“Why don’t you grow your body like that, Frances?” she wondered aloud.
“I thought about it,” said the voice on her console. “But I want to live on a human scale and see the world the way you see it.”
“I still don’t quite understand why. But thank you anyway, Frances. Thank you for inviting me to your birthday.”
“Who else would I invite? Now, that looks like the place.”
A white rectangle, the size of a large room, had been painted on the factory floor. The area inside was stacked with rolls of silver cloth, piles of black chips, rusty tangles of steel wire, fluffy clumps of white stuff, glistening blue sponge…
“My birthplace,” Frances sighed.
Judy stepped onto the white rectangle and looked around. She felt dwarfed by the activity of the rest of the factory. Some people called this place the Source; it was where the first sections of the Shawl had been designed. Now they reproduced by themselves in the space beneath the factory, the blue-white disc of the Earth lying thousands of kilometers below. If you looked down through the great transparent lens in the factory floor, you could see some of the newly born sections turning end over end, waiting to be joined to the uppermost row of the Shawl itself, from where they would begin their long procession downwards as other rows were added above them, until eventually they were released….
But there were other things made here, too. Some of them were quarantined: new types of robot, experimental star drives, VNM designs that had the potential to reproduce unchecked. But everything else was open to inspection. Not far away was a swarm of silver VNMs busily working away, repeatedly forming themselves into metal towers, springing almost as high as the wishbone above before shrinking to nothing, rising and falling like the bars on a graphic equalizer as they tried and failed to find an optimal shape.
“Frances?” The voice came from Judy’s console. It was deeper, yet in some imprecise way more feminine than her friend’s.
“Sukara!” Frances called, “I’m so pleased you’re here.”
“Don’t forget us!” chorused two other voices.
“Lemuel! Cadence!”
“We couldn’t let you leave us without saying good-bye.”
“But I’m not leaving you!”
Judy tried to adopt an impassive expression, but she couldn’t manage it. Her face wobbled in a tearful smile. She was dimly aware of the sacrifice Frances was making.
“Now, stop that, Judy. We need you to look after our friend!”
“I will,” Judy said, wiping her face with the back of her hand.
“She will,” Frances agreed. “They know you will, Judy. That’s why they’re having this conversation at a human level—so you can listen in. They respect you. They think you’re all right.”
“For a human,” Sukara laughed.
High above, a cloud of scarlet gas was twisting as it drifted up the side of the incredibly high, domed roof of the factory. Judy guessed the shape that was coalescing up there must be the size of a small town. The gas, the wishbone, the heaving mass of VNMs, all these made her aware just how small she herself was. She had a sudden, greater, insight into what Frances was doing: cutting herself loose from the wider domain of the processing spaces to trap herself in one small body.
“Frances,” Judy said, suddenly humble. “You know I’m flattered, but why me?”
“I’ll tell you, but you might think I’m being rude.”
“I won’t. I’m a counselor for SC. We’re supposed to understand other points of view. You helped train me.”
“And I saw a potential in you I have seen in no other human. You know that. But that’s not why I chose you. You want to know why? It’s because I know your limitations better than any other human’s.”
Judy smiled. “I can see how that could be a compliment.”
“It wasn’t intended as a compliment,” Frances said. “It was just a statement of fact. Now, I think I’m ready. See the blue sponge?”
It looked like glistening transparent blue jelly, sitting in a shallow tank near her feet. Tiny silver bubbles fizzed inside it.
“I see it,” Judy said.
“Drop one of the reserve VNMs from your console into the sponge.”
Judy held her console over the blue jelly, the silver bubbles fizzing excitedly towards her, and watched as a tiny silver-grey machine dropped into the tank.
“Will that be enough?” she asked. “Don’t you need special machines? That VNM is the one that I usually use for repairing rips in clothes.”
Frances and the other AIs laughed from the console. “That’s such a human thing to say, Judy. All machines can make other ones eventually. There is nothing special about the materials—only the shaping intelligence.”
The little machine seemed to dissolve into the tank.
“How long will it take?” Judy whispered.
“Shhh…It’s happening already.”
The silver bubbles in the tank were rushing together, forming shapes. Silver rods formed of bubbles rose to the surface, bringing the jelly up with them. A blue spongy skeleton began climbing from the tank, even as it formed itself. Blue arms gripped the sides as a blue blob looking something like a brain pulled itself clear of the surrounding goo.
“All right,” Frances said, “I’m ready…”
Voices called from the console.
“Good-bye.”
“Good luck, dear.”
“Come home to us.”
The blue skeleton swayed as it rose from the tank. In some strange way, it seemed to be looking directly at Judy. She backed away uncertainly.
“No, Judy, stay. I need to touch you.”
The voice came from her console, but Judy had no doubt that Frances was now speaking from the blue skeleton. She swallowed hard, then held out her arm. The blue skeleton took her wrist in a cold, fizzing grip.
“I’m giving up so many viewpoints, Judy, but this. To really touch something for the first time…”
Something like a blue hand ran itself across Judy’s face. She forced herself not to flinch.
“Oh, Judy, I have so many more ways of experiencing the world than you, yet even so, I feel so restricted. But if I was everywhere, I would not be a robot. It is necessary for me to withdraw into this body to get the human perspective.”
The blue skeleton gripped Judy for support as it looked around the factory, up at the scarlet shape that had formed in the roof space, back at the last motion of the stacks of VNMs behind them which seemed to have settled on a final shape.
Rain began to fall over half the extent of the factory floor. Judy could look through the silver curtain of water to the dry floor lying beyond the golden pools. Fat drops splashed against her kimono, plastering the thin silk against her skin.
“Why is it raining?” she asked.
“You know,” Frances said in a voice of awed wonder, “I don’t know straight off. I have to look it up.”
“It’s not too late to come back, Frances,” called one of the voices from the console.
“No, Lemuel. I want to stay…”
“Aren’t you going to put a skin on?” Sukara asked. There came a crackling noise from around the base of the brain of the blue skeleton, and then Frances spoke from the robot’s body.
“Oh, yes, I know the perfect thing. Judy, help me.”
Frances led Judy across the factory floor, the black-and-white woman supporting this blue, spongy, fizzing, stick creature. They were heading towards the base of one of the wishbone legs.
Frances climbed into the yellow pool and Judy watched the blue skeleton sink beneath its surface.
“But the wishbone is so hard,” said Judy. “Frances won’t be able to move.”
“Frances was an expert engineer,” Cadence said. The surface of the yellow pool began to stir.
“She still is,” Judy murmured. None of the omnipresent AIs were so rude as to contradict her.
Frances emerged from the pool in a golden suit, yellow liquid slo
wly setting around her body like buttery toffee. Frances’ body was to be smooth and featureless, and Judy had a sudden flash of recognition: that was how she, Judy, liked to think of herself. And then she saw the buttons between Frances’s legs, and she heard a peal of laughter from her console.
“You’re her template, Judy,” Sukara explained. “She’s not been totally honest with you. Already the strain of being focused into one point is restricting her. She’s reacting to you. She’s the rest of you. She’s exploring humanity by completing you.”
Ten years later, Judy and Frances stood on a road that wound its way along the Brittany coastline. White spray, carried by the brisk wind from waves crashing on the rocks below, glistened on Judy’s golden skin. She moved her head this way and that, searching for a route to Peter Onethirteen.
“My feet are cold.”
“Put your tabi back on, then,” Frances said, pointing to the scraps of material tucked into the white silk of her friend’s obi.
“They’re genuine cotton!” Judy said indignantly. “They’ll get stained.”
The wind gusted again and she shivered. The pines standing on the low hills that rose out of the sand dunes were almost doubled over, their branches waving inland, bent by the ceaseless winds blowing over the iron-grey sea.
“This way.” Frances led her along a strip of rough grass weaving inland from the sand dunes between the green reeds of a saltmarsh.
“I hate this wilderness.” Judy fastidiously pulled the legs of her cotton trousers up a little. She had tucked the five separate robes of her dress up into her sash to stop them getting dirty. “The sooner they release VNMs to convert the whole Earth to plastic, the better.”
Frances laughed. “I find it quite sensual. You’re too clinical, Judy. I’m sure that your digital selves have a better time of it. They can always take refuge in the thought that their world is all bits, in the end.”
“And my world is all atoms. It’s all the same.”
The air was damp. Rough grass coated in gritty sand rubbed against their legs as they strode on through the no-man’s-land between the dunes and the low green hills. Ahead of them, a sparkling pattern of lavender lights formed a wall in the air as a warning. Judy waved her hand through the barrier experimentally. Frances stepped straight through and turned to wait for her friend.
“According to the records, the atomic Peter Onethirteen spends most of his time in here,” she said. “I can see why. I sometimes think about coming to live in a common land. It seems to me to be an echo of the thinking behind the Shawl, only without compromise—purer.”
“You should move to Penumbra.” Judy took a deep breath, then followed her friend through the lavender wall.
“See, you’re still alive,” Frances said.
Judy ignored her, examining a scrubby brown tree that twisted itself close to the ground, its ragged green leaves flickering in the wind. The overlaps of her robes flickered in sympathy. “Look at that tree. Is it natural, or a venumb?”
“Natural,” Frances said. “It’s a hawthorn. Now that looks like a venumb to me.”
Judy turned in the direction she was pointing. Keeping just inside the lavender wall, a brown spider bush shuffled backwards, tugging at a piece of silver foil. Silver metal hinges bent and clicked, forming joints in the brown thorny twigs that comprised its legs.
“Where did the foil come from?” she asked.
“Trunk of another spider tree, probably,” Frances said. “Let’s follow it. It’s heading in Peter’s direction.”
Sand spilled across the green mounds in long yellow tongues. Judy’s ankles felt cold and raw from the damp abrading wind. The spider bush seemed unconcerned, its legs clicking along like clockwork, the topmost joints weaving in loops like knitting needles as it dragged its prize back home. Next to the bright colors of Judy’s kimono, it looked dull and unimpressive.
“Where’s its processing space?”
“Probably in the main tree,” Frances suggested, her attention elsewhere as she scanned around for Peter Onethirteen. “It’s rare for a species to waste materials by incorporating a brain into each separate servant.”
The spider bush stood as high as Judy’s waist, formed of brown thorny twigs as thick as her finger, all joined together by metal hinges. The top half of the venumb was a woven mass of twigs from which four thorny pincers reached out to grasp the piece of silver foil, now sending giddy flashes of grass and sky and kimono reflecting in the dull day. As the spider bush made its way down the other side of the low hill, there was a moment of discontinuity, then Judy suddenly found herself standing beneath a huge silver tree.
“Whoa!”
“Couldn’t you see it?” Frances said. “I didn’t think the baffles on this tree were that strong.”
“Just strong enough,” a man’s voice said. “That’s how it has survived.” There was another moment of discontinuity, and a middle-aged man appeared before them wearing an apologetic expression.
“I’m Peter Onethirteen.”
Judy took a deep breath and resumed her professional exterior. Her face assumed its impassive expression.
“You were expecting us, weren’t you?” she said.
Peter Onethirteen nodded, glancing at Judy’s bare feet.
“My digital self contacted me this morning. I don’t know what you did to him, but he was terrified.”
Judy folded her hands into the sleeves of her kimono. “But you’re not, are you?” she said. “Interesting.”
“Oh, I’m still scared,” said Peter calmly, “but I have learned that it’s more effective to ride events than oppose them.” The atomic Peter’s short, stocky body was winning the battle against middle-aged spread. His thinning hair was shaved close to his head. The contrast with his digital self was marked.
Judy said nothing. The spider bush had by now dragged its piece of foil to the base of the silver tree. It dropped it there and then awkwardly began to climb the trunk.
“Ah. It’s going to make another bush to help with the harvest,” said Frances, who had been apparently ignoring the exchange between the two humans. “Clever things, these venumbs.”
“Actually, it’s not a venumb,” Peter Onethirteen said, going over to join her. “It’s more a symbiote,” he continued. “A bit like the way that lichen is a symbiosis between fungus and algae. The tree itself is a genetically modified rose bush. The VNM seems to find the thorny wood of the tree provides the best building material. Watch…”
Smooth brown twigs were falling to the ground, sharp red thorns glowing in the pale light. A rasping, clicking noise came from the branches above, where the spider bush worked unseen. The noise ceased and the spider bush then dropped to the ground in a tangled heap. There was a moment’s stillness and then it began to twitch, its silver joints flashing, and the bush gradually regained control of its legs. It raised itself up and then began collecting the twigs it had just harvested into a pile.
Peter Onethirteen was smiling as he watched the spider bush tearing off pieces of silver foil and placing them amongst the twigs. He moved forward to crouch down by the bush and beckoned Judy closer. She stood at his shoulder, her robes flapping gently in the wind.
“To be honest, I don’t quite understand how the next bit works,” he said. “I don’t think it uses nanotechs, but there is no way those twig fingers could form the metal foil into hinges and motors. It’s a beautiful principle, though. In a region of scarce resources, both VNM and plant make use of their respective strengths. The VNM gains access to building material, while the tree gets armor and stealth protection.”
“Did they evolve naturally? Or do they have a creator?” Peter looked towards her. Her body remained still, but there was a note of interest in her voice.
“I don’t know. They were found in the Russian Free States over a hundred years ago. Nobody will admit how long they’d been around before they were discovered.”
Still crouching, he waved his hand to take in the area around them.
“This area was established as common ground after the Transition. It’s littered with symbiotes like these.” He paused. Frances had moved up beside him, bringing the push buttons between her legs level with his face. He appeared to notice them for the first time.
“There’s something about these bushes,” he said, looking rather disconcerted. He turned to Judy. “A suggestion that there are forms of evolution other than the path chosen for us by the EA. I spent time in the Enemy Domain, you know. It gives you a different…perspective.”
Judy’s hand was moving from her sleeve to her mouth, a tiny blue dot on her finger.
“Ouch!”
“What’s the matter?” asked Peter.
“I don’t know.” Judy frowned. “I thought I felt…Never mind.” She regained her composure and placed a little pill on her tongue.
The second spider bush was completed. After a moment’s apparent thought, it began to scuttle after the first, back towards the beach.
“Going to harvest more foil,” Peter said. “If the tree they’re stealing it from doesn’t get its stealth routines updated fast, all the local symbiotes will find it and strip it clean of metal.”
Judy gazed at him, the little blue pill dissolving on her tongue.
“You’re not like your digital counterpart,” she observed. “I’ve got my sister’s report.”
“People change.” Peter shrugged. “My digital counterpart was created years ago. We’ve grown differently.”
Judy’s gaze was cool. “There’s more to it than that. You said you spent time in the Enemy Domain. Tell me about that.”
Peter gave an involuntary shiver. “I was marooned there for three months,” he said. “That was after the digital Peter Onethirteen was created. He never experienced what I did.” He knelt down and picked up some of the twigs that the spider bush had dropped to the ground.
Judy tilted her head to listen to her console. “Oh, I see,” she said in some surprise. “Three months marooned on a clone world. How could that be allowed to happen?”
“It does sound far-fetched, doesn’t it?” Peter’s voice was soft. “Isn’t that a modern fantasy, to be out from under the gaze of the Watcher?” He noted Judy’s reaction. “Oh yes, I believe in the Watcher.”
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