Proof of Concept

by Gwyneth Jones

  “Okay. I’m Kir LindasdottirSCAV01. Pleased to meet you.”

  The space between them bubbled with delightful intent. “I’m not sterile,” said Bill, “None of us are, on a mission. It’s one of the rules.”

  “Nor me,” said Kir. “I’m too small; I count as not physically mature—although I am, so I can’t.”

  “So . . . that means we can’t have actual sex.”

  “Not without a baby permit,” agreed Kir, beaming all over her face. “Because that would be wrong. But we could go to playtime?”

  “How do you go? M/F? Nonbinary? Something weird? Or do you like to change?”

  “I won’t look like this, but I generally stick with what I’ve got.”

  “I like to change. Would you mind?”

  “Not at all. Shall we?”

  They went to the games rooms together, and parted with shy smiles. In her cubicle Kir stripped off, gel-showered, made her selections, and slipped into the pod’s embrace. At once she stood in a shining chandelier-lit hall, among strangers: some naked, some in costume, some disguised as animals, many marked as constructs. A tall, well-built blond woman, with a fine upstanding pair of breasts and wearing a blue starry kilt, was looking around in hope and anticipation. Kir walked up, grinning.

  “Ms. Murdoch, I presume?”

  Margrethe might not know this—Kir didn’t tell her everything—but Kir had never been on an actual date before, under the Giewont or anywhere else. She liked sex but she was too shy; she’d never met the right person for real intimacy. Being with Bill was a daring step, and incredibly different. To be sharing the warm, slippery internal spaces of yourself, sharing your skills at giving pleasure, the whole mass of feeling that engulfed you, with someone you cared about. Someone who knew you, and cared too . . . It was wonderful!

  That first playtime marked an epoch in Kir’s life. Something human and untamed was happening in the Frame, and she and Bill were part of it. Everyone was part of it. Even the mighty seniors, Margrethe and Dan, Neh and Vati, started coming to the canteen in the evenings, to sit at the narrow tables. What conversations they had! Talking and laughing, shouting across the room. People wept. People sang. Meaning, drama, and cruelty abounded. Dissension was freely and furiously expressed, in terms that could have meant cognitive remodeling, or even Vanishment, upside. Putting the world to rights, Margrethe called it, plunging into the wild rumpus as recklessly as anyone. One night Big Neh, the Bear (as the LDMs had named him), jumped on a table, grabbed his chair, and smashed it over his head, roaring, “I refute thee THUS!”

  Kir left the party early that night. Recreational substances were officially forbidden, but any fool can brew alcohol, and the starship troopers had been let off the leash. People were getting drunk. Vati, the senior who’d stayed sober, escorted her to the doors. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” she sighed, bending to kiss Kir’s brow, and touched the place with her fingertip, in blessing. “But to be young was very heaven—”

  Back in her berth Kir searched those lines of poetry in the Needlers’ very liberal library (to which the LDMs had no access), and found a bloody revolution, savage murders in the name of liberty. She felt a little scared. Unlike the Needle scientists, the LDMs hadn’t been inoculated with a mild dose of unconfinement’s joys. Things were going too far.

  She told herself it would be all right. Bill and his friends would calm down before they had to go back, and GAM would never know.

  Kir began to sit with Bill’s friends in the daytime, the only Needler to take such a step. She met First Officer Ben, the “Flowerpot Man”; Medical Officer Eke, who was trisex; and Communications Officer Foxy: a stunningly beautiful, rather cranky redheaded woman. These were Bill’s core friends, his scav family. The other officers were Daouna, the bosun, a title that caused hilarity (nobody knew what it meant), and Cerek, who was Personnel. Crewbies didn’t join the officers’ table, but they dropped by, curious to meet the Needler with the computer in her head. Everyone talked freely: maybe even more freely than at the canteen parties. Kir heard about supply collapses, power failures, and food riots—harshly suppressed, not much reported. Epidemics that swept unlicensed sectors and escaped to attack the better-off. The Hives were like GAM, said Ben. Awful, awful: except every other idea for running things was worse. . . . All the officers were horrified to learn that Kir could never touch recreational substances; not even cannabis. They told her, as a fact, that she was a victim, and the other scientists were just cushy-lifers. Computers like the one in poor Kir’s head did the work: no human input required. You are absolutely wrong, thought Kir. But she knew she’d only make things worse if she tried to explain. She began to understand why her teammates kept their distance in sober daytime.

  Eke wrote haiku. They recited some, and Kir was impressed. They said, “I want to have a baby, Kir. I have my female system, I wouldn’t need out-of-body. But I had some work done, long ago. I wanted my body to match my mind, never thought it would matter. Guess how much chance I’d have in the baby lottery? Just guess!”

  There were MegaCorps divisions with very conservative views, and they had a lot of influence. Essentially, decided Kir, Eke was up against the same problem as the new science. The MegaCorps mind-set wanted everything in opposition: Either/Or; Yes/No; On/Off; M/F. They hated fluidity, blur, and multiplicity. Except that Margrethe had somehow tamed the monsters, for the Needle—

  “That’s why I signed up for this game, and Dan accepted me, bless him. You’ve got to have a dream, don’t you?”

  Kir thought probably none of the LDMs really believed in Dan Orsted’s galactic mission. They weren’t planning to start a revolution, either. They were entertainers who’d snagged a “cushy life.” Just taking a break from reality, just blowing off steam.

  * * *

  Lilija had warned Kir about the next phase. “Attraction is biology. You genuinely share traits with this unrelated other person, and it feels wonderful. Except he’s not your twin, he’s himself. When you realize that, you can quarrel out of pure disappointment. Be careful.”

  Lilija the loner was her own soul mate, what did she know about relationships? But she was right. One day Bill asked Kir to lunch early, when the canteen was quiet. “Tell me about the Needle,” he said. “You never talk about your work, I notice. Is it all top secret?”

  “Ask me anything, crewmate.”

  “Right. For starters then: How close are you? I mean, to the faster-than-light travel?”

  Shaking her head, Kir smiled. “There is no faster-than-light travel.”

  “The warp drive. Whatever you want to call it.”

  She shook her head again.

  “You’re not going to tell me?”

  “You’ve got the wrong idea. Um, remember what Neh said about Space-Time, that night in the canteen? There are no empty spaces and time does not pass? In a sense, the Needle doesn’t move at all. When it shifts, everything shifts with it: everything reforms, and it’s somewhere else.”

  “Define ‘somewhere else’?”

  “One of your exoplanets, if you like. Defining a pinpoint relative location in the local universe isn’t a hard problem.”

  Bill mugged disgust. “I think I won’t start saving for my ticket. This is a long, long way off, isn’t it?”

  She realized he had a hangover, and scraped her fingers into her hair, exasperated. “Bill, I’m just a server-farm, what do I know, but yeah, you’re right. The Needle experiment is about science, not mass emigration. What we’re doing is fantastic, it’s thrilling, I wish I could make you understand; but I thought you had more sense! We’re not building a starship!”

  “Because this hard problem you can’t tell me about is in your way.”

  “There’s no hard problem, not for us. Okay, it’s like this. Information Space is a powerful idea, because it explains more things than the Standard Model, although the Standard Model hasn’t gone away. It still works, for most things. One of the things IS explains, far more clearly tha
n before, is that you can’t get rid of travel time, the way people used to imagine, without cost. You can’t zoom off to your fourteen-thousand-light-years-from-home exoplanet, zoom back next day, and find planet Earth exactly where you left it. Or looking the way you left it. What we’re doing is fine. The ‘volume’ is tiny, our shift is infinitesimal, and size matters. If there was ever a Needle starship in development, that’s another big puzzle we’d have to—”

  “A puzzle that wouldn’t worry your precious director. She’d be happy to have us teeming masses suffer a catastrophe.”

  “Huh?”

  “Margrethe Patel. The one who stuck the hardware in your head, and nobody could stop her, because a scav kid has no legal status. I want to like you, Kir. I want to more than like you, but I’m getting sick of the way you worship that woman—”

  “Hey, calm down! I don’t worship Margrethe—”

  “She’s spent her life schmoozing the MegaCorps, in one superrich haven after another. Have you ever wondered why they love her? You really haven’t, have you? You must have heard her talk dirty, but you don’t know. You don’t even know.”

  “What don’t I know?”

  “That she’s an Exterminator. She’s shared data with PopCon. Kir, you look puzzled: I mean the Extreme Population Control people.”

  In the crazy world of superdense population, old-fashioned contraception had been killed off by reversible sterilization—and by playtime. Rational M/F partners chose to be sterile, or stuck to playtime, unless they had a baby permit. Many singles, including Kir, had never experienced actual sex, didn’t expect to reproduce, and did not feel deprived. The converse of this arrangement was that if the masses, who had no common sense, wanted to have multiple babies without the advantages secured by a permit, there was no way to stop them. Population control was an impossible issue, a flash point for explosive civil unrest. The Hives were too volatile; it was too great a risk—

  The global population could not be fed, even now that the population was shrinking. Diseases could not be relieved; quality of hivizen life was constantly being eroded. The fate of many unlicensed babies was dreadful, and yet the obvious medicine could not be applied. It was regrettable, senseless, criminal. And yes, Kir had heard Margrethe use those bad, angry words: but only when talking about the vicious stranglehold of the One Percent! She’d also heard Margrethe say that stirring up unrest in the Hives was pointless and cruel. It was too late. Revolts were just the breeding ground for another generation of corrupt hivizen politicians. They did no good at all. Bill’s scowling face filled her with doubt, disquiet—and fury. Margrethe shouldn’t have let this happen, she thought. They have to go back.

  But how dare he talk like that about Margrethe! And had all the rest been a sham?

  “I don’t think that’s fair. I don’t think she’s ever had anything to do with PopCon.”

  “You don’t? Well, wake up, teacher’s pet! I’ve seen the evidence. It’s incontrovertible.”

  “Oh, really? Are you going to tell me good people can’t be trashed? I’ll tell you something incontrovertible. You say you’re a Yank, Ben is a Brit, and Eke is Nigerian . . . You’re dreaming. There are only three actual countries left in the world. MegaCorps East, which you call China, MegaCorps West, and the Dead Zones. And no matter how many babies get born, only one of those is growing.”

  Kir shoved back her chair, grabbed her tray, and stalked off.

  She was very shaken. Not because they’d quarreled, but because Bill had asked her to lunch early, as she now knew, not to be romantic but purely so he could drop his dirt-bomb. He’d been plotting against Margrethe, and using Kir. . . . Maybe it wasn’t like that—she hoped it wasn’t—but she was too angry to go back to the lab. She needed to be alone, somewhere calm. She collected her headset, a small bottle of water, and her blanket, and took the lawless route again. Margrethe knows I do this, she thought, excusing herself as she crawled through the baffles. Of course she knows. She’s probably tracking me right now—

  And she shivered hard, a tremor through her whole body. Margrethe and the MegaCorps. What if Bill was right?

  She headed east, setting her heart on another wildlife encounter. She wanted a boulder this time. A round one, a craggy one, a great tall pillar. Her light cone was tiny, her watch’s sensors were puny. A thrilling feature could be meters away and she’d walk right by, but better equipment would spoil the fun. What she loved in the Abyss was exactly this, the vast unknown: those two tiny islands of discovery, the beach and her circular depression. The threads of life that her presence had printed between them and the Frame, and nothing else but the dark, until Kir stumbled on treasure, and gave it a name. After a while she sat down to sip her water. It was very good, pure and sweet. A picnic in the wilderness. Why don’t we just never go back? Someone had shouted that in the canteen one night, and the whole room had erupted in cheering. Why don’t I just never go back? Suddenly she recalled the warm weight of Bill’s breasts, cupped in her hands, his body moving with hers, and doubled over in pain and misery.

  How naive she’d been to think he liked her!

  Kir? What’s wrong?

  Nothing. Bill just told me that Margrethe has shared data with PopCon and he can prove it. That’s all. Do you know how damaging that is? It would kill us! And it’s my fault. I let him use me, and now I’ve criminally yelled at him and didn’t defend her—

  Oh, I see. You’ve fallen out with Bill. I’m sorry about that. Kir, did you read those articles—

  No. The firewalls are there for my protection. Don’t worry, I worked out what you were trying to tell me. Proof of Concept.

  Oh, I see. Kir, did you know Sergey’s mind has been harvested?

  Kir wondered where on earth this was coming from. So? He was an uploader, Altair. He’d donated his mind to science.

  It’s been done already, down here. Isn’t that strange?

  Sooner the better, everybody knows that. Why not? What are you getting at?

  Thinking about things. Why are the seniors here? Near your hatch there are cold-storage containers. Do you know what’s inside?

  Food, I suppose. Altair, you’re not helping and you’re giving me the creeps. Please shut up and go away!

  No reply.

  Great, she thought. I managed to offend my onboard computer. Now I won’t even know what he’s up to. She’d flung off her headset when the pain of loss hit. She groped until she found it, and plodded back to the Frame. There were no water sources in the Abyss. She’d die of thirst if she stayed out here, a form of suicide that did not appeal. Tomorrow she’d start getting over her stupid crush, and there was nothing more to say.

  * * *

  The evening chat with Margrethe loomed large as an ordeal, but Kir was too proud to excuse herself, and it was fine. Margrethe was in the same mellow, distant mood as the last time they’d met: like someone with a secret not ready to be told. They agreed the canteen parties needed to calm down. Margrethe thanked Kir for “building real bridges” with the LDMs, and Bill was not mentioned. Which Kir found suspicious (news travels fast), but on the other hand, Kir didn’t mention him, either. She went to bed early, didn’t fall asleep for hours, and then woke at three in the morning. Her watch was warning her that she needed to un-disable the night-light her berth insisted on (a very annoying trait in a coffin). So she did that and lay staring: forgetting to think about Bill, because she was suddenly very alarmed about Altair.

  He didn’t want Sergey’s upload to be completed. He asked me what the seniors were for. He talked about food storage containers. . . . He got me to look at offline papers in Margrethe’s library: and I found out about Proof of Concept, which is brilliant and I hope true, but why haven’t I told Margrethe about that? Has he developed new powers? Has he been stopping me from talking to Margrethe about him—?

  How long had she been hearing that voice in her head? A long, long time, but never felt sure it was the quaai. Her imaginary friend could have been just her imagi
nation, until one night she went out into the Giewont Abyss, and somebody said Kir. . . . What had caused the change? What would he do next? A crisping of panic ran up and down her spine, the same as when he’d called her by her name, and she remembered the other question she’d wanted to ask when she was a kid, when Margrethe told her about the implant—a fear forgotten for years. It rooted around, turning and trampling, as she lay sleepless in the hateful slug of night-light glow. You’re going to put a supercomputer in my head. It’s going to share my brain. Okay, I can’t stop you. But what if he goes wrong and starts eating me?

  Is there a way I can destroy him?

  4

  Kir’s second breakup with Bill didn’t last much longer than the first. For a day and a half Kir’s friends pretended they’d noticed nothing, while Bill’s friends cast sympathetic glances over the barbed wire. Then Bill came and sat one chair away from Kir at breakfast, and Kir, who happened to be alone at the end of a table, didn’t move from her place.

  “Seems like we have differences,” remarked Bill, staring grimly ahead of him.

  “Seems like it,” agreed Kir, focused on her food.

  “Look. Suppose we say no more, and carry on as we were? And after this, if we want to meet again, I convince you, or you convince me?”

  Kir said nothing. She was thinking that she couldn’t possibly tell him the experiment’s computer was behaving strangely, and this put them in bad faith again, straightaway. But it couldn’t be helped. His rotten ideas about Margrethe would have to make them even.

  “Give me the silent treatment.” Bill sighed heavily. “Maybe I deserve it. You’re right about the Dead Zones and the MegaCorps. I could’ve been different. I’ve got a mind, I could’ve used it. I’ve caught a glimpse of . . . of another world, down here. It’s shaken me up: I’m sorry.”

  “We all caught a glimpse. I can’t say you’re right about Margrethe, but it’s a deal. We carry on as we were, until after this.”