Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [56]
“Well, I do. I’ve got it figured out, and I’ll tell you. You lose your identity when your signal is transmitted—if you stop and think about it, of course you do. At lightspeed, time stops. There’s no way you could experience the transit time. But when your signal is received, a programmed memory of the trip is retrofitted into your memory structure. That way you believe you’ve been conscious all those hours.”
“What would be the point of that?”
“It protects us from existential horror.” She adjusted her hat. “The fact is that all agents are artificial personalities. We’re such perfect copies of the base personality that we never really think about this. But we’re created, live for a few minutes or hours, and then are destroyed. If we experienced long blank spaces in our memories, we’d be brought face to face with our imminent deaths. We’d be forced to admit to ourselves that we do not reunite with our primaries but rather die. We’d refuse to report to our primaries. The Puzzle Palace would fill up with ghosts. See what I mean?”
“I … suppose I do.”
They came to a data dock, and the woman said, “Well, it’s been nice. But I’ve got to talk to at least five more people this shift if I want to meet my quota.”
“Wait a minute,” the bureaucrat said. “Just what is your occupation, anyway?”
The woman grinned hoydenishly. “I spread rumors.”
With a wave of her hand she was gone.
An edited skip. The bureaucrat emerged from the security gates into the data analogue of the Thulean stargrazers and shivered. “Whew,” he said. “Those things never fail to give me the willies.”
The security guard was wired to so many artificial augments he seemed some chimeric fusion of man and machine. Under half-silvered implants, his eyes studied the bureaucrat with near-sexual intentness. “They’re supposed to be frightening,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what. If they ever get their claws in you, they’re much worse than you’d expect. So if you’ve got anything clever in mind, just you better forget it.”
The encounter space was enormously out of scale, a duplicate of those sheds where airships were built, structures so large that water vapor periodically formed clouds near the top and filled the interior with rain. It was taken up by a single naked giant.
Earth.
She crouched on all fours, more animal than human, huge, brutish, and filled with power. Her flesh was heavy and loose. Her limbs were shackled and chained, crude visualizations of the more subtle restraints and safeguards that kept her forever on the fringes of the system. The stench of her, an acrid blend of musk and urine and fermenting sweat, was overwhelming. She smelted solid and real and dangerous.
Standing in the presence of Earth’s agent, the bureaucrat had the uncomfortable premonition that when she finally did try to break free, all the guards and shackles the system could muster would not hold her back.
Scaffolding had been erected before the giantess. Researchers, both human and artificial, stood on scattered platforms interviewing her. While it looked to the bureaucrat that Earth’s face was turned away from them, each acted as though she were talking directly and solely to that one.
The bureaucrat climbed high up to a platform level with her great breasts. They were round and swollen continents of flesh; standing so closely, their every defect was magnified. Blue veins flowed like subterranean rivers under pebbled skin. Complex structures of silvery-white stretch marks radiated down from the collarbones. Between the breasts were two pimple blisters the size of his head. Black nipples