Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [195]
‘Amazing,’ Ax says, as if it’s anything but. ‘So it’s true what they say: information wants to be free!’
Dee shakes her head. ‘It’s nothing so grand,’ she explains. ‘It happened after I loaded up far more mind-tools than I was ever supposed to have.’ She tries to remember that second birth, that awakening, when she flipped through all those separate selves and saw herself, a ghostly reflection in all the windows.
Ax frowns. He flips a finger, and his cigarette-butt’s fizzing out on the bowl’s film of milk. An investigating cleany-crawly shies away, rearing its frontal segments. ‘When did this happen?’ he asks.
Dee smiles proudly, bursting to share her confidence. ‘Yesterday,’ she says.
Ax’s mouth hangs open for a moment. For a second the seen-it-all look drops from his face. He fumbles a cigarette-packet from inside the sleeve of his tee-shirt and lights one abstractedly, not looking, not offering. ‘But why,’ he continues, ‘did you load up all the extra software in the first place? What made you do that?’
Dee finds herself at a loss. It’s difficult to think back to her earlier simplicity, when she switched from one single mind to another and it was just her, it was where she lived. She was no less conscious then than she is now, but it was an undivided, naive, biddable consciousness, without detachment. But even there, somewhere in Self, was the lust to know. And the opportunity had come, and she’d taken it – with what, looking back, had been a sweet assurance that her owner would be pleased.
‘Instinct,’ she says, with a light laugh. Ax snorts and rolls his eyes.
‘All right,’ Dee says, suddenly stung. ‘Perhaps it did come from the animal body, or the bits of biological brain!’
‘We’ll leave that argument to the other side,’ Ax says.
‘The other side of what?’
‘The other side of the case,’ he explains with strained patience. ‘One way or another, this is going to end up in court. You know about the law?’
‘Oh yes,’ Dee says brightly. ‘I have a mind in here called Secretary. She has precedents coming out of my ears.’
‘Well,’ Ax says firmly, rising, ‘I suggest you go back over them. It’ll all seem very different, I can tell you that for nothing.’
‘OK,’ Dee says. Ax holds the door open, waiting. Dee stands up.
‘What now?’
He looks her down and up. ‘Shopping, I think.’ His voice conveys an epicene disdain.
She picks up her purse, sticks the pistol back in the top of her skirt, and glances around. She’s left nothing.
‘Nice room.’
‘Mine,’ Ax says. ‘I’d be very happy to share it with you.’
The outer door of the building booms behind them. ‘Stay,’ Ax commands it. Magnetic bolts set it ringing again. Ax grins at her and sets off to the left. Dee glances around as she strolls beside him. The house they’ve just come out of is four storeys tall, and narrow. So are all the others around here, in classic crowded canal-bank style, but there are no weathered brick walls or contrast grouting, no sills or window-boxes. Everything’s concrete, a skin slapped up in a hurry on webs of wire-mesh over iron bones, graffiti its only – and appropriate – decoration. The city’s spicular towers loom like construction cranes above the buildings, reducing them to on-site huts.
Smoke rises from among the stalls, steam from the pavements. Mist hangs along the canal surface. The spray-paint on the walls gets more and more vehement, reaching a climax of clenched fists and rockets and mushroom-clouds and dinosaurs at the entrance to an alley.
Ax stops and waves inward. ‘This way.’
The alley is no more than three metres wide but it’s a shopping street in its own right, and unlike what Dee has seen of the neighbourhood so far, it has a worked-for charm, the names of the shops painted in painstaking emulation of the clean calligraphy of twenty-first-century mall-signs. At the first