Dreaming Metal

by Melissa Scott

  “Elvis Christ,” I said, but Hasker was quicker.

  “Gods below, can you imagine what would have happened if that had run?”

  I could picture it all too well, myself, and from the silence so could everybody else. The fire had looked too real; people would have panicked, would have imagined a heat they didn’t actually feel—and even knowing it wasn’t real, I’m not sure I could have stood my ground in the front rows while that blazed in front of me. The audience would have run for the exits, I was sure of it—hell, seeing that in front of me, on the stage itself, I think I would have run—and people would have been hurt, maybe even killed. And Realpeace would once again be to blame.

  “We were lucky,” the ASM said, fervently, and Terez nodded.

  “I’m very glad Celeste was on-line, Fortune.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  “Bi’ Terez,” Celeste said, from the console speakers. “I’ve tracked the entry point.” A schematic flared on the darkened screen, a shape like a tangled flower, the tip of one thin petal glowing red.

  “Air Supply?” Hasker asked, scowling, and Terez nodded.

  “Are you sure, Celeste?”

  “Yes.” Celeste’s voice was serene. “This is the complete analysis.”

  The screen filled with a new diagram, this one so overlaid with line and color that the original pattern almost vanished. I blinked, trying to trace its relationship to the first one, and Terez said, “Save that for me, will you?”

  “Saving,” Celeste said.

  “We should contact Security,” the ASM said.

  Hasker shook his head. “And tell them what? It didn’t run, nobody got hurt, and I can tell you right now what Realpeace will say. They’ll say they didn’t do it, it’s a Dreampeace plot, or the Cartel’s, to make them look bad, and they’ve got a program that didn’t work and an entry point through an Air Supply monitor to prove their point. It won’t do any good.”

  “We still have to tell them,” Terez said. They were both right, and I shook my head, not knowing what to say or do. I was still shaking a little at the thought of what could have happened if the program had run—what would have happened if Celeste hadn’t been there.

  “One point for it being Realpeace,” I said, and was almost surprised that I sounded normal, “is that it would have run if Celeste hadn’t been on-line.”

  “True.” Terez looked at Hasker. “Inay, we have to report it. And we have to tell Binnie—and not necessarily in that order.”

  “Haya.” Hasker straightened slowly. “Fortune, we owe you for that construct.”

  “Thanks.” Terez was watching me, and I braced myself, but at the last minute she seemed to change her mind and said nothing. I was just as glad: I wasn’t sure I could explain about Celeste even if I hadn’t been certain it was a bad time to try. “Then you’re done with me?” I’d been about to say us, and I was sure Terez saw.

  She still didn’t say anything, though, but nodded. “Yeh. The stagehouse should be cleared. We’re going to run some system checks tonight; with luck we’ll have everything back on-line for tomorrow night.”

  “If Binnie decides we go on,” the stage manager said.

  “We need the money,” Hasker said, and sighed. “Right, we’ve got to talk to Binnie, and to Security. Thanks again, Fortune.”

  “You’re welcome,” I answered, and let myself back out into the empty backstage. The working lights were on, but the familiar pinpoints that gave access to the virtual house were dark, and I was very aware of that missing dimension, an emptiness at the corners of my eyes and an absence against my skin. Celeste was gone, too, I thought, but then her voice spoke from the stage manager’s console.

  “I’m not able to access the karakuri anymore.”

  “Where did you leave them?”

  “Stage left, front—by the T-80 cable.”

  I looked, and saw the four karakuri huddled awkwardly together, leaning on each other like tired children. I couldn’t leave them there—first, there was too much chance of someone knocking them over, damaging them, and second, they were too disconcerting, looking like that, to leave them there for the backstage staff to stumble over—but I swore under my breath at the thought of maneuvering them down to the keeping on my own.

  “Fortune, why am I shut out?”

  I looked back at the console, and my vision suddenly filled with color, electric blue sheeting to red, then running back through every shade of purple to that intolerable blue again. I looked away, breaking the connection, and Celeste spoke again.

  “Fortune—”

  “Take it easy,” I said, and realized that she was frightened. “They—Terez has to check all the systems, make sure there aren’t any viral fragments left. If something like that happens again, God knows what systems could let go.” I stopped, aware that what I said was hardly reassuring. “They want to make sure it isn’t going to happen again.”

  “The intruding program is gone,” Celeste said. Her voice was dead in the heavy air. “There’s nothing left of it in this volume.”

  I risked a glance at the pinlight, and the blue filled my eyes again. “They have to be sure it can’t reaccess. And they have to get George back on-line.”

  “George is damaged, I think.” Blue faded to red, pulsed slowly back to blue. “Perhaps his—other selves—also.”

  “They’ll have backup off-line, too,” I said, and hoped the copy was recent.

  “That’s not the same,” Celeste said, but the colors were easing, steadying to a blue I could bear to watch. “It won’t be George.”

  There was nothing I could say to that. The question of whether a copy of a construct was truly or only virtually the same as the original—and of whether a backup could ever be made of true AI, if it existed—was one of the great constructors’ debates, a philosophical question I’d always ignored as essentially unrelated to anything of importance. And now here was Celeste giving me answers I’d never thought to want. “I’m sorry,” I said at last, and heard a sound like a sigh from the console.

  “It’s very difficult. Fortune, would the audience have seen that clip as fire?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “I think they would have realized pretty quickly that it wasn’t real, but for the first few seconds, yeh, I think they’d have been afraid.” And people would have died for that fear, for that instinctive reaction. I shivered again at the thought of how narrow the escape had been.

  “There would have been injuries, then,” Celeste said, echoing my thoughts too closely for comfort.

  “I think so.”

  “A bad thing.”

  Constructs are not AI, and they’re not karakuri; the old so-called Three Laws programming does not apply, or at least has never been applied to them. And Dreampeace argues that if true AI ever does develop, then programming in the Three Laws would be an unwarranted interference with a person’s free will, that without the freedom to kill the decision to refrain is meaningless. I wondered how that argument applied to Realpeace’s followers. “It was a good thing you were there,” I said aloud. “You did well.”

  “I’m glad,” Celeste said, softly, and I heard the door of Terez’s office open.

  “Got to get the karakuri put away,” I said, too loudly, and saw the codes that signaled the start of Celeste’s transfer back to the headbox. I fumbled in my pocket for the karakuri remote that I carry in case of a major failure, and brought them stiffly to life.

  15

  Reverdy Jian

  Jian stared at the stage as the fourth humaniform karakuri emerged from the mouth of a brown-iron machine that looked like the final-stage finisher on the Kagami ship line, its copper skin gleaming in the stage lights. The other three karakuri brought it forward, and the conjurer, smiling now, lifted a black-silk drapery large enough to hide herself and the machines. She was wearing a loose black tunic, semitransparent in places, and her skin seemed to glow through the sheer fabric, her color almost as vivid as the karakuri’s. The drapery f
ell, puddling at the karakuri’s feet, and Jian caught her breath, hearing the same sound echoing around her: Fortune had disappeared. And then there was another puff of smoke, from the brown-iron karakuri, this time, and Fortune stepped smiling through its embrace. She came forward, taking the nearest karakuri’s hands, and there was a perceptible pause—shock and wonder, Jian thought, not dislike—before the wild applause. She joined with the others, and Fortune bowed again, indicating first the iron karakuri and then the copper face that suddenly appeared in the air above the stage. Jian stared at it, her hands slowing, and Vaughn nudged her in the ribs.

  “That’s your construct?”

  “Or what she’s made of it,” Jian answered. “The icon, anyway.” The face was like Fortune’s—practically was Fortune’s, but younger, a fraction softer, the same face the conjurer used on her humaniform karakuri. Jian shook her head, not knowing what to think. She hadn’t given the SHYmate an icon, any more than she’d given it a name.

  Light flared on the stage as the curtain began to descend, and sensation flooded over her: the virtual systems were back to the normal levels, after Fortune’s act had suppressed them, and Jian flinched, groping for the control disk to return her suit to its normal levels. At her side, she saw Vaughn doing the same thing, swearing under his breath.

  “Did you pick up anything?” she asked, under cover of the dying applause, and Vaughn shook his head.

  “She really controls the virtual, too. She’s good, Reverdy.”

  “Yeh.”

  The curtain opened again, revealing the line of performers who’d been in the full show, and Jian’s eyes narrowed again, seeing the thin long-haired man who’d been Red’s contact at the Nighthawk, standing with the rest of his band. They’d been good, too, more like Hati than she liked, and political, but good all the same. She nudged Vaughn again, and leaned close to his ear.

  “The guy there, the yanqui, Red’s friend. Who is he?”

  Vaughn rolled his eyes. “Apparently he’s some kind of cousin of mine, though I couldn’t tell you how. His name’s Fanning Jones—”

  On the stage, something went pop, a virtual explosion against her skin. The sheer sensation, like a slap or a hand laid accidentally against hot metal, drowned her vision, the adrenaline analogues coursing though her, so that she caught her breath and looked frantically for smoke and flames. There was nothing, and she let her breath out in relief, at the same time looking for the faint shapes that had marked the presence of the stage systems. The pale lines were gone, replaced by something she didn’t recognize, and then that, too, had vanished, and she was left with dead air, an absence beneath her skin.

  “What the hell?” Vaughn said, but softly, and she shook her head.

  “System crash?” She glanced around, but no one else seemed to have noticed—most of them were coolies, unwired, and so unaware of the change. The curtain was coming down again, the performers backing out of its way, and all around her people were rising to their feet, conversation rising as they headed for the doors and the lifts and ‘buses that would take them home again.

  “Hang back and let’s see if we can get backstage,” Vaughn suggested.

  Jian nodded, edging her way out of the narrow row, and through the slow-moving crowd, but at the steps that led up into the wings her way was blocked by an unsmiling man in Tin Hau livery, the house glyph of sun and stars woven into his bright red vest.

  “Sorry, bi’, they’re not seeing anybody tonight.”

  “I didn’t tell you who I wanted to see,” Jian said, and the man shook his head again.

  “Nobody’s seeing anyone, bi’.”

  Jian lifted an eyebrow at that—whatever had gone wrong must have been fairly serious, if they were keeping the fans out—but managed a polite nod. “Haya,” she said, overriding Vaughn’s automatic protest, and herded him up the aisle in front of her. Red followed as silently as ever, but she was aware that he was watching carefully, though for what she wasn’t sure.

  In the broad lobby, Vaughn turned on her, furious, and she lifted her hands to wave him to silence, seeing the way the Empire’s security people focused on the movement.

  “You’re just going to walk away?” he demanded, and she waved her hands again, watching over his shoulder as one of the red-vested minders spoke into a shoulder pickup.

  “Yeh, and so are you,” she said. “Something’s got them badly on edge, and we’re not going to find out what by annoying their security.”

  “The whole house is down,” Red said.

  Vaughn frowned at him. “Then they’re running on manual—?”

  “Excuse me,” a firm voice interrupted, and Jian turned to see a big man, easily as tall as she and twice as broad, smiling at them from the foot of the stairs that led to the first balcony. “The house is closing. You’ll need to move along.”

  “Haya,” Jian said, and fixed Vaughn with a stern glare. He nodded, reluctantly, and they followed the last group of coolies out into the Tin Hau plaza. The interchange was still busy, dozens of people visible through the smoke grey glass of the doors, and there were still a few food carts snugged to the power points. A floater with FPG Security glyphs on it was grounded in front of a closed cookshop, glyphs flaring from it to warn of loitering, and Jian sighed.

  “Let’s have a praline,” she said, and saw Vaughn smile. He didn’t say anything until they’d bought three of the heavy sugar disks and turned away from the yawning vendor to sit on the edge of a newskiosk’s platform. All its screens were lit, glyphs blaring in the real and the virtual, touting racquet scores and the latest Hot Blue VWS monoboard, but Jian turned her back on the transceivers deliberately, shutting out their noise. Across the plaza, the Tin Hau Empire rose in all its gaudy glory, the doors and the complex carvings outlined with green and red and gold light tubing. Only the massive black-glass arch of the main display screen was dark, and Jian frowned at the sight.

  “So,” Vaughn said, “what did you have in mind?”

  Jian glanced at him. “Do you think they always turn off the display this quickly after a show?”

  Vaughn blinked once, then followed the direction of her gaze. “I don’t know,” he said, after a moment. “I wouldn’t have thought so. You’d think they’d want the advertising, but then again, maybe they’re saving power. I don’t exactly frequent the Empires, Reverdy.”

  “Me neither.” Jian stared at the darkened arch, wondering again just what it was she had felt. Something had gone wrong, that much was certain—she had felt that in her own suit, had caught enough of the transmission to be sure of that—but exactly what, and why, were impossible to guess. There was no reason to think it had anything to do with Fortune’s construct, either, but she couldn’t shake the conviction that it somehow had.

  “So what are we doing, Reverdy?” Vaughn asked again, and she shook herself, made herself look back at him.

  “Wait for someone we know to come out.” She tilted her head toward a smaller opening to the right of the main door, barely recognizable as a door in the shadows from the decorative lights. “That’s got to be a stage door.”

  “There’s got to be a back entrance, too,” Vaughn said, and Jian shrugged.

  “You think we can get back there, the way their security was? If you’ve got a better idea, Imre, I’m all ears.”

  Vaughn subsided, scowling, and Red said, “There.”

  Jian looked up, to see a single figure leaving the stage door. Even at this distance, he was easily recognizable as Vaughn’s distant cousin, his fine hair loose now over his shoulders. He was heading for the last of the food carts, a hand already reaching into his pocket, and Jian pushed herself to her feet.

  “Come on,” she said, and moved to intercept him. Vaughn swore under his breath, but followed.

  Jones looked up sharply at their approach, his eyes going from them to the FPG floater to the coolie woman running the cart, and Jian gave him what she hoped was a disarming smile.

  “Can I talk to you a minu
te? I’m Reverdy Jian, that’s Imre Vaughn. Red I think you know.”

  “I know Red.” The flat yanqui voice was still wary, and the coolie woman’s eyes widened.

  “No trouble,” she said. “Not here.”

  “No trouble,” Jian answered, and spread empty hands. “We just want to talk.”

  “I’m just getting dinner,” Jones said, and the coolie woman handed him a liter jug of noodles. “I have to be getting back.” He held out a cash card as he spoke, and the woman snatched it from him. She ran it too fast through her reader, and had to try again, never taking her eyes from the little group.

  “We don’t want to keep you,” Jian said. “But it’s important.”

  Jones accepted the cash card reluctantly, tucking the noodles under his arm, and glanced back toward the Tin Hau. “The rest of the band’s waiting—”

  “Elvis Christ,” Vaughn said, not quite under his breath, and Jian glared at him.

  “Shut up, Imre. Look, ba’ Jones, we know something went wrong at the end of the show, and if it was the construct I sold—”

  Jones was shaking his head, frowning in genuine puzzlement, and Jian stopped. “Celeste wasn’t the problem,” Jones said. “There was some kind of virus or something, it knocked out the usual managing construct. Celeste fixed it. You don’t have to worry about her.”

  “Her?” Vaughn said.