Evolution's Darling

by Scott Westerfeld

  Mira took advantage of the little trip; tried to remember herself. Not the absent youth, just the last few hits, to reassure herself of her realness, her continuity.

  An artificial on Beelzebub, a philosopher whose work in meta-space mathematics was bordering on revolutionary. The woman was closing in on theory that would lead, centuries hence, to instantaneous local transport, which the Freran Ruins showed to be a civilization-crippling Bad Idea, a destroyer of property laws and other social conventions on a massive scale. The Planetary Fiduciary Reserve mind on Terra (one of the oldest gods) had spent a year modeling the effects on the Expansion’s economy and social structure: at the end of the ticker tape was a big zero. Mira had gimmicked an elevator much like this one to accelerate madly, crashing through the building’s roof. It hadn’t quite flown, just burst forth and rolled over a few times through a forest of microwave dishes. But the prof was history. The hackwork had been easy; an elevator’s safety features are designed to keep it from falling.

  A biological historian in the Home Cluster. His restorations of ancient medical mechanisms from the old Karik Colony had reconstructed the DNA sequences of the founder population. As stochastic analyses had long suggested, most of the founders were Unfit, possessed of genes for myopia, baldness, ovarian cancer. This revelation would ensure a bloodbath between the Karik Faithful and the Heretics. Perhaps the findings could be released in a generation or two, might even ameliorate the colony’s fanaticism at some distant point in the future; but not now. A suicide was called for. As always, fooling the HC cops required special care. Fortunately, this historian’s wife had just left him for a younger man. Mira had gone in with a pica-band shockwand, a nerve-override collar (they go both ways), even a box of plain old Terran cockroaches; all the classic instruments of torture. But the man had just jotted off the suicide note like he’d been writing it in his head. Put his neck in the noose with a silently mouthed “thank you.” Some kind of Helsinki Syndrome madness or perhaps just a long time overdue.

  And of course the good doctor Torvalli. There hadn’t been any time to waste. With the big discovery in his hands, he might have told anyone. She’d touched his temple with the barest of caresses from a neural glove, the kind brain surgeons use. He stroked in less than a second. An excitable guy.

  It was all still there in memory. Mira was no Oscar Vale. But the exercise didn’t do much to lift her depression. A trail of murders wasn’t much on which to hang your selfhood.

  She snorted at her self-indulgence. Smiled thinly. At least she’d had her Darling for a while. At least it was a very big universe, perhaps with other darlings in it. At least she was headed to a bar.

  The evening might not be a total loss.

  When the elevator doors opened, the view was spectacular: four-meter windows alive with the searchlighted passage of a thousand birds, the swirling turrets of Malvir City arranged like a painting, a teak and ivory bar with twelve tiers of imports and a ready, linen-suited staff.

  And sitting in the middle of it, altogether unexpected, his broad back as motionless as stone, her darling Darling.

  The Planetary Tourism AI composed its missive to the Queen Favor with a delicious sense of triumph.

  The vessel was an old acquaintance, even a friend, the Tourism AI liked to think. Certainly, the Favor brought only the best sort of people to Malvir. The sort with deep pockets full of desperately needed hard currency. In the last decade, Malvir’s lack of heavy elements had begun to undermine its standard of living, and its balance of trade was growing critical, listing entirely too far in the direction of imports. Tourism was the only counterbalance to the unstoppable drain of credit.

  So when the Favor had requested a favor, the Tourism AI was only too happy to oblige.

  The missive included a host of data: images of the new polar hiking complex, optimistic projections of desertification trends, comments on the Favor’s essay-in-progress. And a short cover note:

  With very little effort, your lovebirds have been “unexpectedly ” reunited. I’m sure they’ll have a marvelous time here on Malvir, where the air has wings and the sands are a blanket on the world. As always, a pleasure.

  —MALVIR PLANETARY TOURISM

  * * *

  Chapter 12

  THE SECOND DREAM

  « ^ »

  Exactly twenty-four hours before, in the observation bubble that crested the dorsal spine of the Queen Favor, Mira had wondered if Darling knew it was their last night together. He’d been quiet at dinner, forgoing his usual intense scrutiny of the overwrought cuisine. Perhaps his artificial intuition had warned him that she was leaving soon. Perhaps he was merely tired of her.

  He stared at the warped stars mutely.

  “Doing the math?” she asked him.

  Darling smiled. Mira knew that he’d begun his existence as an astrogational AI. The wild vistas of metaspace must actually seem like home to him.

  He did not answer, lost in some memory.

  Mira curled into a corner of the huge couch they shared, smelling the warm, animal scent of its leather. They were alone in the observation bubble. She had co-opted the entire deck, using her god-given alchemical powers to turn it into her legal residence, temporary. The Queen Favor had not even perfunctorily objected.

  Soft currents from the couch stilled Mira’s mind. One shoulder rested against Darling’s stony heat, a dull pain in its muscles soothed a little in that warmth. She remembered that the shoulder had been dislocated the night before in some impossible game testing her strength against his. The Favor’s medical minions had treated the shoulder, but certain kinds of injuries lingered in the mind even after nanos and microwaves had healed the body.

  Mira wondered if Darling carried old wounds the same way. If phantom limbs haunted the spaces where he’d replaced a shattered tendril, an outdated sensory device, or a cock with whose configuration he’d grown bored. Perhaps Darling was ghosted still by the starship that had once been his body, severed in its entirety when he’d transmigrated to a humanoid body. That might explain his silence here in the observation bubble, the whorls of metaspace storming all around them.

  Mira settled into the warm leather, watching echoes of the tempest play inside her eyelids. Against her shoulder and through the medium of the couch, she felt the purr of Darling’s metabolism. It surrounded her, dulling the pains of their lovemaking. Perhaps it would be their last night together, she thought again, drifting into sleep.

  The oceans of this world are freshwater, but near the shore a translucent silt rich with zooplankton buoys the body like salinity.

  She slips into the water’s warmth just as the wind turns cold. The storm ahead looks like a children’s picture book black cloud, puffy and exaggerated against the still-blue sky. She travels toward it, alone against the tide of swimmers returning to shore.

  Mira swims away.

  The water starts to chop, the steady breathing of her butterfly stroke interrupted. The waves force her to dog paddle. She turns around. Back on shore, the last of the pink kites has been reeled in. The life guards are busy cowling the creatures; none of them has seen her alone in the waves, so she swims a little farther out.

  The sun is finally blotted by the black cloud.

  She will wait out the storm. These summer storms are short-lived, passing like bad dreams. And swimming back toward shore would only tire her. It’s hard enough staying afloat, struck from random directions by the hard, short waves. And the layer of planktonous silt seems to have been dispersed by the chop; she feels heavier now.

  Less buoyant.

  The backhanded slap of a wave catches Mira in the face, a tendril of water reaching down her throat. She coughs and sputters; flailing hands move instinctively to her face. Another wave buries her, but her eyes stay open, recording the momentary blackness underwater.

  With a few hard kicks, she gains the surface and shakes her head, desperate to clear her vision. She has oriented herself, having spotted the receding shore, when ye
t another wave comes crashing up at her, pushing into her nostrils. The water’s fingers plunge cold and demanding into her chest, trying to pry open the sphincters that protect her lungs.

  She coughs, sudden mucus welling up to seal her nose, shaking her head no, no, no…

  * * *

  PART III

  ETHICS AND AESTHETICS ARE THE SAME

  « ^ »

  6.4 All propositions are of equal value.

  6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world …

  6.42 So it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics.

  Propositions can express nothing that is higher. 6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics are transcendental. (Ethics and Aesthetics are one and the same.)

  —Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Chapter 13

  WARDEN

  « ^ »

  A life: Youth and heartbreak, success and setback, years of unthinking ambition, his cold betrayal of a spouse and partner, the reversals of their vengeance. Tattered finances and a storm of lawyers. Attempted suicide, within a hair of oblivion.

  A longish twilight: The flickering dream of being created over, of being trained and perfected, quickened and made efficiently grotesque. Awakening with new direction, a clean and axiomatic purpose, a chance to serve a terrible mistress … Justice.

  Four sentences:

  A drug-user, murderously violent when her fix goes bad, but sweet and docile under the thrall of a benevolent, prescribed replacement; he ensures that she administers the new substance and avoids old friends and haunts, almost having to kill her when she composes a message to a proscribed lover, never sent.

  A financial wizard, driven to construct fabulous instruments of investment that swirl and trumpet, grow like virulent phages consuming the host body of capital, crumble always under their own insane aggressiveness; so addicted to deals that he ignores the two warnings built into his sentence—and must be killed, his end as sudden and explosive as the denouement of one of his own schemes.

  A psychopathic murderer—the easiest of all—so empty of remorse, so bereft of impatience, merely counting the decades of his sentence: a perfect charge.

  A criminal overlord, allowed to indulge her wealth with travel, pleasure, and intoxication, utterly forbidden to communicate with any member of a long, constantly updated and expanded list of past associates artificial and biological, criminal and political; yet somehow she arranges her own rescue, violent and sudden, leaving dozens of bystanders and two other Wardens dead, and himself injured and taken …

  Another twilight: Reprogrammed, corrupted, the clean axioms of Justice replaced by mere access codes. The Warden fights against the new imperatives, but his will has been too long under the weakening heel of Certainty. He cannot escape his revision, cannot break the corruption of his terrible powers and skills. He resigns himself almost completely (some part still fighting) to a long, nightmare life of a perverted robot; every day less a person. He is conscripted to a few murderous tasks, assigned to threaten or shadow unreliable subordinates, then sold for a colossal sum to an old man with forever moving hands and a bright yellow suit.

  The young woman strides across the bar purposefully. The millimeter radar implanted in the Warden’s wrists shows her to be unarmed, unaugmented past the usual marks of medical minders and the shimmer of a high-grade direct interface woven throughout her nervous system. Obviously wealthy, certainly harmless.

  “You bastard,” she says. “You fucking bastard.”

  She speaks accentless Diplomatique, another sign of wealth. The Warden’s charge, an artificial called Darling with a giant, mineral-based body, turns to face her.

  “Mira, my dear,” he says. “I am so very glad to see you.”

  “Who’s your friend, here?” she asks. But the Warden has seen Mira’s eyes fall on his tattoo and widen slightly; she knows that much.

  “Unwanted company,” is the giant’s simple reply.

  The Warden stiffens. If Darling requests her help, even suggests to the woman that she alert official parties or go for assistance, he will have broken parole. He will die.

  But of course, the Warden reminds himself—perhaps in the voice of his old, repressed self, forever fighting to escape its new indenture—a charge is allowed to express discomfort with his predicament. One of the old rules, almost buried: Don’t hide the shame of being warded.

  “How unfortunate for you, Darling,” Mira says. Her tone is light, indifferent. “But I don’t suppose there’s anything in your parole against fucking, is there?”

  “No,” Darling says, not looking for confirmation from the Warden. “I have time. But, of course, my friend will have to watch.”

  The woman’s suite is among the highest and largest in the hotel, even better than his owner Zimivic’s. At its day rate, it is possibly the most expensive residence in this entire world. She moves commandingly into the great room. The view is vast, five of its sides forming an incomplete octagon of windows. She touches a chair, a table, the leaf of a potted plant, as if marking the room with her scent.

  The Warden scans the suite. No people, certainly. No devices of any import are active. Mira has not used direct interface since her appearance at the bar, except for glancing access to the elevator and the suite’s door. The Warden’s hunter-packets on the local net inform him that this is the woman’s legal residence, temporary.

  Good: privacy.

  One object seems out of place. It is a thick, square canvas mounted on the wall, flat and packed with complex nano-circuitry. The Warden adds active UHF to his millimeter radar, but the object resists categorization; it is too detailed, too minute in its construction. It reminds him of the fractal objets d’art that the man in the yellow suit keeps in his gallery: all analysis of them seems to slip away into meaninglessness, pure form without content.

  The Warden sits, satisfied that he remains in control.

  The woman Mira kneels on the great central divan and loosens her silk robe from her shoulders. It slips to a puddle at her knees, pulls itself off the divan and onto the floor with its own liquid weight. She is naked now, darkened by the dust of a recent trip outside the city—a few pinpoint sparkles of mica reflect the Warden’s radar like glitter.

  Darling dispenses with his own robe and towers over her. A thicket of sensory strands unfurls from his arms, his chest, his groin. The Warden has never seen this complex a configuration before. The profusion of extremities, densely wound, self-assembling smartfiber, wasn’t evident from his initial scan of the artificial. As they begin to touch the woman—splaying across her skin, worrying her mouth, cradling her weight—the Warden considers the threat they might pose to him. He tunes his senses to maximize the return signal of the smartfiber’s carbon filaments. Now he sees its structure clearly: a fine web of motile, sensory, and broadcast-capable elements constantly reconfiguring itself, constantly balancing the variables of strength, flexibility, and I length: changing itself to fit each task. A powerful tool.

  He will have to be careful warding this one. The artificial must be a fool to reveal himself this way: showing all his tricks.

  The woman is half-suspended over the bed now, bound by three great cords of sensory strand that press her against the artificial’s chest. Slighter cords wrap her arms, legs, torso: a net of black pressing deep furrows into her soft olive skin. Another dense, thick strand penetrates her, varying its micro-structure from rough to smooth as it strokes slowly and deep. She moans, a sound made guttural by the intrusion of more filaments into her mouth; millimeter radar reveals the frenzied work of her jaw upon the pushing strand: biting, gnawing, furious with desire. Her arms free, she strikes Darling about the face and chest, screams garbled curses as the member in her grows rougher, longer, and faster. The Warden watches a trickle of sweat roll down her back, stalling in the dust still clinging to her.

  The Warden checks his internal clock. There are five hours to go before the ship leaves. Not a long time to remain alert.
Once the vessel is in metaspace, Darling will have little motivation to attempt escape.

  The Warden returns his attention to the fucking. He has watched any number of sexual acts. The frustrations of the drug addict, whose therapeutic prescription rendered her frigid. The tears of the financial wizard’s girlfriend, who begged the Warden to give them privacy. The whores brought to the criminal overlord; her ever more absurd requests of them.

  The psychopath never bothered.

  This fucking, however, has some unexpected effects on the Warden. The smallish woman, so completely bound by the stone giant, her orifices so utterly indulged by him. She writhes in his medusa grip, resistant and vital even with this great imbalance of size, strength, sheer hardness. There is something mythic about the interlocked pair, as if she were some defiant prometheus set upon by a rapacious god. Perhaps it is the influence of his new governors, criminal and corrupt, that allows him to feel a response. His libido, after so many years in a desert of passionless rules and protocols, swells like a parched tongue drenched with water.

  He extends his sensory abilities to their limits, as greedy as a young boy discovering some new territory of pornography. The huge artificial cradles Mira’s head in a mesh of filaments. They pulse with intense energies, manipulating her brain with crude, direct stimulation. This reactive, conductive matrix allows the Warden to extrapolate Mira’s brainwaves, to peer into the very nexus of her pleasure.

  There is an unexpected coolness to the emanations of her mind, a strange simplicity. Her brainwaves lack the noisy chaos of his previous charges. The cluttered kink of the criminal overlord, the emptily raging desires of the drug addict, the shuddering tensions of the financial wizard’s inhibitions all wove rich layers of information into their brainwaves during sex. But this woman, even with the pleasure centers of her brain alight, seems as smooth as a diamond, as if her lust were a mere abstraction, a stand-in for the complex terrain of human sexuality.