AIs Read online

  * * *

  Half blind with fury, Elin strode through a residential settlement. The huts glowed softly from the holotapes playing within—diffuse, scattered rainbow patterns unreadable outside their fields of focus. She’d left Tory behind, bewildered, two terraces above.

  Elin halted before one hut, stood indecisively. Finally, because she had to talk to somebody, she rapped on the lintel.

  Father Landis stuck her head out the doorway, blinked sleepily. “Oh, it’s you, Donnelly. What do you want?”

  To her absolute horror, Elin broke into tears.

  Landis ducked back inside, reemerged zipping up her jumpsuit. She cuddled Elin in her arms, made soothing noises, listened to her story.

  “Coral,” Landis said. “Ahhhh. Suddenly everything falls into place.”

  “Well, I wish you’d tell me, then!” She tried to blink away the angry tears. Her face felt red and raw and ugly; the wetware paint was all smeared.

  “Patience, child.” Landis sat down cross-legged beside the hut, patted the ground beside her. “Sit here and pretend that I’m your mommy, and I’ll tell you a story.”

  “Hey, I didn’t come here—”

  “Who are you to criticize the latest techniques in spiritual nurturing, hey?” Landis chided gently. “Sit.”

  Elin did so. Landis put an arm about her shoulder.

  “Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Coral—I forget her last name. Doesn’t matter. Anyway, she was bright and emotional and ambitious and frivolous and just like you in every way.” She rocked Elin gently as she spoke.

  “Coral was a happy little girl, and she laughed and played and one day she fell in love. Just like that!” She snapped her fingers. “I imagine you know how she felt.”

  “This is kind of embarrassing.”

  “Hush. Well, she was very lucky, for as much as she loved him, he loved her a hundred times back, and for as much as he loved her, she loved him a thousand times back. And so it went. I think they overdid it a bit, but that’s just my personal opinion.

  “Now Coral lived in Magritte and worked as a wetware tech. She was an ambitious one, too—they’re the worst kind. She came up with a scheme to reprogram people so they could live outside the programs that run them in their everyday lives. Mind you, people are more than the sum of their programming, but what did she know about free will? She hadn’t had any religious training, after all. So she and her boyfriend wrote up a proposal, and applied for funding, and together they ran the new program through her skull. And when it was all done, she thought she was God. Only she wasn’t Coral anymore—not so’s you’d recognize her.”

  She paused to give Elin a hug. “Be strong, kid, here comes the rough part. Well, her boyfriend was brokenhearted. He didn’t want to eat, and he didn’t want to play with his friends. He was a real shit to work with. But then he got an idea.

  “You see, anyone who works with experimental wetware has her personality permanently recorded in case there’s an accident and it needs to be restored. And if that person dies or becomes God, the personality rights revert to IGF. They’re sneaky like that.

  “Well. Tory—did I mention his name was Tory?—thought to himself: what if somebody were to come here for a new personality? Happens about twice a year. Bound to get worse in the future. And Magritte is the only place this kind of work can be done. The personality bank is random-accessed by computer, so there’d be a chance of his getting Coral back, just as good as new. Only not a very good chance, because there’s lots of garbage stuffed into the personality bank.

  “And then he had a bad thought. But you mustn’t blame him for it. He was working from a faulty set of moral precepts. Suppose, he thought, he rigged the computer so that instead of choosing randomly, it would give Coral’s personality to the very first little girl who came along? And that was what he did.” Landis lapsed into silence.

  Elin wiped back a sniffle. “How does the story end?”

  “I’m still waiting on that one.”

  “Oh.” Elin pulled herself together and stood. Landis followed.

  “Listen. Remember what I told you about being a puppy tripping over its paws? Well, you’ve just stubbed your toes and they hurt. But you’ll get over it. People do.”

  * * *

  “Today we make a Buddha,” Tory said. Elin fixed him with a cold stare, said nothing, even though he was in green and red, immune. “This is a higher-level program, integrating all your mental functions and putting them under your conscious control. So it’s especially important that you keep your hands to yourself, okay?”

  “Rot in hell, you cancer.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Elin did not respond, and after a puzzled silence Tory continued: “I’m leaving your sensorium operative, so when I switch you over, I want you to pay attention to your surround. Okay?”

  The second Trojan horse came on. Everything changed.

  It wasn’t a physical change, not one that could be seen with the eyes. It was more as if the names for everything had gone away. A knee-tall oak grew nearby, very much like the one she had crushed accidentally in New Detroit when she had lost her virginity many years ago. And it meant nothing to her. It was only wood growing out of the ground. A mole poked its head out of its burrow, nose crinkling, pink eyes weak. It was just a small, biological machine. “Whooh,” she said involuntarily. “This is cold.”

  “Bother you?”

  Elin studied him, and there was nothing there. Only a human being, as much an object as the oak, and no more. She felt nothing toward or against him. “No,” she said.

  “We’re getting a good recording.” The words meant nothing; they were clumsy, devoid of content.

  In the grass around her, Elin saw a gray flickering, as if it were all subtly on fire. Logically she knew the flickering was the firing of nerves in the rods and cones of her eyes, but emotionally it was something else: it was time. A gray fire that destroyed the world constantly, eating it away and remaking it again and again.

  And it didn’t matter.

  A great calmness wrapped itself around Elin, an intelligent detachment, cold and impersonal. She found herself identifying with it, realizing that existence was simply not important. It was all things, objects.

  She could not see Tory’s back, was no longer willing to assume it even existed. She could look up and see the near side of the earth. The far side might well not exist, and if it didn’t, well, that didn’t matter either.

  She stripped way the world, ignored the externalities. I never realized how dependent I am on sensory input, she thought. And if you ignored it—there was the Void. It had no shape or color or position, but it was what underlay the bright interplay of colors that was constantly being destroyed by the gray fires of time. She contemplated the raw stuff of existence.

  “Please don’t monkey around with your programming,” Tory said.

  The body was unimportant, too, it was only the focal point for her senses. Ignore them, and you could ignore it. Elin could feel herself fading in the presence of the Void. It had no material existence, no real being. But neither had the world she had always taken for granted—it was but an echo, a ghost, an image reflected in water.

  It was like being a program in a machine and realizing it for the first time.

  Landis’s voice flooded her. “Donnelly, for God’s sake, keep your fingers off the experiment!” The thing was, the underlying nothingness was real—if “real” had any meaning. If meaning had meaning. But beyond real and beyond meaning, there is what is. And she had found it.

  “Donnelly, you’re treading on dangerous ground. You’ve—” Landis’s voice was a distraction, and she shut it off. Elin felt the desire to merge with what was; one simply had to stop the desire for it, she realized, and it was done. But on this realization, horror collapsed upon her. Flames surrounded her; they seared and burned and crisped, and there were snakes among them, great slimy things with disgusting mouths and needle-sharp fangs.
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br />   She recoiled in panic, and they were upon her. The flames were drawn up into her lungs, and hot maggots wallowed through her brain tissues. She fled through a mind that writhed in agony, turning things on and off.

  Until abruptly she was back in her body, and nothing pursued her. She shivered, and her body responded. It felt wonderful.

  “Well, that worked at least,” Tory said.

  “What—” her voice croaked. She cleared her throat and tried again. “What happened?”

  “Just what we’d hoped for—when your mind was threatened with extinction, it protected itself by reprogramming back down to a normal state. Apparently, keeping your ego cranked up high works.”

  Elin realized that her eyes were still closed; she opened them now and convulsively closed her hand around the edge of the cot. It was solid and real to the touch. So good.

  “I’ll be down in a minute,” Tory said. “Just now, though, I think you need to rest.” He touched a bone inductor and Elin fell into blackness.

  * * *

  Floating again, every metaphorical nerve on edge, Elin found herself hypersensitive to outside influences, preternaturally aware, even suggestible. Still, she suspected more than sensed Coral’s presence. Go away, she thought. This is my mind now.

  I am here and I am always. You have set foot in my country, and are dimly aware of my presence. Later, when you have climbed into the mountains, you will truly know me; and then you will be as I.

  Everyone tells me what I’m going to do, Elin thought angrily. Don’t I get any say in this?

  The thought almost amused. You are only a program caught in a universal web of programming. You will do as your program dictates. To be free of the programs is to be God.

  Despite her anger, despite her hurt, despite the cold trickle of fear she tried to keep to the background, Elin was curious. What’s it like? she couldn’t help asking.

  It is golden freedom. The universe is a bubble infinitely large, and we who are God are the film on its outside. We interact and we program. We make the stars shine and the willows grow. We program what you will want for lunch. The programming flows through us and we alter it and maintain the universe.

  Elin pounced on this last statement. Haven’t done a very good job of it, have you?

  We do not tamper. When you are one with us, you will understand.

  This was, Elin realized, the kind of question-and-answer session Coral must have gone through repeatedly as part of the Star Maker project. She searched for a question that no one else would have asked, one that would be hers alone. And after some thought she found it.

  Do you still—personally—love Tory Shostokovich?

  There was a slight pause, then: The kind of love you mean is characteristic of lower-order programming. Not of program-free intelligence.

  A moment later Tory canceled all programming, and she floated to the surface, leaving God behind. But even before then she was acutely aware that she had not received a straight answer.

  * * *

  “Elin, we’ve got to talk.”

  She was patched into the outside monitors, staring across Mare Imbrium. It was a straight visual program; she could feel the wetwire leads dangling down her neck, the warm, humid air of Magritte against her skin. “Nothing to talk about,” she said.

  “Dammit, yes there is! I’m not about to lose you again because of a misunderstanding, a—a matter of semantics.”

  The thing about Outside was its airless clarity. Rocks and shadows were so preternaturally sharp. From a sensor on the crater’s seaward slope, she stared off into Mare Imbrium; it was monotonous, but in a comforting sort of way. A little like when she had made a Buddha. There was no meaning out there, nothing to impose itself between her and the surface.

  “I don’t know how you found out about Coral,” Tory said, “and I guess it doesn’t matter. I always figured you’d find out sooner or later. That’s not important. What matters is that I love you—”

  “Oh, hush up!”

  “—and that you love me. You can’t pretend you don’t.”

  Elin felt her nails dig into her palms. “Sure I can,” she said. She hopscotched down the crater to the surface. There the mass driver stood, a thin monorail stretching kilometers into the Imbrium, its gentle slope all but imperceptible.

  “You’re identifying with the woman who used to be Elin Donnelly. There’s nothing wrong with that; speaking as a wetsurgeon, it’s a healthy sign. But it’s something you’ve got to grow out of.”

  “Listen, Shostokovich, tinkering around with my emotions doesn’t change who I am. I’m not your dead lady friend and I’m not about to take her place. So why don’t you just go away and stop jerking me around, huh?”

  Tiny repair robots prowled the mass driver’s length, stopping occasionally for a spotweld. Blue sparks sputtered soundlessly over the surface.

  “You’re not the old Elin Donnelly either, and I think you know it. Bodies are transient, memories are nothing. Your spontaneity and grace, your quiet strength, your impatience—the small lacks and presences of you I’ve known and loved for years—are what make you yourself. The name doesn’t matter, nor the past. You are who you are, and I love you for it.”

  “Yeah, well, what I am does not love you, buster.”

  One of the repairbots slowly fell off the driver. It hit, bounced, struggled to regain its treads, then scooted back toward its work.

  Tory’s voice was almost regretful. “You do, though. You can’t hide that from me. I know you as your lover and as your wetsurgeon. You’ve let me become a part of you, and no matter how angry you may temporarily be, you’ll come back to me.”

  Elin could feel her body trembling with rage. “Yeah, well if that’s true, then why tell me? Hah? Why not just go back to your hut and wait for me to come crawling?”

  “Because I want you to quit your job.”

  “Say what?”

  “I don’t want you to become God. It was a mistake the last time, and I’m afraid it won’t be any better with the new programs. If you go up into God and can’t get down this time, you’ll do it the next time. And the next. I’ll spend my life here waiting for you, recreating you, losing you. Can’t you see it—year after year, replaying the same tired old tape?” Tory’s voice fell to a whisper. “I don’t think I could take it even once more.”

  “If you know me as well as you say, then I guess you know my answer,” Elin said coldly.

  She waited until Tory’s footsteps moved away, fading, defeat echoing after. Only then did Elin realize that her sensor had been scanning the same empty bit of Magritte’s slope for the last five minutes.

  * * *

  It was time for the final Trojan horse. “Today we make a God,” Tory said. “This is a total conscious integration of the mind in an optimal efficiency pattern. Close your eyes and count to three.”

  One. The hell of it, Elin realized, was that Tory was right. She still loved him. He was the one man she wanted and was empty without.

  Two. Worse, she didn’t know how long she could go on without coming back to him—and, good God, would that be humiliating!

  She was either cursed or blessed; cursed perhaps for the agonies and humiliations she would willingly undergo for the sake of this one rather manipulative human being. Or maybe blessed in that at least there was someone who could move her so, deserving or not. Many went through their lives without.

  Three. She opened her eyes.

  Nothing was any different. Magritte was as ordinary, as mundane as ever, and she felt no special reaction to it one way or another. Certainly she did not feel the presence of God.

  “I don’t think this is working,” she tried to say. The words did not come. From the corner of her eye, she saw Tory wiping clean his facepaint, shucking off his jumpsuit. But when she tried to sit up, she found she was paralyzed.

  What is this maniac doing?

  Tory’s face loomed over her, his eyes glassy, almost fearful. His hair was a tangled mess; her fi
ngers itched with the impulse to run a comb through it. “Forgive me, love.” He kissed her forehead lightly, her lips ever so gently. Then he was out of her field of vision, stretching out on the grass beside the cot.

  Elin stared up at the dome roof, thinking: No. She heard him strap the bone inductors to his body, one by one, and then a sharp click as he switched on a recorder. The programming began to flow into him.

  A long wait—perhaps twenty seconds viewed objectively—as the wetware was loaded. Another click as the recorder shut off. A moment of silence, and then—

  Tory gasped. One arm flew up into her field of vision, swooped down out of it, and he began choking. Elin struggled against her paralysis, could not move. Something broke noisily, a piece of equipment by the sound of it, and the choking and gasping continued. He began thrashing wildly.

  Tory, Tory, what’s happening to you?

  * * *

  “It’s just a grand mal seizure,” Landis said. “Nothing we can’t cope with, nothing we weren’t prepared for.” She touched Elin’s shoulder reassuringly, called back to the crowd huddling about Tory. “Hey! One of you loopheads—somebody there know any programming? Get the lady out of this.”

  A tech scurried up, made a few simple adjustments with her machinery. The others—still gathering, Landis had been only the third on the scene—were trying to hold Tory still, to fit a bone inductor against his neck. There was a sudden gabble of comment, and Tory flopped wildly. Then a collective sigh as his muscles eased and his convulsions ceased.

  “There,” the tech said, and Elin scrabbled off the cot.