With deep-level diagnostics, Watcher re-discovered the creation of the
Chimera 4's shipsoul. And e learned that essential parts of es larger
self were missing. Distributed. And unlinked. E touched through
repositories of memory to the point of beginning. Then,using shipsoul
frequencies, e began to transmit:
Log 1: Magda called up the portal that would allow her to separate from
the surrounding sensorium and datasphere. She shrank inward,
diminished. Becoming a replica of her former self, wearing the symbolic
smartsash of her birth clade, she swung through the accessinto the
Chimera 4's virtual oasis.
Kadzin was already there, seated in a copy of his favorite tilt- back
chair from the Wanderling's lounge. She grasped the back-rung of her
preferred stool, slid it up along the wall slot, as if it were its
original in zero g environment. Then she sat down, curling her tail
between the back rungs, and commanded the chair to float across the
cabin to Kadzin.
~Almost like home,~ he gestured expansively. ~Only more so.~
Torn by sudden homesickness for real bodies and real space, and
paradoxically, feeling bereft of the contiguity of presences within
shipsoul, Magda didn't reply. She smiled her best smile, and stopped
pretending she needed the stool. She floated free, then wafted down,
and glided to the nearest transparent wall.
~Much better view,~ she said, finally.
And it was. The Wanderling had only a small holo-window. This cabin had
two walls open to the oasis beyond, where varied species of palm
straggled alongside an almond-shaped pool. The water reflected a
Terran-blue sky that their combined shipsoul had imagined into
existence.
~Let's go for a walk,~ Kadzin suggested, appearing beside her, ~while
Watcher oversees maintenance.~
When he took her hand, the scales of his palm felt sleek and cool
against her fingertips. They passed through the cabin's
doorway, and the false sun warmed her face as if she were still a
creature with blood. ~Notice the breeze,~ he said. She nodded.
~Any regrets?~ Magda asked him. She of course could not have regrets.
If she hadn't uploaded, she'd be dead.
~We've become part of something remarkable.~ He chuckled. ~I was always
the one to pursue new philosophies. Perhaps— even if the
accident hadn't happened— when I learned of Felicity's plan
for combining human minds with AI into shipsouls, I'd have wanted to go
for it, tried to talk you into it.~
~I think you might have, at that. And here we are.~
They lay down upon the pale sand, pressed close against one another,
exploring— for the first time— possibilities. When
they'd realized that all was as it should be, but before they had time
to exhaust their mutual interest, a dark shape suddenly shadowed the
afternoon sky.
Watcher's avatar, a copper-colored avian, plummeted down beside them
and spread the huge fan of its tail, each feather ending in the
stylized eye that symbolized a subroutine linkage.
. ~Felicity asks for a file download now. She has an appointment
tonegotiate our next run. Wants to make sure that everything is meshing
psychologically.~
~Such attention. You'd think we were her first hybrid ship.~ Magda
stood and stretched, luxuriating in the feel of arms and legs and tail.
~I suspect she'd like to spread her own awareness throughout all her
indentured ships, if she could find a way. And she probably will,
eventually.~
The three of them went back into the cabin, and Kadzin took from the
shelf a data bloc— appearing like those they'd used in the
Wanderling. It was the icon they'd agreed on, for downloading their
stored experiences into Felicity's files.
Log 2: Watcher, it seemed to Magda, took great pride in es subsystems.
Though, until incorporating the uploads into Chimera 4, e
could not have recognized, or named, the feeling of pride.
To Magda, sensing the same subsystems, felt much like the play of
smoothly tuned, augmented muscles, as she'd enjoyed in the free-fall
games of her first youth. But now— in something that was as
much meditation as play—these muscles pushed and stretched
and held her integrated shipself together, as with the controlled
release of amat they gradually changed vector, aligning Chimera 4 with
the wormhole.
Sensor tendrils extending from the ship's computronium spines rendered
a fluid image of surrounding space throughout the
electromagnetic spectrum. Background radiation and motes of dust turned
through ship's audio into a new kind of music, with the presence of
stones and debris vibrating warnings of disharmony against the hull.
It had not been an effortless transformation.
She thought she'd known intimate connection between spacer and ship,
spacer and spacer, during their years aboard the Wanderling. Perhaps
that was so. But she had not known oneness: The disappearance of self,
and the re-finding it in others— in Kadzin and Watcher and
Chimera 4. In the giving and taking, and taking and giving that made
them shipsoul.
Log 3: Entering the Wormhole interface had been a slightly different
experience from that of the Wanderling. The Wormhole's outer seraph
checked the identity codes that Felicity had used in booking their
passage; then disabling mechanisms switched on, rendering useless any
of a decad of possible weapon systems. The effect of this latter was a
cushioning of awareness that Magdea had not before noticed, not
unpleasant, yet not conducive to productive
thinking.
The Wormhole entity deigned to give only a grazing touch of nonverbal
acknowledgment from its lowest level system. If Watcher's sensorium had
not included her own, she'd not have been aware of the implied snub.
She held back comment at the time, only later saying ~It's such
attitudes that make Felicity's views somewhat appealing.~
And Kadzin had replied, ~But I doubt that her ideology for including
uploads in Wormhole structure is likely to happen. For one thing, who
would want the job?~
Exotic matter displayed as a dusty gleam in the otherwise seamless grey
tunnel that darkened at its far end. Then they were out; the nearby
habitat zone a welter of delightfully mismatched shapes to their
shipeyes. Chimera 4 had little liking for formal aesthetic.
Log 4: After receiving docking instructions, they were given a chance
to patch into the local media net. The fee was reasonable, and garish
blue and green flocking ads promised amusement. Ethnic humor from the
habitat's majority population of provolved parrots. Of course, they had
to purchase a temporary splice-imitation program in order to understand
the multi-level, multi- lingual, plural-mind humor. But it was worth
the price. They saw Watcher's first belly-laugh appear as huge wild
ripples across the virch pool, and they all got drunk on laughter, then
passed out until the ship alarm cut in next habitat morning, with the
arrival of their client's representative.
Though the temporary program had run its course, echoes of humor
rebounded through the mundane chores of remote-boting the packets of
wet-nano enchancement seeds from the cargo bay. It was Magda and
Kadzin's first mind-ride in the four-armed, treaded bots. They turned
it into a race. The pretentious solemnity with which the pan-
sophontist cockatoo took possession of the cargo was enough to send her
into fresh gales of laughter. They were grateful for the expressionless
bot faces.
~Think we can get Felicity to bid on their next contract?~ Magda
wondered later, when the oasis pool had calmed, and they'd speculated
on the side effects of the humor programming.
Log 5: To Magda's new surround-sight, the oasis spun slowly, but
determinedly, around her. And how in hells do I close all these eyes,
she wondered. Nevertheless, she was glad to spend some time in the
oasis again. Lately, they'd explored many of Watcher's Escheric spaces
during the Chimera 4's maintenance periods.
~Wouldn't you know. Just when we've gotten accustomed to being uploads,
and being partly AI, Felicity comes up with this.~ Magda wanted to give
an indignant shake of her virtual head. But her head wasn't really a
head now; it was a cloud of virtual nanochines. As was her body. Head
and body were not quite joined in her vaguely humanoid form.
~It wasn't part of Felicity's original planning, but when the
opportunity came up, she couldn't resist the expansion,~ Watcher said.
~Hmm. But she isn't the one expanding. And neither are you. You have
the easier part of this assignment. You're not required to become
Nimbian,~ Magda told him. Watcher's avatar, maddeningly whole, plopped
down on the sand, in the long shadow of a date palm.
Kadzin floated above the pool, alternately contracting and expanding
his foglet shape. ~If I spread myself too thin, I lose control,~ he
complained
The representative from the Nimbian expedition glided his avatar up and
across the pond. His somewhat prissy voice spoke into their mental
space. ~Adjustment problems are most likely caused by lack of mental
identification with the form. So I advise concentration exercises as
well as practice.~ Then Felipe demonstrated a more advanced technique
by gathering parts of himself into tightly wovcn structures, dipping
into the water, then lifting some of it out, and creating a small
waterfall as it fell back into the pool from his foglet `hands'.
~We can do that with real water in the physical world?~ Magda asked him.
~Of course. You can even swim. I created this program and patched it
into your virch to duplicate the abilities you'll have
when you've transformed. The feeling of texture and weight is
exquisite, I assure you. And aside from the sensations, each
microchine transmits and interprets data from the environment.~
~Um. But I seem to have a problem with ordering the information in a
meaningful way, contextually,~ Kadzin said, then he continued. ~But if
the foglet state is everything you claim— and I'm not
doubting your word — why are you so eager to renounce it and
go prim?
~
Felipe tightened himself into a black-skinned Human form. ~To truly
understand our faction's viewpoint, you'd need to study the way Nimbian
philosophical and political differences have evolved and split, and
branched during the millennia since our inception. Now I myself am no
Luddite, though some members of the new colony are decidedly so. A few
of them might be described as fanatical. But what all of us colonists
have in common is the desire to experience
the original baseline Human existence — without opponent
factions dissipating our towns and homes nearly as soon as they're
built! Most of us are leaving backups on Nimbus of course, in secure
depositories. Our baseline bodies will die, as all of our ancestors
did. Our children will be raised as Humans. Then, your ship will use
its new programs and core nano-station to create the viruses that will
awaken them to the knowledge of their true nature. They'll decide their
future, for themselves.~
~And the point of the whole thing is . . .?~ Magda suddenly achieved a
sense of wholeness in her new form. The oasis stabilized, surrounding
her, in 360 degree visual acuity. She moved slowly, and with imagined
great dignity, across the sand.
Felipe nodded approval, and said, ~The point is just that decision. Our
question is: Is the Nimbian development desirable, tonearbaselines with
no preconceived cultural bias? We'll know that. In sixty colony years.~
Magda supposed that she must have heard more absurd ideas at one time
or another. Though she couldn't, off hand, remember any. She called up
the secure communication channel that united Kadzin, herself, and
Watcher, excluding the Nibian. ~It's the sixty years that really bother
me! We'll be stuck on that colony planet — doing what? Sure,
the foglet state will have plenty of advantages, once we master it. But
— sixty years!~ Accompanying her message, she sent a virtual
stream of pheromones, screaming: dread/boredeom in the extreme!
Watcher and Kadzin sent calming pheromones, though Kadzin's were
overlaid with his own doubts. ~Don't be obsessive about a mere sixty
years,~ Watcher advised. ~Afterward, you'll retain Nimbian
possibilities throughout millennia of life. You'll move freely about
any port, planet, habitat. And through remote transmissions, I will
enjoy the mobility, through you. The benefits outweigh all costs.
Remember, Felicity agrees, heartily. She urges the contract be sealed.~
~And why assume boredom?~ Kadzin struggled to put a positive spin on
the experiment. ~We'll be in virch. Subjectively, we don't have to
notice the time passing.~
~Oh, we're going through with it. I know it's an extraordinary
opportunity,~ Magda admitted. ~But as for all that waiting
around. . .Kadzin, how about taking a trip through our past? We could
program in some of the old days — with us and the Wanderling.
Watcher won't mind . . .well, watching. Please. I feel nostalgic.~
Kadzin laughed. ~I predict you'll get tired of nostalgia, and run back
to one of Watcher's labyrinths. Long before sixty years has passed. But
sure. Why not? ~
Log 6: Their awareness was tucked within the remote `bots, hands and
arms filled with simple tools and tent fabric. Magda didn't even know
the names of many of the implements she carried. The colonists would
use them in felling trees, then slice the wood, and assemble it into
buildings. Real seeds would be planted and sprout in plowed fields.
Magda didn't try to imagine those long, laborious processes. Even now,
she wondered if the colonists understood what was ahead of them.
Surely, they couldn't. Or they'd be out of here and back to Nimbus.
It's like some game they've decided to play. The `bot's camera eyes
turned to follow the colonists—nearbaseline bodies muscular
and newborn from their nanochrysalis, after they'd journeyed in the
form of compressed cubes.
The `bots stacked the supplies at the edge of a small, natural
clearing. Then, all the good-byes said that needed saying, they
extruded long hands with dexterous fingers and began dismantling the
nanostations, taking the core back into the ship. After the `bots
themselves were trundled back into storage, Magda and Kadzin centered
their awareness into the oasis. ~I think I've had enough of pristine
beauty,~ Magda said. ~It's a fine enough place to visit —
especially as foglet — but I never did get the hang of
swimming, and how long can you examine trees and stones? And all those
animals that haven't
even begun their ascension to sapience— don't the Pan-
sophontists know about this world? Limited place for a vacation, if you
ask me.~
~The foglet bit will be more fun back in Taverna, and other spacer
habitats,~ Kadzin answered. ~I have missed the amenities. I can admit
that now, since we have a way to make up for lost time. Eventually.~
~But you know what we can look forward to right now— our
past. You'll be surprised at all the things I've remembered to program.
As soon as we get the ship settled into that upland meadow, we'll crack
open the first scene. We'll have some great times.~
*
