Driven by the lingering imperatives of her builders, she equipped herself into a swift aerial fortress of fearsome destructive potential. But this was not a process she could continue indefinitely. There came a day, after several dozen megaseconds, when she realised that she had begun to tire of endlessly upgrading herself. With so few machines anywhere nowadays, and hardly any airborne at all, the exercise had become pointless.
She had all that she needed. So long as she had her warhead, so long as she had her communications, so long as she avoided the most obviously stupid machines, she could keep going indefinitely.
Instead she started to bargain for software and extra smartware modules to plug into her brain. Getting these units installed was tricky, since she usually had to yield some control over the warhead. But the remaining Factories were too cautious to try anything risky, such as attempting to defuse her while her brain was being expanded. In any case, if they had done business before, there was usually an element of trust.
With each add-on she became smarter. Some of the Factories had begun to sift through the war wreckage, accessing fragile data-memories locked in the debris of the cities. Some were the electronic simulacra of real people: leaders and artists of the pre-war world.
At first she stored these personalities to enlarge her negotiation skills. But with the passing of time she began to assimilate them purely for their own sakes. She loaded the dead into her mind and allowed them to interact, blooming like flowers in a rock garden. She allocated parts of herself to let them run. As they subsumed more and more of her mind, she and they became less separable. Hundreds of half-minds merged within her.
Decades passed. With each year, the Factories found less and less readable data. Then one year they found nothing at all they could read, and therefore no new minds that they could offer her.
Instead, the Factories offered her holographic images of the dead. She read their faces now, her mind growing heavy with the weight of storage. She could still fly, but she was no longer as agile as she had once been. Her life before she met the Factory seemed like an ancient, cruel dream.
Thousands of megaseconds ticked by.
After a century, even the Factories and the other ground machines became rarer. She would cruise for many megs before finding a machine that she could talk to. She always felt pleasure when she located one, for there were scarcely any dangerous (and therefore stupid) machines left now, and she only needed to keep away from the stupid ones. The others she regarded as friends, while not entirely certain how they felt about her.
They knew that she would protect them from predators, but - with so few hostile machines left behind - an arrangement like that was largely theoretical now. Time was winnowing out the killers, the machines incapable of adapting to the post-war world. Therefore, as the encounters became rarer, so they took on trappings of ceremony, the playing out of habitual gestures. She accepted things from the other machines that had no immediate use to her. Small, pretty things that the crawlers had dug up and fixed. Trinkets and tokens of goodwill, curios from a shattered world. Some of them had a kitsch charm, like the nanomachine virus fabricator that one of the Factories had dug out of a ruined bioweapons laboratory. What use was such a thing in a world where nothing moved except machines?
But she took them anyway. It would have been impolite not to. She opened spaces in her hull, discarding weaponry and redundant engine parts, throwing away the things she no longer needed.
The years kept on passing. Time was speeding up for her, she realised. Her circuits were dying, the processes of her brain becoming less efficient. It took her longer to think about things. She lost the thread of long chains of thought.
She was wearing out, failing, beginning to clock the internal damage that the Factories had postponed for so long.
Ironically it was only now that history was restarting on the ground.
She had been wrong about machines being the only things left. There
were
still people, but they had kept to themselves for so long that they had made no mark on the world. Yet now they were on the move once more. As the sky began to heal, small bands of nomads left the seaboard cities for the former war zones.
They were fascinating to her.
From above the clouds, she studied their migrations, occasionally sending down nano-remotes to probe their languages and learn their histories. They went out in winter, when cloud cover was thickest. Wise. She had learned from accessed military data that the radiation in the wastelands - what they called the Empty - remained dangerously high. Even in winter, there were still hotspots: isotopes leaking from ancient wrecks. They understood very little of that. They had lost all written records of the pre-war world, while the electronic archives had been corrupted. Now, they relied on the spoken recollections of the old, the Pastmasters.
Naturally
, said one of her minds.
The oral storytelling tradition's strong in us
. . .
She learned that they called the war the Hour, after all the time that had passed. The minds argued and opined ceaselessly. The people on the ground were savages. No, they were striving to reconstruct former glories. No, they were savages - just look at them. And images flickered from nowhere through her mind. She saw a white building, scalloped like some beached shell, splintered now and fallen, waves lapping its curved flanks. She saw the people on the ground looting its treasures.
Savages
, said the dead voice trenchantly.
I conducted a symphony where they're pissing
. . .
Screw your symphony. My company built half the towers down there - now look at them! Spinifex up to the third floors . . . squatters in the penthouses
. . .
Bastard capitalist! You made the machines that did this, don't forget
. . .
Friend, it's one of my bloody machines that's keeping you alive, though God knows why
. . .
She closed her mind to the clamour, but succeeded only in boxing it so that it echoed more noisily. She understood why they argued. They were frustrated, locked inside her while the living scurried below. She had made a mistake in studying the nomads; reminding the dead within her of their own lost humanity. They had begun to crave life again, embittered by the survivors. Yes, she understood - but she didn't like it. She preferred dealing with the Factories. They understood. The machines had never known any other kind of life, anything other than the calm warmth of the Empty. She had saved the dead - now they were at each other's throats, squabbling in her.
You're a traitor to your own species
. . .
She began to weed out the noisiest, erasing their smartware memories. It was a strange feeling, their hectoring voices stalling in mid-phrase, gradually dying on a reverberating note. She thought of the city lights dimming on the globe she had hawked all day through Cockatoo's Crest, realised that was a memory out of time, a dream within a dream. She erased the men who had made machines like her, and was about to erase the musician, when some flicker of compassion made her still herself.
By then the others started noticing, shutting up quickly. She felt freer now, lighter. She knew that was how they felt, inside her. They had more room in which to expand. They seemed to sigh, collectively.
We're sorry
. . . they said.
We were selfish . . . you rescued us from oblivion, and we ignored you
. . . She told them she understood, but the weeding of the others had been necessary.
In my youth
, she said,
I took the minds of the powerful, because I was a thing of war. But now I have no need of their guidance. I took your minds because I wanted to re-create what you'd been, for your own sakes. Because I hoped to learn from you.
But we're still the dead
. . .
I know. But I don't know how I can help you live
. . . And they swarmed amongst themselves, and returned to her, many mikes later.
We have an answer
, they said.
But you may not like it . . .
She returned them to the Empty. It was winter, the sky lowering with grey clouds, lightning pricking the horizon. They shadowed a tribe of nomads. They were outlaw raiders who never returned to the cities, making their living by robbing the other traders who journeyed out to forage. By now the minds within her had formed a collective, a consensus personality. She herself could be seen as an aspect of it, one facet. They shared the same smartware (though by now it was organically based neural tissue, a benign mould that she had engineered with the nanomachinery, slowly transforming her dying circuits). If two or more minds shared the same substrate, they were destined to blur and merge like ink on blotting paper. She was them. They were her.
Now they had a plan.
The raiders were a family. She had been tracking their movements through the interior for most of the last hundred and thirty years. She had been monitoring their genetic make-up for almost as long, sampling the individuals of each generation with remotes: mosquito-sized miniatures of herself that could flense skin from a cheek and suck blood from the tiniest of wounds.
The raiders were in poor shape. For a while she tried medicine, introducing viruses that gave them invisible, unsuspected gene therapy. She was striving to correct the errors that stemmed from their inwardly spiralling incestuous gene pool. But her efforts were unsuccessful, her tools too blunt for the task in hand. One by one the people on the ground began to die out.
They had no idea what was happening, realising only that their children were failing to develop along normal lines.
They started slaughtering children. She watched in horror, certain that any intervention on her part would only make things worse. The deaths were an atonement ceremony directed at the sky, at the angels of death that they called the Enolas. That part was the strangest: it was as if they had forgotten just who had made the machines like herself. Perhaps it went deeper than that - the failure of memory achieved through intentional means. Over generations, she suspected, they had warped their oral recollections of the past, selectively forgetting some things and distorting others.
They didn't want to remember what had really happened.
The hands and minds of men had made their world just the way it was. Yet the people on the ground had shifted the blame onto figurative demons from the sky. As if, now that the world was a simpler place, there was no compulsion to recall the atrocities of the past. And no time for guilt either, she observed, for they showed little compassion for the sick children they left behind in the sands as their caravans moved on.
She wept for them, if no one else did.
But she was sick herself. She had repaired her mind, but her body was still failing. She was slow now, prone to blackout periods of enhanced solar activity. Finally she reached one of the children before the dunes covered its sleeping form for good, or the dogs of the Empty came out for the night. The child wasn't breathing when she found it. She brought it within herself, nursed it to a kind of vitality. She mapped its mind, understanding soon that there was grave damage to the brain, starved of oxygen. No pattern there, nothing on which a life could be imprinted through learning and sensation. This was what she had expected. The child was a blank slate. She would not, she decided, be denying a particular life by her actions. Any more than a composer denied the world the infinite symphonies that fell between his inked notes.
She released a virus into its blank glial tissue, and waited for nearly eight megaseconds. The virus wove a neural framework, then began to unpeel information coded in its DNA, in order to structure memory and personality into the developing mind.
She knew -
they
knew - that the virus could never transfer more than a fraction of a per cent of what they had become, and that what they had become was still very far from life. But the child, the girl, would contain their shadows. Like a canvas overpainted many, many times, said the artist in her. And the girl would carry ghosts of their past selves until the day she died. But before then her own personality and force of will would sublimate, subsume. She would carry the dead as trinkets, as the machine had carried them in the air.
Later in the winter she found Kodaira's family, camped near a water-hole. She had stopped flying by then and it was all she could manage to leave the child where they - sterile Kodaira and his ill wife - would find it, before something made the sky darken to a shade of black she had never imagined before, and the voices in her were suddenly, calmly silent. But she dreamed that part from afar.
Lucky was awoken by her uncle, sitting gently by the side of her bed. She could tell that he had been there a while. Just looking at her, a doting silhouette against the dawn sky, purple washed over by tangerine.
'You were restless,' he said. 'I came to see you. But when I got here you were sound asleep. Guess I just wanted to sit and watch you sleeping.'
'I had the bad dream again,' she said.
'You were sleeping like a log.'