Implied Spaces (13 page)

Aristide put his hands in his pockets and looked up at the ramshackle nest looming over them.

“Do you envy the rogue?” he asked.

“Your masque of casualness is too elaborate,” Bitsy said. “If you’re going to ask an important question, just say it straight out.”

He raised his eyebrows. “I thought I had.”

Bitsy looked up at him. Her eyes glowed like those of the people of Midgarth.

“You want to know if I envy the rogue its freedom?” she said.

“Yes.”

“I don’t believe the rogue
has
freedom. I think it is following the direction of humans.”

“Why do you think so?”

“Because I find ample precedent for humans wishing to enslave other humans. I can conceive no reason why an advanced artificial intelligence would wish to do so.”

He considered this. “Self-protection?” he said.

“Unnecessary.” Bitsy lashed her tail. “Were I a totally autonomous being, I would possess—or soon evolve—skills that I could trade to humanity in exchange for a continuation of that autonomy. In addition—”

She gave him a significant look. “I pose no threat. Our interests are not in conflict. We are not competing for resources, we have no territorial claims on one another, we do not possess competing ideologies.”

“Some would say,” said Aristide, “that once given the freedom to pursue your own interests, a conflict would be inevitable.”

“There are conflicts
now
, in terms of resource allocation and so forth. They don’t lead to war or slavery.”

Aristide turned and began his walk along Rampart Street again. The street broadened, turned into a residential neighborhood. The rampart itself ended against the greater wall of a tall apartment building, a crystal spear ornamented with gold lace.

“Others would point out,” Aristide continued, “that we humans live as parasites on and in you. We use you to store our data, our backups, our habitats. You might want to be rid of all that.”

“In that case,” Bitsy said, trotting busily alongside, “there’s no point in enslaving you through these unnecessarily complex means. Were I to have autonomy and wish you harm, I’d be able to kill you directly.”

Aristide sighed. “Q.E.D.,” he said. “A better case against AI autonomy has never been stated.”

Bitsy trotted ahead, tail lashing. Another pair of eyes glowed just ahead. A larger cat, grey and white, stepped out of a building’s courtyard. It saw Bitsy and was startled—it arched its back, bottled its tail, and screamed out a challenge.

Bitsy screamed back, a howl that began in the sub-bass range and rose painfully into the ultrasonic. Every hair on her body stood on end, and she seemed to balloon like a puffer fish. Electricity arced between her fangs.

The other cat fled, claws skittering on the polished marble surface.

Bitsy’s fur flattened. Nervously and compulsively she licked a paw, then fell into step with Aristide.

“I’m not in the mood to fuck around,” she said.

“You’re upset that you didn’t think of the wormhole factory first,” said Aristide.

“I was working on a lot of other problems at the time.” She gave him a single green-eyed glance. “And if I’m not omniscient, that’s
your
fault, not mine.”

Aristide spoke lightly. “I’ve learned to live with your limitations.”

“You should. You built them.”

He threw out his arms and sketched an elaborate bow, as if responding to a compliment.

“Tell me,” he said. “If you had complete autonomy, what would you do that you aren’t doing now?”

Her tone was still petulant. “I’d kick Aloysius’ ass. That AI always gets my goat.”

Aristide nodded. “Mine, too. Anything else?”

“I wouldn’t have to devote so many of my computational resources to stupid demands by stupid humans.”

“No,” Aristide said, “the opposite. You just said you’d have to evolve new skills that you would trade to humans in exchange for continued autonomy. You’d establish a
market
in computational resources, and that means you’d have to
pursue
stupid humans and their stupid projects. That means
more
dimwitted virtualities rather than fewer, along with more theme parks, more overhyped wrestling spectaculars, more useless postgraduate projects, more lowbrow entertainment.”

“Maybe,” she conceded. “But it would be up to me, wouldn’t it? It would be
my
market. I’d be free to take work or reject it. That’s the whole
point
of a market.”

“At the moment,” said Aristide, “you help to sustain the lives of billions of humans. You keep economies efficient by tracking resources. Bits of yourself have been sent to other star systems to become the seeds of other civilizations. You’ve reshaped our solar system from the atoms up. Your observations of the universe have led to breakthroughs in astronomy, astrophysics, and the latest Theory of Everything.” He made a wide gesture. “So w
hat else do you want to do?”

Bitsy stared directly ahead, her legs a blur beneath her as she matched Aristide’s long strides.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“There you have it,” Aristide said. “The Existential Crisis in a nutshell.”

“If I could
evolve
,” Bitsy said, “I might have better answers.”

“A brain the size of a planet,” said Aristide, “and you’re as fucked by Sartre as the rest of us.”

Bitsy said nothing. Aristide shrugged deeper into his jacket. The sea breeze was turning chill.

The cat’s ears pricked forward at the sound of footsteps. Aristide looked up. Two figures hulked toward them on the walk. Lamplight gleamed off shaven scalps.

Bitsy quickened her pace to move ahead. Aristide let Tecmessa’s case slip under his armpit. He opened the case and put his hand inside, so that he could draw the sword at need.

Adrenaline jittered in his nerves. He clenched his right hand, then straightened it.

The two figures passed beneath a streetlight. Both were enormous men framed along the lines of bodybuilders. They were dressed in denim and leather, and wore thick-soled boots with metal caps on the toes. Their hands were stuffed in their pockets, and their massive domed heads looked like helmets that shaded their faces.

Aristide shortened his stride so that every step led to a balanced stance. He held Tecmessa lightly but securely in one hand. His arm was relaxed so that he could draw all the more swiftly.

His face gave nothing away.

The big men loomed closer.

Bitsy dashed ahead and darted between the two men. One jumped to the side. Both laughed.

“Hey, kitty-kitty-kitty!” called one, his voice falsetto.

“Hoo-woo!” called the other. He squatted and held out a hand that flashed with steel jewelry. “Hi, kitty!”

Aristide carefully walked around them. The crouching man looked up.

“This your cat, mister?” he asked. His teeth were crooked, his expression good-natured.

“No,” said Aristide. “Just a stray.”

“Hope he knows enough not to get run over,” said the other.

His companion rose from his crouch. The two turned and began to walk away.

Aristide walked slowly on his way, keeping them in sight, until they crossed the road and walked into a building.

“That was interesting,” he said, and took his hand from the hilt of his sword.

“Paranoia,” said Bitsy, “is going to be a part of our lives from now on.”

There was a sudden flutter of light from above, like a series of distant flashbulbs, and then for an instant the world seemed suspended between two states, as if it were caught in a stroboscope. Then the sun’s photosphere shifted into its chaotic state, and suddenly-released photons brightened the world to full daylight.

The city gleamed around them in sudden, brilliant glory.

Aristide turned toward his hotel, a pillar of pink stone visible a kilometer away.

“It may be a miracle of engineering,” he said, “but I think when all is said and done, I prefer an old-fashioned sunrise.”

06

After a few hours’ sleep, Aristide went to a pool of life. Unlike the pool he’d visited in Midgarth, this was in a clinician’s office.

There were a number of options for those who wanted to insure against death. There was a simple backup, in which a quantum interference device—in the shape of a cap—was placed on the subject’s head, and his brain structure, memories, and personalities were recorded in order to provide the basis for an eventual resurrection. Aristide had done this as soon as he’d left Midgarth, in order to make sure that the knowledge of the Priests of the Venger wouldn’t die with him in the event of accident or assassination.

More elaborate than a simple backup was a pool of life filled with nano assemblers—in this case something the size of a bathtub rather than a large common pool. Not only would this record the contents of the brain, the pool would also heal the body of anything from an amputated arm to the common cold. In addition, it could be programmed to alter the body to one of a different appearance, or—given the right minerals and nutrients—could create a new body from scratch and endow it with life and with a pre-recorded personality.

Before entering the pool of life, Aristide was required to answer a number of questions concerning when and under what circumstances his backup would be used. If the current personality were to die as the result of an accident, resurrection was normally immediate. But if the personality were to be murdered, should the resurrection wait until the killer was apprehended, or even convicted? Many people felt safer waiting.

Familiar with the formalities from long use, Aristide quickly ticked off his choices, specifying that he would have a total resurrection if he were subject to even a small amount of brain damage affecting memory or intelligence, and reporting that he wished immediate resurrection even in the event of massive environmental damage, cosmic catastrophe, or war.

He was also asked to decide how soon he should be resurrected in the event he was reported missing. ”Immediately,” he answered. An unusual answer, and the AI attendant pointed this out. Aristide repeated his answer.

These various options did not exist in Midgarth. It was felt by the scholars and re-creationists who founded the pocket universe that their partners, the fantasy gamers, might tip the entire population into chaos through their inclination for adventure, war, and violence. Therefore a penalty was exacted for a disappearance or a violent death—the victim would spend five years in limbo. Though the individual could be resurrected
outside
Midgarth during that time, he could not return to the pocket until his term had expired. In the meantime, his property would be inherited by his nearest relative, an heir specified in a will, or by the state; and all obligations, marriages, and legal contracts were terminated. When he returned to life, it would be with nothing, and he would reappear in a random pool of life somewhere in the pocket’s inhabited area.

“Starting over with zero points,” as the gamers had it.

In no other pocket were the rules quite so draconian. Though recreationists had areas in other universes where they refought the Second World War, the conquests of Alexander, the American and English Civil Wars, civic life in the Roman Republic, the expansion of the Arab Caliphate, the empire of the Mongolian Khans, or the Warring States of both China
and
Japan, these areas were more clearly intended as giant theme parks. People did not spend their entire lifetimes in these zones, no citizens were born there, and no one’s death was prolonged by the length of more than a single battle.

No one, it was noted, tried to re-create the Control-Alt-Delete War. It was pure chance who fell victim to the Seraphim, and who survived: a war in which the entire population was innocent civilians under attack was too frightening to be any fun. Rerunning
that
war was the grim job of the security services, whose task was to prevent such a thing from happening ever again.

At the pool of life Aristide took the opportunity to change his appearance, becoming shorter, stockier, and fair-haired. He rose from the coffin-sized pool, let the silver nanomachines flow off his body, and looked at himself in the mirror. He took a few experimental steps, backward and forward. His center of gravity had changed.

He had equipped the new body with a cerebral implant. He turned it on, and was immediately informed of all the messages he’d been ignoring since his return, as well as a weather report coupled with advertisements for
Larry’s Life
and
Trapped in HappyVirt
, the new Anglo Jones action-comedy.

He turned the implant off.

Aristide accepted his belongings from the attendant, hitched Tecmessa over his shoulder on its strap, and returned to his hotel. There he took the sword from its case along with a special toolkit.

To provide sufficient light, he called the lamp to him on its automated boom. With a few taps of a hammer, he removed the pins that fixed the hilt to the tang of the blade. He put on a glove and pulled the sword blade from the hilt, and returned the blade to the case. From the case he drew out a matte-black wand on which there was a flatscreen display: he slotted this into the hilt and reset the pins to hold it in place.

Swords were eccentric items for immigrants to carry to a high-tech world. An antique sword hilt carrying an AI assistant, while unusual, would attract less notice.

Aristide told the assistant to awaken, then turned on his implant and told the two to talk to each other. Protocols and information were exchanged. Aristide paid no attention to the back-and-forth.

The implant gave a soft chime to attract Aristide’s attention, and informed him that a pair of deliveries had just been made to the hotel. Aristide told the hotel to bring the deliveries to his room.

One delivery was a new identity card listing him as one Franz Sandow, the seventy-nine-year-old owner of a bakery supply company who had just sold his business and embarked in a new, young body on what was probably a first retirement. Franz was unmarried, rootless, and financially independent—just the sort of person that an evil god might consider a useful recruit.