Absorption (17 page)

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Authors: John Meaney

BOOK: Absorption
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‘So she’s an academic,’ said Carl. ‘Some of my tutors were a little odd.’
 
‘And that was—?’
 
‘A long time ago. Are you worried by this Helsen person, Xavier?’
 
‘She’s displayed some odd reactions toward your Roger.’
 
‘In what way?’
 
‘Look, Alisha’s trained in observing minutiae, just as you are, Carl.’
 
Obviously he meant his daughter was reading body language cues and verbal patterns, including tonality. Put it another way: Helsen was giving Roger funny looks.
 
But Carl was not dismissing such observations.
 
‘We all learn psycholinguistics, don’t we?’
 
‘Right, and it’s interesting,’ said Xavier, ‘to find someone as skilled as you are. We’d never have reached agreement this morning, not so quickly and with such good feeling, without some very slick elicitation and guidance from yourself.’
 
There was still no reaction from Carl’s tu-rings. If this was the prelude to physical action, perhaps a snatch squad about to drop from the sky, then Xavier was taking his time in issuing the command.
 
Does he know about me?
 
Perhaps the man was thinking like a businessperson, no more than that.
 
‘At any rate,’ Xavier went on, ‘I think Alisha likes your son. So that makes us allies, doesn’t it?’
 
‘I guess it does.’
 
‘Then’ - Xavier reached out a fist - ‘I’ll see you soon.’
 
‘All right.’
 
They touched fists once more, then Xavier went to stand on an ellipse. He nodded, then sank out of sight.
 
All around, the plaza looked normal.
 
So does he know I’m a Pilot agent-in-place? Or am I just a business contact?
 
Carl became aware of the smile he was making.
 
An interesting problem.
 
As always, the stakes were serious because Miranda and Roger were as liable to peacekeeper arrest as he was. But Xavier Spalding was an interesting man, and whether as ally or opponent - well, that was the challenge, wasn’t it?
 
He stood there until the aircab descended. Knowing it was owned by a possible enemy, he scanned its systems before boarding, finding nothing.
 
‘Take me home,’ he said.
 
 
After the morning tutorial, Roger felt weak and dispirited. Old Hatchet-Face Helsen had been scathing about their construction of virtual characters in the simulated 1920s Zürich; only Alisha had received praise, for the depth of historical accuracy in the city architecture.
 
Once out in the corridor, he headed for a flowdisk that would carry him to the rooftop, someplace where he could think alone about this morning’s work. There was something that nagged at him below the conscious level. There had been perhaps the minutest of dark flickerings around Dr Helsen - that strange phenomenon again - but mostly things had been normal, if you counted intellectual bullying as normality.
 
As he stepped on the disk, another person joined him.
 
‘Can I come up with you?’ asked Alisha.
 
‘I . . . guess so.’
 
She gave the command - by subvocalization, he assumed - without betraying the tiniest of motions. Then the disk was rising, and in a few seconds they were on the open rooftop. Roger stared across the quickglass campus towers, aware that Alisha’s attention was on him.
 
‘What are you thinking?’ he asked her. ‘No, sorry . . . We don’t know each other well enough for questions like that.’
 
‘That’s right. Did your teachers use
mindreading
as a pejorative term? Meaning that you make assumptions about other folk’s intentions and thoughts by interpreting their actions.’
 
‘Some people use the word that way.’
 
‘And you know how, when someone visualizes an image that’s purely mental, even without holo, their eyes focus on very definite locations in space.’
 
Roger let out his breath.
 
‘It’s the entorhinal cortex in here’ - he pointed at his own head - ‘whose spatiotemporal grid creates the geometry of mental images, and I knew that when I was ten years old, so thanks for asking.’
 
‘I didn’t mean—’
 
‘Luculenti aren’t as superior as they think. There are people with skills no Luculentus could—’
 
He stopped himself.
 
What am I doing?
 
Did he want to reveal his Pilot nature? Did he want his parents arrested?
 
‘I’m not a Luculenta yet.’ Alisha’s face was always pale; now it was white. ‘I’m not one or the other. And Luculenti are still human, in case you haven’t noticed.’
 
‘All right. Shit. I’m sorry.’
 
‘I have plexnode interfaces, if you’re interested.’ She pulled back her sleeves. ‘Webbed inside my skin all over, but without processing nodes. I’m open to all Skein protocols, far beyond the subset most people use.’
 
‘That’s not my business.’ He felt unsettled by her sharing this. ‘Look, I wasn’t trying to offend you.’
 
‘But it’s like swimming in an ocean with blinkers on, feeling massive predatory shapes moving below you but unable to make them out, to understand what’s happening. It’s like being two years old and overwhelmed by the world, and it’s making me insane.’
 
Moving by intuition, he stepped closer and put his hand on her shoulder.
 
‘You see things in Skein, but can’t make sense of them.’
 
‘Perception is computation, and I know that you know that, Roger. I’m not trying to belittle you.’
 
‘Right.’ He used his tu-ring to tune his clothing to black. ‘This fabric is reflecting more light, up here on the roof, than a white object would indoors. But you perceive it as black because of computation in the visual cortex, comparing it to the background average.’
 
‘That’s it exactly. In Skein, I can perceive the rawness of things, just as a retina perceives frequency and intensity, but I can’t experience even basic
qualia
, like the sensation of colour.’
 
‘So it’s frustrating.’
 
At some point, he had become aware of just how beautiful she was.
 
‘Look,’ he went on, ‘every Luculentus before upraise must have felt the—’
 
‘We were discussing you,’ she said. ‘And the way Dr Helsen looks at you.’
 
‘Uh . . . We were?’
 
‘Well’ - her smile was intensely cute - ‘that’s what I was leading up to, anyhow. I’d already noticed the way she reacted to you. Hadn’t you felt a paranoid notion that she was out to get you?’
 
‘Yeah, and I notice she likes you. Your architectural reconstruction was
splendid
, as I recall.’
 
‘But she’s reacting to something you do, or hadn’t you noticed?’
 
Roger blinked, suddenly feeling like a neophyte swimmer who’s only just realized how far they are from the shallow end.
 
‘What kind of thing?’
 
‘I don’t know what you’re thinking,’ she murmured, ‘but I know
how
you’re doing it.’
 
It was an old saying from those who knew how to perceive the signals of body language, to distinguish visualization from internal dialogue and other modalities by throat tension, locus of voice, eye motion, fullness of lip and skin lividity.
 
‘So tell me.’
 
‘You’re seeing something around her, something that causes you to feel dizzy and repulsed. Your body language is screaming it.’
 
‘Um, maybe.’
 
‘You want to tell me about it, Roger?’
 
He stepped back from her.
 
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t.’
 
Her expression closed in.
 
Shit. Now what have I done?
 
Then she gave a tiny nod, walked back to the flowdisk, and descended into the building. Now Roger was alone on the rooftop, just as he had wanted in the first place.
 
Except now he felt badly, wondering just how much of an idiot his education and his undeveloped Pilot’s abilities had led him to become.
 
 
She had not dared to move the thing.
 
Rashella Stargonier, having pretended to focus her attention on everyday affairs, to work and to sleep - all of this subterfuge-against-self being most un-Luculenta-like - finally returned to the atrium where she had left it on the glass tabletop.
 
The null-gel capsule, and the shining old plexcore it held inside.
 
I need someone to talk to.
 
It was Greg Ranulph, her ecologist-gardener, who had unknowingly caused her to find the buried capsule. But he was an ordinary Fulgidus: the hired help, his doctorates meaning little, certainly not a confidant.
 
This being a potentially valuable find, maybe she ought not talk to another of her own kind. Or perhaps that was disingenuous: another Luculentus or Luculenta was competition. The only person she wanted to talk to right now was herself.
 
And there were several ways of doing that, undreamt of by the plebs.
 
<>
 
Beyond the table stood another of her, with an equally ironic smile.
 
‘Instantiation,’ said Rashella2, ‘is different from being born.’
 
‘I’ll bet,’ Rashella answered. ‘So, you know what I want to talk about.’
 
Her counterpart existed purely in Skein, her image holo, with no material body to touch.
 
‘You should report the plexcore to the authorities.’ Rashella2 smiled wider. ‘And yes, we both know what
should
means.’
 
The artefact was not strictly her private property, regardless of its being cached in the grounds she owned.
 
‘But I might receive kudos if I did make it public.’
 
‘And acknowledge the little man, Ranulph?’
 
‘Maybe.’
 
Then Rashella2 grew still - not like a breathing human, but frozen - in the virtual equivalent of contemplation.
 
‘Do you remember something I don’t?’ asked the original.
 
Between her and the virtual clone there were differences. There had to be, for Rashella2 was an instantiation whose lifetime could be measured in minutes, yet she remained helpful to her progenitrix.
 
‘There’s nothing conclusive. But I wonder about the little man’s intentions.’
 
Implying that Ranulph had ulterior motives here?
 
‘You want to provide me with a full stochastic graph of that?’
 
‘What’s the point? You’re going to open the capsule anyway.’
 
Rashella looked at Rashella2, and considered debating the point. Instead, she nodded to the surrounding house, and immediately the black nul-gel material began to disintegrate into black floating dust, pulverized by masers. Rashella2 smiled with one side of her mouth.
 
Then the dust swept away. Remaining in place was the shining silver cylinder that had once formed part of a Luculentus nervous system, a plexcore that extended the organic brain. It was so heavy and large. Rashella’s plexnodes were tiny, webbed throughout her body, and she normally thought about them only as often as she mused on the mitochondria that powered each of her cells, like those of every other Earth-derived animal in the universe.
 
‘It must be a hundred years old,’ said Rashella2.
 
‘I can use backwards-compatible protocols.’
 
‘So you
are
going to interface with it.’ Rashella2 stared up, then allowed a flock of tiny shapes to form around her head. ‘My netSprites cannot identify the likely owner, but they can deduce that there is legally secure data related to this whole area. Historic data. At too high a security level for me to even identify it.’

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