IGMS Issue 15 (6 page)

"Silence is the last thing I expected from you," she said.

"You were right," he said. "I'm in our old room."

"Returned to the scene of the crime," she said.

"Something like that," he said. "You know they're planning on selling Lo'ihi, don't you?"

"I haven't been in stasis the last five hundred years," she said.

"But if our sentience seeds are still there they won't be able to sell a square millimetre of the island," he said.

"It's been seven thousand years," she said. "Who knows if our seeds survived?"

"I have to see you," he said. "We need to talk about this."

"We will," she said. "Tomorrow."

"Just tell me where you are," he said. "I'll be there as soon as I can."

"I've told you where I'll be," she said. "That's all you'll get. I have to go, Fad."

She cut the connection.

He stopped himself from re-connecting. His hands vibrated, the rental heart pounded in his chest, and the pressure in his bladder brought tears to his eyes. He tried to remember what was so great about flesh. Washroom technology had evolved somewhat since he'd been away, and he had to ask the room for instructions while his bladder continued to throb. The room was halfway through its explanation when Fadid lowered his shorts, picked a polished device, and released his bladder into it.

A wildfire started where the stream left his body and burrowed inwards. Fadid howled before he shut off the pain feedback loop. He consulted his body's diagnostic software, which reiterated that the transit authority hadn't had the chance to clean out the social diseases the rental body carried. When the wildfire ended, he ran down to front desk.

"Where is the nearest autodoc?" Fadid asked the hotel clerk.

"We have one in the basement, sir. Shall I book an appointment?"

"This is an emergency."

After another substantial bribe, the clerk ejected the autodoc's current client -- a sentient wearing a rental housecat body with a pair of torn ears -- and Fadid slid into the chromed chair and endured the various probings and manipulations of the autodoc.

"I've taken care of most of your ailments, sir," the autodoc said. "But I can do nothing for the venereal infection."

"Doctors could cure VDs before a single machine could think," Fadid said. "Surely an advanced automaton such as yourself can handle a bit of burning pee?"

"Schindler's Convention, sir," the autodoc said.

"My VD is sentient?" Fadid said.

"And as such, protected by the tenants of the convention. No sentient may kill another. No sentient may enslave another. No sentient may evict another sentient from their lawfully inhabited home. No sentient --"

"I know the law," Fadid said. He broadcast the next over the public channel. "Who's riding my balls?"

"What poetry, what dignity!" Levitz-Prolific said. "I am truly in the presence of the greatest artist of this or any other millennia. Fadid the Longing. Fadid the --"

"Can you euthanize me?" Fadid asked the autodoc. The chrome chair offered several auto-termination options, but Fadid leapt out of the seat and ran up the stairs, all the while blasting messages to the bacteria within.

"Hawthorne and the others sent you back here, Levitz-Prolific, not me. I don't know what you're planning by pulling this little stunt, but I'll pay you whatever it takes to get out of my body."

"I was in the middle of a most incredible genesis," Levitz-Prolific said. "My poem-equations were poised on the brink of greatness, metaphor described through algorithms that breathed with the very meaning of the universe. Then my concentration was broken by a washed-up artist who couldn't let go of the past, and I was forced from the womb, and sent along with the washed-up artist himself. After a bit of financial lubrication, the transit authority was kind enough to offer me one of his substandard models, and I accepted. My plan is simple, Fadid. I will do what my body wishes to do -- colonize yours -- and along the way, I hope to make your life as miserable as you've made mine."

"This could be the last chance I get with the woman I've loved for longer than you've been alive," Fadid said.

In response, Levitz-Prolific hummed the opening bars of Fadid's culture opera.

"You were supposed to delete that," Fadid said. The bacterial poet continued to sing an older version of a song Fadid had since revised. During a workshop meeting in the comet months earlier, Fadid had sent a draft version of his culture opera to the other artists; Levitz-Prolific must have saved his copy. Fadid shut out the radio frequency on which he sang, then the microwave channel the poet adopted, then the resonant signal the bacteria set up in his rental body, and a slew of other communication pathways that broadcast a bastardized version of his opera. There was a brief moment of silence, and then his culture opera, the work he'd spent two hundred years composing to win Kabime's heart, began to trickle in via intracellular transmission. Every single cell in Fadid's rental body contained nano-mites that housed a portion of his personality, just as every cell in Levitz-Prolific's bacterial culture contained the nano-mites in which his sentience sat. Where the nano-mites had direct contact, Levitz-Prolific issued a steady stream of information packets Fadid could never ignore. The poet was a buzz in the ear that wouldn't go away.

"Go nova, Sol, and free us all from your tyranny," Fadid said. "I need a drink."

Back out in Hilo's tunneled streets, he bought two bottles of papaya wine, stuffed one in his pocket while he drank the other. He wandered the streets for a while, trying to pass the time, but tomorrow would come no sooner and his opera continued to sound off-key inside his gonads.

Preoccupied as he was, Fadid walked with the steady flow of foot, belly, pseudopodia, and wing traffic that moved through Hilo. It wasn't until the Polynesian architecture of the Second Kingdom Palace loomed over the heads of the crowd, revealed in a giant bell-shaped chamber excavated in the surrounding lava, that Fadid realized where the crowd had taken him. The site of the Lo'ihi real estate auction.

Fadid followed the crowd through the palace's great double doors. Clairvoy Realty public perspective windows hung in the air beneath the bamboo timbers, and the windows looked in on what the realtors imagined life should look like on Lo'ihi. Homes floated above lava floes. Where the molten rock met the sea, spas were constructed, in which Lo'ihi's residents basked in salt-steam baths. Children with butterfly nets caught Pele's tears -- airborne pieces of glassy lava-rock.

At the end of the great hall that led to the old King's audience chamber, the realtors had captured a tank full of molten Lo'ihi. The lava boiled in a transparent half-cylinder four metres long and a metre in diameter. Sentients of all shapes and sizes thronged about the tank , entranced by the liquid version of a material that was typically only encountered in its solid form.

The lava entranced Fadid for different reasons.

Seven thousand years ago, during that first dive to Lo'ihi, he and Kabime had considered themselves junior volcanologists, and had developed nano-mites that could survive within the heat of Lo'ihi's core and report back what they experienced. Later, when Kabime suggested they merge, it was Fadid who'd chosen the vessel for the theoretical personality that would result from their union: they would inhabit Lo'ihi herself. They modified the nano mites so that they could survive indefinitely in the lava, and expanded the mite's processing capabilities so they could host a new sentience that was a merger of both their personalities.

They'd injected the modified mites into Lo'ihi, but then Fadid lost his nerve and suggested the pact instead of the immediate merger. Though he knew something died in their relationship the moment he suggested the pact, the two of them prepared the nano-mites so Lo'ihi would be ready for their merger when she rose to the surface. They encrypted the mites with their own base codes, the string of binary numbers as unique as a human's genetic code, so that no one else could access the mites. To further ensure the seeds weren't detected or hacked, they shut down all the communication devices in the mites save direct, intracellular communication like that Levitz-Prolific used to communicate with the tissue of Fadid's rental body. Locked-up as they were, the devices were no longer true mites, they were mindless vessels that he and Kabime took to calling sentience seeds: one day, a mind would grow within.

As the seeds were deaf to every form of communication save intracellular, Fadid would have to inset a portion of his rental body into the lava to determine whether their sentience seeds had survived the millennia. But he couldn't do it yet. There were too many sentients milling around the lava-tank, he would attract too much attention. Instead, he followed the crowd into the King Kamehama the Seventh's audience chamber.

Beneath bamboo beams as wide as his rental body was tall, Fadid joined hundreds of sentients who waited for the auction to begin. The Realty people had decorated the room with the same white and blue naval motif and more perspective windows hung against the wall displaying scenes from their version of life on Lo'ihi.

When the crowd's grumbling reached some pre-calculated threshold, King Kamehama's old throne slid backwards, and a purple man rose out of a trap door where the throne had been. This must be Clairvoy, Fadid thought. He'd dyed his skin a regal violet, and on his head, yellow, red, orange, and green feathers sprouted in the place hair should have been. Other than the feathers, he wore only a thin loincloth in the white and blue naval theme. Fadid felt overdressed.

"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome," Clairvoy said. "I knew you'd come. You see my mother gave me my father's name; he too was Clairvoy, and yes, he saw me coming. I've inherited his gift for future-gazing, and let me tell you what I see heading you way: the most glamorous piece of real estate in the solar system. An infant Hawaiian Island, for you to raise as your own. Tonight, we'll be selling choice pieces of Lo'ihi, who is scheduled to rise above high tide around sunset tomorrow. It won't be cheap, people; I've foreseen that much. Without further ado, let the bidding begin!"

He clapped his hands and reclined back in the old king's throne. The auctioneer took his place, a thin man dressed in a sensible business toga, who described the bidding process: over the next twenty decades, Clairvoy's volcanologists predicted a twelve hectare growth per year, which would increase to fifty hectares in about twenty-five years. After one hundred years, the predictions grew less reliable, though the auctioneer promised constant growth for several millennia. The auctioneer only offered properties scheduled to form in the next hundred years.

The first properties up for auction would emerge as waterfront in five years, but would be landlocked in ten. They sold for what Fadid earned in five hundred years.

Fadid drank his papaya wine as the bidding continued. The spectacle was one he'd seen too often in his long years; the natural beauty of the world carved up and portioned off to the highest bidder.

When a fifty-year ocean-front property sold for what it would cost to buy a small city on Mars, he laughed and spat wine across an annoyed orangutan's back. He took that as his cue to leave.

On the way out, he stopped at the lava tank. Fadid wiggled his rental fingers, assigned random numbers to them, then picked the unlucky digit and dipped the tip of his middle finger into the lava.

He squeaked before he turned off the new pain feedback loop.

Then he made contact with the seeds.

"Are you all right?" said the same Clairvoy Realty girl who'd greeted him at the entrance to Hilo.

"Just fine," he said.

"Are you sure? Your finger is sitting in a pool of lava."

"Oh!" Fadid said. He pulled his finger out, which now ended in a flat, cauterized wound which pulsed and throbbed in a manner that should hurt a very great deal. "I keep my entire pain feedback system shut down when in the flesh. Can't bear the sensation, to tell you the truth."

"You've seriously injured yourself," the girl said. "Let me call you one of our medical drones."

"I'll be fine," he said. He had to leave the palace so he could think about what he'd learned in the brief communication. The seeds had evolved since he and Kabime had sown them there. They thrived in the molten rock and had multiplied so fully that they extended to every cubic micrometer of the stuff.

"The drone won't take long," the girl said. "You aren't the first tourist to burn themselves."

A pink sphere the size of a cantaloupe floated over to them and opened like a flowering rosebud. Fadid put his finger into the opening, which closed around his finger. He felt a sucking sensation and heard a faint whirring as the drone went to work.

"You've got to be more careful," the girl said. "At least have your rental body inform you when it's damaged."

"Your finger is knitted," the drone said. "However you appear to have a rather brutal bacterial infection in your gonads. Shall I take care of that too, Fadid?"

"Fadid?" the girl said. "As in Fadid, the singer? Fadid the Longing? The unrequited lover-minstrel?"

"Guilty," he said. "But please don't make a fuss about it."

"Of course not," she said. Her eyes grew bright. "Take me out for a drink."

"Didn't you just hear the drone?" he said. "I've got one bitchy VD."

"Who cares," she said. "You're Fadid. Sing me a song, one of those songs you wrote for the woman who left you."

"She didn't leave me, we just kind of drifted apart," Fadid said. The girl looked skeptical. "I'm sorry, but I really can't stay."

"Didn't you come for the auction?" she said.

"It's not quite what I expected," he said.

"Beyond your means?" she said.

"Not to my tastes would be more accurate," he said. "Thank you for healing the finger, but really, I must run."

The girl watched as he hurried out of the Second Kingdom Palace.

"Does no one have any artistic sensibilities these days?" Levitz-Prolific said. "She was tripping over herself to talk to you, and you haven't had a hit since those silly song-scapes you wrote fifteen hundred years ago. She wouldn't be able to grasp the most obvious meaning in my poem-equations."