John Wright - The Phoenix Exultant

Phaethon shrugged. "It is a natural and reasonable thing to suspect at this point." (Actually, it was a nightmare vision which chilled Phaethon to the bone. He imagined an innocent girl, the product of a gentle, Utopian society, defenseless, taken by surprise in the wilderness and murdered horribly, replaced by a cloned body, and, with gruesome irony, the clone's memory was falsified so that she, perhaps, actually believed she was the dead girl, believed she was in love, was good, was innocent. Then, once the mission was accomplished, or some other signal was given, that illusion of love and innocence, the whole dead girl's life, would vanish like a forgotten dream.)

" 'Reasonable'?! Ha! You've turned into a paranoid lunatic. And after I went to all this trouble! If you don't find some way to prove that you are innocent, I'll be stuck, too, you moron!"

"Darling, you've argued with me a million times, and you know it never does any good to become emotional. You might not even be aware that you are an agent for the Nothing, since the programming could have been done at a subconscious level..."

He broke off. She was standing with her arms folded, drumming her fingers against her elbow, one eyebrow raised, a slight smile on her lips.

"What is it?" he said.

"You called me 'darling,' instead of 'miss,' " she said, her smile getting warmer. She spoke slowly, as if the words tasted good to her. "And 'we' have not argued a million times. I have the memory of the woman you argued with a million times. But, according to you, that wasn't me."

"I, ah..."

She waved her hand, and in a light lilt, said, "But I will let you change your mind about that later!" Then she said: "At the moment, you were saying I booby-trapped the noetic reader. Fine. But if I did, then I'm not as smart as a Sophotech; I'm not even as smart as Daphne Tercius Eveningstar Emancipated Download-redact, am I? Because if I had been that smart, I would have realized that I could not fool an engineer with a booby-trapped piece of equipment. You are an engineer, aren't you? Take the thing apart, if you like. But you better make damn sure that you can put it back together, because, without it, we are never getting out of this mess."

Phaethon looked down again at the portable noetic reader. Could he inspect it? He was standing in the middle of a well-equipped thought-shop, after all. The shop-mind had routines with which to examine basic mental interfaces; it could certainly tell the difference between a passive noetic reader and some active circuit meant to make a change in Phaethon's thought-process.

Daphne raised both eyebrows, and said, "And I do not get emotional when I argue. I'm just passionate about my convictions!"

The green-and-blue housecoat in the corner of Ironjoy's cabin was hooked into the general thought-shop circuitry, and served as the main command menu. Phaethon stepped out of his armor, the black material pulling the chrysadmantium plates out from him like the petals of an opening flower. Then the mass pulled itself back together with a bright clash, forming an empty stand of plate mail.

Phaethon shrugged into the housecoat. The coat hesitated, then pulled in the two extra sleeves. Phaethon drew the hood, and then worked the ornamental buttons which riggered the translation from Ironjoy's rather peculiar semi-Invariant neuroform to a base neuroform.

The robe was slow and old, perhaps an antique. It took almost half a minute for the reader-heads in the hood to reconfigure, and find the contact points for the cybernetic neurocircuitry grown throughout Phaethon's brain and spine. A web of energies wove Phaethon into the mind-space of the thought-shop.

The thought-shop was utterly isolated; all communication channels were black. Whatever it was that Antisemris had done, whatever services Notor-Kotok's provider had cut off, had stranded the entire shop outside of the mentality. Which meant, Phaethon hoped, that the shop was secure from intrusion, safe, and virus-free.

He took the gold tablet of the portable noetic reader and placed the unit into the housecoat's large chest pocket. Threads from the housecoat began to weave themselves across the thought-ports, making connections, finding correspondences, downloading initial routines into holding spaces. At the same time, Phaethon had the housecoat insert a physical probe into the golden tablet's housing, so that he could generate tiny fiber-optic pictures of the interior works, and magnetic images of the fields surrounding each part of the construction. Beads on the hem of the hood focused imaging lasers into his eyes, stimulating the areas behind the cornea, to create three-dimensional pictures diagramming the tablet's interior spaces for him.

Daphne sat back down on the bed, picked up his child slate again, and began flicking through different records and menus.

Phaethon inspected the unit and was baffled.

The secondary systems he could grasp: triggers, data-migration mechanisms, coders and decoders, junction cells. The arrangement of thought-reader processors and interprocessors was particularly clever, based on concentric geometries; it looked as if the Sophotechs had finally solved the permeability-interference problems involved in ring-shaped psuedomaterial fields, and constructed the legendary circular self-sustaining information wave. Brilliant.

But the main memory and processing core was an utter enigma. It seemed to be made of a sheet of neutronium, frozen at absolute zero, a matrix of dense subatomic particles bound together by strong nuclear forces, but orderly, very orderly. The edges of the sheet faded into virtual particle masses, a haze without clear properties; but pulses moving to one side of the sheet seemed to disappear and reappear at the opposite side of the sheet, as if the thing was curved in some dimension he could not sense or imagine. The energy field suspending the sheet in place certainly acted as if there were no boundary conditions or edges.

And what was this sheet? Whether it was made of matter or energy was a question for debate. Why it was not heavier than a city, Phaethon could not guess; why it did not explode or randomize was an impossibility. Perhaps it was made of something like tightly woven quantum strings? Or a force produced by another geometry of supersymmetric breaking, like, yet unlike, pseudomatter? Antigravity? Or perhaps that so called subgravity, which graviton-fraction theory said might exist?

But the main question was: Had it been tampered with? Phaethon could have laughed. The whole thing could have been taken apart, turned inside out, rotated in the fourth dimension, and put back together again without him being able to tell a thing. He did not know what the original configuration was; he had no instruments that could sense the disposition of neutral subatomic particles, where the main memory and process information were stored. And, even if he had, he would not be able to read that information by inspecting the gross outward mechanism storing it, any more than a man could read a novel by looking at the electron crystal in his library-ring.

Some engineer. He was a human. This was like the handiwork of the gods. This was magic.

Well. At least he could look at the parts of the mechanism he recognized. First, the reader-heads fed into the central rotary information-ring through a nested series of concentric interprocessors. It was a beautiful solution to certain basic design problems. Phaethon felt privileged just to see it.

"I think I understand why the Second Oecumene destroyed themselves," he said aloud, absentmindedly.

"Why is that, darling?" Daphne did not look up from the record in the slate she was viewing.

"They did not get to watch the Sophotechs solve problems. This is a breathtaking piece of work! The designers created a self-sustaining complex of information waves traveling around a frictionless ring. The geometry is entirely radial, so there are no edge-bleeding effects, and, as far as I can tell, the thing is distortionless, intertialess, and self-interference-free, so that anything stored on it will last until the end of time, or until quanta-level decay erodes the fundamental substructure of the behavior of basic particles, whichever comes first. The memory can be configured from any two points on the ring to form a triangular matrix of any given height, limited only, I would guess, by the curvature of space itself. That means you can put practically any number of code lines into a given area, without worrying about stop points and edge bleed-off that the old rank-and-file square matrixes suffered. And that is just the intermediate thresholding. The information core itself is a block of weightless neutronium!"