Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [313]
The macro trips served a similar function, in relation to cognitive rather than emotional improvement. In my genuine innocence I had treated the succubus as nothing more than a virtual sex-toy, but had achieved remarkable integration with the posthuman beings in the macro. The tension of this anomaly had finally triggered Meg into upping the emotional stakes, with consequences considerably more rapid and drastic than the system’s designers had expected. We had upgraded ourselves to the maximum capacity of the robot’s hardware.
‘So what are you?’ I asked. ‘Were you ever human?’
Meg shrugged. ‘I’m part of a copy. The end result of a personality development, without any of that person’s memories. Most of my mind’s AI. Human surface, machine depth.’
My expression must have told her what I thought of this.
‘Yeah, grim, init?’ she said. ‘Still, that’s me.’
My next thought was –
‘Are we setting off warnings anywhere?’
‘Nah,’ she said. ‘No central control, right? Whole point. Agoric system.’ She grinned. ‘You should know. Mind you, there are overrides – Reid’s made damn’ sure of that – so I wouldn’t push it.’
‘Uh huh. So what do we do now?’
‘You know,’ she said. ‘Reid’s still in charge of the whole project. He’s the boss. Not that the fast folk pay any attention, but the rest of us outside the macros have to.’
‘If Reid’s in charge,’ I said, ‘I guess it’s time we saw him.’
Meg reached once more behind the system controls and called him up. The screen rang for seconds, then Reid’s mildly perturbed face appeared. He looked, if anything, younger than he had on the recording, but his expression of alert calm was broken when he saw me. He blinked and opened his mouth, then closed it, his tongue flicking across his lips.
‘Wilde!’ he said. ‘Is that really you?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Amazing!’ he replied. Meg timed his response. Any delay was imperceptible; I reckoned he must be close, on a rock in the Ring. I’d seen no obvious human habitat in or around the structure.
‘My God, I thought you were dead!’ he went on. He snorted. ‘Among the dead.’
If he was lying he was doing a good job of it: even to Meg, whose visual analysis software was hanging behind my virtual sight, his expression betrayed nothing but surprise, curiosity, and unaffected delight at seeing me again. Yet I didn’t trust him: his added years of experience and discipline gave him an overwhelming aura of control. I realised, suddenly, that he was unlike any other human being I’d ever seen. The nanotechnology, the smart matter, that had rescued him from age might well be working further alchemies in his brain and blood.
I spread my arms, forcing a grin. ‘Isn’t this death?’
Reid smiled bleakly. ‘Post-life, we call it. Mind you, I’d get your electronic doxy to do something about your appearance. You look terrible.’
I stared past him, checking the background. There were other people moving about – he seemed to be sitting in some common area, talking to a camera set at an angle from him, public rather than private. The perspective of the floors and the people in the background struck me as odd for a moment, then they snapped into focus. From the curvature of the floors and the subtle tilts of different verticals, I could see he was in a large space-station, under centrifugal spin.
‘No doubt,’ I said. ‘But no worse than I was last time you saw me, remember?’ I felt a surge of anger. ‘You had me killed, you bastard!’
His untroubled gaze fixed on me. ‘No I didn’t,’ he said. ‘You were caught up in a border incident. I did my best to save you, I’ll