‘Snap out off it, mate,’ said a harsh but friendly voice. It was a man’s voice, a London accent. I looked around (i.e., I had the sensations of turning my head, but all that happened was that my visual field swept back and forth) and spotted another robot working on a girder about a hundred metres away. It raised an arm and gave a brief wave, then returned to its task.
I began my own, following the instructions, and when I had attention to spare I devoted some to working out how I might talk back. I imagined myself hailing it. I went over that simple act again and again in my mind, like a shy kid in a strange playground. By inspecting myself at the same time I recognised eventually a tiny dish antenna on my hull pointing in the relevant direction whenever I took a look at the other robot and thought about calling to it.
So I looked at it and said, ‘Hi!’ I could feel my lips move as I did so, an unsettling sensation that produced a momentary grotesque image of a machine with a mouth.
‘Got ya, Jay-Dub,’ the voice said. ‘Hi. Keep it focused. They don’t like us talking on the job. Glad you’re back.’
I tried a casual laugh.
‘I gather I’ve crashed a few times.’
‘Yeah,’ said the other machine. ‘We all done that. I’ve been around for a good year now, though, so I reckon I’ve licked it. I can handle it.’
‘Why did you call me Jay-Dub?’
By now I couldn’t help but assimilate the voice’s gender to the speaker’s. ‘It’s painted on your side,’ he said. ‘And it’s what you always called yourself. My name’s Eon Talgarth, but you can call me “ET” if that’s what you prefer.’
‘OK,’ I said, without thinking. We both laughed.
We continued our conversation in brief exchanges as we worked. Talgarth introduced me to other machines, each with a different name (or initials) and personality. Most of them were – had been – male, which made sense in that most of them had been criminals or POWs. I decided I must have had some good reason, in my lost pasts, for not revealing my full name, so ‘Jay-Dub’ I remained.
Talgarth himself had been working off a crime-debt whose circumstances I never got to the bottom of – his first name came from his New Settler parents, his second from Talgarth Road in London. It had been his patch. There had been some dispute over that, which had landed him in a Sutherland labour-camp. When the camps started filling up with US/UN POWs he’d been recruited as an armed trusty, halving his remaining time. Offered the curious option of a possible immortality, he’d signed. After that he wasn’t sure, or didn’t say, where he’d been. He’d been all over. Last thing he remembered was the vibration of the LMG he was firing at the barb who were trying to rush the launch-site. He mentioned sand, grass, sea in the distance. Heat like a wet towel. It might have been Florida.
There was no general day or night here, but for me the day had ended. I stepped out of the frame, and found my simulated muscles realistically sore. The bed was made, and a fresh pack of cigarettes lay on the table. The food in the cupboard had been replaced: nothing fancy; micro-wavable stuff, but to my tastes. I took a shower and cooked a dinner, wondering the while what subtle replenishments of the deep software these refreshments represented, and lay on the bed.
The dark succubus came, just as she’d said she would. She was inexhaustible, insatiable, and inventive. And so was I, to an extent that convinced me better than anything else just what was and wasn’t real around here.
Well, fuck reality.
‘Heh,’ said Talgarth. ‘You think that was good? Wait till you go in the macro, man.’
‘Don’t talk about it,’ said another voice.
‘OK. Shit.’
They talked about it anyway. I couldn’t follow their talk, but it was obsessive, minute, the argot of addicts. They lived for the trips. Ten days’ work earned you a visit to the macro. A couple of days later, I saw Talgarth stop work and wait as a macro shifted towards him. A pseudopod of smart matter reached out and touched his hull. It stayed for ten seconds, no more.
Talgarth returned to work and for the rest of that day didn’t talk to me. Others warned me not to try.
‘When you been in, see, you grudge anything that takes your mind off it.’
‘But what’s it like?’
‘Different for everybody.’
I would learn soon enough.
That night I was putting things away when I felt the hands of the succubus on my waist. I turned and kissed her. She was already opening my belt buckle.
‘Wait,’ I said.
I led her through to the lounge and sat her on the sofa. I sat down at the opposite end, setting the ashtray down between us.
‘Smoke?’
‘If you like.’
I lit the cigarette for her, leaned away before she could touch me. She put her hand to her crotch and sighed, and as she smoked began frigging herself.
‘Stop that,’ I said. It was disturbing, like watching a small child or a mentally retarded person doing it.
She giggled and brought her knees together, one hand primly on one knee, the other elegantly holding the cigarette.
‘What are you?’ I asked.
She shrugged. ‘Whatever you want, Jon.’
‘Do you remember any other life?’ I waved a hand at the window. ‘Before this?’
She frowned. ‘What do you want me to remember?’
‘Do you have a name?’
‘Meg,’ she said brightly. I suspected it was the first name that had popped into her head.
‘What’s the deal here?’ I reached for the channel-zapper. Nothing but white noise and snow.
‘Work and fun,’ she said. She leaned forward and stubbed out her cigarette, looking up at me with utter devotion. ‘Come on, I wanna have fun.’
‘What would happen,’ I asked as she twined a leg around my waist and began kissing my throat, ‘if I stubbed out this cigarette on you?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Would it hurt you?’
She chuckled like a bad child. ‘If that’s what you like.’
I could do anything to her, absolutely anything, and she’d be back the following night, eager for more. ‘Meg’, I thought as she tugged me to the bedroom, was probably her mind’s allotted amount of disk space. So fuck it, I thought, and fuck it I did.
The bulb of smart matter bulging towards me showed numberless fractal features, tiny chasms of infinite depth, the shapes of ferns and faces. In the tremulous instants before it enveloped my instruments, I felt that I’d already seen a gallery of art whose afterimage would burn in my visual memory forever.
What physically happened next was that the smart matter of the macro directly interfaced with my own computer, so that some of my mind was actually, physically, implemented inside the macro. What I felt was –
The impact of a snowflake on my eye.
And then the awakening, the joy. It made all my past awareness seem like sleep, all past happiness a passing moment of relief. I stood naked on a grassy slope, looking out across forested ranges of blue hills. The sky at the horizon was a pale green; at the zenith, an almost violet blue. The air was cold but comfortable, heavy with the scent of blossoms, sharp with the taste of salt and woodsmoke. I knew the name of every hill, the species of every plant. My body was tall and bronzed and beautiful, with muscles that would have made Conan or Doc Savage envious.
Behind me I heard voices, and turned. I was standing just below the brow of a hill. Beyond it, I could see an ocean whose horizon was about twice as far away as it would have been on Earth. This was a big planet. (I knew all about it, I knew its mass and orbit and the spectrum of the big bright sun above). On the hilltop, just a few metres away, was a shelter built of four upright logs, crossbeams and a roofing of branches. Within it was a wooden table. Three women and two men sat around the table, talking and laughing. They turned to me, smiled, and then jumped up and gave me a welcome that still brings tears to my eyes.