Chapter
2:
Two hours later, he was frowning over the remains of the second beer, sitting a faux wood bar, and wondering what was going on in his life. Or was that the constructs? The distinction got blurred when he was working hard, or drunk.
He busied himself in an internal debate over a third beer (a real debate: his constructs were convinced it was a bad idea. He, having already had two, was less sure.) Finally, he gave up and had a look around the bar. Alcohol was a minority addiction, these days - Pioza was the poison of choice, now. Still though, there was definitely a niche- it was fairly busy this time of the evening. There were maybe a dozen couples scattered here and there. There were two groups there, at opposite ends of the place, in various stages of intoxication. Then there were a small huddle of shifty-eyed individuals huddled around the bar, breaking in new livers.
Damien had tried Pioza, once. The stuff had everything in it. Coke,
heroin, amphetamines, LSD, cannaboids, morphine, codine, caffeine, the
list went on and on. The theory was that if you had enough dissimilar
compounds in it, it was impossible for the body to become dependent on
any one of them. Be that as it may, Damien had spent four hours with a
splitting migraine and a sensation like his veins were being scoured
with a wire brush during the withdrawl and had decided to stick to beer
for the time being.
He wondered quietly what class he fell into. He was on the verge of spawning a new construct to catalog and label all the classes of bar-goers, then sort him into it, when something changed.
It was subtle, but clear: there was a shift in the metadata of the bar. He idly flicked open the public mindspace overlay. He watched the thin lines crisscross the bar in front of him, showing the inbox connections between patrons. He also saw a skewing in these lines. The lines information capacity was shifting fast. Something had got the room’s attention.
One of the constructs helpfully graphed the line’s bandwidth consumption, found the point of their focus, and told him where to look. He glanced towards the door, and saw what had got the bar’s attention.
She was in her mid-twenties, and by far the prettiest girl in the room. Her face was thin and a soft pale brown, her eyes were a blue that was almost black, and flecked with gold. Her nose had an impish tilt to it, and a small, secretive smile played on wide lips. This was what caught his attention first. The slit pupils, fluorescent hair, and animated tattoos competed for a close second. Her name was Mary.
He
considered this. Body modification wasn’t exactly unusual. Hell, he had
some strictly functionalist modifications himself. Since the FDA had
collapsed a few years before, the market had been
flooded with products based on gene therapy. It was almost
impossible to go through life without using at least some. Some of the
stuff got into the germ line too - Damien's constructs returned a
whole rash of news articles about genetically engineered children being
accidentally born while he mused.
On the other hand, modification this extensive was definitely odd. Rather on par with tattoos and piercings in decades before. On the other hand… the effect was very attractive.
He felt the noise level in the room plunge as the entire straight male and lesbian percentage of the bar-goers hesitated, checking for their constructs to confirm a possible match. Curiosity satisfies, he had turned back to his beer, but he was surprised to discover that his constructs had hit it off with her constructs, having compared thousands of identity matrix values to confirm that they were romantically compatible. He felt a clamping, suffocating sensation in his throat and chest as his implants began to scrub out the alcohol in his bloodstream. By the time she arrived at the bar, he was almost completely sober.
She sat down beside him, and gave him a little grin. He ignored a small part of himself screaming no, that this was wrong. He introduced himself to her, and they began a little verbal dance. His constructs handled most of it, based on analysis of her vocal patterns and facial expressions. Then something she said caught his attention.
“You’re a physicist?”
“Yeah; I specialize in stabilized Morris-Thorne gates. Specifically, as they apply to parallel universe theory. ”
Damien blinked, and took a sip of his beer to cover for himself while he read the articles his constructs turned up on the subject. He blinked hard.
“Wormholes? Those really exist?”
“Ever eaten an old apple?”
He laughed.
“Seriously though, they’re more common than matter. Every square inch of space is riddled with billions of them. Of course, much to SF writer’s disappointment, they’re smaller than quarks, so they’re not of much use for flitting across the galaxy. Besides, unmodified ones are hideously unstable. Trying to send matter through them collapses them.”
“Doesn’t sound like there’d be all that much to study - practically, that is.”
“Honestly,
there wasn’t - practically, that is."
"'Was'??
"Until about two weeks ago.”
“Oh?”
“We… uh… well, I probably shouldn’t be telling you this until the press release comes out, but we found a way to make them bigger and sturdier. Using optical space dialation to stretch space out.”
“Hold on… wormholes are tunnel through space, right?”
“More or less”
“So where do these ones go?”
“We had no idea. Finally, we decided to send some data through, and see if we could hear it popping out of thin air elsewhere. They put me in charge – I sent a copy of ‘The Raven’”
“Did it work?”
“Not exactly… we got an echo.”
“What did that tell you?”
“Nothing, until we took a look at the returning signal. You know that line, “over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore?”
“My constructs do.”
“Close enough. Anyway, when the signal came back, the line was changed to ‘quaint and ponderous volume.’”
Damien sat back in his chair and blinked. His physics construct suffered a mild psychotic break. He sucked in his breath. The sense of surrealism that took the world now was like a sickly fog, choking him.
“You’re joking.”
She took a long drink of scotch.
“I wish.”
“But that’s…” he stopped just short of saying ‘impossible’.
She shook her head.
“It’s perfectly possible. It’s even true. Somewhere, on the other end of that wormhole, a woman who is almost me was sending that poem through to me.”
Damien took a gulp of whatever was in the glass in front of him.
“That means that on the other end of that connection, right now, there is a man sitting at a bar, who is almost me.”
She nodded.
"Probably," she said.
“People will panic.”
“You’re not.”
He looked at her, thoroughly spooked.
“It’s a close thing.”
She hesitated, probably searching for another conversation tact.
"It's nice to be in a place where you can get a decent drink."
"You're new here?"
Damien raised an eyebrow
"I just moved a few months ago. Seems like a nice place - a little empty, though."
"Water at five Euro's a liter tends to do that."
"Yeah. Good to see you have enough left over for brewing."
"Of course," Damien gave a twisted smile here, "my theory is that the only people who stuck around were the ones too blind drunk to notice the water shortage."
She laughed a little, and nodded.
“So what do you do for a living?”
"On my payment invoices, it says I'm an AI safety consultant. In practice, I’m a witch hunter. Companies call me in when they start to suspect that Hal is thinking about locking the pod bay doors.”
She chuckled, and then turned serious.
“Isn’t that dangerous though?”
“No more, than, say, juggling dud dynamite. Most of the time, you’re in no danger. But every now and then, something goes wrong. When it does, grass usually never grows there again.”
He was embattled over whether or not to tell her that the last time things went bad, his wife had died. His constructs overruled him. Mentioning your wife’s murder, they said, was really a terrible conversation tact on a first date.
She had noticed his distress.
“My god… what happened?”
“You remember the Cambridge incident?”
“You were there?”
“I was practically sitting on top of the place when things went bad.”
She shook her head in horror. They were silent for a moment.
Then she looked up.
“My constructs are predicting only a thirteen percent chance that this conversation will end well.”
“Mine are about the same. My fault, I think. You want to give it another shot tomorrow?”
She contemplated him for a moment, biting her cheek, with an unreadable expression.
“I think I would, actually. Dinner at eight?”
“Sounds good.”
She dropped her private inbox key and personal profile into his public inbox. He returned the gesture, and then she was gone, with a wry smile and a little wink.
Damien sat back in chair and wondered what to think about that. His constructs were silent. After another beer, he walked home. Outside, the night air was cool and crisp. A dry autumn leaf rolled across the parking lot under him.
He hailed a cab with his glasses. One squealed to a halt as it passed. He opened the door, and got in. The cab was an older model, with a rust-eaten steel frame, that had been upgraded with cameras, radar, and an electric engine. The whole shebang was driven by an obsolete AI somewhere in India.
That was the theory anyway. More often than not, he suspect that they had just wired a Pentium running Eliza into it and hoped for the best. He made a concerted effort to communicate his address to its lousy speech processor, finally getting the point across. It took off, and he buckled up. As the car spun around streets that were nearly deserted, he decided against switching his glasses to night vision (as he usually did after dark), and instead gazed up at the night sky. The moon was a fine crescent, nearly invisible behind the overcast sky. The cloud cover was thicker, perhaps, than it ought to be. A lot of the defunct biotic swarms ended up aiding nucleation in clouds.
He sunk lower in his seat, eyes focused on the sunroof, not really seeing anything. What was he doing? That had gone well, maybe, but did he really want to be dating? His constructs were all for it. But somehow, it didn’t feel right. Oh well. Dinner couldn’t hurt, and he’d see how he felt when he knew her a little better. It would have been easier to think clearly, if she hadn’t been so pretty. An irritatingly vocal section of his brain was stuck wondering what she’d look like without her clothes on.
Now, why had he gone and brought up the Cambridge incident? Next, she’d be asking about the Nestor series.
The mere thought left him angry. He wanted to kill the idiot who had invented those things. They were unstable as hell, and crazy to boot. There were rumors that they started out with human brains when they were making them. God knew, there was enough infanticide going on these days that it wouldn’t be hard to come across a fairly steady supply.
If only they weren’t so bloody intelligent – the very instability that made them dangerous also made them among the most resourceful of the AI models. They were also incredibly tough. The stuff they did to the growing intelligences… it was inhuman. He’d heard that nine tenths of their models became catatonic or committed suicide before they were cleared for release. The ten percent that were left could handle a level of stress that would have left lesser minds gibbering.
Not that they were really sane as it was. They were eccentric, clever, and frequently murderous. A full fifteen percent of the models released suffered a catastrophic loss of Friendliness before their third year of service. The Cambridge incident had been caused by one. It had been a stupid mistake. Some idiot intern had left the AI unattended in charge of a prototype nanotech swarm while he went to get coffee. It had killed nearly fifty people before someone had activated the failsafe. He still had the radiation scars, and Rose…
He stopped. No point in going there. Better to forget.
The cab tilted dangerously on two wheels as it barreled around the corner next to his house, breaking his reverie. It opened the door, and played a badly mangled pre-recorded message to 'have pleasant sunrise-time" (the fact that it was current 11:00 PM did nothing to increase his confidence in the Li Cab Company).
He sighed, took a quick shower. and lay down to await the morning
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