Elizabeth Bear - Hammered

“What’d you have to do to get that?” Mitch asked, more because he felt he should face up to it than because he wanted to know.

“Broke four fingers and his foot,” Razorface answered. He pulled out a package of cigarettes and shook one out. Mitch already had a lighter in his hand, and offered it to Razorface. Coals flared in the darkness and pale, acrid smoke coiled upward.

“Would you really have bitten his fingers off?”

“Shit, man,” Razorface answered. “Can’t say. Never had to go that far yet. Can’t let myself get a sweet reputation, though.”

Thirteen years ago:

in the Heavy Iron

University of Guelph

Tuesday 21 June, 2049

7:00 P.M.

Elspeth’s VR self sighed, stood, walked to the door. Somewhere her corporeal body hung swathed in black permeables, bathed in the fluid of a full-immersion tank. “Dick. I read your books when I was a little girl. You made me… you made me want to be a scientist. You made me believe that understanding how things worked was the greatest adventure a human being could have.”

Dick’s fingers rippled silently on the arms of his chair.

Elspeth glanced back at him. “But this is wrong. I’m making people crazy, Dick. I have to stop it, before somebody else dies.” I can’t let my work be used to support these endless, soul-numbing wars . She wondered if Feynman, the Feynman of Los Alamos, would understand. Perhaps. Perhaps he would.

“People are often irrational, Elspeth. You don’t control their actions.” You do control your own.

She turned and leaned back against the door, tugging her hand away from her crucifix. Bad habit. “Research shouldn’t mean that people die.”

“Elspeth. Are you saying that there are things that should not be explored?” Open challenge in his inquisitive gaze, a bit of mockery in the smile, fingers drumming.

She bit her lip, resenting the challenge, resenting him even more for being right. “I have to end the experiment, Richard. I have to shut down the machine.” He knew. He had told her that he had found a way to abrogate the virtual reality, and deal with the computer without intermediaries. “Comforting lies,” he had called them, with a grin.

He was silent for a moment, and then he held out his hands — unreal hands, hands that would never hold a lover or a pen. “That’s murder, too, El.”

“It can’t be. I made you. You’re…” She forged ahead. “You’re not real.”

A gentle smile, a fierce look in the eye. “Nonsense. Or you’re not real, because your parents made you.”

“That’s a spurious analogy, Dick.”

“That depends on your point of view.”

She shook her head. “No. No, it doesn’t. Only God can make life. You haven’t got a soul, Dick. You’re a construct. Patterns of electrical activity in a piezoelectric crystal.”

Feynman looked at her, and a manic light burned in his eyes. “And you are patterns of electrical activity in meat. Weigh me your soul and I’ll include it in the equation.”

She turned the handle on the door, turned back. “I feel like I should talk to the others.”

“Others? Oh.” The physicist shrugged. “I tried showing them the library. I tried explaining… they’re not independent. They can’t think, Elspeth, only react. Or act in limited, predetermined patterns. Maybe given time, they might have developed. But I…” He gestured again. “I think I corrupted them. They couldn’t process the contradictions…”

“Dick, are you saying that you drove my programs mad?”

His eyebrows quirked and his hands danced around. “I can call them up. I suppose you would say, I can run the programs. But I can’t force them to adapt to realizing that they aren’t what they remember being.”

Elspeth watched him, nibbling on the edge of her finger.

Feynman chopped at the air with a gesture of dismissal. “Why worry? You can always restore them from backup, right?” A taunting grin. “And you’re going to pull the plug anyway. So who cares?”

Elspeth tapped her hands on the door handle, and looked at her creation, long and hard, and wondered how God felt when Eve told him where to get off. Pride and sorrow mingled in her chest, and she turned back to the door.

1030 hours, Thursday 14 September, 2062

Allen-Shipman Research Facility

St. George Street

Toronto, Ontario

I’ve been assigned my own office, in a different wing from where Gabe and Dunsany sit, and I’ve just called to check in with Face for the day and had to leave a message. I don’t want to leave him the work number, and I’m still too paranoid to leave my HCD on all the time. Same problem with Face — convenient little buggers, but you can track usage through wireless networks and GPS. Better to leave them off if you’re on the DL, only flip them on when you need to check your mail.

He’ll leave a message if he needs me.

When Valens taps on the open door, I’m sitting at the work table in the corner by the window, drinking coffee and pondering a little trip through the Internet to see if I can discover the whereabouts of a certain Chrétien Jean-Claude Hebert, late of Montreal. I spent the morning studying the specs for the good ship Indefatigable, trying to figure out what I could have done differently. Done better.

The answer does not make me happy. Seen the dark body sooner, reacted faster. And I don’t know what the hell I can do about either of those. Keep losing ships.

They’re not real ships. Which doesn’t matter as much as it should.

“Good morning, Fred.” I stand up as he enters.

He glances at the display over my desk, where a schematic of the virtual starship hangs, slowly revolving. “Studying yesterday’s record?”

“Just finished the review. That’s a heck of an obstacle course you have set up…” Sir. I bite it off before it gets away from me.

“Meant to be. You didn’t disappoint us, Casey, if that’s what you’re thinking. You handled that first run better than the other candidates we tried did after their upgrades.”

That sparks my interest. “Tried. Past tense?”

He shrugs. “We had three good candidates in your group, excluding the younger volunteers. One left the program. One — our best candidate — passed away in an accident.” A sidelong smile. “An accident unrelated to the implants, I hasten to add.”

“Of course. Number three?”

“Still with us.”

“When do I get to meet him?”

“You don’t. He’s actually in an orbital research facility on Clarke Station. Bit too far to commute. And you just blew his response times away.” Valens walks to my desk and runs a finger over the interface plate, spinning the Indefatigable about its axis.

I cross the plush, lavender-gray carpeting to stand at his elbow. “I’m not fast enough, Fred. I hope the simulations for the actual vehicles will run a bit slower.”

“The aircraft sims? Well, Casey, here’s the thing. You’re not going to be seeing any aircraft sims.” He shoves a hand into his coat pocket and turns to look me dead in the eye.

Was that a threat? “Pardon?”

He drops a folder on my desk, covering the optics. The holo winks out. “Those are your clearances. You’re in. You’re also reactivated, Master Warrant. Welcome back to the C.A.”

Eyes blinking, I listen to the silence, waiting for his words to change into something that makes sense to me. No.

No.