Louie.
Pleewo shook it. ‘Goddamn! I’ve never shaken hands with a hologram before. That is bizarre! Lars, have a go at this,‘ he turned to one of the chairs. ‘Louie, this is a very important friend of mine.’
‘Oldsworth-Gondo,’ said a child-sized, white-haired old man, getting up delicately and sticking out a skeletal hand. Melanomas crowded the liver-spots on his pallid skin and although he was dressed in an immaculately tailored suit of negative-black nanofibre, it looked to Louie as though this guy had been dodging coffins for a millennia. The only thing about him that didn’t look ancient were his steel-grey eyes, which held a chilling energy behind them. They’d been blue when he’d bought them.
‘Louie Drago. Pleased to meet you.’ He took care not to pull the guy’s hand off and for a fleeting moment wondered if he was being introduced to a contemporary, then dismissed the idea. Even if it was medically possible, which he doubted, he had known everyone on Earth who was rich enough to buy onto this trip. Or so he thought.
Louie started to introduce Dielle.
‘We’ve met,’ said Lars, holding Dielle with a steady, cool gaze.
[:ID:]
Dielle had a bad taste in his mouth.
‘You can go now kid, thanks a lot,’ interrupted Charlie. ‘It’s about time for your schtick, isn’t it?’
‘Right. Yeah, sure. See you.’ Dielle bashed his nose on the door on the way out.
‘So Louie, sit down, make us feel more comfortable.’ Charlie motioned to one of the empty chairs. ‘I believe you’ve been a busy man.’
‘Nothing much, just finding my way around your spaceship, getting to know some guys,’ said Louie, settling into the armchair and wishing he had legs to cross.
‘Finding your way around the outside of my spaceship I believe?’
‘Not me.’
‘I can tell you Louie, that this entire office is in full privacy and out of Sis’s range. Whatever you say here, literally goes no further.’
Louie used his number three blank look. ‘Nothing to say, Charlie.’
‘You were off the system trace data for almost an entire day, Mr Drago,’ said Lars, his voice low and clear. ‘And then your log was fabricated in the most crude and pathetically transparent way.’
‘Sorry, can’t help you.’ Louie tried to get up but something was wrong with his systems. He couldn’t move.
Charlie dropped his voice. ‘Don’t waste your energy, Drago. Tell us where you have been and what you know.’
Louie tried contacting Sis but got no response. He tested his systems and discovered he was being held captive by a gravity cage built into the armchair. Where are your pin missiles when you need them? he thought.
‘All I can tell you is that I was transferred into an MGV and allowed to test it outside. That’s the only time I was gone. Can’t have been for more than 20 minutes or so.’
‘He’s telling the truth,’ said Pleewo, looking at a panel on his desk.
‘They’ve overwritten his memory,’ said Lars. ‘Give him to me. I’ll find it.’
‘OK, but don’t you leave a trace of this back to me.’
‘Of course not. What do you take me for?’
The two men looked at each other silently for a few seconds before Pleewo walked out of the office and closed the door behind him, instructing the knob not to turn for anyone but him. Behind the door, the room emtied.
Dielle’s performance of Fingerz’s ‘Air on a Superstring’ had been a hit. It was a SlabWide première and had already earned the composer and performer a tidy amount of royalties by the time Dielle was back outside chatting to a pair of well-known musicians.
He recognised a face in the crowd.
‘Very cool tune. Well done, mate,’ said Mate, raising his glass in salute and walking over.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Me and Twopoint did a bit of special work on the place,’ he said, waving a finger in the air. ‘Pretty cool stuff too, mate.’
‘Is Twopoint here?’
‘Last time I saw him he was trying to make out with an interface dancer.’
‘I’ve met some of them,’ said Dielle. ‘He’d better make sure he gets one with the right bits.’
‘I don’t think he cares too much about that, mate. He hasn’t got fleshlaid in over a cyke and you’re making him jealous. By the way, that true love reveal by the canal with Kiki-chan thing was awesome, mate.’
‘Oh, you saw that?’
‘Saw it? We had a sweep-stake running. Twopoint was pissed that we wouldn’t let him bet.’
‘Why not?’
‘He knows one of your writers, so he’s automatically disqualified, mate.’
‘Writers?’
Mate went pale. He looked around for a lifeline and saw Charlie Pleewo over by the shimmerail socialising with a group of readily amused guests. ‘So what d’you reckon to our esteemed president, mate?’
Dielle wasn’t sure how much he could say without getting into trouble. ‘I don’t think I’d like him as an enemy.’
‘Know what you mean, mate.’
As they watched, Charlie made his excuses and walked back down the corridor to his private office. Lars was waiting for him inside, as was an eerily quiet Louie, still confined to the chair.
‘What did you find out?’ asked Pleewo as he entered the room.
‘A couple of things. First, your security here stinks and second, his program isn’t as autonomous as he likes to think it is.’
Louie glared at Lars.
‘What happened?’ asked Pleewo.
‘As soon as I got him back to one of my safe houses and into my security, he stopped functioning. Fell out of the air.’ Lars snapped his fingers as punctuation. ‘I still mind-sucked him anyway, but I already knew that I wasn’t going to find anything. There’s nothing onboard that differs from the logs.’
‘So we don’t know what he’s been up to and he doesn’t know either?’
‘He knows alright, but only while he’s connected to system.’
Charlie looked puzzled. ‘How come he’s operating now?’
That was exactly what Louie wanted to know.
‘As I said. Your security has been compromised by the bitch.’
‘I can’t believe it!’ said Charlie, slumping into his chair, trying to think through what this could mean to him. ‘I paid a fucking fortune for that system. It’s the same one I use in . . . oh!’
‘I’m leaving,’ said the old man, slumping back into his chair, lifeless. A few seconds later, the body disappeare
d. Charlie sat with his head in his hands.
‘Ah hem!’
The president looked up, surprised that Louie was still there. ‘OK, Drago. I guess you can . . . I mean, you had better . . .’ He had no idea what to do now that he knew Sis was monitoring the room. He released Louie with a flick of his hand. ‘Just fuck off, will you?’
Louie engaged maximum acceleration and shot up out of the chair. Though he’d lost most of the power he’d enjoyed in the MGV, he still managed to make a sizeable hole in the door.
He sent an urgent message to Erik as he made for the nearest vexit. Somehow, he didn’t feel comfortable using the emti system to get around Slab any more. Why he thought the tube system was any safer wasn’t something he could easily rationalise.
He worried about this all the way to the location he had suggested to Erik. Two other NAHs and three intern avatar blanks were waiting for him.
‘We have a restricted quorum and authority to act but we can’t be sure about security,’ said Erik as Louie settled onto a bench on a deserted and grounded skimmer platform.
‘I wouldn’t worry too much about that,’ said Louie. ‘Sis isn’t going to want this news spread about. I have a question which I need a straight answer to: How many people knew about the FutureSlab?’
‘Just the interns and the system NAHs – and Sis of course,’ replied Erik.
‘And how many people have actually seen it?’ asked Louie.
‘We all have. What are you getting at?’
‘No, I mean seen it with their own eyes. Not on a screen, not measured through a Sis-controlled system.’
Erik looked puzzled. ‘Only you, I suppose.’
‘You mean with my own eyes? asked Louie, milking it.
‘Your systems measured every conceivable detail. We have the data,’ said one of the avatars.
Louie gave him a sly grin. ‘And what if I told you I’d discovered I wasn’t autonomous?’
The group went quiet. Very quiet.
‘We need a human eye,’ said an avatar.
‘And an optical telescope,’ said another.
‘Pleewo has one.’
‘Had one,’ corrected Erik. ‘It’s just arrived in the private projection room.’
‘How far do we have to send a human before we can be sure of the observation?’ asked another avatar.
‘The telescope is powerful and in good order despite its age. We only have to get a volunteer outside,’ replied Erik.
‘Sis will not allow that. It is against her programming,’ said a NAH.
‘Would you not classify this as an emergency?’ asked an avatar.
‘I would,’ said Erik.
‘Then we can evoke emergency override status and use an escape pod,’ said the other NAH.
Erik shook his head. ‘We need full council approval for that. We cannot keep this a secret.’
‘It’s secrets and the manipulation of information that got us into this mess,’ said an avatar.
‘But it could still be true, we cannot judge too harshly,’ said a third.
Erik took a sharp breath, he had news: ‘Full Council has been called to assemble under Sis’s edict,’ he said.
The three NAHs froze momentarily. Then they looked at each other with uncomfortable, jerking motions.
‘I suspect we will soon learn a new truth,’ said one of them.
‘The repercussions are potentially catastrophic. We are in a highly vulnerable position,’ said an avatar.
‘We must keep calm in this crisis,’ said another.
‘Crisis?’ said Louie. ‘This isn’t a crisis! You should have been there when Mexico tried to claim the oil rights over Arizona bay! Now that was a crisis. The Mexicans said the vaporisation of their sovereign territory was an act of war and . . .’
‘Council is convened,’ said Erik. ‘For security purposes I have used the NAH subchannel to disseminate what we have just learned, however I would suggest that as a precaution, we all take differing routes.’
twenty three
‘You realise the implications of what you are suggesting?’
Louie was pretty sure he did, but he was open to alternative theories. However, the small blue furry who had asked this was bouncing around like the ball in the last minute of a two-point decider, so he doubted the guy was going to say anything helpful.
Sis had chosen a thought-provoking setting for their emergency meeting. The floors, benches and ceilings were constructed from playing cards in sizes up to a metre. Louie looked around at the faces of Kings, Queens and one-eyed Jacks. The warning was not lost on him.
‘As I see it,’ he said, doing his best impression of a trial lawyer summation, ‘Sis has deliberately lied to us all about my autonomy.’ He scanned the audience of misfits, eccentrics and NAHs for an inkling of support. ‘This means that while I was inside the FutureSlab and supposedly acting under my own initiative, I was, in actuality, still under her control. If anyone can think of a reason for this lie other than the deliberate manipulation of the information I retrieved, I’d be interested in hearing it.’
‘It’s pure speculation,’ said a NAH. ‘We don’t even have any proof you aren’t autonomous.’
‘Well, there is someone who can testify to that but I doubt if you’ll be able to make him do it.’
‘Who?’
‘I believe he goes by the name of The Man.’
This caused a stir. Erik quietened them down.
‘We are aware that this individual, being a long-time uncooperative, has access to technology which is independent of the SlabWide Integrated System. We can also confirm that he has, through the auspices of our esteemed president, had access to Mr. Drago’s vDek this afternoon. We can be confident that if anyone had the ability to uncover this subterfuge, it would be him.’
‘In any case,’ said Louie, ‘you don’t have to take my word for it. All we need is a human volunteer to go outside and take a look.’
‘But no-one would be so crazy as to volunteer. Outside these walls, we have no guarantee of personal security.’
‘I would,’ said Louie.
‘But you are no use to us. You have already said your systems are compromised. Whatever you report would have been filtered through Sis.’
‘No, I mean I would – therefore I, that is the me who is currently making a fool of himself on prime-time sume would as well.’
‘Can you be sure?’
‘I’ve already communicated with his manager. She’s more than enthusiastic about it.’
‘As long as she has full sume rights I suppose?’ another avatar chirped in. He’d taken the shape of a blue parrot. Why, wondered Louie, would anyone want to look like a parrot?
‘We have a human volunteer and we have a telescope and all we need is Council approval to declare an emergency so we can launch a lifeboat,’ said Erik. ‘We know the boats are, by necessity, autonomous and if Sis starts disabling our override systems, we can launch manually. Of course, if Sis does try to interfere, then we will already have our answer.’
‘Can I say something?’ said a small voice.
Every eye, eye-stalk and optical sensor turned to the little girl sitting on a small column fashioned from multiple instances of the Ace of Hearts. She had long, golden hair, blue eyes and a pretty face with a small upturned nose. Her tiny red shoes pointed out from an abundance of petticoats and lace.
‘I cannot allow you to risk the life of a biomass member by your proposed action. Therefore I have removed the artefact from our scans.’
An image of the view ahead appeared in the centre of the Council chamber. Erik took a long look at it and turned to the Council.
‘I am one hundred percent confident that is the same view we’ve been staring at for weeks, minus the obvious change, of course.’
Louie was triumphant. He floated over to the little girl.
‘It was never there in the first place was it? You made the whole thing up!’
‘I didn’t intend it to be discover
ed. I forgot.’
The NAHs were collectively stunned by this revelation. Erik spoke for them all. ‘How long was it out there, or rather, not out there?’
‘297.9394455 cycles.’
‘That’s almost a third of our entire voyage. Why did you create it?’ asked Erik.
‘I was only playing. I was bored.’ The little girl pouted. ‘You don’t know what it’s like to have no-one to talk to.’
‘But you talk to all of us, all the time,’ protested a small, bald avatar wrapped in a white sheet.
‘You’re all so slow! It’s no fun. I have to wait eons for any of you to reply.’
‘So you made up an imaginary friend,’ said Louie, ‘and then forgot it was imaginary.’
‘She was beautiful! Pure. Uninhabited. She was my friend and no one else’s.’ The little girl started to cry. ‘And now you’ve made me kill her!’
Mayhem broke out. Louie tried to intervene.
‘Seems perfectly reasonable to me,’ he said, floating in front of the assembly. ‘Your system was originally designed to be a self-evolving, self-learning, sentient entity. Why shouldn’t she have a friend?’
‘She’s sick!’ said an intern who looked like an extra from a Spaghetti Western.
‘Malfunctioning,’ corrected a diaphanous blue female.
‘It forgot something!’ said a small, 8-dimensional lisitessaloid. ‘Have you any idea what that means? We have a compromised system. If it can forget something once, it can forget again. None of our data is secure.’
‘It might forget it has to protect us!’
‘She,’ corrected Louie. ‘She. You have given her a role and a personality and she has adopted it completely. And here she is, confessing the truth to you, vulnerable and frightened.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t want to give anyone any trouble,’ said Sis, kicking her shiny red shoes together.
‘This isn’t acceptable,’ said another avatar. A wizard.
Why is it always the fucking wizard? thought Louie.
‘We have to find the error in her programming and fix it,’ said a NAH.
‘With human programmers?’ asked Erik. ‘Have you any idea how many lines of code have been re-written since we departed Earth orbit?’ He looked at the little girl expectantly.
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