Resolution (39 page)

Their aircab skimmed above the ground, throwing up swirls of snow, then settled in a quiet street. Dirk felt giddy as he stepped out into the clear night air, and saw an aurora billowing scarlet near the horizon.

An iron gate clicked open; Orla led the way up narrow steps to a stained-glass door. It, too, opened at her approach, and in a minute all three of them - Dirk, Orla, McLean - were stamping snow from their boots, then pulling them off in the stifling warm narrow hallway.

In his socks, Dirk crept into the cosy sitting-room where Claude Chalou, hands crossed over his stomach, lolled back in an easy-chair, an old-fashioned hardcopy Braille book open on his lap. At his feet, barrel-chested Sam lay; the black retriever opened one dark eye, gave a small twitch of his tail, slipped back into sleep.

Holoflames danced in the fireplace, cast bright reflections across Chalou’s silver eye sockets. Dirk turned just as Orla mouthed the question -
Coffee?
- and pointed towards the kitchen. McLean nodded first, then Dirk.

Tiptoeing, they began to leave the room.

‘Et un petit café crime pour moi, chère Orla. S’il te plait.
’

‘Uncle Claude, you old faker.’

‘The UNSA review board’ - Chalou’s gravelly voice was full of disapproval - ‘is tightening its restrictions on matter compiler shipments.’

McLean nodded, knowing the blind Pilot (or ex-Pilot) could detect such gestures. True matter compilers, if they ever reached their full potential, would change economic systems for ever. A compiler’s owner could create anything from food to a house; they could even build another compiler. But that was in
theory.
Current devices were nowhere near that level, and they consumed vast amounts of energy. If you wanted a building, it was cheaper to grow it, not compile it.

The compilers turned energy into matter, whereas most people found it more useful to make the transformation go the other way: matter into energy.

‘You’ll still get the Elleston 9000 we talked about,’ said McLean. ‘But—’

‘Oui, d’accord.
It would be impossible to hide your tracks if we try again.’

‘Scanners at every spaceport. SatScan tracking every vessel.’

Orla said: ‘It’s a kind of defence, isn’t it?’ Coffee mug between her hands, sitting cross-legged on the beige rug, she looked up at the others. ‘Personal weaponry is already obsolete, just because it’s always detectable. I’m writing a paper on it.’

‘Right.’ McLean put down his coffee, took a sip of the Laphroaig he had poured himself. (The drinks cabinet was well stocked.) ‘Maser pistols will soon be as outdated as swords and daggers.’

Real wars would be fought by smartmiasmas and killmists, at dimensions invisible to humans. The coordinating generals would be AIs reacting faster than people could think. That was the popular view.

‘No-one’s going to hand over the reins to machines,’ said Dirk.

‘And the first time an AI applies for membership to a church ... ?’

‘Then we’ll have some interesting debates.’

‘Which side would you be on?’

‘I don’t think an AI has a soul’ Dirk, sitting on the rug near Orla, clasped his knees. ‘But then, I don’t think anybody here does, either.’ He half-consciously echoed his mother’s usual argument in this regard: ‘Can
anyone
spell “emergent properties”?’

Chalou’s rumbling tones lent his voice a natural gravitas. ‘I’d fight on the AI’s behalf myself.’

Dirk tipped his head to one side, seeing reflected flames dance like devils in Chalou’s silver eye sockets. ‘Sir? I thought you insisted on Darwinian processes being sufficient to explain consciousness.’

‘And linked AIs, if they form an environment where memeplexes like religion can propagate, should have the same rights as us,
n’est-ce pas?’

‘Ouais, bien sûr.’

‘But then, it is unwise to discount the mystic experience ...’

‘Oh, good.’ Orla shifted on the floor. ‘Is it time for ghost stories?’

In the half-lit room where holoflames danced in the fireplace, sitting around in a cosy half-circle with Sam the black retriever curled up at Chalou’s feet, it seemed the perfect moment for it. Only the chill winds outside were inaudible, the modern house insulating them from the snowbound winter night.

But, ‘This is no story,’ said Chalou. ‘Every word is true.’

Rivulets of energy in a sea of golden light filled with black spiky stars. The seedpoint: an insertion from another continuum. Whorls and loops of energy spiral, tighten, and then replicate.

Selection acts within the pattern. Dendrimers branch, seeking energy: it is perception, and a form of tropism: blindly searching for survival; learning coping strategies; absorbing others of its kind, lesser patterns that are helpless before its burgeoning capabilities.

Call it alive, but not self-aware. Not conscious.

Not yet.

‘Such patterns still exist in mu-space,’ Chalou added in a lighter tone. ‘Nowadays, we know to avoid them.’

‘This pattern,’ said Orla, ignoring Dirk’s frown. ‘What did it do?’

Karyn stares at the black lightning-flash decal on his cheekbone, at his muscular, ugly/attractive face. Dart Mulligan, her sensei’s son. Hand in hand, they walk across the green campus, and she feels more alive than she has ever done.

Two weeks, and UNSA surgeons will be removing Dart’s eyes.

‘What’s it like?’ They stop beside a silver birch.

As they sit down on the grass, Dart says: Almost normal. Everything looks a little flat, a little grey, you know? But the viral insertion was only three days ago.’

Another few days’
-
suddenly Karyn can hardly look at him - ‘and perspectives will start shifting.’

‘Yeah. But’ - Dart grins, and everything changes back to being exactly right - ‘you’ll still look beautiful, babe.’

Orla sensed the change in atmosphere.

‘What is it, Dirk?’

‘My grandparents.’ Dirk nodded in Chalou’s direction. ‘He’s talking about my grandparents.’

‘That,’ said Chalou, ‘is exactly correct.’

It spreads, a fractal web of recursive patterns, hovering on the verge of self-organized criticality. Something new is happening. Through golden space, streamers of scarlet and purple blaze.

A tiny copper form, born of unnaturally smooth geometry, is trapped at the pattern’s centre. Offshoots struggle to pierce the event membrane surrounding the intruder.