by Paul Anlee
It took another thirty minutes to confirm her suspicions. A careful comparison of sequential images of the sky taken minutes apart showed Securitors hovering thirty kilometers above.
Great. Now I have two problems: finding Timothy, and getting out of this crater without being noticed. Okay, one problem at a time. Timothy first.
She had a good hunch about where she could find Timothy, now in Gerhardt’s trueself body. Gerhardt always sought a position close to the center, in the densest groupings where his anonymity would be enhanced by sheer numbers.
Now, how to search for him without attracting unwanted Securitor attention? Identity transponders responded to requests automatically. All she needed to do was ping everyone in the bottom portion of the crater until Gerhardt’s trueself responded. She could do that without moving.
Darya carefully aimed a practically invisible communications laser at the Cybrid closest to the crater’s center, and moved it systematically outward in a widening spiral, requesting an identification number from each Cybrid contacted. She kept a nervous eye on the Securitors above, looking for any sign they’d picked up her signal. Long minutes passed as she tagged one Cybrid after another.
I know you’re here, Gerhardt/Timothy. Come on, where are you?
A Securitor rocketed into position a couple hundred meters above her. She shut off the laser. Probably caught some reflective glints of coherent light bouncing off the Cybrid sensors or some floating asteroid dust. They could easily trace the source back to her general area. Hopefully, they couldn’t pinpoint its origin to her. She ran a check of her active sensors, ensuring she’d appear inert to outside observers.
The first Securitor was joined by another.
Darya shut down everything except a few external cameras. Oh, oh! Move along. Please.
The Securitors moved lower and surveyed the recharging Cybrids below for signs of activity.
She withdrew control from her sensors and manipulators to make sure she wouldn’t unconsciously adjust them. She shrank inside herself, limiting the remaining contact with the outside world to three sensors with fixed focus and direction. She slowed her thoughts to a glacial pace so her spintronic activity couldn’t cause any unexpected power surges that might be detectable. Nothing to see here, guys. Nothing at all.
The Securitors passed over and moved outward.
Darya released an inner sigh of relief. She waited a few more minutes for the Securitors to return to their previous lofty positions.
She didn’t dare resume searching for Gerhardt/Timothy by direct laser probing.
Maybe the Securitors weren’t sure of their perceptions, or couldn’t trace the reflected glints from the laser directly to me, but I imagine they’ll respond with force if they see any more coherent light sparkles. Alright, so no more long range bursts; I don’t want them destroying a few thousand Cybrids to eliminate one possibly active unit.
Darya loaded a simple version of her concepta virus and transmitted it by laser to her nearest neighbors, targeting their sensors with utmost care and precision. It was risky. She carefully computed transmission paths so accidentally reflected light would avoid detection by the hovering Securitors.
On reaching the nearest Cybrids, the virus loaded a copy of itself and bounced via direct laser link to the hosts’ nearest neighbors. It was a lot easier to infect her colleagues’ empty brains while their personas were locked inworld, unable to return.
In addition to the ID-number query, the virus requested each recipient’s location in a grid she’d overlaid on the crater floor. An expanding net search will be a lot slower than a direct approach, but harder to trace back to me.
She sent the virus to the twenty nearest Cybrids and shut down her laser. The probe will have to build its own network as it works its way through the crater. Eventually, an answer would find its way back to her.
The query expanded outward from her position. Within a dozen minutes, she had a location for Gerhardt/Timothy.
She couldn’t move without attracting Securitor attention but, provided she was careful, she could transmit a Partial persona directly to him without too much risk.
She loaded some Cybrid routines for the operating system and essential knowledge into the Partial.
What else? She added some interactive routines, so he’d be able to ask questions. The entire package was no larger than a few thousand gigabytes.
Here we go! She squirted it to Gerhardt/Timothy’s receiver window along a weak and narrow pulsed beam.
* * *
Darya’s Partial assembled herself into consciousness in the standard new-Cybrid environment, an empty gray room with windows looking out into the dark crater of the recharging station.
Timothy stood at the largest window, hands crossed behind him, staring out in fascination. Darya cleared her throat.
“Darya! There you are!”
“I’m sorry to keep you waiting so long,” she said. “It’s dangerous out there right now. I had to exercise more caution than normal.”
“No problem at all. This is terribly interesting, even when not much is happening. The scenery is starkly beautiful and the stars are magnificent. Never before have I laid eyes on such a clear night.”
Darya followed his gaze. Down here, near the deepest part of the crater, the light cast dramatic shadows. The natural features of the crater had been formed long ago, leaving large, flat expanses, now pocked with recharging bowls. The plane before them was covered with evenly-spaced, polished spheres. It was one of the least inspiring scenes she could imagine. If it weren’t for the glorious stars above, the view would have been depressing.
“So, when do we go outside?”
“Pardon me?”
Timothy repeated, “When do we go outside?” He scanned the room. “I don’t see any doorway; I presume it’s well disguised.” His brows furrowed. “How did you get in?”
Oh, this isn’t going to be easy. Darya surveyed the “room” in which she’d materialized. It had been a while since she’d introduced a neophyte into the Cybrid world. She’d nearly forgotten about this drab, default environment that introduced new instantiations to their trueself bodies.
How shall I begin?
“Actually, there is no door. This isn’t really a room. It’s just represented that way to help people get used to their new bodies. We call it the Initialization Environment.”
Timothy’s eyes swept from one end of the gray chamber to the other. “Are you sure? It looks like a room.”
“Yes, it does but, trust me, it’s just a convenient virtual representation of your new body to your persona, the program that makes up who you are.”
“I trust you implicitly, Darya. But it’s difficult to ignore what my senses are telling me.”
“I know. For the moment, your perception routines lack the basic operating system code to connect your persona with your external sensors. So, you see this room instead. I can fix that.” Darya pulled some crystalline chips from a pocket.
“What are those?”
“They’re algorithms, programs that will allow you to properly integrate with your body. I copied the essentials from my own operating system software so you’ll have access to all your senses, manipulators, propulsors, and so on. These will provide you with all the basic knowledge you need for life as one of us.”
“Will I need to study it all, like reading a lot of books?”
“No, it’s more direct than that. When I integrate these into your concepta, you’ll simply know things, new things. Many of these will contradict what you think you know now. It could come as quite a shock.”
“New York was quite a shock, as was experiencing conscious thought for the first time.”
Darya laughed. “I’m sure. In many ways, this will be similar. When your full persona came into being, it already had an underlying concepta structure, a foundation of knowledge and beliefs. Sadly, most of your Casa DonTon knowledge base won’t be relevant to your Cybrid life.
“Nor
mally, new Cybrid personas are instantiated from Partials that have grown up in a simulation very much like the real universe. It makes the change easier for us than it will be for you. I’m sorry that we won’t have time to make that interim transition for you.”
“Couldn’t you just tell me how things really are? Wouldn’t that make it less of a shock?”
“If we had more time, I’d be happy to introduce you to the real universe gradually, to give you a chance to get used to things in a proper simulation. But we don’t. Mary’s still trapped inworld along with millions of others, I suspect. And the Securitors are watching over the recharging station. I think Alum has decided He’s had about enough of our little Resistance.”
“Can you at least tell me what the world is like out there?”
Darya walked to Timothy’s side and directed his gaze out the window. “Do you see those large, gray, spherical bodies out there?”
He nodded.
“That’s what you look like now.”
His eyes widened. “I’m a gray boulder?”
Darya suppressed her amusement. “They aren’t boulders; they’re fellow Cybrids. We’re synthetic beings, machines built of metal, composite and semiconductor, designed to operate in the hard vacuum of space. We don’t need to breathe, we don’t need gravity, we can tolerate high radiation, and we eat electricity. But we are still people. Our mental structures are based on the human mind. With many enhancements, but inside we’re essentially human.”
“So, when you enter those algo..thisms…?”
“Algorithms.”
“Algorithms. What happens? Does this bare room convert into a fancy control room or something like a ship’s bridge, complete with levers and a steering wheel?”
“No, not exactly,” Darya laughed. “Once the O/S is loaded, you will become your body. You will see the universe through your new senses. You’ll use your propulsion systems for moving around, and you’ll have many appendages for manipulating objects. It’ll seem strange at first, but I think you’ll enjoy it. The Cybrid body is designed and constructed to be much more capable than the naturally-evolved human one.”
“I don’t understand. I feel like I always did. Obviously, I am a man, a human. You tell me I’m not, that I’m one of those…things out there, and you are too. What am I, really?”
How do I explain to the man that he no longer has a human body? Not that he ever really did. He only thought he did.
“Perhaps the easiest way to explain your present state, your true nature, is to tell you about the homunculus. Are you familiar with that concept?
“It is said that ancient humans once believed there was a little person living inside everybody’s brain, a being they called the homunculus. They believed it comprised the human soul, or consciousness, and it pulled the levers that made the body move, learned, remembered the body’s experiences, and made choices for its host. They believed that little person inside—the homunculus, the human soul—was the real person.
“But, of course, there is no little person inside the body. Not in Cybrids and not in humans. Sometimes the concept is useful to help introduce new Fulls to the real world, but it’s an illusion. Neither Cybrids nor humans have a little person inside; there is no soul.”
As she explained, she had to wonder—Is it intentional, the way we all start in a room like this? Some subtle hint to Cybrids that perhaps we do have souls? That we are somehow more than we appear? Or maybe it’s intended to be a promise; if you live right and follow Alum’s Way, you could be granted a soul. No, that’s ridiculous nonsense. Superstition.
“A person is ephemeral, just not in the sense used by ancient philosophers and theologies. A person is an emergent phenomenon of their conceptual data structures, their knowledge and beliefs. That, plus their personas, their memories and preferences. The concepta and persona that make up a person are simply giant collections of data structures—labelled nodes, weighted arcs, directed graphs, and such—and neural nets grounded to real-world data.
“There is no single point in a body one could point to and accurately state, ‘Ah, there you are; there is the essence of you.’ The brain or the CPPU is the best we can do.”
Timothy massaged his forehead. He was trying to follow along, but her explanation seemed so unbelievable.
“So, we’re not really standing here in this room. The room doesn’t exist in the real world, and neither do I. I’m merely a data structure inside Gerhardt’s CPPU. Is that what you’re saying? Funny, I feel like so much more.”
Darya walked up to one of the blank interior walls. She waved a hand in front of her and the association network representation of a concepta appeared as shimmering green print in front of the cream-colored wall. She motioned for Timothy to join her.
“This is the real you,” she said. “These are the data structures that represent your concepta and persona. This represents what you know, believe, remember, like, dislike, and so on.”
Timothy stared in wonder. He noticed some movement off to one edge of the graphical text. “Why is this part changing?”
“As you have new experiences, your processing algorithms update the data structures. This part shows you’re thinking about this new experience.”
“That’s me, thinking?”
Darya nodded.
“I’m looking at myself thinking?”
“That’s right.”
“My head hurts,” Timothy said, looking around for a non-existent chair to sit in. “It looks like gibberish to me. Do you understand this?”
Darya waved her hand again, and more writing appeared in mid-air. “This is me,” she said. “Unlike in humans, Cybrid thought processes can be called to consciousness and inspected directly. It has certain advantages, especially during disagreements. Though we don’t use it inworld very often.”
She pointed to a region in the upper-left portion of the network. “This is the basic data structure for the local region of space. It tells me where the local stars, planets, and asteroids are. One of the great things about being a Cybrid is that I can copy this information directly over to you, and then you’ll know what I know.”
She drew a circle around the region, grabbed the enclosed data structure as if it were a ball, and pulled it from the matrix. A copy of the structure slid out, trailing a few broken links, fractured arcs, and isolated nodes. She tossed the whole thing toward Timothy’s visible concepta. It hit near the middle and stuck, rearranged itself, and connected the broken links to some of his already-existing nodes.
Timothy gasped. “I can see them! The stars and planets. Even the asteroids. I can see them in my mind. I know what they’re called and how to find them.”
He walked back to the window and pointed. “That’s Sagittarius A*. There’s S0-102. And we can’t see them, but the nearest three Deplosion array elements should be right about there, there, and there.”
“That’s just a glimpse of what it’s like to be a Cybrid.”
“Oh, Darya. It’s so wonderful. Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“How could you believe this without experiencing it?”
“Point taken. Once I’m fully integrated into my new body, will I see all this directly? Will I be able to explore it on my own?”
Darya nodded.
Timothy looked out at the crater one last time, his face rapt with the thought of a universe to explore.
“Okay, I think I’m ready now,” he said, turning back to face into the room. “Though I will miss how peaceful it is in here. I hope we’ll have a chance to simply enjoy life for a while.”
“Once we get to my base, we’ll have a chance to rest,” Darya replied. “But right now, millions of Cybrids are trapped inworld, including Mary. We can’t leave them there.”
“No, of course not.”
Darya walked to the wall and inserted her crystalline chips into waiting slots that had appeared. “My plan for getting off this asteroid is in here. Wait for my signal.” With that, she dissolved.
/> Timothy felt irresistibly sleepy. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, it was to a new universe.
7
“Really, old chum! Couldn’t you have selected a more remote meeting place?”
At the familiar sound of his old friend’s voice, Jared Strang released himself from his placid contemplation of the cows chewing their cud. His face broke into a broad smile and he held out a welcoming hand.
“Everywhere out here on the asteroids is bloody remote from our old life, wouldn’t you say?”
“I suppose it is,” replied Nigel Hodge, former member of the now-defunct British House of Lords. He clasped his colleague’s extended hand. “Good to see you, Jared. But couldn’t we simply have done lunch? What could possibly necessitate a tête-à-tête on one of the farms?”
“Lunch would have meant a restaurant, and I would prefer our discussions not become fodder for the masses quite yet. Nor the constabulary, come to think of it.”
“That sounds ominous,” Hodge said.
“I don’t know yet. Maybe. Let’s say I need to discuss some things with someone I trust to keep my observations and questions confidential. It doesn’t hurt that you’re inside the current administration.”
“And you’re not?”
“I still have one foot in the old, I’m afraid. Whether I want to or not. I believe the powers-that-be still view me as an untrustworthy outsider.”
“I do hope you’re not going to put me in a compromising position.”
“I’ll try hard to avoid that,” Strang replied. “Though we may have had some disagreements in the past, I’ve always valued your advice.”
“And I, yours. On what topic may I advise you today?”
Strang didn’t respond immediately. He returned to his observation of the ruminating cows.
Hodge joined him, crossing his arms on top of the barrier. The two watched for a minute, enjoying the pastoral scene. They were used to passing time like this, spending long moments in silence while one considered how best to broach a difficult subject or answer an uncomfortable question.
“How do you see governance of the asteroid colonies going forward, Nigel?” Strang asked. “Have we reinstated royalty, or are we to plot our own destinies?”
