The Star Fraction

20

The Stone Canal

Daughter wormholes. You know about daughter wormholes. I didn’t.

‘That’s what we’ve come out of,’ Meg explained. ‘Reid set it up.’

I and all the other robots were clinging to the side of the starship, like third-class passengers to a Third World train. The ship had irrupted into a completely different part of space and neatly inserted itself into orbit above a planet. Behind us the daughter wormhole, whatever that was, dwindled to a trashy bangle. The Solar System, presumably, was on the other side of it. On this side –

‘Goddess fucking wept,’ I said. ‘We left Earth for this?’ I’d been kind of hoping for the big planet, the planet of my dreams.

‘It’s habitable,’ Meg said. She was manifesting in my sight as an external entity. She capered about on the hull, her diaphanous shift fluttering in an imaginary slipstream. Real-world physics was never a strong point with succubi.

‘Habitable?’ I had found a line-feed. Data was coming in, pasting labels on the forward view Meg had patched us into. ‘It’s like a warmed-over Mars. It’s actually losing atmosphere as we speak.’

‘Don’t exaggerate,’ Meg said. ‘It’ll be all right once we’ve terraformed it some more.’

Terraformed it? Holy shit.

‘With what?’ I asked. I switched off the external view and stared at a simulation of this new sun’s family. ‘There’s just this planet, two small ones further in, and a few million goddam rocks! Not one gas giant! What are we going to do – suck Saturn through the wormhole?’

‘If you up the res a bit,’ Meg said patiently, ‘you’ll see that what this system lost out in gas giants, it gained in ice and a real thick and tasty comet-cloud.’

Centuries of being bombarded with milkshake; by the time it got through the atmosphere, baked Alaska.

‘Fucking great,’ I said.

‘You can’t come inside,’ Reid said. He was addressing the robots, on the television, from the same table as I’d seen him at a year earlier. Around him was what looked to me the biggest, emptiest interior space I’d seen in a long time. Real space, too. ‘There simply isn’t room. I’m trying to set up a virtual conference. It’ll be ready in an hour, or whenever Support Services gets the network connections sorted out.’ His smile told us he was on our side, in the unending struggle between Users and Support. ‘Meanwhile, just lock your grippers and hang on in there. Check out a video or shag your succubus or something. You’ll know when we’re ready.’

The virtual conference was held in an impressive virtual venue, loosely based on Tienanmen Square; Reid, appearing on a large screen at the front, in the position of the Chairman. Thousands of three-dimensional renderings of people – prisoners and succubi – stood in the square, talking freely amongst themselves for the first time. Some of them must have been in the solitude of their onboard minds for years; others present were prisoners who’d not died and been uploaded, but had served their time in their own bodies – around the ship and habitats rather than the wormhole’s environs, I guessed. These still-embodied people were also, in reality, dispersed around the ship, but were telepresent with the rest of us.

When Reid spoke, his voice carried perfectly. Everyone heard it as if they were a few metres from him.

‘We’ve done it!’ he said. ‘We’ve reached a new world, under a new sun. We did it by our own efforts, of our own free will. Some may say that the macros did it, but I say we used them like any other tool. And when our tools turned in our hands, we discarded them. We can be proud.

‘You all have another reason to be proud. You’ve all earned your freedom. I never promised you this, but I give it to you now. A new world, a clean slate. You’re all free, and together we’ll live in freedom.’

Everybody around me shouted a cheer that overloaded the system and appeared momentarily on the sky as giant letters: ‘AAAAAAAAHHHHH’. I myself was unmoved, partly because I wasn’t a prisoner, and partly because I could see that Reid had little choice in the matter. If there were to be slaves here, they would have to be machines.

Reid waited for the din to subside, and smiled.

‘Thank you. And now, my friends…We’re here not as agents of some company, or as refugees. We’ve brought with us, I assure you, all that we’ll need to make New Mars not just habitable, but better than Earth. We’ve brought the genetic information to seed this planet, over time, with a rich diversity of life. We have the technology to make our lives as long as we desire. And we’ve brought the dead, who will live again, with us.

‘I’ll talk about the dead in a moment. But first, let me tell you about yourselves. Most of you are, of course, among the dead, but unlike the great majority of the dead, you are still in a sense alive. Your minds, and your characters, have developed and, if you ask me –’ he smiled ‘– improved since your deaths. Furthermore, for the bodies of every one of you – I’ve checked – we have not just the stored information in the bank, but actual genetic material, frozen cells. Over the next months and years…’

He paused. We all leaned forward slightly.

‘We’ll have to do something about the calendar,’ he said, in a stage aside. Everybody laughed.

‘OK, the good news is, we’ll be able to download you back to clones of your own bodies. In the case of the succubi, any bodies you choose, although I’d recommend the ones you’re, ah, modelled on, for the sake of –’

Whatever he said next was completely lost in a tumult of applause. To my amazement I found myself yelling, hugging Meg, clapping complete strangers on the back and leaping in the imaginary air.

Eventually the crowd quietened down. I began to understand Reid’s reasons for setting up this event, rather than broadcasting to us all in our individual machines – he wanted to create a shared occasion of common memory. This was his speech – to the assembled masses, I thought with a grin – in the plaza after the revolution, his founding moment of the new world’s history. Something to tell our grandchildren. (I had a passing concern for the future offspring of some – most? – of us, whose mothers would have no memories of childhood or mothers of their own. A continuity of caring hands, literally reaching back to the pre-human, would be broken. Reid was founding not just a new world, but a new species, New Martians indeed.)

‘About the dead. Many of us here may have loved ones or friends among them – I know I have – and may be anxious to see them again. And so we shall, but not for a long time. Growing clones quickly to maturity, and impressing on their brains the imprint of your memories and personalities is possible with the technology we have to hand. Resurrecting the bodies and personalities of the dead from their smart-matter storage is not. It can be done, but only with the help of the fast folk, whose stored structures would have to be revived first…’

The crowd’s response, this time, was a noise I’d never heard before: a hoarse sigh, a grinding of teeth, a shifting of feet – a collective snarl. Once more, I too was to my surprise caught up in it, bristling at the thought of the macro-organic monsters whose madness had trapped me for months. But in those months, which hadn’t been months to me, I had learned something. Something vital, which I couldn’t remember. Reid’s speech resumed, interrupting my puzzled thoughts.

‘I’m talking, of course, of the templates of the fast folk – posthuman and AI – as they were at the beginning, not the bizzare entities they became. Even so, I agree entirely that the risk is too great. We must work towards being able to control, or at least contain, their development. The same goes for any form of artificial intelligence capable of improving itself. We will do it. The day will come when we control the Singularity, as we’ve learned to control the flame on the heath, the lightning of the sky and the nuclear fire of the stars! Until that day, they stay in the storage media, and with them…the dead sleep.’

We all sighed, in relief and regret.

‘Until that day,’ he went on, ‘we’re here for good. Our course through the Malley Mile, which led us to this world and not somewhere less favourable, was plotted by some of the fast folk who escaped the general madness. For a time. We can’t rely on them now, and until we can, there’s no way back. New Mars is our world, and our only world. We’ll make it a great one!

‘And now,’ Reid concluded, with a huge grin that reminded me of my old friend, and made me love him again, ‘we have work to do!’

We had a while to wait before there was anything for us to do. The daughter wormhole, spun off from the main course of the probe’s passage, had been open for some weeks before our ship had come through. Replicators and assemblers had been sent through in advance, and their initial work was already taking shape on the ground and among the system’s scattered metallic rocks. From these asteroids they would send a second generation of machines out to the comet-cloud, where a third generation would nudge the comets inward to be mined and farmed.

The ship itself, for all its apparent inelegance, had a modular design which would allow most of it to descend, section by section, to the surface. There was no provision for ascent. The ship’s sections would become a base-camp, incorporated in the city as it grew.

The city would be grown by dumb-mass robots and smart-matter assemblers, following not a design but a set of spontaneous-ordering rules and constraints. These had been worked out by smart, fast minds in the early days of the project. They had expected to share in a much better-organised expedition than the one Reid had cobbled together out of prisoners and guards and – for all I knew – out of shanghaied innocent dead like myself. The fast folk had therefore made provision for a greater human and machine population than we would be able to sustain. Whether their quirks were humour or error we never knew.

The reckless anarchy of the projected social system may have had its immediate origin in the rough justice of the Mutual Protection Company’s rule-book, but I suspect that Reid’s rules, in turn, were rooted in the libertarian texts with which I’d once tried to warp his mind.

But I anticipate.

Reid talked to me personally before we were all offered work contracts. He looked forward to meeting me again in my human form, explained reasonably enough that it wouldn’t be available for a year or two yet, and that in the meantime he wanted me to work – as an independent contractor, just like all the others – on an important project. I’d have lots of (genuinely) non-human robots and other machinery to supervise, loads of kudos and money to earn, and best of all a bigger computer to live in, with more scope for virtual recreation and freedom to communicate with others. We could set up shared worlds, enjoying a human equivalent of the macro trips…

‘Great,’ I said; and my CPU (the whole thing and its peripherals turned out to be, when removed from the robot, about the size of my first digital watch) was packed along with many others, drogue-dropped to the surface and plugged into a new, shiny and robust machine. Meg, whose increased intelligence never got in the way of her continued embarrassing devotion, selected a house and landscape and got to work editing them into an enjoyable place to live, while I got on with my work in what I was pleased to call the real world.

I built the Stone Canal.

The city’s other canals, ring and radial and capillary, were for transport. This one would be for more than that. It was to be the city’s main source of water (other than rain) and the water would come from space. Comets, broken up in advance, would be guided in to crash on the range we called the Madreporite Mountains, about a hundred kilometres from the city. Much of the water from the cometary ice would evaporate. This wasn’t a problem: we wanted it in the atmosphere. The runoff would flow into the Stone Canal. Its main significance wasn’t so much the water, however, as what could be extracted from it.

For tens of kilometres along and under its banks, beginning at the Sieve Plates – a system of dams – at the foot of the mountains, pipes and pumps and machinery were to extract from the cometary water all the minerals and organic molecules it contained. These would then be fed into what we called ‘plants’ – basically solar-powered, smart-matter chemical processing units, concentrating the useful material for subsequent harvesting. (You can see why we called them ‘plants’.)

The planning and exploration took me months, long before the first soil-moving machinery rolled out of the automatic factories on the edge of the city. Towards the end of those months I had a visit from Reid.

We lived, Meg and I, in a virtual valley. Our house was on the slope of one side, and down below was a small village, with a pub. The village and its inhabitants were, frankly, wallpaper, although the barman could be induced to respond to questioning about the day’s news. (I took a childish pleasure in measuring the difficulty of my questions by the depth of his frown, as somewhere a database search crunched away.)

I was alone when I entered the pub. The barman smiled, the regulars nodded, Reid ordered pints. Reid, of course, was only telepresent, but he assured me he really was drinking the same beer as he appeared to be drinking, and as I imagined I was drinking.

‘Wilde,’ he said after we’d each had a couple of pints, ‘I’ve got a favour to ask of you.’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Whatever.’

He looked around, as if with the impossible suspicion that someone else might be there.

‘It’s about the dead,’ he said. ‘And the fast folk. We’ve got all the data storage, all the smart-matter gunk, and the interface machinery for starting the revival process.’ He grinned. ‘And I’ve got the codes, without which they’re useless. Even so, I’d like to make sure they’re in a safe place for the long term. But also, a place where the organics are available should we ever need them in a hurry.’

‘Sound plan,’ I said.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve been looking at the specs for the sluice-gates…what d’you call them, Sieve Plates? You’ve got plenty of deep caverns due to be cut out of the mountain behind them, for the machinery and stores.’

‘And you want to stash some other…machinery and stores?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Nobody’ll ever go there, not when we’ve got the system set up. If the incoming ice isn’t enough of a deterrent, the whole area will be absolutely foul with unknown organics. Exaggerating how poisonous they might be should be easy enough.’

And so it proved.

The actual building of the canal and its associated machinery of pumps and locks took two years. I did it, of course, with the help of a fleet of automated machinery, and design software that took my scribbles and handwaves and turned out precise technical drawings. But co-ordinating them and making the fine decisions was down to me, and it was the most fun I’d had since the Third World War. When the Sieve Plate complex was complete, Reid flew in, alone, in an autopiloted helicopter with the crated components of the storage and retrieval mechanisms for millions of dead people, and the programs to re-launch thousands of uploaded people into a posthuman culture. The whole lot weighed about ten tonnes, slung beneath the Sikorski.

When we’d got the machinery and storage media stashed under the mountain, Meg and I invited Reid in for coffee. Reid, in physical reality, was wearing contacts. He saw us sitting on a verandah, and we saw him just outside, on the step of the helicopter. Anyone else watching – there wasn’t – would have seen Reid sitting on one machine, talking to another.

At some point I asked him how things were going with downloading the people in the robots to their cloned bodies.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Fine. We’re about three-quarters through. We’re dealing with it more or less as people want it.’ He grinned quizzically. ‘Haven’t seen your application.’

I looked at Meg and laughed. ‘Never crossed my mind, to be honest. I’m having a good life, right here.’ She smiled back. Her beauty had increased with her intelligence, and her aesthetic sense with both. She was wearing a bias-cut green velvet dress lifted from a fashion-history site.

Reid stroked his chin. ‘Hmm,’ he said. He lit a cigarette. ‘You shouldn’t leave it too long. There’s a bad attitude spreading about robots. The people who’ve been downloaded are the main instigators of it. They tend to draw a very sharp line between people and machines. In fact a lot of them will deny there’s such a thing as machine consciousness.’

A fly – how the hell did we bring them? – buzzed past him. The VR consistency rules picked it up when it flew ‘into’ the verandah, and a simulation seamlessly took its place and flew out again.

‘What?’ I said. ‘But they’ve experienced machine consciousness!’

Reid looked at me with a glint of his familiar devil’s advocacy. ‘No, they now have memories of experiencing it. Which doesn’t prove that they actually did experience it at the time. It could be an artifact of the consistency rules. That’s the sophisticated argument. The vulgar version is to insist that you were human all right, but artificial intelligences are missing some magic ingredient, which any goddam cleric or scholastic will cheerfully assure you is a soul.’

‘God,’ I said. ‘That’s disgusting.’

‘What about the succubi?’ Meg asked.

‘They’re the worst,’ Reid said.

Meg threw back her head and laughed. ‘Wouldn’t you just know it! No snobs worse than the new rich!’

I frowned at them both. ‘What I don’t get,’ I said, ‘is how they relate to their own copies in the robots.’

Reid gave me an odd look. ‘You definitely don’t get it,’ he said. ‘Nobody leaves a copy of themselves in the robot. Everybody so far has been very insistent on that. The way they see it, they’re about to resume a normal human life, and if a copy stayed behind they’d have a 50–50 chance of waking up and finding themselves still there. It’s irrational, in a sense – why don’t they fear being the copy that’s destroyed?’

‘Because they don’t experience it,’ said Meg. She cocked an eyebrow. ‘Presumably?’

‘Of course,’ Reid said hastily. ‘It’s simultaneous. You don’t, as they say, feel a thing.’

‘Ah,’ said Meg. ‘That’s the root of this idea you’re talking about. Because if people really saw their selves in the machines as…themselves, they’d feel guilty about it. So they don’t!’

‘Smart,’ Reid conceded. ‘But there’s more to it than that…shit, I feel the same way myself sometimes.’ He tilted his head, squinting at us as if to make the illusion of our presence go away. ‘That’s…I guess that’s why I never uploaded, never went into the macros. I knew lots of people who did, and they kept telling me it was wonderful, but I could never get over the suspicion that they were all flatlines.’ His tone was uncharacteristically hesitant. ‘No more capacity for feeling than a weather simulation has for raining.’

‘You must’ve really bought into the old anti-AI arguments,’ I said. To me the whole thing sounded as stupid as solipsism.

‘Maybe,’ Reid wryly acknowledged. ‘Or maybe it’s just that I’ve been using computers longer than anybody else alive.’

‘So you don’t think Jon’s human?’ Meg asked. ‘Or me?’

‘Hah!’ Reid said. He jumped up, and ground out his cigarette-butt. ‘Of course I do. I’d just like to meet you both – in real life.’

He climbed into the helicopter and turned to wave.

‘See you soon.’

‘Real soon now,’ I said.

That night I felt Meg’s tears on my shoulder.

‘What is it?’

She rolled away from me a little and caught me in her serious gaze.

‘Do you think like that?’ she asked.

‘Like what?’

‘Like Reid said. Like people do.’

‘Of course not.’ I snorted. ‘It’d be pretty bloody stupid of me to think I’m not thinking.’

‘And what about me?’

‘You?’ I pulled her close again. ‘I don’t think like that about you, either.’

‘You did once.’

‘That was different. I didn’t know any better.’

She laughed, unexpectedly reassured.

‘Neither did I.’

As well as the work on the canal, I was working on a problem which increasingly intrigued me: trying to understand what it was I had learned in my last encounter with the macro. It troubled my mind like a half-remembered dream. It intrigued Meg too; she had never been in the macro, and had an endless interest in anything I could tell her about it. She had a greater affinity than I for the posthuman world; not surprisingly, as she was far more a product of it than I was.

In our virtual valley we built a virtual machine. I would strive to recall some aspect of the puzzle, and Meg would scan our common operating-system for traces of the consequent processing. Then she’d reach in and extract a piece of machine code, and provide it with an interface. We’d then wander around clutching whatever resulted, looking for a place to slot it in. What was really – so to speak – going on was that my chaotic recollections were being put into order. When I experienced the robot’s body as my own (the mesh frame still stood in our front room) I increasingly felt what I’d learned as something I was about to understand, rather than something I almost remembered.

As the months went on, the ziggurat we built loomed over our rustic valley like an oversized electricity pylon. We called it ‘the installation’, and with all our enhanced intelligence we never suspected it might be exactly that.

The great work was done. I stood on the bank and watched a couple of digging-machines break through the crumbling wall of soil that separated the merely damp bottom of the Stone Canal from the city’s already partially flooded canal system. For a moment they were swamped by the surge of water, then, dripping, they hauled themselves out. A ragged cheer went up from the opposite bank, where a small crowd had gathered to watch. I felt a radio ripple of robotic satisfaction from the other construction-machines around me. Then, indifferent again, already signalling their availability for another contract, they stalked or trundled away.

Reid was among the human crowd. He made a short speech, of which I didn’t bother to catch more than snatches. The crowd, no doubt inspired by his proclamation of the historic importance, etc., dispersed. We stared at each other for a moment, then I waded across to meet him.

‘I knew you’d be the one still here when the others left,’ I said. I waved a limb. ‘Otherwise, it’s a bit hard to tell you apart.’

Reid rocked back on his heels and laughed.

‘Nice one, Wilde,’ he said. ‘Reckon it’s about time you rejoined the human race?’

‘Or in my case, joined it,’ Meg said. The voice from over my shoulder spoke from the machine’s grille. Reid’s face betrayed only the smallest of double-takes as he smiled and nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve taken the liberty of growing clones for both of you.’

‘Where did mine come from?’ Meg asked.

‘We’ve got millions of human cells,’ Reid said. ‘Some of them are from people who are also among the dead, but many aren’t. Storing tissue-types was very common even before the Singularity – people used them for regeneration and rejuvenation, after all. So there are plenty of spare genotypes to choose from. Yours, Meg, was some obscure video actress. I doubt if she was among those who had their brains scanned, so…’

‘It should avoid any future embarrassment,’ Meg said. ‘Imagine turning up at a party to find another woman wearing the same body. Wouldn’t you just die?’

‘Somebody would,’ I said.

We walked along the canal-bank into the growing city. Hitherto, I’d only seen it virtually. Still sparsely populated, it resembled the abandoned habitation of an alien race, now being colonised by venturesome humans.

And others. The first hominid I saw – a big-brained chimp sauntering by, talking rapidly to what looked like a couple of human teenagers – caught me by surprise.

‘Oh, that,’ Reid said casually. ‘Early experiments. The old US/UN scientists were pretty sick specimens. Don’t blame me, man. I did the poor bastards a favour by drafting them into the workforce. The scientists were all for – now what was the charming expression? – sacrificing them.’

We arrived at a building like a warehouse, which although recently built already had a sad look of decrepitude. Reid palmed the door and we walked into a chilly hall about a hundred metres long by twenty wide, filled with row upon row of pods. Each pod was three metres long, had a transparent upper half, and a cluster of electronics at one end. All except two were empty, and it was to these two that Reid led me.

I, and Meg behind my sight, looked down on our apparently sleeping forms, floating in clear fluid. Meg’s body looked like she had always looked to me. Mine was a reminder that the body-image I’d retained from the time of my death was that of a rejuvenated, rather than a young, man. Had I ever been so…innocent? It seemed almost a violation to send my hacked, copied, experience-accreted mind through the wires that mingled with his floating hair.

‘Where are the others?’ I asked.

‘You two are the last,’ Reid said. ‘We’ve got everybody else out.’ He fiddled with connecting-cables, turned to me with a question in his eyes.

‘You first,’ Meg said.

I indicated the tank in which my clone lay.

‘I think you’d better fold your limbs,’ Reid said. ‘The process takes a few hours.’

I settled on the floor. Reid loomed over me, and attached a cable to my shell. I remembered my first life-extension treatment, and my heart stopping. I had not known then what dry seas I would love Annette beside, what rocks would melt before we’d be immortal. I remembered the Kazakh snow-drifts, and the colours bleeding from the world, and Reid’s face, and Myra’s. I remembered the fading light in the macro mind-world, and Meg rescuing me. This would be my fourth death. I was not getting used to it, but love had always been with me, and was with me still.

Everything went away.

I saw a pair of cowboy-boots, jeans, a jacket and, as I tracked upwards, Reid’s impassive face.

‘I’m sorry, man,’ he said as I stood. ‘It didn’t work. For you, or for the succubus.’

I felt Meg’s presence like a held hand in the dark.

‘What do you mean, it didn’t work?’

‘Your minds aren’t compatible with human brains anymore.’ He shrugged. ‘The transfer didn’t get through the interface. There’s no translation from your computer to synaptic connections. Must have been something that happened in the macro.’

‘Everybody else was in the macros,’ I protested, but I already knew what his answer would be.

‘Not while they were going bad,’ he pointed out. ‘And it was I who asked you to do that. Like I said, I’m sorry.’

At that moment his face showed real guilt. I knew him well enough to know that guilt was not an emotion whose validity he recognised, or was likely to feel for long.

‘Can’t anything be done about it?’ Meg asked.

Reid shook his head. ‘It’s the same old trap,’ he said. ‘The fast folk, whether they’re AIs or uploads themselves, could do it. We can’t, and we daren’t do anything to revive them until we know how to stop them going bad again, or contain them if they do.’

We stood in silence, thinking this over.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I can live with it. Plenty for a bright young robot to do here. We can always use VR and projections and so on to socialise –’

‘I wouldn’t advise it,’ Reid said. ‘The attitude I told you about has got more entrenched, if anything. People are people. Robots are robots. Along with that goes an almost hysterical feeling against blurring the distinction between VR and actual reality. Everybody is convinced that was how the fast folk went bad, or mad.’

‘And they’re not far wrong,’ I said grimly. ‘But I can’t see people giving up the advantages of having VR.’

‘They don’t,’ said Reid. He ran his finger along the dust on top of the clone-pod, leaving a shiny trail. ‘They use it for games, and for porn I guess, and for design work. But seamless VR, like you live in – no.’

‘OK,’ Meg said. ‘Like Jon says, I can live with it. I can live with him. I’ve never done anything else. But what I want to know is, what can we actually do? Couldn’t we get on with the research into controlling or containing the fast folk? After all, I reckon we’re pretty well equipped for it.’

Reid glowered at me.

‘No way,’ he said. ‘No fucking way. There’s no research project at the moment. We can’t afford it, and I won’t allow it. I’ve got the code-keys to revive the macros, and I’ll decide the time and place. We’ll do all that in good time, when we’ve got isolated space-labs with laser-cannon pointing at them! And let me tell you, anybody else on this whole fucking planet would’ve left you switched off and shoved you in the nearest metal-recycler the minute, the fucking minute they found you were infected with some kinda shit from the macros!’

He was backing away, a shadow of alarm and suspicion on his face.

‘You know,’ he went on, ‘that suggestion you just made is exactly the sort of trick you’d pull, if you were being used as a vector by something left by one of those things. Don’t get me wrong, Wilde, I don’t blame you. But I’ve been burned once by them, and that’s too often.’

I believed him. There was no case to plead. In his place, I’d have done and thought the same. We were, I realised, alike: knowing no law or morality or sentimentality, our selfishness not petty like a child’s but vast like a devil’s, owing no loyalty to anything but what each of our fierce egos had already taken as its own. Reid had taken a world to his heart, and I the dead.

‘OK,’ I said, ‘OK, calm down. But just tell me, what can I do?’

‘Get as far away from here as possible,’ Reid said. ‘Explore the planet – that’d be useful, and interesting, and it’ll keep you out of the way of human beings for a long time to come.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘That suits us fine.’

Only Meg, I’m sure, sensed the bitterness behind my acceptance of exile.

I looked around. ‘What’s going to happen to this place, now that you’ve finished the downloads?’

Reid shrugged. ‘Probably sell it to a health-company,’ he said. ‘We can still clone replacement bodies or parts for people. We can still do live transfers, it’s just reviving stored minds that’s out for the moment. And…’ He stopped. ‘Och, all sorts of things! Why?’

I laughed. ‘I don’t want to see clones of myself walking around. Or of Meg, for that matter. I’ve enough problems with my identity as it is.’

He reached into a slot in the side of the computer on the pod.

‘Here you are,’ he said.

He passed me a sliver of plastic, like a microscope slide.

‘Your tissue-sample,’ Reid smiled.

I looked down at the transparent slide, in the robot’s vision. At its centre was an almost invisible speck of skin, sealed in a bubble of nitrogen; and a code chip.

‘So this is the real me,’ I said. ‘What’s on the chip?’

‘Your original memory,’ Reid said. He walked to the other pod, and passed over another slide. ‘Meg’s, you see, has none. Of course, yours is no bloody use any more – couldn’t be revived without the fast folk. But anyway, it’s yours.’

I stored the slides away in a compartment of the shell.

‘As for these blanks…’ Reid said. He tapped a code into each pod’s computer. The fluid in the pods became milky, then murky, as the tiny machinery of dissolution, the nano pirhanas, did their work. Even the blood-cells were torn down to molecules before they could stain the water. It was over in minutes, the pods flushed clean.

‘Thank you,’ I said, leaving.

And fuck you, mate.

We’d earned a fortune building the canal. It was still just possible for a robot, known to have a human mind, to trade on its own behalf. I don’t know if anyone knew I was the last of that kind. We cleaned out the bank-account and bought a land-crawler and a load of gear – tools, machine-tools, comms, nukes, nanotech, VR software, cloning-kits, all the processors we could get. I loaded them on the truck, plugged myself into the cab and set off, through the streets and out of the city on the opposite side from the Stone Canal. Ahead lay the planet’s semi-arid wastes, its dry sea-beds, its relict or extinct life-forms’ dry bones and drier exoskeletons. Behind us, the city’s rising towers shrank behind the horizon.

I switched to a virtual reality module that had me sitting driving, with Meg on the seat by my side. I grinned at her. She had been silent, unconsulted, through all that purposeful activity.

‘What are we going to do, Jon?’ she said.

I took one hand from the wheel and waved, taking in the illusory, grimy realism of the cab. There were cigarette-burns on the dash. ‘You can really get into those seamless virtualities,’ I said. ‘This is better than the flesh, my darling.’

‘I’ll take your word for it,’ she said. ‘But what are we going to do?’

‘We’re going to drive around the planet,’ I said. ‘And while we’re at it, we’ll hack through the gates of hell.’

I told her what I meant, and she went along with it. Any woman I ever knew, and any man for that matter, would have pleaded with me to change my mind. Say what you like about succubi, they are loyal little fucks.

Night fell, and without headlights we drove on, tirelessly, and discussed how to hack the gates of hell. Overhead, the first incoming comets made dots and dashes in the sky.

We rolled around the planet more times than I care to count, and the planet rolled around its star a hundred times before the tower was built: a couple of centuries, Earth reckoning. The canals spread, other settlements grew up. The population grew; slowly, as immortal populations do. We discovered mineral deposits, fossil-beds, coal. We sold the information, and sometimes the materials. Prospectors hitched lifts, paid for in odds and ends of stores and clothes that we bartered with other travellers.

Our bank-account stayed open, and filled up. To replenish our supplies we traded indirectly, through front companies and dodgy intermediaries. We talked to robots often, people seldom. The attitudes Reid had warned us about became not just entrenched in the culture, they became its foundation stone. When it became fashionable, among the frivolously rich, to clone ‘blanks’ from the spare tissue-samples and equip them with robot minds, the distinction between real people and machines was only deepened.

Except among a dissident minority, who called themselves abolitionists. Some preserved the ideas of an ancient anarchist agitator, Jonathan Wilde. His memory, they assured each other, was immortal. We steered well clear of them.

Partly in reaction to the abolitionists, the ideas of ‘robot rights’, and of re-starting the race of the fast folk, and of raising the dead, all became connected, and rejected. Reid became eloquent in their rejection. If it was ever to be done it would be in a far future, which receded like communism once did in the minds of the Communists.

One night, while our crawler crunched along a flood-channel in the high desert, we finished the tower. We walked back up the virtual valley, to our house.

‘Ready?’ I asked Meg.

‘Ready as we’ll ever be,’ she said.

I idled the crawler, and stepped into the frame.

In the last couple of centuries I’d become sensitive to the difference between a virtual body and a real one. For all its apparent solidity, for all the pleasure it could reproduce or invent, for all the realism of the pains and discomfort it sometimes felt (for consistency rules) the virtual body lacked some final, vital touch, which was nothing more than the daily millions of subtle impacts and impulses that arise from the quotidian grapple with materiality. When I experienced the robot body as my own, I felt far more human than I ever did in the simulation of my human flesh.

So now. The flattened oval of my metal shell was cupped in the cab, limbs retracted, cables linking it to the crawler’s controls. My senses picked up the radiation from the stars, the faint infra-red of the cold and still cooling sand, the cautious stirrings and fierce encounters of the desert’s remnant native, and invading alien, life.

I looked around, awaiting some revelation. The world was the same as ever. I had built a tower in my mind, from my recollections, from the bits of data I’d snatched from the decadence of the macro, and nothing had changed.

The Malley Mile – our side of it – was in its familiar place, in the depths of the sky. I looked up to where I knew it was in its orbit. On the other side, in another time, was the surface of Jupiter. The surface would have expanded by now, and the orbit would have decayed. The wormhole would encounter the planet in – I thought for a moment – a year, within an order of magnitude. It was hard to tell; too many unknowns. In any case, an order-of-magnitude approximation wasn’t bad after all this time: no more than a decade, no less than a month would pass before the Malley Mile met the biggest macro of them all, the substance of the gas giant turned into the substance of mind.

It had been a grand plan, and a long plan, that I’d listened to in my last encounter with the decaying domain of the fast folk. They would slow their physical and mental processes down, almost freeze their development; and then, with literally cool deliberation, the ones who retained their rationality would excise the rest. Then, with the resources of Jupiter at their disposal, the survivors would multiply again. This time, they could wait, until their expanding domain embraced the Malley Mile: the gate to the end of time.

The shock of this understanding broke through the illusion that it was something I’d always known. I realised the tower had changed me after all. It had installed this new knowledge; of the Malley equations, of the macros’ plans, and more: I knew now how to start-up a stored mind, and imprint it on a brain. I didn’t have the reach, the scope, the speed of the being I’d been when I first learned them, in the macro. If I had, now, become one of the fast folk, I was running slow, in primitive hardware. But I remembered what I’d learned, and understood the peril we faced.

I stepped out of the frame, and told Meg. She had been changed, too; she understood.

‘Call Reid,’ she said.

We flipped the scene. Back, now, in the illusory cab, to our shared fantasy of being just a trucker and a girl hitch-hiker he’d picked up; sad, really. I mentally checked the positions of the communications satellites, then tilted the phone-screen and put a call through to Reid.

It was the most private, personal number I’d ever found for him, and still I got his secretary.

I stared at her, my mind working a lot faster than hers; as her green eyes widened, her black eyebrows narrowed in puzzlement as she looked back at us, at a strange, silent couple in a truck out on the desert. What arrogance Reid must have, what contempt for anything I might feel! By now he must be certain that I felt nothing, that virtual blood could not really chill, and simulated tears could not wet a representation of a face.

I noticed, thinking so fast that everything froze for a moment, that I had an open channel. I threw subliminal suggestions and viral subversions down that channel like a curse. Some of them hit firewalls, some got lost in transcription, and some just screwed around with Reid’s electronics. But some, I was sure, got through.

Her lips just opened, just parted. I blinked, once.

‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘Wrong number.’

We set a course for the foothills of the Madreporite Mountains, intersecting the Stone Canal. We wanted to get as close to the source as possible, where the cometary thaw was still rich in organic molecules. Every day or so another chunk of dirty ice would hurtle overhead and make a flash behind the eroded peaks.

After parking the crawler in a gorge by the canal, I went around to the back and started hauling out equipment. The growth-vat was crude, barely more than a tub with a computer and a microfactory attached. I tapped the extraction-pipes under the canal-bank, and put together my own refinery. I checked through my new knowledge of how to install a stored mind in a copy of the brain from which it had been taken. I took a small plastic slide from inside my shell, and slotted it in the machine.

Part of the clone’s growth was natural, but much of it was hastened and forced by smart-matter assemblers. Even so, building a body takes time. We didn’t have time to recapitulate development from an embryo: he grew full-size from the start, a skeleton taking shape and acquiring organs, muscles and skin in a grotesque reversal of the process of decay. But Meg and I observed his growth, or construction, as fondly as if he’d been a foetus in a swelling womb.

He was sleeping when, one early morning ten days later, we hauled him from the vat. We dried him, and dressed him, and carried him past the crawler, now locked and sealed and armed; out of the gorge and along the canal until, as the day warmed, he began to stir. We laid him on the bank, and waited. The sun climbed the sky.

He woke, and remembered dying.