Fractions (83 page)

‘Not while they were going bad,' he pointed out. ‘And it was I who asked you to do that. Like I said, I'm sorry.'

At that moment his face showed real guilt. I knew him well enough to know that guilt was not an emotion whose validity he recognised, or was likely to feel for long.

‘Can't anything be done about it?' Meg asked.

Reid shook his head. ‘It's the same old trap,' he said. ‘The fast folk, whether they're AIs or uploads themselves, could do it. We can't, and we daren't do anything to revive them until we know how to stop them going bad again, or contain them if they do.'

We stood in silence, thinking this over.

‘Well,' I said, ‘I can live with it. Plenty for a bright young robot to do here. We can always use VR and projections and so on to socialise –'

‘I wouldn't advise it,' Reid said. ‘The attitude I told you about has got more entrenched, if anything. People are people. Robots are robots. Along with that goes an almost hysterical feeling against blurring the distinction between VR and actual reality. Everybody is convinced that was how the fast folk went bad, or mad.'

‘And they're not far wrong,' I said grimly. ‘But I can't see people giving up the advantages of having VR.'

‘They don't,' said Reid. He ran his finger along the dust on top of the clone-pod, leaving a shiny trail. ‘They use it for games, and for porn I guess, and for design work. But seamless VR, like you live in – no.'

‘OK,' Meg said. ‘Like Jon says, I can live with it. I can live with him. I've never done anything else. But what I want to know is, what can we actually do? Couldn't we get on with the research into controlling or containing the fast folk? After all, I reckon we're pretty well equipped for it.'

Reid glowered at me.

‘No way,' he said. ‘No fucking way. There's no research project at the moment. We can't afford it, and I won't allow it. I've got the code-keys to revive the macros, and I'll decide the time and place. We'll do all that in good time, when we've got isolated space-labs with laser-cannon pointing at them! And let me tell you, anybody else on this whole fucking planet would've left you switched off and shoved you in the nearest metal-recycler the minute, the fucking
minute
they found you were infected with some kinda shit from the macros!'

He was backing away, a shadow of alarm and suspicion on his face.

‘You know,' he went on, ‘that suggestion you just made is exactly the sort of trick you'd pull, if you were being used as a vector by something left by one of those things. Don't get me wrong, Wilde, I don't blame you. But I've been burned once by them, and that's too often.'

I believed him. There was no case to plead. In his place, I'd have done and thought the same. We were, I realised, alike: knowing no law or morality or sentimentality, our selfishness not petty like a child's but vast like a devil's, owing no loyalty to anything but what each of our fierce egos had already taken as its own. Reid had taken a world to his heart, and I the dead.

‘OK,' I said, ‘OK, calm down. But just tell me, what can I do?'

‘Get as far away from here as possible,' Reid said. ‘Explore the planet – that'd be useful, and interesting, and it'll keep you out of the way of human beings for a long time to come.'

‘All right,' I said. ‘That suits us fine.'

Only Meg, I'm sure, sensed the bitterness behind my acceptance of exile.

I looked around. ‘What's going to happen to this place, now that you've finished the downloads?'

Reid shrugged. ‘Probably sell it to a health-company,' he said. ‘We can still clone replacement bodies or parts for people. We can still do live transfers, it's just reviving stored minds that's out for the moment. And…' He stopped. ‘Och, all sorts of things! Why?'

I laughed. ‘I don't want to see clones of myself walking around. Or of Meg, for that matter. I've enough problems with my identity as it is.'

He reached into a slot in the side of the computer on the pod.

‘Here you are,' he said.

He passed me a sliver of plastic, like a microscope slide.

‘Your tissue-sample,' Reid smiled.

I looked down at the transparent slide, in the robot's vision. At its centre was an almost invisible speck of skin, sealed in a bubble of nitrogen; and a code chip.

‘So this is the real me,' I said. ‘What's on the chip?'

‘Your original memory,' Reid said. He walked to the other pod, and passed over another slide. ‘Meg's, you see, has none. Of course, yours is no bloody use any more – couldn't be revived without the fast folk. But anyway, it's yours.'

I stored the slides away in a compartment of the shell.

‘As for these blanks…' Reid said. He tapped a code into each pod's computer. The fluid in the pods became milky, then murky, as the tiny machinery of dissolution, the nano pirhanas, did their work. Even the blood-cells were torn down to molecules before they could stain the water. It was over in minutes, the pods flushed clean.

‘Thank you,' I said, leaving.

And fuck you, mate.

 

We'd earned a fortune building the canal. It was still just possible for a robot, known to have a human mind, to trade on its own behalf. I don't know if anyone knew I was the last of that kind. We cleaned out the bank-account and bought a land-crawler and a load of gear – tools, machine-tools, comms, nukes, nanotech, VR software, cloning-kits, all the processors we could get. I loaded them on the truck, plugged myself into the cab and set off, through the streets and out of the city on the opposite side from the Stone Canal. Ahead lay the planet's semi-arid wastes, its dry sea-beds, its relict or extinct life-forms' dry bones and drier exoskeletons. Behind us, the city's rising towers shrank behind the horizon.

I switched to a virtual reality module that had me sitting driving, with Meg on the seat by my side. I grinned at her. She had been silent, unconsulted, through all that purposeful activity.

‘What are we going to do, Jon?' she said.

I took one hand from the wheel and waved, taking in the illusory, grimy realism of the cab. There were cigarette-burns on the dash. ‘You can really get into those seamless virtualities,' I said. ‘This is better than the flesh, my darling.'

‘I'll take your word for it,' she said. ‘But what are we going to do?'

‘We're going to drive around the planet,' I said. ‘And while we're at it, we'll hack through the gates of hell.'

I told her what I meant, and she went along with it. Any woman I ever knew, and any man for that matter, would have pleaded with me to change my mind. Say what you like about succubi, they are loyal little fucks.

Night fell, and without headlights we drove on, tirelessly, and discussed how to hack the gates of hell. Overhead, the first incoming comets made dots and dashes in the sky.

 

We rolled around the planet more times than I care to count, and the planet rolled around its star a hundred times before the tower was built: a couple of centuries, Earth reckoning. The canals spread, other settlements grew up. The population grew; slowly, as immortal populations do. We discovered mineral deposits, fossil-beds, coal. We sold the information, and sometimes the materials. Prospectors hitched lifts, paid for in odds and ends of stores and clothes that we bartered with other travellers.

Our bank-account stayed open, and filled up. To replenish our supplies we traded indirectly, through front companies and dodgy intermediaries. We talked to robots often, people seldom. The attitudes Reid had warned us about became not just entrenched in the culture, they became its foundation stone. When it became fashionable, among the frivolously rich, to clone ‘blanks' from the spare tissue-samples and equip them with robot minds, the distinction between real people and machines was only deepened.

Except among a dissident minority, who called themselves abolitionists. Some preserved the ideas of an ancient anarchist agitator, Jonathan Wilde. His memory, they assured each other, was immortal. We steered well clear of them.

Partly in reaction to the abolitionists, the ideas of ‘robot rights', and of re-starting the race of the fast folk, and of raising the dead, all became connected, and rejected. Reid became eloquent in their rejection. If it was ever to be done it would be in a far future, which receded like communism once did in the minds of the Communists.

One night, while our crawler crunched along a flood-channel in the high desert, we finished the tower. We walked back up the virtual valley, to our house.

‘Ready?' I asked Meg.

‘Ready as we'll ever be,' she said.

I idled the crawler, and stepped into the frame.

In the last couple of centuries I'd become sensitive to the difference between a virtual body and a real one. For all its apparent solidity, for all the pleasure it could reproduce or invent, for all the realism of the pains and discomfort it sometimes felt (for consistency rules) the virtual body lacked some final, vital touch, which was nothing more than the daily millions of subtle impacts and impulses that arise from the quotidian grapple with materiality. When I experienced the
robot
body as my own, I felt far more human than I ever did in the simulation of my human flesh.

So now. The flattened oval of my metal shell was cupped in the cab, limbs retracted, cables linking it to the crawler's controls. My senses picked up the radiation from the stars, the faint infra-red of the cold and still cooling sand, the cautious stirrings and fierce encounters of the desert's remnant native, and invading alien, life.

I looked around, awaiting some revelation. The world was the same as ever. I had built a tower in my mind, from my recollections, from the bits of data I'd snatched from the decadence of the macro, and nothing had changed.

The Malley Mile – our side of it – was in its familiar place, in the depths of the sky. I looked up to where I knew it was in its orbit. On the other side, in another time, was the surface of Jupiter. The surface would have expanded by now, and the orbit would have decayed. The wormhole would encounter the planet in – I thought for a moment – a year, within an order of magnitude. It was hard to tell; too many unknowns. In any case, an order-of-magnitude approximation wasn't bad after all this time: no more than a decade, no less than a month would pass before the Malley Mile met the biggest macro of them all, the substance of the gas giant turned into the substance of mind.

It had been a grand plan, and a long plan, that I'd listened to in my last encounter with the decaying domain of the fast folk. They would slow their physical and mental processes down, almost freeze their development; and then, with literally cool deliberation, the ones who retained their rationality would excise the rest. Then, with the resources of Jupiter at their disposal, the survivors would multiply again. This time, they could wait, until their expanding domain embraced the Malley Mile: the gate to the end of time.

 

The shock of this understanding broke through the illusion that it was something I'd always known. I realised the tower had changed me after all. It had installed this new knowledge; of the Malley equations, of the macros' plans, and more: I knew now how to start-up a stored mind, and imprint it on a brain. I didn't have the reach, the scope, the speed of the being I'd been when I first learned them, in the macro. If I had, now, become one of the fast folk, I was running slow, in primitive hardware. But I remembered what I'd learned, and understood the peril we faced.

I stepped out of the frame, and told Meg. She had been changed, too; she understood.

‘Call Reid,' she said.

We flipped the scene. Back, now, in the illusory cab, to our shared fantasy of being just a trucker and a girl hitch-hiker he'd picked up; sad, really. I mentally checked the positions of the communications satellites, then tilted the phone-screen and put a call through to Reid.

It was the most private, personal number I'd ever found for him, and still I got his secretary.

I stared at her, my mind working a lot faster than hers; as her green eyes widened, her black eyebrows narrowed in puzzlement as she looked back at us, at a strange, silent couple in a truck out on the desert. What arrogance Reid must have, what contempt for anything I might feel! By now he must be certain that I felt nothing, that virtual blood could not really chill, and simulated tears could not wet a representation of a face.

I noticed, thinking so fast that everything froze for a moment, that I had an open channel. I threw subliminal suggestions and viral subversions down that channel like a curse. Some of them hit firewalls, some got lost in transcription, and some just screwed around with Reid's electronics. But some, I was sure, got through.

Her lips just opened, just parted. I blinked, once.

‘Forget it,' I said. ‘Wrong number.'

 

We set a course for the foothills of the Madreporite Mountains, intersecting the Stone Canal. We wanted to get as close to the source as possible, where the cometary thaw was still rich in organic molecules. Every day or so another chunk of dirty ice would hurtle overhead and make a flash behind the eroded peaks.

After parking the crawler in a gorge by the canal, I went around to the back and started hauling out equipment. The growth-vat was crude, barely more than a tub with a computer and a microfactory attached. I tapped the extraction-pipes under the canal-bank, and put together my own refinery. I checked through my new knowledge of how to install a stored mind in a copy of the brain from which it had been taken. I took a small plastic slide from inside my shell, and slotted it in the machine.

Part of the clone's growth was natural, but much of it was hastened and forced by smart-matter assemblers. Even so, building a body takes time. We didn't have time to recapitulate development from an embryo: he grew full-size from the start, a skeleton taking shape and acquiring organs, muscles and skin in a grotesque reversal of the process of decay. But Meg and I observed his growth, or construction, as fondly as if he'd been a foetus in a swelling womb.