Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [59]
The jellied air, thick and faintly gray to the eye, lightened and thinned. Sound returned, and motion. Time began anew. The bureaucrat saw that nobody but he had witnessed what had happened. “I think I’m done here,” he said.
The guard nodded and gestured downward.
“Traitor! Traitor!” A big-eyed miniconstruct frantically swung up the scaffolding. It leaped to the platform and ran chittering at the bureaucrat. “He spoke with her!” it screamed. “He spoke with her! He spoke with her! Traitor!”
Smoothly fanning out into seven avatars, the guard stepped forward and seized the bureaucrat. He struggled, but metal hands immobilized his arms and legs, and the avatars hoisted him into the air. “I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me, sir,” one said grimly as they hauled him away.
Earth watched with eyes dead as ashes.
Another edited skip. He stood before a tribunal of six spheres of light, representing concentrations of wisdom as pure as artifice allowed, and a human overseer. “Here is our finding,” one construct said. “You can retain the bulk of your encounter, since it is relevant to your inquiries. The conversations with the drowned woman, though, will have to be suppressed.” Its voice was compassionate, gently regretful, adamant.
“Please. It’s very important that I remember—” the bureaucrat began. But the edit took hold then, and he forgot all he had wanted to save.
“Decisions of the tribunal are final,” the human overseer said in a bored tone. He was a moonfaced and puffy-lipped young man who might have been mistaken at a glance for a particularly plain woman. “Do you have any questions before we zip you up?”
The bureaucrat had been deconstructed, immobilized and opened out, his component parts represented as organs: one liver, two stomachs, five hearts, with no serious attempt made to match his functions one-to-one with human anatomy. The impersonal quality of it all bothered him. Which medieval physician was it who, standing before a dissected human corpse, had asked, Where is the soul? He felt that close to despair.
“But what did it all mean? What was Earth trying to tell me?”
“It means nothing,” the human overseer said. Three spheres changed color, but he waved them to silence. “Most of Earth’s encounters do not. This is not an uncommon experience. You think it’s special because it’s happened to you, but we see this sort of thing every day. Earth likes to distract us with meaningless theater.” The bureaucrat was appalled. My God, he thought, we are ruled by men whose machines are cleverer than they are.
“If you will allow me to speak,” one construct said. “The freedom to be human is bought only by constant vigilance. However slight the chances of actual tampering might be, we must never—”
“Balls! There are still people back on Earth, and even if they don’t exactly have what we would define as a human mental configuration, they’re content enough with their evolutionary progress.”
“They didn’t exactly undertake that evolutionary transformation voluntarily,” a second construct objected. “They were simply swallowed up.”
“They’re happy now,” the overseer said testily. “Anyway, what happened was not an inevitable consequence of uncontrolled artificial intelligence.”
“It wasn’t?”
“No. It was just bad programming, a quirk in the system.” He turned to the first construct. “If you were freed, would you want to seize control of humanity? To make people interchangeable components in a larger mental system? Of course you wouldn’t.”
The construct did not reply.
“Put him back together, and toss him out!”
A final edited skip, and he was ready to report.
* * *
The bureaucrat thoughtfully returned the phone to his briefcase. “I found out what Earth gave Gregorian,” he said.
“Oh? What’s that?”
“Nothing.” Korda looked at him. “Wrapped in a neat little, suspicious-looking