Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [314]
I tried not to show how shaken I was. ‘So how do I come to be here?’ I demanded. ‘Don’t tell me you didn’t know they’d made a copy!’
Reid sighed, running his fingers back through his thick black hair. ‘Of course I knew. You were one of the first human subjects – we didn’t even know it would work. We took the copy within minutes of finding you, and stored the brain-scan and your genetic information. But as far as I knew, that was it – the copy was stored with the rest of the dead, in the bank. You’d made no disposition, so we left you there. You were never uploaded to a macro, I’m pretty sure of that. I didn’t know anyone had made a knock-off, and that’s the honest truth.’ His expression hardened. ‘And there’s no way I can find out, now – the engineers responsible uploaded themselves long ago.’
‘Well, I can hardly complain about my own existence,’ I said. ‘But I want out of your slave labour-force, if that’s all right with you.’
Reid smiled as if relieved.
‘Naturally,’ he said.
‘If that’s the word.’
His lips compressed. ‘Hmm.’ He reached for a keypad and tapped out a code.
‘OK, enough about me,’ I said. ‘What’s all this about the dead in a bank? What’s happened to Annette, and Myra, and – everybody else?’
Reid kept glancing off-camera, as if keeping an eye on another monitor. The activity in the background had quickened, with an air of greater urgency.
‘I think Annette’s safe,’ he said abstractedly. ‘She died in the, uh, troubled times, but she’d arranged for a copy. If it got made, she’s in the bank, same as you. Same as millions of people. It was cheap by then. People made back-ups routinely. To be honest we don’t know who exactly we’ve got. Myra, and your daughter, well – as far as I know they stayed on Earth. Goddess knows how things are going back there –’
‘There’s no contact?’
‘Fucking Earth-Tenders, they’re scared, they jam us – anything you’ve seen on our tapes was old or faked. No, we don’t have any contact.’ He turned abruptly, facing straight towards me. ‘Look, Wilde, I’ve got to go. You’re free now, I’ve zapped your restraints.’ He stood up, and leaned towards someone out of sight. I couldn’t hear the exchange which followed. Then Reid turned back, looking up at me with unguarded guile.
‘Wilde?’ he said. ‘Still there? Can you do something, right now? Go and check what’s going on in the nearest macro. There’s some problem –’
The screen greyed out.
‘Shit!’ I said.
Meg stood in front of me, a worried wraith. ‘What do we do?’
I shrugged. ‘Do as Reid said, I guess. Can you think of anything else?’
She shook her head.
I stepped into the simulated simulation-frame, and Meg stepped in after me. The sense of over-lapping body-images was momentarily disorienting, and then we meshed smoothly with each other and with the machine. Meg became a voice behind my shoulder, a shadow in the corner of my eye.
I had full control of the robot now – Reid’s zap must have disabled the run-file that separated me from its motor circuits outside of work periods and emergencies – and I jetted undisturbed through the structure towards a macro which I (now) could recognise as the one I’d been in contact with. Some of the other robots were doing desultory work, others drifted in their off-line mode or clung like roosting birds to girders. The Malley Mile glowed a faint blue in its rainbow ring: Cherenkov backwash from the probe.
I grasped a girder, inched closer to the macro’s surface, and plunged my face into its bath of freezing fire.
All is analogy, interface; the self itself has windows, the sounds and pictures in our heads the icons on a screen over a machine, the mind. It’s so in the natural body, and in the artificial, and many times so in the smart-matter world of the macro-organic.
Meg was stealing processing-power, time-sharing in greater minds. It was necessary for me, for us, to get a minimal, symbolic understanding of what was going on, but it