Raphael Carter - The Fortunate Fall

“That body is gone,” Keishi said. “But I live.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Think back, Maya,” she said. She began to walk toward me, but stopped, as if she sensed that I could not have borne her touch. “You remember who I was. Don’t you think I would have had a plan to stay with you, even after my own death?”

“If she had,” I said, not meeting her gaze, “she would have told me about it.”

“If I’d told you, it wouldn’t have worked. I knew they’d mind-suck you; anything I said to you, they would have found out. I had to let you think I was dead, hide out in the Net, and then come back to you when the worst of the heat was off.”

“The soul can’t survive discorporation,” I said. “Maybe in the African Net, but not here.”

“A soul can’t live in the Net, no. But there’s nothing mystical about it. It’s a physical process—for all intents and purposes the soul is serotonin. If you upload your mind to the Net, at least here in the Fusion, you lose your sensory qualia, your emotions; you become a program. But then if you put it back into a brain, the soul grows back. —Especially,” she said, “if it’s the soul of a Weaver.”

“Oh God,” I said, “Oh God, I knew there was a setup in this somewhere—”

“No… no, Maya! I mean, I was a Weaver. It’s a manner of speaking—you know, to your last dying breath and all that. But seeing as how they killed my body, I should probably give up that loyalty. Don’t you remember?”

“She was my screener….” I said, slowly.

“Yes, and Maxwell Smart wrote greeting cards. It was a cover, Maya. Weavers keep cuckoos in every profession…. Including one named Keiji Mirabara.”

I watched her silently, fighting back memory.

“And now you know how I replaced Anton without causing an outcry. And how I obtained the, ah, the Postcop pursuit vehicle— which, by the way, no Postcop in the world is authorized to drive. And that’s how I found the Weaver viruses, and how I created the bubbles and back doors, which Mister Resurrection hastens to take credit for.”

“Believe what you like,” Voskresenye said lightly. “The point is insignificant.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

“Look back into your memories. It’s there.”

But I would not touch those memories. I would keep my muscles clenched around them, I would squeeze them into a ball, hard-shelled and separate. They were in me, but I would not make them part of me; as a sunken anchor does not give up its substance to the ocean, or an acorn passes through the stomach whole. I would not become that other woman, who had died when her lover died, twenty years past. I would remain myself.

“Do you remember?” she said.

“No.”

“You will,” she said. “In time. You were a camera and I was a Weaver, and we have known each other nearly thirty years.”

“I don’t believe you,” I repeated.

“Maya, let me touch your mind again,” she said, extending one beseeching hand. “This time with nothing hidden. I promise you you’ll understand.”

“Keep your hands off me,” I said. I backed up a step and tripped, so that I had to catch myself against the whale’s tank with one hand. I braced myself against her mind’s touch, holding up one futile hand to shield my face.

She looked upon my fear with horror. Her hand fell to her side. “All right, then,” she said, nodding. “I’ll tell you the story.”

“I was created a Weaver in 2290,” she said, “just a few years before I first found you. I was nineteen years old—they take us young, you know, like Mousketeers. For nineteen years I was the prisoner of my own skull, trapped in an almond-sized sphere at the intersection of my ears and eyes. Then the surgeon injected me with nanobugs—not like yours; bugs made from clones of my own cells, half robot and half leukocyte. They made a blastula inside my skull, dividing again and again, with their animal pole at my left ear and their vegetal pole at my right. Their signals pulsed from one side of my head to the other, as I lay unconscious on a surgeon’s table in Mecca—holy, hallucinatory town.

“Then I woke from the knife, and I was the Net. Without moving, I could touch Novaya Zemlya and Cape Town, both at the same time. Or I could walk through the streets and understand the shouts of Arabic, without needing a fluency chip. I discovered that the slogan shouted on every street, that I had taken for a prayer, meant ‘Take you to Africa? Ten thousand riyals!’ I had the money, but I declined the offers. Why should I go anywhere, when I had the Net inside me? I could sit in the Net as a spider sits, perfectly still, at the center—for wherever she is, is the center—and when a fly brushes the web, it’s as if the silk were her own body. Night after night, I coursed through minds, leaving new dreams behind me. And in the day, my kibo fell around me in a thousand voices, like a gentle rain.”

“What’s a kibo?” I asked, more to gain time than to hear the answer.

“A kibo is a Weaver’s summoning-word,” she said. “Nobody knows why they’re called that, they just are. They even try to get you to take your kibo as your name. Silliest damn thing I ever heard of—grown people going around being called Alcoholism or Famine. What am I, a Horseman of the Apocalypse?” She grew quiet. “Do you remember what my kibo was?”

“Lesbianka?” I guessed, still not touching my memories.

“No,” she said gravely. “If it had been, many things would have been different. It was Calinshchina. ”

“And?”

“And, to begin with, that’s how I found the whale,” she said. “Voskresenye slipped up, just a little, and of course I felt it. But I decided not to turn him in, because by that time I’d met you, and I was beginning to plan what I would do if the other Weavers found out about us. I carved myself a refuge in the whale’s mind. And I forced him to accept it, or be taken by the Weavers. After that, for my own sake, I protected him.”

“Why me?” I asked. “What did you want from me?”

“Maya, when I said I’d been in a thousand minds, it was just a fraction of the truth. There’s hardly a mind in the Fusion I haven’t touched. You were the one that fit—the only one. That’s what I kept trying to tell you last night: we are the halves of a single whole.”

From the chair where he was sitting, Voskresenye called out: “I do believe Miss Mirabara is a better Platonist even than I. She appears to believe in the rolling spiders of the Symposium.”

“Shut up, old man,” she said over her shoulder. “This isn’t about you.”

He smiled, acquiescing. But he watched us from his seat, an audience before the stage. Or rather, an actor between scenes, who already knows the outcome, but watches to compare the other actors’ performances to his own. And all the while he listens, with half an ear, for his final cue.

“If you’re her, and she was a Weaver,” I said, “why did she need to go to Africa? A Weaver could hide from anyone.”

“Except another Weaver. I had to be a step ahead of them, and that meant African tech. If we hadn’t been what we were, you know—if we’d been an airline pilot and a bricklayer—things wouldn’t have been as difficult. Weavers only care about stuff that gets onto the Net. They leave it to the Postcops to take care of mere reality.”

Voskresenye snorted. “As usual, Mirabara, you have things exactly backward. The Weavers control the Net, which is reality; the Postcops only police the flesh, and that has not been real for decades, if indeed it ever was.”

She turned around and hissed at him in Sapir, loud and long. He fell silent, smirking.