Blue Remembered Earth (13 page)

‘Right . . .’ Geoffrey said, on a falling note.

‘A fully interactive construct, loaded with every scrap of information anyone has on her. So far, so unexceptional.’

‘I’ll take your word on that.’

‘Please do. This may be a back-room project but it’s still a level above any other construct currently in existence . . . or at least any I know about. The routines she’s built on aren’t proprietary. They’re highly experimental Bayesian algorithms, based on the free-energy mini-malisation paradigm. Jitendra calls her a fembot. That makes her as close to Turing-compliant as anything out there, and if the Gearheads knew they’d probably be knocking holes in the cavern about now. That’s not the main thing I want you to keep in mind, though. This is a
person
, brother. It’s not some made-up personality – it’s the simulation of a real but deceased individual. And sometimes that can trip you up – especially if that person happens to be someone you knew. You forget, maybe for just a second, that it isn’t her.’

‘What makes you think she knows anything at all?’

‘I’m not certain that she does, but it’s still possible that she might. I’ve been studying her life and . . .’ She held up her hands as if she was trying to bend a long piece of wood between them. ‘It’s like measuring a coastline. From a distance, it looks simple enough. But if I wanted to make a thorough study of her life, down to the last detail, it would cost me more than
my
life to do it. So that’s not an option. The best I can do – the best any one human being is capable of doing – is to plot major landmarks and survey as much of the territory between them as I can. Her birth in Africa. Marriage to Jonathan Beza. Time on Mars, and elsewhere. The construct actually knows far more than I ever will, but it won’t tell me anything unless I ask the right questions. And that’s before we even get into the voids, the areas of her life I can’t research.’ She shrugged apologetically. ‘But it’s worth a try. Anything’s worth a try.’

‘How do I see her?’

‘As a figment. Privacy-locked, so only people I allow to can see her. You’ll need access to our local version of the aug for that. It’s deliberately very basic, but it allows us to ching and interact with figments. Can I go ahead and authorise that?’

‘Be my guest.’

Sunday voked the appropriate commands, giving her brother unrestricted access to the Eunice construct. But even Geoffrey was forbidden from tampering with the construct’s deep architecture; he could tell it things, facts that it would absorb into its knowledge base, but he could not instruct it to forget or conceal something, or to alter a particular behavioural parameter.

Only Sunday could reach in and edit Eunice’s soul.

‘Invoke Eunice Akinya,’ she said under her breath.

Her grandmother assumed reality. She was as solid as day, casting a palpable aug-generated shadow.

Sunday had opted to depict Eunice as she had been upon her last return from deep space, just before the start of her Lunar exile in 2101. A small, lean woman with delicate features, she didn’t look remotely resilient enough to have done half the things credited to her. That said, her genetic toughness was manifest in the fact that she did not look quite old enough to be at the end of her seventh decade. Her hair was short and luminously white. Her eyes were wide and dark, brimming with an intelligence that could be quick and discriminating as well as cruel. She looked always on the point of laughing at something, but if she laughed, it was only ever at her own witticisms. She wore – or at least had been dressed in – clothes that were both historically accurate and also nondescript enough not to appear jarringly old-fashioned: lightweight black trousers, soft-soled running shoes with split toes and geckopad grip patches for weightlessness, a short-sleeved tunic in autumnal reds and golds. No jewellery or ornamentation of any kind, not even a watch.

She was sitting; Sunday had crafted a virtual chair, utilitarian and Quaker-plain. Eunice Akinya leaned forward slightly, hands joined in her lap, her head cocked quizzically to one side. The posture was one of attentiveness, but it also suggested someone with a hundred other plans for the day.

‘Good evening, Sunday,’ Eunice said.

‘Good evening, Eunice,’ Sunday said. ‘I’m here with Geoffrey. How are you?’

‘Very well, thank you, and I trust Geoffrey is well. Can I help you with something?’ That was Eunice to a tee: small talk was for people who had time on their hands.

‘It’s about a glove,’ Sunday said. ‘Tell her the rest, Geoffrey.’

He glanced at her. ‘Everything?’

‘Absolutely – the more she knows, the more complete she becomes.’

‘Please don’t talk about me as if I’m not in the room.’

‘My apologies, Eunice,’ Sunday answered. She did not, of course, ever refer to her as ‘grandmother’. Even if that had been Eunice’s chosen form of address, Sunday would have found it inappropriate. Eunice was a label, a name pasted onto a bundle of software reflexes that only happened to look like a living human being.

‘I found a glove,’ Geoffrey said. ‘It was in a safe-deposit box of the Central African Bank, in Copernicus City. The box was registered in your name.’

‘What kind of glove?’ Eunice asked, with the sharpness of a fierce cross-examiner.

‘From an old spacesuit. We think maybe it belonged to a Moon suit.’

‘We wondered if it might mean anything,’ Sunday said. ‘Like, was there a glove that had some particular significance to you, something connected to one of your expeditions?’

‘No.’

‘Did you lose a glove, or have something happen in which a glove played a decisive role?’

‘I have already answered that question, Sunday.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘There’s something inside the glove,’ Geoffrey said, ‘stuffed into the fingers. Jogging any memories?’

‘If I have no recollection of the glove, then I am hardly likely to be able to shed any light on its contents, am I?’

‘All right,’ Sunday said, sensing a brick wall. ‘Let’s broaden the enquiry. You used a few spacesuits in your time. Was there one that stands out above all the others? Did one save your life, or something like that?’

‘You’ll have to narrow it down for me, dear. The primary function of spacesuits is to preserve life. That is what they do.’

‘I mean,’ Sunday elaborated patiently, ‘in a significant way. Was there an accident, something like that – a dramatic situation in which a spacesuit played a pivotal, decisive role?’ As accustomed as she was to dealing with the construct – and she’d logged hundreds of hours of conversation – she still had to contain her annoyance and frustration on occasion.

‘There were many “dramatic situations”,’ Eunice said. ‘One might venture to say that my entire career was composed of “dramatic situations”. That’s what happens when you choose to place yourself in hazardous environments, far from the safety net of civilisation.’

‘She only asked,’ Geoffrey said.

‘We’re on the Moon,’ Sunday said, the model of patience ‘Did anything ever happen here?’

‘Many things happened to me on the Moon, dear child. It was no more or less forgiving an environment than anywhere else in the system. Just because Earth’s hanging up there like a big blue marble doesn’t mean it’ll save you if you do something stupid. And I was
not
stupid and I still got into trouble.’

‘Prickly, isn’t she?’ Geoffrey murmured.

Eunice turned to him. ‘What did you say?’

‘You can’t whisper in her presence,’ Sunday said. ‘She hears everything, even subvocalisations. I probably should have mentioned that already.’ She sighed and slipped into a momentary aug trance.

Eunice and her chair vanished.

‘What just happened?’

‘I de-voked her and scrubbed the last ten seconds of working memory. That way she won’t remember you calling her prickly, and she won’t therefore hold a permanent grudge against you for the rest of your existence.’

‘Was she always like this with adults?’

‘I don’t think she was particularly receptive to criticism. I also don’t think she was one to suffer fools, gladly or otherwise.’

‘Then I suppose she’s just marked me down as one.’

‘Until I scrubbed her working memory. But don’t feel too bad about it. In the early days I must have scrubbed and re-scrubbed about a million times. To say we kept getting off on the wrong foot . . . that would be a major understatement. But again, it’s my fault, not hers. Right now what we have is a cartoon, a crude caricature of the real thing. I’m trying to smooth the rough edges, tone down the exaggerations. Until that’s done, we can’t make any judgements about the real Eunice Akinya.’

‘Then I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt. Although she wasn’t much help, was she?’

‘If she has anything useful to tell us, we’ll need to zero in on it with some more information, fish it out of her. It’s that or sit here while she recounts every significant incident of her life – and believe me, your tourist visa won’t begin to cover that.’

A swish of beaded curtains heralded Jitendra’s return.

‘Perhaps I may now be of assistance.’ He held out his hand: the three small wadded packages resting in his palm resembled paper-wrapped candies.

Jitendra put the packages down on the coffee table. They each took one and spread the wrapping open. Coloured stones tinkled out onto the coffee table’s glass top, looking just like the hard-boiled candies the wrappers suggested.

‘Real?’ Sunday asked.

‘Afraid not,’ Jitendra said. ‘Cheap plastic fakes.’

The three of them stared dispiritedly at the imitation gems, as if willing them into semi-precious rarity. Sunday’s were a vivid, fake-looking green, Geoffrey’s blood-red, Jitendra’s a pale icy blue.

There were eight green gems, but perhaps double the number of red and blue ones. Jitendra was already doing a proper count, as if it might be significant.

‘Did you damage the glove getting them out?’ Sunday asked.

‘Not in the slightest,’ Jitendra said. ‘And I was careful to record which finger each group of gems came out of.’

‘We could boot her up again and ask about them,’ Geoffrey said.

‘I don’t think it’ll get us anywhere,’ Sunday said.

‘And I suppose we’d be wise not to deliberately antagonise her by repeating ourselves. Can she keep stuff from us?’ Geoffrey asked.

Jitendra was still moving the gems around, arranging them into patterns like a distracted child playing with his food. ‘Your sister and I,’ he said, ‘have long and involved discussions about the precise epistemological status of the Eunice construct. Sunday is convinced that the construct is incapable of malicious concealment. I am rather less certain of that.’

‘It won’t lie,’ Sunday said, hoping to forestall another long-winded debate about a topic they could never hope to resolve, ‘but the real Eunice might well have done. That’s what we have to remember.’

‘Eight, fifteen, seventeen,’ Jitendra said. ‘Green, red and blue in that order. These are the numbers of gems.’

‘You think there’s some significance to that?’ Geoffrey asked.

‘The green ones are larger,’ Sunday said. ‘She couldn’t get as many of those into the finger.’

‘Perhaps,’ Jitendra said.

‘Maybe it’s the colours that mean something, not the numbers,’ Geoffrey said.

‘It’s the numbers, not the colours,’ Jitendra replied dismissively.

‘You sure about that?’ Sunday asked.

‘Absolutely. The gems are just different colours to stop us mixing them up. Orange, pink and yellow would have sufficed for all the difference it makes.’

‘The bigger question,’ Geoffrey said, ‘is exactly when I should tell the cousins. When I sneaked the glove out of the vault, I didn’t know that there might be something inside it.’

‘Nothing to stop you stuffing the gems back into the glove and claiming you never knew about them,’ Sunday said.

‘Someone will take a good look at the glove when I go through Earthbound customs. Then I’ll have some serious explaining to do.’

Sunday shrugged. ‘Not exactly crime of the century, smuggling cheap plastic gems.’

‘And I’m a researcher crawling around on his belly begging for money. The slightest blemish on my character, the slightest hint of impropriety, and I’m screwed.’

Geoffrey was standing now, with his arms folded, striking a pose of imperturbable determination. Sunday knew her brother well enough to realise that he was not likely to budge on this point.

So she wouldn’t push him just yet.

‘Eight, fifteen, seventeen,’ Jitendra said. ‘I know these numbers. I’m sure they mean something.’ He pressed his fingers against his forehead, like a man tormented.

CHAPTER FIVE

In the morning the taxi dropped them at the base of one of the ceiling-penetrating towers, a faceted pineapple with neon snakes coiling up its flanks. In the smoke-coloured lobby a queue for the elevators had already formed. Serious-looking young people milled around, several of whom were evidently well known to Sunday and Jitendra. Hands were pumped, knuckles touched, high-fives made, whispered confidences exchanged. They were speaking Swahili, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Punjabi, English. Some were multilingual, others were making do with earphone translators, usually ornamented with lights and jewellery, or just enthusiastic gesturing. The air crackled with rivalry and the potential for swift backstabbing.