Karl Schroeder - Lady of Mazes

Livia thought about their lack of progress on any front. A stray thought came to her: what would Lucius Xavier do in this situation? "Go ahead," Livia said past Morss's shoulder.

"We're much obliged," said the vote. He waved his hand even as Morss said "No!"

Livia stumbled. She looked around; somehow in the press of people she'd ended up with her back to the diamond-glass wall. She put out her hand to brace herself against the impenetrable substance —

— And it shattered.

Reflexively she grabbed for the edge as she fell, and swung out and then back, slamming against the side of me wall below the level of the ballroom's floor. Above her was a gabble of concerned voices and several arms reached down, waving futilely just out of reach. She slid down a centimeter, then another, and made the mistake of looking down.

Clouds wavered past, kilometers away. Below them, nothing but cold ocean.

She screamed, feeling the jagged edge of broken window cut through her fingers, then she had to let go and she fell —

— And was standing again in the ballroom. She stumbled and this time when she leaned against the unbroken diamond wall, it held. She looked at her hands; there were no cuts.

The votes were staring at her with a creepy intensity. Doran Morss looked angry.

"Told you she'd pass," said the vote Morss had been arguing with. He swore at it and walked away. The vote turned back to Livia.

"My apologies for the ... unexpected nature of the test. It's to see whether you still have normal human responses to threat situations. Most Archipelagics who suddenly found themselves hanging from a cliff would assume it was just another inscape experience, and would not struggle. They'd have had no adrenalin reaction; yours on the other hand was strong."

"What does that mean?" Her heart was still pounding in her chest, and she was angry, but unsure at who or what

"It means you might be useful to us," said the vote. "Ms. Haver, would you like a job?"

Aaron had accused her of being idle. It was hard not to be when every avenue that might lead home brought you in circles. If only for her own sanity, she had to do something that produced results.

"Yes," she said to the vote, "I'll take your job." Whatever it is.

The solar system pinwheeled around Aaron. For hours he had swept like an angel through inscape visions of the Archipelago, trying to learn everything about everything. He loved it, loved this place and the ocean of information. But his back was starting to ache and there was a persistent pain behind his eyes. Worse, he was feeling guilty. He should have spent his time searching for ways back into the Fallow Lands, instead of catching up on two centuries of history. But he couldn't help himself.

For a while he had hovered over the sun, amazed at the detail of the boiling Hadley cells like rice grains on its surface. Even down in that incandescent chaos, Archipel-agic machines grazed. Vast tethers swung down and up, harvesting material from the inner orbits of the sun in an intricate dance. Farther out, the heavy-metal asteroids known as the vulcanoids had been taken apart and made into giant arching machines that focused the outpouring solar wind into discrete streams. These hurricanes of energy were directed with pinpoint accuracy throughout the solar system, where they acted like trade winds to push cargoes, and even whole coronals, from port to port.

The closer he looked the more detail there was. Each of the thousands of coronals had its own history and local flavor, all open and visible in a way the manifolds had never been. True, everyone could live everywhere at once through inscape so there were few real cultural distinctions. Automatic translation hid any language differences; and since any coronal could have its own mile-high waterfalls or any other wonder imaginable, natural beauty was kind of redundant here. Qiingi and Livia kept complaining that this place lacked the overwhelming abundance of Teven's manifolds.

There was more here than could be learned hi a lifetime, though. Couldn't they see that? With a heavy sigh he wiped away the inscape view. Now he stood in a sumptuous apartment somewhere in Doran Morss's chandelier city. Outside the French doors to his left was a wide balcony that currently looked out over a view of the drifting sands of Mars. Once or twice he'd tuned it to see the blasted heaths and hills of Morss's Scotland. That was his physical location, after all. It made no difference; when he stepped out of this apartment he could just as easily view the streets of Brand New York or an aerostat city on Venus. He could be anywhere — except Teven Coronal.

He stalked into the kitchen to find an analgesic patch for his neck. While there he saw that one of his discussion boards had filled up with comments. He had generated dozens of agents to comb the Archipelago for any clues to the identity or location of 3340. While doing this he had often succumbed to the temptation to spin off queries about his various passions in science and technology. One agent had led him to this board, where amateur AI designers compared tricks and techniques, and speculated on topics that he'd wondered about his whole life.

Why such a horror of trans-humanism? he had asked in a recent posting. People who try to improve themselves in the Archipelago seem to be persecuted for it. Before they came here, he had sometimes daydreamed about the wider world beyond Teven. Without the deliberate tamping-down of the tech locks, he assumed, people would remake themselves however they wanted. And why not? Why not grow wings to fly, or new senses to see microwaves and hear the hiss of radio? Imperishable bodies, networked minds — these had been his fantasies for years, because such things were banned in Teven. Yet they were banned here, too.

One person had posted several replies, he noticed. They were signed Veronique. Many of us feel as you do, Veronique had written. But it is difficult to speak out right now, because of the Omega Point crisis. It makes us all look bad.

"But why?" he asked the board. "What did they do?"

They tried to become gods.

He stared at the reply. He'd always known it was possible; there were entities within the Archipelago that had such power — and not just the armies. But as he reread the words, he remembered the devastation of the farside accident; remembered the corpses. One gray and awful day he had come upon the body of a woman dressed in some fabulous costume from a manifold he didn't recognize. Her face had been like porcelain, perfectly clean and composed. It had hit him then: she could still be alive. The technology existed, the angels were a small example.

People didn't have to die at all, anymore. Or if they did, they could be resurrected. But he was cursed with living in a place where such mercy wasn't permitted.

There had been nothing he could do about it then. He suppressed the rage and grief. He'd kept it locked away ever since.

"The votes are talking about Omega Point right now," he said to the board. "My ... friend ... says that they're going to wipe it out."

A reply came instantly this time. How do you know that? Isn't that meeting happening off-line?

Aaron frowned. Was he interacting with an agent, or was this the real Veronique now? "I'm there now," he said. "In Doran Morss's Scotland. We, I, were invited."

And do you agree with them? Should Omega Point be destroyed?

Aaron frowned, gazing out the window for a while at drifting dust devils. "I don't know," he said honestly. "Somebody on this message board said that's why the an-nies were originally created. To fight an outbreak of trans-humanism that ended the monoculture."

That's the official story.

He stared at the words in surprise. In a civilization without government, where anyone could say or do anything they wanted, how could there be any such thing as an "official story"? The annies were supposed to be unconcerned with the daily affairs of humans; so at least he'd come to understand in the days he'd spent exploring the place.