Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [328]
One night, while our crawler crunched along a flood-channel in the high desert, we finished the tower. We walked back up the virtual valley, to our house.
‘Ready?’ I asked Meg.
‘Ready as we’ll ever be,’ she said.
I idled the crawler, and stepped into the frame.
In the last couple of centuries I’d become sensitive to the difference between a virtual body and a real one. For all its apparent solidity, for all the pleasure it could reproduce or invent, for all the realism of the pains and discomfort it sometimes felt (for consistency rules) the virtual body lacked some final, vital touch, which was nothing more than the daily millions of subtle impacts and impulses that arise from the quotidian grapple with materiality. When I experienced the robot body as my own, I felt far more human than I ever did in the simulation of my human flesh.
So now. The flattened oval of my metal shell was cupped in the cab, limbs retracted, cables linking it to the crawler’s controls. My senses picked up the radiation from the stars, the faint infra-red of the cold and still cooling sand, the cautious stirrings and fierce encounters of the desert’s remnant native, and invading alien, life.
I looked around, awaiting some revelation. The world was the same as ever. I had built a tower in my mind, from my recollections, from the bits of data I’d snatched from the decadence of the macro, and nothing had changed.
The Malley Mile – our side of it – was in its familiar place, in the depths of the sky. I looked up to where I knew it was in its orbit. On the other side, in another time, was the surface of Jupiter. The surface would have expanded by now, and the orbit would have decayed. The wormhole would encounter the planet in – I thought for a moment – a year, within an order of magnitude. It was hard to tell; too many unknowns. In any case, an order-of-magnitude approximation wasn’t bad after all this time: no more than a decade, no less than a month would pass before the Malley Mile met the biggest macro of them all, the substance of the gas giant turned into the substance of mind.
It had been a grand plan, and a long plan, that I’d listened to in my last encounter with the decaying domain of the fast folk. They would slow their physical and mental processes down, almost freeze their development; and then, with literally cool deliberation, the ones who retained their rationality would excise the rest. Then, with the resources of Jupiter at their disposal, the survivors would multiply again. This time, they could wait, until their expanding domain embraced the Malley Mile: the gate to the end of time.
The shock of this understanding broke through the illusion that it was something I’d always known. I realised the tower had changed me after all. It had installed this new knowledge; of the Malley equations, of the macros’ plans, and more: I knew now how to start-up a stored mind, and imprint it on a brain. I didn’t have the reach, the scope, the speed of the being I’d been when I first learned them, in the macro. If I had, now, become one of the fast folk, I was running slow, in primitive hardware. But I remembered what I’d learned, and understood the peril we faced.
I stepped out of the frame, and told Meg. She had been changed, too; she understood.
‘Call Reid,’ she said.
We flipped the scene. Back, now, in the illusory cab, to our shared fantasy of being just a trucker and a girl hitch-hiker he’d picked up; sad, really. I mentally checked the positions of the communications satellites, then tilted the phone-screen and put a call through to Reid.
It was the most private, personal number I’d ever found for him, and still I got his secretary.
I stared at her, my mind working a lot faster than hers; as her green