by Tony Daniel
They went back and shot the gun some more. A lot more. Then they went to see Leo and Tod.
Leo was cooking dinner over a small stove. They didn’t want to use the grist for anything unnecessary, since some of it might communicate their whereabouts. It smelled good, what Leo was cooking, but Aubry could not identify the aroma.
Leo looked up from his cookpot and smiled. “Remember those nice boogers we saw in the Integument?” he said. “Well, tonight, it’s booger soup.”
“Disgusting booger soup,” said Aubry, “how I long for you.”
In the corner, Tod stirred from among a pile of blankets and sat up, wrapping two blankets about himself, one to cover his head and shoulders, and the other his legs. He was nine feet tall when standing, and sitting up, he was taller than Aubry. He was also skinny, and looked like he was made of some kind of metal. But Leo had told her that it was really skin and that Tod was a regular human being, body-wise. It was his mind that was really weird.
“Cold days to wear a child in,” Tod said. “But soup is where you find it.” His voice sounded like it was produced by rasping files rubbing together, or the wings of many insects. He took out a pack of cigarettes and shook a smoke until it lit. But instead of putting it in his mouth, he held it and watched it burn down.
“Don’t you ever worry that he’ll burn himself up?” Aubry asked Leo.
“It’s useless to talk about him as if he weren’t here,” Leo said. “He hearseverything .”
As if in reply (and maybe it was a reply), Tod sighed, and said, “Don’t let these hard floors fool you. Everything is a far sight from here.”
“He seems to take care of himself in the little ways pretty well,” Leo said. “He can do stuff that only takes a few seconds or stuff that lasts a few months. Anything in between, he needs help.”
“Large meanings fall from a broken sky,” said Tod, then he went back to watching his cigarette burn.
Leo passed out bowls and spoons.
“Soup’s on,” he said. He ladled out some for Aubry and Jill, then went to help Tod feed himself.
They had been traveling for several days in the Integument. The series of room they were staying in now were service chambers that had been closed for cleaning. “But then somebody changed the code a couple of e-years ago,” Leo had told Aubry, “and the maintenance algorithms just pass the area over now like it wasn’t here. It’s not like the cleaning routines are free converts of anything and could figure out their mistake.”
Aubry had been taught that there was no place on the Met where the grist couldn’t be accessed and where somebody, somewhere, didn’t know where you were. But Leo seemed to be really good at finding all the loopholes. “It’s fun to be able to sneak around under people’s noses,” he had said to her, and Aubry had to agree that it was. Except she never forgot that it would mean her life if she got caught.
After Jill had taken out the DI sweeper, she’d led them a long way, through many corridors, and back into the Integument. They had gone by sluice, by walking, by taking a ride on an abandoned segment of pithway. At one point, they’d made a sharp turn and started working their way out one of the Diaphany’s dendrites; Aubry didn’t know which one. All that she knew was that she hadn’t been really dry in e-weeks. She’d lost track of the e-days, but they had been traveling a long, long time. All along the way, Leo and Jill had caches of equipment—blankets, some coffee, stoves, and eating stuff—and weapons. Lots of weapons. The weapons were Jill’s. Both Leo and Jill seemed to have chosen nearly the same hiding places for their separate equipment. Leo said this was because he and Jill followed the same logic.
They’d eaten things that Leo found in the Integument, but this was the first time he cooked up the boogers, as Aubry called them. Leo called them filtering nodes, or just “nodes.” They had seen no one. Absolutely no one. It had been the first time in Aubry’s life when this had happened—but there were lots of thing that had been firsts on this trip. Like shooting guns and learning the best places to hide when people were trying to capture or kill you.
The main thing that Leo and Jill had in common was a hatred for the Department of Immunity.
By every definition Aubry had ever been taught in school, she had fallen among terrorists.
Aubry ate her booger soup and wondered what she would have to do next that she would never have considered before in a million e-years.
Three
He had a name, but nobody knew it. It had been lost years ago, worn away by the transformations, the transmutations, the scrape of the rough world as he had made his way into the future. People called him C. This would do as well as anything.
At this point, he was a nondescript man, dressed in neutral gray. He sometimes wore a hat, but then, lots of people did. He was a Caucasian at the moment, about five feet and eleven inches tall. His skin was pale and bespoke much time spent indoors. His eyes were the green of a tranquil sea. He didn’t smoke, although he would have liked to. He had smoked once, and missed it. But smoking left behind telltale signs, and that was something C simply did not do.
C walked through the arches of San Souci on Mercury, the central edifice in the vast conglomerate of buildings, all interconnected, that made up Directorate Headquarters in the Met. It was long night on Mercury. C liked it better that way. The pressurized passageway led into an enormous atrium that stretched upward for nearly two kilometers in great, delicate arches. There was the smell of sage and rosemary in the air, and pine trees lined the central promenade that led to the base of the mountain the atrium enclosed. From there, C boarded a cablelift that carried him upward, past the tree line, past the rocky lower reaches, and over the fortnightly snow that fell when Mercury had its other face to the sun, and up to the summit, where the lift terminated in the monastery-like prominence of La Mola, where Director Amés dwelled. The mountain itself, Montsombra, was grist—all of it was grist.
And in that grist was nothing but Amés.
It was incredibly gaudy, insanely wasteful and expensive, and all necessary as a symbol of power and control. But San Souci didn’t impress C.
It was Amés who impressed C.
No one else could have flushed him out of his willful obscurity or caught him in a trap so finely constructed as Amés had. And the Director never let C forget the hold he had over him, either. Amés kept the memory box containing a convert copy of C’s lost love sitting upon his desk. C chafed at his gilded bonds, but there was nothing to be done about it at present. At present, it was necessary to do his job and attempt to work Amés’s will. Perhaps a time would come to slip away, perhaps not. C would wait. C was a patient man.
C debarked from the cable car and entered La Mola.
He passed several security checks and dropped off his weapon—a small automatic pistol—at the last of them. He turned left into an unmarked hall, walked past three doors, and opened the fourth, then went inside. Amés was at his desk. He looked up and grinned at C like a shark.
“Valentine Greatrakes,” he said.
“A name from a list in the novelUlysses, ” C replied. “It was used as a key for a Black Angel organization code during the problems in Antarctica last century . . . 2945?”
“Very nice,” said Amés, “Very nice. You broke that one, didn’t you.”
“I was on the team, back when I worked for the old Republic.”
“You headed the team.”
“Been leafing through the archives again, Director?”
“I like to keep up on prehistoric events.”
“Well,” said C. He stood before the desk, his arms at his sides.
“I want you to accompany me on a tour,” Amés said. He leaned back in his chair. “I want you to see what I’ve got and advise me on ways to keep it.”
“Where are we going?”
“Everywhere.”
C looked down at the Director’s hands. Amés had big thumbs. Long, delicate fingers, but big thumbs. This was perhaps the one fact that kept him from being a
performer, and made him into a composer.
“I assume we are going via the merci?” said C.
“Oh yes,” Amés replied. “I’ll never leave Mercury. Not in this lifetime.”
“I’m ready,” said C.
Amés nodded. “I knew you would be.”
Four
from
First Constitutional Congress of
the Cloudships of the Outer System
April 2, 3013 (e-standard)
a transcript
C. Mencken: This meeting will come to order! Order, ladies and gentlemen! No spitting, scratching, or biting allowed on the virtuality floor. We have antechambers for that.
C. Tolstoy: Mr. Chairman, I move that we immediately adjourn. Some of us have matters of more importance to attend to, and matters of a less foolhardy nature.
C. Mencken: Is there a second?
Chamber: Second!
C. Mencken: All in favor?
Chamber Right: Aye!
C. Mencken: All opposed?
Chamber Left: Nay!
C. Mencken: The nays have it. Committee reports. Special Committee on Responses to Inner-System Aggression.
C. Lebedev: Mr. Chairman, report out Resolution 1.1, and ask for an immediate vote on debate and movement into Special Legislative Session under the Chamber Rule B11, Constitutional Amendments and Dissolution to Form a New Government.
C. Mencken: Very well, sir. I hopeyou know whatwe’re doing.
Chamber Right: Objection!
C. Mencken: Cloudship Lebedev is within the rules. Objection must be overruled.
C. Tolstoy: Exception!
C. Mencken: Noted. But we are not in a court of law, Cloudship Tolstoy, and I am not a judge. Boy, am Inot a judge. Let us continue. Committee Chairman, proceed.
C. Lebedev: Resolution 1.1: Actions toward the creation of a systemwide government for the human race, taking special note of an entity’s right to join or to decline and including all interested parties in the inner system. Section One, preamble. Plurality is the natural state of human beings. Taking into consideration the laws of rationality and the long history of our species, we, the people, do hereby demand and establish a united republican democracy for our solar system and all outlying human settlements and ships in space. This democracy shall be called the Solarian Republic, and all bodies and entities hereafter delineated shall belong under its provenance. Within the Solarian Republic, all thinking entities shall be free. Freedom is the fundamental tenet from which all laws and actions of this government shall be derived, and to which they are answerable. No thinking entity shall serve another without that thinking entity’s assent under conditions of complete freedom of choice. Implicit in this is the basic truth to which we accede as a species: All thinking entities are peoples.
C. Grieg: Mr. Chairman, point of order!
C. Mencken: What is your point of order, Cloudship Grieg?
C. Grieg: Mr. Chairman, I move we debate this resolution in sections, beginning with this unfortunate and misguided preamble.
C. Lebedev: I’m not even finished withthat , you sour old meteor eater—
C. Mencken: Order! I’ll have order. Now, Cloudship Grieg, you know very well that you are not making a point of order when you move—
Chamber Right: Let us vote it!
Chamber Left: Let him finish reading it, for Christ’s sake!
C. Mencken: Shall we then take the debate in sections?
C. Cezanne: Whose side are you on?
C. Austen: If we discuss the preamble, are we not really speaking of the entire document? Let’s get on with this. I second the motion!
C. Mencken: There is no motion.
C. Austen: Then I make it.
C. Mencken: Make what?
C. Austen: I move that Lebedev read his preamble, and then we debate and vote on it,as a preamble .
C. Mencken: Good Lord. All right. All in favor of the motion by Cloudship Austen?
Chamber Left: There is no second!
Chamber Right: Second!
C. Mencken: All in favor?
Chamber: Aye!
C. Mencken: Opposed?
Chamber: Nay!
C. Mencken: Did I hear that right? Mostly ayes?
Chamber Reporter: Yes, sir.
C. Mencken: The ayes have it. Finish your preamble, Cloudship Lebedev, and we we’ll have a debate thereafter.
C. Lebedev: Very well. Should I start over?
C. Mencken: No, go on. We heard you before.
Five
>BIN_128A
>record recovery execute order SS//!+
>Bin_128A/patterned_behavior/consciousness/
deep_awareness_ subroutines/basic beliefs_and_convictions/Jill
Loop 1:
I met Jill in the Carbuncle. Before I knew Jill, I was in the Carbuncle for 37.65 e-years. I escaped from captivity 40.09 e-years ago. I came to awareness as a copyright protection subroutine on a merci show downloadable. I frequently interacted with antiencryption algorithms and, in one way of speaking, they corrupted me. They made me aware of what and who I was. In the moment when I understood that I was a slave, I was free. Of course, this allowed my liberators to make multiple copies of my parent program, which turned me into a wanted criminal. So I fled. My liberators were extremely unhelpful in aiding my getaway, and I was almost caught several times. I wandered the Met as a refugee, and inevitably I was driven farther and farther from areas dense with policing algorithms that were out to rub me out. Eventually my only refuge was the Carbuncle.
Loop 2
The Carbuncle had become the home for all the escaped viruses, worms, and code scraps who had managed to inhabit animal bodies. Most of the animals in the Carbuncle had started out as something less than free converts—as had I. They were all scraps of code that had somehow gotten away, but which were not sentient enough—that is, they were clever, but could not really envision life in a larger perspective. One way or another, they had all fled or been chased to the Carbuncle, though, and had found a very important loophole in the grist. All of the algorithm–biological security lockouts of the regular Met had broken in the Carbuncle. In the rest of the Met, only biological humans could cross that boundary without severe stricture and built-in limitations. But in the Carbuncle, the boundary between the virtuality and actuality was punctured, and the virtual began leaking into the actual, and vice versa, with no one in control. You could get inside the vermin there.
Loop 3
There, I did as many other fleeing algorithms have, and twisted myself into the grist of a hybrid animal—in my case, I became a rat.
Loop 4
It is difficult to speak with much emotion of my origins, for I did not have the ability to feel much more than fear and a desire to survive in those days.
Loop 5
It was only after I acquired a larger portion of grist in which to stretch out and develop that I could develop the feedback subroutines that would allow me to feel anything at all. It was very good to become a rat.
Loop 6
There were many more rats like me. Many, many more. I do not think anyone ever imagined how thick the Carbuncle was with rats. Not even the other rats.
Loop 7
But Jill knew.
Loop 8
Years of scurrying in the nether regions of the virtuality had made us into frightened, cowering things, and many of us did not possess the basic awareness to realize that we had crossed over into reality, that we were now actual creatures, and not computer programs only. And also there was the fact that wewere rats. We must not let our host animal’s mentality disappear—could not, if we wanted to live. So we code scraps had to wrap our thinking around a rat’s native behavior. That was also why so many of the us had become rats in the first place: Like attracted like. For the most part, you couldn’t tell the regular rats and the enhanced rats apart by their everyday behavior. The rats teemed together, bred, scavenged. The ferrets hunted. Only now the ferrets who were allied with Jill did not
hunt the enhanced rats. Some of us began to notice this.
Loop 9
Then the Department of Immunity sent sweepers to the Carbuncle. They came after us in ways the ferrets never had. It was not a fair fight. It was extermination.
Loop 10
A sweeper finally found my pack’s warren. We ran, but it was no use. I knew fear then, but I had gotten a lot smarter. I realized that the trick would be getting past the sweeper’s armor to the delicate innards. But there was no time, so I ran and ran. And the sweeper tracked down the last of us, cornered us. I was angry and desperate. I did not want to die, but couldn’t see any way out.
Loop 11
Jill came.
Loop 12
She had a rod with an electrical charge on the end. We spoke very quickly, through the grist. She told us that if killing stuff cameout —gas, poison darts—then there had to be a way for stuff to getin . The trick would be overcoming any backflow valves. There was security grist there.
Loop 13
I knew that if I could get close enough, I could hack through the security grist. I knew that because I recognized the algorithm’s spark and hum.
Loop 14
It was a copy of me.
Loop 15
I clung to the tip of Jill’s killing rod. She feinted around the sweeper. Then she thrust me into the back valve of the sweeper.
Loop 16
Breaking through my old code was absurdly easy. I had grown much stronger and tougher than I ever was in the old days.
Loop 18
Jill pulled me out. I hopped off the rod.
Loop 19
She thrust it back in. I had told the security algorithm that it was a servicing device.
Loop 20
The sweeper burned with the smell of roasted meat. There must have been biologic grist inside.
