“And a bloody clever one you are,” Kirra said delightedly. “I never sussed. What’s your name, love?”
“I’m generally known as Teena. If you think of a name you like better, tell me and I’ll answer to that with you. At the moment I have one hundred and sixty-seven names. But if you want to refer to me, to another person, call me Teena.”
I’d been crabwalking my way to the tunnel mouth with the others, but suddenly I paused. “Uh…Teena?” I began, pitching my voice too low for the others to hear. “…do you—I mean, is there any way to—”
“May I try to guess your questions, Morgan?” she murmured in my ear. “Yes, I will be monitoring you every minute you’re in or near Top Step, while you’re feeding the felcher or making love or just trying to be alone. No, there is no way to switch me off. But there’s only a very limited sense in which I can even metaphorically be said to be thinking about what I perceive. In a very real sense, there is no me, save when I am invoked. My short-term memory is much less than a second, I don’t save anything that is not relevant to health, safety or your direct commands, and even that can be accessed by only eight people in Top Step—to all of whom you gave that specific right when you sighed your contract. So please don’t think of me as a Peeping Teena, all right?”
“I’ll try,” I said, resuming my journey to the tunnel mouth. “It’s just that…well, I’ve heard AIs before—but you’re so good I’d swear you’re sentient.” Glenn heard that last and said, “Me too.”
“Artificial sentience may be possible,” Teena said, “but it won’t be silicon-based.”
One of the women I didn’t know said something in Japanese.
“Why not?” Glenn translated.
“The map is not the territory,” Teena said—and apparently the Japanese woman heard the answer in her own language. What a marvelous tool Teena was!
Glenn seemed disposed to argue, but Teena went on, “It’s time we got you six to your quarters. Follow me—”
A group of little green LED lights along the tunnel wall began twinkling at us, then moved slowly away into the tunnel like Tinkerbell.
One at a time, we put our soles against the bungee cord and jaunted after them.
The tunnel itself was laser-straight, though its walls were roughly sculpted. There were numbered hatches let into the padded rock at odd intervals, and other, smaller tunnels intersected at odd intervals and angles. The main corridor was about eight or ten meters in cross section, with rungs spiraling along its length so that you could never be far from one. These came in handy as we progressed; we were to learn that a perfect tunnel-threading jaunt is almost impossible, even for free fall veterans. Old hands boast of their low CPH, or Contact-Per-Hectometer rate. (If you’re a diehard American, a hectometer, a hundred meters, is the rest of humanity’s name for about a hundred yards.) We soon began to pick up the trick of slinging ourselves along with minimal waste effort. No matter how fast or slow we progressed, the blinking lights that we followed stayed exactly five meters ahead of the foremost one of us, like one of those follow-from-in-front tails you see cops or spies do in the movies.
We overtook and passed a group of especially clumsy males. They were following pixies of a different colour, so there was minimal confusion between our two groups.
“Who you roomin’ with, Morgan?” Kirra asked as we jaunted together.
“I don’t know. The woman I planned to room with came down with the Foul Bowel three days ago—bad enough to get flown off to hospital. I guess I get pot luck.”
“S’truth!” Kirra exclaimed. “Mine got right to the airlock this morning and decided what she really wanted to do was go back to her husband. Hey, you don’t reckon…? I mean, they sat us next to each other on the Shuttle, do you suppose that means—Hey Teena—”
“Yes, Kirra?” Teena said.
“Who’s my bunkie gonna be?”
“You and Morgan will be rooming together. That is why you were seated adjacent on the Shuttle.”
“That’s great!” Kirra said.
I was oddly touched by the genuine enthusiasm in her voice; it had been a long time since anyone had been especially eager for my company. I found that I was pleased myself; Kirra was as likeable as a puppy. “Thanks,” I told her. “I think so too.”
She grinned. “I ought to warn you…I sing. All the time, I mean. Puts some people off.”
“Are you any good?”
“Yah. But I don’t sing anything you know.”
“I’ll risk it. I dance, myself.”
“So I hear; like to see it. That’s settled, then. Thanks, Teena!”
It occurred to me that Teena hadn’t answered Kirra’s question until Kirra asked it. She’d heard us discussing it, presumably, but had not volunteered the information until asked. She’d told the truth, earlier: unless we called on her, she “paid attention” only to things like pulse, respiration, and location coordinates. (If everyone in Top Step ever called her at the same moment, would her system hang? Or did she have the RAM to handle it?) I found that reassurance comforting.
A woman who knew everything, needed nothing and was only there when you wanted her. I was willing to bet a man had written Teena. She was what my ex-husband had been looking for all his life.
Shortly Teena said, “We’ll be pausing at that nexus ahead: the one that’s blinking now. Prepare to cancel your velocity.”
The “nexus” was an intersection of several side tunnels, important enough to have bungee cords strung across the middle of the main tunnel to allow changes of vector. We all managed to grab one.
“We split up here,” Teena said. “Soon Li, Yumiko, your quarters are this way—” Tinkerbell skittered off down one tunnel, then returned to hover at its entrance. “—Glenn, Nicole, Morgan and Kirra, yours are this way.” Another tunnel developed green fairies.
We did each say leave-taking politenesses appropriate to our culture, but even Yumiko didn’t linger over it. We were all too eager to see our new home, our personal cave-within-a-cave. Have you ever approached a new dwelling for the first time… after the lease has been signed? Remember how your pulse raced as you got near the door? The schizoid cheap/lavish style of Top Step might just pinch here.
Our wing was P7; Teena pointed out the wing bathroom and kitchenette as we jaunted past them, stopped Kirra and me at a door marked P7-23. I’m not even sure I said goodbye to Glenn as she continued on past our door toward her own room and roommate. Teena had Kirra and me show the door-lock our thumbprints, whereupon it opened for us.
Home, sweet spherical home…
Chapter Three
When the 10,000 things are viewed in their oneness, we return to the origin and remain where we have always been.
Our new home didn’t look too weird to us because we’d seen pictures in Suit Camp. Still it was exotic; flat pictures don’t do justice to a spherical living space. We drifted around in it for a while, staring at everything, trying out the various facilities, lights and sound and video and climate control, teaching them all to recognize our voices and so on, but the room somehow kept refusing to become real for me. It was just too strange.
There was no “upper bunk” to fight over; one half of the room was as good as the other. The hemisphere I arbitrarily chose had, as a small concession to the ancient human patterns of thought I was here to unlearn, a local vertical, a defined up and down—the Velcro desk lined up with the computer monitor and so on—but Kirra’s half had a different one, at a skewed angle to mine. Neither had any particular relationship to the axis of the corridor outside. Looking from my side of the room to Kirra’s made me slightly dizzy. My eyes wanted to ignore anything that disagreed with their personal notion of up and down. Such things did not play by the rules, were impolite, beneath notice.