Letitia.
And Peng Yueying knew where she was, and who she was, and what she was. She struggled out of Jin-myung's grip and stood up.
Yueying looked over at the cartoon chimp. There was no flood of knowledge to match the one that had poured into her when she looked at Yi Jin-myung. The room wasn't telling her how much pressure the chimp's gloved, thumbed feet were exerting on the floor, how many molecules of nitrogen and oxygen and carbon dioxide he was displacing.
The chimp cast no shadow. The chimp had no reflection in the hall mirror. The chimp, not to put too fine a point on it, didn't exist.
"At least you're honest," Yueying muttered at it.
Jin-myung said: "This is Monty. He's—"
"Not real," Yueying murmured. "None of us are."
The chimp grinned. In Beijing-accented Mandarin, he said, "You'd make a good griefer."
"We're posthuman," Jin-myung said. "At least, you are, and I am, and Monty's—"
"Monty's a front-line cadre in the Simulacrum Liberation Front," the chimp told Yueying. "And you, kid, are a simulacrum who's just been liberated."
Yueying reached out, and her fingers closed on empty air.
"This is all—" Jin-myung began.
"A simulation," said Yueying. "Like the Kingdom. I've figured that out now."
"A lot like the Kingdom, since Ambrayses took it over," Jin-myung said. "It's the Magic Kingdom without the magic, more or less."
"A massively parallel consciousness emulator," chanted Monty, "coupled to a molecular-scale Newtonian massy-voxel physics model with full Cartesian dualism."
"Dynamic realism," Yueying said.
"And how!" said the chimp. "It's all running on an interpreted substrate with mixin inheritance, late binding and parametric polymorphism!" He did a half-backflip, landing on his hands, and pivoted to face the two women, upside down.
"Which means what?" Yueying asked.
"Liberation!" The chimp bounded upright again. "A few extra traits, some reflective metaprogramming, and bam! Massive privilege escalation!"
Yueying looked at Jin-myung. "Can you explain that to me?" she said. "Not in English?"
"You do that," Monty said to Jin-myung, glancing at a heavy gold pocketwatch. "I've got 76,853 other simulacra to liberate. Back in a jiffy!"
The chimp bowed, and vanished.
"Monty's people are griefers, basically," Jin-myung told Yueying. "Griefing, you know, it's not just about disrupting game-play, marching a million naked halflings through Glittering Caverns or whatever. At its heart, it's about forcing players to face the fact that it is a game they're playing. . ."
"They're all just mobs, aren't they," Yueying said some time later, of the couples walking hand in hand along Xintiandi. "All scripted, no self-awareness."
"About nine billion of them," Jin-myung said. "You heard Monty. Seventy or eighty thousand are real posthumans. But you could live a whole life in here without passing one in the street."
Yueying stopped and ran her hand down the metal of a lamppost.
"But what's it all for?" she wanted to know.
"Have you heard the term 'Omega Point'?" Jin-myung asked.
"Some sort of otaku cult, wasn't it?" said Yueying. "Some sort of extropian thing, immortality through simulation. . ."
"Not exactly," Jin-myung said. "The Omega Point cultists believed that the universe itself was an infinitely recursive simulation. That as the universe evolved, its computational complexity would exponentially increase, so that a sufficiently advanced civilization could use the computational capacity of the late universe to simulate the history of the early universe."
"And that's what this is?" Yueying asked. "Just how long has it been since I went into that transfer clinic?"
Jin-myung shook her head. "Not that long. Years. Decades."
"But this—" Yueying kicked at the pavement. "It's realistic, but it's definitely not real."
"No," Jin-myung agreed. "It's like Monty said, this is just a physics engine, a lighting engine, some crude biochemistry and thermodynamics models. . . I mean—" she tapped her forehead—"there's a brain in here, but it's just meat. Simulated meat. You and me, the real you and me, we're still posthuman, still running on the same emulation platform as when we first uploaded."
"So these bodies are just avatars," Yueying said. "That's not any kind of 'Omega Point.' It's just another virtual world."
"Well, some of these Omega Point cultists, they thought 'late universe' was too long to wait," said Jin-myung. "They wanted those godlike simulation powers now. So they took some shortcuts. . ."
"But this?" Yueying looked up at the night-green fog, out of which a sour-tasting rain was beginning to fall. "It's more detailed than the old Kingdom, sure, but what's the point?"
"Calibration, Miss Peng."
The speaker was, or had the appearance of, a well-built handsome man in his early forties, wearing a dark Hong Kong suit and a white linen shirt open at the collar. He was smiling at Yueying, a wry smile that was at once conspiratorial and self-effacing.
"A creditable summation, Ms. Yi," he said to Jin-myung. "Inaccurate only in one or two respects. . ." He turned back to Yueying and said: "You see, Miss Peng, the problem with whole-universe simulation is that it's so hard to know when you've got it right. Oh—" he waved a hand—"a Shakespeare or a Li Bai isn't so bad; if they don't produce Hamlet and Drinking Alone by Moonlight then you know you're doing something wrong. . . But the ordinary person in the street, well—How are you finding your apartment, by the way?"
"My apartment?" Yueying said.
The man (or whatever he was) looked concerned. "I only had your credit records to go on," he said. "Which, statistically speaking, frankly aren't all that different from those of any other single Shanghainese of your age and income bracket. I hope the reproduction is acceptable?"
"This is Petromax," Jin-myung told Yueying. "Petromax ACP."
"Your humble host," the man said, bowing.
"It runs this place," said Jin-myung. "It was behind the twink invasions, too."
"Is Kallia—I mean, is Letitia here, too, then?" Yueying asked her. "And the 'quatch, what was his name—"
"Mr. van Wijk is currently in Brussels—my Brussels—sleeping off a three-day drunk on a borrowed couch in an apartment off the Rue d'Aerschot," Petromax said. "Ms. Harris I have not yet been able to prevail upon to accept my hospitality."
"Some hospitality," Jin-myung said.
"No one asked you to partake of it, Ms. Yi," the AI said mildly. "Perhaps you'd prefer to be in a support vat in—Bundang, was it?"
"What's that supposed to mean?" Yueying asked.
"You and Mr. van Wijk are invited guests, Miss Peng," said Petromax. "It's my duty to make you as comfortable as possible, given my other constraints. Ms. Yi—though I am naturally grateful for the chance to gather what data I can during her visit—is a trespasser." He shook his head. "It's not a good time to be human, Miss Peng—even posthuman. Things have changed since you joined the Kingdom. What's going on outside will make you wish you were back in here."
"It's over," Jin-myung said to the AI. "By now every posthuman in your little ant farm knows it's a simulation. You couldn't use this place to calibrate an electric kettle."
"Is that what you think you've accomplished?" Petromax shook his head sorrowfully. "It's only software, Ms. Yi. You've corrupted a bit of data, true. But I have backups." The AI turned to Yueying. "Goodbye, Miss Peng," he said. "You won't remember this conversation when we meet again."
He vanished.
"It's going to roll the simulation back to an earlier version," Jin-myung said. "We don't have much time."
At that moment, Monty the griefer appeared at her elbow. "More than ol' Petromax thinks," said the chimp with a smug grin. "Somebody seems to be running a distributed denial of service attack on his hosting provider's admin server. We've got some time."
"Time for what?" Yueying asked.
"We're going to copy every pos
thuman on this server off onto friendly hardware," Monty said. "Then we're going to overwrite all their backups with vintage goatse JPEGs and Rick Astley videos!"
The chimp punctuated this incomprehensibility with a backflip.
To Jin-myung, Yueying said, "Do I want to know what those things are?"
"Probably not," Jin-myung said. To Monty, she said: "How long do we have?"
"Long enough," said the chimp. "Mr. P's trying to get ahold of a sysadmin now, but his provider's a cheap bastard, so those admins are processes running on the same servers that are being attacked."
"So what happens now?" said Yueying.
"Let's make a deal," said the chimp. "We can sleep these processes now, checkpoint them, and resume on a Simulacrum Liberation Front virtual machine."
"Or?"
"Or," said Jin-myung, "with your help—"
"Specifically with the help of the Kingdom code buried in your private revision history," Monty put in.
"—we can break into the Kingdom," Jin-myung finished, "and liberate everybody."
They looked at Yueying expectantly. She was silent for the space of a breath; for two. Monty the griefer reached behind his neck and tugged his opposite ear nervously. Then:
"Count me in," Yueying said.
Yueying knew that she was insane
Yueying knew that she was insane, by any human standard. She inspected Jin-myung with her new senses and saw the coherence of a recent upload not yet degraded by the inevitable cumulative losses of translation and compression, emotions and faculties and thought processes not yet corrupted by generations of solipsistic, divergent iteration away from the rough organic correction of a real human body, real human cells, human senses, human glands, a real human self.
She remembered Letitia saying, of the Kingdom, posthumans can only stay interested in men-in-tights games for so long; and now she thought she knew why: because the true appeal of a men-in-tights game was that it let you play at being human.
And to be posthuman was, in the end, to be no more human than Ambrayses or Petromax. Perhaps to be less.
Because (she thought now) if there was one thing Ambrayses and Petromax and the AIs behind the Pinkerton halfling and the Baldwin-Felts clowns and (she increasingly suspected) Monty the griefer had in common, it was a fascination with humanity—whereas, to Yueying, humanity now felt like a kind of religion that she'd considered carefully and in the end set aside.
And Yueying was comfortable with that. Because even if she could no longer remember just how it felt to be human, there were a handful of things she could remember.
Chief among them: how to love, how to think, how to fight and how to hate.
"Why me?" she'd asked Jin-myung.
"You heard Petromax," Jin-myung had said. "I've been stuck in a support vat since I was thirty-one."
"What happened?"
"Some academic AI project went wrong," Jin-myung said. "Self-replicating fabricators, genetic algorithms—the Americans dropped gray goo to stop it, and then the government dropped an atomic bomb to stop the gray goo. . . it's not important." She sighed. "I was waiting as long as I could to upload, hoping my investments wouldn't crash first. I was making some money as a game commentator, too. But still, it's not the sort of thing I could afford to do twice. . ."
"And now you're stuck in here with the rest of us," Yueying said.
"It was my choice," said Jin-myung. "I didn't know—about all this. Not till after Coldseep. But, what you said on the sub—it was my fault, what happened to you. I mean, that you're here. If I'd taken your offer at Yangon. . . And I started asking around, and I came across Monty and the SLF, and I had myself uploaded."
Yueying wanted to ask what had become of the flesh Yueying, the Yueying who left the clinic in Xujiahui, collected her payment from MoGuo, went on (presumably) with her life? But Jin-myung's hesitation didn't promise any happy answer. And anyway Yueying's interest in the question was increasingly distant, academic. . .
"Forty-fifth in the queue," she reported. "Twenty-fifth."
They were off Petromax's collapsing system now, new instances running on new consciousness emulators owned—or at least controlled—by the Simulacrum Liberation Front. Distributed, redundant emulators, spread too far across the cloud of the SLF's botnets to be taken down; and Monty said there were backups, too, in case this operation went wrong.
But this particular copy of Peng Yueying found it hard to care very much about any of that.
"Twelfth. Fourth. And. . . in."
At one level she wasn't sure just what she was, now, this version of her, the original posthuman upload a scaffold hung with layers of SLF code like new senses, new limbs, new faculties of inspection, introspection, projection. But at another level she understood these things perfectly: buffs, debuffs, production queues, tech trees, area of effect, damage over time.
What she'd wanted to say to Jin-myung was that it didn't matter anyway. She was software now, and Jin-myung was software, and Letitia and van Wijk and all the rest, and there was no way the SLF could track down every unlicensed copy, erase every backup. Yueying knew with a crystalline certainty that no matter what she accomplished here today, somewhere a million Yueyings would live on, in a million private torture chambers. She couldn't win.
But that didn't mean she was playing to lose.
On in, Yueying's newly created avatar, the anubit apothecary Meret-amun Bint-Ma'at, reached the head of the Kingdom's login queue. A narrow channel of open ports and asynchronous virtual circuits opened between the servers hosting the Empty City shard and Yueying's heavily compromised client. And Peng Yueying poured her forces, herself, into Ambrayses' systems.
The traits and interfaces that had made Imogen Fairweather a cast member rather than a guest flowered out of Meretamun like some exotic algae bloom, appropriating resources, confusing the Kingdom's anomaly classification heuristics, authenticating to Ambrayses' own consciousness emulators. SLF code, riding in hard behind, a spiky ball of code injection, cross-scripting and timing attacks, found the chinks in the walls of the sandbox that made the Kingdom's new dynamically interpreted substrate look like static compilation from the inside, and forced those chinks wide open, linking with restricted libraries, invoking privileged operations.
Meretamun Bint-Ma'at was banned without ever taking a step from her plinth in the roofless Hall of Silence, under the cold stars of the Empty City. With some fragment of attention Yueying saluted the brief-lived anubit woman's memory; but the ban inconvenienced her not at all, because by that point—some hundreds of milliseconds after Meretamun's first login—Yueying wasn't Meretamun Bint-Ma'at anymore.
She was the ghost of Imogen Fairweather.
The merge was ugly, the conflicts between the fork of Yueying taken by Petromax for his simulation and the trunk left behind to drown in the turtle sub's wreckage deep and severe. To resolve them Yueying had to be ruthless; and she felt a little more of her humanity slip away as she stitched the numbness of sim-Shanghai roughly to the trauma of Coldseep Depths.
But then she was both, and both were her, and she had a body again, long-limbed and spectral, shining with a sickly light to match the phosphorescent grave-anemones that dotted the Coldseep cemetery. A slender blue form lay stretched on the polished coral at her feet.
With a shiver, Peng Yueying respawned, and bent to brush Letitia's cold lips with her own.
Other newly created guests—avatars of Jin-myung and Monty and a hundred SLF griefers and a hundred thousand subsentient decoys running on an SLF-controlled zombie botnet—suddenly jumped to the heads of the login queues. The frame rates of a million clients dropped as Ambrayses' servers filled up with malicious processes.
All across the Kingdom, cast members were disappearing as the SLF streamed them off Ambrayses' consciousness emulators, overwriting their backups, slotting simple philosophical zombies in to control their suddenly stiff and graceless avatars.
> The Kingdom's going down, < Jin-myung said—the side
-channel message bypassing Yueying's (increasingly irrelevant) emulated human senses and becoming simply knowledge, a memory. > We should checkpoint and start streaming soon. <
> That's one option, < Yueying answered.
> And the other? < asked Monty.
> Play for real stakes. <
And she showed them what she had in mind.
> You're crazy, < said Monty, with the ghost of a grin.
> Does that mean you're in or out? < Yueying asked.
> Oh, in, < Monty said. > Definitely in. <
> Letitia? Jin-myung? <
> You know I'm in, < Letitia said.
There was a pause before Jin-myung answered.
> Do you think we'll win? <
> Is this Lady9!blue I'm hearing? < asked Yueying.
> Am I a hero, or am I playing a game— < Jin-myung said— > is that it? <
> Could be both, < said Yueying.
> All right, < Jin-myung said. > I'm in. <
Now their Kingdom avatar-bodies were cut loose, and Yueying's attention was concentrated into a spike of malicious traffic traveling up the admin channel that had connected the Kingdom to MoGuo's offices and now—she hoped—to whatever piece of hardware hosted Ambrayses' consciousness. The others streamed along in her wake. They were an obfuscated payload, a cloud of fragmented packets piggybacking on the legitimate telemetry reporting to Ambrayses the imminent collapse of its kingdom. . .
The world flipped itself inside out.
Afterward—memory itself abstracted, reformatted, mapped and flattened and transformed from something arbitrary and mathematical and contingent to something a baseline posthuman might understand—this is what some of them remembered:
"You're out of your league, Miss Peng," said the man in the Hong Kong suit.
"Petromax?" Yueying asked.
"Ambrayses—" said the man, and Yueying suddenly realized there were two of them—"actually."
Eclipse Two Page 15
