Fractions (79 page)

It was accelerating the probe, and with it the other side of the wormhole, to within a fraction of the speed of light. Both sides of the wormhole remained connected – there was literally no space between them, and no time. Our end of the wormhole existed in the ship's time-frame, not in ours.

To an observer on the ship, relativistic time-dilation would shorten a journey of centuries to days – eventually, as its velocity crept closer and closer to the impassable eternity of the photon, millions of years to minutes, then trillions to seconds. In thirty or so ship-board years, it would reach the edge of the observable universe, and the heat-death or the Big Crunch.

And for all of those years, our side of the wormhole would be in the same place, and the same time, as the side that was with the ship. We had built a gateway to the stars – and to the future. In thirty years, if we wanted, we could walk to the end of time.

 

Meg, the succubus, was sitting on the sofa, pouting as I channel-hopped the television. I ignored her blatant impatience and wafts of aphrodisiac pheromones; she's just a fucking machine, I told myself. Since the probe's launch two days earlier the pace of work had slackened, and the television started to show news and entertainment. The news had an oddly stilted, house-journal quality: it was all solar weather-reports, interviews with rehabilitated crew-members – as we were now called – and accounts of what a great job we were doing. The entertainment was movies, game-shows, plays. Some of them were classics (
somebody
out here had a thing about Gillian Anderson) but most were unfamiliar to me. Their contemporary references gave no hint of the regression of civilisation I'd been shown in the orientation pack. It was exactly as if everything on Earth was what most people in my time would have expected the late twenty-first century world to be like: a bit crowded, a bit decadent; and that we, here, were picking it up after a few light-hours' delay, in a space construction-site whose workers were for some obscure but accepted reason confined to individual space-tugs.

In short, it was as if what Reid had said on my first day here, and what the orientation package had told me, were quite untrue. I didn't dare to hope, but I could imagine how some people would. I wondered what new item on our masters' agenda this phoney reassurance implied.

Assuming what I saw really were broadcasts, and not something specifically aimed at me…once more I was overwhelmed by the impossibility of determining what was and wasn't real. I was at a low point, strung out. Six more days until I got back in the macro, four days since I'd been in. The effect of my last visit was wearing thin, and my next was a painfully long time in the future. At some level I missed the people I'd known in life, but that was masked by a more desperate yearning to meet again my superhuman friends. Would they even remember me? How much more powerful would they have become?

‘You're troubled, Jon,' Meg whispered in my ear, putting her arms around me. ‘Come to bed.'

‘No!' I snarled. ‘Fuck off, you fucking puppet!'

Her eyes brimmed with convincing tears.

‘Jon, I know I'm a fucking puppet, but I have feelings too. You're hurting me.'

‘You're just a program.'

She blinked and half-smiled, looking up at me in an irritatingly placatory way. ‘So are you, Jon, and you have feelings.'

I stared, startled by her argument. Not its content, but that she was making it at all.

‘You once told me,' I said, thinking aloud, ‘that you could be whatever I wanted.'

She brightened. ‘Yes! I can!'

‘Could you be more intelligent than me?'

She frowned in momentary concentration. ‘How much more intelligent?'

‘Twice?' I waved an arm.

She gave me an odd look and stood up. She glanced at the television, grimaced and walked over to the window and looked outside for a while. Then she turned, one hand on her hip, the other leaning against the window.

‘Well, Jon Wilde,' she said. ‘This is a fine bloody mess you've got yourself into.'

There was an impatient look on her face that reminded me, suddenly and painfully, of both Annette and Myra. I recognised that characteristic stamp of the features beyond all the differences of appearance and personality, and realised what it had always meant: the irritation of a greater intelligence waiting for mine to catch up.

‘Well don't just stand there,' Meg said, walking past me. ‘There's a computer icon in the other room. Let's see what we can hack.'

 

‘First thing you gotta realise,' she said, as we stood in front of the computer screen, ‘is that this is all real, but it ain't
physical.
It's a simulation. You, and me, and all of this interior space, exist physically as electrical charges in the computer of this robot we're riding in.'

‘Well,' I said, ‘that had dawned on me.'

‘OK, you never told me.' She grinned. ‘Mind you, I doubt if I'd've understood any of this five minutes ago. Anyway…just so's you don't freak out.'

With that she plunged an arm to the elbow through the screen which had always been solid to me, and started poking about. ‘Oh good,' she said. ‘Got the dot sys files for us. Hah! Mine can only be accessed by you talking me up, like you just did. But yours, I can fiddle with from here…just a minute.'

She reached in with her other hand and slid something sideways before I could do anything.

‘How's that?' she said.

I looked at the beautiful woman in the short black nightdress. Something was wrong. She had her arms stuck right into the computer screen. I backed away a step.

‘Hold it,' I said. ‘Just…wait. Mind the glass.'

But the glass wasn't broken. I blinked, not sure if I was seeing right. The woman laughed.

‘Shit,' she said. ‘Wrong way.' She moved her hands again and I opened my mouth again to warn her about the glass.

And she was glass, and I was glass, and all was light.

‘Oh,' I said. ‘I see now.'

 

Unlike what I experienced in the macro, my memories of the time of my enhanced intelligence with Meg are clear and vivid. I wasn't a superhuman mind with limitations, but a human mind with added capacities. The continuity of my self was never interrupted, as it was in the strange bright company of the fast folk I met on the simulated big planet. So, even now, it's a time I can remember, if never quite relive.

For a moment we just stared at each other.

‘Well,' Meg said. ‘Fair's fair. Your turn.'

‘Oh.' I glanced at the computer, then shrugged. ‘OK Meg,' I said. ‘Be as intelligent as you can be.'

‘Thanks,' she said. Her face became, in some indefinable way, more focused. She blinked and looked around.

‘This is really something, init?'

‘Not really.'

She laughed. ‘Looks all a bit different, though.'

It certainly did. It wasn't the actual appearance of things that had changed, but everything was as if tagged with an explanation. It was just obvious what the programs underlying the simulations were doing.

‘What's to stop anybody else doing something like this?'

Meg shrugged. ‘Nothing. You cheated, sort of. But it's got to do with the way your mind – your natural mind – worked. You gotta have a pretty good mind to handle the intelligence increase. It can't be just bolted on. If most of the other blokes here figured out how to do it, they'd just be sort of…stoned, or tripping. They'd have to work for it, in its own time. Basically you shouldn't be here at all.'

While she was talking – perhaps because she was talking – I was seeing what she meant, the underlying logic of her statement being filled in with additional data extracted from the machine's memory.

The wormhole construction site really was a labour camp, and everything about it was designed to both control and rehabilitate its inmates. It allowed, indeed encouraged, co-operative work, while preventing collusion in other contexts, thus providing the reeducation of work without becoming a university of crime. Outside the work process, we were essentially in solitary confinement, with the succubi available to provide sexual and social gratification. Each succubus was an aspect of the same computer on which the human personality of the inmate was implemented; and it responded to increasing social interaction by increasing its own social repertoire, thus rewarding any increase in empathy on the part of the inmate with greater intimacy.

The macro trips served a similar function, in relation to cognitive rather than emotional improvement. In my genuine innocence I had treated the succubus as nothing more than a virtual sex-toy, but had achieved remarkable integration with the posthuman beings in the macro. The tension of this anomaly had finally triggered Meg into upping the emotional stakes, with consequences considerably more rapid and drastic than the system's designers had expected. We had upgraded ourselves to the maximum capacity of the robot's hardware.

‘So what are you?' I asked. ‘Were you ever human?'

Meg shrugged. ‘I'm part of a copy. The end result of a personality development, without any of that person's memories. Most of my mind's AI. Human surface, machine depth.'

My expression must have told her what I thought of this.

‘Yeah, grim, init?' she said. ‘Still, that's me.'

My next thought was –

‘Are we setting off warnings anywhere?'

‘Nah,' she said. ‘No central control, right? Whole point. Agoric system.' She grinned. ‘You should know. Mind you, there are overrides – Reid's made damn' sure of that – so I wouldn't push it.'

‘Uh huh. So what do we do now?'

‘You know,' she said. ‘Reid's still in charge of the whole project. He's the boss. Not that the fast folk pay any attention, but the rest of us outside the macros have to.'

‘If Reid's in charge,' I said, ‘I guess it's time we saw him.'

Meg reached once more behind the system controls and called him up. The screen rang for seconds, then Reid's mildly perturbed face appeared. He looked, if anything, younger than he had on the recording, but his expression of alert calm was broken when he saw me. He blinked and opened his mouth, then closed it, his tongue flicking across his lips.

‘Wilde!' he said. ‘Is that really you?'

‘Yes,' I said.

‘Amazing!' he replied. Meg timed his response. Any delay was imperceptible; I reckoned he must be close, on a rock in the Ring. I'd seen no obvious human habitat in or around the structure.

‘My God, I thought you were dead!' he went on. He snorted. ‘Among the dead.'

If he was lying he was doing a good job of it: even to Meg, whose visual analysis software was hanging behind my virtual sight, his expression betrayed nothing but surprise, curiosity, and unaffected delight at seeing me again. Yet I didn't trust him: his added years of experience and discipline gave him an overwhelming aura of control. I realised, suddenly, that he was unlike any other human being I'd ever seen. The nanotechnology, the smart matter, that had rescued him from age might well be working further alchemies in his brain and blood.

I spread my arms, forcing a grin. ‘Isn't this death?'

Reid smiled bleakly. ‘Post-life, we call it. Mind you, I'd get your electronic doxy to do something about your appearance. You look terrible.'

I stared past him, checking the background. There were other people moving about – he seemed to be sitting in some common area, talking to a camera set at an angle from him, public rather than private. The perspective of the floors and the people in the background struck me as odd for a moment, then they snapped into focus. From the curvature of the floors and the subtle tilts of different verticals, I could see he was in a large space-station, under centrifugal spin.

‘No doubt,' I said. ‘But no worse than I was last time you saw me, remember?' I felt a surge of anger. ‘You had me killed, you bastard!'

His untroubled gaze fixed on me. ‘No I didn't,' he said. ‘You were caught up in a border incident. I did my best to save you, I'll tell you that, but we were too late. As far as I knew, you died there. Your body was shipped back to England and cremated. I was at your memorial meeting, man!'

I tried not to show how shaken I was. ‘So how do I come to be here?' I demanded. ‘Don't tell me you didn't know they'd made a copy!'

Reid sighed, running his fingers back through his thick black hair. ‘Of course I knew. You were one of the first human subjects – we didn't even know it would work. We took the copy within minutes of finding you, and stored the brain-scan and your genetic information. But as far as I knew, that was it – the copy was stored with the rest of the dead, in the bank. You'd made no disposition, so we left you there. You were never uploaded to a macro, I'm pretty sure of that. I didn't know anyone had made a knock-off, and that's the honest truth.' His expression hardened. ‘And there's no way I can find out, now – the engineers responsible uploaded themselves long ago.'

‘Well, I can hardly complain about my own existence,' I said. ‘But I want out of your slave labour-force, if that's all right with you.'

Reid smiled as if relieved.

‘Naturally,' he said.

‘If that's the word.'

His lips compressed. ‘Hmm.' He reached for a keypad and tapped out a code.

‘OK, enough about me,' I said. ‘What's all this about the dead in a bank? What's happened to Annette, and Myra, and – everybody else?'

Reid kept glancing off-camera, as if keeping an eye on another monitor. The activity in the background had quickened, with an air of greater urgency.

‘I think Annette's safe,' he said abstractedly. ‘She died in the, uh, troubled times, but she'd arranged for a copy. If it got made, she's in the bank, same as you. Same as millions of people. It was cheap by then. People made back-ups routinely. To be honest we don't know who exactly we've got. Myra, and your daughter, well – as far as I know they stayed on Earth. Goddess knows how things are going back there –'