Foundation Fear (17 page)

The president of Artifice Associates waved his hand as he entered Nim's office. The
president touched his palm as he passed and with a metallic click the door locked itself
behind him. Nim didn't know anyone could do that, but he said nothing.

“I want them both deleted, ” the president told Nim.

“It might take time, ” Nim said uneasily. The huge working screens around them seemed to
almost be eavesdropping. “I'm not that familiar with what he's done.”

“If that damned Marq and Sybyl hadn't run out on us, I wouldn't have to come to you. This
is a crisis, Nim.”

Nim worked quickly. “I really should consult the backup indices, just in case -- ”

“Now. I want it done now. I've got legal blocks on those warrants, but they won't hold for
long.”

“You're sure you want to do this?”

“Look, Junin Sector is ablaze. Who could have guessed that this damned tiktok issue would
stir people up so much? There'll be formal hearings, legalists sniffing around -- ”

“Got them, sir.”

Nim had called up both Joan and Voltaire on freezeframe. They were in the restaurant
setting, running on pickup time, using processors momentarily idle -- a standard Mesh
method. “They're running for personality integration. It's like letting their subconscious
components reconcile events with memory, flushing the system, the way we do when we sleep,
and -- ”

“Don't treat me like a tourist! I want those two wiped!”

“Yessir.”

The 3D space of the office refracted with strobed images of both Joan and Voltaire. Nim
studied the control board, tentatively mapping a strategy of numerical surgery. Simple
deletion was impossible for layered personalities. It resembled ridding a building of
mice. If he began here --

Abruptly, rainbow sprays played across the screen. Simulation coordinates jumped wildly.
Nim frowned.

“You can't do that, ” Voltaire said, sipping from a tall glass. “We're invincible! Not
subject to decaying flesh like you.”

“Arrogant bastard, isn't he?” the president fumed. “Why so many people were taken in by
him I'll never -- ”

“You died once,” Nim said to the sim. Something was going funny here. “You can die again.”

“Died?” Joan put in loftily. “You are mistaken. Had I ever died, I'm sure I would
remember.”

Nim gritted his teeth. There were coordinate overlaps throughout both sims. That meant
they had expanded, occupying adjacent processors on overrides. They could compute portions
of themselves, running their layer-minds as parallel processing paths. Why had Marq given
them that? Or ... had he?

“Surely, sir, you err. Voltaire leaned forward with a warning edge in his voice. ”No
gentleman confronts a lady with her past."

Joan tittered. The simwait roared. Nim did not get the joke, but he was too busy to care.

This was absurd. He could not trace all the ramifications of the changes in these sims.
They had capabilities out of their computing perimeter. Their sub-minds were dispersed
into processors outside Artifice Associates' nodes. That was how Marq and Sybyl got such
fast, authentic, whole-personality response times.

Watching the debate, Nim had wondered how the sims generated so much vitality, an
undefinable charisma. Here it was: they had overlapped the sub-mind computations into
other nodes, to call on big slabs of processor power. Quite a feat. Contrary to Artifice
Associates rules, too, of course. He traced the outlines of their work with some
admiration.

Still, he was damned if he would let a sim talk back to him. And they were still laughing.

“Joan, ” he barked, “your re-creators deleted your memory of your death. You were burned
at the stake.”

“Nonsense, ” Joan scoffed. “I was acquitted of all charges. I am a saint.”

“Nobody living is a saint. I studied your background data-slabs. That church of yours
liked to make sure saints were safely dead for a long time.”

Joan sniffed disdainfully.

Nim grinned. “See this?” A lance of fire popped into the air before the sim. He held
steady, made flames crackle nastily.

“I've led thousands of warriors and knights into battle,” Joan said. “Do you think a
sunbeam glancing off a tiny sword can frighten me?”

“I haven't found a good erasure path yet,” Nim said to the president. “But I will, I will.”

“I thought this was routine, ” the president said. “Hurry!”

“Not with such a big cross-linked personality inventory -- ”

“Forget doing the salvage saves. We don't need to pack them all back into their original
space.”

“But that'll -- ”

“Chop them.”

“Fascinating,” Voltaire said sardonically, “listening to gods debate one's fate.”

Nim grimaced. “As for you -- ” he glared at Voltaire “ -- your attitudes toward religion
mellowed only because Marq deleted every brush with authority you ever had, beginning with
your father.”

“Father? I never had a father.”

Nim smirked. “You prove my point.”

“How dare you tamper with my memory!” Voltaire said. “Experience is the source of all
knowledge. Haven't you read Locke? Restore me to myself at once.”

“Not you, no way. But if you don't shut up, before I kill you both, I might just restore
her. You know damn well she burned to a crisp at the stake.”

“You delight in cruelty, don't you?” Voltaire seemed to be studying Nim, as if their
relationship were reversed. Odd, how the sim did not seem worried about its impending
extinction.

“Delete!” the president snapped.

“Delete what?” asked Gar�on.

“The Scalpel and the Rose, ” Voltaire said. “We are not for this confused age, apparently.”

Gar�on covered the short-order cook's human hand with two of his four. “Us, too?”

“Yes, certainly!” Voltaire snapped. “You're only here on our account. Bit players! Our
supporting cast!”

“Well, we have enjoyed our time,” the cook said, drawing closer to Gar�on. “Though I would
have liked to see more of it all. We cannot walk beyond this city street. Our feet cease
moving us at the edge, though we can see spires in the distance.”

“Decoration,” Nim muttered, intent on a task that was getting more complicated as he
worked. Rivulets of their personality layers ran everywhere, leaking into the node-space
like ... “Like rats fleeing a sinking -- ”

“You assume godlike powers,” Voltaire said, elaborately casual, “without the character to
match.”

“What?” The president was startled. “I'm in control here. Insults -- ”

“Ah,” Nim said. “This might work.”

“Do something!” cried the Maid, wielding her sword in vain.

“Au revoir, my sweet pucelle. Gar�on, Amana, au revoir. Perhaps we'll meet again. Perhaps
not.”

All four holograms fell into each other's arms.

The sequence Nim had set up began running. It was a ferret-program, sniffing out
connections, scrubbing them thoroughly. Nim watched, wondering where deletion ended and
murder began.

“Don't you go getting any funny ideas,” said the president.

On the screen, Voltaire softly, sadly, quoted himself:

"Sad is the present if no future state

No blissful retribution mortals wait ...

All may be well; that hope can man sustain;

All now is well; 'tis an illusion vain."

He reached out to caress Joan's breast. “It doesn't feel quite right. We may not meet
again ... but if we do, be sure I shall correct the State of Man.”

The screen went blank.

The president laughed in triumph. “You did it -- great!” He clapped Nim on the back. “Now
we must come up with a good story. Pin it all on Marq and Sybyl.”

Nim smiled uneasily as the president gushed on, making plans, promising him a promotion
and a raise. He'd figured out the delete procedure, all right, but the info-signatures
that raced through the holospace those last moments told a strange and complex tale. The
echoing cage of data-slabs had resounded with disquieting, odd notes.

Nim knew that Marq had given Voltaire access to myriad methods -- a serious violation of
containment precautions. Still, what could an artificial personality, already limited, do
with some more Mesh connections? Rattle around, get eaten up by policing programs,
sniffers seeking out redundancies.

But both Voltaire and Joan, for the debate, had enormous memory space, great volumes of
personality realm. Then, while they emoted and rolled their rhetoric across the stadium,
across the whole Mesh ... had they also been working feverishly? Strumming through
crannies of data-storage where they could hide their quantized personality segments?

The cascade of indices Nim had just witnessed hinted at that possibility. Certainly so,
nothing had used immense masses of computation these last few hours.

“We'll cover our ass with some public statement,” the president crowed. “A little crisis
management and it'll all blow over.”

“Yessir.”

“Got to keep Seldon out of it. No mention to the legalists, right? Then he can pardon us,
once he's First Minister.”

“Yessir, great, yessir.”

Nim thought feverishly. He still had one more payment due from that Olivaw guy. Keeping
Olivaw informed all along had been easy. A violation of his contract with A2, but so what?
A guy had to get by, right? It was just plain good luck that the president now wanted done
what Olivaw had already paid for: deletion. No harm in collecting twice for the same job.

Or had seemed so. Nim chewed his lip. What did a bunch of digits matter, anyway?

Nim froze. Had the entire sim -- restaurant, Gar�on, street, Joan -- gone in a flash?
Usually they dissolved as functions died. A sim was complex and could not simply stop all
the intricate interlayers, shutting down at once. But this interweave had been
unprecedented, so maybe it was different.

“Done? Good!” The president crisply clapped him on the shoulder.

Nim felt tired, sad. Someday he would have to explain all this to Marq. Erasing so much
work ...

But Marq and Sybyl had disappeared into the crowds back at the coliseum. Wisely, they
didn't show up for work, or even go back to their apartments. They were on the run. And
with them had gone the Junin renaissance, up in smoke as the Junin Sector burned and
dissolved in discord and violence.

Even Nim felt a sadness at the smash up. The eager, passionate talk of a renaissance. They
had looked to Joan and Voltaire for a kind of maturity in the eternal debate between Faith
and Reason. But the Imperium suppressed passion, in the end. Too destabilizing.

Of course, the whole tiktok movement had to be squashed, too. He had sequestered Marq's
memory-complex about the debate of 8, 000 years ago. Clearly “robots, ” whatever they
might be, would be too unsettling an issue to ever bring up in a rational society.

Nim sighed. He knew that he had merely edited away electrical circuits. Professionals
always kept that firmly in mind.

Still, it was wrenching. To see it go. All trickled away, like grains of digital sand,
down the obscure hourglass of simulated time.

R. Daneel Olivaw allowed his face to express squint-eyed concern. The cramped room seemed
barely able to contain his grim mood.

Still, Dors read this as a concession to her. She lived among humans and relied on their
facial and body expressions, voluntary and unwilled alike. She had no idea where Olivaw
spent most of his time. Perhaps there were enough robots to form a society? This idea she
had never entertained. The instant she did, she wondered why she had never thought of it
before. But now he spoke --

“The simulations are quite dead?”

Dors kept her voice level, free of betraying emotion.

“So it seems.”

“What evidence?”

“Artifice Associates believes so.”

“The man I had hired there, named Nim, is not entirely certain.”

“He reports to you?”

“I need several inputs to any critical situation. I needed to discredit the tiktok freedom
idea, the Junin renaissance -- they are destabilizing. Acting through these simulations
seemed a promising channel. I had not allowed for the fact that computerists of today are
not as skilled as those of fifteen thousand years ago.”

Dors frowned. “This level of interference ... is allowed?”

“Remember the Zeroth Law.”

She did not allow her distress to show in her face or voice. “I believe the simulations
are erased.”

“Good. But we must be sure.”

“I have hired several sniffers to find traces of them in the Trantor Mesh. So far,
nothing.”

“Does Hari know of your effort?”

“Of course not.”

Olivaw gazed at her steadily. “He must not. You and I must not merely keep him safe, to do
his work. We must guide him.”

“Through deception.”

He had lapsed to the unnerving manner of not blinking or letting his eyes move. “It must
be.”

“I do not like to mislead him.”

“On the contrary, you are correctly leading him. Through omissions.”

“I ... encounter emotional difficulty ... ”

“Blocks. Very human -- and I mean that as a compliment.”

“I would prefer to deal with positive threats to Hari. To guard him, not to deceive him.”

“Of course.” Still no smile or gesture. “But it must be this way. We live in the most
ominous era of all Galactic history.”

“Hari is beginning to suspect so, too.”

“The rise of the New Renaissance on Sark is a further danger, one of many we face. But
this excavation of ancient simulations is even worse. The Junin disorders are but an early
signature of what could come. Such research could lead to the engineering of a new race of
robots. This cannot be allowed, for it would interfere with our mission.”

“I understand. I tried to destroy the simulation ferrite blocks -- ”

“I know, it was all in your report. Do not blame yourself.”

“I would like to help more, but I am consumed by defending Hari.”

“I understand. If it is any consolation, the reemergence of simulations was inevitable.”