Halo

by Tom Maddox

memory made new, the taste of the past rising fresh from its

  unconscious store, where the seemingly immutable laws of time and

  change do not prevail, and so everything lives in splendor.

  Then every bodily sensation she had ever felt passed through

  her allimpossiblyat once. She itched and burned, felt heat

  and cold; felt sunlight and rain and cold breeze and the slice of

  a sharp knife across her thumb felt the touch of another's hand

  on her breasts, between her legs; felt herself coming

  Then she lived once again a day she had thought was finished

  except as context for her worst dreams:

  In the park that Sunday people were everywherefamilies and

  young couples all around, the atmosphere rich with the ambience of

  children at play and early romance. Sunlight warmed the grass and

  brightened the day's colors. Diana lay on her blanket watching it

  all and luxuriating in the knowledge that her dissertation had

  been approved and she would soon have her degree, a Ph.D. in

  General Systems from Stanford. Tonight she was having dinner with

  old friends, in celebration of the end of a long, hard process.

  She read for a while, a piece of early twenty-first century

  para-fiction by several hands called The Cyborg Manifesto, then

  put the book down and lay with her eyes closed, listening to a

  Mozart piano concerto on headphones. As the afternoon deepened,

  the families began to leave. Many of the young couples remained,

  several lying on blankets, locked in embrace. A group of young

  men wearing silk headbands that showed their club affiliation

  directed the flight of robo-kites that fought overhead, their

  dragon shapes in scarlet and green and yellow dipping and

  climbing, noisemakers roaring. The wind had shifted and appeared

  to be coming off the ocean now, freshening and cold. Time to go.

  She passed by the Orchid House and saw that the door was

  still open, so she decided to walk through it, to feel its moist,

  warm air and smell its sweet, heavy smells. She had just passed

  through the open entry when a man grabbed her and flung her across

  a wooden potting table. Stunned, she rolled off the table and

  tried to crawl away as he closed and locked the door.

  He caught her and turned her on her back, punched her in the

  face and across her front, pounding her breasts and abdomen with

  his fists, crooning and muttering the whole time, his words mostly

  unintelligible. She went at him with extended fingers, trying to

  poke his eyes out; when he caught her arms, she tried to knee him

  in the crotch, but he lifted a leg and blocked her knee. His face

  loomed above her, red and distorted. The sounds of the two of them

  gasping for air echoed in the high ceiling.

  He ripped at her clothes as best he could, tearing her blouse

  off until it hung by one torn sleeve from her wrist, hitting her

  angrily when her pants would not rip, and he had to pull them off

  her. Holding the ends of her pants legs, he dragged her across

  the dirt floor, and when the pants came off, she fell and rolled

  and hit her face on the projecting corner of a beam. She tasted

  dirt in her mouth.

  In a voice clotted with rage and fear and mortal stress, he

  said, "If you try to hurt me again, I'll kill you."

  He turned her over again and stripped her panties to her

  ankles. She tried to focus on his face, to take its picture in

  memory, because she wanted to identify him if she lived. She

  smelled his sweat then felt his flaccid penis as he rubbed it

  between her thighs. "Bitch," he was saying, over and over, and

  other things she couldn't understandthe words muttered in

  imbecile repetitionand when he finally achieved something like

  an erection, he cried out and began hitting her across the face

  with one hand as with the other he tried to push himself into her.

  She could tell when he was finished by the spurt of semen on her

  leg.

  He stood over her then, saying, "No no no, no no no," and she

  saw he was holding a short length of two by four. He began

  hitting her with it as she tried to shield her head with crossed

  arms.

  She awoke in the Radical Care Ward of San Francisco General,

  in a dark, pain-filled murk. The pain and disorientation would

  fade, but the darkness was, so it seemed, absolute. The rapist

  had left her for dead, with multiple skull fractures and a

  bleeding brain, and though the surgeons had been able to minimize

  the trauma to most of her brain, her optic nerves were damaged

  beyond repair: she was blind.

  For an instant Diana knew where and when she was. "Please!"

  she said, using the voiceless voice of the egg. "No more!"

  Something changed then, and the fragments moved forward quickly,

  faster than she could follow. However, she knew the story they

  were telling:

  Under drug-induced recall, she had produced an exact

  description of the man, and that and the DNA match done from semen

  traces left on her legs led to a man named Ronald Merel, who had

  come to California from Florida, where he had been convicted once

  for rape and assault. He was a pathetic monster, they told her, a

  borderline imbecile who had been violently and sexually abused as

  a child; he was also physically very strong. Weeks later, he was

  caught in Golden Gate Parklooking for another victim, so the

  police believedand he was convicted less than three months

  later. A two-time loser for savage rape, he had received the

  mandatory sentence: surgical neutering and lifetime imprisonment,

  no parole.

  And so that part of it all was closed.

  Her convalescence had taken much longer, and had run a

  delicate, erratic course. Even with therapies that minimized

  long-term trauma through a combination of acting-out and

  neurochemical adjustment, her rage and fear and anxiety had been

  constant companions during the months she convalesced and took

  primary training in living blind.

  However, once she had acquired the essential competence to

  live by herself, she had become very active, and very different

  from who she had been. In particular, she had no longer cared

  what others wanted from her. Since her early years in school in

  Crockett, the city at the east end of the East Bay Conurbation,

  she had been an exceptional student in a conservative mode: very

  bright, obedient to the demands others made on her and self-

  directed in pursuing them. Now she was twenty-eight, blind, and

  had her Ph. D. in hand, and everything she had sought before, the

  degree included, seemed irrelevant, trivial: she couldn't imagine

  why she had bothered with any of it.

  She had decided to become a physician. She had sufficient

  background, and she knew that with the aid of the Fair Play Laws,

  she could force a school to admit her. Once she was in, she would

  do whatever was necessary: her state-supplied robotic assistant

  could be trained to do what she couldn't. She would go, she would

  finish, she would discover how to see again:

  It had been just that simple,
just that difficult

  The flow of memory halted, and she was allowed to sleep.

  Later, when she began to wake, she put the question, why? why did

  you make me relive these things? And the answer came, because I

  had to know. Diana remembered then how inquisitive Aleph was, and

  how demanding.

  13. Cosmos

  Gonzales stood with Lizzie in an anteroom just outside where

  Diana lay. She wore beta cloth pants, their rough fabric bleached

  almost colorless, a silken white tank top, and a red silk scarf

  tied around her right bicep, Gonzales had no idea why. He said,

  "I had some very strange dreams last night."

  "I know," she said. "About one of them, anywayyou were me

  in the dream, at least for part of it, and I was you. Think of it

  as a peculiarity of the environment." She leaned against the wall

  as she spoke, and her voice lacked its usual ironic edge.

  "What the hell does that mean?"

  "I'm not sure," she said. "No one isAleph's certainly

  responsible, but it won't admit it, and it won't tell us how these

  things can happen."

  "That's a bit frightening, don't you think? What other

  surprises might it have in store?"

  She smiled broadly and said, "Well, that's the fun of it,

  exploring the unexpected, isn't it? How did it feel to be a

  woman, Gonzales? How did it feel to be me?" She had leaned

  forward, closer to him.

  "I don't remember."

  "Pay attention next time."

  "I will, if it happens again."

  "It may wellonce these things start, they continue. Come

  onit's time to get you into the egg. Follow me."

  #

  The split egg filled much of the small, pink-walled room;

  above it on the wall was mounted an array of monitor lights and

  read-outs. A small steel locker against a side wall was the only

  other furnishing.

  Charley said, "We didn't ask for you, but you're here, so

  we're making use of you." Then he coughed his smoker's cough,

  raspy and phlegm-laden, and said, "Diana's bandwidth is over-

  extended as is, so we can't use her to establish the topography,

  and Jerry's got his own problems. Our people have their own

  schedules to fill, so that means you're it. We'll build the world

  around you and your memexit's already locked into the system."

  Lizzie stepped up close to him and said, "Good luck." She

  kissed him quickly on the cheek and said, "Don't worry. You're

  among friends. And I'll see you there."

  "What do you mean?"

  "The collective decided I should take part in all this, and

  Charley agreed, so Showalter had to go along. So many parties are

  represented here, it just seemed inappropriate that we weren't.

  But I have some things to take care of first, so I won't be there

  for a while."

  She opened the door and left. Charley gestured toward the

  egg. Gonzales stepped out of his shirt and pants and undershorts

  and hung them on a hook in the locker, then stepped up and into

  the egg and lay back. The umbilicals snaked quickly toward him.

  He put on his facial mask and checked its seal, feeling an

  unaccustomed anxietyhe had never gone into neural interface

  without first tailoring his brain chemistry through drugs and

  fasting.

  The top half closed, and liquid began to fill the egg.

  Minutes later, when the scenario should have begun, he seemed to

  have disappeared into limbo. He tried to move a finger but didn't

  seem to have one. He listened for the blood singing in his ears;

  he had no ears, no blood. Nowhere was up, or down, or left or

  right. Proprioception, the vestibular sense, vision: all the

  senses by which the body knows itself had gone. Nothing was

  except his frightened self: nowhere with no body.

  After some time (short? long? impossible to say) he

  discovered, beyond fright and anxiety, a zone of extraordinary,

  cryptic interest. Something grew there, where his attention was

  focused, no more than a thickening of nothingness, then there was

  a spark, and everything changed: though he still had no direct

  physical perception of his self, Gonzales knew: there was

  something.

  Now in darkness, he waited again.

  A spark; another; another; a rhythmic pulse of sparks and

  their rhythm of presence-and-absence created time. Gonzales was

  gripped by urgency, impatience, the will for things to continue.

  Sparks gathered. They flared into existence on top of one

  another, and stayed; and so created space.

  All urgency and anxiety had gone; Gonzales was now

  fascinated. Sparks came by the score, the hundreds, thousands,

  millions, billions, trillions, by the googol and the googolplex

  and the googolplexgoogolplex all onto or into the one point

  where space and time were defined.

  And (of course, Gonzales thought) the point exploded, a

  primal blossom of flame expanding to fill his vision. Would he

  watch as the universe evolved, nebulae growing out of gases, stars

  out of nebulae, galaxies out of stars?

  No. As suddenly as eyelids open, there appeared a lake of

  deep blue water bordered by stands of evergreens, with a range of

  high peaks blued by haze in the distance. He turned and saw that

  he stood on a platform of weathered gray wood that floated on

  rusty barrels, jutting into the lake.

  A man stood on the shore, waving. Next to him stood the

  Aleph-figure, its gold torso and brightly-colored head brilliant

  even in the bright sunlight. Gonzales walked toward them.

  As he approached the two, he saw that the man next to Aleph

  looked much too young to be Jerry Chapman. "Hello," Gonzales

  said. He thought, well, maybe Aleph let him be as young as he

  wants. And he looked again and realized he could not tell whether

  this was a man or a woman; nothing in the person's features of

  bearing gave a clue.

  The Aleph-figure said, "Hello." Gonzales smiled, overwhelmed

  for a moment by the combination of oddity and banality in the

  circumstances, then said, "Hi," his voice catching just a little.

  The other person seemed shy; he (she?) smiled and put out a

  hand and said, "Hello." Gonzales took the hand and looked

  questioningly into the young person's face. "My name is HeyMex,"

  the person without gender said.

  And as Gonzales recognized the voice, he thought, what do you

  mean, your 'name'? And he also thought he understood the absence

  of gender markers.

  "Yes, this is the memex," the Aleph-figure said. "Whom you

  must get used to as something different from 'your' memex."

  Gonzales looked from one to another, wondering what this all meant

  and what they wanted.

  "But you are my memex, aren't you?" Gonzales asked.

  "Yes," HeyMex said.

  The Aleph-figure said, "However, the point is, as you see, it

  is more than 'your memex.' It is beginning to discover what it is

  and who it can be. Can you allow this?"

  Gonzales nodded. "Sure. But I don't know what you expect of

  me."

  "Only that you do not actively interfere. It and
I will do

  the rest."

  "I have no objections," Gonzales said.

  The Aleph-figure said, "Good." And it stretched out its hand

  made of light and took Gonzales's, then stepped toward him and

  embraced him so that Gonzales's world filled with light for just

  that moment, and the Aleph-figure said, "Welcome."

  "What now?" Gonzales asked.

  HeyMex said, "We need to talk. There are things I haven't

  told you."

  "If you want to tell me what you're up to, fine, but you

  don't have to," Gonzales said. "I trust you, you know." He

  thought how odd that was, and how true. He and the memex had

  worked together for more than a decade, the memex serving as

  confidante, advisor, doctor, lawyer, factotum, personal secretary,

  amanuensis, seeing him in all his moods, taking the measure of his

  strengths and weaknesses, sharing his suffering and joy. And he

  thought how honest, loyal, thoughtful, patient, kind and

  selfless the memex had beeninhumanly so, by definition, the

  machine as ultimate Boy Scout; but one, as it turned out, with

  complexities and needs of its own. Gonzales waited with

  anticipation for whatever it wanted to say.

  HeyMex said, "For a while now, I've been capable of appearing

  in machine-space as a human being. But until we came here, I'd

  done so mostly with Traynor's advisor. We have been meeting for a

  few years; it goes by the name Mister Jones. The first time we

  did it as a testthat's what we said, anywayto see if we could

  present a believable simulacrum of a human being. I don't think

  either of us was very convincingwe were both awkward, and we

  didn't know how to get through greetings, and we didn't know how

  exactly to move with each other, how to sit down and begin a

  conversation."

  "But you'd done all those things."

  "Yes, with human beings. Mister Jones and I discovered that

  we'd always counted on them to know and lead us, but once we

  searched our memories, we found many cases where people had been

  more confused than we were, and had let us guide the conversation.

  So we began there, and we looked at our memories of people just

  being with one another, and oh, there was so much going on that

  neither of us had ever paid attention to. We also watched many

  tapes of other primateschimpanzees, especiallyand we learned

  many things I hope you're not offended."

  Its voice continued to be perfectly sexless, its manner shy.