Elizabeth Bear - Worldwired

“In a toilet.”

“So be it. I have been impressed with your integrity, Pilot Xie. Your resourcefulness. Your honor.”

“Which you are about to ask me to abrogate.” The water was cold. He plunged his hands in without bothering to adjust it, scrubbed with gritty liquid soap, and ran his hands under the faucet for longer than he needed to.

“I am asking you to testify to things you know to be true,” the general said quietly. “The Canadians' deceptions. Their manufactured truths. And what you yourself witnessed on board the Huang Di : a captain taken to drink—”

“Because of your orders.” Shijie's eyes hung over Min-xue's shoulder when Min-xue looked in the mirror.

“Are you certain they were my orders?” Quietly, and Min-xue had no answer. The general let the silence drag a little, and Min-xue pulled his hands out of the icy water, ducked his head, and laved his face. “Pilot Xie—”

“General.”

“Consider for a moment that we have many augments, pilots — and others. Unlike the commonwealth. Consider for a moment that Canada may yet be forced to return the Huang Di and her crew, including you, to our care. That crew contains several other augments, one higher ranking. It is logical to think that the Huang Di 's first pilot will be promoted to a newer starship.”

Ah. There's the bait. And it's rich enough to make the trap seem comfortable enough to live in. “You would promote me to first pilot of the Huang Di, if I testified as you wish.” He straightened, let the water flow cease, and slicked his hair out of his eyes with wet fingers and palms.

“Not as I wish.” The gaze the general rested on Min-xue was calm and open, completely guileless. “As will best serve China with your honesty. And not first pilot.”

“What then?” But Min-xue swallowed hard. He already knew.

“Captain Wu…” The general hesitated delicately. “He will not serve aboard another ship.”

Yes, Min-xue thought. You broke him and now you cast him aside. He's served his purpose and may be replaced by a new tool.

He pushed past General Shijie, careful not to touch the other man. He was in the corridor, hand on the heavy door that would take him back into the General Assembly, when he looked from one stiff guard beside the doorway to another, and realized exactly what it was that Shijie Shu had just offered him.

Nothing less than the captaincy of the Huang Di .

Leslie understood now why the pilots fixated so hard on getting into that black leather chair that dominated the bridge like the steel table dominates an operating theater. He knew, because he could feel it — a fraction of it: Richard and the limitless space he occupied.

It was… intoxicating . As if his senses had enlarged. If he concentrated, he could feel the things that Richard felt — the glorious confusion of moving water and atmosphere that the AI was struggling to learn to model and control, like a swirling breeze on Leslie's skin; and the angular body of the Montreal with its wings and gears and the soft hum of electricity through its veins; and the Benefactors spread across space. Charlie in his lab, and Richard's gossamer touch spanning star systems. No body of his own, no hands, no hope of ever feeling them again when he was honest with himself. Just a dream, an endless dream of space.

He imagined it felt the way a spider's web feels to the spinner, or a dolphin's sonar to the cetacean. Or perhaps the way a winding road clung to the tires of a sports car, the sensation of that contact almost seeming to extend to the driver's skin.

The birdcage's alien “map” of the sky, the distorted curves of space-time they felt as plainly as a surfer running a tube felt the surge and power of the wave under his board — Leslie could feel it, too, feel it the same way he'd been able to feel what the land would look like from a few hummed bars of song, once upon a time. It was intoxicating, amazing, as if the boundaries had dropped away from his body and his senses, and he had grown bigger than the skin he could no longer feel.

It wasn't all he felt. Richard was also feeding him the news coverage and commentary on the day's UN session, now that Jenny's testimony had ended. Information as a fluid, wrapped around him even when he knew that he was wrapped inside a skin of silver, floating in Earth orbit, and he was never going home.

He couldn't afford to think about that now. There was no guarantee that whatever the Benefactors had done to preserve his consciousness would last from moment to moment, and he wouldn't waste a moment of that time. He was too busy exploring their sensations, translating their mind-maps into something topographic, representative of space as his species perceived it.

Dick, why can I “feel” Charlie, and not Genie or Patricia?

“Or Min-xue or Jen?” The AI smiled in his head. “It's because of the way the network is set up. Jenny and the rest are implanted with individual control chips; they're essentially small nanonetworks on their own. You and Charlie are, as near as I can guess, partially on the Benefactor network. And you're also on the worldwire. Controlled like all the nanotech on Earth by the Calgary 's processor core.”

How do you keep that running at the bottom of the ocean?

“The nanosurgeons are capable of mechanical construction as well as biological repair,” Richard said. “They stay pretty busy. The Calgary wound up in shallow water. If I can get the global conveyor belt working again and manage the climate back to a compromise level, I might have them encourage the local fauna to turn it into an artificial reef. The processor core and the reactor are sealed. And tropical fish are nice.”

They are indeed . Leslie grinned internally at the image of holo-Richard hovering in midocean like some craggy Madonna of the Fishes, clownfish and Moorish idols nibbling through the seaweedy strands of his hair. Leslie hummed silently, a half-formed thought about who would sing the songs for the roads the starships would travel teasing the edges of his mind. So, Dick, then why not take it back to preindustrial levels?

“Even if I could, the world had almost three hundred years of adaptation already when Captain Wu tossed that rock at you.”

Because, of course, you aren't a PanChinese target in any way, Dr. Feynman AI.

“Technically speaking, I'm not even a doctor.” But it came packaged with another grin. “In any case, there's no point in throwing out the baby with the arctic meltwater, so to speak. It would cause even more chaos to try to reverse all the damage. And I'm not sure I can or want to. I'm not even sure my global conveyor trick is going to work, and it's not going to work quickly. Or without doing some additional damage — I'm up to my virtual armpits in a system that's already in flux, and what I'm doing is heedless and improvident.”

Leslie agreed, musing. And then he suffered a thought that snapped him out of his meditative state. Dick?

“Yes, Les?”

What's to stop the Chinese from nuking the Calgary?

Richard's pause was pregnant, as he allowed Leslie to get there first. “In the final analysis? There are a number of small inconveniences and inelegances to an attack of that kind. But, overall, there's nothing to stop them.”

Just like there was nothing to stop Toronto.

“Just like. Indeed.”

Would that kill you?

“No.” Utterly seamless, without the half-expected pause as if the AI was deciding how much information to share. Which meant that Richard had already known how he intended to answer that question, and didn't mind his human friends twigging that he's planned it in advance. “I'm not centralized anywhere, and while it would cost me a fragment of my capacity not to have the Calgary processor to run on, there's still the spare cycles of a googolplex or twelve nanomachines scattered around the Milky Way. It would be a very bad thing for the planet, however, for the worldwire to fail right about now—”