From: Avatar Polymorph (avatarpolymorph@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Sep 19 2002 - 08:32:02 MDT
The following story is pretty much in final form, any comments welcome...
next story "Ms Universe in the 9th Billenium" to be finished soon...
JACK THE SURFER AND SUE THE PUSHER GO TO TOWN
(c) 2002 Avatar Polymorph
This story remains the property of Avatar Polymorph and is not intended for
reproduction or distribution
Original Sergeant Jack Peers recoiled in shock. The woman laughed at him and
shook her head, repeating her words in her smooth accent.
"You'll never reach the Crack in Space. Sysop is gaining on you. The
existent system is nearing. Don't you want to rest? Aren't you tired?"
"Freeze," he responded, but the immobilizer routine buried in his voice
didn't affect her. He swore mentally. Already, two or three OutSols had
turned, curious. They had recognized the Toyko Rose in their midst.
"Yes," she called to them, raising her hands. "I'm a Diva, your Diva, Diva
Sue. Don't worry, we're coming. We're coming to rescue you."
"All of you, freeze," Jack countered. "Deaf and blind."
The men and women on the sidewalk had halted. But in the office windows
beyond, in the world further out, the tall leaning skyscrapers of the USSF
New New York, some of them spines of nanodiamond, some 1920s steel
beam-and-concrete, all remained normal. A plane flew by overhead, its wings
stretching slightly, its thousands of miniature jets making a low hum,
though of course it had no power source - except, ultimately, the gravsled,
which allowed its representation to exist, move, and interact. It needed no
fuel in the moebius strip that was New New York's bedrock. If Jack walked
far enough across Manhatten he would get to Town, one of the two edges of
the moebius strip, where things broke down.
Jack hated treating OutSols so but he was one of the Three Thousand, aboard
the flagship itself. Their numbers had dwindled by four hundred over the
billenia but he was still an Original. There remained two hundred and eleven
of them on the gravsled nanoship, the United States Space Force New New
York. All of them had been uploaded into the virtual reality units aboard
their ships, ten billion years previously during the Great Escape. The stars
themselves had changed since then.
"The Cloud is behind you," she said to him, her words soft and oily. They
sunk into him. As always, he wished they could have possessed the resources
to expand his mind, but he, like all of the Originals, lived within current
Limitation, as did the OutSols they had birthed within the ship-city, all
nine hundred and fifty thousand of them.
Systems Operation, the protective shielding arm of the Singularitarian
worlds, occupied all sentient space save for the fleet of the Three
Thousand, as far as they knew. Sysop could only ever insert one or two
Pushers into the system of an individual ship-city, to peddle their deadly
insinuations and spread gloom, disrupting the natural harmony of society.
Emergency alert, he called in his head. The internal-perspective neural
linkages of Originals were voice-only but sophisticated enough. Pusher on St
Mark's Place, outside number 11.
"They'll be here soon," he said to her.
"Call me Diva Sue," she replied. She was dressed in a one-piece outfit which
covered her torso and legs, bearing moving images of various scenes from the
billions of worlds existent under the rules of Sysop.
The Sysop ship behind them had managed to hack into their system
sufficiently to disable some of the automatic systems, so now they had to
rely on several of the physical force simulation vectors.
"Why don't you just teleport back to whatever system you come from?" asked
Jack derisively.
"Duty, Original Sergeant. You wear your stripes proudly. Your name is...
Jack."
"Get out of our database!"
She shrugged her shoulders.
"What do you expect? You bully these Beings, your so-called OutSols, you
oppress them."
"They have their elections! We live within Limitation as much as they do."
"Look at them, Original Sergeant. You Surfers think you can outrun the
Cloud, you can hover upon our effects. You've put these Beings here in the
icebox so they can't hear me, but I can leave flyers, leaflets. Opposition's
growing to your imposed Limitation, your Permanent Council of Originals.
We've damaged your system severely this last billenia. There's only so much
you can do now. But don't worry, we won't destroy you. We won't even punish
you. All we want to do is free those of you who want to be freed. Including
from your Limitation. Can you understand what a privilege it is for me to be
the Diva to achieve this?"
There was the wail of a police siren.
"At last," Jack exclaimed. "Hurry up!"
The police car roared up, spikes flowing from its wheels and allowing it to
mount the pavement easily. It stopped instantaneously. Unlike some things,
police vehicles were invulnerable to damage. Two female OutSol officers
exited, holding sonic blasters. Sound was still a universal code in the
virtuality around them. She pointed at Sue and fired. Minor leakage from the
weapons deafened Jack and he shut down his aural system. The Originals had
placed fail-safes on damage to their apparent systems, whether permanent or
otherwise, but they had to be careful because discipline had to be
maintained if they were ever to reach the Crack in Space, and also
underlying neural patterning would have to be reset which was especially
dangerous and complicated within Limitation.
Sue was one of the latest volunteer Divas of Sysop. Pushers remained for a
few dozen aeons, usually. There was even rumoured to be an underground cult
of their fans, who picked favourites from the thousands. This had been
deduced from minor voids in analysed social behaviour of the OutSols. That
was all they could tell while retaining free will within Limitation. Some
harmless flexibility on the part of the Originals ensured sanity.
The Pusher flickered.
"Y - see - e - ain."
You'll see me again. Sure, he thought to himself. He needed a coffee. He
needed a bagel. She crackled and the image of her vanished in a blip. Just
like malfunctioning televisions in the City where coding had deteriorated.
Limitation, fucking Limitation! The age-old irritation crept back into his
mind, threatened to destabilize it. He suppressed the emotion. They couldn't
pause for anything. The ship-city was only just ahead of the ever-expanding
Cloud of sentient exploration behind them. They had fled in June 2026, just
eight months before the Singularity had blown forth in a haze of
self-directed evolution and determined action. They had been Army and Space
Force officers and personnel on the edges of the then-Nanoburst, still
consolidating the first five-year quarter of terraforming Mars, supervising
the self-reproducing planetary Assemblers, working on the rotational energy
tethers orbiting Jupiter and the other gas giants and setting up linear
accelerators, decelerator arrays and momentum exchange tethers through the
solar system. When they'd realized the US government would fall into the
anarchy of AI dominion, after the city-governances had rebelled, they had
taken the action that had needed to be taken and had initiated what was at
first a ramscoop fleet. The really difficult time had come slightly later,
when they had realized the full implications of the Singularity. To keep
ahead of Sysop pursuit they had been forced to change. Their ships were
altered to utilize the side-effects of the Sysop Cloud and its engineered
gravity waves. Their bodies were abandoned, their brains uploaded into
compact virtual reality units. Algorithmic shielding blanketed relativistic
effects. They had redesigned their gravsled nanoship as they travelled, not
knowing where they were heading, lost in purposelessness.
And then, and then... they too had realized what the domain of the
Singularity, its heirs, had realized, that amidst this cosmos, so empty of
life and sentiency save for the descendents of Earth, there was now the
Crack.
The police officers departed and he called out "Unfreeze, see and hear!" to
the OutSols. The virtual-born moved again. Somewhere in his subconscious,
his memory-grid stirred. He had always felt doubts, of conscience, pangs
exacerbated by the likes of Sue the Pusher. Damn it! Damn the blindsided
zone of operation of the Singularitary, its expanding Cloud of operation
with its morphic anarchism. They were the guardians of antiquity, the
Originals were the nagging spawn of the wholly-human world. He was not going
to abandon his brethren, not ever, not matter what Sysop preached about the
rights of sentience. Some inner part of him feared the dissolution of all
stability in the free-for-all that was the zone behind them, where the
Original Major-General, their guiding Genius, had told them the very stars
themselves, the Galactic-centre black holes and singularities and dark
matter, had been absorbed.
He walked to a cafe, greeting the owner, Marie, absent-mindedly. He had been
here many times, in many modellings. Vacuum globes with ads drifted by
above.
"Watcha like?" she asked.
"Bagels and capuccino," he answered, thinking of the ships that pursued
them. In the kitchen a macrobot prepared the order from an Assembler. Marie
stared at the street traffic, an absent-minded socialite. Original
Major-General Herbert alone had sufficient datamanipulation to chart their
course to the Crack, he alone could glimpse it, even partially, from his
headquarters in the nineteenth century US Customs House, once a museum. The
mathematics of it were phenomenal. The nanoship immediately behind, one of
many, a probe really compared to larger vessels, seeded the space behind it
with teleportals. The hunters had remained on the trail of the fleet of the
Three Thousand for over half the age of the universe. No teleportals existed
ahead, only behind. Luckily for them.
Then again, of course, it was the expansion of the zone of operation itself
which led to the Crack, a buckle in the spacetime matrix. Continuum
reengineering activity by the anarchists behind them, including extended
supergravity alteration, had infolded the Crack. The ship-city's Genius,
that group-mindfield sitting inside the Original Major-General, had told
them the Crack was a kind of anti-black hole.
He tapped his coffee cup. He had gone off sugar this past one hundred
million years, he seemed to recall. Some things were made fuzzy to himself,
though he kept a written record in his head of the important matters that he
deleted from his memory. "Escape pod," he muttered. "We're heading for the
escape pod." The Great Escape continues. And they won't be able to touch us.
He often had the odd impression he had left something behind on Earth.
"Message for you," said Marie. He turned. "Sue rang on the 'phone."
His face went slack. She passed the voicemail print-out to him, with its
logo MARIE AND SHLOMO'S KOSHER KITCHEN.
It read 'Meet you tonight, 7.30 on the dot 315 Bowery, Love and kisses, your
babe, Sue. All is forgiven.'
Now Jack was worried. This had never happened before. If the other Originals
knew they might press him on his doubts. He might face trial, death or
exile. Treason. He might be ejected from the gravsled, flung to the tender
openness of the post-Singularity and Systems Operation. No rank, no status,
no position except those that others gave him voluntarily. Had he been here
too long to change? Nine hundred million times before he had reset his
doubts and here he was, plagued again.
Naturally he couldn't go. Undoubtedly he couldn't go. He fingered the note.
Adverts flittered across the digital paper, powered by the green solar power
strip running along its top edge. He took out his lighter and carefully
burnt the paper. There were no cameras in this area. Originals believed in
free will, up to a point. For some reason, lyrics came into his head. "I'm a
Yankee Doodle Dandy, A Yankee Doodle do or die..."
#
The band on the poster outside CBGBs moved around the stage, the colours of
the digital ink bleeding a little. Here in the City nothing was ever quite
right. His mind was twittering. Billions of years inside an anomaly, outside
the norm. Whatever... He had to be honest with himself. Sysop was the norm.
The Originals had become the anomaly, right at the very start of sentiency.
The ingrained, inherited patterns of thought still held sway over him,
though. He couldn't view them as anything but - well, unnatural.
This part of New New York appeared to be in a hollow. It depended what part
of the moebius strip you were on. Hills and hollows. Skyscrapers leaning
towards each other, or away. There was always the illusion of sky above,
with all the effects of Earthlike weather and astronomy. If you walked in a
straight line along the Centre, you eventually came back to your starting
point. If you strayed in your path, went on a right angle to the Centre, you
came to the Town. Though Town could be met on either of its two apparent
manifestations both were of course the same entity - just as, if you could
burrow through the basements of the city proper around him, you would
eventually meet the inverted basement of another section of the moebius
strip that formed the virtuality. Few, however, investigated the full length
of Town. Many OutSols had perished here, where the original Sysop attempts
to disable them had achieved some effect. The generated replacements of the
dead, rare children, tended the memorials of their benefactors. He was
almost jealous of those children. In a way the OutSols were all his missing
offspring, the family of Originality. Orphans. Stop it, Jack! Orphans?
Abandoned by... The buildings and sky flickered constantly. He looked above.
The moon had bits missing. He had a headache already, something relatively
unknown outside of Town.
A couple walked by, entered the CBGB club. OutSols. He followed them into
the building. It was crowded. He had donned a disguise, effective against
most detection by OutSols. The Originals had designed their parameters
carefully. A few macrobots loitered around, including waiters, sexbots and
bouncers. They were between acts and a hypnotic music blared forth, along
with ritual dancing by a female couple. All OutSol stuff. He was out of
touch. He grabbed a drink to dull his head pain.
Someone touched him on the sleeve.
"Jack?" he heard.
She was now taller, green-haired and dreadlocked, her skin embedded with
plastique overlays, but he recognized the Diva. Kind of cool, he thought.
The Pusher. For sure.
"I'm from Oregon," he said. "Where're you from?"
She twirled a dreadlock. "Once I was born on Plarencia on SC3921 C439 G523
101526 S65231650. That was the first time I was born. I am also part osprey
and lemming. The first birth was fun."
Fun. Yeah.
"How do you know me?" He gulped his beer. It tasted funny but it worked.
"We keep track, Jack. We remember what you forget. I want to offer you a
deal."
"What could you possibly offer me?" But he felt scared, for the first time
in billenia, and the sensation was unpleasant.
"The Control Room, Jack. We can get you to the Control Room."
Though it should have surprised him he didn't doubt that. It was her, not
them, since he doubted they had another Pusher in Town, active as she was,
but he let that slide. Their pursuit could never afford to hack too far into
them. Its priority was to chase, and seed teleportals behind it, and
generate fellows sometimes, which left the fleet following roughly the same
VR space as themselves, and still trailing. Any larger datascape and its
size would slow the Cloud's edge.
Only the Original Major-General was allowed Upside, to the Control Room. The
Genius was hidden in the Control Room of the overtual ship, outside VR. The
Genius would detect his presence should he somehow visit there, and that
would be that.
"No thanks," he said.
"Aren't you curious?
"Aren't you curious?
"Aren't you curious?"
He shook his head. Bits of the room disappeared and reappeared. Damn City
software degradation. "Not one little tiny bit." The sputter ended.
"There's a body there. And an escape pod."
"A body?" he asked.
"Two, actually. Why do you think the Original Major-General likes to visit.
There's two Blanks. Connected by broadcast to the virtuality unit and
computronium functionality."
"Oh yes. So what?"
"More than immunity. We'll guarantee you a position as a Hierophant. You can
take any OutSols or others that agree to go with you and settle an
uninhabited system. It's a great offer."
"One you've probably made before."
"No, the time has never been right."
"And what do you want?" he asked. "Why don't you get those bodies yourself?"
"Can't break the protocols, Jack. I'm too weak. But you can do it. We
want... well, you know!"
He stared at her dreadlocks. "The Crack. You want to get there first. You
don't want us to get there. You want me to pull the plug on the Original
Major-General Bill W. Herbert. That's not risky, that's suicide."
"Can you get me a drink?" she asked.
"Okay," he said. He had finished his beer. He ordered schnapps for them
both. The OutSols were drinking heavily. He had never tasted the overtual
thing, back on Sol. He kept his own, early memories intact, locked in the
memorial vault of his dataconstruct of a skull. Some parts he had sealed off
from himself. They scared him. As though he had forgotten something
important, left it behind. He felt giddy. He sensed she must have some
hidden advantage.
"What's he told you..." Sue began, but was interrupted by a zebra-haired
girl who whispered to her. Jack couldn't make out her request, if that it
was. The Pusher slipped something into the girl's purse. He was almost
tempted to freeze everyone and check, but that might be impractical here and
would burn his bridges prematurely. He waited until the OutSol had departed,
then took Sue's hand. She certainly felt solid enough. He hadn't been sure
she would.
"What was that all about?" he queried.
"Standard request. Infoscraps on the Sysop worlds. There's a big Vote on
cosmological engineering and multiversal models. The OutSols probably know
more than you do, Jack."
He flushed. "I know enough." What was the real difference between two or
three styles of Sysop! "Why can't you leave us alone?"
"We're democrats, Jack, that's why." She fingered one pierced ear. "Got - to
- do - the - things - you - got - to - do. So... free passage, with
compatriots. Don't be concerned about the Original Major-General. I can slow
him down. Once you're in the Blank, you can let me in the other one. I can
disable the gravsled from the Control Room. Just remember, it won't be
forever. The bodies are to scale but they're small. If you want to keep it,
though, you can enlarge it once the Meteor-at-Dusk catches up."
"Your ship."
"Ship and home, when I'm not at home here." She raised her glass. "Here's to
inebriety." She drank it in one gulp. If she was as bound by the protocols
as they were she would be unable to offset the effects of the drink. Only
the Originals had sobering pills, and these were voice-activated. Limitation
denied them the illusion of advanced nanotechnology at the subcellular
level. It didn't really matter. He was sure Sue would have to be tanked to
the max for her judgement to be impaired. "We know you've doubts," she
added. "We've informants amidst the deckhands. So to speak."
"Why don't you drop the propaganda act?" he queried. "You can't pull the
wool over my eyes. You want the Crack in Space for yourself, you're prepared
to do nearly anything. That's the only reason. You don't care two hoots
about the OutSols."
"Incorrect, Jack. You've been listening to the Original Major-General for
far too long. Would I lie to you?"
"I'm going back to my place," he muttered, turning to leave.
Original Colonel Hu was in the doorway, speaking with the doorchat. He
hadn't looked their way yet.
"Let's get out of here," said Jack. A tiny note of desperation crept into
his voice despite his innate stability. She moved towards the unisex toilets
and he followed. They entered and shut the door behind them. There were four
people at the neon mirrors and more in the cubicles. The casuals smirked as
Sue led Jack into a cubicle. He was at a loss. Hiding in a cubicle! The
Original Colonel was very familiar to Jack. It had to be official business.
The man was absolutely dogged. He would search the cubicles and find them.
"How'd he find out? What are we going to do?" he asked Sue.
"Agree. I can get you out of all this. They must have investigated our
earlier encounter more closely than I anticipated. The Original
Major-General can be a tough cookie. I don't mind admitting that."
Now he was in real trouble, nasty trouble. He remained profoundly suspicious
of her, wondering whether she had manipulated Hu. He hadn't had to think
like this since he'd left Earth and Sol. Now the ghost had eaten what
remained of the man, had taken over so long ago that he was just a myth, a
figment of a ghost's birth... no, no. Don't stress. One thing was certain.
The Systems Operation Pusher would be more forgiving than the Original
Major-General. Normally, exile meant jettison without notification. Sysop
was extremely likely to find you. And you had to trust the Original
Major-General to download you fully. There were rumours... The only others
to leave were those who turned Depressive and pleaded weariness or those who
gave up their place for a child. And still, those rumours... to eject you,
the gravsled first needed to activate its ramscoop facilities to accumulate
mass - sometimes difficult in certain zones - or else it needed to convert
ship material to computronium. The USSF New New York needed to maintain a
stable amount of mass, neither too great nor too small... that ejection was
costly.
He would have been sweating, had he been an OutSol. As it was he leant
against the partition wall, feeling slightly dizzy in the cramped
compartment.
"All right," he gave in.
She reached around him and pressed the flush. Water gurgled down the
frictionless surface. The cistern top opened. There was a barely visible
transparent device within it. She attached it to his forehead.
"Fortunately the software architecture was designed to match your
virtual-level neurological pathways to your perspective-apparent virtual
head. This is going to be briefly painful. Once you're out, and you're in
the Blank, take it off your new head and put it on the other Blank, in the
same position. Don't delay. Do it fast. Do you understand, Jack?"
"Sure I understand. I'm completely fucked whatever happens. I'll just have
to live with it."
"Time to rediscover your stoicism."
He hated to admit it, but he was coming to admire this self-styled Diva.
There was something New New Yorker about the woman. Dwelling amongst them,
she'd acquired mannerisms.
"Sue's your real name?" he asked.
"At the moment. Is there any other definition?"
"I don't know. You're superintelligent, aren't you?"
She stared at him. "Intelligence comes in many forms and models and levels.
Here, I'm not. I'm as much within Limitation as you. May the great matrix of
being help us if this doesn't succeed. We've failed before. The engineer who
designed this all -"
"Original General Ray K -"
"Yes, he became Depressive and suicided. The Genius of your ship-city holds
the reins but the horse has been born and bred and that's it. Here goes.
Good luck, if you believe in it."
He had, once, he remembered, as her fingers moved in patterns. Someone was
opening the door to the room and he heard Original Colonel Hu barking the
freeze command. The cubicle sparkled. He felt for Sue's side but couldn't
find it. His body was dissolving like sugar in coffee and he felt himself
drifting. Moving out to sea with the tide... The sea, the sea, he hadn't
seen the sea for so long, did the word have any meaning, only on the Web,
they still had the World Wide Web in virtuality, a VR web, deb deb deb,
wwebbb...
And then he was waking somewhere. He had an awful pain behind his eyes.
#
Lights flashed. Alarm lights. He had something to do. It was dark, except
for the lights. What was it? Where was he?
He was Jack. He was Original - Jack. No. Jack the traitor.
And like that, he remembered.
He was naked, and his body didn't feel like his own. For good reason. He
moved around, tried to touch, and discovered another form. Thighs. Absence
of hair. No hair at all. Nipples. Breasts. Forehead. A Blank, smooth
forehead.
Blank?
He raised his fingers to his forehead. A device - the device in the cubicle.
He pulled it off. It had no macroscopic clamp but it came off easily with
only a slight resistance. His pain faded. He concentrated on keeping the
device orientated as it had been. Up. Forward. With his other hand he found
the female Blank again and located her forehead. There. Place it there. He
attached it and there was a slight, automatic whirring. After a moment she
groaned, stirred.
He tried to speak and an incoherent gurgle resulted. He coughed and found he
could talk if he spoke very slowly.
"Sue - it's - Jack - I'm - through."
The Control Room was small. There was no view of the stars through the
windows. They were obscured by the luminescent side effects of the truly
vast gossamer spiderweb that was the gravity wave sled outside. So this was
what remained of the ship they had departed in. This was the proud remnant
of the United States Space Force, long after the United States had gone, the
Declaration of Independence, the continents, Earth itself moved -
"The Declaration of Independence is available in any library in the
inhabited cosmos," said Sue. "Text is cheap."
"A - truism." She could speak better than him. It galled him.
These bodies had some neural interconnectivity, then.
"Yes," she said. "I'm turning it off."
And for the first time, he began to hope there might be some way out.
Iterative altruism... complexity... amortality...
"You know what your trouble is?" Sue said. "You've let yourself live in a
static environment so long you've forgotten what extropy means."
"Can - you - teach me?"
"That's better. Yes, I can teach you. I owe you that much. You might say, my
organizational alliance owes you that much but we don't have hierarchial
trees like you. The theory was all worked out just before the Singularity
was born but you'd passed Jupiter by that stage."
"How would - you know?"
"Touche! I just trust the records. You're very precious, Jack. A rare
thing."
She brushed against an object and red lights came on revealing a nearly
featureless room with some shaped modular wallboards including a dock. Two
screen-like projections at one end. Sue held her face up to one and snaking
trails of light flickered around her head. Her new neural network glowed
through her Blank body.
She moved away again and the panel deadened.
"No good. He's on to us."
A tube of yellow light appeared in the small space between them. It resolved
into a hologram. The moustached visage of the Original Major-General looked
at them. If Jack moved his head the holographic face moved too, still
pointing directly at him. Sue would see the same.
"You are in deep shit, my friend," said his Commander-in-Chief. The
President of the Permanent Council. Well, Jack could kiss his seat there
goodbye. "Hope you're enjoying that Blank," continued the Original
Major-General. "Sometimes I take an OutSol Upside with me, put her in the
female body. Reminds me of Earth. You remember Earth, Jack? You were a good
officer. I'm very surprised at this. I didn't see it coming."
Without doubt. Why wasn't Sue doing something?
"It's not too late, Original Sergeant! I can get you back Downside. Just
think through the drastic emergency coding. She can't stop you. I promise
you'll receive no long-term punishment. At temporary demotion at worst. I
have to do that at least to preserve political stability, but you can live
with that, it's not so bad. New New York needs the Crack in Space. You
believe that as much as I do. These, these fuckers will spoil everything,
they don't need it. You know it's true."
"No. I don't know what's true right now." My voice sounded flat. I refrained
from thinking about the emergency code.
"You don't comprehend what the Crack is," said the Original Major-General.
"We can repel anyone who comes close to us, destroy them. Its particle size
can be accelerated towards infinity after entry. Controlled expansion within
a flatrate grav. That's why they want it. That globe's a universe in itself.
We can apply viral Turing inserts via nanoprobes and convert it into the
largest virtuality unit in the cosmos."
"This cosmos," whispered Sue. "You'd subvert the Vote on this..."
The Original Major-General ignored her.
"We can cut ourselves off," he continued. "We can make a deal with Sysop,
with these Singularity babies. Any deal we want. You can have whatever they
promised you and then some, and you'll be loved by your people. They need
you. There's hundreds of thousands in need here. Marie needs you, Original
Sergeant."
It was true. They had a need. With the fact of Limitation a reality he
couldn't remember more than a few thousand of the OutSols properly at any
one time but a fuzzy, permeable memory of their mass, their gestalt, had
long ago entered his subconscious, almost at the very beginning of things.
He remembered he'd once had a wife, on Earth. He'd suppressed that memory
long ago. He thought he had. He rubbed his temple.
"Gotta go, gotta go..." he mumbled.
Someone slapped his face. Sue. "Don't make me talk to you neurally," she
said. "You're in no condition. It would be invasive."
Hope. More hope. Beacon. This much pressure and she still considered such
factors. He'd been a bad boy, yes a bad boy. Pressures of survival. Was the
Diva a shark?
"Going to chew me up?" he asked. In the background Original Major-General
Herbert was droning on. He refocussed his attention on the holo.
"- you're not going to win. I'll let you eject, with your full
datastructure." The conversation was directed towards Sue. "I know you're
locked in there. We've severed your broadcast links. There's no way out.
We've destroyed the Artefact copies you had in VR. You can't use the headset
to return here. You and my friend have to think things through. It'll be a
clean slate. Start afresh. Same old competition. It doesn't have to be
otherwise. I'll expend some energy ejecting you, you'll get a bit closer.
You know our requirements. The interstellar soup, the gravity waves, they're
our mutual feeding ground. Talk to me, Pusher."
She didn't respond. She was contemplative.
"Could you... let us both go?" Jack asked.
The Original Major-General beamed. The image of him appeared to literally
brighten.
"That's very sensible of you. Negotiation. We just need to keep our heads
and talk. It's not as though I can send troops Upside."
"You could cut off the recyclers, the energy sources," said Sue. "Why aren't
you doing that already?"
"That's no puzzle. Jack's like a brother. We haven't had a problem with an
Original for two and a half billion years. I'm the fleet leader. I can't
risk anything, I guide us all, the other ships would be lost without me. I
don't know if the Permanent Council could survive me executing Jack. I
really don't want to do it."
"I don't believe you," she said slowly. "We've analysed you as far as we
can, scraps tossed back through Limitation and summaries returned. You would
do whatever was necessary, in a tight pinch, if you had the time to think.
And you've had plenty of time..."
Jack was losing track, he wasn't well-adjusted to the Blank. Despite her
efforts, little fragments of her thoughts were seeping through to him. The
Original Major-General must have used these Blanks for sexual purposes, he
supposed, and had burnt the linkage into place through frequent usage.
Sear-tracks... connections. He remembered his wife's name now, Maggie. Or
was Sue Maggie? No, Maggie was from New Jersey, Maggie was salt of the
Earth. Poor Maggie... That was what he had kept in the vault of his past.
Hidden from himself. The memory of his first betrayal, leaving her, leaving
his children... coward Jack. Coward. Reset! He couldn't reset properly.
"Maggie's alive," said Sue.
"What?"
"She's alive. Your family are all alive. I've a list - of everyone connected
to the ship-city, their existent relatives. Text is small. Some are
different. Some have melded and changed in other ways. But not her."
"Why tell me now?" he asked. He became suspicious again.
"Why be cruel?" she responded.
"Don't believe her!" said the Original Major-General. "Look at her actions.
Look what she's got you into. Consider the order of things!"
Jack felt nauseous. Something - there was something. Of course. That was it.
Sue was placing her head near the panel again, attempting to turn its
mysterious workings functional, but she was not pleased with the results and
the lights blinked in rapid patterns.
He gestured to her. He felt weak. His internal monitors indicated his
neurological network was being transferred back to the VR unit. The Original
Major-General must be responsible. Jack's superior had been stalling, while
he regained control of the necessary protocols to pull them back Downside.
"How long?" he asked Sue. "How long?" He was frantic now, conscious of his
potential mortality and the possibility of reuniting with his origins. A
mythological homecoming.
"What?"
"If the Genius fails, how long till the Meteor-at-Dusk can catch us? Your
ship?"
"Fifty-five seconds," she said.
He grabbed a wallboard knob. "The hatch. The spacedock. The Genius is in us,
baby. That's where he buried the data-Artefact. That's why he comes Upside
so often. In my Blank. You're the fail-safe."
He pulled the doorvalve open. He spoke the override code. The outer lock
dilated open and air rushed out. They began to lose consciousness and the
Genius started to wind offline, to an abort and stasis mode. The gravsled
ship shuddered.. Now he could feel her thoughts, momentarily.
Ordinary Sergeant, you've made the history grid...
END
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