Fractions (76 page)

There was no sense of time having passed. No white light, no Near Death Experience for me. One moment I was lying on my back, heat and blood from my body melting the cold snow, and the colours going. The next –

I was sitting bolt upright and stark naked on a bed, facing a wide window. The window was a rectangle of utter blackness divided horizontally by a white band, itself banded with black lines of varying thickness. I felt exactly as if I'd been wakened by an air-raid siren. And yet the room was silent, except for a distant susurrus that I took to be ventilation, but which might as well have been wind in trees. The air held no fading echoes, and no sound rang in my ears.

I no time to wonder where I was, because outside the window, heading straight towards it and me, was a rock. It was tumbling end over end with deceptive slowness and its apparent size against the black background and the white bands was increasing so fast that I knew it would smash through the window in seconds.

It was falling towards me between two huge jointed constructions – like arms made from girders – that extended outwards from positions to either side of the window. Between me and the window stood an empty mesh frame, in the outline form of a man with feet set apart and arms splayed out, like the imprint left by a cartoon character slamming into a chicken-wire fence and then falling back.

I knew what to do, and I didn't wonder that I knew what to do. I leapt from the bed and threw myself into the frame. It pressed itself against my skin and across my eyes.

Everything changed. The window was all my sight, and the arms outside it were my arms. The rock seemed less than half a metre from my face, and now drifting, not hurtling, towards it. I brought my hands in and around it and caught it as easily as a beach-ball.

Except that I was now moving backwards.

I pushed it away, still holding it, and turned to look behind me. A wall, banded and whorled with red and orange, yellow and white, occupied the entire view, and between me and it was a swarm of black dots and one great webwork of black lines. At the same instant, the wall resolved itself into part of a spherical surface, curving away in all directions to a fuzzy edge against the black space, and I became aware that I was moving – falling – towards it.

I struggled to stop falling. There was a sensation of slipping and slithering and trying to find a foothold, and then of finding it, of the soles of my feet digging in. At the lower margin of my sight, a brief burst of light and a wisp of vapour appeared and vanished.

Then I was back in the room, standing in the mesh frame with my hands in front of my face. Outside the window, the greater arms still held the rock. I could see the light and shadow of its pitted surface, the black fingers like the limbs of insects.

I disengaged myself from the frame and stepped back and sat down on the bed. The frame stood like a wire sculpture. Slowly it spread its arms again. That was one hell of an advanced telepresence rig, I thought. While I was in it, it had felt as if the entire…spaceship?…I was in was
my
body. The detail about the rocket control being subjectively equivalent to my legs struck me as particularly neat. But I'd felt no acceleration when the rocket had fired. I pondered this anomaly as I looked around and tried to take stock of my situation.

First, my body. As far as I could make out it was just as I remembered it, scrawny and wrinkled and old but, as they say, well-preserved: rather like those Bronze Age corpses found in peat-bogs. Five knobs of scar-tissue made a diagonal across my chest. I fingered them thoughtfully.

The room was about four metres from the rear wall to the window, five metres on the other axis, the ceiling two and half metres up. The bed was a plain, king-size pine bed with cotton sheets and duvet. The window occupied the entirety of one wall. The other walls were matt white. The floor was covered with pale-brown carpet. To my right was a wooden chair and table with a screen and datapad. To my left, a tall cupboard.

And in the leftward wall, a door.

I stood up and walked around the bed and opened the cupboard. Jeans hung over a rail, neatly folded stacks of tee-shirts and underpants and socks were piled on shelves. Several identical pairs of trainers lay at the bottom.

I got dressed and, after a moment of hesitation, opened the door to find, banally enough, a bathroom: shower, lavatory, wash-stand. Through another door, a small kitchen, which in turn opened to a lounge about the same size as the first room. It had a sofa instead of a bed, a television screen in one corner. The wall facing the sofa was another window, and standing between the sofa and the window was another man-shaped wire-mesh mould. Presumably I could leap from the sofa and hurl myself into it if an approaching rock or other emergency was brought to my attention. I returned to the bedroom.

It may seem surprising that I began with exploring what was immediately to hand, and didn't rush to work out where I was. I suppose I was trying not to think about it, trying to extract every last drop of the reassurance that each apparently normal feature of my strange environment had evidently been designed to give.

The abnormal features were not reassuring at all. I sat and stared out through the transparent wall. The spherical surface outside was a planet, and the only planet it could be – assuming I was still in the Solar system – was Jupiter. The white bands with finer black lines within were, as my vessel turned and its arms shunted the rock away, more and more clearly part of an immense ring.

The Rings of Jove:
there
was something remarkable enough in its implications, but it was nothing to the fact that I was walking around. There was no evidence that I was under acceleration, no sense of motion when the view outside the window reeled. That the vessel used rockets was proof enough that no form of gravity-control was involved: if you have gravity-control, you have a Space Drive into the bargain, and you certainly don't fart around with rockets.

One horribly plausible explanation, as I sat there with my head in my hands (ha!), was that the real virtual reality here wasn't the telepresence I'd experienced in the frame. That telepresence could be the real thing; the rooms, and the flesh, in which I found myself, the figment. My real body, now, could be the ship itself, and what I experienced ‘inside' it a simulation, run on that ship's computer.

There was also the possibility that it was the other way round – that my body and the room were real, and that what was outside was a simulation. (Or a real telepresence – I tried to remember if any of Jupiter's moons had a similar mass to Earth. Or whether, perhaps, I was on a ship or space-station, spinning to give a one-gee weight…) Could it be that what I'd woken from was mere amnesia: that I hadn't died in that Kazakh snow-drift but had recovered, and had worked for years on this evidently gigantic project?

Or, of course, I might not be in space at all! The whole set-up could just as well be some VR training rig on Earth! Surely, of all the possibilities, that was the one that Occam's razor shaved the least. Perversely, it was the one I thought of last, perhaps because I didn't dare to hope that it was correct.

Still, it brought me to my feet. I went to the table and looked at the computer: flat screen, flat pad, all standard.

All dead. Damn.

 

I stepped into the frame again. Once more, with my face pressed against the metal net, my viewpoint became one with that of the machine. I moved the arms of the frame, but the arms of the ship didn't move with them. I guessed that I only had control of them in certain circumstances. So I hung there for a while, and took in the scene.

Jupiter loomed before me. I was moving rapidly towards the swarm of black dots around the black structure. With another rocket burn, this time from the front and again without any sense of a change in velocity, I slowed and drifted into the swarm. As I passed other darting machines I was able to examine their shape and infer that of my own:

Cylindrical, they had arms at mid-section which appeared capable of articulating and extending in any direction; ‘hands' like bushes, fingers repeatedly dividing and sub-dividing; the trunk covered with lenses, nozzles, aerials and hatches; four shorter, sturdier limbs for gripping and grappling; all (except the lenses) made from a matt black substance that didn't look metallic, and which was usually stained and scratched. The machines oriented themselves with the jets (robots with attitude control, I thought with an inward smile) and were working in eerie, silent harmony on what looked, to me at that time, the biggest space-station ever built. If the robots were of approximately human size, then the structure must be tens of kilometres across.

I remembered early experiments with spiders in space, spiders on drugs. What I saw could be imagined as the work of a million free-falling, hallucinating spiders. Around it the black robots moved in their Newtonian ballet, and within its strands other things moved with an easier grace. Their numerous and multi-coloured forms resembled computer renderings of chaos equations, mathematical monsters whose outer fractal surfaces whipped and flickered like the cilia of micro-organisms in a droplet of water.

Already I thought of them as the enemy.

 

The machine which I inhabited floated into the great web, attached itself to a section of one of the strands and began to work with the smallest fingers of its fingers (should I say, the decimals of its digits?) on something at a node of several strands. The object of its toil was below the resolution of my present sight. I disengaged from the frame and stepped back. Through the window I could see everything speeded up – the fingers a blur of motion, the shapes within the web flowing and flying.

I walked into the kitchen. Taps turned, water boiled; the coffee-jar was labelled ‘Nescafé' and its contents tasted better than I remembered. A cigarette-lighter and an open pack of Silk Cut lay on the surface beside the sink. The heat from the flame, the tumbling curls of smoke, the nicotine rush were all as good as real.

I took a long drag and breathed it out with an enjoyment that had a certain unaccustomed purity. One thing to be said for being dead: you don't worry about your health. I wondered what would happen if I set out to damage everything in sight, including myself. Once, when I was about thirteen and reading Bishop Berkeley's insidious speculation, I'd formed the mad notion of testing it, of scraping at the surfaces of the world to expose the grinning skull of God…here, that insanity might be possible – did the simulation extend to the interiors of things, to the interior of myself? – but I didn't care to try the experiment. Intellectually, I had no difficulty in accepting the possibility that I was a simulation – uploading had been speculated about for long enough, and it seemed an inevitable consequence of the deep technology which Myra had told me about. Nanotechnology and strong AI could emulate a human mind, I'd never doubted that.

Emotional acceptance was something else.

I carried the coffee and cigarettes into the lounge and sat down on the sofa. After a moment of hunting around I discovered a remote control for the television, lying in a corner of the room. I settled down again and keyed the first channel. When I saw what came on I almost dropped the coffee.

The face that appeared on the screen was Reid's. He looked physically younger than he had the last time I saw him – the last time I (really) saw
anything
– but spiritually older. I have no other way to describe it; the whole set of his expression conveyed a hard-won wisdom and experience that would have been startling in some aged sage, and were doubly so on the familiar lean features of his more youthful self.

‘This is a recording,' he said, and smiled. He waved a hand at the room in which I sat. ‘And so is this, as I'm sure you suspect by now. The fact that you're watching this means you've returned to consciousness.
Video, ergo sum
, or something – anyway, welcome back. It can't be much fun being a flatline, which is what you've been until now. You've been running on programming, habit and reflex: a virtual zombie you might say, and now some unpredictable but probably inevitable combination of circumstances has woken you up.'

He paused. ‘If you can't understand what I'm saying, or if you find it disturbing, please key the second channel.'

I made no move.

‘Good,' Reid resumed. ‘I knew you had it in you – you had to be pretty sane and tough to get your head frozen or your brain scanned, or whatever it was you did to end up here. So I'll go on giving it to you straight.

‘The date is –' (a slight hiatus, a glitch of editing software) ‘– March 3rd, 2093. This may come as a surprise, if you've figured out what's going on – surely, you think, not so soon? Welcome to the Singularity. What you're seeing outside is the work of billions of conscious beings, living and thinking thousands of times faster than you. The entities crawling among the struts of this structure are entire civilisations of humanity's descendants. Those macro-organisms, or macros, as the humans around here call them, are constellations of smart matter – what we used to call nanotech – each of them capable of sustaining virtual realities that are the homes of millions of minds – some originally human, some artificial intelligences. Every one of those minds experiences simulations, shared or private, of worlds beyond our wildest dreams. Each is capable of augmenting its capacities far beyond anything we think of as human, and has the opportunity to do so in exact proportion to its ability to make good use of its existing capacities.

‘And many of them were once like you! An ordinary human being, whose brain had been recorded, neurone by neurone, synapse by synapse in an infiltrating matrix of smart matter. Recorded, and replicated, and run on superior hardware with a success which you are right now in the ideal position to appreciate.'

He laughed. Something in his tone chilled me, a cynicism as deep and mature as that sentiment is usually shallow and callow.