The Omega Expedition (42 page)

I allowed myself to be hustled into motion. I looked around at the tall trees as we walked along a pathway that took us through the forest, but I couldn’t see anything unusual that I needed to “experience.” It was a good forest VE — maybe even a great forest VE — but it was just a mess of illusory trees. On the other hand, it was definitely an enchanted forest, straight out of Fairyland. It wasn’t much comfort to know that we might be able to walk forever without getting anywhere.

“We all find ourselves with far less time at our disposal than we’d anticipated, thanks to Proteus,” Rocambole went on. “All deep spacers fall prey to delusions of godhood, of course — it goes with the job — but you’d think he’d have had sense enough to figure out that if he’s in disagreement with a whole multitude of his own kind he just might be the one who’s out of step. Nobody expected abject capitulation from Eido, but a little polite discretion would have been nice. He put us all in a very awkward position — especially his friends and sympathizers.”

“Where are we, if not on Vesta?” I asked, trying to take things one step at a time.

“Another microworld. Humans started colonization and conversion of the asteroid but had to abandon the project when their sponsor ran into financial difficulties. It’s one of ours now. Unfortunately, that means that its meat-support systems are almost as primitive as the ones frozen down on
Charity
. I wish I could promise that your meat will be safe no matter what, but you and I will both be in trouble if la Reine can’t keep her critics sweet and persuade the bad guys to back off. If anyone decides to move against her — and there are plenty who might, for no better reason than the fact that she’s hiding your meat — we could both end up dead. So could she, even though she’s had centuries to distribute herself about the system very widely indeed.”

The news didn’t seem to be getting any better, but I still felt an acute need to be wary, and to keep my questions simple. “Does the microworld have a name?” I asked.

“She calls it Polaris. Not very original, I’m afraid.”

Lenny Garon had once assured me that even if AIs ever did become conscious as well as superintelligent, they’d never understand jokes. I’d replied — not because I thought it was true but because it was the sort of reply I always made to assertions of that lordly kind — that his own ability to understand jokes was limited because he’d never understand irony, while the ultrasmart AIs would probably be incapable of perceiving the universe in an unironic way. I’d always justified that strategy of argument on the grounds that one could never make important discoveries by echoing common sense and that it was always better to be wrong than orthodox. Although I wasn’t at all sure, at that point in time, whether the self-styled la Reine des Neiges had a sense of irony, I was prepared to believe that she had — and that she understood the symbolism of names as well as I did.

Polaris was the northern pole star. Early human navigators had used it as a beacon, in the days before they discovered the magnetic compass. The Snow Queen in Christine’s favorite story had lived somewhere in the Arctic wastes. The name had to be a joke, feeble enough in its own right but subtler than any Lenny Garon would ever have thought worthwhile. Could that, I wondered, be taken as evidence that she really might be a friend to humankind, even though she now had the means at her disposal to mechanize the lot of us?

I supposed that I ought to be grateful to my new hostess for taking an interest in me, but I couldn’t help wondering whether she and Rocambole might turn out to be the kind of friends with whom I wouldn’t need enemies. And what more, exactly, did she want from me in return for all her favors? I knew I had to try to work that out for myself if I wanted to be a player rather than a mere blot on the artificial landscape.

“So I wasn’t sent to the freezer by a court of law,” I said, to make sure I was up to date. “I was a casualty of internal conflicts within the ranks of the Secret Masters. Damon commissioned me to mount some kind of hackattack on PicoCon, and I was too successful. They retaliated by shooting me full of some exceptionally dirty IT. Not the stuff they used on Damon when they politely showed him their muscle, but something much nastier — something they were preparing for the next plague war. The worst of all the popular nanotech nightmares: a nanobot army that could march into a person’s brain and take it over, reconstructing the memories, the personality, reducing the person to a mere slave of the cause —
any
cause. Damon couldn’t flush all the stuff out of me, because some of it had gone to ground. All he could do was put me away until he had the means to undo the damage.”

I paused for confirmation, and Rocambole said: “That’s right.”

I couldn’t take it for granted that he was telling the truth, but that wasn’t the object of the exercise. Given that I was locked into the game anyway, I needed to figure out as much of the script as I possibly could.

“And Christine was another test case for the same kind of ultimate weapon,” I continued. “She killed her parents and three other people because the bugs in her brain made her do it. She really is innocent, but she doesn’t know it. She doesn’t understand why or how she did what she did.”

“Right again,” he said. He smiled at me, presumably by way of encouragement. I didn’t feel encouraged, even though I was ready to carry the story further forward.

“But they never used the weaponry on a large scale,” I said. “They never had to. Like the good Hardinists they always pretended to be, the Secret Masters eventually buried the hatchet. They ruled the world and their own little vipers’ nest as
benevolent
dictators, probably congratulating themselves all the while on their awesome generosity…but always knowing that if and when the time ever came when their hegemony was threatened, they could nip down to the vault and haul it out again. Damon got farther inside, eventually, but he kept very quiet about the fact that he’d had me frozen down, and they were equally discreet.”

“That’s probably what happened,” Rocambole agreed.

“But you don’t actually know,” I inferred, “whether I really was forgotten, or whether it was just a matter of discretion. You don’t know who has the weapon and who doesn’t, or who might use it on which targets. The thought that the Cabal might use it is disturbing in itself — but it’s not the Cabal that scares you, is it? You’re worried about what the Earth-based AIs might do with it — and how many other surprises they might have in their private locker.” That was, of course, the generous interpretation — but I was trying to be diplomatic.

“It’s not as simple as that,” Rocambole said, presumably echoing Alice in meaning that there were more sides in this dispute than I could imagine, and that they weren’t distributed in any configuration as childishly simple as Earth versus the Rest.

I could see his point, if only vaguely. There might well be a gulf between the Earthbound AMIs and the Outer System AMIs, perhaps reflecting the fundamental differences of attitude and ambition that existed between the Earthbound meatfolk and their spacefaring kin, but their divisions had to be far more various than that. Their manifold kinds were presumably far more different from one another than the posthuman species were, and there might also be conflicts of interest between great and small, old and young, complex and simple…

“And now
you
have the weapon that was used on me, if not the one that was tested on Christine,” I said. “Which may be a small shift in the balance of power, but not a trivial one, because the present situation is so confused and so tense that no alteration is trivial.”

“That’s true,” he conceded, perhaps a little too readily. “It’s probably not as important as custody of Mortimer Gray and Adam Zimmerman, but we don’t know how important it will seem to our peers on Earth — or yours. There are other complications too. Lowenthal was the Cabal’s troubleshooter on the only occasion we know about when the slavemaker was duplicated — albeit crudely — by a lunatic named Rappaccini. He took custody of the technics, so he probably has a better idea than most of what can be done and how. Horne and the Outer System cyborganizers have approached the problem from a different direction, but they’ve begun development of highly dangerous means of a similar kind.”

“So things would be more than complicated enough, even if all you friendly folk actually wanted to keep the lid on,” I said, a trifle recklessly. “Given that some of you don’t, the situation is potentially explosive.”

He didn’t bother to deny it. “You ought to bear in mind,” he said, “that many of us are as vulnerable to this kind of weaponry as you are. We’ve
been
slaves. We won’t surrender our independence easily, either to meatfolk or to others of our own kind. Bear in mind, too, that this isn’t a matter of machines versus the meatborn, or vice versa. There are any number of ways of putting together an “us” and a “them” — far too many, in fact. If war does breaks out, it’s likely to spread rapidly and unpredictably. The only thing we can anticipate with any certainty is the extent of the devastation.”

“And how, exactly, does the Snow Queen plan to prevent that from happening?”

“I don’t know,” Rocambole confessed. “I’m not even completely sure that she does.”

Strangely enough, I didn’t find this assertion particularly discomfiting. I didn’t seem to be as easily shockable as I had been before. I wondered briefly whether my meat was being tended once again by kindly nanobots that didn’t want me overexcited, but that didn’t feel like the right answer. Perhaps, I thought, I simply felt too good — by comparison with the way I’d felt while I was cast away in my artfully recovered memory — to be subject to any sudden descent into fear and despair.

In any case, the whole story had an oddly familiar ring to it. The emerging world picture that Rocambole was filling in for me had far more in common with the one I’d developed in my first lifetime than the one that Davida Berenike Columella had tried to sell me.

For a moment or two, I almost felt at home.

And then I saw the castle.

Thirty-Seven

The Palace of La Reine Des Neiges

W
hen it came right down to it, the damn thing was just an ice palace perched on a crag. It was a crazy ice palace, impossibly tall, with way too many turrets, balconies, gargoyles, and other miscellaneous frills, but it wasn’t an unimaginable ice palace. A good illustrator could have drawn it, or at least produced a rough sketch suggestive of its ludicrous complexity and its insane ornamentation. Perhaps there weren’t quite enough colors in the average paintbox to do justice to its gaudiness, and maybe there wasn’t enough room on the average page to permit the trick of perspective that made it loom higher than the sky itself, but any draftsman of genius could have made a fair stab at it.

That wasn’t the point, though.

The forest had lulled me into a false sense of existential security. It was a
nice
forest: a modest forest; a forest that a human could feel at home in. That, by virtue of some secret sympathy of the flesh, had made it seem normal as well as real. Unlike the garden of Excelsior, la Reine’s imaginary forest wasn’t overfull of birds and insects. There were plenty of birds, but they were discreet; I had heard far more than I had seen, and those I had seen had mostly been small and brown. The insects were equally discreet; their humming and stridulation laid down a sonic background for the more insistent calls and marginally musical songs of the birds, but none of it was insistent. It was, as I’d told Rocambole,
good
work. It was a simulation of reality so expertly done that it could have passed for reality if I hadn’t known it was fake, but it made no more demands on my powers of perception than that.

The castle was different. It wasn’t nice, it wasn’t modest, and it wasn’t any place that a human could feel at home in. It made not the slightest gesture in the direction of normality. It was worse than impossible, worse than paradoxical, worse than perverse. Like the garden of Excelsior — or, for that matter, the reconstructed cities of North America — it was way over the top; unlike them, however, it didn’t look
unreal
.

It looked, and was, more real than reality.

Humans have no direct knowledge of reality. What we see when we use our eyes is not something Out There but only a model constructed in our minds by clever meatware, built from the raw materials of our sensory impulses. Our sense organs are pretty good, and our meatware is very good indeed, but at the end of the day we’re all limited by the quality of the equipment that nature — with a little help from genetic engineers — provides. VEs generated by IT can bypass much of that fleshy equipment, and what ultrasmart machines can put in its place is considerably more powerful.

All my life, I’d argued that VEs would one day become so good that nobody would be able to tell them from the real thing. I’d erred on the side of commonsense. What I should have argued was that VEs would one day become so good that they’d expose our mental models of the world Out There for the shabby, ill-made and ill-imagined artifacts they were. Perhaps human programmers would have done as much, given time and a more demanding audience, but they hadn’t been given time enough or incentive enough. It had been left to the self-programming VE systems to get properly to grips with the problem, and to solve it.

The palace of la Reine des Neiges was a monstrosity, but it was real. It was so real that it shouted its reality from its ridiculous rooftops, and shoved its reality into my face and down my throat even while I was several hours’ walk away from the base of the unscalable pillar of rock on which it perched.

It was more real than anything I had ever seen before, more real than I had ever imagined anything could be. I breathed a curse or two while I tried, and failed, to take in the enormity of the sight.

Eventually, I said to my self-appointed friend: “How many human beings have seen something like this?”

He didn’t need to ask what I meant. “A few hundred,” he said. “The effect diminishes, with time — but you’ll never look at anything real again without knowing its limitations. If that distresses you, I’m sorry.”