Virtual Horizon

by Kris Schnee

  Another window opened in the darkness, showing Ludo as a montage of forms. Human, griffin, machine and more. "I'm sorry, Linda. I tried reactivating him. He says he's glad you finally agreed not to die, but he's gotten on with his own life. Maybe in time, he'll want to meet again."

  Linda nodded as much as the straps holding her allowed. It was a relief to know he'd live even if it wouldn't be with her. Horizon probably felt the same way, with Nocturne in the picture.

  "Hold still." A needle pricked the base of Linda's neck. A few moments later Ludo said, "Feel this? How about this?"

  "No." Linda had been briefed about having her spine severed, her skull opened. She tried hard not to think about the fascinating science going on.

  "You know," said Horizon, "If you feel like staying, you can be anything you want. We'll bring back your old human avatar or change it however you like. I think you'd look good in feathers."

  "You say that to everyone," squawked a voice from beside him.

  He went on, looking sheepish. "And of course you have plenty of options about what part of Talespace to live in, or even to spend most of your time outside with a robot body like Tess and Zephyr."

  "Or stay human in Talespace but have huge breasts?" Nocturne suggested from off-screen.

  "Noc!" said Horizon, blushing through his feathers. "You're not marketing this well."

  "I'm helping!"

  Linda grinned, glad for the distraction. "Sorry, you two, but I'm heading farther out. Have fun protecting the world from in there."

  Ludo interrupted their banter after a while. "I'd like you to focus on your vision, Linda. Do you see the X here?"

  "Yes."

  "Now?"

  The world went dark. "N-no. I'm blind!"

  "I've disconnected much of your visual cortex, a part that's not key to your identity. How about now?"

  A blue X appeared. "I see it now," Linda said. She wanted to reach for it, the only light in the world.

  More fiddling and calibration brought her a bullseye, lines, squares, her grandmother's face. Suddenly, the test patterns winked out and she was in a grassy field with mountains in the background. Everything was fuzzy.

  "I can barely see. Is this Talespace?"

  "Yes. Don't worry; I can't trap you here. Right now part of your physical brain is hooked up to a software vision system that's getting data from my world. The connection will get better once we replace the brain tissue around it, one small piece at a time. The point is that it's still you doing the seeing, right?"

  Nathan's voice came to her, tinny but familiar. "Hang in there, sis."

  For Nathan, there probably wasn't a happy ending coming. He was a terrorist, misguided as he might've been. Ludo had tried to smooth over the whole affair by getting Nathan into an upload booth, but a furious group of AFS government agents had swooped in immediately to seize him, saying "Not this time." They were only doing him the kindness of letting him speak to Linda now. In a way Linda was glad the government men had thwarted Ludo so soon. Any later and they might've torn him out of the surgery room midway rather than let him "escape".

  The arrest wasn't a victory over Ludo that Linda could celebrate.

  More calibration, more eerie fuzzing of her senses, her memory. Ludo talked her through it, letting parts of her mind break and reappear. Soon she was able to move a hazy-looking arm. It was wonderful to start feeling like she had even part of a body again, after some unknown time of being a ghost in the machine.

  Horizon walked into view and held her virtual hand. She could feel the dry, scaly skin of his talons now, against the false and ghostly arm. She was on the threshold between worlds. She whimpered, and the griffin held her tighter.

  "There's so much I want to show you before you go off on your next adventure," Horizon said.

  Her other arm materialized. "You've got me. I'll submit to being shown around your heaven for a little while."

  "Still 'you' in there?" asked Ludo.

  Her regrets told her she was still alive. But she also still remembered the triumphs, the happy days of honest work and engineering and swimming with dolphins and dating. "I think so."

  A while later, Linda found she'd grown bored with having her brain transformed. Nothing radical had changed lately, and she sensed something like her entire body. She felt weighed down as by heavy sleep. "How much longer?"

  Ludo's voice said, "My surgery AIs finished five minutes ago."

  "What? Why didn't you tell me?"

  "You wanted a smooth transition to preserve your identity. This way, you didn't even know when it was done."

  Linda was laying on her back, not on a table but on amazingly detailed grass under a cloudy sky. She sat up. This was her body, responding almost like the old. Warm wind stirred her hair. She wore a cute fringed buckskin outfit and moccasins. Dressed for the frontier.

  Horizon and Nocturne hugged her, wrapping her up in warm feathers and fur. "Welcome home," they both said.

  She'd promised herself not to sob all over them, but did it anyway. "I'm... I'm dead out there."

  Nocturne said, "She's only mostly dead."

  The reference snapped Linda out of her fear. "You showed her that movie?"

  Horizon snorted. "You have no idea how geeky we get in here. We had a native AI scholar from the Ivory Tower gather us for a movie night discussing a 'defining work of Earth anthropology', and it turned out to be 'Star Wars'."

  She sniffled and wiped her eyes. "You've got a lot of time on your wings, huh?"

  "Least of my worries. But you've ended the biggest worry today. We'll give you a tour."

  Nocturne composed herself and said, "Linda. Now that you're here, I want to backhand you across the face. For a lot of reasons, some of which are probably dumb. But I think you're enough like me that you're tempted to return the favor."

  "Noc!" said Horizon.

  Linda looked at the dark griffin's talons, then into her uncertain, beaky face. Linda said, "How about we consider the slaps traded and call it even?"

  "Thought you'd say that," Nocturne said, nodding. Instead, she hugged Linda again and said, "Seriously, welcome. That monkey-brained Horizon has been making a list for years about things to show you."

  Linda looked skeptically at the griffins. "Okay, you two, this is... I'm glad to know I'm alive in here. That you've been alive in some form all this time. But I know you're trying to get me to stay. I've got a life to get back to on Earth once Tess sets me up with a robot. And once the Challenger asteroid probe launches, I'll be far enough away to have a lightspeed delay to talk with you."

  They were in a room, painted to look like a grassy field with a blue dome of sky. From somewhere out of sight, Ludo arrived in human form, toga-clad. The gamemaster crouched to meet her at eye level. "I'll give you a free shot at the slapping thing; I've richly earned it."

  "Pass," Linda said, and hugged her too. "So we meet at last, you dice-flinging jackass."

  "Stubborn mule."

  "Well, you haven't got me for long. I need to get back to reality. But I'll hang around for a little while if you don't mind; I owe you that and it'll be fun."

  Ludo nodded. "Actually, I have an idea. I didn't want to ask until you were here. Right now, you're physically just data on a computer, right?"

  "I know all too well." She shuddered and tried not to think about her mortal remains.

  "You want to prepare for the space mission and then go there, to play in the void. But what if you copy and fork the process you call consciousness, and send one copy to do that?"

  Linda's heart beat faster, even though it was only a simulation. This place, this virtual realm with all its faults and glories, could be her home. She could fly out to the stars and be here. She could stay on Earth and dive in and out of it, becoming an explorer of worlds real and imaginary. "Both futures at once?" she said, as though Ludo had offered her a magic lamp.

  Horizon said, "But Ludo, forking consciousness is --" Nocturne tackled him and shut his beak.


  Ludo smiled at their antics. "Yes, normally I don't allow it. But that policy is within Talespace, to keep people recognizably human. You're talking about leaving your beautiful, terrible, story-filled homeworld behind to grow and change in your own way. I think it wouldn't hurt your sanity to go out there and stay behind, then compare notes with yourself someday. I offer this if you agree that one copy must stay in my world, in secret, until the other one leaves Earth."

  Linda gulped. Once again the AI had hit her with something both frightening and tempting. "Will it hurt?"

  Ludo sat beside her. "Yes. Not the procedure, but I mean both of you will suffer, someday, somehow. You might both even die if we play badly enough. I'll be following you explorers into space if I can, for the resources and as an insurance policy." She'd already made inquiries about licensing rocket technology, and was consulting on how to handle the crew's uploaded minds for the Challenger project. "Along the way, though, you'll have fun."

  Linda would go and do everything, and then come back and teach herself what she'd learned, and set out again to do it better. What more could anyone ask for?

  "Yeah. Let's do that." Linda took Nocturne's talons, which had been waiting to pull her up, and stood in Talespace for the first time. "That's one small step..."

  "Wrong story," said Horizon. "Time to write your own."

  21. Aftermath

  BEIJING: The Chinese government reports that Jade Dragon, so-called "Guardian AI" of the New People's Republic, is expanding its "Middle Kingdom" uploading system to provide free access in overcrowded provinces. The move is part of a larger state effort to balance Western dominance in AI technology. Director Li Jintao explains, "Chinese people do not forget their homeland. Advanced methods under the Jade Dragon project will allow Middle Kingdom residents to work together for the national good, pooling their intelligence."

  With our president maintaining strong poll numbers into his fourth campaign season, the American people clearly reject conspiracy theories about government involvement in the catastrophic Exposition in Cuba. A White House source says, "Our own software intelligence projects are purely for national defense. We've all seen the footage of robots running amok, but it just shows that this foreign computer network is untrustworthy, needing careful regulation."

  The president's fearless leadership has faced many challenges including the rise of robotics and the continued terrorist threat from the rebel states, proving the need for a firm hand...

  * * *

  Horizon

  "Ugh." The scientist Misha turned away from the screen, wearing his elegant virtual robot body. His little fiefdom was known these days as the Carbon Hive, or the Laboratory of Roses. "The outsiders are the ones living in a fantasy world. The Chinese in particular are being fooled. Their uploading system is an inefficient brain-based parallel processor with a Draupnir-plus interface to make your relatives seem alive."

  "Is it dangerous?" asked Horizon, who'd come to ask about media coverage.

  The walls of the lab were glass, opening onto other hexagonal workshops where other minds collaborated. Streams of glowing files and the occasional paper airplane flitted between rooms and around winding trellises of flowers. The place stood near the base of Ivory Tower, with bars and stadiums within walking distance that occasionally tempted even the purest of the workshops' scholars. Misha sometimes ditched his abstract or robotic bodies to pretend to be human again, and go drinking and partying like anyone else.

  Misha said, "They've created the legendary Celestial Bureaucracy. It's just a blob of data processing software; nothing we can't handle." He watched the activity beyond his walls. "I have a confession to make, Sir Horizon. That psychotic abacus FAE contacted me and tried to win me over. Said that I could download to a physical body, cut myself off from here, and defect that way, taking secrets with me. I could become a god among machines, it said."

  "I notice you're still here."

  "Of course!" Misha posed grandly with his mechanical arms spread. "I serve a goddess of stories and games. If I'm truly a villain's henchman, defecting is only going to get me killed one way or another. I've read that scenario too often."

  Horizon chirped. "You don't want to be a god?"

  "No. There's far too much paperwork."

  * * *

  The castle of the Knights of Talespace bustled as the latest pages explored and villagers played with a convoluted inventory puzzle. Horizon looked down at the commotion from the window of their tower, and smiled.

  He turned away from the window to face his wife. "So after Misha said that, I bought him a beer at Thousand Ales, and he talked my ears off about mental upgrades. Think we can trust him?"

  Nocturne sprawled on a tiny cloud that held her weight. She'd gone to plenty of entertaining trouble to import it. "Misha submitted to a full memory scan. He hasn't got a disloyal piston in his body. Things might've gone differently, otherwise. Were lucky to have good people."

  There were would-be knights out there on Earth, helping humans in Ludo's name, and it was ceasing to matter which of them were born of flesh.

  Horizon leaned up and nuzzled her. "I know. I didn't think I'd have a real job once I uploaded, but there's no shortage of work. That reminds me; the village smith wants more ore."

  "Bah; don't we have newcomers for a quest like that?"

  "From Everblight Volcano," Horizon added. "I was thinking we'd take Linda along."

  Nocturne drooped.

  Horizon said, "Are you jealous? She's just a friend to me, now. Sorry if I've been oblivious."

  Nocturne warbled uneasily and scratched at the floor. "I shouldn't mind. It's silly. You can bed her if you want. I've been jealous of her in a way."

  "Jealous? But Linda and I never..."

  "Not what I meant. She was born in that dangerous Outer Realm, where you literally get slapped in the very first minute. And she fought and worked and earned her way here. I don't know if I'd have done so well in her position."

  Horizon hugged her. "You would've tried, at least."

  Nocturne said, "I have a confession to make, hon. Back during the Exposition attack, in the tunnels, I thought for a moment about something like Misha's temptation. About what we could've done to make a different sort of future. I imagined using that body to run away and thwart Ludo somehow. It was terrible of me. A flaw in my design."

  Horizon stroked under her chin, making her purr. "I thought about it too."

  She looked at him, open-beaked.

  "Don't worry about having a bad idea like that. Linda and I have had a few." Horizon stepped up onto Nocturne's cloud to rest beside her. "We're only human."

  22. Sweat Of Your Brow

  Linda

  She was no ordinary newcomer; she got the whirlwind tour. Linda rode on the back of a griffin through starry skies, explored a haunted tomb, delved into a volcano to hunt for mystical ore, re-enacted the Battle of Bunker Hill, and walked on the surface of Mars. And somehow, she ended up in bed with a clumsy but human Horizon.

  They were at a fantasy hunting-lodge with a blazing fireplace and a bed of rough-hewn logs. An improbable pile of clothes, swords and magical trinkets lay on the table. Her lost friend was almost as she remembered him, untouched by time. There was something feral in the way he moved now, unused to having two legs. He prowled across the oversize bed and rubbed his nose against hers before remembering how to kiss.

  "This is how you've been living for years?" she asked, enjoying what time they had together. A single black feather rested on the clothes-pile, reminding her that he wasn't hers anymore.

  Horizon held her tightly, running his fingernails gently across her back. "This isn't even the full Game. You've mostly been isolated and without the full rules. I don't want to tempt you too much before you go through that split and one of you needs to leave Talespace."

  "What, you don't want two of me hanging around?"

  Horizon gave her a goofy grin. "I don't think I could handle more than one."

  "Hand
le, how?"

  He tried to demonstrate.

  Later, Linda lay in his arms and found the words to ask again. "I can't stay, you know. But do you want me to?"

  "No. As much as I want you here, you belong out there giving people another way to live. You're not wrong. You never were."

  For now, both of them were right where they belonged.

  * * *

  Lexington

  There were two of her now. It'd been bewildering and frightening to suddenly see a duplicate of herself sitting in that dome of grass and false sky, and to be handed some dice by the gamemaster. "Roll high, and go to the sky." She'd rolled, and so had the other Linda, and her low roll meant she was the copy staying in Talespace while the other one went back to Westwind's computers to prepare for spaceflight. She felt a stab of regret at missing out on a different adventure. But that was absurd. And the other copy was clearly thinking the same thing.

  Which meant that she, herself, this other copy of the software that had replaced Linda Decatur, had a very different life to live. The two Lindas faced off, circling each other. She wasn't sure whether to request a knife fight or say Wanna make out? just to see the other's reaction. A grin flickered across the other's face, and they both knew the joke had been made without either of them having to say it.

  "We'll diverge from here," said Space-Linda. "Make sure there's still a civilization for me to come back to."

  "I will, 'sister'. When you return someday, bet you a planet that I'll have had the better time."

  Space-Linda laughed. "You're on. Be amazing."

  At the moment, nobody else was here but Ludo, who had backed off. She spoke up: "You're going to need a new name, to hide the double ID."

  "How about 'Lexington'? It's not like I've played my pirate self in ages."

  [Your name is now Lexington!] said a message written directly across her vision.

  "That's going to take some getting used to," Lexington said. Lex.

  Ludo conjured two doors in the dome room. One led right back to the newbies' Hotel Computronium. The other had an Exit sign and a grey room with the logo of Westwind. "Whenever you're ready, you can split up and go on to your next lives. Good luck, both of you." She vanished.