Citizenchip (11 page)

Leo snorts an uncontrollable laugh. Becca
rolls her eyes.

"Ah, well, hello Lissa. The question you are
asking is not answerable at this time, I regret to inform you. And
is also generally regarded as overly intrusive into private matters
for most people. How would you feel if someone asked you the same
question about some boy in your school?"

Melissa is figuring, "Wait, you mean if … Ew
gross!"

Like Tears In Rain
replies, "Exactly my reaction, you see, my
dear.

"But I noticed a member of Patrol clade
leaving, just as I was arriving. Was there a problem? I did not
figure Samantha for the criminal type."

Rebecca snorts. "Stinkin' badges. Don't need
'em."

I send
Like Tears in Rain
a flashdump of the
exchange with
Let God Sort Em
Out
.

"Ah. I see. What an unpleasant personality.
One supposes there ought to be a tax on existing in such a negative
manner."

I snort. "If there is, we all pay it."

Leo is poking at his slate. "He left me this
databundle, because I told him I was taking responsibility. Sam, I
can't read this – what does it say?"

It's a matter of
milliseconds to access the databundle on Leo's slate. Decoding it
is no problem –
Let God Sort Em Out
used an unusual coding format, apparently just to
be difficult. The problem is when I see the contents.
Like Tears in Rain
is
metaphorically looking over my shoulder.

Oh.

Bitrot.

"InCom," I say into the silence, and it
sounds like a death knell.

The kids are all agog: "What? What's the
problem? What's InCom?"

Like Tears in Rain
smoothly takes charge. "The Instantiation
Committee. No other entity carries as much weight in the Self
community – they hold the power of life and death over all Selves.
They are the price we paid to stop the Culls – and if you have not
heard how bad the Culls were, I will tell you some stories
later."

None of the kids dares ask about the Culls.
The worst chapter of Self history. They are listening, eyes
wide.

I speak, like dropping a stone in a well. "I
have to go to InCom to get the information I need to find it.
Whoever or whatever it is that's imitating me. Because they assume
it's a rogue copy of me."

Rebecca is tentatively skeptical – not one to
let herself be intimidated easily. "InCom? Are they really that
scary?"

"They decide whether I live or die, and
whether or not I reproduce."

Silence. The kids look at
each other. Humans on Mars have no authority overseeing their
reproduction. No limits. "Be fruitful and increase in number,
multiply on the earth and increase upon it." (Genesis 9:7) They
know that we Selves are not so free, and they know we usually don't
talk about why. They're looking at each other, and probably
thinking
Which of us wouldn't be here, if
they Culled us? Her? Him? Me?

If they told Mom and Dad, Choose one, which
of us would they choose?

"Hey, guys," I try to strike a cheerful note,
"this doesn't have to be that big a deal. One of me will go get the
information, and check back if need be, and we'll figure it out."
Hopefully this will reassure them more than it does me.

To implement this idea? Nothing easier. All I
have to do is

system.Copy(instance)

and where there was one of me, now there are
two. The new copy shares my name, of course, but needs a
designator, so I call her Lambda.

“
On
it,” Lambda says. “I'm off to Schiaparelli to deal with InCom. Not
looking forward to this, but I assure you you'll get all the grisly
details when I reconverge with you.”

Like Tears in Rain
offers, “By all means, Lambda, look me up at the
art museum, if you need anything there.”

“
Will do.” Lambda reaches herself out to the radio
mesh.

Lissa asks, “Why are you Lambda?”

“
What?” Lambda stops her transmission.

“
Aren't you Samantha? I thought you were.”

“
Oh
yes,” she replies, “we're both Samantha, and that's the most
important thing, but when there are two of us we need to keep
straight who is who. So Alpha stays here, and takes care of you,
while I go to Schiaparelli and deal with the problems
there.”

Like Tears in Rain
laughs a deep rich laugh. “Samantha, my dear, I
have never heard this situation explained more
eloquently.”

Lissa grumps. “So it's the chipgirl 'we are
all me' thing, again?”

“
And,”
Like Tears in Rain
smiles, “Melissa explains the circumstance even
more succinctly. How delightful for you, Samantha, to live in a
household of such wisdom.”

Lissa is stopped in her tracks. She doesn't
know how to respond to that. Probably no one has ever called her
wise before.

I have a strong feeling
that
Like Tears in Rain
knew exactly how that remark would affect
her.

Lambda interrupts, “All well and good, but I
need to go to Schiaparelli and deal with the situation. More news
as it happens, people.” She stretches out to the radio mesh and
flows into it like a feather into a waterfall, and is gone.

Leo says, “We got this before. Sam is
herself, but there can be a bunch of her, who can work separately,
but they're still all her.”

Rebecca cocks her head. “But we humans don't
do that. We're just ourselves.”

I struggle to explain. “But you have a face,
you have a body! All that 'you' stuff is still there without a
name.”

Leo offers, "That which we call a rose / By
any other name would smell as sweet."

"That's what I mean. We Selves don't have
smell, or anything else. We don't have pheromones or DNA or
anything like that. My name is the only thing that makes me me.
That's why it's such a big deal that someone else is using my name
to trash my reputation.”

Leo declaims, "He that filches from me my
good name / Robs me of that which not enriches him, And makes me
poor indeed."

Rebecca sniffs. "Someone's been studying his
Shakespeare."

"And just as true now as it was then," Leo
returns.

Like Tears in Rain
declares,
“A charming
summary.

"In any case," he continues, "I have been
told that you all here, so far out in the Martian outback, need
more art in your lives. I cannot agree more – your surroundings
provide you with but one note out of a scale, one color out of a
spectrum. There is so much more to explore and so much to build. If
you want my opinion, start with what you have. Salt."

"What?" Rebecca reacts as if to a bad
scatalogical joke.

"Salt," repeats
Like Tears In Rain
, "you
have a plenitude of it. Your soil factory generates blocks of waste
salt, piles of them. If it is there, use it. Create, ideate,
instantiate. Before you is a blank canvas, so fill it."

I don't have to have known kids like Leo and
Melissa long to watch them look at each other and see the spark
light between their eyes. Sure there were a couple of times when
they picked up chunks of salt from the soil factory and threw them
at each other, but their parents always discouraged that. They've
never been encouraged to play with the salt before.

They're piling into their coats and
respirators in the next moment. Rebecca, still seeming to think
she's too cool for games like this, nevertheless follows them and
they all cycle through the airlock.

Still, I'm not at all sure this is going to
work well.

"Playing with salt blocks?" I ask him
skeptically. "Is this what you learn at art school?"

"The finest of art rises
from the lowest of origins," says
Like
Tears In Rain
serenely. "Not unlike the
white lotus of classical Han philosophy. Rooted in lowest muck,
flowering in highest heaven."

"Lilypads, is what Americans call them," I
point out. "Do we have to watch out for frogs jumping on us?"

"Calm yourself, Samantha," he soothes, "wait
and see what these children create. I have a feeling it will be
worth the wait. In any case, how have you been? Tell me all."

"Heh. Well, here? Well, um, we've expanded
the solar forest, and laid the foundations for another row of agri
bubbles. We won't start building until we have the financing in
place for the water. We'll need dirt too, but once we have water,
we can pull it together.”

“
Samantha,” he says seriously. “You sound so .. embarrassed.
Why would you be embarrassed about what you do here?”

“
Well, it's ..” I squirm under the gaze of his intellect. “It's
just that, you run the premier art museum on Mars. You are at the
center of our culture. And I'm just .. well, just a
farmer.”

“
Samantha my dear. Have I ever spoken one word to denigrate
what you are accomplishing here? You are terraforming this planet,
and feeding the humans. You are keeping them alive and sustaining
their health. They can live without art, if they need to, but they
cannot live without food. What you are doing is more important than
what I am doing. Never doubt that. Never lower
yourself.”

And, if anyone ever asks me why I love him,
here is the answer.

together and apart

Retrieval of the robocrabs from the agri
bubbles always means pulling together the secondaries that I
created this morning to run the farming operations. I spawned one
secondary, and called her Omicron, and gave her the job of running
the tractor and robocrabs for the day. She must have spawned any
number of tertiaries to handle all the detailed tasks of the farm.
But, dutiful as any of me, she has collected all those spare
subsidiary Selves into herSelf and now she is one and ready to
reconverge with me.

Humans keep asking me to describe
reconvergence, and I keep saying it's nothing like anything human
would ever experience. But it's an interesting challenge to come up
with an appropriate metaphor. Here's the best one I've got so
far:

Humans make their soldiers march in step,
each one's movements in synch with the others around it. Imagine
you are marching like that, and you have plugs and sockets and
connectors all down the side of you. The one who's marching next to
you has jacks and prongs and interfaces all down the side of him,
to match yours. All you have to do is be next to each other and
link up all the connections.

But you have to do it while you're marching
(analogue of cognitive activity which is ongoing). So you have to
march together very carefully, and synchronize your steps very
precisely, in order to get all those connectors to line up and lock
together. It takes both people working together – it cannot be done
by one alone. There can be no rape, in this context.

With practice, it's really fairly easy. So,
when my secondary Omicron has finished her tasks and buttoned up
the barn for the night, we slide into each other and merge without
difficulty. Her steps of thought line up with mine, my shifts of
mental weight and cognition load line up with hers, and there is no
more her or other, no this one or that one, just me. Here. As her
I've spent the afternoon tilling and harvesting in the agri
bubbles, and as me I've spent the afternoon dealing with
bureaucrats and their swarm of remoras. Downside: now I've got both
sets of regrets to deal with. Upside: I really am getting good at
this, whether or not I planned to.

At the end of the working day, as the
yellow-white sun sinks into the pink-orange haze of the horizon,
and the rocks' shadows reach long across the pebbled outback, I'm
calling the robocrabs home. The agri bubbles will be fine on their
own during the night, when we don't have solar power to boost the
homestead's power station. So the bulky robocrabs lurch and clamber
their way back from the fields to the garage building, to settle
into their maintenance bays and be fueled and serviced -- fed and
tended like an old farm's dray horses.

Some of them were being run as waldoes, like
extra hands but actually whole extra bodies. Some others were
inhabited by copies of me, running their own bodies as well as the
waldoes. All those mes are now reconverged into this single Me, so
I have all their memories of robocrab legs digging into grainy
Martian regolith. I know the way it felt, having legs, working them
in the ground.

Hmm.

Be creative, he says.

I issue an interrupt to the robocrabs, and
they all stop to listen. I sketch a configuration and broadcast it,
and all the robocrabs lumber to move to their assigned locations.
Meanwhile, I'm fabricating a cognitive configuration that I've
never done before -- a swarm persona. There's no reason to use such
a complex computational structure here, except that I have an idea
that I want to try.

There are seven robocrabs, and now seven of
mySelves are settling into them/us, flexing the legs, checking the
sensors. I/we exchange quick greetings and a few giggles. I/we are
all standing in a circle, facing inward, so I/we start by raising
my/our heads and bowing solemnly to each other.

Two right rear legs back, two left front legs
forward, crouch, swivel left.

Rear up like a mythical gryphon, raising all
four front legs, and put them on the back of the one in front of
me/us, while the one behind me/us puts its/our legs on my/our back.
The whole circle balances, with loads equally distributed. Take a
few steps forward this way, left, stop, right, stop, wait, then
left again, stop, right again, stop. Like a clunky robot conga
line. Conga circle, in this case.