He'd been a big man once, muscled and broad-shouldered, but the years had withered him to kindling. His white hair ran down the sides of his head like streams of milk spilled onto a silk pillow. His hands were folded around his scepter. She stepped forward and dropped to her knees beside his bed, thumbing off the stasis field to awaken him from long sleep. The spiders clattered and scrambled, unsure of what to do with this un-programmed event. The paper-thin eyelids fluttered open and a light breath rattled out.
Tana Berrique bowed her head. "You summoned me, Lord."
"Yes." His voice rasped, paper rustling wood. "Are my people well?"
"They are not, Lord. They need you."
The tight mouth pulled, thin wisps of beard moving with the effort. "Not as such."
And she knew what was coming now. The reality of it settled in as she recalled the boy's words. They will not prevent me, he had said, you will. "What would you bid me, Lord?"
"Kill me," the Emperor of Ascending Light whispered. One hand released the scepter and thin, dry, brittle fingers sought her hand. "Let it all change." He coughed and a spider moved to wipe his mouth. "It is time for change."
"I don't think I can." She felt the tears again, hot and shameful, pushing at her eyes and spilling out. She wanted to drop his hand but could not. "I don't think I can. I can't."
He shushed her. "You can. Because I am your Emperor." His lips twitched into a gentle smile. "You will obey."
Tana Berrique stood and bent over her god. She felt the sweat from her sides trickle forward tracing the line of her breasts as she leaned. She felt the tears tracing similar paths down her cheeks. She shuddered, bent further, and kissed the dry, rattling lips. She placed her hands gently on the thin neck and squeezed, the soft hair of his beard tickling her wrists. The eyelids fluttered closed. She kept squeezing until her shoulders shook. She kept squeezing while the spiders panicked and climbed over one another to somehow complete their program and preserve a life. She kept squeezing until she knew that he had gone. Her hands were still on the throat when heavy boots pounded the hallway.
"Missionary General!" Captain Vesper's voice shouted from outside, "Is the Emperor okay? The Regent's retinue is packing for a rapid withdrawal and no one is telling me any—" She heard him clatter into the room. "What are you doing?" he screamed.
She turned quickly to face him. Panting, eyes wild, face drawn in agony, the young officer pulled his sword. "What are you doing?" he asked again, pointing its tip at her as he took a step forward.
"I'm doing what I'm told," she said. "And by the Ascending Light you'll do the same or watch all our Lord worked for crumble and decay."
He paused, uncertainty washing his face.
"You already know, Alda." She gestured to the bed. "He wanted more than this for his people."
The sword tip wavered. "I thought we were working for more," he spat.
"We are. He was." She waited. "I'm doing what he said."
"What proof have you?"
She shook her head. "None but his words to me and me alone. And something about the Yellowing Field. I don't know what—it meant something to the Regent, though."
Alda went paler. The sword dropped. "The Yellowing Field? Are you sure?"
"You know of it?"
His shoulders slumped. "I do. It's a Brigade story from the forging of the Empire."
"I've never heard this," she said.
He walked forward, looking down at the Emperor. "There are many things you've not heard," he told her. "When S'andril was young he saved a boy who swore he would repay him. 'I have saved your life today,' the Emperor told this boy, 'and one day I will bid you repay me by not saving mine.'" He looked up at her. "I am at your service."
She sat on the edge of the bed. "We're not finished yet," she told him. "There's more."
He nodded. "The boy?"
He understands, she thought. He truly understands. Her words came slowly. "It will be bloody. Many will die. But after this, we can rebuild. There will be no further Dissents. The Families will burn out their rage and then we can have peace." Because, she hoped, if the god is truly dead then the idea of that god can live on without harm.
His voice was firm. "His family, too?"
"No. Spare them but keep it quiet. Just him. He won't struggle. It's what he wants."
"And after?" Alda Vesper stood.
She played the words to herself, then said them carefully. "After, I will Declare the boy myself and give witness to his Ascent." An eternal emperor, she thought, on the throne of each heart. An invisible empire of Ascending Light.
"God help us," Vesper said. He spun on his heel and left.
She sat there for a while and wondered what her life had suddenly become. And she wondered what would come after the lie her god bid her tell?
She would return to her guest quarters. She would clear the window and sit in front of it and stare down into the garden, wondering what it would be like to breathe the hot air of Pyrus, swim the boiling rivers of its jungles, pluck the razor flowers by the water's edge. She would address the Council of Seekers and dismantle the Mission. She would write it all down, this new gospel, for the generations to come after and go into hiding from the wrath of the disappointed and unforgiving.
Finally, she stood to leave.
Vesper's words registered with her. God help us, he'd said.
She looked down at the Emperor of Ascending Light one final time.
"He already has," she whispered.
MICHAEL LAURITS IS: DROWNING
Paul Cornell
Michael Laurits is: Drowning.
_Please Help!
That was the Lief status update Cal Tech Professor Laurits' 311 friends were startled to see around ten thirty EST one Saturday night last October.
The genial, soft-spoken Laurits, who looked more like a country rock star than the Nobel laureate he was, was a polymath with friends in fields ranging from social engineering to Federal military intelligence. Maybe a third of the 311 of those he kept in touch with via Lief knew vaguely where he was at that moment: on a trimaran in Japan's Inland Sea, attaching biological shepherding systems to whale sharks, part of a vacation project to manage and systemise the Sea's ecology under the auspices of Nagoya Penguin Torii.
None of them knew that at that very second, Michael Laurits, his feet caught in a weighted line, his craft a fiery husk, was already thirty feet underwater, dropping like a stone, with no chance of regaining the surface.
Laurits had joked that he spent far too much time in Lief. "He'd get applications ideas and work them up right in front of us. People doing other things in the same touchspace would start yelling at him to stop waving his hands around," says Ryoumi Nofke, one of Laurits' closest friends on the faculty. Nofke, voluntarily autistic in pursuit of her own thesis on Sub Planck Metaphysics, and with three suspended marriages backed up as a result, perks up only at the mention of Laurits' current situation. "Oh yeah, he's Aut now. People say they're not sure. That he's exactly the same as he was. They're wrong."
Fortunately for Laurits, Nofke's words, like those of any voluntary Aut, are inadmissible in a court of law. Exactly how wrong the people who think that Laurits is still Laurits are, is currently the subject of legal action.
Laurits was inside the cabin of his vessel, the Torii Gate, when he heard "a thumping sound" from overhead. He reached the deck at the same moment that a rocket-propelled grenade, fired from a nearby launch, landed on it. Laurits puts his (possible) survival down to the fact that the grenade bounced, right past him, through the open cabin door.
The explosion sent Laurits flying into the ocean. He landed amongst his equipment, became tangled in the lines, and fell into the depths.
The attacking vessel was a patrol boat associated with the Atheist organisation Ground State Sanity. The Sanists are regarded as terrorists by the Japanese prefectural authorities, and are engaged in what, subject to a UN vote, is likely to be defined as a Minor War with rival Atheist organisatio
n Obvious Caution Sanity. The difference of opinion between the two factions concerns whether or not the undisputed appearance of a divine being would be reason enough to rethink their Post-theist principles. Ground State say yes. Obvious Caution's point of view, as outlined in their manifesto, is more complex, but boils down to the question being immaterial.
The Torii Gate had ventured into what the Ground State Sanists had decreed were their current personal territorial waters. The Shinto designs on its stern may have been seen as provocation.
I was able to talk, within Lief, ironically enough, to an unidentified but code genuine individual from Ground State. "It's always sad when an individual is 'killed,'" she said (inverted commas subject's own), "but it's important to say he's not Damned. He'll be back after the Singularity and doubtless form part of the Academy."
"It's interesting," says Laurits' wife, Amy, the shaking of her hand on her teacup showing exactly where she's put her mental resources in the last six months, "that they don't even seem to note the possibility that the afterlife they claim to be seeking is already here."
Laurits can be thankful that the extreme opinions of my Ground State contact are also unlikely to convince a jury.
Of the many ironies in this case, the greatest is surely that Laurits' own researches in the field of chaos management mean he might have been expected to see this coming. His memes have been successfully applied in weather forecasting, city planning, and mobile war prevention within the Federal Government. "The world," he once said, in the introduction to a book by fellow Nobel Laureate Dally Ah Pascoe, "is fixable. Chaotic systems can be predicted over large scales, exactly as one predicts the large-scale results of extra-physical activity under the Planck length observation limit. In Hampshire hurricanes hardly ever happen. Like consciousness hardly ever happens outside of a vast memory storage system. But, though we still can't begin to imagine how, when you've got enough memory, consciousness can and does happen."
Those words, to coin a phrase, may come back to haunt Laurits.
As he dropped into the darkness, Laurits, involuntarily, he insists, started shifting his sight, hearing and skin senses into Lief, as anyone would when playing a game or collaborating on a project. "It felt like a reflex, like ducking under cover," he says, "the most natural thing in the world. In reality, I was trying to breathe water, I was facing certain death. In Lief, I didn't have to be aware of that. That was all I had in my head."
"He was always a fatalist," says Amy Laurits. "He was never happy being happy. He always expected that he'd have to pay a price, that something terrible would happen."
Within seconds, a number of his friends had joined Laurits in Lief, and were asking if his status update was literally true. Several of them, all of whom now decline to be named, started yelling that, as per Lief law, if Laurits was in physical jeopardy, he should immediately leave Lief and become conscious.
"They were, in effect, telling me to follow the rules and die," says Laurits.
But one of that crowd had a more constructive plan in mind. He took onboard Laurits' garbled package of fastword and understood that he had seconds to act. He took a connector block from the vast memory array at the University of Burma in York and attached it directly to Laurits' Lief page.
If Laurits' life has been saved, it's because he was fortunate enough to befriend one of the few people with the access and imagination to take that action: David Savident of Carbon Futures.
Savident, a neat, conservatively dressed man with the salty turn of phrase of a self-made entrepreneur, had made his fortune through carbon-balancing bacteria, then sold on that business and invested heavily in one of the assets his former area of expertise had also caused to bloom: the vast memory tanks that are required to metacalculate chaotic systems.
"Mike was dying," he says, "and there were all these tossers standing around waving their neon arms and talking about ethics. I thought bugger that, we've all wondered about this, this is the only chance we're ever going to get for an ethical experiment, let's do it. And save my mate in the process."
Savident told Laurits to transfer all his sensory processes into the vast array. He was contacting hundreds of his own engineers and pulling them a bigger and bigger workspace around Laurits, elbowing out concerned friends in a way which others there that day remember as being rude, "predatory" as one said, but which Savident insists was all about rushing to help his friend.
Within a minute, Savident had himself created vast capacity connections which allowed whole transport of processes from the parietal and temporal lobes of Laurits' brain. His aim was to try and move everything that could be defined and isolated: memory; sensory systems; a series of discrete brain state snapshots.
But instead, before Savident could start the terrible task of picking what could be saved from the archive of his friend's mind, desperately hoping to reconstruct something resembling a person from the pieces, if we're to believe Laurits and his many advocates—
The entirety of Michael Laurits made the journey all at once.
"I don't know how I did it," says Laurits. "Lief is hooked into your kinesthetic sense, your central idea of where your body is, that's how it works. It was as simple as moving my hand. I desperately wanted to be in some other place than my body, and then I was suddenly aware that there was such a place, that the. . . tunnel. . . was big enough to go down." (Laurits equates this moment with Savident providing a big enough connection and big enough memory space at the other end.) "So I went."
The mystery of that process will surely be a central argument in the forthcoming court action brought by Sona, the owners of Lief.
"We were initially pleased that Lief had been made use of so positively in what looked like a humanitarian act and a scientific breakthrough," says Kay Lorton, a legal spokesperson for the company. "But the more our people looked into it, the more we began to suspect that Mr. Savident hadn't transferred Mr. Laurits' mental state into the memory array, but had simply created a copy. A barely functioning copy, that is, without many of those attributes which we would regard as indicative of self-awareness. Exactly the same as the ghosts that pop up in memory tanks from time to time, and then generally cease to be detectable, or, as some would have it, move into other universes. As Mr. Laurits himself noted in his work, intelligence arises out of sheer memory. The only difference is that this intelligence wishes to interact with the world, because it mistakenly believes itself to be Mr. Laurits."
The reason these matters of philosophy have ended up before a court of law is that Sona are seeking to recover damages from the stress the connection to the memory tank is putting on Lief. They claim that work activity has slowed 32 percent. Any regular user will tell you that the difference is palpable.
Furthermore, they claim that Savident's action was tantamount to industrial espionage, since he's a major shareholder in rival workspace company Transgress. They seek a legal ruling concerning their stated desire: to erase the Lief page that now represents Michael Laurits, through which he senses and communicates.
"That," says Amy Laurits, "would be murder."
Savident is contesting the legal action, stating that every action he took was allowed under Lief law. Sona had accepted connections to vast memory arrays in the past, without slowing their systems.
"The difference is," says Laurits, "that I'm in here now. Whatever a person is, here I am. I take up some processing space. Sorry."
Savident has employed teams of engineers from Odashu and Google to develop a new interface, hoping to transfer Laurits' complete mental processes, if that's what they are, from Lief to the new workspace. But since nobody knows exactly what happened in the moments when Laurits willed himself into his familiar escape from reality, replicating the event is proving a difficult task.
Laurits himself is helping with the research. "It's a problem in manipulating chaotic systems," he said. "We have to try and move the package of who I am without understanding or being able to measure or predict what's inside t
he package."
* * *
In a high-profile step to popularise their point of view, Sona has hired time on the cameras mounted on the underside of Federal global warming control mirrors in an effort to find Laurits' body. They seek to prove that Laurits' claim that he still sometimes has hazy sensory input from the cadaver, particularly while asleep, that he is, in effect, one person who can move between two bodies, is nonsense.
The corpse, subject to predation and tidal drift, should lie on the seabed some sixty metres beneath the site of the attack. But so far it hasn't been found.
Laurits' family and friends are convinced that the person they meet several times a day in Lief is Michael. Though a few of them share Nofke's impression that he's been changed somewhat by the transition. But how much of a change would be needed to convince a jury that what Amy Laurits speaks to, holds in her arms, has even, as she deliberately and precisely tells me, made love to, isn't a man, but a copy of one?
Certainly, talking to Laurits feels like talking to a person. He passes the Turing Test. But then, so have many programmes and devices in the last twenty years, including Lief's own personified help systems.
"I continue," he says, showing me some of the art he makes when nobody's visiting, which can't be often, considering the pilgrimages made to him by everyone from the Dalai Lama to the King of Brazil. "I'm the sum of my surroundings, and something else that's still quite mysterious, just like I've always been. I always expected that something terrible would happen, a revenge for all my prosperity and silliness and presumptuousness. And then it did. But then I discovered that even so, it was all going to be okay."
ELEVATOR
Nancy Kress
When visiting hours ended, Ian got on the hospital elevator on the fifth floor. Throat tight and stomach roiling, he didn't notice the "up" arrow until the doors started to close. Ian was going down, but he had no energy left to move. Marcia had, once again, drained it all.
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