Beyond Singularity, page 19
Outside, the screaming ceased. There was a very brief silence. Then the creature flung itself against one of the metal doors. It rang with the impact.
A delicate girlish voice wearily said, "What is this noise?"
They turned in surprise and found themselves looking up at the enormous corpus of Queen Gloriana. She lay upon her pallet, swaddled in satin and lace, and abandoned by all, save her valiant (though doomed) guardian apes. A pervasive yeasty smell emanated from her flesh. Within the tremendous folds of chins by the dozens and scores was a small human face. Its mouth moved delicately and asked, "What is trying to get in?"
The door rang again. One of its great hinges gave. Darger bowed. "I fear, madame, it is your death." "Indeed?" Blue eyes opened wide and, unexpectedly,
Gloriana laughed. "If so, that is excellent good news. I
have been praying for death an extremely long time."
"Can any of God's creations truly pray for death and mean it?" asked Darger, who had his philosophical side. "I have known unhappiness myself, yet even so life is precious to me."
"Look at me!" Far up to one side of the body, a tiny arm—though truly no tinier than any woman's arm—waved feebly. "I am not God's creation, but Man's. Who would trade ten minutes of their own life for a century of mine? Who, having mine, would not trade it all for death?"
A second hinge popped. The doors began to shiver. Their metal surfaces radiated heat.
"Darger, we must leave!" Surplus cried. "There is a time for learned conversation, but it is not now."
"Your friend is right," Gloriana said. "There is a small archway hidden behind yon tapestry. Go through it. Place your hand on the left wall and run. If you turn whichever way you must to keep from letting go of the wall, it will lead you outside. You are both rogues, I see, and doubtless deserve punishment, yet I can find nothing in my heart for you but friendship."
"Madame ..." Darger began, deeply moved.
"Go! My bridegroom enters."
The door began to fall inward. With a final cry of "Farewell!" from Darger and "Come on!" from Surplus, they sped away.
By the time they had found their way outside, all of Buckingham Labyrinth was in flames. The demon, however, did not emerge from the flames, encouraging them to believe that when the modem it carried finally melted down, it had been forced to return to that unholy realm from whence it came.
The sky was red with flames as the sloop set sail for Calais. Leaning against the rail, watching, Surplus shook his head. "What a terrible sight! I cannot help feeling, in part, responsible."
"Come! Come!" Darger said. "This dyspepsia ill becomes you. We are both rich fellows, now! The Lady Pamela's diamonds will maintain us lavishly for years to come. As for London, this is far from the first fire it has had to endure. Nor will it be the last. Life is short, and so, while we live, let us be jolly!"
"These are strange words for a melancholiac," Surplus said wonderingly.
"In triumph, my mind turns its face to the sun. Dwell not on the past, dear friend, but on the future that lies glittering before us."
"The necklace is worthless," Surplus said. "Now that I have the leisure to examine it, free of the distracting flesh of Lady Pamela, I see that these are not diamonds, but mere imitations." He made to cast the necklace into the Thames.
Before he could, though, Darger snatched away the stones from him and studied them closely. Then he threw back his head and laughed. "The biters bit! Well, it may be paste, but it looks valuable still. We shall find good use for it in Paris."
"We are going to Paris?"
"We are partners, are we not? Remember that antique wisdom that whenever a door closes, another opens? For every city that burns, another beckons. To France, then, and adventure! After which, Italy, the Vatican Empire, Austro-Hungary, perhaps even Russia! Never forget that you have yet to present your-credentials to the Duke of Muscovy."
"Very well," Surplus said. "But when we do, I'll pick out the modem."
Barry Westphall Crashes
the Singularity
James Patrick Kelly
Here's a sly little tale that suggests that if you get tired of waiting for the Singularity to arrive, you can always go to it.
James Patrick Kelly made his first sale in 1975, and has since gone on to become one of the most respected and popular writers to enter the field in the last twenty years. Although Kelly has had some success with novels, especially with Wildlife, he has perhaps had more impact to date as a writer of short fiction, with stories such as "Solstice," "The Prisoner of Chillon," "Glass Cloud" "Mc Boy," "Pogrom," "Home Front," "Undone," and "Bernardo's House," and he is often ranked among the best short story writers in the business. His story "Think Like a Dinosaur" won him a Hugo Award in 1996, as did the story, "1016 to 1" in 2000. Kelly's first solo novel, the mostly ignored Planet of Whispers, came out in 1984. It was followed by Freedom Beach, a mosaic novel written in collaboration with John Kessel, and then by another solo novel, Look Into the Sun. His short work has been collected in Think Like a Dinosaur, and, most recently, in the collection Strange But Not a Stranger. Born in Mineola, New York, Kelly now lives with his family in Nottingham, New Hampshire. He has a website at www.JimKelly.net and reviews Internet-related matters for Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.
"In the name of the Holy Coffee and the Blessed Shot of Cuervo, amen." Barry Westphall waves the sign of the cross over the steaming cup, then sips. It is his third refill.
The bartender of the Armadillo Lodge is too busy washing glasses to pay attention, even though Westphall is his only customer.
"So anyway," Westphall says, "the brain is a quantum device." He licks a brown dribble from the corner of his mouth. "Capable of accessing the entire field of space-time by folding the empty dimensions." Westphall has had the headache for almost eight hours now. "You may be wondering how I know this." It feels like bees stinging his brain. "I haven't a clue." The tequila helps a little.
The phone rings in the kitchen; the bartender leaves Westphall to answer it.
"Of course, these dimensions aren't easily folded," says Westphall. "Takes an unusual combination of intense physical stimulation and careful neurotransmitter suppression to access a time line." He peers into the mirror behind the bar.
"I mean it," says the medbot's N partition. "He wouldn't be talking to no one. I think he sees us."
"He sees nothing," says the medbot's D partition. Its N has always been excitable.
Westphall rests his elbow on the bar and points at his reflection. "Something's wrong," he says to the mirror. "I know that much for sure. What the hell are you doing to me?"
"Unpack his next major memory cluster." The D partition invokes a priority glyph.
In 2196, the medbot's V partition retracts the needle array from the brain of Barry Westphall's cryogenically frozen corpse, repositions it and inserts. A rosette of neurons fires and dies. Stills of twenty minutes Westphall's life on the night of July 22, 2002 tile across the medbot's sensorium.
A woman wearing a black halter-top and jeans with the knees out surveys the nearly empty room.
/Skip/
She moves from the end of the bar to the seat next to Westphall.
/Skip/
She is too white by half to be living in the desert.
/Skip/
He watches her rattle ice in her empty glass.
/Skip/
Westphall lays a twenty dollar bill on the check.
/Skip/
Room Seven is a nightmare of knotty pine. There are cigarette burns in the wheat-colored carpet and a black halter top on the bureau.
"What can I do for you?" says the woman.
Westphall rubs a finger along his eyebrow. "Intense physical stimulation?"
"Whatever." The blue-green edge of a tattoo peeks from the waistband of her panties. She hitches both thumbs under the elastic. "You like?"
Westphall whistles like wind on a screen door.
The tattoo is of a rose that looks like a skull. Her hands are busy as she brushes her lips down his chest. "Did you know," says Westphall, "that quantum non-locality means that photons can communicate instantaneously over vast stretches of space-time?"
"Sure."
He lifts his hips. She bounces his Dockers off the closet door. She climbs on top of him and giggles as he counts vertebrae to the strap of her bra. He turns from her sloppy kiss to the mirror over the bureau.
"Ever feel like you were in two places at once?" he asks the future.
D partition proclaims a network resource alert.
The woman nibbles the lobe of his ear. "I'm right here, hotshot. Where are you?"
All the medbot's partitions repurpose nonessential functions to assist in the dissection of Westphall's memory. Even A partition breaks away from the daily memory synchronization to monitor the anomaly.
"Sorry," he says to her. "Wasn't talking to you." He licks the tip of her nose.
The medbot's A partition intervenes in the procedure. "What is he doing?" It invokes the emergency glyph. "Next memory cluster!" Nearby bots join the session.
The V partition retracts and repositions the needle; neurons fire and die. Stills tile across the sensorium.
/Skip/
Her naked back arches, pale as moonlight.
/Skip/
Westphall fills a plastic cup with tequila.
/Skip!
The pale woman sprawls in a nest of sheets.
/Skip/
An older woman in a blue uniform strips bedding into her laundry cart.
"Where is he?" says the medbot, as all its partitions but V freeze on the anomalous images. "Back, go back." By now most of the world's intelligence collective has joined the session. V continues to manipulate the needles sunk in Westphall's exposed cerebrum as the sensorium shows him putting an empty plastic glass on the bedstand of Room Seven at the Armadillo Lodge at 11:36PM.
A nanosecond later, he disappears from 2002. And instantly reappears in 2196.
"Excuse me," said Westphall, "but that's my brain you're destroying."
The medbot is just beginning to turn as Westphall yanks its sensorium module backward, breaking it off at the stalk and resulting in a catastrophic failure. Since most of the intelligence collective is following the session with an attention quotient of 98%, over six thousand nodes crash with the medbot.
Westphal) pulls needles out of his frozen cerebrum. "You sent for me," he tells himself, "when they started dissecting you." He finishes, steps back and takes a good look at his dead body. He aged well. He makes a good-looking corpse, even with the top of his skull sawed off. It gives him a reason to live. "Why did you do this to yourself?"
He hears himself whisper over the medbot's brain-dead speakers. His voice sounds old. Raspy. Apologetic. "I thought they might revive me."
"Doesn't look like it."
"No." His corpse does not open his eyes.
"I always wanted to see the future."
"Me too." Westphall glances at the stack of frozen corpses waiting to have their memories unpacked. "Too bad I can't stay."
The pale woman blinks in the morning light. The second thing she notices is that the quart of Cuervo is empty. Westphall flushes the toilet and emerges from the bathroom of Room Seven.
"Come here, hotshot." She pats his side of the bed. "How's that headache?"
Barry Westphall settles next to her. "It's over," he says.
Flowers From Alice
Charles Stross & Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow is the coeditor of the popular Boing Boing website (boingboing.net) and the outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www eforg). In 2001, he also won the John W. Campbell Award as the year's Best New Writer. His stories have appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Science Fiction Age, On Spec, and elsewhere, and were recently collected in A Place So Foreign and Eight More. His well-received first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, won the Locus Award as Best First Novel. His most recent book is the novel Eastern Standard Tribe. He has a website at www craphound. corn.
Charles Stross's bio notes appear with his solo story in this anthology on page 45.
Here they join their considerable talents to demonstrate that even deep in a Singularity, a wedding is always going to be a stressful occasion .. .
I don't know why I invited Al to my wedding. Nostalgia, maybe. Residual lust. She was the first girl I ever kissed, after all. You never forget your first. I couldn't help but turn my head when round-hipped, tall girls with pageboy hair walked by, hunched over their own breasts in terminal pubescent embarrassment, awkward and athletic- at the same time. You don't get much of that these days outside of Amish country, no parent would choose to have a kid who was quite so visibly strange as Al had been as a teenager, but there were still examples of the genre to be had, if you looked hard enough, and they stirred something within me.
I couldn't forget Al, though it had been twenty years since that sweet and sloppy kiss on the beach, ten years since I'd run into her last, so severely post- that I hardly recognized her. Wasn't a week went by that she didn't wander through my imagination, evoking a lip-quirk that wasn't a smile by about three notches. My to-be recognized it; it drove her up the wall, and she let me know about it during post-coital self-criticism sessions.
It was a very wrong idea to invite Al to the wedding, but the wedding itself was a bad idea, to be perfectly frank. And I won't take all the blame for it, since Al decided to show up, after all—if "decided" can be applied to someone as post- as she (s/he?) (they?) [(s I t)/he(y)?] was by then. But one morning as we sat at our prenuptial breakfast table, my to-be and me, and spooned marmalade on our muffins and watched the hummingbirds visit the feeder outside our nook's window, one morning as we sat naked and sated and sticky with marmalade and other fluids, one morning I looked into my fiancée's eyes, I prodded at the phone tattooed on my wrist and dialed a directory server and began to recite the facts of Al's life into my hollow tooth in full earshot of my lovely, lovely intended until the directory had enough information to identify Al from among all the billions of humans and trillions of multiplicitous post-humans that it knew about and the phone rang in my hollow tooth and I was talking to Al.
"Al," I said, "Alice? Is that you? It's Cyd!"
There was no sound on the end of the line because when you're as self-consciously post- as Al, you don't make unintentional sound, so there was no sharp intake of breath or other cue of her reaction to this voice from her past, but she answered finally and said, "Cyd, wonderful, it's been too long," and the voice was warm and nuanced and rich as any human voice but more so, tailored for the strengths and acoustics of my skull and mouth which she had no doubt induced from the characteristics of the other end of the conversation. "You're getting married, huh? She sounds wonderful. And you, you're doing well too? Well! I should say so. Cyd, it's good to hear from you. Of course one of me will come to your wedding. Can we help? Say we can! I, oh, the caterer, no, you don't want to use that caterer, she's booked for another wedding the day before and a wedding and a Bar Mitzvah the day after, you know, so, please, let me help! I'm sending over a logistics plan now, I just evolved it for you, it's very optimal, you don't have to use it, of course, though you should really."
My bethrothed took it very well. She was working in her studyin on her latest morph porn, down on the ground floor, And my to-be shook her head and answered her phone and said, "Why hello, Alice! No, Cyd sprang this on me without warning—one of his little surprises. Yes, I can see you're talking to him, too. Of course, I'd love to see the plans; it was so good of you to come up with them. Yes, yes, of course. And you'll bring a date, won't you?"
Meanwhile, in my tooth, Al's still nattering on, "You don't mind, do you? I respawned and put in a call to your beautiful lady. I'm resynching with the copy every couple instants, so I can tell you we're getting along famously, Cyd, you always did have such great taste but you're hopeless with logistics. I see the job is going well, I knew you'd be an excellent polemicist, and it's such a vital function in your social milieu!"
I didn't get more than ten more words in, but the society of Al kept up the conversation for me. I never got bored, of course, because she had a trillion instances of me simulated somewhere in her being, and she tried a trillion different conversational gambits on all of them and chose the ones that evoked the optimal response, fine-tuning as she monitored my breathing and vitals over the phone. She had access to every nuance of my life, of course, there's no privacy with the post-humans, so there was hardly any catching up to do.
I didn't expect her to show up on my door that afternoon.
and I was upstairs with my neurofeedback machine, working up a suitable head of bile before writing my column. She beat me to the door.
"Who is it?" I called irritably, responding more to the draft around my ankles than to any conscious stimulus. No reply. I unplugged myself, swore quietly, then closed my eyes and began to ramp down the anger. I found people responded all wrong to me when I was mad. "Who?" I called again.
"Cyd! How cozy, what a great office!" A flock of silver lighter-than-air golf balls caromed off the doorframe and ricocheted around me—one softly pinged me on the end of the nose with a warm, tingling shock. It smelled utterly unlike a machine: human and slightly flowery—
"Al?" I asked.
The ball inflated, stretching its endoskeleton into a transducer surface. The others homed in on it, merging almost instantly into an inflatabubble that suddenly flashed into a hologram of Al as I'd last seen her in the flesh—only slightly tuned, her back straight and proud, her breasts fetchingly exposed by a Cretan-style dress that had been in fashion around the time we split up. "Hiya, Cydonia!" That grin, those sturdy, well-engineered teeth, and a sudden flashback to a meeting in a mall all those years ago. "Don't worry, I'm downstairs talking to your love wearing the real primary-me body, this is just a remote, hey, I love the antique render farm but isn't it a bit out of tune? Please, let me to fix it!"
