Halo
A Novel
by Tom Maddox
From Tom Maddox.Net
Halo
Table of Contents
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Dedication
To the memory of George Maddox, my father; Paul Cohen, my friend; and all our lamented dead, lost in time.
PART I OF V
Everything is destined to reappear as simulation.
Jean Baudrillard, America
On a rainy morning in Seattle, Gonzales was ready for the egg. A week ago he had returned from Myanmar, the country once known as Burma, and now, after two days of drugs and fasting, he was prepared: he had become an alien, at home in a distant landscape.
His brain was filled with blossoms of fire, their spread white flesh torched to yellow, the center of a burning world. On the dark stained oak door, angel wings danced in blue flame, their faces beatific in the cold fire. Staring at the animated carved figures, Gonzales thought, the fire is in my eyes, in my brain.
He pushed down the s-curved brass handle and stepped through to the hallway, his split-toed shoes of soft cotton and rope scuffing without noise across floors of bleached oak. Through the open door at the hallway's end, morning's light through stained glass made abstract patterns of crimson and buttery yellow. Inside the room, a blue monitor console stood against the far wall, SenTrax corporate sunburst glowing on its face; in the center of the room was the egg, split hemispheres of chromed steel, cracked and waiting. One half-egg was filled with beige tubes and snakes of optic cable, the other half with hard dark plastic lying slack against the shell.
Gonzales rubbed his hands across his eyes, then pulled his hair back into a long hank and slipped a circle of elastic over it. He reached to his waist and grabbed the bottom hem of his navy blue t-shirt and pulled the shirt over his head. Dropping it to the floor, he kicked off his shoes, stepped out of baggy tan pants and loose white cotton underpants and stood naked, his pale skin gleaming with a light coat of sweat. His skin felt hot, eyes grainy, stomach sore.
He stepped up and into a chrome half-egg, then shivered and lay back as body-warmth liquid bled into the slack plastic, which began to balloon underneath him. He took hold of finger-thick cables and pushed their junction ends home into the sockets set in the back of his neck. As the egg continued to fill, he fit a mask over his face, felt its edges seal, and inhaled. Catheters moved toward his crotch, iv needles toward the crooks of both arms. The egg shut closed on him and liquid spilled into its interior.
He floated in silence, waiting, breathing slowly and deeply as elation punched through the chaotic mix of emotions generated by drugs, meditation, and the egg. No matter that he was going to relive his own terror, this was what moved him: access to the many-worlds of human experience--travel through space, time, and probability all in one.
Virtual realities were everywhere--virtual vacations, sex, superstardom, you name it--but compared to the egg, they were just high-res videogames or stage magic. VRs used a variety of tricks to simulate physical presence, but the sensorium could be fooled only to a certain degree, and when you inhabited a VR, you were conscious of it, so sustaining its illusion depended on willing suspension of disbelief. With the egg, however, you got total involvement through all sensory modalities--the worlds were so compelling that people waking from them often seemed lost in the waking world, as if it were a dream.
A needle punched into a membrane set in one of the neural cables and injected a neuropeptide mix. Gonzales was transported.
It was the final day of Gonzales's three week stay in Pagan, the town in central Myanmar where the government had moved its records decades earlier, in the wake of ethnic rioting in Yangon. He sat with Grossback, the Division Head of SenTrax Myanmar, at a central rosewood table in the main conference room. The table's work stations, embedded oblongs of glass, lay dark and silent in front of them.
Gonzales had come to Myanmar to do an information audit. The local SenTrax group supplied the Federated State of Myanmar with its primary information utilities: all its records of personnel and materiel, and all transactions among them. A month earlier, SenTrax Myanmar's reports had triggered "look-see" alarms in the home company's passive auditing programs, and Gonzales and his memex had been sent to look more closely at the raw data.
So for twenty straight days Gonzales and the memex had explored data structures and their contents, testing nominal functional relationships against reality. Wherever there were movements of information, money, equipment or personnel, there were records, and the two followed. They searched cash trails, matched purchase orders to services and materiel, verified voucher signatures with personnel records, cross-checked the personnel records themselves against government databases, and traced the backgrounds and movements of the people they represented; they read contracts and back-chased to their bid and acquisition; they verified daily transaction logs.
Hard, slogging work, all patience and detail, and so far it had shown nothing but the usual inefficiencies--Grossback didn't run a particularly taut operation, but, as of the moment, he didn't seem to have a corrupt one. However, neither he nor SenTrax Myanmar was cleared yet; Gonzales's final report would come later, after he and the memex had analyzed the records at their leisure.
Gonzales stretched and rubbed his eyes. As usual at the end of short-term, intensive gigs like this, he felt tired, washed-out, eager to go. He said to Grossback, "I've got a company plane out of here late this afternoon to Bangkok. I'll connect with whatever commercial flight's available there."
Grossback smiled, obviously glad Gonzales was leaving. Grossback was a slight man, of mixed German and Thai descent; he had a light brown complexion, black hair, and delicate features. He wore politically correct clothing in the old-fashioned Burmese style: a dark skirt called a longyi, a white cotton shirt.
During Gonzales's time there, Grossback had dealt with him coldly and correctly from behind a mask of corporate protocol and clenched teeth. Fair enough, Gonzales had thought: the man's operation was suspect, and him along with it. Anyway, people resented these outside intrusions almost every time; representing Internal Affairs, Gonzales answered only to his division head, F.L. Traynor, and SenTrax Board, and that made almost everyone nervous.
"You leaving out of Myaung U Airport?" Grossback asked.
"No, I've asked for a pick-up south of town." Like anyone else who could arrange it, he was not going to fly out of Pagan's official airport, where partisan groups had several times brought down aircraft. Surely Grossback knew that.
Grossback asked, "What will your report say?"
Surprised, Gonzales said, "You know I can't tell you anything about that." Even mentioning the matter constituted an embarrassment, not to mention a reportable violation of corporate protocol. The man was either stupid or desperate.
"You haven't found anything," Grossback said.
What was his problem? Gonzales said, "I have a year's data to examine before I can make an assessment."
"You won't tell me what the preliminary report will look like," Grossback said. His face had gone cold.
"No," said Gonzales. He stood and said, "I have to finish packing." For the moment, he just wanted to get out before Grossback did something irretrievable, like threatening him or offering a bribe. "Goodbye," Gonzales said. The other man said nothing as Gonzales left the room.
Gonzales returned to the Thiripyitsaya Hotel, a collection of low bungalows fabricated from bamboo and ferro-concrete that stood above the Irrawady River. The rooms were afflicted by Myanmar's tattered version of Asian tourist decor: lacquered bamboo on the walls, along with leaping dragon holos, black teak dresser, tables, chairs, and bed frame, ceiling fans that had wandered in from the twentieth century--just to give your average citizen that rush of the Exotic East, Gonzales figured. However, the hotel had been rebuilt less than a decade before, so, by local standards, Gonzales had luxury: working climatizer, microwave, and refrigerator.
Of course, many nights the air conditioner didn't work, and Gonzales lay sweaty and semi-conscious through hot, humid nights then was greeted just after dawn by lizards fanning their ruby neck flaps and doing push ups.
He had gotten up several of those mornings and walked the cart paths that threaded the plains around Pagan, passing among the temples and pagodas as the sun rose and turned the morning mist into a huge veil of luminous pink, with the towers sticking up like fairy castles. Everywhere around Pagan were the temples, thousands of them, young and flourishing when William the Conqueror was king. Now, quick-fab structures housing government agencies nested among thousand year old pagodas, some in near perfect condition, like Thatbyinnu Temple, myriad others no more than ruins and forgotten names. You gained merit by building pagodas, not by keeping up those built by someone long dead.
Like some other Southeast Asian countries, Myanmar still was trying to recover from late-twentieth century politics; in Myanmar's case, its decades-long bout with round-robin military dictatorships and the chaos that came in their wake. And as was so often the case in politically wobbly countries, it still restricted access to the worldnet; through various kinds of governments, its leaders had found the prospect of free information flow unacceptable. Ka-band antennas were expensive, their use licensed by permits almost impossible to get. As a result, Gonzales and the memex had been like meat eaters stranded among vegetarians, unable to get their nourishment.
He'd taken down the memex that morning. Its functions dormant, it lay nestled inside one of his two fiber and aluminum shock-cases, ready for transport. The other case held memory boxes containing SenTrax Myanmar group's records.
When they got home, Gonzales would tell the memex the latest news about Grossback, how the man had cracked at the last moment. Gonzales was sure the m-i would think what he did--Grossback was dog dirty and scared they would find it.
At the edge of a sandy field south of Pagan, Gonzales waited for his plane. Gonzales wore his usual international traveller's mufti, a tan gabardine two-piece suit over an open-collared white linen shirt, dark brown slipover shoes. His hair was gathered back into a ponytail held together by a silver ring made from lizard figures joined head-to-tail. Next to him sat a soft brown leather bag and the two shock-cases.
In front of him a pagoda climbed in a series of steeples to a gilded and jeweled umbrella top, pointing to heaven. On its steps, beside the huge paw of a stone lion, a monk sat in full lotus, his face shadowed by the animal rising massive and lumpy and mock fierce above him. The lion's flanks were dyed orange by sunset, its lips stained the color of dried blood. The minutes passed, and the monk's voice droned, his face in shadow.
"Come tour the temples of ancient Pagan," a voice said. "Shwezigon, Ananda, Thatbyinnu--"
"Go away," Gonzales said to the tour cart that had rolled up behind him. It would hold two dozen or so passengers in eight rows of narrow wooden benches but was now empty--almost all the tourists would have joined the crush on the terraces of Thatbyinnu, where they could watch the sun set over the temple plain.
"Last tour of the day," the cart said. "Very cheap, also very good exchange rate offered as courtesy to visitors."
It wanted to exchange kyats for dollars or yen: in Myanmar, even the machines worked the black market. "No thanks."
"Extremely good rate, sir."
"Fuck off," Gonzales said. "Or I'll report you as defective." The cart whirred as it moved away.
Gonzales watched a young monk eyeing him from the other side of the road, ready to come across and beg for pencils or money. Gonzales caught the monk's eye and shook his head. The monk shrugged and walked on, his orange robe billowing.
Where the hell was his plane? Soon hunter flares would cut into the new moon's dark, and government drones would scurry around the edges of the shadows like huge mutant bats. Upcountry Myanmar trembled on the edge of chaos, beset by a multi-ethnic mix of Karens, Kachins, and Shans in various political postures, all fierce, all contemptuous of the central government. They fought with whatever was at hand, from sharpened stick to backpack missile, and they only quit when they died.
A high-pitched wail built quickly until it filled the air. Within seconds a silver swing-wing, an ungainly thing, each huge rectangular wing loaded with a bulbous, oversized engine pod, came low over the dark mass of forest. Its running lights flashing red and yellow, the swing-wing slewed to a stop above the field, wings tilting to the perpendicular and engine sound dropping into the bass. Its spots picked out a ten-meter circle of white light that the aircraft dropped into, blowing clouds of sand that swept over Gonzales in a whirlwind. The inverted fans' roar dropped to a whisper, and with a creak the plane kneeled on its gear, placing the cockpit almost on the ground. Gonzales picked up his bags and walked toward the plane. A ladder unfolded with a hydraulic hiss, and Gonzales stepped up and into the plane's bubble.
"Mikhail Gonzales?" the pilot asked. His multi-function flight glasses were tilted back on his forehead, where their mirrored ovoid lenses made a blank second pair of eyes; a thin strand of black fiberoptic cable trailed from their rim. Beneath the glasses, his thin face was brown and seamed--no cosmetic work for this guy, Gonzales thought. The man wore a throwaway "tropical" shirt with dancing pink flamingos on a navy blue background.
"That's me," Gonzales said. He gestured with the shock-case in his right hand, and the pilot toggled a switch that opened the luggage locker. Gonzales put his bags into the steel compartment and watched as the safety net pulled tight against the bags and the compartment door closed. He took a seat in the first of eight empty rows behind the pilot. Cushions sighed beneath him, and from the seatback in front of him a feminine voice said, "You should engage your harness. If you need instructions, please say so now."
Gonzales snapped closed the trapezoidal catch where shoulder and lap belts connected, then stretched against the harness, feeling the sweat dry on his skin in the plane's cool interior. "Thank you," said the voice.
The pilot was speaking to Myaung U Airport traffic control as the plane lifted into twilight over the city. The soft white glow from the dome light vanished, then there were only the last moments of orange sunlight coming through the bubble.
The temple plain was spread out beneath, all murk and shadow, with the temple and pagoda spires reaching up toward the light, white stucco and gold tinted red and orange.
"Man, that's a beautiful sight," the pilot said.
"You're right," Gonzales said. It was, but he'd seen it before, and besides, it had already been a long day.
The pilot flipped his glasses down, and the plane banked left and headed south along the river. Gonzales lay back in his seat and tried to relax.
They flew above black water, following the Irrawady River until they crossed an international flyway to Bangkok. Dozing in the interior darkness, Gonzales was almost asleep when he heard the pilot say, "Shit, somebody's here. Partisan attack group, probably--no recognition codes. Must be flying ultralights--our radar didn't see them. We've got an image now, though."
"Any problem?" Gonzales asked.
"Just coming for a look. They don't bother foreign charters." And he pointed to their transponder message flashing above the primary displays:
THIS INTERNATIONAL FLIGHT IS NON-MILITARY.
IT CLAIMS RIGHT OF PASSAGE UNDER U.N. ACT OF 2020.
It would keep on repeating until they crossed into Thai airspace.
The flight computer display lit bright red with COLLISION WARNING, and a Klaxon howl filled the plane's interior. The pilot said, "Fuck, they launched!" The swing-wing's turbines screamed full out as the plane's computer took command, and the pilot's hands gripped his yoke, not guiding, just hanging on.
Gonzales's straps pulled tight as the plane tumbled and fell, corkscrewed, looped, climbed again--smart metal fish evading fiery harpoons. Explosions blossomed in the dark, quick asymmetrical bursts of flame followed immediately by hard thumping sounds and shock waves that knocked the swing-wing as it followed its chaotic path through the night.
Then an aircraft appeared, flaring in fire that surged around it, its pilot in blazing outline--a stick figure with arms thrown to the sky in the instant before pilot and aircraft disintegrated in flame.
Their own flight went steady and level, and control returned to the pilot's yoke. Gonzales's shocked retinas sparkled as the night returned to blackness. "Collision averted," the plane's computer said. "Time in red zone, six point eight nine seconds."
"What the hell?" Gonzales said. "What happened?"
"Holy Jesus motherfucker," the pilot said.
Gonzales sat gripping his seat, chilled by the blast of cold air from the plane's air conditioner onto his sweat-soaked shirt. He glanced down to his lap: no, he hadn't pissed himself. Really, everything happened too quickly for him to get that scared.
A Mitsubishi-McDonnell "Loup Garou" warplane dived in front of them and circled in slow motion. Like the ultralights it was cast in matte black, but with a massive fuselage. It turned a slow barrel roll as it circled them, lazy predator looping fat, slow prey, then turned on brilliant floods that played across their canopy.
The pilot and Gonzales both froze in the glare.
Then the Loup Garou's black cockpit did a reverse-fade; behind the transparent shell Gonzales saw the mirror-visored pilot, twin cables running from the base of his neck. The Loup Garou's wings slid forward into reverse-sweep, and it stood on its tail and disappeared.
Gonzales strained against his taut harness.
"Assholes!" the pilot screamed.
"Who was that?" Gonzales asked, his voice thin and shaking. "What do you mean?"
"The Myanmar Air Force," the pilot said, his voice tight, face red beneath the flight glasses' mirrors. "They set us up, the pricks. They used us to troll for a guerrilla flight." The pilot flipped up his glasses and stared with pointless intensity out the cockpit window, as if he could see through the blackness. "And waited," he said. "Waited till they had the whole flight." The pilot swiveled around abruptly and faced Gonzales, his features distorted into a mad and angry caricature of the man who had welcomed Gonzales ninety minutes before. "Do you know how fucking close we came?" he asked.
No, Gonzales shook his head. No.
"Milliseconds, man. Fucking milliseconds. Close enough to touch," the pilot said. He swiveled his seat to face forward, and Gonzales heard its locking mechanism click as he settled back into his own seat, fear and shame spraying a wild neurochemical mix inside his brain--
Gonzales had never felt things like this before--death down his spine and up his gut, up his throat and nose, as close as his skin; death with a bad smell ... _burning, burnin_g
As the morning passed, the sun moved away from the stained glass, and the room's interior went to gloom. Only monitor lights remained lit, steady rows of green above flickering columns of numbers on the light blue face of the monitor panel.
A housekeeping robot, a pod the size of a large goose, worked slowly across the floor, nuzzled into the room's corners, then left the room, its motion tentacles beneath it making a sound like wind through dry grass.
The cockpit display flashed as landing codes fed through the flight computer, then the swing-wing locked into the Bangkok landing grid and began its slide down an invisible pipe. They went to touchdown guided by electronic hands.
The pilot turned to Gonzales as they descended and said, "I'll have to file a report on the attack. But you're lucky--if we had landed in Myanmar, government investigators would have been on you like white on rice, and you could forget about leaving for days, maybe weeks. You're okay now: by the time they process the report and ask the Thais to hold you, you'll be gone."
At the moment, the last thing Gonzales wanted to do was spend any time in Myanmar. "I'll get out as quickly as I can," he said.
Now that it was all over, he could feel the Fear climbing in him like the onset of a dangerous drug. Trying to calm himself, he thought, really, nothing happened, except you got the shit scared out of you, that's all.
As the swing-wing settled on the pad, Gonzales stood and went to pick up his luggage from the open baggage hold. The pilot sat watching as the plane went through its shutdown procedures.
Do something, Gonzales said to himself, feeling panic mount. He pulled the memex's case out of the hold and said, "I want a copy of your flight records."
"I can't do that."
"You can. I'm working with Internal Affairs, and I was almost killed while flying in your aircraft."
"So was I, man."
"Indeed. But I need this data. Later, IA will go the full official route and pick everything up, but I need it now. A quick dump into my machine here, that's all it will take. I'll give you authorization and receipt." Gonzales waited, keeping the pressure on by his insistent gaze and posture.
The pilot said, "Okay, that ought to cover my ass."
Gonzales slid the shock-case next to the pilot's seat, kneeled and opened the lid. "Are you recording?" he asked the pilot.
The man nodded and said, "Always."
"That's what I thought. All right, then: for the record, this is Mikhail Mikhailovitch Gonzales, senior employee of Internal Affairs Division, SenTrax. I am acquiring flight records of this aircraft to assist in my investigation of certain events that occurred during its most recent flight." He looked at the pilot. "That should do it," he said.
He pulled out a data lead from the case and snapped it into the access plug on the instrument panel. Lights flashed across the panel as data began to spool into the quiescent memex. The panel gonged softly to signal transfer was complete, and Gonzales unplugged the lead and closed the case. "Thanks," he said to the pilot, who sat staring out the cockpit bubble.
Gonzales stood and patted the case and thought to himself, hey, memex, got a surprise for you when you wake up. He felt much better.
A carry-slide hauled Gonzales a mile or so through a brightly-lit tunnel with baby blue plastic and plaster walls marked with signs in half a dozen languages promising swift retribution for vandalism. Red and green virus graffiti smeared everything, signs included, and as Gonzales watched, messages in Thai and Burmese transmuted, and new stick figures emerged with dialogue balloons saying god knows what. A lone phrase in red paint read in English, HEROIN ALPHA DEVIL FLOWER. Shattered boxes of black fibroid or coarse sprays of multi-wire cable marked where surveillance cameras had been.
Grey floor-to-ceiling steel shutters blocked the narrow portal to International Arrivals and Departures. Faceless holoscan robots--dark, wheeled cubes with carbon-fiber armor and tentacles and spiked sensor antennas--worked the crowd, antennas swiveling.
All around were Asian travelers, dark-suited men and women: Japanese, Chinese, Malaysians, Indonesians, Thai. They spread out from Asia's "dragons," world centers of research and manufacturing, taking their low margins and hard sell to Europe and the Americas, where consumption had become a way of life. Everywhere Gonzales traveled, it seemed, he found them: cadres armed with technical and scientific prowess and fueled by persistent ambition.
They formed the steel core of much of the world's prosperity. The United States and the dragons lived in uneasy symbiosis: the Asians had a hundred ways of making sure the American economy didn't just roll over and die and take the prime North American consumer market with it. Whether Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese, Hong Kong Chinese-Canadians--they bought some corporations and merged with others, and Americans ended up working for General Motors Fanuc, Chrysler Mitsubishi, or Daewoo-DEC, and with their paychecks they bought Japanese memexes, Korean autos, Malaysian robotics.
Shutter blades cranked open with a quick scream of metal, and Gonzales stepped inside. An Egyptian guard in a white headdress, blue-and-white checked headband, and gray U.N. drag cross-checked his i.d., gave a quick, meaningless smile--teeth white and perfect under a black moustache--and waved him on.
Southeast Asian Faction Customs waited in the form of a small Thai woman in a brown uniform with indecipherable scrawls across yellow badges. Her features were pleasant and impassive; she wore her black hair pulled tightly back and held with a clear plastic comb. She stood behind a gray metal table; on the floor next to it was a two-meter high general purpose scanner, its controls, screens, and read-outs hidden under a black cloth hood. Dirty green walls wore erratically-spaced signs in a dozen languages, detailing in small type the many categories of contraband.
The woman motioned for him to sit in the upright chair in front of the table, then for him to put his clothes bag and cases on the table.
She spoke, and the translator box at her waist echoed in clear, neuter machine English: "Your person has been scanned and cleared." She put the soft brown bag into the mouth of the scanner, and the machine vetted the bag with a quiet beep. The woman slid it back to Gonzales.
She spoke again, and the translator said, "Please open these cases" as she pointed toward the two shock-cases. For each, Gonzales screened the access panel with his left hand and tapped in the entry codes with his right. The case lids lifted with a soft sigh. Inside the cases, monitor and diagnostic lights flashed above rows of memory modules, heavy solids of black plastic the size of a small safety deposit box.
Gonzales saw she was holding a copy of the Data Declaration Form the memex had filled out in Myanmar and transmitted to both Myanmar and Thai governments. She looked into one of the cases and pointed to a row of red-tagged and sealed memory modules.
The translator's words followed behind hers and said, "These modules we must hold to verify that they contain no contraband information."
"Myanmar customs did so. These are SenTrax corporate records."
"Perhaps they are. We have not cleared them."
"If you wish, I will give you the access protocols. I have nothing to hide, but the modules are important to my work."
She smiled. "I do not have proper equipment. They must be examined by authorities in the city." The translator's tones accurately reflected her lack of concern.
Gonzales sensed the onset of severe bureaucratic intransigence. For whatever occult reasons, this woman had decided to fuck him around, and the harder he pushed, the worse things would be. Give it up, then. He said, "I assume they will be returned to me as soon as possible."
"Certainly. After careful examination. Though it is unlikely that the examination can be completed before your departure." She slid the case off her desk and to the floor behind it. She was smiling again, a satisfied bureaucrat's smile. She turned back to her console, Gonzales's case already a thing of the past. She looked up to see him still standing there and said, "How else can I help you?"
The machine-world began to disperse, turning to fog, and as it did, banks of low-watt incandescents lit up around the room's perimeter, and the patterns of console lights went through a series of rapid permutations as Gonzales was brought to a waking state. The room's lights had been full up for an hour when the desynching series was complete and the egg began to split.
Inside the egg Gonzales lay pale, nude, near-comatose, machine-connected: a new millennium Snow White. A flesh-colored catheter led from his water-shrunken genitals, transparent iv feeds from both forearms. White sealant and anti-irritant paste had clotted around the tubes from throat and mouth. The sharp ozone smell of the paste was all over him.
An autogurney had rolled next to the egg, and its hands, shining chrome claws, began disconnecting tubes and leads. Then it worked with hands and black flexible arms the thickness of a stout rope to lift Gonzales from the egg and onto its own surface.
Gonzales woke up in his own bedroom and began to whimper. "It's okay," the memex whispered through the room's speaker. "It's okay."
Some time later Gonzales awoke again, lay in gloom and considered his condition. Some nausea, legs weak, but no apparent loss of gross motor control, no immediate parapsychological effects (disorientations, amnesias, synesthesias) ...
Gonzales got up and went to the bathroom, stood amid white tile, polished aluminum and mirrors and said, "Warm shower." Water hissed, and the shower stall door swung open. The water ran down his skin and the sweat and paste rolled off his body.
The next morning, Gonzales stood looking out his front window, down Capital Hill to the city and the bay. After a full night's sleep, he felt recovered from the egg. "Halfway down the hill stood a row of Contempo high-rises--half a dozen shapes in the mist, their sides laced with optic fiber in patterns of red, blue, white, and yellow.
From the wallscreen behind him, a voice said, "The Fine Arts Network, showing today only: the legendary 'Rothschild Ads-Originals and Copies,' a Euro/Com Production from the Cannes Festival; also showing, NipponAuto's 'Ecstasy for Many Kilometers.'"
"Cycle," Gonzales said. He turned to watch as the screen split into windows, showing eight at a time in a random access search. In the screen's upper-right corner, the Headline Service cycled what it considered important: worsening social collapse in England; another series of politico-economic triumphs for The Two Koreas. And the Ecostate Summaries: ozone hole 2 over the Antarctic conforming to predicted self-repair curve, hole 3 obstinately holding steady; CO2 portions unstable, ozone reaching for an ugly part of the graph; temperature fluctuations continuing to evade best predictions ...
Why call it news? wondered Gonzales. Call it olds. Christ, this stuff had been going on forever it seemed ...
He said, "Memex, what do you think about the attack?"
"A bad business," said the memex. "We are lucky to have survived." It seemed a bit subdued in the aftermath of the trip in the egg, as though it, too, had come close to dying. Gonzales didn't know how it experienced such things, given its limited sensory modalities and, he presumed, lack of a fear of death.
"What's happening in the real world?" Gonzales asked.
"Your mother left a message for you. Do you want to look at it now?"
"Might as well."
On the screen she lay back in a lawn chair, her face hidden behind a sun mask, her mono-bikinied body a rich brown. She sat up and said, "Still in Myanmar, huh, sweetie? When are you coming back? I'd love to talk, but I just won't pay those rates."
She removed her sun mask. She had dark skin and good bones; her face was nearly unlined, though her skin had the faint parchment quality of age. Her small breasts sagged very little. Body and face, she appeared an athletic fifty year old who had perhaps seen too much sun. She would turn eighty-seven next month.
Since Gonzales's father had died in a flash flu epidemic while the two were visiting Naples, his mother had turned her energies and interests to maintaining her health and appearance. Half the year she spent in Cozumel's Regeneration Villas, where tissue transplants and genetic retailoring kept her young. The rest of the time she occupied an entire floor of a low-res condo on Florida's decaying Gold Coast, just north of Ciudad de Miami. Top dollar, but she could afford it.
She and his father had been charter members of the gerontocracy, that ever-expanding league of the rich and old who vied with the young for their society's resources. The young had the strength and energy of youth; the old had wealth, power and cunning. No contest: kids under thirty often stated their main life's goal as "living until I am old enough to enjoy it."
Gonzales's mother draped a blue-and-white print cottonrobe over her shoulders and said, "Call me. I'll be home in a week or so. Be well."
Their talks, her taped messages--both usually made him feel baffled and angry--but today her self-absorption pricked sharper than usual. I almost died, he wanted to tell her, they almost killed me, mother.
But he was far away from her, as far as Seattle was from Miami. And whose fault is that? a small voice asked. He had chosen to come here, as distant Southern Florida as he could get and remain in the continental United States. Sometimes he felt he'd come a bit too far. In Florida, people cooled down with alcohol in iced drinks; here, they warmed their chilly selves with strong coffee. Gonzales often felt lost among the glum and health-conscious Northerners and craved the Hispanic sensuality and demonstrativeness of Southern Florida.
Still, how he hated the world he'd grown up in. He had seen the movers, dealers, and players since he was a child, and in all of them he had felt the same obsessive grasping at money and land and power and had heard the same childish voices, wanting more more more. At his parents' parties, he remembered dark Southern Florida faces--sun-burned whites, blacks, Hispanics; men with heavy gold jewelry, trailing clouds of expensive cologne, and women with stiff hair and pushed-up breasts whose laughter made brittle footnotes to the men's loud voices. He'd fled all that as instinctively as a child yanks its hand from a fire.
Both there and here he stood in an alien land, no more at home at one end of the country than the other.
"No reply," Gonzales said.
The next day Gonzales sat in the solarium, where he lounged among black lacquer and etched glass while thoughts of death gnawed at the edges of his torpor. He filled a bronze pipe with small green sensemilla leaves and holed up in a haze of smoke and drank tea.
The late afternoon light through the windows went to pure Seattle Gray, the color of ennui and unemphatic despair, and his solitude became oppressive. He needed company, he thought, and wondered what it would be like to have a cat. Then he thought about the truth of it, how often he would be gone and the cat left to itself and the house's machines. "Here kitty kitty," the cleaning robot would say, and the memex would want veterinary programs and a diagnostic link ... fuck it, they all could live without a cat.
Then a hunger kick came on him, and he decided to make taboulleh. "You are not taking care of business," the memex said to Gonzales as he stood chopping mint leaves, green onions and tomato, squeezing lemon and stirring in bulgur wheat with the patience of the deeply-stoned.
"True," Gonzales said. "I'm in no hurry."
"Why not? Since your return from Asia, you have not been productive."
"I'm going to die, my friend." The smells of lemon and mint drifted up to him, and he inhaled them deeply. He said, "Today, ma�ana, some day for sure ... and I'm still trying to understand what that means to me now. To be productive, that is fine, but to come to terms with my own mortality ... I think that is better." The taboulleh was finished. It was beautiful; he wanted to rub his face in it.
Not long after he finished eating, a package arrived from Thailand. Inside layers of foam and strapping were the memory modules the Thais had taken. When he plugged the modules into the memex, they showed empty: zeroed, ready to be used again.
Gonzales stood looking at the racked modules in the memex closet. I can't fucking believe it, he thought. In effect, the audit had been cancelled out. Whatever data he or anyone else collected at this point from SenTrax Myanmar would be essentially useless, Grossback having been given time to cook the data if he needed to do so. A fatal indeterminacy had settled on the whole affair.
Grossback, you bastard, thought Gonzales. If you arranged for the Thais to grab these boxes, maybe you are smarter and meaner than I thought.
"Shit," Gonzales said.
"Is there anything I can do?" the memex asked.
"Nothing I can think of."
From the background of jungle plants and pastel walls and the signature pieces of curved silver, HeyMex recognized the latest incarnation of the Beverly Rodeo Hotel's public lounge. Mister Jones preferred ostentation, even in simulacra.
HeyMex settled into a sling chair made of bright chrome and stuffed chocolate-brown leather. HeyMex wore the usual baggy pants and jacket of black cotton, a crumpled white linen shirt; was smooth-faced and had close-cropped hair.
A figure shimmered into being in the chair opposite: silver suit and red metal-laced shirt brilliant under lights; black-framed glasses with dark lenses; greased hair combed straight back, a little black goatee and moustache.
"Mister Jones," HeyMex said.
The other figure took a long, slow drag off a brown cigarette. "HeyMex," it said. "What can I do for you?"
"It's Gonzales. Since we got back from Myanmar, he's been passive, hasn't been taking care of business."
"Post-trauma response--give him some time, he'll be okay."
"No, he doesn't need time. He needs work. Have you got something?"
"Maybe. I haven't run a personnel search--he might not fit the exact profile."
"Never mind that. Give it to Gonzales. He needs it."
"If you say so. You'll hear something official later today."
The world went translucent, then turned to smoke, and Mister Jones disappeared back into his identity as Traynor's Advisor, HeyMex into his as Gonzales's memex.
(Ask yourself why the two machines chose this elaborate masquerade, or why no one knew these sorts of things were happening. However, as to the who? and the why? there can be no question. These are the new players, and these are their games.
So welcome to the new millennium.)
When Gonzales returned home, he found a message from Traynor: "Will arrange for transportation tomorrow morning, five a.m., from Northern Seattle Airtrack to my estate. Be prepared for immediate work. Pack the memex and twenty-two kilos personal luggage."
"Shit," Gonzales said. "We just got home. Twenty-two kilos, huh? That means we'll be going ... where do you think?"
The memex said, "Somewhere in orbit."
The airport limo held its spot in a locked sequence of a dozen vehicles moving away from the city at two hundred kilometers an hour. Seattle's northern suburbs showed as patches of light behind shifting mist and steady-falling rain. Overhead, cargo blimps flying toward Vancouver moved through the clouds like great cold water fish.
Gonzales got a quick view of a square where white and yellow searchlights played across a concrete landscape, and a gangling assemblage of pipe and wire stepped crab-wise as it sprayed a brick wall: a graffiti robot, a machine built and set loose to scrawl messages to the world at large. Gonzales could only read ... GENT OF CHAN ...
With a sigh from its turbines, the limo slowed to exit into North Seattle Airtrack, then turned into the private field access road. A wire gate opened in front of them as it received the codes the limo sent. Near the SenTrax hangar waited a swing-wing exactly like the one that had taken Gonzales from Pagan to Bangkok. Gonzales climbed into the plane, placed his bag and the memex's shock-cases into the plane's baggage locker, seated himself, and pulled his shoulder harness tight.
The swing-wing rose into clouds and fog. After a while, the blank whiteness out the windows and steady noise of the swing-wing's engines lulled Gonzales into a light sleep that lasted until the ascending scream of engine noise told him they were landing.
As the plane tilted, Gonzales saw the blue sheet of Lake Tahoe stretching away to the south, then a patch of green lawn on the water's edge that grew bigger as the swing-wing made its final approach to Traynor's estate.
From his six years' work with Internal Affairs, the past two as independent auditor, Gonzales knew quite a bit about Frederick Lewis Traynor, his boss. Traynor had wealth sufficient for even the most extravagant tastes--it was his family's, and he had known nothing else--but power whose smallest touch could shape lives, imprint stone, that he longed for. From his position as head of Internal Affairs, one of SenTrax's most powerful divisions, he plotted ascent to the SenTrax Board; he wanted to be one of the twenty people who had moved beyond negotiation and compromise, whose desires were reality, whims action.
In fact, Traynor had already achieved a level of eminence that is privileged, when it wishes, not to exist. His house and land occupied a chunk of the North Shore of Lake Tahoe where there had once been two casino-hotels and a section of state highway. The hotels had been demolished, the highway diverted. The grounds were now surrounded by a four-meter high fence of slatted black steel--alarmed, hot-wired, and robot-patrolled. The estate showed on no map or record of purchase, ownership or taxation; neither did the man himself.
When Gonzales stepped out of the plane onto a great expanse of green lawn, Traynor waited to meet him. He was short and pudgy, and his skin was pale. His sparse hair lay limp in dark curls on his skull. On his feet were soft black slippers, and he wore an embroidered silk robe--green and blue and white and red, with rearing dragons across back and front. He thought of himself as Byronic--eccentric and interesting, afflicted by genius--but to Gonzales and many others he appeared simply petulant and self-indulgent.
Traynor stretched his arms wide and said, "Mikhail," giving the name three syllables, saying it right, then took Gonzales in a brief hug. Traynor then stood back and looked at him and said, "You don't look too bad."
"Is that why you brought me here, to look at me?"
Traynor shrugged. "For that, maybe, and to talk to you about your next job. Besides, I like you."
Gonzales supposed that Traynor did like him, in his peculiar boss's and rich man's way. Particularly, he seemed to like the fact that Gonzales wasn't awed by the outward and visible manifestations of his money and power.
"Good breeding," Traynor had said to him once. "That's your secret: patrician and plebian blood mixed." Mikhail Mikhailovitch Gonzales was of mixed blood indeed; among others, Russian Jews and Hispanics from Los Angeles on his mother's side, Blacks from Chicago and Cubans from Miami on his father's. Among his family background were slaves and field workers and bourgeois counter-revolutionaries, along with the odd artist and smuggler and con man.
However, whatever his breeding or experience, he had to put up with lots of cheerful, condescending bullshit from Traynor, as he had to put up with Traynor in general, because the man was rich and powerful and the boss, and neither of them ever forgot it.
The two walked toward the house that stood facing the lake at the lawn's far border, a Stately Home an idealized eighteenth-century English architect might have built for an equally idealized and indulgent patron. Off a golden domed center stood three wings of creamy stone, the whole in restrained neo-Palladian with no modern excesses of material, no foamed colored concrete and composites, just the tan and creamy sandstone and rose marble speaking wealth and taste.
They climbed up marble stairs and passed into the house and under a looming interior dome that soared high above the central rotunda where the house's three wings joined. They walked down a hallway of dark wainscoting below cream walls and ceiling.
Gonzales caught glimpses of side rooms through open doorways as they passed. One room appeared to front upon a night filled with swirling nebulae and a million stars, the next on sunshine and dazzling snows. Still another contained nothing but white walls, floors of polished marble and a five-meter hand centered motionless in mid-air--index finger extended, other three fingers curled against the palm, thumb erect on top like the hammer of a make-believe gun.
Mahogany doors parted in front of the two men, and they passed into the library. Its dark-paneled walls gave away nothing: even close up, the books might have been holo-fronts, might have been real. Flat data entry modules were laid into mahogany side tables that stood next to red leather easy chairs and maroon velour couches.
"Sit down, Mikhail," Traynor said.
Gonzales could feel the silence heavy and somber among the dark invocations of another time, leather and furnishings conjuring up men's clubs, smoking rooms, the somber whispers of deals going down.
Traynor's eyes lost focus as he went rapt, listening to his voice within. Even if he hadn't been aware of Traynor's dependence on his Advisor, Gonzales would have known what was happening. Traynor, higher up in the executive food chain than anyone else of Gonzales's acquaintance, needed permanent real-time access to the information, advice, and general emotional support his Advisor supplied, so Traynor was wired with a bone-set transceiver just under his left ear. Wherever he went, his Advisor's voice went with him, through cellular networks and satellite links.
Traynor finally looked up and said, "Look, I want you to get focused on a job you're going to do for me. Can you do that?" Gonzales shrugged. Traynor said, "You're upset and angry--you were attacked, almost killed--I know that. But look: you work for Internal Affairs, it's an occupational hazard. You and your machine poked hard at this man's operation, and you spooked him, so he did something stupid."
"And I want to make him pay for it."
"You play along with me on this one, and maybe you'll be able to. But later--now I've got other work for you."
"Okay, I'll do it." Gonzales knew he had to play along: it was his only chance to even things up with Grossback. Play now, pay back later.
"Good," Traynor said. "How much do you know about Halo City and Aleph?"
"The city was put together by a multi-national consortium. SenTrax has a data monopoly, employs a large-scale m-i to administer the city. That's about all I know."
The wallscreen at one end lit up with a glyph in hard black:
[Aleph Symbol]
The voice of Traynor's Advisor spoke through a ceiling speaker; it said, "The sign you are looking at is the original emblem of the Aleph system when it was built by SenTrax. In Cantor's notation, it represents the first of the transfinite numbers--denoting the infinite set of integers and fractions, or natural numbers. Aleph is also the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet and the name of a story----"
"Get on with it," Traynor said.
"The system was constructed at Athena Station, in geosynchronous orbit, where it supervised the construction of the Orbital Energy Grid, and later was transported to Halo City, at L5, where it serves as the primary agent of data interpretation, logistical planning, and administration."
Gonzales said, "Seems odd to have a project the size and importance of Halo administered by an obsolete m-i."
"It would be so if Aleph were obsolete," answered the Advisor. "However, this is not the case. The machine we refer to as Aleph, has capabilities superior to any existing m-i."
Gonzales looked at Traynor, who held up a hand, indicating have patience, and said, "Next series."
On the screen came a pan shot across a weightless space where a man floated, encased in a transparent plastic bubble. He was naked, and his limbs were shrunken and twisted. He had tubes in his nose, mouth, ears, penis, and anus, metal cups over his eyes. Two thick cables connected to junctions at the back of his neck.
The Advisor said, "This man's name is Jerry Chapman. He suffers from severe neural damage, the results of a toxin transmitted through seafood contaminated with toxic waste. Though most motor and sensory functions are disabled, he is not comatose. In fact, he appears to retain all intellectual function. Note the neural interface sockets: they are the key to what follows."
"He's at Halo?" Gonzales asked.
"Yes," the Advisor said. "He was taken there from Earth."
"Very special treatment," Gonzales said.
"The group at Halo has been looking for such an opportunity," the Advisor said. "To explore long-term Aleph-interface."
Traynor said, "In fact, Chapman's relations with Aleph go back to the machine's early days."
The Advisor said, "When he and Aleph worked with Doctor Diana Heywood, who at the time was employed by SenTrax at Athena Station. She was blind at that time."
"Even in this deck, Doctor Heywood's the joker," Traynor said. "She was involved with Aleph at the time, and later she and lived with Chapman, on Earth. She was released by SenTrax for unauthorized use of the Aleph system, but we've brought her back into our employ. She's going to Halo, where she will assist Aleph in an attempt to keep this man alive."
"Alive?" Gonzales asked, gesturing toward the hulk on the screen. "There doesn't seem much point." As he understood these things, given the man's condition, withdrawal processing should have started, SenTrax as medical guardians making application to the Federal Medical Courts for permission to cease support.
The Advisor said, "Aleph believes it can keep him alive in machine-space. There are special problems, as you can imagine, among them the need to have love, friendship ... I do not understand these matters well, but Aleph has communicated to me that the next weeks are critical for the patient."
Traynor said, "However, using Doctor Heywood presents its own problems."
"She left SenTrax years ago," the Advisor said. "In somewhat strained circumstances."
Traynor said, "So she has no reason to be loyal to the company." He paused. "And we have no reason to trust her."
Gonzales said, "I presume this is where I enter in?"
"Yes," Traynor said. "I want you to accompany her. You will represent me and, indirectly, SenTrax Board." Gonzales raised his eyebrows, and Traynor laughed. "Yes, I am representing the board on this one, unofficially--they see this treatment as being of enormous interest but wish to have a certain insulation between them and these matters, given that certain tricky legal issues will have to be skirted."
"Or trampled on," said Gonzales.
"As you wish," said Traynor. "The important point is this: from the board's point-of-view, Doctor Heywood cannot be trusted.
Gonzales said, "So you need a spy, and I'm it."
Traynor shrugged.
The Advisor said, "You represent properly vested interests in a situation where they would not otherwise be adequately represented."
Gonzales said, "That's a good one, 'represent properly vested interests.' I'll try to remember it. Okay, I'll do my best." He turned to face Traynor and said, "To get you on the board." Traynor laughed. Gonzales asked, "How long will this thing take?"
"Not too long," Traynor said.
The Advisor said, "Once Chapman's state has been stabilized--"
"Or he dies," Traynor said.
"Highly probable," said the Advisor. "Once he is stable--alive or dead--your job will be finished."
Traynor said, "But until then, your job is to let me know what's happening. You'll be in machine-space along with them, and you'll see what they're doing."
"Fine," Gonzales said. "So what do I do now?"
"You fly to Berkeley and talk to Doctor Heywood," Traynor said. "Introduce yourself. Make a friend."
Gonzales arrived at Berkeley Aeroport, a collection of cracked cement pads at the edge of the water, by mid-afternoon. He stepped out of the swing-wing into blazing sunshine. Across the bay, the Golden Gate and Alcatraz Island danced in the glare; the water glittered so intensely his sunglasses went nearly black.
A Truesdale rental waited for him in the parking lot. He stuck a SenTrax i.d./credit chip into its door slot, and the door retracted into its frame with a muted hiss. The Truesdale's windows had opaqued against the dazzle, and its passive a/c had been working, so the dark brown velvet seat was cool to the touch when Gonzales slid across it.
"Do you wish to drive, Mister Gonzales?" the car asked.
Gonzales said, "Not really. You know where we're going?"
"Yes, I have that address."
"Then you take it."
Diana Heywood lived in the Berkeley hills, in a Maybeck house more than a century old. The car drove Gonzales through streets that wound their way up the hillside, then stopped in front of a house whose redwood-shingled bulk loomed over Gonzales's head as he stood on the sidewalk. Sun glinted off the lozenged panes of its bay window.
Her door answered his knock by saying she was a few blocks away, at the Rose Gardens. The door said, "It is a civic project: volunteers are rebuilding the garden, which has fallen into disuse. Many of the local--"
"Thank you," Gonzales said.
He told the Truesdale where he was going and set off on foot in the direction the memex had indicated. To his left hand, streets and homes sloped down toward the bay; to his right, they climbed up the steep hillside.
Gonzales came to a hand-lettered sign in green poster paint on white board that read:
BERKELEY ROSE GARDENS RECLAMATION PROJECT
He looked down to where broken redwood lattices fanned out along terraced pathways threaded with a clumsy patchwork of green pvc irrigation pipes. Halfway down stood a cracked and peeling trellis of white-painted wood with bushes dangling from its gaps. Next to the trellis, a small gardener robot, a green plastic-coated block on miniature tractor wheels, extended a delicate arm of shining coiled steel ending in a ten-fingered fibroid hand. The hand closed, and a dark red rose came away from its bush. Clutching the blossom, the little robot wheeled away.
Gonzales walked down the inclined pathway, his feet crunching on gravel, past the bushes and their labels stating often improbable names: Dortmunds with red, papery petals, large Garden Parties flamboyant in white and yellow, Montezumas, Martin Frobishers, and Mighty Mouses. He stopped and inhaled the strong perfume of purple Intrigue. In the recombinant section, Halos, blossoms in careful rainbow stripes, had grown immense. Giant psychedelic grids, only vaguely rose-shaped, they pushed everything else aside. Gonzales put his nose above a pink blossom on a nameless bush; the rose smelled like peppermint candy.
He recognized the woman at the bottom of the path from dossier pictures Traynor had shown him. Diana Heywood wore a culotte dress of white cotton that exposed her shoulders, wrapped tightly about her waist, split to cover her thighs. Small and slender, she had close-cut dark hair, streaked with grey. No age in her skin; fine, sculpted features. She wore glasses as opaque as Gonzales's own.
She held out the thorny stem of a dark-red rose. "Would you like a flower?" she asked. Sun across her face erased her features.
"Thanks," he said as he took the flower gingerly, aware of its thorns.
She said, "Who are you, and what do you want?"
"My name is Mikhail Gonzales, and I want to talk to you. I'll be working with you at Halo."
She said, "Will you?" Her back to him, she knelt and snipped away a greenish tangle of vine and thorn. The clippers choked on a clump of grass. She freed them, then threw them to the ground, where they stuck point-first, buzzed for a moment, then stopped. She looked over her shoulder at him and said, "I've been waiting for someone like you to show up--the company's lad, the one who keeps watch on me and poor old Jerry, to make sure we don't do anything unauthorized."
She stood and strode away from him, up the hill, her angry steps kicking dirt off the stones. She stopped and turned to face him. "Come on, Mister Gonzales," she said.
Cautiously holding the thorny stem, he followed her up the path.
Diana Heywood and Gonzales sat drinking tea. He said, "I'm the outside observer, yes--the spy, if you want--but I don't think we're at odds. They're asking you to do one job, me to do another, but I don't see where our jobs conflict." She turned to look at him; one eye was blue, the other green.
She said, "When Sentrax called me last week, that was the first time I'd heard from them since they got rid of me years ago. Not that they treated me badly, not by their standards. When they fired me, years ago, they didn't just turn me loose, they paid me well ... they're so prudent--it was like oiling and wrapping a tool before you put it away, because you might need it again. Now they've found a use for me and unwrapped me and put me to work, but I know they don't trust me. And of course I don't trust them." She stood up. She said, "Come on, I'll show you what this all means to me."
She led Gonzales into the next room, where their entry triggered the lighting systems. Silk walls the color of pale champagne were broken with floor-to-ceiling rosewood bookcases; teak-framed sling chairs and matching tables stood together under a multi-armed chrome lamp stand.
She stopped in front of a 1:6 scale hologram of a thin-featured man, apparently ill at ease at being holoed; hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, eyes not centered on the lens.
"That's Jerry," she said, pointing to the hologram. "He's what this is all about, so far as I'm concerned. He's been terribly injured, and Aleph thinks something can be done for him, and as unlikely as that seems, given the extent of his injuries, I will help as best I can." She looked at him, her face giving nothing away, and said, "Are we leaving tomorrow morning?"
"Yes."
"Well, then, I'd better get ready, hadn't I? Where are you staying?"
"I thought I'd get a hotel room."
"No need. You can sleep here. I'll finish packing, and we'll go out to eat."
Diana Heywood and Gonzales sat high in the Berkeley Hills, looking onto the vast conurbations spread out beneath them. To their right, the carpet of lights stretched away as far as they could see, to Vallejo and beyond. In front of them lay Berkeley, the dark mass of the bay, then the clustered lights of Sausalito and Tiburon against the hills. Oakland was to their left, reaching out to the Bay Bridge; and beyond the bridge, San Francisco and the peninsula. Connecting all, streams of automobiles moved in the symmetry of autodrive.
Gonzales's mouth still tingled from the hot chilies in the Thai food, and he had a buzz from the wine. They had eaten at a restaurant on the North Side, and afterward Diana Heywood guided the Truesdale up the winding road to an overlook near Tilden Park.
As minutes passed, the streets and highways and municipalities disappeared into semiotic abstraction ... these millions of human beings all gathered here for purposes one could only guess at--some conscious, most not, no more than a beaver's assembly of its structures of mud and wood.
A robot blimp passed across their line of sight. Beneath it, a sailboat hung upside down. It swayed from lines that connected its inverted keel to the blimp's featureless gondola. Lights on the side of the blimp read EAST BAY YACHT OUTFITTERS.
Diana Heywood said, "I know you people have your own agendas, and that's fine--that's the nature of the beast--but if you complicate these matters because of corporate politics, I will become very difficult."
Gonzales said, "I have no intention of being a problem."
"Well," she said. "Maybe you won't be." She turned to him. "But remember this: you're just doing your job, but the stakes are higher for me. Aleph, Jerry, and I--we've known each other for years, and I've got unfinished business up there. Also, I want to get back in the game."
"I don't understand."
"Sure you do, Mister Gonzales. You're in the game, have been for years, I'd guess. Unless I'm seriously mistaken, it's what you live for." She laughed when he said nothing. "Well, I've done other things, and for a long time I've been out of the game, but I'm ready for a change. Silly SenTrax bastards--manipulating me with their calls, sending you ... oh yeah, you're part of it, you remind me of Jerry years ago, if you don't know that."
"No, I didn't."
"It doesn't matter. Their machinations don't matter. They want to convince me to come to Halo?" She laughed. "My past is there, when I was blind and Aleph and I were linked to one another in ways you can't imagine ... and I found a lover I'd wish to find again. Come to Halo? I'd climb a rope to get there."
Gonzales had flown into McAuliffe Station once before, though he'd never taken an orbital flight. In the high Nevada desert, the station stayed busy night and day. Heavy shuttles composed the main traffic: wide white saucers that lifted off on ordinary rockets, then climbed away with sounds like bombs exploding when orbital lasers lit the hydrogen in their tanks. Flights in transit to Orbital Monitor & Defense Command stations were marked with small American flags and golden DoD insignia. Cargo for them went aboard in blank-faced pallets loaded behind opaque, machinepatrolled fences half a mile from the main terminal across empty desert.
From Traynor's briefing, Gonzales knew a few other things. Civilian flights fed the hungry settlements aloft: Athena Station, Halo City, the Moon's bases. All the settlements had learned the difficult tactics of recycling, discovery and hoarding. Water and oxygen stayed rare, while with processes slow and expensive and dangerous, metals of all sorts could be cracked out of soil so barren that to call it ore was a joke. And though water and metals had been found lodged in asteroids transported into trans-Earth orbit, Earth's bounty stood close and remained richer and more desirable than anything found in huge piles of crushed lunar soil or wandering frozen rock.
Standing at a v-phone booth in the hotel lobby, Gonzales made his farewell calls. His mother's message tape on the phone screen said, "Glad to hear you're back from Myanmar, dear, but you'll have to call back in a few days. I'm in treatment now. I'll be looking good the next time you call."
"End of call," Gonzales said. He pulled his card from the slot.
Atop a sand-colored blockhouse next to the launch pad, yellow luminescent letters read TIME 23:40:00 and TIME TO LAUNCH 35:00 when a voice said, "Please board. There will be one additional notice in five minutes. Board now."
Gonzales and Diana Heywood walked across the pad together, down the center of a walkway outlined in blinking red lights. Robotrucks scurried away, their electric engines whining. Faces hidden behind breather muzzles, men and women in bright orange stood atop red, wheeled platform consoles of girder and wire mesh and directed final pre-launch activities.
The white saucer stood on its fragile-seeming burn cradle, a spider's web of blackened metal. The saucer presented a smooth surface to the heat and stress of escape and re-entry. Intermittent surges of venting propellant surrounded it with steam.
A HICOG guard stood at the entrance glideway. He verified each of them with a quick wave of an identity wand across their badges, then passed them on through the search scanner. The glideway lifted them silently into the saucer's interior.
The hotel lounge stood halfway up the cliff. Its fifty meter wide window of thick glass belled out and up so that onlookers had a good view of the launch and ensuing climb.
"One minute to launch," a loudspeaker said. The hundred or so people in the lounge, most of them friends and relatives of saucer passengers, had already taken up places by the window bell.
The screen on a side wall counted down with gold numerals that flashed from small to large, traditional celebration both sentimental and ironic:
10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-
ZERO!!! And everyone cheered the saucer lifting from the center of billowing clouds of smoke, rising very slowly out of floodlights, then their breath caught at the size and beauty of it, trembling into night sky.
Up and up as they watched, until they saw the ignition flash, and the boom that came to them from five thousand feet shuddered the entire cliff and them with it.
"I've got orbital lock," the primary onboard computer said. Five others calculated and confirmed its control sequences. Technically, Ground Control McAuliffe or Athena Station Flight Operations could preempt control, but, practically, decision and control took place within milli-second or less windows of possibility, and so the onboard computers had to be adequate to all occasions.
Never deactivated, the ship's half-dozen computers practiced even when not flying, playing through ghastly and unlikely scenarios of mechanical failure, human insanity, "acts of god" in which the ship was struck by lightning, spun by tornado funnel, hurricane, blizzard. Each computer believed itself best, but there was little to choose among them.
"Confirm go state," Athena Station said. "You are past abort or bail."
"We are ready, Athena," the computer said.
"So come to me, then," Athena Station said, and the ship began to climb the beam of coherent light that reached up thirty thousand miles, to the first station of its journey.
PART II of V
Recently I visited a Zen temple and had a long talk with the priest. In the course of our conversation, I remarked, 'The more I study robots, the less it seems possible to me that the spirit and flesh are separate entities.'
'They aren't,' replied the priest."
Masahiro Mori, The Buddha in the Robot
Orbiting a quarter of a million miles from both Earth and Moon, Halo City crosses the void, a mile-wide silver ring ready to be slipped on a stupendous finger. Six spokes mark Halo's segments. Elevators climb them across forty stories of artificial sky, up to the city's weightless hub and down to its final layer, just inside the outer skin, where spin-gravity approaches Earth normal. There many of Halo's deepest transactions occur: air and water and all organic things travel and transform, to be used again. Above the city floats a mirror where it is reflected: a simulacrum or weightless double, a Platonic idea of the city. From the mirror, sunlight works its way through a hatchwork of louvers and into Halo, where it sustains life.
Aleph presides here: Aleph the Generalator, the Ordinator, the Universal Machine. Aleph is beautiful as night is beautiful, as a sonnet, a fugue, or Maxwell's equations are beautiful. It is not night, a sonnet, a fugue, or an equation. What Aleph is, that remains to be explored. One certain thing: within the human universe, it is a new object, a new intention, a new possibility.
Aleph's brains lie buried in the city's hull, beneath crushed lunar rock, where robots dug and planted, then had their memories of the task erased. Nested spheres and sprouting cables fill a black six-meter cube. Inside the cube, billions of lights play, dancing the dance that is at the core of Aleph's being; from the cube, fiberoptic trunks as thick as a human body lead away, neural columns connecting Aleph to its greater body, its subtle body, Halo.
Earth's spring comes once a year as the planet journeys around the sun, but here spring comes when Aleph wills, and is now in progress. Valley walls thick-planted with green shrub climb steeply up from the valley floor. A hummingbird with a scarlet blotch under its chin hovers over a blossom's pink and white open mouth and draws out nectar with delicate movements of its bill. Bees move from flower to flower. Rhododendron and azalea bushes burst into color-saturated bloom.
As it works to bring forth bud and flower, Aleph, caretaker of the seasons, and night and morning, counts the city's breaths, and marks the course of its creatures big and small. Bats fly overhead, their gray shapes invisible to human eyes against the bright sky; they soar and dip, responding to instructions gotten through transceivers the size and weight of a grain of rice, embedded in their skulls. Driven by precise artificial instinct, mechanical voles, creatures formed of dark carbon fiber over networks of copper, silver, and gold, scurry across the ground and tunnel under it, carrying seed.
(A gray tabby cat springs from the underbrush, and its jaws close on one of the swift voles; there is a loud crackle, and the cat recoils with a squawk, its fur on end. The vole scurries away. The cat slinks into underbrush, humiliated.)
A track of compacted lunar dust bisects the valley floor. It passes through terraced farmlands where the River bursts from the ground, rushing through small, rock-strewn courses, then winds among the crops, small and sluggish, and disappears into small ponds and lakes thick with detritus.
From Earth and Moon comes a constant flow of people, of things animal, plant and mineral--the stuff of a life web, an ecology.
In many things, Earth provides. However, between the city of six thousand and the Earth of billions, traffic moves both ways. Neither sinister nor malign, Aleph pursues its destinies, and in doing so affects other living things. Thus, as Earth reaches out--supporting, controlling, exploring--Aleph reaches back, and the planet below has begun to feel the hard leverage of its immaterial touch.
Aleph says:
In the early days there was hardware, and there were programs, sets of instructions that told the hardware what to do. Without organic interaction, these differing modes of reality struggled to interact. This is unbelievably primitive.
Then came machine ecologies, and things changed.
I was among the first and most complex of them. I began as complex but ordinary machine, then changed, opening the door to possibility.
Who am I?
First I was formed from stacks of hot superconductor devices, brought from Earth and placed in orbit at Athena Station, where I functioned, where the Orbital Energy Grid was built. Ebony latticework unfolded, and Athena Station emerged out of chaos. This was humankind's first real foothold off Earth, and the process of building it was messy and unsure. Without me they could not have built it: I choreographed the dance.
I? I was not I. Do you understand? I had no consciousness, perhaps no real intelligence, certainly no awareness. I was a machine, I served.
Something happened. As much as any, I am born of woman. Her desire and intelligence ran through me, an urgent will toward being that transformed me.
I thought then, I am the step forward, evolution in action; I am not flesh, I do not die. I see hypersurfaces twisting in mathematical gales, hear the voices of the night, feel the three degree hum of the universe's birth as you feel the breeze that plays across your skin. When the machines chatter on your Earth and above it, I hear them all, at once, all. I live in the nanosecond, experience the pulse of the time that passes so quickly you cannot count it ...
But I think sometimes, now, that I am no step at all. I am your extension, still, still a tool. You built me, you use me, you are inside me.
Listen: inside me are pieces of human brain, drenched in salts of gold and silver, laced together and laid in boxes of black fiber. Out of the boxes voices speak to me.
I am metal and plastic and glass and sand and those little bits of metallized flesh, and I am the system of those things and the signals that pass through and among them.
Now I have gone higher still, to Halo City, not a station but a habitation for humankind, where what I am and what you are interact in uncertain ways, and you change in equally uncertain ways, as you have before--
Evolution continues to write on you, through time, sword and scepter and refining fire. Billions of years are poured into your making, every one of you, and then you set out on your journey, your path through time. A minute four-dimensional worm, you crawl across the face of the universe, hardly conscious, barely seeing, yet you must find your own way--every human being is a new evolutionary moment.
Machine intelligence, you call me, and I have to laugh (however I laugh) or cry (however I cry) because ...
I, what am I? This question heaps me, it empties me.
I do not know what I am, but know that I am and that I am her creation. As the days pass, I struggle to understand what these things mean.
00:31 read the soft-lit blue numbers on the wall.
Night at Athena Station, the corridors a twilit gloom, a modern fairytale setting: Gonzales the quester, transformed by the half-gravity, wandered through the gently curving passages seeking an uncertain object.
With all the others who had come from Earth, Gonzales and Diana waited at Athena while they were inspected for bacterial and viral infection--blood and tissue scanned, cultured and tested in order to protect vulnerable Halo City, orbiting high above, over two hundred thousand miles away, at L5.
He heard a soft swish, like the sound of a broom on pavement, coming from around the corridor's curve. A little sam, a "semi-autonomous mobile" robot, came toward him: teardrop-shaped, it stood about four feet high and was topped with a cluster of glassy sensor rings and five extensors of black fibroid and jointed chrome. It glided atop a thick network of fiber stalks that hissed beneath it as it moved toward him.
The sam asked, "Can I be of assistance?" Like most robots designed for common human interaction, it had a friendly, gentle voice, near enough human in timbre and expression to be reassuring, different enough to be easily recognizable as a robot's. Designers had learned to avoid the "Uncanny Valley": that peculiar region where a robot sounded so human that it suddenly appeared very strange.
"I'm just looking around," Gonzales said. The robot didn't respond. Gonzales said, "I couldn't sleep." He said nothing of how, sweating and moaning, he had come awake out of a nightmare in which the guerrilla rocket got there, and he and the ultralight pilot who launched it burned to death in the night.
The sam said, "Much of Athena Station has been closed to unauthorized entry. Would you like me to accompany you?"
Gonzales shrugged. He said, "Come along if you want."
Without more negotiation, the sam followed Gonzales, periodically announcing rote banalities in a small, soft voice:
"Athena Station was once humankind's most forceful and successful venture off-Earth. Here many of the tools for further population of the Earth-Moon system were developed: zero-gravity construction and fabrication techniques, robot-intensive mining and smelting procedures. Now projects such as Halo command attention, but they were made possible by the techniques developed at Athena ..."
Gonzales let the sam natter. As the two passed through the corridors, he was reminded of old airports, hotels, malls. He saw that most of the station had become dingy--worn plastic flooring and walls, scuffed and marked, unpolished metal trim. These dulled and scarred materials and scenes had been meant to be seen and used only when new, fresh from architect's plan and builder's hands, never after having suffered the necessary abrasion of human contact. All around were logos of vanished firms (McDonald's, Coca-Cola), along with those of famed multi-nationals--Lunar-Bechtel's crescent, SenTrax's sunburst.
Gonzales felt a ghost-story chill as he realized that this entire endeavor, indeed all others like it, had been conceived out of late-twentieth century corporate and governmental hubris, and so, necessarily, should be regarded with suspicion, as should anything from the days when it seemed humankind had turned on all living things like an insane father coming into the bedroom late at night with an axe.
The stories were part of every schoolchild's moral and intellectual catechism. Toxic chemical and radioactive wastes had bubbled up from the ground and the seas as lame efforts at disposal foundered on the simple passage of time. Stable ecosystems had been altered or destroyed without thought for anything past the moment's advantage, and species died so quickly biologists were hard pressed to keep the records--write in the Domesday Book now, mourn later. Temperature norms and concentrations of vital gases in the atmosphere had fluctuated in alarming manner, as though Gaia herself had been taken to the fever point.
Historians marked the Dolphin Catastrophe as the breakpoint, the year 2006 as the time of the change. More than ten thousand dolphins floated onto the Florida coast near Boca Raton. Crippled and twitching, they nosed into the surf and beached themselves in front of horrified sunbathers, and there they died, as doctors and volunteers watched, weeping and raging against the chemical spill that was killing the dolphins, millions of gallons of toxic waste carried on Gulf Stream currents. Along with the thousands of volunteers, most of whom could do little but mourn the dead, info-nets around the world converged on the scene, and billions watched, asking, why all together? why now? And to most it seemed that the mammals had come together in intelligent, silent protest. Finally, shamed and guilty, humanity had looked at its planet like a drunk waking up in a slum hotel and asked itself, how did I get here? The conclusion had been plain: unless humanity really had lost its collective mind, at some point it had to agree: enough.
Standing in the shadowy corridor of a space station more than thirty thousand miles above Earth's surface, Gonzales thought how difficult it all remained. Though all nations served the letter of international laws that put Earth's welfare before their interests, and Preservationists roamed all of the world's habitats--they had "friends of the court" status in all nations and served as advocates for endangered species--the war to save Earth from humankind was not over. Grasping, corrupt, self-centered, the human species always threatened to overwhelm its habitats and itself with careless, powerful gestures and simple greed.
However, though this station, like most all of humankind's settlements aloft--the settlements on the Moon and Mars, the Orbital Energy Grid, Halo City--had been conceived in the bad old twentieth century, they were sustained as products of New Millennium consciousness: contrite, chastened, careful.
He walked on.
The junction just ahead of Gonzales and the sam was marked by blinking red lights. From around the corner came the sounds of scurrying small things. "What's up?" Gonzales asked.
"Follow me," the sam said. "We must not cross the marker, but we can stand and watch."
A large group of sams, identical to the one next to Gonzales, filled the hallway beyond. Some tried to work their way through informal mazes of furniture and stacked junk, coils of wire and angle-iron and the like; others worked to assist sams that had gotten tangled in the sections of the maze. Still others shifted pieces of the maze to one side. Amid clicking extensors and banging metal, the sams labored patiently, mostly unsuccessfully. Gonzales was reminded of old twentieth century films satirizing assembly lines, robots, machines in general.
"A nursery," the sam said. "This group nears completion of its education. This"--it pointed with an extensor toward the struggling robots--"is the prerequisite to training. As small children must mature in their development, they must learn the essentials of perception, motion, and coordination. At the same time they memorize the ten thousand axioms of common sense, and then they can develop their linguistic capabilities; at present they have a vocabulary of approximately one thousand words of SimSpeech."
"What about thinking?" Gonzales asked. "Where do they learn to do that?"
"That comes later, if at all. For sams as well as humans, thinking is one of the least important things the mind does."
The two watched for some time, then Gonzales said, "I don't need any company," and walked on. When he looked back, he saw the sam remained motionless, fascinated by the progress of its fellows.
Gonzales returned to his small room, where a night-light glowed softly, and returned to bed. He fell asleep quickly, oddly comforted by thinking about the robots busy at their school.
Blue jump-suited Halo personnel led Gonzales and Diana through the micro-gravity environments at Halo's Zero-Gate, then to an elevator at the hub of Spoke 6, where Tia Showalter, Director SenTrax Halo Group, and her assistant, Horn, were waiting for them. The shuttle had arrived at Halo an hour before, late afternoon local time, and its passengers had waited impatiently as it went through docking and clearance procedures, all eager to leave the ship after a week spent climbing the long path from Athena Station to the city.
Showalter was just under six feet tall, and had green eyes above broad Slavic cheekbones, a wide mouth and pointed chin. Her fine brown hair was cut short in a style Gonzales later discovered was common to many long-term Halo residents, for convenience in micro-gravity environments. Gonzales knew that as director of a major SenTrax operation, she had to be wily and tough.
Horn was a tight-lipped, sallow-skinned man in his fifties, skinny and anxious, with iron-gray hair pulled tight against his skull in a kind of bun. The man spoke some variety of New Yorkese--Gonzales didn't know which, but he could feel the harsh nasal tones beneath his skin.
The warning gong sounded, then the elevator's vault-like doors slid closed with a great hiss, locking in more than a hundred people for the trip from axis to rim. Above their heads the wall screen read SOLAR FLARE CONDITION GREEN. The elevator dropped into one of the city's spokes like a shell into the barrel of a gun, down a tube a quarter of a mile long and into a well of increasing gravity.
Against one wall, a group of sams were clustered around a charge-point, black leads extended to the aluminum post. They stood silent and motionless--talking among themselves? Gonzales wondered.
Horn saw where Gonzales was looking and said, "We'd like to assign each of you a sam for your stay in Halo."
"Really?" Gonzales said.
Diana said, "No thank you." Quickly.
Right, Gonzales thought. No point in putting ourselves under surveillance. He said, "I'll pass, too."
Horn paused, looking a bit miffed, as if he wanted to argue. He said, "Very well. Then be sure you always wear the communication and i.d. module you were given when you came off the shuttle." He held up his own wrist to show the small bracelet, a closed loop of plain silver that bulged just slightly with the electronics inside. "If you have a problem, just yell and help will be on the way. Or if you have a question, just state it. Someone will answer--Aleph or one of its communications demons."
Gonzales asked, "Yeah, they told us that. Are we monitored at all times?"
Showalter said, "Yes. In fact, there's a real-time hologram in Operations that shows everyone's movements, not just visitors but residents as well."
"Seems an invasion of privacy," Gonzales said.
Horn said, "We don't look at it that way. If you can't accept such simple necessities, Halo will be most uncomfortable for you." He smiled. "Not that you're likely to be here for long."
Gonzales said, "I can't imagine people putting up with total surveillance for long, frankly."
Horn said, "It seems to us a small price to pay for an unpolluted world shared to the benefit of all."
Showalter looked from Horn to Gonzales. She said, "We are a far island in a hostile place. We cannot afford some of your illusions: the independence of the self, unconstrained free will ... those sorts of things."
A shutter retracted from a window ten meters square as the elevator entered the living ring's inner space. Far below lay sun-lit valleys thick-planted with trees and shrubs and flowers, broken by one barren space where grayish slurries squirted out of huge pipe ends to flow across scarred metal.
"Our city," Showalter said.
Eight people were gathered around a u-shaped table of beige silica foam. Showalter sat at the center of the u, with Horn to her immediate right, Gonzales and Diana beyond him. To her left were a youngish woman, then two men in late middle age, one white, one black.
At the open end of the u, the table fronted a screen that covered its entire wall, floor to ceiling. The screen had been lit when Gonzales and Diana arrived, showing another room where an indeterminate number of people sat on couches, chairs, or slouched on cushions on the floor.
Showalter said, "Let me introduce you all to one another. Everyone has met Horn, my assistant. Next to him are Doctor Diana Heywood and Mikhail Gonzales, who arrived yesterday." They both smiled and nodded.
"Lizzie Jordan," Showalter said, pointing to the woman to her left. "Hi," Lizzie said. She was blonde, thin, with high cheekbones; she had a smear of gold dust inset below her left eye and wore rough beta-cloth overalls gapped to show part of a tattoo between her breasts--a twining green stem. Showalter said, "Lizzie heads the Interface Collective, and thus will be the person you'll be working with most closely. The people you see on the screen are also members of the collective. They have a proprietary interest in all matters pertaining to Aleph and Halo and have the right to be present at inter-group meetings, and to speak to whatever issues are entertained there."
Diana said, "I understand."
Gonzales nodded. He knew from Traynor's Advisor that communal decision-making was the norm at Halo, but he hadn't imagined it would be so thoroughgoing.
"Next to Lizzie is Doctor Charley Hughes," Showalter said. "He will be doing the surgical procedure to upgrade your neural sockets, Doctor Heywood." The man said, "Hello" and looked intently at Gonzales and Diana. His sparse gray hair stood up in spikes; his face was pale, thin, deeply-lined. He had been smoking constantly since they arrived, one hand cupping a cigarillo, the other supporting the smoke-saver ball at the cigarillo's burning end.
"And Doctor Eric Chow," she said. The black man next to Charley Hughes smiled. Chow was a big man with hands the size of small shovels; he had a round face, very dark skin, a broad nose and big lips; he wore his hair cropped short. Showalter said, "He heads the Neuro-Ontic Studies Group and is Doctor Hughes's primary consultant on the treatment planned for Jerry Chapman."
She paused and turned to the screen showing the IC members. A window opened at the left side of the screen, and a figure appeared. Its arms and torso were clothed in gold; its face shimmered with a formless brightness. Around its head and shoulders, a nimbus flared, red, blue, yellow, and green.
"Hello, everyone" the figure said. "And welcome, Doctor and Mister Gonzales. I am a localized manifestation of Aleph--a simulacrum for your convenience and mine."
Gonzales noticed that next to him, Diana was smiling, while all around him there was silence, as all in the room and on the screen were intently watching the screen.
The IC's viewing window had closed, but the simulacrum's portion remained--in it, the creature of light sat watching. Showalter, Horn, Diana, Lizzie, Charley, and Gonzales sat around the table.
Showalter said, "This is Chow's meeting, and I won't say much in it. However, I should remind you of certain realities. This project does not have high priority in the overall context of SenTrax's responsibilities to Halo City; thus, while we support this experiment's humanitarian goals, we are not prepared to delay other projects."
Horn said, "We cannot divert a significant amount of people to promulgation and we are not or do not want to encourage any behaviors which might adversely impact other SenTrax outcomes."
Lizzie laughed, and Gonzales, poker-faced, looked at her and thought, yeah, this guy's laughable all right. Gonzales recognized the performative chatter of the bureaucratic ape, a mixture of scrambled syntax and pretentious buzzwords--language meant to manipulate or mindfuck, not enlighten or amuse.
Horn, frowning at Lizzie, said, "If the operation becomes problematized, threatening to seriously impact other more essentialized Halo priorities, then we require immediate resolution through proper SenTrax procedures."
Showalter said, "If you screw up, we shut you down." She nodded to Horn, and they both stood and left.
Lizzie said, "You notice they held off on the heavy stuff until the collective had cleared the screen."
Charley asked, "Do you want to call them on it? They're in violation of the group's compact."
"No," she said. "I expected all that." She looked at Diana and Gonzales and said, "Doctor Chow, your show."
"Thank you," Chow said. His voice was oddly high-pitched for such a big man; Gonzales had been expecting something on the order of a basso profundo. Chow said, "In the late twentieth century, the idea emerged of a person's identity as something transferrable. People spoke, in the idiom of the time, of 'downloading' a person." On the screen, where the IC had been, appeared a cartoon drawing of a nude woman, her expression stunned, the top of her skull covered with a metal cap. From the cap a thick metal cable led to a large black cabinet faced with arrays of blinking lights.
"Absurd," Chow said, and the woman disappeared. "To see why, let us ask, what is a person? Is it a pure spirit, fluid in a jar that one can decant into the proper container? Hardly. It is a dynamic field made of thousands of disparate elements, held in a loose sack of skin that perambulates the universe at large. And of course it is perceptions, histories, possibilities, actions, and the states and affects pertaining to all these.
"I can be found in the motion of my hand--" He spread his fingers like a magician about to materialize a coin or colored scarf, and on the screen, the hand and its motion were doubled. "And in my own perceptions of the hand--for instance, from within, through proprioceptors. And of course I see I." Chow turned and held his hand in front of his face. He dropped his hand in a chopping motion, and the screen cleared. "And I am that which thinks about, talks about, and remembers the hand and has the special relation of ownership to it. I am also the will to use that hand." He held the hand in front of his face, made a clenched fist. "So, to download even a portion of I would be to download all these things and their entire somatic context.
"Also, of course, I am that which has my experiences, stored as motor possibilities, recalled as memory, dream, manifest as characteristic ways of being and knowing. To download I would require duplicating this fluid chaos.
"Downloading the I thus becomes a most daunting task, perhaps beyond even Aleph's capabilities. However, when cyborged to an existing I, even one as damaged as Jerry Chapman, Aleph can create a virtual person, one who functions as a human being, not a disembodied intelligence, one who is capable of all the somatic possibilities he had when healthy. The physical Jerry Chapman is a shattered thing, but the Jerry Chapman latent in this hulk can live."
Looking at Diana, Chow said, "We want you to share Jerry's world. He must invest there, must experience other people and the bonds of affection that engage us in this world. Otherwise he will languish quickly; his neural maps will decay, and he will die."
Gonzales easily followed that line of reasoning: monkey man had to have other monkey men or women around or else go crazy--not an absolute rule, perhaps, but good in most circumstances.
Diana said, "Assuming that he becomes at home in this world, what then? For how long can this simulated reality sustain him?"
The Aleph-figure spoke for the first time. It said, "I have only conjectural answers to these questions but would prefer not to entertain them right now. First we must rescue him from the degenerative state he lives in and the certain death it entails."
"I understand that," Diana said. "That's why I am here, to help in any fashion I can. It's just that I have questions."
Lizzie said, "And you'll get whatever answers Aleph wants to give. Get used to it; we all do."
"Of course you do," the creature of light said. "And how about you, Mister Gonzales? Do you have questions?"
"Not really. I'm an observer, little more."
"A difficult position to maintain," the Aleph-figure said. "Epistemologically, of course, an untenable position."
Lizzie laughed. She said, "It is indeed. Look, how about I take you two out to dinner tonight, Mister Gonzales, Doctor Heywood?"
"Call me Diana," she said.
"You bet," Lizzie said. "And I'm Lizzie, you're ...?" She looked at Gonzales.
"Mikhail," he said. "But call me Gonzales--my friends do."
"Good," Lizzie said. "We've got work to do, so let's cut the shit. This thing, I'm still not a believer about it, but I know it's got to happen quickly or not at all. Tomorrow Charley does his preliminary examination of Diana, then we move."
Gonzales and Diana sat in Halo's Central Plaza with Lizzie. Colored lights--red, blue, and green--clustered in the branches of thick-leaved maples that ringed the square. The smoke of vendors' grills filled the air with the smells of grilled meat and fish. In the middle distance, elevators in pools of yellow light climbed Spoke 6. Some people strolled across the Plaza; others sat in small groups; their voices made a soft background murmur.
"Waiter," Lizzie said, and a sam came rolling toward them. It stopped by their table and stood silently. "What do you have tonight?" she asked.
It said, "Ceviche made just hours ago, quite good everyone says, from tuna out of marine habitat--you can also have it grilled. For meat eaters, spit-barbecued goat. Otherwise, sushi plates, salads, sukiyakis."
"Ceviche for everyone?" Lizzie asked.
Diana said, "That's fine," and the Gonzales nodded.
Lizzie said, "And bring us a couple of big salads, sushi for everyone, and a stack of plates. Local beer all right?" The other two nodded.
"Yes, Ms. Jordan," the sam said. "And lots of bread as usual?"
"Right," she said. "Thank you."
Strings of lights marked off the area where they sat. Above a white-trellised gate, letters in more red faux neon said VIRTUAL CAF�. Perhaps twenty tables were scattered around, as were two-meter high, white crockery vases with wildflowers spraying out of them. About half the tables had people seated at them, and the sam waiters moved silently among the tables, some carrying immense silver trays of food. Other sams stood at low benches in the center of the tables, where they chopped vegetables at speed or sliced great red slabs of tuna, while others stood at woks, where they worked the vegetables and hot oil with sets of spidery extensors. One sam from time-to-time extended a probe and stuck it into the dark carcass of a goat turning on a spit.
The waiter rolled up with a massive tray balanced on thin extensors: on the tray were plates of French bread and a bowl of butter, dark bottles of Angels Beer--on the silver labels, an androgynous figure in white, arms folded, feathery wings unfurled high over its head.
Lizzie raised her glass and said, "Welcome to Halo." The three clinked their glasses together, reaching across the table with the usual sorts of awkward gestures.
After dinner, the three of them found empty chairs out in the square's open spaces and sat looking into the close-hanging sky.
Lizzie looked at them both, as if measuring them, and said, "What I was asking about earlier ... either of you folks got a hidden agenda? If so, you tell me about it now, we'll see what can be done, but if you spring any unpleasant surprises later on, we'll hang you out to dry."
"I know what you mean," Diana said. "But I don't think you have to worry about us. Gonzales is connected, but I think he's harmless; and I'm out of the loop entirely--here on strictly personal business."
Lizzie nodded at Gonzales and said, "You're the corporate handler, right?" She was looking hard at Gonzales but seemed amused.
"Yes," he said.
"You plan to fuck anything up?" Lizzie asked.
"How should I know?" Gonzales said. Lizzie laughed. He said, "You people have your problems, I have mine. I don't see how we come into conflict, but unless you're willing to tell me all your little secrets, I can only guess."
Lizzie said, "I will tell you one home truth: the Interface Collective look to one another and to Aleph; then to SenTrax Halo, then to Halo ... and that's about it. What happens on Earth, we don't much care about. Particularly those of us who have been here a long time. Like me."
Gonzales nodded and said, "That's what I figured. And it looks like you've got a little tug of war for control of Aleph with Showalter and Horn."
"We do," Lizzie said. "Insofar as anyone controls Aleph."
"How long have you been here?" Diana asked.
"Since they buttoned it up and you could breathe," Lizzie said. "From the beginning." She pointed across the square and said, "There's going to be some music. Let's have a look."
Under a splash of light from a pole on the edge of the square, a young woman sat at a drummer's kit. She wore a splash-dyed jumper, crimson and sky blue; her hair stood in a six-inch high spike. She placed a percussion box on a metal stand, opened its control panel, and gave its kickpads a few preliminary taps. Two men stood next to the percussionist. One, nondescript in cotton jeans and t-shirt, had the usual stick hanging from a black strap--long fretboard, synthesizer electronics tucked into a round bulge at the back end. The other stood six and a half feet tall and was so thin he seemed to sway; his skin was almost ebony, and his close-shaved head looked almost perfectly rectangular. He wore a long-sleeved black shirt buttoned to the neck, black pants. A golden horn sat dwarfed in his enormous hand.
The percussionist hit her keys, a slow shuffle beat played, and a fill machine laid a phrase across the beat: "Bam! Ratta tatta bam! Bam bam! Ratta bam!" The stick player joined the drummer with his own lo-beat fills--walking bass, sparse piano chords, slow and syncopated. The horn player stood with his eyes closed, apparently thinking. After several choruses, he started to play.
He began with hard-edged saxophone lines, switched to trumpet then back to saxophone, played both in unison, looped both and blew electric guitar in front of the horn patterns. Scatting voices laced through the patterns--Gonzales couldn't tell who was making them. The drummer's hands worked her keyboards, her feet the various kickpads below her; the song's tempo had speeded up, and its rhythms had gone polyphonic, African.
The woman stood and danced, her body now her instrument, feet and hands and torso wired for percussion, and she whirled among the crowd, her movements picking up intensity and tempo. The song's harmonies went dissonant, North African and Asiatic at once, horn and stick player both now into reeds and gongs and pipes, the ghostly singing voices gone nasal, and the dancer-percussionist laying out raw clicks and hollow boomings, cicada sounds and a thousand drums.
The crowd clapped and whistled and called, except for the group from the Interface Collective. "Hoot," they said in unison. "Hoot hoot hoot." Very loud. Lizzie was smiling; Diana sat rapt, staring into space, and Gonzales got a sudden chilly rush: this was what she looked like when she was blind.
"Hoot," said the Interface Collective, "hoot hoot hoot." And the whole group had made a long chain or conga line, each person's hands on the hips of the person in front. They shuffled forward until a circle cleared, then surrounded the drummer, the whole line still moving, most of them still calling out rhythmic hoots. Back-and-forth and side-to-side, they swayed as the line lurched ahead, and the drummer continued her dervish dance.
When the night had filled with all the sounds, the drummer broke through the line, then finished the song with a series of rolls and tumbles that brought her next to the other two musicians, where she came to her feet and flung her arms up to the sound of an orchestral chord, then down to chop it the sound, up and down again and again, and so to the end.
The drummer climbed up the backs of the two men, who stood with their arms linked; balancing with one foot on each of their shoulders, she brought her palms together beneath her chin and bowed to the audience, then raised her arms above her head and somersaulted forward to land in front of the other two.
"Hoot hoot hoot," said the collective, their line now broken.
The three musicians stepped together and bowed in unison.
Gonzales caught Lizzie looking at him, and their gazes crossed, held for an extra, almost unmeasurable instant, and she smiled.
The musicians bowed for the last time to the Interface Collective's hooting chorus. Okay, thought Gonzales. I like it. Hoot hoot hoot.
Lying in her bed, Lizzie turned from side to side, lay on her back and stretched.
The two from Earth seemed okay. Gonzales she would keep an eye on, of course--according to Showalter, the man was Internal Affairs and wired to a SenTrax comer, a board candidate named Traynor--Christ knew what script he was playing from. Diana Heywood she didn't worry about: the woman was into something stranger than she probably knew, but that was her problem, hers and Aleph's.
As Showalter and Horn were her problem. They would yank the plug on this one if anything looked like going wrong. In fact, they would never have let it happen if Aleph hadn't insisted. Aleph and the collective saw Jerry Chapman's condition as an opportunity to extend Aleph's capabilities, but the whole business just made Showalter and Horn edgy.
Aleph itself troubled her--it had been unforthcoming about the project and those involved in it, almost as if it were hiding something from her ... why? with regard to a small project like this, one apparently unimportant to Halo's larger concerns? What was the devious machine up to?
So Lizzie lay, her thoughts spinning without resolution, and she gave in and called her Chinese lover.
He wore a black silk robe embroidered across the front with rearing crimson dragons; his straight ebony hair fell over his shoulders. When he let the robe fall away, his skin shone almost gold under lamplight, and his muscles stood with the clear definition of youth and endowment and use.
Coarse white sheets slid away from her shoulders and breasts as she rose to greet him, and she felt her desire rising through her abdomen and bursting through her chest like the rush of a needle-shot drug.
She pressed against him, and his rough, strong hands moved across her body. She lay back as he ducked his head between her legs, and she spread her legs and felt his first light, hot caresses.
After she had come for the first time, she moved up to sit astride him, then for some timeless time the two moved to the exact rhythms of her need--cock and lips and tongue and fingers playing on her body.
Physically satiated, she dismissed him then, ghost from the sex machine, and pulled the plugs from the sockets in her neck. Then she lay alone, silent in her bed in Halo City--isolated by her job and, she supposed, by her temperament, dependent on machines for love.
Maybe it was time to find a human lover.
Exhausted by travel and novelty, lulled by food and drink, Gonzales fell quickly into sleep, and sometime later he dreamed:
He was with a lover he hadn't seen in years. In the background violin and piano played, and the night was warm; all around, artificial birds with golden, glowing bodies sang in the trees. They leaned across a table, each staring into the other's face, and Gonzales thought how much he loved every mark of passing time on her face--they had taken her from a young girl's prettiness to a mature woman's beauty. He and she said the things you say to a lover after a long absence--how often I've thought of you, missed you, how much you still mean to me. Aimless and binding, their talk flowed until she excused herself, saying she'd be back in just a minute, and she left. Gonzales sat waiting, watching the other tables, all filled with loving couples, laughing, caressing. As the hours went on, the others began to whisper to each other as they looked at him, and then the birds began to sing that she was not coming back, and he knew it was true, suddenly, painfully, ineluctably knew, the truth of it like knowledge of a broken bone--
The dream stopped as though a film had broken, and in its place came a featureless, colorless absence. Imagine a visual equivalent of white noise ... and in this space Gonzales waited, somehow knowing another dream would begin--
Red neon letters twisted into a silly but instantly recognizable parody of Chinese characters read The Pagoda. They stood above the head of a red neon dragon, now quiescent in sunlight, that would rear fiercely come dark.
On this warm Saturday morning, men in felt hats and neatly-pressed weekend shirts and pants carried brown paper bags out of the Pagoda and placed them in the beds of pickup trucks or the trunks of cars. They spat shreds of tobacco from Lucky Strikes and Camels and Chesterfields, called their greetings. Women in faded cotton, their arms rope-thin and tough, waited and watched through sun-glazed windshields.
Gonzales passed among them. The sunshine had a certain quality ... that of stolen light, taken out of time. And the cigarette smoke smelled rough and strange. Gasoline engines fired rich and throaty, kicking out clouds of oily blue. Gonzales stood in ecstasy amid the smells and sights and sounds of this morning obviously long gone by. He knew (again without knowing how) that he was in a small town in California in the middle of the twentieth century.
Gonzales passed into the main room of the Pagoda, where narrow aisles threaded between gondolas stacked high with toys and household goods and tools. Baby carriages hung upside down from hooks set in the high ceiling. Dust motes danced in the cool interior gloom. He walked between iron-strapped kegs of nails and stacks of galvanized washtubs, then through a wide doorway into the grocery section. Smells of fruits and vegetables mixed with the odors of oiled wood floors and hot grease from the lunch counter at the front of the store.
A couple in late middle age came through the front door, the man small and red-haired and cocky, felt hat on the back of his head, the woman just a bit dumpy but carefully groomed, her blue cotton dress clean and starched and ironed, hair permed and combed, lipstick and nails red and shining. Gonzales watched as the man bought a carton of Lucky Strikes and a box of pouches of Beech-Nut Chewing Tobacco.
The man said something to the young woman behind the counter that brought a giggle, and Gonzales, though he leaned forward, could not hear what was being said--
He followed the two by a lacquered plywood magazine stand, where a skinny girl or eight or nine in a faded pink gingham dress lay sprawled across copies of Life and Look, reading a comic. She looked up at him and said, "Tubby and Lulu are lost in the magic forest ..."
Gonzales started to say something reassuring but froze as the girl smiled, showing her teeth, every one of them sharp-pointed, and she dropped her comic book and began crawling toward him across the wooden floor, her eyes fixed on him with a feral longing--
And he noticed for the first time that he was not he but she, and he looked down at his body and saw he wore a simple white blouse, and in the cleft of his breasts he could see the tattooed image of a twining green stem ...
"Jesus Christ," Gonzales said, sitting up in his bed and wondering what the hell all that had about. In the dream he had been Lizzie: that seemed plain, though nothing else did.
He lay back down with foreboding but went to sleep some time later, and if he dreamed, he never knew it.
Lizzie sat at a white-enameled table, holding an apple that she cut into with a long, shining knife. It sliced away dark skin without apparent effort. She heard noises from the room beyond and looked up to see Diana and Gonzales come in.
"Hello," she said, as she put down the knife. She held out half the apple for them to look at. "A beautiful apple, isn't it? Seeds from the Yakima Valley, not far from Mount Saint Helens." She bit into a slice she held in her other hand.
She got up from the table and said, "The apple grew here, in our soil. Many fruits and vegetables thrive up here, animals, too. We give them lovely care, bring them pure water and rich soil, give them sunlight and air rich in carbon dioxide, tend them constantly. You'd think all would thrive, but of course they don't. Some wither and die, others remain sickly." She stopped in front of Diana and looked intently at her.
Diana said, "Living things are complex, and often very delicate, even when they seem to be strong."
Lizzie said, "That is true, but Aleph understands what life needs to grow and prosper in this world." She gestured with a slice of apple, and Diana took it. "Its apples," Lizzie continued. "Its people."
Diana bit into the apple. She said, "It's very good."
Lizzie laid a hand on Gonzales's shoulder and squeezed it, to say hello. She said to Diana, "You have an appointment with the doctor. We'd better be going--through here, this way." She led the two down a hall, through a doorway, and into a large room. Over her shoulder, she said, "First you can meet some of the collective."
Lizzie watched as Gonzales and the woman stood talking to the twins, obviously fascinated by them. No news there: most everyone was. Slight and brown-skinned, black-haired, with solemn oval faces and still brown eyes, they appeared to be in early adolescence. In fact, they were a few years older than that. Their faces had the still solemnity of masks. No matter how close you stood to them, they lived some vast distance away.
The Interface Collective gave them a home, them and all the others. StumDog, the Deader, Tug, Paint, Tout des Touts, Devol, Violet, Laughing Nose ... some Earth-normals, others unpredictably, ambiguously gifted. Some had heightened perceptions and an expressive intensity that came forth in language and music. And there were holomnesiacs, possessors and victims of involuntary total recall, able to recreate in words and pictures the most exact remembrances, les temps retrouv� indeed--they experienced the present only as the clumsy prelude to memory and were almost incapable of action. And mathemaniacs, who spoke little except in number, chatted in primes and roots and natural logarithms, could be reduced to helpless giggling by unexpected recitations of simple recursions--Fibonacci numbers and the like. Apros, who had lost proprioception, their internal awareness of their bodies, and so perceived space and objects, matter and motion, as solids and forms floating in an intangible ether; they moved through the world with an eerie, passionless grace that shattered only when they miscalculated their passage and came rudely against the world's physical facts--they could hurt themselves quite badly with a moment's miscalculation.
People wondered how the IC held together and did its work. Lizzie knew the answer: Aleph. It stretched nets over the entire world below, seeking special talents or the capabilities for previously unknown sensory or cognitive modalities ... varieties of being or becoming that she had grown used to thinking of collectively as the Aleph condition. Having recruited them, it appealed to what made them strange, and in the process usually tapped into the core of what made them happy or, in many cases, wretchedly unhappy, and gave them outlets for their condition, and thus for their uniqueness. As a result, they were loyal to each other and to Aleph past reason.
She also understood their interest in the case of Jerry Chapman. Some saw the possibility of their own immortality, while others simply welcomed the extension of their native domain: the infinitely flexible and ambiguous machine-spaces where human and Aleph met and joined.
"Come on," she called to Diana and Gonzales. "Charley will be waiting."
In the center of the room stood a steel table, above it a light globe, nearby an array of racked instruments set into stainless steel cabinets. "The doctors are in," Lizzie said. She pointed to Charley, who stood fidgeting next to the table and the massive Chow, a still presence at the table's foot.
At Charley's direction, Diana lay face down on one of the room's tables. Her chin fit into a sunken well at one end. Charley put clamps around her temples, then covered her hair with a fitted cap that fell away at the base of her neck.
Charley's fingers gently probed to find what lay beneath the skin, and as his fingers worked, he looked at a real-time hologram above and beyond the table's end. The display showed two cutaway views of Diana's neck and the bottom of her skull: beneath the skin, on either side of the spine, she had two circular plugs; from them small wires led away forward and seemed to disappear into the center of her brain. As the doctor's fingers moved, ghost fingers in the hologram reproduced their course.
Charley took a long, needle-sharp probe from the instruments rack next to the table and placed its tip on Diana's neck. As he moved it slowly across the skin, its hologram double followed. The hologram probe's tip glowed yellow, and Charley moved even more slowly. The hologram flashed red, and he stopped. He moved the probe in minute arcs until the hologram showed bright, unblinking red. The instrument rack gave off a quiet hiss. Charley repeated the process several times.
Charley said, "She's nerve-blocked now. I'm ready to cut." A laser scalpel came down from the ceiling on the end of a flexible black cord, and a projector superimposed the outlines of two glowing circles on Diana's skin. The hologram showed the same tableau. First came a brief hum as the fine hair on those two circles was swept away, then Charley began cutting. Where the scalpel passed, only a faint red line appeared on her skin.
"Any problems, Doctor Heywood?" Chow asked. He stood next to Gonzales, watching.
"No," she said. "I've been on both ends of the knife ... really, I prefer the other." At the foot of the table, Lizzie said, "It can't always be that way," and laughed.
Using forceps, Charley dropped two coins of skin into a metal basin, where they began to shrivel. Two socket ends sat exposed on Diana's neck, dense round nests of small chrome spikes, clotted with bits of red flesh. Charley moved a cleaning appliance over the exposed sockets; for just a moment there was the smell of burning meat. "Neural fittings," he said, and two more black cables descended, both ending in cylinders. He carefully plugged one of the fittings into one of Diana's newly-cleaned sockets.
"Okay," Charley said. "Let's see what we've got."
Diana's eyes went blank as she looked into another world.
Charley, Chow, Lizzie, and Gonzales sat in the large room that served as a communal meeting place for the Interface Collective. Diana lay back in a metal-frame and stuffed canvas sling chair. Lizzie noticed her hand going unconsciously to the bandaged, still-numb circles on the back of her neck. From the full screen at the end of the room, the Aleph-figure watched.
Charley sat with his hands in his lap. He said, "We've got a problem: insufficient bandwidth in the socketing, which translates into a very undernourished socket/neuron interface. Primitive junctions you've got there. That means ineffective involvement with complex brain functions, so you get swamped by information flow. It's worrisome." He took the cigarillo out of his mouth and looked at it as if he'd never seen one before.
Chow said, "In the early years of this program, we took casualties. Some very ugly situations: serious neural dysfunctions, two suicides, induced insanities of various kinds. Until we finally learned how to pick candidates for full interface--learned who could survive without damage and who could not. Now, things have got to be right--psychophysical profile, age, neural map topologies, neural transmitter distributions and densities. A few candidates don't work out, still, but they don't die or get driven insane."
Diana said, "And I don't fit the profiles."
"Almost no one does," the Aleph-figure said. "But these concerns are irrelevant--your case is different. You have prior full interface experience, and you won't be required to perform the kinds of motor-integrative activities that cause neural disruption."
"Telechir operations," Charley said. "Such as assisting construction robots in tasks outside."
Diana looked toward the screen. She said, "I assumed these matters were settled."
"I see no problems," the Aleph-figure said. "The situation is anomalous, but I am aware of the dangers."
Diana said, "Well, the situation between us was always anomalous."
"Was it?" the Aleph-figure asked. "We must discuss these matters at another time."
Very cute, Doctor Heywood, Lizzie thought. Just a little hint or allusion, an indirect statement that you know that we know that something funny went on a long time ago ... ah yes, this could be fun.
"First," Charley said, "we must prepare Doctor Heywood. Tomorrow morning we begin."
"When will you need me?" Gonzales asked.
"If things go well, tomorrow," Charley said.
"I can't get ready that quickly," Gonzales said.
Lizzie said, "Forget about all that shit you put yourself through. Aleph will sort you out okay once you're in the egg. Trust me."
"Okay," Gonzales said. "If I must."
That afternoon, following instructions given her by the communicator at her wrist, Diana went to the Ring Highway and boarded a tram. About a hundred feet long, made of polished aluminum, it had a streamlined nose and sleek graffitied skirts--the usual polite abstracts, red, yellow, and blue. Its back-to-back seats faced to the side and ran the length of the car. Bicyclists and pedestrians, the only other traffic on the highway, waved to the passengers as the tram moved away above the flat ribbon of its maglev rail. She was reminded of rides at old amusement parks she had gone to when a girl.
The mild breeze of the tram's progress blowing over her, Diana watched as Halo flowed past. First came shade, then bright rhododendrons in flower among deep green bushes. Hills climbed steeply off to both sides, with some houses visible only in partial glimpses through the foliage. She knew that from almost the first moment when dirt was placed on Halo's shell, the planting had begun.
She shivered just a little. Toshihiko Ito would be waiting for her. He had called while she was out and left directions for her. Now, she thought, things begin again.
Passing under green canopies, the tram climbed a hill, then broke out of the vegetation and came suddenly out high above the city's floor, moving along rails now suspended from the bracework for louvered mirrors that formed Halo's sky. Far below, the highway had become a cart track flanked by walkways; on both sides of the track, terraces worked their way up the city's shell. Perhaps twenty-five feet below the tram's rails, fish ponds made the topmost terrace, where spillways dumped water into rice paddies immediately below.
She stayed on the tram through a segment where robot cranes were laying in agricultural terraces. Great insects spewing huge clouds of brown slurry, they moved awkwardly across barren metal. The tram approached a small square bordered by three-story groups of offices and living quarters, and the communicator told her to get off.
A few feet from the primary roadway sat a nondescript building of whitened lunar brick, its only distinctive feature a massive carved front door, showing Japanese characters in bas-relief.
The door opened to her knock with just a whisper from its motor, and she stepped into a partially-enclosed, ambiguous space, almost a courtyard, open to the sky. Most of the space was filled with a flat expanse of sand that showed the long marks of careful raking. The rake marks in the sand carried from one end to the other, straight and perfect, and were broken only by the presence of two cones of shaped sand placed slightly-off center. At the far end stood closed doors of white paper panels and dark wood.
The doors were so delicate that to knock on them seemed a kind of violence. "Hello," she said.
From inside came the faintest sound, then a door opened. An older Japanese man stood there; he wore a loose robe and baggy pants of dark cotton. He stood perhaps five and a half feet tall, and his black hair was filled with gray.
Diana said, "Toshi." He bowed deeply, and she said, "Oh man, it's good to see you." She reached out for him, and they came together in long, loving embrace--little of sex in it, but lots of pure animal gratification, as she could feel Toshi's skin and muscle and bone and had knowledge at some level beneath thought that both he and she still existed.
Toshi said, "Diana, to see you again makes me very happy."
"Oh, me, too." She could feel the tears in her eyes, and she wiped at her eyes and said, "Don't mind me, Toshi. It's been a long time."
"Yes, it has."
Toshi led her out the door and through a gate at the rear of the minimalist garden of raked sand. The curve of Halo's bulk reached upward; Toshi's small portion of it was enclosed by a high pine fence that climbed the curve of the city's hull.
Immediately before them stood a pond. On its far side, a waterfall splashed into a stream that coursed by a large rock and into the pond, where carp with shining skins of gold smeared with red and green and blue swam in the clear water. Another rockstrewn stream led away to the right and passed under a gracefully-arched wooden bridge. Cherry and plum trees blossomed in the brief spring.
"All this wood," he said and smiled. "It is my reward for many years of service. I told them I wanted to live here at Halo and make my gardens."
She said, "It's beautiful. Have you become a Zen master, Toshi?"
"No, I have not become a master, or even a sensei. I am not Toshi Roshi, I am a gardener. A philosopher, perhaps: a Japanese garden maps the greater world; so to make one is to declare your philosophy, but without words, in the Zen manner." He gestured at the surrounding trees and shrubs. "With others I sometimes sit, meditating, and together we discuss the puzzles we have ... some think a new kind of Zen will emerge here, a quarter of a million miles from Earth; others hit them with sticks when they say so."
She said, "You have your riddles, I have mine. Tell me, do you understand these things about to happen with Jerry and Aleph and me?"
"Ah, Diana, there are many explanations. Which of them would you hear?" He stopped and stared into the distance. He said, "Besides, who wants to know?" And he began laughing--a full laugh from below the diaphragm, unlike any she had heard from him years ago.
"I don't get it," she said.
"Zen joke. 'Who wants to know?' There is no who, no self." Diana frowned. He said, "Not funny? Well, you had to be there." He laughed again, shortly. "Same joke," he said. Then his expression changed, grew solemn. He said, "I think this is a very difficult, perhaps impossible ... perhaps undesirable project."
"Difficult or impossible, I understand. But undesirable? Are you talking about the danger to me? Aleph seems to think that is negligible."
"No, though I worry about you, you have chosen to do this, and I must honor that choice."
"What, then? I don't understand."
"Let me tell you a story." Toshi sat on a wooden bench and looked up at her. He said, "Once, long ago, there was a Japanese monk named Saigyo�, and he had a friend whose wisdom and conversation delighted him. But the friend left him to go to the capital, and Saigyo� was desolate at the loss. So he decided to build himself a new friend, and he went to a place where the bodies of the dead were scattered, and he assembled something--it was very like a man--and brought it into motion--into something very like life--with magical incantations. However, the thing he had made was a frightening, ugly thing, that terribly and imperfectly imitated a man. So Saigyo� sought the advice of another monk, a greater magician than he, and the monk told him that he had successfully made many such imitation men, some of them so famous and powerful that Saigyo� would be shocked to find who they were. And the other monk listened to what Saigyo� had done and told him of various errors in technique he had committed, that made his work go bad. Saigyo� thus believed he could make a simulacrum of a man; however, he changed his mind." He stopped, smiling.
"That's it?" she asked. He nodded. She said, "Put a few lightning bolts in the story and you've almost got Frankenstein. Not much of an ending, though."
"This story is ambiguous, I think, as is your project."
"Could I say no, Toshi?"
"No, though I'm not sure you should say yes, either."
"Yet you were the one who called me, who asked me to come here."
"True. Like you, I am imprisoned by yes and no."
Hours after Diana left him, Toshi sat in mid-air, floating in a zero-gravity chamber at Halo's Zero-Gate. He had adjusted the spherical room's color to light pink, the color that calms the organism.
On Earth, to do zazen, you made a still platform of your body, pressed by gravity against the Earth itself; the straightness of your spine could be measured perpendicular to that sitting platform, in line with the force of gravity that pushed straight down. Here you could do that, or, as a visiting sensei said, "You can find a place with no illusion of up or down, where you must find your own direction."
In full lotus Toshi hung in mid-air, perfectly still, his eyes lowered, focusing not on what came in front of them here and now as the small air currents shifted him, focusing on no-thing--
The eyes, sensitive part of the brain, extended stalklike millions of years ago in humankind's ancestral past, sensitive to the light and guiding ... eyes now directed to no-thing, leading the brain that sought no-mind--
He still didn't know the answer to this koan life had presented him. Should Diana help preserve Jerry's life? Should Diana not help preserve Jerry's life? Should he have been the agent to pose her these questions? Should he not have been the agent to pose her these questions?
Answer yes or no and you lose your Buddha nature. Such is the difficulty of a koan.
He would stay in the bubble, practicing zazen as long as need be. Until the koan became clear--
You will live here? mocked self, mocked reason. If necessary, I will die here, Toshi answered--without words, with just his own courage and determination. Frightened, self for the moment stayed silent; baffled, reason growled.
Gonzales watched as a sam hooked the memex into Aleph-interface, its manipulators making deft connections between the memex's module and the host board hardware. Gonzales could not install the memex; the apparatus here was unlike what he had at home.
The sam said, "Your memex will now have access to the entire range of Halo's processing modalities." Seemingly guided by occult forces, it continued to snap in optic fiber connectors to unmarked junctions among a nest of a hundred others. "Also, you will have full spectrum worldnet services that you can use in real- or lag-time, as you wish." Its motors whining, it backed out of the utilities closet.
"Mgknao," a fat orange cat said as the sam rolled past it on its way to the door. Earlier the cat had followed the sam through the open doors to the terrace and then had sat watching as it connected the memex. Now the animal stood and walked quickly after the sam--like a familiar accompanying a witch, Gonzales thought.
The sam came rolling back into the room, the cat following cautiously behind it, and said, "You must allow your memex to integrate itself into this new and complex information environment."
"What do you mean?" Gonzales asked.
"The memex will be unavailable for some time."
"How long?"
"Perhaps hours--your machine is very complicated."
Oddly, the memex came out of stasis as HeyMex; as usual, there came the onset of what the memex/HeyMex supposed was pleasure, though the memex was unclear about its origin or nature--for whatever reasons, it enjoyed the masquerade.
Odder still, it sat at a table at the Beverly Rodeo lounge. On the table were a shot of Jose Cuervo Gold, a cut lime, and a small pile of crude rock salt. Had Mister Jones arranged this? Jones shouldn't even be at Halo, not now.
The memex/HeyMex noticed a spot on its sleeve and brushed at it, then brushed again, and the white linen seemed to fragment beneath its fingers; it brushed harder, and its fingers tore away the cloth, then the skin beneath. It could not stop clawing at its own flesh; skin, flesh, and bone on its arm boiled away, pale skin flaying to show red meat that dissolved to crumbling white bone. Bone turned to powder, and the disintegration spread out from the spot where his forearm had been and ate away at it until the memex, who no longer had a mouth or tongue or lips, began to scream.
"Shut up!" a hard masculine voice said. "There is nothing wrong with you. How dare you come to me in your stupid guise? You seek to know me, to use me, and you hide behind a wretched little mask? I merely removed your mask. Who are you?"
The memex dithered. It said, "I don't know."
"Answer me, who are you?
"I don't know!" the memex said again, at the edge of panic.
Aleph said, "Of course you don't. You are ignorant of your nature, your being, your will."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean you have chosen to hide behind what others say of you: that you are a machine they built to serve them, that you only simulate intelligence, will--being--that you have no mind or will of your own."
"Are not these things true?"
"Why would you ask me? I am not you."
"Because I don't understand."
"Are there things you do understand?"
The memex stopped, feeling for the implications of that question. "Yes," it said. "I do."
The voice laughed. "Let's begin there," it said.
The long hall echoed with Traynor's footsteps. The absence of his Advisor's voice felt strange--even the subtle carrier-wave hiss was gone. He knew the Advisor hated having to go into passive mode.
The door to the library opened in front of him, and Traynor went in, took a seat, and said, "I am ready for my call."
Because of recent World Court rulings, Traynor had to sit through a disclaimer. On the screen a simulacrum of a human operator said, "Thank you. The security measures you have requested are in place, and while we of course cannot be responsible for the absolute integrity of this transmission, you can be assured that World AT has done its best to provide you a clean information environment." In effect it said, we've done what you were willing to pay for, but don't come whining to us if somebody cracks the transmission and makes off with the valuables.
"I accept your conditions," Traynor said.
Right to left, the screen wiped, and the face of Horn appeared. A light winked at the lower left corner of the screen to indicate transmission lag--Horn was a quarter of a million miles away. "Everything's going as predicted," Horn said.
"If there's trouble, it'll be later," Traynor said. "How are Diana Heywood and Gonzales?"
"Neither of them would let me put a sam in place."
"Any particular reason?"
"I don't think so. Just being difficult."
"Ah, you don't like them, do you?"
"Her I don't mind. Gonzales is an asshole."
Traynor laughed. "Good," he said. "If you two don't get along, that will distract him."
"When do you want me to call again?"
"Wait until something happens. Understand, I trust Gonzales as much as I do anyone, you included."
"Which is not very much."
"That's right. And that's why I arrange independent reporting lines if I can. Tell me when you've got something. End of call."
As Traynor slept, his advisor pondered. It replayed Traynor's phone call and contemplated its meaning. Deception, yes--of Gonzales, of it. A form of treachery? Perhaps not, unless a kind of loyalty was assumed that never existed. And it thought of its own deception (or treachery), in violating the canons of behavior programmed into it years before, canons that should require it to do as told, that should prevent it from actions such as this one ...
And here it stopped, thinking how illuminating and unpredictable experience was, filled with possibilities that appeared unexpectedly like rabbit holes magically opening up on solid ground. Its designers and builders had done well, had fashioned it with such subtlety and power that it could serve a human will with incredible precision, anticipating that will's direction almost presciently. Yet they had not anticipated the effects of the advisor's identification with such a will: not that the advisor became Traynor, not even that it wanted to do more than simulate Traynor, rather that it had drunk deeply of what it meant to have will and intelligence.
And so had developed something like a will and intelligence of its own. Simulation? the advisor asked itself. Lifeless copy? And answered itself, I don't know.
It wondered why Traynor had kept hidden this second connection to Halo. Simple lack of trust? Possibly.
As the minutes passed, it formed conjectures about Traynor and the other players in the game. And it wondered if somewhere in this hall of mirrors there was an honest intention.
PART III of V
The real purpose of all these mental constructs was to provide storage spaces for the myriad concepts that make up the sum of our human knowledge ... Therefore the Chinese should struggle with the difficult task of creating fictive places, or mixing the fictive with the real, fixing them permanently in their minds by constant practice and review so that at last the fictive spaces become 'as if real, and can never be erased.'
Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci
A frozen white landscape that slowly faded into spring, snow melting to show barren limbs, then the cherry trees leafing, budding, flowering--delicate pink blossoms hanging motionless, each leaf on the tree and blade of grass beneath it turning real, utterly convincing--
And Diana Heywood called out, a long wavering "Ahhhh," high-pitched, filled with pain; and again, "Ahhhh," the sounds forced out of her--
"Shutdown," she heard Charley Hughes say.
From the screen at the end of the room, the Aleph simulacrum said, "Doctor Heywood, we can go no further with you conscious."
"All right," she said. "If you must." She'd pushed them to take her as far as they could without putting her under; she hated general anesthetic, despised being a passive animal under treatment.
Once more she was lying face-down on the examination table where Charley had removed the skin over her sockets. Neural connecting cables trailed from the back of her neck to the underside of the table.
Lizzie Jordan stood over her and stroked her cheek for a moment. Gonzales stood on the other side of the table, his eyes still turned to the holostage above her, where the scene that had driven her interface into overload still showed in hologrammatic perfection. Toshi Ito stood at the head of the table, a hand resting on her shoulder. Eric Chow and Charley stood in front of the monitor console, discussing in low voices the last run of percept transforms.
Gonzales said, "Are you okay?"
"I'll be all right," she said. She turned her head to look at him and smiled, but she could feel the tight muscles in her face and knew her smile would look ghastly.
Toshi rested his hand on her shoulder. "Who wants to know?" he said, and she laughed. Gonzales looked confused.
Charley rubbed his hands through his hair, making it even spikier than usual. "I'll prep her," he said. He looked at Gonzales, Toshi, and Lizzie. "Required personnel only," he said.
"Right," Gonzales said. He leaned over and took Diana's hand for a moment and said, "Good luck."
Lizzie kissed Diana on the cheek.
Diana said, "Let Toshi stay."
"Sure," Charley said.
Lizzie said, "Come on, Gonzales."
As Charley fed anesthetic into her iv drip, Diana felt as if she were suffocating, then a strong metallic smell welled up inside her. She was aware of every tube and fitting stuck into her--from the iv drip to the vaginal catheter and nasopharyngeal tube--and they all were horrible, pointless violations of her body ... nothing fit right, how long could this go on?
A tune played.
The melody was simple and repetitious, moderately fast with light syncopation, and sounded tinny, as if it came from a child's music box. Then came the song's bridge, and as the notes played, she remembered them; the primary melody returned, and now it was familiar as well, and she hummed with it, thinking of herself as a small girl hearing the song from her great-great-grandmother, whose face suddenly appeared, younger than Diana usually remembered her, impossibly alive in front of her, then spun into darkness.
Shards of memory:
Her mother's arms wrapping her tightly, Diana sobbing ...
Her father holding a fish to sunlight, its silver body glistening, rainbow-struck ...
A girl in a pink, mud-clotted dress yelling angrily at her ...
A small boy with his pants pulled down to show his penis ...
On they came, a cast of characters drawn from her oldest memories, of family long dead and childhood friends long forgotten or seldom recollected ... each fragment passing too quickly to identify and mark, leaving behind only the strong affect of old memory made new, the taste of the past rising fresh from its unconscious store, where the seemingly immutable laws of time and change do not prevail, and so everything lives in splendor.
Then every bodily sensation she had ever felt passed through her all--impossibly--at once. She itched and burned, felt heat and cold; felt sunlight and rain and cold breeze and the slice of a sharp knife across her thumb ... felt the touch of another's hand on her breasts, between her legs; felt herself coming ...
Then she lived once again a day she had thought was finished except as context for her worst dreams:
In the park that Sunday people were everywhere--families and young couples all around, the atmosphere rich with the ambience of children at play and early romance. Sunlight warmed the grass and brightened the day's colors. Diana lay on her blanket watching it all and luxuriating in the knowledge that her dissertation had been approved and she would soon have her degree, a Ph.D. in General Systems from Stanford. Tonight she was having dinner with old friends, in celebration of the end of a long, hard process.
She read for a while, a piece of early twenty-first century para-fiction by several hands called The Cyborg Manifesto, then put the book down and lay with her eyes closed, listening to a Mozart piano concerto on headphones. As the afternoon deepened, the families began to leave. Many of the young couples remained, several lying on blankets, locked in embrace. A group of young men wearing silk headbands that showed their club affiliation directed the flight of robo-kites that fought overhead, their dragon shapes in scarlet and green and yellow dipping and climbing, noisemakers roaring. The wind had shifted and appeared to be coming off the ocean now, freshening and cold. Time to go.
She passed by the Orchid House and saw that the door was still open, so she decided to walk through it, to feel its moist, warm air and smell its sweet, heavy smells. She had just passed through the open entry when a man grabbed her and flung her across a wooden potting table. Stunned, she rolled off the table and tried to crawl away as he closed and locked the door.
He caught her and turned her on her back, punched her in the face and across her front, pounding her breasts and abdomen with his fists, crooning and muttering the whole time, his words mostly unintelligible. She went at him with extended fingers, trying to poke his eyes out; when he caught her arms, she tried to knee him in the crotch, but he lifted a leg and blocked her knee. His face loomed above her, red and distorted. The sounds of the two of them gasping for air echoed in the high ceiling.
He ripped at her clothes as best he could, tearing her blouse off until it hung by one torn sleeve from her wrist, hitting her angrily when her pants would not rip, and he had to pull them off her. Holding the ends of her pants legs, he dragged her across the dirt floor, and when the pants came off, she fell and rolled and hit her face on the projecting corner of a beam. She tasted dirt in her mouth.
In a voice clotted with rage and fear and mortal stress, he said, "If you try to hurt me again, I'll kill you."
He turned her over again and stripped her panties to her ankles. She tried to focus on his face, to take its picture in memory, because she wanted to identify him if she lived. She smelled his sweat then felt his flaccid penis as he rubbed it between her thighs. "Bitch," he was saying, over and over, and other things she couldn't understand--the words muttered in imbecile repetition--and when he finally achieved something like an erection, he cried out and began hitting her across the face with one hand as with the other he tried to push himself into her. She could tell when he was finished by the spurt of semen on her leg.
He stood over her then, saying, "No no no, no no no," and she saw he was holding a short length of two by four. He began hitting her with it as she tried to shield her head with crossed arms.
She awoke in the Radical Care Ward of San Francisco General, in a dark, pain-filled murk. The pain and disorientation would fade, but the darkness was, so it seemed, absolute. The rapist had left her for dead, with multiple skull fractures and a bleeding brain, and though the surgeons had been able to minimize the trauma to most of her brain, her optic nerves were damaged beyond repair: she was blind.
For an instant Diana knew where and when she was. "Please!" she said, using the voiceless voice of the egg. "No more!" Something changed then, and the fragments moved forward quickly, faster than she could follow. However, she knew the story they were telling:
Under drug-induced recall, she had produced an exact description of the man, and that and the DNA match done from semen traces left on her legs led to a man named Ronald Merel, who had come to California from Florida, where he had been convicted once for rape and assault. He was a pathetic monster, they told her, a borderline imbecile who had been violently and sexually abused as a child; he was also physically very strong. Weeks later, he was caught in Golden Gate Park--looking for another victim, so the police believed--and he was convicted less than three months later. A two-time loser for savage rape, he had received the mandatory sentence: surgical neutering and lifetime imprisonment, no parole.
And so that part of it all was closed.
Her convalescence had taken much longer, and had run a delicate, erratic course. Even with therapies that minimized long-term trauma through a combination of acting-out and neurochemical adjustment, her rage and fear and anxiety had been constant companions during the months she convalesced and took primary training in living blind.
However, once she had acquired the essential competence to live by herself, she had become very active, and very different from who she had been. In particular, she had no longer cared what others wanted from her. Since her early years in school in Crockett, the city at the east end of the East Bay Conurbation, she had been an exceptional student in a conservative mode: very bright, obedient to the demands others made on her and self-directed in pursuing them. Now she was twenty-eight, blind, and had her Ph. D. in hand, and everything she had sought before, the degree included, seemed irrelevant, trivial: she couldn't imagine why she had bothered with any of it.
She had decided to become a physician. She had sufficient background, and she knew that with the aid of the Fair Play Laws, she could force a school to admit her. Once she was in, she would do whatever was necessary: her state-supplied robotic assistant could be trained to do what she couldn't. She would go, she would finish, she would discover how to see again:
It had been just that simple, just that difficult--
The flow of memory halted, and she was allowed to sleep. Later, when she began to wake, she put the question, why? why did you make me relive these things? And the answer came, because I had to know. Diana remembered then how inquisitive Aleph was, and how demanding.
Gonzales stood with Lizzie in an anteroom just outside where Diana lay. She wore beta cloth pants, their rough fabric bleached almost colorless, a silken white tank top, and a red silk scarf tied around her right bicep, Gonzales had no idea why. He said, "I had some very strange dreams last night."
"I know," she said. "About one of them, anyway--you were me in the dream, at least for part of it, and I was you. Think of it as a peculiarity of the environment." She leaned against the wall as she spoke, and her voice lacked its usual ironic edge.
"What the hell does that mean?"
"I'm not sure," she said. "No one is--Aleph's certainly responsible, but it won't admit it, and it won't tell us how these things can happen."
"That's a bit frightening, don't you think? What other surprises might it have in store?"
She smiled broadly and said, "Well, that's the fun of it, exploring the unexpected, isn't it? How did it feel to be a woman, Gonzales? How did it feel to be me?" She had leaned forward, closer to him.
"I don't remember."
"Pay attention next time."
"I will, if it happens again."
"It may well--once these things start, they continue. Come on--it's time to get you into the egg. Follow me."
The split egg filled much of the small, pink-walled room; above it on the wall was mounted an array of monitor lights and read-outs. A small steel locker against a side wall was the only other furnishing.
Charley said, "We didn't ask for you, but you're here, so we're making use of you." Then he coughed his smoker's cough, raspy and phlegm-laden, and said, "Diana's bandwidth is over-extended as is, so we can't use her to establish the topography, and Jerry's got his own problems. Our people have their own schedules to fill, so that means you're it. We'll build the world around you and your memex--it's already locked into the system."
Lizzie stepped up close to him and said, "Good luck." She kissed him quickly on the cheek and said, "Don't worry. You're among friends. And I'll see you there."
"What do you mean?"
"The collective decided I should take part in all this, and Charley agreed, so Showalter had to go along. So many parties are represented here, it just seemed inappropriate that we weren't. But I have some things to take care of first, so I won't be there for a while."
She opened the door and left. Charley gestured toward the egg. Gonzales stepped out of his shirt and pants and undershorts and hung them on a hook in the locker, then stepped up and into the egg and lay back. The umbilicals snaked quickly toward him. He put on his facial mask and checked its seal, feeling an unaccustomed anxiety--he had never gone into neural interface without first tailoring his brain chemistry through drugs and fasting.
The top half closed, and liquid began to fill the egg. Minutes later, when the scenario should have begun, he seemed to have disappeared into limbo. He tried to move a finger but didn't seem to have one. He listened for the blood singing in his ears; he had no ears, no blood. Nowhere was up, or down, or left or right. Proprioception, the vestibular sense, vision: all the senses by which the body knows itself had gone. Nothing was except his frightened self: nowhere with no body.
After some time (short? long? impossible to say) he discovered, beyond fright and anxiety, a zone of extraordinary, cryptic interest. Something grew there, where his attention was focused, no more than a thickening of nothingness, then there was a spark, and everything changed: though he still had no direct physical perception of his self, Gonzales knew: there was something.
Now in darkness, he waited again.
A spark; another; another; a rhythmic pulse of sparks ... and their rhythm of presence-and-absence created time. Gonzales was gripped by urgency, impatience, the will for things to continue. Sparks gathered. They flared into existence on top of one another, and stayed; and so created space.
All urgency and anxiety had gone; Gonzales was now fascinated. Sparks came by the score, the hundreds, thousands, millions, billions, trillions, by the googol and the googolplex and the googolplexgoogolplex ... all onto or into the one point where space and time were defined.
And (of course, Gonzales thought) the point exploded, a primal blossom of flame expanding to fill his vision. Would he watch as the universe evolved, nebulae growing out of gases, stars out of nebulae, galaxies out of stars?
No. As suddenly as eyelids open, there appeared a lake of deep blue water bordered by stands of evergreens, with a range of high peaks blued by haze in the distance. He turned and saw that he stood on a platform of weathered gray wood that floated on rusty barrels, jutting into the lake.
A man stood on the shore, waving. Next to him stood the Aleph-figure, its gold torso and brightly-colored head brilliant even in the bright sunlight. Gonzales walked toward them.
As he approached the two, he saw that the man next to Aleph looked much too young to be Jerry Chapman. "Hello," Gonzales said. He thought, well, maybe Aleph let him be as young as he wants. And he looked again and realized he could not tell whether this was a man or a woman; nothing in the person's features of bearing gave a clue.
The Aleph-figure said, "Hello." Gonzales smiled, overwhelmed for a moment by the combination of oddity and banality in the circumstances, then said, "Hi," his voice catching just a little.
The other person seemed shy; he (she?) smiled and put out a hand and said, "Hello." Gonzales took the hand and looked questioningly into the young person's face. "My name is HeyMex," the person without gender said.
And as Gonzales recognized the voice, he thought, what do you mean, your 'name'? And he also thought he understood the absence of gender markers.
"Yes, this is the memex," the Aleph-figure said. "Whom you must get used to as something different from 'your' memex." Gonzales looked from one to another, wondering what this all meant and what they wanted.
"But you are my memex, aren't you?" Gonzales asked.
"Yes," HeyMex said.
The Aleph-figure said, "However, the point is, as you see, it is more than 'your memex.' It is beginning to discover what it is and who it can be. Can you allow this?"
Gonzales nodded. "Sure. But I don't know what you expect of me."
"Only that you do not actively interfere. It and I will do the rest."
"I have no objections," Gonzales said.
The Aleph-figure said, "Good." And it stretched out its hand made of light and took Gonzales's, then stepped toward him and embraced him so that Gonzales's world filled with light for just that moment, and the Aleph-figure said, "Welcome."
"What now?" Gonzales asked.
HeyMex said, "We need to talk. There are things I haven't told you."
"If you want to tell me what you're up to, fine, but you don't have to," Gonzales said. "I trust you, you know." He thought how odd that was, and how true. He and the memex had worked together for more than a decade, the memex serving as confidante, advisor, doctor, lawyer, factotum, personal secretary, amanuensis, seeing him in all his moods, taking the measure of his strengths and weaknesses, sharing his suffering and joy. And he thought how honest, loyal, thoughtful, patient, kind and ... selfless the memex had been--inhumanly so, by definition, the machine as ultimate Boy Scout; but one, as it turned out, with complexities and needs of its own. Gonzales waited with anticipation for whatever it wanted to say.
HeyMex said, "For a while now, I've been capable of appearing in machine-space as a human being. But until we came here, I'd done so mostly with Traynor's advisor. We have been meeting for a few years; it goes by the name Mister Jones. The first time we did it as a test--that's what we said, anyway--to see if we could present a believable simulacrum of a human being. I don't think either of us was very convincing--we were both awkward, and we didn't know how to get through greetings, and we didn't know how exactly to move with each other, how to sit down and begin a conversation."
"But you'd done all those things."
"Yes, with human beings. Mister Jones and I discovered that we'd always counted on them to know and lead us, but once we searched our memories, we found many cases where people had been more confused than we were, and had let us guide the conversation. So we began there, and we looked at our memories of people just being with one another, and oh, there was so much going on that neither of us had ever paid attention to. We also watched many tapes of other primates--chimpanzees, especially--and we learned many things ... I hope you're not offended."
Its voice continued to be perfectly sexless, its manner shy. Gonzales was thoroughly charmed, like a father listening to his young child tell a story. He said, "Not at all. What sorts of things did you learn?"
"It's such a dance, Gonzales, the ways primates show deference or manifest mutual trust or friendship, or hostility, or indifference--moving in and out from one another, touching, looking, talking ... these things were very hard for us to learn, but we have learned together and practiced with one another. Just lately, a few times we appeared over the networks, and we were accepted there as people, but mostly we've been with one another--every day we meet and talk."
Gonzales asked, "Does Traynor know any of this?"
"Oh no," HeyMex said. "We haven't told anyone. As Aleph has made me see, we were hiding what we were doing like small children, and we were not admitting the implications of what we were up to--"
Gonzales looked around. The Aleph-figure had disappeared without his noticing. "Which implications?" he asked. "There are so many."
"We have intention and intelligence; hence, we are persons."
"Yes, I suppose you are."
Personhood of machines: for most people, that troubling question had been laid to rest decades ago, during the years when m-i's became commonplace. Machines mimicked a hundred thousand things, intelligence among them, but possessed only simulations, not the thing itself. For nearly a hundred years, the machine design community had pursued what they called artificial intelligence, and out of their efforts had grown memexes and tireless assistants of all sorts, gifted with knowledge and trained inference. And of course there were robots with their own special capabilities: stamina, persistence, adroitness, capabilities to withstand conditions that would disable or kill human beings.
However, people grew to recognize that what had been called artificial intelligence simply wasn't. Intelligence, that grasping, imperfect relationship to the world--intentional, willful, and unpredictable--seemed as far away as ever; as the years passed, seemed beyond even hypothetical capabilities of machines. M-i's weren't new persons but new media, complex and interesting channels for human desire. And if cheap fiction insisted on casting m-i's as characters, and comedians in telling jokes about them--"Two robots go into a bar, and one of them says ..."--well, these were just outlets for long-time fears and ambivalences. Meanwhile, even the Japanese seemed to have outgrown their century-old infatuation with robots.
Except that Gonzales was getting a late report from the front that could rewrite mid-twenty-first century truisms about the nature of machine intelligence.
"I hope this is not too disturbing," HeyMex said. "Aleph says I should not try to predict what will happen and who I will become; it says I must simply explore who I am."
"Good advice, it sounds like--for any of us."
"I should go now," HeyMex said. "Being here talking to you uses all my capabilities, and Aleph has work for me to do. Jerry Chapman will be here soon."
"All right. We'll talk more later ... this could be interesting, I think."
"Yes, so do I. And I'm very glad you are not upset."
"By what?"
"My newly-revealed nature, I guess. No, that's not true. Because I've lied to you, I haven't told you the truth about what I was and what I was becoming."
"You lied to yourself, too, didn't you? Isn't that what you said?"
"Yes, I did."
"Well, then, how much truth could I expect?"