“No.”
“What’s it like?”
“What?”
“Ghosting.”
“It’s...difficult to describe. Usually—do you understand how the overlays work?”
Coif shrugged.
“Well, they provide a set of inhibitions and proclivities that sort of reroute behavior—like movable walls that change with different needs. I’m sorry if that’s too technical—”
“I scan technical. Go on.”
“It’s like being in a cine, only full sensory, and there’s no dialogue to follow, just a set of responses that you don’t know are there until they’re triggered. Most of the time a client doesn’t care about anonymity, so the overlay is light and you’re aware through it. You get to watch.”
“This one isn’t like that.”
“No... it’s complete anonymity.”
“You don’t sound happy”
“I’m not. These scare me. I won’t have any memory of what happened while I’m ghosting one of these. The overlay is deep, like a complete persona that just moves in and shoves me out of the way. I don’t like them. They’re the reason I quit.”
“Hell of a favor.”
Nemily only nodded and finished dressing in silence. Nemily had never met a ghost whom the experience did not frighten a little, but she had met several who enjoyed the fear. She had found the light overlays—thin ghosts, they called them—bearable, sometimes, depending
on the client, even pleasurable. But she could not rid herself of the anxiety each time she loaded one.
So what am I doing offering to run a full encoding for Mace?
She zipped the last zipper and tugged at the suit, ignoring the answer as long as she could. When she sat down to wait for Reese, it came.
You want something., .you want to fill the gaps...
“Good choice,” Reese said as he came into the room. He stopped in front of her. “Very good choice.”
“Did you do what I asked?”
“I’ve made arrangements.” He reached across his desk and picked up an augment. “Load it now.”
“Now?”
“Complete anonymity. Coif will take you to the appointment and see that you come back safely.”
Nemily held out her hand and Reese dropped the button onto her palm. “How long?”
“As long as it takes. Don’t worry Nem, I’ve been assured that there’s nothing about this that’s dangerous.”
“You can never tell with the fanatically paranoid.”
“That’s why I’m sending Coif with you. Now, if you would?”
Nemily drew three deep breaths and exchanged augments.
Vision splintered through a rhythmless headache. She moved her shoulders, twisted her head from side to side to find relief from the pressure, but the pain followed, a shadow across her shoulders and neck and scalp. Her stomach poised on the edge of rejection, as if it contained a poison. She slid her hands along fabric, then tried to push herself up. Dizziness threatened to steal consciousness, but she kept very still until it passed.
“Nem? Here, I have water. Nem? Nemily?”
She blinked at the man kneeling before her, holding out a glass, until she recognized his face.
“Reese?”
“Good. Here, drink it.”
She took the glass. Her hand quivered and a little fluid spilled across her thumb. She leaned back against something soft and raised the glass to her mouth. She understood then that she must have exchanged the
overlay augment for her own synthesist. The sharp contrast of the exchange brought on this sort of vertigo. It took time for her wetware to adjust properly.
The bitter taste nearly gagged her, but she recognized it and made herself finish all of it. The tension in her neck abated within seconds and her head soon felt better. She sat still, letting the medicine work through her system, eyes closed, thoughtless. When she opened her eyes again she felt familiar to herself.
“Time?” she croaked. She coughed and held the glass out. Someone took it from her.
“Four-twenty” a voice said—not Reese—and it took a few seconds for her to place it. Coif.
“...four-twenty...?”
“Long night,” Reese said.
The glass touched her hand and she closed her fingers around it. Plain water filled her mouth this time. The headache was nearly gone. She noticed then how few other residual sensations remained. No aches, no scoured sensations. Had anything happened besides a simple persona overlay? The shakes passed quickly.
Coif stood near the exit, arms folded over her chest, one ankle crossed over the other. The indifference of her pose contrasted sharply with the angry expression on her face. She kept glaring at Reese, though, and when she looked at Nemily the anger softened to sympathy. Reese paid no attention to Coif. He sat on the edge of his desk, idly reading something on his screen.
Nemily decided she wanted a shower. She still wore the green outfit, but her clothes from the day before lay at the other end of the couch. She finished the water and began stripping out of the new suit. As she peeled it off, she thought distantly that Reese was still in the room, but she did not care, really—he had seen her naked before—she only wanted to get out of these clothes and into her own.
“You owe me for the outfit,” she said then, realizing that she did not consider it her own anymore.
“Of course.”
The stiffness faded with movement, but she continued to move slowly, as if attending a ritual that required the respect of time. By the time she closed the last seal on her own clothes she felt herself again. She left the green garment on the floor.
“Do you have your ghost back?” she asked.
Reese held up the augment. “I thank you, Nem. I’m told you were more than satisfactory.”
Her own set of augments was on the end table by the couch. She sat down and began inserting them. When she had run through all the diagnostics she could, she left the synthesist in and put the case in her pocket.
“What about what I asked for?”
Reese nodded. “Not an easy thing to obtain, either. It took some favors. But I’m assured that he’ll be gone from Aea in the very near future. You don’t need to know details.”
“No... thank you... do I owe you anything?”
He seemed to think about it for a few seconds, but shook his head with a faint smile. “No. We’re more than squared.”
“I won’t do this again. Ever.”
Reese pursed his lips.
“I’ll be back,” Coif said. Reese frowned at her but said nothing as she left the office.
“Did I make a bad exchange?” Nemily asked.
“That depends. I still don’t see why you couldn’t go to SA. He doesn’t seem as well connected as you suspect. What’s your association with him?”
“That’s personal.”
“Then only you can judge if it was worth it. If it helps any, what you did has given me the opportunity to take one more step toward complete legitimacy.” He grinned when she looked at him. “I’ve been working toward it since I got here. Most of my interests are completely approved by SA. I’m converting the rest a little at a time.”
“Next thing you’ll tell me is you’re a member of the council.”
“Not yet.”
The humor in his face failed to hide the complete seriousness underlying the remark. Reese occasionally ran on about his plans, his ambitions, but until now Nemily had thought of him as a thoroughly sensible man, well aware of his limitations and his capabilities.
The door opened then and Coif stepped back inside. Nemily took it as an opportunity to leave.
“Good luck,” she said.
“You, too, Nem.”
Nemily went to the exit. Coif opened it for her, then followed her out.
“I recommend,” Coif said then, “that you not go back to your dom.”
Nemily paused, looking at the big woman. Coif shrugged.
“Why?” Nemily asked.
“Can’
t say here. If you need a place for a while, just to clean up, may be run a better diagnostic...”
“I’d appreciate that,” she said.
Coif nodded. “I’ll take you, then.”
Coif’s dom was three levels up, a knot of small rooms centered on a kitchen, and sparsely furnished. It seemed too small for Coif, whose overadapted bulk seemed to fill any space in which she stood.
One room contained a sleeping mat and hundreds of brilliantly colored scarves hung from the walls, organically thick and variegated. Nemily stared, caught by the inseparability of pattern and texture.
“My...”
“I collect them,” Coif said, her voice small now with modest pride. “A couple are from the last century.”
“From Gaia?”
“No! On my stipend? No, reproductions. But the patterns are all Gaian. Except this section here, that’s Martian.”
“You sleep here?”
Coif nodded. “First thing I see every morning. Lights come up, ‘minder screams at me, and poof! This.”
“It’s beautiful.”
Coif reddened slightly and backed out of the room. “You can stay as long as you like,” she said, retreating. “Hour, a day, whatever. I have to get back to Reese.”
“If it’s all right,” Nemily said, following, “I’ll just clean up and view my data. I have another place I can go, but I need to do this in private.”
Coif nodded. “Whatever. If you go out, just press the mici three times, real fast, it sets the security.”
“Thank you. Really.”
Coif gave her one more self-conscious nod and ducked out of the dom.
Nemily sat on the sleeping mat for a time, gazing at the collection of scarves, letting her thoughts drift. It helped sometimes to pay as little attention to her own processes as possible.
Coif’s water came colder than Nemily liked, but she stood in the stinging spray of the shower until the goosebumps faded, then soaped up as thoroughly as she could. She toweled off and stretched out on Coifs mat.
She thought this job for Reese would be easier, since it revisited the familiar. In the first months after being cleared through InFlux, work came easily, but none of it provided sufficiently for any kind of advancement. Cramped as it was, her dom in Lunase had been far better than the assemblages of GHs in segment four she had lived in for nearly a year. Step by step, in justifiable increments difficult to retrace later, she found Reese and Reese provided work with a higher stipend. For a long time ghosting did not bother her. It was too like everything else she had ever done, only combined in ways she had never thought to combine them. But over time the anxieties increased and a sense of grime began to intrude in her apprehension of sex. Reese, never unreasonable, found other things for her to do. By then she had acquired legitimate work with a better stipend and began the move upshaft, and less than a year after her association with Reese began it ended.
For the most part, at least. From time to time Reese had asked a small favor, and since none of it involved ghosting or seemed in any way illegal, she had responded. This would be the last, she thought.
Coif’s terminal lacked a direct interface. Running a pathic on herself would have to wait, along with a complete net diagnostic. It was too early still to call Mace, though she doubted he would mind. Instead she downloaded the stolen file from her collator onto a disc and slipped it into Coif’s reader.
Reading about someone’s life in the form of a corporate profile felt like ghosting without the sensations. It dismayed Nemily that so much could be reduced to a format. Born, raised, educated, worked, died, and in these ways at these levels, a set of specifications on the off chance one might wish to bet on the life’s performance or recreate it or relive it.
Which is exactly what I’ve offered to do, she thought.
Helen had been a few years older than Mace, which turned out to
be a complicated detail to determine given her birth on Aea and his on Mars. Nemily had never considered the problem till now, that “local time” required a difficult operation to bring into conformity with a different “local time” which, in view of everything else implied by the term “local,” ended up meaning almost nothing. Earth years still dictated standard chronology, but it was only a convenience that could easily be discarded for some other, more relevant system, and probably would be when reverence for Gaia finally burned itself down to the cinder of historical relic.
Helen’s father had died in an accident on a construction site.
She had originally wanted to become a commercial pilot.
Her mother had remarried when Helen was twelve. The new parent figure had been a woman. Helen had sued for legal autonomy. Instead, her mother had signed her into a corporate college that offered several career vectors.
At thirteen Helen had attempted suicide.
At fifteen she had graduated with honors. It was the last recorded time she had seen her mother. A year after that her mother emigrated to Brasa and all contact ceased.
It did not say, in the typically judgmental objectivity of such reports, if the estrangement resulted from her mother’s remarriage or from her mother’s choice of partners or some other, unrelated issue, the timing of which gave a false impression.
Helen’s first recorded lover came into her life at seventeen. A woman.
Her next partner was a male and so was the one after that. The list scrolled on, names and dates and places, durations and separations, all related to her psychological profile and job performance, a matter that became relevant at eighteen when she took a position with PolyCarb. Only a very few of her partners had been from within the company. At twenty-two she had been required to attend counseling on the matter, though the report did not specifically state that as the reason.
At twenty-three she had herself sterilized. Nemily wondered if Mace knew about that.
She became a project assistant on a platform development in Mars orbit at twenty-five. Over the course of the eighteen-month-long job, it came to corporate attention that she was actually running the program, due to her supervisor’s lack of involvement. He was transferred and Helen was given the position. Despite the delays already accrued, she brought the project in only a few weeks behind schedule and slightly over budget. In all other regards she had performed better than profile and she was brought into the regular management pool.
By thirty she had reached the top of her classification. The following year PolyCarb brought her into Executive.
The next several years saw her bounce from one interest to another, as if she were exploring all the possibilities within the corporate structure. For five years there were no recorded lovers. Nemily weighed that against the workload Helen had taken on and decided that, simply, there had been no time.
She settled finally on outer system project development and began working on the Titan project. Titan looked like an impossible objective, in some ways more daunting than Venus, but it was still a world of acceptable size with an atmosphere that could be modified over time. A new human settlement, another world, one more anchor to guarantee survival. It said more than the numbers about how much PolyCarb thought of Helen that they gave it to her.
After three years, though, she was recalled. No reason was given. She took several small assignments, most of them on Mars. During this period she met Macefield Preston. After a fast courtship, they married. Given her history, this event came as a surprise. Seven years after the marriage she died on Hellas Planitia.
More details followed, medical records mostly, and organizational charts from all her projects. Two details startled Nemily.
First, she had worked with Piers Hawthorne, on two separate projects, one of which had been Titan. Piers had lied about that at lunch. The other project had been Mars, on the Trans Ares underground.
Second, Helen had been a CAP.
Nemily stared at the notation. Helen had had a net installed when she turned thirty-five. A very late date for the modification, a high risk of rejection
or maladaption. According to her pathic profile she had not needed it. It was an elective augmentation. She had wanted it for her career. Not uncommon.
But Mace did not know. At least, she thought he did not know. The fact was not so much surprising as it was a verification. Nemily had suspected—people who had their personas downloaded to ROMs tended to be CAPs; there were other ways to do it, but none as simple or as reliable.
Nemily rubbed her eyes. The time chop said six-fifty. She decided to try to sleep for a while before doing anything more. She closed the file and tucked the disc in with her augments, then lay on Coifs mat.
She stared at the wall of color, frightened all over again.
Fifteen – AEA, 2118
NEMILY SAT UP IN SEMIDARKNESS, a hazy memory of dust and wind just out of reach behind her eyes, receding now even as she groped for it. She hated dreaming and had forgotten, among so many other reasons, about this unpleasant aftereffect of ghosting. Dissociated images drifted through her net, randomly assembling into bizarre set pieces until collation—sometimes more than one, sometimes only after a very deep collation and a complete diagnostic—cleared them out. It was the only time a CAP dreamed and it frightened her. The occluded overlaps were the worst because she had no way of knowing from which side of the augment the images emerged—the assumed persona or the encounter with the client. She could not imagine the lives of the unmodifieds, living with these incoherent dramas waiting in the shadows of sleep every night.
Usually erotic dreams followed ghosting, but this one offered nothing sexual. She had never been in a storm, but she understood the concept. Storms happened on Gaia, on Mars, in the atmospheres of worlds. Sometimes a brief one occurred as the result of a blowout, a sealed habitat violently releasing its air and life. She looked around for a panicked instant at the walls for signs of a breach.
She blinked again at the muted colors hanging all about. Coifs dom. She had offered sanctuary, a place to sleep, to recover, and had warned her not to return to her own dom...
She rolled off the mat and found her shoes in the half-light. At the comm terminal she slipped them on, then quickly inventoried her augments. She was tempted to collate, but she wanted to be gone from here. She wanted to do a full net diagnostic and purge whatever remnants from the overlay might still be lingering. Supposedly that could not happen, but often tantalizing fragments continued to drift through her wetware for days after a deep overlay. She used to dream about particles combining and splitting apart when she worked for the alchemists. Everything she did for them had been classified and occluded, but the barriers were never complete.
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