The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [40]
She stared at me as if I were the one that might be mad. “It was fiction,” I added. “Pornography, of a sort.”
“I want to see it,” she said. She was no longer in a laughing mood, but I couldn’t tell what sort of a mood had taken its place. She was fearful, but in an odd way. There was something in her reaction to the memory of her crimes with which my empathetic imagination couldn’t get to grips.
“They don’t have it,” I told her. “Not here, at any rate. The sisters reckon that a few copies might have been exported from Earth before the last ecocatastrophe, but they don’t know if it was ever adapted to run on modern equipment. Gray — the historian from Earth — might be able to locate one, if anyone can.”
“But you saw it.”
“A long time ago…that is, a long time before I was put away. My memory of it is vague. I was more interested in the technical production than the story — I was in the business at the time. Fight tapes, sex tapes…but nothing like Bad Karma. The business had already moved on by the time I was frozen down. The technics were evolving at an incredible pace, thanks to nanotech enhancements. Bad Karma must have become a museum piece long before the end of the twenty-third century. It was probably lost more than five hundred years ago.”
“That’s bullshit,” she said. “All VE tapes were routinely upgraded to take aboard new developments. I saw six different updates of The Snow Queen when I was a kid, and four of Peter Pan.”
The Snow Queen and Peter Pan were classic VE tapes made for children. The twenty-second-century versions Christine was referring to had been modeled on much earlier webware, but dozens of writers over the course of half a century had added more and more code to them, building up the backgrounds and making the special effects more elaborate. Even Damon had done a little hackwork on The Snow Queen at one time.
“It’s not the same thing,” I told her. “The hoods you and I used got better and better, but the basic design and coding routines remained the same. Those technics were already reaching their limit when I got out of the business. The next generation of hoods was about to restart from scratch, using an entirely different set of electronic substrates. They might have remade The Snow Queen yet again after I was put away, but if they did they’d have had to do it from the bottom up rather than continuing the series of add-ons. More likely it was filed away, replaced with some new favorite specifically designed to show what the new technics could do. When Bad Karma was made your case was still relatively fresh in the older generation’s memory, but it couldn’t have stayed that way. We were supposed to be living in the New Utopia, but there was no shortage of killers around. Compared with the Eliminators you were old news — and Davida assures me that there were plenty more to come.”
“Who’s Davida?” It was a stall, to give her time to think.
“She was sitting where I am when I woke up where you are. Davida Berenike Columella. Here on Excelsior, they seem to have done away with surnames. Maybe we should have done that ourselves, as soon as Helier wombs wrested the burdens and privileges of reproduction from the nuclear family.”
“Caine can pass for a given name,” she observed, sardonically. “Only too well.”
“Tamlin too,” I told her. “But maybe not Zimmerman. That comes with heritage attached.”
She looked around again. “So this is a holding cell, right?” she said. “Do we have to share it, or can I get one of my own?”
“It’s not a cell, exactly,” I reassured her. “The sisterhood assures me that we’ll have freedom of movement when their preliminary observations are complete. They want us to remain here for the time being, but we have our own spaces. Mine’s on the other side of that wall over there — if you want a connecting door to open all you have to do is ask. In the meantime, we can go anywhere we want in virtual space.”
“I don’t see any hoods, let alone a bodysuit.”
“The walls are a lot cleverer than they look. The sisters haven’t rigged