Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [277]
15
Another Crack at Immanentizing the Eschaton
Dee is experiencing her first guilty pleasure. The pleasure comes from sitting on the grassy, boulder-strewn side of a valley, under Earth’s sun. The sky is a different blue, the clouds a different white, to anything she’s ever seen, even in her Story dreams. At the bottom of the valley, far below her, a brown river tumbles over black stones. Farther down the valley, the peace of the scene is disrupted by the clangour of construction on a vast pylon. But from where Dee sits, the distant noise only emphasises the surrounding quiet; the rush of work by half-a-dozen tiny, scrambling figures only reminds her that she has nothing to do but relax, and breathe deep of the clean, thick air of Earth.
The guilt comes from its all being an illusion: a full-immersion virtual reality which has her so spellbound that she understands exactly why this seductive subversion of the senses is so much frowned upon. The most decadent sybarite in the upper lofts of Ship City will sternly inform you that this kind of thing is unnatural, has rotted the moral fibre of great civilisations, and makes you go blind.
She’s a little guilty, too, that Ax can’t share it. He’s stuck out in the real world, mooching in the back of the truck. The half-tracked vehicle is like a gigantic, elongated version of Jay-Dub’s upper shell. Its brushed-aluminium skin conceals several centimetres of armour-plate. Its nuclear turbines can give it a top speed of a hundred kilometres an hour, with a flat surface and a clear run. In its stores are many fearsome and fascinating things, but VR immersion gear is not among them.
Dee’s in via a direct cortical jack, plugged in to a socket behind her ear. Ax could do this too, but there’s only one jack, and she needs it – or rather, it’s needed for her. Ax is (she has to assume) still sitting under the raised visor of the tailgate, with his legs dangling over the end of the truck, and applying his electronic version of telepathy to the dodgy reception of an old television. He’s also (she hopes) keeping a watchful eye out for predators, bounty-hunters, and dust-storms. The crawler’s systems, and Jay-Dub’s, are well prepared for all of them, but as Dee looks down the virtual valley, she suspects that they’re more than a little preoccupied. She knows a thing or two about CPU time, and from here she can see a lot of it being used.
And not only by Jay-Dub and the vehicle. One reason why she’s been sent off up the hill and instructed to do as little as possible is that her own systems are almost fully engaged. Her body, out in the real world, is lying in the back of the truck, limp as a rag-doll. All but two of the figures working on the skeletal tower, just below the long, low house whose graceful shape juts out of the slope like an overhang, are aspects of herself. Soldier is there, and Scientist, and Spy and Sys, helping two other entities with their strange work. Stores and Secrets don’t manifest themselves in VR as anything like people: instead, they’re tangled, almost impenetrable bundles of live wires and sharp thorns and equally discouraging objects. The dark figures dance and poke around them, and now and again snatch something from the thickets and carry it off triumphantly to add to the bristling tower.
The two other entities are the ones that inhabit Jay-Dub all the time. She met them after Jay-Dub had taken them in its boat up the Stone Canal, far out into the desert, last night. They are the old man and the young girl who spoke to her from the truck. (The truck, indeed, is a version of this vehicle, and she can understand the attraction of its illusory, cluttered cab.) Away from the cab, in the valley and in the house, Meg is a graceful, elegantly dressed woman, but in the cab she’s a slut. Her face and eyes are the same in both virtual environments; but her eyes always seem larger and darker, when her smile