“Among other things, yes, Zette.”
“Hmm. That’s good.” I was filling with doubts already.
“You all right there, Zette?”
“Just thinking about … just thinking about what I’m up against, actually.”
“You just said that whomever that is thinks you’re dead now.”
“How secure is this quarantine unit?”
“It’s at least as secure as the hospital—”
I interrupted. “Then it might already be too late.”
“You think someone’s accessed our files?”
“I would say someone completely owns your files by now.”
“We have the highest level of non-military quantum crypto…”
I managed a grim laugh. “Sissel, what you need is the kind of security that would keep God out. And I’m not kidding.”
“Good God, McGee. Look at me! I’m a bloody kid!”
“I understand, Gideon. Believe me, I understand. But we’ve got to get moving!”
He looked thirty years old. Tall, strong, a little dashing, his dark eyebrows not yet quite out of control. Even his voice was better: he sounded like a theatrical actor trying to reach the back of the auditorium.
“It feels like a suit that’s the wrong size.” He was flexing his hands and shifting his legs and feet about, and looked very much like he was trying to squeeze his way into clothes that had not been tailored for him. I hid a smile, not wanting him to see me enjoying this rare moment of Gideon’s discomfiture.
Then he turned quite pale, with a look of unease I had never seen on him before. “This new body, McGee…” he said, gathering his thoughts. “It’s based on some kind of android technology, yes?”
I nodded, but I could see where he was going with this line of thinking. He went on, “My God, McGee! They’ve made me into a…”
“Smith, you’re the same man you’ve always been. You’re Gideon bloody Smith! It’s like you said, all that’s different is you’re wearing a new suit, kind of.”
“Am I even still human?”
I’m not sure why I did this, but I took his warm hand in mine, and looked at him. “You’re human enough.” I smiled. “Nothing will ever change that.”
He looked down at me, and I could see that for the first time he was noticing that I was different, too — intriguingly different, if that brief unguarded gaze was any guide. Nobody had ever looked at me like that. A girl could get used to this, maybe, I thought.
Then his normal decorum returned. He took his hand back, straightened up, and he was Gideon again, just like that, as if he always had been, with the suave smile, the arched eyebrow, and the roguish charm. He made it look easy, and I envied him that ability to adapt to new circumstances.
At the spaceport, Gideon’s ship was still getting cleaned. The disposable technician at the reception desk told us the Good Idea still needed at least another thirty hours of decontamination, cleaning and repairs, and that there was no way they were letting people go aboard until she’d been declared habitable and flightworthy.
“But this is my ship!” Gideon was trying to explain, as if to an idiot.
“Yes, sir. It is your ship. It’s just we have to follow regulations.”
“I want my ship. I want it now. I don’t bloody care about the infections!”
“I’m sorry, sir. Come back in thirty hours.”
Gideon, the unstoppable force, looked at the poor bastard. The poor bastard, the immovable object, stared back.
“We’ll take the Stalk to the surface,” I said.
“McGee, I’m getting my ship.”
I looked at the disposable. There was no way he was going to budge. He couldn’t budge. “Good luck to you. I’ve gotta get down to the surface. See ya.” I walked off in the direction of the Stalk shuttle booking kiosks. Behind me I heard Gideon getting increasingly upset, not so much at the helpless disposable but at a universe which made so many things so easy, and so many things so infernally difficult.
He caught up to me in due course. “Did you get me a ticket?”
I handed him a boarding pass. He looked at it. “Orbital Express? This was the best you could do?” OE was a firm known for their no-frills approach to moving passengers and freight up and down the gravity well. No sleeper cars. No restaurant car. No picturesque observation deck car. We’d be sleeping reclined in our seats, and our seats would be too close together for comfort. There’d be screaming children, smelly, strange and talkative people, and, if the stars were really against us, “entertainment”.
“I’m trying to save money,” I said, glad that I could access my bank account again. Sissel and her team had given me the new headware we’d talked about. It had finished installing itself earlier and had just come online. It was wonderful. Mail, news, biostats, psychostats, and, best of all, a cutting-edge security system with counter-intrusion software. Already it had registered and repelled several thousand attempts by routine commercial viral intruders to break into my head and make me think incessantly of their stupid brands. I was a happy Zette.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t a rich Zette. Until my medical insurance reimbursed me for my hospital costs, I was a bit light in the finance area. Simon’s shuttle flight had been costly, too, and I wasn’t keen to repeat that sort of expenditure. The way things with the Good Idea were going, we might even need to rent a ship if we wanted to get back home before the tubes dried up. I could imagine Gideon’s pleasure at a prospect like that.
We left the booking kiosks and headed for the Orbital Express terminal. It was a long hike. Gideon suggested zipways. I said I’d be just happy walking and that with the new body, I felt like I could actually walk a bit without my back aching and my feet protesting.
Mentioning the new body started Gideon up again, ranting and raving. “The criminal bastards. They never mentioned their stupid Procedure would do this!”
I ignored him. It was distracting just watching him, which, when I noticed myself doing it, made me feel almost nauseous. “Oh my God!” I said, disgusted at myself.
Gideon interrupted his tirade to ask after me. “McGee?” He reached out a hand to pat my shoulder, an almost fatherly gesture he sometimes used to do when he knew I wasn’t feeling well. Now, suddenly, it felt all wrong, and I flinched away.
There was a moment of confused tension between us, right there in the middle of the vast Amundsen Station concourse. Busy people and bots of all descriptions bustling about on urgent business, bumping into us at all times, but right there, in the middle of it all, we stood staring at each other, quietly freaking out.
I apologized. Gideon nodded, shrugged, and said it was fine. From his tone, though, it was clear that he didn’t know quite what was fine, just as he didn’t know why his touch made me flinch. It was an unhappy reminder of that day on the ship, during our confinement in the hypertube, when he had flinched away from me.
We set off walking to the terminal. It was about half a k through often narrow passageways, thronged plazas, noisy shopping malls and quiet residential areas. Conversation was difficult. Mostly, we apologized to people we inadvertently bumped into, which was often each other. It was the strangest walk I’d ever taken. I’d go to look at Gideon, only to find he’d been looking at me, and we’d both quickly look away — many of our accidental collisions happened at such moments.
When we arrived at the lackluster Orbital Express terminal and found some wobbly seats on which to wait the hour and ten minutes before the next train left, Gideon suddenly asked me, “Listen. You’ve got this new … well, you … you’re all young again!”
“And thin. Don’t forget thin. I’ve never been thin in my life!” Walking had presented real challenges. For one thing, I caught myself turning sideways to squeeze through narrow spaces, only to find that I had plenty of room, and that I could h
ave gone straight through. For another, my legs didn’t chafe. I felt like I could jump about twenty meters straight up, I felt so light. I’d caught people, mainly men, staring at me as I went by, too. For years I’d been used to this. It was the, “God, what industrial accident happened to you?” look. These new looks were different, and I didn’t know what to make of them. In mirrors and reflections, I barely recognized myself. I looked like a photo manipulation stunt. Gideon, on the other hand, just looked like a young and strapping version of his former elderly self and did his gentlemanly best not to gawk at me. “Yes. Quite. Erm… What I’m wondering is this, McGee. Are you still an android? I’ve been wondering.” He looked like the very question embarrassed him.
“I, um, I don’t know, Smith. My doctor said this new body thing is an application of android tech. Does it matter?”
“I don’t know, either. I was just wondering. I mean, if you’re not an android anymore…”
“Am I a ‘real’ human now?”
“Actually I was wondering if I’m a real human anymore…”
I stared at him. He looked uncomfortable. For a moment I could still see the old man who felt embarrassed and weepy to have ruined my investigation because of slightly-less-than-extremely-vigilant system security on his ship.
“This … this flesh and blood I wear now. It all came from machines.” He was looking at his hands, closely.
“You said you didn’t have a problem with me being a machine. You said the definition of humanity itself has stretched and gotten all loose and flexible.”
“I didn’t have a problem with you being a machine.”
“But you do have a problem with you being a machine, right?”
“It just feels different.”
“Wrong different or just strange different?” I asked.
“Sort of wrong different. Am I the same person I was? Do I still have a soul?” He looked a lot more worried about this than I would have expected of him.
“But isn’t this how you looked when you were younger?”
“Yes, it is, of course, but it’s like I’m a replica of what I looked like when young. Actually, I don’t think I ever looked quite this good. The doctors took a little creative license, I think.” He was looking down at himself as though studying a new suit.
“You never have a problem with food made in fab machines.”
He flashed a grin. “I don’t know, some of those cheap ones…”
“Yeah, I know. But when you eat a steak at the Anchorage Tavern with me, you don’t care that it didn’t come from a real cow, do you?”
Gideon frowned and shrugged. “It feels different.”
He was right about that. I didn’t know what to say. Gideon wondered if he still had a soul. What test could you perform? And if we didn’t have souls, what did that make us? Were we just very slick machines, or was it worse than that?
I’d started out as a machine made in a factory, but given the persuasive illusion that I was a human being. At some level I probably believed that I had at least the capacity for a soul or for spiritual feeling. Was I wrong? And what now? My new, different body contained a near-identical copy of my former brain, complete with my mind and all of its false beliefs about my childhood and family. Was I the same now as I was before, a machine, a monster?
What had become of me? Was I still me, even though I was a function of a mind in a brain which had been copied down to the level of individual particle spin-states? Sissel had told me that even with this remarkable copying procedure I might still lose a small percent of my stored memory, and there might be very minor functional problems. So I wasn’t a perfect copy. I had glitches. Nothing yet apparent, and certainly, it appeared, there was nothing much wrong with my capacity for worry, so that was good. Could I still be who I was, though?
Did it matter? No, of course not. Don’t be silly, I told myself.
All the same, deep in the back of my new mind, there was a small puddle of fear. Of knowing. I was not who I had been. At best I was a bootleg copy, like the Claudia disposable which had trashed and burned my house. I was an echo, a detailed model, an emulation.
I felt glad I’d never had much in the way of religious indoctrination as a child — and quickly realized that this very issue was probably why the programmers made me that way. The last thing I needed now was to have a profound spiritual crisis. Gideon, on the other hand, looked deeply unsettled, even ill.
“Your parents take you to church much when you were a kid?” I said.
He nodded. “Every week. They were dead serious about it.”
“Fundies?”
He looked at me, puzzled for a moment. “Oh, Fundamentalists! Yes. You could say that. Catholic Orthodox.”
I’d come across those folks occasionally in the course of my work. You’d be amazed how attempting to re-stage the Crucifixion could get out of hand. It wasn’t pretty, but it did happen. “Sorry to hear that.”
“I was supposed to go to the Seminary.”
I couldn’t quite imagine someone as worldly as Gideon being a priest. “Right…”
“What I wanted was to be an explorer, or a scientist, out in the dark, discovering things. You could say there was sharp disagreement in the Smith family home for many years.”
I could imagine. This would have been around 110 years ago. The Earth was long gone, but the pain and the shock were still vivid in everyone’s mind. The anger, which only got worse as official inquiries failed again and again to plausibly explain what had happened, and who was responsible. Billions of people wanting only to find a target for their wrath before all that concentrated emotion drove them mad. It was a time when many people fell back on old Earth traditional values and beliefs. Gideon’s family wouldn’t have been alone at church in those days.
My headware chimed: urgent incoming message. I sat up, surprised, feeling a sudden shot of fear.
Gideon said, “What’s the—?”
I blinked open the message. It was from Simon, down on Narwhal Island. The message was text only, time-stamped to show it was sent in the last couple of minutes. He said,
“Don’t come down. Repeat: don’t come down. Islanders massacred. Everyone dead. Buildings burning. I’m hiding in a cave on North Cape. Things hunting me. Don’t have long. I say again: everyone is dead. All structures destroyed. Possibly ten attackers. Black. Not humanoid. Hard to count numbers. They know I’m—”
CHAPTER 20
Shocked, suddenly cold and shaking, I showed Gideon a copy of the message. He went pale, and put a trembling hand up to his face. He read through it again and again. He must have read it twenty times. I couldn’t tear my eyes from it. Soon, I felt sick. My new psychostats tried to help, but the strain was too great. A passing bin noticed and pulled over so I could be sick into it. Gideon rubbed my back.
We sat like that for a long while. When I was done with the bin, it offered its services to Gideon. He declined. The bin scuttled away, looking for rubbish.
“You know what’s going on, don’t you?” Gideon said quietly.
“Think so.” My mouth and throat burned. I felt weak.
“Our firemind friend, destroying evidence?”
I nodded. Hydrogen Steel probably had his minions cleaning things up on the planet’s surface right now. I got my fancy new headware to make my brain nice and relaxed, looking for a newsfeed from Esseka which carried updates on the Narwhal Island investigations.
I found no such feed. No other news service on the whole planet had anything about the massacre or its police investigation. It wasn’t even possible to buy commercial satellite images of Narwhal Island, which might have shown some telling details in various wavelengths.
This was a bad sign.
“The bastard knew you were on your way,” said Gideon.
I nodded again. “Five hundr
ed people down there.”
“What are you going to do?” Gideon asked.
“Guess.”
“You’re going down there anyway.”
“Good guess.”
“Those things will kill you, too, McGee!”
“That’s right.”
“Then listen to me,” he said. “I’ve got a few ideas.”
We missed our train. Gideon took me shopping, instead. We visited one military-surplus store after another. I was amazed that there were so many of these places, and that they had such surprising quantities of gear.
“It’s because of the Silent,” Gideon explained. “They shut down interstellar military operations. Suddenly loads of supplies aren’t getting used. Likewise loads of personnel who would ordinarily operate the fleets or participate in offworld ground campaigns. Result: places like this.”
This particular store was Theo’s Outdoor and Offworld Adventure Supplies. In the main showroom areas they mainly had camping, hiking, and hunting gear, suitable for a wide range of environments. I’d never seen so many different camouflage patterns. If you wanted to see the rest of the gear, you had to have a word with Theo, who was a thin, aging guy with haunted, sunken eyes and stringy hair, who, for a “consultation fee” would escort you downstairs.
Gideon knew the drill and went to work, after a moment, to convince Theo that he was in fact the Gideon he used to know. All was well and they got down to business.
Theo also looked like someone who liked the look of me, in my shiny new gorgeous body. I believe he addressed me as “Toots” at one point, but I can’t be sure. If I’d been sure, they’d be scraping what little remained of Theo off the ceiling for days.
Gideon looked like he was aware of what was going on. He introduced me as his friend McGee — no first name, just McGee — and that I was a former copper. I think Theo was even more interested in me after that, no doubt imagining me in uniform.
I considered making up an excuse to go back outside, and leave the boys to their toys. Except I was also more than a little curious to see just what kind of gear Theo had down there. Theo led us through a succession of heavy-duty high-security vault doors. There was a thick odor of oil and hardware and something vile and nasty that I couldn’t identify, but it smelled somehow very male.
Hydrogen Steel Page 19
