Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [322]
But I anticipate.
Reid talked to me personally before we were all offered work contracts. He looked forward to meeting me again in my human form, explained reasonably enough that it wouldn’t be available for a year or two yet, and that in the meantime he wanted me to work – as an independent contractor, just like all the others – on an important project. I’d have lots of (genuinely) non-human robots and other machinery to supervise, loads of kudos and money to earn, and best of all a bigger computer to live in, with more scope for virtual recreation and freedom to communicate with others. We could set up shared worlds, enjoying a human equivalent of the macro trips…
‘Great,’ I said; and my CPU (the whole thing and its peripherals turned out to be, when removed from the robot, about the size of my first digital watch) was packed along with many others, drogue-dropped to the surface and plugged into a new, shiny and robust machine. Meg, whose increased intelligence never got in the way of her continued embarrassing devotion, selected a house and landscape and got to work editing them into an enjoyable place to live, while I got on with my work in what I was pleased to call the real world.
I built the Stone Canal.
The city’s other canals, ring and radial and capillary, were for transport. This one would be for more than that. It was to be the city’s main source of water (other than rain) and the water would come from space. Comets, broken up in advance, would be guided in to crash on the range we called the Madreporite Mountains, about a hundred kilometres from the city. Much of the water from the cometary ice would evaporate. This wasn’t a problem: we wanted it in the atmosphere. The runoff would flow into the Stone Canal. Its main significance wasn’t so much the water, however, as what could be extracted from it.
For tens of kilometres along and under its banks, beginning at the Sieve Plates – a system of dams – at the foot of the mountains, pipes and pumps and machinery were to extract from the cometary water all the minerals and organic molecules it contained. These would then be fed into what we called ‘plants’ – basically solar-powered, smart-matter chemical processing units, concentrating the useful material for subsequent harvesting. (You can see why we called them ‘plants’.)
The planning and exploration took me months, long before the first soil-moving machinery rolled out of the automatic factories on the edge of the city. Towards the end of those months I had a visit from Reid.
We lived, Meg and I, in a virtual valley. Our house was on the slope of one side, and down below was a small village, with a pub. The village and its inhabitants were, frankly, wallpaper, although the barman could be induced to respond to questioning about the day’s news. (I took a childish pleasure in measuring the difficulty of my questions by the depth of his frown, as somewhere a database search crunched away.)
I was alone when I entered the pub. The barman smiled, the regulars nodded, Reid ordered pints. Reid, of course, was only telepresent, but he assured me he really was drinking the same beer as he appeared to be drinking, and as I imagined I was drinking.
‘Wilde,’ he said after we’d each had a couple of pints, ‘I’ve got a favour to ask of you.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Whatever.’
He looked around, as if with the impossible suspicion that someone else might be there.
‘It’s about the dead,’ he said. ‘And the fast folk. We’ve got all the data storage, all the smart-matter gunk, and the interface machinery for starting the revival process.’ He grinned. ‘And I’ve got the codes, without which they’re useless. Even so, I’d like to make sure they’re in a safe place for the long term. But also, a place where the organics are available should we ever need them in a hurry.’
‘Sound plan,’ I said.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve been looking at the specs for the