Raphael Carter - The Fortunate Fall

The myrmichor chimed to signal that the upload was complete. I moved my muscles experimentally, trying to get used to my new body. The body feels different in grayspace; something to do with the organization of the sensory and motor cortices. I didn’t really read that part of the manual, though I remember the illustration: a little homunculus arched over a cross-section of the brain, with its face upside-down above the rest of its body and its tongue above that—which is about what it feels like. The Africans draw this as the sky-goddess Nut stretched out over the world, which is not how it feels, at least not in Russia.

When I’d finished uploading, I looked around me. Where was Keishi? She should have loaded faster than I did; her myrmichor was newer. But all I could see was rain—little yellow sparks of life, falling randomly into the dark, that could animate what they touched. Most were being eaten up by driftweeds, the grayspace equivalent of plants.

All right, then, I thought; if she didn’t want to come, that was fine with me. I didn’t have time for games.

I called up a hardware map and, sure enough, there was Darkness-at-Noon—visible, I suspected, only to me. I began to swim in its direction.

Then my vision went red. I blinked it back, but it was red again the moment my eyes opened. I turned, but it was all around me. I tried to break through, but I was trapped. Some driftnet spider, combing the waves, had entangled me. Reaching back into my body, I groped for the manual abort button.

“Cancel that!” Keishi said. “Relax, News One. It’s only me.”

My mistake had been looking for something my own size. She was all around me, spread out in a thin layer of cortex from which towers of enhancement rose. I had, of course, known before how fast and dense her mind was, but only now did I truly feel it. Beside her acres and arches and spires of mind, mine was a mere clot of neurodes. As I searched for her, I had been moving through her, like a tumbleweed through an abandoned city.

Then the city came to life, collapsed its towers, and gathered into folds around me.

“Keishi, what are you doing?”

“Umm, I’m sort of engulfing you,” she answered distractedly.

I felt her mind seep into me, taking up my unused spaces, and then seal itself around me like a shell.

“Keishi, this isn’t funny.”

“I’m trying to protect you. Stealth technology, remember? You’re shining like a lighthouse; half of grayspace can see you.”

“There’s nothing there to see me.”

“Contrast, News One, contrast. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”

When I protested again, she said impatiently: “Here, look!” and folded a layer of herself over my eyes. All at once the space around us, which had been a field of undistinguished neurodes, took on odor, taste, and texture. I felt tremblings, tramplings, stirrings round me. It was like the bottom of the ocean, where strange cave-jawed fish, impossible in light, are nourished, and pearl and weed have been developing for years, unseen of man. I saw a shark sniff Keishi’s tendrils, turn bronze in fear, and scull away; and in the distance some lopsided creature spasmed, drowning, tangled in a knot of fishing line.

“You could have shown me this before you did it,” I said, but so halfheartedly she didn’t bother to reply. Instead she moved forward, instantly attaining an impossible velocity. I was frightened at first, but then began to lose myself to the experience. I swept past sharks and spiders, and rocketed through tangler webs, invulnerable because I was armored in her; so that I began to dread the thought that we would soon reach Voskresenye, and she would have to stop.

We passed a border between computers. I couldn’t see it, but I felt it slow us down, like breaking through a sheet of paper. “This is Whisper,” she said. “My hearth.” It looked just like the rest of grayspace; yet, somehow, the confidence was comforting. “We’ll just be going through one corner of it, though—yes, here.”

Ahead of us, sharks were moving in slow motion.

“Oh, devil take it! I thought Swazi would be the fastest way— it’s a Dahlak—but it’s overloaded. Some idiot must be compiling an AI. Well, it’s still quicker than backtracking.”

We passed through into the slower hearth. Our thoughts didn’t slow down; the speed of neural nets isn’t affected by load in other parts of the system. But our motion ground to a crawl.

There was no sense trying to look ahead of us—everything there would be as slow as we were—so I looked behind us, where, things would be faster. But Whisper was as black as night. “Did you take away that new interface?” I said.

“No, it’s still there.”

“Then why am I blind?”

“The regulators are way backlogged on ‘see’ commands,” she said.

“That never used to happen. Motion would get slow, but you could always see.”

“That was back when most abos were still blind, so demand for sight was low. Now almost everything has vision, and the rules committee won’t increase the regulator standards. Just thank God you weren’t here ten years ago, when the abos were collecting eyes like kids collect marbles. One argus could bring a whole hearth to its knees. God, I’m glad they’re extinct. —Burst your eyes, Swazi, if you can’t keep your grayspace running right, then give it the hell away. Fucking public hearth admins….” She crawled and fumed, mostly in Sapir.

The sharks back in Whisper were starting to fade into view, their movements fast and jerky, like bad time-lapse. One or two dipped into Swazi, tempted by slow-moving prey, but most kept their distance. The abos know you can’t compare speeds across the boundary between computers. Gradually, they were dispersing.

Then as the sharks became brighter, I saw that some of them were not just pacing at the border. Some had their mouths stuck into Swazi, and were spinning out great woven sheets of neurodes, larger than a tangler’s web.

“What are they doing?” I asked.

“That’s right,” Keishi said, “you don’t know about webfish either. They’re a convertible shark that takes advantage of slowdowns. They stay at the border, where the vision is still fast, and send out sticky strands one neurode wide. Since the strands are so small, they move faster than everything else. And when the slowdown’s over, they reel in their catches. It’s sort of a brainless strategy, but it works. That’s why arguses had so many eyes, too— they’d deliberately backlog the regulators until everyone was equally blind, and then they’d fish by touch.”

“What happened to them?”

“The hearth admins screamed about the overloads, so the rules committee decided to limit the number of vision calls per abo. The arguses lost all their eyes, but they developed a symbiosis with these huge clouds of aphids that each had one eye, and those were even better at slowing a system down than the argus had been. Finally some bright hacker cooked up a program called Millipede, that would run around faster and faster the less it could see, so that no matter what happened, motion was always backlogged worse than vision. That made the argus strategy obsolete. Made huge traffic jams, too, until the ecosystems all reorganized to cope with it. —Thank God, here, this is Veles.”

We broke through another membrane, and Keishi began to pick up speed.

“Just in time, too,” she said. “Swazi is about to freeze up. We’d have had to unplug and start over.”

As we moved away I saw Swazi behind us begin to turn silver. Swazi had been unable to maintain its part of grayspace, and, finding no one to take it over, was storing it all on a moistdisk, frozen in time.

A boom of sound disturbed my sightseeing. I looked forward. Some long, lithe creature, like an eel, was swimming for its life, with an immense shark behind it. It jumped over us, booming; the shark followed, close enough to touch. At the last instant, the eel ducked into Swazi and was silvered. The shark tried to follow it in, but bounced off. Pacing in Veles, it fretted and fumed, like a cartoon lawman stopped by a painted border.