Bruce Sterling - Holy Fire

“Gosh, that sounds lovely.”

“It’s my dream come true. Real couture people will pay attention to me now. I’ll carry real lines of clothing from professional designers. No more of this kid stuff. Kid stuff, kid stuff, kid stuff, oh, truly I’m so, so sick of the vivid life.”

“I hope you’ll stay out of trouble with Bruno’s friends from now on.”

“Of course I will,” Therese said. “No matter what you think about the polity, well … they are making the world better . They really are! Bruno’s gangsters—well, the police have got them. It’s the medical thing, and the money, and the surveillance.… It’s working. The bad boys are dying from it. Every year, less and less of them. The criminal classes are dying. They’re very old and they were very strong for a long time but they are going away now, like a disease. There is something tragic there, but … but it’s a great political accomplishment.”

Maya sighed wearily. “Maybe I shouldn’t have stickered you with quite so many tranquilizers.”

“Don’t say that. It’s not true. Can’t you see how happy I am? You should be happy with me.” She looked into Maya’s face. “What changed you so much, Maya? Why aren’t you cheerful like you were in Munchen?”

“You’re having mood swings, darling. Try not to talk so much. Let’s get some rest. I’m very tired.”

Therese shrank back in her seat. “Of course you’re very tired. You were so brave. I’m sorry, Maya.… Thank you so much.”

They were silent a long time. Therese wept a little more. Finally she fell asleep.

In the passing lights of rural Europe, Therese’s face was a picture of peace. “You’re on the other side now,” Maya told her gently. “Now you’re a perfect little bourgeoise. I can’t believe it really works like this. I can’t believe it works so well. I let a world like this happen. I did it, it was my fault, this was just the kind of world I wanted. I can’t believe you’re so anxious to live in a world that I couldn’t stand to live in for one moment longer. I have to be an outlaw just to live and breathe, and now there’s no way back for me. And the Widow is onto me now. She knows. I just know that she knows. She’d arrest me right now, except that she’s patient and gentle. You know who the Widow is?”

The sleeping Therese hugged her tray a little closer.

“Don’t ever find out,” Maya said.

Reworking the palace presented considerable difficulties. Foremost among them was the difficult fact that something was alive inside it. It had taken Benedetta and her friends quite a while to track down this troubling presence. It was Martin’s dog. Plato was loose in the memory palace.

Martin had linked the dog’s organic brain directly to his virtuality. This was not a medical process approved for human beings, for many good reasons. Neural activity was an emergent and highly nonlinear phenomenon. Brains grew, they metabolized from a physical organic substrate. When software tried to grow in tandem with a brain, the result was never a smooth symbiosis of thought and computation. It was usually a buzzing, blooming mess. Left alone it became artificial insanity.

Benedetta showed her the hidden wing of the palace where the dog’s brain had been at work. The cyborganic mélange had grown for years in knobs and layers, immense frottages and glittering precipitates, a maze like coral and oatmeal. The neural augmentation wasn’t dead yet, but they had found the links to the dog’s wetware, and blocked them off. There were monster pearls in it here and there, massive spinning nodules like bad dreams that would never melt.

Since Warshaw’s death, the dog’s mental processes had broken through the floors in five places. The abandoned mentality jetted through the broken floors like sea urchins.

“What does this look like in code?” Maya said.

“Oh, it’s such wonderful code. You couldn’t parse this code in a million years.”

“Do you really think it was helping him think?”

“I don’t think dogs think the way we think, but this is definitely mammalian cognitive processing. Warshaw had his palace netlinked into the dog’s head. Very sophisticated for the time. Of course, it’s nothing compared to the stunts they work on lab animals nowadays. But for the 2060s, this was broad bandwidth and very rapid baud rate. There must be antennas woven all through the dog’s spine.”

“Why?”

“We speculate that he meant to hide some data inside the dog. Possibly move the whole palace into the dog’s nervous system. That sort of visionary nonsense was very big in the 2060s. People believed anything in those days. They romanticized computers and mysticized virtualities. There was a lot of weird experimentation. They thought anything was possible, and they didn’t have much sense. But Warshaw was no programmer. He was just old and rich. And reckless.”

“Is the dog still on-line in here?”

“That’s not the way to phrase it, Maya. The dog never had little doggy gloves or little doggy goggles. He never experienced the palace as a palace at all, he just infested it. Or it infested him.… Maybe Warshaw thought he could live in here as well, someday. Pull up all his physical traces and vanish into textures of pure media. People thought that was possible, until they tried it a bit, and learned how hard it was. Warshaw did a silly movie about that once.”

“You’ve seen Martin Warshaw’s movies? Really?”

“We have made it our business to dig them up.”

“Do you like Warshaw’s movies?”

“He was a primitive.”

“This doesn’t look primitive to me.”

“But this isn’t cinema at all. This is artificial life. Billions of cycles every day for thirty years.”

Down in the palace basement, they had the holy-fire machineries partly stoked and lit. The dream machines. They were supposed to do certain highly arcane things to the vision sites in the brain and the auditory processing centers. You would sort of look at them and sort of hear them, and yet it never felt much like anything. Human consciousness couldn’t perceive the deeply preconscious activities of the auditory and visual systems, any more than you consciously felt photons striking your retina, or felt the little bones knocking the cochlear hairs in your ears. The installations weren’t blurry exactly; they simply weren’t exactly there. The experience was soothing, like being underwater. Like twilight sleep in the color factory. To a semi-inaudible theme of music-not-music.

It wasn’t spectacular or thrilling. It didn’t burn or blast or coruscate. But it did not weary. It was the polar opposite of weariness. They were inventing very, very slow refreshments for the posthuman souls of a new world. They didn’t know how to do it very well yet. They were trying different things, and testing approaches and keeping records.

Maya was not one of the test subjects, but they let her see everything, because they liked her. There were the boxes in the boxes in the boxes, the ones that bled their own geometries, the spatial kaleidoscope. Then there were the ear-flower pinwheels. You could hear the flowers moving but they never really touched the backs of your eyes. And the giant burrowing things that endlessly burrowed into the burrowing things. These were very visceral and subtle, like mental vitamins.

She could not tire of the holy fire. There was no possible way to tire of it. It did not require attention; it worked without attention. It was something that happened to one, instead of something one did. But eventually the gloves and the earphones would pinch her, or her back would start to ache. Then she would log off and look at the wall.

After the holy fire, a blank wall was intensely revelatory. She could sit and meditate on a blank wall and the sheer richness of its physicality, the utter and total thereness of its sublime and awesome thereness was sweetly overwhelming. It wasn’t the inside that did things anymore, it was the outside when you came out and looked. …