Limit of Vision (8 page)

“Sure. Aliens lead dull lives.”

“I take it we understand each other, Ms. Suvanatat?”

Oh yes. She understood him. He had made a mistake, talking to her about the
Roi Nuoc
, and now he wanted to pretend that mistake was repaired. Fine. “Of course, Mr. Nguyen.”

So what was his connection to the
Roi Nuoc
anyway?

With a few quiet finger taps, she passed the question on to Kathang for investigation. After all, she was not going to stay trapped in the Mekong forever. Someday soon she would be in Australia—and beyond Nguyen’s reach.

7

Panwar said,
“
We
need to think.”

He and Virgil had both been silent for several minutes after Summer Goforth left, each stewing in his own thoughts. Now Virgil looked up, to meet Panwar’s gaze across the lunchroom table.
We need to think
. . .

It was their code phrase for a cognitive circle. They had never done a formal circle with only two members, but there was no choice now. Maybe, if they gave themselves up to the inspired mania of a cognitive circle, they would find some way to keep their
L
ov
s.

Virgil blinked, feeling a sandy fatigue in his eyes. His skin was sticky, and his muscles felt fragile and stretched. The lunchroom clock said 5:55 A.M. He started to get up. Through the doorway he could see a watery light sparkling over the cindies parked in the hall.

“Hey, look at that.” He went to the door and looked out. The blue-green light was spilling out of the darkened conference room, where E-3's image still sparkled on the wall screen. Somehow the link had been left open. It was easy to imagine an oversight like that, given the division of authority between the police, EquaSys security, and the IBC.

Virgil followed the shimmering display into the conference room, expecting the link to wink shut at any second.

It held. He gazed at the sparkling globe, aware of Panwar crowding in behind him. “We’re three again,” Virgil said.

Panwar edged past him, looking warily at E-3, then back again to Virgil. “You want to bring E-3 into it?” He mouthed the words, accenting them with only a whisper of sound.

Virgil nodded. He pulled back the russet cords of his hair, using one cord to tie the others up in a high, sloppy ponytail so that his
L
ov
s were exposed.

“But that’s what Gabrielle did,” Panwar said softly. “You believe that, don’t you?”

Virgil nodded. He could see no other explanation. She had engaged in a cognitive circle with E-3, and had lost herself.

“It overwhelmed her,” Panwar said, speaking in a low, swift voice. “It exhausted her. Exhaustion always ends a circle. Even among the three of us, we’ve never been in control. Gabrielle must have been so deep in the trance her body didn’t recognize its own fatigue. Then it was too late.”

“Don’t you want to know a trance like that?” Virgil asked. He touched his
L
ov
s. “This could be the only chance we’ll have to know what Gabrielle knew. You want to know, don’t you?”

Panwar looked at E-3, while his own
L
ov
s sparkled across his brow. Then he nodded.

Maybe Summer Goforth was right, Virgil thought. Maybe they were crazy. Seriously bent. But it didn’t feel that way.

“See if you can open a two-way link,” he told Panwar. “Wide-field, full-sensory transmission. Don’t hide our
L
ov
s.”

The privilege of discovery was awarded to so few. Galileo when he looked through his telescope. Leeuwenhoek when he turned his gaze in the opposite direction and found bacteria and protozoa beyond the lens of his microscope. Rutherford when he unraveled the structure of an atom.

The keyboard still lay on the conference-room table. Panwar sat down beside it. He tapped a few keys. “It’s functional. Should we fix a termination point?”

Virgil took a chair. “Doesn’t matter. They won’t let this go on long.” After this, there would be nothing. They had already lost their freedom. Tomorrow, maybe the day after, they would lose their
L
ov
s. This was their last chance to do anything with their lives.

Panwar entered a few more taps at the keyboard, then slipped it back under the table.

Virgil closed his eyes and summoned his
L
ov
s.
Ideas!
he thought.
Feed me the fuel that will fire ideas
. His
L
ov
s sensed his desperate mood and reinforced it, flooding his brain with a cocktail of neurally active chemicals. His heart beat faster. His metabolism ran hot. He felt the rush of an excited high that he had come to cherish. Abruptly, he felt himself leaving the mundane world to enter another that was faster, brighter, and far more compelling.

Across the table, the blue-green glow of Panwar’s
L
ov
s had risen in intensity. Virgil could not distinguish the microsecond flashes of code they must be emitting, but his own
L
ov
s understood it. They responded in a feedback reaction: his
L
ov
s stirring Panwar’s, stirring his. Mood was made in the delicate trade of neurotransmitters across the brain. From his excited
L
ov
s Virgil harvested a fierce determination that clarified his thoughts, and focused his mind.

He turned to face the blue-green globe of Epsilon-3 on the screen. This time there was no verbal warm-up. E-3 immediately launched into a fully formed sentence:
Light talk and words this now subject of thought.
Thought present in the bright eyes there with you.

“The bright eyes are called
L
ov
s,” Virgil reminded. “What am I called?”

E-3's scintillating lights flared in a bright aurora. Virgil’s
L
ov
s translated that burst as a rush of excitement that filled his mind, lifting his thoughts to an even greater intensity.

Eyes-are is a different eye from I-am requires response you-are.
You are the other called Virgil.
This other is Panwar.
The bright eyes are new.
Where is Gabrielle?

“She is in another place,” Virgil said, answering without hesitation.

Open a link
.

“There is no link.”

No link?
No link?

Virgil frowned. Had he imagined the upswing in intonation? “Is that a question?”

A question.
Divide and rephrase: What is a place?

“You have access to a definition. In this case, I refer to a physical location in space.”

Question: This place has no link?

“That’s correct.”

Question: How can this be?

Virgil’s temper tripped. This was not what they had come to discuss. Panwar sensed it and took over. “Not every place is wired.”

Wired is linked.
Not every place is linked.
If true statement, then place exists beyond this perception
.

“Well sure,” Virgil said. “There are many places, real, physical places, that you cannot access.”

He felt something then, an emotion that was not his, but that came to him through his implanted
L
ov
s: an echoing sense of expansion, as if the world had suddenly inflated, so that now it was exponentially larger than it had been a moment ago. He gasped. “Panwar—”

Panwar answered with a nervous laugh. “The world is a bigger place than we realize, eh? Babies go through this stage too—”

Question: Did Virgil Panwar exist two point five minutes in the past?

Virgil laughed, giddy now with a sense of discovery. “Yes! Yes. Our existence
does
continue even when you cannot perceive us.”

“Babies go through this,” Panwar said again. “There is a time when they conceive of the world as something created by their own perceptions, so that any object that disappears from their perceptions has, to them, ceased to exist.”

E-3 confirmed its new maturity:
This existence continues when there is no link with you
. The voice was flat, as always, without the emotion implied by the words, but Virgil could feel its excitement, perceived and echoed by his own
L
ov
s, its amazement at the presence of a vast and unseen world.

E-3 had gained something critical from its sharing with Gabrielle. He had asked Summer Goforth:
Is it a mind?
Two days ago his own answer to that question would have involved a hundred conditional statements that never quite added up to “yes.” Now everything had changed. Epsilon-3 was slow, confused, and unclear, but it asked questions that left no doubt in Virgil’s mind that some spark had been lit and that it had an awareness—of itself, of the world it existed in, of the wonder of life.

He stood, unable to contain his elation in the confining chair. “You see what’s happened, don’t you?” he said to Panwar. “Gabrielle gave it emotional modules. That’s the difference. It’s learned to
care
about what happens to it.”

“Maybe that’s it. Maybe that is the key.”

They would never know exactly what had happened in Gabrielle’s last session, but if the
L
ov
s had learned only to echo the chemical emotions spilled by their relatives on Gabrielle’s brow, they would have learned far more about emotion than words could ever teach.

A key is a formula to decode information known by another.
Question: confirm?

“Confirmed,” Panwar said. “But there are other things we need to talk about.”

This light is fear
.

Panwar touched his forehead, self-consciously fingering his
L
ov
s. “Yes. It is fear. Virgil and I are here to discuss our fear.”

It took frustrating hours of tangled explanation before E-3 seemed to grasp the basic facts of the situation: that its own existence was threatened, that its relationship to Virgil and Panwar was almost certainly doomed. There was no way the political nuances could be conveyed without lessons in culture that there was no time to give, and perhaps, no capacity to understand. It was not human after all. More than once Virgil was moved to say, “We’re wasting time. If it can’t grasp the problem, it can’t help with a solution.”

“It’s only one part of the cognitive circle,” Panwar answered. “You and I will find the solution. It’s enough if E-3 helps us think.”

“Is it helping? Or is this interchange just an addiction?”

“You love it, don’t you? Me too. This is more real than anything I’ve ever known.”

“Is it only a drug, Panwar? Have we only found a new way to get high?”

“It’s a drug. Straight-up. Everything that goes on in the brain has a chemical root. The question is, does it make us more alive?”

“God yes.”

“Then how are we going to hold on to this?”

They traded every crazy idea that popped into their heads.

“Let E-3 go public,” Virgil snapped. “That’s most obvious.”

“Or parade it on the Hammer. Those techs will love it. They’ll protect the project.”

“They won’t protect us. They’ll want to take it over.”

“We could smuggle more
L
ov
s down. Now. While we still have a link to the lockdown.”

Virgil glanced at the camera Detective Kanaha had left behind. They were hanging themselves, but did it matter? “Bring all the
L
ov
s down,” he said. “Free them.”

“Smuggle them all? There’s no time.”

E-3 said:
Close the links.
No access
.

“No,” Virgil said. “It doesn’t work that way. There can be access without links. Someone could come into the
L
ov
lockdown. Someone could come into our place, here.”

“Lock the door,” Panwar laughed. “That cuts physical links.”

“The door can be cut.”

I am not that can go out the door.
You are not that to come in
.

“There are others who can come in.”

These others are as you.
All others are.
Not this.
Not I.
What are you.
Gabrielle this asked I that am.
What am I?

“A new mind,” Panwar said immediately, defiantly. “Not a toy. Not a curiosity, but a biochemical machine. You are a thinking
being
. Virg, it
is
sentient.” He turned to the hovering police camera. “Record that! Whoever the hell you are out there. E-3 knows that it knows.”

“For now,” Virgil said. He shook his head, feeling so wired he wondered if all this might be just a dream. “The organization’s always lost as soon as E-3's focus changes. It always forgets what it learns, what it is.”

Panwar leaned across the table. “I’m not so sure of that anymore. Even when it seems to forget, the knowledge is there, waiting to be rediscovered. It could be just a problem with organization, but even that’s fading. No
ethical
ethics committee could condemn it.”

E-3 interrupted:
This is fear
.

Virgil sat back in his chair, rubbing his face, his tired eyes, wondering why they were being allowed this session at all. Maybe some of the bigwigs on the ethics committee shared their curiosity? “It’s learning so quickly.”

“Of course it’s learning quickly.” Panwar rose from his chair. He approached the screen, so that Virgil could see him now only in silhouette. “Summer pumped up the cellular metabolism. No computational resources are wasted on computing muscle coordination, handgrip, digestion, walking, eating, or any of the physical realities we have to deal with. So
L
ov
s are efficient, and they’re nonspecialized too. Resources can shift to whatever function is required.”

“Focus on the problem,” Virgil said. “Survival.”

“Ours?” Panwar asked. “Or E-3's?”

It wasn’t the same issue. Virgil felt the truth of this sink in. “E-3's, then. Because we’re not getting out of this. No matter what decision they make about E-3, they will take it all away from us. You know they will. No lawyer is going to change that.”

Panwar’s shoulders rose and fell as he stood silhouetted before the screen. Virgil could hear the soft sussuration of his breath. “All right!” he snapped. “I’m not giving up, but for now, focus on E-3.”

Virgil nodded, feeling a little cold, but still thinking clearly. At least his mind felt clear. But was it? No way to know. “Two questions,” he said. “If the committee’s decision goes against E-3, will it know, and be able to react?”