Superluminal

by Tony Daniel

  At first, Techstock’s duties had allowed him to keep up his relationship with Li. But, over the course of several e-weeks, Li began to notice a curious effect. Techstock grew more and more vague. He was not physically vague—the various aspects who came to visit and have sex with her retained their usual perfect health and vitality. But the mind—the mind she had fallen in love with and now practically worshiped—was slipping away.

  At first she believed this was only Techstock’s way of breaking off with her. Such a turn of events would have devastated Li, but she had long expected eventually to have to deal with it. Techstock had no intention of leaving his wife, and had never made Li any promises that he would.

  But Techstock wasn’t merely wriggling out of the chains of the relationship; he was becoming distant even to his own wants and needs. He no longer worked at the university, and Li never saw him during business hours anymore. He had an office in the Directorate headquarters of Montsombra itself, where he oversaw a vast team of researchers spread out over most of the inner solar system.

  Although his work was officially secret, Techstock spoke of it to her fervently and in great detail. Li was one of the few people who could understand the excitement he felt wielding so much power for the advancement of science! Even now he had a team that was closing in on basic physics of the peculiar quantum “dampening effect” exerted by the ancient LAPs known as “time towers.” These effects had long been known and never explained—which led to several of the time towers being elevated to a near godlike stature by some gullible Met denizens. It was a time of breakthroughs—all funded by wartime spending of gigantic proportions! Techstock was perpetually reeling off the latest addition to his agency’s already titanic operating budget. It didn’t take much thinking for Li to guess that the merci-blocking weapon that had been deployed by the military against the fremden forces was based on this new technology.

  The moment Techstock ceased talking about work, however, it was as if the vitality went completely out of him. The difference was stark. Tidal , was how Li thought of it. Everything, every emotion, every judgment, must flow back to the sea of his work. Whenever Techstock sought to get away from it, he displayed only a barren coast. Techstock had never been an empathetic man. But this utter lack of concern and feeling for anyone or anything other than the work went beyond lack of sympathy. It was, Li had to admit, pathological.

  He stopped bringing flowers.

  He began to speak of his work while he was making love to her.

  When he’d first done so, she had been amazed. The next time she’d been appalled, and said as much. Nothing she said seemed to register. After six e-months had passed, Li had to admit the truth to herself: Her strapping, potent, vain, and brilliant middle-aged lover had become a soulless chatterbox.

  Li thought at first that Techstock was breaking up on a basic level. She’d never heard of it happening before to a LAP. It must be a sort of nervous breakdown on a grand scale. But Techstock stuck to his work and kept doing it very well. In fact, by all accounts, he was doing it better. Could this be a peculiar advantage LAPs had when they went crazy, a kind of concentration of attention?

  She searched the literature and spoke (always circumspectly) to some of her colleagues who were LAP specialists. LAPs were heavily personality-tested before they were allowed to become multiple copies of themselves. Only stable individuals need apply.

  Nothing added up. Finally Li began to suspect something even worse than a mental breakdown. She began to sense larger forces at work. Techstock’s individuality wasn’t breaking up; it was being absorbed. And there was only one possibility for the one absorbing him.

  His old friend, Director Amés. The biggest LAP of them all.

  Not only was this thought to be impossible, but it was completely illegal. Converts and even, in some cases, bodily aspects, could be traded or taken over by other personalities. But one LAP could not “merge” with another LAP. It was common sense and common wisdom in the Met: LAPs could cooperate, but LAPs could not incorporate.

  As many an astute observer had discovered before her, Li reluctantly realized that, in this case, common sense was dead wrong. Her lover was lost—both to her and to himself.

  There was really nothing to do about it. Techstock was not her husband. No one had discovered their affair, so far as Li knew. It was all a private sorrow. With a heavy heart, one day Li broke up with her longtime lover.

  He seemed not to notice. In fact, he kept coming to her house as if she’d never said a thing. When it came time to make love, Li had refused. Chattering, chattering, Techstock had spent the remaining time in her living room, and left through the door precisely at his usual time—chattering, chattering.

  He came the next day at the usual time. And the next. There was no more sex. There was no more Techstock.

  Li put out inquiries for a new apartment. Housing was tight on Mercury, but not so tight that one couldn’t find a roommate. No one made any offers. Apartments that had been advertised as open only moments before on the merci turned out to be unavailable when her convert arrived to look the place over.

  Instead of believing that some sort of vast conspiracy had it in for her, Li skipped work one day and underwent a complete psychological evaluation. There was, according to the testing software, nothing wrong with her. She was as psychically fit as a fiddle.

  The next day, she confronted Techstock with the test results. He was not going to tell her she was being paranoid—she had the evidence to prove that false. He was going to tell her what was happening.

  Techstock arrived at his usual early-evening hour. He was in his twenty-eight-year-old male aspect. He was wearing a brown turtleneck singlet and brown patent leather shoes with archaic laces—such shoes were one of Techstock’s vanities since Li had known him. Over the singlet he wore a tan camel-hair jacket. He kept his brown hair short, and it was swept back from left to right, as if he were walking into a perpetual wind that blew at a forty-five-degree angle across his head. His grist pellicle kept it nattily in place, of course.

  “No flowers?” Li said as she admitted him to the apartment.

  “I don’t have time to go and get them, what with the new job,” Techstock replied. “You know that.”

  “And yet you have time to see me.”

  “Of course.”

  “Why ‘of course’?”

  Techstock didn’t answer for a moment. Instead, he went to his customary living-room chair and sat himself down. Li was about to repeat her question when Techstock spoke.

  “Because I’m allowed to continue seeing you,” he said. “I’m supposed to, as a matter of fact. They don’t want me to undergo any major disruptions.”

  “They? What are you talking about?”

  “The Department of Immunity. They.”

  Li sat on the couch across from him. Her psych reports printed as a booklet lying on the coffee table that separated her from Techstock.

  “And what if I don’t wish to see you anymore, Hamar?”

  This time Techstock had no answer. Li waited, but the man stared at her blankly, as if his facial features had been turned off. She finally realized that, in some sense, they had been.

  “They took you from me,” she said. “I can’t accept this.”

  “That’s exactly what you’re going to do.” Techstock spoke abruptly and with a dead matter-of-fact tone that left no doubt in Li’s mind that he was in earnest and knew what he was talking about. His voice also left no doubt in her mind that it wasn’t really Techstock who was speaking anymore. At least not the part of Techstock that she cared about.

  Li began to cry. Techstock moved close to her—at first she supposed to comfort her. But that was not what he hand in mind. Instead, he leaned over and kissed her hard on the mouth. He pressed firmly and did not let up. At first Li resisted, then she gave in and returned the kiss.

  Then her lips began to tingle. The tingling spread to her tongue. Her throat. Something was in her lungs.

>   Li pulled violently away from Techstock.

  “What have you done to me?” she gasped.

  “Give it a minute,” he replied. “Just a minute.”

  And then she knew. A flood of pleasure moved through her. No. Not pleasure, exactly. Satisfaction. Belonging.

  She been fretting for weeks over Techstock’s inattention, waking at odd hours from her sleep to find herself wound in her own sheets. Sometimes her fingers were pulling her own hair, as if she were subconsciously punishing herself for somehow being ineffective, somehow getting everything wrong. Now all the knots within unwound; all the bindings released themselves. She sighed deeply. Therapeutically, even.

  Everything was going to be all right.

  “It’s the Glory,” Techstock said.

  “What the military uses?” Li said—or rather, a part of her said, detached, distant. Her real, true self was not paying attention at all to her situation or her setting. It was too busy soaking up the Glory.

  “Now you know how I’ve been feeling,” he replied. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

  “Yes, but how…”

  “It’s something the Science Directorate has been experimenting with. Director Amés was worried that those of us in the university system had become more interested in tenure and bickering than in working for the common good. So a special task force got called over from the Department of Immunity to set up a Glory program for Science.”

  “This is the way you feel when you please Amés?” spoke the detached Li, the Li that wasn’t really she. At most, it had control of her mouth. But not of her true thoughts. Not of her will.

  “That’s one way of putting it,” Techstock said. “But it isn’t just some cheap shock to the limbic grist, you know. The Glory integrates in real time with Amés’s long-term strategy database. That’s where the satisfaction comes in; that’s why it’s not Pavlovian stimulus and response. You can feel a moment of Glory at any moment—even doing things that you had no idea were connected to furthering the overall plan. It’s a reward for doing the right thing for everyone.”

  He kissed her again. Li opened her mouth, felt his tongue against her own. The Glory grew and grew within her.

  “How is this helping others?” she whispered. “How is this furthering the plan?”

  “You’ll know very soon,” Techstock answered in a low voice. He drew back, still holding her, and looked her in the eyes. “I know you’ve been disappointed in me recently. Now you understand some of what’s been going on. We’re at war, Li. And science is on the front line. We’ve got to do what it takes to win this war for civilization.”

  “I want to win the war,” Li said without any real conviction, as she actually had no opinion of the war one way or the other.

  The Glory began to fade.

  “Oh no,” she said. “Please, how do I make it come back?”

  “Be truthful with yourself. Don’t be afraid to criticize your own motives and desires. When they fit with the strategy, then you’ll feel the Glory return.”

  “You mean something in me will be constantly accessing this strategic database set up by the Department of Immunity, and either rewarding me or punishing me as a result?” That didn’t sound at all good. But the Glory had been so real. Even the rapidly fading remnants she now felt set her body and soul at ease, like warm water slowly evaporating from the skin after a hot bath. And to have it back, even with…compromises.

  Maybe giving up a bit of personal freedom was worth it.

  “The database is maintained by the Department of Immunity,” Techstock said. “It’s set up by Director Amés himself. It’s like accessing his mind directly. Touching his thoughts.”

  All of Li’s worries about her life and love were…not distant , exactly. She still felt them. But they were somehow contained. Like a worrisome grain of sand that had received its first coating of mother-of-pearl in an oyster. She wanted to coat them further. To lacquer them with the Glory until everything inside her was smooth and easy.

  “I want to feel it again,” Li said. “What do I have to do to feel it again?”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Techstock, “the Science Directorate has a job in mind for you. If you accept the position, I can guarantee you there’ll be as much Glory as your heart desires.”

  Fourteen

  From

  Grist-based Weapons

  Federal Army Field Manual

  Compiled by Forward Development Lab, Triton

  Gerardo Funk, Commandant

  ANTI - INFORMATION WEAPONS

  One of the most effective uses of grist weapons is to set up anti-information zones, often called AIZs. These can range from simple areas of message disruption—say, of brain synapses or electromagnetic transmission—to complex, self-evolving containment algorithms that do not kill, but confuse and sometimes subvert enemy forces. Enemies trapped within a complex AIZ may wander for what seems years to them. They may be subjected to hallucinations and delusions, and their mental and physical makeup may be transformed by infiltrating grist-mil. Portions of their subconscious minds may be dissociated from their personas and used against them. In fact, their interior mental landscape can be transformed into what they perceive as a wilderness or jungle—a seemingly physical place full of deadly threats.

  The hallmark of this weapon is its complexity and rapid adaptation to defenses against it. Large amounts of grist-mil must go into the construction of AIZs, and the concomitant energy and matériel expenditure is considerable. The use of the weapons is therefore limited, but AIZs are extremely effective when deployed.

  INFILTRATION WEAPONS

  Another use of complex grist, usually under the control of a near-sentient algorithm, is for attacks behind enemy lines. This is accomplished by infiltrating grist, which takes up position either camouflaged or mimicking something else. The grist can go through various transformations itself as it is transported toward its ultimate destination. The ability to transform and remain concealed calls for long-range planning on the part of engineers and, often, high complexity within the grist itself. At times, however, even a relatively minor transformation can serve the purpose—a load-bearing wall, the severed finger or toe of an enemy, quickly regrown before the enemy is aware of the replacement. Grist-mil successfully placed in such a tactical position can contain code that activates it as a weapon when the appropriate conditions are met. Often, all the grist-mil must do is dissolve and disappear in order to wreak havoc.

  Fifteen

  Father Andre Sud still had doubts about his decision to go back to his work as a parish shaman-priest. He wasn’t even sure he was a priest. In his younger days, he’d been convinced of his calling—convinced enough to kill himself by taking the Walk on the Moon that all confirmed shamans of the Greentree Way must undertake. In the craters of the moon, his non-space-adapted body had died a choking, swelling death. He remembered it all, of course. That was the point—to feel yourself die and come back with the enlightenment of the spiritual traveler who has visited the Tree and climbed among its branches.

  What the “Tree” actually was—whether the gene pool of humanity, the collective unconsciousness, or some other force or principle of the universe—the Way did not say. This knowledge was unspeakable—the Zen in the Zen-Lutheran heritage of the religion. Comprehending the Tree came as a moment of revelation, of satori. The shaman-priest was to draw on that moment of enlightenment for the rest of his or her days.

  Andre’s satori had come in a dinner in Seminary Barrel, during his final year at the school. He’d heard it was still a story told around the seminary. The diner offered a special platter with the choice of three vegetables. Andre (who had been immersed in getting ready for his final graduate board review) had looked at the menu and had been completely unable to decide. Then suddenly—instantly—all the years of study, his own developing understanding of the Way and the Tree, his growling stomach, and the shabby hominess of the diner came together to a point of light and knowledge within him.r />
  “Yams, yams, and yams,” he’d told the waiter. “Those are the three vegetables I choose.”

  [You’re not remembering it right,] said Andre’s convert portion. [You ordered sweet potatoes.]

  [Same thing,] Andre—the aspect part of him, that is—thought back.

  [Not really,] said Andre’s convert. [But I won’t argue the point.]

  Most people, of course, did not talk to their convert or pellicles, they just were aspect, convert, and pellicle. One of Andre’s disciplines as a Greentree shaman was to separate the convert and aspect portions into personas—even personalities—in themselves. Communication between these two was mediated by his pellicle, which seldom “spoke,” but embodied his internal passion and his mental harmony. Full Greentree shamans—those who had Walked on the Moon—could accomplish this because they had literally died and been reborn in a cloned body. The convert remembered physical death; the aspect was inhabited by a mind that had, for a time, been disembodied. A priest’s complete personality was supposed to be an enlightened Trinity. The biological begat the mental, and the two communicated by means of the grist pellicle, which was the technological equivalent of the Holy Ghost. This trinity was within all people, technologically, psychologically, and spiritually. Most people sought unity within and diversity without. The shaman understood both the multiplicity and the unity of all things, including him- or herself. Everything was one and everything was many—all at the same time.

  [But you have your doubts,] said Andre’s convert portion.