Less Than Human

by Maxine McArthur

  A brown that was full of other colors, running together like an iridescent oil slick, like a kindergarten finger painting. She flowed along the rainbow river, getting her bearings. These blue-green tributaries, they were the factory network. Farther on, warmer colors diverged in wide deltas.

  This way, Akita’s voice said, a green flux throbbing. We will find an entry point at the lowest level. The greenish glow shimmered away from her, toward the orange deltas.

  Eleanor deliberately flowed the other way. She ducked into a small ice-blue stream and followed it to a dead end. The colors pooled into a whirlpool of blackness. Or perhaps it was no-color. She sent a tendril of herself—a soft ultramarine—to investigate, and the tendril poked easily through the swirl. The rest of her followed.

  She was in a different place. Long tunnels stretched away into infinity, in all directions. Colors there were, but in tiny sparks that traveled along the walls of the tunnels, not flowing into each other.

  Some tunnels had long tendrils of a uniform amethyst that crisscrossed the passages in an ever-shifting network. Phone lines, perhaps?

  Lilith, what are you doing? Akita’s voice sounded far away, but it grew closer and angrier with each word.

  Eleanor panicked. She fled down one of the tunnels, anywhere for refuge. Without “looking” she knew Akita followed close behind. At least I’m delaying his plan, she thought wryly.

  This is the wrong way. The green of Akita filled the tunnel, but it wasn’t as strong as in the livelines. Where are you going?

  Eleanor couldn’t move. What do you want from me? she finally cried. Or would have cried, if she could.

  Akita swirled around her, then coalesced in a long streak, as though pointing the way. Let me show you another reason why you must join me. The streak zipped along the wall of the tunnel, but kept part of itself around her so she couldn’t separate from it again.

  The tunnel connected in dark knot-points with others, but Akita simply speared through the knots and kept going. They were in an enclosed system. The layers of programming surrounded them like multihued stacks of pancakes.

  Look familiar?

  With a shock, she recognized the structure. The layers and connections translated into her own laboratory at Tomita.

  Akita pooled by the exit knot. See how primitive your efforts were.

  She flowed through every connection. It was so familiar. She adjusted small problems with ease and for the first time understood the major ones. Akita was right—her old understanding had been primitive.

  She trickled into the service bot via its recharge connection in a stain of ultramarine, experimenting with its movement as she had with the helpbot before. The service bot was easier—its movements were simple, and its programs weren’t as dense and were, therefore, easier to flow through. She wheeled it across the lab and lifted its hammer hand to tap on the bench.

  And Sam? Standing abandoned, still connected but unwanted. She wheeled the service bot back to its recharge panel, dived back into the circuits, and found Sam. So amazing to wind herself into the maze of Sam’s programs and experience.

  Sam’s sensory perception was far more comprehensive than the service bot’s simple proximity alarms. Camera sight, infrared, ultrasound, and all the other inputs converged in interlocking cones to produce a picture. Benches, monitors, wires, chairs…nobody human to be seen.

  The lab looked huge from the height of a five-year-old. She tried walking. One leg swung slowly, and its balance mechanism demanded more energy. She adjusted the leg so easily, as if it were her own body. She walked Sam confidently around the lab, made it reach out to touch the service bot, sulking in its corner like a stolid praying mantis. Sam’s touch on the service bot didn’t feel right. She adjusted the haptic sensors, like she did days ago, but this time it worked; Sam could “feel” service bot’s smooth surface.

  If she could laugh … in the desk mirror she caught a glimpse of Sam’s comically huge features pulled up in a grin.

  See how incomplete your understanding was?

  She had forgotten Akita, and his voice coming from the lab speakers startled her into retracting from Sam’s circuits, back into the lab system.

  Is that all you have to show for fifteen years of work? His expressionless voice still managed to mock her.

  It was the best I could do…

  Not enough, was it?

  She hated him for being right.

  You will have to join us to understand more. Triumphant, echoes of his voice filled the lab.

  But I don’t want to help you destroy…

  He didn’t let her complete the thought. The bile-green smear encircled her deep blue, shepherding her out of the lab systems and into the network again. She resisted, and to her horror part of the blue disintegrated in the green.

  She felt no pain here, but part of her suddenly wasn’t there. More memories lost? She fled.

  No one can defy me in here, Akita said.

  She allowed him to shepherd her along the tunnels to the dark whirlpool. It looked bigger from this side. They dived through into the soothing many-hued river of livelines, flowed along it into the bright delta of official connections, dotted with whirlpool gates.

  She yearned for form, to touch something, and tendriled into the narrow flow of an auxiliary system, looking for a helpbot, a recycle chamber, anything.

  Akita blocked her way.

  Don’t you understand? To let yourself remain tied to the Microcosm is a weakness. It reduces your ability to function in the Macrocosm.

  Did you never try these other bodies? she retorted.

  I am called to higher things. Come. His green glowed with menace, and she followed reluctantly.

  Akita avoided the boundaries between the two worlds. That’s what the robots were, border country. Neither program nor machine, but an uneasy marriage of both. She loved the action of a robot body on the world. Machines weren’t alive, but they were a part of the Microcosm.

  Akita burrowed through the delta and entered a whirlpool gate, Eleanor following. The clear colors of a complex system stretched endlessly around them. The bile green and ultramarine blue flowed easily with other colors into the lowest layer of the system.

  Seed this. From Akita to her bounced an oil slick-brown packet. He flowed in and out of the system pillars, lustrous pearl pillars, and, where he passed, small brown freckles appeared that gradually spread into stains.

  She didn’t want to, but Akita’s green glow kept bumping her and, hating herself, she complied.

  It doesn’t work. All her freckles slid off and dissolved.

  Impose your color over the place you put the seed.

  It was easy. She smudged ultramarine over the iridescent length, then the brown spot. It stuck, and spread in ugly diseased patches.

  Eleanor blinked in the too-bright air. Vision blurred and her eyes hurt. She lay down on the carpet and shut them. Shutting her eyes only strengthened what her other senses delivered—the pattern in the rough weave of the carpet under her shoulder and the cold seeping up through it; the rasp of her own breathing, the smack of bare feet in the corridor outside, murmur of voices; dust and sickly-sweet insect spray on the carpet.

  She opened her eyes again. Silver and blue figures surrounded Adam on her right. Snatches of conversation drifted into her consciousness. Something about dosages.

  She tried to think what had happened in the Macrocosm, but the physical world got in the way. Where they had been, what they had done, would not translate into this-world terms. She couldn’t remember what had happened. What was it she’d been thinking when she started? Something about trees.

  But she did remember the other children teasing her, how one day they took her pet cicada from its cage on the teacher’s desk and shook it in a water bottle until it died. It’s only an insect, Nobuyuki, said the teacher when he found out.

  She remembered the smell of burned sugar as Tomiko rejected her, in the doughnut shop on the corner near the station. You’re not
attractive, Tomiko said. Sorry, but it’s the truth, you flop all over the place. The shop manager bowed to each of the customers in turn in apology for the smell and gave them coupons for free doughnuts…

  She opened her eyes again with a start. She was still in the chair in front of the console, unstrapped, but the silver and blue figures and Akita were gone. Her body felt as though they’d all trampled her on the way out.

  What the hell was that about insects and doughnuts?

  Her throat grated with thirst. She narrowed her eyes at the table beside the dais, but it held no water jug. She must have a drink. Maybe she’d remember the right things if she had a drink.

  She pushed herself upright, stumbled down the stairs, along the carpet, out the door.

  A blue-clothed novice blocked her way. “Where are you going?” he demanded. Not Taka this time, some pudgy-faced boy she’d never seen before.

  “Toilet,” she managed to croak.

  The novice led her right, offering no help even though she had to hold on to the wall for support, and let her push open the door by herself, stationing himself outside.

  The room held four toilet cubicles and four hand basins. She leaned on the basin with one hand and sucked water from the other.

  In the mirror above the basin a hairless, sallow-cheeked, smudge-eyed apparition looked at her. A white line gleamed on her scalp—not biometal, it was her old scar. The biometal sat smugly above one ear.

  She looked at her hand, white biometal bone and bruised flesh under a layer of drying aqua goo, and the thought of what she’d done with Akita returned. Brown stains spreading on pearly pillars. She was an accomplice to his crime.

  “Oh, shit,” she said, and was sick into the basin.

  What could she do? She stared blankly at the mess she’d made—not that much, since she couldn’t remember the last time she ate. The basin had no self-cleaning function. Not like her Betta bathroom. Tears pricked her eyes in ridiculous homesickness.

  After a minute she washed her face and hand in a different basin. The cold water hit her skin like tiny knives.

  She could wait for Iroel to help her and Mari escape. But that would be too late to stop Akita. She couldn’t search for Iroel’s tunnel herself, she would be watched every minute. And what about Mari?

  She’d thought she could outmaneuver Akita within the interface. Hah. He certainly proved her wrong. She shuddered at the memory of his color engulfing hers. What would happen if he did take more of her memories … would she emerge a blank? The kind of fate she had feared so many years ago. If I am the sum of my memories, and I lose those memories, have I lost myself?

  And what were those other memories, insects and doughnuts, of a childhood she never had? Akita’s childhood? Iroel’s youth? Was it possible that if you used the interface too much you left part of yourself inside, to be picked up by others? She shivered.

  Being inside her own robot had given her such insights into the mistakes she’d made with it…given time, she finally knew enough to make the project a complete success. Or even a similar project. But Tomita wouldn’t give her time, or funding.

  Her stomach clenched painfully. She needed food, or she couldn’t think. Her hand didn’t hurt at all, they must have given her a shot of something. Pity they hadn’t fed her, too.

  She poked her head out the door. The novice was still there, picking his nose diligently.

  “W … where’s Adam-sama?” she said. Her stammer had not been this bad for years.

  The boy dropped his hands to his sides as though Adam could see him. “He’s, um, resting.”

  “W … what’s the time?” She thought it was probably the middle of the day on Friday.

  “Time is an expression of our desire. There is only now,” parroted the boy, but his hand patted the air around his thigh where a phone/timekeeper pocket would normally be.

  “I n… need some food.”

  He hesitated. “Come back here.” He beckoned her to follow him and pointed at the room Eleanor had just left. “I’ll bring you something.”

  As they walked back she could hear voices. She turned, but there was nobody behind them. She shut her eyes and the voices became clearer. Some of them she knew—Samael and Fujinaka. She couldn’t distinguish the words, but she could tell which rooms they were in. From one room came a continuous hum of voices, twenty or thirty people at least. Iroel had said everyone will be praying. And Mari? Would she change her mind and escape if she could?

  On the pipes running along the top of the wall she could read the tiny stenciled letters giving their date of manufacture. So that was how Adam could “see” through things and “hear” people’s thoughts. If he’d been using the interface for months, maybe years, this hypersensitivity must be far greater than hers. No wonder the believers thought him omniscient.

  She shivered. That was why he was dosed up with drugs. He wouldn’t be able to touch anything otherwise. Even the air would become an unbearable invasion of sense.

  The novice shut the door behind her. She tried the handle, but it was locked. She paced unsteadily up and down the carpet. Could she sabotage the hardware itself? Not by physically attacking it—Samael’s response would surely be violent, and she wasn’t prepared to commit suicide for the sake of the NDN. But it might be possible either to damage the program or even a connection …

  The console, upon investigation, possessed no ports on the outside. It sat flush against the wall, from which the building livelines apparently entered it directly. Rather like the refrigerator/oven unit in the Betta. And just as difficult to get at.

  The rest of the console was smooth metal, a squat rectangular box with monitors attached to the top and wired to other monitors. She might be able to damage those connections, but she didn’t think it would stop Akita or even slow him down.

  That left the apertures themselves. She peeled back a synthetic cover over the one she had used. A flat, rubbery skin was fixed firmly to the rim of the hole. She poked at it gently, and the skin bounced her finger back. Strange. Perhaps the console needed to be activated before the skin would let her in. But the monitors were active.

  She poked at the skin again, using her biometal fingertips this time, and it parted in the middle. Aha.

  How much damage had she and Akita done to the NDN while they were in there? The spreading blotches she’d helped Akita disperse were probably a virus of some kind. They’d be eating through the system right now, whichever system it was. She tried to remember specific details, but it was all a blur of color. Bits of postbox red… she snorted. Could have been the post office, then. Whatever Akita thought, his wonderful interface was too damn unreliable yet. It needed years of trials.

  She thought resentfully of all those manga that involved the heroes jacking into computers and dueling the villain within cyberspace. Fine for them. Manga never bothered about the early, experimental stages of a technology.

  “Food,” said the novice from the doorway. He placed a tray on the red carpet and shut the door again.

  Instant noodles, fake prawn flavor. Eleanor had never tasted anything so good.

  Feeling grounded again, she placed the chopsticks neatly on top of the bowl and burped softly.

  She’d have to try again from inside. She had to defeat Akita in there, where the other Angels couldn’t see what was happening, so they wouldn’t attack Mari or her own body. She would go past the whirlpool entry points of the NDN until she found a police network. Shouldn’t be hard—they had police boxes at every street corner, it seemed. With her color sense, the police network would probably be blue.

  Flavors all around her, and smells. The main flow was sweet, the sweetness of fruit salad with many different elements. Salty flecks, chili sparks, sour drops crossed her path then vanished. No colors this time. As she entered the Macrocosm she must have remembered the damn noodles.

  Follow the sweet river. She lapped along it, fascinated in spite of herself. The sweetnesses divided here. That way was peach, this wa
y was musk, this way a cloying durian-type heaviness …

  What does a police network smell like? If it weren’t so desperate, she would have giggled.

  Get ahold of yourself, Eleanor. Where the smells divide must be the same place she’d seen the orange delta branch out last time. Akita had gone through that delta into the NDN portal. So if she sniffed around here … ha-ha … she should find other livelined networks, like the police system.

  Hell of a plan, but the best she had. She wondered if the virus Akita had spread that morning was already working. He’d said something about midnight, so it might be set to activate then.

  Down a narrow vanilla stream she found layers of flavor starting with a sourness that sent her scurrying away, and a retch-inducing saltiness like the essence of pickled plum. Could this be it? It didn’t feel right. The police communication system should be a massive edifice. This was too condensed. She flowed back into the peach stream, then stopped.

  Something was wrong with her real body. She could feel it, a faint faraway itch like a mosquito bite felt through a layer of cloth. She tried to ignore it, but the feeling grew stronger. It came to her directly, not along the river of flavors, not as a scent.

  Forget it. She was nearly there. The police systems surely spread nearby …

  Her own words came back to her. What happens to me physically? She couldn’t bear being trapped there … would she even survive at all if her body died?

  She rushed back through the sweet rivers.

  “What are you doing?”

  As soon as her eyes opened Samael grabbed her shoulders and pulled her upright. She croaked with pain as his fingers bit into her flesh and as her left hand popped out of the console with a squelch.

  She’d only used one strap on the chair; he must have undone it while waiting for her to withdraw from the interface. Her skin crawled. What had he been doing to her while she sat defenseless? The skin on her neck felt tender, perhaps he’d had his hands there… she swallowed the bile that rose in her sore throat at the thought, and at the realization that once more she’d failed inside the Macrocosm.