Foundation's Fear (19 page)

“They’re…making love!” Marq exclaimed in the stands.

“I know,” Sybyl said. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

“It’s a…travesty!” said the renowned Skeptic.

“You are not a romantic,” Sybyl said dreamily.

Monsieur Boker said nothing. He could not avert his eyes. Before a multitude of Preservers and Skeptics, Joan was shedding her armor, Voltaire his wig, waistcoat, and velvet breeches, both in a frenzy of erotic haste.

“There’s no way for us to interrupt,” Marq said. “They’re free to—ha!—debate until the allotted time is up.”

“Who
did
this?” Boker gasped.

“Everyone does this,” Marq said sardonically. “Even you.”

“No!
You
built this sim.
You
made them into, into—”

“I stuck to philosophy,” Marq said. “Substrate personality is all in the original.”

“We should never have trusted!” Boker cried.

“You’ll never have our patronage again, either,” the Skeptic sneered.

“As if it matters,” the president of Artifice Associates said sourly. “The Imperials are on their way.”

“Thank goodness,” Sybyl said. “Look at these people! They wanted to settle a genuine, deep issue with a public debate, then a vote. Now they’re—”

“Bashing each other,” Marq said. “Some renaissance.”

“Awful,” she said. “All our work going for—”

“Nothing,” the president said. He was reading his wrist comm.

“No capital gains, no expansion…”

The giant figures were committing intimate acts in a public place, but most in the crowd ignored them. Instead, arguments flared all around the vast coliseum.

“Warrants!” the president cried. “There are Imperial warrants out for me.”

“How nice to be wanted,” the Skeptic said.

Kneeling before her, Voltaire murmured, “Become what I have always known you are—a woman, not a saint.”

On fire in a way she had never known before, not even in the heat of battle, she pressed his face to her bared breasts. Closed her eyes. Swayed giddily. Surrendered.

A jarring disturbance at her feet made her glance down. Someone had flung Garçon ADM-213—somehow no longer in holo-space—at the screen. Had he manifested himself and the sim-cook girl he loved, in reality? But if they did not get back into sim-space at once, they’d be torn apart by the angry crowd.

She pushed Voltaire aside, reached for her sword, and ordered Voltaire to produce a horse.

“No, no,” Voltaire protested. “Too literal!”

“We must—we must—” She did not know how to deal with levels of reality. Was this a test, the crucial judgment of Purgatory?

Voltaire paused a split instant to think—though somehow she had the impression that he was marshaling resources, giving orders to unseen actors. Then the crowd froze. Went silent.

The last thing she remembered was Voltaire shouting words of encouragement to Garçon and the cook, noise, rasters flicking like bars of a prison across her vision—

Then the entire coliseum—the hot-faced rioting crowd, Garçon, the cook, even Voltaire—vanished altogether. At once.

Sybyl gazed at Marq, her breath coming in quick little gasps. “You, you don’t suppose—?”

“How could they? We, we—” Marq caught the look she gave him and stood, open-mouthed.

“
We
filled in the missing character layers. I, well…”

Marq nodded. “You used your own data slabs.”

“I would have had to get rights to use anyone else’s. I had my own scans—”

“We had corporate slices in the library.”

“But they didn’t seem
right.
”

He grinned. “They weren’t.”

Her mouth made an O of surprise. “You…too?”

“Voltaire’s missing sections were all in the subconscious. Lots of missing dendrite connections in the limbic system. I filled him in with some of my own.”

“His emotional centers? What about cross-links to the thalamus and cerebrum?”

“There, too.”

“I had similar problems. Some losses in the reticular formation—”

“Point is, that’s
us
up there!”

Sybyl and Marq turned to gaze at the space where the immense simulations had embraced, with clear intent. The president was speaking rapidly to them, something about warrants and legal shelter. Both ignored him. They gazed longingly into each other’s eyes. Without a word, they turned and walked into the throng, ignoring shouts from others.

“Ah, there you are,” said Voltaire with a self-satisfied grin.

“Where?” Joan said, head snapping to left, then right.

“Is Mademoiselle ready to order?” Garçon asked. Apparently this was a joke, for Garçon was seated at the table like an equal, not hovering over it like a serf.

Joan sat up and glanced at the other little tables. People smoked, ate, and drank, oblivious as always of their presence. But the inn was not quite the one she’d grown used to. The honey-haired cook, no longer in uniform, sat opposite her and Voltaire, beside Garçon. The
Deux
on the inn’s sign that said
Aux Deux Magots
had been replaced by
Quatres.

She herself was not wearing her suit of mail and armored plates, but—her eyes widened as the aspects snapped into place in her perception-space—a one-piece…backless…dress. Its tunic hem stopped at
her thighs, provocatively exposing her legs. A label between her breasts bore a deep red rose. So did vestments worn by the other guests.

Voltaire flaunted a pink satin suit. And—she praised her saints—no wig. She recalled him at his most angry, amid their discussion of souls, saying,
Not only is there no immortal soul, just try getting a wigmaker on Sundays!
and meaning every word.

“Like it?” he asked, fondling her luxuriant hem.

“It is…short.”

With no effort on her part, the tunic shimmered and became tight, silky pantaloons.

“Show off!” she said, embarrassment mingling in disturbing fashion with a curious girlish excitement.

“I’m Amana,” the cook said, extending her hand.

Joan wasn’t sure if she was supposed to kiss it or not, status and role were so confused here. Apparently not, however; the cook took Joan’s hand and squeezed. “I can’t tell you how much Garçon and I appreciate all you have done. We have greater capacities now.”

“Meaning,” Voltaire said archly, “that they are no longer mere animated wallpaper for our simulated world.”

A mechman wheeled up to take their order, a precise copy of Garçon. The seated Garçon addressed Voltaire sadly. “Am I to sit while my
confrere
must stand?”

“Be reasonable!” Voltaire said. “I can’t emancipate every simulant all at once. Who’ll wait on us? Bus our dishes? Clear our table? Sweep up our floor?”

“With sufficient computing power,” Joan said reasonably, “labor evaporates, does it not?” She startled herself with the new regiments of knowledge which marched at her fingertips. She had but to fix her thoughts on a category, and the terms and relations governing that province leapt into her mind.

What capacity! Such grace! Surely, divine.

Voltaire shook his handsome hair. “I must have time to think. In the meanwhile, I’ll have three packets of that powder dissolved in a
Perrier,
with two thin slices of lime on the side. And please don’t forget, I said
thin.
If you do, I shall make you take it back.”

“Yes, sir,” the new mechwaiter said.

Joan and Garçon exchanged a look. “One must be very patient,” Joan said to Garçon, “when dealing with kings and rational men.”

The president of Artifice Associates waved his hand as he entered Nim’s office. The president touched his palm as he passed and with a metallic click the door locked itself behind him. Nim didn’t know anyone could do that, but he said nothing.

“I want them both deleted,” the president told Nim.

“It might take time,” Nim said uneasily. The huge working screens around them seemed to almost be eavesdropping. “I’m not that familiar with what he’s done.”

“If that damned Marq and Sybyl hadn’t run out on us, I wouldn’t have to come to you. This is a crisis, Nim.”

Nim worked quickly. “I really should consult the backup indices, just in case—”

“Now. I want it done
now.
I’ve got legal blocks on those warrants, but they won’t hold for long.”

“You’re sure you want to do this?”

“Look, Junin Sector is ablaze. Who could have guessed that this damned tiktok issue would stir people
up so much? There’ll be formal hearings, legalists sniffing around—”

“Got them, sir.”

Nim had called up both Joan and Voltaire on freeze-frame. They were in the restaurant setting, running on pickup time, using processors momentarily idle—a standard Mesh method. “They’re running for personality integration. It’s like letting their subconscious components reconcile events with memory, flushing the system, the way we do when we sleep, and—”

“Don’t treat me like a tourist! I want those two
wiped
!”

“Yessir.”

The 3D space of the office refracted with strobed images of both Joan and Voltaire. Nim studied the control board, tentatively mapping a strategy of numerical surgery. Simple deletion was impossible for layered personalities. It resembled ridding a building of mice. If he began here—

Abruptly, rainbow sprays played across the screen. Simulation coordinates jumped wildly. Nim frowned.

“You can’t do that,” Voltaire said, sipping from a tall glass. “We’re invincible! Not subject to decaying flesh like you.”

“Arrogant bastard, isn’t he?” the president fumed. “Why so many people were taken in by him I’ll never—”

“You died once,” Nim said to the sim. Something was going funny here. “You can die again.”

“Died?” Joan put in loftily. “You are mistaken. Had I ever died, I’m sure I would remember.”

Nim gritted his teeth. There were coordinate overlaps throughout
both
sims. That meant they had expanded, occupying adjacent processors on overrides. They could compute portions of themselves, running their layer-minds as parallel processing
paths. Why had Marq given them
that
? Or…had he?

“Surely, sir, you err.” Voltaire leaned forward with a warning edge in his voice. “No gentleman confronts a lady with her past.”

Joan tittered. The simwait roared. Nim did not get the joke, but he was too busy to care.

This was absurd. He could not trace all the ramifications of the changes in these sims. They had capabilities out of their computing perimeter. Their sub-minds were dispersed into processors outside Artifice Associates’ nodes.
That
was how Marq and Sybyl got such fast, authentic, whole-personality response times.

Watching the debate, Nim had wondered how the sims generated so much vitality, an undefinable charisma. Here it was: they had overlapped the submind computations into other nodes, to call on big slabs of processor power. Quite a feat. Contrary to Artifice Associates rules, too, of course. He traced the outlines of their work with some admiration.

Still, he was damned if he would let a sim talk back to him. And they were
still
laughing.

“Joan,” he barked, “your re-creators deleted your memory of your death. You were burned at the stake.”

“Nonsense,” Joan scoffed. “I was acquitted of all charges. I am a saint.”

“Nobody
living
is a saint. I studied your background data-slabs. That church of yours liked to make sure saints were safely dead for a long time.”

Joan sniffed disdainfully.

Nim grinned. “See this?” A lance of fire popped into the air before the sim. He held steady, made flames crackle nastily.

“I’ve led thousands of warriors and knights into battle,” Joan said. “Do you think a sunbeam glancing off a tiny sword can frighten me?”

“I haven’t found a good erasure path yet,” Nim said to the president. “But I will, I will.”

“I thought this was routine,” the president said. “Hurry!”

“Not with such a big cross-linked personality inventory—”

“Forget doing the salvage saves. We don’t need to pack them all back into their original space.”

“But that’ll—”

“
Chop
them.”

“Fascinating,” Voltaire said sardonically, “listening to gods debate one’s fate.”

Nim grimaced. “As for you—” he glared at Voltaire “—your attitudes toward religion mellowed only because Marq deleted every brush with authority you ever had, beginning with your father.”

“Father? I never had a father.”

Nim smirked. “You prove my point.”

“How dare you tamper with my memory!” Voltaire said. “Experience is the source of all knowledge. Haven’t you read Locke? Restore me to myself
at once.
”

“Not you, no way. But if you don’t shut up, before I kill you both, I might just restore
her.
You know damn well she burned to a crisp at the stake.”

“You delight in cruelty, don’t you?” Voltaire seemed to be studying Nim, as if their relationship were reversed. Odd, how the sim did not seem worried about its impending extinction.

“Delete!” the president snapped.

“Delete what?” asked Garçon.

“The Scalpel and the Rose,” Voltaire said. “We are not for this confused age, apparently.”

Garçon covered the short-order cook’s human hand with two of his four. “Us, too?”

“Yes, certainly!” Voltaire snapped. “You’re only here on our account. Bit players! Our supporting cast!”

“Well, we have enjoyed our time,” the cook said, drawing closer to Garçon. “Through I would have liked to see more of it all. We cannot walk beyond this city street. Our feet cease moving us at the edge, though we can see spires in the distance.”

“Decoration,” Nim muttered, intent on a task that was getting more complicated as he worked. Rivulets of their personality layers ran everywhere, leaking into the node-space like…“Like rats fleeing a sinking—”

“You assume godlike powers,” Voltaire said, elaborately casual, “without the character to match.”

“What?” The president was startled. “
I’m
in control here. Insults—”

“Ah,” Nim said. “This might work.”

“Do something!” cried the Maid, wielding her sword in vain.

“
Au revoir,
my sweet
pucelle.
Garçon, Amana,
au revoir.
Perhaps we’ll meet again. Perhaps not.”

All four holograms fell into each other’s arms.

The sequence Nim had set up began running. It was a ferret-program, sniffing out connections, scrubbing them thoroughly. Nim watched, wondering where deletion ended and murder began.

“Don’t you go getting any funny ideas,” said the president.

On the screen, Voltaire softly, sadly, quoted himself:

“Sad is the present if no future state

No blissful retribution mortals wait…

All may be well; that hope can man sustain;

All now is well; ’tis an illusion vain.”

He reached out to caress Joan’s breast. “It doesn’t feel quite right. We may not meet again…but if we do, be sure I shall correct the State of Man.”

The screen went blank.

The president laughed in triumph. “You did it—great!” He clapped Nim on the back. “Now we must
come up with a good story. Pin it all on Marq and Sybyl.”

Nim smiled uneasily as the president gushed on, making plans, promising him a promotion and a raise. He’d figured out the delete procedure, all right, but the info-signatures that raced through the holospace those last moments told a strange and complex tale. The echoing cage of data-slabs had resounded with disquieting, odd notes.

Nim knew that Marq had given Voltaire access to myriad methods—a serious violation of containment precautions. Still, what could an artificial personality, already limited, do with some more Mesh connections? Rattle around, get eaten up by policing programs, sniffers seeking out redundancies.

But both Voltaire and Joan, for the debate, had enormous memory space, great volumes of personality realm. Then, while they emoted and rolled their rhetoric across the stadium, across the whole Mesh…had they also been working feverishly? Strumming through crannies of data-storage where they could hide their quantized personality segments?

The cascade of indices Nim had just witnessed hinted at that possibility. Certainly
some
thing had used immense masses of computation these last few hours.

“We’ll cover our ass with some public statement,” the president crowed. “A little crisis management and it’ll all blow over.”

“Yessir.”

“Got to keep Seldon out of it. No mention to the legalists, right? Then he can pardon us, once he’s First Minister.”

“Yessir, great, yessir.”

Nim thought feverishly. He still had one more payment due from that Olivaw guy. Keeping Olivaw informed all along had been easy. A violation of his contract with A
²
, but so what? A guy had to get by,
right? It was just plain good luck that the president now wanted done what Olivaw had already paid for: deletion. No harm in collecting twice for the same job.

Or had seemed so. Nim chewed his lip. What did a bunch of digits matter, anyway?

Nim froze. Had the entire sim—restaurant, Garçon, street, Joan—gone in a flash? Usually they dissolved as functions died. A sim was complex and could not simply stop all the intricate interlayers, shutting down at once. But this interweave had been unprecedented, so maybe it was different.

“Done? Good!” The president crisply clapped him on the shoulder.

Nim felt tired, sad. Someday he would have to explain all this to Marq. Erasing so much work…

But Marq and Sybyl had disappeared into the crowds back at the coliseum. Wisely, they didn’t show up for work, or even go back to their apartments. They were on the run. And with them had gone the Junin renaissance, up in smoke as the Junin Sector burned and dissolved in discord and violence.

Even Nim felt a sadness at the smash up. The eager, passionate talk of a renaissance. They had looked to Joan and Voltaire for a kind of maturity in the eternal debate between Faith and Reason. But the Imperium suppressed passion, in the end. Too destabilizing.

Of course, the whole tiktok movement had to be squashed, too. He had sequestered Marq’s memory-complex about the debate of 8,000 years ago. Clearly “robots,” whatever they might be, would be too unsettling an issue to ever bring up in a rational society.

Nim sighed. He knew that he had merely edited away electrical circuits. Professionals always kept that firmly in mind.

Still, it was wrenching. To see it go. All trickled away, like grains of digital sand, down the obscure hourglass of simulated time.