Worldwired

by Elizabeth Bear

  Elspeth had her back to the corner, her arms folded over her breasts, just listening. Almost nothing went over her head, but she usually stayed very quiet when the rest of the team was talking about subjects unrelated to her own specialty. Charlie suspected her thought process was keyed to intuition, and her long silences were her way of encouraging the penny to drop.

  Leslie's thought, startlingly clear and tight for someone who was wrapped in a bubble of metallic colloidal hydrogen, kilometers away in the cold of space: You can have a hydrogen-based life form?

  Leslie, Richard said, apparently you can make a life form out of anything, as long as it has the power to conduct and regulate piezoelectricity.

  Exactly, Charlie agreed. Don't ask me what keeps them from evaporating out here, though, or just . . . discombobulating. Or—and here's the kicker—how the hell it got that way. The weird part is that that means there's some process by which little informational and structural heterogeneities can arise and persist at pressures that smoosh hydrogen itself down to liquid. That's just wild.

  Richard gave a scientist's chuckle, the sort that is usually preceded by the phrase “it is intuitively obvious.” Charlie. You have a creature whose sensory system and technology seem to be predicated on perceiving and manipulating gravity.

  He set the coffee cup down, sat back in his chair, and folded his hands behind his head. That would tend to indicate that they're the original source of the nanotech, since we know the shiptree uses . . . visible light. For something. His palms were sweating again, and he resolutely ignored it. If he got too nervous Richard would adjust his biochemistry. He hated relying on that. This was his life, a change that had been wrought on him, as randomly and unfairly as if he had lost a limb.

  As long as he thought of it that way, and held up for himself the example of Jen Casey—her steel hand winking with machined precision and her absolute refusal to accept pity or, it seemed, to acknowledge even to herself that she had lost anything at all—he could hold it together. Thank you for not actually laughing at me, Dick.

  The AI grinned in his head. No sweat.

  In the other work space, Jeremy looked up from his interface. Charlie experienced the rearrangement of Leslie's attention as the xenosemiotician used the lab motes to follow his old schoolmate's gaze. It wasn't that different from inhabiting somebody else's body along with his own in a VR suit—the ghostly sense of limbs was identical, except it was his own body he felt slightly attenuated from, and the one he cohabited with that floated as if in a sense-dep tank.

  Jeremy cleared his throat. “So now that we know what they're made of and how they experience their environment, how do we develop a symbolic system so we can move information?”

  Leslie nodded. And I ask on my own, when do we get started on the shiptrees?

  Well, we could always send an EVA team over there, too, and infect their nanites with our nanites. Give them one of our scientists. After all, fair's fair.

  Bring a camera, Richard said. Charlie laughed, because of course Richard could record everything that he saw.

  Wow, he said. Somebody write the date down. You realize that we've just witnessed the death of an ancient concept. Privacy.

  Oh, I don't know, Richard answered. We can wall each other out more or less effectively. And if you squint at it from the right angle, you already have a bunch of individual consciousnesses inhabiting your head. Freud's id and ego and superego and so forth, or, if you prefer, Jung's “collective unconsciousness” or the left brain and the right brain and the—

  “Modular-mind theory, more like,” Elspeth corrected. And then said, “Christ, Dick.”

  Elspeth? What?

  She straightened, her hands swinging as she stepped away from the wall and started to pace like a professor lecturing a class. “I think you just got yourself that second Nobel Prize, sir. You're absolutely correct. We have got a whole bunch of animals living in our heads already. Alien animals, animals that don't really communicate all that well. You ever hear about the experiments where somebody whose corpus callosum had been severed could be taught completely different things on each side of his brain, and couldn't articulate them to himself?”

  Now that I pause to look it up.

  “Well, your right brain and your left brain—well, not yours, Richard. You're a special case, of course. But say, Jeremy's, here—”

  Jeremy laughed first, and swatted her mocking hand out of his hair. “I've known you not even a month, Elspeth, and already you take liberties with my person.”

  She squeezed his shoulder before she stepped away. She folded her hands in front of her again, instead, leaned against the back of a swivel chair, and cleared her throat. “Essentially, the nonverbal side of the brain will resort to hand gestures and drawing images to get its message to the verbal brain. In extreme cases, the left hand will even grab and redirect the right hand when the left brain is about to make a mistake and the right brain knows it. But my point is, the hemispheres don't talk the same language on their best day. They communicate in terms of symbols and emotions and sometimes dreams or uneasy sensations or . . . hunches, for lack of a better term. Which is why so much of any therapist's work is interpreting between the subconscious and the conscious mind, and teaching them to understand each other, and that greedy little reptile in the back of all of our heads, as well.”

  Charlie found himself standing, grinning until his cheeks hurt, his hands tight on the edge of the lab bench. So you're saying we need a therapist, Elspeth?

  They were all under tremendous stress, and his timing had been better than usual. When the hysterics dwindled into subdued coughing, Elspeth wiped her eyes on the back of her wrist and said, “In that analogy, I think we are the therapist. Or maybe the corpus callosum. In any case, I think we're halfway there.” Which was bad enough that even Richard groaned. “Leslie, are you getting this? Are you following me?”

  You want me to try . . . Oh. Elspeth, Dick. Can you talk to Jenny and see if she can pass along an impression of what space feels like through the Benefactor stardrive?

  “You want to see if it matches up with what you feel from the birdcages.”

  I want to see if it's the same melody. Charlie had a distinct sense of Leslie grinning. Charlie shoved his hands into the pockets of his lab coat and for a moment couldn't remember whose gesture that had been, originally, Leslie's or his own. Which would have turned the faint seasick unease in his stomach into full-fledged nausea, if he'd been willing to let it.

  You're in denial, Charlie. Your whole life has changed. And of course he knew Leslie felt the thought, and felt Leslie's warm assurance back through their shared thought process. There was nothing like finding yourself irrevocably mentally welded to another middle-aged man, and one with a quite different set of biases and assumptions, to trigger a thoroughly miserable midlife crisis. Even if your counterpart weren't—

  A very small spaceship.

  Yes, that. Charlie wondered if Canada would buy him a little red sports car, if he asked extra nicely. As partial compensation for giving away half of his brain.

  And I said to myself, self—

  There's no guarantee it is irrevocable, Charlie. Richard's voice, and his unique understanding of what it was like to share a mind with other consciousnesses, was soothing. When we get Leslie back—

  If you get Leslie back, Leslie said.

  There is no if.

  Charlie knew Richard was using the nanotech to regulate hormone and endorphin and adrenaline levels, to keep him calm and sane and rational. It was probably the only reason he or Leslie was coherent, rather than enlivening a rubber room planet-side. Or, in Leslie's case, floating between the stars glibbering and meeping like the protagonist of a Lovecraft story. That, and Leslie's strange determination that this was all an adventure, and that he had nothing to lose, and everything to gain.

  He chuckled as Leslie's amusement welled up his throat.

  I'm culturally programmed to a certain amount of comfort with
otherspace, Leslie said. Being ungrounded from my body isn't quite the shock it might be to you.

  I should have known you'd jump at the opportunity to flaunt your racial superiority, Charlie answered, and Leslie laughed inside his head. The sarcasm was a defense, and he knew Leslie knew it. Still, he felt the chuckle and smiled himself, sharing the response. Because—on the other hand—when Charlie forgot to panic, the sensation of never quite being alone was strangely easy to get used to, and maybe even a little comforting.

  “Charlie?” Elspeth's voice, distracting him—or drawing him back from distraction. “Try to stay with us, eh?” The motes showed the sidelong glance Jeremy gave her, and the way he rubbed one hand through his hair and then across his mouth, infinitely tired for the moment when her attention was turned away. Jeremy swallowed and swiveled his chair to stare out the porthole, only vaguely in the direction of the birdcage. A frown tugged the corners of his lips down. Charlie never would have understood the expression if he hadn't felt Leslie's discomfort like the itch of a peeling sunburn. He's worried about you, Leslie.

  Leslie shrugged the comment aside. He always worried too much about me. Mind if I use your vocal cords for a tick? The motes annoy me.

  Help yourself.

  “Bob's your uncle. So what do we do next?”

  “We talk to the captain about another EVA, I guess,” Elspeth said, and shook her head sadly through the resulting laughter.

  0800 hours

  Monday October 8, 2063

  Thanksgiving day (Canada)

  Canadian Embassy and Consulate

  New York City, New York USA

  On Monday morning, I testify.

  It's so much like the last time that the face I see in the walnut-framed mirror over my bureau shocks me when I glance into it. I expect the glossy black hair of a child in her third decade, the furrowed, meat-colored scars of fresh burns turning the left side of her face into a Halloween mask. As if the intervening twenty-six years don't exist. As if, when I go downstairs with Frederick Valens to get into the official car that will deliver us to the site of the hearing, it will be Corporal Casey and Captain Valens, and it will be a simple court-martial that I am to testify before, rather than the assembled eyes of the world.

  The problems get bigger and bigger. But the level of nausea in my gut remains the same.

  That's growth of a sort, I suppose.

  I look down to adjust the shining buttons in the cuffs of my professionally pressed dress uniform. The blue steel of my left hand contrasts the deep, mellow richness of the gold. There are no scars on my face anymore, just a mottled patch that doesn't tan evenly, and my hair will be white in another three or four years. And the steel armature on my left side is light and silent and moves like my own hand and wrist, rather than like a clattering horror of an obsolete machine. And it's beautiful, too: a smooth, graceful design.

  I clench my long steel fingers into a fist, and feel them press the heel of my metal hand, and close my eyes.

  Bernard told me to change the world for him. After I took the stand and said the words that killed him.

  I really wonder that I don't feel more irony—more anything—at the fact that it's not going to be my testimony that makes the difference today, this week, this month, but rather the testimony—from beyond the grave—of his niece, Indigo. Who once tried very, very hard to murder me.

  I open my eyes. I open my hand. I point my forefinger at the mirror, cock my thumb, and say “bang” under my breath. And then I check the lie of my uniform one more time, pick my cover up off the dresser, flick my thumbs along the brim to make sure it's sitting right, and go downstairs to meet Fred Valens and my fate.

  I suppose it's equal parts gift and torture that I'm the first witness. I mean, I've never seen the United Nations before, despite twenty years spent wearing its goddamned baby blue hats, and I'd like the time to look around and get a feel for the place. My overwhelming impression, as the car pulls into the drive, is a confused riot of flags like children shouting for attention, lined up snapping in a breath-frosting wind, below a teal glass curtain wall. The driver gets out to open the door. I stand, and then I stop, looking up, long enough for Fred to clear his throat heavily.

  Fat flakes drift from a dirty slate-colored sky and my boots crunch snow in the gutter as I move forward. It's not a big building—especially in comparison to its neighbors, enormous apartments that dwarf it—but the severe hundred-year-old slab shape reminds me of a tombstone. The old building is a little streaked and shabby around the edges, and I can see where the panes have been replaced by less mottled ones. They don't quite match the facade. The marble on the narrow sides is soot stained and showing erosion on what should be fine edges, and the fluid lines of the long concrete Assembly building spilling away from the teal blue high-rise look a little weary, too.

  It looks worked hard, that structure.

  And yet it's difficult to walk forward into. The damned thing looks heavy. And it might not be all that big, but it's a damned sight bigger than I am.

  Escorts take charge of us at the doors, however, and once we step inside my whole impression changes. The broad lobby is airy and bright, the worn silver-and-white marble floors polished until they glow like jade. Mostly I regret the display cases that Fred and I are hustled past too fast for me to get a really good look inside. There's a Moon rock and a Mars rock and a chunk of asteroid and another chunk of one of Saturn's rings, I see that much, and a long display on a destroyed city whose flat, motionless gray photos mark it as something from another era, almost another world. Dresden or Hiroshima, maybe. Mumbai's footage would be in color, if there is a display for Mumbai.

  I wonder how long it will be before Toronto is memorialized.

  There's a hush about the place, the taste of serious business under way. A woman in a sari hurries through as we cross the lobby, a bindi gleaming red between her brows. She catches my eye as we pass, notices the steel hand, and does a visible double take. Her stride never slackens, but I turn my head, pretending for a minute that I'm not in uniform, and I see her staring over her shoulder as she walks away from us, twisting from the hips to get a better view.

  Nice to have a place to go where everybody knows your name.

  A young man in hanbok—a dark embroidered jacket and flowing, flame-colored trousers—hurries toward us, his feet scuffing on the marble. A little puddle of melting snow drips from the sole of one of my boots, although I stomped them before I came inside. Valens, of course, looks like he was delivered fresh via teleporter. I tighten my arm against my side so I don't drop my cover in the mud puddle I'm making while I greet our new friend. He's got very dark, very bright eyes, and something faceted winks near the edge of the iris of the left one—a hypoallergenic implant under the clear surface of the cornea, a platinum bauble shaped like a stylized rocket ship. Genie says they're all the rage this year.

  Valens's amusement is palpable when the young man stops in front of me, rather than him, and makes a little formal gesture. “Master Warrant Officer Genevieve Casey?”

  He has an accent smooth as the silk of his jacket, and I could listen to him say my name all day. “I am. And this is Brigadier General Frederick Valens.”

  He offers Fred his hand and Fred takes it, giving me a look over our guide's head that's both charmed and bemused. I half get the feeling he's enjoying being snubbed. “I am Dongsik Jung. I will be your escort—”

  “I'm pleased to meet you, Mr. Dongsik—”

  “Mr. Jung,” he says, and winks at my transparent blush. “Master Warrant Officer, it's an honor to make your acquaintance. And you, Brigadier General, a very great honor as well.” He steps back, looking from one of us to the other, and lifts an eyebrow at each. “Have you been to the United Nations before?”

  “Never,” Fred says, shrugging out of his overcoat.

  “Wonderful,” Mr. Jung says, turning neatly on the ball of his foot and falling into step between and a few steps in front of us. Even if he fell back, I
could still see Valens over the top of his head. “We just have time for a little tour before you're due in the General Assembly chamber. Would you like to see the Peace Bell or the famous Chinese ivory carving first?”

  The two security guards following us are so seamlessly professional I hardly even know they're there unless I catch their reflections in some polished surface. “The Peace Bell,” I say, at the same second Fred says, “The carving, please.”

  “We have time for both,” Mr. Jung tells us, his stride fast enough that Fred and I both have to hustle to keep up. “And we will pass the Foucault Pendulum when we enter the lobby of the General Assembly. You wouldn't want to miss that.”

  Fred catches my eye when I glance toward him and mouths a few words I don't catch. I shake my head. He smiles, stretching the papery skin on either side of his mouth into lines that show his exhaustion more than anything else about him. “I hope you polished up your medals for your big hero fan club, old girl,” he murmurs, leaning close enough that I feel his breath on my ear.

  “I only brought the salad bars, actually,” I answer. “All that pewter doesn't mix well with my osteoporosis. Old man.”

  I'm reasonably sure a couple of ancient warhorses aren't supposed to bray like donkeys when they laugh in public places, but what can you do? A disgrace to the uniform. Both of us.

  The Foucault Pendulum—Mr. Jung is very explicit that it's Foucault and not Foucault's—is definitely worth the pause to collect ourselves before we enter the General Assembly. It's a huge coppery sphere swaying at the end of a nearly invisible wire, something like a waltzing cannonball, and it's downright hypnotic. The way it moves reminds me of the giant game of crack-the-whip going on overhead, the orbital platforms slung out at the ends of their beanstalks, the whole thing whirling in space. For a second, I fantasize I can feel the whole universe moving around me like the works of a giant clock. It makes me want to run right out and build an orrery.

  Maybe when I retire. If they ever let me.

  Mr. Jung gives us a few moments to ooh and aah over the pendulum before he abandons us in a ready room, both security types planted solidly outside the door. From there, we'll proceed to the General Assembly chamber. I wonder what machinations Riel and the PanChinese and the UN itself wrangled through to arrive at this solution—open hearings, and open testimony, in front of the entire body. I can't remember ever hearing of anything being handled exactly this way before.