Battlemind (16 page)

Cables snaked in from left, right, and above, melding seamlessly with her sleek, synthflesh hide. At a mental command from one of the somautomata techs, the nanotechnic connectors dissolved and the cables retracted themselves; Kara could feel her internal power source throbbing gently, like a heartbeat, and sensed the ebb and flow of various autonomous system monitors, reassuring her that all systems were on-line and go.

Horus offered her his hand. She ignored it gracefully by gripping the chair’s armrests to lever herself up. She stood easily, though she had to deliberately suppress the oddly telescoped sensation that her arms and legs weren’t quite long enough. In some ways, it was easier to teleoperate a warstrider, a machine that was in no way at all humanoid. You didn’t have to worry about walking in a strider; you simply pushed there with your mind and you were moving, effortlessly and with perfect, AI-imposed control. There were no AIs in a hubot; wearing one was more like wearing someone else’s body, and her brain assumed that arms and legs, mass and reach, height and center of balance, would all be the same as they were in her own body she usually wore.

She took a couple of experimental steps, bouncing lightly on the treaded balls of her feet. The initial strangeness was already passing.

As she turned in place, she caught sight of herself in a mirror screen behind the chair. Her own face stared back at her, holographically projected over the front of the robot’s blank and polished head. A low-level hubot’s normal facial features were almost nonexistent, save for a slightly raised band at eye level where visual, aural, and olfactory sensors were stored. Most people, however, Kara included, maintained one or more personal analogs, limited software duplicates of themselves resident within their Companion’s organic circuitry and serving as secretaries and stand-ins for routine business over communications links. That same internal programming, which created a duplicate of the person inside ViRsimulations, could shape the holoprojection of the hubot’s face into a fair likeness of her own. The effect wasn’t good enough to fool anyone, certainly—there was an odd stiffness about the face, almost as though it were pasted on—but the likeness was good enough to let others recognize who she was.

“If that body doesn’t suit you,” the hawk-headed technician told her, watching closely as she looked at her image, “we can transfer you easily enough to a different model. We have some excellent full-sensorium models that you will find match your org’s sensory input in every way.”

Kara knew about the top-of-the-line hubots, luxury models that were all but indistinguishable from bodies of flesh and blood.
Not for me,
she thought with a wry, inner smile that her hubot’s holographic face matched with something approaching a grimace.

“No, thanks,” she said. “This one will do fine.”

“Are you sure? We have some female bodies that—”

“I’m sure, Horus,” she said, her voice sharp. “I’m not into the full-sensory stuff, okay?”

“Absolutely, Captain! It’s whatever you want! Not all of our customers are as… discerning as you are.”

Meaning, she translated, they weren’t as cheap. But then, Kara never had cared much for surface show, expensive or otherwise, when something simpler existed that served her needs just as well. She’d specifically reserved a Model 15 for this excursion, a version advertised as a high-endurance economy sports model. For a few thousand more yen or meg, depending on which currency she chose, she could have had a full-function, full-sensory hubot, a precision-crafted one, nanotechnically grown from the body casts and downloads of any of a variety of ViRsim entertainment personalities, machines identical in every outward detail to a genuine and healthy human body, and capable of experiencing every human sensation, including—or, given the enormous market for the things,
especially
—sexual arousal and satisfaction.

Kara was more than happy with the Mod 15, however, a utilitarian model that better suited both her nature and her present, no-nonsense mood.

“If the captain would like a download of some of New America’s more popular tourist spots—” the red-haired woman began.

“Never mind the sales pitch,” Kara told her. “I’m not a tourist. Is my credit good?” Her rental agreement, and the downloading of the fee, had been handled long distance, from the
Gauss.

“Everything has been taken care of,” the man said, and though Kara wouldn’t have thought it possible, the rigid beak of the hawk’s head smiled. “And we hope you enjoy your visit here!”

Kara grinned, and the holographic projection of her face echoed the thought, a little more naturally this time. “I certainly intend to.”

Minutes later, Kara stepped out of the hubot office—walking out beneath a twice-life-size full-motion holo of two nude Model 3000s, fully human, a male and female linked in a close and passionately erotic tangle. B
E
T
HERE
, the agency’s name, was featured in meter-tall, glowing scarlet letters. Advertising hype scrolled steadily through the air as pulsing music throbbed to the couple’s lovemaking. She gave a wry shake of her head at the holographic antics; sex, it appeared, and the rawer the better, was what sold product everywhere.

She had only to access the city net to summon a robot flitter that would take her out to the family estate at Cascadia, but one of the reasons she’d chosen a visit by teleoperated hubot was the opportunity it gave her to stroll Jefferson’s pedestrianways and visit haunts she hadn’t seen in years. She decided to walk to Franklin Park in the center of the city and take a flitter from there.

The city of Jefferson was much as Kara remembered it… large and bright and bustling. For centuries, New America had been something of a backwater world, an isolated outpost on the far periphery of the human Shichiju. It supported three separate colonies, one Ukrainian, one Cantonese, and one predominantly North American, and all descended from settlers who’d been seeking greater freedom and a better life elsewhere than under Japan’s Hegemony on Earth. Before the Revolution, New America’s quasi-independence had been preserved by a quirk of nature. Where most of the worlds of the Shichiju possessed one or more sky-els—the immense, surface-to-synchorbit elevators that made movement back and forth between space and surface cheap and easy—the gravitational tides raised by Columbia. New America’s huge, close natural satellite, made such construction impossible. Here, any sky-el would be torn to shreds, assuming that it could be hung in the first place.

As a result, little of Jefferson’s architecture followed the styles common elsewhere in the Shichiju, where Japanese influence had dominated for centuries. Cities here were more open, less closely packed. There were cities in the Shichiju, especially on old Earth, where it was no longer possible to walk from block to block or building to building in the open air. Underground tubeways, from simple slidewalks to more elaborate maglev train systems, were the principal means of moving from place to place, especially in the larger and more sprawling of Man’s ant-heap megopoli, and in most, elevated causeways connected the separate buildings, allowing the population to move about in safe, climate-controlled, and enclosed comfort.

Jefferson, however, had always managed to maintain the look and feel of a small town nested into a valley between forested mountains and the sea, even when the rapid influx of immigrants over the past few years had swelled the city’s population to several million. Much of the city had been destroyed during the Revolution, when Imperial forces had briefly occupied the planet. When the place was rebuilt, however, the team drawing up the plans had kept the look of the old city, and that included the broad, tree-lined walks and malls, and the numerous parks that helped separate the clusters of taller buildings.

The wonderful thing about the city was that it was still possible to walk there beneath the golden-white light of 26 Draconis. Amberbrush lined the walkways of the park, and flights of morninglories exploded skyward as pedestrians passed.

As always, though, Kara was more interested in the people than in the morninglories. Most native New Americans tended to be rather conservative folk, both in custom and in politics, but clothing styles and fashions showed the influence of many worlds and cultures. A casual stroll through a large public area could turn up citizens in anything from Scots kilts to Imperial kimonos to shipboard skinsuits to nothing at all. Nudity was increasingly common on the worlds of the Periphery, especially in gatherings in private homes, but it might be encountered anywhere.

Kara had been aware of the mix of fashion trends for as long as she could remember, and knew they’d existed in one form or another for centuries. The latest trend, however, had less to do with fashion than it did with the perception of what still constituted humanity. For some time now, but especially in the past three or four standard years, people who wanted to make a fashion statement—or catch the eye, or shock, or simply fantasize—had used Naga Companions to reshape their bodies.

Body sculpting, it was called. In the kilometer-and-a-half walk from Be There to Franklin Park, Kara encountered dozens of people far more outlandishly styled and refashioned than the Horus she’d met at the hubot rental. There walked a gargoyle in scales, horns, and claws, two-meter wings carried arched above his shoulders; here was a woman with four working arms. Across the way was an alien monstrosity of sheer fantasy, dragon-headed, centaur-limbed, shaggy-bodied. That last, Kara thought, might easily have been a gene-tailored pet of some sort… except that it was in deep conversation with a chunky, armor-hided creature with a humanoid stance and tentacles waving above his shoulders. She wasn’t sure, but she thought the creature figured prominently in a popular ViRdrama fantasy.

Many of the humans, she noticed, were also ViRdrama stars. Kara rarely indulged in ViRsimulated scenarios and didn’t know the personalities well, but many of the faces and bodies she saw were familiar. Some, probably, were other downloaded tourists in high-end model hubots, but others were clearly real people, their features tailored by their Companions.

In an astonishingly short time, Companions had completely transformed the way Man looked at himself. No longer was a certain skin color or facial features or a particular number of arms the prerequisite for humanity. That particular revolution was even now having far-reaching effects that no one could have anticipated. If a man was human even if he looked like that winged, scaly, snake thing over there, then what about a gene-tailored human, a genie… creatures who were human in every important detail save for the fact that someone had tampered with their DNA before they were decanted to shape them for some particular task? What about AIs, the artificial intelligences that ran so much of human technology and exhibited intelligence in particular areas of a higher order than that of the people who’d designed them?

Or someone like Dev, who had no body at all?

Kara shook her robotic head in amusement at the thought. Her own feelings on the matter had been changing lately… and her unexpected meeting with Dev Cameron had brought her further along the road to change still. She’d very nearly decided that the question of what constituted humanity might well no longer have any real meaning. Better, perhaps, to judge each individual person on his, her, or its own merits, and forget about trying to force them into molds that simply might not fit.

She found herself wondering if Dev could download permanently to a hubot body, something that would allow him to move and interact in the world of reality again. Or did he prefer his disembodied state?

As peaceful and prosperous as the city seemed, Kara found she couldn’t shake a growing sense of ominous presence, a shadow across New America’s citizenry even in the light of the two suns overhead. Many of the people she saw were in uniform—striderjacks and naval personnel off Confederation ships in orbit. Accessing the medefeeds through her hubot’s comreceiver, she scanned through program after program discussing a single topic: the likelihood of renewed war with the Empire.

That evening, Kara and her mother, Senator Katya Alessandro, sat opposite one another at an elegant table perched high atop a wild, sheer cliff overlooking the spray-whipped sea. The sky overhead was rose-gloried, streaked with clouds as Columbia hung ponderously above the sea to the east. Kara took another bite from the plate before her, closing her eyes and reveling in the aromatic and faintly spicy blend of flavors that spread like liquid ecstasy through her mouth and into her brain.

Her dish, labeled simply “Number 196” in the program’s menu, looked like a chicken stew, but its taste and smell were literally indescribable. As the morsel touched her tongue, it dissolved, releasing a cascade of flavors and less identifiable sensations all tailor-made for her nervous system, the effect nearly orgasmic as it sent a series of shudders down her spine.

“Whew!” she said, when she could draw breath once more.

“Good, huh?” Katya said, grinning at her from across the table.

“That doesn’t describe it by a tenth! I can see how people could become addicted to this sort of thing.”

“Mmm. Let’s hear it for the NPRs.”

Direct neural feeds, starting with the most primitive brain-machine interfaces of five centuries before, had naturally and immediately led to serious abuses. In every culture and in every age there were people who would willingly addict themselves to intense pleasure or rich sensations, whether through drugs or, these days, by way of a relatively simple pleasure center download.

At the same time, modern technic civilization encouraged the sampling of as wide and as rich a variety of experiences as possible. True addiction, though, was rare, thanks to NPRs, the neuroprogrammer routines piggybacked onto the AI monitoring and controlling their meal and similar pleasures that helped break chemical bond dependencies as they formed. She couldn’t become addicted to the intense pleasure associated with this food, even if she wanted to. But after a bite or two, she could begin to understand what led people to
want
such an addiction.