It was striking how the presence of a man changed so much about their dynamic, made it about invisible lines of attention. She shrugged, winced at her shoulder, switched her gaze to Gretyl, felt that slow curling low in her belly again. It was scary, the feelings that came up when she looked at Gretyl. Gretyl looked back at her, skewered her on her frank stare, and a shiver raced from her toes to her hairline. Gretyl’s stare said You’re mine and Will you be mine? at the same time. Strong/weak. Soft/firm. Like Gretyl, big arms and muscular back, round soft belly and huge, soft breasts.
“CC was backed up,” Tam said, breaking in.
Well of course he was. He was core to the project.
“Were the others?” She realized she didn’t even know the names of the dead, assumed if Tam hadn’t told her the names they must not be people she was close to, but who knew with Tam?
“No,” she said. “They weren’t.” She looked angry.
“But CC was.”
“Yeah,” she said. “CC was. Is. There’s already a group who’re putting the cluster together, using whatever spare compute-time they can get out of the B&B.”
Limpopo sat up, twisted from side to side, showing them the top edge of her burn. “We’ve got a lot of compute power here,” she said. “Been running the workshop 24/7 to produce new logic ever since you left, Iceweasel. I thought it might come to this, and we had feedstock.” She smiled a private smile. The old B&B had collapsed right on schedule, about a month before Iceweasel struck out, dissolved in acrimony, and Limpopo had taken undisguised satisfaction in picking through the remains of her sullied creation – but some of the schadenfreude wore off when she came to the places where blood had dried on the walls. The actual fights were never published by the meritocratic crew, but the ugly messages, accusations and name-calling that led up to them were. Supposedly, no one had died, but if someone had died, they hardly would have advertised the fact.
Tam nodded “I heard that. I want to see what happens with this when we’re not resource-constrained. The cargo all got in, right?”
“Yeah,” Limpopo said. “It was hard without the mechas.”
Iceweasel thought of how the mechas trashed the A.T.V. and its cargo pods. “Were those mechas from here?”
“Yeah.” A storm passed over her face. Iceweasel had hardly ever seen Limpopo mad. It was scary. “A pod of mercs and an infotech goon pwned everything using some zeroday they’d bought from scumbag default infowar researchers. They took over the drone fleet, and while we dewormed it, seized the mechas.”
“Is the B&B network safe?”
Limpopo shrugged. “That’s a bitch, huh? Maybe they put deep hooks in that we’ll never find. We’ve done what we could, checked checksums against the backups and known-good sources. The zeroday got sequenced and patched damned quick, since it affects the main branch, all the way up to UN refugee camps where a billion people live.”
Gretyl whistled. “Shit,” she said. “Can you imagine the bad stuff you could do with an exploit against the whole UNHCR net?”
Limpopo and she shared a look. “It’s every UNHCR admin’s nightmare. We’ve never had better cooperation with them. They patched in an hour, across their whole base, but there’s other downstream projects like ours that may be vulnerable to total lockout or HVAC shenanigans that could burn them down.”
The two women’s faces were in near-identical serious configurations. Iceweasel nearly laughed. But the realization that they were alike in so many ways stopped her. There’d been moments during her years with the B&B where she’d felt jealousy for Limpopo and Etcetera’s romance, and she’d assumed it was to do with Etcetera. Now she wondered if it wasn’t Limpopo. Gretyl was a larger-than-life Limpopo, bigger in every physical and emotional way. The realization made her forget about the implications of their discussion.
Tam brought her back. “How much of the certainty that the network’s okay is wishful thinking?” She was the one who said what everyone else thought and didn’t want to say. “We’re going to bring Dis online, right? Then CC? Maybe those mercs, why the fuck not. None of us want our friends to be dead until we can toast a whole new set of CPUs, right?”
Seth splashed. “That’s telling them.” He loved shit disturbers. Not to mention other things about Tam.
Limpopo said, “There’s that.”
The water felt less welcoming and the atmosphere got less social.
[IX]
DIS WAS EVERYWHERE. The B&B crew couldn’t get enough of her. They touched in to speak to her all over the building. Even with all the compute-time, she had to queue them, calling them as they walked in the woods or lazed in the common-room.
But she always had time for Iceweasel.
“How’s CC coming?” Iceweasel said.
Dis didn’t have a blinking cursor anymore, but Iceweasel still could read body-language into her pauses. This one was awkward. “Not good. I’ve been trying to talk him through, but he doesn’t want to stabilize. With me it was a matter of finding the possibility space where I could deal with being a head-in-a-jar. It may be that CC doesn’t have that subset.”
“What? It’s CC! He loves this stuff! It’s what he lived for! That’s like a rocket-scientist with a fear of heights!”
“I don’t know a lot of aerospace dudes, but one reason to get into uploading is your overwhelming existential terror at the thought of dying. It’s not a discipline you’d chase if you were uninterested in the subject.”
Iceweasel tried to learn to relax. The B&B didn’t need that much work to keep going. A chart making the rounds in their social-spaces showed how if everyone put in an eight-hour shift every three days, they’d have double the hours they needed. One crew was ideologically committed to doing nothing, creating a “safe space” for “post-work.” She understood. Sitting on her ass, especially in public, made her feel guilty. Unworkers were moral cover for people experimenting with doing SFO for a day or a month (or a year).
She sat on a lounger on B&B’s lawn, a big field of sweet-smelling wild-grasses with a thriving biome of critters that rustled and soared around it. She had Dis in both ears, but her system was smart enough to mix in wind-through-grass sound, things chasing each other, yin-yang of breezy aimlessness and panicked scrambling.
“How long before you can stabilize CC?”
Another micro-pause. Dis had lots of compute-time. The pauses had to be deliberate. She’d ask Gretyl – comp-sci was a mystery to her, despite hanging around the university crew.
“Don’t know if I’ll be able to. When I figured how to stabilize myself, I concluded I’d be able to apply the technique to every sim. But I’m a data-set of one. People are idiosyncratic. I’m idiosyncratic. Maybe I’m a rare exception and no one else will do what I’ve done.”
“That’s not what you said—”
“It’s what all the people who know what they’re fucking talking about are saying now. Everyone else is running around shouting, ‘Death is cured! USA! USA! USA!’”
“This is Canada.”
“Yeah, but you sound stupid chanting ‘Ca-na-da!’ It’s easy to get excited when science actually does something, because science is failing and taking notes. We want to get a ‘breakthrough,’ but not everything is a breakthrough. Sometimes, it’s just a tiny step forward. Or a dead end. I’m trying to bring CC up, but maybe the only way to wake him is in a state so distorted that he’s not recognizable. I’ve modeled using me as a template and mixing our models one bit at a time until we get to a hybrid, with just enough me in to keep him alive. There’s no clean way to do that. Nearly everything I tried modeled out to nothing recognizable as either of us. Interesting as that is, I have no urge to make insane, immortal synthetic personalities out of thin air. We’ve got enough fucking weirdos.”