by John Barnes
The tapjoints at Mina’s neck were small pink hexagonal notches.
Joy inserted three disks. Mina tapped her temple. “Seems right this way.” Then she said no more for a long while.
Not so for the Faulkner woman, who got five Aspect disks, since adults could handle more of the tiny selves. Faulkner sat stiff and unmoving, head canted as if listening to voices. And she was, from how her lips moved without murmur, trying to give voice to the Aspect torrent pouring through her.
“Awwwaakkk...” she croaked, jumping to her feet. She danced. Frantic, flailing arms cut impossible arcs as feet flew up in mad leaps. Her entire body writhed in absurd fast-time, sweat burst from her face, she blinked as if strobing her vision. A shriek yanked her head skyward and – she collapsed. Even then her legs jerked and eyes twitched behind eyelids, beneath jumping eyebrows.
Slowly the heated dancing faded. She curled into a fetal pose on rocky ground, oblivious to the hard world around her.
They spent the day hunkered around the looming beautiful monument. No further stashes turned up, after they emptied the small one Mina had found. It seemed curious that the symbol leading to the opener code was an ancient maths trick. Maybe Marauder class mechs had no such knowledge?
Soon enough, Mina was repairing broken tech in Family bodies. The Faulkner woman came out of it and also was good at fixes. Mostly the Family defenses needed work and damage repair. Their sensoria were often the first to go, hammered by mech overload pulses. Only big men like Cermo-the-Slow carried actual munitions; others like Erika bore EM weaponry that could send nanosecond high power bursts into mech diodes and antennas, scrambling their minds, rumbling their servos.
Mina liked the work but said, “Y’know, my three Aspects keep talking all the time.”
“Been in stasis for longer’n you been alive,” Kirchoff said with a grin. “Aspects are like laundry – smell better if they get aired now and then.”
“They want to know what’s up, what happened to the Citadel, stuff about people been dead forever,” Mina said. “Nagged by the dead – this is progress?”
“They teach you, yeasay?” Kirchoff shook a finger in a kindly way as Erika watched. Ever since Mina’s father had died years ago she had sought a man who could fill that role. Always better to have somebody instruct the young who was not Mom. “So show respect.”
Mina frowned. “They’re powerful odd. Listen, I can give voice to them –”
Abruptly her face shifted to a twisted worry-mouth and she said in an alto accent, “You reject the Word? You still have not conquered the unloving?”
Then Mina shifted back to her voice. “That’s my first Nialdi Aspect, a bore who knows lots of tech stuff under that religious prattle. I’m tempted to trash it.”
Kirchoff was properly shocked. “That’s death for Aspects!”
Mina ignored him and went on, head lowered, mouth pursed in inner reflection. “Then there’s Amanda –”
Mina arched her head back and spoke in gravel tones, “Strict rules make for fine fellowship. Couples must select the genetic traits most useful to Citadel Bishop in our hour of peril –”
“Just get the tools, ignore the rants,” Erika said.
Mina said, “I’ve got this great bioengineer, too. Here’s her –
“One must remember, the mechs’ own evolution is powered by ideas of Lamarck, not dreary Darwin.” This was in a solemn, pontifical voice. “It says we’re a fourth species of a ‘chimpanzee’ – whatever that is. We’re taller and have a stronger, more limber skeletal structure than humans. But we’re humans, right?”
Kirchoff nodded. “Wow, you coulda been an actor. That Aspect’s talking ’bout older humans, ’fore we self-modded ourselves, to deal with the mechs. Look...” A reflective, warm tone came into his voice. “Best you don’t give a ratsrear about their opinions.”
Erika could feel her own teaching Aspect, Isaac, fidgeting at the back, but suppressed it and the others. They were not much help with tech, anyway. But Erika could tell that Mina liked the new Aspects’ gifts: those intricate plays of devices and software, the tinkering that brought defunct devices alive again. Across the huge plaza of the great (human-made!) building, Family Bishop worked on rebuilding their systems and suits, from electro-leverage assemblies, bushing plate stops and block grads, to pelvic cradles and shocks. The Family had little left of theory, still less of understanding how techs worked. In place they had a once-rich heritage of knowledge now hammered flat into rigid rules of thumb. Their suits were host to entities known by names: Amps, Volts, Ohms. Such spirits lived somehow in their gear. Currents flowed, the tiny electron beasts made larger stuff move and sing. No one knew or much cared just how.
Mina fixed some bad points in Erika’s sensorium feed, too. Erika felt it dwindle at first, a multicolored fluid seeping away. Then with some jigs and jolts from Mina, it came back – full, florid, the entire electro-acoustic-sensing platform bristling with energy.
Before her eyes, her daughter was blossoming. First the addition puzzle, now her tinkering skills – Mina suddenly flowered into areas Erika knew little of.
They celebrated that night, mostly with some alky. There were playful rankings –
“She’s such a tightass, needs a shoehorn just to fart.”
“Damn glad I got my inbodies fixed up, was so sore couldn’t wipe my ass.” To which the reply shot back, “Since when didja?”
When it came Erika’s turn she said mildly, “I started out with nothing and still have most of it left.” Self-ranking set the right tone. They calmed. Nobody minded the casual insults of a ranking-down; the mirth helped them all.
Erika crept away to her own quiet vice. She had taken up reading old texs from Urth. They were the closest thing her nomad life had to furniture and she lounged in them the way people had lived in their easy chairs in the Citadels. One tex was in rather stilted Anglish, called War and Peace. She liked stories where people still lived in rooms and had parties. The book’s big issue was an enormous war. Its point was don’t take on things bigger than you are; not a lesson she really needed these days. She had plowed through other novels from that ancient Urth past. In her opinion, Emma Bovary should have gone to some school and gotten a job, instead of screwing somebody not her husband. Anna Karenina should have driven trains, learn to engineer them, rather than throwing herself onto the tracks. What were these ancients thinking?
Erika was only a bit into her reading on her carry-pad when Kirchoff came by her sleep bag, tucked in a distant corner. As they talked, Erika watched a spider like a burnt pancake with legs stride with authority down a wall. She listened to his voice in the dark and silently made an interior mod on her inboards. It would take a few moments work, so she used them to simply take him into her arms. It was all natural, silent, almost spiritual.
In a few more moments he whispered, “Hey, your sexcen came up fast.”
“So did yours – visibly.”
He laughed and took her in his arms.
SHE WAS NOT a spiritual person the way her parents had been. They had seen the good days. She could recall those, in her rosy childhood that seemed a lifetime back there now. Now the Family kept hard rules to retain some of that era. When you stop hearing Sir and Ma’m the end will be in sight. The good things in courtship, too, the pretty soft things, they had to be there to make it work at all. So keep to the true. Mina’s Amanda Aspect had spoke right.
They broke camp and headed toward a Splash of impact-liberated water, valleys away. She caught the whisper voices again as they skip-walked away, speaking of something called the Taj Mahal, but it meant nothing to her.
Kirchoff shot a navvy that was sniffing for ore. He had aced it with a firenet, to drive it into cyberclash. Grinning, he brushed off the cries of elation with, “I’d vex on mechs, not navvys.” His rhyming taunt meant a sly challenge, and she filed that away for later tactics. Maybe he would be a good Cap’n.
The Family felt better with the new Aspects, which ma
de them heirs of a grand race, not a mere ravaged, fleeing band.
The land improved. They had been on the run through land so sorry that it won’t grow a toenail, but now –
Thorny brush choked the stretching plains beneath the immense sky. Murmuring streams fed down from the hills and crossed green meadows. The long tawny grasses in red soil had been invaded by the mechmade sisal shoots, standing as high as a man and rattling in the raw dry winds like a chorus of armored warriors on the march. The ever-spreading sisal was useful to mechs for fabrication in their auto-factories. At least the mechs had not yet reduced the flocks of birds that could darken the sky when they gathered to caw and frisk and mate in their eternal cycle. Flies and ants too seemed immune to the vast eco-plundering of the lumbering mech agri-tillers and seeders. Erika wished that somehow the mechs had erased the irritating tiny flies that inched through suit joints and irked under a woman’s skin like pinpricks.
A waitaminute vine grabbed her with its thorns. She twisted free, pivoted on her left foot and nearly got caught in an even worse plant trap, a lawyer bush. She had once looked up the term ‘lawyer’ and found it was someone who helped you fight laws. That seemed curious and downright wrong to her; laws kept a Family together. To not heed law was to bring down harm and mechs. She backed away from the lawyer bush, since they were known to shoot out tendrils to snare the fool who came too close. The bush often collaborated with the waitaminute vine. Plants had their own hunting strategies.
To not see the beauty in this eroded world was to walk through life as a dead woman. To not smell and hear and see it betrayed life itself.
Yet even here mechmess filled the gullies and their geegaws lay in rust. She no longer marveled at the incessant spewing engines of mechcraft. Their endless wealth seemed like that of the natural, green world she had grown up in, before mechs began pelting their world with rocks, making the Splashes and wrecking their weather.
The mech cities were glassy, steepled mounts that crackled with e-mag crosstalk. Even seen far away, the e-tremors made a bass snarl in her sensorium. Ominous.
She was skip-walking on the left edge of the Family’s moving triangle, just reaching a ridgeline, when she sensed it. Air rippled and her sensorium sang with strange pips and bings – a purr of fast EM computation. She saw just below an array of tubes and modules, tractors articulating as it edged around a razorback shelf. The Family was behind her now, rounding from the other way. She had maybe seconds before –
Without thinking, she leaped. Full bore she landed on the center spherical module. She sent —Give a hard lookleft!— and got to it.
She had never actually collided with a battle mech. She kicked in plates and ripped away whipwire antennae in pureblind rage. Over the finely machined carcass she lumbered, firing straight into the cryo-cooled units that burst open with hissing, pressured vapor. Weapons snouts turned toward her but their range was too short and she busted them with a thumper, parts flying. She fired with orange fire-nets crackling from the shoulders, frying the thing’s inboards. She pillaged the finest workmechship of factories men had never seen and never would, the ceaseless detailed labor of countless Crafters – all smashed to scatteration.
A hollow shuuuung twisted the air by her head. It was a blaring noise-cast, blending infrasonic rumbles at her feet. Electromagnetic screeches hit her sensorium with teeth-jarring frequencies.
A fevered mix of fear and rage propelled him forward. She pivoted –
The thing collapsed. Only then did she see, tumbling, that it was the Mantis. They had never been able to finish it off before. The whole Family never had enough ammo to shoot up every part of its composite array intelligence. The navvy Kirchoff had shot was undoubtedly both a sentinel and a data-repository of this angular anthology intelligence.
By now the Family descended, yanking free parts and servos, booty used to maintain their own suits. They hacked at it and she staggered back, her back tweaked from the fall –
—Mina!— No answer.—Mina!—
She was down. As Erika ran to her daughter Mina moved, got up to her knees. Even a Mantis took a while to surekill a human and extract the inboard personality. Those moments Erika had prevented.
They embraced without words.
As a child she had heard that the eyes are the windows of the soul. She had seen into the eyes of the Mantis, if you call them eyes at all – webs of antennas, blank black tunnels looking at her, some scopes atop the tubular frame of the thing. She did not know what those alien eyes were the window to and guessed she’d as soon not know.
Her Isaac Aspect said, We are not thinking machines, we’re feeling machines that happen to think.
Her Betsy Aspect jibed, I differ. A Mantis can deftly target, but we do not know if it thinks at all, as we see thinking.
About the Mantis she did not want to think, only to feel.
THE ENTIRE FAMILY celebrated the Mantis smashing, though it was not suredeath, knowing that its disembodied mechmind would surely come after them again – but not for a while. It would tend its wounds, re-assemble itself, grow more canny. As always.
Their fresh Aspects had done more than repair some tech. The whispering voices of their forebears had made the beleaguered Family stronger, more anchored in the honored human past.
Some said Erika should be Cap’n for getting the jump on the Mantis. She turned away, not wanting that at all.
They were on the move again into richer moist lands when – “Heayeh! Heayeh!” – a child shouted. On a skimpy pond were flocks of powder-white birds, bobbing as they dove for morsels in the mud below. The joyous little girl waved arms at them and the birds sprang into the air. The child stopped, bewildered that these other ways of living had not recognized her and been glad. “Bird! Bird!” she cried but they just flapped away.
Mina laughed. Her parents had taught her the burden and duty to all lifeforms, since humans were their greatest representatives, and the only voice speaking for the kingdoms of doomed animal life. Mechs ruled the air and their emissions stained the sunsets. But life could persist.
To Erika, none of this changed the central fact: that a casual blow from a passing machine could obliterate her as an entity with no remorse. That was the central hard fact of their human world. Mechs could disperse their selves and so persist. For humans, only shrunken Aspects held any promise.
Yet the human story was not fully writ yet, not by a long shot, and there might yet be a comeuppance. The Family was solidly here, damaged and yearning, yes – yet still coming.
“I WANT TO be a child again,” the client said.
Anika nodded. “And are you familiar with that process? You’ve done some research?”
The client – his name was Bruce, his profile said – nodded vigorously. He presented as a man in his late thirties, but his profile said he was approaching fifty. No partner. No children. Single-occupancy non-mortgage residence in a distant corner of the city. Anika checked his shoes. They were cheap, and his trousers rode too high over his ankles, exposing pristine white mass-production socks. No one to impress, then. Nowhere to be at three o’clock in the afternoon. Of course he wanted a do-over.
“Early life re-versioning means taking on a lot of responsibilities,” Anika said. “Your next version will have to become a foster parent, just like the foster parents who will raise you.”
Again, he nodded. “I understand that.”
“You won’t have a choice in the version you foster. We’ll do a questionnaire – it’s very detailed – about your preferences, about what kind of family you’d like to be placed with, and so on, but in the end you’ll need to involve a lawyer if you want to renege on the contract.”
“I know.”
“We strongly advise you to retain your own legal counsel to go over your contract before signing. We have attorneys we’ve worked with in the past that we can recommend to you.” She gestured, and a half-dozen profiles blinked on in the space between them. They spun slowly, exposing photos on one s
ide and stats on the other. She took a swipe at one, and expanded it. “This office is the closest to ours. It’s right on the corner. Third floor. I can set up an appointment for you.”
“I think I’ll be okay.”
They always thought they’d be okay. They had no idea how damning their desire was, how futile, how running away from their particular experience of adulthood in this way guaranteed even more obligations and even less fun in the long term.
This was why Anika always chose consignment bodies, whenever she re-versioned. The selection wasn’t quite as good as it was for brand-new models, but she found amazing bargains in the cast-offs of the wealthy and bored. This body, this blonde birdlike thing with the big violet eyes and slender, tapered fingers – this was a classic. Suitable for any occasion. The little black dress of bodies. Perfect for a city councilor’s wife. And the previous wearer had kept her in excellent condition.
More importantly, consignment bodies came with no strings attached. No contract. No payment plan. No subscription service for upgrades and updates. Cash on the barrelhead. And then it was yours, truly yours, not mortgaged or leased or indentured to whatever faceless entity had sold it to you.
Like the entity Anika worked for.
“Oh, and I want to forget,” Bruce added.
Quelle surprise. “You want a clean re-version? No crossover?”
“No crossover. Fresh start.”
Anika nodded. “I understand.”
“You do?” He smiled. It was the first genuine smile of their entire interaction, unless she counted the moment he’d realized she’d be the one handling his case. “No one else seems to get it.”
“All of my reversions are clean reversions,” she said. “I start fresh every time.”
He blinked. “Wow. That’s just... wow.”
There was nothing to say. She could have told him about the challenges posed by his – their – particular choice, but only if he asked. The studio considered it poor form to ask why anyone would start with a clean slate. Most often, it was because they had something they wanted to forget. And if you got them talking about it, they would remember how much whatever it was actually meant to them in the first place. And they would change their minds about the whole thing. It was bad salesmanship.