Elizabeth Bear - Worldwired

“So the more the worldwire breeds, the more processing power Richard and Alan have available.”

“Yes,” Gabe says. He grins at me, and grins a little bit wider at Patty. He knows perfectly well I don't have a handle on this stuff; hand me a wrench and I'm happy. “But more than that. When we created the two Richards and remerged them, and then created Alan and gave him a direct link to Richard, what we did was build a multithreaded personality.”

“Elspeth called it disassociative identity disorder.”

“Elspeth's training is biased toward the conclusion that everyone is crazy,” Richard said. “Gabe's on the money so far.”

Gabe's a smart boy.

“So are we all,” Richard says, with the air of somebody quoting something. “All smart boys—”

Gabe's still talking, mostly to Patty now. I hope he didn't see me glaze over. “—got is a system where Richard and Alan have learned to divide themselves at will, to spawn self-directed processes that are, to all intents and purposes, new AIs, and then reabsorb these threads of themselves or each other, or allow different threads — I'm calling them personas, and I'm calling the whole AI structure an entity, for lack of a better name — allow different threads to rise in importance in the hierarchy as their job becomes more urgent or demands more system resources. So what's the zeroth persona at one moment can be the one-hundred-fifty-ninth tier a picosecond later, and then pop back up, and they all can spawn subprocesses and subpersonas customized to the task at hand. It's all interconnected. A true nonlocalized intelligence of almost infinite adaptability.”

Richard grins in my head. “He's figured out more than anybody except Min-xue has. Except he hasn't realized that we have an emotional connection to continuity of experience and personality, the same as you meat folks. So we're a bit less fluid than all that. But he's got the essentials down.”

You're not going to kill us all for having uncovered the evil AI plot to take over the world?

“Don't panic when I say this, Jen, but we don't need a plot. We've already conquered the planet. You're stuck with us now.”

Yeah, I say. I know . I finish my Coke and set the cup aside. I'll pitch it at the recycler on the way back out the door. Come on, Dick. Let's get this kid tucked in.

Gabe Castaign lay on his lofted, half-height alcove bed, ankles crossed, staring at the bulkhead — all two meters square of it. Or more precisely, staring at the porthole that pierced it. The bed was not quite broad enough for his shoulders. The only other furniture was a wall-mount swivel chair and a professional grade interface crammed into a third the normal space.

There was almost enough floor space to do push-ups. He'd seen solitary cells that were bigger, and had bigger windows.

But not a better view.

Genie's room was on the other side of the wall, her bed in the alcove immediately under his, so that he effectively had the top bunk and she the bottom, although they could not see or speak to each other.

He'd spent the first three weeks that they'd shared a wall teaching her Morse code — and he had to be the last man on the planet who knew it. It tickled her to learn, like knowing the Victorian language of flowers or something. She just knocked on the ceiling of her bunk when she wanted him, and he in his turn knocked on the floor. They'd become curiously formal with each other since Leah's death and the separation that had followed, and Gabe hadn't had the heart to press her as he knew he probably should. Kids were always funny around that age anyway, just moving toward adulthood, womanhood, and secrets. It was a strange, sad, and mysterious thing.

And he was too much of a damned coward to reach out and grab her before she got away. Irritated, he swung his feet down, ducking the edge of the bunk, and slithered to the floor. Half the covers followed him, rasping his jumpsuit pockets; he tidied them with military reflexes. He didn't even have to step across the room to reach his chair, just turn around and sit.

“Richard,” Gabe said, settling back, eyes trained on the revolving view through the porthole. “Remember when we were busting our asses trying to fix Ramirez's hack job on the Montreal 's operating system?”

“Intimately,” the walls answered, as if the conversation had been ongoing rather than abruptly and unceremoniously commenced. “There haven't been any disturbances since we declared it clean.”

“I keep thinking it was too easy.” Reinforced aluminum creaked under Gabe's weight, even in partial gravity.

“You thought at the time that there might be a second saboteur.” Which, Richard didn't say, was a hypothesis they'd examined thoroughly and discarded. Richard was not the sort to disregard hunches, or discrepancies that nagged at the back of your mind for days, or weeks, or months.

And neither was Gabe. “I keep coming back to it, that if you can get one man inside, you can get a second. But I've got no evidence. Nothing but a hunch. And no line of investigation.”

“May I use your console, Gabe?”

“Sure.”

A holographic image flickered into opacity over Gabe's interface, a weathered, bony man in a white shirt and tan corduroys, no tie, his arms folded as he leaned against the bulkhead. “The code is clean,” Richard said, and rubbed his nose with a knuckle. “We've been over it fifteen times. There's not a scrap of program on this system we both haven't investigated until we know what purpose every comma serves.” But his lips were pursed, and a long shallow line hovered between his brows.

“I know. I know. No logic bomb anywhere. Still, it's got to be a little creepy for you, in a psychological sense.”

“If I can be precisely said to have a psychology.”

“All the same. Essentially, you are the Montreal . And your own more-or-less-subconscious tried to kill us all several times.” The chair swiveled, but it wouldn't scoot back against the wall comfortably. Gabe compromised by putting his feet up on the interface, avoiding the holoprojectors so he wouldn't make Richard's image flicker. The metal desk dug into his calves.

Richard's restless fingers were tapping now. “The analogy doesn't work. It was more like… well, a virus is aptly named. A foreign disease that turns the host body's cells against it.”

“So what if the Chinese had another agent aboard? One with a more… physical agenda. Explosives, or a real disease?”

Richard shrugged. “We're taking every precaution available. We've got two existing bottlenecks — the beanstalks in Malaysia, Brazil, and the Galapagos, leading up to Forward, Clarke, and Piper orbital platforms — and then the shuttles to the Montreal . The platforms themselves are already pretty well defended, security protocols recently upgraded, and it's not like it's a steady stream of traffic from there to here—”

Gabe nodded. He looked down, picking at the seam on his jumpsuit with his thumbnail, and then he looked back up and met Richard's holographic gaze. “We'll just have to be careful, then, and bet our balls.” It earned him half a grin from the AI, as the two entities regarded each other across a space of no more than a meter. “Dick—”

“Yes, Gabriel?”

Honest curiosity, too long repressed in the name of politeness. It wasn't staying down any longer. “What's it like?” And then he laughed at himself, shaking his head ruefully, not breaking the eye contact, quite. Comme un gosse qui demande à son père d'expliquer le sexe.

“Being me?” Dick's grin was full-fledged now. He ran one hand across his hair; Gabe could have sworn he heard the rasp of wavy strands through knotty fingers. “You know, I remember being human, Gabe.”