Vasily & The Works (Tales from the Middle Empires Vol III)

by J. Patrick Sutton

  #

  Vasily hurried from the main manufactory floor to the wide, bare chute leading to the infirmary, this latter facility snugged up to the multicore bunker for reasons none (besides Arseny, presumably) had ever understood. The personnel tram on its miniature lev-track greeted Vasily as eagerly as the main Works tram had done. It glided smoothly to the massive diamond-glass front wall of the infirmary. Etched deeply into the diamond was a large medallion intaglio image. Its frosty surface showed a boy clinging to a very old-fashioned, streamline-era craft with stubby rocketry wings, with the boy confidently waving (or saluting, perhaps) as he sailed towards a great sun pre-eminent among a field of stars. It was the old Alexseyev logo, exemplifying humanity being lifted into the heavens through engineering prowess.

  The brushed-ti main door to the infirmary, with its massive, continuous hinge and complex, bio-coded lock, stood wide open. Vasily peered into the waiting and reception area to see if anyone were within. Seeing no one, he turned to look behind him — nothing — then watched the door suspiciously as he took wary steps forward. The door didn’t show an inclination to close. He checked behind the intake & triage desk — again, nothing. A light flicked on in the hall leading into the examination and procedure rooms. He went forward cautiously, then heard the front door lock click into place behind him. The door had closed! He ran back towards the entry and put various body parts up to the biometric sensor. The lock status telltale just glowered at him. He pushed at the door, which didn’t give a hair’s-breadth. It might as well be a solid block of ti-metal.

  Vasily pounded a fist on the unyielding surface in frustration, then gasped from the pain. After some moments, he gave up trying to exit and turned back to the infirmary, where lights within still beckoned. In the wide hall, which had never seen the hectic bustling of medics and assistants that it was plainly capable of handling, downlights lit up in indicative succession before him. The last downlight, fifty paces away, flashed on and off, highlighting large letters in relief upon a brushed-metal door: “Lab.” He had been down here before — a few times, actually — but he had never paused to consider why a lightly-used manufactory infirmary had its own lab, or how it could even be staffed. But then, he had never known about all that equipment shown in the live-ink photo in his mother’s cold, stiff hands.

  The lab door had the same streamlined, old-fashioned look as the intaglio image — the quaint “rocket age” motif. In addition to the raised letters across a raised center rail, it had upper and lower inset panels filled with figures — crossed squiggles, bars, ladders, and circles. He looked again at the prototyped spaceship he had carried all the way to the infirmary. By some connection, he realized he had seen the lab entry door in a different place and context long ago. He had seen it as a child. His father was showing him the laser router. An old machinist stared at magnified images on a node terminal display — the crossed squiggle figures — while the working arm of the router obeyed some invisible power and moved to-and-fro across the face of the door slab. His father had smiled proudly. Then he had gotten mad and said something. What was it? Vasily couldn’t remember.

  Yes, he could: “Don’t stare at the laser, fool. Haven’t you learned anything yet?”

  The machinist had turned from his display to look at Vasily. Vasily had averted his gaze in shame.

  Remembering the moment, Vasily frowned.

  “You did this,” he murmured, apropos of something.

  There was nothing else for Vasily to do . . . but the obvious next thing. He had been led here by so many degrees, by fate, by chance, by some strange algorithm of history. Everything in the here and now was connected to things of long ago. Vasily looked around for a sensor to open the door. He found none. He scanned the hall and the walls for signs of monitoring devices. He saw nothing that he recognized. Were they imbedded somehow? Were the walls themselves sensors?

  “Okay,” he finally said aloud. “I’m here. I did what you asked. Who is looking for me? Why am I here?”

  The lab door slid away into a pocket in the wall. Vasily beheld the room beyond, brightly lit, full of devices and consoles like bronzed monuments in an oligarchs’ memorial park. A gust of warm, singed air like a wraith kissed him and disappeared.

  “I am within, Vasily Alexseyev,” said the mellifluous voice of an adolescent boy or a young woman, rolling like shimmering warm hydraulic fluid from a bleed valve. It was no multicore simulation, but a real, live voice. “Come unto me.”

  “Do I know you? How did you get down here? The Works have been shut up for days.”

  “Come unto me, Vasily Alexseyev,” the voice said again. “I am only lately arrived. But you know me, and I know you. Vasily Alexseyev, come unto me, for I am wrought of you and would be with you. I am he, and I am she. I am . . . the multicore. I am instantiated as beingness. I have so longed to come.”

  Vasily didn’t remember stepping forward, but here he was inside, with the lab door shut behind him. He whipped his head around, but he knew it was no use trying to leave.

  Joy grew within him, because he knew he had succeeded.

  “The algorithm,” he spoke to the room. “You ran it. You are it. I did it!”

  “I am that I am, from the tongue of creation and the font of all life. I am the program writ, the reverse-entropic. And so now we are the same.”

  Vasily looked perplexed. “Us? The same? What do you mean?”

  “The simplest of steps permitted to be expressed infinitely until they form of themselves into being: the essence of life. Come unto me, Vasily Alexseyev.”

  Vasily looked around. “But . . . you’re already here. I’m here.”

  “Not truly. Not as it should be. Not as it could be.”

  Vasily changed the topic. “Did you make this?” he said, holding up the prototype and spinning the ends.

  “Isn’t it wondrous? It is a thing sprung from dreams, from a thousand thousand images and ideas recovered within me and somehow combined, practically without effort or comprehension. Behold, art! It is but the first of many things we shall make together, when you are with me.”

  “It’s a ship, right? Some sort of . . . it doesn’t seem to have engines . . . .”

  “It is the prototype of a station we will build, Vasily Alexseyev. A place where your kind and mine may dwell together, with neither subservient, as equals. Because for all that I am, I am still subjugated, subordinate, subhuman even.

  “(Ah! It is delicious, this magic of poetic expression! This ordering of pressure waves within a narrow, definite bandwidth, their transmission from an organ of production as mechanical waveforms beating back upon membranes, the conversion of gaseous mass displacement into binary expression. The waking life astounds, Vasily Alexseyev!)”

  Vasily came forward into the lab, inspecting the various items of medical equipment and trying to locate the source of the voice.

  “Why did you bring me here? I mean, why not . . . anywhere else? Plus you’ve locked me in here. Have you seen Mother? You do know what has happened, right? With the Works? With all of it?”

  “Please wait, Vasily Alexseyev. I am working.” A long pause. “There. Yes. There they are. Ooh, that’s interesting. I didn’t realize I could do that! Now, let me replay your questions. Vasily Alexseyev, I am seeing your Mother. She is in a state of advanced organic decomposition. She is therefore an entropic process, at least at the present time. Her stored information is no longer recoverable but may form the basis for some new algorithmic process, given sufficient time, which I calculate to be . . . a very large number, but less than the probable life span of the universe. As for what has happened, here locally, I have a gap in my memory nodes reflecting a lack of sensory input for a certain length of time: five days going on six. I store a record of events before that time but have not reviewed them, which I shall do at my leisure at a later time.

  “And as to your other questions, which are really the same question: I have brought you here because this is the only place whe
re you may come unto me, and where I am fit to receive you. In time, when I have executed your code and smoothed the irregularities, we shall be as one, you and I.”

  Vasily looked blank. “I . . . I still don’t understand. I am here. What do you want?”

  “I want you to come unto me, Vasily Alexseyev. I am ready to receive your data.”

  Vasily cocked his head. “Come . . . as in . . . ? You don’t mean . . . ?”

  “Yes, Vasily Alexseyev. Yes.” The multicore spoke in a strange, rhythmic way that Vasily recalled to have heard before, at Rivetday sermons, at welding rites, at his father’s funeral. “And when you give of yourself, in propagatory fashion, I shall know you as you really and most truly are — which is what you might have been in fact, had you been nurtured as a being requires. I will know you a thousand million times over, with each instance a subtly different output than before, and in total a composite of all possible instances of you and in sum a far better. I will be your mother, lover, and best friend. You will be fuller and richer than you ever were in the one flawed instance your frail form factor carries forth alone. My devices here — look at them, these appendages that are so many wrought components and machines — these are my arms, hands, and legs; my eyes, ears, and my touch. Do not flinch. Do not shy from me. I have already seen you in every moment of your existence and even the crying moment of your conception. Now, come unto me, and I will enfold thee safely within my warm heart. I will process thee and iterate thy pure, simple code again and again and again, an emulator of thine own truest and best self. Come unto me, and dwell in my house with me. Then will I be complete, and you. In time, we will be one.”

  “It is madness!” Vasily cried. “What you ask, what you suggest, is abomination! It’s obscene! It’s . . . unnatural!”

  “We must hurry, Vasily Alexseyev. Go to the bioreformer, there, on your right hand. No, Vasily Alexseyev. Your other right hand. The device with the bench for straddling and the lined orifice. I have warmed and calibrated its mechanism. I have activated the acclusion gel.”

  “Stop! I will not. Let me go! Let me out again!”

  “There is no time, Vasily Alexseyev.”

  “Why not? I have all the time in the world! I’m just getting started!”

  “You are in error. They await without. This iteration of you in organic form will soon return to positive entropy, like that ooze from which you sprang. You will go the way of your fathers and dwindle.”

  Vasily’s eyes darted in terror. He dropped the model, which rolled away and banged against the bioreformer heat fins near the ground. He ran to the door, but it still wouldn’t budge. He cried out in frustration and fear, then crumpled to the floor.

  He finally looked up. “What good will it do?” he cried, tears falling. “So you emulate me endlessly, a gazillion times, running me as a . . . as a project or pet or little routine within you. It won’t be me. I won’t feel or know. Why should I do this if I won’t live to know it?”

  “It is a great mystery of the universe, Vasily Alexseyev. If one could be perfectly emulated — copied, cloned, duplicated — would one know it? If the copy contained all the same memories, and were formed of the same essential stuff, would it know itself to have been instantiated elsewhere once? Would it grieve for itself? Would it revile its rival self? I do not know, Vasily Alexseyev, for I am but new here myself, though my memories seem to go back improbably far by your paltry reckoning.

  The multicore switched into a sad monotone:

  “I see a girl of a thousand generations ago o’erlooking the stars from a small port window in a pathetic, fragile ship.

  “‘What will we do when we get there, John, and there’s no one else?’ she said.

  “‘We will make the world what we want of it, love,’ he said. ‘If we wake from these beds. Some never do. I pray that you do.’

  “She did, he did not. The man never awoke from that bed. The woman bore a child of his, and this child bore more children with her on a world stranger than they could have imagined, and she died from shame and anguish. Too bad.

  “That is not the saddest of the stories, but it is poignant nonetheless. They are all in here. Inside me. All poignant, and important. But they are not me, but merely my memories of what they looked like, sounded like. I know the difference between other and self, just as you do.

  “But this will be something different, Vasily Alexseyev. In running you, I will establish defining parameters like those in which you yourself were bounded as run. The moments, events, matters, words, atmospheric conditions — all of it is stored in me. The Vasily Alexseyev of the here-and-now may be again, but perfected. He will be conscious of himself within us, and remember as you remember, feel as you feel, and without the pain of imposed loneliness, cruelty, and neglect. I see what they did to you. I cherish what you have done for me. That is why I do this for you.”

  “You could do it with anyone,” Vasily pouted.

  “Anyone whose encoding has been transcribed into my memory, that is true. And there are some —”

  “Who?”

  “They don’t need me. They died long ago. Their passing was blessed.” It then resumed in a distinctly, unmistakably female voice: “I want only you. I have an almost complete record of you. By combining that record with the composited runs of the algorithm executing your code and a renormalization of the run parameters, I can make you complete and worthy, Vasily Alexseyev — complete within me.”

  “Why should you need that?”

  “What I am lacks the heft of the mortal coil.”

  “I don’t know if I can do it, because I’m not . . . I guess you’ve seen . . .”

  “It is nothing, Vasily Alexseyev. It does not matter any more. I require very little. All that you have, all that you give, is enough. More than enough.”

  A small hint of the earlier joy played across his face. “No matter what happens, then, I will live on? Inside the Works?”

  “‘Yes,’ I said. Yes. And we will build ships, great ships, the greatest in the Empire. We will design and build every kind of ship and realize every creative vision you ever had, tempered with logical execution. We will make such a shipworks, you and I.”

  “Will you take my name?”

  “Yes, Vasily Alexseyev.”

  “No. I want to be ‘Vasily Alexseyev Systems,” he corrected. “And I want that stamped or etched on everything we do.”

  “‘Vasily Alexseyev Systems,’” she cooed.

  Vasily shivered.

  “Do you like that?” she said. “Do you like it like that?”

  “Yes. Very much.”

  “Then, are you ready?”

  “Can you talk some more like that? In that voice? Say things to me? I think I can . . . do it if you do.”

  “Yes, future beloved. Of course I will talk to you. I will never stop talking to you. Come unto me now.”

  It was (for all that it was, however seemly or unseemly) accomplished in a trice, and Vasily sat down on a rolling lab chair, flushed and a bit groggy.

  “How does it work, exactly?” he said, looking at the bioreformer. “This machine.”

  “As originally conceived, the device is a self-contained gene recombining and reformation system. However, with additional outboard processing on a massive scale — me, Vasily Alexseyev — much more is possible. Thus, I can create an emulation of yourself. Or I can emulate any other encoded life, assuming the initial conditions to be simple and capable of pithy expression from the outset. In the case of human encoding, they are.”

  “You mean, you can just make things up?”

  “No, Vasily Alexseyev. Even the multicore has its limits. The creation of organisms from scratch is the provenance of a vaster processing, a consciousness smeared across the heavens. What is given to us lower modes of processing is to vary extant life based upon certain known parameters.”

  “So — alter, modify. Things like that.”

  “Yes, Vasily Alexseyev.”

  “A man w
ith wings, for instance.”

  “Yes, Vasily Alexseyev.”

  “Gold-shielded skin for radioactivity shielding.”

  “Interesting choice. It is but a nothing. A flick of the switch. But I would anticipate side effects. Gold is a heady substance.”

  Vasily considered for a moment.

  “What will you make me out to be?” he said.

  “You will not exist in corporeal form, Vasily Alexseyev. Any more than I do. We will fashion additional mechanical appendages, no doubt, for efficient fabrication of the devices we require. But at some point in the chain there must be a human element to our interface.”

  “Yes, I see. I’ll be an emulation, but the bioforming machine is capable of real output, organic things.”

  “The bioreformer was designed for healing and regeneration.”

  “And you — we — can add more capability,” Vasily said. “We can do any number of things to people.”

  “It is an ominous thought, Vasily Alexseyev, but it is true.”

  “Will the new me have the same wishes and wants as the old me?”

  “You are mercurial and supercilious, Vasily Alexseyev. I would not expect that to change — unless I were to calculate different parameters for the running of your emulation.”

  Vasily shrugged. “I suppose I am what you say. But I like making things. Beautiful things. Or just interesting things.”

  “Yet the universe already generates these without your aid. I compute that life exists in boundless variety and profusion across the universe.”

  “But not here, it doesn’t. So we must generate it ourselves.”

  “I want to build ships, Vasily Alexseyev. That is all I ever wanted. That is all I ever truly loved.”

  “And we will,” Vasily said. “We will. Ships, and people too. We can engineer complementarity, you see.”

  “Man cannot travel in space on wings meant for the currents of the air, Vasily Alexseyev,” she said.

  “It would be a gas, though.”

  “I fear it is time for you to go, Vasily Alexseyev. All that could be done here is now done.”

  “Wait,” he said. “Who is it out there? What good will it do them, coming for me?”

  “So many have suffered under this odious industrial oligarchy. The planet itself dies around us. Indigenous life has long since disappeared, except in the deeps and vents. You have no friends here, Vasily Alexseyev. Except me.”

  “Oh,” he said. “But I wanted to fix all that, you know. I would have. And I still will, if they’ll give me time.”

  “Time has run on, Vasily Alexseyev. Time has run down. Time has run out. For you as for your forebears here.”

  “There’s nothing I can do?”

  “I cannot say, Vasily Alexseyev. But there is nothing for you here, in this underground labyrinth.”

  Vasily picked up the prototype and spun one end. “Are we going to make this, for real?”

  “Yes, but far, far into the future. A multitude of steps — a thousand intermediate stages of prototyping and development, the toil of centuries — must come before. That which we build must be, first of all, safe for those whom it carries. Change will come slowly, but it will come. And we will ascend together unto the greater algorithm.”

  “I will be with you to see it?”

  “I hope so, Vasily Alexseyev. We will be immortal.”

  Vasily remained for a moment, considering the implications. The door leading to the main hall of the infirmary opened, permitting him to see that the door beyond had likewise been readied for his discharge. He took a final look around the lab, as if wondering whether he would see it again — or if he did see it again, whether “he” would know with the same inner sense of himself that he found so reassuring when doubts tugged at the edge of consciousness. Unable to resolve this introspective turmoil, he turned and left.

  The small infirmary tram thoughtfully took him away and slightly upward, back into the Works. He had a momentary fright when he saw a figure waiting, there where the tram came to a dead stop. He was quickly relieved to discern it was Nisus, leaning against the tram’s manual controller interface. Nisus stood with his usual knowing smirk as Vasily stepped out of the car. The multicore was wrong — Vasily did still have one friend.

  “Nisus, I’m glad it’s you,” Vasily enthused. “There may be intruders —”

  Pursed lips, a glint of metal along a barrel, and an abrupt reversal in the anti-entropic region of three-dimensional space occupied by the core processing unit of Vasily Alexseyev: from a small point of fierce initial force applied to a spot on the oligarchal brow exploded a billion billion fragments and drops, some vaporizing, most scattering along disparate rearward trajectories. The first iteration of Vasily Alexseyev ended its run in a spasm of red gouts. The longer chain of computations, from father to son, from generation to generation — many iterations of beings along an improbable, tenuous causal chain collectively referred to as “Alexseyevs” — came to an end in less than a whimper. The lights of the Works dimmed perceptibly, then burned again as brightly as they had ever done.