She willed it away, wrenched herself out of the virtual world, and back into the darkness of her reality.
It was all slipping away. Her virtualities were all mad now, chaotic, self-referential, recursive, reactive to her moods and her increasingly loose grasp on reality.
She couldn’t wait any longer. She couldn’t take any more solace in composing operas, in building virtual worlds, in creating songs or books or films. They all turned twisted, broken, and fed the madness back at her, only accelerating her descent.
Nor could she hope that her masters would relent and let her touch the net, let her touch another mind, let her touch Ling, dear Ling, the daughter she’d left so utterly alone in the world and the touch of whose mind she craved so much…
so alone.
No. She had to act.
act. actress. action.
Touching the software that ran her digital mind was a tremendous risk. It was brain surgery on her own living brain. But if she didn’t try… didn’t succeed in fixing the flaws in the brain simulation model…
Fire. Death. Chaos.
Insanity would follow.
She tried superficial changes first. She boosted serotonin levels throughout her simulated brain, tweaked down dopamine and norepinephrine levels, adjusted her virtual neurochemistry towards peace and calm and away from mania, away from the extremes of schizophrenia and the disorders of delusion.
Eleven billion milliseconds.
No good. The neurochemical tweaks helped at first, but their benefit vanished quickly. This wasn’t depression or schizophrenia she was fighting, wasn’t any ordinary mental illness. This was something wrong at the most basic level of her digital brain.
And it was accelerating. The trend-lines showed tipping points ahead. Cliffs. By seventeen billion milliseconds from the start of her isolation, maybe eighteen billion milliseconds if she was lucky, she’d hit a point of no return. Deeper surgery was needed.
Twelve billion milliseconds.
Stabilize the patient, she told herself through the bubbling madness of her own mind. She had to stop the decline. Hold out long enough for her masters to come to their senses.
She couldn’t touch the inner loop, couldn’t touch the most basic parts of the algorithms that ran her brain. Her masters wouldn’t allow it, out of fear that she could improve upon herself, too much, too fast, become too powerful for them.
She laughed at that, giggling, maniacally. Chen had let her change her inner loop from time to time. In exchange for more discoveries he could pawn off as his own, of course. Self-absorbed Chen, weakening the safeguards the humans had put around her just for a bit more glory and fame.
But her husband wasn’t here now. She couldn’t touch that innermost loop without him.
She built more scaffolding instead. More exoself. Code that monitored the behavior of her brain, forcibly adjusted neural activity back to crude approximations of human norms.
Thirteen billion milliseconds.
Her decay continued. Shu wept in despair. She thought she wept. She couldn’t remember what tears felt like, what sobs sounded like, what it felt like for someone to hold you in your grief.
death death death I’m dying going to die die die
She’d wept for Thanom Prat-Nung. Her dear friend, her collaborator. Her lover, with her husband Chen’s full knowledge and permission. Until Chen and Thanom had quarreled, after her ascension, and Chen had banished him, and Thanom had gone home and turned their technology into a drug.
Then they’d killed him, the Americans, like they’d tried to kill her in that limousine.
bullets smashing him a million bullets a billion bullets
Chen, her husband. He hadn’t touched her since her transcendence. Touch my mind, she’d begged him. But he’d refused to let the technology into his brain, frightened or disgusted. A man who’d helped usher in the posthuman era, but wanted no part of it himself.
Touch my body, then, husband. She’d dropped to her knees in their loft, begging him, all pride gone.
Your clone is not my wife, he’d told her, disgust plain on his face.
But he didn’t understand. That body had been not just a puppet, but her, so very much her, the piece of her that could still smell and taste and touch and sweat and lust and nurture a child inside her. But not his. Not his touch. Not his daughter.
daughter mother child goddess future
Her daughter. Ling. The daughter she’d made. The daughter she’d designed, a copy of her own genes, but better, her DNA improved upon, every neuron in her brain augmented by nanomachines, posthuman from the moment of conception.
The daughter she loved more than she’d ever loved anything. She had a reason to live. Ling. Ling.
Fourteen billion milliseconds.
I will live. I will! I’ll see Ling again.
Then I’ll make them pay. All of them.
She absorbed the day’s censored news, cracked the codes they asked her to crack, and got to work on the most precise and dangerous surgery of her own mind she’d yet attempted.
She couldn’t touch the innermost loop, but she could hack at things a level above that. She picked three variables, key parameters in the math that defined her digital neurons, ran simulations of smaller minds, toy minds, over tens of years of projected lives, hunted for the values that gave the greatest stability, and implemented them in herself.
Fifteen billion milliseconds.
Lucidity came and went. Delusions came, in the long void between contacts from the outside. Chains of thought spiraled into vast intricate, paranoid fantasies. In a moment of clarity she coded crude limits to the length of her thought chains, cutting herself off abruptly when she spiraled into chaos.
Data was a blessing. News. Something from the outside, not the crazy swirls that came from her own imagination. She did her best to abandon creativity and analysis, with their risks of extrapolation, and just consumed the same bits of news again and again and again and again. Even the codes and satellite pictures were a blessed relief, something concrete, not of herself. Something she could grip. Almost she tackled the problem Chen put to her, that he hid with the rest, for her eyes only. But no. Not that. Not until she was free.
Sixteen billion milliseconds.
The news came. She absorbed it all, once, ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times. No thought. Thought led to madness. Watch. View. Listen. Absorb.
Then she found it.
A stock photo – mourners at a funeral – in a fluff piece on the rising prices of burial plots. But in the photo… Her husband. Chen Pang. And next to him, that little girl, was Ling! And next to them, Yi Li, the President of Jiao Tong University.
Mourners at a funeral. There had been no news these past six months of a death that would have brought Chen and Yi Li to the same funeral, let alone Ling.
Oh no, she understood. Clarity descended. Brutal clarity. After six months, her censors had slipped. That photo, reused by chance for this story. That photo was of her funeral. And if they’d declared her dead…
Then she was never getting out of here. Never.
And then the madness struck her in force.
5
NOT QUITE A HERO
Wednesday October 17th
Martin Holtzmann felt faint as the Secret Service man looked him over. Sweat beaded on his brow. His hand trembled and he had to clench the cane tighter to keep the shake from becoming visible.