“Easy,” she whispered.
“Maintain defence posture one.” That was when a new voice boomed out of nowhere.
“Welcome, Thalia. This is Orson Newkirk speaking. I’m sorry about your tribulations with the servitor.” She raised her own voice in return.
“I can’t see you, Citizen Newkirk.”
“My apologies. It’s spectacularly bad form not to be there to greet your guests, but I haven’t been unplugged in a while and there was a problem with one of my disconnect valves. All fixed now, though. I’m on my way down as I speak. Be with you in a jiffy.”
“On your way down?” she asked, looking up.
“How much do you know about us, Thalia?” he asked, his voice cheerfully playful.
“I know that you stay out of trouble with Panoply,” she said, giving a non-answer that she hoped would mask her ignorance.
“Well, that’s good. At least you haven’t heard anything bad.”
Thalia was getting a crick in her neck.
“Should I have?”
“We have our critics. People who think the level of abstraction we practise here is somehow wrong, or immoral.”
“I’m not here to judge. I’m here to install a software patch.”
She could see something now: a mote of light in the darkness above, descending towards her. As Orson Newkirk came fully into view, Thalia saw that he was contained inside a rectangular glass box, which was being lowered down on a barely visible line. The box wasn’t much larger than a suitcase.
He was a bust, Thalia thought: a human head, half of the upper torso, and nothing else. Nothing below the ribs. No arms, no shoulders. Just a head and a chest, the base of his torso vanishing into a ring-shaped life-support device. A padded framework rose up behind him, supporting the torso, neck and head.
“They say we’re just heads,” Newkirk said chattily.
“They couldn’t be more wrong! Anyone can keep a head alive, but without the hormonal environment of the rest of the body, you don’t get anything remotely resembling the rich texture of human consciousness. We’re creatures of chemistry, not wiring. That’s why we keep as much as possible, while throwing out everything we don’t need. I still have glands, you know. Glands make all the difference. Glands maketh the man.”
“All your glands?” Thalia asked, glancing at the truncated torso.
“Things can be moved around and rerouted, Thalia. Open me up and you’d find a very efficient utilisation of space.”
The box came to a halt with Newkirk’s head level with Thalia’s.
“I don’t understand,” she said, thinking about the echoing, musty spaces she had already walked through.
“Why have you done this to yourself? It can’t be that you need the room.”
“It’s not about room. It’s about resources.” Newkirk smiled at her. He had a young man’s face, not unattractive when one ignored everything else about him. His eyes were white orbs, blank save for a tiny dot of a pupil. They trembled constantly, with the coordinated motion of someone in deep REM sleep.
“Resources?” she asked.
“Funds have to be used in the most efficient manner possible. There are more than a million people living in Sea-Tac. If every single one of them had the mass-energy demands of an adult human, we’d be spending so much money keeping them all fed and watered that we wouldn’t have a penny left over for bandwidth.”
“Bandwidth?” Thalia asked, blearily conscious of where this was heading.
“For abstraction, of course,” Newkirk said, sounding surprised that this wasn’t obvious.
“But there isn’t any. My glasses were dead.”
“That’s because you were outside the participatory core. It’s heavily shielded. We don’t waste a watt broadcasting abstraction where it isn’t needed.” She cut him off.
“Where is everyone, Citizen?”
“We’re all right here.” Lights blazed on, descending in a wave from a vanishing point that appeared to be almost infinitely far above. Thalia saw tier upon tier of compartments, each of which held an identical glass box to the one in which Newkirk resided. There wasn’t room for this inside the habitat, she started to think, before realising that she must be looking along one of the connecting spokes, all the way to the weightless hub.
“Why have you done this to yourselves?”
“That’s not the right question. What you should be asking is, who do I have to kill to join?” She grinned nervously.
“No thanks.”
“You don’t know what you’re missing.”
“Maybe not. I do know that I quite like having a body, being able to walk around and breathe.”
“But you know nothing of abstraction. If you had any experience of it before you became a prefect, it must be just a fading memory by now. Like a glimpse of the gates of heaven between a crack in the clouds. Before the clouds closed again.”
“I’ve sampled abstraction—I had implants before I joined Panoply.”
“You’ve sampled it, yes. But only in Sea-Tac would you know the euphoric bliss of total immersion.” Thalia looked across the open space, at the boxes ranked on the far wall, the endless parade of human busts.
“They’re all somewhere else, aren’t they? Mentally, I mean. Their minds aren’t in Sea-Tac at all.”
“What would be the point? My people are the only real citizens of the Glitter Band, the only ones who truly inhabit it. Their minds are out there now, Thalia: spread across the entire volume of near-Yellowstone space, a choir invisible, singing the body electric, angels in the architecture.”
“They’ve paid a price for it.”
“One they’d all gladly pay ten times over.”
“I really should be getting on with the upgrade,” Thalia said.
“The polling core’s at the bottom of the shaft. Follow the walkway and it’ll bring you to the base in two rotations.” Thalia did as Citizen Newkirk instructed. When she reached the bottom of the shaft—Newkirk lowering down to match her descent until he was hovering only a metre above the floor—she reached out her right hand and summoned the whiphound back. It sprang into her grip, retracting its filament with a supersonic crack. She locked the whiphound back onto her belt.
“I’ll run through what I need to do. I’m going to open a ten-minute access window into the polling core’s internal operating architecture.” Thalia patted the cylinder she had brought with her.
“Then I’m going to implement a minor software upgrade. I won’t need to take abstraction down for more than a few milliseconds.” She cast a glance at the wall of busts.
“They won’t notice it, will they?”
“A few milliseconds? Not very likely. Buffering software in their implants will smooth over any glitches, in any case.”
“Then there’s no reason for me not to begin.” Thalia’s cylinder opened like a puzzle box, revealing racks of specialised tools and colour-coded data diskettes. She pulled out the first of the four one-time pads and held the rectangle up to eye level. She applied finger pressure and watched text spill across the rectangle’s surface.
“This is Deputy Field Prefect Thalia Ng. Acknowledge security access override Probity Three Saxifrage.”
“Override confirmed,” the apparatus replied.
“You now have six hundred seconds of clearance, Deputy Field Prefect Ng.”
“Present entry port sixteen.” The polling core sank into the floor like a descending periscope, rotating on its axis as it did so. An illuminated slot came into view. Thalia reached into her cylinder and extracted the diskette containing the relevant software upgrade. She slid the diskette into the slot, feeling the reassuring tug as the pillar accepted it. The diskette vanished into the polling core, accompanied by a series of faint rumbles and thuds.
“The diskette contains a data fragment. What do you wish me to do with this data fragment, Deputy Field Prefect Ng?”
“Use the fragment to overwrite the contents of executable data segment alpha alpha five one six.” She turned to Newkirk and whispered, “This will only take an instant. It’s a run-time fragment, so there won’t be any need to recompile the main operating stack.”