Authors: Ian McDonald
Number four hundred and thirty in tank one six.
“Special Tactical Squad nine to West One Central, Tactical Squad nine to West One, Sergeant Grenfall reporting successful arrest of PainCriminal Courtney Hall in company of two hostile noncitizen accomplices within confines of Final Arsenal Maximum Security Complex. Also, report, resecuring of Final Arsenal and entropic weapons system, known as The Unit. You can stand down from condition triple-red. Plus, report capture of one cat. Repeat, cat. Yes, you’ve got that right, West One. Noncitizens plus cat exhibit special talents; request you have Extraordinary Abilities team rendezvous with us at touchdown and maximum security units prepared for prisoners. Estimated transit time to West One, fifty-five minutes. Sergeant Grenfall out.”
Number ten in tank five fifty-seven.
Number four in tank niner two.
Number nine ninety-six in tank … hang on, have we got a number nine ninety-six? Have you got a number nine ninety-six? Well, then who has got number nine ninety-six? No, I don’t have number nine ninety-six. Yes, there most certainly is a number nine ninety-six. Right here in front of me, that’s where … No, no docket. Yes, of course I’ve looked. Underneath? Yes, you were right all along. It was underneath the pod. Number nine ninety-six to level sixty-six. Well, it’s not my fault if the number gets hidden underneath, is it?
“Ah, we’re getting anomalous readings from number four in unit forty-two.”
“What do you mean, anomalous readings?”
“Anomalous persona engram readings. Like superimposed memory traces.”
“Persona runner?”
“Similar, but much more intricate. Never seen anything quite like this. Scans more like record-only personality information, loosely stored.”
“Let’s have a look.”
“There, see?”
“That’s unusual … isn’t unit forty-two one of the specials?”
“No, they’re up on sixty-six. This one has just an ordinary high-security categorization. As much as you could call any high-security categorization ordinary.”
“You know what this means, of course. We’ll have to follow up each and every one of those engram traces and erase them before we can even begin any personality reengineering.”
“Aw, no.”
“’Fraid so.”
“And who have we here?”
“Tlakh fem, about twenty-seven, not bad looking, if you like that sort of thing.”
“Shame on you, a partnered man, and a closet transcaster. Here, let’s have a looksee. Eh, not bad at all. What’s she down for?”
“Let’s see … well, she’s just finished subliminal preliminary voice-print indoctrination. She’s due another shot of that in about three hours or so. For the moment she’s just stewing in her own juice.”
“Why not give her a little tickle.”
“It’s not down here on the spec sheet.”
“Oh, go on … I’ll do it. Here we go daughter … twelve milliamps clean through the limbic gate … oh, she likes that, she likes that a lot! You doing anything tonight?”
“Going out: Lares and Penates have the partner and me booked in for dinner at the Social; reckon we need a little romance back in our partnership. Yourself?”
“Nothing much. I’m up on level fifty-five, you know, all the weirds, until twenty o’clock. Then I’ll probably off-shift with a few comrades and a crate of brews, catch something on the entertainment channels, nothing much.”
“Hey ho. It’s a life, isn’t it?”
“That’s the whole thing, I suppose.”
Number twelve forty-two in tank nineteen.
Number sixteen oh nine in tank sixteen oh nine.
Number twenty-seven in tank four.
Number one in high security level forty-two, tank one.
…
IS NOT A HAPPY ONE.
TIDDY-PUM
.
I
MAGINE. THERE IS A
dimension without sight, without sound, of eternal and impenetrable darkness and a silence so complete you cannot even hear the drone and pulse of your own body. A dimensionalless dimension, without up or down or forward or backward or left or right, without inside or outside, without the pressure of bowels and bones and blood and bladder, without any tactile awareness whatsoever, without even the gravitational cues to orientation in space: the interior world as void as the exterior, without shape or form or any understanding, without taste or smell or feel, without even a name for a name is something and this is nothing, no-thing, this is sensory shutdown, this is the nightmare zone: welcome!
Welcome to yourself.
There is nothing and no one else here to be welcome to, but yourself. Hope you get on well with you. If you don’t, well, never mind, you’ll have lots of time to get to like yourself as you float, encased in soft rubber smeared with anesthetic gel, in your tank of freegee biobase pseudopolymer with the Ministry of Pain hardwired into your brain and cathetered, tubed, piped into your lungs, veins, bowels, bladder: time makes its own rules in sensory deprivation.
Number eight in tank forty-two seven …
This does not worry him. He has been through sensory deprivation, and worse, within the Cosmic Madonna’s silver sphere. Boredom, however …
When no action is possible, practice presence.
When you cannot become, simply be.
When there is no outwardness, practice inwardness. Descend into the flesh, fill up the whistling vacuum of the interstices of your own body: most of you is empty space. Most of everything is empty space; you are in good company. The universe is incarnate within you. Into the flesh, through the flesh, to the heart of things, to the cells, and through them to the stately gavotte of things molecular: here, at the edge of life, he takes into his hands the twin strands of his humanity and his divinity and separates them. The phospho-amino linkages between the protein and the pseudo-organic monomolecules snap with crackles of light and laughter as he untwines the machine from the human.
All knowledge is in the molecules
: It is written, for the organic and the inorganic. The billion years of life on earth from the finger of God’s stirring the primordial waters to the painfree angel-children of the Cosmic Madonna. The half millennium in which the machines have evolved faster, further than the living creatures, perhaps, into a Mobius loop of cause and effect into that primate
fiat lux
, the lightning moving upon the waters beneath the darkness? He stands at the junction of two heritages, a racial memory in each hand. He has learned what it is to be human. He has not yet learned what it is to be a machine. He sends his spirit out along the shining black coils of the machine-life.
The city is his body, his soul. What he had hallucinated before the Salmagundy Street shrine he comprehends with certainty. The Cosmic Madonna herself, for all her diggings and her delvings, is but one small organ of his self. The Celestials, the digits through which he constantly replenishes and reconstructs himself. Having flown inward, he now follows himself backward, through those rushing, swooping memories of voices he recognizes now as the computers that supervised his incarnation, back to those other times he had deliberately put off his greater body to take the lesser form of a human and walk and talk and move and love within the confines of that greater organism: nine times in almost half a millennium he has taken the fleshwalk, always without caste or name or number. Five times that walk has taken him here. He reads those terminal black marks along his coil of life where the Love Police have pulled a lifeless collop of meat from their sensdep tanks (scratch official heads in puzzlement, how would, could, did prisoner X
die
in adaptive custody, impossible, incredible, and altogether improper) never guessing that in the darkness he had returned to the Infinite Exalted Plane and his true body and true place before the Polytheon to report duly, sadly, sorrowfully, that mankind was still not ready to master its own destiny.
And once more he was embedded in darkness, to which the Compassionate Society consigned those it could not accommodate, who could not accommodate it; the sixth darkness, spun out at the rag end of his coil of life. The choice was open, the voices welcomed: if you want, if you really want, if you think there is no possible hope, then will yourself along the web of bioprocessors and return to your heritage.
Or remain. In the sixth darkness.
The choice is yours.
But this sixth time, he knows who he is. Never before has he known this how and why and who. And that makes it different. He must hope.
He will remain and what will happen will happen. He relaxes, expands into the spaces of his own atomic structure. And down in the inner darkness, he becomes aware of another presence, an echo of other nonorganic life. Out there in the exterior darkness he imagines he can see coils of pseudo-organic molecules, blacker than black. He is not alone … how? Who? What? … no time for questions, there is hope, and hopeward, he reaches out, every pseudo-cell, every nonorganic neuron …
… number nine in tank sixty-six seven.
He spent the first eternity throwing himself at the walls around the sensdep tank, but after the first repulse led to the second rebuff to the third recoil and so to the fourth and the fortieth and the four hundredth and the four thousandth, the arrogant fury had risen (somewhen between the forty thousandth and the four hundred thousandth) at the walls of defense programs the Ministry of Pain had erected around his lynkbrain; walls he couldn’t climb, tunnel, undermine, fly over, break apart, ghost through, dissolve away, disintegrate. And somewhen between the four hundred thousandth and the four millionth rejection had come the sick certainty that this time there would be no recrossing of lances out there in virtual space; whatever left this tank, whenever if ever, would not be Angelo Brasil, the Man with the Computer Brain.
And for the second eternity he had fled from the sensory nothingness that surrounded him into the mythical kingdoms of his lynkbrain. Cybernetic universes, mathemagical domains, angels with the heads of pins, worlds resting upon crystal pillars borne up by the back of teenage mutant turtles, dungeons, dragons, and damsons, alphanumeric logopoli, corporate ziggurats, hallucinatory almost-places with floating islands and flying whales.
The third eternity he spent in the defense of his mythical kingdoms against the dragons, demons, dark clouds, black nights, plagues, pollutions, politicians, corporate takeovers, wars, and destruction the Ministry of Pain wished against him. Their logic was as unsubtle as their attack; not content merely to contain and restrain, they sought to derange his lynkbrain with scramblers and stranglers and ninja programs and leave him naked and exposed to their brainwashings.
Then he saw him. Halfway through an attack of stealth programs that came smashing through his fractal manipulation matrix in a crash-blast of black-tracked juggernauts all spikes and knives and blasting cannon: their very illusory existence proof of how far his image generation system had been invaded. There: a tiny golden thing on the edge of one of the tiers of the interlinked geometric solids that were his lynkbrain’s representation of the Polytheon. A golden blink of humanity, there among the geoids, a little shining homunculus.
He had been so surprised that he had let the Ministry of Pain’s strangler systems dissolve away his peripheral telemetry and feedback systems before he could rally a counterattack. Creating a spread of antibody programs, he asked this little golden homunculus, “Just what the fug do you think you’re doing here?”
“Helping,” said the little golden homunculus, extending an illusory hand. “My name is Kilimanjaro West.” Angelo Brasil rezzed up a loose-graphic fractal self-simulation and floated out of disembodihood to land beside the visitor to Armageddon.
“Yes, but what are you doing here?” (All the while thinking, suspecting—how can I trust anything/one in this maze of treacheries?)
“I felt you, another, like me, and I saw that together we could help each other to get out.”
“Well, thank you most sweetly, my dear, but as you can see, I’m having this teensy-weensy problemette with these security programs …” (As his antibodies sent a squadron of random-noise interference generators into a closed loop to vanish up their informational backsides.)
“Well, I can see that, but if you look, I think you’ll see that what I’m offering is genuine.”
So he looked. And he saw. The way out. And it was genuine.
The defense network was impregnable. But it was customized impregnability; this entire web of programs and counterprograms and loops and viruses had been designed purely to keep Angelo Brasil helpless and vulnerable. And Angelo Brasil only. Against this Kilimanjaro West, whoever he might be, it was ineffective. He was the lynk through, the golden line through the wall to the machines that commanded and controlled this nothing.
Angelo Brasil blinked back into realtime consciousness, of nothing, nowhere, nohow, nowhen; cleared all his simulations, and leaving only the most minimal of defenses around his lynkbrain/biobrain interface, reached out for the line of gold. And was absorbed into it. He became the line, the line of gold reaching out through sensory and cybernetic darkness. “Hold on to me, whoever you are,” he whispered as his identity was dissolved away into the presence of this Kilimanjaro West, and he willed himself down the line, into the other, and out, out into the light …
No more demons, no more dragons, no more vampires, no more black ninja warriors, no more dungeons, no more prison walls high as the sun; he is free to do whatever he likes, anything, everything is possible … He extends that self that is the thin gold line and stabs into the Ministry of Pain’s naked, undefended mainframes. West One lies open to him as he reassembles his self, his Angelo Brasilness, within their computers. Laugh. Laugh. Laugh. West One is his to toy with, to play with. But first … freedom.
With a beat of his lynkbrain he ordered the release of the captives ….
Number seven in tank forty-two six.
… me! They want to drive you mad with their whispering voices and their gentle pleadings and their subliminal suggestions, they want to chip you loose, they want to crush you to pieces, they want to grind those pieces to dust, they want to dissolve that dust to nothing and you have no one to help you fight against them, no one to hear your cries, no one to cling to, no rock, no shelter, no stronghold. Except yourself. Except me.
Me
. I am me. No. I am Kansas Byrne. I am twenty-seven years old. I am a Raging Apostle, a member of a nonauthorized intercaste multimedia performing arts … no. I
was
a Raging Apostle. I
was
twenty-seven years old. I
was
Kansas Byrne … who knows what, who, how old I am now.