Fractions (82 page)

I was alone when I entered the pub. The barman smiled, the regulars nodded, Reid ordered pints. Reid, of course, was only telepresent, but he assured me he really was drinking the same beer as he appeared to be drinking, and as I imagined I was drinking.

‘Wilde,' he said after we'd each had a couple of pints, ‘I've got a favour to ask of you.'

‘Sure,' I said. ‘Whatever.'

He looked around, as if with the impossible suspicion that someone else might be there.

‘It's about the dead,' he said. ‘And the fast folk. We've got all the data storage, all the smart-matter gunk, and the interface machinery for starting the revival process.' He grinned. ‘And I've got the codes, without which they're useless. Even so, I'd like to make sure they're in a safe place for the long term. But also, a place where the organics are available should we ever need them in a hurry.'

‘Sound plan,' I said.

‘Well,' he said, ‘I've been looking at the specs for the sluice-gates…what d'you call them, Sieve Plates? You've got plenty of deep caverns due to be cut out of the mountain behind them, for the machinery and stores.'

‘And you want to stash some other…machinery and stores?'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘Nobody'll ever go there, not when we've got the system set up. If the incoming ice isn't enough of a deterrent, the whole area will be absolutely foul with unknown organics. Exaggerating how poisonous they might be should be easy enough.'

And so it proved.

The actual building of the canal and its associated machinery of pumps and locks took two years. I did it, of course, with the help of a fleet of automated machinery, and design software that took my scribbles and handwaves and turned out precise technical drawings. But co-ordinating them and making the fine decisions was down to me, and it was the most fun I'd had since the Third World War. When the Sieve Plate complex was complete, Reid flew in, alone, in an autopiloted helicopter with the crated components of the storage and retrieval mechanisms for millions of dead people, and the programs to re-launch thousands of uploaded people into a posthuman culture. The whole lot weighed about ten tonnes, slung beneath the Sikorski.

When we'd got the machinery and storage media stashed under the mountain, Meg and I invited Reid in for coffee. Reid, in physical reality, was wearing contacts. He saw us sitting on a verandah, and we saw him just outside, on the step of the helicopter. Anyone else watching – there wasn't – would have seen Reid sitting on one machine, talking to another.

At some point I asked him how things were going with downloading the people in the robots to their cloned bodies.

‘Fine,' he said. ‘Fine. We're about three-quarters through. We're dealing with it more or less as people want it.' He grinned quizzically. ‘Haven't seen your application.'

I looked at Meg and laughed. ‘Never crossed my mind, to be honest. I'm having a good life, right here.' She smiled back. Her beauty had increased with her intelligence, and her aesthetic sense with both. She was wearing a bias-cut green velvet dress lifted from a fashion-history site.

Reid stroked his chin. ‘Hmm,' he said. He lit a cigarette. ‘You shouldn't leave it too long. There's a bad attitude spreading about robots. The people who've been downloaded are the main instigators of it. They tend to draw a very sharp line between people and machines. In fact a lot of them will deny there's such a thing as machine consciousness.'

A fly – how the hell did we bring
them
? – buzzed past him. The VR consistency rules picked it up when it flew ‘into' the verandah, and a simulation seamlessly took its place and flew out again.

‘What?' I said. ‘But they've
experienced
machine consciousness!'

Reid looked at me with a glint of his familiar devil's advocacy. ‘No, they
now
have
memories
of experiencing it. Which doesn't prove that they actually did experience it at the time. It could be an artifact of the consistency rules. That's the sophisticated argument. The vulgar version is to insist that you were human all right, but artificial intelligences are missing some magic ingredient, which any goddam cleric or scholastic will cheerfully assure you is a soul.'

‘God,' I said. ‘That's disgusting.'

‘What about the succubi?' Meg asked.

‘They're the worst,' Reid said.

Meg threw back her head and laughed. ‘Wouldn't you just know it! No snobs worse than the new rich!'

I frowned at them both. ‘What I don't get,' I said, ‘is how they relate to their own copies in the robots.'

Reid gave me an odd look. ‘You definitely don't get it,' he said. ‘
Nobody
leaves a copy of themselves in the robot. Everybody so far has been very insistent on that. The way they see it, they're about to resume a normal human life, and if a copy stayed behind they'd have a 50–50 chance of waking up and finding themselves
still there.
It's irrational, in a sense – why don't they fear being the copy that's destroyed?'

‘Because they don't experience it,' said Meg. She cocked an eyebrow. ‘Presumably?'

‘Of course,' Reid said hastily. ‘It's simultaneous. You don't, as they say, feel a thing.'

‘Ah,' said Meg. ‘That's the root of this idea you're talking about. Because if people really saw their selves in the machines as…themselves, they'd feel guilty about it. So they don't!'

‘Smart,' Reid conceded. ‘But there's more to it than that…shit, I feel the same way myself sometimes.' He tilted his head, squinting at us as if to make the illusion of our presence go away. ‘That's…I guess that's why I never uploaded, never went into the macros. I knew lots of people who did, and they kept telling me it was wonderful, but I could never get over the suspicion that they were all flatlines.' His tone was uncharacteristically hesitant. ‘No more capacity for feeling than a weather simulation has for raining.'

‘You must've really bought into the old anti-AI arguments,' I said. To me the whole thing sounded as stupid as solipsism.

‘Maybe,' Reid wryly acknowledged. ‘Or maybe it's just that I've been using computers longer than anybody else alive.'

‘So you don't think Jon's human?' Meg asked. ‘Or me?'

‘Hah!' Reid said. He jumped up, and ground out his cigarette-butt. ‘Of course I do. I'd just like to meet you both – in real life.'

He climbed into the helicopter and turned to wave.

‘See you soon.'

‘Real soon now,' I said.

 

That night I felt Meg's tears on my shoulder.

‘What is it?'

She rolled away from me a little and caught me in her serious gaze.

‘Do you think like that?' she asked.

‘Like what?'

‘Like Reid said. Like people do.'

‘Of course not.' I snorted. ‘It'd be pretty bloody stupid of me to think I'm not thinking.'

‘And what about me?'

‘You?' I pulled her close again. ‘I don't think like that about you, either.'

‘You did once.'

‘That was different. I didn't know any better.'

She laughed, unexpectedly reassured.

‘Neither did I.'

 

As well as the work on the canal, I was working on a problem which increasingly intrigued me: trying to understand what it was I had learned in my last encounter with the macro. It troubled my mind like a half-remembered dream. It intrigued Meg too; she had never been in the macro, and had an endless interest in anything I could tell her about it. She had a greater affinity than I for the posthuman world; not surprisingly, as she was far more a product of it than I was.

In our virtual valley we built a virtual machine. I would strive to recall some aspect of the puzzle, and Meg would scan our common operating-system for traces of the consequent processing. Then she'd reach in and extract a piece of machine code, and provide it with an interface. We'd then wander around clutching whatever resulted, looking for a place to slot it in. What was really – so to speak – going on was that my chaotic recollections were being put into order. When I experienced the robot's body as my own (the mesh frame still stood in our front room) I increasingly felt what I'd learned as something I was about to understand, rather than something I almost remembered.

As the months went on, the ziggurat we built loomed over our rustic valley like an oversized electricity pylon. We called it ‘the installation', and with all our enhanced intelligence we never suspected it might be exactly that.

 

The great work was done. I stood on the bank and watched a couple of digging-machines break through the crumbling wall of soil that separated the merely damp bottom of the Stone Canal from the city's already partially flooded canal system. For a moment they were swamped by the surge of water, then, dripping, they hauled themselves out. A ragged cheer went up from the opposite bank, where a small crowd had gathered to watch. I felt a radio ripple of robotic satisfaction from the other construction-machines around me. Then, indifferent again, already signalling their availability for another contract, they stalked or trundled away.

Reid was among the human crowd. He made a short speech, of which I didn't bother to catch more than snatches. The crowd, no doubt inspired by his proclamation of the historic importance, etc., dispersed. We stared at each other for a moment, then I waded across to meet him.

‘I knew you'd be the one still here when the others left,' I said. I waved a limb. ‘Otherwise, it's a bit hard to tell you apart.'

Reid rocked back on his heels and laughed.

‘Nice one, Wilde,' he said. ‘Reckon it's about time you rejoined the human race?'

‘Or in my case, joined it,' Meg said. The voice from over my shoulder spoke from the machine's grille. Reid's face betrayed only the smallest of double-takes as he smiled and nodded.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘I've taken the liberty of growing clones for both of you.'

‘Where did mine come from?' Meg asked.

‘We've got millions of human cells,' Reid said. ‘Some of them are from people who are also among the dead, but many aren't. Storing tissue-types was very common even before the Singularity – people used them for regeneration and rejuvenation, after all. So there are plenty of spare genotypes to choose from. Yours, Meg, was some obscure video actress. I doubt if she was among those who had their brains scanned, so…'

‘It should avoid any future embarrassment,' Meg said. ‘Imagine turning up at a party to find another woman wearing the same body. Wouldn't you just
die
?'

‘Somebody would,' I said.

We walked along the canal-bank into the growing city. Hitherto, I'd only seen it virtually. Still sparsely populated, it resembled the abandoned habitation of an alien race, now being colonised by venturesome humans.

And others. The first hominid I saw – a big-brained chimp sauntering by, talking rapidly to what looked like a couple of human teenagers – caught me by surprise.

‘Oh, that,' Reid said casually. ‘Early experiments. The old US/UN scientists were pretty sick specimens. Don't blame me, man. I did the poor bastards a favour by drafting them into the workforce. The scientists were all for – now what was the charming expression? –
sacrificing
them.'

We arrived at a building like a warehouse, which although recently built already had a sad look of decrepitude. Reid palmed the door and we walked into a chilly hall about a hundred metres long by twenty wide, filled with row upon row of pods. Each pod was three metres long, had a transparent upper half, and a cluster of electronics at one end. All except two were empty, and it was to these two that Reid led me.

I, and Meg behind my sight, looked down on our apparently sleeping forms, floating in clear fluid. Meg's body looked like she had always looked to me. Mine was a reminder that the body-image I'd retained from the time of my death was that of a rejuvenated, rather than a young, man. Had I ever been so…innocent? It seemed almost a violation to send my hacked, copied, experience-accreted mind through the wires that mingled with his floating hair.

‘Where are the others?' I asked.

‘You two are the last,' Reid said. ‘We've got everybody else out.' He fiddled with connecting-cables, turned to me with a question in his eyes.

‘You first,' Meg said.

I indicated the tank in which my clone lay.

‘I think you'd better fold your limbs,' Reid said. ‘The process takes a few hours.'

I settled on the floor. Reid loomed over me, and attached a cable to my shell. I remembered my first life-extension treatment, and my heart stopping. I had not known then what dry seas I would love Annette beside, what rocks would melt before we'd be immortal. I remembered the Kazakh snow-drifts, and the colours bleeding from the world, and Reid's face, and Myra's. I remembered the fading light in the macro mind-world, and Meg rescuing me. This would be my fourth death. I was not getting used to it, but love had always been with me, and was with me still.

Everything went away.

 

I saw a pair of cowboy-boots, jeans, a jacket and, as I tracked upwards, Reid's impassive face.

‘I'm sorry, man,' he said as I stood. ‘It didn't work. For you, or for the succubus.'

I felt Meg's presence like a held hand in the dark.

‘What do you mean, it didn't work?'

‘Your minds aren't compatible with human brains anymore.' He shrugged. ‘The transfer didn't get through the interface. There's no translation from your computer to synaptic connections. Must have been something that happened in the macro.'

‘Everybody else was in the macros,' I protested, but I already knew what his answer would be.