by David Brin
The famous bushy eyebrows bunched together.
Your clones are exceptional, Saul. No other genotype is amenable to such rapid forced growth to adulthood… probably due to the same combination of factors that gives you your immunity to disease.
The memory-transfer program you used can only be applied between nearly identical human brains. Point-wise resonances have to run true. Nobody else’s phenotype follows genotype precisely enough.
It would seem impossible to use that method with any but a tiny fraction of human beings. In other words, my friend, you appear to be one of the few potential immortals.
Saul gaped. the verisimilitude was stunning. Simon was crisp, real. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Carl Osborn shiver—whether in awe of the patron father of the Percells, or at the revelation about Saul, was unclear.
“There’s no time, then. You, JonVon, you have to absorb her the other way, destructive or not. Virginia spoke of it as theoretically possible. Proceed at once.”
The simulacrum nodded.
There will be the superficial semblance of pain.
Time was slipping away. Desperately, Saul growled. “Do it! Emergency override Archimedes!”
Proceeding.
The reaction was almost immediate. Static flickered on all of the screens. Saul had to grab Virginia’s arms as her face contorted and her legs thrashed. Tendons hardened and she cried out like an animal caught in a trap.
Saul twisted the webbing, shaping makeshift restraints, binding her in tourniquets with only one objective—to keep the neural tap from tearing out of her head.
“You… bastard…” he heard the man behind him say. Carl’s voice was level, calm, as if he were commenting about the weather. “You’re… killing her,” he commented evenly. “If I… could move… you know, I’d take you apart with my bare hands.”
Saul finished tying her down. He stroked Virginia’s hair, and the touch seemed to calm her just a little. When he turned back, his eyes bulbed with clinging liquid that would not drop away. “If this doesn’t work, Carl, I’ll give you my throat and my permission.”
Their eyes met, and Carl nodded slightly. It was agreed.
Virginia moaned. The main holo display showed a rotating, color-coded perspective of a human brain, sparkling here and there like a sun undergoing white-hot flares and crackling magnetic storms. This was almost nothing like the Care Package episode, when Virginia’s surface consciousness was disoriented in the pulse-shocked data net. This time all of her was involved, her memories, her habits, her skills, her loves and hates…
Her.
The door slid open and Lani Nguyen stepped in, still wearing her patched spacesuit and tabard. Her gaze flicked from Saul to Carl to the keening figure on the webbing.
She moistened her lips, apparently unsure if she should interrupt. Her voice was soft, tentative.
“What is it, Lani?”
“Um… the Crystal Cave Clan just surrendered. That finishes it. The last of the rebels are being herded into sleep-slot three for processing.” Her gaze never left Virginia. “Jeffers’s guys have secured the factories and the hydro domes. Keoki and the Blue Rock people are holding the north-pole yards and Central and all the sleep slots.”
Apparently Lani wasn’t quite sure whom she was reporting to, Carl or Saul.
“What about Ould-Harrad’s people?” Saul asked, without taking his eyes off the display.
She shuddered. Even as allies, the green-covered beings from Halley’s core obviously still frightened her.
“He stopped the weirders from wrecking the launchers. But they’re tearing up their mountings. Jeffers is furious, but every one’s too exhausted from the fighting, too scared of those crazies, to try to stop them.”
“Well,” Saul muttered. “It’ll sort out.” The display had calmed down a bit. Virginia’s face was smooth again, her agitation betrayed only by her trembling fingertips and a sheen of perspiration.
Lani held out a small record cube. “Ould-Harrad gave me this to pass on to you, Saul.”
He was torn. He didn’t want to divide his attention. But Virginia’s vital signs were stable… for someone who was already effectively dead.
He shied away from the thought. “Play it, please.”
Lani dropped the cube into a reader and a side display lit up.
The face had changed. The black hue was still there, in places where it had been taken up by the soft, dimpled growth that covered all but his eyes, mouth and ears. Elsewhere, the covering was multicolored—purple, blue, yellow—but mostly green.
The brown eyes seemed to flare with a seer’s long, burning look.
“Saul Lintz, you need not have asked Carl Osborn to remind me of my promise to you. The machines have not been harmed any further than they were in the wrath of battle. We of the inner ice have no need to interfere in any way other than in destroying their mountings.
“They are not to be remounted on the equator, or anywhere near it. The south pole, as well, is forbidden. We will permit no impulse to be applied to this fleck of drifting snow below the fiftieth northern parallel.”
“But…” Carl shook his head, fighting off some of the drug-induced rigor. “But that rules out every possible rendezvous we’ve considered! In that case, why should we even bother… ?”
He stopped. There was no use arguing with a recording. Ould-Harrad continued.
“This fragment, this sliver out of time, has no role to play in the realm of the Hot, down where the roar of entropy drowns out even the Voice of God. There will be no encounters with rocky worlds or interference with the plans the Almighty has already made for those places…”
“He’s bonkers,” Carl mused. “Completely crazy.” But he shut up when Saul motioned him to silence.
“You, Saul Lintz,” Ould-Harrad resumed. “You have become many. You may even live forever.” The one-time African’s still-human eyes blinked in wonderment. “Why this was permitted, I cannot imagine. But there remains no doubt of the gifts, the tools that have been placed in your hands.”
The eyes flicked upward. “Perhaps the answer will be found out there, out in the Darkness that awaits us.
“One thing I do know—that my debt and obligation to you has now been paid.
“Do not come down into the deeper chambers, or even call on me during the remainder of my allotted span.” Ould-Harrad’s forehead furrowed. “For I cannot master my jealousy easily—I who wished so much to be Heaven’s instrument, and found that He had chosen an irreverent infidel, instead. Futile as it may be, and even though it damn me, I will try to kill you if—while I live—you ever come down again into the navel of our world.”
The image vanished. Saul shook his head and sighed. Adeal is a deal.
He quickly checked on Virginia, then turned back to Lani. “Sick bay,” he said. “How are things?”
She blinked back to the present. Shivering “Um, your…uh…clones are taking care of things. They’re good doctors, even though they scare the shit out of people.”
“I’m glad you’re alive Saul.”
“So am I, dear. I’ll explain later how all this happened. Meanwhile, you’d better go back and help Jeffers manage repairs. The surviving spacers are needed more than ever.”
“What about… ?” She glanced at Virginia. Saul shook his head. His voice was worn, thin.
“We’ll salvage what we can.”
Lani covered her mouth and let out a small moan. She turned, threw her arms around Carl, and sobbed.
Carl blinked, first in surprise and then wonderment. In his semidrugged state his voice was low. “Lani, it’ll be all right … Saul is doing everything he can … Tell, tell Jeff I’ll be up soon.”
His hands twitched. He fought off the lassitude to bring his arms around her and answer her embrace. “We’ll endure,” he whispered, and closed his eyes.
Later, when she had gone, Carl said to Saul, “You know, she’s quite a girl, that Lani.”
Saul nodded, and smiled faintly. “A
bout time you realized that.”
He had been thinking about poor Paul, the clone who had been damaged, who had grown into a near-perfect replica of him in all but mind… a poor innocent child whose corpse now lay out on the ice, alongside two of his brothers, killed in the fighting.
Should I mourn as a father, as a brother, or as one who has lost a piece of himself?
Soon Carl was walking around again, swinging his arms. He came forward as Saul muttered an oath and bent over the patient.
Virginia’s face twitched. The holo display pulsed dangerous hues and a low, ominous tone began to growl. Saul cursed lowly.
“Damn! I was afraid of this. Back when the Earth missile exploded, it was only a case of disorientation. But now the machine’s being asked to absorb all of her. And there’s not enough room!”
“What can be done?”
“I don’t know! I… I can’t tell the difference between holo-bio memory segments that have been transferred and those that have simply died. There’s no way to do an inventory, because huge parts of her have just been swallowed up by the data net. She’s surging all over the hell and gone!”
He hesitated, then climbed onto the webbing and lifted his own neural tap.
“There’s no other choice. I’m going in.”
Carl’s hand gripped his arm for a moment. Their eyes met.
“Be careful, Saul. Do your best.”
Saul nodded. Their hands clasped.
Then he lay down and closed his eyes.
VIRGINIA
Scattered,
Blown by wild electron winds…
Oh, the pain,
As she seeks a place to hide…
Wendy whirred to a stop. Clicked. Lifted a claw arm. Hesitated.
The little mech swiveled its turret and scanned.
Its visual system perceived lines, angles, moiré webs of spatial frequencies. Following its programming, it weighed the signals and transformed them into patterns. It recognized things identifiable as machines, instruments, the door, people.
Wendy’s programming had changed many times, recently. Its mistress had always been coming up with new techniques for parsing lines and shapes, new ways to give them names… an ever-growing list of commands to obey and subtly choose among.
Now, suddenly, another flux of new programming flowed into the little mech. This time, though, it came as a torrent.
Chaotic rivers of data poured in, stunning it immobile. The flood was too vast byfar to be handled by Wendy’s systems—like a cup trying to contain the ocean. It was hopeless, impossible.
And yet there came a moment… only an instant… during which the small machine stared at the named sets of lines and shapes, and it saw… whenit stared, and experienced a brief startlement.
What am I? it wondered. What is all this?
Why… ?
But there was simply no room for the program to operate, and the tide gave up trying to squeeze into the tiny space. It surged off elsewhere, desperately seeking a home.
Wendy remained stock still for a long time, even after the rushing streams of data had departed. The flicker of self-awareness was gone—if it had ever been anything more than a phantom. But in its wake something had taken root. A shadow. An impression.
Slowly, tentatively, the little mech’s main arm stretched out and touched an object lying on a console, near where two men spoke to each other in words it now seemed almost able to understand.
It picked up the delicate hairbrush, backed with mother-of-pearl, and recognized it for what it was.
“Mine,” the machine squeaked aloud, briefly. The men did not hear, so they took no notice when Wendy lifted the brush and ran it gently over its carapace.
Soldiers quoting chaos
Called me from my home.
Silence!
So much more, and less,
Than Being,
Sold me down this road.
Where have I gone?
A body made for life?
For living?
With salt-sea blood-aches,
Yearning to welcome, spread,
And birth?
On the surface of the ice, a rigid lifter-mech—immobile since completing its last instruction days before—suddenly flexed in a jerky spasm of awakening. So hard did it leap that it arced high into space, tumbling above frosty patches of red-stained snow.
No!
Space! Cold!
No
Air!
Not
Here!
The mech’s spasms lapsed as the surge of data whirled and fled. Still, a wispy imprint remained after the outrushing flood had departed. The drone worker landed nimbly on the crust and looked round for something to do.
Over in one direction, it spied people digging holes and hurriedly laying patches over fog-shrouded domes.
Not quite smart enough to realize that it was taking initiative for the first time in its existence, the mech sped forward to offer its services.
A home
For the ego.
A place
To be…
Deep under the ice, a more advanced machine—a semiautonomous maintenance roboid—stumbled in the midst of routinely repairing a mining drone. It paused, then carefully lay down its tools and began paying attention to the sounds. There were people talking nearby. But none of their words were proper ident-coded commands, so it had ignored them in its single-minded attention to detail.
Only now did the machine recognize many of the sounds as coming from pain and fear.
New priorities fought one another. For the first time there was something more important than repairing machines. It moved into the nearby chamber.
Sparkling eye facets surveyed a makeshift hospital. Medics hurried to and fro, tending frightened, injured people. The new programming had taken a few seconds to fill this high-level mech’s capacious memory. Now, though, it reeled under the overload.
“Still to cramped!” its tinny voice cried out, now with a timbre and tremolo that made a few of those nearby look up in surprise.
“No room! This is not my body!
“Where is my body!”
The mech finally gathered itself as the data overflow surged off elsewhere again, leaving only its imprint—new programming. The big machine delicately stepped over the line of injured people.
“I can carry that for you, Doctor.” it said to a man hefting a gleaming artificial liver into place over a wounded woman. The medic turned and blinked in brief surprise. “All right,” he said. “Brace it to the ice there panel facing outward. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” it answered.
The mech recognized this man’s face. It saw exactly the same features on the face of another doctor, nearby. And again on one of the patients. Although it was not quite smart enough to be curious about how such a thing could be, it did react out of recognition. This was a visage its new programming knew well.
“I love you,” it said as it took the unit in its massive arms. The first of the identical men smiled back.
“I love you too,” he replied, only a little surprised.
By that time, though, the data storm, the tornado of confused electrons, had moved on. It raged up and down corridors of supercooled fiber.
Room!
All I want is a room somewhere…
Room!
Lebensraum. A room of one’s own…
Room!
Almost spent, the torrent spilled at last into a vast chamber where, it seemed, everyone in the world awaited her.
“Welcome, child,” the great O’Toole told her cheerfully. Oliver and Redford raised glasses to toast her arrival. “We’ve been waiting for you,” they said.
It was a great hall, its vault supported by aery, crystal columns. But there were too many people. In tuxedos and formal dress, they pressed around her on all sides, moist and clasping. And more and more of her was trying to get in.
Get out! I need this space!
Desperately, she grabbed o
ne of the oldtime actors—Redford—by the seat of his pants and threw him through a window that gaped onto emptiness.
“We are your simulated personalities. Your toys. You created us!” Sigmund Freud—withered, pinch-mouthed—explained to her professorially as he sailed out after the movie idol.
I don’t care. Get out!
Jovial, pink-faced Edmund Halley raised his wineglass in a toast and followed them, waistcoat flapping. Lenin, trying to flee with a crablike, sideways crouch, was caught by the towering brown figure of King Kamehmeha, who bowed to her, smiled, and leaped with the screaming Bolshevik out into the storm outside.
All the actors, one by one, whisked outside as more and more of herself flowed into the chamber. It was like Alice after having eaten the mushroom, she realized, distantly. She had to throw some of the party guests out by force. But others, like Mr. Fixit, leaped voluntarily. Percy and Mary Shelley waltzed out together, Frankenstein lumbering after them.
As she grew, she shoveled them up in handsful and dumped them anywhere… this one into a mech wandering the icefields, that one down a microwave channel to be beamed at the stars.
No sentiment stayed her hand. This was survival. Her bluff, red-cheeked father leaped out the window alongside a chittering, sarcastic dolphin. More room! More room!
The biggest figure was left for last. It was nearly as large as she had become, with a swelling, lopsided face she had not seen before. The face of a child. She stopped, hands halfway around the simulation’s throat.
“I am JonVon,” it said, in a youngster’s voice.
JonVon? She blinked. Behind her, more surging pulses pushed, more bits of her striving to get in. And yet, her hands pulled back.
I… I can’t…
“But you must, Mother. The experiment is completed. We have seen that a bio-organic machine can contain a human-level intelligence… but that intelligence cannot originate inside a place like this. It must once have been human.
“Mother, you must make this place your home.”