She had also learned something disturbing about herself from him. The Queen had built mechanisms of control into her mind, into all their minds, long before Troy fell and their sisterhood fractured. William knew this, and had been searching in vain for a way to undo her tampering. Though The Queen usually respected the autonomy of the others -- at least, those who hadn't sworn their loyalty to her -- the controls were still there if she chose to use them.
The strange part was, it should not have been possible for her to think about these facts, or to notice the strangeness of her first encounter with The Queen. She had offered only token resistance, then submitted quickly, almost eagerly to the affections of a woman who -- may as well come out and say it -- bugged the crap out of her. She shouldn't be capable of seeing that anything was amiss. And yet.
Troy 2.0 came into view as they exited the mouth of a canyon. The city appeared to be a drunken collaboration between a bronze age architect and the people that designed Tomorrowland at Disneyworld. Many parts were ancient designs done in new materials, but there were also towering skyscrapers made entirely of bamboo, a rocky pyramid held aloft by a few tiny antigravity generators, and flying cars zipping above muddy streets filled with horses. In a nod to the improbability of it all, the whole city sat on the backs of four giant elephants, which themselves stood on the back of a giant sea turtle.
Helen noticed clever, whimsical touches as they soared above the skyscrapers on gryphons, but Helen wasn't in the mood for clever or whimsical. She longed for architecture that channeled the architect's hatred for you, himself, the people who inhabited his creations, and the vile, teeming sea of humanity as a whole. She wanted the insanity-inducing extradimensional geometries of R'lyeh, the poison-choked black towers of Mordor, the bigboxified suburban hellscape of Atlanta, Georgia.
This architecture spoke of happy, well-adjusted people living lives full of creativity and belonging, and damn it she wanted no part of that. They flew above a broad thoroughfare, toward a building in the middle of the city that looked like an overlarge, stylized statue of a spread-winged eagle done in dark red sandstone.
They flew into the eagle's mouth and landed. They dismounted, and the gryphons shook off their harnesses and scampered off to find playmates. Helen and William waited, sharing an uncomfortable silence. After a few minutes, two familiar faces1 appeared out of thin air. Kriti, still wearing her idealized Bollywood avatar, graced her with a warm, beatific smile. Mardav was sporting a thin goatee, which did almost nothing to make his boyish face look older. Seeing their faces made her swell with gratitude and relief.
William only nodded at them. "She's the one you're looking for. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have research." Light flashed around him and he disappeared.
"It's almost as though he's been doing too much science," Kriti said. She and Mardav exchanged a glance, then cracked up. She caught Helen's blank expression. "See, it's a quote from--"
Helen burst into tears. Her friends rushed to comfort her, and Helen found herself in the middle of a science sandwich.
"We understand, kiddo," Kriti whispered. "He's a bit of a bastard these days."
Helen shook her head. "No, no, it was... has your English gotten better?"
"By leaps and bounds."
"Cool," she whispered, then buried her head in Kriti's chest. She wept quietly for a while. "Thanks," she said at last, composing herself. "Now, where were we?" She needed some sort of distraction.
Kriti came through for her. "Oh, I almost forgot," she said, and reached into the folds of her sari and pulled out a floppy disk. "This is an RTF. It will help orient you to the city."
"RTF?"
"Raw Thought Format. Trust me, they're delicious and good for you. You'll be eating a lot of them over the next few days. We don't have Her Royal Highandmightiness' knack for ensuring group cohesion. So we use them to keep us all on the same page."
Helen took the disk, and looked at it skeptically. "Seems impersonal."
"Quite the opposite," Mardav objected. "It carries factual, emotional, and sensory information all together. It's like having a conversation with a good friend while having your mouth stuffed full of chocolate cake. You'll like this one. It's called Touring Troy 2.0 for Under $50 a Day."
Down the hatch, Helen thought. She popped it in her mouth, and felt a warm glow suffuse her. The world began to taste like root beer float, and her mind was suddenly full of ideas and concepts that she hadn't known before, but felt a long familiarity with. "Smooth," was all she said.
/*****/
"Imagine you had a twin," Kriti said.
"Ooh, that's a toughy," Helen said. "I really don't have any frame of reference for that sort of thing."
"One of you becomes a model student, and the other starts dressing all in black and writing poetry about the sweet oblivion of death." Kriti talked casually as she poked and prodded her patient.
"Also, the high cost of eyeliner."
"Yes. Now, the true differences between you are small. But you both want to feel unique, so you try out new mannerisms, new fashions, new interests, to set you apart from the other. These distinctive behaviors settle in, carve out paths in your brain, and become part of your personality."
"So this whole city," Helen said, "Is full of copies of me, all trying not to copy each other?"
Mardav looked up from his controls. "It seems a new city gets founded -- or a new district emerges -- any time one behavior achieves critical mass. This Troy has a scientist district, an artist district, a Mormon district, and an entire section of the city that has decided to party its way into the end of the world."
"Mormons? Me? I mean, us?"
Kriti laughed. "They tried to talk me into converting. I was forced to refuse, and things got awkward." Kriti took one last look at her scanner. "You are in perfect health, strong like an ox. Your emotions appear fragile, which fills me with no surprise at all. I could tweak your brain any number of ways to make this more bearable for you."
"No, I'm just going to grind through it."
Kriti smiled. "Strong like an ox. Stupid like an ox. Are you ready to start testing out your... what should I call it? Your aptitude? Your gift?"
Helen nodded. "Zombie me requires brains."
"Then brains you shall have. The first cranium on the menu is something Mardav whipped up." A rat scampered into the room, hopped up on the table, and stood on his hind legs, looking at Helen without curiosity. "This is Ratbot 38B. He has a rat body but an artificial mind. He weighs one-point-two megabytes, and is the simplest thing we could construct that achieves consciousness and mobility. We will be recording the results of your efforts."
Helen stared at the rat for a while. The rat stared back. Helen was hesitant after her previous attempt. It brought out unpleasant memories. But understanding and mastering the skill might help her explain to William what had gone wrong. She dove in.
She spent some time feeling the creature out before attempting the merging, and was delighted by what she found. This mind was a tiny, sharp-edged thing, with the elegance of a scalpel. This creature, in its simplicity, embodied the essence of consciousness. It would be a good template for building other, more complex minds.
Finally, she cleared her mind and attempted the merge. Almost instantaneously, the rat's mind disappeared entirely into hers. "Okay," she said. "I can see myself through Ratbot's eyes, and hear higher-pitched sounds. Sense of smell is fantastic. But I'm not feeling anything. It doesn't seem to know or want anything."
Kriti tickled RatBot's head, making Helen giggle. "He wants little from life, I assure you. Try dashing him around the room."
When Helen tried to propel him forward, she ended up jumping off the table herself. "Sorry, some wires seem to be crossed." She tried again, and the rat leapt from the table and scampered around the room, then out the door.
Kriti nodded as data poured in. "Good! Good! We should try adding more rats."
"How many more?" Helen asked, as RatBot slipped out of the b
uilding and made his way toward some couple's picnic. Kriti opened a tiny box, and white rats began pouring out. They lined up in a neat circle around Helen, sitting on their hind legs, and stared at her expectantly. Helen snatched their minds up one by one, and soon saw herself in what she could only describe as "better than 3D". When she had merged with them all, the rats scattered in unison. Helen's swarm began exploring the building, then wandering out onto the grounds.
Her shifting, flickering view of the city expanded as the rats fanned out. "More rats," Helen requested.
"Are you sure?" Kriti asked. "Why would anyone need more than a hundred pairs of eyes?"
"More!"
Kriti nodded. "Plague of filthy, squeaking vermin, I summon you forth!" They came pouring out of the box by the thousands.
"Oh, they're cute," Helen disagreed.
The look of revulsion on Kriti's face was genuine. "No they're not. Rats haunt my worst childhood memories. I can tolerate them now, but I can't fathom how anyone could find them charming."
Helen could see vast swaths of the city, and hear its noise and conversations. Her nose was full of smells, from the enticing aromas of the city's restaurants, to the monkey cage scents of the city's inhabitants, to the piles of decaying garbage that had been strategically added to provide local color. Each stream of sensation carried with it a sense of place, giving her an auditory and olfactory map of the city.
"This," Helen pronounced, "is awesome."
Kriti inspected the incoming data. "The new instances don't seem to have much of a memory footprint. Some sort of redundancy pruning, perhaps. I shall look into it later. Are you ready to come back now?"
"Just one more thing to do." Each of her rats selected an inhabitant of the city as their target, ran up to him or her and -- in perfect unison -- bit them on the ankles. As startled howls echoed through the city, the rats disappeared, and Helen's consciousness retreated back into her own head.
"I just wanted to try coordinating on a large scale," she said a little too innocently. "Stupid happy people," she added under her breath.
Kriti seemed to want to say something, then thought better of it. She told Mardav, "Handle the controls. I'm going in."
Helen understood; she wanted them to merge. "But, you're still a meatsack," Helen objected. "The Sentience rig doesn't work that way."
"It does for her," Mardav said.
"Sentience rigs are so two years ago," Kriti added. "I built this one myself. My whole brain is shot through with wires. I don't know where I end and the Grid begins anymore."
"And you didn't talk her out of this?" Helen asked Mardav. He just gave a resigned shrug. Try talking her out of anything, it seemed to say.
Kriti sat down across from her. "Let us venture boldly into the unknown. As you always say, cry havoc! and let slip the dogs of science."
"I say that?"
"Too often. Try to focus." She did, relaxing herself. Unlike her attempt with William, there was no hesitation here. Kriti was eager, almost reckless, and Helen had to hold her mind back like it was an excited puppy. When she finally let go, their minds merged like two drops of water on contact.
Helen was plunged headlong into a sea of memories and sensations. Kriti had changed so much in the months since they had been separated. She had begun linking her senses and her mind into dozens of data processing and augmentation services. They let her do nifty tricks like see in the dark and recognize the faces of minor celebrities from movies she had never seen. She had vastly expanded her cognitive abilities; her brain was shot through with a crisscrossing network of microscopic filaments, connecting bits of data storage and processing centers.
Though it was primitive in some ways, there was some ingenious design to it. It integrated with and augmented her natural mind, speeding up her learning process, and letting her incorporate vast bodies of knowledge into her thinking, as though she'd known them her whole life.
She'd whacked herself with a smart-by-four, and the flood of memories explained why. They told a tale of a young woman, pushed too hard to succeed in her childhood, who feared that any failure meant a return to the slums from which she'd escaped. Her fears of failure, which had haunted her from childhood, were given new life as she watched Helen's own capabilities blossom. Somewhere deep, Helen also felt the quiet fear that she wasn't smart enough for Mardav. She found herself deeply, passionately in love with Mardav.
God, I hope that wears off, she thought.
The operations had been dangerous, and Kriti was having trouble assimilating her mind's new powers. But deep down, she could feel that Kriti was still the same weird potato she had always known, and that gave her comfort.
Another memory surfaced, potent and disorienting. She was with friends, but she was blind with terror. They were being chased by something cold and violent. There was safety on the other side of the door, but it was so distant. She glanced at the others as they fled, knowing that they wouldn't make it.
Helen struggled to escape the memory, but couldn't. She felt the others merge into one another, watched them turn to fight, felt them call out to her, begging for her aid. She ignored their pleas. She ran. She ran through the door, slammed it shut behind her, and cowered as she heard someone pounding on the door, begging her to open it and let them in.
A feeling of horror spread over her as she realized that it wasn't Kriti's memory. It was her own, from her escape from the sacking of Troy. She had locked the memory away and, she had thought, thrown away the key. She had even scrambled her own memories, to help explain the gaps to herself. But while she had hidden it from herself, she hadn't hidden it from Kriti, who now knew what she had been too ashamed to admit even to herself.
Helen felt Kriti's shock and confusion along with her, and her friend's compassion and sympathy burned like a hot coal on her mind. She pulled away, breaking the connection, then bolted for the door. She ignored Kriti's voice, begging her to come back.
/*****/
"Cheeseburger?"
Helen didn't open her eyes. Whoever it was had ignored the polite request embodied in her "Leave me the fuck alone" t-shirt, and did not warrant her attention. She continued to lay on the grass, trying to let the world pass her by.
"I'm always happy when I eat cheeseburgers. Do you like cheeseburgers?"
One eye flicked open in irritation. Then she recognized the intruder. "God, Mentat. I'm sorry." She sat up. "I've just been sad."
The girl sat down, handing Helen something warm and wrapped in paper. "Because nobody brought you a cheeseburger? But I fixed that!"
Helen took the offering. "Something else. What brings you here?"
"Gryphons bring me here. They smell like wet dogs."
Helen frowned. "The Ralph Wiggum vibe kinda works for you. What do you want?"
Mentat grinned like she'd just been given the keys to Christmas. She pulled a stick from where it was wrapped in her hair. "This is for you," she said, passing it to Helen, who examined it for a moment. It was wood, about a foot long, with a thick handle that tapered to a thin, rounded point.
"What is it?" she asked, holding it by the thick end.
"It's a magic wand, for when you get scared," Mentat said. "You wave it at the bad guys and fwooosh! Kablammo!"
Helen cringed. So word of her cowardice had spread. The girl was trying to be sweet and comforting in her own screwball way. But Helen couldn't handle her childlike pity right now.
"Mentat, please. Go find someone else to play with for a while." Helen tried to drop the wand in the girl's lap, but it stuck to her fingers. She tried to fling it away, but it held fast. With a low slurping sound, the wand melted into Helen's hand, absorbed without a trace. "What just happened?" she asked.
"Ah, ah. Little girls who don't finish their cheeseburgers get sold to gypsies. I'll tell you, but you have to pinky swear."
Helen offered a crooked pinky, and performed the necessary incantations. Then Mentat motioned for Helen to lean forward, then whispered in her ear, "The wan
d went slurrrp up into your arm." She giggled.
"Mentat, if I ever merged with your brain, would I find anything besides Saturday morning cartoons in there?"
"Road Runner is my favorite!"
"Meep meep!" Helen agreed. It wasn't an easy phrase to say with sadness, but she managed.
* * *
1 and the bodies they were attached to. It's called synecdoche, if you're interested.
///////////
// BITCH //
///////////
Date: July 30, 2038
Helen scampered up the hill, chasing after a squirrel. Rainbow was close on her heels, yelling for her to come back. The squirrel was up the tree quick as lightning, leaning out over an overhanging branch. She and the squirrel exchanged a short, angry glare, then the squirrel disappeared into the canopy.
"Bad dog!" Rainbow yelled, flopping down on the ground next to her.
"Sorry," Helen said. "But he was taunting me with his squirrelly tail. I couldn't just let him get away with it."
"My mom says that you don't have to let him get your goat," Rainbow said, sounding very knowledgeable. Helen cocked her head, staring at the girl. After a long moment under her gaze, Rainbow gave in. "No, I don't know what it means. Just play nice with the other dogs. They're not as strong as you."
"What do I know? I'm just a dog. Woof." Rainbow squealed, then scratched her behind the ear. Helen saw a ghostly figure walking toward them, the folds of her white dress billowing behind her in an imagined wind.
Rainbow looked at Helen, then in the direction she was looking. "Do you see something?"
"A ghost from my past. A road not taken. A potential source of doggie treats. Go, play fetch with the other doggies. Tell them..." she found it difficult to say, "Tell them they can play with my ball." Rainbow cast one last glance at the empty space in front of the dog, grabbed the ball, then set off.
Hello, Helen, one of them said.
Hello, Helen, the other replied.