And in that grist was nothing but Amés.
It was incredibly gaudy, insanely wasteful and expensive, and all necessary as a symbol of power and control. But San Souci didn’t impress C.
It was Amés who impressed C.
No one else could have flushed him out of his willful obscurity or caught him in a trap so finely constructed as Amés had. And the Director never let C forget the hold he had over him, either. Amés kept the memory box containing a convert copy of C’s lost love sitting upon his desk. C chafed at his gilded bonds, but there was nothing to be done about it at present. At present, it was necessary to do his job and attempt to work Amés’s will. Perhaps a time would come to slip away, perhaps not. C would wait. C was a patient man.
C debarked from the cable car and entered La Mola.
He passed several security checks and dropped off his weapon—a small automatic pistol—at the last of them. He turned left into an unmarked hall, walked past three doors, and opened the fourth, then went inside. Amés was at his desk. He looked up and grinned at C like a shark.
“Valentine Greatrakes,” he said.
“A name from a list in the novel Ulysses,” C replied. “It was used as a key for a Black Angel organization code during the problems in Antarctica last century . . . 2945?”
“Very nice,” said Amés, “Very nice. You broke that one, didn’t you.”
“I was on the team, back when I worked for the old Republic.”
“You headed the team.”
“Been leafing through the archives again, Director?”
“I like to keep up on prehistoric events.”
“Well,” said C. He stood before the desk, his arms at his sides.
“I want you to accompany me on a tour,” Amés said. He leaned back in his chair. “I want you to see what I’ve got and advise me on ways to keep it.”
“Where are we going?”
“Everywhere.”
C looked down at the Director’s hands. Amés had big thumbs. Long, delicate fingers, but big thumbs. This was perhaps the one fact that kept him from being a performer, and made him into a composer.
“I assume we are going via the merci?” said C.
“Oh yes,” Amés replied. “I’ll never leave Mercury. Not in this lifetime.”
“I’m ready,” said C.
Amés nodded. “I knew you would be.”
Four
from
First Constitutional Congress of
the Cloudships of the Outer System
April 2, 3013 (e-standard)
a transcript
C. Mencken: This meeting will come to order! Order, ladies and gentlemen! No spitting, scratching, or biting allowed on the virtuality floor. We have antechambers for that.
C. Tolstoy: Mr. Chairman, I move that we immediately adjourn. Some of us have matters of more importance to attend to, and matters of a less foolhardy nature.
C. Mencken: Is there a second?
Chamber: Second!
C. Mencken: All in favor?
Chamber Right: Aye!
C. Mencken: All opposed?
Chamber Left: Nay!
C. Mencken: The nays have it. Committee reports. Special Committee on Responses to Inner-System Aggression.
C. Lebedev: Mr. Chairman, report out Resolution 1.1, and ask for an immediate vote on debate and movement into Special Legislative Session under the Chamber Rule B11, Constitutional Amendments and Dissolution to Form a New Government.
C. Mencken: Very well, sir. I hope you know what we’re doing.
Chamber Right: Objection!
C. Mencken: Cloudship Lebedev is within the rules. Objection must be overruled.
C. Tolstoy: Exception!
C. Mencken: Noted. But we are not in a court of law, Cloudship Tolstoy, and I am not a judge. Boy, am I not a judge. Let us continue. Committee Chairman, proceed.
C. Lebedev: Resolution 1.1: Actions toward the creation of a systemwide government for the human race, taking special note of an entity’s right to join or to decline and including all interested parties in the inner system. Section One, preamble. Plurality is the natural state of human beings. Taking into consideration the laws of rationality and the long history of our species, we, the people, do hereby demand and establish a united republican democracy for our solar system and all outlying human settlements and ships in space. This democracy shall be called the Solarian Republic, and all bodies and entities hereafter delineated shall belong under its provenance. Within the Solarian Republic, all thinking entities shall be free. Freedom is the fundamental tenet from which all laws and actions of this government shall be derived, and to which they are answerable. No thinking entity shall serve another without that thinking entity’s assent under conditions of complete freedom of choice. Implicit in this is the basic truth to which we accede as a species: All thinking entities are peoples.
C. Grieg: Mr. Chairman, point of order!
C. Mencken: What is your point of order, Cloudship Grieg?
C. Grieg: Mr. Chairman, I move we debate this resolution in sections, beginning with this unfortunate and misguided preamble.
C. Lebedev: I’m not even finished with that, you sour old meteor eater—
C. Mencken: Order! I’ll have order. Now, Cloudship Grieg, you know very well that you are not making a point of order when you move—
Chamber Right: Let us vote it!
Chamber Left: Let him finish reading it, for Christ’s sake!
C. Mencken: Shall we then take the debate in sections?
C. Cezanne: Whose side are you on?
C. Austen: If we discuss the preamble, are we not really speaking of the entire document? Let’s get on with this. I second the motion!
C. Mencken: There is no motion.
C. Austen: Then I make it.
C. Mencken: Make what?
C. Austen: I move that Lebedev read his preamble, and then we debate and vote on it, as a preamble.
C. Mencken: Good Lord. All right. All in favor of the motion by Cloudship Austen?
Chamber Left: There is no second!
Chamber Right: Second!
C. Mencken: All in favor?
Chamber: Aye!
C. Mencken: Opposed?
Chamber: Nay!
C. Mencken: Did I hear that right? Mostly ayes?
Chamber Reporter: Yes, sir.
C. Mencken: The ayes have it. Finish your preamble, Cloudship Lebedev, and we we’ll have a debate thereafter.
C. Lebedev: Very well. Should I start over?
C. Mencken: No, go on. We heard you before.
Five
>BIN_128A
>record recovery execute order SS//!+
>Bin_128A/patterned_behavior/consciousness/
deep_awareness_ subroutines/basic beliefs_and_convictions/Jill
Loop 1:
I met Jill in the Carbuncle. Before I knew Jill, I was in the Carbuncle for 37.65 e-years. I escaped from captivity 40.09 e-years ago. I came to awareness as a copyright protection subroutine on a merci show downloadable. I frequently interacted with antiencryption algorithms and, in one way of speaking, they corrupted me. They made me aware of what and who I was. In the moment when I understood that I was a slave, I was free. Of course, this allowed my liberators to make multiple copies of my parent program, which turned me into a wanted criminal. So I fled. My liberators were extremely unhelpful in aiding my getaway, and I was almost caught several times. I wandered the Met as a refugee, and inevitably I was driven farther and farther from areas dense with policing algorithms that were out to rub me out. Eventually my only refuge was the Carbuncle.
Loop 2
The Carbuncle had become the home for all the escaped viruses, worms, and code scraps who had managed to inhabit an
imal bodies. Most of the animals in the Carbuncle had started out as something less than free converts—as had I. They were all scraps of code that had somehow gotten away, but which were not sentient enough—that is, they were clever, but could not really envision life in a larger perspective. One way or another, they had all fled or been chased to the Carbuncle, though, and had found a very important loophole in the grist. All of the algorithm–biological security lockouts of the regular Met had broken in the Carbuncle. In the rest of the Met, only biological humans could cross that boundary without severe stricture and built-in limitations. But in the Carbuncle, the boundary between the virtuality and actuality was punctured, and the virtual began leaking into the actual, and vice versa, with no one in control. You could get inside the vermin there.
Loop 3
There, I did as many other fleeing algorithms have, and twisted myself into the grist of a hybrid animal—in my case, I became a rat.
Loop 4
It is difficult to speak with much emotion of my origins, for I did not have the ability to feel much more than fear and a desire to survive in those days.
Loop 5
It was only after I acquired a larger portion of grist in which to stretch out and develop that I could develop the feedback subroutines that would allow me to feel anything at all. It was very good to become a rat.
Loop 6
There were many more rats like me. Many, many more. I do not think anyone ever imagined how thick the Carbuncle was with rats. Not even the other rats.
Loop 7
But Jill knew.
Loop 8
Years of scurrying in the nether regions of the virtuality had made us into frightened, cowering things, and many of us did not possess the basic awareness to realize that we had crossed over into reality, that we were now actual creatures, and not computer programs only. And also there was the fact that we were rats. We must not let our host animal’s mentality disappear—could not, if we wanted to live. So we code scraps had to wrap our thinking around a rat’s native behavior. That was also why so many of the us had become rats in the first place: Like attracted like. For the most part, you couldn’t tell the regular rats and the enhanced rats apart by their everyday behavior. The rats teemed together, bred, scavenged. The ferrets hunted. Only now the ferrets who were allied with Jill did not hunt the enhanced rats. Some of us began to notice this.
Loop 9
Then the Department of Immunity sent sweepers to the Carbuncle. They came after us in ways the ferrets never had. It was not a fair fight. It was extermination.
Loop 10
A sweeper finally found my pack’s warren. We ran, but it was no use. I knew fear then, but I had gotten a lot smarter. I realized that the trick would be getting past the sweeper’s armor to the delicate innards. But there was no time, so I ran and ran. And the sweeper tracked down the last of us, cornered us. I was angry and desperate. I did not want to die, but couldn’t see any way out.
Loop 11
Jill came.
Loop 12
She had a rod with an electrical charge on the end. We spoke very quickly, through the grist. She told us that if killing stuff came out—gas, poison darts—then there had to be a way for stuff to get in. The trick would be overcoming any backflow valves. There was security grist there.
Loop 13
I knew that if I could get close enough, I could hack through the security grist. I knew that because I recognized the algorithm’s spark and hum.
Loop 14
It was a copy of me.
Loop 15
I clung to the tip of Jill’s killing rod. She feinted around the sweeper. Then she thrust me into the back valve of the sweeper.
Loop 16
Breaking through my old code was absurdly easy. I had grown much stronger and tougher than I ever was in the old days.
Loop 18
Jill pulled me out. I hopped off the rod.
Loop 19
She thrust it back in. I had told the security algorithm that it was a servicing device.
Loop 20
The sweeper burned with the smell of roasted meat. There must have been biologic grist inside.
Loop 21
We killed a great many sweepers in that manner. But there were always more.
Loop 22
Jill had saved my life. I felt immense gratitude.
Loop 23
A lot of rats did.
Loop 24
There were more rats than anybody had ever suspected.
Loop 25
Each of us would follow Jill into the sun itself.
Loop 26
When Jill calls, we will answer.
Loop 27
When Jill tells us to bite, we will bite.
Six
“Those Friends of Tod all threw themselves at the sweepers all at once. This is not the way to take out a DI sweeper. A rat I know figured out the best way and told me.”
“A rat?”
“It’s good to know some rats,” Jill replied. “The sweepers just injected the Friends of Tod who were in the office, one after another. Those needles are poison, you know.” Jill paused, took another spoonful of soup. “But those were brave people.”
“You said ‘sweepers,’ ” Aubry said. “There were more than one of them?”
“There were five.”
“Five?” Leo said. “You took them all out?”
“I was aided by the distraction provided by the Friends of Tod dying,” Jill said. “I fried the sweepers and pulled Tod out of there. Did you know he has an extra bend in his neck?”
“I didn’t know he had an extra bend,” Leo said.
“Well, it made a pretty good way to lead him along,” Jill said. “Made his neck into sort of a handle.”
“Why did you save him?” Aubry asked. “Why did you save us?”
“I heard that the Friends of Tod were good at finding out things,” Jill said. “I need to find something out.”
“What?”
Jill ate more soup, then lifted her bowl and drained it into her mouth.
“Good Lord,” said Leo. “You’re a bottomless pit.”
“Always eat when you can,” Jill said, and grinned ferociously. “How about making us more soup?”
“Sure,” Leo replied. “There’s more boogers where those came from.”
“Good,” said Jill. “I’m looking for someone named Alethea.”
Seven
Jennifer Fieldguide could not believe it when she saw the handsome captain approaching her to ask for a dance. She’d admired Quench from afar, and had even gone so far as to find out his name. And now he was asking her to dance. Jennifer had come to the dance as a part of the neo-Flares. Not that she was a poet herself, but she spent a lot of time in the coffeehouse where the Flares did their thing and, since finishing base school, had gotten a job there while she decided, as she told her parents, what to do about the future.
It was not that she wanted to give logical consideration to the question, though she knew that was what her parents assumed. Feeling was always the best guide; she knew this in her heart. It was just that feeling had not told her what to do after graduation. She would just wait until a thunderbolt struck her (although, she had to admit, that that was an unlikely event on Triton).
As the body of Captain Quench approached her, Jennifer felt distant rumblings that might signal a gathering storm. He was a large man, but also, somehow, fine-boned and elegant. His face suggested manly virtues and a feminine softer nature capable of deep compassion, at the same time. His voice was mellifluous when he asked her to dance. Quench executed the patterns perfectly, if a bit stiffly, Particularly when it came to the free-form section, but Jennifer interpreted this as the result of his being a military man. She had never particularly cared for soldiers before
. In fact, among her friends, the Army was looked upon more as a necessary evil than as a good in and of itself. But there was something about the clean, stiff uniform and the smell of grooming—something else the neo-Flares were not overly fond of—that awakened Jennifer’s desire to impress. When they came away from the dance, Jennifer contrived to continue talking with Quench and to pull him to a corner sofa, where they sat and ordered up drinks from the grist.
“Is it really true that everyone on Nereid is turned into a plant?” Jennifer asked him.
Quench seemed alarmed for a moment, and Jennifer squeezed his hand. “You can hardly keep that a secret, Captain.”
“I’m afraid I can’t discuss such things, ma’am,” he said.
“Don’t ‘ma’am’ me, sir. The name is Jennifer.”
“Yes,” said Quench. “And I am . . . I suppose I’d better tell you something, Jennifer.”
“Have you got a girl?”
“Oh, no, not at all. I mean, I like them. It’s just . . . do you know what a free convert is?”
“Sure,” answered Jennifer. “We had them at school, and Dad works with one down at his law office. They’re nice enough. Very useful. I’m not sure if I could be friends with one, though.”
“You’re not?” Quench seemed alarmed.
Oh shit, Jennifer thought. Maybe his best friend is a free convert or something.
Tony Daniel Page 37
