The forum with the flying-pig fountain had been abandoned long ago, but Yatima had planted a copy from the archives in vis homescape, the cloistered square marooned in the middle of a vast expanse of parched scrubland. Empty, it looked at once too large and too small. A few hundred delta away, a copy (not to scale) of the asteroid ve'd watched being trimmed was buried in the ground. At one point Yatima had envisioned a vast trail of similar mementos stretching across the savanna, a map ve could fly over whenever ve wanted to review the turning points in vis life… but then the whole idea had begun to seem childish. If the things ve'd seen had changed ver, they'd changed ver; there was no need to re-create them as monuments. Ve'd kept the forum because ve genuinely liked to visit it—and the asteroid out of the sheer perverse pleasure of resisting the urge to tidy it away.
Yatima stood by the fountain for a while, watching its silver liquid effortlessly mock the physics it half-obeyed. Then ve re-created the octahedral diamond, the six-pointed net from vis lesson with Radiya, beside it. That physics meant nothing in the polises had always been clear to ver, as it was to most citizens; Gabriel disagreed, of course, but that was just Carter-Zimmerman doctrine talking. The fountain could ignore the laws of fluid dynamics just as easily as it could conform to them. Everything it did was simply arbitrary; even the perfect gravitational parabola of the start of each stream, before the piglets were formed, was nothing but an aesthetic choice and the aesthetic itself was nothing but the vestigial influence of flesher ancestry.
The diamond net was different, though. Yatima played with the object, deforming it wildly, stretching and twisting it beyond recognition. It was infinitely malleable… and yet a few tiny constraints on the changes ve could make to it rendered it, in a sense, unchangeable. However much ve distorted its shape, however many extra dimensions ve invoked, this net would never lie flat. Ve could replace it with something else entirely such as a net which wrapped a torus and then lay that new net flat… but that would have been as meaningless as creating a non-sentient, Inoshiro-shaped object, dragging it into the Truth Mines, and then claiming that ve'd succeeded in persuading vis real friend to come along.
Polis citizens, Yatima decided, were creatures of mathematics; it lay at the heart of everything they were, and everything they could become. However malleable their minds, in a sense they obeyed the same kind of deep constraints as the diamond net—short of suicide and de novo reinvention, short of obliterating themselves and constructing someone new. That meant that they had to possess their own immutable mathematical signatures—like the Euler number, only orders of magnitude more complex. Buried in the confusion of details of every mind, there had to be something untouched by time, unswayed by the shifting weight of memory and experience, unmodified by self-directed change.
Hashim's artwork had been elegant and moving—and even without the outlook running, the powerful emotions it had evoked lingered—but Yatima was unswayed from vis choice of vocation. Art had its place, tweaking the remnants of all the instincts and drive, that the fleshers, in their innocence, had once mistaken for embodiments of immutable truth—but only in the Mines could ve hope to discover the real invariants of identity and consciousness.
Only in the Mines could ve begin to understand exactly who ve was.
3
BRIDGERS
Atlanta, Earth
23 387 545 324 947 CST
21 May 2975, 11:35:22.101 UT
Yatima's clone started up in the gleisner body and spent a moment reflecting on vis situation. The experience of "awakening" felt no different from arriving in a new scape; there was nothing to betray the fact that vis whole mind had just been created anew. Between subjective instants, ve'd been cross-translated from Konishi's dialect of Shaper, which ran on the virtual machine of a womb or an exoself, into the gleisner version which this robot's highly un-polis-like hardware implemented directly. In a sense, ve had no past of vis own, just forged memories and a secondhand personality… but it still felt as if ve'd merely jumped from savanna to jungle, one and the same person before and after. All invariants intact.
The original Yatima had been suspended by vis exoself prior to translation, and if everything went according to plan that frozen snapshot would never need to be re-started. The Yatima-clone in the gleisner would be re-cloned back into Konishi polis (and re-translated back into Konishi Shaper), then both the Konishi original and the gleisner-bound clone would he erased. Philosophically, it wasn't all that different from being shifted within the polis from one section of physical memory to another—an undetectable act which the operating system performed on every citizen from time to time, to reclaim fragmented memory space. And subjectively, the whole excursion would probably be much the same as if they'd puppeted the gleisners remotely, instead of literally inhabiting them.
If everything went according to plan.
Yatima looked around for Inoshiro. The sun had barely cleared the horizon, let alone penetrated the canopy, but the gleisner's visual system still managed to deliver a crisp, high-contrast image. Thigh-high shrubs with huge, droopy, dark green lenticular leaves covered the forest floor nearby, between massive trunks of soaring hardwood. The interface software they'd cobbled together seemed to be working; the gleisner's head and eyes tracked the angle-of-view bits of Yatima's requests for data without any perceptible delay. Running eight hundred times slower than usual was apparently enough to let the machinery keep up—so long as ve remembered not to attempt any kind of discontinuous motion.
The other abandoned gleisner was sitting in the undergrowth beside ver, torso slumped forward, arms hanging limp. Its polymer skin was all but hidden, encrusted with dew-wet lichen and a thin layer of trapped soil. The mosquito-sized drone they'd used to port themselves into the gleisners' processors which had stumbled on the disused robots in the first place—was still perched on the back of the thing's head, repairing the tiny incision it had made to gain access to a fiber trunkline.
"Inoshiro?" The linear word came hack at Yatima through the interface software, imprinted with all the strange resonances of the gleisner chassis, muffled at odd frequencies by the jungle's clutter and humidity. No scape's echo had ever been quite so… undesigned. So guileless. "Are you in there?"
The drone buzzed, and rose up from the sealed wound. The gleisner turned to face Yatima, dislodging wet sand and fragments of decaying leaves. Several large red ants, suddenly exposed, weaved confused figure-eights across the gleisner's shoulder but managed to stay on.
"Yes, I'm here, don't panic." Yatima began receiving the familiar signature, via an infrared link; ve instinctively challenged and confirmed it. Inoshiro flexed vis facial actuators experimentally, shearing off mulch and grime. Yatima played with vis own expression; the interface software kept sending back tags saying ve was attempting impossible deformations.
"If you want to stand up, I'll brush some of that crap off you." Inoshiro rose smoothly to vis feet; Yatima willed vis viewpoint higher, and the interface made vis own robot body follow suit.
Ve let Inoshiro pummel and scrape ver, paying scant attention to the detailed stream of tags ve received describing the pressure changes on "vis" polymer skin. They'd arranged for the interface to feed the gleisners' posture, as reported by the hardware, into their own internal symbols for their icons—and to make the robots, in turn, obey changes to the icons (so long as they weren't physically impossible, and wouldn't send there sprawling to the ground)—but they'd decided against the kind of extensive re-design that would have given them deeply integrated flesher-style sensory feedback and motor instincts. Even Inoshiro had balked at the idea of their gleisner-clones gaining such vivid new senses and skills, only to slough them off upon returning to Konishi, where they would have been about as useless as Yatima's object-sculpting talents were in this unobliging jungle. Having successive versions of themselves so dissimilar would have made the whole experience too much like death.