Larry Niven - Achilles choice

A power outage? An industrial accident?

Something serious, if Beverly had been forced to reboot. Jillian blinked twice, calmed herself, and stepped through the doorway.

Beverly smiled at her, “Hello, sugar. What can I do for you?” Her voice sounded hollow, as if she were speaking from the bottom of a well.

Jillian felt something that she had never before experienced when in the Void. Sleepy. Headachy. She straightened herself with an effort.

Beverly leaned forward, concern sparkling in her bottomless dark eyes. “I think you could use a little nap, darling.”

“I want information. Why would Donny Crawford need to conceal a satellite interrupt?”

Beverly’s mouth opened, and her lips moved soundlessly. The water shifted and blurred. Beverly’s face became indistinct, and started to fade— And Jillian woke up.

She was sweating. What in the hell was going on? Jillian tore the tabs away from her eyes and temples, and stared at them. That had never happened before.

A superstitious person might set such things down to bad luck, and quit.

Jillian couldn’t quit. She reattached the headset and closed her eyes.

Jillian walked along the ocean floor toward a ring of shattered coral reefs. There was motion around her: blurs of pastel color instead of fish. In the middle of the ring of blurred wreckage stood a chair and a desk. The door still stood, unsupported… featureless, a cartoon. Beverly sat at a cartoon desk.

This… place, this environment: it was a collaboration worked out over the fifteen years in which she and Beverly had been programming each other. It was a visual/auditory/kinesthetic feedback loop, Jillian and Beverly taking cues from each other so quickly that the illusion of continuity and depth were almost flawless. But it lived in Beverly’s mind; it was Beverly’s landscape. Had Beverly altered it? Or had her memory been damaged?

Jillian walked through the door as through a dream. Beverly stared straight ahead. She barely acknowledged Jillian’s presence. Beverly looked twodimensional, flat and lifeless. The white sundress was a surreal fog struggling to condense into muslin.

In old-style flat holos, “flicks,” a critical number of frames per second was needed to preserve the illusion of motion. Below that threshold, the eye could see individual pictures flash against a darkened screen. The images became jerky and artificial.

Maintaining the Void became nightmarishly difficult. Data was slowed, stalled, corrupted. And the images and sensations were deteriorating, slowly consumed by static.

“Beverly,” Jillian said gently, “I want unclassified material.”

“I’ll help you if I can, Jillian.” Beverly’s mouth was out of synch with her words. Her index fingernail, elegantly manicured, traced the JILLIAN LOVES carving.

Beverly’s nail left a wisp of smoke. Now the letters read: JILLIAN, STOP.

The ocean around them became a sea of disparate voices, fishy mouths lipping her gently, strange swirling smells and tastes.

“Beverly,” Jillian said. “Maybe the interference is coming from the main lobe. Can you partition off? Can you give us some privacy here?”

“I can shield us.” There was a distinct clicking sensation, and the weird and inexplicable feeling that she and everything around her had suddenly been reduced in size. But Beverly was clearer, sharper. When she spoke her voice was distinct again.

“This is better, darling, but if I try to access data they can get to me. They might be able to get to me here. Are you sure you know what you’re asking?”

“I’ve got to know about Donny Crawford.” Donny had been attacked. Somebody… Council members?… had used him as a puppet to make a point.

“All right, darling.” Beverly’s dark eyes were huge and luminescent, bottomless, and Jillian felt herself fall into them, Alice-down-the-Rabbit-Hole.

A flood of sensation: pictures, sound, kinesthetic measurements. She felt Donny in motion. It was a formidable learning tool, and even more powerful because of Donny’s physical dynamism. She was inside his body as he performed a flawless routine on the uneven parallel bars.

The sensations of his effort triggered an explosion of sexual images: maternal, sensual, emotional. A catalog of experience and fantasy. Sean’s body with Donny’s face. Remembered tastes and smells and touches, subtly altered to fit Donny Crawford.

So beautiful, so beautiful.

Donny’s image always did this to her. Now she wrenched herself from the seething erotic fantasies.

“Not this… Beverly. I need information on Donny’s relationship with the Council.”

“The Council”—Beverly’s voice crackled with static—“is composed of approximately two dozen of the most powerful Linked—”

“Approximately?”

Sparks crackled, tiny lightnings that disrupted the illusion. “The exact number is classified.”

“Help me, Beverly.” Jillian whispered it. “Donny Crawford was almost killed because of something someone named McFairlaine wanted from Energy. Why would anyone want to hurt Donny? Just who is this McFairlaine?”

“Carter Crombie McFairlaine is the chairman of Transportation. He’s known to be a Council member.”

“And what does ‘two points’ mean?” Hastily, she added, “If you can tell me without accessing the main lobe.”

Beverly’s voice was becoming too formal, had lost all of its musical quality. “Analysis of current news indicates that contract negotiations between Energy and Transportation may be at a critical juncture. ‘Two points’ could mean percentage points, a financial arrangement.”

“Donny was afraid. He talked about ‘war.’ Do you know what he meant?”

No.

Then she was on her own. She didn’t dare have Beverly ask a question like that. But what would “war” mean? There was no war. That was one of the gifts the Council had brought to the world.

Donny Crawford must be working for Transportation. Why would he personally suffer during a breakdown or stalemate in negotiations between Transportation and Energy? War, he said.

War between members of the Council? Impossible. Wasn’t it?

Her concept of fractal sociology predicted a repetition of patterns through higher and higher levels of social organization. Could she conceivably start with one man, Donny, as the smallest social unit, and predict anything about the system to which he belonged? The sample was impossibly small… but she was looking for perspective, not ultimate truth. It was worth a try.

If she considered Donny Crawford to be a microcosm of the entire, if she interpreted what happened to him on the mountain as a breakdown in communication between the neural net and the Boosted nervous system which it controlled, the macro equivalent of that might be a breakdown in communication within the Council.

In other words, removed from the ameliorative influence of the neural net — (If the Old Bastard didn’t come down from fucking Olympus)— the negative influence of Boost would take over. Donny’s nervous and endocrine systems would begin to go berserk.

(—Go to war with each other?)

“All right, Beverly. You have to do this for me. I want all data on industrial accidents and civil disobedience worldwide, whenever it exceeds statistical probability as established in the actuarial tables of Lloyds of London and Prudential Insurance.”

Beverly faded for a few moments, then reappeared. She was a cartoon, a line drawing, simpler every moment. “I can’t get that information.” She paused, and then added matter-of-factly, “They do not approve of your line of questioning, Jillian.”

“There’s nothing illegal about asking questions.” Even to herself, she sounded like a guilty child.