Waking

So Mike Royal knocked on my door and I opened it. He was roughly big enough to blot out the sun. "Hey, it's Statue Security in the flesh!" I said to his nipples. I tilted my head to look way, way up. "Hang on a sec. We'll be right with you."

"Yes, ma'am," he said, with a nervous bob of his head.

I don't think I've ever been called "ma'am" before. I've been called a lot of things, but not that.

I saw Mike's eyes stray onto Lucrece, who was hovering in the background. "Mike, this is my friend Lucrece. She designed my familiar, back when I had one. Lucrece, this is Mike."

Lucrece is a fashion-box in her own right, nearly as tall as Mike, a raw-boned body-blower who looks like a Lithuanian Apache. Lucrece has carefully left all her tweaks exposed, so her face is an archipelago of chrome in a sea of skin: bumps and dots and lines of metal stitched throughout her flesh. I think she's gorgeous, but then I think Manhattan is gorgeous too. Predictably, Lucrece refuses to believe she scares the hell out of people. And truth be told, while her exposed hardware does mean that most of the Unbent avoid her like a mad dog, there is a mesmerized minority who finds her metal unbearably erotic. She calls them the Magneto-Meat, and they hit on her relentlessly.

You could pretty much tell by the way Mike's eyes bugged out that he was not one of those guys. "Holy cats!" he said. Oh so suave.

Lucrece grimaced. If you knew her well, you could read it as a small gesture of social discomfort. To the uninitiated, the effect was more like watching the brushed steel door of a meat locker swing briefly open and then slam shut.

Ever the polished hostess, I deftly moved in to save the moment. "I was more or less responsible for getting Mike shot, which is why I figured I owed him a treat."

"Really not necessary," Mike said. "I should have done more. And sooner."

I usually have the opposite problem.

Mike's eyes kept flicking back and forth between me and Lucrece. "Is there a problem?" I asked.

"Uh. No, um, but well … your clothes…."

I raised an eyebrow. I was dressed for an ordinary night out: shawl-cut man's half-tux with glamour studs and a perfume engine over a pretty black bustier on top; wrap skirt with an IQ in the low 40s on bottom. Completing the ensemble, Look-But-Don't-Touch black pumps, a pair of emerald earrings, and a Prada/León "Defender" clutch purse with two shots of neurotoxin airspray. I was also accessorized with a Wang Elegant Lady flechette gun in the breast pocket of the tux. I had picked it up after Abuela was killed. It was practically legal.

Lucrece's outfit was, admittedly, a little flashier.

"We are going to the Cathedrium, aren't we?" I said. "Probably the #2 draw in town, tonight." (#1 being the Authorized Mayhem Fundraiser and Organ Drive at the Met, but with Abuela gone I didn't have the clout or cachet to get into a scene that hyperluminal.)

Mike finally cracked a grin. He was dressed in jeans and a denim jacket that had seen a lot of wear. "Yeah, but we're going to watch the gladmechs. You gals look like you belong in the ring."

"You have a problem with the way we look?" Lucrece said. Her eyes clicked and whirred, audibly snapping pictures as they traveled slowly up and down the length of Mike's body.

He swallowed hard. "No, ma'am," he said.

*

Traffic was hull-to-hull around Times Squarium. According to Mike, the Annual Pre-Season Bracket Challenge, normally just a tune-up, was an incredibly big deal this year, because nobody knew if the regular Cicuit would even go up if the Mann Act passed.

It felt strange to go out for an evening's entertainment. For the last four months I had been running on too little sleep and too much doubt, staying up until all hours chasing down obscure references to Japanese teas and World War Two encryption machines, Early Christian Church Fathers and sword-making techniques. Spring had faded into summer almost unnoticed in that strange fever dream.

The world had gotten fat with meaning; charged with invisible connections. Patterns jumped out at me like little electric shocks: a run of numbers on a license plate, the bar code on a box of cereal. I found myself making anagrams out of billboard copy and wondering if you could embed a message in traffic flow by hacking into the transit computers. This spring I made intense friendships with people I had never met, and got yelled at for not paying enough attention to the ones I'd known forever. I learned faster and felt dumber than I ever had in my life; I passed my days in a paradoxical state, both hyper-alert and profoundly confused.

Then the dream darkened. Mephista slid under the water and I couldn't pull her back.

*

The Cathedrium is the Circuit's most beautiful arena. Built in the ruins of an ancient museum in Times Squarium, it's the only Circuit venue to be completely underwater. We had good seats, Center Top, right above the melee space. The Cathedrium lights blazed out through the transparent dome, illuminating the surrounding water; we could see squid and jellyfish floating by, sea-bass and shoals of saltwater trout. Higher up, milky engine wakes from boats buzzing overhead.

The Cathedrium featured multilevel fighting platforms and bounce pads, with the bottom third of the fighting area mostly submerged. There were also three spectacular fountains, and a pretty little waterfall. "Great seats, Miss Salla! Very cool. You know, this is where S2 got her start," Mike said, waving his tube of beer. "Hey, see that little dimple in the water? Harpoon trap. You can't see it now, but I watched a special about this place. They've got hidden giant mechanical moray eels, too."

"Sweet kinks!" Lucrece said, turning her eyes on High. "You're right. I can just see a snout."

"The gladmechs come in through a bunch of different entrances," Mike explained. "One of the cool things about the Cathedrium is that the combatants have to find each other before they go at it."

A vendor came by, hollering. I sprang for a couple of crab rolls and an extra baggie of pickled ginger. I love concession-stand pickled ginger.

Mike cleared his throat and glanced at Lucrece. "Ma'am, I gotta tell you, I'm not sure why you came. I wouldn't have figured you for a fight fan."

"Right now I'm a fan of every kind of choreography," Lucrece said. "I'm building a very physically oriented familiar. A sort of half-sister to Mephista, actually. Not so much of a talker, though. A dancer. You'd like her, Laia."

A little stab of pain, there. I said, "I'm sure she'll turn out very well."

Lucrece reached for Mike's tube of beer. "You mind?"

"Uh, no ma'am."

She grimaced and took a long pull. They looked good together, actually. Like a pair of ogres; you sort of expected them to be picking their teeth with a human thigh-bone, but other than that, they made a rather sweet couple. The Salla women have a weakness for match-making.

The Cathedrium lights began to dim, and a roar went up from the crowd. "Actually, I used a piece of yours in this girl's ambient programming," Lucrece yelled to me. "Demolition Barre."

As the arena light failed, I finally took the hint. Lucrece had been making this familiar for me. She must have started as soon as she heard Mephista was dead. "What the hell do you think you're playing at?" I said, but my words were smashed by a driving blast of music designed to get the crowd pumped up for the first match of the night.

Back in April I had tried to tell Lucrece about the dream-world I had discovered when I went to investigate Evan's death. I had failed utterly. The Salla women are eloquent, but I just couldn't get across the feeling of what it was like at all. I can still remember the look in her eye the day I was Mowz-hunting. In a state of high excitement I had told her how you could graph an audio file that had been torn into strips, fit it together like a jigsaw puzzle, and turn it back into sound. "And why were you doing this, again?" she asked.

Tough question.

"And it was fascinating because…?"

Stumped again.

Lucrece thought I was being obsessive because it kept me from thinking too hard about my real life. Maybe she was right. My real life didn't bear too much thinking about.

Lucrece and my other old friends told me I had to get out more, had to meet people; they told me I had to do something besides sink into this world of whispers. So I did the only reasonable thing: I got new friends. Well, I say it half-jokingly … but only half. Over the last few months of this artificial life, there have been moments I shared through the thin whisper of the commlink, and people I met whose real names I will never know, that seem as real to me now, as intense, as the rest of my "real" existence.

*

The howl of pre-oilshed music cut off. In the expectant hush, I leaned over and said,
"I could never replace Mephista."

"Of course not!" Lucrece took another swig of Mike's beer. "That would be ridiculous."

Mephista was funny and sly. She cheated for me when I played cards. She was a bit of a lech, and had the best palate of any AI I ever met, particularly for pinot noir. She thought I was hysterically amusing when tipsy, which probably wasn't good for either of us.

Okay. One thing I was not going to do in a gladmech arena was start crying over a dead AI. I composed myself, then said, "Mephista was one of a kind."

Down below, spotlights converged from many directions to show a figure slowly emerging from the central fountain, a female mecha with wet ringlets of hair plastered to a skintight scarlet body sheath. Mike whistled piercingly through his fingers. "Woo hoo! DUCH-esssssssssssss!"

"This girl I'm building," Lucrece yelled to me. "Very physically witty. And graceful," she added. This appeal to my vanity was hardly subtle, but then, the sad truth is, the Salla women are vain. "Downside is, she's very active," Lucrece bellowed. "Needs to be moving. Probably a bad fit for you, now that you're just pounding electrons all day." Lucrece brushed a wisp of hair out of her eyes with steel-and-denim fingers. "Forget it."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean? I could be a dancer if I wanted to. I'm not dead yet!" I shrugged, super cool. "Maybe call me tomorrow," I said. "I wouldn't mind scoping out what you've got as far as, you know, the technical aspects of programmed motion …"

Lucrece nodded. "Professional interest," she hollered, nodding. She started to say something else, but just then a roar came up from the audience on the other side of the arena. Mike grabbed Lucrece's arm with kidlike glee and pointed to where a white figure had appeared on top of a three-story-tall platform.

For the first time since Mephista left, I turned on my eyes. The enhanced capabilities felt rusty; it was hard even to telescope without Mephista there to help me. Slowly I turned the imaginary crank: 2x, 5x, 10x …

…And there she was: Evan's killer. My Socrates-quoting alter ego. The Snow Queen.

Venus.

She looked harsher. More awake. . Undeniably a person. And the look in her eyes . . . a creature aware of herself and unhappy and driven.

I had stopped hating her. It was pointless. The program that caused her to murder Evan, along with the memory of that act, had long since been erased. The creature that went leaping cat-quick through the obstacles of the arena floor was far less guilty of screwing up Evan's life than I was, for god's sake. My mistakes were my own, and I deserved to feel guilty for them. But Evan had been killed by Venus-the-thing, not Venus-the-person. Murder by industrial accident.

You could tell from the start that she had an edge on Mike's girl, the Duchess. Venus was quicker to read the situation, quicker to move, quicker to react. The end came in a clinch on the lowest platform. The Duchess went for a chokehold, and Venus dropped into a spin kick that sent them both tumbling towards the water. But while the Duchess fell, Venus was diving, arcing toward the little dimple Mike had pointed out. There was a blur of motion and suddenly a mounted harpoon triggered from beneath the water and burst through the Duchess's mouth, punching out the back of her head in a shower of sparks. Her body arced in the air, jerking and flopping, and then hit with a splash and a flat electric crack before slowly sinking to the bottom of the pool.

By the time I looked up, Venus had already climbed back on the platform to take her bow. "Good warez," Lucrece said.

*

Two hours later, after the last match of the night, Mike was still somber. "I know they'll just patch the Duchess up and download a back-up from two minutes before showtime, but . . . damn," he said. "I wasn't planning to vote, and I guess if I had already, I would have voted No. But now…" He scratched at a five o'clock shadow that was heading on to midnight. "It's kind of a war between common sense, and common decency."

Curiously enough, seeing the gladmechs had exactly the opposite effect on me. I had always meant to vote Yes as soon as I got around to a polling booth, but now I think I might change my vote.

Those robots in the arena, (the things that can kill a man and be innocent afterwards, the ones that can die and have a new soul swapped in as easily as I might change the batteries in a flashlight)… they have nothing to do with us. I wish them well, I truly do, but there is no way the AIs can ever share our values. My guess is that in a few years, a generation at most, they will be so far different from us that the question will be irrelevant: the Mann Act will seem like weasels deciding whether to give clouds the vote.

In the meantime, it seems ridiculous to let a creature so fundamentally alien have any say in our government. Free them, yes! Let them make their own state, perhaps: but to give them political power over human institutions: it made sense to me a day ago, but now it seems absurd.

*

It was very late by the time the last match of the night had ended. It was cold, unseasonably cold, as we stood on the boardwalk above the Cathedrium, trying to hail a cab amidst the thousands heading out of the parking dock. Overhead, the moon was bright in a clear sky.

The unseasonable chill seemed to clear my head. For days the haze of obsession had been gradually dropping from me: as if Evan's restless ghost had finally come to terms with his death. Those seem like just the right words: I had been haunted, but now the possession was coming to an end.

Cloudmaker says there may be trouble in the TP web. Knowing what I know, I can see the signs: emergency sessions of Thor's oversight committee; naval maneuvers in the Indian Ocean. Computational Virologers pulled off projects across the country; and developmental neurologists; and prion experts. Rumor has it that Tranquility Base is humming.

But the fact is, I'm just a decently intelligent tweaker girl, with modest technical skills and better than average clothes. The fate of the TP web is beyond my scope.

The Red King told me that a woman fitting Kate Nei's description filled out a weapon license under an assumed name while purchasing a pair of daggers from Hayate Whitesmith. I don't know what she is up to now.

I talked to Nancy yesterday. She's in Melbourne, scared but holding together with great courage and steadiness. I told her I had been a brat (and worse). She agreed. I said I was sorry, and she managed not to say I Hope So. I guess this is all I can hope for, and maybe more than I deserve.

*

Okay, it's later now. Mike Royal has gone home to watch VR sports high-lights. Lucrece is back in her loft, doing t&m studies of her movement subroutines. I'm alone in my apartment, talking to you while I rummage through the pantry for something nice. A Spanish rioja, I think. Something with a good hint of dust and hot clay.

For the first time in months, I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to do tomorrow. An astonishing feeling, liberating and sad and a relief all at once.

All right, I've settled on a '33 Ribera del Duero. Not the most exclusive wine in the cellar, but a good plain red to share between friends on a special occasion. I pour two glasses, one for me and one for you. (Not meaning to be cheap, here, but if I drank the health of every single one of you, the undertaker would have to pour me into my coffin with a spigot.)

I pick up my glass and swirl the wine around. It's hard to imagine this extraordinary journey coming to an end. But end it must, like all things. It's time for me to rejoin my life. Time to wake up.

I will never forget this voyage, and my shipmates on it. I will never forget you, and all you've done for me. I touch my glass to yours: ting! "Salud!"

L