K-Machines

by Damien Broderick

  After a time, I reopened my eyes, turned back to look at Jan. The small, bright fairy named Sylvie floated in the cabin between our two chairs, wings beating to a blur. The tiny creature's face showed an agony of concern. It softened my heart, that look. I said, "I talked myself out of it, Sylvie. I'm not going to blow up the spaceship after all."

  Diminutive hands flew to rosebud lips. "Blow up... August, tell me you weren't going to—" At the same moment, the tattoo's owner looked away from her instruments, sent me a startled look. She said, "Are you talking to my psychonic familiar? I mean, of course you are, you just called her by name. Can you see her?" Automatically, her hand moved to touch the bare flesh where the fairy usually rested, engraved as tattoo ink. Or—for all I knew—as a fantastically elaborate nanotechnological circuit diagram no less complex than a human brain.

  "Of course I can see her, do you think I'm blind? I might be gullible but my senses still work just fine."

  "No, but—" Jan's gaze moved to the hovering fairy. "Sylvie, why didn't you tell me he could see you?"

  With the faintest hint of sarcasm, the silvery voice said, "You never asked." It flew back to its mistress, perched on one shoulder. "Besides, I thought you knew. He saw me the very first time we met."

  "At Avril's moot? I thought he was staring at my tits."

  "You said I'd made his day, when I told him he was cute."

  "Oh, all right, he is cute. For a kid brother. I thought he was staring at the tatt as an excuse for looking at my boobs."

  I said, "Your boobs are okay, for a sister. Are you telling me I'm not supposed to see Sylvie when she turns into Tinkerbell?"

  "Hey, I'm much prettier than that old thing. I don't think the commander wants you to hear me. It's all because of that thing in your hand, isn't it?" The fairy added a raucous raspberry. "Not that thing, you dog, the lump of metal."

  I was blushing before I consciously understood her double-entendre. The tattoo fairy swayed her hips in the air in an enticing, mocking version of a belly dance. Who ever heard of a tattoo on the make? Well, at least I wasn't related to Sylvie.

  "I'm taken," I said. "You're very sweet, Sylvie, but I don't think Lune would approve."

  "Dear Lord," Jan said, "another moralist. That's tedious. The trip's going to be more boring than I expected. Sylvie, you brat, get back home."

  With a grimace and a high-pitched crystalline squeal of annoyance, the tattoo darted back to her body and folded itself against her skin.

  "Incidentally, Mr. Prig," Jan told me in a snooty tone, "don't be too sure about your friend Lune's attitudes. She's been around, that one, as have we all." She dug out a joint from one pocket, lit up.

  "Let's leave Lune's morals out of this," I said, with a rasp in my own voice. It was a stupid, knee-jerk thing for me to say, I realized instantly, the sort of remark I might have made to the jackaroos I'd spent Christmas rounding up cattle with. What a twerp I had been. I'd thought I was quite something out there in the middle of the Australian nowhere, the third-year medical student sweatily drinking Bundaberg Rum and coke by lamplight and staggering away in the small hours with Mavis Boggs the jillaroo, dragging off our shirts and shorts in the hot, still air, the plaintive voices of the aboriginal stockmen wailing in the distance the lyrics and simple chords of cowboy laments from 1950s jukeboxes, screwing our drunken brains out. It had occurred to me before I drove back to Melbourne that I should keep in touch with Mavis, but only if I could talk her into changing her name into something less likely to cause my friends to fall over laughing. My God, what a prick. And then I'd met Lune, and all the world's women lost their appeal to me. How romantic!

  "All right." I heard a note of apology in Jan's voice. Fragrant smoke blew my way. "None of my business, I know. I'm sorry to have dragged you away. I suppose... in a way, I guess, you must have been on your honeymoon." She shrugged, extended the joint in a conciliatory gesture. "Well, that's how it is in the Contest."

  I took it, sipped, coughed, handed it back. "Jan, it might be obvious you—it must be obvious to all of you—but it sure as hell isn't to me. That's why I—" An enormous yawn caught me in mid-sentence, stretched my mouth wide. I was dizzy with exhaustion and time lag. How long had it been since I'd slept? "Look, I badly need to catch some shut-eye. I really want to talk to you about this, that's why I came here." Grimacing, I said, "I mean, what I really want is to see this bloody spaceship back down on the ground so I can get back to Lune. She's probably at Toby's place by now wondering where the hell I've got to. But obviously you and Maybelline couldn't give a shit what I want. So I'm stuck here in jail, can't pass Go."

  "It's the next move in the Contest, that's all, what's wrong with you?"

  I tried to catch her meaning; it veered and evaded me. Stupid metaphors. Did she think we were twelve-year-olds sitting in front of a PlayStation? I said, "All right, have it your way. Then why are these three Players being taken out of the game and parked on the sidelines for two thirds of a century, for God's sake? It's terrible tactics and worse strategy."

  Her eyes drifted away, though, and she took another toke.

  My own eyelids were drooping. I could threaten her physically, but what would that get me? Obviously The Hanged Man was not going to respond to my commands without endorsement from its commander, and I was pretty sure the starship had enough intelligence to detect coercion, and undoubtedly plenty of firepower. I stood up. Enough of this crap. "Where can I sleep?"

  She took another drag, hesitated, waved her hand. Sylvie floated free for a moment, blew me a kiss. "Hanger will tell you the way to your quarters. Deck Three. Make yourself at home, dude. Hey, we can talk when you wake up. Maybelline might be in a better mood by then."

  "Fat chance," the fairy said, and settled back into her mistress's bare upper arm. I left them there, Jan yawning by contagion.

  the first companionway to your right, a voice said quietly in my ear.

  The elevator took me smoothly away.

  your stateroom is awaiting you. if you require something to eat or drink, just let me know. i can compile whatever you need if i possess the algorithm.

  "Actually," I muttered, "I badly need to take a leak. I hope your lavatory facilities don't require the use of Schwellen."

  the system uses total onboard recycling, the machine said, possibly with some pride in its voice. your quarters contain a full bathroom, and the Entertainment system awaits your choice.

  "Some sleep, my man, that's all I need. Although a back rub would be nice. Do you do back rubs?"

  that can be arranged, the voice told me imperturbably.

  I was directed down another bland corridor, past unmarked closed doorways that looked as snug as air locks. Something made me pause at one no different from the rest. I placed my right hand against it, Vorpal implant tingling faintly.

  sorry, August, it is not your room.

  I pushed. A faint click. The door opened silently. I seemed to be looking into a magnificent throne room, lavish with silver and jade. Maybelline sat upon her imperial throne in an attitude of rather self-satisfied bliss. A loose robe richly decorated with pomegranate blossoms hung on her shoulders, seven pearls at her neck, a crown of twelve brilliant blue-white stars upon her brow. In her right hand she held aloft a heaped vanilla ice cream cone; her tongue licked her lips. All around her, vegetable courtiers paid their obeisance. Soft rain sifted down from the ceiling upon the Venerian soil that unaccountably covered the floor, massed and seething with alien plant life. A huge box of chocolates shaped like a heart was propped against her throne. I started to back out, but her eyes had flickered to me. With a screech of rage, she flung the cone at me and surged from the throne, robes flapping. The double scoop of ice cream plopped in a sad little trajectory; the cone, poor cometary tail, spun, fell short.

  "You intolerable sneak!" Her loyal subjects fluttered their outer leaves, drew back from her fury. I tried very hard not to laugh, and succeeded. Raindrops clung to my hair. I wanted to say, "So this is your we
t dream," but instead, with surprising restraint, I held up an appeasing hand. She was roaring, "How dare you—"

  "I'm truly sorry, Maybelline," I said. "I thought this was my room. Really, you've done it up very nicely." Something caught in my throat, perhaps a cough, certainly not a snigger. "Please, I apologize. And since I'm here, I'd just like to express my regret that my presence aboard this ship is upsetting to you." She pulled up before reaching me, hand stabbing at a console masquerading as a blazing tiger lily in a magnificent spiraling amethyst vase apparently provided by the Vatican or the Russian Hermitage. The illusion flicked off, throne, courtiers and jewels, and she stood facing me in her terrible underwear in a plain, serviceable cabin you might have seen in a mid-priced motel. For an instant I thought of running like hell up the corridor.

  "Just. Go. Away," she told me. She shoved me hard, pushed me outside into the corridor, jabbed again at the console. The door slid smoothly shut. It must have been unendurably frustrating not to be able to slam it in my face.

  apologies for the inconvenience, August. access to Maybelline's quarters should not have been possible without her permission. now, if you will continue along the companionway, i will see you to your own room.

  But I was doubled up in laughter by then, weakened by fatigue and mirth both. I wiped my eyes. "Lay on, Macduff. Listen, run me a bath and see if you can find a decent Scotch, would you? Glenlivet would hit the spot." I found my own door, went into a room identical to Maybelline's. "But don't get any dumb ideas that I've forgiven you bastards, or that I'm going to put up with this shit for very long." I yawned again, pulling off my clothes, standing at a quite conventional toilet bowl to take a much-needed piss (no strange, uncomfortable, zero-gravity tubes), and found I was still smiling, despite my cranky words, at May's humiliation. I heard myself mutter, the words slurring a little: "Alice really was right. You're all nothing but a pack of bloody cards."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  SgrA*: 2006, Aged Sixty-Two

  Outside his Brunswick efficiency apartment on the fourth floor of a cleverly renovated factory or perhaps storehouse, the dark, three-in-the-morning wind beyond the snug windows can't make up its mind if it's winter or spring. August's traditional Antarctic blasts are confused by the unseasonable turbulence of the greenhouse effect, assuming that's real and not just a hysterical concoction. It certainly feels real. He sits propped up in bed on three pillows, in agony and distress.

  Years ago he had been driven home from a party where he'd eaten and drunk to excess, and as the car bounced erratically on tram tracks and across railway intersections, his swollen bladder pressed in a crescendo of pain that made him yelp, but his driver, half-drunk himself, refused to stop, until finally he stumbled free into his front yard, unzipped, pissed for what seemed like five minutes in a bliss of relief. This is the same sensation, without the relief.

  His bladder is seized. For a day and a half he has dribbled or stood uselessly above the gaping white bowl in frightened frustration, mouth dry, urine staying put inside his body, kidneys pressing ever more liquid into the swollen organ, muscles or urethra locked. He's not an anatomist, after all, despite his three futile years of undergraduate medicine, but repeated desperate searches of Google suggest all too plainly that his elderly prostate has clenched like a fist around the outlet pipes. Pain radiates into his balls, up into his belly, across his lower back, beneath his shoulder blades. Like influenza but without the fever, like every nightmare of an examination you can't leave because your life depends upon it yet you need to piss so badly—

  He's made an appointment with a urology clinic, but they can't see him for several days. Too many aging baby-boomer males going on the blink, too few specialists. In the dark, he tries for sleep, and his restless legs and arms burn and tingle. My god, this really is old age. He had imagined that its depredations were twenty years away. Granted, his mother was only five years older than he is now when she died, but that was ovarian cancer, she did not suffer the brutal indignities of senescence.

  Could this, too, be cancer? Prostate cancer is common enough in men his age. Surely not. The knife, the ablating laser beam, the radioactive pellets burning away tissue. Medical triumph! Days or weeks or months of vomiting, poisonous chemicals flooding the bloodstream, murdering cells good and ill. Better to be dead, perhaps. He catches himself, shakes his head in the darkness. Shut the fuck up, you idiot, he tells himself. The traditional bromides are right, however fatuous and feel-good: where there's life there's hope. And he has no evidence that this is a tumor.

  He turns on his side and pain spears him. Can this be what women go through every month? He crawls out of bed and stumbles again into the bathroom, stands there uselessly, stressed, trying to relax—ridiculous to try to force yourself to allow something unforced to flow. In desperation, he turns on the faucet behind him at the basin, lets water run into the sink. The map is the territory in a situation like this. The symbol gives rise to the reality. Babbling brook, rushing stream, all that; come on, come on. The burning pressure ascends from his groin to his chest. Nothing. His parched mouth and throat demand a soothing sip of water; he refuses them. He returns to bed, lets his limbs lie motionless. Better that he abandon all control and piss into the goddamned sheets and mattress than to suffer this incandescent pressure.

  In and out of awareness, thoughts blurred, anxiety muttering his pulse. If this now, what next? He gets out of bed, on cold feet goes into his small study, switches on the computer. Windows takes forever to boot up. Have to protect your machine from viruses and systemic breakdown. He laughs at his own expense. The mind children. Like parent, like child. At least the poor fucking simple things don't suffer urinary retention.

  The time icon flicks on, the date. It catches his eye. Christ, his birthday. Wonderful. Harbingers of birthdays yet to come, the galloping rush down the entropy slide.

  He regards himself as a technological optimist. This machine in front of him is more powerful than the computers that controlled flights to the Moon thirty-seven years ago, more than half his lifetime. A memory flickers: that beloved book of childhood, those spaceships of the mind, what, fifteen, seventeen years before Neil Armstrong botched his lines. He'd been sure that by now he'd be living on the Moon, or at least in a great, wheeled, satellite space station. He sighs.

  The fabled twenty-first-century, and they can't even fix a man's inherited propensity to block up his own urinary tract with an overgrown, useless, internal sex organ. It's not even as if he's had a fuck in the last... what? Year? Two years? The graduate students are off-limits, the female staff members committedly married, dull or plain beyond consideration, lesbians, or, most distressingly, frankly uninterested in an old fool in his sixties. Pain stabs again as he crouches on his ergonomic chair before the flatscreen monitor. Pain is right, Christ, but let's get this in perspective. He opens up his gallery of horrors, his witness file to inhumanity. What kind of God could create and sustain a world like this? And if it's a simulation after all, as Tipler and Bostrom argue, what kind of monster?

  Here's a file from a year ago, the New York Times. The editorial writers were still trying to shame the president into acting in Africa, where the broken remnants of European colonial rule endlessly tore at their own bellies, at the weakest among their number. Darfur, wherever that is. Okay, the map comes up on the screen. It might as well be on Mars. Something called the Janjaweed militia were running out of control. They'd seized nine boys, torn off their clothes, tied them up, and—Christ. He feels like vomiting, and involuntary spasms jerk at his swollen belly. The little boys had their eyes gouged out and, for good measure, their noses and ears cut off before they were shot dead and left in the public square. A message to the villagers, like the ten-year-old boy in a second village. These tough guys castrated him, one more message from the sponsor.

  He flicks down through the files. He's been keeping them for years. In another part of Africa, the tough guys like to cut off children's hands, but for some reason
what he finds the most horrifying and spirit-sapping detail is the way they treat their enemies' animals. He stares numbly at the screen. With their machetes, they hack off the hoofs of cows in the pastures, leaving the poor wretched bleeding brutes to hobble hideously on their stumps, presumably until they bleed to death, crying aloud in terror.

  Sick to the stomach, he goes again to the bathroom, stands helplessly above the mocking ceramic bowl. His innards remain clenched, like the hardened, brutal hearts of his fellow humans at play in the fields of the Lord.

  There has to be a better way.

  Aching, he blunders back into the dark of his bedroom, perches wide awake and trapped by his flesh, waiting for the morning.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Juni

  From the top of her diamond terrace, fifteen kilometers above the faint ruins of coastal Pontianak, Juni Seebeck surveyed her tropical domain through a faint offog haze and found it good.

  Once this Earth had pullulated with ten billion crass, self-serving humans and their domestic animals, their lives a ceaseless soap opera of furtive or bumptious lusts, global aggressions, fits of envy and suspicion, petty antagonisms, clawing after reputation or security or approval or stupid excitement, laying waste to everything they touched. It was deplorable. It was the human condition. It was everywhere to be seen in the variant Earths, save for these few enchanted worlds like hers and Ember's, where the wretched bastards had attained the terminal decency of obliterating themselves comprehensively. Admittedly, on this world, their nano-goo had run so far out of control that it gnawed every living thing to the bone and beyond, had chewed the very soil from the face of the planet, down to the bedrock. She sighed. There could be too much of a good thing. Happily, in the way of these things, surfeit was its own brake.