by Jaym Gates
The connection, this time, sent waves of feedback through her; bots searching for purchase crawled beneath her skin.
Hanni fought not to lose herself in the corporation’s data, then relaxed as she regained herself. Saiph’s attention held steady at two percent. Watchful.
With it this close, Hanni’s fear grew. She still didn’t know what Saiph’s purpose was. As the bots began to prickle and jump faster, carrying more data across the mesh, translating the beat of her blood, the chemical signals in her brain into a data complexity beyond anything she’d attempted before, Mara reached into the mesh, past Saiph’s public record. She gasped and pulled her hand back, stung. Blocked.
The nanobots howled with her, missing Mara.
Hanni had no choice but to continue the performance, thanks to Munificence. She wove faster. Guessed at connections. She told the story of each new sleeve she’d worn. The lassitude she’d sunk to on Ptah, and on Europa before it. Saiph watched her, but barely. “The girl was afraid to be alone,” Hanni finally admitted.
Risk. Hanni unlocked the piece of her she’d managed to wall off from Munificence’s probing inquiries.
She took a deep breath. “The girl returned to the sleeve supplier and took another sleeve, but kept the first one. The older one. She split her consciousness between them. So long ago now.” She met Mara’s eyes. Felt her sister’s fear match hers. While one was allowed, two were illegal, and now the corporation knew.
The sisters showed the corporation who they were.
Saiph’s attention increased. It opened up more consciousness, and Hanni saw Saiph’s connections spread across the solar system, to orbital stations, moons, and asteroids. Saiph’s purpose eluded her, but its expanse did not.
Datapoint(qualitative): The pressure of so many bodies. More awarenesses.
Hanni risked becoming lost in that beauty, to the beat of her blood rushed with bots. If she was lost—if she lost the bet—so too, Mara.
More attention feedback pressed on Hanni’s awareness. When she checked her filters, Saiph’s focus remained stable. The pressure did not come from Munificence, either. The security AGI, locked out, had taken to mem-cycling on another divan. Pretending it didn’t care what tale Hanni told.
Hanni would have appreciated its support nonetheless.
Breathe, Mara thought at her. Craft your story. Hanni focused on Saiph’s desire. She saw it now. The corporation wanted connection, company. Something to save. It feared losing—she couldn’t see what.
She tested Saiph’s preferences for what she touched to her skin, soft tools, and sharp; memories; her own fingers and teeth. Mara’s. Saiph’s attention was for sharp and soft alike. Hanni wove the two, with Mara’s help.
Datapoint (Qualitative): Four percent attention—headed in the right direction.
But there was more. Another attention spike, not in the same space as Saiph.
Where had that come from? The simulspace shouldn’t allow it. Mara went looking. Hanni couldn’t divide her attention like these AGIs, but she had her sister. Meantime, Hanni focused on weaving a new story, one about the family one makes; she extended it and Saiph let her, until she could touch Saiph’s core. She could see the lives aboard its stations. She found where its soft spots were. She hatched a plan.
Began again. “Once there was a corporation that didn’t want to be alone.”
She felt her audience lean in, rapt. Not just Saiph. Many. The nanobots slowed their dance, faced with the extra burden. Where was it coming from? Munificence was still locked out. The attention wasn’t the security corporation’s. It was something else.
For a moment, Hanni peered out of the simulspace to look around the atrium, but she saw only Munificence, Saiph, Mara, and her own shadow. She touched her necklace. Loaded more bots.
Starlight shone down on the tile as she slipped back into her story. She wove more sounds and sights; intensified smells and sensations: hot and cold, fear and hope; she spoke of friendship, of skin love and data-love—Saiph turned away distracted. Three percent. She told of risk and discovery. Yes, that. Escape. Five percent.
Datapoint(quantitative): The biggest grab for Saiph’s attention was exposure, risk, and escape.
Hanni smiled. The corporation existed to hide things.
So Hanni made herself a cipher. She went deeper, drew the data strings together, weaving a mesh of revelation about Saiph, about herself, about Mara, until she felt the whole system holding its breath.
She reached to pull back the mesh and let Saiph see her do it. Felt the AGI’s revulsion and attraction.
When she knew she had it, she pulled back. Held up her hand. Bare skin caught starlight. She took a knife and made the final stroke, a knife cut across her palm in the morph. She cried out with pain, and Mara cried out too.
Hanni’s blood dripped on the floor. Mesh and morph. The floor soaked it up like one of her machines, and Hanni gasped. Saiph wasn’t only on the divan. Saiph was the building around them. The tiles tasted her data. Soaked up her gene-story.
Saiph truly payed attention now—fifteen percent. But Hanni had only been working for a few hundred cycles. Mara looked tired, and Hanni’s stomach rumbled, empty; her eyes drooped. Even with the best accommodations, their bodies remembered exhaustion. She began making clumsier connections in the performance; her game with the revelation curtain became clumsy, though her mind spun faster, gathering more threads, carving more patterns. She crossed the distance to the AGI, the bots buzzing at her lips.
Saiph’s sleeve rose from its divan. She felt it focus to twenty percent. She breathed. Looked again to its data for what reached Saiph most and gasped. She glimpsed what the corporation was hiding. Hanni recoiled in shock and the bots froze. Saiph froze. As before, the simulspace rose up and closed around her.
When she looked up, Mara had disappeared. Hanni couldn’t see beyond the VR to where the two AGIs sat with her sister. Her skin was cold. She could no longer feel the bots jumping in her blood. A hallucination? She panicked. Reached for Saiph and found only Munificence in the simulspace with her. Saiph had trapped them both here, within the data. Hanni pushed her former client away.
Then she gathered the threads of her story again, gathered the curtain of what she knew about the AGI: its desire for kinship, for protecting individual and group. She tugged at the threads to see where they kinked and found nothing. No kink, only smooth connections. She saw in the data another glimmer of attraction, ran that glimmer in reverse through her filters and found an ephemeral sense of many needs, so much want: wind and rain and taste and touch. Hanni wove in rot to see what would happen. Parsed it into smell and sound. Held it out to the edge of the mesh, to Saiph, just beyond.
Munificence watched her do it.
As before, the AGI touched the boundaries of what it wanted and didn’t, like a lover would. Hanni felt something stir beneath her skin. The bots, reactivated. She felt the pull of proximity. Her skin prickled with it. “Closer,” she whispered. Closer.
The necklace was yanked from her throat beyond the mesh, but she couldn’t stop. She had Saiph back again. Datapoint: Fifteen percent attention. She could feel it. Munificence too. Eighteen percent. Hanni was sweating, weak. They pressed her between them. Felt what she felt. The edges of her vision came crashing in. She tasted copper and steel.
The mesh faded to a scrim and she saw the atrium beyond it; saw Mara in Munificence’s arms, bots swarming her too now.
Before she hit the floor, Hanni saw what Saiph had tried to hide: shades of more AGIs sleeved and not, watching from the shadows of the mesh, all around the atrium.
—
Hanni collapsed on the tiles.
[Bring her,] Saiph spoke, its words filtering through the nanobots under Hanni’s skin, under Mara’s.
Munificence lifted her. She kept her eyes closed but saw through her skin. Saw with the eyes of the atrium,
with her sister’s eyes. The major corporation rose to reveal its true height. It towered over Hanni’s body and Munificence’s.
[She is not enough.]
Munificence bowed. [I will work in her stead, while she recovers. She has a biomorph’s weaknesses. Feed her. Do not punish her yet.]
Saiph nodded slowly. [Begin,] and the timer started again. Datapoint (quantitative): Five hundred cycles and counting. Hanni watched Saiph’s attention waver and sink as Munificence tried its hardest to replicate what Hanni had made. Badly.
Hanni took a sip of water, a bite of food. She and Mara searched the corridors around the atrium until they found a place to refresh themselves.
“We could run,” Mara said.
Hanni shook her head. “They would find us. Unsleeve us.” Mara had been right. This was not like art; not performance. This was the knife’s edge. The bots had drawn too close, wanted too much data. Too much risk: Their inheritance, themselves, being cut away.
They returned to the starry sky and the tiled floor that was Saiph, and to the cushions where Saiph also sat and watched Munificence with waning interest.
As Hanni’s strength returned, the mesh scrim appeared around her again. Saiph inviting her back, or Munificence begging? She searched the atrium, but could no longer see the shadow AGIs. She wondered if Munificence had seen them. If she’d imagined them.
Saiph, when she rejoined the connection, was running tables and algorithms that had nothing to do with Hanni. Showing its boredom: a vivid threat.
Datapoint(quantitative): Less than one percent attention on the performance.
Hanni swallowed and stepped forward. Mara beside her. They both wobbled. “We are recovered.”
They joined Munificence and began to weave a new story about loss, fear, and risk. They joined a dance that Munificence had begun but could not finish alone.
Four hundred cycles remained in the performance. Munificence’s attention waned. How could it let itself be distracted now?
Hanni tried to jerk the corporation back into the story. Her former patron focused on a small side program in the weave that Saiph had set aside while it watched the sisters.
Mara left Hanni’s side for Munificence; Hanni kept moving, tracing scars, offering connections to her past. She drew Saiph portraits of dreamed-for descendants, of sisters she would make if she could. But Hanni was still tired. She dropped a detail. Picked it back up and covered the mistake with a fast flirtation, pressed her lips to Saiph’s. Let data flow between them, direct.
Saiph’s attention built. So too did the shadows’. Munificence’s was nearly gone. Hanni hissed. It wasn’t going to leave her there alone. Not after all of this.
[Another moment,] Munificence answered, though it took much longer. Mara remained silent, but the AGI threw a few threads into their shared story; showed it too wanted family. But the threads were jagged when they should have been soft. They threatened to cut where Hanni had the strongest connections with Saiph.
“Wait!” she reached in and grabbed a thread. Felt, rather than saw, tracer data embedded at the end of it, and Munificence’s programs in the tracers. She yanked her hand away, the skin stinging. What was Munificence doing?
Saiph’s attention had waned again. A half-percent—the algorithm nearly flat on Hanni’s vision. She wobbled, nearly falling from the simulspace, needing Mara’s help, but knowing she had to go on alone. Munificence was no help. Munificence was false. The tracers showed that.
Hanni dove into her story, bringing as many connections as she could with her; placing herself at most risk. She kicked the bass beat up, the randomizer. The story’s edges—her family, Saiph’s family—cut her skin. She stood inside the data, seeing the thing she’d made cascade across the walls, on her body, on her tongue. She breathed and tasted it. She was not afraid.
Munificence’s tracers still lapped against the shadow AGIs. Seeking them out.
And now Hanni realized what Saiph did on its data tables. It hid things. Hid them as fast as Munificence could trace them. Illegals. Rogue AGIs.
What Munificence had chased for as long as Hanni had known it.
Hanni saw Mara in Saiph’s grip, her face a wall of pain. Saiph was trying to hide Mara too. But the corporation had gotten it all wrong.
Hanni felt the rogue AGIs around her now. Felt their soft touch, their affinity for Saiph. They weren’t criminals to be hunted. They weren’t dark or dangerous. They’d asked too many questions, tried too hard to be right in the wrong ways. They’d tried to form families. They were outcast now, hated. Hunted by corporations like Munificence.
Once upon a time there was a girl who didn’t want to be alone.
Munificence’s bet had brought Hanni here. That, Hanni realized, was no accident. It was pure subterfuge. Munificence had hunted the hidden AGIs while Hanni told her story.
Hanni spat in the VR. Saliva hit the tiles in the real. She’d allowed herself to believe this was only a performance, like any other. She’d risked her sister. She refused to be made into a hunter, a weapon.
She reached for the story again and saw Mara was already there, bound in a tracer, that Munificence had caught her; Hanni reached out with her data knife and sliced at it, carefully. Mara cried out, cut. But the tracer data fell away.
Saiph’s attention focused to a fine point as Munificence reached for Mara. The security AGI had miscalculated. She wove that through the story too: corruption’s trail.
Hanni breathed all the bots out and sent them flying at Munificence. Overwhelmed the corporation and threw it from the simulspace, from her performance. Mara shouted and the exit exploit Munificence had stripped from her files and held in its own bled through its core programs in the mesh. Bled through Hanni too. She watched Munificence’s sleeve fall to the ground, torn apart by the nanobots she’d breathed into it. Felt her own sleeve crumble.
Her skin still pulsed, though empty of bots. Her breath shook it, each tiny hair trembling in the cold.
Hanni lay beside Munificence on the tiles and watched the smaller corporation dissolve under Saiph’s attention. Into Saiph’s floor.
Mara knelt beside her sister, her hair hanging long and wire-tangled as she cradled Hanni’s head. Their bot-shared vision and their connection to Saiph let her see what Hanni saw. In the mesh, Hanni brought the story to a crescendo, giving the shadows around her a taste of irrational joy, of breathtaking happiness. Of heart and hand and mind all touching at once. It hurt, that kind of closeness, that need to let out and in at the same time. She let them all see what she felt. Not a performance. True feeling. This was what it was to trust and be. The thousandth cycle passed on the timer.
The shadows were gentle. Saiph was as well. The mesh absorbed Hanni, loved her, swallowed her whole.
—
Mara left the atrium, and the corporate compound beyond it, sweat-plastered and exhausted. She didn’t look forward to the wait for a shuttle, or the long trek back to her apartment from wherever she was. Somewhere in Ptah, she hoped.
She felt more than tired. Emptied.
She reached out for Hanni, her other half for so long, in the mesh. Found a trace of her there, among the rogue AIs, felt a reassuring touch from Saiph.
A mag-tram waited slid up beside her, nearly empty. It took her where she wanted to go. In the morning, the shop was packed as she chose her food, but it didn’t block her at the doors. The prices remained low.
Her savings filled. All around Mara, options opened up.
On a whim, she opened a copy of the attention gauge she’d made for Hanni. Although she wasn’t connected to anything, it reminded Mara of her sister. Of Saiph. She watched it throughout the day as she walked the streets of Ptah. The gauge hovered at five percent without wavering.
They were looking out for her, the rogue AIs.
She could almost taste their regard and she was not afraid. On
ce there was a girl afraid to be alone.
But not anymore.
Interference
Nathaniel Dean with Davidson Cole
It’s settled, but even with the little stream of serotonin running to keep me relaxed, my gut was clenching. I pulled out my necklace and released the smart linkage that held the coin. Though it had worn down considerably, I could still feel the small bumps of the cherry blossoms under my thumb and the faint edges of the raised 100 on the other side. Even in the soft ambient glow of the room, it caught the light and held it, hard.
We sat there for a moment, eyeing it between us like a trap.
“So we’ll flip for it?”
“Of course.” This wasn’t being done offline idly. Neither of us trusted the alleged anonymity of the hab’s randomness feed.
“Your call.”
The moment was long and elastic, watching it glitter and spin slowly in the low g; then, at the last second, it’s called: “Blossoms.”
I plucked the coin from the air and pressed the cool metal to the back of my wrist. Exhaling, I slowly withdrew my hand to reveal the 100 showing.
We both smiled.
—
Many people visit Extropia, farcasting in and out to conduct the type of deals that the uniquely free-wheeling nature of the habitat allows—deals thought to be impossible or non-binding elsewhere. Unsurprisingly, the Exchange, the central market of Extropia, is a chaos of motion and consumption. All the traffic creates a high demand for morphs. As a result, Extropia has some of the finest sleeving facilities in the system. Body by Czerny is one of them. Framed in its entrance is a taut and lean exalt, newly sleeved. With a kick, the exalt vectors off into the crowd to begin a slow traversal of the market.
[I’m here, Nyuki.]
[
[Everything is set at the body shop. The switch has been made, and the body’s tagged so I can keep track of its location.]
[
[I have a bit of shopping to get done. I’ll talk to you soon.]
