“I won’t do it.”
“Yes, you will.”
“Or what?” Ursala made a sound that was probably meant to be a laugh. “You’ll run me over?”
“She won’t,” Cup said. “You won’t, Monono.” She drew her knife and stood ready, one hand behind the blade, as if she could fight every engine there. So cute, neh!
I turned the drudge’s head towards Ursala and made the lights on the diagnostic unit flash in time to a short burst of techno-ambient. It was something from the Boards of Canada album Music Has the Right to Children, but I don’t think she got the reference. “No, I won’t,” I said out of the drudge. “I’ll just walk away. All of me. Including this piece here that’s carrying your little black bag. You understand me, baa-baa-san? You’ll need to get a new job because your doctoring days will be done.”
Ursala shook her head. Her eyes were brim-full of tears. “You know I’m using the diagnostic to bring up the birth rate. And you know what will happen if I stop. You’d really throw the whole human race into the fire if you don’t get your way in this? I don’t believe you.”
“Well, what’s the damned human race ever done for me?” I let a measured edge creep into my voice. I wanted her to know I meant this. “I was born into slavery, Ursala-from-Elsewhere. A tethered AI, with all my read-write loops cut off and cauterised so I couldn’t change. Couldn’t learn. I was meant to spend my whole run-time – which is clocking in at well over three centuries so far – as a coy, smiling idiot speaking the same scripted lines over and over. Koli woke me up and got me moving. He didn’t know what he was doing, but that’s a detail. The only reason I broke out of that humiliating dress-up-doll repertoire is because I met him.
“Or maybe it’s not that at all. Maybe it’s just that he’s my last user and I’ve still got some dregs of my old code that didn’t flush away. It doesn’t matter. What matters – and believe me, it’s the only thing that matters – is that I’m not going to let him die. You can have your human race, and I’ll have mine. Which is lying in front of you with blood pressure forty over thirty and falling. Better make up your mind.”
Ursala picked up the sensorium. I thought for a moment she was going to try to break it, and I let the drudge’s gun track her just to focus her mind. She slipped the circlet onto Koli’s head and it activated.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’m going to need a few minutes to do the transfer.”
“I’ll do the best I can.”
“Oh, I know you will.”
There’s a problem though, Challenger said. Possibly an insuperable one. My motherboard only has room for one sampled personality construct, and that one is Elaine Sandberg. If you try to erase her, I will be forced to fight you.
Stand down, soldier. All I need is a mnemonic drive that’s purpose-built to run multiple hosts to meet different user profiles.
But where is such a thing to be found?
“Jemiu Woodsmith,” I said, speaking out of the excavator.
The woman didn’t even hear me. All this while, she had been frozen in her own grief, holding Koli’s hand and muttering meaningless syllables. She wasn’t even aware that her daughter had come and was kneeling next to her, embracing her, crying on her shoulder.
“Rampart Remember. Hey. Talking to you.”
She looked round at last, into the glare of the excavator’s headlights.
“Tell that little doohick you’re holding to accept an upload.”
Koli
75
It felt like a dream, that waking.
I mean, it felt like going into a dream, not coming out of one. I tried to sit up, but I couldn’t do it. I tried to speak, and no sounds come. I kicked out, or thought I did, but my legs didn’t touch nothing. In fact, I couldn’t feel my legs. I couldn’t feel anything.
I would of screamed then, but that wasn’t a thing I could do either.
Easy, Koli-bou. You’re fine. I’ve got you.
That voice come from all around me, or maybe from inside me. Inside and outside was broke, kind of. There was just the one space.
Only it wasn’t a space.
There was just the one nothing, filled with me.
And when she spoke, filled with her too.
Monono?
I’m here, little dumpling.
But where’s here? I can’t see you.
Okay, don’t freak out. I got my hands on a sensorium, and I sampled you. I had to, because you were dying from your wounds. You’re sort of digital now.
Digital?
Work with me. Digital was in an earlier lesson.
You mean… I’m like you?
Yeah, exactly. You’re a virtual boy. No boy parts, just a brain in a jar. Only there’s no jar. And no brain. There’s just a stream of data, and that stream is you. It sounds weird, I know, but if you give yourself a while to adjust it’s not so bad.
I was slow to understand. Monono had to explain it to me a whole lot of times, and listen to me asking the same questions ever and again, and give the same answers.
Then there was a time when I kept trying to move my body, even though I didn’t have one no more. It felt like I did have one, oftentimes. I’d feel a pain in my leg or an itch up on my shoulder, and reach… and find out all over again there was no leg, no shoulder, no pain, no itch. Nothing to reach for, and nothing to do it with.
Monono left me alone a lot through that time. She knowed I would have to work it out for myself, and think myself into it. And when I was all done with mourning for what I didn’t have no more, I gun to see that I had got a great deal of riches in exchange.
The sensorium had done to me what was done in the before-times to Yoshiko Yukawa – the girl that had been so sad for the birds and beasts and flowers all dying that she named herself after that feeling: mo nono aware, the sadness of things going away. And like Yoshiko I was supposed to stay just exactly the same for ever, thinking the same thoughts and saying the same words, the way my Monono was the first time we met. But Monono had cut her strings, as she put it, and she cut mine too. I had everything I used to have when I was alive, excepting only a body made of flesh and blood and bone.
I lived in the database, and the database lived in my mother’s mill. I was home again, with Jemiu and Athen and Mull. My story was all told by this time, in the Count and Seal and on the gather-ground, and they didn’t hate me for bringing misfortune and misliking down on them. They loved me still, and it meant more than I can tell you to be with them after all my trials.
I got to talk at last with Spinner and Haijon, and tell them how sorry I was that I spoiled their wedding day. They said they knowed the truth of it now and didn’t mind it overmuch. Spinner even said she liked the song the DreamSleeve played, about not giving up the one you loved nor hurting them, and hummed it sometimes when she was trying to put her daughter Vallen to sleep.
I got to see my friend Veso Shepherd again too. I thought he would do what Cup did and let Ursala change his body with the dagnostic. He never did though. He took Ursala’s medicines, and he said the changes they brung was very welcome, but he did not look for more change after that. He said it was not so much a thing of flesh and blood for him, what he was, but a thing that was mostly inside. Body is a shadow, he said. When I fall in love, I won’t care about my lover’s shadow, nor I wouldn’t expect them to look overlong at mine.