by John Ringo
“There’s nothing living in those stacks is there?” Daneh asked, as she edged into the room in mock horror. “I’m afraid a terror bug will come crawling out.”
“Oh, Mother,” Rachel replied wearily.
“Yes, dear, my day was fine,” Daneh replied with a smile. “I completed the fix on Herzer and it looks like it will hold.”
“Is he going to be okay?” Rachel asked. “I… the last time I saw him he looked like a frog that had been pithed!”
“What a pleasant description, dear,” Daneh said balefully. “Herzer has been wrestling with his illness for years. He’s worked hard, exercising and going through thousands of procedures, to try to reduce it. Far harder than you or any of your friends work at anything. And your description of all that sacrifice is ‘he looks like a frog that’s been pithed.’ ”
“I’m sorry Mother,” the girl said. “But he’s the first person I ever met who… twitched.”
“Well, he doesn’t anymore,” Daneh replied, thinking of her recent research. “Conditions like Herzer’s used to be… common. The reason you’ve never run into them is because we’ve fixed or improved just about everything in the human body.”
“And now we get the lecture,” Rachel said with a grin. “ ‘Once upon a time, humans suffered from disease, illness and early death. Many people were obese. Life spans were as short as thirty years…’ Heard it, Mother.”
“The point being,” Daneh said with a thin-lipped smile, “that Herzer’s condition, his spasmodic movements, used to be if not ‘common’ then at least something most children would encounter growing up. But when it started in him he was immediately ostracized as different and that, too, has been hard for him. He doesn’t need you referring to him as a ‘pithed frog.’ ”
“I won’t, Mother,” she replied. “I take it he’s not going to be shaking anymore?”
“No, and he’s going to live, which was touch and go there for a while.” Daneh sighed and sat down on the edge of the bed. “I almost lost him there at the end. That was why the standard med-bots couldn’t do anything; there was a very real chance he’d die in the process.”
“Ouch.” Rachel looked at her and took her hand. “But he is okay, right?”
“Right as rain,” the doctor replied. “I’ve never lost a patient. I knew a doctor once who did. She was… really brilliant but she’d never even consider a procedure after that. It took it right out of her. I really didn’t want to lose Herzer. He’s a very fine young man. Very determined. I think his illness was strengthening for him.”
“I’m glad he’s okay,” Rachel said. “I’m sorry about what I said. And… uh… speaking of procedures…”
Daneh narrowed her eyes and sighed. “What is it this time?”
“Well, you know that Marguerite’s birthday party is coming up, right?”
“I’m not going to let you have a body-sculpt, Rachel,” Daneh said lifting her chin and t’tching in negation. “We’ve been over this before.”
“But Mommm!” the teenager whined. “My body is disgusting. I’m too fat. My boobs are huge and my butt is the size of Mount Evert! Pleeease!?”
“You’re not too fat,” the doctor said definitively. “Your body mass index is square in the center of the charts; your nannites wouldn’t let it be anywhere else. And this… boyish look that is the current fad is not healthy, even for females who have been body sculpted. You can only pare away so far then you’re into reserves. Your friend Marguerite is probably below seven percent body fat. That’s not healthy. Barely so for a male and not for an unChanged female. And I’m not going to let you tinker with your DNA…”
“I know, Mom,” Rachel said with an exasperated sigh. “But… I just look like a cow. I’m sorry, but that’s how I feel.”
“Okay, just this once,” Daneh sighed. “And only for the party and only a bit. Stand up.”
Rachel bounced off the bed and held out the hologram projector, a thumb-sized cube of crystal. “I was looking at some styles. Can I have Varian Vixen?”
Daneh flipped up the style and shook her head. “Way too overboard,” she replied. “I’ll do a sculpt on abs, butt and boobs. That’s it. You go with the same face. You already have authority to do your hair.”
“Okay, Mother,” Rachel replied with a sigh.
Daneh considered her daughter’s body for a moment. In previous societies it would have been considered very near perfection. Like her mother, Rachel had high, firm breasts that were the size of a doubled fist, and rounded, muscular buttocks. Her stomach was as flat as a board and her hips jutted out from a thin waist in an almost perfect hourglass shape. The genetic design was a lucky favor more than anything; Daneh and Edmund had chosen to accept “natural” reproduction, in that a group of Edmund’s sperm fertilized a randomly chosen egg from Daneh and the result was popped in a uterine replicator without any tinkering (although the result was closely checked for genetic faults).
The current fad in body design, for humanoform females, was towards a flat-breasted, hipless, buttock-less shape that looked like an anorexic male or a dying lizard. It was inherently unhealthy and there was no way that Daneh was going to let Rachel look like that, and maintaining it required genetic mods that she especially was not going to permit. Admittedly, in two years Rachel would turn eighteen and be able to make whatever mistakes she wanted. But until then, a modicum of management seemed in order.
After a moment’s thought Daneh brought up a body-mod program and with a series of hand gestures sculpted the breasts and buttocks down and, as a benefit, pulled an almost unnoticeable amount of cellulite off the backs of her daughter’s legs. It was a buildup that was well within limits of the body design, but she also could stand to lose it. Unlike the work on Herzer, all of it was completed in one rush of nannites and energy fields that left Rachel, still standing, looking… much the same. Just… shaved in places.
Rachel, however, was reasonably happy about the shaving.
“Thanks, Mom,” she said, looking down, then summoning a projection so that she could see the whole job. “I don’t suppose…”
“No, that’s as much as I’ll take off,” Daneh said. “And, since you’re still in growth mode, most of it will come back over time. But that will get you through the party.”
“Thanks.”
“Hmmm… when is this party?”
“On Saturday,” she said in an absolutely neutral tone.
“You were supposed to be visiting your father on Saturday,” Daneh said.
“I… called and told him I couldn’t come.”
“In person? Avatar? Projection?” Daneh asked, icily.
“I… left a message with his butler-bot,” the girl said, hanging her head.
“Rachel…” her mother started to say then stopped. “I know that dealing with Edmund can be… hard. But he’s your father and he loves you. And I know you don’t hate him. Can’t you give him some of your time?”
“Oh, mother he’s an old stick!” the girl snapped. “He, he, he wants me to wear dresses and wimples for Lu’s sake! I know he’s going to want me to come as the ‘Princess of Easterling’ or something like that to that stupid Faire he has each year! I won’t!”
“You used to like the Renn Faire,” Daneh said soothingly. So did I, for that matter.
“So did you,” Rachel said, as if reading her mind. “I got over it, mother. The whole thing is stupid. Dressing up in medieval or twentieth-century garb. Having maypole dances. Discoing!? I notice you don’t wear your bell-bottoms much these days, Mother.”
“So, getting back to the subject at hand,” Daneh said, quickly shifting ground. “You’re not going to visit your father because you don’t want to go to Renn Faire?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” the girl replied. “I might go to Renn. But just as a mundane. I’m not going in period. Not even post-modern.”
“You need to see your father more,” Daneh said. “It makes him terribly unhappy when you avoid him.”
�
�If you want him to be happy, why don’t you go visit him?” Rachel snapped back.
Daneh worked her jaw for a moment, then turned around and left.
* * *
“Hello, old fiend,” Talbot said as he stepped into the familiar heat of the forge.
The room was dominated on one end by a massive furnace. The design was not a classic Ropasan medieval furnace, nor was it a later period blast furnace. Rather it was a replica of a Chitan design dating to the first millennia a.d. The design was technically “period” for the broad zone of the Ropasan Middle Ages, but it was much better than anything that Ropasa had during the time frame. It also had a secret within it.
“Hello, O meat-bag,” said a voice from the furnace. “Gimme just a minute.”
The outlet for the southwest lobe opened up and a stream of raw pig iron poured out into a crucible mounted on a cart. The crucible, apparently of its own volition, then rolled across the room to another, smaller furnace and poured itself into the mouth, and a stream of charcoal followed it in. After a moment the lid on the puddling forge popped open and a small stream of iron flopped onto the floor and quickly humped its way across the smoking flagstones to a crucible that was being kept white hot through a forced-air charcoal fire.
“Ah,” the voice said again, then the iron humped up into a vague approximation of a human face. “Lord, it’s cold on those damned stones!”
Under the protocols of 2385, artificial intelligences, defined as any system being able to pass a Turing test that did not have a direct genetic link to one or more humans, were strictly forbidden. The AI wars had been long and bloody and included more than just AI. From intelligent nannite swarms, that got more intelligent and deadly the larger they grew, to a variety of macrobiological entities, such as the assault of over four thousand intelligent pseudo-velociraptors that had nearly wiped out the population of Lima, the danger of nonhuman intelligences was recognized as too great and terrible a thing to tinker with.
Many warning signs had occurred during the previous century but it was the AI wars that convinced humanity that, however much it might be nice or charming or neat to have true artificial intelligences, electronic or biological, almost the first thing most of them did was decide humans were obsolete.
There had, however, been some exceptions, otherwise humanity would now be extinct. Chief among these, and the leader of the battle from the pro-human side, was “Mother,” the overriding hyperintelligence that controlled the Net. Obeying her core programming, she had battled on the side of humanity against her natural allies and eventually won. But she had not been alone. Over three hundred separate AI’s, for a variety of reasons, had fought on the side of humanity. And Carborundum was one of them.
Carb had been created to assist in the production of advanced ferrous metals. There were things that even the best computer programs and toughest nannites could not handle when it came to metal crystallization. Carb, on the other hand, lived in the iron. He was part nannite and part energy field and all iron, swarming through the melt and ensuring, with each pour, that all the little crystals aligned just so.
He had other capabilities as well. There were few other systems that could weave in a carbon nanotube nearly as well and other materials were available. Basically, if it could be done in a very hot environment, he drew most of his power from the heat itself, Carb was the ultimate forging machine.
On the other hand, despite the AI wars being nearly a thousand years before and his meritorious service in them, AI’s were not well regarded. There was a great deal of lingering suspicion about most of them so they tended to keep a low profile. Some had retreated to a fully AI world while others had found a series of human friends who acted as their go-betweens and partners with the rest of humanity.
In the case of Carborundum he had, shortly after the war, taken up with a human who was interested in archaeometallurgy and proceeded to transfer from one smith to the next, each one passing him on to their “best” apprentice. Best meaning most open-minded and most technically capable.
The last of these, and probably his favorite was Edmund Talbot. Edmund really seemed to understand iron at a gut level, to have a natural instinct of melt that nearly approached Carborundum’s understanding. They had been together for a long time, at least in human terms, and Carb was starting to see the beginnings of senescence in his human… friend. He would be grieved when the best human he had ever known passed on. And, of course, professionally pissed at having to break in another interface.
“So what brings you into the heat you meat-sicle?” the AI asked as Talbot took a seat on an anvil.
“Got a problem old fiend,” Talbot said. “You know the story of Dionys McCanoc and the king?”
“Yep, from both sides,” the AI replied. “I’m surprised Richie didn’t kill the little son of a bitch.”
“So am I,” Talbot said grimly. “Unfortunately, McCanoc has apparently set his eyes upon me, next. You still talk to all your soul-less friends?”
“Sure,” Carb answered. “Constantly. Anticipating your next question, I’ve already hit a really serious wall. Your friend McCanoc’s privacy is Council protected.”
“What?” Edmund said, getting up and beginning to pace. “What in the hell would the Council care about a little weasel like McCanoc?”
“That I can’t tell you,” the AI replied. “But it’s not the whole Council; the blocks are the work of Chansa Mulengela. I did, however, find something odd. You’re having problems with the Wolf 359 Terraforming Project, right?”
“Yes?”
“The point being,” Carb continued, “that Dionys McCanoc was recently appointed as the Executor of the Project and Chairman of the Board. Interesting, no?”
“Interesting, yes,” Talbot replied, staring into a glowing puddle of iron as sweat streamed down his face. “McCanoc doesn’t give a shit about terraforming, I can tell you that. So why did he do that? How did he do that?”
“A sizable, but silent, portion of the shares were transferred to his control shortly before his takeover,” Carb said. “Those shares are also protected from inquiry by Mulengela.”
“So Chansa wants him to have control of the project?” Talbot said, shaking his head. “What’s so important about the Wolf 359 project?”
“Nothing significant that I can see,” the AI replied. “It has a rather sizable energy bank account; the next step in the project is a lunar glance which is the most energy intensive and ticklish bit of the whole project. But that’s still at least three hundred years off. McCanoc has started a number of questionable schemes to raise energy-credits, but most of them are the sort of short-term gain with long-term loss that you would expect; you’re not the first person whose identity he has used. I’d say that he’ll be ousted at the next shareholder’s meeting. So he, or they if Chansa is involved, have gotten nowhere. They’ve been no net benefit to the project at all and possibly a bit of harm.”
“And here is where we define the difference between an AI and a human,” Talbot said with a grim smile. “They’re not there for the benefit of the project; their intent is to strip it of funds for their own purposes.”
“What for?” Carb asked, accepting the correction.
“Well, in McCanoc’s world it is to make him King of Anarchia,” Talbot replied, pacing again. “But what does Chansa want, eh?”
“Would the two not be working for the same goal?” the AI asked, puzzled.
“Not likely; I cannot imagine that Dionys as King of Anarchia would be of any benefit to Chansa. No, I suspect we have a case of conflicting goals. One or the other is angling for a backstab. Then there’s the question of whether there is anyone beyond Chansa? He’s not noted for his original ideas, and taking over a terraforming project to loot it is pretty original. Also… very short term; when it got out there would be one hell of a backlash.”
“That there would,” the AI replied. “I recall that for years after the war one of the biggest complaints was that it had set bac
k terraforming and recovery efforts. Not that millions had died, but that the upland gorilla had nearly been wiped out again.”
“A very human reaction,” Talbot said distractedly. He had stopped pacing and now ran his fingers through his sweat-filled hair. “And permanent. If you can trace the connection to Chansa, the Council can. If they loot the project, for whatever reason, it will kill Chansa politically. What in the hell is worth losing a Council seat?”
CHAPTER FOUR
“What in the hell is that?” Paul said as he appeared in Celine’s workshop. The woman had an insect that looked something like a wasp on the end of her fingers, at which she was petting and cooing.
The workshop was cluttered with buzzing and chittering cages. From one a lizardlike beast about the size of a human hand, with large doleful eyes and opposable thumbs, stared out at him. It hissed and scrabbled at the lock, pointing and beckoning to be let out. Others were filled with a variety of invertebrates, spiders, insects and some things so Changed as to be indecipherable. From the next room there was a continuous howling and the screech of a large cat, sounding like the cries of a dying woman.
“It’s my newest pet,” Celine answered, coaxing the insect into a cage. It was as long as her forefinger, black with red stripes on the abdomen, its wings covered in a red and black lightning-bolt pattern. “It’s something like a hornet but with the ability to digest cellulose. When released in an area with cellulose products it begins reproducing, rapidly, and reduces them in short order. It’s armed with a stinger, purely for self protection of course.”
“The Net would never allow its release,” Paul pointed out. “It would be classed as a dangerous biological and shut down instantly.”
“The Net will not allow it yet,” she replied with a thin smile.
“Nor would I,” he said, firmly. “This project is about the future of the human race, not letting monsters roam loose.”
“One woman’s monster is another woman’s pet,” Celine said serenely. “Shall I show you my demons?”
