Грег Иган - Schild’s Ladder

Their Mediators were smart enough to synchronize the process without needing to be told. Tchicaya sent the code to his Exoself, and the two of them dropped out of Slowdown together. Switching the metabolic modes of cells throughout his body, and reconfiguring all the higher-level systems responsible for maintaining posture, breathing, circulation, and digestion took nearly fifteen minutes. The time passed imperceptibly, though, since his Qusp only resumed its normal rate once his body had completed the shift.

The light in his room had frozen into a late-winter’s afternoon. He could hear a breeze moving through the trees beside the house, a different sound entirely to the throb of barometric pressure changes to which he’d grown accustomed. They were only six civil days into the Slowdown, but the new rhythms had seeped into his mind more rapidly than they’d had any right to, as if abetted by some process that his Exoself had neglected to retard.

Mariama tugged on his hand, pulling him toward the door. "Come on!" Her expression made a joke of it, but she couldn’t disguise the note of genuine impatience. They were like lightning now, their least purposeful meanderings a dazzling feat in everyone else’s eyes, but that still wasn’t fast enough.

"Not that way." He gestured at the window.

Mariama said accusingly, "You’re afraid to walk past them."

"Of course." Tchicaya gazed back at her calmly. It was perfectly reasonable not to want to be discovered, and however skillful she was at manipulating him, he wasn’t going to be made ashamed of every last instinct of his own. "It’s safer to use the window. So we’ll use the window."

Mariama managed to look both amused and martyred, but she didn’t argue. Tchicaya climbed out, then she followed him, carefully pulling the hinged pane closed behind her. He was puzzled for a moment; no one was going to notice an open window in the short time they’d be gone. But in two weeks, the night frosts would have left an indelible mark on some of his more fragile possessions.

As they crossed the garden, he said, "Don’t you go home to sleep?"

"No. I’ve set up camp in the power station. All my food’s there." She turned to face him, and Tchicaya was sure she was on the verge of demanding that he go back to the house to pilfer some supplies of his own, but then she said, "You can share it. I’ve got plenty."

The bright afternoon was eerily quiet, though Tchicaya doubted that he would have been unsettled if he’d heard no other voices for a minute, or an hour, on an ordinary day. As they stepped onto the road, he spotted two other pedestrians in the distance. During Slowdown, his Exoself had not only reprogrammed his own gait, it had tweaked his expectations of other people’s appearance: moving with both feet constantly on the ground, positioning the arms to maximize stability, had looked as normal as it had felt. With his old notions of bodily dynamics restored, the pedestrians appeared, not merely frozen, but cowed and timid, as if they expected an earthquake at any moment.

He looked back at his house, quickly lowering his eyes from the windows to inspect the garden. Wind and rain could shift soil and pebbles into unwanted places on a time scale of decades, but the plants were engineered to herd those unruly elements; he’d watched the process with his own eyes. Out in the fields, the crops would be tending themselves, collectively arranging whatever changes they needed in irrigation and drainage, glorying in the strange seasons of unharvested bounty.

Tchicaya said, "How did you find the code?" It was the first Slowdown for both of them; she couldn’t have stored it on a previous occasion.

Mariama replied casually, "It’s not a big secret. It’s not buried deep, or encrypted. Don’t you ever examine your Exoself? Take apart the software?"

Tchicaya shrugged. He’d never even dream of tinkering with things on that level: his Exoself, his Mediator. Next thing you were probing the working of your own Qusp, dissecting your own mind. He said, "I only take things apart if I can survive not putting them back together."

"I’m not stupid. I make backups."

They’d reached the park. Four giant hexapods huddled motionless in a corner. The decorative robots consisted of nothing but six coiled legs, arranged as three pairs that met at right angles in the center. If they’d been endowed with even the mildest form of sentience, they would have gone insane from the lack of stimulation, but they were little more than pattern-recognizers on springs.

Mariama ran up to them and clapped her hands. The nearest one stirred sluggishly, shifting its center of mass and wobbling on the tripod of the three legs currently touching the ground. She started dancing back and forth, encouraging it, and it began to tumble for her.

Tchicaya watched, laughing, biting back an admonition: someone would notice that they’d moved, and know that the Slowdown had been violated . He doubted that the hexapods had memories, but there was machinery everywhere, monitoring the streets, guarding the town against unlikely dangers. The fact that they hadn’t woken anyone didn’t prove that they wouldn’t be found out in the end.

Mariama weaved between the robots. "Aren’t you going to help me?"

"Help you do what?" She’d managed to get all four of them moving simultaneously, without his aid. Tchicaya hadn’t played with them since he was an infant, but he’d never been able to hold the attention of more than one at a time.

"Make them collide."

"They won’t do that."

"I want to get their legs tangled together. I don’t think they understand that that can happen."

"You’re a real sadist," he protested. "Why do you want to confuse them?"

Mariama rolled her eyes. "It can’t hurt them. Nothing can."

"It’s not them I’m worried about. It’s the fact that you enjoy it."

She kept her eyes on him without breaking step. "It’s just an experiment. It’s not malicious. Why do you always have to be such a prig?"

Tchicaya felt a surge of anger, but he fought it down and replied pleasantly, "All right, I’ll help you. Tell me what to do." He caught the flicker of disappointment in her eyes before she smiled and started issuing detailed instructions.

The hexapods were primitive, but their self-and-environment model was more reliable than Mariama had imagined. After fifteen minutes trying to trick them into tying their legs into knots, she finally gave up. Tchicaya collapsed on the grass, breathless, and she joined him.

He stared up into the sky. It had grown pale already, almost colorless. It had been summer when the Slowdown began; he’d forgotten how short the winter days were.

Mariama said, "Has anyone you know even heard of Erdal?"

"No."

She snorted, her expectations confirmed. "He probably lives on the other side of the planet."

"So? Do you want half the planet to go into Slowdown, and the other half not?" Everyone on Turaev was connected somehow. While Erdal traveled, the whole world would wait for him, together. It was either that, or they broke into a thousand shards.

Mariama turned to face him. "You know why they do it, don’t you?"

It was a rhetorical question. People always had an ulterior motive, and Tchicaya had always been taken in by their explanations. He squirmed like an eager child and asked with mock excitement, "No, tell me!"

Mariama shot him a poisonous look, but refused to be sidetracked. " Guilt . Cosmic apron strings. Do you think poor Erdal would dare not come home, with nine million people holding their breath for him?"

Tchicaya knew better than to dispute this claim directly; instead, he countered, "What’s so bad about Slowdown? It doesn’t hurt anyone."

Mariama was venomous. "While every other civilized planet is flowering into something new, we do nothing and go nowhere, ten thousand times more ponderously than before."