Elizabeth Bear: Worldwired

Genie floated in the darkness, calm and aware. No one touched her there; she couldn't feel Richard or Alan, Patty or Jen, Charlie or Leslie. She couldn't feel herself, or the Benefactors, or even the Montreal .

It was perfectly silent, and perfectly safe, and perfectly warm. And perfectly alone. Carver Mallory, she thought, naming a boy she's heard talked about but had never met. I've wound up like Carver Mallory, crippled and locked in my own head.

She reached out and found nothing. The last sensation she remembered was the pressure on her opened hand as Papa slid the wire into her chip, and then falling, and then the dark.

She wondered if this was what it had been like for Leslie and Charlie, adrift in space. She wondered if she would ever find her way home. At least it was warm, warm and quiet…

But she was bored .

And time went by.

She became aware of sensation. None of the ones she'd been expecting — not the softness of sheets or the smell of antiseptic or the hum of a ventilator, and not the prick of a needle in the crook of her arm. Not even soreness lingering in the back of her hand where Elspeth had ever-so-carefully cut her.

No. This was strangely neutral — but definitely a sensation, the way water has a flavor, even if it doesn't taste like anything, exactly. Water. Yes, actually, that was what it reminded her of. Water the exact temperature of her body, water flowing over her skin effortlessly, darkness and a swell and pulse as if she took deep deep breaths, breaths deep enough to stretch her entire body, and then puffed them out again hard—

There was pain on her skin, but it wasn't significant. Patches like sunburn, a sloughing kind of itch, and she knew they were less than they had been, and growing lesser still. Healing. Which didn't explain why she had too many arms and legs, come to think of it, or why the glimmerings of light that reached her faintly were watery, aquamarine.

Or why she felt the familiar internal pressure of sharing her head with somebody else.

Richard?

“Right here, Genie.” Something… different about his voice.

Oh, good, she thought, and laughed hysterically, except no sound came out. Where are we?

He laughed along with her, but his chuckle didn't have that frantic edge. “You're on a ride-along in a jumbo flying squid. Dosidicus gigas . I thought it would be nicer than waking up in a hospital bed, given how much time you've spent in those.”

You're so sweet.

“I try.”

She sensed his smile, a ghostly affection like the memory of somebody stroking her hair. The squid — and Genie, and Richard — must be swimming closer to the surface. She could make out cloudy green rays of light filtered through moving water now, and feel the currents on her skin a way she never could have in her own body. Why is the squid hurt, Dick?

“It had skin lesions. From exposure to fallout from the Impact. They're healing.”

It's infected.

“It's on the worldwire. We wouldn't be here if it wasn't.”

Genie reached out to the fishy presence she half-sensed, becoming aware of a calm, alien sentience, a canny cephalopodic awareness that she barely even recognized as a mind. Incurious and hungry, the squid slipped through the water. She drew back, unsettled, and then she realized that she could feel other minds out there in the darkness, even stranger and more alien ones, minds experiencing sensations she had no words for and senses she couldn't describe: the multidimensional mind-song-maps of cetacean sonar, the sense like pressure but not like pressure from a fish's lateral lines, the unfailing knowledge of goal and direction that Richard showed her was a sea turtle, guided on migration by lines of magnetic force.

And then there were the Benefactors. The shiptree, sensing light and nutrients like a flavor on its hull, and its birdcage companion, the alien creature in a multiplicity of bodies that felt space as the twisted, tessered outline of a Klein bottle groped by hand in a pitch-black room. And she felt their awareness on her as well; their curiosity, their alienness matched by the alienness of herself, and Richard and the worldwire binding the whole thing together. Richard, who wasn't — quite — Richard anymore. Whose presence in her mind reflected all those things, all at once, as if on a long-distance conversation she heard the noise of other people talking in the background, a world at the other end of the wire.

We did it, Richard? We really did it?

“Just like Leah would've,” he said. She thought his voice broke, but that was impossible, because he was a machine. “You saved the world, kid. Don't let it go to your head.”

“Wow,” she said, and heard her own voice like it belonged to somebody else. “Wow, this is really neat.”

“Genie?”

She opened her eyes. The infirmary was too bright, painfully bright and uncomfortably warm. She shaded her eyes with her hand; the IV tugged when she moved. “Papa?”

“Right here,” he said, and bent over to kiss her on the forehead, and she was crying, and it didn't even scare her when he started to cry as well.

1330 hours

Saturday 3 November 2063

Vancouver, Offices of the Provisional Capital

British Columbia, Canada

Connie stands up when I walk into her office, and comes around the desk to shake my hand. She smiles gingerly, but I think it's sincere. Her eye sockets are more green than purple, and the bandage over her nose is shaped like a nose again.

They got the reconstructive done fast. On the other hand, she's had to be on the feeds a lot . I squeeze her hand, layering the metal one over the meat ones carefully. She steps back after a moment, but she doesn't let go of me until another second passes. Then she looks down and clears her throat, and rubs the corner of her bandage with the side of her forefinger.

“I didn't see you at Janet's funeral, Jen.”

“That's because I didn't go.” So how come Janet Frye gets a funeral, and Leah doesn't? Riddle me that. “I take it the identity of her mysterious American died with her?”

She shrugs. “We might pry it out of Toby yet. Although I'd almost rather he clams up. We can send him to jail longer if he doesn't get all cooperative. How soon can you pilots have the Montreal and the Huang Di ready for their maiden voyage?”

I'm not usually stunned speechless. Call it a character flaw. Still, I have to swallow three times before I get anything intelligent out. “What… I'm sorry, Prime Minister. I thought we'd be here for a while, facilitating the communication between the birdcages and the shiptrees—”

“The wheels are in motion, but I don't think you'll be taking Drs. Dunsany, Tjakamarra, and Kirkpatrick with you. We need them. You can have Forster, though.”

“Ellie comes with Gabe and Genie and me. Not negotiable.”

Her smile says she knew that already. She shrugs. “I've just gotten off the line with Premier Xiong. We'll be returning the Huang Di to Chinese control, in return for Chinese aid in mitigating the ecological damage around the Toronto Impact. Richard assures me that repairs can start there soon, although…”

Breath held, I will her to speak without making me ask for it, but Riel plays this game better than I do. “Although?”

“He says it will take centuries. If he doesn't break something fixing it. The worldwire going down was a setback.” She turns to the window. She takes three steps toward it and stops, one hand on the wall. The light makes her look old. All this — all that —and like Wainwright, Riel will never trust me. “Has he told you what he got from the Chinese AI when he took it apart?”