Marion spoke softly. “You’ve been very unlucky. Your message made it to the outside world, but unfortunately for you, the object code failed to destroy itself. It was analyzed in a routine efficiency scan just as its resources were about to be returned to the heap and it caused an exception to be thrown. Even then, we would have wondered at its meaning if it hadn’t been for something you said earlier.”
“What’s that?”
“Back in the concert hall, yesterday. You subvocalized something to your internal personalities: ‘I’m not sure the Night Jay will have a method of contacting the outside world.’”
“Oh,” said Constantine.
– Stupid, stupid, stupid! said Red.
– It’s too late to worry about that now, said Grey.
Marion continued. “You had the whole realside team in turmoil because of that. What did you mean, ‘outside world’? What was the Night Jay? They couldn’t believe that the simulation had been compromised. Most of them assumed it was some sort of code. They didn’t want to believe you had found out where you were. And then we found the message in the bottle.”
“Oh,” said Constantine. He didn’t know what else to say.
Marion touched his elbow. “Look, it was a mistake anyone could make. You’re up against a team of a hundred people.”
Again he was lost for words. Marion cleared her throat.
“Anyway. While I was busy trying to seduce you in here, the powers that be out in the real world were putting together an offer.”
Constantine nodded. “I’m listening.”
Grey spoke with cold finality.
– There can be no bargains.
Marion gave a tiny shake of her head. “I’m not sure that you would really understand what the offer means. You don’t understand what’s involved here. That’s why we’re going to show you.”
She reached out her hand into the nothingness and pulled it to one side. Another door opened in space. Through it Constantine could see a corridor, just a little wider than the doorway itself. A steep stairway, looking oddly familiar, led downward. He strained to see more, hungry for the touch of reality in the empty world. It looked so real. He could make out cracked paint on the ceiling; he could see how the stone of the steps was slightly dipped in the center where so many people had already trodden.
“Go on down,” said Marion.
Constantine did not need to be told. He was already stepping into the welcoming doorway. Anything to get out of this dreadful nothingness. He walked down eight or nine steps, feeling the reassuring solidness of the stone beneath his feet. He pressed a hand gratefully against the cool, cream-painted plaster of the wall. Marion stepped onto the top step behind him and pulled a cream-painted door closed behind her. She sat down on the top step and took a deep breath.
“What now?”
“Go down the steps,” said Marion. “Someone will be waiting for you at the bottom.”
“Aren’t you coming, too?”
“No. I’ll wait here for your return.” She shivered, and said with real feeling. “I couldn’t bear to wait out there.”
Constantine shivered in sympathy. “I know what you mean.” He turned and began to descend.
Constantine danced quickly down the stairs, the stone treads beneath his feet sending up a pitter-patter echo in the narrow passageway. As he reached a landing, the stairway reversed direction, yet still heading down. The feeling that he had been here before was rising in Constantine all the time. Onto another landing and he reversed direction again. There was a door at the bottom of this next flight of steps. A green double door with anti-crush bars stretched across, faintly patterned with the oil of a thousand fingerprints. And Constantine at last remembered where he was. He pushed open the doors of the concert hall and stepped out onto the wide paved area of the fourth level of Stonebreak.
A familiar figure in a shabby green suit was waiting for him, just beyond the doors.
“Hello, Mary,” said Constantine.
Mary led him to a nearly empty cafe bar located close to the Source. They ordered tiny cups of espresso and tall glasses of chilled water and carried them to a table well away from the bored-looking youth who served at the counter. Around them, the tables were still littered with dirty cups, dried coffee foam forming tidemarks around the rims; half-eaten sandwiches, and cakes dried and curled on plates. Mary looked across to the five entwined branches of the Source and then raised her espresso cup to Constantine.
“Cheers,” she said.
“Cheers.”
Mary sipped at the strong coffee then took a drink of cold water. Constantine did the same. The contrast between the strong, hot, bitter coffee and the refreshing coldness of the water was stimulating. Constantine replaced his cup on the saucer and sat up straight.
“What’s it all about, Mary?”
She sat up a little straighter too and looked at him.
“I was supposed to be your conscience. It was another possible way to get what we wanted from you.”
Constantine said nothing for a moment, took another sip of espresso, another of water.
“It probably stood the best chance of working, you know.”
“The company AI said it would. I never believed it.”
“Which company is it?”
“The company now called 113 Berliner Sibelius, following the corporate merger at the AI level earlier this week. My presence is also partly explained by the much more environmentally aware policy we’ve been pursuing since then. I’m not sure it’s to our benefit, you know, but there you go. Who are we to argue with an AI?”
“Who indeed?” asked Constantine. He looked across to the Source again.
“Is the DIANA strand crumbling out in the real world, too?”
“Oh, yes,” said Mary.
He finished off the espresso and downed the rest of the water in one gulp. He was ready for a whisky, now.
“So. What is it you want to know?” he asked.
Mary smiled at him and sat back in her seat. A young couple crossed the square behind her, wrapped up in each other’s arms.
“Three things,” said Mary.
She raised a finger. “One, how did you carry the VNM away from Mars?”
She raised a second finger. “Two, where did you take the VNM? How are you maintaining its integrity?”
A third finger. “And three, what are you going to do with it?”
“Can’t you guess?” asked Constantine.
“Oh, we can see the point, sort of. We know that the VNM is entirely the product of human ingenuity. As a human-” she smiled briefly “-as the personality construct of a human, I share your concerns about the motivations of AIs and realize the value of having something untouched by their machinations. We just don’t see the commercial advantage.”
“Maybe there isn’t one.”
Mary said nothing. Constantine held her gaze for a moment.
“Okay. I’ll answer your first question. I didn’t take the VNM off the planet. I couldn’t. You’re thinking of modern self-replicating machines, the sort of thing you can hold in your hand or pour by the million into a bottle. This was a first attempt: thirty gigabytes of code and about one hundred tons of raw materials. It was the code that counted. That’s what I took away.”
“Couldn’t you just get it from records here on Earth?”
“How do we know it hadn’t been subtly altered by the AIs in the meantime? How paranoid can we be here? Every processor, every memory slice that can be accessed by an AI is necessarily suspect. I couldn’t even trust a modern secured memory slice; it would have to interface with modern equipment eventually and then that code would become visible. So I took something called a laptop computer. Over a hundred years old-an oversized plastic box with a fixed-size viewing field and a data entry area that hurts your back and arms and neck just using it.”