Fractions (70 page)

‘But we can on appeal to another court,' Tamara pointed out.

‘Ah,' Wilde said. ‘So could Reid – this cuts both ways! We don't know how Talgarth and Jay-Dub got on when they were both robots together – could've been the best of mates, for all we know.' He straightened up, coming to a decision. ‘Reid can't know that Jay-Dub never mentioned this, or for that matter that it's currently out of communication with us. So he might be holding this back as grounds for an instant appeal if the decision goes against him. Fuck it. I'll just have to bear it in mind. Play on.'

 

Dee hears a distant shout. The figures around the tower are yelling and waving at her, and moving away. The tower itself has changed, its barbed branches forming a pattern that looks somehow inevitable and right, ugly though it is.

She sighs and stands up. Now she'll have to slog and slither all the way back down the hill, and along the rough road. Seeing as how this is virtual reality, she doesn't understand why she can't just fucking
fly.
Wilde has told her about something called ‘consistency rules' but she's not impressed.
She
doesn't need a spurious consistency to stop her going mad.

But all this casting of curses and aspersions proves redundant, for without a moment's warning she's back in her tired and aching flesh. Her head hurts so much she wishes she were scrambling down that hillside, under the big, hot sun of Earth. Above her, tools and flashlights sway from hooks, and all around the deep electric hum of the crawler's turbines tell her they're on their way.

She sits up cautiously and swings her feet to the floor. Ax stands by the closing tailgate. Interior screens light up on all four walls of the vehicle's hold as the rear door shuts with a sigh of hydraulics and a suck of sealing-strips. They are heading straight for the canal, which they cross with a gentle pitching motion. The crawler's treads, Dee knows, are mounted on some kind of extensible legs which make drops of a couple of metres no more than bumps in the road.

‘What's going on?' Dee asks.

Ax shrugs, but Dee's question is answered as the forward screen changes to a view over the shoulders of Wilde and Meg. Meg twists around and smiles, Wilde keeps looking forward but his eyes meet hers in the rear-view mirror. (Consistency rules again. Crazy, Dee reckons.)

‘Hi,' he calls. ‘Sorry about the abrupt departure. You can go back to our place with Meg if you want, but right now I've got to stay in reality.' He laughed. ‘To the extent of looking out the window and driving the truck, anyway.'

In reality, Jay-Dub is nested in a cavity near the front of the vehicle, and has been since they arrived. The truck is perfectly capable of driving itself. Dee has a shrewd suspicion that the necessity of controlling its progress is in part purely psychological, at a more superficial level than that of the embedded consistency-rules. She lets the explanation pass.

‘Where are we going?' she asks.

‘We have to go back to Ship City,' the man tells her.

‘Problem at the trial?' Dee guesses. She's not paying the conversation her full attention; she's exploring her mind, checking off her selves like they're strayed children coming home, and finds to her relief that they're all there. Secrets is smaller, Stores is far bigger than when she downloaded them to Jay-Dub – but that's all right, she has room in her head to spare.

‘Oh no,' Wilde shouts back, his eyes flicking from the mirror to the desert. Dee can see the vehicle is moving at almost its top speed. ‘We have to pick up some poison, and then…'

His voice trails off, whether because of the outcrop they're about to (she grabs the edge of the bed-bench) go over – or because he doesn't know what to say.

‘Then what?'

Wilde's eyes, crinkling into a smile, look back at her again.

‘We're going to hack the gates of hell.'

She doesn't even bother to ask for a further explanation. It is obvious that none will be forthcoming, and she has to assume there's some good reason why not. Wilde gives her an encouraging nod, and then turns his attention to the flat desert and to Meg. Ax has braced himself on an old foil blanket, next to an aerial feed, and is having visions by television.

Dee sets Scientist to work, and enters Sys. Minutes pass. Then, as from a great, cold height, a mountain higher than any on Earth or either Mars, in a raw virtual vacuum that makes her head feel as though it's about to bloodily explode, Dee sees exactly what Wilde's cryptic statement means.

 

‘You first,' Tamara said. The others dispersed to their seats and Wilde stepped forward to the microphone. Talgarth stubbed out the cigarette he'd spent the seven minutes smoking, and nodded.

Wilde went through the same courtesies as Reid had used and said:

‘Esteemed Senior, I am more than willing to answer for my actions, and for those undertaken on my behalf. I am not willing to answer for the actions of the robot Jay-Dub, or to accept the allegation that it is my property. My present physical existence began last Fi'day, around noon, when I was resurrected. The robot Jay-Dub claimed to have accomplished this, by means which I make no pretence to understand –'

Reid sprang to his feet.

‘Objection!' he said. ‘Irrelevant.'

‘Sustained,' said Talgarth.

Wilde swallowed. ‘Very well, Esteemed Senior. The point can be made independently by appealing to the records of Jay-Dub's transactions with the Stras Cobol Mutual Bank, which I am happy to make available to the court so far as they are relevant. They establish indeed that the owner of Jay-Dub is one Jonathan Wilde. And they identify who, exactly, that Jonathan Wilde is. The earliest records include transactions with David Reid's company, Mutual Assured Protection. They explicitly accept the name ‘Jay-Dub' as a synonym of Jonathan Wilde, and the robot Jay-Dub as equivalent to that person, Wilde. The robot Jay-Dub has been accepted without demur these many years as none other than Jonathan Wilde – Jay-Dub, in short,
is
Jonathan Wilde! Any records mentioning Wilde as the owner of the robot Jay-Dub, therefore, can only be interpreted as meaning that the person Jonathan Wilde owns Jay-Dub in the same sense that I, Jonathan Wilde, own my body.' He smiled thinly. ‘Any coincidence of names is regretted.'

Eon Talgarth, sitting on his chair on the dais, shared an eye-level with Wilde, standing. Their eyes locked for a moment.

‘The court will rule on this point,' Talgarth said. ‘The robot known as Jay-Dub is in a unique position among all the inhabitants of this colony, so far as I know. However, it is a position in which many of the said inhabitants once were, and in which it alone remains. I accept the argument which has just been put, and I rule that any charges against Jonathan Wilde in the capacity of owner of the robot Jay-Dub must be laid against that robot, as a self-owning mechanism.' He looked around. ‘It is not present in this court and should be notified forthwith. The charge against
that
Jonathan Wilde remains pending.'

Reid started to his feet with a look of fury, but a woman sitting beside him caught his arm and drew him back. After conferring head-to-head with her, Reid desisted.

‘My ruling carries no precedent relevant to questions of machine personality as such,' Talgarth went on. ‘The matter of the ownership of Dee Model has still to be considered. Regardless of whether her control-systems were corrupted, and who if anyone is responsible for that, Reid's claim that he did not abandon her is not contested. Therefore he remains her owner, and those present on the other side of the case are enjoined to co-operate in her apprehension and return.'

Tamara rose, received a flicker of permission to speak, and said, ‘Senior Talgarth, this court has many times ruled that the autonomy of machines may be claimed by the machines themselves. That, and not the issue of abandonment which I freely admit I was wrong about, is the basis on which we wish to assert Dee Model's self-ownership.'

Talgarth sighed. ‘All such cases,' he said patiently, ‘relate to unowned sapient machines in the machine domains. The freedom of such automata is also implicitly recognised by other courts. The gynoid under consideration, however, has been constructed by the resources and efforts of David Reid, and remains his property until he decides otherwise.'

Tamara sat down and gave Wilde a grimace of regret or apology. Wilde, however, seemed to gaze right through her. He blinked, smiled at her and stood up. He walked to the microphone and looked over the crowd before turning to the judge.

‘Esteemed Senior, your valued opinion on the matter of Jay-Dub and the matter of Dee Model raises some further points, which I beg the court to consider. First, in the matter of Jonathan Wilde in his embodiment as Jay-Dub. The court has accepted that he and I are separate persons, though – by implication – sharing a common history up to a point which the court has refused to determine –'

‘How?' Talgarth frowned.

‘When you sustained the objection that the time of my resurrection was irrelevant.'

Talgarth sat back. ‘That's correct.'

‘As a separate embodiment of Jonathan Wilde, I wish to proceed against David Reid on the charge of having unlawfully killed me, on the basis that any considerations or acknowledgements that may have been made between Reid and Jonathan Wilde aka Jay-Dub have no bearing on me.'

‘I'll defer consideration on that until the time of your resurrection has been determined satisfactorily,' said Talgarth. ‘The charge of murder which you brought against Reid remains outstanding until that point has been cleared up, or is not contested. David Reid, what do you say?'

Reid rose, disdaining to step forward. ‘Please the court,' he said loudly, ‘I am quite willing to accept this person's claim that he was resurrected by the robot Jay-Dub three days ago. As a matter of natural justice I wish the earliest opportunity to clear myself of the charge of murder, or have it thrown out of court as a waste of the court's valuable time and a piece of actionably vexatious litigation.' He glared at Wilde and sat down.

‘Very well,' said Talgarth. He turned to Wilde. ‘Before we move to considering that charge, do you have anything further to say about points raised by my opinion on the matter of Dee Model?'

‘I do indeed,' said Wilde. ‘The court mentioned that the gynoid Dee Model had been constructed with the, ah, other party's resources and efforts. I wish to raise a question about the ownership of those resources themselves. Because Dee Model's body is a clone of the body of my late wife. This is obvious to me, and I challenge Reid to deny it.'

He paused and turned around to face Reid. Reid's response was a tremor of the eyelids, and a shake of the head.

‘You don't deny it?' Talgarth said.

Reid stood up. ‘No.'

Wilde shot Reid a look of triumph and hatred, then composed his face to swing a calm smile past the cameras as he turned again to Talgarth.

‘In that case,' Wilde said slowly and distinctly, ‘I claim that Dee Model's body belongs to the legitimate heir of my wife!' He smiled at Talgarth. ‘Whether that heir is myself or Jay-Dub I leave to the court to determine.'

Reid rose at once and bowed politely, though whether to Wilde or Talgarth wasn't obvious.

‘I am happy to concede the ownership of the genotype,' he said. ‘And to come to an amicable or, failing that, arbitrated arrangement about its use, or compensation for its use and any distress inadvertently caused. My major concern is the recovery of the gynoid's software and non-biological hardware, which are incontestably my property.'

Wilde looked over to Tamara, who shrugged and raised her eyebrows as if to say, ‘What's his game?' The MacKenzie remote was saying substantially the same thing. It had expected a bigger fight, since the ownership of genotypes was a hotly contested issue. Its only suggestion was that any concession made here would avoid establishing a precedent that other courts might recognise.

‘Very well,' said Wilde. He adjusted the microphone, his hand shaking slightly. ‘The only compensation I wish is that David Reid resurrect my wife's mind as well as her body – something which is evidently possible, as the robot Jay-Dub has demonstrated by resurrecting me.'

Reid was on his feet at once. Wilde had to step back quickly as Reid strode up and caught the microphone from his hand.

‘The court has not accepted that Jay-Dub resurrected this man!'

Talgarth flicked ash from his sleeve. ‘Ah, but
you
have,' he said mildly.

Reid sat down again. The woman beside him whispered in his ear, her face stiff with annoyance. The news remotes buzzed, and people in the crowd were checking out the running commentaries, on hand-held screens or on their contacts.

‘Order!' Talgarth banged his gavel, carefully steadying his drink first. ‘David Reid may answer your request in his own time.'

‘I'll answer now,' said Reid. Wilde stepped back from the microphone, and returned to his seat.

‘You've stirred things up a bit,' Tamara observed.

Wilde winked, confusing the remote adviser for a moment, and settled back to listen to Reid.

‘Wilde's request is reasonable,' Reid was saying. ‘The question of resurrecting the dead has for long been on the minds of us all. But, however much we may wish to do it, we are prevented by
force majeure.
Most of the personalities of the dead, including that of Reid's wife Annette, are held in smart-matter storage which remains inaccessible without the co-operation of posthuman entities whose capacities and motives are unknown, but who – as experience has shown – are a risk to us all. I am responsible for keeping the codes that could be used to re-start them, and I can assure this court that until someone demonstrates a way to do this safely, these codes remain in my possession, and the dead…sleep.' He glanced at Wilde. ‘There are some matters best left undisturbed,' he told him.