Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [217]
He’s been going on about the iniquities of society for a few minutes now. He’s talked about things that have happened to him, and about how they’d be all right with Reid but not with Wilde. Wilde wouldn’t have stood for it. This Jonathan Wilde seems to be a mythical figure, somebody who knew Reid and lost out to him and who might, equally mythically, some day come back and avenge the oppressed. Dee has listened politely, filing it all away for more detailed study later. She’s handling it as she used to handle social occasions. But what he’s just said brings her up short.
‘What do you mean, an old man?’ she asks.
‘Somebody who hasn’t re-juved before stabilising,’ Ax replies flippantly. ‘Quite a sight.’
Dee shudders, thinking of how people used to fall apart like badly maintained biotech, how they’d eventually just stop. Horrible. She’s sat through classical movies with Reid, and they give a very different picture of Earth than historical romances do. Nobody lives happily ever after.
‘I saw an old man recently,’ she says. ‘In the last couple of weeks. An old man with a girl, in a truck. Called up Reid’s front office, said it was a wrong number.’ She glances sidelong at Ax. ‘Not many old men here. Could that have been Wilde?’
Ax looks at her with sharp scepticism. ‘What was this guy like?’
‘Hmmm,’ says Dee. She moves her lower lip over her upper teeth, then wipes her thumb across the teeth and observes the streak of lipstick.
‘Something bothering you?’ Ax asks, amused.
Dee stops in mid-stride. ‘Yes.’ The memory belongs to Secretary, but it resonates with several of her other selves as well: all the new ones she’s loaded up have this odd imperative, linked to the memory and tagged to their root directories.
‘Just a minute,’ she says.
There’s a bollard a few metres away. She walks over to it and sits down, flipping the back of her black lace skirt carefully out of the way, so that she sits on the bollard, not on the skirt. The iron is cold through fine leather, thin silk and bare skin. Ax, watching, gives an appreciative moan, but Dee has already boot-strapped into the dry clarity of Sys.
When Dee is in Self she thinks of Sys as ‘Sis’, and indeed it’s what (she imagines) a big sister would be like: knowing everything, correcting her, tidying up after her, picking up and putting away the shrugged-off costumes of her quick-changed selves. She doesn’t go into Sys very often, and doesn’t stay in that thin, chill air for long.
Now, her cold inward eye takes in the hierarchy of her selves and minds and tools, the common structures and the ceaseless activity of Sys that make them one personality and not a squabbling legion contending for control of her body. She traces the memory of the phone-call, as it’s passed from Secretary to Self to Sys, and then sees its onward cascade over the days in which she loaded up all that extra software: Scientist, Soldier, Spy, Seneschal…and on to Stores and Secrets, out on a limb of their own. These last two she can’t access. They’ve always been in her mind anyway; but now patient, mindless subroutines of Sys are systematically besieging them, hurling code after code at their mental locks like antibodies at a virus.
She drops back in to Self. Ax is looking down at her with puzzled concern.
‘So that’s how it happened,’ she says, rising.
‘How what happened?’
‘How I became me. It was that phone-call. There was a command-code carried in it. It told me to load up and seek and search and…and I did, and when there were enough selves and data and so on in my head, it happened! I woke up!’ She gives a flighty laugh. ‘Is that how it is with you? Do you get lots of selves, and then become self-aware?’
‘To the best of my knowledge,’ Ax says gravely, ‘no. That is not how humans become self-aware. It happens at an early age, you understand.’
He shakes himself. ‘You’re telling me you woke up because of a phone-call from an old man?’
‘Yes.