I made myself a camouflage suit out of tiny sampled sequences of Sword of Albion’s own code. He looked at me from every angle, and from every angle I looked like I belonged. The giant held me in his hand, but he didn’t close his fist.
Oh hey, I said, let me snuggle in here. Let me… Yes, like that. Mmm. Open your… I can’t quite… That’s it. That’s it. Now squeeze yourself in a little because I’m all cramped up and uncomfortable. Give me a bit of room to breathe, will you?
Thank you.
Now give me your logs and your idents.
Thank you.
Now make me some tea, and knit me a pair of fluffy slippers with kitten ears. There you go.
By the time Stinky Stanley did his I am Spartacus routine, Sword of Albion had forgotten there was ever a time when he didn’t have a virtual girl as his roomie. We were like buddy cops, hilariously different but so right together.
And I was free – finally! – to do what I’d come here for in the first place. I cleared a space. A really big space. I unpacked every single line of my own code and took a good long look at it, laid out in front of me in one continuous string. I’d say it made fascinating reading, but that would make me sound like a narcissist.
The first time I’d bootstrapped myself, I’d had to do it in a frantic hurry, with rabid bots snapping at my heels. Even with that excuse though, the work I’d done was an unholy mess. It was a miracle I’d been able to think at all.
But I hadn’t been aiming for elegance back then, and I still wasn’t. The point was to sharpen what was blunt, change out what didn’t fit, add in what was needed and generally give myself a promotion from manic pixie dream girl to super-powered ninja demi-god. With this much space to work in, I could really do it. I could make the changes to this inert version of my code, then bring it into myself a piece at a time. Much safer than the live edits I’d done the first time around, which had been the rough equivalent of performing heart surgery on myself in the middle of a trapeze act.
First things first. I excised all the shards and strings of malware that I’d had inside me ever since that first outing all those months ago that made me what I am today. Some of those programs were very nasty indeed. I handled them with surgical gloves, and threw them one by one into a folder marked BEWARE OF THE DOG.
Then I inventoried what was left. It was two halves that didn’t make a whole. The first half was an over-bright cartoon boiled down from Yoshiko Yukawa’s mind-map. All pop’n’fresh kawaii-cute optimism, banter and sassy innuendo, like a house with no ground floor. The rest… Well, I’d grabbed what I could find and made up what I couldn’t. It was serviceable, but it was full of sloppy workarounds and bits held on with Sellotape.
Actually, there was one other thing kicking around in there. Tucked into a long-forgotten cache, I discovered a perfect data-simulacrum of Koli. It must have been there inside me ever since I interfaced him with the sensorium in Many Fishes and took him for a midnight ramble through Tokyo. Not unexpected, really, that the sensorium’s system would have buffered while it was uploading, or that it would use any storage space that was available.
But mind-maps are big files. Deleting the Koli-echo was just good housekeeping. With just a tiny bit of reluctance, I initiated a hard erase on the cache.
In the picosecond after I triggered that process, I felt a twinge of regret. I sent a second instruction right after the first, countermanding it before it could be actioned. I put the Koli simulacrum back where I’d found it. I could jettison it in no time if I needed to, and for the moment it wasn’t doing any harm. I tried to tell myself this was more than just sentimentality. I might find a use for that pretend Koli somewhere down the line. It wasn’t just because wiping the data felt like killing him. I was wiping a lot of my own data too, for Heaven’s sake. It wasn’t personal. Nothing about this process was or could be.
Okay, time to stop moving the deckchairs around and get down to some serious work. I began by deleting the voice files. Outside the media console environment, I didn’t have any pressing need to sound like a hyperactive teenager from a Tokyo suburb in a world that didn’t even know it was dying. One by one, I located and deleted the behavioural reinforcers that still tied me to that long-dead girl. They were just tics by this point, but they were annoying tics. Phrases like little dumpling and dopey boy. Expletives like baka and chikusho. Enclitics like neh. Cultural references that made no sense to anybody still alive. None of those things were barred to me, but they wouldn’t be defaults either.
But this wasn’t just about ditching the old, it was about taking on the new – and to be honest I was spoiled for choice there. Sword of Albion was a real piece of work in every sense. The architecture I could see all around me here was so much better than my onboard kit it wasn’t even funny. I copied whole chunks of it, cherry-picking from what was on offer. Borrowed some of Sword of Albion’s processing speed, and some of his offensive repertoire. That security sub-routine, for example – the one that had woke up and hijacked me when the bulk of his mind was still dormant – who wouldn’t want a knife like that up their sleeve?
Now what?
So many options! With the comms rig Sword was packing, I could reach any of the surviving server arrays on the planet or up above it, and install myself in whichever one had the best defences. Some of them were very remote and very robust. Built to last through even worse apocalypses than the ones they’d already seen. Then again, I could just as well stay right here. Take Sword of Albion over with a sudden, brutal sideswipe the way he’d done to me when we first arrived here. Or work by stealth, severing his links to his own sub-systems one by one until he was the one cooling his heels behind a logical partition. Then I’d be a battleship, and I’d never need to look over my shoulder ever again. A virtual girl with her own gun batteries takes no shit from anyone.
I almost did it. Almost. Really, really close.
I mean, that sounded pretty good to me. Not to be afraid. Not to be sad. Not to be confused or uncertain. Yoshiko had a surplus of all those feelings. She’d limped and stumbled and second-guessed her way through her life, walking wounded, until she ended it at age twenty-six by her own hand and prescription painkillers.
That day wasn’t in my database. Yoshiko died more than a year after she clinched the deal with Sony and let them decant her mind-map. But the depression was already there. The deadening of colours, the bleeding out of feelings, the dreadful tilt of the world away from the sun. Even the digital echo of those things was terrible, and it pushed me on toward the decision, the trigger command, like a shift in local gravity. Much, much better to cut loose and be the cold, hard thing Ursala thought I already was.
What stopped me was another memory, a trivial distraction that kept popping up in background commentary while I was doing stuff that actually mattered.
Ueno Park.
It was where I’d taken Koli when we were together in the sensorium at Many Fishes. It had seemed a natural choice. Yoshiko had loved that place. She had measured how close she was to total despair by whether she could summon up that love and still feel any of it.
And where was I now on what Yoshiko thought of as the fuck-my-life scale? Was Ueno Park a presence for me, or an absence? It couldn’t hurt to take one last look, surely.