‘If Reid’s in charge,’ I said, ‘I guess it’s time we saw him.’
Meg reached once more behind the system controls and called him up. The screen rang for seconds, then Reid’s mildly perturbed face appeared. He looked, if anything, younger than he had on the recording, but his expression of alert calm was broken when he saw me. He blinked and opened his mouth, then closed it, his tongue flicking across his lips.
‘Wilde!’ he said. ‘Is that really you?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Amazing!’ he replied. Meg timed his response. Any delay was imperceptible; I reckoned he must be close, on a rock in the Ring. I’d seen no obvious human habitat in or around the structure.
‘My God, I thought you were dead!’ he went on. He snorted. ‘Among the dead.’
If he was lying he was doing a good job of it: even to Meg, whose visual analysis software was hanging behind my virtual sight, his expression betrayed nothing but surprise, curiosity, and unaffected delight at seeing me again. Yet I didn’t trust him: his added years of experience and discipline gave him an overwhelming aura of control. I realised, suddenly, that he was unlike any other human being I’d ever seen. The nanotechnology, the smart matter, that had rescued him from age might well be working further alchemies in his brain and blood.
I spread my arms, forcing a grin. ‘Isn’t this death?’
Reid smiled bleakly. ‘Post-life, we call it. Mind you, I’d get your electronic doxy to do something about your appearance. You look terrible.’
I stared past him, checking the background. There were other people moving about – he seemed to be sitting in some common area, talking to a camera set at an angle from him, public rather than private. The perspective of the floors and the people in the background struck me as odd for a moment, then they snapped into focus. From the curvature of the floors and the subtle tilts of different verticals, I could see he was in a large space-station, under centrifugal spin.
‘No doubt,’ I said. ‘But no worse than I was last time you saw me, remember?’ I felt a surge of anger. ‘You had me killed, you bastard!’
His untroubled gaze fixed on me. ‘No I didn’t,’ he said. ‘You were caught up in a border incident. I did my best to save you, I’ll tell you that, but we were too late. As far as I knew, you died there. Your body was shipped back to England and cremated. I was at your memorial meeting, man!’
I tried not to show how shaken I was. ‘So how do I come to be here?’ I demanded. ‘Don’t tell me you didn’t know they’d made a copy!’
Reid sighed, running his fingers back through his thick black hair. ‘Of course I knew. You were one of the first human subjects – we didn’t even know it would work. We took the copy within minutes of finding you, and stored the brain-scan and your genetic information. But as far as I knew, that was it – the copy was stored with the rest of the dead, in the bank. You’d made no disposition, so we left you there. You were never uploaded to a macro, I’m pretty sure of that. I didn’t know anyone had made a knock-off, and that’s the honest truth.’ His expression hardened. ‘And there’s no way I can find out, now – the engineers responsible uploaded themselves long ago.’
‘Well, I can hardly complain about my own existence,’ I said. ‘But I want out of your slave labour-force, if that’s all right with you.’
Reid smiled as if relieved.
‘Naturally,’ he said.
‘If that’s the word.’
His lips compressed. ‘Hmm.’ He reached for a keypad and tapped out a code.
‘OK, enough about me,’ I said. ‘What’s all this about the dead in a bank? What’s happened to Annette, and Myra, and – everybody else?’
Reid kept glancing off-camera, as if keeping an eye on another monitor. The activity in the background had quickened, with an air of greater urgency.
‘I think Annette’s safe,’ he said abstractedly. ‘She died in the, uh, troubled times, but she’d arranged for a copy. If it got made, she’s in the bank, same as you. Same as millions of people. It was cheap by then. People made back-ups routinely. To be honest we don’t know who exactly we’ve got. Myra, and your daughter, well – as far as I know they stayed on Earth. Goddess knows how things are going back there –’
‘There’s no contact?’
‘Fucking Earth-Tenders, they’re scared, they jam us – anything you’ve seen on our tapes was old or faked. No, we don’t have any contact.’ He turned abruptly, facing straight towards me. ‘Look, Wilde, I’ve got to go. You’re free now, I’ve zapped your restraints.’ He stood up, and leaned towards someone out of sight. I couldn’t hear the exchange which followed. Then Reid turned back, looking up at me with unguarded guile.
‘Wilde?’ he said. ‘Still there? Can you do something, right now? Go and check what’s going on in the nearest macro. There’s some problem –’
The screen greyed out.
‘Shit!’ I said.
Meg stood in front of me, a worried wraith. ‘What do we do?’
I shrugged. ‘Do as Reid said, I guess. Can you think of anything else?’
She shook her head.
I stepped into the simulated simulation-frame, and Meg stepped in after me. The sense of over-lapping body-images was momentarily disorienting, and then we meshed smoothly with each other and with the machine. Meg became a voice behind my shoulder, a shadow in the corner of my eye.
I had full control of the robot now – Reid’s zap must have disabled the run-file that separated me from its motor circuits outside of work periods and emergencies – and I jetted undisturbed through the structure towards a macro which I (now) could recognise as the one I’d been in contact with. Some of the other robots were doing desultory work, others drifted in their off-line mode or clung like roosting birds to girders. The Malley Mile glowed a faint blue in its rainbow ring: Cherenkov backwash from the probe.
I grasped a girder, inched closer to the macro’s surface, and plunged my face into its bath of freezing fire.
All is analogy, interface; the self itself has windows, the sounds and pictures in our heads the icons on a screen over a machine, the mind. It’s so in the natural body, and in the artificial, and many times so in the smart-matter world of the macro-organic.
Meg was stealing processing-power, time-sharing in greater minds. It was necessary for me, for us, to get a minimal, symbolic understanding of what was going on, but it took its toll. I was running slower than the fast folk, slower even than the slow. I walked as an invisible ghost, a momentary shiver in the dreams of the posthuman.
I found myself first on the big planet. On the slope where I’d first stood, I watched seasons – snow and spring, summer and fall – lap and retreat like waves on the shore. The environment was a guess at that on a planet they’d actually espied, some thirty light-years away. In a future day this picture might be updated and revised by the downlink from the passing of the probe.
They lost interest in it even as I watched. Consistent to the last, they deleted it from their memories by flaring off its sun. I walked through the engulfing nova, in the sleet of a false reality dissolving into binary code, and on into a vast hall. In the gloom of a Moloch’s temple heavy-lidded giants sat, athletic marble gods awkward in the pose of Buddhas. Decay beyond decadence, a stasis of frenzy and fatigue. Indefatigable mechanisms, beneath and beyond the giants’ conscious control, continued their relentless, pointless acceleration of processing speed. Second by second, Meg’s operating system tracked the change.
Before the last echo of my footsteps had died from the hall the meditating giants were dust. Outside, in yet another virtual environment, cities were built and torn down in what to me were moments, against an ever-shifting backdrop of planetary landscapes. Eventually all human analogy and interest ceased. I drifted down endless corridors of geometric abstraction, the chopped logic of interminable arguments filling my mind, as if I were overhearing the trapped ghosts of theologians in a hell that only they could fully deserve.