"Unfortunately, no."
"Well, anyway, versos are people who don't want inscape to weave a coherent narrative of their lives for them." said Sophia. "They disable inscape's narrative function and do horrid things like allowing accidental events to happen to them. Some of them even try to live in a single consistent view their whole lives." She shook her head in disgust
"Oh, I see," said Livia. "Well, we're not versos. Just foreigners." She remembered how her surroundings had slowly begun to look like Barrastea yesterday, until she intervened and deliberately switched views. In all likelihood, Livia decided, she was a verso.
"What brings you to the Archipelago?" Sophia leaned forward, looking indulgent.
Qiingi smiled at her; he had lost the shell-shocked look he'd had for the past days, and now looked completely self-assured. Livia felt a swell of pride at seeing him rally.
"We are looking for your ... authorities," he said. "We would call them founders where we come from: people with responsibility, decision makers. Those granted power by the majority."
"Leaders?" said Sophia helpfully.
"Yes. But other than a brief and confusing encounter with something that called itself the Government, we've met none of this Archipelago's leaders. I suppose you're our first."
"Me!" Sophia leaned back, affecting alarm. "A leader? But of course your questions didn't turn up anything. We don't have a government here, after all. Only the Government. And the votes. And nobody pays much attention to them anymore."
Livia was about to ask more about that, when she heard the aircar's voice say, "We have arrived."
"Just a moment," she said to Sophia. "We're here — I mean, our view is still stuck in the aircar. Awkward, really. We'll just exit the car and meet you in person, if that's all right?"
Sophia looked amused. "If you want."
The garden vanished, and they stood up out of the air-car, which sat on a broad platform hundreds of meters above the guttering lights of the city — virtual or real, she wasn't sure — known as Brand New York. A fantastical tower like spun sugar spiraled above them; outthnists of glass or more likely diamond cradled long oval residences. The nearest one was full of light and sound and the movement and laughter of people. "That would be the place," said Aaron as he set off toward it. "Work the crowd?" he said, glancing at Livia with a raised eyebrow.
"You take the technical questions," she said. "I'll do our host"
He nodded. "Some of the people here looked like AIs, or at least animas of a sort. I'll try to learn more about how they use inscape. And why it looks like there's no tech locks here."
Livia turned to Qiingi, who was watching this exchange intently. "The other essential is how we're going to live here," she said. "That and ... who can we trust? You're good at assessing people. Can you find out about Sophia for us? Discreetly, of course."
"I will be charming," he said, "but discreet."
The process that had led to their invitation here was somewhat mysterious. The invitation had arrived the first evening; Livia had initially assumed that the Government itself had contacted Eckardt. When she summoned it to thank it for the service, it denied having done so. "Nobody issued the invitation," it had said, "it just emerged." Livia had been too tired to pursue the matter. After that conversation, though, she'd begun to notice new things about this place. Life seemed tightly organized yet nobody consistently kept roles — customers became shopkeepers to other customers; people in restaurant views cooked, served, or ate as the whim took them. She'd put it down to the fluidity of inscape eliminating the need for stable identities. But that didn't explain apparent strangers — who were not encompassed by the shared reticle that indicated they were in the same view — exchanging items without consultation. She saw people tap one another on the shoulder and issue cryptic statements that were then passed on, like in a child's game. There was something going on outside of the Archipelago's consensual realities, it seemed.
As they entered the submanifold that Sophia Eckhardt called her narrative, they split up. Livia made her way in the direction of Sophia, who stood chatting with a striking, slender woman dressed in mirror-bright metal. As Livia walked she listened to the swirling conversations in the submanifold. The names were different, but the topics were mostly the same as at home: art, gossip, relationships, sports. She didn't overhear any political discussions, though, unless the excited talk about something called "Omega Point" counted.
Several small groups of people were huddled around what looked like copies of an actual paper book. One man was showing another a page, and as Livia passed he said, "You see? You were Phoenix up until we met, but since I'm currently Priestess, you become Charioteer." The other man nodded grudgingly.
As she was rounding a small pool Livia heard sounds of heated argument off to the left It was unfamiliar enough — the sort of thing that animas would have smoothed over at home — mat she stopped and looked over.
He was a total contrast to the rest of the narrative. Where they were dressed in light and impossible garments such as the butterfly-swarm flitting strategically around the woman next to her, this man was garbed in stolid gray cloth. His sandy hair was not augmented by light or motion; the lines in his face appeared real. He held an ordinary looking glass with some amber liquid in it. Just now he was glaring at a tall, miiltilimbed thing that might once have been human.
"Don't you think it's wrong, if not downright creepy," he said loudly, "that inscape can take over your auto-nomic nervous system, make someone who's standing right in front of you invisible and then steer your body around them? Don't you think we're being violated in such moments?"
The many-armed thing dismissed this line of reasoning with a laugh. "More than nine-tenths of all our thought and action is unconscious, Respected Morss. Why should such petty issues as avoiding tripping over somebody be allowed to take up that last fraction in which we are aware? And why should I make any distinction between the unconscious processes going on in here," it pointed to its head with two arms, "and those going on out there on my behalf ?"
Livia entirely agreed, but this Morss grunted derisively. "Because I am this," he said, pointing toward his body, "not this." He gestured at the swirling party. "This is just a fantasy-land for people who've forgotten about reality. You can keep it I prefer to live in the real world." As he spoke his eyes drifted away from the being he was speaking to. His gaze alighted on Livia, and she saw his eyes widen slightly.
Of course: she was not dressed in any illusions, was in fact only in her shift which had been scoured clean of tech lock nano and most of its programming. She had not yet found out how to interface with other people's inscape to craft the kind of fabulous confectionary costume that the rest of the submanifold wore. So, she and the other refugees were the only ones in the place who looked as plain as this Respected Morss.
She smiled at him politely and walked on by. She spotted Sophia again and waved; her host energetically gestured for her to come over.
"This is Lady Filament," said Sophia. The woman in rippling silver smiled and held out her hand. She appeared human except for one feature: her eyes glowed with inner light, a subtle and entrancing gold. "She is a vote"
"Oh." Livia shook her hand. "Tell me, what exactly is a vote?"
Filament's eyes widened in surprise. She looked at Sophia as if to confirm the joke, then laughed. "You are from far away. I'm the aggregate personality of a particular constituency within the Archipelago. Just an average person, in the most literal sense." She grinned and Livia smiled, a bit uncertainly.
"You're an AI?"
"An old term, and crude ... call me an emergent property of inscape itself."
"You were asking how we ran things here," Sophia said at Iivia's obviously puzzled smile. "So I thought I'd introduce you to Filament. She's one of the ways. In the modern and ancient ages they used to vote in humans to run their institutions, but you could never guarantee that the person you voted for really had the same agenda as you. Aggrega
te personalities like Filament solve that problem. They really are the constituency, in a sense. So when they get together, you know your interests are being looked after."
"Thank you," said Filament, "that sounds very flattering. But it's not really a top-down thing. Inscape is designed so that like-minded people doing similar things form stable nodes of activity. When such a node becomes large enough, a vote spontaneously appears as a high-level behavior of the network. There's one of us for each interest group in the Archipelago. And the entity that emerges out of our interactions is called the Government."
She smiled at Sophia. "But I'm really just a relic of the past, aren't I? Sophia here represents the new way: an emergent government that doesn't use the inscape network at all."
"The Good Book," said Sophia.
"The invitation for you to visit Sophia emerged from a self-organizing system," said Filament, "but not one that lives in inscape. For more than a hundred years there's been no way for the human citizens of the Archipelago to govern themselves except through people like me — "
"Until the Book," Sophia nodded.
" — Which is exactly that: a bound, old-style book. Its pages contain simple rules of interaction. If enough people follow these rules most of the time, a network intelligence emerges from the social connections between them. It's independent of inscape, see? So the Book operates outside the control of the Government."
Livia's head was spinning. "But you're a vote. Doesn't that make you an enemy of this Book?"
Livia's host simpered. "But the votes don't have an agenda of their own — only our agendas. If I choose the Book, my votes choose it, too."
Gamely, Livia tried to keep up. "So you use the Good Book — is that the significance of your tattoos?"
Sophia's eyes widened. "You mean you don't know — " Now it was her turn to look shocked, while Filament grinned. Sophia quickly composed herself. "I've never had that question before."
"I apologize if I've offended you — "
"No, no, I'm just surprised. I thought the soundtracks were known everywhere."
"You're ... a musician?"
Sophia nodded. "I'm a soundtrack. A soprano."
"Not just any soundtrack," interjected Filament She proceeded to describe what Sophia did, only about half of which Livia understood. The tattoos were apparently proudly-born marks of an ordeal Sophia had undergone years ago. In a carefully constructed virtual world (basically a submanifold, although they didn't call them that here) she had allowed herself to be starved, tortured, and terrorized for weeks. She had emerged with a psyche ringing with anxiety and rage, her days full of bad memories and flinch-reactions. With the use of drug and neu-roimplant therapies she could easily partition off that side of herself and so live a placid life. But when she performed at assigned times in other people's narratives she let it all out, and her rawness and pain lent emotional power to whatever key event was occurring in that person's life. It was all orchestrated by inscape, of course.
"Passion is a rare commodity these days," said Filament. "When everyone can have all pain, mental or physical, treated and removed instantly. And when everybody can have their vocal tract altered to give them an ideal singing voice, how do you stand out? Here," she pointed to an inscape panel, "you can find a sample of Sophia's lovely work."
Livia toned in for a moment. The voice she heard shuddered and begged, raged and commanded, all in a language she had never heard before.
"Is there much work for, uh, soundtracks, here?" she asked without thinking.
"Do you sing? Almost nobody does," said Sophia, "simply because, as Filament said, everybody could."
Livia thought of the many songs of the Fictional History that she had learned as a child. They wouldn't know anything of that cycle here. "I might ... have a unique contribution," she said.
"Go ahead then," said Sophia. "Let's hear you."
Livia hesitated; but she was actually in pretty good voice lately, from singing to Aaron and Qiingi during the long days of their journey here. She decided on a particularly difficult run from the Opera of Chances that she'd been practicing lately. She began to sing, feeling her confidence soar as the words poured from her mouth. Of course, the language was Teven's language, Joyspric, but even so she could see she was drawing a crowd. She closed her eyes as she came to the chorus —
— and was interrupted by a loud splash from nearby. Everybody looked over, to see the strange spectacle of a multiarmed man flailing about in the reflecting pool.
Gray-clad Respected Morss stood on the edge of the pool, looking down at the wet guest. "Oops," he said with heavy irony. "Lucky thing that's not real water. Oh, and I suppose you're not really sitting about on your ass in it, either."
"Excuse me," said Sophia. She scowled and edited Morss out of their view. Before he vanished he grinned unashamedly at Livia.
Things were getting just too strange. "If you'll excuse me," Livia said to Sophia and Filament. "I should find my people." She bowed to them both and hurried off to find the others.
The three refugees summoned up a quiet apartment of their own in a corner of Sophia's narrative. Then they sat down together to decide what to do next.
Livia described her conversation with Sophia, and her introduction to Filament. "There are no founders here," she said. "And apparently, no stable institutions as we'd understand them. Everything's an adhocracy, even the government. Sophia was picked to meet us and introduce us to Archipelagic society, but nobody chose her, her name just emerged from the process. And yet there's the Government AI, and these votes. I'm not sure they'll help us. But it seems like all we have to do is want help, and it'll appear from somewhere, because the inscape here tries to make a narratives — a story — out of whatever we do. I think that's how it works, anyway."
"If it worked that way," commented Qiingi drily, "we would be on our way home with a fleet of ships already."
"Hmm." She wouldn't let him puncture her good mood. "What about Sophia? Did you learn anything about her?"
"She is apparently a singer of old songs, which is probably why inscape brought you to her attention — you share a common interest. Also, she is a passionate believer in something called "The Good Book.' I do know that the Book is not part of the narrative process you just described, Livia. Beyond that I learned little, except that the people here find us exotic and fascinating. But they have not guessed where we come from."
She frowned, thinking. "We may have to decide whether to ignore what the Government said, and reveal ourselves." She looked at the odier two; Aaron was remaining strangely silent. Livia frowned at him. "What about you, Aaron? Did you find out anything?"
"Well," he said reluctantly. "I started out with some discreet inquiries about the anecliptics. The guests were just confusing on the subject, but I had a couple of good conversations with serlings about it. It seems," he took a breath and let it out heavily, "this whole area of inhabited space is near the boundary of the Lethe Nebula. Nobody crosses that boundary into the Fallow Lands. The Lands are off-limits to everybody except the anecliptics."
"The Government said that," said Livia impatiently.
Aaron shook his head. "But I don't think you understand the implications. Nobody gets in or out of the Fallow Lands. Nobody ever has. These people hate those restrictions — so it's a good thing only the Government seems to know we came from there."
The armies, as the anecliptics were called, were apparently AIs of transcendent power. They seemed to have taken over much of the function of blind nature in the Archipelago. They had complete control over the Feeds, those two twisting bands of precious matter radiating out from the sun. They doled out matter and energy to the various human and nonhuman civilizations that encircled the sun. But the annies themselves were answerable to no one. They existed outside of all human law and influence.
Qiingi seemed unsurprised at this. "They are like thun-derbirds," he said. "Mediators between Man and the Great Spirit."
"Well. I wouldn't
put it that way," said Aaron. "They're more like the local equivalent of the tech locks. Apparently they were created to prevent any one group from taking over the Archipelago — in particular, post-humans. They ruthlessly limit the technology and resources available to anybody in the Archipelago ... Which is not to say there aren't beings of great power out there, and more being created every day. One serling kept talking about 'gods.' It took me a while to realize he wasn't being metaphorical. If not for the annies, humanity probably wouldn't exist anymore. We would all have been replaced by post-humans.
"Anyway, the Fallow Lands belong to the annies," he continued. "They're rumored to be experimenting with new life forms there. But nobody gets in or out, not even the Government." He looked at Livia somberly. "And that's very bad news. Nobody's going to believe we're from the Fallow Lands — and nobody's in any position to help us go back. No human power exists that can safely return us to Teven."
Livia shifted in her seat. "No, there must be someone. And anyway, we got out, didn't we? So you must be able to get in."
Aaron just looked at her.
"Aaron," she laughed, a little nervously, "we've only been here a few days. We need to know a lot more before we jump to this sort of conclusion."
"Maybe." He summoned a reluctant grin. "I guess."
That ended the conversation. They sat silently, surrounded by sumptuous, virtual luxury. Livia felt her hopes slipping in the face of her companions' gloom. It can't be true, she thought. Thirty-three forty's people came from somewhere — but she refused to believe they were employed by one of the anecliptics. Maybe they were from elsewhere inside the Fallow Lands — but no, it would do no good to believe that, either.
"Actually, our next course of action is obvious," she said after a while. "The followers of this 3340 got into the Fallow Lands somehow. Find out who they are and where they came from, and we find out how to go home."
The men looked at one another. Aaron nodded, and seemed about to reply when inscape chimed. "Yes?" said Livia quickly.
Lady of Mazes Page 17
