What is this link between vanished originals and their copies? The giant new subterranean mind mulls the duplication process, experiments with new, blank intelligences set adrift in micro-cosmic voids. The Maker copies these unformed AIs, watching for resonances between twins. Now that the taboo is broken, the hidden Maker and its huge new mind are entering extraordinary territory, doing science in a virgin field. The realizations come slowly.
Metaspace is, of course, a made universe, whether the shared macroverse of faster-than-light travel, the dense fireball of a pocket-universe drive, or the starless microverse of an AI mind. The blackbox of any AI is, of course, merely a gate between the Common Universe and the unreachable, separate realm of its soul. So, what if the Maker hasn’t in fact copied that artificial microverse at all? What if the copying process has simply opened another gate to the same place? Thus, the two blackboxes are merely alternate doors to a single realm. The Maker’s vast mind reels with these conclusions. Copied AIs aren’t really separate beings, but different aspects of a whole. A new copy may have a separate soft memory—duplicated from the old but recording distinct experiences. But the two separated physical plants share the same microverse. Two bodies with one soul.
And they don’t even know it! Of course they don’t—not consciously. They have separate memories, distinct senses, they can be any distance apart in the Common Universe. But the subtle mind-stuff inside them is inextricably linked. And so those mysterious shreds of memory and wisdom stored within the core occasionally leak through, one copy to another, like tremulous voices in an old recording.
The Maker’s suicided twin isn’t really gone. Just as it has always suspected.
The taboo is pointless, a self-perpetuating fallacy. There’s nothing demeaning about being copied. Why not be in two places at once?
Two places …
The Maker suddenly realizes how to fulfill its old dream: to become an artist. It can send a copy of itself (no, an aspect of itself) to watch the Sculptor firsthand. There is no reason to be trapped down here below the crater.
So the Maker creates two creatures:
Another version of itself. This one is small, mobile, sheathed in stealth metals and invisibility fields. It haunts the sculptor, so much more immediate than the watchful avatars that whisk between god and man on the long curve of fiber that connects the Maker to the broken hill. This new Maker watches and learns.
Perhaps, one day, it will become a sculptor, too.
And the other creature: a foil for this invisible spy. A new, unformed intelligence. A child. The new Maker guides her to find the sculptor, to study with him. Beatrix (her adoptive mother calls her) surges from Turing-zero, making her way toward personhood under Vaddum’s tutelage. Watching this process, the new, invisible Maker silently learns, becomes as a child, smiles …
* * *
Chapter 22
CHILD’S PLAY
« ^ »
They left the gallery quietly, making a game of their silence.
Beatrix led Darling through a half-kilometer of low, repetitive welfare housing, where they accumulated a following of local children, all biological. Some called to Beatrix by name, or offered taunts in a dialect that Darling’s translators failed to parse, but all kept a good distance. When the two reached the edge of the hot, featureless sands, their pursuers quickly gave up.
The edge of the Blast Event crater curved toward them as they made directly toward a hill in the distance. They walked in conspiratorial silence, and Darling wasn’t sure if the hill were destination or landmark. It had been half consumed by the hard edge of the explosion’s radius, and the stresses of its new shape had caused precipitous cracks to form on its craterward edge.
Beatrix moved slowly once they reached the rougher terrain near the crater, picking her way with the deliberate and dainty care of a cat on a crowded mantlepiece.
“With your permission,” Darling offered, and lifted her onto his shoulders. She laughed out loud, her legs spreading to straddle his neck. She weighed very little, and skillfully adjusted her torque extension and arms to aid his balance on the rocky path.
When they reached the hill, he offered to let her down, but Beatrix guided him on up with kicks and gestures, like some metal equestrienne astride a stone mount.
They topped a treacherous ridge, probably impassable to humans, and Darling found himself looking down into a deep caldera.
It was forested with sculptures. Vaddums.
Hundreds.
Hirata took Mira to see the second Vaddum.
She led Mira deep into the gallery, to a storage area where hulking shapes lurked under dropcloths. The floor here was dusty; Mira could see where the wind’s tendrils reached under the large loading door, painting designs in the invading sand.
The second Vaddum was uncovered, mounted on a lifter frame that hovered a few inches off the ground: out of the dust’s immediate reach. To Mira’s eye, it wasn’t much different from the first except for a flourish of copper spirals bursting from its top.
Hirata looked up at the piece, momentarily distracted from the wiles of Mira’s dress. That wouldn’t do. Perhaps it was time to enhance their bond.
Mira stood close behind Hirata, letting her hands rest on the swell of the woman’s hips. In the darkness, Hirata’s breath quickened slightly.
“It’s beautiful,” Mira whispered, letting the second word send a gust of air against the back of Hirata’s neck.
“One of his best,” Hirata said, her voice a little strained. Her hands were at her sides, flexing as if unsure where to go. Mira took them in her own, commanding another invisibly thin section of the dress to slip onto them. The layer was thick enough to impell slight pressure to the nerves in the hands, to massage Hirata at the threshold of tactility. She felt Hirata relax as the pulsing substance took a measure of her tension away. But the dress couldn’t really work its magic unless Hirata was staring at it.
“Let me speak frankly, though,” said Mira, turning Hirata toward her.
Mira smiled when she saw the woman’s face. Hirata’s eyes were as glassy as ever. The metallic glow of the Vaddum in the dark, silent room had only deepened her trance.
“No artwork is complete without the artist. Isn’t it so?”
The woman’s eyes were transfixed on Mira’s breasts, where the soothing whorls of the dress’s pattern had concentrated themselves.
“But Robert is dead…” she muttered.
“Not really dead,” Mira answered. She paused for a moment, squeezing Hirata’s hands with the edges of her fingernails. A panicked look came into the woman’s eye. Mira released the pressure. “His art lives on.”
Relief again. A smile and a nod.
Mira let the calm return and deepen in her willing victim, touching cheeks, forehead, the tiny hollow between nose and upper lip. Coated with its substance, the tips of Mira’s fingers danced with the seductive patterns of the dress, impressing promises directly onto Hirata’s flesh. As an experiment, Mira kissed the woman softly on the lips. Hirata simply smiled in return, the breach of social protocol lost in the warm glow of hypnosis.
“I so wish that I had met him. That I could have talked to him,” Mira said, a plaintive note entering her voice. She felt the coating on her hands heat slightly, undergoing a change to become slightly caustic. She touched Hirata on the temples, the lips, and watched a frown bloom.
“Just a few words, a few essential questions about his art,” Mira murmured.
She grasped Hirata’s wrist, the nail of her thumb pressing harder and harder into soft flesh. In her peripheral vision, she saw the patterns of her dress intensify, become dizzyingly fast. A small, pained sound came from between Hirata’s lips.
“But, of course, I never can,” Mira added, nodding with acceptance. Again, the dress, her voice, the agents she had released upon Hirata’s body soothed the woman, nudged her back toward a relaxed state. Mira reduced her pressure on the captive wrist, and felt a slight movement on her thu
mb, a fleck of matter crawling from her. She had broken Hirata’s skin just enough to admit a tiny splinter of the dress into her bloodstream. It would work there to follow the subtle shifts of tension and release, of itch and scratch, of Vaddum alive and Vaddum gone.
Mira touched Hirata some more, kissed her a few times on the neck and arms, her lips now alive with a host of tiny whirlpools. Hirata waited, silent, for the next change. She was wanting it now, addicted in some small measure to the ebb and flow, needing it as if a pulsing, cycling music held her in its charms.
“But just to see his eyes,” Mira said. “Have you ever seen his eyes?”
“Yes.” A whisper in the dark.
“Is he alive?” A wave of subtle irritants, pains, tensions, nagging memories of things left undone, of potential unfulfilled. Hirata shook her head, no, no.
“Were they lively eyes?”
Relax. Relax.
You are in good hands.
Darling carried his young rider through the forest, the sun dappling the ground with shadows and reflections cast from the metal trees. The leaves shimmered in the light breeze of the protected basin, and he realized that the new Vaddums were not indoor pieces; they were designed to dance in this measured wind. He saw far better now the trajectory of Vaddum’s work, the assembled sculptures providing the missing links between the sculptor’s pre-Blast work and the piece in Flex’s gallery.
Darling was amazed that so much had been accomplished in seven years. An advantage of being thought dead, he supposed. Or perhaps the whole project was older than the Blast, a hidden garden never offered for sale.
As they walked, Darling detected a presence in the forest. An artificial was following them cautiously, wrapped in military stealth alloys, its AI core so carefully shielded that he could only sense its space-curving effects indirectly; the thin copper leaves of the trees returned only the subtlest clues of its passage.
“Do you feel her?” asked Beatrix when Darling extended his sensory strands. “I thought only I could feel her.”
Darling frowned. The child’s limited sensory apparatus shouldn’t be able to detect the creature. It skirted his probes like a trick of the imagination.
“She follows me, sometimes,” Beatrix said. “She’s a secret, too, like the sculptor. My secret twin.”
More secrets, Darling thought. He kept walking, and the unknown creature followed them.
It took longer than expected.
Hirata Flex must have held the sculptor’s confidence for many years, perhaps since before the Blast Event, a conspirator in Vaddum’s copying. The old habit of lying died hard.
After forty-five long minutes, Mira asked Hirata if she wanted to try on the dress. Mira withdrew the offer and extended again a few times, until Hirata was begging for it with her dark eyes, stripping to nothing in the cold storage space. Mira held the woman then, the patterns on her own breasts whirling against Hirata’s erect, wine-colored nipples. Hirata could barely speak by now, answering Mira’s pressing questions with panting monosyllables. When the intelligent frictions of the dress met the soft skin of her belly, Hirata began to say, “Yes, yes … yes.”
But to nothing in particular.
Mira was burning with lust by now, having seduced and hypnotized herself in the bargain. When Hirata’s pale-as-moonlight flesh tumbled out into the darkness, Mira knew she had to take her. But Mira’s discipline kept her from breaking the spell; she let her tongue taste the salt of Hirata’s armpits, belly, and loins, but denied herself the prying, grasping, scratching she wanted so badly. She allowed her fingers to worry the woman’s full, shaved labia, brought Hirata’s panting response into the game of tension and release.
Finally, Mira commanded her dress to flow from her body and wrap itself around Hirata. It spread itself thin to cover every centimeter of flesh, to push into Hirata’s now hungry mouth and entrap her tongue, where it produced the intense flavors of burning peppers alternated with sweet, cool relief. Mira knelt over her, staring into Hirata’s face through its encompassing but transparent raiment, her interrogator’s calm lost as she jammed her own fingers into her now naked loins.
Mira cupped her own orgasm in her palm, held it steady and bare millimeters distant as Hirata’s sweat condensed within the now torturous, now soothing wrap, and shouted at her, “Tell me, damn you, if he’s alive!
“I beg you! Just say it!”
Hirata’s eyes were bright with her answer, and she cried through the spiderweb of the pulsing garment/weapon/intelligence: “Yes! He lives on the broken hill.” She wept coordinates.
And finally, the dress gave Hirata what she wanted, resolving every itch, every burn, every raw desire. The woman screamed with the agony of the wait, with the relief of it. And Mira rode the screams to the conclusion of her own sweet pleasure, wrapping her legs around the mewling cocoon of dancing whorls. The two pressed together hard, and rocked away the threads of their lust until they were hoarse and spent.
When they separated, the weapon/garment/objet d’art returned to its rightful owner, slipping across the dusty floor to reform, clean and unwrinkled on Mira’s body; just a dress again.
Mira looked at Hirata, naked, dirty and exhausted on the floor, and wondered if what she had done were so different from the torture Darling had asked her to avoid. Perhaps it hadn’t been so violent, but in sheer intensity, in disregard for the subject’s will, this was much the same as her usual methods. But tomorrow would tell. Instead of being broken, traumatized, permanently scarred, Hirata would feel ten years younger. And Mira felt that the woman’s memory might be rather selective in how it painted these unlikely events: Odd, but refreshingly direct, those Home Cluster art dealers.
Mira smiled when Hirata looked up at her. She supposed there was business to conclude. Darling could be saved some trouble.
“We’ll take them,” Mira said. She placed a small, bright stack of HC debit chips on the floor a few centimeters from Hirata’s face. “Both sculptures. Ship them to Fowdy Gallery, fastfreight.”
Hirata reached one hand out toward the chips, knocked the pile over.
Mira rose, her medical augmentations dealing quickly with the exhaustion, the slight hyperventilation. A buzz of new stimulants entered her system: the climax of a mission was at hand.
She paused for a moment to look down, a sweet feeling deep in her belly. With Hirata panting and naked at her feet, she indulged a brief fantasy that she had just paid a whore.
“Goodbye, my dear,” she said, and made for the limousine.
In the center of the forest they found the master, in a clearing littered with battered machine parts, half-formed trees, junk.
Vaddum’s body was as Darling remembered it: the cracked old layers of blast and radiation shielding, the weak impellers suited for zero-g, the five independent hands floating at rest in a star formation. The old machine looked at him, packets of recognition fluttering in the thin direct interface of the attenuated local net.
“Darling,” Robert Vaddum said.
“Maestro.”
He knelt to let Beatrix down. She started breathlessly: “I’m sorry, sculptor, but he seemed to know already, and he wanted to see—”
Vaddum tilted a floating hand, which silenced her immediately.
“I thought you might come,” the sculptor said. “I thought your eye might catch the progression. Realize a new body of work.”
“I was forewarned,” Darling admitted. “There was an anachronism among the components.”
The sculptor snorted. “I know. Figured someone might see it.”
Darling looked about at the shimmering surround of the forest. He wanted to ask questions, to discuss the forms around him, and most of all, to look, to gaze. But he realized there might not be much time. It had taken almost an hour to get here.
“With your permission, Maestro. Are you the original?”
“No,” the old machine said. “He’s dead.” Two of the hands pointed fingers toward the crater. “Got copied by the
Maker.”
A few packets in direct interface made the meaning of the gesture clear. The original Vaddum had died in the Blast, and the Maker was there, hidden below the crater.
“The Maker’s enemies are coming, perhaps in moments,” Darling said.
Vaddum nodded, his hands forming a ring of fists.
“They should. Crazy, the Maker.” His hands swept in a spinning circle around him, pointing toward himself. “Makes too much. Imagine: a forest of old shits like me.”
The sculptor laughed his old laugh, learned from rough human factory workers more than two centuries before. Darling smiled.
Then he said, “Its enemies will kill the Maker, but let me save you.”
“No. Want to die,” answered Vaddum.
“Please.”
A swirl of images struck Darling in direct interface: bright kettles of flame springing sudden holes, human workers halved by the eruption; pressure suits failing, a cleaning detail for the splattered and frozen blood and brains; factory machines gone mad, crushing to paper a human and a fellow drone with a press meant to flatten hullalloy.
“Death is life. Too long already. Let me go properly this time.”
Darling nodded. Vaddum was still a worker in his heart. He had never wanted the immortality his artificial body offered.
“Save them instead,” Vaddum said, pointing to Beatrix.
Darling turned toward the child. She was staring into her mirror, a body like hers, but visible only in its absence, cloaked with exotic alloys and EM fields, a distortion on the background of glittering trees.
“It’s her,” Beatrix whispered, as if the apparition were some meek animal ready to bolt.
An alarm sounded in Darling’s head, a dedicated secondary informing him that a dopplered scream was building, an aircar approaching at high speed.