Lightpaths (21 page)

But they do not. The tension of the triangle continues to build and build as Brock spends more time with Morchella than Gwen will excuse, even in the name of Science. Finally one day, when the three of them are alone together in the padded confines of a low-gravity gymnasium, the tension explodes into action.

This was what Roger had been waiting for: Contrasting female bodies rushing together with an audible smack; enraged cursing and yelling; stinging slaps; red-faced fury; murder in the eyes; circling, wary, crouching stances; hands extending like claws, grabbing hair and scalp and yanking savagely; women kneeing and kicking each other; female fighters clinching in hostile embrace, breast against breast, snared in each other’s arms; solid head-locks; choke holds; muffled grunts; short shrieks; arm-locked upper bodies; half and full nelsons; leg lifts; hip throws; scissor holds; hand clenches; long raking scratches; strangle holds; popping, stinging blows; the tangled ball of intertwined arms and legs; straddles; pins; submissions—all the impedimenta of his kink without a name—half voyeur’s spectacle and half sadist’s pleasure at seeing others’ pain—being played out in the virtual reality before him.

Roger privately thought of himself as a scopogynomachiaphile—his own coinage for his nameless sexual obsession. He had been one for as long as he could remember, his kink like a dark twisted root anchored deep, irremovably, in the soil of his soul. He didn’t know where his kink came from—his mother arguing with his crazy aunt? a girl-fight seen in grade school?—but he did know it was making him come now.

Behind him a cardkey scrabbled in the lock of the door to the conference room. Putting himself quickly and sloppily back into his pants, Roger turned to see Marissa standing wide-eyed in the doorway. In the pornholo’s virtual reality, the fight played on, life-sized.

“Oh, sorry,” Marissa said, embarrassed, closing the door again quickly.

Roger sat, slumped and pondering. The new day must be beginning. He must have stayed in the lab all night. He felt numb somehow—too numb to get up and turn off the pornholo.

Plot summary of
Free Fall Free-For-All
concludes:

Morchella, Brock’s true love, defeats her blonde opponent. The habitat scientists determine that Morchella is not genetically burdened at all. When she opts to return to Earth, Brock decides to go with her—to monogamy and a settled life on an inside-out world. They ride off, not into the sunset but down the gravity well, new Adam and new Eve bent on re-establishing Heaven on Earth.

As the pornholo credits flashed up, Roger found himself still wondering how much of it Marissa had seen—how much of his secret kink she might even now be figuring out. Would she make the connection between it and his other obsessions—mole-rat society, the human pheromone project? The thought of it made him curse his own stupidity. Twice in twenty four hours, once intentionally with that Tao-Ponto woman Jhana and once accidentally with Marissa, he had let too much of himself show, let his plans and desires be nakedly exposed to others. Who knew how all these non-violencers up here—especially his mother—might react if they became aware of a particularly crucial “side-effect” of the pheromone he was trying to develop? Would they banish him? Send him into life-long exile, never to return?

He should be so lucky. What would be so bad about getting away from all these overpolite idealists, really? People who would hardly admit they belched or farted or did anything physical and human, much less admit of their own dark sides? If, amid all their public chatter in this Happy Isle In The Sky, the only truly private, individuating event was a guy watching a porno, then so be it. That said less about him than about the sad state of their so-called “diversity” here. He would be glad to be free of the tight constraints of their insufferable good manners, their intolerable tolerance.

Still, he would have to guard carefully against such thoughtless self-revelation in the future. He had jeopardized his project enough already.

“The RATs have changed again,” Aleister said, appearing with Lakshmi in Lev’s virtual overlays. Korchnoi was in virtual space already, doing research in military history for Mob Cad’s upcoming performance, which he and the band had now agreed to officially title
The Temple Guardians
—more to meet publicity deadlines than anything else.

“How so?” he asked.

“Here,” Lakshmi said. “We’ll shoot you an extract.”

Passage embedded in RAT code:

Paradise always has been hollow. The word ‘paradise’ itself is from the Avestan
pairi-daeza
, ‘the wall around.’ That’s the paradox of paradise: paradise is the wall around, the boundary. In that sense the inside-out world of the orbital habitat is the perfect paradise, a world that’s all wall around, a spherical wrap-around wall world.

“Seems pretty harmless,” Lev said with a shrug, perusing a Sumerian war chariot in another part of his virtual space.

“Try this one,” Aleister suggested, shooting another marquee of three-dimensional words into Lev’s virtual space.

Passage embedded in RAT code:

A Spanish philosopher once claimed that human consciousness is a disease. Maybe Earth would be better off if humanity quarantined itself. Maybe the only way Earth can be a Paradise again is if humanity walls itself out of that world.

“Sort of like quirky fortune cookies,” Lev said, scanning a diagram of Greek hoplite armor. “Interesting, though I can’t say much for fortune-cookie philosophy.”

“Better not speak too soon, Lev,” Lakshmi warned. “There are hundreds or even thousands of these encysted or embedded bits of text. A lot of them are coming out of the Public Sphere. As near we can tell, all are being taken from already extant sources—including your song lyrics.”

“Well,” Lev remarked, moving around information on Roman short swords, “even cybertoothed rats can show good taste, I suppose.”

“The Rats don’t show much of anything,” Lakshmi said. “Their autonomy is pretty limited. Aleister’s found out more about their history. They’re just being used.”

Lev could sense that Lakshmi was going to start talking about the “distributed consciousness” again, so he decided to head her off.

“So, Aleister,” Lev asked the man he knew was lurking somewhere behind the webspider icon with the pudgy face, “what
have
you found out about the RATs and where they came from?”

“The Abbey where they were developed was a pretty interesting place,” Aleister said. “Turn of the century New Agers who believed in ‘mental singularities’, portals in the sky, a gradual, Gnostic version of the end of the world. The ‘Rainbow Door’ opening into the ‘World of Light’ on the ‘Day of Doom’—that’s what they talk about in their literature. What I don’t get is why a lot of high-powered information-industry types listed themselves as Myrrhisticineans and donated scads of money to the Abbey.”

“What about this guy Manqué,” Lev asked, examining diagrams of pikes and halberds in another section of his virtuality, “the one who created the RATs?”

“According to the surviving members—the ones who were off the mesa the day it was destroyed—Manqué was something of a heretic. While the Myrrhisticineans generally were gradualists, Manqué was an apocalyptist. He believed the Earth itself could be the rainbow door in the vault of heaven—that any day could be doomsday, every day a Judgement Day. He was in favor of a ‘technological push’ to open the door so they could walk into the world of light
right now
.”

“And that was tolerated by the rest of the brethren and sistren?” Lev asked, scanning specifications of blunderbusses and early musketry.

“Certainly,” Aleister replied. “I’ve scanned some Myrrhisticinean texts. The ex-nun who founded the group, Alicia Gonsalves, had an interesting hodgepodge of influences - mystical scientists like Arthur C. Clarke and scientific priests like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, for instance. She believed humanity’s role on Earth was to create the conditions for the manifestation of the divine. The role of the Myrrhisticineans in particular was to midwife the birth of a technology so advanced as to be indistinguishable from divinity.”

“But what’s that got to do with the Rats?” Lev asked, pausing from his overview of the evolution of small arms and light gunnery.

“I’m not sure yet,” Aleister admitted, “but I do know that the Myrrhies were particularly big into a Teilhardian notion of evolution. Not long before the disaster happened, a team from Kerrismatix installed an ALEPH, an Artificial Life Evolution Programming Heuristic, on the Abbey’s ParaLogics systems. Manqué was the Abbey’s network manager, its web spider, so he had to be involved. Given what I can figure from the RATs I’ve decrypted, he developed them using the ALEPH’s predation subheuristic—”

“But the RATs aren’t what they used to be,” Lakshmi put in impatiently. “Manqué developed them as a joke: A-life with nasty habits. From the survivors’ reports, we know that Manqué released them in the Abbey net, where they took to devouring a user’s mannequin, the old-style virtual body in electronic space—while the user just happened to be inhabiting said mannequin.”

“That must have made him popular with the locals,” Lev said with a smirk.

“Hardly,” Lakshmi continued. “Even the serene brothers and sisters of the Abbey didn’t much take to being virtually ‘eaten alive’.”

“They sent a bunch of messages flaming down to Manqué,” Aleister put in. “Eventually—all dolled up in a Pied Piper of Hamelin mannequin, according to the reports—Manqué piped away and the RATs followed him through the Abbey virtuality, until they were all drowned in a buffer ‘river’.”

“Then ours aren’t the same RATs?” Lev asked, looking over from a display on cavalry charges.

“There’s a
lot
of evidence in the actual code that says ours are highly related to his,” Aleister said firmly, glancing toward Lakshmi, as if they’d had this discussion before.

“But our RATs
do
behave very differently,” Lakshmi demurred. “We’re only finding the ones that
want
to be found—with messages
something
wants to communicate. I’ve gotten a bunch of inquiries from industry friends on Earth. All the new information being beamed into cislunar space has not escaped their attention. Those trideo game things were the initial vector, but it’s spread. Sudden shifts in machine memory-usage suggest, to my contacts at least, that stealthy forms of self-replicating software—the RATs—have thoroughly infiltrated almost all of Earth’s infosphere. Now, though, it seems they’re less Rats than Retrievers, fetching and sampling quantum information packets, then returning the quips almost instantly to the infostream.”

“And now you’re going to tell me,” Lev said, unable to dodge the inevitable any longer, “that the master those retrievers are fetching for is your ‘distributed consciousness’.”

“That’s right,” Aleister said, intervening. “There’s just too much evidence for it, Lev. I think Manqué’s work didn’t end with the RATs. I think he was working toward that ‘technology indistinguishable from divinity’—but something went wrong and the Sedona disaster, the Abbey event, happened. Someone saved the Black Box from the wreckage, though—or beamed Manqué’s work off-site and stored it before the disaster. I think our ‘distributed consciousness’ found where that work was stored.”

“And
how
did it do that?” Lev asked, frustrated at the particular electro-metaphysical turn the conversation was taking—and by the fact that it had now fully taken him away from his military research for the Mob Cad performance.

“The same way it’s monitoring everything we’re saying and doing right now,” Aleister said, very quietly.

“Aw, come on!” Lev exploded. “
Net
stands for ‘no easy transcendance’, remember? What are you saying? That this thing’s omniscient, like God or Santa Claus?”

“Not omniscient,” Lakshmi said thoughtfully, “but it does have a really
big
data base. And a vast array of sensors, too.”

“Not omnipresent either,” Aleister added, “but it’s got lots of remotes, peripherals, and actuators, if it needs them. Body electric—and a big strong one at that. You ought to come and see the latest progress on what it’s building at Lakshmi’s place—in its spare time.”

“I will, I will,” Lev said, “just as soon as I have some spare time. I just hope your god-in-a-box waits till my show is over before it comes down out of the stage machinery.”

“We hope so too,” Lakshmi said with a smile, but then quickly grew more serious. “Look, Lev, this is getting too big for just us to handle. We’ve got to bring more people in on this. I was thinking of contacting some of the encrypted names, the ones it sent us. Seiji Yamaguchi and Atsuko Cortland in particular. That okay with you?”

“Lakshmi, I’m surprised,” Lev said, feigning astonishment. “Of course it’s okay. Since when have you ever needed my permission to do anything?”

“Since we all got stuck in this together,” she said. “I know you’re busy, but we’ll keep sending you the messages we pull out of the RAT code, and the sources for them when we can find them. See if you can make any sense of it, notice any patterns.”

“I’ll do my best—in my spare time,” Lev said, signing off and returning to his research in military history for the band’s performance. Somehow, though, after everything Aleister and Lakshmi had just told him, all this history of the ways in which humans had mauled, mutilated, and murdered one another—it all seemed childish and petty now, toylike, just variants of pop-guns and firecrackers and sharp sticks.

* * * * * * *

What Marissa had seen Roger up to that early morning had bothered her deeply—less in itself than from the way it fit into a disturbing larger pattern. Not wanting to think about it, she shrugged back her long reddish hair as she goggled in and suited up for the CAMD virtuality, diving deep into her work once again.

Her anti-senescence project was progressing slowly, even though she had largely left behind the mole-rat part of it and was concentrating almost exclusively on human possibilities. Despite this shift, though, ordinary nonviolent mortality in humans was proving to be the result of an almost unbelievably complex synergy of factors. Death seemed never to be the simple result of one thing. Certainly, looking at telomeres and cell division alone had long since been proven to be too simplistic a methodology, so she was stuck with a broad spectrum approach.

She’d had to examine patterns of mutation and evolution at many scales—not only the vector virus’s, but the potential human host’s too. Even when she thought she had those possibilities covered, Marissa still had to spend more time working through genespace, finding intron and pseudogene locations where her viral vector could safely splice in manufactured coding—for telomerases and a variety of telomere stabilizers that didn’t induce cancer, as well as extra engineered copies of so-called Methuselah genes, particularly DNA sequences for making free-radical absorbers like superoxide dismutase.

Despite its frustrations, Marissa had to admit that her work in virtuality had a hypnotic effect. It took her mind far away from the real. When she was tweaking molecules and twisting fate in the CAMD room, time had no meaning to her, so thoroughly was she caught up in her own world. In that timeless realm she truly felt she was more than just a researcher developing a viral vector against senescence—important as that work was. She was more than just a genetic cryptographer cracking and rewriting the code. Most of all, she wasn’t any longer the poor kid who had struggled up from the hardpan and broken glass of the fringes and trailer parks; she was a powerful woman riding the coiling serpents of the DNA molecule, a high-born lady astride the double dragon, holding in her hand the dragon’s secretly hoarded pearl of great price, the talismanic object that could cure the serpent-wound by which mortality had come into the world.

Did she want that, though? Certainly the theory of clonal selection, evolution on a somatic scale, even directed selection on that same scale—all suggested her anti-senescence project could be accomplished. But should it? Clicking out of virtuality, removing her goggle overlays and gloves and shutting down the holo display at last, she thought that, whatever she might be feeling about Roger at the moment, he was probably right about the danger of releasing an incurable Immortality Plague on Earth. Unlimited life extension without corresponding limits to birthrate would lead straight to a vastly accelerated boom/bust cycle in human population, an inevitable carrying-capacity disaster and, paradoxically, the very possible extinction of the human species as a whole—by violence and starvation, though not by disease or “natural causes”.

Sad, she thought as she walked out of the lab and down the corridor. Especially since the absolute increase in the population growth rate had peaked fifty years ago. True, the human population was still growing, but at a “decreasing rate of increase”, as one of her undergraduate biology profs had put it. He’d been full of phrases like that. To him, cancerous growths were “cells with an ego problem”—and humanity was a “species with an ego problem” especially when it completely eliminated other species out of ignorance or for its own selfish concerns.

Leaving the desert preserve building and coming out into the late afternoon light, Marissa thought of the Tennyson passage that had been carved in stone over one of the entryways to the old Life Sciences building on her undergraduate campus: “Nature, so careful of the type, so careless of the single life.” But that favorite biology professor had said the problem with people was just the opposite: “Humanity, so careful of the single life, so careless of the type.” All those individuals wanting the genetic immortality of children for themselves, until the planet as a whole was being driven toward ecological collapse by the sheer weight of human numbers and their demands. Victims of our own success. Crazy.

Marissa’s vectoring of cancer-derived immortalizing factors into human beings seemed hardly likely to make the species saner, or cure it of its egotism. No, Roger was right. She would have to be very careful, so very careful in her research, the closer it came to fruition.