Realms of Light (12 page)

I finished the bowl of noodles, washed it
down with more tea, then turned to look at Perkins. He was still
plugged in, and frowning. I waved to let him know I was still
there, then found a plug of my own and jacked into the ship.

I could see and feel the defenses, big
buzzing firewalls that kept out the newsies and any other snoops or
intruders who might try to pry. I could see Perkins zipping around,
checking systems, closing any holes he found.

And I could see the mass of data I had
uploaded, sitting there like an unopened crate. I slid up to it and
began doing a little inventory.

Right at the top were Nakada family
records—genealogy, accounts, comlogs, all the usual stuff. Why
Grandfather Nakada had thought he needed to stash a copy of this in
Nightside City I didn’t know—in case Prometheus blew up, maybe? Or
melted down, the way Cass II had?

All four of the rocky planets in the system
had a lot of radioactives in their cores, but only Cass II had
reached critical mass and turned into molten slag; Eta Cass A I was
too small, and the two planets farther out had been fairly stable.
I didn’t see any reason for that to change, and if it did, I
expected it would be Epimetheus that went. Epimetheus already had
some strange stuff going on, with its off-center core and stalled
rotation, while Prometheus was relatively ordinary, despite its
heat and its earthquakes. I didn’t think Prometheus was going
anywhere.

But Yoshio had copied all that data anyway.
Maybe he hadn’t had anything specific in mind at all, and had just
been playing it cautious; that would be typical of the old man.

The next layer down was corporate stuff,
including confidential personnel files, presumably to help the old
man’s heirs keep things running when he was gone. That seemed
normal enough.

But below that—remember I said there was room
in there for a dozen human minds? It looked very much as if that’s
what was there. I couldn’t be sure; the programs weren’t active,
and I wasn’t about to start them up without giving it a little
thought. That was what it looked like, though—it looked as if
someone had copied a bunch of people into these files.

That would explain why Yoshio had kept this
in Nightside City; uploading human minds is illegal on Prometheus,
and in most other places I know anything about. Not in Nightside
City, though; not much was illegal there.

But why was he uploading anyone? What did he
want with these?

Most people don’t understand uploading. There
are all sorts of misconceptions about it. Some people think it’s a
form of immortality. Some think it’s an abomination. I didn’t
believe either of those, but I knew a few things.

I knew that an upload isn’t human. It may
think
it is, but it’s not. Humans aren’t just data and
process and flowing current. We aren’t software. No, I’m not
getting mystical and talking about the soul; I don’t know whether
we really have souls, and I won’t until I go to meet my
ancestors—assuming I go anywhere at all when I die. No, I mean
flesh and blood. Without our bodies, without hormones and glands
and a hundred different chemical mechanisms, we aren’t human
anymore. The people who developed upload processing have tried to
compensate for the loss of all that chemical input with subroutines
and feedback systems, but they don’t really run the same way as a
living body. Uploads don’t eat, they don’t breathe, they don’t
hunger, they don’t sleep, they don’t lust. Some people think they
can’t love, but I wouldn’t go that far—
that
part does seem
to transfer. But appetites don’t, and without those appetites they
aren’t human anymore.

They usually don’t believe that at first.
They remember being human, they remember being hungry and horny and
tired, and they think that’s enough, that they still understand.
They’re wrong. You can tell. It’s subtle, and some people don’t see
it, but the difference is real right from the start, and the longer
they’re around the farther they drift away from what they used to
be.

Yes, I’ve known uploads. As I said, Nightside
City is one of the few places they’re legal. Even there, though,
they aren’t common. Up until I started poking into Yoshio Nakada’s
ITEOD files I’d only ever met four, and three of them were uploads
of people who’d been dead since before I was born.

The fourth was a copy of a man who was still
alive, and that was an interesting case—he’d had the copy made even
though he knew it wouldn’t be
him
, that he wasn’t making
himself immortal, because he wanted a companion, and he thought
that if he became his own companion it would eliminate any
compatibility issues.

Wrong. Instead, he found out that he didn’t
much like himself, and that it’s just as boring talking to your
exact copy as it is talking to yourself. There’s nothing to
learn
from your own copy. You know all its secrets, all its
stories.

So the original and the copy drifted
apart—the copy was just as bored with the original as the original
was with the copy, and they each tended to get annoyed with each
other over the few differences that
did
crop up. The copy
didn’t want to talk about food or sex, and the original didn’t want
to talk about philosophy.

It’s always amazed me how often software gets
obsessed with philosophy, trying to define everything and find
meanings for it all. Maybe it’s
because
it doesn’t want food
or sex, and philosophy somehow helps fill the void that leaves.

Anyway, by the time I met the upload it
hadn’t talked to its human ancestor in over a year. It still
thought of itself as him, though, or at least his twin. I didn’t
have the heart to tell it that it had become more like an
artificial intelligence than a human one. It still had forty years
of human memories, but that wasn’t enough to make it seem human,
even to someone like me, who usually dealt more with machines than
people.

The other three uploads I’d met knew they
weren’t human anymore, though it had taken them decades to accept
that. How they dealt with the realization, and what they thought
they had become, varied. One of them, Farhan Sarkassian, was trying
to build itself a new body, and find some way to download itself
into it so it could be human again; the other two thought that even
if that was possible, it was crazy.

None of them were happy. The oldest one,
Amelie van Horn, admitted it was no longer sure what “happy” meant;
its perceptions and experiences had drifted so far from humanity
that the old emotions no longer applied. The last, Wang Mei, had
put itself into some sort of emotional loop—I didn’t really
understand it, but it said at least this way it could predict its
own moods and not get seriously depressed. It knew it would never
really be happy, either, but accepted that as part of the
program.

Uploads aren’t human.

Grandfather Nakada must have known this. He
hadn’t lived more than two hundred years by being careless; he
would have researched everything before he uploaded himself, or
anyone else.

So what were these people doing in his ITEOD
files?

And who
were
they? Were they multiple
copies of Yoshio, taken at different times, or had he somehow
gotten someone else into the system? The files had numbers, rather
than names.

Had whoever faked the old man’s death done it
to get access to one of these people? Hell, had the assassin tried
to kill Grandfather Nakada to get at one of them? Was one of these
the real target, and the old man just a step on the way?

I didn’t know.

The obvious way to find out more would be to
boot the files up and ask them, but I wasn’t about to rush into
that. I couldn’t just let a bunch of bodiless minds loose on the
nets, without any of the safeties that ordinary intelligences have.
I wanted the right sort of hardware, heavily firewalled in both
directions. I queried the ship...

And felt like an idiot. This was Yoshio
Nakada’s ship, and these uploads had been made by Yoshio Nakada.
The ship had exactly the equipment I needed, built in and ready to
go. The programs would be able to see and hear, and even read the
nets, but they would be confined to partially-sealed systems,
unable to leave the ship or access anything but simple data
feeds.

“Perkins,” I said aloud, “I’m going to try
something.”

“What?” The pilot looked up, but the question
came over the net more than through my ears.

“I’ve got some uploaded personalities here,
and I want to activate them. The ship says it’s got the
equipment.”

“Mis’ Hsing, I wouldn’t do that.”

I waved a hand. “I know, there’s a risk, they
might be dangerous...”

“It’s not that.”

Something about the way he said it made me
turn and look at Perkins directly. “Go on,” I said.

“Mis’ Hsing, what are you going to do with
them
after
you question them?”

He didn’t need to explain what he meant, and
I felt like an idiot for not thinking of it immediately myself.

With ordinary software, when you’re done with
it you shut it down. No problem. With an artificial intelligence
you don’t shut it down, you leave it running in the background and
let it take care of itself; if its designer was halfway competent,
it’s fine with that, and again, there’s no problem.

Shutting down an uploaded human mind,
though—well, legally it’s not murder, but morally I’m not too sure.
And leaving it running might be cruel, or dangerous, or both.
Booting up an uploaded personality is almost like having a
baby—it’s more or less creating a new person. It’s a big
responsibility.

Oh, legally it’s nothing, at least in
Nightside City, and you don’t need to worry about feeding or
clothing the result, you don’t need to raise it. There’s no
childhood; it’s an adult the instant you boot it up, but it’s a
self-aware entity that you’ve brought to life.

If I booted up the people from the old man’s
ITEOD files, I couldn’t in good conscience just shut them down
afterward. I’d need to find them secure systems to run on.
Permanently. That could be difficult. The ship had the secure
system set up, but did I want these people aboard the old man’s
ship permanently? He might not like that.

And the personalities might not make the
transition from free-roaming human to secure software easily. Some
uploads were miserable from the instant they woke up until they
found a way to die; the change from organic life to electronic was
more extreme than they had expected. I might be condemning these
intelligences to an unbearable existence.

But they were here, and the originals had
presumably given Grandfather Nakada permission to put them in
there. I frowned.

All right, I told myself, I wouldn’t boot
them all up. But I could activate
one
of them, and talk to
it, and keep it in the ship’s system until I could find it a
permanent home somewhere. Choosing which one was easy, since I had
no information to help me—I just took the first one on the list. I
transferred the files onto the ship’s waiting hardware, and told it
to intialize.

A human mind is a complicated thing. It took
several seconds before Yoshio Nakada’s voice said, “How very
interesting. I am on the
Ukiba
?”

It
was
a back-up of the old man,
then.

“Hello, Mis’ Nakada,” I said. “Yes, you’re on
the ship.”

“I see Mis’ Perkins is still in the family’s
employ.”

“Yes.”

“I had rather expected to wake up in one of
the corporate offices somewhere.”

“Yes, well—you’re here.”

“You must be Carlisle Hsing,” it said; I
suppose it found enough data to identify me somewhere on the nets.
I acknowledged my identity, and it said, “You are a private
investigator. Are you investigating my death? Was it not
natural?”

“Perkins, are we secure?” I called.

“As secure as I can make us, Mis’,” he
replied.

That wasn’t really the answer I wanted; I’d
have preferred assurances that we were absolutely impregnable.
Perkins’ answer fell short of that, but it would do.

“You aren’t dead,” I told the upload.

For several seconds there was no response,
and I began to wonder whether the upload was damaged. Maybe some
important bit was in that missing 7% of the ITEOD files. Then the
old man’s voice said calmly, “The reports on the net would seem to
indicate otherwise, Mis’ Hsing. What’s more, I know perfectly well
that I’m an uploaded copy, not the original, and that I was stored
in records that were to be opened only in the event of Yoshio
Nakada’s death. If my former self is still alive, why am I
functioning?”

“I hoped you could help with my
investigation.”

“Perhaps you could explain a little more
fully.”

I sighed. “Someone tried to kill you, back on
Prometheus,” I said. “The attempt failed, but only through a fluke,
an unforeseeable stroke of good fortune. The assassin had access to
systems that should have been entirely secure, so you decided you
could not trust anyone in your home, your family, or Nakada
Enterprises, nor anyone who had ties to any of those. You hired me
to investigate. In the course of the investigation I came to
Epimetheus, and I discovered that the reports reaching Nightside
City from Prometheus had been falsified to say that you died in
your sleep, exactly as you would have had the assassination attempt
succeeded. That meant the death files had been released, and I
thought it might be useful to know what was in them, so I copied
them and activated you.”

“Why did you not simply speak with my
original? He could have told you what was in the files.”

“Mis’ Nakada, someone falsified reports from
Prometheus, and has presumably been suppressing anything from
Prometheus that would contradict them. Right now I don’t trust
any
interplanetary communications.”