Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [134]
They were silent a long time. Therese wept a little more. Finally she fell asleep.
In the passing lights of rural Europe, Therese’s face was a picture of peace. “You’re on the other side now,” Maya told her gently. “Now you’re a perfect little bourgeoise. I can’t believe it really works like this. I can’t believe it works so well. I let a world like this happen. I did it, it was my fault, this was just the kind of world I wanted. I can’t believe you’re so anxious to live in a world that I couldn’t stand to live in for one moment longer. I have to be an outlaw just to live and breathe, and now there’s no way back for me. And the Widow is onto me now. She knows. I just know that she knows. She’d arrest me right now, except that she’s patient and gentle. You know who the Widow is?”
The sleeping Therese hugged her tray a little closer.
“Don’t ever find out,” Maya said.
Reworking the palace presented considerable difficulties. Foremost among them was the difficult fact that something was alive inside it. It had taken Benedetta and her friends quite a while to track down this troubling presence. It was Martin’s dog. Plato was loose in the memory palace.
Martin had linked the dog’s organic brain directly to his virtuality. This was not a medical process approved for human beings, for many good reasons. Neural activity was an emergent and highly nonlinear phenomenon. Brains grew, they metabolized from a physical organic substrate. When software tried to grow in tandem with a brain, the result was never a smooth symbiosis of thought and computation. It was usually a buzzing, blooming mess. Left alone it became artificial insanity.
Benedetta showed her the hidden wing of the palace where the dog’s brain had been at work. The cyborganic mélange had grown for years in knobs and layers, immense frottages and glittering precipitates, a maze like coral and oatmeal. The neural augmentation wasn’t dead yet, but they had found the links to the dog’s wetware, and blocked them off. There were monster pearls in it here and there, massive spinning nodules like bad dreams that would never melt.
Since Warshaw’s death, the dog’s mental processes had broken through the floors in five places. The abandoned mentality jetted through the broken floors like sea urchins.
“What does this look like in code?” Maya said.
“Oh, it’s such wonderful code. You couldn’t parse this code in a million years.”
“Do you really think it was helping him think?”
“I don’t think dogs think the way we think, but this is definitely mammalian cognitive processing. Warshaw had his palace netlinked into the dog’s head. Very sophisticated for the time. Of course, it’s nothing compared to the stunts they work on lab animals nowadays. But for the 2060s, this was broad bandwidth and very rapid baud rate. There must be antennas woven all through the dog’s spine.”
“Why?”
“We speculate that he meant to hide some data inside the dog. Possibly move the whole palace into the dog’s nervous system. That sort of visionary nonsense was very big in the 2060s. People believed anything in those days. They romanticized computers and mysticized virtualities. There was a lot of weird experimentation. They thought anything was possible, and they didn’t have much sense. But Warshaw was no programmer. He was just old and rich. And reckless.”
“Is the dog still on-line in here?”
“That’s not the way to phrase it, Maya. The dog never had little doggy gloves or little doggy goggles. He never experienced the palace as a palace at all, he just infested it. Or it infested him.… Maybe Warshaw thought he could live in here as well, someday. Pull up all his physical traces and vanish into textures of pure media. People thought that was possible, until they tried it a bit, and learned how hard it was. Warshaw did a silly movie about that once.”
“You’ve seen Martin Warshaw’s movies? Really?”
“We have made it our business to dig them up.”
“Do you like Warshaw’s movies?”
“He was a primitive.