Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

Carlyle inclined her head. ‘Her?’

‘No, the other one, the blonde in the sort of reddish dress—shit, it’s like I’ve gone colour-blind—the cerise duchesse shift. ’

‘Got ya.’

‘Well, just last month, she … ’

Carlyle listened patiently, eyes and mouth widening at—she hoped—appropriate moments, to Hoffman’s account, which she suspected was as much a character assassination in itself as it was the story of one. There was a moment when her attention drifted, and she noticed that she could make out what people were saying up on the walls.

‘—coming—’

‘—over by the bar—’

‘—any minute—’

‘—what she has to say—’

Then most of the screens showed herself and Hoffman, his pictured lips in synch with what she was hearing, and the cameras were all around them like angry bees, and on other screens a man walked confidently through the parting crowd, and she turned to see him coming towards her. A stocky man, black hair thick from a high hairline, walking with a bar-brawler’s roll, a small hard-man’s shoulder-swagger. He wore black formals, wrecking the effect with a row of pens in his jacket’s breast-pocket. Black eyes that saw right through her. She slid off the stool and faced him. Standing on the floor felt safer. He stopped just out of swinging distance, poised on the balls of his feet.

‘Good evening, Lucinda,’ he said.

She recognised the voice.

‘Good evening, Professor Shlaim,’ she said.

Behind him, her image mouthed the same words. She realised that the show was live, was sound and vision, that the world was watching and that she was on. On air . Silence spread through the huge room, making that archaic expression real. She took a deep breath and focused on speaking American.

‘I’ve been set up,’ she said. ‘Just so you all know I know. All right, Shlaim. Go ahead. Say what you have to say.’

Hoffman glanced at her, made a frantic wiping gesture with both hands, and stepped back. She could believe he had nothing to do with this.

Shlaim reached out sideways without looking and kept his hand there until somebody put a glass of beer in it. He sipped the beer, put it down on the bar counter and wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

‘Ah, that’s good,’ he said. ‘My first in two hundred and eighty years. How old are you, Lucinda?’

‘Twenty-four,’ she said.

‘You’ve had me in your suit for eight years. You got me when you were sixteen. Sweet sixteen. You got me for your fucking birthday. ’

‘You were treated right,’ she said. ‘You had a decent virtuality package to run in. And in ten more years you’d have worked off your debt.’

Shlaim gulped beer again. ‘I can assure you that a decent virtuality package is not a substitute for real life. It’s not even a substitute for real beer. Only my intellectual interests kept me sane. What would have happened to someone without them?’

‘We don’t keep non-intellectual people in virtuality,’ Carlyle said. ‘As you bloody well know. What would be the point? And if you’d gone mad or shown severe distress we’d have rebooted you. Spare us your sob stories.’

‘Mistreatment is not the issue,’ said Shlaim. ‘Slavery is.’

‘Oh, fuck off,’ said Carlyle. She shifted her gaze slightly to look directly at the nearest hovering camera. ‘You know where he developed his intellectual interests? The Computer Science Department of the University of Tel Aviv! He helped to engineer the Hard Rapture. He’s a goddamn war criminal. He’s lucky we didn’t throw him in a hell-file.’ She faced Shlaim again, stabbing towards him with her finger. ‘You owe us, Shlaim. I said I’d manumit you, and I won’t go back on that. As far as I’m concerned you’re free and clear. But if it wasn’t for us you’d still be a bunch of electrons doing the exercise-yard shuffle in a dreg processor on a decaying balloon sonde on Rho Coronae Borealis b. And who put you there? Who could it have been but your own posthuman exaltant, who saw its human original for the ruthless, selfish, unpleasant little nerd that he was. I had hoped you’d had a chance to think and reform your character while you were doing time, but maybe not. I never did buy rehab anyway. Restitution, aye, I’ll take that out of your hide, and I have, and I’m not ashamed of it.’

‘Lies,’ said Shlaim, quite unperturbed. ‘I was caught up in the Hard Rapture quite innocently and inadvertently, like millions of others. You can’t hold computer scientists collectively responsible for the disaster anyway. For generations your criminal family has been using this spiel as a spurious justification for enslaving any upload or conscious AI you could get your grubby hands on. And you’ll use it against Eurydice, too.’ At this point he took his turn to speak to camera. ‘Ask her what compensation the Carlyles intend to exact from you for damage done in the final war. They carry a load of resentment about that, but they’ve always thought the forces of the fightback were dead or beyond their reach. Now they’ve found you. Be afraid. Or prepare to fight.’

With that he leaned on the bar and resumed his drink. Answer that if you can, his face told her.

‘This is ridiculous,’ Carlyle said, to him and to the camera floating behind his shoulder. ‘The Carlyle company has no claim against Eurydice. I’m certain that all we’ll do is to open the wormhole for traffic and trade. We’ll charge for that, of course, but most clients find our rates reasonable. Those that don’t are free to fittle. I think you’ll find the benefits of reestablishing contact with the rest of the human race are so vast that anything we’ll charge is a pittance.’

This was true, as far as it went, which was just enough for her to be able to say it with a clear conscience and a sincere sounding voice. Shlaim drained his glass, laughed in her face, and stalked away.

‘I think,’ said Hoffman, stepping forward and turning her smoothly around, ‘that now would be a good time for us to flounce out.’

He was having me on .

Carlyle crammed the frock into the drexler and stood naked in front of the window of her fortieth-floor hotel room, and watched midnight rain fall on the towers of New Start. The lights were grouped like clusters in a busy spiral arm, the parks dark between them like dust, the blue-green grass soaking up the rain, the same rain that blurred the window. She had left the light off, so there was no reflection to peer through, nothing for someone looking in—not that anyone was, at this height—to see. Unless they were using infrared, in which case what they would pick out most strongly would be the glow of her face, hot with embarrassment.

Of course he had been having her on. Hoffman had taken her for a rube, a country girl, a daft naive lassie, and she had confirmed it for him. Imagine believing that there was some kind of wetware switch that could flip your sexuality from gay to straight for an evening! It had started as a joke, then a pose, then something he couldn’t believe she’d fallen for, and had strung her along to. He was probably laughing about it right this minute. That his sexuality was mutable she could well believe; here, most folks’ was. In a closed cornucopian economy everything was camp, performance, role-play. People got off on heterosexuality, on marriages and divorces and families as soap opera. Everything was in inverted commas and ironic drag. Like the economy itself: a charade of capitalism played out as if to keep the Joint Chiefs and other ancients happy, in the full unacknowledged knowledge that they were in on the joke.

She went into the bathroom and carefully wiped off the makeup he’d applied, seeing her own face reemerge, its own light and shade. The eyes looked smaller, the brows thicker, the nose bigger, the lips less full, the cheekbones less defined. But that was all. There was nothing wrong with it in the first place. It was a normal, healthy face at the pretty end of plain, just ordinary, attractive in its own way. Good teeth, bright eyes, a nice open smile. She knew that. It was only in the context of Eurydice’s relentless genetic optimisation that it seemed anything less. Everyone here was like an athlete, an actor, a movie megastar, a top-of-the-range supermodel. Maybe that was what they could sell to the rest of the inhabited galaxy. Image could be their substance. In the cornucopian economy this was not such a daft idea. She smiled vengefully at the thought of the planet as a vast agency, pimping its population’s pretty faces to the media and advertising conglomerates.