Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [329]
I noticed, thinking so fast that everything froze for a moment, that I had an open channel. I threw subliminal suggestions and viral subversions down that channel like a curse. Some of them hit firewalls, some got lost in transcription, and some just screwed around with Reid’s electronics. But some, I was sure, got through.
Her lips just opened, just parted. I blinked, once.
‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘Wrong number.’
We set a course for the foothills of the Madreporite Mountains, intersecting the Stone Canal. We wanted to get as close to the source as possible, where the cometary thaw was still rich in organic molecules. Every day or so another chunk of dirty ice would hurtle overhead and make a flash behind the eroded peaks.
After parking the crawler in a gorge by the canal, I went around to the back and started hauling out equipment. The growth-vat was crude, barely more than a tub with a computer and a microfactory attached. I tapped the extraction-pipes under the canal-bank, and put together my own refinery. I checked through my new knowledge of how to install a stored mind in a copy of the brain from which it had been taken. I took a small plastic slide from inside my shell, and slotted it in the machine.
Part of the clone’s growth was natural, but much of it was hastened and forced by smart-matter assemblers. Even so, building a body takes time. We didn’t have time to recapitulate development from an embryo: he grew full-size from the start, a skeleton taking shape and acquiring organs, muscles and skin in a grotesque reversal of the process of decay. But Meg and I observed his growth, or construction, as fondly as if he’d been a foetus in a swelling womb.
He was sleeping when, one early morning ten days later, we hauled him from the vat. We dried him, and dressed him, and carried him past the crawler, now locked and sealed and armed; out of the gorge and along the canal until, as the day warmed, he began to stir. We laid him on the bank, and waited. The sun climbed the sky.
He woke, and remembered dying.
21
Vast And Cool
I stood there in the cave, in Dee’s body, and tried to think fast. It wasn’t easy.
Of all the bodies I’d been in, this one was the strangest, the most alien. (And the more so because I had once known its every intricate inch.) In the robot bodies I’d had a virtual body to retreat to. Not in this. As Meg had said, there was room in this mind for us all, but with Dee’s Self and selves there was no room for virtual realities. We had to time-share it, one of us in control, the others conscious but passive passengers.
Although I surely never planned, or imagined, that things would turn out this way, it was also the best body through which I could persuade Reid of what had to be done. All his conscious prejudice might be undermined by this voice that had coaxed and teased, this face that had smiled and cried, this embodiment of an obsession that had lasted beyond the death of its real object.
I had at first hoped to defeat Reid, to force him legally and by popular pressure to release the codes that could unlock the interface with the smart-matter storage of the fast folk and the dead. I’d underestimated the strength of his resistance to the very idea.
I initially rescued Dee and Ax, leaving Wilde to fend for himself, in part to hold Dee as a bargaining-chip and in part to stop the killing spree on which she and Ax had embarked. It was only when I invited Dee into my virtual reality that I learned just where Reid had stored and secreted his codes: in Dee’s mind, in Stores and Secrets. That I never expected to find them there is, perhaps, a testimony to the cunning of his choice.
With these codes, and the information from the