‘So what’re flatlines?’ Wilde asked. He’d managed to get his cigarettes out, under the guards’ watchful eyes, and he lit one and absently offered the pack around. Reid watched this performance with an air of being quite unimpressed.
‘You should know,’ he said. ‘Automata that mimic conscious action, but have none themselves. No subjectivity. No…souls.’
Dee’s mouth opened, but Wilde spoke first.
‘Ach, come off it Dave,’ he said. ‘We can argue about that sort of thing till the whisky runs out, like we used to. What you should worry about now is non-human minds, all right, but it’s not any you see standing around here. It’s the ones that’ll come for us all any time now, when they reach the other side of the Malley Mile. That’s when you’ll see what a flatline universe looks like. From the inside.’
The suspicion on Reid’s face was like a relenting of his earlier contempt.
Dee spoke again. ‘That’s why we need to run the fast folk,’ her voice said. ‘To find the way back.’
‘But you do know the way back,’ said Reid, facing Dee but speaking to someone else. ‘That’s what I sent you into the macro to find out, so we could set it all up.’
‘What I know, what I found out back there, is the way here.’ Her voice was uncharacteristically harsh, straining the deeper registers of her vocal chords. Then it shifted up again. ‘But the way here and the way back are not the same thing, and we have to go back. Through the daughter wormhole.’
20
The Stone Canal
Daughter wormholes. You know about daughter wormholes. I didn’t.
‘That’s what we’ve come out of,’ Meg explained. ‘Reid set it up.’
I and all the other robots were clinging to the side of the starship, like third-class passengers to a Third World train. The ship had irrupted into a completely different part of space and neatly inserted itself into orbit above a planet. Behind us the daughter wormhole, whatever that was, dwindled to a trashy bangle. The Solar System, presumably, was on the other side of it. On this side –
‘Goddess fucking wept,’ I said. ‘We left Earth for this?’ I’d been kind of hoping for the big planet, the planet of my dreams.
‘It’s habitable,’ Meg said. She was manifesting in my sight as an external entity. She capered about on the hull, her diaphanous shift fluttering in an imaginary slipstream. Real-world physics was never a strong point with succubi.
‘Habitable?’ I had found a line-feed. Data was coming in, pasting labels on the forward view Meg had patched us into. ‘It’s like a warmed-over Mars. It’s actually losing atmosphere as we speak.’
‘Don’t exaggerate,’ Meg said. ‘It’ll be all right once we’ve terraformed it some more.’
Terraformed it? Holy shit.
‘With what?’ I asked. I switched off the external view and stared at a simulation of this new sun’s family. ‘There’s just this planet, two small ones further in, and a few million goddam rocks! Not one gas giant! What are we going to do – suck Saturn through the wormhole?’
‘If you up the res a bit,’ Meg said patiently, ‘you’ll see that what this system lost out in gas giants, it gained in ice and a real thick and tasty comet-cloud.’
Centuries of being bombarded with milkshake; by the time it got through the atmosphere, baked Alaska.
‘Fucking great,’ I said.
‘You can’t come inside,’ Reid said. He was addressing the robots, on the television, from the same table as I’d seen him at a year earlier. Around him was what looked to me the biggest, emptiest interior space I’d seen in a long time. Real space, too. ‘There simply isn’t room. I’m trying to set up a virtual conference. It’ll be ready in an hour, or whenever Support Services gets the network connections sorted out.’ His smile told us he was on our side, in the unending struggle between Users and Support. ‘Meanwhile, just lock your grippers and hang on in there. Check out a video or shag your succubus or something. You’ll know when we’re ready.’
The virtual conference was held in an impressive virtual venue, loosely based on Tienanmen Square; Reid, appearing on a large screen at the front, in the position of the Chairman. Thousands of three-dimensional renderings of people – prisoners and succubi – stood in the square, talking freely amongst themselves for the first time. Some of them must have been in the solitude of their onboard minds for years; others present were prisoners who’d not died and been uploaded, but had served their time in their own bodies – around the ship and habitats rather than the wormhole’s environs, I guessed. These still-embodied people were also, in reality, dispersed around the ship, but were telepresent with the rest of us.
When Reid spoke, his voice carried perfectly. Everyone heard it as if they were a few metres from him.
‘We’ve done it!’ he said. ‘We’ve reached a new world, under a new sun. We did it by our own efforts, of our own free will. Some may say that the macros did it, but I say we used them like any other tool. And when our tools turned in our hands, we discarded them. We can be proud.
‘You all have another reason to be proud. You’ve all earned your freedom. I never promised you this, but I give it to you now. A new world, a clean slate. You’re all free, and together we’ll live in freedom.’
Everybody around me shouted a cheer that overloaded the system and appeared momentarily on the sky as giant letters: ‘AAAAAAAAHHHHH’. I myself was unmoved, partly because I wasn’t a prisoner, and partly because I could see that Reid had little choice in the matter. If there were to be slaves here, they would have to be machines.
Reid waited for the din to subside, and smiled.
‘Thank you. And now, my friends…We’re here not as agents of some company, or as refugees. We’ve brought with us, I assure you, all that we’ll need to make New Mars not just habitable, but better than Earth. We’ve brought the genetic information to seed this planet, over time, with a rich diversity of life. We have the technology to make our lives as long as we desire. And we’ve brought the dead, who will live again, with us.
‘I’ll talk about the dead in a moment. But first, let me tell you about yourselves. Most of you are, of course, among the dead, but unlike the great majority of the dead, you are still in a sense alive. Your minds, and your characters, have developed and, if you ask me –’ he smiled ‘– improved since your deaths. Furthermore, for the bodies of every one of you – I’ve checked – we have not just the stored information in the bank, but actual genetic material, frozen cells. Over the next months and years…’
He paused. We all leaned forward slightly.
‘We’ll have to do something about the calendar,’ he said, in a stage aside. Everybody laughed.
‘OK, the good news is, we’ll be able to download you back to clones of your own bodies. In the case of the succubi, any bodies you choose, although I’d recommend the ones you’re, ah, modelled on, for the sake of –’
Whatever he said next was completely lost in a tumult of applause. To my amazement I found myself yelling, hugging Meg, clapping complete strangers on the back and leaping in the imaginary air.
Eventually the crowd quietened down. I began to understand Reid’s reasons for setting up this event, rather than broadcasting to us all in our individual machines – he wanted to create a shared occasion of common memory. This was his speech – to the assembled masses, I thought with a grin – in the plaza after the revolution, his founding moment of the new world’s history. Something to tell our grandchildren. (I had a passing concern for the future offspring of some – most? – of us, whose mothers would have no memories of childhood or mothers of their own. A continuity of caring hands, literally reaching back to the pre-human, would be broken. Reid was founding not just a new world, but a new species, New Martians indeed.)