He felt queasy thinking about having his body parts tinkered with. “It’s hard to explain, but I’ve got a strong sense of identity, and part of that is, uh, my body. I’m not some intangible spirit. Being a cripple does things to you.”
Zephyr’s ears perked; they’d been repaired. “Are you a ‘cripple’?”
Garrett stared at his screwed-up body. “Not anymore. For a while I felt like I couldn’t do anything for myself, like everybody pitied me. Literally they looked down on me. I was afraid to get the surgery for prosthetics partly because a cripple was what I was. It defined me. Because once you get beaten down enough you get convinced you deserve it, and forget that anything better is possible. Damn, it felt good to stand up again!” That first day, he’d fallen flat on his nose and laughed it off, waving away his parents when they tried to help him up. It took him two whole minutes to get up from that fall but he did it by himself, on his new legs.
“I don’t have that kind of identity,” said Zephyr. “A body is just an interface to the most important world.”
“Okay, but you’ve been using that one for a while. Haven’t you got an awareness of your strength, your height, the sight of your hands? Do you think much about the damage you took?”
“I guess so. It was frustrating not to have a body, and strange to upgrade to this model when it arrived. Suddenly being transfered to a lower-capability body would be unpleasant.”
“Can I have my legs back now?” Zephyr returned them and Garrett spent a few minutes hooking them up. He wiggled the intact one at the ankle. “Make the best replacement you can, then. I’ll be interested to see what you come up with. Maybe I’ll even get the other one replaced to match.”
“I get a free hand?” Zephyr seemed excited by the prospect.
“Leg. You’re right; it doesn’t matter exactly what I’m made of. I’m more than the sum of my parts.”
“I said that?”
Garrett stood and attempted to scratch Zephyr’s ears. The robot leaned his plastic head into it like a cat. “Sure. Since when did you become a prosthetics specialist?”
“I’ve been doing a lot of reading, and absorbing a few expert systems.” Zephyr paused. “There’s actually something else. When I work with people I pick up some of their skill, which includes their way of analyzing things. Their personality.”
Zephyr had been helping with the technical details of botany, something otherwise handled with the “brute force and ignorance” of non-specialists. “Does that mean you’ve got a partial imitation of Alexis in you? And Phillip? And Valerie, and Tess, and me?”
“Yes. See, I tried to explain this to Tess and she thought I was doing something bad, but really I’m not! At least I don’t think so. I’m designed to build these internal models to predict people’s behavior, and it so happens that they’re effectively mini-AIs.”
Garrett thought about all the people Zephyr had met being trapped inside him. That wasn’t fair, though; was his own memory of his father “trapped” in his skull too? “I’m not used to this Borg hive-mind thing you’ve got going on. What exactly are you doing?”
“I don’t know. I was hoping Tess would help me figure it out. Why is a ‘hive-mind’ evil, anyway? I want a human opinion.”
Garrett thought back to old stories of mind-slave cyborgs and rapacious insect-hordes. “Because the ‘people’ in those are missing something, or it’s been stolen from them. They’ve been forced into some huge pattern they have to obey, and it turns them into interchangeable, expendable parts. The individual gets drained and becomes lesser.”
“Like AGVs,” said Zephyr. “An expendable robot army.”
“You’re thinking of warmechs? Those were never intelligent, so they’re like animals at best. Imagine that someone ripped out half your soul to turn you into a slave like that.”
“I don’t have to imagine.”
4. Noah
He could run back to Sapphire Haven and the tar-paper roofs, or stay here, or do whatever else he could imagine. The thought made him grin, baring his teeth against the cold wind that had set in. He was home, and it was almost Christmas.
“Don’t you people do anything for the holidays?” he asked Leda, walking up behind her to wrap his arms around her. They owed each other, for a couple of moments in the fight.
Leda shivered. They were in the west corner of the farm, which was becoming a hangout spot. It had a relatively large, stable platform with a canopy and wave-guard and a sort of bandstand. Now Leda was in a slick wetsuit supervising the workers who’d shown up yesterday. Pilgrim types were coaxing the new guys through fish-feeding and equipment-fixing.
Leda said, “With Sir Phillip we didn’t. He said it was sinful.”
“You don’t have to do the traditional stuff with the fat white burglar. But how about presents? A tree, even?”
Leda slipped out of his grip, saying, “I used to do all that, with my old family.”
“So let’s start it up here, and have some fun.”
“We’re not here for fun,” she said, looking over her shoulder. “The point is…”
Leda looked Castor over, seeing the impossible island Noah had been staring at since he arrived. She said, “It’s to serve each other, isn’t it? Or God, if you put it that way.”
“Sure,” said Noah. “But we’re here to have a good time too. You want the Pilgrims to be happy, right? We could all use some good cheer about now.”
Leda looked uncertain. “Well, there’s no tinsel or anything.”
Noah walked to the door of the Chaste Dolphin, the only restaurant for miles around. The place had opened after days of his own work alongside the Dentrassi brothers. It’d been fun: hanging on to a big spaying hose to pump concrete into a framework and turn outlines into real walls. The stuff had come out full of bubbles and shredded paper, stretching the material, and become a set of blank, dank rooms. It was funny how when he’d been asked to clean up the trash from the construction, he hadn’t minded at all. Now that there were distinct rooms to work with, the Dentrassis had done the rest. Now they had nice pine tables instead of the cheap plastic ones in the galley and Dockside; the whole place was lined with ships’ wheels and nets and other nautical things. He was about to go in when a rumble caught his ears.
He bounded up to the topdeck to see a rusty ship stacked with steel cargo containers. “What’s that?” he asked a passing Pilgrim.
“It’s for the hotel.”
Sure enough, the old couple running the station’s room bookings was looking to build a whole little platform of their own. Noah was already getting experienced at the construction methods around here, so he got hired to help turn a cluster of floating boxes into a hotel. The work had him mixing concrete and making slabs to balance on the containers. It was scary to stand out there, but before long he’d led the way. It looked almost like solid land, parked near the main platform. He cursed and sweated through the work until he could stand on the ocean, and stare at what he’d made. “I built an island!”
He still had Rickie’s phone number. He sent the man a picture of the thing, hoping it would spark something in him.
The Pierpont family was there for the construction of course, bundled up and talking excitedly about the next steps. They’d need to assemble more actual buildings atop the platform. It surprised him to feel he understood some of the technical details now, and for the first time he actually cared about math. He’d been cheated in school by teachers who’d cared more about babysitting him than about having him make things.