Betrayals: fourteen

Zero minus four hundred thirty three years

Even with wormhole transfer, the journey from Arkab Prior to Nova would take four tendays. This time was entirely spent travelling from one wormhole to another, as the holes were almost always far from the primary star for safety reasons. A narrow intersystem transfer liner took them to the Wormhole in distant orbit around Prior A. In fact the wormhole was not really a very impressive sight, considering it represented the most important artefact in the entire system…  A framework with six openings covered in navigation and warning lights was suspended above the surface of the spherical `hole', which was almost invisible - except for strange divergent lensing effects producing twisted,. sliding images of the stars and the Milky Way around the dark centre.

Wormholes can be surprising the first time a new traveller sees one; they are three-dimensional warps in a four dimensional space, and look like dark spheres rather than a disk or whirlpool; which is the way that landlubbers usually imagine them.
The transfer craft manoeuvred and entered the 50-metre bubble with less than a metre clearance on each side. Soon the craft emerged in the crowded system of Medius, a wormhole relay system forty light years from Djed, the capital world of the Mutual Progress Alliance. Behind them now was the wormhole, a twin of the one in Arkab orbit, a tiny black sphere covered in lights and surrounded by twisted space, soon dwindling to nothing as the transfer craft accelerated toward the next hole.

Max had made a new acquaintance, a pastel-blue female bushbot who professed to be an ice sculptor; she had offered to show Max some of her techniques, together they were carving portraits of the passengers from the ice produced by the bar compiler. Max had made a particularly fierce image of a tiger-splice woman (who did not seem over-impressed with his efforts, or the way the two vecs were laughing as they played).

Gus was surfing through virtual displays of this busy crossroads in space; a ring of nearly a hundred wormholes surrounded a huge belt of habitats of all types, then a few old Jupiter sized planets converted to deep well industrial zones, a second, more populous belt of habitats and finally a very efficient solar swarm around the central star. The MPA were determined to produce the most impressive form of every type of stellar engineering, and this system was a magnified reflection of the Negentropy system of Arkab Prior A, which they had just left, with a hundred wormholes instead of just one.

  "Bust my backup, Max. The population of this place is phenomenal! Five hundred billion embodied. Don't ask how many virtuals there are. And the gazetteer keeps trying to connect me with a virtual guide, who will apparently show us the local culture, and demonstrate the local hospitality." Gus let the information he was reading spill out all over his nanotattoos, so that the resembled an animated guidebook himself.

  "Might as well have a look, might be a woman. You got lucky on Santos, you old goat." Max blinked all his light emitting fronds, the vec equivalent of a wink. His femvec acquaintance,
Cladia, blushed a fetching lilac for a moment, then laughed her robot laugh;
  "Hahahahaha! Looks like you are enjoying your holiday, citizen!"

The tigersplice woman looked up from her table once again, glowering.

  "Well, you know, that was pretty weird, Max. I don't know…there must be something missing in those people's lives, if you ask me- why did she jump on me like that? Following Negentropism must repress the natural urges or something."
  "She was the one who advertised for exchange visitors in the local Net; I expect it is something she does all the time."
  "Nice to have a hobby, I suppose. Ha! It is a comfortable society they have built for themselves around Prior A, but I think it would bore me to live there for hundreds of years."
  "The Negents would probably say that your life lacks purpose, Gus, and admit it, you haven't got a clue what to do with your life, even at your age."
"I'm only two hundred and forty - not ready to go into virtual retirement yet. Anyway, I've got a goal, right here, right now- and that is to get to Nova and have a good time."

Cladia slid down from her latest sculpture- an icy head of Gus, complete with goatee beard and incised tattoos – and pointed most of her eye fronds toward him.
"Are you going to the old Solar System? Earth? It is only one jump from Nova…"

  "I am afraid not. We are in the Tau Ceti system for eight tendays, and the only way we will get through the Einstein Gate is if sixteen thousand people cancel. The chance of that happening is supposed to be-"
  "Twenty to one." Max said. "Better odds than staying at home, I suppose."

  "I am happy to just get to Nova; that is my life's ambition at the moment. And to have another drink. Now. Can I get you anything, citizen vec? Madam?"

  "No, thank you; I have to retire to my compartment for a little contemplative reprogramming. I'll talk to you later, Max - you have my e-dress?"
"Safely filed, Cladia. Expect a call."

Soon after Gus stood at the small bar in the drinks lounge drinking a light beer, with Max hanging from the ceiling siphoning his electrolytes. The whole bar was only ten metres across, and held several other fantastically varied customers, including the fierce tigersplice female.

The assorted clientele were quite comfortable in the three-quarter-gee acceleration produced as the transfer craft powered toward the wormhole that led to Djed, 5AU distant, on the other side of the Medius system. In a couple of hours the craft would stop accelerating, and turn tail, allowing it to fire the GUT motor once again, and slow down until it could hook up with a chain of similar vessels to plunge into the busy Djed wormhole. For about half an hour during this reversal, they would be in zero gee.

  "Take a look at this ad. Doesn't sound too snarky." Gus said.
His' chest tattoo area was displaying a relatively polite, understated advert from a virtual guide, who could offer a friendly informal commentary on the systems of Medius and Djed ("Two systems
for the price of one").
   "Go for it, Gus." Max urged. Gus activated the link, and downloaded the virtual guide entity to his external memory store in his skin control layer.
A traditional smile icon appeared on his chest when the download was complete.

Instantly a virtual human appeared at the bar, visible only to Gus.
  ‘May I give you my most sincere greetings, I am so pleased to meet you.' said the virtual guide, a solid looking male human, dressed in light green, faintly glowing robes. 'Please permit me to introduce myself. I am Kenn Warrick, raconteur and fabulator, and your guide to Medius and Djed.’
  “Hi, Kenn, I’m Gus, and this is Max, my symaiote vec.”
  “Oh, is he here already?" Max said, peering about. "Hi, Kenn, wherever you are; does it cost more if I can see you too?”
  ‘Certainly not, buy one, get one free,’ the guide said, and blinked on and off. ‘How’s that?’
  “Much better, Kenn. Hello. Right, shall we get started? Perhaps you could tell us about those scruffy looking habs over there, just coming into visible range?”

  ‘Ahem.’ The virtual guide composed himself.
  ‘The many worlds of the cosmopolitan Medius system,’ he declaimed, with his eyes seemingly closed, ‘include representatives of almost every clade of Terragen sentient life. Here we see the irregular zero gravity aggregations of the various microgravity adapted peoples, including the Cosmoi, and the Vacuum adapted Sailors on the Ebon Sea. In times gone by relations between these rival groups were strained; but today they live together in a dynamic community that is an inspiration to us all.’

The Space People habitats were shapeless, clumped, chaotic, and often open to space- sometimes Gus could glimpse tiny black humanoid figures floating in space, or scuttling about like spiders. With a little concentration he was able to magnify his view of the irregular habitat clusters at will, the images directed straight to his visual cortex via his direct neural implants. This ability was so completely second nature to him that he did not think it strange, and would have felt blind without this inner vision. 
And so would Max, the moravec aioid robot, who lived, if the truth be told, far more vividly in the realm of cyberspace than in the meat and concrete world that he shared with his symbiote human.

  ‘Our trajectory,’ continued the virch, ‘next takes us past the Deep Well Industrial Zones of the Medius system. When humanity arrived at this star, four thousand years ago, there were five large gas giant planets in wide orbits; these worlds have been mined continuously ever since, until they are less than a quarter of their original mass. The accretion disks around these small artificial black holes, which are in low orbit around the former giants, can be clearly seen; these are the deep wells themselves, and they are controlled precisely to allow the creation of a full range of elements and particles, and even exotic matter.
  ‘Visible in the middle distance, you will be able to detect the light from the Medius system weylforge ‘Delores’, sleeping now, er work is done, having created the most recent wormhole pair twenty eight standard years ago –‘

Gus looked at Max, who was not twinkling at all; this guy was no fun! On their shared private channel Gus complained bitterly to his symaiote.
  ~This guy is boring, Max. I’m going to have to self-medicate an attention-focussing drug to stop myself yawning.
  ~Doesn’t worry me- I can set my boredom threshold to any level I like. Vp! There. Now even you are incredibly tedious.
  ~Let’s get him to ease up on the tourist patter and try to get to know something about him.
  ~Sorry, I’m not listening, you are too dull. Just leave me alone, you slow, thickwitted human.
  ~Come on, Max, enough’s enough, reset your boredom threshold settings, you miserable vec; or I’ll trim your fronds into something a little more…decorative.

  ‘- and the largest is two hundred metres in diameter,’ continued the virch guide.
  “Hey, Kenn, wait up,” said Gus. 
  ‘Can I help you in some way?’ The virtual man halted, slightly startled; he vanished completely, came back in negative, inverted colours, then stabilised, finally focusing on the man and the bush robot. 
  “It’s okay, Kenn… drive, no problem. We were just thinking… wondering… if we could get a word in edgeways…”

Gus took another sip, and his nanotattoos slowly scanned a bluegreen stripe from head to foot. Max lost his handhold, and fell on the bar top, laughing. The Tigersplice woman raised her head and looked at the pair, then slowly looked away in disdain.
  “What my slow-witted meathead friend is trying to say is, why don’t you chill, relax, take it easy.. and tell us a little about you self? Or does that cost extra as well?” 
  ‘You want me to tell you about myself? You are interested in me, are you?’ Kenn looked a little nonplussed.

  “Well, yeah,” Gus took another sip. “Y’know, being a virtual is something I might consider when I get fed up of this here meat body which my, my associate holds in such contempt…
Come on, Kenn, what’s it like?”

  ‘Aha. Well. If you are curious, perhaps I can give you a little glimpse of the virch life; it is not really how you would expect it to be.
  'Speed, for one thing. You get to choose the subjective speed you experience time at. So I can speed myself up to double, ten times or a thousand times faster than you can ever think…. .. .. … … .and then slow myself right back to your ridiculous snail’s pace.’ The blue green figure went briefly hazy, like a moving image in fast forward mode.

  ‘But it is not just a matter of subjective speed difference. In the virtual cosm, you can forget your body, and sail away on a sea of information and debate- there are plenty, billions, of people in the Datasphere who are relatively stupid and ignorant, but there are billions who are much more clever than yourself…
it is a little scary to meet them, at first.
  'They won’t let you get away with a simple half-considered comment, or with a tiny non-sequitur, or a false induction. Even worse, even worse, the stupid ones can quickly pump their processing power up in a matter of minutes so that they are way out of your league.'

  “You don’t recommend it then, becoming a virch.”
  ‘Oh, on the contrary, it can be wonderful beyond your too, too solid imaginations. For hundreds of subjective years I spent my time copying myself and after a while using reintegration programs to merge the copies back together. I ended up being like a braided leather belt, so many strands diverging and coming together again. One after another my copies all ascended or transcended, and now, it seems, we each have little in common. 
  'Ah, well. That’s life… depending on your definition of life, of course.
  'At any time I could start that process all over again, now that I have enough processing credits saved up. One of my copies even went back into the solid world and occupies a construction vec body, building habitats for the Progress Materialist movement.
  'Me, I like to entertain and educate the tourists.’

  “Well, you are doing that all right, Kenn. I didn’t realise there were so many different sides to virching.” Gus noticed a polite warning from the transfer ship to prepare for turnround. “Oops, here we go, zero-gee. Not that it will worry you particularly.”

The virtual guide made a good show of holding on to the hand rail and rising into the air as the ship ceased accelerating. 
  ‘Most of the time,’ he said, ‘when I am between tours, I like to live in a rather pleasant sim world cooked up by a cyberspace designer from Arcturus. Mind you, I can’t say that every different type of cyberworld suits me… some are just too bizarre. And actually, while we are on the subject, there is another thing I don’t like.’
  “Another thing? Ha ha ha ha You certainly know your own mind,” Max, floating like seaweed, was blinking his lights pointedly again.

  ‘Not so long ago, I foolishly allowed myself to go for total involvement in a particular cyberworld, and I was unaware of anything else. You must have been in a few virtual worlds yourself- mind you, they only allow fleshies into the soft stuff…they don’t allow people like yourselves to do total involvement for more than a couple of hours at a time, as you know. I lived in this world for fifteen thousand years… even at more than a thousand times subjective speed, I was out of circulation for well over a ten-year.‘
  “Fifteen K – what did you get up to?” Gus was treading the air, trying to keep facing toward the guide, even though the virtual man was not really there.
  ‘A totally artificial world, made up of bridges between fabulous countries… my whole personality has become altered, according to my other copies. Apparently I am like a cranky old man nowadays.
  ‘Heh heh, heh.’ The virtual man laughed to himself. ‘It could have been worse though. It could have been a hijack.’

All Max’s lights seemed to go very dim.
  “Nah, they have been stamped out years ago, surely.” 


  “What? Hijack, what do you mean?” Gus was searching his internal dictionary and on-line Encyclopaedia Galactica to find the appropriate meaning.
He didn’t like what he found.
  ‘The Negentropy Alliance and the Eden Sentient Rights Association have fought against Copy Hijacking since before the Version War- they stamp down very hard when they find it. But you never know- sometimes, surprisingly often in fact, unauthorised copies turn up in isolated or degenerate parts of the galaxy, with their personalities bent and hammered into compliance through various forms of mental abuse. Slaved personalities, cannon fodder, entertainment constructs. Horrible things to happen to an innocent entity.’ Ken looked sour.
  “This sort of thing happens to moravec robots too- if I was hijacked, my personality could end up as a microwave oven timer or something. Bing!”

The transfer craft, eager to reach its destination at the correct velocity, began to decelerate. The passengers slowly found the floor beneath their feet again. 
  ‘Well, it’s no good worrying about a rumour like that- I’m sure the Cyberpolice have got it under control, one way or another’ said Kenn, straightening up as his virtual feet apparently met the floor again. ‘Shall we get on with the tour?’

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