by Dan Simmons
“Start at the beginning,” I said. “Who was murdered?”
Johnny sat up straight, an attentive schoolboy. There was no doubting his sincerity. He said, “I was.”
It took ten minutes to get the story out of him. When he was finished, I no longer thought he was crazy. I was. Or I would be if I took the job.
Johnny—his real name was a code of digits, letters, and cipher bands longer than my arm—was a cybrid.
I’d heard about cybrids. Who hasn’t? I once accused my first husband of being one. But I never expected to be sitting in the same room with one. Or to find it so damned attractive.
Johnny was an AI. His consciousness or ego or whatever you want to call it floated somewhere in the megadatasphere dataumplane of the TechnoCore. Like everyone else except maybe the current Senate CEO or the AIs’ garbage removers, I had no idea where the TechnoCore was. The AIs had peacefully seceded from human control more than three centuries ago—before my time—and while they continued to serve the Hegemony as allies by advising the All Thing, monitoring the dataspheres, occasionally using their predictive abilities to help us avoid major mistakes or natural disasters, the TechnoCore generally went about its own indecipherable and distinctly nonhuman business in privacy.
Fair enough, it seemed to me.
Usually AIs do business with humans and human machines via the datasphere. They can manufacture an interactive holo if they need to—I remember during the Maui-Covenant incorporation, the TechnoCore ambassadors at the treaty signing looked suspiciously like the old holo star Tyrone Bathwaite.
Cybrids are a whole different matter. Tailored from human genetic stock, they are far more human in appearance and outward behavior than androids are allowed to be. Agreements between the TechnoCore and the Hegemony allow only a handful of cybrids to be in existence.
I looked at Johnny. From an AI’s perspective, the beautiful body and intriguing personality sitting across the desk from me must be merely another appendage, a remote, somewhat more complex but otherwise no more important than any one of ten thousand such sensors, manipulators, autonomous units, or other remotes that an AI might use in a day’s work. Discarding “Johnny” probably would create no more concern in an AI than clipping a fingernail would bother me.
What a waste, I thought.
“A cybrid,” I said.
“Yes. Licensed. I have a Worldweb users visa.”
“Good,” I heard myself say. “And someone … murdered your cybrid and you want me to find out who?”
“No,” said the young man. He had brownish-red curls. Like his accent, the hairstyle eluded me. It seemed archaic somehow, but I had seen it somewhere. “It was not merely this body that was murdered. My assailant murdered me.”
“You?”
“Yes.”
“You as in the … ah … AI itself?”
“Precisely.”
I didn’t get it. AIs can’t die. Not as far as anyone in the Web knew. “I don’t get it,” I said.
Johnny nodded, “Unlike a human personality which can … I believe the consensus is … be destroyed at death, my own consciousness cannot be terminated. There was, however, as a result of the assault, an … interruption. Although I possessed … ah … shall we say duplicate recordings of memories, personality, et cetera, there was a loss. Some data were destroyed in the attack. In that sense, the assailant committed murder.”
“I see,” I lied. I took a breath. “What about the Al authorities … if there are such things … or the Hegemony cybercops? Wouldn’t they be the ones to go to?”
“For personal reasons,” said the attractive young man whom I was trying to see as a cybrid, “it is important—even necessary—that I do not consult these sources.”
I raised an eyebrow. This sounded more like one of my regular clients.
“I assure you,” he said, “it is nothing illegal. Nor unethical. Merely … embarrassing to me on a level which I cannot explain.”
I folded my arms across my chest. “Look, Johnny. This is a pretty half-assed story. I mean, I only have your word that you’re a cybrid. You might be a scam artist for all I know.”
He looked surprised. “I had not thought of that. How would you like me to show you that I am what I say I am?”
I did not hesitate a second. “Transfer a million marks to my checking account in TransWeb,” I said.
Johnny smiled. At the same instant my phone rang and the image of a harried man with the TransWeb code block floating behind him said, “Excuse me, M. Lamia, but we wondered with a … ah … deposit of this size if you would be interested in investigating our long-term savings options or our mutual assured market possibilities?”
“Later,” I said.
The bank manager nodded and vanished.
“That could’ve been a simulation,” I said.
Johnny’s smile was pleasant. “Yes, but even that would be a satisfactory demonstration, would it not?”
“Not necessarily.”
He shrugged. “Assuming I am what I say I am, will you take the case?”
“Yeah.” I sigheld. “One thing though. My fee isn’t a million marks. I get five hundred a day plus expenses.”
The cybrid nodded. “Does that mean you will take the case?”
I stood up, put on my hat, and pulled an old coat from a rack by the window. I bent over the lower desk drawer, smoothly sliding my father’s pistol into a coat pocket. “Let’s go,” I said.
“Yes,” said Johnny. “Go where?”
“I want to see where you were murdered.”
Stereotype has it that someone born on Lusus hates to leave the Hive and suffers from instant agoraphobia if we visit anything more open to the elements than a shopping mall. The truth of it is, most of my business comes from …, and leads to … offworld. Skip-tracing deadbeats who use the farcaster system and a change of identity to try to start over. Finding philandering spouses who think rendezvousing on a different planet will keep them safe from discovery. Tracking down missing kids and absent parents.
Still, I was surprised to the point of hesitating a second when we stepped through the Iron Pig Concourse farcaster onto an empty stone plateau which seemed to stretch to infinity. Except for the bronze rectangle of the farcaster portal behind us, there was no sign of civilization anywhere. The air smelled like rotten eggs; The sky was a yellow-brown cauldron of sick-looking clouds. The ground around us was gray and scaled and held no visible life, not even lichen. I had no idea how far away the horizon really was, but we felt high and it looked far, and there was no hint of trees, shrubs, or animal life in the distance either.
“Where the hell are we?” I asked. I had been sure that I knew all of the worlds in the Web.
“Madhya,” said Johnny, pronouncing it something like “Mudye.”
“I never heard of it,” I said, putting one hand in my pocket and finding the pearl-handled grip of Dad’s automatic.
“It’s not officially in the Web yet,” said the cybrid. “Officially, it’s a colony of Parvati. But it’s only light-minutes from the FORCE base there and the farcaster connections have been set up before Madhya joins the Protectorate.”
I looked at the desolation. The sulphur-dioxide stench was making me ill and I was afraid it was going to ruin my suit. “Colonies? Nearby?”
“No. There are several small cities on the other side of the planet.”
“What’s the nearest inhabited area?”
“Nanda Devi. A town of about three hundred people. It’s more than two thousand kilometers to the south.”
“Then why put a farcaster portal here?”
“Potential mining sites,” said Johnny. He gestured toward the gray plateau. “Heavy metals. The consortium authorized over a hundred farcaster portals in this hemisphere for easy access once the development began.”
“Okay,” I said. “It’s a good place for a murder. Why’d you come here?”
“I don’t know. It was part of the memory section lost.”
“I don’t know that either.”
“What do you know?”
The young man put his graceful hands in his pockets. “Whoever … whatever … attacked me used a type of weapon known in the Core as an AIDS II virus.”
“What’s that?”
“AIDS II was a human plague disease back long before the Hegira,” said Johnny. “It disabled the immune system. This … virus … works the same with an AI. In less than a second it infiltrates security systems and turns lethal phagocyte programs against the host … against the AI itself. Against me.”
“So you couldn’t have contracted this virus naturally?”
Johnny smiled. “Impossible. It’s comparable to asking a shooting victim if he might not have fallen on the bullets.”
I shrugged. “Look, if you want a datumnet or AI expert, you’ve come to the wrong woman. Other than accessing the sphere like twenty billion other chumps, I know zilch about the ghost world.” I used the old term to see if it would get a rise out of him.
“I know,” said Johnny, still equable. “That’s not what I want you to do.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Find out who brought me here and killed me. And why.”
“All right. Why do you think this is where the murder took place?”
“Because this is where I regained control of my cybrid when I was … reconstituted.”
“You mean your cybrid was incapacitated while the virus destroyed you?”
“Yes.”
“And how long did that last?”
“My death? Almost a minute before my reserve persona could be activated.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help myself.
“What is amusing, M. Lamia?”
“Your concept of death,” I said.
The hazel eyes looked sad. “Perhaps it is amusing to you, but you have no idea what a minute of … disconnection … means to an element of the TechnoCore. It is eons of time and information. Millennia of noncommunication.”
“Yeah,” I said, able to hold back my own tears without too much effort. “So what did your body, your cybrid do while you were changing personae tapes or whatever?”
“I presume it was comatose.”
“It can’t handle itself autonomously?”
“Oh, yes, but not when there’s a general systems failure.”
“So where did you come to?”
“Pardon me?”
“When you reactivated the cybrid, where was it?”
Johnny nodded in understanding. He pointed to a boulder less than five meters from the farcaster. “Lying there.”
“On this side or the other side?”
“The other side.”
I went over and examined the spot. No blood. No notes. No murder weapons left lying about. Not even a footprint or indication that Johnny’s body had lain there for that eternity of a minute. A police forensics team might have read volumes into the microscopic and biotic clues left there, but all I could see was hard rock.
“If your memory’s really gone,” I said, “how do you know someone else came here with you?”
“I accessed the farcaster records.”
“Did you bother to check the mystery person or person’s name on the universal card charge?”
“We both farcast on my card,” said Johnny.
“Just one other person?”
“Yes.”
I nodded. Farcaster records would solve every interworld crime if the portals were true teleportation; the transport data record could have recreated the subject down to the last gram and follicle. Instead, a farcaster essentially is just a crude hole ripped in space/time by a phased singularity. If the farcaster criminal doesn’t use his or her own card, the only data we get are origination and destination.
“Where’d you two farcast from?” I asked.
“Tau Ceti Center.”
“You have the portal code?”
“Of course.”
“Let’s go there and finish this conversation,” I said. “This place stinks to high heaven.”
TC2, the age-old nickname for Tau Ceti Center, is certainly the most crowded world in the Web. Besides its population of five billion people scrabbling for room on less than half the land area of Old Earth, it has an orbital ring ecology that is home for half a billion more. In addition to being the capital of the Hegemony and home of the Senate, TC2 is the business nexus for Webtrade. Naturally the portal number Johnny had found brought us to a six-hundred-portal terminex in one of the biggest spires in New London, one of the oldest and largest city sections.
“Hell,” I said, “let’s get a drink.”
There was a choice of bars near the terminex and I picked one that was relatively quiet: a simulated ship’s tavern, dark, cool, with plenty of fake wood and brass. I ordered a beer. I never drink the hard stuff or use Flashback when on a case. Sometimes I think that need for self-discipline is what keeps me in the business.
Johnny also ordered a beer, a dark, German brew bottled on Renaissance Vector. I found myself wondering what vices a cybrid might have. I said:
“What else did you find out before coming to see me?”
The young man opened his hands. “Nothing.”
“Shit,” I said reverently. “This is a joke. With all the powers of an AI at your disposal, you can’t trace your cybrid’s whereabouts and actions for a few days prior to your … accident?”
“No.” Johnny sipped his beer. “Rather, I could but there are important reaons why I do not want my fellow AIs to find me investigating.”
“You suspect one of them?”
Instead of answering, Johnny handed me a flimsy of his universal card purchases. “The blackout caused by my murder left five standard days unaccounted for. Here are the card charges for that time.”
“I thought you said you were only disconnected for a minute.”
Johnny scratched his cheek with one finger. “I was lucky to lose only five days’ worth of data,” he said.
I waved over the human waiter and ordered another beer. “Look,” I said, “Johnny … whoever you are, I’ll never be able to get an angle on this case unless I know more about you and your situation. Why would someone want to kill you if they know you’ll be reconstituted or whatever the hell it is?”
“I see two possible motives,” said Johnny over his beer.
I nodded. “One would be to create just the memory loss they succeeded in getting,” I said. “That would suggest that, whatever it was they wanted you to forget, it’d occurred or come to your attention in the past week or so. What’s the second motive?”
“To send me a message,” said Johnny. “I just don’t know what it is. Or from who.”
“Do you know who would want to kill you?”
“No.”
“No guesses at all?”
“None.”
“Most murders,” I said, “are acts of sudden, mindless rage committed by someone the victim knows well. Family. A friend or lover. A majority of the premeditated ones are usually carried out by someone close to the victim.”
Johnny said nothing. There was something about his face that I found incredibly attractive—a sort of masculine strength combined with a feminine sense of awareness. Perhaps it was the eyes.
“Do AIs have families?” I asked. “Feuds? Squabbles? Lovers’ spats?”
“No.” He smiled slightly. “There are quasi-family arrangements, but they share none of the requirements of emotion or responsibility that human families exhibit. AI ‘families’ are primarily convenient code groups for showing where certain processing trends originated.”
“So you don’t think another AI attacked you?”
“It’s possible.” Johnny rotated his glass in his hands. “I just do not see why they would attack me through my cybrid.”
“Easier access?”
“Perhaps. But it complicates things for the assailant. An attack in datumplane would have bee
n infinitely more lethal. Also, I do fail to see any motive for another AI. It makes no sense. I’m a threat to no one.”
“Why do you have a cybrid, Johnny? Maybe if I understand your role in things, I could get at a motive.”
He pickcd up a pretzel and played with it. “I have a cybrid … in some ways I am a cybrid, because my … function … is to observe and react to human beings. In a sense, I was human once myself.”
I frowned and shook my head. So far nothing he’d said had made sense.
“You’ve heard of personality retrieval projects?” he asked.
“No.”
“A standard year ago, when the FORCE sims recreated the personality of General Horace Glennon-Height to see what made him such a brilliant general? It was in ail the news.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I am … or was … an earlier and much more complicated retrieval project. My core persona was based on a pre-Hegira Old Earth poet. Ancient. Born late eighteenth century Old Calendar.”
“How the hell can they reconstruct a personality that lost in time?”
“Writings,” said Johnny. “His letters. Diaries. Critical biographies. Testimony of friends. But mostly through his verse. The sim recreates the environment, plugs in the known factors, and works backward from the creative products. Voilà—a persona core. Crude at first but, by the time I came into being, relatively refined. Our first attempt was a twentieth-century poet named Ezra Pound. Our persona was opinionated to the point of absurdity, prejudiced beyond rationality, and functionally insane. It took a year of tinkering before we discovered that the persona was accurate; it was the man who had been nuts. A genius but nuts.”
“And then what?” I said. “They build your personality around a dead poet. Then what?”
“This becomes the template upon which the AI is grown,” said Johnny. “The cybrid allows me to carry out my role in the datumplane community.”
“As poet?”
Johnny smied again. “More as poem,” he said.
“A poem?”
“An ongoing work of art … but not in the human sense. A puzzle perhaps. A variable enigma which occasionally offers unusual insights into more serious lines of analysis.”