Forbidden planets, p.12
Forbidden Planets, page 12
“It’s not the trial,” she snarled. “It’s the thought of stepping into that thing . . . when I came here, I never intended to leave. I won’t go with you.”
“You must.”
He took a step toward her, knowing even as he did it that the move was unwise. He watched her finger tense on the blaster’s trigger, and for an instant he thought he might cross the space to her before the weapon discharged. Few people had the nerve to hold a gun against an agent of Scrutiny; even fewer had the nerve to fire.
But Meranda Austvro was one of those few. The muzzle spat rapid bolts of self-confined plasma, and he watched in slow-motion horror as three of the bolts slammed into his right arm, below the elbow, and took his hand and forearm away in an agonizing orange fire, like a chalk drawing smeared in the rain. The pain hit him like a hammer, and despite his training he felt the full force of it before mental barriers slammed down in rapid succession, blocking the worst. He could smell his own charred fur.
“An error, Doctor Austvro,” he grunted, forcing the words out.
“Don’t take another step, Inspector.”
“I’m afraid I must.”
“I’ll kill you.” The weapon was now aimed directly at his chest. If her earlier shot had been wide, there would be no error now.
He took another step. He watched her finger tense again and readied himself for the annihilating fire.
But the weapon dropped from her hand. One of Caliph’s smaller spheres had dashed it from her grip. Austvro clutched her hand with the other, massaging the fingers. Her face showed stunned incomprehension. “You betrayed me,” she said to the aerial.
“You injured an agent of Scrutiny. You were about to inflict further harm. I could not allow that to happen.” Then one of the larger spheres swerved into Fernando’s line of sight. “Do you require medical assistance?”
“I don’t think so. I’m about done with this body anyway.”
“Very well.”
“Will you help me to escort Doctor Austvro to the dissolution chamber?”
“If you order it.”
“Help me, in that case.”
Doctor Austvro tried to resist, but between them Fernando and Caliph quickly had the better of her. Fernando kicked the weapon out of harm’s way, then pulled Austvro against his chest with his left arm, pinning her there. She struggled to escape, but her strength was nothing against his, even allowing for the shock of losing his right arm.
Caliph propelled them to the dissolution chamber. Austvro fought all the way but with steadily draining will. Only at the last moment, when she saw the gray hood of the memory recorder next to the recessed alcove of the dissolution field, did she summon some last reserve of resistance. But her efforts counted for nothing. Fernando and the robot placed her into the recorder, closing the heavy metal restraining buckles across her body. The hood lowered itself, ready to capture a final neural image, a snapshot of her mind that would be encoded into a graviton pulse and relayed back to the homebrane.
“Meranda Austvro,” Fernando said, pushing the blackened stump of his arm into his chest fur, “I am arresting you on the authority of the Office of Scrutiny. Your resurrection profile will be captured and transmitted into the safekeeping of the Metagovernment. A new body will be quickened and employed as a host for these patterns and then brought to trial. Please compose your thoughts accordingly.”
“When they quicken me again, I’ll destroy your career,” she told him.
Fernando looked sympathetic. “You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve heard that before.”
“I should have skinned you twice.”
“It wouldn’t have worked. They’d have sent a third copy of me.”
He activated the memory recorder. Amber lights flickered across the hood, stabilizing to indicate that the device had obtained a coherent image and that the relevant data was ready to be committed to the graviton pulse. Fernando issued the command, and a tumbling hourglass symbol appeared on the hood.
“Your patterns are on their way home now, Meranda. For the moment you still have a legal existence. Enjoy it while you can.”
He’d never said anything that cruel before, and almost as soon as the words were out he regretted them. Taunting the soon-to-be-destroyed had never been his style, and it shamed him that he had permitted himself such a gross lapse of professionalism. The only compensation was that he would soon find himself in the same predicament as Doctor Austvro.
The hourglass vanished, replaced by a steady green light. It signified that the homebrane had received the graviton pulse and that the resurrection profile had been transmitted without error.
“Former body of Meranda Austvro,” he began, “I must now inform you . . .”
“Just get it over with.”
Fernando and Caliph helped her from the recorder. Her body felt light in his hands, as if some essential part of it had been erased or extracted during the recording process. Legally, this was no longer Doctor Meranda Austvro: just the biological vehicle Austvro had used while resident in this brane. According to Metagovernment law, the vehicle must now be recycled.
Fernando turned on the pearly screen of the dissolution field. He tested it with a stylus, satisfied when he saw the instant actinic flash as the stylus was wrenched from existence. Dissolution was quick and efficient. In principle the atomic fires destroyed the central nervous system long before pain signals had a chance to reach it, let alone be experienced as pain.
Not that anyone ever knew, of course. By the time you went through the field, your memories had already been captured. Anything you experienced at the moment of destruction never made it into the profile.
“I can push you into the field,” he told Austvro. “But by all accounts you’ll find it quicker and easier if you run at it yourself.”
She didn’t want it to happen that way. Caliph and Fernando had to help her through the field. It wasn’t the nicest part of the job.
Afterward, Fernando sat down to marshal and clarify his thoughts. In a little while he too would be consumed by fire, only to be reborn in the homebrane. Scrutiny would be expecting a comprehensive report into the Pegasus affair, and it would not do to be woolly on the details. Experience had taught him that a little mental preparation now paid dividends in the long run. The recording and quickening process always blurred matters a little, so the clearer one could be at the outset, the better.
When he was done with the recorder, when the green light had reported safe receipt of his neural patterns, he turned to Caliph. “I no longer have legal jurisdiction here. The ‘me’ speaking to you is not even legally entitled to call itself Adam Fernando. But I hope you won’t consider it improper of me to offer some small thanks for your assistance.”
“Will someone come back to take over?” Caliph asked.
“Probably. But don’t be surprised if they come to shut down Pegasus. I’m sure my legal self will put in a good word for you, though.”
“Thank you,” the aerial said.
“It’s the least I can do.”
Fernando stood from the recorder and—as was his usual habit—took a running jump at the dissolution field. It wasn’t the most elegant of ends—the lack of an arm hindered his balance—but it was quick and efficient and the execution not without a certain dignity.
Caliph watched the tiger burn, the stripes seeming to linger in the air before fading away. Then it gathered its spheres into an agitated swarm and wondered what to do next.
The Singularity Needs Women!
Paul Di Filippo
So this Singularity walks into a bar—That’s how my sad yet ultimately hopeful story starts. Like a bad joke.
Maruta and I were drinking Ghostyheads in the Sand Castle. You know that drink. Pureed ectoplasm from the Wraiths of Bongwater 9, cut with tequila from the mutant agaves of New Old New Mexico and a spritz of volcano water. Pretty potent. By the second sip, your head is full of dark energy and your limbs are parsecs long. By the third sip, you’ve solved the riddle of where the Growlers disappeared to. And by the fourth, you feel you could walk a tightrope strung between Mount Meru and Shambhala.
But even that altered consciousness didn’t equip us to deal with a naked Singularity.
Maruta was telling me about the vicissitudes and excitements of her past month. At that period, she worked for Captain Pongo and his Mathspace Explorers. They had just returned from a long voyage to the von Bitter Shoals with a rich cargo of novel Penrose tilings. Captain Pongo had declared an extended shore leave for his weary sailors. Hence our little celebration.
“So, Lu, there we were, our ship hung up on fractal coral, the waters full of savage zero knots. None of us had eaten anything other than a slice of pi in the past week, and half our crew lay in sick bay, undergoing emergency Fourier Transforms. And what do you think Captain Pongo says? ‘Damn the toroids, full secant ahead!’ ”
Maruta laughed heartily at the punchline of her own anecdote, then tilted her head back to glug down an immoderate slug of her drink. I admired the sheer mechanical efficiency of her slim throat as it worked, let my eyes roam over the rest of her fine body, which was clothed in the latest fashionable cuirass and greaves from designer Hulda Loveling. Maruta was visibly happy to be reembodied and was exulting in her pure physicality.
As was I. I had missed her more than I had imagined I would, over the past several weeks. I tried to convey that by sensuously gripping her knee, although the joint of her greaves didn’t actually allow for any flesh-to-flesh contact.
“Damn dangerous job, Ruta. Always said so. But you’re good at it, and you enjoy it, so that’s all that counts. I’m just happy you’re back safely. Pretty lonely here without you.”
Maruta grinned broadly, then leaned forward to bring her face close to mine. The pungent odor of Ghostyhead wafted off her lips. “I didn’t really have time to miss you, Lu. But once I got back, I realized once more just how much you mean to me. So, what do you say to finishing our drinks and going back to your place?”
Closing her eyes and inching even closer, she invited a kiss. I moved to comply. But our lips never connected.
The noisy, revelry rich environment of the Sand Castle suddenly became quiet as a deepsea trench. Maruta and I both straightened up to see what had caused the hush.
Standing in the fine-grained flowing curtain of the doorway was a naked Singularity.
Appearing as a dark-haired, light-skinned human male some seven feet tall, impeccably proportioned and endowed in masculine fashion, the Singularity was instantly recognizable as such by his magisterium corona. No one knew the origin or exact nature of the field that always surrounded an incarnate Singularity, but the presence of the refulgence was an unmistakable sign of posthuman activity.
For several eternal frozen seconds, none of us humans dared do so much as breathe or blink. Then a few brave souls fingered their Lifelines, insta-texting calls to Ess-Cubed.
The Singularity took no notice of these silent cries for help, although I’m sure he registered them. Rather, he just proceeded further into the club.
There was a single step down from the doorway. The Singularity moved off the step but did not obey gravity’s injunction to meet the floor. Rather, he walked through the air, one-step-high.
And he headed straight for Maruta and me.
I got down off my stool, and Maruta followed. Those patrons of the bar nearest us backed hurriedly away, some falling over themselves in their efforts to disassociate themselves from us.
For me and Maruta, there was no point in running, no point in adopting a combative stance. But somehow it just felt better to meet this intrusion on my feet rather than sitting down.
With no haste and an air of implacable deliberate-ness, the Singularity closed the interval between us. I had plenty of time to experience a gamut of emotions: fear, curiosity, anger, envy, and, inexplicably, shame and guilt. All my surroundings, including the stressor-shaped circulating-particle walls and ceiling of the room, assumed a preternatural lucidity. I wasn’t sure if this was just plain old human fight-or-flight sharpening of my senses or some kind of magisterium leakage.
Halfway across the room, the worst thing happened.
The Singularity smiled and held out a hand, like some kind of commission-driven flitter salesman.
The essential banality of the gesture chilled me more than anything that had preceded it.
Inevitably, the Singularity reached us, still grinning and inviting a handshake. For all the insignificant good it would do, I interposed myself protectively between the intruder and Maruta. The fringes of his magisterium tickled my vision, inducing strange fractures and curdlings in the scene before me. I blinked three times rapidly, and the effect lessened, although things still did not look quite right.
Still hovering six inches above the floor, the Singularity spoke first, introducing himself.
“Magister Zawinul. I’ve come for your woman.”
Zawinul was a planet halfway across the Milky Way, although of course just a few steps distant on the Indrajal. It had gone posthuman only last week, making the nightly media reports on such occurences, which was why that world’s name was fresh in my mind.
The Singularity’s bold, blunt statement of its purpose did not surprise me by its tone. Although I had never dealt with a Magister-class entity before, I understood that they did not cater to human norms of behavior.
But the substance of Zawinul’s speech sent a shockwave through my whole being. I found myself responding intemperately, even though no one had ever had any luck dialoging with a Singularity.
“Fuck you! Maruta’s not my woman, she’s her own woman. And you can’t have her!”
Magister Zawinul lowered the hand I had refused to shake and frowned. With absurd irrelevance, I wondered what ineffable higher-level states of supraconsciousness these human subroutines could be intended to mirror.
“You deny the sub-Planckian connections that bind you and her because you can not see them as I can. If it were you I wanted instead, I would have politely informed the woman that I was taking her man. But as matters stand, I did the reverse.”
“Screw all that shit about who belongs to who! Why are you even talking about taking Maruta? You’re a godling! Whatever you think you need her for, you can make her equivalent faster than I can spit!”
“Not so. Some noetic-plectic aspects of the plenum are irreproducible, unique, even from my perspective. Humans belong to that category. Hence I must have this specimen and no other. She completes me.”
I started to bluster some more when Maruta interrupted me. Stepping out from behind me, she said, with admirable if not entirely altruistic fervor, “Lu, it’s no use. If he wants me, I’ll have to go.”
I looked at her. She seemed bewitched by the Magister’s glamour, her face reflecting his aura, which danced in her eyes. I gripped her by the shoulders and shook her.
“Snap out of it, Ruta! You don’t know what you’re getting into!”
Magister Zawinul softly placed one hand on my own shoulder then. It felt like a silk glove filled with live bees. “She is making a wise decision. Do not interfere with the woman’s choice—”
His touch was enough to make me explode.
I whirled around, aiming a solid blow at his jaw.
When my fist intersected the magisterium corona, it was as if my hand had transected an event horizon. The motion of my limb simultaneously sped up and slowed down, smearing across all scales. But my fist never connected with Zawinul’s jaw.
I was trapped immovably, as if I had tried to bop a tarbaby. There was no pain involved for me. No physical pain. But my heart ripped in two as I witnessed what came next.
I had to watch as Zawinul’s magisterium expanded to enclose Maruta in its field. The two of them began to ascend.
My hand popped out of the retreating corona, freeing me—but too late to do anything.
When Zawinul’s aura touched the stressor fields of the ceiling, the entire building underwent instant catastophic collapse. Whether Zawinul intended this or it was just an accident, I can’t be sure.
But they say with Magister-level entities that “accident” is a null term.
The Sand Castle and much of its furnishings were configured of shaped stressor fields confining whirling grains of common beach sand along various architectural planes. The building was only two stories high and not very big, so there was probably less than a ton of sand dispersed along its dimensions.
But all of that sand came down in a flash when the stressor fields died, burying me and all the other patrons.
