Whatever he thinks he’s accomplishing in there. No one she knew had visited him for several years now. He’s hasn’t written anything other than harassing Stream-mail since his conversation with the first AI-Persona to show itself. As she walked on, a motion more like being carried along on a conveyer, down the Interstate 90 corridor, she wondered if she should break into the Space Needle. Maybe Adam’s mutations had destroyed his mind.
Natalie waded through the soft, untracked snow filling the pass through the Cascade Mountain Range.
I have no idea what I am. I just am. She almost said, I just follow my instincts. But it would be tough to know what an instinct would be for her. Ghosts of a genetic past she no longer actually has? Anyway, she told herself as she kicked in her traveling playlist and music began filling her mind, I just do my best.
She crested the last foothill before the great rolling plains of Eastern Washington, the white mounds of the Palouse rolled ahead of her and disappeared into the fog of ice crystals. There wasn’t enough moisture in the air this far north for snow to fall. The sky a blank cobalt-blue expanse. Her infrared sensors noticed a huddle of heat-blips several miles away toward several collapsed structures. One heat signature stood alone amid trees. Smoke flowing up. Internal data response detailed the structure’s past. A cattle ranch. Further infrared resolution determined there were three people hard at work down there.
Kicking into high-gear, Natalie’s legs morphed into tracks. When she got within a thousand yards of the ranch house, she reformed her legs and grew snowshoes. Bug People were not always greeted with glee, especially when they didn’t look human. A hundred yards out, her visual sensors resolved the scene into three Bios digging with stones lashed to sticks into a mass of frozen meat. Cow carcasses, she self-reported, frozen and preserved. She huddled under the mound of blankets used to disguise the battery encasement that made her look like a hunchback, a dead giveaway to Bios who had encountered Bug People or heard stories of them. There weren’t many of her kind out this far, but sometimes Bugs hunted Bios out of humanitarian impulses to get them uploaded. Especially the children.
Natalie trudged heavily, noisily so she wouldn’t surprise the three. Her approach in the windy, snow-blown valley didn’t draw the attention of the three people until she was within fifty feet. The three, under mounds of heavy winter gear made of leather and course fabric, stopped chipping at the hardened flesh and spun, brandishing their stone-age weapons at her. She stopped and spread her arms.
“Unarmed and alone!” Her voice cut through the wind.
The biggest of the three, a thick, ice-coated grey beard pushing out from the fur of his hood, stepped forward and shifted his stone axe across his body, cradled it in heavy greased gloves.
“We got no tech here.”
Her disguise hadn’t worked, of course. What would a single Bio female be doing wandering around in the wilderness?
“I’m not here to cause trouble.” She pushed open palms toward them. If they attacked, she’d leave them be. “But yes you do have tech. That highly processed titanium in your back.”
The other two stepped to either side of the big, old man. Stone-tipped clubs up and at the ready.
“BUT,” Natalie nearly screamed the interjection, “I just want information. I’m not here to replicate anyone or take your tech or hurt you in anyway. I’m just looking for a Bio Tribe that a friend of mine is in.”
“What’s your name, Persona?”
“I’m a Bugger, it’s true, but a human Bugger. My name is Natalie Rodriguez. I was changed in Seattle during the first days. I’ve come this way looking for Grant Heller who might be traveling with his family, or I hope so.”
The three relaxed, the mounds of blankets sinking as shoulders came down. A Bug Person could be reasoned with. An AI-Persona, not so much.
“What made you come this way?” The old man bent under the weight of the meat strapped across his shoulders.
“Ran into Bio Tribe down on the Shasta-Trinity National Forest a few months ago, heading south. They said he’d come this way.”
“That’s Kristi Beach’s tribe. Heard they had a little trouble with some toughs.”
Natalie felt a bit of panic, as much as her system would allow. “Did they persevere?”
“Aren’t as many toughs as there used to be. Small band can be overcome. Get a few through here now and then.” He looked around Natalie out of habit, but Toughs didn’t travel with Bug People. “Anyway, Kristi didn’t make it. The rest of them seems to have got on.”
“Shit. I am sorry to hear that. I worked with Kristi and Grant before The Transition. What’s your name?”
“Alfred Range.” He motioned to his right. “Judy, my daughter, and Jemarl Baker, been with us a couple of years.”
“Nice to meet you. So, what can you tell me about Grant?”
“Well, I tell you what. We’re having a bit of workout here with these bottom two cows. You give us a hand getting ’em up to the house, and I’ll tell you what I know. As you’ve seen, I guess, my back’s not so good.”
“You got it.” Natalie absorbed the outer bulk masquerading as blankets back to a thin thermal layer. She kept her former Bio Human form, because other forms embarrassed her around Bios. She stepped forward toward the three, who stepped aside. “I will need some assistance, Judy and Jemarl.” She walked between them. “My energy stores have to last …” She stepped up to the ice block, pushed her fingers into it. After a few seconds, the ice around the carcasses shattered from the internal pressure of her nanites spreading through the minute cracks and fissures. She retracted her fingers, grabbed a cow leg in each hand and pulled. Judy and Jemarl put down their tools and pulled with her.
They dragged the two cows to a cleared patch of packed snow next to the two-story log cabin. The building hunkered just inside the edge of a pine forest. Smoke churned out of two rock chimneys. The four hustled through the big heavy door, stomping boots and pulling gloves. The old woman standing at a large fireplace with stone cooking surfaces, smiled as she turned and then dropped the large wooden cooking spoon onto the stone floor and put her hands to her mouth when she saw Natalie.
“It’s alright, Ida. She’s not here for us.”
Ida nevertheless stepped back. Her look of shock gave way to horror.
“Ida,” said Judy, a woman in her thirties, short brown hair already speckled throughout with grey. “She helped us with the cows.”
“I don’t care if she brought flowers. What is she doing here?”
“We’ll get to that,” Alfred turned to Natalie, who had stayed by the door keeping her face relaxed, expressions of any kind are almost always misread. “She’s lost a lot of people. We all have. Now, Momma, let’s be hospitable. Come here and meet our guest.”
“No, thank you.” She crossed her arms, back straight. Fear mixed with rage in her eyes.
Jemarl picked the spoon off the floor and turned over two big pieces of meat. “We don’t wanna burn ’em, Ida. Hey, look, we couldn’t stop her from doing whatever she was gonna do no matter how hard we tried. So, we might as well see if we can’t do something for each other.”
“I can’t be in this room. Sorry, but I just can’t.” Ida’s eyes spilled over. She untied her apron, laid it across the back of a rocking chair and walked through a doorway and slammed the door.
The other three turned to Natalie and all three started to say different kinds of apology.
“It’s okay. It’s alright. I understand.”
“It’s all them kids that died the first few years. Some by cold and some by starvation, kidnapped and killed by the Toughs. Replicated by Personas …”
“I’m sorry. This wasn’t up to me,” she looked down at her body, shimmering slightly absorbing energy from the heat of the fire. “I just want to find my friend.” The Bios had chosen a hard road, but she understood fully why so many had fled the cities or remained in the woods instead of uploading. Her new body couldn’t feel much emotional pain, b
ut her mind knew sorrow. She wanted to help these people out. But she couldn’t stay, not the least reason of which was her tech-self would attract a Persona sooner or later. That thought made her think too of Alfred and the titanium in his back. Sooner or later, a Persona would come here to collect it. “Let me help you …”
Judy and Jemarl had taken seats around a rough-hewn table. Each had rough ceramic coffee cups steaming before them. Jemarl had begun dealing cards.
“Oh,” Alfred poked at the hot coals under the slab of a cooking stone, “we got what we need. I’d offer you a place for the night, but I just don’t think ol’ Ida will put up with it. She’s lost her husband and entire family.”
“I’ll make you a deal, Alfred,” for Natalie had suddenly understood why Alfred hadn’t said anything about where to find Grant and his people. “I’ll replace that tech in your back. I can harvest calcium material from the cow bones and replace the metal with it. It’ll hold up just fine and you’ll be free of that threat. Then, you’ll tell me where I can find my friend.”
Alfred lumbered up to his feet, walked slowly to a chair and slumped down into it. “I suppose you could drag that information out of my mind if you wanted to. Saw it happen before. Nasty business.” He put a pipe to his mouth. His steady pokerface behind the bush of beard revealed nothing. A man who had seen a thing or two and had decided to never feel fear again. “But, I can see you’re a nice Bug or you’d have done it already.”
Natalie felt loneliness at the insult. He was in fact goading her. Out of pride or exhaustion, she couldn’t say. Nor would she say how much she wished it all hadn’t happened and that she was sitting in a warm old cabin as a Bio just like them.
“I’ll replace that tech, whether you tell me or not. Up to you.” She did not want this old gentleman to fight her. She was just an interloper in this world, after all. A journalist helicoptering into a war zone to get a story and get out. “I’ll find them. Just hope I do before anything else does.”
“Yes, you’ll find them. Hell, you’re probably too late as it is. They’re two hundred miles from here, south-by-southwest. Can’t miss ’em.”
“How do you mean?”
“They’re livin’ dangerously. They’ve got some powerful tech that’s shielding them from the disassemblers, but these new Personas have longer ranges and get through any defense eventually. You’ll pick up its thermals long before you see them.”
“They’re living inside a tech barrier?”
“Indeed they are. Not much hope for them there, I figure, so why not let you know. This here place doesn’t have a nail in it. Not so much as a shave of metal anywhere. We cleared it all out as soon as we all knew they’d be coming for it. Now, tell me about this operation you say you can perform.”
Cagey old bastard! Natalie nearly said it. “You’ll just have to trust me.”
“I have seen some remarkable work done by you Bug People up in Canada, before we all learned to avoid you as much as the others.” He tapped out the smoldering pipe into his hand and flicked the ashes into the fire. “Where do you want me?”
“I’ll need to go in through your front, since I can’t see putting you on that belly.” She smiled at him then. They had an understanding.
“Well, like my momma used to say. I am an easy keeper.”
Alfred leaned out of the chair, got to his side and rolled onto his back with an “Oof.”
The two at the table got up and stood over him. Natalie went outside and came back with several bones. She settled onto her knees, lifted his shirt above his hairy stomach and placed one hand on his skin and the other on the bones. “I’ll print you some new scaffolding in there and then remove the tech by the same procedure.”
“Is it gonna hurt?”
“Honestly,” her nanites entered his body, “I don’t know.”
It did.
III
What does a ride in a 1969 Impala convertible down Rainier Avenue in SimSeattle feel like? Rolling through a neighborhood formerly and euphemistically called diverse by those unwilling to acknowledge the de-facto racism, the white-privilege fear that made and kept the neighborhood nearly entirely Black suddenly feels like justice has descended with the morning dew. When the economic, neighborhood-by-neighborhood prison system lifted, the creativity and social power that system tried to knock down and keep down, has sprung into full bloom with a marvelous cacophony of form, structure, sound and color.
Idling along with the chorus of thundering, big-bass beauties all around, down the narrow, once-dangerous Rainier Avenue, the big steering wheel rolled light under my fingers. I passed through a corridor of four-story brick buildings and once-dilapidated housing reformed by the creativity of people who even while viciously repressed dominated the orphaned white culture. The joy of freedom long held out of reach is palpable. Magical Realism has sprung to life in the valley …
Thus began Robert Henderson, former courts reporter for the Seattle Daily-Record. In the Mind Hive, he became a roving features writer. He wrote and published through the simulated Daily Record old-school, long-form essays.
… like all neighborhoods and cities replicated in The Simulation, the Rainier Valley convulsed with many new arrivals living out old fears, anger and aggression. Drivers careened into each other. Pedestrians got mowed down. Gangs and the loosely associated attacked each other out of economic panic. But once people realized the economy of the simulated universe functions around trading in quality, interest, talent and effort instead of buying shit with money, as soon we could all see the bottom and it wasn’t that far down, soon as we saw that no one was left out of all the richness of making, having and sharing then the violence stopped. Now even the sky over this valley radiates with a vibrancy once associated with vacation beaches set aside for the rich. This Red ’69 I’m driving, for example, was built/created by Disruption Auto, a group my friend from the bad old days of the war on drugs, a lawyer and marijuana entrepreneur. The mechanics and engineers print car parts in replicated 3D printers. The cars they build are so exact and perfect to the originals on Real Earth that you have to be very high on their list of cool people to get in one …
Robert’s stories became widely popular in part because of the writing, as he would insist if asked, but mostly because he figured out how to travel to places he had not been. From his experience of traveling to war-torn hotspots or poverty-stricken, climate-ravaged foreign lands, he remembered the key fixture for any journalist working in a foreign place: The Fixer. On Real Earth, a fixer was a local who could speak the language of the reporter and had good connections within the government and neighborhoods in whatever country or scene the reporter wanted to work. In this New World, individuals could not find their way to places they had not been in their Earth lives because they could only go wherever their experiences could take them. Robert, however, realized he could follow a person to a place he had never been. Once he had that insight, he began interviewing people about their lives on Real Earth and once he found people from places he had never been to, he asked them to take him there.
From Barcelona he wrote about cultural rebels mixing with kinetic artists and European sophisticates to create a city pushed to the extreme limits of architectural energy on par with the grandest conceptions of Antoni Gaudí. In this city’s gothic, narrow alleyways, sword fighting had become the dominant form of conversation, a freedom of expression mixed with the bravado of bullfighting. Women were the most fierce and feared of the sword fighters. Knowing they can’t actually kill, they duel to the extremes of pain. They strike and strike and strike with a fury born of eons of pampering the egos of men.
Robert’s first and most-effective fixers were the two women Natalie called The Twins in her Real Earth reporting. The Twins had traveled the world with Celestine setting up “clans.” The Twins were a little scary to travel with, because not everyone was super happy with how the end of the world had come about. Nevertheless, the arrangement was a good one for The Twins and Robert. They cou
ld explore the many localities of The Simulation under the cover of helping a journalist; and Robert got access to places, Clan leaders and people he would not otherwise have found in The Simulation’s mind-boggling, multi-dimensional sprawl without them. The Twins were also quite a lot of fun to party with.
But, all things good or bad come to an end, and Robert had split ways with The Twins when they began establishing a cult following with their panpsychic, universal-consciousness philosophy. They argued that the neural network must be conscious and even independent of the Mind Hive, that mysterious uber-program housing the lives of many tens of millions of human and animal identities, the way a wet brain housed consciousness. When he found out The Twins were collecting the energy from and thereby diminishing the lives of replicated people to fuel their efforts to model The Simulation and communicate with it, he abandoned their company.
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