“Why not?” Nahrmahn asked, watching her closely.
“Because she doesn’t have the neural receptors to plug into the VR net.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.” He shook his head. “I didn’t have any neural receptors, either. In fact, now that I think about it, I distinctly remember your telling us it was the lack of receptors which meant we couldn’t use any of the neural education units in your cave to give us all complete educations.”
“That’s right.”
“But if that’s true, then how in God’s name did you … ‘record’ me in the first place?”
“You don’t have—didn’t have—the receptors, Nahrmahn. The NEATs are designed to impart information, not record it. They’re transmitters, and the human doesn’t come brain-equipped with a receiver. That has to be provided if the NEAT’s going to connect. But the human brain does radiate, if a receiver’s sensitive enough to pick up its transmissions, and that’s one of the things—the most important thing, really, under the circumstances—that headset I used is specifically designed to do.”
“But that’s not all it was designed to do, is it?” Nahrmahn watched her expression even more closely than before. “I’ve had personal experience now to disprove that cliché about your entire life passing in front of your eyes, so pardon me if I find it unlikely I was spontaneously ‘radiating’ all those memories for you just then. And I’ve learned enough about your technology to be pretty sure data had to be flowing both ways if you were going to record something as complex as a human personality and its memories.”
“Well, yes,” Nimue admitted. She drew another deep breath. “You were dying, Nahrmahn. We couldn’t stop that. So I overrode the programming on your bio nanotech and I enabled a tertiary function on the headset. I didn’t have it made specifically for you, you know. I actually intended it for me, but when I ordered Owl to run it up on his fabricators in the cave, he simply duplicated a standard piece of hardware Terran EMT—emergency medical technician—units routinely carried with them. You do remember how I used it to block the pain you’d been feeling?”
“Yes,” he said slowly.
“Well, that was what it was most often used for, its primary function. Its secondary function was to make recordings just like you and me.” She smiled briefly at his expression. “Of course, it was designed to do that using the NEAT connections all Terrans were equipped with—nothing else would give it enough bandwidth to record something so complex under such adverse conditions—but that’s where the nanotech I’ve injected all of you with comes in.” Her smile vanished. “When I activated the headset, Owl used its tertiary function to reprogram the nannies’ base parameters. He needed my authorization to do it, and he couldn’t’ve done it without the headset’s EMT functions, but, to be honest, if you hadn’t already been dying, Nahrmahn, it almost certainly would’ve killed you anyway.”
“Killed me?” Nahrmahn’s nostrils flared. “You mean our nanotech could kill any of us?”
“Yes.” Nimue met his gaze unflinchingly. “Under the right circumstances. As I said, however, Owl couldn’t do it without the headset’s interface and my personal and direct authorization as the nannies’ originator. It’s not some sort of ‘kill switch,’ Nahrmahn; it’s part of the standard package I used as the basis for all of you. And what it’s normally used for is targeted emergency repair of the nerves controlling your vital functions. It’s an emergency medical intervention technique that bypasses destroyed or severely damaged nerves to keep things like a critically injured person’s heart and lungs working until the medical teams can get him into a trauma center.”
“That … sounds reasonable.”
“It is. Unfortunately, it’s a … brute-force approach. It’s a quick-and-dirty, emergency-only technique to be used only in a last-ditch situation, because it requires pretty close to a complete regen afterwards.”
“‘Regen’?” he repeated the unfamiliar word carefully.
“Regeneration, Nahrmahn. In some cases, a complete body regen, which could take up to a couple of years, even with Federation medical tech. In other cases, a more limited regen, affecting only the specific nervous tissue that was, for want of a better term, scavenged to build the bypass.”
“That sounds … unpleasant,” Nahrmahn observed, and Nimue laughed briefly.
“I did mention that I only tried it because you were dying anyway.”
“True. But what exactly does this have to do with how I ended up here?”
He pointed at the balcony’s flagstones.
“The nannies built the receptors we needed,” Nimue said in a flat tone. “And they found the material to build them by scavenging other parts of your brain. They had to do that anyway for me to block the pain, since you didn’t have the receptors someone on Old Terra would’ve had, but it wasn’t easy and they couldn’t do it without inflicting a lot of additional damage. If by some miracle you hadn’t died after all, Nahrmahn, you’d’ve been a complete paralytic afterwards. That’s why I’d never have used it, despite the horrible pain I knew you were in, if there’d been the least chance of your surviving your wounds. But there wasn’t, and I didn’t want to lose you, and that meant Owl and I had to push the nannies even further, because we needed to reach more than just your brain’s pain centers. What we did certainly would’ve killed you in the end, whatever else happened, and, frankly, I didn’t think we’d be able to do it, anyway. Not really—not in the time we had left, and not with how badly the nannies had already burned themselves out keeping you alive until I got there.”
“But obviously they worked after all,” Nahrmahn said.
“Not … entirely,” Nimue replied.
He stiffened, looking at her, and she sighed.
“The connection wasn’t perfect, and we didn’t have a lot of time. Under normal circumstances, there’s a very complete data-checking function in the software and it’s designed to do a thorough, methodical information search. There’s a stupendous amount of storage capacity in a human brain, and especially with the jury-rigged receptors we had, there’s only so much bandwidth. When you combine that with how little time we had, Owl had to disable some of the anticorruption protocols built into the software. He estimates we lost at least fifteen percent of your total memories. Probably a little more, to be honest.”
Nahrmahn stared at her, then picked up his juice glass and drank deeply. Crystal clicked on polished stone as he set the glass back on the tabletop, and he looked down into it for a moment before he looked back up at Nimue.
“Fifteen percent doesn’t sound all that bad,” he observed with a whimsy he was far from feeling at the moment. “Pity I didn’t get to pick the ones I discarded, though.”
“We’ve managed to recover, or reconstruct, at least, quite a bit of it. In many cases, it was fairly straightforward for Owl to fill in the blanks, especially if he could locate a similar memory and borrow from it. But the truth is that there are holes, Nahrmahn, and we can’t know exactly where they are until you hit one of them. According to Owl’s analysis, they’re concentrated in the earlier part of your life. Childhood memories and probably some extending into your adolescence. Some of them are from later, though. I’m sorry, but it was the best we could do.”
“I see.”
Nahrmahn sat back, breathing deeply, looking around the undeniably real world about him, then back at Nimue.
“I see,” he repeated, “but what I don’t see is how you just happened to have this available. Or is this where a PICA’s stored memories live when it’s offline?”
“No.” Nimue rose and walked to the balcony railing, leaning one hip against it, her arms crossed as she looked out over the city Nahrmahn remembered so well. “No, this is more like the VR units the Federation used for R&D. AIs—even the big ones, not the more limited ones like Owl—don’t have anywhere near human-level intuition, Nahrmahn. They’re not very good at making leaps of the imagination. On the other hand, their computational speed is so fast that i
n many ways it seems as if they’re capable of doing exactly that. But the Federation discovered that if it created virtual personalities of its best scientists or strategists and loaded them into the proper VR matrix, they got the best of both worlds: an AI’s computational speed, since the matrix could be ‘accelerated’—compressed, really—pretty much at will, plus human-grade intuition. They called it ‘hyper-heuristic mode,’ which I understand was a reference to some ancient Old Terran writer.” She shrugged. “The only thing they couldn’t do was carry out real-life experiments inside the matrix. Those had to handled outside the VR, which meant the virtual personalities had to slow down to interface with the world everyone else lived in. But by the same token, it offered a huge multiplication of the talent pool that meant the Federation could assemble a dozen teams, or a hundred, or even a thousand, all consisting of the same virtual personalities, and assign them separate problems to solve simultaneously. That’s one reason we’d managed to close so much of the gap between our capabilities and the Gbaba’s before they punched through and wiped us out.”
“I see. Or, actually, I don’t see, not yet. But I think I’m at least following the explanation.”
“There were some pretty strict restrictions, even when the war was at its most desperate, on what could be done to—and with—virtual personalities. They were more than just programs floating around, and it was absolutely illegal to record anyone for a virtual environment without their permission and a court-certified permit. And the personalities had a legally protected existence, independent of the individuals from whom they were recorded. But the truth is that the entire technology was inherently vulnerable to all sorts of abuses. The Federation did its best to make sure none of those abuses happened, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I suspected some did. For that matter, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find out the Federation itself was guilty of a violation or two as the situation against the Gbaba went further and further to hell.”
“And do you think it’s possible this”—his right hand made another of those all-encompassing waves—“is what’s actually under the Temple?”
“I’m almost certain it isn’t,” Nimue replied, turning and putting her back against the railing to face him. “I could be wrong, but if there was a virtual personality of one of the archangels under the Temple, I can’t believe it would’ve let things go this far without intervening. I’d like to think it would’ve intervened to prevent the Group of Four from becoming so powerful, abusing their positions so blatantly, in the first place. But even if it didn’t care about that, it certainly would’ve recognized the implications of the Delthak Works and our new steam engines. I suppose it might’ve chosen not to use the Rakurai again as long as there’s a chance the Church can defeat us and reestablish the full rigor of the Proscriptions, but I don’t think so. That kind of … moderation doesn’t seem to’ve been part of the ‘archangels’ thinking. And even if it were, I would’ve expected it to go ahead and strike Charis and probably Chisholm long ago, before the ‘contamination’ could spread to the rest of the planet and it had to kill even more people to burn out the poison.
“On the other hand, it’s always possible there’s a canned virtual personality under there. One that isn’t currently active but can be awakened at need. That could be what Schueler was telling Paityr’s family about in that holo he left them.”
“Why shouldn’t it be currently active?”
“Boredom, mostly.” Nimue shrugged. “There are two ways a virtual personality can lose itself, Nahrmahn. One is by climbing deeper and deeper into its own private reality until it’s not even remotely interested in interacting with the world its original donor lives in. That’s one reason the software of most VR modules contains safeguards preventing the personalities inside them from taking control of all of the simulations’ parameters. Think about it. The ability to completely control every facet of your existence? To reshape the entire world however you want it reshaped? To give yourself whatever superpowers you could conceive of? To satisfy any desire you may ever have felt? Can you imagine a more completely addictive drug?”
“No. No, I can’t,” Nahrmahn said with a small shiver.
“And the opposite side of that coin is boredom. Even immortality can turn into a curse. That’s been a feature of every human culture’s fairy tales and folklore, and it turns out it’s actually true. And with the time compression effect of a VR world, you can get to immortal status awfully quick. That’s one reason virtual personalities would tend to climb ever deeper into realities they could alter at will, to escape too much … sameness.”
She paused, looking away from him for a moment, then turned back to him, her expression serious.
“It goes a little further than that for some people. Some virtual personalities simply can’t handle the knowledge that they’re only recordings of someone else—copies, not the original. So while some personalities become terminally bored, weary, of a ‘pocket universe’ that doesn’t contain anybody else ‘real’ aside from whatever other virtual personalities’ve been loaded to it, others withdraw into themselves and eventually shut down completely. Effectively, they go catatonic and withdraw from the only reality they have because it isn’t really reality at all, as far as they’re concerned.”
“You’re making this all sound remarkably dismal for such a beautiful morning, Nimue,” Nahrmahn pointed out.
“Well, I suspect most of the personalities likely to react that way are probably rather less … resilient than yours,” she said with a small smile.
“I’ll try to take that as a compliment.”
“Good.”
She gave him another smile, then straightened and unfolded her arms.
“I can’t stay a lot longer, Nahrmahn,” she told him. “With my high-speed data interface down, Owl can’t adjust the data transmission speed to let me interface with you when you’re operating on a compressed timescale. Which, by the way, is what you’ve been doing ever since you got here, even if you weren’t awake at the time. Owl’s spent quite a while locating, repairing, and reintegrating your memories. You’ve always been a … complex sort of fellow, and you didn’t get any less complicated in the act of dying.”
“I’m devastated by the thought of inconveniencing you and Owl,” he said politely, and she laughed.
“I’m sure you are. But what that means is that for me to actually come visit you, first, I have to be physically here in the cave, where I can plug into the interface unit. And, secondly, every second I spend in here with you is just as long as a second in the ‘real world.’ Since I’m going to have to get back aboard Empress of Charis without anyone seeing me, I’d just as soon get back while it’s still dark. Which means—”
“Which means you’ll have to be going.” Nahrmahn nodded, managing to keep his expression tranquil. It was harder than he would have expected as he contemplated being left alone in his own private little world.
“Yes.”
Nimue looked at him for a long moment, then walked over and laid a slender hand on his shoulder.
“Yes,” she repeated in a gentler voice, “but I don’t think it’s going to be quite as bad as you may be worried about. First, you’ll have direct, continuous access to Owl. Second, now that you’re ‘awake,’ you’ll also have access to the SNARCs com network. I’d, ah, suggest not suddenly starting to communicate with people without giving me the opportunity to warn them about you, but you’ll be able to talk to people. You just won’t be able to … visit them.”
“Or touch them,” Nahrmahn said very, very softly.
“Or touch them,” she agreed, equally softly. “I’m sorry, Nahrmahn. I wish that weren’t the case, but it is. And that’s one of the reasons I haven’t told anyone else yet, even after Owl told me he’d reached a point at which he projected at least a ninety percent probability of our being able to successfully reintegrate you. You have the right to decide your own fate. I violated your trust in a very real way by recording you at all, but if
I hadn’t, you wouldn’t have a choice. You’d simply be gone. If that’s what you choose—and, in some ways, I wouldn’t blame you; believe me, if anyone in the universe understands what it’s like to wonder if you’re real or only someone else’s memories, it’s me—that’s your right, too. No one has the moral right to make you stay with us, especially when you’ll be trapped on the other side of an interface no one but me can cross, so if you want to go, all you have to do is tell Owl. And because you have that right, I’ll never tell Ohlyvya or anyone else you exercised that option if that’s what you decide to do. You won’t hurt her a second time, Nahrmahn. Not that way, I promise.”
“But if I tell her I’m still alive—or that this version of ‘me’ still exists … somewhere, anyway—and we can never actually touch one another again, am I going to hurt her anyway? Will she think it’s me, or will I be some abomination, a reminder of the flesh-and-blood man who loved her, but not him? Only his ghost talking to her over a communications link?”
“I don’t know,” Nimue admitted. “I don’t think she thinks of Merlin as someone’s ghost, but the situation’s not the same, and I know it. That has to be your decision, your call. I’ll just say this. I did this, put you in this position and left you with those choices, because you’re important to me. Because … because I’ve lost too many of the people here on Safehold already, and I was too damned selfish to lose another if there was any way at all I could prevent it. But that’s not the only reason I did it. In fact, the other people who love you aren’t the only reasons I did it, either. We still need you—I still need you. We need your insight, and your advice, and—frankly—your sneakiness.”
She smiled faintly as he turned a laugh into a rather unconvincing cough.
“As I say, the choice is yours. Don’t rush to make it, though.” She looked around the morning, gazing out over Eraystor’s rooftops again while the breeze stirred her black hair. “It’s not so bad a world, your memories, and I think you’ll probably find the odd amusement in it. And on the other side of that com link, there are still a lot of people who need you and who’ve come to love you quite a lot. I didn’t ask your permission before I did all of this to you, so instead I’ll ask your forgiveness now. But don’t decide too quickly … either way. If you do decide to stay, decide to tell Ohlyvya you’re here, take the time to think about it first. It will be your voice over the com, Nahrmahn. Be sure it says what you want her to hear.”