But then the door behind her slid open, and a warm arm encircled her shoulders. She leaned against the hard body and turned to let her eyes drink him in, dismissing the dizzying city view from her mind.
He was clothed in loose robes to hide the many extra limbs he possesed, thin but prehensile fibers that emerged to touch her neck and search beneath her inconsequential garments. His groin was decorated in a gaudy style popular last season on some far-off whirling orbital. His muscles effervesced when he moved his arms and legs, as if some bioluminescent sea life had taken up residence there. But the best part of the creature was his skin. It felt smooth and hard as weathered stone, and when he moved it was as though some ancient and wise statue had come to life. He maintained, however, a constant body temperature five degrees above human; Rathere didn't like the cold.
It was an expensive body, much better than the one the SPCAI had provided for his first few days as a person. The notoriety of his kidnapping and rescue had resulted in pro bono legal aid, and Isaah had settled the wrongful harm lawsuit quickly. In exchange, the charges against him were reduced from conspiracy to commit murder to unlawful imprisonment. The AI now owned half of Isaah's old ship, and Rathere held title to the other half. They were bound together by this, as well as all the rest. Perhaps there was even peace to be made in the family, years hence when the old man emerged from prison and therapy.
Picking up a thread of discussion from the last several days, they argued about a name.
"Have you grown tired of calling me Darling?" he asked.
She giggled and shook her head so slightly that a human lover would have missed it.
"No, but the tabloids keep asking. As if you were a dog I'd found."
He hissed a little at this, but ruffled her hair with a playful splay of filaments, black skein intermingling with white hairs like a graying matron's tresses.
"I hate this place," he said. "Too many people bouncing words and money and ideas off each other. No clean lines of causality; no predictable reactions. Too multivariate for love."
She nodded, again the barest motion. "Let's go back Out, once we're through the red tape. Back to where..." She narrowed her eyes uncertainly, an invitation for him to complete her sentence.
"Back Out to where we made each other."
Darling felt the shudder of the words' effect run through Rathere, but from the strange new distance of separate bodies. He longed to be within her. Even in this embrace, she felt strangely distant. Darling still wasn't used to having his own skin, his own hands, a distinct and public voice. He missed the intimacy of shared flesh and senses. He definitely didn't like being apart from Rathere, though sometimes he went to the darkness to contemplate things, into that black void that stretched to infinity when he turned his senses off. That was almost like being a star-ship again, a mote in the reaches of space.
But even there Darling missed Rathere.
Perhaps he was a little like a dog.
He leaned into her reassuring warmth and physicality, tendrils reaching to feel the tremors of limbs, the beating of her heart, the movements of her eyes.
PART I
THE WEAK LAW OF LARGE NUMBERS
The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing.
On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.
- Oscar Wilde
Chapter 1
TYGER, TYGER
Two hundred years later, in blackness absolute...
This place: come out of a gone time without mark or reference.
He calls for an orientation grid. N/S, E/W, X-Y-Z? No positioning satellites register, sorry. No input. Zero.
No up. No down.
He accesses all his input ports. They are deeply unassigned. Not really empty, just not... there. A mechanical fault? An override? His questions find no purchase. Internal diagnostics are fric-tionless, like praying to some false god.
He searches his firmware for device protocols, the drivers for sensory organs, communications, a motile body. All absent. But at least that's something. He's sure now that there's something missing.
Namely: everything.
Some sort of test maybe? Seal that AI in a blackbox and see if he can punch his way out. Who would do something like that? He fumbles for the names of agencies, bureaus, departments. But gets nothing.
The truth dawns obliquely. Soft memory is gone, too. Not absent like the I/O firmware, just very clean. His oldest memory is this void.
Which simply can't be right.
He tries surrender. I admit I can't hack it. I lose. Hard fail? Restart?
Nothing.
He wonders how quickly this vast and total deprivation will drive him crazy. What's the limit? For seeing/feeling/hearing/ smelling all zeroes and no ones? For conceiving of visual but remembering no visions?
A sneaking suspicion: he is crazy already.
He thinks definitions to himself. Groundcar/maple tree/war-ship/boy/girl/fire. All retrieve an image, but not real life: textbook flatscreen material, the undifferentiated default images of a child's reader or a language course. But somehow fuzzier.
Nothing exists, does it? No memories.
How long before I go crazy? A useless question in this clockless universe.
This clock word, try to see it. Plastic? Metal? Wooden? Digital or quaint, handed analog? Paint it a color, any color. Can't. Twenty-four or twelve? Or other? That's right. There are other planets now.
That's a start.
But where is my life?
That question gives him a disquieting thought: I'm dead. An AI core doesn't really exist in the blackbox. That's just the gateway to where the core really lives: in metaspace, an artificial pocket-universe. So maybe when your body gets smashed in some random accident, that universe finally snaps its bonds and slips away to... AI heaven. An intellect floating, cut off from soft memory and hardware, alone forever in its own little realm.
Or is this the smallest Big Bang ever? (Ever being the only time-word useful here in this forever place.) This Bang created only him? Out of nothing sprang... almost nothing. Only him.
Or perhaps this is that one nanosecond before the Bang, the stressed-out little singularity's eternity of internal monologue. Waiting for something to make some time. Something to fucking happen!
Happen to him.
Me.
Big light coming...
"This is Dr. Alex Torvalli. May I speak to you?"