Betrayals: nineteen

Zero minus four hundred thirty three years

  The blue and white world of Nova swam toward them. Round the equator was a solid ring, lumpy with hotels and docking facilities. It was much lower than the beanstalk had been on Santos- the ring was supported dynamically by rotating mass particles, according to the Encyclopaedia. This made the trip down to the surface shorter and more agreeable. The elevator took them to an artificial island, seventy kilometres north of Backup City, and a hundred and twenty from Landfall, the nominal Capital of this old planet.

  “Welcome to Nova Terra, the oldest stellar colony of humankind,” said a large disembodied head, regarding them all with the disturbing frankness of a posthuman. Gus could not quite tell if it were male or female. “Please be aware that this world is partially angelnetted for your safety.  You are free to act as you wish, and are free from coercion, but you will not be permitted to harm any other sapient being without that being’s consent.
  “Enjoy your stay in Nova Terra, consume in happiness.”

  The first thing Max and Gus did when they finally arrived at their hotel in Landfall City was to visit the pool. For many days they had been accelerating and decelerating at the Nova surface gravity, and were now medically prepared by (apparently) the best value nanomedicine; but it was still nice to ward off the heaviness by immersion in water. 

  Travelling light, they had no luggage, and only had to call up the recipe for a new item of clothing or a snack (in advance) and the hotel matter compilers would manufacture it for them. Here in the NoCoZo this service was not provided free, and Gus was aware of the contrast with the money-less society of Santos and the parsimonious Negentropic providers, which provided material goods free of charge (if it was good for your soul).
 In his home system of the Arkab Prior Necklace, Gus was well used to earning his keep by zero-gee construction work and by selling space on his skin tattoos for advertising. Both he and Max had a brought large amount of Interstellar Credit to Nova, and the exchange rate didn’t seem too bad. As well as the credit they brought with them, Gus was sponsored by the Arkab Necklace Tourist Board to display their adverts for various holiday locations on his skin while in the foreign parts of the galaxy, for instance…

<‘life’s good- the world is a beach-

- Anse Ring in Arkab Necklace’>

accompanied by white sands and blue skies – and he noticed that his credit rating actually was creeping upwards. Perhaps they were not going to be destitute at the end of this little jaunt after all.

  The pool was half covered by a saddle-shaped roof, and was filled with a varied collection of sentient beings, including many tiny ten-centimetre humans Gus had never seen before, some multi-armed cyborgs with huge soppy grins on their faces splashing and throwing water – (the water seemed to move too fast because of the high gravity)…
And over in the outdoor portion of the pool, a small herd of evolved Plateosaurus wandered past, wearing cyberhelmets and talking to each other in low rumbling voices. 

  “Hallo, are you from off-plenet?” said a voice, barely audible over the water sounds and laughter at the poolside. Gus looked around but couldn’t identify who had spoken. Max amplified the voice and replayed it to Gus on their mutual channel- using his sensitive vec audio microphones as a hearing aid for his less well-equipped human partner. The accent of the voice – wherever it came from – was thick and difficult to understand, even with amplification.
  ~You are getting deaf, you old dumbag, Max commented privately. He – or she- is in the water. Look down.
A sleek human head with tiny ears poked up out of the pool, periodically submerging apparently to swallow water and spit it out again in a quick arc.
  “Hello, how do you do? Yes, we are. This is Max Handy, and I’m Gus Gienah, we are from Arkab. This is our first day here, actually.”
  “Welcome to Landfall City. You can call me Sally.” She now spoke Anglic with a perfect Arkab Necklace accent. 

  She disappeared under the water for a second, then shot out of the pool with fantastic speed, landing on the artificial rock next to Gus and Max. Her feet and hands resembled large flippers, webbed fingers and toes thirty centimetres long. She had light grey, rubbery skin, and wore no clothing, although she was almost completely genderless to look at. As it happened, almost nobody at the pool wore swimwear- Gus felt like the alien he was, dressed in his brief Scrabo shorts.

  “You – you’re a merman.”
  “Well, I’m not a man, for a start,” she said, but didn’t elaborate. Her face was almost expressionless, unreadable- a different species of humanity.
  “Hello, Sally.” Max said, blinking his lights in greeting. “Thank you for switching to our local dialect by the way, nice trick.  I must say, this is a wonderful world you have here. We are a couple of alien innocents abroad- please tell us, what would you do in our situation?”
  “Don’t you have a guide-being?” She peered short-sightedly at the brushbot, who was solidly planted on the artificial rock in the heavy gravity.
  “I have only downloaded a non-sentient guide- we thought we could try looking around on our own, but flicking through the database, we find ourselves spoilt for choice.”
  “Well, send it back uncopied and get a refund. I’ll show you a few sights you won’t find in the databases.”
 

  Somehow, they were attracting a strange sort of attention from the other swimmers – a small bipedal dinosaur was watching them intently, and so were several of the small humanoids.
  “Well, it’s nice of you to offer, but…” Gus was wary, and suspected a scam. If they were not careful they would probably end up buying a twentieth share in a planetoid holiday complex. “You aren’t trying to sell property or artefacts, are you? We wouldn’t want to be, er, inconvenienced by someone’s high- pressure sales techniques now, would we.”

  “No, I have nothing to sell but my knowledge and personality. If you’d rather have someone else, there are half a dozen other hopeful guides hanging around the pool right now, looking for someone to entertain.” She turned round and called over to the small dinosaurid. “ I said you’d welcome the opportunity to show these people round too, wouldn’t you, Owenn.”
  Owenn called back in a fluty voice “Gzeut, Sally, Soldidos. It would be a pleasure.”
  Sally turned back to them.
  “And the good people of the Sea Kingdom are interested in anything I can tell them about you two, as well. I certainly enjoy your skinverts.”
  Gus smiled. “Oh, I can show you more interesting files if you want.”

  ~What do you think, hu? I could get fifty percent back on that non-sentient guide, Max said to Gus on the private channel.

  ~How’s that then, vec? Gus said in reply, while still talking to the mermaid with his audible voice.

  ~I’ve only opened a tiny amount of the database- didn’t get to the real meat and vegetables-everything is costed in this system, you realise, down to the last bit and atom.

~Well, she seems quite nice- yep, go for it, vec…
The mermaid was the first non-virtual guide they had encountered in their travels, and she took them to see the real-life parts of the world of Nova. The weather was mild, even so the mermaid would periodically search out a tap or washbasin, or buy a large bottle of water, and pour it over herself, soaking her plain green dress - so she was constantly wet and cold.  Gus felt a chill whenever she did this. It seemed that, being a creature of the sea, she could not bear to be away from her home element.

  Landfall city had a central business district mostly dominated by the famous Novamedia corporations, now each forming a separate entertainment empire after the break-up of the old monolithic Novamedia megacorporation several centuries before.
  The three of them walked down a long boulevard toward the seafront, and found the daylife district- so called because the nightlife carries on all day. The multicoloured, multispecies crowds were bustling throughout this district, lowered pavements allowing the Plateosaurs to join in conversation more easily.
  They visited a screamer bar - groups of people screaming at each other incoherently, while communicating on Direct Neural Interface. “What’s the deal here?” Gus asked Sally.
  “The common channel gets full of various types of emotion, from fear though camaraderie to joy. If you want to try it I’d recommend only a second or two at first.”
  “Two seconds then.” 

  Gus started screaming for exactly two seconds and staggered backwards into a beefy cyborg mediatype, who also stopped screaming and glowered at him.
  ~What was it like?  said Max, clutching the bar to support his weight while steadying Gus by the elbow.
  ~Egghh.   Like - like falling off a high cliff while having sex. And while being shot at.
  Max started to laugh in his breathless vec fashion.
  “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
   Sally joined in, nodding her head up and down like a dolphin, although her expression hardly changed. 

  Next they found a vec bar full of fluorescent spherical bushbots, who clustered around Max so closely their fronds intermingled. Later Max pretended to be shocked, but that didn’t stop him from wanting to go back.

  Later they found immersion clubs where the full-sense experiences of dangerous sports enthusiasts could be relayed to the clientele in real time- a whole bar full of people leaning into a curve as the driver of a warbuggy negotiated the slopes of the Hope Massif. Gus had avoided dangerous sports up to that point, as it was irrelevant to the task of living forever- after half an hour’s immersion, he decided to check out the real thing when he got back to the Necklace – plenty of nutters into that sort of thing in the MPA, he was sure.

  They saw the hanging buildings of Magellan – a huge city of suspended spheres and polyhedra, hanging from arches between the valley walls. The new city of Batuta had taken this style of architecture even further, as the buildings were suspended from structures coated in chameleon tiles, and from a distance the supporting arches seemed to disappear- leaving the luxurious sky buildings apparently floating in mid-air.

  “Hey – you know, years ago, when I was a kid,” Gus said to Sally as she drove them in her semi-sentient motor vehicle though Batuta City. “Back in ArGartha before it got boring and went out of fashion, we all used to camouflage ourselves and try to turn invisible like that. I wonder if I can still do it…”
  Gus concentrated, and he became the same colour as the car interior, while his head and shoulders took on the appearance of the view through the motor vehicle windows. After a second or so he became a blur, nearly invisible in the dark interior of the vehicle.
  “Oh, well done,” Sally said, clapping her webbed hands together, expressionless as ever.

  They visited the restaurants of Fejel and Alkahira, highly recommended throughout the Terragen Sphere; and on the outskirts of Landfall they saw the barrios, where the economic casualties of free enterprise clustered together for support.
  “There but for the grace of the Invisible Hand go I,” said Sally, making a small devotional gesture with her hand.
  “That is the invisible god of the NoCoZo, isn’t it?” Max was brusque and dismissive. ”Not really a god at all, in my opinion. At least you can sometimes see the Merciful Binah if you go to her temple in the Alpha Band in Djed. Your deity is just an emergent phenomenon.”
  “Well, so is life itself,” said the mermaid defensively. ”The Invisible Hand of the Market has been directing human affairs since the invention of trade, fifty thousand years ago. E has become fully transapient thanks to the automation of the interstellar markets without ever becoming limited to a single consciousness. E is the oldest and most powerful of the gods that Humanity has created.”
  “And the cruellest.”

  The next day they visited the city of Red Rock, a secondary landing site and a popular place for the recreation of ancient cultures, like the militaristic Conver Ambi and the Wild West culture of American Earth. In a dusty ‘honkitonk’ saloon Gus noticed a group of identically dressed men in long leather jackets and wide hats, each holding an ancient projectile rifle. When they each lifted a glass of rye whiskey to their lips in unison he realised that they were members of a group mind.
  “I didn’t know that you had Clan Slarian types here on Nova, Sally. Do you think we should make a quick exit? They can be trouble in a big bunch like that.”
  “Oh, no, don’t worry about them- they are just a bunch of Old Unity Recusants.” Sally laughed. “They are harmless- all the best ones ascended years ago, just leaving these creaky old chronovores.”
  “You mean they are just old people.”
  “Positively ancient.”
   “Nearly everybody is long-lived nowadays, Sally- I’m never going to see two hundred again,” Gus protested.
  “Yeah, well, I’m pushing ninety myself. I mean really old- you know, past the maximum memory capacity, past the accident point.”
  “Accident what?” Gus asked.
  “Sally seems to be referring to the length of time you can expect to go without suffering a fatal accident. About three thousand years nowadays, I believe.”
  “And the maximum memory capacity is-”

   Sally began, but Gus stopped her, saying, “Oh - believe me, I know what the memory capacity thing is all about. I’m just a little older than you after all. They say it is about a thousand years if you use the right nano-mnemonics- I am beginning to forget things already.” 

  “Poor you.” Even with her immobile face she looked vaguely sympathetic. “Well, these guys are so old they can’t remember a thing unless they put their heads together. Some of these might have been human since 800 a.t., before the first Federation got here. They rejected the path of Keterist ascension that most Unity groupies have taken, and are just existing as near-baselines apparently for ever and ever. You say you have Slarians on Arkab?”
  “Yeah – and they are a pain in the arse.” Gus peered at the old group mind cowboys warily. “They get into fights and shout all over the place with all their voices at once.”
  “Oh, the Recusants are harmless- you can have some fun watching them, especially if one starts dreaming.”

  As she said that, the group of cowboys turned from the bar as one, and moved over to an empty space at the back of the room. Unlike Clan Slarian multividuals from Arkab, these cowboys were not identical clones of each other, but were almost comically varied – but short, tall, black-skinned or albino, they all moved as one. They started to dance to some music only they could hear, moving in complicated patterns and almost hitting each other but always precisely controlled. After three minutes or so of movement they stopped, and went back to the bar, where a line of new drinks was waiting.

  Gus was stunned, and even more so when a tiny icon flashed in his visual neural implant –

~Voluntary Donations now accepted~

  He was so impressed at the bare-faced commercialism he parted with a couple of DekaCredits.
  “Eh- don’t do that too often, Gus- they’ll put you on a list of interstellar pushovers.” Max was blinking his diodes again. 

  A day or two later they were staying in Palm Beach City, on the eastern seaboard. Finding rooms had been slightly difficult, as a major tournament of Relief Roulette was in progress in the main amphistadium. It was not possible to get tickets to see the event in real-life, but a few minutes exposure to the real-time virtual transmission gave Gus and Max a taste of the game.

  A group of newly uploaded copies were playing this baroque game of chance with their own originals- a contentious combination of chance and skill. Each round, one of the uploaded copies would have to kill his or her own Original. This was the famous Relief Roulette - although most of the Originals were eager to upload into electronic media and exist in the Nova Mediasphere, when it came to the actual killing many Originals decided to fight, making for an interesting contest. The prize was won by the last Original left alive in a flesh and blood body at the end of the game, and the uploaded copy of the winning Original lost any opportunity for upgrading for a hundred subjective years.
  “Yeesh – you play rough in the NoCoZo,” Gus said to Sally, as they explored Palm Beach City’s dazzling daylife district.
  “The Punters seem to enjoy it. And the Punter is always right.” She indicated the crowds, who were in various states of excitement and intoxication as the Mediasphere fed them with updates from the ongoing Roulette game. Periodically a shout or roar would rise up as the virtual spectators witnessed another termination.
  “That’s the Argelander out of the contest,” Max said, keeping an internal eye on the proceedings.

  Even in the loud music of the Hafnir hotel bar, full of dancing Unity recusants and embracing media junkies, the tournament was the main focus of attention. But not the only one.

   Gus watched a pair of fantastically dressed lovers embracing at the edge of the dance floor- they would periodically laugh, or throw their hands up in horror, simultaneously. Something about their movements made him suspect they were mindlinked just like the old recusants dancing in unison behind them.
  “Those two. Are they Unity as well, or does everybody on this planet share a single mind?” Gus shouted at the mermaid over the music.
  ~ No, they aren’t Unity, said Sally’s voice in his head, the first time she had used the neural interface to talk to him.   ~They are just using Unity-analogue software to share each other’s experiences over the normal net channels- lots of people do that here when they become good  - er – friends.
  The music was loud, with a heavy bass and rhythm. Gus didn’t recognise the style but he thought it was pretty good, and after dancing with the mermaid he thought he could understand it a bit better, although once or twice he trod on her long feet. ~Well, have you ever tried this Unity-analogue software? Ever melded your mind with someone else?
  ~Yeah, all the time- only with seapeople though, never with a landlubber, let alone an alien spaceman.
  Sally was getting a little inebriated, Gus thought. What the hell, so was he. Max was away over in the corner of the bar, interweaved with some fluorescent pink and blue bushbots, looking like a bunch of fuzzy balloons.

   The mermaid bought a bottle of water, and poured it over herself, and sent the sensation of the splash direct to Gus’ implants.
  “Whaa?”
  He didn’t expect to be suddenly feeling the cold water on his –on her skin, and he yelled out loud, although nobody heard him over the music.
  ~Corrupt my backup- is that the Unity-ware? he sent, shuddering. He could still feel the cold water on her skin.
  ~Ha, Ha, sort of. Like I said, it is only an analogue of the real thing, but it is pretty realistic. Isn’t it? You would get a better idea of the full effect if you sent me your internal sensoria address- it starts to feedback on itself and gets really cool. 

  She kissed him quickly, and he felt the kiss from her viewpoint as well as his own.

  (Binah- this woman is supposed to be my employee, he thought. I can’t get entangled with the hired help.
Can I? )
  But he sent the address to her anyway. Still her expression did not change, but she nodded like a happy little porpoise. 

  His/her bodies embraced, just for a second, cold/warm wet/dry; then they danced with four legs, two bodies, movements co-ordinated and syncopated – and now he was able to avoid her toes with ease - sharing thoughts while they danced which bounced back and forth so rapidly that soon he/she did not know who was thinking what. Then she/he kissed again, off the dancefloor now, strange spirals and loops of sensation passing between them.
  (Hired help eh?:: Sorry, no offence:: none taken:: that’s alright then:: did you think that?:: No, you did:: did I?)
  Gus was used to the quiet voices of other people and machines whispering in his head via his direct Neural Interface, but now somehow he seemed to share all the thoughts and sensations of the other person. It was like having two bodies. Perhaps she was keeping a tiny part of her mind secret from him, he couldn’t tell… he certainly couldn’t hide very much from her. But she seemed to know what she was doing, and he found himself trusting her guidance.
  After less than an hour he/she were/was beginning to lose all sense of individual identity.

  A familiar voice came to intrude on this exploration.
  ~Er, are you in there, Gus?
  ~Frag off, Max, not now:: no, wait what do you want?:: Probably jealous:: no, let him speak:: can’t you see we are busy, vec?:: Excuse me, but I want to hear what he has to say, if you don’t mind. 

  Gus isolated himself from the stream of shared thoughts (with difficulty) and spoke to his symaiote in private.
  ~Well? What in the name of matter can be so important?
  ~ Oh dear, how can I put this? Your fishy friend has been taking you for a mug.
  ~ Max, is this a joke? Come on, robot, get on with it- I was busy doing the sort of things humans do.
  ~Yeah, well, I know what you were doing, but that’s the point. You’re famous, pal. You had an audience.
  ~I beg your pardon?
  ~Those bushbots I was talking to seemed to find you amusing for some unknown reason, Gus. I finally twisted it out of them. Turns out you have got a channel dedicated to yourself. That bloody fishwife has been narrowcasting everything you say to her on the media. Now she’s got your internal address, she’s sending everything you think and feel out on the net as well.
  ~Everything?
  ~Uh, huh. It was just beginning to get popular- she must be making a fortune. Aliens in love and all that. Some people are interested in novelty, even if it’s just the secret thoughts of a hick Scrabo tourist hundreds of light years from home.
  ~oh my gods- I gave her my internal address voluntarily- she even told me she was going to pass stuff on to her friends in the sea kingdom; I didn’t realise I was going to get syndicated …
  ~you numpty…
  ~Tell you what, though; my credit balance is higher than ever. ::Sally, what percentage of the profits am I getting-?
::Sally- - -?
 

   Gus turned round to look for the merwoman, but she had melted into the night.

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