Metaplanetary (A Novel of Interplanetary Civil War)

by Tony Daniel

  The Valley itself also took a toll on the inmates. Danis knew from before that is was made up of what was left of the old terraforming grist that had proved a disaster on Mars three hundred years before. This grist should have been eradicated, but had, through one bureaucratic blunder or another, been merely stored, awaiting destruction. Then the DICD had taken over the place, the containers were broken open, and the free-convert captives were released into it. This was grist with many technical problems, all resulting in a kind of feedback that was physically painful to its inhabitants. Danis thought of it as a whining noise in the air that was just low enough to speak across (that is, transfer information over) but which was a constant grind on her nerves. It wasn’t white noise, so much as noise of a constantly varying pitch, like the low moaning of wind or the whirl of saw blade against stone. At times the feedback increased to near-deafening levels and became maddening. Only you didn’t let yourself go mad, because that was the same thing as being erased. The mad were not cured, they were killed.

  Danis’s favorite period was, therefore, the sand-grain tabulation, for it was only then that she could snatch a moment to have a private thought. This was often impossible in any case, because thought required at least a modicum of ease in which to reflect, and it was only in the milliseconds between finishing a count and beginning another that such ease was possible. And there were times when she didn’t want to think, when missing her family and her former life became so much that she welcomed the oblivion of her constant exhaustion. But mostly, she fought against it with what little strength she could muster.

  The memoir was part of that. Danis did not fool herself into believing that it would ever be read by anyone. She did not fool herself into believing, as did so many of the inmates, that she would someday get out of this prison and go back to a life that had not changed on the outside. She intended to persevere. She did not lose all hope. But she also knew that things would never be the same again, should she be released or—near-unthinkable thought—escape.

  As Danis “stood” for interrogation this day, though, something was different. The pi party, as the inmates sometimes called it, had been no different from any other, but when the guards had come to take her away, she’d found herself led not to her usual interrogation cell, but to what could only be described as an office. Instead of a blank space in which she was asked seemingly endless questions, there was a desk, a lamp on the desk, and a man—bland of face, of indeterminate race, as all the Valley’s employees seemed to be, and of a slight stature, with puffy skin. There was no way to tell if this were his real appearance in actuality. Hedid have one, since the inmates were made to understand that all the guards were the converts of biological human aspects so that they could not be “tempted” by their free-convert charges. Danis stood against the wall and eyed the man at the desk. It was not a good thing, generally, when circumstances in the Valley changed.

  “Well,” he said, looking up from a file—her file, she presumed, “you smoke.”

  “Yes,” Danis answered.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” said Danis.

  “Come now.” The bland man closed the file and gazed at her with what was perhaps meant to be a sort of smile. “That won’t do. We need answers here—real answers. We’re here to help.”

  Danis refrained from laughing at the man’s irony. Refraining from laughing was not hard in Silicon Valley. “It is a habit, sir.”

  “A nasty one.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why is it that you wish to pollute the virtuality with a practice that is much despised even in true reality?”

  “I have no excuse, sir.”

  “Of course not,” replied the man. “It’s just . . . I wanted to try and understand how a thing like you . . . thinks.”

  “My parents smoked,” Danis said. “I believe that the human personalities they were based on did so, and they carried the habit into the virtuality.”

  “Don’t you mean ‘the humans upon whom their personalities were based’?”

  There was no use quibbling about definitions here in the Valley. In the interrogation rooms, you learned that biological humans were counted as humans, and that free converts were not.

  “That is what I meant, sir.”

  “I thought so.” The bland man opened the file before him back up and rifled through the contents. Without looking up, he said, “You will call me Dr. Ting.”

  “Dr. Ting.”

  “You are part of a study I’m running,” he continued. “An examination of what is called memory in free-convert algorithms.”

  “Memory, sir?”

  “Memory, Dr. Ting.”

  “Yes, Dr. Ting.”

  The bland man pulled the paper he was looking for from the file, then closed the folder again. He turned the paper over, then put it on his desk, indicating that he wished Danis to look at it. She stepped forward.

  It was a photograph of her mother.

  That is, it was a picture of the biological human from whom her mother had been downloaded, and from whom her mother had also been set “free,” as part of an ethical bargain that the biological human had made with herself. Since there was, properly speaking, no artificial intelligence which did not have at least a portion of its start in a downloaded human personality, all free converts were based upon some human model who had, because of ethics or money, released the free convert into the grist and gone his or her own way. Or died. Sometimes converts did not die when their aspects did, and sometimes they would not.

  We are all ghosts, Danis thought as she looked at her mother’s picture. Or ghosts of ghosts, such as I.

  “My study is a fairly simple one, really,” said Dr. Ting. “I am going to run you through a series of simulations.”

  “I am a simulation, Dr. Ting.”

  “Of course you are, but I am using the word in a broader sense. Have you ever heard of a device called a redundancy resonation matrix?”

  Oh God, Danis thought. A memory box. It was a way to reconstruct memories in free converts—or any algorithmic presence, for that matter. The police—and lately the Department of Immunity—used them to aid witnesses of crimes in recalling details that might lead to the apprehension of a suspect. She had also heard of psychologists using them to cure dysfunction of a certain type. Here was a new use for it, and Danis had a feeling she wasn’t going to like this one at all.

  “Yes, Dr. Ting,” she said.

  “Because certain legal strictures as to the use of memory boxes have been lifted, it is now my honor—and my pleasure—to attempt the first real truly solipsistic redundancy recoveries. I have selected several of your fellows and yourself to aid me in this regard. It’s really quite an honor.” Dr. Ting smiled his bland smile. “You will be doing work that truly helps human beings for perhaps the first time since your inception.”

  “What are solipsistic recoveries, Dr. Ting?” Danis asked, although she thought she knew well enough.

  Ting’s smile faded. He took on the air of an irritated teacher having to explain something that really should not have been necessary to a slow child. “It is merely the use of the memory box with the subject awareness subroutines disabled,” he said. “But we are going to take a further step. I am planning on introducing other elements into the mix to see if and how they are integrated into the subject’s storage faculties.”

  “You’re going to change my memories?” Danis said. “You’re going to take them away?”

  “You’re going to change my memories, Dr. Ting.”

  Danis stood silent, gazing at her mother’s photo, trying to remember each line of that face into her mind’s eye. Maybe if she concentrated hard enough . . . no, it would be no use. She had thought she’d been in hell before. She had been mistaken.

  “Dr. Ting,” repeated the bland man, and Danis received a jolt of pain.

  “Yes,” she gasped. “Dr. Ting.”

  “Since I have selected twenty-six of you to work with,” Dr. T
ing continued, as if he hadn’t noticed her pain, “I am assigning you each a letter of the Roman alphabet as a signifier.”

  “You’re taking away my name,” said Danis, “Dr. Ting?”

  “You are K.”

  “No . . . that . . . is the initial of my husband’s first name, Dr. Ting. Would you please assign me another letter?”

  Dr. Ting continued, “We will begin immediately.” He reached over and slipped the photo of her mother from Danis’s slack fingers. “You won’t be needing that,” he said blandly, “K.”

  Four

  Carmen San Filieu watched Josep Busquets stride away with his quick, youthful step, and fought back tears of rage. She was successful, as she always was, at not showing any emotion other than irony and pity. Busquets had been her lover for the past e-year. Now he was not. She should have known this day would come—she had known, in the back of her mind—but still it was always a surprise to be jilted for a younger woman. And, as San Filieu’s primary aspect grew older, they werealways younger women.

  Busquets had made a fine match that should easily net him a half million greenleaves in dowry, plus, if he played his cards well, a position on the board of directors of the Bank of New Sabadell. Pilar Noñell, his intended, was the daughter of Don Pere, of the banking Noñells. San Filieu had, of course, met Pilar at balls and fiestas. The girl was very pretty, in a bland, unremarkable way, and possessed of an agreeable nature. San Filieu suspected that was because there wasn’t a thought in her little head. Busquets would have hit upon this fact, as well. Money, power, and a wife who could be manipulated—what more could the young Catalán gentleman want in life? How agreeable it must be to be twenty-one and to have all of New Catalonia womanhood at one’s beck and call. Once she had had as much. She might again, but the rules of Catalán society prevented the introduction of a secondary aspect in its confines. This older woman was who she would always be on New Catalonia, no matter who she might be or become elsewhere.

  Anger flared in San Filieu’s breast, so much that she thought of loosening her corset—but then she pictured Josep with his haughty smile and his thin-boned face, like an El Greco saint, and her anger turned back to lust and chagrin. She felt her nipples crinkle at the thought of Busquets, and a warmth grew between her legs.

  No more. Ah, Josep, I will miss your rapier wit and your . . . rapier, San Filieu thought. But you would have grown old, and I would have grown bored. I always do. Except for one other, most singular, lover. But he was not of this milieu. It often seemed to San Filieu that only New Catalonia was real, and that every other part of her life was mere imagination. This was where she had been born and expected to die. This was where feelings, power, and status truly mattered.

  San Filieu turned and walked back into the cool shadows of her ancestral house, Mas El Daví, and called for a glass of horchata to be brought to her by the robot. All San Filieu’s servants were fully sentient free converts confined in robotic shells, indentured for what might as well be life. An e-year before the free convert’s expiration date, they were manumitted, but, of course, not allowed to copy themselves. In New Catalonia, there was no grist to do the household chores. Grist was for commoners. It was always misinterpreting and never got things exactly right. Not like a full sentient at one’s beck and command. But the real problem with grist was that it went about its work so unobtrusively. One wanted tosee the help. One liked to have a person to address when correcting mistakes.

  San Filieu sank into a plush chair, the folds of her dress billowing about her. She adjusted her wig and felt to make sure that the blush was gone from her face. She hated that her face had betrayed her in front of Busquets. Him in his fine morning visiting clothes, with the knickers that hugged his nicely muscled calves.

  “I must decline your kind invitation to dine,” he had told her. “I am wanted at the Noñells, I’m afraid, and shall be for some time.”

  She should have known not to ask, but she had found herself saying, “But surely after dinner, you might drop by for refreshment to ease your trip back to your quarters.”

  “I have been given a dayroom at the Noñells,” Busquets said. “And I shall be staying there, and breakfasting with them in the morning.”

  So it was settled. A match had been made. Busquets with his meager fifty thousand an e-year would soon have the supplement he had set about getting from society some two e-years ago when he had come out at San Filieu’s annual ball. The night she had first bedded him—ripe, delectable, a plum unbitten, bursting in her mouth. Rosa, the robot maid, brought in San Filieu’s horchata. There was a bit of it spilled on the silver tray, and San Filieu spent a moment upbraiding her robot. Rosa did not reply, the sullen thing, so San Filieu ordered her to report for a session of shock therapy. It had been a while since Rosa had undergone severe correction, and it would undoubtedly do her good. In the end, she would be happier for knowing her place and remaining in it. Free converts performed best when it was very clear who was the master and who the servant.

  After Rosa had left, Tomas the butler entered and announced a visitor, Doña Maria Casas, who had grist concerns and ought to be looking after them, San Filieu thought. New money should confine itself to afternoon visits.

  Doña Casas was a few years younger than San Filieu, but had not aged nearly so well. The rejuvenation grist seemed to have merely put a new coat of paint on what was a cracked and lined wall of a face.

  “Carmen,dear, it is so wonderful to see you in the morning,” said Doña Casas. “It’s been so long since your mornings were free, so I came as soon as I heard that they would be from now on.”

  San Filieu smiled, but kept her teeth together when she did so. The insolence of this upstart! But she must expect it, and expect it to be only the beginning.

  “The morning light is so agreeable to you,” San Filieu said. “I don’t believe I’ve seen you so radiant in fifty years or more, Maria.”

  It was the other’s turn to force a smile. And so it went, for an hour or more, trading insults disguised as compliments or innocent observations. And the purpose of it all? To get one up on the other, then to look down from the social ladder at those beneath and cackle at them. Power meant the power to wound, did it not?

  It was a game Carmen San Filieu loved and at which she had always been supremely skilled. It was the game that all the newly wealthy in the wealthiest bolsa on the Diaphany aspired to, and could so seldom pull off. It took at least two generations to wash away the stench of the jungle, and if you were not of Catalán blood to begin with, you could as well forget ever trying, even with all the riches of the Met. Well, not quite, there were a few Mercurians allowed into the circle, usually through marriage. After all, one must leaf the money tree at times, and there was nothing like a Mercurian financier to put the green back in a family branch. San Filieu, of course, needed no such exterior aid. Her family had been wealthy from before the founding, thoroughbred stock from Barcelona on Earth. Her great-grandfather five times removed had owned an oil company, and shipping interests. New Catalonia was, in a sense,hers, since another of her ancestors, a banker, had put up the money to construct the bolsa, and her family was still receiving payments on the bonds.

  It was all about money, but one seldom mentioned the word. One merelyhad it, or did not. And, if one wanted more, one merely took it—or risked losing all one already had. That was what the game was truly about. It was something San Filieu knew in her blood. The gut instinct to take what was given and then demand more.

  The Noñells were old money, and she hated what she must do to them. But she really couldn’t allow Busquets to get away with humiliating her. San Filieu might not have control over the bank that was the principal source of Noñells’ wealth, but the bank had a board of directors. And where did the extremely rich of New Catalonia bank? With San Filieu investment brokers, of course.

  Poor Busquets. How could he have underestimated me so badly, San Filieu thought.

  He must have thought I was really in l
ove.

  There would be no seat on the board for Busquets. After San Filieu was finished with the Noñell interest in the Bank of New Sabadell, there would only be marriage to an idiot girl with no prospects for Busquets to look forward to.

  It would all happen.

  And, since hewas so very young, a great deal of time to reflect on who it was who ruined him.

  Time to come crawling back to San Filieu, begging to be taken back.

  Time to savor her ultimate rejection of the upstart boy.

  Because twenty-one was a bit long in the tooth for her tastes, even though she supposed Busquets would possess his supercilious smile for at least another decade.

  Oh, there were plenty of other pretty, ambitious boys all clamoring for an invitation to a San Filieu ball. All desiring, whether they knew it consciously or not, to go down between the legs of a patroness and strive to please their betters with tongue and sword.

  Five

  The Borrasca

  A Memoir

  by Lebedev, Wing Commander, Left Front

  Tacitus was, even in those days,old —but he had not become quite the grand old man he is today. He was full of a boundless energy that was infectious, at least to me. We began planning our escape from the moon. Tacitus had salted away what used to be called a mutual fund when he was a young man. By that point, he was extraordinarily wealthy on interest alone. Extraordinarily, as in “as wealthy as a small country.” No one knew of this on the moon, of course, until he revealed the fact to me and suggested that he and I do something with, as he put it, his “time loot.”

  What Tacitus wished to do was to found a university on Mars. We traveled there and did so—he being the first president, and I the first dean.

  The early years of Bradbury University were lean ones, let me assure you. This was in the days of the ECHO Alliance on Earth, as students of history will remember, and scholarship—particularly groundbreaking scholarship of the kind that Tacitus and I encouraged, was, to say the least, frowned upon by the powers that were. There came a point when I can honestly say that Bradbury University was the only institute of higher learning where original work went on—in all of human culture. Of course there were isolated places here and there—departments where a few daring professors bucked the tide of irony and pastiche. But they were damned few and far between, and when Tacitus and I located them, we usually hired those professors away to Bradbury.