Karl Schroeder - Lady of Mazes

Of course he did care, but I was too young to see that. But he had opened a pit at my feet. I stopped working on the sculpture and stared aghast at the windows. I never painted again.

"That's terrible," said Qiingi. "I can see why you turned away from your world."

Oh, no, that's not the horrible part. It's what came after that made me realize what kind of place the Archipelago really is. You see, I got over it.

Several months later, the whole incident had receded and become trivial. I didn't even remember the shock and dismay I'd felt; it was like a dream. And then I met Charon again, who slyly asked me about that day. I proudly told him that I didn't care about what he'd shown me. And he laughed.

"Of course you don't care," he said. "Your narrative steered you away from the edge of that cliff. That's what it does. I bet you had some nice heart-to-heart talks, got gifts, a nod of approval here and there, new interests and people flooded into your life ... It's been an eventful time, hasn't it?"

I hesitated. Yes, it had been an eventful season. I hadn't even had time to think, really.

"The great commandment of the narratives is Oast your life must be meaningful," said Charon. "If knowing the truth strips the meaning away, then the truth must be suppressed. Do you even remember what it was I showed you, that day?"

I opened my mouth to put him down, and at that moment I realized what was happening. Since the day that Charon showed me the truth, my view had been manipulated to soften the blow. Who I talked to, what was said; where I went, what was there ... all were filtered and revised on the fly by inscape. All to restore my mental health.

The engines of my narrative had caught and begun laboring, making sense for me. Because they assumed that in the world of the Archipelago, no human could do that for herself.

And so, as understanding dawns, heaven slowly turns into hell. I began to realize that I was living in a labyrinth without exits. My parents had very carefully kept themselves ignorant of the true mechanisms behind the Archipelago. The ignorance is necessary or you'll go mad, you see? You realize that you have a choice: either exist as wallpaper, and accept that there's nothing you can do that hasn't been done before, nothing you can say that hasn't been said, nothing you can think that a million others aren't thinking right this second ... or else, allow inscape to craft some unique, fulfilling, and utterly unreal fantasy world for you to live in. Any attempt to fight the system becomes part of the system. There is no escape.

I became a verso that very moment, though it was years later that I discovered others of my own kind. We're trying to live without narratives, and the only way we know is by going back to the way things once were. When everything you did had real meaning. I thought that by coming to Doran Morss's Scotland I would find the perfect place to find that meaning.

Funny thing, though. I may have escaped the narratives, but the Archipelago's pursued me here. I can't seem to escape it, not even by leaving Archipelagic soil. Maybe there really is nowhere to escape to.

Ishani stopped speaking, looking bleak. Lindsey seemed a bit shocked at the way the story had ended.

The two women rose to clear the table. Qiingi offered to help, but they protested that he was a guest; so he sat back to contemplate Ishani's story. As he was thinking, Ishani went to the stove, and cranked a dial on it. Warmth flooded off the squat metal thing.

"In my homeland," he said slowly, "we have something you do not have in the Archipelago. We call it tech locks"

"Yes?" said Ishani. Her back was turned as she scrubbed the plate; she seemed embarrassed for some reason.

"The wisdom of the tech locks is simple," he continued. "What we know is that you can't have just one technology. Like you can't have just one silverfish in your house. Technologies come in families, like people, and when you invite one into your home, the whole family will eventually move in and they won't leave."

Both women were now looking back at him.

"And even if you don't let the rest of the family into your house, they will camp out on your doorstep and pester you whenever you go by. The one inside your house will constantly remind you of the ones outside. And each family of technologies comes with a particular way of life. To invite that family in is to accept their way of life. To invite just one member in is to be constantly reminded that you could be living another way. It brings doubt into your house.

"Think of your stove, which does not burn. Is it not a reminder of everything you are trying to forget?

"Knowing this, our ancestors drew the family trees of all the technologies. And men they made a ... a meta-technology that was able to suppress any of the others. It is easier for me to call this Ometeotl, for that is the name I was told as a boy. This great spirit knows what way of life — what family — each technology belongs to. Like people's families, technology's families shift and overlap. So it is never easy for a person to know what family he is inviting in when he adopts a new tool. But the spirit knows. You tell it the way of life you want to have, and it evicts the family members that go against that way.

"I tell you this: you cannot be happy in the life you are trying to make here, if you only evict one member of a family. You must evict them all — all serlings, agents, and helpers. You must leave inscape behind.

"You must throw away that stove."

Lindsey suddenly laughed and clapped her hands. "I know where I've heard the name!"

Qiingi and Ishani stared at her.

"It just came to me," said Lindsey. "Qiingi — you got that name from the Life of Livia!"

Qiingi nearly fell off his chair. "What?"

"Am I not right? Are you a fan?" Lindsey slipped into the chair opposite him.

"How do you know that name?" he asked apprehensively.

"See?" Lindsey waved Ishani over. "I was right. It took me a while. See, Qiingi is one of the characters from the Life ofLivia." She turned back to him. "You adopted his name. That's very interesting."

"Qiingi Voicewalker is the name Raven gave me when I was born," he said. "I did not adopt it. But tell me, what is Dais Life of Livia?"

Lindsey looked uncertain. "It's just seconds-new. Everybody's talking about it. It's the perfect verso sim, except it's not as interactive as a narrative. More like an old-style game. Livia Kodaly is this woman, she lives on a coronal, only it's not any real coronal, more like a mix of all of them. The Life is packed with scenes from all different parts of her life, mostly her childhood, and they're much more realistic than most sims. The characters are so real — I mean, any competent AI can mimic Archipelagic minds, but these people are different Not part of the narratives at all. And so strong in what they believe ... People are just eating it up."

"I hadn't heard about this," said Ishani.

"Well, you've been avoiding inscape," said Lindsey. "Which, if we listened to 'Qiingi,' here, the rest of us should be doing, too. Except that he obviously isn't, himself ... "

Qiingi was so astonished he could barely speak. "Show me this Life"

As inscape winked open and Qiingi watched an unfamiliar young woman walk die calm streets of Barrastea, he thought furiously about what must have happened. Livia's xhants had been stolen in those few moments after the flying house was picked up, and before the intervention of the Government. Whoever had done it had repackaged Livia's personal records as an entertainment and was distributing them throughout the Archipelago.

"Who is that?" he asked, indicating the young woman.

"That's Livia, the protagonist."

Most of the people Qiingi had met in his brief stay with Livia's peers now looked different; Aaron and Qiingi himself were idealized, almost caricatures. "How much is there?" he asked worriedly. Lindsey flipped through memory after memory, and Qiingi felt his heart sink. Not all of Livia's history was here — much less than half her years, perhaps. And it ended just before the attack on Barrastea.