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.We’d have to feed the new nets everything they’d need to know from our secure databases, and we can’t be sure those aren’t corrupted.”“Damn.I’ll call Herrschaft.”“The hell you will!” Technician 2 shouted.After a moment, he said, “Sorry.”He stood and stretched, looking about himself, feeling claustrophobic in the clutches of a building controlled by what increasingly seemed to be a schizophrenic artificial intelligence, potentially a dangerous one.One that controlled almost every machine and piece of electronics on most of a dozen worlds—that is, everything that wasn’t controlled by NKK’s Behemoth, their AI answer to the Brain.And, once in a while, he thought maybe the Brain would lock him in, trap him in this cell if the Brain could figure out what he was doing to it.Technician 2 prayed that the Brain was only losing its mind.He was secretly a Christian, though not a militant Literalist; in a world where all communications are controlled by the machine, only fools would organize a resistance to that machine.The Brain, naturally, was protected by a built-in survival drive.The metaphorical wrench he had thrown into the machine was the act of a man alone, a man who had carefully cultivated this security clearance, who had forced himself to develop no personal relationships that could interfere with the most important mission a Child of God had attempted in two millennia.In the course of their daily rigor of tests for the Brain, he had asked over and over the important questions.Questions without answer.Questions about God, life, the universe, creation, and so on, questions he had learned in Bible class and college philosophy classes alike.Continually, without break, as long as his shift lasted.No one ever asked the Technicians about the test questions they posed to the Brain; their skulls held Priority Clearance AA01 cards, and only Herrschaft himself held the power to interrogate them.He prayed that the Brain was simply fragmenting.He prayed that it wasn’t doing what all indicators seemed to show.“If it becomes sentient in some way we haven’t predicted,” the other seemed to shout in the dead silence, “we’re crashed.”“Start educating the reserve GenNets,” Technician 2 said.They should have done this long ago, if they wanted to maintain the Brain’s rule.It would have looked better for keeping his job, but he was willing to bear the cross of his actions.The entire world would endure drastic upheavals during the transition back to human control.But the world would be returned to its rightful masters.The rule of the machines would fall.He sat back into his chair, the old gel gurgling as it adjusted to his weight.“We might be able to have a new Brain ready to go before the current one crashes.”When Technician 1 turned away, Technician 2 crossed himself three times.Innerspace 2Jonathan slams shut the shockplas door of his parents’ apartment and stands for a moment in the narrow entryway.During a rerun of one of last year’s shows, the Captain has to escape a gang of NKK thugs across the surface of the Moon.Once again, Feedcontrol’s hype led him to believe the live show was about to begin when they only planned to run pre-show programming a while longer.He doesn’t care.He can splice Lone Ship Bounty reruns for hours at a time, and often does, switching subscription point-of-view—pov—to experience the same scenes from fresh perspectives.Only the corners of Jonathan’s eyes show the entryway’s stark white walls, while the center 30 degrees of his pov is alive with shifting lunar hills, vivid grey and smooth beneath a raging sun and a sky pure black.It’s almost enough to help overcome his fear of returning home.“Jonny, is that you?” Josephine, his sister, asks.Curiously, she’s speaking audio-only.Jonathan gets a funny idea, that maybe she’s changed for the better.He decides to talk to her and flips on his 3VRD self image for her.“Yeah.I’m back from the headmed clinic.”“Jonny, honey,” his mother’s sudden 3VRD says.She’s middle-aged, smiling imbecilically, her rolls of brown hair neatly coiled around a youth-edited face.Her hands hang at her sides, motionless.She looks ludicrous overlaid atop the Captain’s adventure on the Moon, floating motionless as the lunar landscape whisks past.Father joins the party, another absurd, unprotected human standing in the vacuum as red and green laser-rifle bolts slice the pure black day.“My son,” Mr.Sombrio’s 3VRD says, nodding, his face calm and emotionless.For some reason Jonathan has never understood, the man’s image wears a crisply pressed military uniform.He never served anywhere.“Welcome home.”“Fuck off,” Jonathan responds.Flick, his father is gone, surely involved in something more important—like fucking one of the individs he keeps running continually, which Jonathan discovered once while eavesdropping via his blackcard.Of course, the man hadn’t been aware of his son’s intrusion, since blackcards are good at hiding themselves.Jonathan shudders at the memory of seeing his father whipping the little boy whose features were disturbingly like his own.“We were worried about you,” Ms.Sombrio says.“Yeah,” Jonathan says with a snarl.His stomach begins to knot.“If you were so worried, why didn’t you come pick me up?”“We sent the car,” she says, still smiling though her voice is making a heroic effort at portraying emotion.Stupid 3VRD program.“Oh, my, didn’t it go to the right place? We—”“The car got there,” Jonathan says.“Never mind.” He throws up an ID filter to shut her out of his head.She makes no effort to override or switch communications bandwidth and try again.Just as well, Jonathan thinks, his stomach tightening more, as if something in there is biting his guts.His mind returns to his sister and her strange greeting.She had seemed almost welcoming.Change, change, he thinks [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]