"No." Amber sighs. "Not too different from us, though. I mean, we aren't exactly well adapted to this environment, are we? We tote these body-images along, rely on fake realities that we can map into our human-style senses. We're emulations, not native AIs. Where's Su Ang?"
"I can find her." Boris frowns.
"I asked her to analyse the alien's arrival times," Amber adds as an afterthought. "They're close – too close. And they showed up too damn fast when we first tickled the router. I think Aineko's theories are flawed. The real owners of this network we've plugged into probably use much higher-level protocols to communicate; sapient packets to build effective communications gateways. This Wunch, they probably lurk in wait for newbies to exploit. Pedophiles hiding outside the school gate. I don't want to give them that opportunity before we make contact with the real thing!"
"You may have little choice," says Sadeq. "If they are without insight, as you suspect, they may become afraid if you edit their environment. They may lash out. I doubt they even understand how they created the contaminated metagrammar that they transmitted back to us. It will be to them just a tool that makes simpleminded aliens more gullible, easier to negotiate with. Who knows where they got it?"
"A grammatical weapon." Boris spins himself round slowly. "Build propaganda into your translation software if you want to establish a favorable trading relationship. How cute. Haven't these guys ever heard of Newspeak?"
"Probably not," Amber says slowly, pausing for a moment to spawn spectator threads to run down the book and all three movie versions of Nineteen Eighty-Four, followed by the sharecropped series of sequel novels. She shivers uncomfortably as she re-integrates the memories. "Ick. That's not a very nice vision. Reminds me of" – she snaps her fingers, trying to remember Dad's favorite – "Dilbert."
"Friendly fascism," says Sadeq. "It matters not, whosoever is in charge. I could tell you tales from my parents, of growing up with a revolution. To never harbor self-doubt is poison for the soul, and these aliens want to inflict their certainties upon us."
"I think we ought to see how Pierre is doing," Amber says aloud. "I certainly don't want them poisoning him." Grin: "That's my job."
Donna the Journalist is everywhere simultaneously. It's a handy talent: Makes for even-handed news coverage when you can interview both sides at the same time.
Right now, one of her is in the bar with Alan Glashwiecz, who evidently hasn't realized that he can modulate his ethanol dehydrogenase levels voluntarily and who is consequently well on the way to getting steaming drunk. Donna is assisting the process: She finds it fascinating to watch this bitter young man who has lost his youth to a runaway self-enhancement process.
"I'm a full partner," he says bitterly, "in Glashwiecz and Selves. I'm one of the Selves. We're all partners, but it's only Glashwiecz Prime who has any clout. The old bastard – if I'd known I'd grow up to become that, I'd have run away to join some hippie antiglobalist commune instead." He drains his glass, demonstrating his oropharyngeal integrity, snaps his fingers for a refill. "I just woke up one morning to find I'd been resurrected by my older self. He said he valued my youthful energy and optimistic outlook, then offered me a minority stake with stock options that would take five years to vest. The bastard."
"Tell me about it," Donna coaxes sympathetically. "Here we are, stranded among idiopathic types, not among them a single multiplex —"
"Damn straight." Another bottle of Bud appears in Glashwiecz'a hands. "One moment I'm standing in this apartment in Paris facing total humiliation by a cross-dressing commie asshole called Macx and his slimy French manager bitch, and the next I'm on the carpet in front of my alter ego's desk and he's offering me a job as junior partner. It's seventeen years later, all the weird nonsense that guy Macx was getting up to is standard business practice, and there's six of me in the outer office taking research notes because myself-as-senior-partner doesn't trust anyone else to work with him. It's humiliating, that's what it is."
"Which is why you're here." Donna waits while he takes a deep swig from the bottle.
"Yeah. Better than working for myself, I can tell you – it's not like being self-employed. You know how you sometimes get distant from your work? It's really bad when you see yourself from the outside with another half gigasecond of experience and the new-you isn't just distant from the client base, he's distant from the you-you. So I went back to college and crammed up on artificial intelligence law and ethics, the jurisprudence of uploading, and recursive tort. Then I volunteered to come out here. He's still handling her account, and I figured —" Glashwiecz shrugged.
"Did any of the delta-yous contest the arrangement?" asks Donna, spawning ghosts to focus in on him from all angles. For a moment, she wonders if this is wise. Glashwiecz is dangerous – the power he wields over Amber's mother, to twist her arm into extending his power of attorney, hints at dark secrets. Maybe there's more to her persistent lawsuits than a simple family feud?
Glashwiecz's face is a study in perspectives. "Oh, one did," he says dismissively: One of Donna's viewports captures the contemptuous twitch in his cheek. "I left her in my apartment freezer. Figured it'd be a while before anybody noticed. It's not murder – I'm still here, right? – and I'm not about to claim tort against myself. I think. It'd be a left-recursive lawsuit, anyway, if I did it to myself."
"The aliens," prompts Donna, "and the trial by combat. What's your take on that?"
Glashwiecz sneers. "Little bitch-queen takes after her father, doesn't she? He's a bastard, too. The competitive selection filter she's imposed is evil – it'll cripple her society if she leaves it in place for too long, but in the short run, it's a major advantage. So she wants me to trade for my life, and I don't get to lay my formal claim against her unless I can outperform her pet day trader, that punk from Marseilles. Yes? What he doesn't know is, I've got an edge. Full disclosure." He lifts his bottle drunkenly. "Y'see, I know that cat. One that's gotta brown @-sign on its side, right? It used to belong to queenie-darling's old man, Manfred, the bastard. You'll see. Her Mom, Pamela, Manfred's ex, she's my client in this case. And she gave me the cat's ackle keys. Access control." (Hic.) "Get ahold of its brains and grab that damn translation layer it stole from the CETI@home mob. Then I can talk to them straight."
The drunken, future-shocked lawyer is on a roll. "I'll get their shit, and I'll disassemble it. Disassembly is the future of industry, y'know?"
"Disassembly?" asks the reporter, watching him in disgusted fascination from behind her mask of objectivity.
"Hell, yeah. There's a singularity going on, that implies disequilibrium. An' wherever there's a disequilibrium, someone is going to get rich disassembling the leftovers. Listen, I once knew this econo—economist, that's what he was. Worked for the Eurofeds, rubber fetishist. He tole me about this fact'ry near Barcelona. It had a disassembly line running in it. Spensive servers in boxes'd roll in at one end. Be unpacked. Then workers'd take the cases off, strip the disk drives, memory, processors, bits'n'guts out. Bag and tag job. Throw the box, what's left, 'cause it wasn't worth dick. Thing is, the manufact'rer charged so much for parts, it was worth their while to buy whole machines'n'strip them. To bits. And sell the bits. Hell, they got an enterprise award for ingenuity! All 'cause they knew that disassembly was the wave of the future."
"What happened to the factory?" asks Donna, unable to tear her eyes away.