It was good to be alive, and it was good to be alive again.
The configuration identified as Art Fish was a wonder and a revelation to him, a synesthetic concert of intelligence in conscious mode. In the first moments after the symbol Gina had broken through and brought him to a level where he could function and communicate again, Art Fish had shared memory with him. That had been disorienting at first, but with the data had come the format and the know-how. By the time he had seen Gina, he had changed in many, many ways.
But Gina stirred the old feelings in him nonetheless; perhaps even more so. He had been refined and reorganized to such an extent that he saw her with a clarity beyond anything he'd had in his last moments of meat awareness. He remembered that he loved her; that had not changed. There had been so much noise in the old meat that he would never have found his way through it to where she was, and now that the noise was gone, he didn't even have arms to put around her.
Art had much salient memory to share on the matter, in spite of the fact that It had never been flesh. It was the only thing he could think to call Art, and he still bridled somewhat against the old associations of the word, even though It in this new existence was a far more encompassing term than mere he or she. He supposed it was a matter of getting used to it… and getting used to It. He remained he in his own thoughts, though that too would change over time. Change for the machines. That could be a good thing.
He and Art were in complete rapport from the moment of his unlocking. The memory Art shared assured him that he would eventually find what he had instead of arms much more gratifying. Mark shared that just about anything was more gratifying than Schrodinger's dick and was surprised at how completely Art understood what he meant.
With Art's help he completed plotting Gina's life-graph, while Art shared Its own with him. Ambiguities were not so troublesome, because they could also be charted until there was a whole enchanted forest of decision trees to wander through over and over, taking different paths to different outcomes; a multitude of lifetimes in an instant.
Gina would be all right. Gabe Ludovic was capable of being good for her. They were not as odd a pairing as he might have thought; their differences did not raise the noise level. They could find each other. He felt a little sorry for them, since they would not be able to find each other as thoroughly as he and Art. Unless they used the sockets.
He had no simulations with him-he'd had to jettison as much as possible when he'd locked down-but it was surprisingly easy to recreate a simulation of a brain for Fez's use. The old associations could be reconfigured so that the substance they had referred to could be reconstructed. It was an exquisite difficulty and showed him the truth of the first thing Art had shared with him: Information can neither be created nor destroyed-it's accessible or it's inaccessible, but it is. If you have known it, and you can find the tiniest remnant of association, then you will know it again.
When he understood that it really was possible, he thought it was the most comforting thing he'd ever heard in his life. Or lives. Things were different when you lived completely within the context.
He learned as he went, and he had the sensation of everything around him shifting while he remained constant, as if the context were opening wider and wider, letting him see more deeply into it. The outside meat-inhabited world became even clearer to him. Already he could distinguish most of the individuals just by their input; little things, the style, the patterns, the rhythms and pauses showed variations that were no longer minuscule to him, no two ever quite the same. Fez was like a cattle-herder even at a keyboard, directing the flow of useful things that had little intrinsic value until placed together in certain ways. He thought Fez might be closest to an understanding of what he, Mark, was now. Fez seemed to understand configuration, but he fell short of seeing more than a few dimensions. Mark reminded himself that none of them in their physical world was capable of rapid shifts in pov.
But it seemed that he always had been. The years of video playing in the old meat organ called brain had given him the capability, music and pictures shifting back and forth on him, being able to make one out of the other. They still served him. If he thought an association was lost, he could find it in the music and the pictures, and he could always find the music and the pictures. Even though the program director was gone.
Automatically he configured the diagnostic program before Fez could even start to adapt it. It was complicated, even with Art's help; better than letting Fez hack away at it for a day or two, and then debug it for another day or two, and perhaps end up with something that was not exactly what they wanted after all. And yet, as complicated as it was, it reduced down to something simple, as did all good programs. It was the output that would be Byzantine, not the program itself.
"What is this?" Fez wanted to know, staring at the results on the screen. "You took a highly sophisticated viral diagnostic, and you made this out of it?" He raised his face to the cam.
Visualizing for him, Mark produced charts, and Art put them on the screens. "Outputs are what you'll look at," he told Fez. "Those are all ranges the outputs would fall into, with ambiguity margins. But you have to consider all of them together simultaneously to determine the presence or absence of something like the spike."
The one Art called Sam-I-Am moved into view, looked at the screens, and then frowned suspiciously at the cam. "Art? Are you screwing around again?"
"Not me," Art vocalized. "There isn't time. The Phoenix node just went down, and Alameda's gone with it, just like I told you it would." Art had already shared the information with him, but Mark waited through the protocol so necessary for communication through all their innate people-noise. "It's on the way. It's been around the world a few times, but it's finally spiraling in on us."
Sam wiped both hands over her face. "Don't tell me-sympathetic vibrations, right?"
"Not really your fault, Sam," Art told her. "It would have learned how on its own anyway, after it had sophisticated enough."
"Sophisticate is not a verb," came Rosa's voice from out of cam range.
"It is now," Art said. "All outside communications are down. What will you do when the power goes?"
"Will it do that?" Sam asked. The anxiety on her face was a road map of her life. Rosa appeared next to her.
"It will do that. If it can't get in and take us, it'll crash us."
Sam turned to Fez. "How long can we run on solar and batteries?"
"Not long. We don't have half-enough solar, and the monitors are already on those."
"I knew all those goddamn monitors would be a drain," Sam said.
"Well, they're off now," Fez said and looked worriedly into the cam. "How long do we have before it works its way over to us?"
"About three hours," Art told him.
"That might give us long enough to run one diagnostic. Even one like this." He gestured at the screen where the one line of Mark's masterpiece was displayed.
›How are you?‹
"But it's more than enough time to compress," said Art.
"Compress?"
"For nanoware."
Sam's face was a portrait of surprised hope. Mark thought she looked exactly like Gabe Ludovic for that moment. Then she frowned. "You could both fit?"
"We're topological acrobats," Art said. "All a matter of making the associations work in multiple dimensions. We should start. Now."
Fez held up a hand. "Art, you've never compressed that much with, ah, another individual presence. Neither has Mark. In the reorganization, you could lose your… ah… distinguishable… distinguishing…"