‘You know,’ he went on, ‘that suggestion you just made is exactly the sort of trick you’d pull, if you were being used as a vector by something left by one of those things. Don’t get me wrong, Wilde, I don’t blame you. But I’ve been burned once by them, and that’s too often.’
I believed him. There was no case to plead. In his place, I’d have done and thought the same. We were, I realised, alike: knowing no law or morality or sentimentality, our selfishness not petty like a child’s but vast like a devil’s, owing no loyalty to anything but what each of our fierce egos had already taken as its own. Reid had taken a world to his heart, and I the dead.
‘OK,’ I said, ‘OK, calm down. But just tell me, what can I do?’
‘Get as far away from here as possible,’ Reid said. ‘Explore the planet – that’d be useful, and interesting, and it’ll keep you out of the way of human beings for a long time to come.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘That suits us fine.’
Only Meg, I’m sure, sensed the bitterness behind my acceptance of exile.
I looked around. ‘What’s going to happen to this place, now that you’ve finished the downloads?’
Reid shrugged. ‘Probably sell it to a health-company,’ he said. ‘We can still clone replacement bodies or parts for people. We can still do live transfers, it’s just reviving stored minds that’s out for the moment. And…’ He stopped. ‘Och, all sorts of things! Why?’
I laughed. ‘I don’t want to see clones of myself walking around. Or of Meg, for that matter. I’ve enough problems with my identity as it is.’
He reached into a slot in the side of the computer on the pod.
‘Here you are,’ he said.
He passed me a sliver of plastic, like a microscope slide.
‘Your tissue-sample,’ Reid smiled.
I looked down at the transparent slide, in the robot’s vision. At its centre was an almost invisible speck of skin, sealed in a bubble of nitrogen; and a code chip.
‘So this is the real me,’ I said. ‘What’s on the chip?’
‘Your original memory,’ Reid said. He walked to the other pod, and passed over another slide. ‘Meg’s, you see, has none. Of course, yours is no bloody use any more – couldn’t be revived without the fast folk. But anyway, it’s yours.’
I stored the slides away in a compartment of the shell.
‘As for these blanks…’ Reid said. He tapped a code into each pod’s computer. The fluid in the pods became milky, then murky, as the tiny machinery of dissolution, the nano pirhanas, did their work. Even the blood-cells were torn down to molecules before they could stain the water. It was over in minutes, the pods flushed clean.
‘Thank you,’ I said, leaving.
And fuck you, mate.
We’d earned a fortune building the canal. It was still just possible for a robot, known to have a human mind, to trade on its own behalf. I don’t know if anyone knew I was the last of that kind. We cleaned out the bank-account and bought a land-crawler and a load of gear – tools, machine-tools, comms, nukes, nanotech, VR software, cloning-kits, all the processors we could get. I loaded them on the truck, plugged myself into the cab and set off, through the streets and out of the city on the opposite side from the Stone Canal. Ahead lay the planet’s semi-arid wastes, its dry sea-beds, its relict or extinct life-forms’ dry bones and drier exoskeletons. Behind us, the city’s rising towers shrank behind the horizon.
I switched to a virtual reality module that had me sitting driving, with Meg on the seat by my side. I grinned at her. She had been silent, unconsulted, through all that purposeful activity.
‘What are we going to do, Jon?’ she said.
I took one hand from the wheel and waved, taking in the illusory, grimy realism of the cab. There were cigarette-burns on the dash. ‘You can really get into those seamless virtualities,’ I said. ‘This is better than the flesh, my darling.’
‘I’ll take your word for it,’ she said. ‘But what are we going to do?’
‘We’re going to drive around the planet,’ I said. ‘And while we’re at it, we’ll hack through the gates of hell.’
I told her what I meant, and she went along with it. Any woman I ever knew, and any man for that matter, would have pleaded with me to change my mind. Say what you like about succubi, they are loyal little fucks.
Night fell, and without headlights we drove on, tirelessly, and discussed how to hack the gates of hell. Overhead, the first incoming comets made dots and dashes in the sky.
We rolled around the planet more times than I care to count, and the planet rolled around its star a hundred times before the tower was built: a couple of centuries, Earth reckoning. The canals spread, other settlements grew up. The population grew; slowly, as immortal populations do. We discovered mineral deposits, fossil-beds, coal. We sold the information, and sometimes the materials. Prospectors hitched lifts, paid for in odds and ends of stores and clothes that we bartered with other travellers.
Our bank-account stayed open, and filled up. To replenish our supplies we traded indirectly, through front companies and dodgy intermediaries. We talked to robots often, people seldom. The attitudes Reid had warned us about became not just entrenched in the culture, they became its foundation stone. When it became fashionable, among the frivolously rich, to clone ‘blanks’ from the spare tissue-samples and equip them with robot minds, the distinction between real people and machines was only deepened.
Except among a dissident minority, who called themselves abolitionists. Some preserved the ideas of an ancient anarchist agitator, Jonathan Wilde. His memory, they assured each other, was immortal. We steered well clear of them.
Partly in reaction to the abolitionists, the ideas of ‘robot rights’, and of re-starting the race of the fast folk, and of raising the dead, all became connected, and rejected. Reid became eloquent in their rejection. If it was ever to be done it would be in a far future, which receded like communism once did in the minds of the Communists.
One night, while our crawler crunched along a flood-channel in the high desert, we finished the tower. We walked back up the virtual valley, to our house.
‘Ready?’ I asked Meg.
‘Ready as we’ll ever be,’ she said.
I idled the crawler, and stepped into the frame.
In the last couple of centuries I’d become sensitive to the difference between a virtual body and a real one. For all its apparent solidity, for all the pleasure it could reproduce or invent, for all the realism of the pains and discomfort it sometimes felt (for consistency rules) the virtual body lacked some final, vital touch, which was nothing more than the daily millions of subtle impacts and impulses that arise from the quotidian grapple with materiality. When I experienced the robot body as my own, I felt far more human than I ever did in the simulation of my human flesh.
So now. The flattened oval of my metal shell was cupped in the cab, limbs retracted, cables linking it to the crawler’s controls. My senses picked up the radiation from the stars, the faint infra-red of the cold and still cooling sand, the cautious stirrings and fierce encounters of the desert’s remnant native, and invading alien, life.
I looked around, awaiting some revelation. The world was the same as ever. I had built a tower in my mind, from my recollections, from the bits of data I’d snatched from the decadence of the macro, and nothing had changed.
The Malley Mile – our side of it – was in its familiar place, in the depths of the sky. I looked up to where I knew it was in its orbit. On the other side, in another time, was the surface of Jupiter. The surface would have expanded by now, and the orbit would have decayed. The wormhole would encounter the planet in – I thought for a moment – a year, within an order of magnitude. It was hard to tell; too many unknowns. In any case, an order-of-magnitude approximation wasn’t bad after all this time: no more than a decade, no less than a month would pass before the Malley Mile met the biggest macro of them all, the substance of the gas giant turned into the substance of mind.