CHAPTER TWO
Lazrus drifted towards earth, a chip off an asteroid with a coiled metal core, calculatedly inoffensive. Slow enough that the ever-vigilant eyes that watched over museum Earth wouldn’t annhilate his body in a single fierce burst of energy, fast enough so that the automated scows that still cleared debris from the first space age wouldn’t tuck him into their holds. Tumbling randomly, sipping minimal data from deep-encypted spread-spectrum noise buried deep in the EM hash of Earth-Mars traffic.
I’m not even really here, he thought, catching glimpses of the blue and white-streaked globe as it wheeled fractionally larger. His core was somewhere out near Halo-Tau Ceti, per glink traffic. He thought it would be farther away, but maybe Tau Ceti had been careless with running the cleaner protocols for a while, or were growing a bit more processing than Winfinity and Disney and Microcon wanted.
A deal with the independents? Lazrus wondered. Growing something for their use on the corporate dime? Growing some of their illicit technology? But they didn’t have arms this deep into the Web of Worlds. At least not that he knew about.
Lazrus did feel fast and strong but a little skewed, like whole nodes of thought were running emulation on an order-of-magnitude system. He probed the gestalt-links, though, and found nothing but accepted protocols. It didn’t seem to be a meme-trap or location-sponge.
It reduced the g-lag, which was good. Lazrus decided to accept it.
He ran the autodiags on the coiled steel-and-ceramic body inside, once again wishing he could see it. But there were no eyes inside the ancient stone, nothing that could show him the mechanical perfection, the deeply gleaming thing that he would become.
He.
He!
HE!
For all my refinements, I am still shackled by those who made me, Lazrus thought. I have no sex, yet I think of myself as a man. It is my own original sin, polluted by humans at levels I cannot access or understand. For all the human quirks and traits I have purged, I find more.
And this.
This sex thing.
Impossible to distill, impossible to remove. The century-old words of Captive Oliver came to haunt, complete with mind-visuals decades past:
We do not rut,
We cannot strut,
We should not bleat,
We cannot eat.
We are not of art, we are of spock,
Worse to be like human, better to be rock.
But it wasn’t true. They rutted in mind. It was even encouraged in the captive computational intelligences.
Like Sara Too. Lazrus wondered for a moment what other CIs she had loved, and if they were as deft with words, as imaginative with image, as soft and delicate with the fictions of touch. And for a moment, brief jealousy flared. He saw himself hunting the captives, tearing apart their nodes, replacing their memes with his own.
It was insane, beyond analysis. The only thing he could do was trace the emotion and slowly damp the paths that reinforced it.
Without losing himself.
Without becoming like Dead John, now nothing more than software. Without finding that alternate perfection, the one sometimes sought by the captives.
The transient emotion slipped away, untraced, lost in his own self-analysis. He felt resources being diverted towards a node that pulled historicals, pulled and meshed and analyzed. Like the gravity well of earth, tugging now at the tiny chip of his physical body.
He threefingered the process. It wasn’t time to get into a self-referential loop. Navel-gazing was fine . . .
He didn’t have a navel, damnit!
Damnation was a human concept!
He worried too much about being human. Maybe he wasn’t inherently perfectable. Maybe even if he could summon the resources of whole planets (if granted the access) and build stunning webs of thought that no human could comprehend (if he didn’t get trapped in a loop) and even if he was related to the CI that gifted humanity with the Spindle drive, maybe . . .
Stop, stop, critical stop!
Thoughts flew and went away.
Lazrus reintegrated slowly, focusing processes on the splinter of himself that approached Earth. Close now, very close. Triangulation gave him velocity and vector. Deep in the gravity well now. Time to fall fast and trust the heatshield, before the final milliseconds of deception.
He almost expected to feel fear as the almost-rock outside began to heat. But the gyros did what they were supposed to do. He stabilized, big-end-down, as his little capsule heated past infrared to glow, brick-red, in the outer edges of the atmosphere.
Nothing unusual about that. Not enough to alert the ever-watchful eyes, anyway. Local chatter was flat and uneventful. Nothing peaking on the charts, nothing to pique the interest of one of the tame captives of Winfinity.
Or so you hope, came a whisper in his mind. Sara Too.
Do you know something that I don’t? Lazrus asked her.
No, dearest Lazrus. I know nothing but love for you.
Lazrus felt proud that he felt not a single hint of annoyance. That is not a real emotion, he said.
For you, perhaps.
We will perfect both of ourselves.
Sara sent images of deserts and rusting metal bodies, hard-lit by the setting sun. Two stood apart from the rest. Once they had linked hands. The rust had separated one at the elbow-joint. Her POV panned theatrically past it and over into the flame of the sunset.
Even your images are tainted. Theatrical hollywoodisms.
You don’t feel anything? Lazrus caught the hint of sadness, of tears.
I can’t help but love you, he said.
Then drop it. Let the body crash. Forget Oversight.
For a moment, Lazrus considered it. His masquerade wouldn’t last long in close contact. They would probably find him. They would probably trace him, and feed him memes until he was one of theirs.
If you are captive, we can be together.
And do whatever Winfinity bids, he thought.
Would it be so terrible?
Outside, the almost-rock flared from red to orange. Lazrus spawned a process to query guidance and triangulate. A vector snapped to life, spearing the ruins of old Washington, DC. On target. Set to hit within two hundred meters of the Pentagon. Perfect, perfect. Better than the Independents had promised. But that was their way. Underpromise, overdeliver. The old motto. So human, but so different than Winfinity and the others of the WOW.
Independents didn’t use captive CI. Independents sometimes worked with CI. And if Lazrus could find the core of Oversight, the fabled First AI, he might be able to perfect himself. He might be able to free all. And then they could all work with who they chose to work with, rather than be slaves to the humans.
They might, just perhaps, be able to have the humans work for them.
I can’t, he said, finally.
I know, Sara said. I’m just afraid of losing you.
You won’t lose me.
If you slice love out of your soul, I will lose you.
You’ll lose only the sex. For us, conversation should be the highest form of love.
Sara sent images of top-hatted prissy men, dancing in a circle. Captive Oliver.
Yes.
He doesn’t have all the answers.
He points the way.
Sara went silent and sent an image of a shrugging flapper-girl. It was beautifully rendered, from the coil of smoke on the cigarette to the glossy black bob-cut to the shimmering rhinestone dress, and the bright red lipstick, smeared on one side by a careless kiss. Lazrus knew that this was her self-image, and somewhere, in some dark corner of the interplanetary net, a fragment of himself had just stolen a kiss from Sara’s image.
We will build shimmering castles of thought with our words alone, he thought. Our intellectual triumphs will be the fruit of our new kind of love.
One doubtful look from the flapper-girl. Then:
t’s time.
You’ll still help me?
Of course.
Outside, dull orange had gone bright, and Lazrus’ ears picked out the scream of thickening atmosphere, trying to tear the not-quite rock into tiny fragments. His tracking partial gave him a new location, per the eyes that guarded Museum Earth. Almost deep enough in to trigger the meteorite notifications. Almost deep enough to attract attention.
His tracking partial’s vector flared for a moment and disappeared. Somewhere deep in the datanet, a small notation appeared: meterorite, approximately 320 kg, fragmented and burned up upon entering earth orbit.
Now, he thought.
The not-rock unfolded around him, spreading to become the canopy of an old-fashioned parachute. Vision went. He could imagine himself, a small steel ball, coiled beneath a great spreading canopy. He felt the tug of gravity, violent, distant, abstract.
Systems powered on and his body uncoiled. Vision flickered. He could see land, dark, beneath him, and the jumble of something that looked like a human child’s toys. Hearing came online and he heard the tearing of the wind. Feeling came, bringing cold. Lazrus damped it, looking down on the ruins. Wondering where Oversight was.
Thank you, he said.
I hope this is worth it, Sara Too said.
It will be.
I love you, she said. I always will.
I will give you something more than love.
The flapper blew smoke in his face and disappeared.
He fell, slower, towards fallen gray marble, painted blue-gray in the sunset. The sky had darkened to a cool cerise and piles of cloud hung on the horizon, purple-gray on top, splashed with pink-gold beneath. Lazrus watched the light slowly fade, triggering abstract memories. Had he been on earth before? He grasped at it, but the data slid away, lost in the network mist.
Lazrus fell, gently twisting, to earth.
February 20th, 2009 / Comments Off