by Dan Simmons
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“It probably does not matter. I very much doubt if my … purpose … was the cause of the assault.”
“What do you think was the cause?”
“I have no idea.”
I felt us closing a circle. “All right,” I said. “I’ll try to find out what you were doing and who you were with during these lost five days. Is there anything besides the credit flimsy that you can think of to help?”
Johnny shook his head. “You know, of course, why it is important for me to know the identity and motive of my assailant?”
“Sure,” I said, “they might try it again.”
“Precisely.”
“How can I get hold of you if I need to?”
Johnny passed me an access chip.
“A secure line?” I said.
“Very.”
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll get back to you if and when I get some information.”
We moved out of the bar and toward the terminex. He was moving away when I took three quick steps and grabbed his arm. It was the first time that I had touched him. “Johnny. What’s the name of the Old Earth poet they resurrected …”
“Retrieved.”
“Whatever. The one they built your AI persona on?”
The attractive cybrid hesitated. I noticed that his eyelashes were very long. “How can it be important?” he asked.
“Who knows what’s important?”
He nodded. “Keats,” he said. “Born in A.D. 1795. Died of tuberculosis in 1821. John Keats.”
Following someone through a series of farcaster changes is damn near impossible. Especially if you want to remain undetected. The Web cops can do it, given about fifty agents assigned to the task, plus some exotic and damned expensive high-tech toys, not to mention the cooperation of the Transit Authority. For a solo, the task is almost impossible.
Still, it was fairly important for me to see where my new client was headed.
Johnny did not look back as he crossed the terminex plaza. I moved to a nearby kiosk and watched through my pocket-sized imager as he punched codes on a manual diskey, inserted his card, and stepped through the glowing rectangle.
The use of the manual diskey probably meant that he was headed for a general access portal since private ’caster codes are usually imprinted on eyes-only chips. Great. I’d narrowed his destination down to approximately two million portals on a hundred and fifty-some Web worlds and half that many moons.
With one hand I pulled the red “lining” out of my overcoat while I hit replay on the imager, watching through the eyepiece as it magnified the diskey sequence. I tugged out a red cap to go with my new red jacket and pulled the brim low over my face. Moving quickly across the plaza, I queried my comlog about the nine-digit transfer code I’d seen on the imager. I knew the first three digits meant the world of Tsingtao-Hsishuang Panna—I’d memorized all the planetary prefixes—and was told an instant later that the portal code led to a residential district in the First Expansion city of Wansiehn.
I hurried to the first open booth and ’cast there, stepping out onto a small terminex plaza paved in worn brick. Ancient oriental shops leaned against one another, eaves of their pagoda roofs hanging over narrow side streets. People thronged the plaza and stood in doorways and, while most of those in sight were obviously descendants of the Long Flight exiles who settled THP, many were offworlders. The air smelled of alien vegetation, sewage, and cooking rice.
“Damn,” I whispered. There were three other farcaster portals there and none were in constant use. Johnny could have farcast out immediately.
Instead of ’casting back to Lusus, I spent a few minutes checking the plaza and side streets. By this time the melanin pill I’d swallowed had worked and I was a young black woman—or man, it was hard to tell in my trendy red balloon jacket and polarized visor, strolling idly while taking pictures with my tourist imager.
The trace pellet I’d dissolved in Johnny’s second German beer had had more than enough time to work. The UV-positive microspores were almost hanging in the air by now—I could almost follow the trail of exhalations he had left. Instead, I found a bright yellow handprint on a dark wall (bright yellow to my especially fitted visor of course, invisible out of the UV spectrum) and then followed the trail of vague blotches where saturated clothing had touched market stalls or stone.
Johnny was eating in a Cantonese restaurant less than two blocks from the terminex plaza. The frying food smelled delicious but I restrained myself from entering—checking prices in alley bookstalls and haggling in the market for almost an hour before he finished, returned to the plaza, and farcast out. This time he used a chip code—a private portal, certainly, possibly a private home—and I took two chances by using my pilot-fish card to follow him. Two chances because first the card is totally illegal and would someday cost me my license if caught—less than likely if I kept using Daddy Silva’s obscenely expensive but aesthetically perfect shapechanger chips—and, second, I ran a better than even chance of ending up in the living room of Johnny’s house … never an easy situation to talk one’s way out of.
It was not his living room. Even before I’d located the street signs I recognized the familiar extra tug of gravity, the dim, bronze light, the scent of oil and ozone in the air, and knew I was home on Lusus.
Johnny had ’cast into a medium-security private residential tower in one of the Bergson Hives. Perhaps that was why he’d chosen my agency—we were almost neighbors, less than six hundred klicks apart.
My cybrid was not in sight. I walked purposefully so as not to alert any security vids programmed to respond to loitering. There was no residents’ directory, no numbers or names on the apartment doorways, and no listings accessible by comlog. I guessed that there were about twenty thousand residential cubbies in East Bergson Hive.
The telltales were fading as the spore soup died, but I checked only two of the radial corridors before I found a trail. Johnny lived far out on a glass-floored wing about a methane lake. His palmlock showed a faintly glowing handprint. I used my cat-burglar tools to take a reading of the lock and then I ’cast home.
All in all, I’d watched my man go out for Chinese food and then go home for the night. Enough accomplished for one day.
BB Surbringer was my AI expert. BB worked in Hegemony Flow Control Records and Statistics and spent most of his life reclining on a free-fall couch with half a dozen microleads running from his skull while he communed with other bureaucrats in datumplane. I’d known him in college when he was a pure cyberpuke, a twentieth-generation hacker, cortically shunted when he was twelve standard. His real name was Ernest but he’d earned the nickname BB when he went out with a friend of mine named Shayla Toyo. Shayla’d seen him naked on their second date and had laughed for a solid half hour: Ernest was—and is—almost two meters tall but masses less than fifty kilos. Shayla said that he had a butt like two BBs and—like most cruel things do—the nickname stuck.
I visited him in one of the windowless worker monoliths on TC2. No cloud towers for BB and his ilk.
“So, Brawne,” he said, “how come you’re getting information-literate in your old age? You’re too old to get a real job.”
“I just want to know about AIs, BB.”
“Only one of the most complex topics in the known universe,” he sighed and looked longingly at his disconnected neural shunt and metacortex leads. Cyberpukes never come down, but civil servants are required to dismount for lunch. BB was like most cyberpukes in that he never felt comfortable exchanging information when he wasn’t riding a data wave. “So what do you want to know?” he said.
“Why did the AIs drop out?” I had to start somewhere.
BB made a convoluted gesture with his hands. “They said they had projects which were not compatible with total immersion in Hegemony—read human—affairs. Truth is, nobody knows.”
“But they’re still around. Still managing things?”
“Sure. The s
ystem couldn’t run without them. You know that, Brawne. Even the All Thing couldn’t work without AI management of the real-time Swarzschild patterning …”
“Okay,” said, cutting him off before he lapsed into cyberpukese, “but what are their ‘other projects’?”
“No one knows. Branner and Swayze up at Artlntel Corp think that the AIs are pursuing the evolution of consciousness on a galactic scale. We know they have their own probes out far deeper into the Outback than …”
“What about cybrids?”
“Cybrids?” BB sat up and looked interested for the first time, “Why do you mention cybrids?”
“Why are you surprised that I mentioned them, BB?”
He absently rubbed his shunt socket. “Well, first of all, most people forget they exist. Two centuries ago it was all alarmism and pod people taking over and all that, but now nobody thinks about them. Also, I just ran across anomaly advisory yesterday that said that cybrids were disappearing.”
“Disappearing?” It was my turn to sit up.
“You know, being phased out. The AIs used to maintain about a thousand licensed cybrids in the Web. About half of them based right here on TC2. Last week’s census showed about two thirds of those’d been recalled in the past month or so.”
“What happens when an AI recalls its cybrid?”
“I dunno. They’re destroyed, I suppose. AIs don’t like to waste things, so I imagine the genetic material’s recycled somehow.”
“Why are they being recycled?”
“Nobody knows, Brawne. But then most of us don’t know why the AIs do most of the things they do.”
“Do experts see them—the AIs—as a threat?”
“Are you kidding? Six hundred years ago, maybe. Two centuries ago the Secession made us leery. But if the things wanted to hurt humanity, they could’ve done it long before this. Worrying about AIs turning on us is about as productive as worrying that farm animals are going to revolt.”
“Except the AIs are smarter than we,” I said.
“Yeah, well, there is that.”
“BB, have you heard of personality retrieval projects?”
“Like the Glennon-Height thing? Sure. Everyone has. I even worked on one at Reichs University a few years ago. But they’re passé. No one’s doing them anymore.”
“Why’s that?”
“Jesus, you don’t know shit about anything, do you, Brawne? The personality retrieval projects were all washouts. Even with the best sim control … they got the FORCE OCS:HTN network involved … you can’t factor all variables successfully. The persona template becomes self-aware … I don’t mean just self-aware, like you and me, but self-aware that it’s an artificially self-aware persona—and that leads to terminal Strange Loops and nonharmonic labyrinths that go straight to Escher-space.”
“Translate,” I said.
BB sighed and glanced at the blue and gold time band on the wall. Five minutes and his mandatory lunch hour was over. He could rejoin the real world. “Translated,” he said, “the retrieved personality breaks down. Goes crazy. Psycho City. Bugfuck.”
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
“But the AIs are still interested in the process?”
“Oh, yeah? Who says? They’ve never done one. All the retrieval efforts I’ve ever heard of were human-run … mostly botched university projects. Brain-dead academics spending fortunes to bring back dead academic brains.”
I forced a smile. There were three minutes until he could plug back in. “Were all the retrieved personalities given cybrid remotes?”
“Uh-uh. What gave you that idea, Brawne? None were. Couldn’t work.”
“Why not?”
“It’d just fuck up the stimsim. Plus you’d need perfect clone stock and an interactive environment precise to the last detail. You see, kiddo, with a retrieved personality, you let it live in its world via full-scale sim and then you just sneaked a few questions in via dreams or scenario interactives. Pulling a persona out of sim reality into slow time …”
This was the cyberpukes’ age-old term for the … pardon the expression … real world.
“… would just drive it bugfuck all the sooner,” he finished.
I shook my head. “Yeah, well, thanks, BB.” I moved to the door. There were thirty seconds left before my old college friend could escape from slow time.
“BB,” I said as an afterthought, “have you ever heard of a persona retrieved from an Old Earth poet named John Keats?”
“Keats? Oh, sure, there was a big write-up on that in my undergrad text. Marti Carollus did that about fifty years ago at New Cambridge.”
“What happened?”
“The usual. Persona invent Strange Loop. But before it broke up it died a full sim death. Some ancient disease.” BB glanced at the clock, smiled, and lifted his shunt. Before clicking it into his skull socket he looked at me again, almost beatifically. “I remember now,” he said through his dreamy smile, “it was tuberculosis.”
If our society ever opted for Orwell’s Big Brother approach, the instrument of choice for oppression would have to be the credit wake. In a totally noncash economy with only a vestigial barter black market, a person’s activities could be tracked in real time by monitoring the credit wake of his or her universal card. There were strict laws protecting card privacy but laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove.
Johnny’s credit wake for the five-day period leading to his murder showed a man of regular habits and modest expenses. Before following up the leads on the credit flimsy I’d spent a dull two days following Johnny himself.
Data: He lived alone in East Bergson Hive. A routine check showed that he’d lived there about seven local months—less than five standard. In the morning he had breakfast at a local cafe and then farcast to Renaissance Vector where he worked for about five hours, evidently gathering research of some sort in the print archives, followed by a light lunch at a courtyard vendor’s stand, another hour or two in the library, and then ’cast home to Lusus or to some favorite eating spot on another world. In his cubby by 2200 hours. More farcasting than the average Lusian middle-class drone, but an otherwise uninspiring schedule. The credit flimsies confirmed that he had held to the agenda on the week he was murdered, with the addition of a few extra purchases—shoes one day, groceries the next—and one stop at a bar on Renaissance V on the day of his “murder.”
I joined him for dinner at the small restaurant on Red Dragon Street near the Tsingtao-Hsishuang Panna portal. The food was very hot, very spicy, and very good.
“How is it going?” he asked.
“Great. I’m a thousand marks richer than when we met and I found a good Cantonese restaurant.”
“I’m glad my money is going toward something important.”
“Speaking of your money … where does it come from? Hanging out in a Renaissance Vector library can’t pay much.”
Johnny raised an eyebrow. “I live on a small … inheritance.”
“Not too small, I hope. I want to be paid.”
“It will be adequate for our purposes, M. Lamia. Have you discovered anything of interest?”
I shrugged. “Tell me what you do in that library.”
“Can it possibly be germane?”
“Yeah, could be.”
He looked at me strangely. Something about his eyes made me go weak at the knees. “You remind me of someone,” he said softly.
“Oh?” From anyone else that line would have been cause for an exit. “Who?” I asked.
“A … woman I once knew. Long ago.” He brushed fingers across his brow as if he were suddenly tired or dizzy.
“What was her name?”
“Fanny.” The word was almost whispered.
I knew who he was talking about. John Keats had a fiancee named Fanny. Their love affair had been a series of romantic frustrations which almost drove the poet mad. When he died in Italy, alone except for one fell
ow traveler, feeling abandoned by friends and his lover, Keats had asked that unopened letters from Fanny and a lock of her hair be buried with him.
I’d never heard of John Keats before this week; I’d accessed all this shit with my comlog. I said, “So what do you do at the library?”
The cybrid cleared his throat. “I’m researching a poem. Searching for fragments of the original.”
“Something by Keats?”
“Yes.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to access it?”
“Of course. But it is important for me to see the original … to touch it.”
I thought about that. “What’s the poem about?”
He smiled … or at least his lips did. The hazel eyes still seemed troubled. “It’s called Hyperion. It’s difficult to describe what it’s … about. Artistic failure, I suppose. Keats never finished it.”
I pushed aside my plate and sipped warm tea. “You say Keats never finished it. Don’t you mean you never finished it?”
His look of shock had to be genuine … unless AIs were consummate actors. For all I knew, they could be. “Good God,” he said, “I’m not John Keats. Having a persona based upon a retrieval template no more makes me Keats than having the name Lamia makes you a monster. There’ve been a million influences that have separated me from that poor, sad genius.”
“You said I reminded you of Fanny.”
“An echo of a dream. Less. You’ve taken RNA learning medication, yes?”
“Yes.”
“It’s like that. Memories which feel … hollow.”
A human waiter brought fortune cookies.
“Do you have any interest in visiting the real Hyperion?” I asked.
“What’s that?”
“The Outback world. Somewhere beyond Parvati, I think.”
Johnny looked puzzled. He had broken open the cookie but had not yet read the fortune.
“It used to be called Poets’ World, I think,” I said. “It even has a city named after you … after Keats.”
The young man shook his head. “I’m sorry, I haven’t heard of the place.”
“How can that be? Don’t AIs know everything?”