Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future (72 page)

*

Miniruta— Ari is going to cut the power lines to your apartment. This is not a ruse. It's not a threat. I'm warning you because I think he's doing something that could have a disastrous effect on the long-range welfare of the ship's community— a precedent that could make the ship unlivable. You've still got time if you move now. Put on your emergency suit. Get in your escape tunnel and go all the way to the surface before he puts a guard on the surface hatch. If you start now, you could make it all the way to the communications module while he's still getting organized.

*

Morgan's forces attacked Miniruta's production facilities on the moon two hours after she received his warning. Her security system put up a fight, but it was overwhelmed within an hour. Every fabrication unit in her factories was brought to a halt. The rail launcher that propelled her machines toward Athene was dismantled at three different points.
Morgan had selected the most powerful intellectual enhancer his physiology could absorb. He would be disoriented for almost five daycycles after he stopped using it. He was still intellectually inferior to Miniruta, but he had just proved he had been right when he had claimed she wasn't used to thinking about conflict situations. He had taken her by surprise because she hadn't realized he had reprogrammed his lunar fabrication units and created a force that could break through her defenses.
This was the first time he had used this enhancer while he was struggling with a real-time, real-world challenge. He turned his attention to the action on the surface of Athene as if he was training a massive weapon on a target.
Miniruta's forces were still destroying his machines faster than he was destroying hers. She had spent a full hour working her way across the surface of the ship to the communications module and she had managed to maintain the exchange rate all the time she had been doing it. On the site closest to Athene's equator, she had taken complete control of the situation. Morgan's machines had been backed against a cliff and most of Miniruta's machines were churning up the ground and lasering potential fossil beds without resistance.
Morgan had eliminated Miniruta's source of reinforcements when he had destroyed her facilities on the moon. His own fabrication units were still turning out a steady stream of reinforcements and launching them at the planet. Sooner or later, Miniruta's machines would be wiped out. Sooner or later, he would be replacing his machines faster than she destroyed them. But the trip from the moon to Athene took over twenty hours. It would be almost forty hours, the charts on his screens claimed, before he destroyed Miniruta's last machine.
His brain skimmed through the plans for the vehicles that ferried equipment between the moon and the planet. Numbers and equations danced
across his consciousness: payloads, production times, the weight of the reaction mass a transport vehicle forced through its engines when it braked to a landing on Athene. His fabrication units on the moon received a new set of orders and started producing transport vehicles that would make the trip in nine hours. The vehicles would carry fifty percent more reaction mass, so they could kill the extra velocity. Payload would be reduced by thirty percent.

*

"Somebody told her we were going to attack her power lines. She climbed out her surface escape hatch minutes before we put a guard on it. We didn't even know she'd left until she started controlling her machines from the communications module."
Ari had been speaking VA13 when he had deposited the message in Morgan's files. He had obviously wanted to make sure Morgan understood his feelings.
"There's only one person on this ship who could have warned her in time, Morgan. No one in my communion would have done such a thing. Now she's sitting in the communications module, wrecking and smashing some of the most precious information the human race has ever uncovered. And we're battering our skulls into pulp trying to break through all the weapons her friend Madame Dawne deployed around the communications module."
Morgan put his machines into a defensive posture on all five sites and held them on the defensive while he waited for reinforcements. Every now and then, when he saw an opportunity, he launched a hit-and-run attack and tried to catch one of her machines by surprise.
Ari was right, of course. The destruction Morgan was watching on his screens was one of the great criminal acts of history. Most of the fossils that had filled in the story of human evolution had come from a small area of Earth. The sites Miniruta was destroying had been selected because they met all the parameters entered into the search program. Would there be important, unfillable gaps in the record when they had explored the entire planet? Would her spree of destruction leave them with questions that could never be answered?

*

Morgan switched to the offensive as soon as the first reinforcements arrived from the moon. He picked the site where Miniruta was weakest and eliminated every machine she controlled within two hours. Then he picked her second weakest site and began working on it.
He could feel the full power of Miniruta's mind every step of the way. He was making maximum use of all the help his wargaming programs could give him but he couldn't reduce the exchange ratio by a single percentage point. He was going to defeat her only because she was manipulating a finite force and he could draw on an infinite supply of reinforcements. Whatever he did, she still destroyed nine of his machines every time he destroyed five of hers.
At any given moment, furthermore, only about half her machines were actually fighting his. The rest of them were busily maximizing the destruction she was causing.

*

"We've lost at least thirty percent of the information we could have pulled from each site," Ari said. "On site four, we probably lost over sixty percent."
Morgan was lying on a couch, with a screen propped on his stomach. The recording of Ari's face seemed to be shimmering at the end of a long tunnel. The medical system had advised him it might be most of a tenday before he recovered from the combined effects of sleeplessness, emotional stress, and ultra-enhancement.
"I could have cut off her power within three or four hours if you hadn't interfered," Ari said. "It took you eleven hours to destroy her vehicles—
eleven hours—
even after you started getting extra reinforcements from the moon."
For the third time in less than a daycycle, Morgan was being given a rare chance to hear Ari speak VA13. This time Ari was applying the full force of a module that communicated graduated degrees of revulsion.

*

Morgan had made no recordings of his private moments with Miniruta. The EruLabi didn't do that. Pleasure should be experienced only in memory or in the reality of the present, the EruLabi mentors had proclaimed. There was a long period— it lasted over two years— when Morgan spent several hours of every daycycle watching recordings of Miniruta's public appearances.
Savela could have helped him. He could imagine circumstances in which Savela would have offered him a temporary bonding that would have freed him from an emotion that seemed to blunt all his other feelings. Savela was no longer friendly, however. Savela might be an EruLabi but she shared Ari's opinion of his behavior.
Morgan believed he had averted the complete political breakdown of the ship's community. But how could you prove you had avoided something that never happened? People didn't see the big disaster that hadn't taken place. They only saw the small disaster you had created when you were trying to avert the big disaster. Out of the three thousand people on the ship, at least a thousand had decided they would be happier without his company.
Once, just to see if it would have any effect on his feelings, Morgan struck up a relationship with a woman with a BR-V73 body type. The woman was even an EruLabi. She had never advanced beyond the second protocol but that should have been a minor matter. Her body felt like Miniruta's when he touched it. The same expressions crossed her face when they practiced the EruLabi sexual rituals. There was no way he could have noticed any significant difference when he wrapped himself around her in the darkness.
Ari's sexual enhancement was another possibility. Morgan thought about it many times during the next two decades. He rejected it, each time, because there was no guarantee it would give him what he needed. The enhancement affected only the most basic aspect of sexual desire— the drive for simple physical release. It didn't erase memories that included all the hours that had preceded— and followed— the actual moments when their bodies had been joined.
He had made eight attempts to contact Miniruta during the three years that had followed their miniature war. His programs still monitored the information system for any indication she was communicating with anyone. A
style-analysis program occasionally detected a message Miniruta could have created under a pseudonym. Every example it found had been traced to a specific, identifiable source. None of the authors had been Miniruta.
He had sent two queries to Madame Dawne. The second time, she had appeared on his screen with hair that was so short and so red she looked like someone had daubed her skull with paint. The language she had used had been obsolete when the
Island of Adventure
had left the solar system.
"Please do not think I am indifferent to your concern," Madame Dawne had said. "I believe I can inform you— with no likelihood of exaggeration or inaccuracy— that Miniruta finds your anxieties heartwarming. Please accept my unqualified assurance that you can turn your attention to other matters. Miniruta is a happy woman. We are both happy women."
Morgan had deleted the recording from his files two tendays after he received it. He had given his profiling program a description of Miniruta's latest transformation. Miniruta had changed her allegiance three times in the last one hundred and fifteen years. There was a possibility her affiliations were episodes in an endless cycle of unions and ruptures, driven by a need that could never be permanently satisfied. The program couldn't calculate a probability. But it was a common pattern.
In the meantime, he still had his researches. He had picked out three evolutionary lines that looked interesting. One line had apparently filled the same ecological niche the pig family had exploited on Earth. The others raised questions about the way predators and prey interacted over the millennia.
They were good subjects. They would keep him occupied for decades. He had now lived over three hundred years. Nothing lasted forever. He had his whole life ahead of him.

New writer David Marusek is a graduate of Clarion West. He made his first sale to
Asimov's Science Fiction
in 1993, and his second sale soon thereafter to
Playboy,
followed subsequently by more sales to
Asimov's
and to the British anthology
Future Histories.
His pyrotechnic novella "We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy" was one of the most popular and talked-about stories of 1995. Although it was only his third sale, it was sufficiently accomplished to make one of the reviewers for
Locus
magazine speculate that Marusek must be a Big Name Author writing under a pseudonym. Not a pseudonym, Marusek lives the life of a struggling young writer in a "low-maintenance cabin in the woods" in Fairbanks, Alaska, where he is currently working on his first novel, and I'm willing to bet that his is a voice we'll be hearing a lot more from as we move through the new century ahead.
In the vivid, powerful, and compassionate story that follows, which was a Hugo and Nebula finalist last year, he takes us back to the intricate and strange high-tech, posthuman-future milieu of "We Were Out of Our Minds With Joy," to a world where the border between what's real and what's not real has grown disturbingly thin— and we don't always find ourselves on the right side of the line.

*

Anne and Benjamin stood stock-still, as instructed, close but not touching, while the simographer adjusted her apparatus, set its timer, and ducked out of the room. It would take only a moment, she said. They were to think only happy happy thoughts.
For once in her life, Anne was unconditionally happy, and everything around her made her happier: her gown, which had been her grandmother's; the wedding ring (how cold it had felt when Benjamin first slipped it on her finger!); her clutch bouquet of forget-me-nots and buttercups; Benjamin himself, close beside her in his charcoal grey tux and pink carnation. He who so despised ritual but was a good sport. His cheeks were pink, too, and his eyes sparkled with some wolfish fantasy. "Come here," he whispered. Anne shushed him; you weren't supposed to talk or touch during a casting; it could spoil the sims. "I can't wait," he whispered, "this is taking too long." And it did seem longer than usual, but this was a professional simulacrum, not some homemade snapshot.
They were posed at the street end of the living room, next to the table piled with brightly wrapped gifts. This was Benjamin's townhouse; she had barely moved in. All her treasures were still in shipping shells in the basement, except for the few pieces she'd managed to have unpacked: the oak refectory table and chairs, the sixteenth-century French armoire, the cherry wood chifforobe, the tea table with inlaid top, the silvered mirror over the fire surround. Of course, her antiques clashed with Benjamin's contempo
rary— and rather common— decor, but he had promised her the whole house to redo as she saw fit. A whole house!
"How about a kiss?" whispered Benjamin.
Anne smiled but shook her head; there'd be plenty of time later for that sort of thing.
Suddenly, a head wearing wraparound goggles poked through the wall and quickly surveyed the room. "Hey, you," it said to them.
"Is that our simographer?" Benjamin said.
The head spoke into a cheek mike, "This one's the keeper," and withdrew as suddenly as it had appeared.
"Did the simographer just pop her head in through the wall?" said Benjamin.
"I think so," said Anne, though it made no sense.
"I'll just see what's up," said Benjamin, breaking his pose. He went to the door but could not grasp its handle.
Music began to play outside, and Anne went to the window. Her view of the garden below was blocked by the blue-and-white-striped canopy they had rented, but she could clearly hear the clink of flatware on china, laughter, and the musicians playing a waltz. "They're starting without us," she said, happily amazed.
"They're just warming up," said Benjamin.
"No, they're not. That's the first waltz. I picked it myself."
"So let's waltz," Benjamin said and reached for her. But his arms passed through her in a flash of pixelated noise. He frowned and examined his hands.
Anne hardly noticed. Nothing could diminish her happiness. She was drawn to the table of wedding gifts. Of all the gifts, there was only one— a long flat box in flecked silver wrapping— that she was most keen to open. It was from Great Uncle Karl. When it came down to it, Anne was both the easiest and the hardest person to shop for. While everyone knew of her passion for antiques, few had the means or expertise to buy one. She reached for Karl's package, but her hand passed right through it.
This isn't happening
, she thought with gleeful horror.
That it
was
, in fact, happening was confirmed a moment later when a dozen people— Great Uncle Karl, Nancy, Aunt Jennifer, Traci, Cathy and Tom, the bridesmaids and others, including Anne herself, and Benjamin, still in their wedding clothes— all trooped through the wall wearing wraparound goggles. "Nice job," said Great Uncle Karl, inspecting the room, "first rate."
"Ooooh," said Aunt Jennifer, comparing the identical wedding couples, identical but for the goggles. It made Anne uncomfortable that the other Anne should be wearing goggles while she wasn't. And the other Benjamin acted a little drunk and wore a smudge of white frosting on his lapel.
We've cut the cake
, she thought happily, although she couldn't remember doing so. Geri, the flower girl in a pastel dress, and Angus, the ring bearer in a miniature tux, along with a knot of other dressed-up children, charged through the sofa, back and forth, creating pyrotechnic explosions of digital noise. They would have run through Benjamin and Anne, too, had the adults allowed. Anne's father came through the wall with a bottle of champagne. He
paused when he saw Anne but turned to the other Anne and freshened her glass.
"Wait a minute!" shouted Benjamin, waving his arms above his head. "I get it now.
We're
the sims!" The guests all laughed, and he laughed too. "I guess my sims always say that, don't they?" The other Benjamin nodded yes and sipped his champagne. "I just never expected to
be
a sim," Benjamin went on. This brought another round of laughter, and he said sheepishly, "I guess my sims all say that, too."
The other Benjamin said, "Now that we have the obligatory epiphany out of the way," and took a bow. The guests applauded.
Cathy, with Tom in tow, approached Anne. "Look what I caught," she said and showed Anne the forget-me-not and buttercup bouquet. "I guess we know what
that
means." Tom, intent on straightening his tie, seemed not to hear. But Anne knew what it meant. It meant they'd tossed the bouquet. All the silly little rituals that she had so looked forward to.
"Good for you," she said and offered her own clutch, which she still held, for comparison. The real one was wilting and a little ragged around the edges, with missing petals and sprigs, while hers was still fresh and pristine and would remain so eternally. "Here," she said, "take mine, too, for double luck." But when she tried to give Cathy the bouquet, she couldn't let go of it. She opened her hand and discovered a seam where the clutch joined her palm. It was part of her.
Funny
, she thought,
I'm not afraid
. Ever since she was little, Anne had feared that some day she would suddenly realize she wasn't herself anymore. It was a dreadful notion that sometimes oppressed her for weeks: knowing you weren't yourself. But her sims didn't seem to mind it. She had about three dozen Annes in her album, from age twelve on up. Her sims tended to be a morose lot, but they all agreed it wasn't so bad, the life of a sim, once you got over the initial shock. The first moments of disorientation are the worst, they told her, and they made her promise never to reset them back to default. Otherwise, they'd have to work everything through from scratch. So Anne never reset her sims when she shelved them. She might delete a sim outright for whatever reason, but she never reset them because you never knew when you'd wake up one day a sim yourself. Like today.
The other Anne joined them. She was sagging a little. "Well," she said to Anne.
"Indeed!" replied Anne.
"Turn around," said the other Anne, twirling her hand, "I want to see."
Anne was pleased to oblige. Then she said, "Your turn," and the other Anne modeled for her, and she was delighted at how the gown looked on her, though the goggles somewhat spoiled the effect.
Maybe this can work out
, she thought,
I am enjoying myself so
. "Let's go see us side-by-side," she said, leading the way to the mirror on the wall. The mirror was large, mounted high, and tilted forward so you saw yourself as from above. But simulated mirrors cast no reflections, and Anne was happily disappointed.
"Oh," said Cathy, "look at that."
"Look at what?" said Anne.
"Grandma's vase," said the other Anne. On the mantel beneath the mirror
stood Anne's most precious possession, a delicate vase cut from pellucid blue crystal. Anne's great-great-great grandmother had commissioned the Belgian master, Bollinger, the finest glass maker in sixteenth-century Europe, to make it. Five hundred years later, it was as perfect as the day it was cut.
"Indeed!" said Anne, for the sim vase seemed to radiate an inner light. Through some trick or glitch of the simogram, it sparkled like a lake under moonlight, and, seeing it, Anne felt incandescent.
After a while, the other Anne said, "Well?" Implicit in this question was a whole standard set of questions that boiled down to— shall I keep you or delete you now? For sometimes a sim didn't take. Sometimes a sim was cast while Anne was in a mood, and the sim suffered irreconcilable guilt or unassuagable despondency and had to be mercifully destroyed. It was better to do this immediately, or so all the Annes had agreed.
And Anne understood the urgency, what with the reception still in progress and the bride and groom, though frazzled, still wearing their finery. They might do another casting if necessary. "I'll be okay," Anne said. "In fact, if it's always like this, I'll be terrific."
Anne, through the impenetrable goggles, studied her. "You sure?"
"Yes."
"Sister," said the other Anne. Anne addressed all her sims as "sister," and now Anne, herself, was being so addressed. "Sister," said the other Anne, "this has got to work out. I need you."
"I know," said Anne, "I'm your wedding day."
"Yes, my wedding day."
Across the room, the guests laughed and applauded. Benjamin— both of him— was entertaining, as usual. He— the one in goggles— motioned to them. The other Anne said, "We have to go. I'll be back."
Great Uncle Karl, Nancy, Cathy and Tom, Aunt Jennifer, and the rest left through the wall. A polka could be heard playing on the other side. Before leaving, the other Benjamin gathered the other Anne into his arms and leaned her backward for a theatrical kiss. Their goggles clacked.
How happy I look
, Anne told herself.
This is the happiest day of my life
.
Then the lights dimmed, and her thoughts shattered like glass.