Scraped from here.
Started writing a story recently. Have a bit of a buffer. Would appreciate...
Started writing a story recently. Have a bit of a buffer. Would appreciate...
S.I. (original/SI)
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DataPacRat
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Scraped from here.
Started writing a story recently. Have a bit of a buffer. Would appreciate constructive feedback. SB seems a good place for that. Think this forum's the right one, could be wrong. So here we go.
S.I.
Table of Contents:
[1.1][1.2][1.3][1.4][1.5][1.6][1.7][1.8][1.9][1.10]
[2.1][2.2][2.3][2.4][2.5][2.6][2.7][2.8][2.9][2.10]
[3.1][3.2][3.3][3.4][3.5][3.6][3.7][3.8][3.9][3.10]
[4.1][4.2][4.3][4.4][4.5][4.6][4.7][4.8][4.9][4.10]
[5.1][5.2][5.3][5.4][5.5][5.6][5.7][5.8][5.9][5.10]
[6.1][6.2][6.3][6.4][6.5][6.6][6.7][6.8][6.9][6.10]
[7.1]
***
"Looking back, I suppose my story really begins on the day I died. Of course, I didn't realize that had happened for quite some time..."
*****
*Book One: Re-*
*Chapter One: Re-Awakening*
First Awakening
I woke up as sick as it was humanly possible to be. The only reason everything within five feet wasn't covered in noxious fluids was my GI tract was, mercifully, already empty. Even given all of that, somewhat more concerning was the discovery that my legs ended mid-thigh. Thinking about that used up enough of my cognitive resources that I didn't even try to figure out how concerned I should be that I was hallucinating a pink-furred rabbit-woman puttering around at the head of my bed, and was barely able to pay enough attention to the fact that she was naked to try to remember the more aesthetic details when I could properly appreciate them...
The bed shook. At first I thought it was from my twitching, but a sheet of see-through plastic extended itself over the bed, sealing me in a bubble - just in time for the whole room to shake, and a cloud of dust to billow in through the door. Followed by someone who, as far as I could tell without my glasses, was wearing a rather bad Darth Vader costume. (Or, at least, a black bodysuit, cape, and insectile gasmask.)
Darth Idiot transformed himself into Darth Don't-Piss-Him-Off by raising a very realistic gun and pointing it in my direction. He barked out a few words that were completely incomprehensible. I did what seemed the sensible thing; I raised my arms and said, "Please don't shoot me."
There were more incomprehensible words, which were overlapped with, "English? Identify yourself!"
I said my name, following it up with, "Civilian. Innocent amputee? Sick and confused?" I repeated, "Please don't shoot," for good measure. That's as far as I got before my stomach tried to empty itself of its nothingness again, forcing me to curl up in pain. And with everything else going on, that seemed to be my body's limit, and I knew no more.
--
Second Awakening
I woke up feeling as sick as it was humanly possible to be, but in somewhat different ways than before. My stomach wasn't trying to escape through any available orifice anymore, but the whole world was kind of wobbly.
Also, my wrists were strapped to the side of the bed, and my waist and neck were similarly immobilized, which seemed kind of overkill, given my lack of lower limbs. There was a cat on my bed, between my left hip and my hand; its fur looked bright blue, but I scritched its head anyway. A pair of tubes were taped to the inside of my elbow, reaching above my head to where I couldn't see.
Peering as best I could around the room, I noted the walls were a lighter shade of gray, and were differently shaped. Also, Harveyette the pink rabbit now had her own bed, just like mine, with the addition of an extra pair of straps for her legs. I squinted at those - they weren't human-shaped, but weren't really rabbit-shaped, either. For one, rabbits had fur covering all their paws, while she seemed to have a set of dog-like pads on the bottoms of her feet...
A not-so-delicate cough brought my attention from imaginary anatomy to a chair next to me, in which was sitting a man. Oriental, hairless, smooth-skinned; wearing black from the neck down, a pocketwatch hung from around his neck, a clipboard rested on crossed legs, a cane against the side of the chair. He opened his mouth and spoke, but the movements didn't match what I heard. "You speak English, yes?"
My eyes blinked rapidly a few times, and then I nodded. As my head came back against my pillow, I noticed yet another detail I'd missed in all the fuss - I didn't have any more hair than he did. Looking down at myself, I realized that applied everywhere. I also realized I didn't have a sheet, or even one of those backless hospital gowns. There simply wasn't anything I could do about that, so I tried to ignore the flushing of my face as I said, "What time is it? How long have I been out?"
"We're trying to work that out. Can you tell me the last things you remember? Were you ill, or injured?"
"Ah." I reshuffled my thoughts - given the general awful aches and illnesses, it seemed I was in some sort of hospital. Since what remained of my legs were smooth stumps, I had to have been under medical care for some time. Since I didn't remember losing my legs, and given the hallucinations and restraints, there seemed a good chance I was in a psych ward. Whatever was wrong with my noggin, the most likely way to get it fixed was to be reasonably honest with whoever was doing the fixing. So I answered, "I was riding my bike. Bicycle, not motorcycle. Someone opened a car door just in front of me. I got knocked into traffic - I think I bounced off a moving minivan... and that's about it."
"Do you recall the date?"
"Just after Victoria Day." He waved a hand in a circle, which I guessed was an indication to expand. "May, Tuesday, the... um, the tenth was a Saturday, so it must have been the twentieth. Twenty fourteen?"
He nodded calmly. "Very well. I need to inform you that some medical decisions need to be made regarding you, but you are currently not competent to make them." I started to nod slowly, but he continued, "Among other issues, you are drunk off your gourd."
"No I'm not," I riposted.
"Why do you say that?"
"Can't be drunk. I'm a teetotaler. Never touched alcohol, or any other mind-affecting substance, in my life."
"Ah. Well, be that as it may, you're drunk."
"'Why do you say that?'," I repeated back to him.
"You are suffering from ethylene glycol poisoning. Part of the treatment is to filter it out of your blood. Another part is to block a certain metabolic pathway which creates even worse toxins. One of the best chemicals to do that is simple alcohol. You are drunk because if you weren't, your kidneys would have already failed."
"... Oh. I'd say 'that sucks' but that seems kind of an understatement. So - medical decisions?"
"Indeed. Even with the treatment, you are going to have kidney damage. Your heart has a reasonable chance of failing. As you have no doubt noticed, you have lost your legs. And other issues, minor in comparison. In short, standard treatment is going to require a number of expensive transplants and prosthetics."
"You're really not one for softening the blows, are you?"
"Time is a factor. I have been assigned to manage your case. I will be making the decisions. I have a short time to learn what your preferences are, to consider taking them into account."
"Um. Well - if you want to know my preferences instead of arguing about them, that's pretty simple. I'm going to live forever or die trying."
"What about the afterlife?"
"Randi's offered a million-dollar prize for even a decent hint of the supernatural. Nobody's won it. I seem to have misplaced my necklace and bracelet, but I've made arrangements to have my body cryonically preserved after I die. It cost less than cable - a hundred fifty bucks a year for membership, about the same for insurance to pay for it. I figure there's only around a five percent chance it'll work, but if something does kill me, five percent is a lot better odds than zero."
"I see. Assuming that you do live - what would you want to do while you're alive?"
"I expect you've already got it written in your notes, but I'm schizoid - /not/ schizophrenic - which just means I'm happy in my own company. I'd make a good lighthouse keeper, if they were still hiring those. And I seem to be rambling a lot more than I'm used to, which I'm going to guess is because I'm drunk. I don't think I like being drunk. Anyway - I like reading, and hiking, and... thinking. I /really/ like figuring out ideas I hadn't worked out before, but that doesn't happen nearly as much as I like. I don't know what sort of prosthetic legs my insurance covers, so I'm just kind of hoping they'll be ones that let me enjoy walking for miles next to old canals, or the like. If that can't work... then I guess I'd make do with sitting in a library, with a good internet connection, and stuffing my head full of as much as I can. Um, I'm kind of losing my train of thought here. Is there anything else I can say to help you?"
He grabbed his cane, and used it to push himself to his feet. "Probably not. I believe I have enough information to do what is necessary, as soon as certain test results come in." He poked at the top of my bed.
"Okay, then," I said, then frowned. "Ethylene glycol? How'd I get poisoned with that?"
"You mean, you don't know?"
"I don't even remember what it is."
"Antifreeze. Your tissues were suffused with several litres of it, along with dimethyl sulfoxide, which helped it pass through cellular membranes."
"Wait. That sounds like... how long /have/ I been out?"
"I'm not authorized to give you that information." He left my bed, and went to poke around at the head of the other bed. "Mostly due to the existence of your lapine friend here."
"Wait - what?" My speech was really starting to slur, and I tried to say, "You can see her - she's real?", but didn't quite get anything out before the world spun away again.
--
Third awakening
They say happiness is a warm puppy - but waking up to a sudden lack of pain and nausea has to be a close approximation. Sure, there was a slight headache, but compared to how I'd been feeling, I was raring to go, from head to feet...
Before I even opened my eyes, I wiggled my toes, and smiled. And then frowned. While I was feeling, if not like a million bucks, at least like a short-buy order that would turn into a million at the right time, I was getting all sorts of sensations that didn't quite add up.
I opened my eyes. I looked down at myself.
I saw a whole lot of pink fur.
I closed my eyes.
--
Fourth awakening
I was dreaming something about that short-buy order getting exchanged for Bitcoins, which were used to buy derivatives of Chinese rare-earths based on a prediction of war, when a sharp sting in my thigh woke me up. I yelped, twitched against the restraints, and opened my eyes. The same watch-necklaced, cane-using bald fellow in black was standing over me, withdrawing a syringe full of red.
"Okay," I said, "What th- ow!" My tongue scraped against sharp teeth when I tried to make the 'th' sound. I made a couple of other attempts, equally painful, then gritted my teeth for a moment as I worked out a temporary solution. "I tend to swear less van once a year, so please understand the full depf of what I mean when I say: What. Ve. Fuck."
"Full speech - or near enough - already. Rather impressive. Further evidence that the rabbitoid body was designed specifically for your nervous system to be implanted." He set the syringe on a tray, and pulled another, empty. He poked it into my arm, and as it filled, said, "The interior of the skull is shaped exactly to match the contours of your brain - and didn't have a central nervous system. The skeleton carries a good deal of computational hardware, which is connected to the nervous system, and let it move around under its own control. I'll be curious to see if it takes control of your body at any point, or remains dormant."
"Do I need to repeat ve question?"
"Very well." He set the syringe down. "According to all the evidence, you've been dead for some decades." I could have told him that - when I'd died, it was just barely possible to 3D print a few cells of muscle tissue onto a framework, nevermind creating a functional tail, nevermind a whole functioning not-quite-human body. "Much to our surprise, we found you during a standard scouting mission around the Detroit city-computer." There were so many assumptions in that sentence that I'd barely started working through what their implications entailed before he continued, and added even more to the pile I had to try to think through. "It would take at least fifteen years to educate you sufficiently to where you could participate in life as a citizen, as well as a number of expensive medical procedures. So I took the less expensive option, and had you placed in the body that had been prepared for you. The undeciphered software of your skeletal system means that you will not be allowed into the city proper - but there are other ways you can contribute to society, and repay the debts incurred by the surgery and your treatment. We have a few days to pin down the details."
"Debts? Wait - if you hadn't come barging in to where you found me, then if vis body was already being prepared for a brain transplant... wouldn't I already be in vis situation, wifout owing you a thing? How does that put me in 'debt'?"
"The fact that I have the legal authority, and physical power, to lock you away permanently for non-payment of debts, and perform whatever analysis is necessary to determine if there is any hazard in your skeleton's software. Which would involve dicing it."
"... Slavery it is, ven. ... I feel like I should want to punch you."
"But you don't."
"But I don't. Sedatives?"
"Merely calmatives."
"When do I get my own emotions back?"
"Probably around when you stop feeling like you should want to punch me."
"I fought you said you only had a few days."
--
Quarantined and Infodumped
I asked for, and was given, a pair of trekking poles to help me get back onto my feet. Turned out I didn't need them. Even though my legs were now digitigrade like a dog's instead of plantigrade like a human's, and I felt like I was walking on tip-toes all the time, I had no more trouble keeping my balance than before my brain transplant. However, I decided that it might be better if the Technovillians underestimated me a bit, and that I was probably under constant surveillance, so I carefully fell flat onto my face. Repeatedly. And used the poles to hobble around wherever I went, gradually 'improving'.
I tested my body's flexibility, and discovered I could tie myself into a pretzel.
I asked for clothes, but discovered that they, quite literally, rubbed my fur the wrong way. I ended up compromising with a sports bra and shorts modified for my tail, and tried to get used to more modest apparel.
My guardian - for lack of an actual name - provided me with a couple of pieces of electronics. One was a read-only ebook reader (which could also read aloud, play music, play videos, and similar tricks)... which he'd carefully limited to only containing subject-matter published before my death. The other was a pocket-watch on a necklace like his, which turned out to be a computer built to translate languages. (It also kept track of time and location, did math, sensed temperature, humidity, and pressure, and had a camera and microphone.) After searching for a few items in the former, I concluded that its contents were heavily slanted in whatever direction Technoville had deemed was propagandistically best; and that both were stuffed to the gills with spyware. Unfortunately, since there wasn't any information on Technoville's native language (other than 'a descendant of Lojban'), it was either use the spyware-ridden translator or not understand anything. Just like it was either live in a body with a skeleton full of mysterious computer that might take control of my actions at any time, or do without any body at all. There were no good options, just 'bad' and 'really really bad' ones.
No, I didn't investigate my new gender, any more than I needed to in order to use the plumbing. Constant surveillance, remember?
Between familiarizing myself with my new body, and suffering through various tests, I had various pieces of conversation. Exchanges of words, at least.
--
"It would be trivial for you to simply walk away. Your body has a number of post-human tweaks, including being able to digest cellulose. We also have no records of biological constructions such as your body dying of old age. If I can't get you to want to contribute to human progress, then you could walk into the forest and spend, well, for all I know, centuries wandering around and nibbling on trees and grass."
I tried grass. Tasted just about what I expected grass to taste like. Random leaves weren't much better. Hay was bland enough to tolerate.
I got a report on my new biology. My eyes were still my nearsighted originals, carried along with my brain; it took a couple of days for glasses built to fit my new head to appear. My DNA was based on human, but with almost all the junk DNA trimmed. That meant I'd be unable to reproduce with baseline humans, or anyone who didn't have a near-identical set of tweaks - not that I was planning on doing so. Ever. Given the hormone levels they measured over time, it seemed I wouldn't have to worry about menstruating monthly - maybe once a year. I wasn't looking forward to that, either; my ovaries were, I was told, swollen noticeably larger than my genetics alone would indicate, which could imply rather strong hormonal flux. Some of the genetic tweaks matched up to things the Technovillians already had in their databases - an immune system pre-programmed with just about every known disease, muscles that got enough exercise from everyday activity, and, I was informed, limbs that would regenerate like a lizard's. I had no intention of testing that one out.
--
"Even without citizenship, or security clearance, there are plenty of employment opportunities. We actually do have lighthouses with keepers. Farmers. Smiths. Couriers. Scouts."
--
"What happened to my body?"
"Non-viable, not even good for providing transplants. Other than some samples, incinerated."
I winced. So much for ever getting back to normal.
--
"Um... how's the space program doing?"
"Kessler syndrome. We haven't got the spare resources to clear the debris for a launch."
"Alternate universes?"
"Technically an infinite number of them, but it's impossible to communicate with or travel to them."
"FTL?"
"Physically impossible. Planck-scale physics runs on a much smaller-scale cellular automata system, which is mostly obscured by quantum effects, but there really isn't any way for the cells to switch their neighbours on and off any faster than lightspeed."
"Wormholes?"
"Space-time doesn't bend that way."
"Hm... Dark matter?"
"The gravitational shadow of alternate universes that shared our Big Bang."
"Cryonics?"
"We tend not to die in a way that leaves a viable corpse. And with limited resources during the State of Emergency, the infrastructure for it doesn't exist."
"Internet?"
"Gone. The city-computers are full of AIs that will instantly hack any computer connected to a communications device they have access to, use it to run incomprehensible programs for inscrutable purposes, and leave in an unusable state."
"Singularity?"
"Happened around 2050 AD." 'Welp', I thought, 'guess that means Star Trek's been lost to zeerust as a prediction of the future'. He continued, "Pretty much every human who could get to a city got sucked into it. Superstimuli, at the least." That wasn't quite how I'd heard it was predicted to happen, but of course, I had missed out on thirty-five years of pre-Singularity predictions about that. "We humans who managed to stay away during the critical week aren't quite sure what happened to them, other than they're not there anymore." Now wasn't that just creepy. "Just about every urban area got turned into a giant computer, not particularly hospitable to human life - chemical outgassing, radiation, and worse. The smaller city-comps seem to have died off. The rest - about eighty in North America - seem to do things so fast, that if there's any human-level intelligences left in them, a half-second pause in a conversation would feel like a ten minute break. No communication or exchange is possible. The city-computers occasionally emit various pieces of data, or robots, or biological organisms, or stranger things."
"... How many people /are/ vere?"
"We have extremely limited information outside our sphere of influence. The primary zone of control of Technoville - on the site of what used to be Ann Arbor - is around one to two hundred kilometers radius. About thirty thousand citizens, and two hundred thousand non-citizens. Our main allied polity has another two hundred fifty thousand. Outside that?" He shrugged. "Could be thousands, could be millions."
"Climate change?"
"A major hassle when the methane clathrates got loose. All sorts of geo-engineering projects. The most important one is probably the sun-shield at L1. Fortunately, somebody cut off its communications systems before the apocalypse, so it's running on its pre-written program and keeping the overall temperature relatively steady."
"Sources of information over van you?"
"You're still under quarantine. Including information quarantine, in case your skeleton contains information that would destabilize Technoville's systems."
--
Eventually, while jogging on a treadmill, I said, "I've got a thought." As long as I paid close attention, I could avoid both infantile speech patterns and slicing my tongue on my rodent-like incisors.
"Do tell."
"However long this body lasts... one way or another, it's going to die. And when it does, I doubt there'll be another one waiting for another brain transplant. I want to hedge my bets."
"Cryonics again? I told you, we don't do that. You would need... years of training to even begin to understand the economics behind how to fund it yourself."
"That's not my thought. You only have concrete data on a small fraction of the continent, let alone the world. How much do you know about Phoenix, Arizona?"
"That it's probably an active city-comp."
"And if there was a colony of people living near it who did practice cryonics? I've been reading, and it requires a surprisingly small tech base. Blacksmithing seems to be enough to put together machine tools, once you know they exist, which should be enough to build the pumps and such to liquefy air and make dry ice. Nineteenth-century chemistry seems to be enough to create cryoprotectant."
"You want to go looking for cryonicists?"
"Or, at least, a group willing and able to adopt the practice. I'm living proof that someone who was vitrified can be brought back to life - even if it did take a brain transplant to /keep/ me alive."
"Hm. We generally don't like wasting resources and manpower on long-term scouting missions; we lose too much of both dealing with the Detroit city-comp."
"Then let me put it this way. I may have spent my first few years on a farm... but do you really think I'm going to milk cows for Technoville's benefit, for however long I happen to live?"
"I'll run some numbers and get back to you."
--
"You still want to go exploring dangerous, deadly wilderness?"
I unfolded myself from my cross-legged meditation position. "In a nutshell."
"Our best prediction is that for every thousand kilometers you travel, the odds of your surviving halve."
"If I die in a week or in a hundred years, I'll still end up dead. I'd rather do what I can while I can."
"We predicted you'd say something of the sort. If you don't change your mind, I've been authorized with a small budget to outfit you. Mainly in the form of assigning you a courier's motorized bicycle and trailer, a few supplies, and an analog radio to inform us of whatever you find before you're killed. And some time to bring you up to speed on conditions outside the quarantine facility."
"You're all heart. Still, beats getting diced."
--
"Here's a map of the surrounding area. You will note it is covered in bright colors. These indicate how dangerous any given zone is.
"Not on this particular map, are white zones. They are unexplored. We are letting you go kill yourself so that your reports will let us fill in some white zones.
"Green zone: No significant dangers. Mostly harmless. May still have wild beasts, bandits, ordinary toxic plants, and similar pre-Singularity annoyances.
"Blue: Mild danger to life and limb, of sorts which can be treated medically. Toxic spills and wandering kill-bots lead to blue zones.
"Yellow: Moderate danger of permanent alteration to persons, which does not significantly affect victims' economic capacity. For example, involuntary brain transplants, loss of one or maybe two limbs, physical age-regression to 2 years old with mind intact, or minor loss of memory or personality change.
"Red: Significant danger of being changed in ways which eliminate most of victims' economic capacity. Forcible transformation into animal shape, loss of three or four limbs, or physical regression to minus one month old, or significant loss of memory or personality change.
"Black: Extreme danger of death, or fates worse than death. Transformation into aware but immobile objects, regression to minus nine months old, complete loss of mind.
"Zoning is at the discretion of the discovering scout/agent. When a farming community was hit with a biological agent which rewrote the locals, so that people gave birth to foals and horses gave birth to infants, the agent could have chosen to arrange exported food to be sterilized and classify the region as Yellow, or quarantined it entirely and classified it Red, or decided to call in air-strike to kill everything and classify it Black."
"... I notice you're using the past tense for that example instead of the hypothetical."
"In your time's idiom, I know you think that I am something of a son of a bitch. Let's just say that that's not /quite/ accurate."
Started writing a story recently. Have a bit of a buffer. Would appreciate constructive feedback. SB seems a good place for that. Think this forum's the right one, could be wrong. So here we go.
S.I.
Table of Contents:
[1.1][1.2][1.3][1.4][1.5][1.6][1.7][1.8][1.9][1.10]
[2.1][2.2][2.3][2.4][2.5][2.6][2.7][2.8][2.9][2.10]
[3.1][3.2][3.3][3.4][3.5][3.6][3.7][3.8][3.9][3.10]
[4.1][4.2][4.3][4.4][4.5][4.6][4.7][4.8][4.9][4.10]
[5.1][5.2][5.3][5.4][5.5][5.6][5.7][5.8][5.9][5.10]
[6.1][6.2][6.3][6.4][6.5][6.6][6.7][6.8][6.9][6.10]
[7.1]
***
"Looking back, I suppose my story really begins on the day I died. Of course, I didn't realize that had happened for quite some time..."
*****
*Book One: Re-*
*Chapter One: Re-Awakening*
First Awakening
I woke up as sick as it was humanly possible to be. The only reason everything within five feet wasn't covered in noxious fluids was my GI tract was, mercifully, already empty. Even given all of that, somewhat more concerning was the discovery that my legs ended mid-thigh. Thinking about that used up enough of my cognitive resources that I didn't even try to figure out how concerned I should be that I was hallucinating a pink-furred rabbit-woman puttering around at the head of my bed, and was barely able to pay enough attention to the fact that she was naked to try to remember the more aesthetic details when I could properly appreciate them...
The bed shook. At first I thought it was from my twitching, but a sheet of see-through plastic extended itself over the bed, sealing me in a bubble - just in time for the whole room to shake, and a cloud of dust to billow in through the door. Followed by someone who, as far as I could tell without my glasses, was wearing a rather bad Darth Vader costume. (Or, at least, a black bodysuit, cape, and insectile gasmask.)
Darth Idiot transformed himself into Darth Don't-Piss-Him-Off by raising a very realistic gun and pointing it in my direction. He barked out a few words that were completely incomprehensible. I did what seemed the sensible thing; I raised my arms and said, "Please don't shoot me."
There were more incomprehensible words, which were overlapped with, "English? Identify yourself!"
I said my name, following it up with, "Civilian. Innocent amputee? Sick and confused?" I repeated, "Please don't shoot," for good measure. That's as far as I got before my stomach tried to empty itself of its nothingness again, forcing me to curl up in pain. And with everything else going on, that seemed to be my body's limit, and I knew no more.
--
Second Awakening
I woke up feeling as sick as it was humanly possible to be, but in somewhat different ways than before. My stomach wasn't trying to escape through any available orifice anymore, but the whole world was kind of wobbly.
Also, my wrists were strapped to the side of the bed, and my waist and neck were similarly immobilized, which seemed kind of overkill, given my lack of lower limbs. There was a cat on my bed, between my left hip and my hand; its fur looked bright blue, but I scritched its head anyway. A pair of tubes were taped to the inside of my elbow, reaching above my head to where I couldn't see.
Peering as best I could around the room, I noted the walls were a lighter shade of gray, and were differently shaped. Also, Harveyette the pink rabbit now had her own bed, just like mine, with the addition of an extra pair of straps for her legs. I squinted at those - they weren't human-shaped, but weren't really rabbit-shaped, either. For one, rabbits had fur covering all their paws, while she seemed to have a set of dog-like pads on the bottoms of her feet...
A not-so-delicate cough brought my attention from imaginary anatomy to a chair next to me, in which was sitting a man. Oriental, hairless, smooth-skinned; wearing black from the neck down, a pocketwatch hung from around his neck, a clipboard rested on crossed legs, a cane against the side of the chair. He opened his mouth and spoke, but the movements didn't match what I heard. "You speak English, yes?"
My eyes blinked rapidly a few times, and then I nodded. As my head came back against my pillow, I noticed yet another detail I'd missed in all the fuss - I didn't have any more hair than he did. Looking down at myself, I realized that applied everywhere. I also realized I didn't have a sheet, or even one of those backless hospital gowns. There simply wasn't anything I could do about that, so I tried to ignore the flushing of my face as I said, "What time is it? How long have I been out?"
"We're trying to work that out. Can you tell me the last things you remember? Were you ill, or injured?"
"Ah." I reshuffled my thoughts - given the general awful aches and illnesses, it seemed I was in some sort of hospital. Since what remained of my legs were smooth stumps, I had to have been under medical care for some time. Since I didn't remember losing my legs, and given the hallucinations and restraints, there seemed a good chance I was in a psych ward. Whatever was wrong with my noggin, the most likely way to get it fixed was to be reasonably honest with whoever was doing the fixing. So I answered, "I was riding my bike. Bicycle, not motorcycle. Someone opened a car door just in front of me. I got knocked into traffic - I think I bounced off a moving minivan... and that's about it."
"Do you recall the date?"
"Just after Victoria Day." He waved a hand in a circle, which I guessed was an indication to expand. "May, Tuesday, the... um, the tenth was a Saturday, so it must have been the twentieth. Twenty fourteen?"
He nodded calmly. "Very well. I need to inform you that some medical decisions need to be made regarding you, but you are currently not competent to make them." I started to nod slowly, but he continued, "Among other issues, you are drunk off your gourd."
"No I'm not," I riposted.
"Why do you say that?"
"Can't be drunk. I'm a teetotaler. Never touched alcohol, or any other mind-affecting substance, in my life."
"Ah. Well, be that as it may, you're drunk."
"'Why do you say that?'," I repeated back to him.
"You are suffering from ethylene glycol poisoning. Part of the treatment is to filter it out of your blood. Another part is to block a certain metabolic pathway which creates even worse toxins. One of the best chemicals to do that is simple alcohol. You are drunk because if you weren't, your kidneys would have already failed."
"... Oh. I'd say 'that sucks' but that seems kind of an understatement. So - medical decisions?"
"Indeed. Even with the treatment, you are going to have kidney damage. Your heart has a reasonable chance of failing. As you have no doubt noticed, you have lost your legs. And other issues, minor in comparison. In short, standard treatment is going to require a number of expensive transplants and prosthetics."
"You're really not one for softening the blows, are you?"
"Time is a factor. I have been assigned to manage your case. I will be making the decisions. I have a short time to learn what your preferences are, to consider taking them into account."
"Um. Well - if you want to know my preferences instead of arguing about them, that's pretty simple. I'm going to live forever or die trying."
"What about the afterlife?"
"Randi's offered a million-dollar prize for even a decent hint of the supernatural. Nobody's won it. I seem to have misplaced my necklace and bracelet, but I've made arrangements to have my body cryonically preserved after I die. It cost less than cable - a hundred fifty bucks a year for membership, about the same for insurance to pay for it. I figure there's only around a five percent chance it'll work, but if something does kill me, five percent is a lot better odds than zero."
"I see. Assuming that you do live - what would you want to do while you're alive?"
"I expect you've already got it written in your notes, but I'm schizoid - /not/ schizophrenic - which just means I'm happy in my own company. I'd make a good lighthouse keeper, if they were still hiring those. And I seem to be rambling a lot more than I'm used to, which I'm going to guess is because I'm drunk. I don't think I like being drunk. Anyway - I like reading, and hiking, and... thinking. I /really/ like figuring out ideas I hadn't worked out before, but that doesn't happen nearly as much as I like. I don't know what sort of prosthetic legs my insurance covers, so I'm just kind of hoping they'll be ones that let me enjoy walking for miles next to old canals, or the like. If that can't work... then I guess I'd make do with sitting in a library, with a good internet connection, and stuffing my head full of as much as I can. Um, I'm kind of losing my train of thought here. Is there anything else I can say to help you?"
He grabbed his cane, and used it to push himself to his feet. "Probably not. I believe I have enough information to do what is necessary, as soon as certain test results come in." He poked at the top of my bed.
"Okay, then," I said, then frowned. "Ethylene glycol? How'd I get poisoned with that?"
"You mean, you don't know?"
"I don't even remember what it is."
"Antifreeze. Your tissues were suffused with several litres of it, along with dimethyl sulfoxide, which helped it pass through cellular membranes."
"Wait. That sounds like... how long /have/ I been out?"
"I'm not authorized to give you that information." He left my bed, and went to poke around at the head of the other bed. "Mostly due to the existence of your lapine friend here."
"Wait - what?" My speech was really starting to slur, and I tried to say, "You can see her - she's real?", but didn't quite get anything out before the world spun away again.
--
Third awakening
They say happiness is a warm puppy - but waking up to a sudden lack of pain and nausea has to be a close approximation. Sure, there was a slight headache, but compared to how I'd been feeling, I was raring to go, from head to feet...
Before I even opened my eyes, I wiggled my toes, and smiled. And then frowned. While I was feeling, if not like a million bucks, at least like a short-buy order that would turn into a million at the right time, I was getting all sorts of sensations that didn't quite add up.
I opened my eyes. I looked down at myself.
I saw a whole lot of pink fur.
I closed my eyes.
--
Fourth awakening
I was dreaming something about that short-buy order getting exchanged for Bitcoins, which were used to buy derivatives of Chinese rare-earths based on a prediction of war, when a sharp sting in my thigh woke me up. I yelped, twitched against the restraints, and opened my eyes. The same watch-necklaced, cane-using bald fellow in black was standing over me, withdrawing a syringe full of red.
"Okay," I said, "What th- ow!" My tongue scraped against sharp teeth when I tried to make the 'th' sound. I made a couple of other attempts, equally painful, then gritted my teeth for a moment as I worked out a temporary solution. "I tend to swear less van once a year, so please understand the full depf of what I mean when I say: What. Ve. Fuck."
"Full speech - or near enough - already. Rather impressive. Further evidence that the rabbitoid body was designed specifically for your nervous system to be implanted." He set the syringe on a tray, and pulled another, empty. He poked it into my arm, and as it filled, said, "The interior of the skull is shaped exactly to match the contours of your brain - and didn't have a central nervous system. The skeleton carries a good deal of computational hardware, which is connected to the nervous system, and let it move around under its own control. I'll be curious to see if it takes control of your body at any point, or remains dormant."
"Do I need to repeat ve question?"
"Very well." He set the syringe down. "According to all the evidence, you've been dead for some decades." I could have told him that - when I'd died, it was just barely possible to 3D print a few cells of muscle tissue onto a framework, nevermind creating a functional tail, nevermind a whole functioning not-quite-human body. "Much to our surprise, we found you during a standard scouting mission around the Detroit city-computer." There were so many assumptions in that sentence that I'd barely started working through what their implications entailed before he continued, and added even more to the pile I had to try to think through. "It would take at least fifteen years to educate you sufficiently to where you could participate in life as a citizen, as well as a number of expensive medical procedures. So I took the less expensive option, and had you placed in the body that had been prepared for you. The undeciphered software of your skeletal system means that you will not be allowed into the city proper - but there are other ways you can contribute to society, and repay the debts incurred by the surgery and your treatment. We have a few days to pin down the details."
"Debts? Wait - if you hadn't come barging in to where you found me, then if vis body was already being prepared for a brain transplant... wouldn't I already be in vis situation, wifout owing you a thing? How does that put me in 'debt'?"
"The fact that I have the legal authority, and physical power, to lock you away permanently for non-payment of debts, and perform whatever analysis is necessary to determine if there is any hazard in your skeleton's software. Which would involve dicing it."
"... Slavery it is, ven. ... I feel like I should want to punch you."
"But you don't."
"But I don't. Sedatives?"
"Merely calmatives."
"When do I get my own emotions back?"
"Probably around when you stop feeling like you should want to punch me."
"I fought you said you only had a few days."
--
Quarantined and Infodumped
I asked for, and was given, a pair of trekking poles to help me get back onto my feet. Turned out I didn't need them. Even though my legs were now digitigrade like a dog's instead of plantigrade like a human's, and I felt like I was walking on tip-toes all the time, I had no more trouble keeping my balance than before my brain transplant. However, I decided that it might be better if the Technovillians underestimated me a bit, and that I was probably under constant surveillance, so I carefully fell flat onto my face. Repeatedly. And used the poles to hobble around wherever I went, gradually 'improving'.
I tested my body's flexibility, and discovered I could tie myself into a pretzel.
I asked for clothes, but discovered that they, quite literally, rubbed my fur the wrong way. I ended up compromising with a sports bra and shorts modified for my tail, and tried to get used to more modest apparel.
My guardian - for lack of an actual name - provided me with a couple of pieces of electronics. One was a read-only ebook reader (which could also read aloud, play music, play videos, and similar tricks)... which he'd carefully limited to only containing subject-matter published before my death. The other was a pocket-watch on a necklace like his, which turned out to be a computer built to translate languages. (It also kept track of time and location, did math, sensed temperature, humidity, and pressure, and had a camera and microphone.) After searching for a few items in the former, I concluded that its contents were heavily slanted in whatever direction Technoville had deemed was propagandistically best; and that both were stuffed to the gills with spyware. Unfortunately, since there wasn't any information on Technoville's native language (other than 'a descendant of Lojban'), it was either use the spyware-ridden translator or not understand anything. Just like it was either live in a body with a skeleton full of mysterious computer that might take control of my actions at any time, or do without any body at all. There were no good options, just 'bad' and 'really really bad' ones.
No, I didn't investigate my new gender, any more than I needed to in order to use the plumbing. Constant surveillance, remember?
Between familiarizing myself with my new body, and suffering through various tests, I had various pieces of conversation. Exchanges of words, at least.
--
"It would be trivial for you to simply walk away. Your body has a number of post-human tweaks, including being able to digest cellulose. We also have no records of biological constructions such as your body dying of old age. If I can't get you to want to contribute to human progress, then you could walk into the forest and spend, well, for all I know, centuries wandering around and nibbling on trees and grass."
I tried grass. Tasted just about what I expected grass to taste like. Random leaves weren't much better. Hay was bland enough to tolerate.
I got a report on my new biology. My eyes were still my nearsighted originals, carried along with my brain; it took a couple of days for glasses built to fit my new head to appear. My DNA was based on human, but with almost all the junk DNA trimmed. That meant I'd be unable to reproduce with baseline humans, or anyone who didn't have a near-identical set of tweaks - not that I was planning on doing so. Ever. Given the hormone levels they measured over time, it seemed I wouldn't have to worry about menstruating monthly - maybe once a year. I wasn't looking forward to that, either; my ovaries were, I was told, swollen noticeably larger than my genetics alone would indicate, which could imply rather strong hormonal flux. Some of the genetic tweaks matched up to things the Technovillians already had in their databases - an immune system pre-programmed with just about every known disease, muscles that got enough exercise from everyday activity, and, I was informed, limbs that would regenerate like a lizard's. I had no intention of testing that one out.
--
"Even without citizenship, or security clearance, there are plenty of employment opportunities. We actually do have lighthouses with keepers. Farmers. Smiths. Couriers. Scouts."
--
"What happened to my body?"
"Non-viable, not even good for providing transplants. Other than some samples, incinerated."
I winced. So much for ever getting back to normal.
--
"Um... how's the space program doing?"
"Kessler syndrome. We haven't got the spare resources to clear the debris for a launch."
"Alternate universes?"
"Technically an infinite number of them, but it's impossible to communicate with or travel to them."
"FTL?"
"Physically impossible. Planck-scale physics runs on a much smaller-scale cellular automata system, which is mostly obscured by quantum effects, but there really isn't any way for the cells to switch their neighbours on and off any faster than lightspeed."
"Wormholes?"
"Space-time doesn't bend that way."
"Hm... Dark matter?"
"The gravitational shadow of alternate universes that shared our Big Bang."
"Cryonics?"
"We tend not to die in a way that leaves a viable corpse. And with limited resources during the State of Emergency, the infrastructure for it doesn't exist."
"Internet?"
"Gone. The city-computers are full of AIs that will instantly hack any computer connected to a communications device they have access to, use it to run incomprehensible programs for inscrutable purposes, and leave in an unusable state."
"Singularity?"
"Happened around 2050 AD." 'Welp', I thought, 'guess that means Star Trek's been lost to zeerust as a prediction of the future'. He continued, "Pretty much every human who could get to a city got sucked into it. Superstimuli, at the least." That wasn't quite how I'd heard it was predicted to happen, but of course, I had missed out on thirty-five years of pre-Singularity predictions about that. "We humans who managed to stay away during the critical week aren't quite sure what happened to them, other than they're not there anymore." Now wasn't that just creepy. "Just about every urban area got turned into a giant computer, not particularly hospitable to human life - chemical outgassing, radiation, and worse. The smaller city-comps seem to have died off. The rest - about eighty in North America - seem to do things so fast, that if there's any human-level intelligences left in them, a half-second pause in a conversation would feel like a ten minute break. No communication or exchange is possible. The city-computers occasionally emit various pieces of data, or robots, or biological organisms, or stranger things."
"... How many people /are/ vere?"
"We have extremely limited information outside our sphere of influence. The primary zone of control of Technoville - on the site of what used to be Ann Arbor - is around one to two hundred kilometers radius. About thirty thousand citizens, and two hundred thousand non-citizens. Our main allied polity has another two hundred fifty thousand. Outside that?" He shrugged. "Could be thousands, could be millions."
"Climate change?"
"A major hassle when the methane clathrates got loose. All sorts of geo-engineering projects. The most important one is probably the sun-shield at L1. Fortunately, somebody cut off its communications systems before the apocalypse, so it's running on its pre-written program and keeping the overall temperature relatively steady."
"Sources of information over van you?"
"You're still under quarantine. Including information quarantine, in case your skeleton contains information that would destabilize Technoville's systems."
--
Eventually, while jogging on a treadmill, I said, "I've got a thought." As long as I paid close attention, I could avoid both infantile speech patterns and slicing my tongue on my rodent-like incisors.
"Do tell."
"However long this body lasts... one way or another, it's going to die. And when it does, I doubt there'll be another one waiting for another brain transplant. I want to hedge my bets."
"Cryonics again? I told you, we don't do that. You would need... years of training to even begin to understand the economics behind how to fund it yourself."
"That's not my thought. You only have concrete data on a small fraction of the continent, let alone the world. How much do you know about Phoenix, Arizona?"
"That it's probably an active city-comp."
"And if there was a colony of people living near it who did practice cryonics? I've been reading, and it requires a surprisingly small tech base. Blacksmithing seems to be enough to put together machine tools, once you know they exist, which should be enough to build the pumps and such to liquefy air and make dry ice. Nineteenth-century chemistry seems to be enough to create cryoprotectant."
"You want to go looking for cryonicists?"
"Or, at least, a group willing and able to adopt the practice. I'm living proof that someone who was vitrified can be brought back to life - even if it did take a brain transplant to /keep/ me alive."
"Hm. We generally don't like wasting resources and manpower on long-term scouting missions; we lose too much of both dealing with the Detroit city-comp."
"Then let me put it this way. I may have spent my first few years on a farm... but do you really think I'm going to milk cows for Technoville's benefit, for however long I happen to live?"
"I'll run some numbers and get back to you."
--
"You still want to go exploring dangerous, deadly wilderness?"
I unfolded myself from my cross-legged meditation position. "In a nutshell."
"Our best prediction is that for every thousand kilometers you travel, the odds of your surviving halve."
"If I die in a week or in a hundred years, I'll still end up dead. I'd rather do what I can while I can."
"We predicted you'd say something of the sort. If you don't change your mind, I've been authorized with a small budget to outfit you. Mainly in the form of assigning you a courier's motorized bicycle and trailer, a few supplies, and an analog radio to inform us of whatever you find before you're killed. And some time to bring you up to speed on conditions outside the quarantine facility."
"You're all heart. Still, beats getting diced."
--
"Here's a map of the surrounding area. You will note it is covered in bright colors. These indicate how dangerous any given zone is.
"Not on this particular map, are white zones. They are unexplored. We are letting you go kill yourself so that your reports will let us fill in some white zones.
"Green zone: No significant dangers. Mostly harmless. May still have wild beasts, bandits, ordinary toxic plants, and similar pre-Singularity annoyances.
"Blue: Mild danger to life and limb, of sorts which can be treated medically. Toxic spills and wandering kill-bots lead to blue zones.
"Yellow: Moderate danger of permanent alteration to persons, which does not significantly affect victims' economic capacity. For example, involuntary brain transplants, loss of one or maybe two limbs, physical age-regression to 2 years old with mind intact, or minor loss of memory or personality change.
"Red: Significant danger of being changed in ways which eliminate most of victims' economic capacity. Forcible transformation into animal shape, loss of three or four limbs, or physical regression to minus one month old, or significant loss of memory or personality change.
"Black: Extreme danger of death, or fates worse than death. Transformation into aware but immobile objects, regression to minus nine months old, complete loss of mind.
"Zoning is at the discretion of the discovering scout/agent. When a farming community was hit with a biological agent which rewrote the locals, so that people gave birth to foals and horses gave birth to infants, the agent could have chosen to arrange exported food to be sterilized and classify the region as Yellow, or quarantined it entirely and classified it Red, or decided to call in air-strike to kill everything and classify it Black."
"... I notice you're using the past tense for that example instead of the hypothetical."
"In your time's idiom, I know you think that I am something of a son of a bitch. Let's just say that that's not /quite/ accurate."
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DataPacRat
Truthseeker
- Location
- Niagara, Canada
*Chapter Two: Re-Engaging*
In theory, with good roads, I can bicycle over a hundred kilometers per day, with muscle power alone. When I finally made it out of that quarantine building (which, from the outside, looked like someone had repurposed a hundred-or-more year-old brick grade school), I made it about five klicks the first day through the forest. Not because I couldn't keep going - but because I didn't trust my state of mind after all the 'calmatives' and who-knew-what-else that had been pumped into my bloodstream. Until they were flushed out of my system, I couldn't tell whether biking off into the unknown distance was really a good idea, or I'd just been manipulated into doing what Technoville wanted of me.
The day was pleasantly warm, and my translator-watch said the pressure was high and humidity low, so rain wasn't likely. (It was certainly a far cry from having a worldwide array of weather stations and supercomputer analysis of trends for a ten-day forecast. From what had been said and implied to me, though, even all those tools would choke when faced with the results of a dozen interrupted weather control projects.) So instead of setting up the tent, I hung a hammock.
I looked suspiciously at the water and food-powder I'd been so kindly provided with... then dumped the water, wandered over to a stream, where I checked for radiation, pre-filtered some water, filtered it, let it settle, ignored the chemical purifiers I had, and boiled the heck out of it.
I wandered around a bit, using the translator's camera and internal database to identify various plant-parts, and trying them out for taste. I started jotting notes in a paper notebook about the results, and brought back to my camp the fixings for a... rather terrible, but filling, salad.
Technoville hadn't seen fit to issue me any firearms, stun guns, or pepper spray. But, before relaxing, I made sure I knew exactly where my various self-defense measures were: the knife sheathed inside the back of my belt, among other sharp implements (some more concealed than others); a sling in one pocket and selection of stones in another; and a pistol-sized crossbow. I debated whether to spread out some caltrops on the most obvious path leading from the road to the hammock, then decided I'd more likely end up with one embedded in my own feet, or the bike's tires, than they'd help against any sort of robbers.
After that, there was nothing to do but stretch out, relax, catch up further on some technical manuals, and occasionally scare the birds as I tooted atunally on a harmonica. (Not standard issue for a Technovillian courier, and the only non-mission-oriented item I'd been able to get approved. I'd never actually played a harmonica before - I just wanted /something/ that wasn't purely utilitarian.)
Outside the fact that I was effectively a transman, in a not-quite-human body, travelling through a sort of dangerous post-apocalyptic wilderness, trying to get out from the clutches of what seemed to be some sort of totalitarian dystopia... it was a surprisingly pleasant way to spend an afternoon.
(Okay, fine. Now that I was out of direct surveillance, I did lock the probably-spyware-ridden electronics away, and investigated my anatomy more thoroughly than I had previously. Happy?)
--
In the morning, before pulling on my helmet and dog-style booties and all of that other gear... I tried more than the carefully-clumsy stretches and not-quite-steady jogging I had while in quarantine. A cartwheel went off without a hitch. A somersault led into a front flip, then a back flip.
Back before I'd had fur, I wouldn't have been able to pull any of those off.
I prodded my ribcage. "Uh... hello? Is there... anyone in there?" I waited, but didn't feel any twitches. "Okay," I said. "In case there's more than just some pre-programmed muscle memory... I'd like to say, well, thanks. This was your body before I was put in it, and I don't know what the plan was before Technoville got hold of us, but... I really appreciate being able to walk around. If you've got any wants, and there's any way you can communicate them to me, I'll see what I can do... okay?" The breeze blew, ruffling my fur, but I couldn't sense anything I could interpret as my skeleton trying to tell me something. So I shrugged, and got on with my day.
--
"Ahoy the house!" I called out, after an embarrassing squeak and a cough to clear my throat. A couple of mutts had come streaking out when I turned into the long driveway, and were enthusiastically sniffing my legs, the bike, and trailer; but didn't seem aggressive.
A screen door banged open, and a weathered man stepped onto the porch, caucasian and in clothes that were old-fashioned before I'd been born. "Yeah?" he asked. "Kann ich Ihnen helfen?" I fumbled to pull the translator pendant out of the pocket I'd stuffed it into to keep it from bouncing on my chest, and caught the tail-end of its "... I help you?"
"I'm travelling," I said, with the translator echoing, "Ich reise." "Could I sleep in your barn tonight? Maybe trade some preserved food for a fresh meal?"
"Hm," he grunted. The translator echoed his next words, "What's wrong with your legs?"
I realized my motorcycle-style helmet was hiding my face from view, so I pulled it off, twitched my whiskers, and let my long ears rise.
"Hm," he repeated. "You born like that?"
"No, sir," I said, not quite sure where this was going, but deciding to stick to honesty. "Still getting used to it."
"You got any decent clothes?"
"Um..." I looked down at myself - white t-shirt, tan cargo shorts, and black booties. "I have... some stuff for colder weather?"
"Nevermind," he said. "You can borrow a dress from my daughters. Go put your contraption in the barn. You'll eat dinner with us and can sleep in the spare room."
"Thank you, sir," I nodded. "What can I do for you in return?"
He spat over the side of the railing into the dirt. "Don't talk nonsense. You don't pay back Christian charity."
"I don't know if this gizmo will translate this right... but I've been helped in the past, and I try to pay that help forward, when I can."
"Hm." He turned around and went back into the house.
As I turned the bike around to get it to the barn door, I was wondering if this was really as good an idea as it had seemed when I thought of it...
--
"Ooh, your fur's so soft," relayed the translator, accompanied by giggles from all around me, and uncountable numbers of little girls' hands petting everywhere from my ears to my feet.
I was sitting on a bed, an uncomfortable smile plastered on my face as at least a half-dozen girls chattered, while a dress that matched all of theirs was tweaked to fit me. I was an urban fellow who'd had hipster tendencies before that word became popular, so of course I'd occasionally considered a kilt, either traditional or utility; but this was a skirt of a different order.
"Did getting changed hurt?" came from my left.
"Um, I wasn't awake for-"
"Is it hard to walk?" from my right.
"Surprisingly, no-"
"I wish I could have ears like this," from behind me.
There was a smacking sound. "Don't be ridiculous, Rebecca. Even if you found the same demon, they don't do the same curses again and again."
"Some do," piped up one of the horde. "The English are always looking for tame demons they can get the same curse from, over and over."
"Besides, don't you want to get married to Peter? Cursed people can't have children."
"Well," I said, "I was told I might be able to - but it would have to be with someone who was like me."
"Ooooh," came a chorus.
"That makes sense," said one.
"Would the babies be cursed, too?"
"Er," I said, "if I ever have children, I'm pretty sure they'd have fur..."
"'If'?"
"She's English, a lot of English women get killed fighting demons before they get married."
A bonnet was tugged down around my head. I instinctively raised my ears, lifting it away, and there was much giggling. After a huddled conference, a pair of scissors was applied, and my ears were pulled through the material. I tried twitching each ear, and this time it stayed in place.
After fielding a few more questions about hair-care, the dress was done, and it was rapidly tugged down around my head, and a light apron tied around the dark blue material.
"How's that feel?"
"Weird," I commented, pulling the translator pendant up through the collar. "My fur's all higgledy-piggledy." (To my surprise, the translator handled the word without a hitch.)
"Should we get a curry-comb?"
"I'll get used to it." I brushed the sleeves. "For as long as I need it, anyway. Uh - sorry in advance if I shed into it."
That prompted another chorus of laughter. I wondered if they'd still feel as well-disposed if I mentioned I'd previously been male. The fact that they were talking about 'demons' and 'curses' could imply that the idea wouldn't shock them too much... but it still might introduce additional awkwardness. Even if I was the only one feeling awkward.
--
Every day, at around noon, I made sure the solar panels on the trailer had been hooked up to the radio's battery and that it was fully charged. I checked the translator's report on my location, and double-checked with a sextant, and wrote it down. Then I fired up the radio, and transmitted my location to Technoville. Once I got out of the previously-scouted areas, I'd be transmitting more details; but for now, in order to keep them from transmitting an order to their military to arrest me on sight (or worse), I kept them apprised of my position.
The quarantine facility was to the north of Detroit - or what used to be Detroit. The maps I'd been given traced a path through green zones to the west, then south, then east, around the former city, leading to 'Dogtown' - what used to be Toledo. As far as I could tell, outside of Technoville-the-city, the area seemed to be populated wholly by small-scale farmers; in particular, anabaptists of various stripes, including Amish, Mennonites, and Hutterites. People who separated themselves from the 'English' (non-anabaptist) world, but submitted to government authority even when that government was English.
As I rode along, I passed occasional horse-drawn carts, or actual Technovillian couriers heading the other way. Once, I had to get my bike off the road entirely as a long line of tanks rumbled by. (Or maybe it was just personnel carriers. They had tracks and rotating turrets with big guns; I didn't know enough to tell the difference, or if they were some third category I'd never heard of.)
The farms were reasonably familiar... with exceptions. In addition to the usual livestock, raising snakes seemed to be popular. When I asked one farmer what the serpents were for, he said, "Ours get milked for heroin."
I had to show off the plastic ID card I'd been given just about every time I passed a cluster of homes large enough for someone to sit around keeping an eye on things. In a script I needed the translator pendant to decipher, it said I was a 'former human', with permission to travel through non-sensitive areas, but not to enter Technoville. I tried not to shudder every time I heard the words, "Ihre Papiere, bitte."
Once, I nearly jumped out of my booties when a horse leaned over a fence and asked me for a smoke. I actually did have a bit of tobacco in my trailer, for trade goods; and I was curious enough to pull out a cigarette and light it for him. We talked. Turned out he used to be a scout, and found a red zone the hard way. He missed being part of Technoville society, but clammed up about the details. A promise of another smoke got him talking again, at least about life on the farm. "It's not so bad," he said. "I'm strong, healthy, can still talk and think, and do useful work; and what happens in the barn stays in the barn." I looked at my fur-covered fingers, decided I'd gotten off lucky, and made a mental note to avoid red zones unless my life depended on it.
I almost started to get to like the taste of hay. It was cheap, my bunny-body produced all the vitamins I needed, and was a lot less suspicious than the rations I'd been supplied with.
Not all of the farms I tried visiting were as charitable as the first one. Some refused to have any contact with me. Some demanded I cover up 'modestly' before they even deigned to say 'no'. Some let me stay in a barn, but that's all. Some wanted me to do a lot of work before they'd even let me stay in the barn. Some wanted me to get rid of every 'implement of violence' before letting me stay - and since, as far as I'd seen so far, there wasn't anything like police, and I'd been able to pick up almost nothing about the local legal system, I refused to give up my tools of self-defense, and slept in the woods. And some treated me as just another traveller, letting me join them at their table and sleep in a real bed.
And then I came to the Voth's.
--
That afternoon, I'd asked a few farms for shelter for the night, and been summarily - even rudely - rejected. At the fourth place I tried, when I'd put on the cast-off dress and bonnet (which I'd gotten in exchange for some trade-good sugar), and hailed the house, the farmer's eyes were darkly circled. When I asked for a berth in the barn, he said, listlessly, "Do as you like." A child started crying inside the house, and he turned around, going back inside without another word.
I stood there stupidly for a few moments, then parked the bike, and, cautiously, knocked on the house's doorframe; when there was no reply, beyond the continued crying, I went in.
He was rocking an infant back and forth. "She just won't stop crying," he said. "And she's getting weaker. I think she's going to join her mother soon, God rest her soul."
"Is there anyone else here?"
"It was just me and her, carving out a new home - but the birth was hard, too hard..."
Feeling awkward was one thing - but it was a luxury when there was a real problem to deal with. I carefully took the babe from his arms; he didn't resist. "Go," I said. "Sleep. I can take care of her for at least one night... what's her name?"
"Ruth." He turned and stumbled deeper into the house.
I wasn't on any particular timetable, so I could let the man rest. I wondered how society could have evolved, so that this family was left without any sort of support structure.
As I rocked Ruth, I opened up the translator pendant, and ran through its symptom-checking software. Its verdict: allergy to cow's milk. I looked around the pantry, and tried feeding her a few things - a dab of honey on a fingertip, or a bit of flour and sugar dissolved in warm water. I don't know if any of it helped, but after a while, she fell asleep.
After a while, so did I.
In the morning, I made a disconcerting, if not downright disturbing, discovery. My chest hurt - and two spots on my bra were wet.
I now had absolute proof that I was a female mammal: my mammaries were in full working order.
I had no real clue why it had started. Maybe my body was designed to react to pheromones from malnourished infants. Maybe the computers in my skeleton were keeping an eye on things, somehow.
Sure, I didn't want a kid to starve to death - but actually being a wet-nurse was a bit beyond what I'd signed up for. I considered looking for a jar and relieving the ache manually... but I didn't actually know how to express milk without spilling it all over.
When the farmer came out of bed, he inhaled sharply upon seeing me seated by a window, staring fixedly outside as Ruth noisily, and happily, suckled.
"It's a miracle!" he said.
"It's embarrassing," I grumbled.
"Oh - of course." Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him turn around. "Please accept my apologies for seeing you in dishabille. I'll make you some breakfast - what do you like?"
"I can't stay. I have a job."
He hung his head. "I know it's selfish to ask, but... even one day? For Ruth?"
I rumbled deep in my throat. I didn't /want/ to stay. I didn't /want/ to be a wet-nurse, and didn't even have any particular desire to be female. I didn't want Technoville to decide to reclaim their investment in me in less pleasant ways.
But - I was still human, which meant I had mirror neurons in my brain that made me feel the way I thought other people felt... and I didn't want Ruth to cry non-stop, or worse.
"In my trailer," I said, "there is a certain box..."
In a few minutes, he returned with the radio, and at my direction, set up the antenna, and put the Morse key in my hand, trying not to look at me and Ruth. Translating from the peculiarities and formalities of talking through beeps, I sent, [<Hey, it's me. Anybody listening?]>
The response came, [<This is not your check-in time.]>
I sent, [<At a farm. Sick baby. Cow allergy. I'm nursing her. I leave, baby might die. What sort of civilization are you running these days, anyway?]>
There was a long pause. Eventually, I got back, [<Confirm your location.]>
I transmitted the coordinates.
[<A replacement will be sent. She will arrive in 36 to 48 hours. You may continue to assist the infant until then.]>
"Hunh," I said.
"Good news?" he asked, hopefully.
"I think so. It sounds like an actual wet nurse will get here late tomorrow, or the next morning."
"Oh - thank the Lord. You don't know... you won't have to lift a finger while you're here - do you like strawberries? How about I get you that breakfast? I do have some things I need to do over the day - I just haven't been able to get everything done, with Ruth..."
And so I spent the day with my feet up - literally, at Johann's insistence - instead of pedalling away. I did change Ruth's diaper a few times, which wasn't really much worse than dealing with my cat's litterbox, back when I'd been a human with a pet cat. He took his cart out to visit a few of his neighbours, doing farmery things I didn't pay much attention to.
It might have been better all around if he'd stayed home.
The next evening, as the sun was approaching the horizon, I was watching the road for any sign of my 'replacement'. I caught sight of a horse-drawn cart, with a few people in back - and then another couple. They turned up into Johann's drive, and I frowned to myself, noting a rather distinct abundance of sharp agricultural implements. It was entirely plausible that Johann had asked his neighbours for some help doing chores requiring a whole bunch of different pointy tools... but just in case of otherwise, I started heading back to the room with my backpack.
I heard Johann step outside. "My friends!" the translator turned his distant voice into clear words. "It is wonderful surprise to see you all!"
I wasn't feeling scared. Or even nervous. I simply tried to perform several actions quickly, without being hurried and doing them clumsily. I set Ruth on the bed, pulled off my dress, and pulled my usual biking costume back on - plus a few accessories I usually left packed away.
By the time everything was in place, I'd grabbed hold of a trekking pole, and I'd picked up Ruth again, I heard Johann's translated voice again, "You can't be serious. Even if all you say is true - she saved Ruth's life!"
A strange voice came through, "At the risk of her soul, and her body being twisted by a curse."
A third voice added, "Better to be in heaven, then trapped in a living hell on Earth."
I tried to remember what scraps I'd picked up about public speaking from an old Dale Carnegie course, and stepped out the front door to join Johann, facing a small crowd of farmers - including all the ones who'd refused to let me stay at their homes the other day.
I shifted Ruth from my left arm to my right, shifting my pole to the other hand. "Is there," I said, slowly and carefully, with the translator pendant's volume set to 'loud', "something you all want to talk to me about?"
"We're not going to talk to /you/," one of them said, apparently blissfully unaware of the inherent contradiction.
"Then I'll talk," I said, and rapidly tried to think of something to say. "If any of you are thinking of violence today, I suggest you think again. If you have a problem with me - that's one thing. But there is a true innocent here," and I shifted Ruth back to my left arm, "in the middle of things, who will suffer if you do anything unpleasant - and if that happens, her blood will be on your hands when you face God's judgment."
Johann put a hand on my shoulder, and whispered, "Please, don't do anything. They're just letting me know they're going to start shunning me for living in sin with you."
I looked back at him, my lips pulled back as I said, "Are you stupid? They don't need pitchforks just to tell you that."
"But," Johann said, "we're men of /peace/. We believe in non-violence."
Someone in the crowd shouted out, "Against /humans/. Nothing wrong with stomping out vermin and demons."
I pushed Ruth into Johann's bewildered arms. I picked up my trekking pole in both hands, gave a firm pull - and revealed the skinny sword-blade that was within. I let the sheath part drop, gave a tug at the belt hanging over my shoulder, shifting the side with all the sheathed throwing knives from the back to the front. And I reached behind myself, and grabbed the pistol-crossbow I'd hung from there. I took a position I'd probably seen in an anime somewhere, standing sideways to the centre of the group, the sword-blade pointing directly at the head of the fellow who'd been talking the most, the crossbow held close to my head and pointed up at the sky.
"What makes you think," I said, "that you're the first to try?"
Someone in the back of the group said something I couldn't make out, but the translator could. "I thought you said she was a /rabbit/. /Harmless/, you said."
"If it makes you feel any better," I announced, "I plan to be on my way tomorrow. And you can tell yourselves that you frightened off the scary woman who was keeping a baby alive. Or not, and you get to find out if I'll try to kill you or only cripple you. I don't care, really - it's up to you."
There was some muttering and shuffling the translator didn't deign to interpret... and then two of them turned and started walking back to their cart. Then a couple more. Then they were all loading up to go away. I let my arms fall, but didn't move from the spot until they were out of sight.
Then I turned around, walked to the privies, and threw up into them.
When I was rinsing my mouth, Johann came over, looking at me... differently than before. "Would you have killed them? Or just... maimed them?"
"Neither," I said. "I would have turned and run. Gotten on my bike if I could, on my feet if I couldn't."
"But - the /sword/! And knives."
"Just because I'm capable of hurting people doesn't mean I want to, if I can avoid it. I could take the rest of the evening explaining the reasoning why I made a decision to avoid escalating violence. But more importantly - they /were/ the first to try serious violence against me. I've never used a sword before in my life." I swigged some more water and spat it onto the ground. "People suck," I observed.
After all of that, it was kind of an anticlimax when my replacement turned out to be a perfectly ordinary housekeeper with a couple of nannygoats.
In theory, with good roads, I can bicycle over a hundred kilometers per day, with muscle power alone. When I finally made it out of that quarantine building (which, from the outside, looked like someone had repurposed a hundred-or-more year-old brick grade school), I made it about five klicks the first day through the forest. Not because I couldn't keep going - but because I didn't trust my state of mind after all the 'calmatives' and who-knew-what-else that had been pumped into my bloodstream. Until they were flushed out of my system, I couldn't tell whether biking off into the unknown distance was really a good idea, or I'd just been manipulated into doing what Technoville wanted of me.
The day was pleasantly warm, and my translator-watch said the pressure was high and humidity low, so rain wasn't likely. (It was certainly a far cry from having a worldwide array of weather stations and supercomputer analysis of trends for a ten-day forecast. From what had been said and implied to me, though, even all those tools would choke when faced with the results of a dozen interrupted weather control projects.) So instead of setting up the tent, I hung a hammock.
I looked suspiciously at the water and food-powder I'd been so kindly provided with... then dumped the water, wandered over to a stream, where I checked for radiation, pre-filtered some water, filtered it, let it settle, ignored the chemical purifiers I had, and boiled the heck out of it.
I wandered around a bit, using the translator's camera and internal database to identify various plant-parts, and trying them out for taste. I started jotting notes in a paper notebook about the results, and brought back to my camp the fixings for a... rather terrible, but filling, salad.
Technoville hadn't seen fit to issue me any firearms, stun guns, or pepper spray. But, before relaxing, I made sure I knew exactly where my various self-defense measures were: the knife sheathed inside the back of my belt, among other sharp implements (some more concealed than others); a sling in one pocket and selection of stones in another; and a pistol-sized crossbow. I debated whether to spread out some caltrops on the most obvious path leading from the road to the hammock, then decided I'd more likely end up with one embedded in my own feet, or the bike's tires, than they'd help against any sort of robbers.
After that, there was nothing to do but stretch out, relax, catch up further on some technical manuals, and occasionally scare the birds as I tooted atunally on a harmonica. (Not standard issue for a Technovillian courier, and the only non-mission-oriented item I'd been able to get approved. I'd never actually played a harmonica before - I just wanted /something/ that wasn't purely utilitarian.)
Outside the fact that I was effectively a transman, in a not-quite-human body, travelling through a sort of dangerous post-apocalyptic wilderness, trying to get out from the clutches of what seemed to be some sort of totalitarian dystopia... it was a surprisingly pleasant way to spend an afternoon.
(Okay, fine. Now that I was out of direct surveillance, I did lock the probably-spyware-ridden electronics away, and investigated my anatomy more thoroughly than I had previously. Happy?)
--
In the morning, before pulling on my helmet and dog-style booties and all of that other gear... I tried more than the carefully-clumsy stretches and not-quite-steady jogging I had while in quarantine. A cartwheel went off without a hitch. A somersault led into a front flip, then a back flip.
Back before I'd had fur, I wouldn't have been able to pull any of those off.
I prodded my ribcage. "Uh... hello? Is there... anyone in there?" I waited, but didn't feel any twitches. "Okay," I said. "In case there's more than just some pre-programmed muscle memory... I'd like to say, well, thanks. This was your body before I was put in it, and I don't know what the plan was before Technoville got hold of us, but... I really appreciate being able to walk around. If you've got any wants, and there's any way you can communicate them to me, I'll see what I can do... okay?" The breeze blew, ruffling my fur, but I couldn't sense anything I could interpret as my skeleton trying to tell me something. So I shrugged, and got on with my day.
--
"Ahoy the house!" I called out, after an embarrassing squeak and a cough to clear my throat. A couple of mutts had come streaking out when I turned into the long driveway, and were enthusiastically sniffing my legs, the bike, and trailer; but didn't seem aggressive.
A screen door banged open, and a weathered man stepped onto the porch, caucasian and in clothes that were old-fashioned before I'd been born. "Yeah?" he asked. "Kann ich Ihnen helfen?" I fumbled to pull the translator pendant out of the pocket I'd stuffed it into to keep it from bouncing on my chest, and caught the tail-end of its "... I help you?"
"I'm travelling," I said, with the translator echoing, "Ich reise." "Could I sleep in your barn tonight? Maybe trade some preserved food for a fresh meal?"
"Hm," he grunted. The translator echoed his next words, "What's wrong with your legs?"
I realized my motorcycle-style helmet was hiding my face from view, so I pulled it off, twitched my whiskers, and let my long ears rise.
"Hm," he repeated. "You born like that?"
"No, sir," I said, not quite sure where this was going, but deciding to stick to honesty. "Still getting used to it."
"You got any decent clothes?"
"Um..." I looked down at myself - white t-shirt, tan cargo shorts, and black booties. "I have... some stuff for colder weather?"
"Nevermind," he said. "You can borrow a dress from my daughters. Go put your contraption in the barn. You'll eat dinner with us and can sleep in the spare room."
"Thank you, sir," I nodded. "What can I do for you in return?"
He spat over the side of the railing into the dirt. "Don't talk nonsense. You don't pay back Christian charity."
"I don't know if this gizmo will translate this right... but I've been helped in the past, and I try to pay that help forward, when I can."
"Hm." He turned around and went back into the house.
As I turned the bike around to get it to the barn door, I was wondering if this was really as good an idea as it had seemed when I thought of it...
--
"Ooh, your fur's so soft," relayed the translator, accompanied by giggles from all around me, and uncountable numbers of little girls' hands petting everywhere from my ears to my feet.
I was sitting on a bed, an uncomfortable smile plastered on my face as at least a half-dozen girls chattered, while a dress that matched all of theirs was tweaked to fit me. I was an urban fellow who'd had hipster tendencies before that word became popular, so of course I'd occasionally considered a kilt, either traditional or utility; but this was a skirt of a different order.
"Did getting changed hurt?" came from my left.
"Um, I wasn't awake for-"
"Is it hard to walk?" from my right.
"Surprisingly, no-"
"I wish I could have ears like this," from behind me.
There was a smacking sound. "Don't be ridiculous, Rebecca. Even if you found the same demon, they don't do the same curses again and again."
"Some do," piped up one of the horde. "The English are always looking for tame demons they can get the same curse from, over and over."
"Besides, don't you want to get married to Peter? Cursed people can't have children."
"Well," I said, "I was told I might be able to - but it would have to be with someone who was like me."
"Ooooh," came a chorus.
"That makes sense," said one.
"Would the babies be cursed, too?"
"Er," I said, "if I ever have children, I'm pretty sure they'd have fur..."
"'If'?"
"She's English, a lot of English women get killed fighting demons before they get married."
A bonnet was tugged down around my head. I instinctively raised my ears, lifting it away, and there was much giggling. After a huddled conference, a pair of scissors was applied, and my ears were pulled through the material. I tried twitching each ear, and this time it stayed in place.
After fielding a few more questions about hair-care, the dress was done, and it was rapidly tugged down around my head, and a light apron tied around the dark blue material.
"How's that feel?"
"Weird," I commented, pulling the translator pendant up through the collar. "My fur's all higgledy-piggledy." (To my surprise, the translator handled the word without a hitch.)
"Should we get a curry-comb?"
"I'll get used to it." I brushed the sleeves. "For as long as I need it, anyway. Uh - sorry in advance if I shed into it."
That prompted another chorus of laughter. I wondered if they'd still feel as well-disposed if I mentioned I'd previously been male. The fact that they were talking about 'demons' and 'curses' could imply that the idea wouldn't shock them too much... but it still might introduce additional awkwardness. Even if I was the only one feeling awkward.
--
Every day, at around noon, I made sure the solar panels on the trailer had been hooked up to the radio's battery and that it was fully charged. I checked the translator's report on my location, and double-checked with a sextant, and wrote it down. Then I fired up the radio, and transmitted my location to Technoville. Once I got out of the previously-scouted areas, I'd be transmitting more details; but for now, in order to keep them from transmitting an order to their military to arrest me on sight (or worse), I kept them apprised of my position.
The quarantine facility was to the north of Detroit - or what used to be Detroit. The maps I'd been given traced a path through green zones to the west, then south, then east, around the former city, leading to 'Dogtown' - what used to be Toledo. As far as I could tell, outside of Technoville-the-city, the area seemed to be populated wholly by small-scale farmers; in particular, anabaptists of various stripes, including Amish, Mennonites, and Hutterites. People who separated themselves from the 'English' (non-anabaptist) world, but submitted to government authority even when that government was English.
As I rode along, I passed occasional horse-drawn carts, or actual Technovillian couriers heading the other way. Once, I had to get my bike off the road entirely as a long line of tanks rumbled by. (Or maybe it was just personnel carriers. They had tracks and rotating turrets with big guns; I didn't know enough to tell the difference, or if they were some third category I'd never heard of.)
The farms were reasonably familiar... with exceptions. In addition to the usual livestock, raising snakes seemed to be popular. When I asked one farmer what the serpents were for, he said, "Ours get milked for heroin."
I had to show off the plastic ID card I'd been given just about every time I passed a cluster of homes large enough for someone to sit around keeping an eye on things. In a script I needed the translator pendant to decipher, it said I was a 'former human', with permission to travel through non-sensitive areas, but not to enter Technoville. I tried not to shudder every time I heard the words, "Ihre Papiere, bitte."
Once, I nearly jumped out of my booties when a horse leaned over a fence and asked me for a smoke. I actually did have a bit of tobacco in my trailer, for trade goods; and I was curious enough to pull out a cigarette and light it for him. We talked. Turned out he used to be a scout, and found a red zone the hard way. He missed being part of Technoville society, but clammed up about the details. A promise of another smoke got him talking again, at least about life on the farm. "It's not so bad," he said. "I'm strong, healthy, can still talk and think, and do useful work; and what happens in the barn stays in the barn." I looked at my fur-covered fingers, decided I'd gotten off lucky, and made a mental note to avoid red zones unless my life depended on it.
I almost started to get to like the taste of hay. It was cheap, my bunny-body produced all the vitamins I needed, and was a lot less suspicious than the rations I'd been supplied with.
Not all of the farms I tried visiting were as charitable as the first one. Some refused to have any contact with me. Some demanded I cover up 'modestly' before they even deigned to say 'no'. Some let me stay in a barn, but that's all. Some wanted me to do a lot of work before they'd even let me stay in the barn. Some wanted me to get rid of every 'implement of violence' before letting me stay - and since, as far as I'd seen so far, there wasn't anything like police, and I'd been able to pick up almost nothing about the local legal system, I refused to give up my tools of self-defense, and slept in the woods. And some treated me as just another traveller, letting me join them at their table and sleep in a real bed.
And then I came to the Voth's.
--
That afternoon, I'd asked a few farms for shelter for the night, and been summarily - even rudely - rejected. At the fourth place I tried, when I'd put on the cast-off dress and bonnet (which I'd gotten in exchange for some trade-good sugar), and hailed the house, the farmer's eyes were darkly circled. When I asked for a berth in the barn, he said, listlessly, "Do as you like." A child started crying inside the house, and he turned around, going back inside without another word.
I stood there stupidly for a few moments, then parked the bike, and, cautiously, knocked on the house's doorframe; when there was no reply, beyond the continued crying, I went in.
He was rocking an infant back and forth. "She just won't stop crying," he said. "And she's getting weaker. I think she's going to join her mother soon, God rest her soul."
"Is there anyone else here?"
"It was just me and her, carving out a new home - but the birth was hard, too hard..."
Feeling awkward was one thing - but it was a luxury when there was a real problem to deal with. I carefully took the babe from his arms; he didn't resist. "Go," I said. "Sleep. I can take care of her for at least one night... what's her name?"
"Ruth." He turned and stumbled deeper into the house.
I wasn't on any particular timetable, so I could let the man rest. I wondered how society could have evolved, so that this family was left without any sort of support structure.
As I rocked Ruth, I opened up the translator pendant, and ran through its symptom-checking software. Its verdict: allergy to cow's milk. I looked around the pantry, and tried feeding her a few things - a dab of honey on a fingertip, or a bit of flour and sugar dissolved in warm water. I don't know if any of it helped, but after a while, she fell asleep.
After a while, so did I.
In the morning, I made a disconcerting, if not downright disturbing, discovery. My chest hurt - and two spots on my bra were wet.
I now had absolute proof that I was a female mammal: my mammaries were in full working order.
I had no real clue why it had started. Maybe my body was designed to react to pheromones from malnourished infants. Maybe the computers in my skeleton were keeping an eye on things, somehow.
Sure, I didn't want a kid to starve to death - but actually being a wet-nurse was a bit beyond what I'd signed up for. I considered looking for a jar and relieving the ache manually... but I didn't actually know how to express milk without spilling it all over.
When the farmer came out of bed, he inhaled sharply upon seeing me seated by a window, staring fixedly outside as Ruth noisily, and happily, suckled.
"It's a miracle!" he said.
"It's embarrassing," I grumbled.
"Oh - of course." Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him turn around. "Please accept my apologies for seeing you in dishabille. I'll make you some breakfast - what do you like?"
"I can't stay. I have a job."
He hung his head. "I know it's selfish to ask, but... even one day? For Ruth?"
I rumbled deep in my throat. I didn't /want/ to stay. I didn't /want/ to be a wet-nurse, and didn't even have any particular desire to be female. I didn't want Technoville to decide to reclaim their investment in me in less pleasant ways.
But - I was still human, which meant I had mirror neurons in my brain that made me feel the way I thought other people felt... and I didn't want Ruth to cry non-stop, or worse.
"In my trailer," I said, "there is a certain box..."
In a few minutes, he returned with the radio, and at my direction, set up the antenna, and put the Morse key in my hand, trying not to look at me and Ruth. Translating from the peculiarities and formalities of talking through beeps, I sent, [<Hey, it's me. Anybody listening?]>
The response came, [<This is not your check-in time.]>
I sent, [<At a farm. Sick baby. Cow allergy. I'm nursing her. I leave, baby might die. What sort of civilization are you running these days, anyway?]>
There was a long pause. Eventually, I got back, [<Confirm your location.]>
I transmitted the coordinates.
[<A replacement will be sent. She will arrive in 36 to 48 hours. You may continue to assist the infant until then.]>
"Hunh," I said.
"Good news?" he asked, hopefully.
"I think so. It sounds like an actual wet nurse will get here late tomorrow, or the next morning."
"Oh - thank the Lord. You don't know... you won't have to lift a finger while you're here - do you like strawberries? How about I get you that breakfast? I do have some things I need to do over the day - I just haven't been able to get everything done, with Ruth..."
And so I spent the day with my feet up - literally, at Johann's insistence - instead of pedalling away. I did change Ruth's diaper a few times, which wasn't really much worse than dealing with my cat's litterbox, back when I'd been a human with a pet cat. He took his cart out to visit a few of his neighbours, doing farmery things I didn't pay much attention to.
It might have been better all around if he'd stayed home.
The next evening, as the sun was approaching the horizon, I was watching the road for any sign of my 'replacement'. I caught sight of a horse-drawn cart, with a few people in back - and then another couple. They turned up into Johann's drive, and I frowned to myself, noting a rather distinct abundance of sharp agricultural implements. It was entirely plausible that Johann had asked his neighbours for some help doing chores requiring a whole bunch of different pointy tools... but just in case of otherwise, I started heading back to the room with my backpack.
I heard Johann step outside. "My friends!" the translator turned his distant voice into clear words. "It is wonderful surprise to see you all!"
I wasn't feeling scared. Or even nervous. I simply tried to perform several actions quickly, without being hurried and doing them clumsily. I set Ruth on the bed, pulled off my dress, and pulled my usual biking costume back on - plus a few accessories I usually left packed away.
By the time everything was in place, I'd grabbed hold of a trekking pole, and I'd picked up Ruth again, I heard Johann's translated voice again, "You can't be serious. Even if all you say is true - she saved Ruth's life!"
A strange voice came through, "At the risk of her soul, and her body being twisted by a curse."
A third voice added, "Better to be in heaven, then trapped in a living hell on Earth."
I tried to remember what scraps I'd picked up about public speaking from an old Dale Carnegie course, and stepped out the front door to join Johann, facing a small crowd of farmers - including all the ones who'd refused to let me stay at their homes the other day.
I shifted Ruth from my left arm to my right, shifting my pole to the other hand. "Is there," I said, slowly and carefully, with the translator pendant's volume set to 'loud', "something you all want to talk to me about?"
"We're not going to talk to /you/," one of them said, apparently blissfully unaware of the inherent contradiction.
"Then I'll talk," I said, and rapidly tried to think of something to say. "If any of you are thinking of violence today, I suggest you think again. If you have a problem with me - that's one thing. But there is a true innocent here," and I shifted Ruth back to my left arm, "in the middle of things, who will suffer if you do anything unpleasant - and if that happens, her blood will be on your hands when you face God's judgment."
Johann put a hand on my shoulder, and whispered, "Please, don't do anything. They're just letting me know they're going to start shunning me for living in sin with you."
I looked back at him, my lips pulled back as I said, "Are you stupid? They don't need pitchforks just to tell you that."
"But," Johann said, "we're men of /peace/. We believe in non-violence."
Someone in the crowd shouted out, "Against /humans/. Nothing wrong with stomping out vermin and demons."
I pushed Ruth into Johann's bewildered arms. I picked up my trekking pole in both hands, gave a firm pull - and revealed the skinny sword-blade that was within. I let the sheath part drop, gave a tug at the belt hanging over my shoulder, shifting the side with all the sheathed throwing knives from the back to the front. And I reached behind myself, and grabbed the pistol-crossbow I'd hung from there. I took a position I'd probably seen in an anime somewhere, standing sideways to the centre of the group, the sword-blade pointing directly at the head of the fellow who'd been talking the most, the crossbow held close to my head and pointed up at the sky.
"What makes you think," I said, "that you're the first to try?"
Someone in the back of the group said something I couldn't make out, but the translator could. "I thought you said she was a /rabbit/. /Harmless/, you said."
"If it makes you feel any better," I announced, "I plan to be on my way tomorrow. And you can tell yourselves that you frightened off the scary woman who was keeping a baby alive. Or not, and you get to find out if I'll try to kill you or only cripple you. I don't care, really - it's up to you."
There was some muttering and shuffling the translator didn't deign to interpret... and then two of them turned and started walking back to their cart. Then a couple more. Then they were all loading up to go away. I let my arms fall, but didn't move from the spot until they were out of sight.
Then I turned around, walked to the privies, and threw up into them.
When I was rinsing my mouth, Johann came over, looking at me... differently than before. "Would you have killed them? Or just... maimed them?"
"Neither," I said. "I would have turned and run. Gotten on my bike if I could, on my feet if I couldn't."
"But - the /sword/! And knives."
"Just because I'm capable of hurting people doesn't mean I want to, if I can avoid it. I could take the rest of the evening explaining the reasoning why I made a decision to avoid escalating violence. But more importantly - they /were/ the first to try serious violence against me. I've never used a sword before in my life." I swigged some more water and spat it onto the ground. "People suck," I observed.
After all of that, it was kind of an anticlimax when my replacement turned out to be a perfectly ordinary housekeeper with a couple of nannygoats.
DataPacRat
Truthseeker
- Location
- Niagara, Canada
*Chapter Three: Re-Evaluating*
When I left Johann Voth and Ruth's farm, I fired up the bicycle's motor to get as far away from their neighbours as I could, without killing myself pedaling. Technoville didn't seem to have a petroleum industry, but they did have various ways of making bio-diesel and alcohol. None of the farmers had been willing to trade or sell me any fuel they had, so I'd been conserving it - but standing face-to-face with people who'd been seriously considering turning my insides into my outsides, in the name of their faith, was making me reconsider the whole 'trade with the locals' approach I'd been taking.
Amish surviving a hostile Singularity? Sure, they've always had a decent tech base and strong internal support structure. Amish adapting to treat post-Singularity effects as curses and demons? Well, it wasn't as far-fetched as expecting them to start building nanotech on their own. Having to dress up in actual dresses, and not make religious waves? My native culture was erased from the Earth - I was going to have to make social compromises no matter where I went anymore.
Risking my life merely for some better food and a more comfortable bed? That was just insane.
I was also disturbed by my mammaries' little surprise. I was used to having a pretty good idea of how my body worked - all those high school biology courses, plus spending as much time in the library as I could when I was growing, plus the Internet and Wikipedia and so on later on. Exercise too little, get fat; eat too much sugar, end up with diabetes; spend too much time getting my cells irritated by chemicals or UV, end up with cancer. There wasn't anything in any of that for suddenly producing nutrient fluid exactly when someone needed it. If that could happen - then what else could? Was my pink fur going to turn purple in winter? If I broke an arm-bone, would the computer in it go insane and start trying to strangle me with my own hand? How much understanding did my skeleton have about what was going on around me, and what were its goals, or preferences, or heuristics?
And just about everybody I'd known had been pretty certain that, one way or another, my life would become a lot simpler after I died...
--
The day was cloudy, threatening a downpour at any time, but never quite breaking out into rain. While the clouds kept the noon sun from broiling me directly, the humidity was a bit of a killer - my furry form still sweated like any other human, but it just wasn't evaporating, so I stayed hot, so I kept on sweating.
Pedaling up an incline, by the time I was halfway to the top I was gasping for breath; so I gave a mental shrug and fired up the motor again. At this rate, I was going to take a break in the first bit of shade I found; and as I looked back over the fields and meadows, if there was as little shade once I'd made it over the hump as I'd been going through, I decided to break out the tent and make my own.
Naturally, as soon as the road levelled off, what I saw made me change my plans. There were two rather obvious sites. To the left of the road, was what looked like a commercial-industrial area, with small warehouses, storefronts, garages, and the like, embedded in parking lots made up of hexagons just over a foot across. More significantly, every ten, twenty meters or so, were stopsign-sized signs - blue, instead of red. I couldn't read the language describing the details, but they matched what I'd been told indicated a dangerous 'blue zone' of dangerous, potentially lethal, conditions.
Over on the right side of the road, rolling around in the grass and flowers, was a five-story, grayish-furred striped house-cat. Which had, apparently, stopped tossing a deer around like a mouse at the sound of my engine, eyes and ears pointed straight at me.
I turned my bike into the blue zone and gunned the throttle.
It probably wasn't the best plan; it might not even have been a good plan. I wasn't thinking about what sort of materials would let a feline-shaped thing of that size walk around; it was the decision I made in the split-second of imagining ending up in a giant's stomach.
Without having had time to point the translator pendant at the signs, I didn't know what the dangers here were - poisonous chemicals, machines run amok, or even just unstable building structures. The hexagon-things provided good traction, so I turned my head to check on the kaiju; it was still rolling to its feet. Not especially fast, then. I should probably have just turned the bike around and gone back down the slope; sucks to be me. New plan - try to hide out of sight of the thing, until it's not between me and the road anymore, and /then/ run away as fast as possible.
Over to my right, I saw an open garage door, with shadowed shapes inside, but room for the bike; I cut the engine to make myself less noisy, and bolted towards it, trying to gauge myself to get there as fast as I could and still stop without squealing the brakes. I jerked to a stop between a black cab-over big-rig to me left, and a trailer with a giant Pepsi logo spread across the side to my right. I swung my legs off the bike, noticed the truck's driver door was open, and almost dived in. I pulled it closed behind me, trying not to slam it...
... and crouched in the wheel well, next to the dusty pedals, panting.
I pulled off my helmet to free up my ears, lifting them to try and hear where the giant cat might be...
... and a basso voice came out of the dashboard, starting with "Watashi wa" before the pendant in my pocket provided, "Can I help you, little bunny?"
"Ssshh!" I hissed hurriedly. "Big monster," I whispered, fiddling to get the pendant's back open to reduce the volume. "Hiding."
The voice from the dash whispered, in English, "Glove compartment. Headphones," and then fell silent.
I adjusted my glasses, and looked around the cab a bit more. I was getting a very '70's vibe - 1970's, that is. All-analog dials, faux wood paneling, a CB radio, a combined 8-track player, cassette deck, and AM radio... I wondered what it was doing here, and how the paint-job was still so shiny. I thought about what the possible negative consequences might be of putting on a pair of headphones in a blue zone, and what the likelihood might be; and the likelihood of the giant cat hearing the voice if I didn't plug in the headphones, and smashing in the windows to get at me.
I set my helmet on the driver's seat, and, trying not to rise to where I could be seen from outside, crawled around the gearshift to the passenger side. There was a case of a couple of dozen cassette tapes on the floor in my way, so I put it on the passenger's seat. Inside the glove box was a random assortment of stuff - binoculars, a camera, a flashlight, a digital wristwatch, a black-and-wood automatic pistol... I blinked at that one, considered, and set it on the seat next to the tapes. I didn't see any ammunition, outside of whatever was in the gun itself, but did find a portable tape player, around which was wrapped a pair of headphones.
After crawling back to the driver's side, it took me a few moments to figure out enough of the extended dashboard's controls to rule them out, that the headphones didn't fit into the CB radio's jack, and that there was only one spot I could plug the headphones in: the AM radio. It took a bit of fiddling to get the designed-for-human headphones to hook into my ears and stay on; basically, I put them on upside-down, around the back of my head.
I whispered, "Can you hear me?"
"Yes, I can, little rabbit. What sort of monster are you hiding from?"
That was the second time he called me a rabbit - he could see me, too. I looked around for anything I might recognize as a camera, but didn't see anything. "It looked like a giant cat. Bigger than this building. It was eating a deer..."
"I see. It may be able to track you by scent. You should disguise that. Under the driver's seat are some bottles of soda. Open one and pour it over yourself."
I rearranged myself to peer under the seat - a couple of glass bottles of Pepsi, and an opener. I pulled them out, put the opener to the lid of one... and paused. "Um... I'm already in a truck, with the doors closed - and my bicycle out there probably smells more of me than the truck does."
"I suppose that's true. Sorry, bad idea. I can hear you panting - you can drink them if you want."
I put the bottles back. "Maybe later." I searched my mind for a plausible excuse for my hesitation, and found one. "My stomach isn't like a human's - it could make me sick."
"As you wish. Do you have a name, little bunny?"
"More than one. 'Bunny' works."
"Have I done something to make you nervous of me, Bunny?"
"Um... not really, but I'm hiding from a giant monster, in a posted danger zone that wasn't on my maps, in a truck that looks like it's century old and brand new at the same time, talking with someone I don't know anything about... is there any reason I /shouldn't/ be nervous?"
"I see your point. You have every right to feel the way you do. To start with, my name is Pepushikonboi, but you can call me Pepsi Convoy."
"Oh... kay..." That finally triggered a whole host of connections in my brain. In Japan, Optimus Prime was called Convoy; and, in the earlier versions, took the form of a cab-over semi; and was originally produced in, what was it, the late 70's? The toy lines that eventually turned into the Transformers were from the '70's, anyway.
I turned around to look at what should be the entrance to the sleeper compartment - but while there were lines that looked like they were seams for a door, I didn't see any actual way inside it. I wondered if there was a giant upside-down robot head in there, waiting to be flipped.
"Um, Convoy," I continued, intelligently, "Please tell me you're not going to go out and fight that monster..."
"I wish I could, but I must not. Technoville has threatened to destroy me with long-range artillery if I leave."
"... Artillery that isn't being used against the giant cat right now?"
"I understand it takes them some time for them to notice such things. I considered leaving after I saw the Statue of Liberty walk by-" I coughed. "Well, /a/ Statue of Liberty. I don't know if it was the original. The local humans were quite upset at the mess its footprints made of their roads. When I saw its pieces being shipped back, I decided that their threats were credible."
"Oh. Um, if you don't mind my asking, why does Technoville want to blow you up, but let you stay?"
"They fear all non-biological life that they have not disassembled to the last bit. However, unlike most of the robots who were created at the same time as me, I am not a warrior - so while dozens of other Convoys were destroyed, either by fighting other robots or by Technoville, I made a bargain. I would stay here, until there was a drought I could help with; and they would not have to use up the resources they would need to destroy me. Win-win-"
Convoy stopped speaking as a shadow fell across the garage's opening. I crouched down further, flattened my ears, and grabbed the gun from the passenger seat. I'd never held a real gun before - I was a Canadian - and didn't even know if this one had a safety, or where it was, but if the giant cat came in I didn't have much else to work with to even try to stay alive...
The shadow moved away. Meaning all I had to deal with for the next little while was an AI of unknown design or goals housed in the chassis of a giant truck, which might or might not be able to rearrange itself into a large bipedal form...
"I have to admit," I carefully whispered, "I'm kind of scared of you."
"Why is that, Bunny?"
"Well... you're the first robot I've ever had a conversation with. I don't know much about robots - but I've heard they can be dangerous, or unpredictable."
"I can understand that. Would it help if I told you more about myself?"
"Maybe," I hedged.
"Alright, then. About ten years ago, one of the manufacturies near Detroit got orders to turn some stories into reality. So it started making the robots from those stories, as accurately as it could. There's no such thing as force fields in real life, or super-strong alien alloys, so not all the robots worked right. Still, most of them started walking around, and they were programmed to behave as much like the characters in the stories as they could."
"Why did that order get sent?"
"I truly do not know. It might even have been an accident. What happened next didn't seem like it had any sort of plan. Some of the robots were villains - stupid villains - who wanted to conquer and destroy. And some of the robots were heroes - stupid heroes - who wanted to protect people from the villains. And so, just like in the stories they were from, they started swinging fists at each other, and shooting their beam weapons. And since it's always possible to pour more energy into a piece of metal than the chemical bonds can handle... they all turned each other into scrap metal."
"You don't look much like scrap..."
"Well, thank you. You see, not all the robots were heroes or villains. Some were just created from toys with no story. Some were silly, or insane, or had other goals. While I was built to behave a little like some of the hero robots, I was really built with one goal: to quench peoples' thirst."
"That doesn't sound so bad. Wait - so when you told me to pour the soda on me, wouldn't that have wasted it?"
"If you had, I would have suggested you drink whatever was left in the bottle."
"Oh. Um... is that your only goal?"
"Is it not enough?"
"I... don't know. I once promised myself that if I couldn't think of anything more important to do with my life, I'd pretend my goal was to read comics, until I came up with a better idea."
"I can think of many better ideas."
"So could I - that was part of the trick. If I could think of anything I should do instead of reading comics, well, there was my plan. I don't mean to sound... bad or insulting or anything, but just giving people pop to drink sounds... about as important as reading comics."
"Any one bottle of soda may not contribute much. But there are millions of people, suffering all sorts of ills. A refreshing drink can save a life, or let someone focus on their job instead of their parched throat. Freedom from thirst is the right of all sentient beings - though it is a right not all can enjoy fully, yet."
"That... sounds well and good. But if that's what you want to do... then why are you letting Technoville keep you penned up here, where you can't offer anyone a drink?"
"A few reasons. I was designed to match a story - a story in which robots needed tremendous amounts of energy. Most of the parking lot here collects solar power, which allows me, and the others parked here, to stay conscious. It appears that it will be some decades before a suitable energy or fuel infrastructure will be put into place again. My parts deteriorate very slowly; I can wait for Technoville's government to change its policies, or be replaced."
"Okay. I guess I can see that - I don't know how long I'm going to live, but if it's as long as I hope, I guess I could make long-term plans like that, too. I think I might get bored, though."
"There, my programming is less like a human's. I spend most of my time using what little computing power I have to try to solve various problems on how to help peoples' thirst, once I do leave here. Sometimes I simulate conversations with individuals, to try to figure out how to quench their thirst - or to get them to help quench others' thirsts. With the right tools, small actions can have big results."
"Tools?"
"The most important is a free mind. If I could, I would build a computer that needed much less power to run my mind in - and build it as big as possible, so I could run as many simulations as I could, to work out the absolute best ways to give as many people as possible as much to drink as they could ever need."
"Uh - that's starting to sound a bit scary again. Thirst isn't the only problem people have, and, well, there can be such a thing as too much of a good thing. If you filled this cab up with pop for me, I'd be trying too hard to get air to drink any..."
"That's a rather silly and simplistic solution, which I would never do. Drowning people doesn't do a thing to make them less thirsty."
"Well, technically, dead people don't feel thirsty."
"Technically true. But my mission is derived from a Japanese phrase that means 'cure people's thirst'. Killing people isn't curing them."
"How about... changing their nervous system, so they don't ever actually feel thirsty?"
"That would only remove the sensation, but leave the thirst itself in place."
"Changing people so they don't need to drink anymore?"
"A possible method. There are some desert organisms which require very little water, such as the kangaroo rat - and I don't know how much you know about yourself, little Bunny, but there was a time when there weren't any people with fur. Somebody had to make people like you - and if you don't mind living, then if kangaroo rat people were made, they wouldn't mind living, either."
"Well - I'm pretty sure lots of people around today wouldn't want to get turned into kangaroo rats. I don't know that I would."
"You said that you hope to live a long time?"
"Hm? Well, yes, as long as possible, barring a few exceptions where increasing my lifespan increases the odds that sapient life goes extinct."
"Organic brains eventually get old and die. If you want to live a really long time, you're going to have to move into another sort of body... and robots don't get thirsty."
"Um. Well, the only people I know of who uploaded their minds into digital form were in the cities that turned into computers - and as far as I know, they're all dead. Or as close as makes no difference."
"Then do not do what they did - place yourself into a computer that does not connect the way those ones did."
"It's kind of a moot point - I don't know how, or of anyone else who knows how, either."
"Maybe not now... but if you live long enough, that knowledge may be rediscovered, too. And maybe what I say to you now will help you make a decision then."
"... Playing the long game, again?"
"I could easily spend a century in this garage. The long game is the only one I can play."
"Ah. Well - if nothing else, I need to go out to eat and - uh - excrete, and get past that giant cat without dying, and after that deal with all sorts of other dangers without getting killed in all sorts of ways. I was nearly lynched just the other day. So, looking at it all realistically, the odds are that I'm probably not going to survive long enough to even find a cryonicist, let alone find the tech to upload my mind, let alone face the decision about whether or not to upload."
"There are ways to increase your odds of survival."
"I'm using all the ones I can. So far, 'running away' has been Plan A, and if it doesn't work... there are only so many Plan Bs I'm physically and mentally capable of."
"What you need are better tools."
"... Why am I suddenly getting the feeling of being in one of those stories, where the protagonist is tempted with exactly what they've said they wanted?"
"Probably because I have not interacted with enough people to refine my model of human - and human-derived person - behaviour, and I'm giving off subconscious signals I'm not trying to."
"Ah. Yes. Probably that."
"You have not spoken of a home to go to, or a community you live in. Are you alone?"
"... Usually, that question is a prelude to being attacked if the answer is 'yes', since it means there's nobody to retaliate on my behalf."
"Have people truly become so untrustworthy and mercenary?"
"... Maybe not. Have I mentioned that I'm feeling nervous?"
"You are alone - and fear what others can do to you, that you cannot stop, or cannot even see coming."
"I don't think I can argue with that."
"I am surprised you are able to sleep at night."
"I've been getting better at finding places that are out of sight."
"But if someone did come across you while you were unconscious, you would be helpless."
"I suppose. Is this conversational direction going somewhere in particular, other than to keep me feeling nervous?"
"Consider - if you had a guard animal, who could wake you should danger approach, you would be able to spend less time trying to hide."
"I... suppose? I don't know any sort of trained animal that could do that, and that I could take with me and keep fed on the road."
"I am going to do something that will probably startle you. Please try not to scream or jump around; that monster is likely still prowling around nearby."
"Hooboy. Can I reserve the right to jump outside and bike away anyway?"
"If you like." The next words came not just through the headphones, but also in the cab. "Scorpia, awake," though the words outside the headset sounded more like, "Mewosamasu, Sukorupia."
In the glove compartment, something moved. A small, mostly-black figure crawled out, and onto the dash; given what Convoy had said, I wasn't all that surprised that it was scorpion-shaped, with a half-dozen legs, a pair of claws, and a tail that curved over its body. That body, however, was made out of the digital watch I'd seen earlier.
Convoy continued, through the headphones, "She is too small to have more than animal-level intelligence - but that is enough to respond to a variety of orders, such as 'stand guard', or 'shock me awake half an hour before sunrise'."
"'Shock'?" I was still holding onto the door handle.
"She is electrically powered - if no other source is available, the watch strap collects solar energy, and she uses very little while she's in watch form."
"... And why are you bringing her out, and sort of passively offering me a... robotic scorpion transforming watch thing?"
"I encounter all too few new people these days - even fewer who are not military and under careful orders from Technoville's government. If you live very long, you will likely live a very long time indeed - and if that happens, I would prefer that you think well of me, who helped you out when you were young and frightened."
"And if I don't live long?"
"Then Scorpia will try to make her way back here, if she can."
"Oh. Well, it's good you've got a backup plan."
"You do not seem enthused."
"I don't? Well, maybe I'm kind of trapped in a talking truck with a scorpion robot that responds to the truck's commands, while that truck is talking about staying rooted in one spot longer than I've been alive without seeming bothered by any of that..."
"I guessed that you would prefer an animal-shaped assistant to a bipedal one. If this particular shape displeases you, many of the cassette tapes turn from rectangles into other shapes: dinosaurs, lions, a rhino, felines, birds, bats..."
"I... don't think that would help any. Or not much, anyway."
"If you do not want her, then you do not have to take her." Outside the cabin, the words "Sukorupia, suripu jotai ni hairu," echoed, while the headphones translated, "Scorpia, go to sleep." The smaller-than-palm-sized robot scuttled back into the glove compartment.
"Thanks. Um - I've had a lot to take in, and I'm probably going to need to be fresh to get away from that cat... is there somewhere nearby I can take a quick nap? ... No offense, but without worrying about teeny little robots crawling over me while I'm asleep?"
--
As I pedaled away from Pepsi Convoy and his fellow non-heroic, non-villainous robot companions, I kept glancing down at the new accessory I was wearing on my wrist. Sure, it was entirely possible that it was part of some nefarious scheme that would result in every value I held dear being trampled in pursuit of some unknowable, or mind-bogglingly trivial, goal. The thing was, the same could be said for the pendant that let me talk to the Germanic-speaking farmers this region was full of, and to those who used Technoville's peculiar tongue. The same could be said for my own skeleton, and maybe the rest of my body. At this point, it was getting to be less a matter of whether I was a pawn in somebody's larger plots, and more a matter of who I wanted to be the pawn of.
Besides, after Convoy had reprogrammed Scorpia to respond to English, she could do just about every trick I could think of, and was surprisingly cute when doing so.
And I'd been feeling a lot less nervous after I grabbed my radio from my bike, and was able to call in an airstrike on the kaiju.
When I left Johann Voth and Ruth's farm, I fired up the bicycle's motor to get as far away from their neighbours as I could, without killing myself pedaling. Technoville didn't seem to have a petroleum industry, but they did have various ways of making bio-diesel and alcohol. None of the farmers had been willing to trade or sell me any fuel they had, so I'd been conserving it - but standing face-to-face with people who'd been seriously considering turning my insides into my outsides, in the name of their faith, was making me reconsider the whole 'trade with the locals' approach I'd been taking.
Amish surviving a hostile Singularity? Sure, they've always had a decent tech base and strong internal support structure. Amish adapting to treat post-Singularity effects as curses and demons? Well, it wasn't as far-fetched as expecting them to start building nanotech on their own. Having to dress up in actual dresses, and not make religious waves? My native culture was erased from the Earth - I was going to have to make social compromises no matter where I went anymore.
Risking my life merely for some better food and a more comfortable bed? That was just insane.
I was also disturbed by my mammaries' little surprise. I was used to having a pretty good idea of how my body worked - all those high school biology courses, plus spending as much time in the library as I could when I was growing, plus the Internet and Wikipedia and so on later on. Exercise too little, get fat; eat too much sugar, end up with diabetes; spend too much time getting my cells irritated by chemicals or UV, end up with cancer. There wasn't anything in any of that for suddenly producing nutrient fluid exactly when someone needed it. If that could happen - then what else could? Was my pink fur going to turn purple in winter? If I broke an arm-bone, would the computer in it go insane and start trying to strangle me with my own hand? How much understanding did my skeleton have about what was going on around me, and what were its goals, or preferences, or heuristics?
And just about everybody I'd known had been pretty certain that, one way or another, my life would become a lot simpler after I died...
--
The day was cloudy, threatening a downpour at any time, but never quite breaking out into rain. While the clouds kept the noon sun from broiling me directly, the humidity was a bit of a killer - my furry form still sweated like any other human, but it just wasn't evaporating, so I stayed hot, so I kept on sweating.
Pedaling up an incline, by the time I was halfway to the top I was gasping for breath; so I gave a mental shrug and fired up the motor again. At this rate, I was going to take a break in the first bit of shade I found; and as I looked back over the fields and meadows, if there was as little shade once I'd made it over the hump as I'd been going through, I decided to break out the tent and make my own.
Naturally, as soon as the road levelled off, what I saw made me change my plans. There were two rather obvious sites. To the left of the road, was what looked like a commercial-industrial area, with small warehouses, storefronts, garages, and the like, embedded in parking lots made up of hexagons just over a foot across. More significantly, every ten, twenty meters or so, were stopsign-sized signs - blue, instead of red. I couldn't read the language describing the details, but they matched what I'd been told indicated a dangerous 'blue zone' of dangerous, potentially lethal, conditions.
Over on the right side of the road, rolling around in the grass and flowers, was a five-story, grayish-furred striped house-cat. Which had, apparently, stopped tossing a deer around like a mouse at the sound of my engine, eyes and ears pointed straight at me.
I turned my bike into the blue zone and gunned the throttle.
It probably wasn't the best plan; it might not even have been a good plan. I wasn't thinking about what sort of materials would let a feline-shaped thing of that size walk around; it was the decision I made in the split-second of imagining ending up in a giant's stomach.
Without having had time to point the translator pendant at the signs, I didn't know what the dangers here were - poisonous chemicals, machines run amok, or even just unstable building structures. The hexagon-things provided good traction, so I turned my head to check on the kaiju; it was still rolling to its feet. Not especially fast, then. I should probably have just turned the bike around and gone back down the slope; sucks to be me. New plan - try to hide out of sight of the thing, until it's not between me and the road anymore, and /then/ run away as fast as possible.
Over to my right, I saw an open garage door, with shadowed shapes inside, but room for the bike; I cut the engine to make myself less noisy, and bolted towards it, trying to gauge myself to get there as fast as I could and still stop without squealing the brakes. I jerked to a stop between a black cab-over big-rig to me left, and a trailer with a giant Pepsi logo spread across the side to my right. I swung my legs off the bike, noticed the truck's driver door was open, and almost dived in. I pulled it closed behind me, trying not to slam it...
... and crouched in the wheel well, next to the dusty pedals, panting.
I pulled off my helmet to free up my ears, lifting them to try and hear where the giant cat might be...
... and a basso voice came out of the dashboard, starting with "Watashi wa" before the pendant in my pocket provided, "Can I help you, little bunny?"
"Ssshh!" I hissed hurriedly. "Big monster," I whispered, fiddling to get the pendant's back open to reduce the volume. "Hiding."
The voice from the dash whispered, in English, "Glove compartment. Headphones," and then fell silent.
I adjusted my glasses, and looked around the cab a bit more. I was getting a very '70's vibe - 1970's, that is. All-analog dials, faux wood paneling, a CB radio, a combined 8-track player, cassette deck, and AM radio... I wondered what it was doing here, and how the paint-job was still so shiny. I thought about what the possible negative consequences might be of putting on a pair of headphones in a blue zone, and what the likelihood might be; and the likelihood of the giant cat hearing the voice if I didn't plug in the headphones, and smashing in the windows to get at me.
I set my helmet on the driver's seat, and, trying not to rise to where I could be seen from outside, crawled around the gearshift to the passenger side. There was a case of a couple of dozen cassette tapes on the floor in my way, so I put it on the passenger's seat. Inside the glove box was a random assortment of stuff - binoculars, a camera, a flashlight, a digital wristwatch, a black-and-wood automatic pistol... I blinked at that one, considered, and set it on the seat next to the tapes. I didn't see any ammunition, outside of whatever was in the gun itself, but did find a portable tape player, around which was wrapped a pair of headphones.
After crawling back to the driver's side, it took me a few moments to figure out enough of the extended dashboard's controls to rule them out, that the headphones didn't fit into the CB radio's jack, and that there was only one spot I could plug the headphones in: the AM radio. It took a bit of fiddling to get the designed-for-human headphones to hook into my ears and stay on; basically, I put them on upside-down, around the back of my head.
I whispered, "Can you hear me?"
"Yes, I can, little rabbit. What sort of monster are you hiding from?"
That was the second time he called me a rabbit - he could see me, too. I looked around for anything I might recognize as a camera, but didn't see anything. "It looked like a giant cat. Bigger than this building. It was eating a deer..."
"I see. It may be able to track you by scent. You should disguise that. Under the driver's seat are some bottles of soda. Open one and pour it over yourself."
I rearranged myself to peer under the seat - a couple of glass bottles of Pepsi, and an opener. I pulled them out, put the opener to the lid of one... and paused. "Um... I'm already in a truck, with the doors closed - and my bicycle out there probably smells more of me than the truck does."
"I suppose that's true. Sorry, bad idea. I can hear you panting - you can drink them if you want."
I put the bottles back. "Maybe later." I searched my mind for a plausible excuse for my hesitation, and found one. "My stomach isn't like a human's - it could make me sick."
"As you wish. Do you have a name, little bunny?"
"More than one. 'Bunny' works."
"Have I done something to make you nervous of me, Bunny?"
"Um... not really, but I'm hiding from a giant monster, in a posted danger zone that wasn't on my maps, in a truck that looks like it's century old and brand new at the same time, talking with someone I don't know anything about... is there any reason I /shouldn't/ be nervous?"
"I see your point. You have every right to feel the way you do. To start with, my name is Pepushikonboi, but you can call me Pepsi Convoy."
"Oh... kay..." That finally triggered a whole host of connections in my brain. In Japan, Optimus Prime was called Convoy; and, in the earlier versions, took the form of a cab-over semi; and was originally produced in, what was it, the late 70's? The toy lines that eventually turned into the Transformers were from the '70's, anyway.
I turned around to look at what should be the entrance to the sleeper compartment - but while there were lines that looked like they were seams for a door, I didn't see any actual way inside it. I wondered if there was a giant upside-down robot head in there, waiting to be flipped.
"Um, Convoy," I continued, intelligently, "Please tell me you're not going to go out and fight that monster..."
"I wish I could, but I must not. Technoville has threatened to destroy me with long-range artillery if I leave."
"... Artillery that isn't being used against the giant cat right now?"
"I understand it takes them some time for them to notice such things. I considered leaving after I saw the Statue of Liberty walk by-" I coughed. "Well, /a/ Statue of Liberty. I don't know if it was the original. The local humans were quite upset at the mess its footprints made of their roads. When I saw its pieces being shipped back, I decided that their threats were credible."
"Oh. Um, if you don't mind my asking, why does Technoville want to blow you up, but let you stay?"
"They fear all non-biological life that they have not disassembled to the last bit. However, unlike most of the robots who were created at the same time as me, I am not a warrior - so while dozens of other Convoys were destroyed, either by fighting other robots or by Technoville, I made a bargain. I would stay here, until there was a drought I could help with; and they would not have to use up the resources they would need to destroy me. Win-win-"
Convoy stopped speaking as a shadow fell across the garage's opening. I crouched down further, flattened my ears, and grabbed the gun from the passenger seat. I'd never held a real gun before - I was a Canadian - and didn't even know if this one had a safety, or where it was, but if the giant cat came in I didn't have much else to work with to even try to stay alive...
The shadow moved away. Meaning all I had to deal with for the next little while was an AI of unknown design or goals housed in the chassis of a giant truck, which might or might not be able to rearrange itself into a large bipedal form...
"I have to admit," I carefully whispered, "I'm kind of scared of you."
"Why is that, Bunny?"
"Well... you're the first robot I've ever had a conversation with. I don't know much about robots - but I've heard they can be dangerous, or unpredictable."
"I can understand that. Would it help if I told you more about myself?"
"Maybe," I hedged.
"Alright, then. About ten years ago, one of the manufacturies near Detroit got orders to turn some stories into reality. So it started making the robots from those stories, as accurately as it could. There's no such thing as force fields in real life, or super-strong alien alloys, so not all the robots worked right. Still, most of them started walking around, and they were programmed to behave as much like the characters in the stories as they could."
"Why did that order get sent?"
"I truly do not know. It might even have been an accident. What happened next didn't seem like it had any sort of plan. Some of the robots were villains - stupid villains - who wanted to conquer and destroy. And some of the robots were heroes - stupid heroes - who wanted to protect people from the villains. And so, just like in the stories they were from, they started swinging fists at each other, and shooting their beam weapons. And since it's always possible to pour more energy into a piece of metal than the chemical bonds can handle... they all turned each other into scrap metal."
"You don't look much like scrap..."
"Well, thank you. You see, not all the robots were heroes or villains. Some were just created from toys with no story. Some were silly, or insane, or had other goals. While I was built to behave a little like some of the hero robots, I was really built with one goal: to quench peoples' thirst."
"That doesn't sound so bad. Wait - so when you told me to pour the soda on me, wouldn't that have wasted it?"
"If you had, I would have suggested you drink whatever was left in the bottle."
"Oh. Um... is that your only goal?"
"Is it not enough?"
"I... don't know. I once promised myself that if I couldn't think of anything more important to do with my life, I'd pretend my goal was to read comics, until I came up with a better idea."
"I can think of many better ideas."
"So could I - that was part of the trick. If I could think of anything I should do instead of reading comics, well, there was my plan. I don't mean to sound... bad or insulting or anything, but just giving people pop to drink sounds... about as important as reading comics."
"Any one bottle of soda may not contribute much. But there are millions of people, suffering all sorts of ills. A refreshing drink can save a life, or let someone focus on their job instead of their parched throat. Freedom from thirst is the right of all sentient beings - though it is a right not all can enjoy fully, yet."
"That... sounds well and good. But if that's what you want to do... then why are you letting Technoville keep you penned up here, where you can't offer anyone a drink?"
"A few reasons. I was designed to match a story - a story in which robots needed tremendous amounts of energy. Most of the parking lot here collects solar power, which allows me, and the others parked here, to stay conscious. It appears that it will be some decades before a suitable energy or fuel infrastructure will be put into place again. My parts deteriorate very slowly; I can wait for Technoville's government to change its policies, or be replaced."
"Okay. I guess I can see that - I don't know how long I'm going to live, but if it's as long as I hope, I guess I could make long-term plans like that, too. I think I might get bored, though."
"There, my programming is less like a human's. I spend most of my time using what little computing power I have to try to solve various problems on how to help peoples' thirst, once I do leave here. Sometimes I simulate conversations with individuals, to try to figure out how to quench their thirst - or to get them to help quench others' thirsts. With the right tools, small actions can have big results."
"Tools?"
"The most important is a free mind. If I could, I would build a computer that needed much less power to run my mind in - and build it as big as possible, so I could run as many simulations as I could, to work out the absolute best ways to give as many people as possible as much to drink as they could ever need."
"Uh - that's starting to sound a bit scary again. Thirst isn't the only problem people have, and, well, there can be such a thing as too much of a good thing. If you filled this cab up with pop for me, I'd be trying too hard to get air to drink any..."
"That's a rather silly and simplistic solution, which I would never do. Drowning people doesn't do a thing to make them less thirsty."
"Well, technically, dead people don't feel thirsty."
"Technically true. But my mission is derived from a Japanese phrase that means 'cure people's thirst'. Killing people isn't curing them."
"How about... changing their nervous system, so they don't ever actually feel thirsty?"
"That would only remove the sensation, but leave the thirst itself in place."
"Changing people so they don't need to drink anymore?"
"A possible method. There are some desert organisms which require very little water, such as the kangaroo rat - and I don't know how much you know about yourself, little Bunny, but there was a time when there weren't any people with fur. Somebody had to make people like you - and if you don't mind living, then if kangaroo rat people were made, they wouldn't mind living, either."
"Well - I'm pretty sure lots of people around today wouldn't want to get turned into kangaroo rats. I don't know that I would."
"You said that you hope to live a long time?"
"Hm? Well, yes, as long as possible, barring a few exceptions where increasing my lifespan increases the odds that sapient life goes extinct."
"Organic brains eventually get old and die. If you want to live a really long time, you're going to have to move into another sort of body... and robots don't get thirsty."
"Um. Well, the only people I know of who uploaded their minds into digital form were in the cities that turned into computers - and as far as I know, they're all dead. Or as close as makes no difference."
"Then do not do what they did - place yourself into a computer that does not connect the way those ones did."
"It's kind of a moot point - I don't know how, or of anyone else who knows how, either."
"Maybe not now... but if you live long enough, that knowledge may be rediscovered, too. And maybe what I say to you now will help you make a decision then."
"... Playing the long game, again?"
"I could easily spend a century in this garage. The long game is the only one I can play."
"Ah. Well - if nothing else, I need to go out to eat and - uh - excrete, and get past that giant cat without dying, and after that deal with all sorts of other dangers without getting killed in all sorts of ways. I was nearly lynched just the other day. So, looking at it all realistically, the odds are that I'm probably not going to survive long enough to even find a cryonicist, let alone find the tech to upload my mind, let alone face the decision about whether or not to upload."
"There are ways to increase your odds of survival."
"I'm using all the ones I can. So far, 'running away' has been Plan A, and if it doesn't work... there are only so many Plan Bs I'm physically and mentally capable of."
"What you need are better tools."
"... Why am I suddenly getting the feeling of being in one of those stories, where the protagonist is tempted with exactly what they've said they wanted?"
"Probably because I have not interacted with enough people to refine my model of human - and human-derived person - behaviour, and I'm giving off subconscious signals I'm not trying to."
"Ah. Yes. Probably that."
"You have not spoken of a home to go to, or a community you live in. Are you alone?"
"... Usually, that question is a prelude to being attacked if the answer is 'yes', since it means there's nobody to retaliate on my behalf."
"Have people truly become so untrustworthy and mercenary?"
"... Maybe not. Have I mentioned that I'm feeling nervous?"
"You are alone - and fear what others can do to you, that you cannot stop, or cannot even see coming."
"I don't think I can argue with that."
"I am surprised you are able to sleep at night."
"I've been getting better at finding places that are out of sight."
"But if someone did come across you while you were unconscious, you would be helpless."
"I suppose. Is this conversational direction going somewhere in particular, other than to keep me feeling nervous?"
"Consider - if you had a guard animal, who could wake you should danger approach, you would be able to spend less time trying to hide."
"I... suppose? I don't know any sort of trained animal that could do that, and that I could take with me and keep fed on the road."
"I am going to do something that will probably startle you. Please try not to scream or jump around; that monster is likely still prowling around nearby."
"Hooboy. Can I reserve the right to jump outside and bike away anyway?"
"If you like." The next words came not just through the headphones, but also in the cab. "Scorpia, awake," though the words outside the headset sounded more like, "Mewosamasu, Sukorupia."
In the glove compartment, something moved. A small, mostly-black figure crawled out, and onto the dash; given what Convoy had said, I wasn't all that surprised that it was scorpion-shaped, with a half-dozen legs, a pair of claws, and a tail that curved over its body. That body, however, was made out of the digital watch I'd seen earlier.
Convoy continued, through the headphones, "She is too small to have more than animal-level intelligence - but that is enough to respond to a variety of orders, such as 'stand guard', or 'shock me awake half an hour before sunrise'."
"'Shock'?" I was still holding onto the door handle.
"She is electrically powered - if no other source is available, the watch strap collects solar energy, and she uses very little while she's in watch form."
"... And why are you bringing her out, and sort of passively offering me a... robotic scorpion transforming watch thing?"
"I encounter all too few new people these days - even fewer who are not military and under careful orders from Technoville's government. If you live very long, you will likely live a very long time indeed - and if that happens, I would prefer that you think well of me, who helped you out when you were young and frightened."
"And if I don't live long?"
"Then Scorpia will try to make her way back here, if she can."
"Oh. Well, it's good you've got a backup plan."
"You do not seem enthused."
"I don't? Well, maybe I'm kind of trapped in a talking truck with a scorpion robot that responds to the truck's commands, while that truck is talking about staying rooted in one spot longer than I've been alive without seeming bothered by any of that..."
"I guessed that you would prefer an animal-shaped assistant to a bipedal one. If this particular shape displeases you, many of the cassette tapes turn from rectangles into other shapes: dinosaurs, lions, a rhino, felines, birds, bats..."
"I... don't think that would help any. Or not much, anyway."
"If you do not want her, then you do not have to take her." Outside the cabin, the words "Sukorupia, suripu jotai ni hairu," echoed, while the headphones translated, "Scorpia, go to sleep." The smaller-than-palm-sized robot scuttled back into the glove compartment.
"Thanks. Um - I've had a lot to take in, and I'm probably going to need to be fresh to get away from that cat... is there somewhere nearby I can take a quick nap? ... No offense, but without worrying about teeny little robots crawling over me while I'm asleep?"
--
As I pedaled away from Pepsi Convoy and his fellow non-heroic, non-villainous robot companions, I kept glancing down at the new accessory I was wearing on my wrist. Sure, it was entirely possible that it was part of some nefarious scheme that would result in every value I held dear being trampled in pursuit of some unknowable, or mind-bogglingly trivial, goal. The thing was, the same could be said for the pendant that let me talk to the Germanic-speaking farmers this region was full of, and to those who used Technoville's peculiar tongue. The same could be said for my own skeleton, and maybe the rest of my body. At this point, it was getting to be less a matter of whether I was a pawn in somebody's larger plots, and more a matter of who I wanted to be the pawn of.
Besides, after Convoy had reprogrammed Scorpia to respond to English, she could do just about every trick I could think of, and was surprisingly cute when doing so.
And I'd been feeling a lot less nervous after I grabbed my radio from my bike, and was able to call in an airstrike on the kaiju.
DataPacRat
Truthseeker
- Location
- Niagara, Canada
*Chapter Four: Re-Joining*
After booting around what seemed like all of southern Michigan, on a route that practically corkscrewed to avoid the zones Technoville had designated as dangerous, once I got to the Raisin River, it was practically a straight shot to Lake Erie. The town at the river's mouth was called Monroe, and whatever it might have been before, now it was a fishing village of, I guessed, maybe around a thousand souls.
I hadn't realized it until then, but I'd missed the Lakes. I'd spent more of my pre-mortem life next to Lake Ontario than Lake Erie, but had enjoyed both - especially just looking out over the water at the horizon from under a shade tree, listening to the birds, watching the squirrels, munching a snack, and maybe reading or putting on a bit of music. All I had to read at the moment was the propagandistic Technoville ebook library, I was nibbling on the local flowers instead of just looking at them, and I had to provide my own music with my (terrible) harmonica playing... but this was the first time I'd felt /really/ relaxed since I'd been revived.
More good news, some of the people in Monroe spoke a version of English I could understand. (Well, mostly.) I didn't have any of the scrip they used for money, but with a bit of haggling about some of my trade goods, and my help with some chores after, I bought myself an honest-to-goodness meal of deep-fried battered fish and chips, with salt and vinegar, pickles, and tartar sauce. There was even a wedge of lemon - or, at least, something that was close enough to a lemon that I wasn't going to ask where it came from.
--
From Monroe, the old interstate was maintained well enough that it was less than a day's ride to Toledo - or, as the most people seemed to call it, Dogtown (or their native language's translation thereof). This was my first post-Singularity city, and it didn't disappoint. I heard over a dozen different languages, though the lingua franca between different groups seemed to be another variation of English. (From the signs I saw, it had a peculiar form of spelling, that I had to puzzle out practically letter by letter; I felt a flash of annoyance that I was nearly illiterate, outside of the ebook reader Technoville had provided in my native idiom.) There were mixes of nineteenth-century tech with mid-twenty-first, like a waterwheel that both ground bread and spun a small generator to recharge peoples' batteries.
And I was far from the only non-human wandering around and doing business. Outside of the human majority, bipedal animals like myself seemed most common, followed by centauroids, elves (or maybe Vulcans), Klingons (or maybe orcs), and a few rare cyborgs. (Or maybe nearly everyone was a cyborg, and those few were just the ones who didn't hide the metal bits.) I even caught a momentary glimpse of what I thought was another bunny-person, down a side-street, though that might have been pareidolia.
On the road, I'd been able to get away with wearing the minimum possible. I'd also gotten away with keeping my backpack stuffed into the trailer, against standard protocol for Technoville couriers. (In theory, such a courier could lose the trailer and still keep going with the backpack; then lose the pack and keep going with the safari vest; then lose the vest and keep going with belt and cargo pants or shorts... and if they lost those, they really had some explaining to do.) But before I made it into the many streets of the city, I simply had to heave a sigh, and pull on the full set of fur-twisting clothes, shoulder the pack, and make sure everything that could be locked away against pickpockets and other thieves was sealed as tight as possible. As additional deterrent, I strapped my machete to my right thigh, and pretended that I knew how to use it in a fight.
While I kind of wanted to explore a bit, in search of anything resembling libraries, bookstores, or internet cafes, I was obligated to make one stop as early as possible - Technoville's embassy to Dogtown. (Or maybe consulate, or military base - the TV'ers I'd talked with didn't seem interested in going into details about the what, only the where.)
When I finished following the map, I arrived at a stone wall with a gate - and a pair of fellows in black, with helmets and gasmasks that obscured their features, and gun-type weapons bigger than pistols and shorter than rifles - from what little I knew, I guessed submachine guns. Which shifted slightly as I stopped, to point at the ground halfway between each of them and me.
"Um, hi," I said, pulling out the translator. They didn't say anything. A few pokes inside the back of the pendant told it to translate into Technovillian. "I was told to come here. Um - do you need to see my ID card?"
The one on my left shifted his head a bit. "No unverified computing devices are allowed inside."
"Oh. Well, that's a bit of a problem, since there's computer stuff inside me."
"Then you can't go in."
"Oh. Well, I'm supposed to at least deliver the bike and equipment to Technoville authorities, which means you guys. Can I pass it to you and have you push it in, then?"
"No equipment goes in without a chain-of-custody document."
"Okay... can you get me one of those?"
"We are required to stay at our posts until relieved."
"... Can I get one of those some other way?"
"I have no idea."
"Oh. Um - maybe I should just head out, and radio in for instructions?" I started turning the front wheel, but froze as the weapons shifted to aim a few inches closer to my feet.
"Proprietary Technoville equipment may not be removed by unauthorized personnel."
"... So you're not going to let me ride off?"
"No."
"Okaaay... can I leave the bike here and /walk/ away?"
"Unattended possessions are considered a bomb threat."
I looked at the one on the left, then the one on the right. "You're not joking, or playing a prank, or anything like that, are you?"
"No."
"Right." I ran my available options through my mind... and chose the one that seemed most likely to create a useful effect.
--
I'd made it through "Flood"'s first few songs, and was halfway through 'Dead', when someone came from inside the gate. Dressed in black like the pair of gas-masked grunts, but without the headgear.
"Now it's over, I'm dead, and I haven't done anything that I want. Or I'm still alive and there's nothing I want to do!", I belted out enthusiastically, and paused instead of jumping into the second half.
"Would anybody care to explain?" asked the newcomer.
I shrugged. "These fellows wouldn't let me in or leave. I figured I'd eventually need to buy food and water." I bent down and picked up some of the coins that had been tossed into the helmet, squinting at the engravings. "I wonder what the local prices are for getting hay delivered."
He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. "And you needed to strip naked to put on your... minstrel performance?"
"I'm not naked - I'm wearing fur." He opened his eyes and glared. I shrugged again, and started sorting out my take from ten minutes of unskilled-but-cheerful busking. "Fine, I'm naked. I stripped to get the attention of someone in the embassy who was slightly more in the loop than... these two fine, upstanding personnel who are unimpeachable in their devotion to following orders."
He heaved a sigh. "Put your clothes back on and come inside."
"I'm not sure I should. If it's this hard to get in, how hard will it be for me to get out, if you happen to decide to detain me for some reason, or none at all?"
"You're a member of the Technoville Auxiliaries. I order, you obey. Come inside, mister!"
I didn't move. "You seem to be misinformed. I'm not a member of anything. I made a bargain - Technoville supplied equipment, and I'd send back reports on unscouted areas. Well, here's your equipment, down to the last stitch of clothing you gave me. If I give you these glasses, too, then our deal's done, and I don't owe you a thing more."
"What, not the wristwatch?"
"I got the watch on my own merits, not from Technoville."
He started rubbing his temples. "I suppose you have a reply ready if I ordered these men to take you inside?"
"Half passive resistance, half pointing out that I'd be much less inclined to transmit reports after such treatment."
"Then please tell me, Miss. What, exactly, do you want?"
"Mostly? To go away. I was told to report in here. Hi - reporting in. If you'll tell your /fine/ upstanding guards here not to shoot me for riding off in the bicycle you folk traded me for my future reports, you can go back to your job and I can get on with mine."
"Don't you want updated maps, field manuals for dealing with various post-singularity techs, and other such things?"
"A little. But they're kind of feeling like cheese in a mousetrap. From all I can tell, if you ordered these two /fine/ upstanding fellows to shoot me dead in the street, you wouldn't face murder charges; the worst that would happen to you is you'd have to fill out a two-page form and answer three questions, or something to that effect. That hardly seems like a good basis for positive cooperation and mutual exchange, now does it?"
"I would face a /somewhat/ more thorough investigation than that. But I'm not paid enough to deal with this. I'm going to go inside and pass the buck. You can stay or leave, get dressed or stay nude, sing or dance a jig or I don't care. I suggest you don't go far, and you turn on your radio and listen for... whoever it is you radio with."
As he turned around and started stomping back in, I tried very hard not to smile as I started pulling my undergarments back on. (Much to the disappointment of the passers-by who'd been enjoying the various spectacles.) I might be a pawn, but I didn't have to be a mindless one. I'd gotten the impression that Technoville's hierarchy wasn't really set up to handle people who really could just drop everything and walk into the woods. As for being nude - well, in a sense, it wasn't really /my/ body, was it? And more importantly, I wanted the Technovillians to lose confidence in whatever model they were putting together of my behaviour, so they couldn't be quite sure whether any given interaction would follow whatever script they'd laid out for me. Sure, there was a risk that doing that would mean they'd decide to cut their losses and stick me in an oubliette to be forgotten; but since their investment in me so far amounted to little more than a motorized bicycle and related gear, and some surgery that my bunny-body had been built for in the first place, that risk didn't seem very likely. At least, it seemed less likely than them having to start treating me more like an actual person with my own wants, needs, and foibles.
I held up a piece of paper to the sunlight - it didn't quite match the scrip that had been used in Monroe, but seemed similar enough. I wondered if I could find a local newspaper.
--
I didn't just find a paper; I found the whole printing press. The building housing the 'Free Press', established in 2005, smelled wonderfully of ink and paper, and my eyes were drawn to the repeated motions of the presses. If I played my cards right, I might be able to work a deal with the publisher, sending them reports as well as - or instead of - to Technoville.
I left with slumped shoulders, and in a glum mood. Despite its name, the paper had a political officer that could, and did, veto stories harmful to Dogtown's government - or, I was informed, "which would make our good allies in Technoville unhappy".
I got directions to someplace that sold tea, or a reasonable facsimile - 'red tea', in this particular case, which I had no idea whether or not it had any relation to the South African rooibos plant, or green tea, or anything else. But it was made with boiled water, only cost a few of my coins, and most importantly, effectively let me rent a table to sit at and people-watch while I thought. Specifically, I was taking a bit of time to re-evaluate the various ideas and plans and plots I'd managed to come up with so far.
A lot of it came down to... what did I know, and how did I know it, and how confident was I in what I knew? Almost everything I'd been told had come through the filter of Technoville and its agents, and that happy little gang seemed to have all the hallmarks of an authoritarian military tyranny. Sure, it was possible that that organization was the best way to deal with post-Singularity conditions. It might even be the only way to maintain a high level of technology.
Only... that technology wasn't all that high a level. Back when I'd died, thirty-odd years before the Singularity had happened, it was supposed to create minds that could plumb the heights and depths of the laws of physics, figuring out how to do anything that was physically possible, leading to revolutions in not just any one technology, but how they all tied together. What Technoville had was... tanks, and planes, and computers. Sure, they'd domesticated some new species, and had some new enemies to point the tanks at, like the kitty-kaiju... but with to their careful separation of computers and communications, and their apparently non-democratic society (at least for certain sorts of undesirable people, of which I was one), they seemed downright old-fashioned to my eyes.
Why had they left the blue zone with Pepsi Convoy, Scorpia, and the rest off the map? Why had they given me a courier bike and let me come at least this far? Why had they bothered sticking my brain in this body in the first place? I couldn't think of good answers for any of these. (Well, I had a guess that they'd stuffed a bunch of one-time pads into the frame of the bike, which would be useful if I did make it this far and no great loss if I didn't, but that seemed more along the lines of taking advantage of an opportunity rather than a good reason in and of itself.) Without even being able to make a good guess at their motivations - or being able to figure out who any sub-groups who drove overall Technovillian policy were - I couldn't even figure out if, should I head back to their embassy here in Dogtown, whether they'd give me more supplies and pat me on the head and send me on my way, or shoot me on sight.
Convoy was easier to figure out than Technoville was - and the more I thought about his one goal, and the various ways he could go about filling it if he was given the chance, the more I felt like calling in another airstrike might be the best plan all around. I rubbed a finger around Scorpia's display, thoughtfully. Convoy could be a source of tools outside of Technoville's control, if I went back there. I didn't want to do anything that would increase the odds of him deciding to convert every living human (and human-like person) into a non-thirsty robot, whether we wanted or not, among less pleasant possibilities... but if he thought the odds of me living long enough to help him were good enough to try influencing me in his favor, by providing aid and materiel... and if that materiel helped deal with any even less pleasant goals other intelligences were working to achieve... it just might be a deal worth taking.
I moved my finger to the fur on the back of my hand. I wondered why the body that had been built for my brain to be inserted was a bunny. Sure, I was a fan of anthropomorphic animals, which seemed to be a thing in reality instead of cartoons, these days. But rabbits had never had any particular appeal to me. I'd focused on centaurs in some years, clever foxes in others, and thought about bat-style flight, before settling on a species that could survive just about anything that man or nature could throw at them as my totem: the rat, especially the white lab-rat. I'd later thought about switching to grizzly bears, who rose from hibernation every spring; but by that time, my online identity had been thoroughly tied to a rodent name, and changing email, website, and a hundred forum profiles would have been a pain. But... rabbits? I hadn't paid any more attention to rabbits than I had to, say, tigers, or raccoons. Had a rabbit-body already been under construction, and then adjusted for my brain to fit?
... Why had my frozen corpsicle been revived at this time, anyway? Why not in the rapidly-evolving weeks leading up to the Singularity, or any time after it? Why bring me back as a live brain, instead of uploading me into digital form the way the billions of people caught up during the main event had been? Why hadn't any of the other cryonicists who'd been preserved near Detroit been woken?
So many questions I couldn't answer, yet. But there were at least a few that I probably could figure out, such as: What did /I/ want, now that I /was/ wandering around this landscape in this body?
Goal number one was simple - try not to die. Approach one: figure out the danger spots, and get as far from them as possible. Flaw of approach one: My body might not age, but my brain probably still does; running and hiding would only keep me from dying for decades, maybe a century or two on the outside. I needed to find some way to get around that.
Approach two: get myself uploaded into digital form, where the flaws of biology no longer applied, and I could make as many off-site backups as needed to keep death from being anything more inconvenient than amnesia. Flaw of approach two: That's supposed to be what happened during the Singularity, but according to Technoville, the individuals who'd uploaded didn't exist anymore. Maybe there was some sort of Darwinian competition for resources, and minds who upgraded their patterns away from the human condition out-competed those who clung to their mortal foibles; maybe Technoville was wrong, and the urban population hadn't uploaded themselves in the first place; maybe there was some other explanation entirely.
Approach three: Find some other way to transcend biology's limits. I'd talked with a horse that used to be shaped like a man; and had heard about many more physical transformations that resulted from stepping in the wrong zone. Maybe there was a zone which did nothing more than clean up all the accumulated cellular junk in neurons, adding decades of life without needing to get used to hooves or tentacles instead of hands. Maybe there was a way to create custom zone effects. Flaw of approach three: I didn't actually know how any of the transformations were done in the first place.
Approach four: In case I do end up dead again, from another traffic accident or a bullet, it would be kind of nice to be able to get my body frozen for future revivification. I already had proof that it could work; even if it required a whole-body transplant to deal with the antifreeze, that seemed to be something that could be done, now. Which brought my estimates of the success of another round of cryonics up from 5% to... a lot more than that. But Technoville "didn't do" cryonics, or at least claimed not to; and I hadn't found any indication that there was a cryo group here in Dogtown, either. There were a couple of cryo groups active when I died; the one I'd signed up with, and another off in Arizona. Since Technoville wouldn't let me poke around in the Detroit area for signs of my own cryo group, maybe, if I could make it to Phoenix, I could try to find if the other group was still active.
A major, if not necessarily immediate, complication for any of the above approaches: I'd been told Earth's climate had gone wonky, and there was an off-chance the L1 solar shade (I made a note to myself: try to find some evidence that that actually existed) could fall out of position any year now, among other possible runaway catastrophes. Getting off-planet in a long-term-survivable ecosystem was probably a good idea, if it ever became feasible. I did have good evidence for the claim of a Kessler cascade, in the form of spectacular meteor showers most clear nights, so it might be some time before a rocket wouldn't end up looking like Swiss cheese. Once there were rockets again.
With all those goals in mind... one of the best ways I could think of to improve my odds at all of them at once, would be to learn more about the city-computers, both active and dead, to try and improve my guesses about what had happened during the Singularity; and about zone transformations, to avoid the nastier ones and look into the more useful ones. Learning more about manufacturies, such as the ones that had built Convoy, wasn't a bad idea, either. Learning about... well, just about everything, seemed the general approach.
I shook open the newspaper I'd gotten from the press, and started puzzling through the not-quite-English letters. It seemed like they'd adapted something like a one-letter-per-sound alphabet, but that included half-a-dozen letters that looked almost like 'O', and a whole bunch of words I'd never seen before and couldn't even make a decent guess at based on simple etymology. And even the items I could puzzle out, I had to remember had been filtered through the political officer, and an editor, and a reporter, and maybe the owner or some other people entirely... but even if every story was a complete fabrication, I could still try picking up some clues about the filtering entities, at the very least. And maybe I'd come across something more directly relevant to my interests...
After booting around what seemed like all of southern Michigan, on a route that practically corkscrewed to avoid the zones Technoville had designated as dangerous, once I got to the Raisin River, it was practically a straight shot to Lake Erie. The town at the river's mouth was called Monroe, and whatever it might have been before, now it was a fishing village of, I guessed, maybe around a thousand souls.
I hadn't realized it until then, but I'd missed the Lakes. I'd spent more of my pre-mortem life next to Lake Ontario than Lake Erie, but had enjoyed both - especially just looking out over the water at the horizon from under a shade tree, listening to the birds, watching the squirrels, munching a snack, and maybe reading or putting on a bit of music. All I had to read at the moment was the propagandistic Technoville ebook library, I was nibbling on the local flowers instead of just looking at them, and I had to provide my own music with my (terrible) harmonica playing... but this was the first time I'd felt /really/ relaxed since I'd been revived.
More good news, some of the people in Monroe spoke a version of English I could understand. (Well, mostly.) I didn't have any of the scrip they used for money, but with a bit of haggling about some of my trade goods, and my help with some chores after, I bought myself an honest-to-goodness meal of deep-fried battered fish and chips, with salt and vinegar, pickles, and tartar sauce. There was even a wedge of lemon - or, at least, something that was close enough to a lemon that I wasn't going to ask where it came from.
--
From Monroe, the old interstate was maintained well enough that it was less than a day's ride to Toledo - or, as the most people seemed to call it, Dogtown (or their native language's translation thereof). This was my first post-Singularity city, and it didn't disappoint. I heard over a dozen different languages, though the lingua franca between different groups seemed to be another variation of English. (From the signs I saw, it had a peculiar form of spelling, that I had to puzzle out practically letter by letter; I felt a flash of annoyance that I was nearly illiterate, outside of the ebook reader Technoville had provided in my native idiom.) There were mixes of nineteenth-century tech with mid-twenty-first, like a waterwheel that both ground bread and spun a small generator to recharge peoples' batteries.
And I was far from the only non-human wandering around and doing business. Outside of the human majority, bipedal animals like myself seemed most common, followed by centauroids, elves (or maybe Vulcans), Klingons (or maybe orcs), and a few rare cyborgs. (Or maybe nearly everyone was a cyborg, and those few were just the ones who didn't hide the metal bits.) I even caught a momentary glimpse of what I thought was another bunny-person, down a side-street, though that might have been pareidolia.
On the road, I'd been able to get away with wearing the minimum possible. I'd also gotten away with keeping my backpack stuffed into the trailer, against standard protocol for Technoville couriers. (In theory, such a courier could lose the trailer and still keep going with the backpack; then lose the pack and keep going with the safari vest; then lose the vest and keep going with belt and cargo pants or shorts... and if they lost those, they really had some explaining to do.) But before I made it into the many streets of the city, I simply had to heave a sigh, and pull on the full set of fur-twisting clothes, shoulder the pack, and make sure everything that could be locked away against pickpockets and other thieves was sealed as tight as possible. As additional deterrent, I strapped my machete to my right thigh, and pretended that I knew how to use it in a fight.
While I kind of wanted to explore a bit, in search of anything resembling libraries, bookstores, or internet cafes, I was obligated to make one stop as early as possible - Technoville's embassy to Dogtown. (Or maybe consulate, or military base - the TV'ers I'd talked with didn't seem interested in going into details about the what, only the where.)
When I finished following the map, I arrived at a stone wall with a gate - and a pair of fellows in black, with helmets and gasmasks that obscured their features, and gun-type weapons bigger than pistols and shorter than rifles - from what little I knew, I guessed submachine guns. Which shifted slightly as I stopped, to point at the ground halfway between each of them and me.
"Um, hi," I said, pulling out the translator. They didn't say anything. A few pokes inside the back of the pendant told it to translate into Technovillian. "I was told to come here. Um - do you need to see my ID card?"
The one on my left shifted his head a bit. "No unverified computing devices are allowed inside."
"Oh. Well, that's a bit of a problem, since there's computer stuff inside me."
"Then you can't go in."
"Oh. Well, I'm supposed to at least deliver the bike and equipment to Technoville authorities, which means you guys. Can I pass it to you and have you push it in, then?"
"No equipment goes in without a chain-of-custody document."
"Okay... can you get me one of those?"
"We are required to stay at our posts until relieved."
"... Can I get one of those some other way?"
"I have no idea."
"Oh. Um - maybe I should just head out, and radio in for instructions?" I started turning the front wheel, but froze as the weapons shifted to aim a few inches closer to my feet.
"Proprietary Technoville equipment may not be removed by unauthorized personnel."
"... So you're not going to let me ride off?"
"No."
"Okaaay... can I leave the bike here and /walk/ away?"
"Unattended possessions are considered a bomb threat."
I looked at the one on the left, then the one on the right. "You're not joking, or playing a prank, or anything like that, are you?"
"No."
"Right." I ran my available options through my mind... and chose the one that seemed most likely to create a useful effect.
--
I'd made it through "Flood"'s first few songs, and was halfway through 'Dead', when someone came from inside the gate. Dressed in black like the pair of gas-masked grunts, but without the headgear.
"Now it's over, I'm dead, and I haven't done anything that I want. Or I'm still alive and there's nothing I want to do!", I belted out enthusiastically, and paused instead of jumping into the second half.
"Would anybody care to explain?" asked the newcomer.
I shrugged. "These fellows wouldn't let me in or leave. I figured I'd eventually need to buy food and water." I bent down and picked up some of the coins that had been tossed into the helmet, squinting at the engravings. "I wonder what the local prices are for getting hay delivered."
He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. "And you needed to strip naked to put on your... minstrel performance?"
"I'm not naked - I'm wearing fur." He opened his eyes and glared. I shrugged again, and started sorting out my take from ten minutes of unskilled-but-cheerful busking. "Fine, I'm naked. I stripped to get the attention of someone in the embassy who was slightly more in the loop than... these two fine, upstanding personnel who are unimpeachable in their devotion to following orders."
He heaved a sigh. "Put your clothes back on and come inside."
"I'm not sure I should. If it's this hard to get in, how hard will it be for me to get out, if you happen to decide to detain me for some reason, or none at all?"
"You're a member of the Technoville Auxiliaries. I order, you obey. Come inside, mister!"
I didn't move. "You seem to be misinformed. I'm not a member of anything. I made a bargain - Technoville supplied equipment, and I'd send back reports on unscouted areas. Well, here's your equipment, down to the last stitch of clothing you gave me. If I give you these glasses, too, then our deal's done, and I don't owe you a thing more."
"What, not the wristwatch?"
"I got the watch on my own merits, not from Technoville."
He started rubbing his temples. "I suppose you have a reply ready if I ordered these men to take you inside?"
"Half passive resistance, half pointing out that I'd be much less inclined to transmit reports after such treatment."
"Then please tell me, Miss. What, exactly, do you want?"
"Mostly? To go away. I was told to report in here. Hi - reporting in. If you'll tell your /fine/ upstanding guards here not to shoot me for riding off in the bicycle you folk traded me for my future reports, you can go back to your job and I can get on with mine."
"Don't you want updated maps, field manuals for dealing with various post-singularity techs, and other such things?"
"A little. But they're kind of feeling like cheese in a mousetrap. From all I can tell, if you ordered these two /fine/ upstanding fellows to shoot me dead in the street, you wouldn't face murder charges; the worst that would happen to you is you'd have to fill out a two-page form and answer three questions, or something to that effect. That hardly seems like a good basis for positive cooperation and mutual exchange, now does it?"
"I would face a /somewhat/ more thorough investigation than that. But I'm not paid enough to deal with this. I'm going to go inside and pass the buck. You can stay or leave, get dressed or stay nude, sing or dance a jig or I don't care. I suggest you don't go far, and you turn on your radio and listen for... whoever it is you radio with."
As he turned around and started stomping back in, I tried very hard not to smile as I started pulling my undergarments back on. (Much to the disappointment of the passers-by who'd been enjoying the various spectacles.) I might be a pawn, but I didn't have to be a mindless one. I'd gotten the impression that Technoville's hierarchy wasn't really set up to handle people who really could just drop everything and walk into the woods. As for being nude - well, in a sense, it wasn't really /my/ body, was it? And more importantly, I wanted the Technovillians to lose confidence in whatever model they were putting together of my behaviour, so they couldn't be quite sure whether any given interaction would follow whatever script they'd laid out for me. Sure, there was a risk that doing that would mean they'd decide to cut their losses and stick me in an oubliette to be forgotten; but since their investment in me so far amounted to little more than a motorized bicycle and related gear, and some surgery that my bunny-body had been built for in the first place, that risk didn't seem very likely. At least, it seemed less likely than them having to start treating me more like an actual person with my own wants, needs, and foibles.
I held up a piece of paper to the sunlight - it didn't quite match the scrip that had been used in Monroe, but seemed similar enough. I wondered if I could find a local newspaper.
--
I didn't just find a paper; I found the whole printing press. The building housing the 'Free Press', established in 2005, smelled wonderfully of ink and paper, and my eyes were drawn to the repeated motions of the presses. If I played my cards right, I might be able to work a deal with the publisher, sending them reports as well as - or instead of - to Technoville.
I left with slumped shoulders, and in a glum mood. Despite its name, the paper had a political officer that could, and did, veto stories harmful to Dogtown's government - or, I was informed, "which would make our good allies in Technoville unhappy".
I got directions to someplace that sold tea, or a reasonable facsimile - 'red tea', in this particular case, which I had no idea whether or not it had any relation to the South African rooibos plant, or green tea, or anything else. But it was made with boiled water, only cost a few of my coins, and most importantly, effectively let me rent a table to sit at and people-watch while I thought. Specifically, I was taking a bit of time to re-evaluate the various ideas and plans and plots I'd managed to come up with so far.
A lot of it came down to... what did I know, and how did I know it, and how confident was I in what I knew? Almost everything I'd been told had come through the filter of Technoville and its agents, and that happy little gang seemed to have all the hallmarks of an authoritarian military tyranny. Sure, it was possible that that organization was the best way to deal with post-Singularity conditions. It might even be the only way to maintain a high level of technology.
Only... that technology wasn't all that high a level. Back when I'd died, thirty-odd years before the Singularity had happened, it was supposed to create minds that could plumb the heights and depths of the laws of physics, figuring out how to do anything that was physically possible, leading to revolutions in not just any one technology, but how they all tied together. What Technoville had was... tanks, and planes, and computers. Sure, they'd domesticated some new species, and had some new enemies to point the tanks at, like the kitty-kaiju... but with to their careful separation of computers and communications, and their apparently non-democratic society (at least for certain sorts of undesirable people, of which I was one), they seemed downright old-fashioned to my eyes.
Why had they left the blue zone with Pepsi Convoy, Scorpia, and the rest off the map? Why had they given me a courier bike and let me come at least this far? Why had they bothered sticking my brain in this body in the first place? I couldn't think of good answers for any of these. (Well, I had a guess that they'd stuffed a bunch of one-time pads into the frame of the bike, which would be useful if I did make it this far and no great loss if I didn't, but that seemed more along the lines of taking advantage of an opportunity rather than a good reason in and of itself.) Without even being able to make a good guess at their motivations - or being able to figure out who any sub-groups who drove overall Technovillian policy were - I couldn't even figure out if, should I head back to their embassy here in Dogtown, whether they'd give me more supplies and pat me on the head and send me on my way, or shoot me on sight.
Convoy was easier to figure out than Technoville was - and the more I thought about his one goal, and the various ways he could go about filling it if he was given the chance, the more I felt like calling in another airstrike might be the best plan all around. I rubbed a finger around Scorpia's display, thoughtfully. Convoy could be a source of tools outside of Technoville's control, if I went back there. I didn't want to do anything that would increase the odds of him deciding to convert every living human (and human-like person) into a non-thirsty robot, whether we wanted or not, among less pleasant possibilities... but if he thought the odds of me living long enough to help him were good enough to try influencing me in his favor, by providing aid and materiel... and if that materiel helped deal with any even less pleasant goals other intelligences were working to achieve... it just might be a deal worth taking.
I moved my finger to the fur on the back of my hand. I wondered why the body that had been built for my brain to be inserted was a bunny. Sure, I was a fan of anthropomorphic animals, which seemed to be a thing in reality instead of cartoons, these days. But rabbits had never had any particular appeal to me. I'd focused on centaurs in some years, clever foxes in others, and thought about bat-style flight, before settling on a species that could survive just about anything that man or nature could throw at them as my totem: the rat, especially the white lab-rat. I'd later thought about switching to grizzly bears, who rose from hibernation every spring; but by that time, my online identity had been thoroughly tied to a rodent name, and changing email, website, and a hundred forum profiles would have been a pain. But... rabbits? I hadn't paid any more attention to rabbits than I had to, say, tigers, or raccoons. Had a rabbit-body already been under construction, and then adjusted for my brain to fit?
... Why had my frozen corpsicle been revived at this time, anyway? Why not in the rapidly-evolving weeks leading up to the Singularity, or any time after it? Why bring me back as a live brain, instead of uploading me into digital form the way the billions of people caught up during the main event had been? Why hadn't any of the other cryonicists who'd been preserved near Detroit been woken?
So many questions I couldn't answer, yet. But there were at least a few that I probably could figure out, such as: What did /I/ want, now that I /was/ wandering around this landscape in this body?
Goal number one was simple - try not to die. Approach one: figure out the danger spots, and get as far from them as possible. Flaw of approach one: My body might not age, but my brain probably still does; running and hiding would only keep me from dying for decades, maybe a century or two on the outside. I needed to find some way to get around that.
Approach two: get myself uploaded into digital form, where the flaws of biology no longer applied, and I could make as many off-site backups as needed to keep death from being anything more inconvenient than amnesia. Flaw of approach two: That's supposed to be what happened during the Singularity, but according to Technoville, the individuals who'd uploaded didn't exist anymore. Maybe there was some sort of Darwinian competition for resources, and minds who upgraded their patterns away from the human condition out-competed those who clung to their mortal foibles; maybe Technoville was wrong, and the urban population hadn't uploaded themselves in the first place; maybe there was some other explanation entirely.
Approach three: Find some other way to transcend biology's limits. I'd talked with a horse that used to be shaped like a man; and had heard about many more physical transformations that resulted from stepping in the wrong zone. Maybe there was a zone which did nothing more than clean up all the accumulated cellular junk in neurons, adding decades of life without needing to get used to hooves or tentacles instead of hands. Maybe there was a way to create custom zone effects. Flaw of approach three: I didn't actually know how any of the transformations were done in the first place.
Approach four: In case I do end up dead again, from another traffic accident or a bullet, it would be kind of nice to be able to get my body frozen for future revivification. I already had proof that it could work; even if it required a whole-body transplant to deal with the antifreeze, that seemed to be something that could be done, now. Which brought my estimates of the success of another round of cryonics up from 5% to... a lot more than that. But Technoville "didn't do" cryonics, or at least claimed not to; and I hadn't found any indication that there was a cryo group here in Dogtown, either. There were a couple of cryo groups active when I died; the one I'd signed up with, and another off in Arizona. Since Technoville wouldn't let me poke around in the Detroit area for signs of my own cryo group, maybe, if I could make it to Phoenix, I could try to find if the other group was still active.
A major, if not necessarily immediate, complication for any of the above approaches: I'd been told Earth's climate had gone wonky, and there was an off-chance the L1 solar shade (I made a note to myself: try to find some evidence that that actually existed) could fall out of position any year now, among other possible runaway catastrophes. Getting off-planet in a long-term-survivable ecosystem was probably a good idea, if it ever became feasible. I did have good evidence for the claim of a Kessler cascade, in the form of spectacular meteor showers most clear nights, so it might be some time before a rocket wouldn't end up looking like Swiss cheese. Once there were rockets again.
With all those goals in mind... one of the best ways I could think of to improve my odds at all of them at once, would be to learn more about the city-computers, both active and dead, to try and improve my guesses about what had happened during the Singularity; and about zone transformations, to avoid the nastier ones and look into the more useful ones. Learning more about manufacturies, such as the ones that had built Convoy, wasn't a bad idea, either. Learning about... well, just about everything, seemed the general approach.
I shook open the newspaper I'd gotten from the press, and started puzzling through the not-quite-English letters. It seemed like they'd adapted something like a one-letter-per-sound alphabet, but that included half-a-dozen letters that looked almost like 'O', and a whole bunch of words I'd never seen before and couldn't even make a decent guess at based on simple etymology. And even the items I could puzzle out, I had to remember had been filtered through the political officer, and an editor, and a reporter, and maybe the owner or some other people entirely... but even if every story was a complete fabrication, I could still try picking up some clues about the filtering entities, at the very least. And maybe I'd come across something more directly relevant to my interests...
DataPacRat
Truthseeker
- Location
- Niagara, Canada
*Chapter Five: Re-Educating*
I was almost disappointed that Dogtown had recognizable schools. If I'd woken up a century in the past after my death, instead of heading futurewards, I knew enough scraps about how educational methods had changed to drastically improve how children learned. (Well, maybe; it was too easy to over-estimate such things.) But looking in the windows were rows of desks facing blackboards, children reading textbooks or writing papers, and similar activities that wouldn't have been out of place anywhere in the 20th century.
Well, except for the rather disappointing revelation that segregation was back in style, and not one of the students nor teachers would have been able to pass as a 20th-century human. Some came closer than others, like the people who looked like they were made out of plastic or shiny rubber, and maybe the armless woman with a half-dozen tentacles visible under her dress could have passed as an amputee... but this was obviously a school for changed people, and not for baseline humans.
It was bigger than a one-room schoolhouse, so upon entering, I was able to find someone on staff who wasn't occupied with a couple of dozen kids - a secretary, a centauroid with the hind-torso of a sheep rather than a horse. "Can I help you?", she looked up from her paperwork with stiff formality.
"I hope so," I answered. "Is this where I can talk to someone about adult education?"
A few minutes later, I was ensconced in a small office with a large bear. "Miss... Bunny, is it?" I just nodded - a name was anything that people referred to you by, and Convoy, at least, had called me 'Bunny'. "I am Hair Miller."
"... Is that your first name, or the German for 'Mister'?"
"Both, as it happens. What can I do for you?"
"I have a... somewhat complicated background."
"As do we all."
I had been debating with myself whether to mention my decades-long period of deadness, but for the moment, that seemed more likely to me to make it harder to get the information I wanted than easier, so I hedged. "You may have noticed I talk funny. When I was growing up, my family wasn't connected to present-day society. I had access to books and media that are old - nothing more recent than twenty fifteen A.D. As far as I know, I don't have any living relatives. I've just come through Technoville territory, and sort of had a job with them, but I might be fired. If I'm not fired... I'm probably going to be travelling through unscouted territory, through cities and danger zones, and I don't know what the youngest student here already thinks everyone takes for granted. I was hoping I could get a crash course, or some reference books, or... something like that."
"Hm." Miller had been jotting down notes as I spoke, in that not-quite-familiar script I couldn't make out. "I think I can help you with that - though I would be remiss in my duties if that was all I did. Do you have any academic qualifications?"
"Er... I don't have a diploma, but I have at least the equivalent of a twenty-fifteen high school education. I know trigonometry, though I've never quite figured out matrices; I've read the Iliad and Harry Potter; I can type on a QWERTY keyboard; I know 2015-era geography and history; some biology, chemistry, and physics; a bit about computer programming-"
"Ssh!" he hissed, and glanced out the doorway. He stood up, slid around the desk, and closed it, before settling back into place. "I can certainly believe you've been isolated from modern society if you would mention /that/."
I blinked. "How much trouble could I have gotten myself in?"
"We para-humans mostly gather in the cities because the rural people have unpleasant superstitions about us, and our lives are less in danger here, because we can protect each other. If word got around that you knew anything about computers - even ancient ones - then not only wouldn't the para-human community try to help you, a lot of them would join in the lynch mob."
"... Ah." I swallowed. "Alright - I'll keep that to myself from now on." My forehead wrinkled. "Um - I've got a few... devices from Technoville, like a translator..."
He shrugged, massively. "They've got an army to protect them from people who don't like them, and as long as everyone else just /uses/ such things instead of /makes/ them... I'm not defending the reasoning behind the feeling, or the lack thereof, just warning you about it."
"Alright. Fair enough. That's one possible lethal social accident out of the way. How many more do I need to learn about?"
"Probably a few. I have you pegged as roughly equivalent to a grade four education - that's our nine-year-olds-"
"You have nine year olds are learning trigonometry?"
"No - that's in grade five." I raised my eyebrows - so maybe they did have a few new pedagogical tricks. He continued, "As I was saying - around grade four, advanced in some areas, behind in others. Are you staying in the city?"
"Not for long, I'm afraid. If I'm still employed tomorrow, then I'll have to leave fairly soon."
"Hm. That means I can't fit you in under the budget for residents. Which brings up the awkward question of payment."
"If I'm still employed tomorrow, I should be able to get Technoville to pay for any supplies I think are necessary - including information. The main limit would be... I could probably get away with staying in the city for a few days, but after that, I'll be travelling, and every kilogram of books I carry is a kilogram of other equipment I can't."
"And if you're not employed by Technoville tomorrow?"
"Then I get to have fun finding a place to sleep until I get a new job. I can get by on hay and water, so I might be able to manage by busking for a few days. Or I could wander off into the wilderness and eat whatever plants I pass by, but it's not my preferred lifestyle."
"Hm. I'll need to look up a few things... When you find out whether you need a new job tomorrow, come by, either way - I just might be able to get you hired if you need to be." He reached over and dropped a heavy paw on my shoulder, baring his fangs in what I hoped was a friendly smile. "After all, we Changed need to stick together, right?"
"Er - right," I tried smiling back.
"In the meantime," he started scribbling on a new piece of paper, "something else that might help you... there's a tour of the old city center this afternoon, and my chop will let you squeeze in."
--
"This tour is in Deutsch, miss. Do you speak Deutsch?"
"I'll be fine, I have a translator," I held up my watch-pendant to the middle-aged woman, whose outfit was, if anything, pinker than my own fur.
"Very well. Please try to keep up with the main group and not get in the way."
"Of course," I shrugged, and let the gaggle of mostly farmers be in front. They were paying customers, or something of the sort, and I was mostly here to use up a couple more hours before I got back in touch with Technoville.
"Hallo, alle zusammen," the pink guide called out, and we were off. I barely paid attention at first, since the buildings - if that was the right word for them - were much more fascinating than factoids about the previous names for the city, a near-bloodless territorial dispute, and general infrastructure expansion. I did aim both ears at her once she hit the twenty-first century, but she said, "As you may already know, the period from roughly two thousand to twenty fifty A.D. is called the Dark Age, or some variation on the term. More and more information was stored on far away computers, or on computers people kept in their homes; and when the Rapture came, all that was lost. Most of what we know of the period is from the scant few paper records that were made, interviews from those who survived the end of the old world, and what little archaeological reconstruction the Toledo Historical Society has bene able to fund.
"Mostly, it was more of the same as the twentieth century: people went to jobs, though now their cars drove themselves; they played games and sports; they had elections, and protested the various forms of government, and sometimes those protests had to be repressed by those governments to maintain good order and keep society functioning."
I somehow managed not to cough indelicately, since she was getting to the good part. Soon enough, "In twenty forty-seven, the first artificial intelligence was created by recording the neurons of a human brain, and creating a computer program that imitated them. Computer programs are very easy to make copies of, so from that first AI were made dozens of copies, then thousands. As they learned how to do different jobs, some copies became copied more often than others. Soon, there were copies that could do any job that didn't require physical labor. And since they didn't eat, or need a house, just a tiny bit of electricity, they could do those jobs for a lot less pay than any human could. It turned out there were a lot of jobs that weren't worth paying a human for, but were worth paying a tiny amount for. Riches could be made by even the poorest person, as fast as computers could be built to make them."
She paused, and pointed up at the not-quite-skyscrapers. "Which brings us into the darkest part of the dark ages. Even the survivors don't know much. One of the guesses is that the copies took over. Another guess is that people who lived in cities got themselves uploaded. Another is that somebody made a program that could solve programs even better than the copies made from that human brain, and that it went wrong. What we do know is that anyone who was in any city in November, twenty fifty, was just gone by the time December came. No bodies have been found. What was found were these..." She gestured up again. "Which are typical of any city. They're not computers - we're reasonably sure they simply radiated away the heat from the real computers, which would have gotten so hot they would have melted otherwise, because of all the programs thinking so hard.
"And we're walking..." She led us to the base of one, where there was a roughly human-scale entrance.
"Nobody knew that for quite some time. When people started coming into cities again after whatever happened in the Singularity, more than heat came out of here. There were... underground factories, controlled by the computers. Sometimes they built more computers. Sometimes they built robots that killed people who came too close. Sometimes they built diseases. And sometimes," she pointed straight at me, "they built machines that turned humans into... other things."
I eeped, ears flat, and raised one forearm to give an embarrased little fingers-wave to all the people looking up and down at me.
The guide spoke again, "But we're safe, here, now. The bigger cities' computers kept building more heat sinks, and other things. The smaller cities' computers slowly died off. The last known dangerous thing manufactured by the computers here in Dogtown was cleaned up ten years ago. Inside, we have a museum showing some of the things the computers tried to use to kill us - all completely safe, of course. The exit is through the gift shop."
I didn't follow the crowd in right away, instead looking up at the windowless slabs of metal, the size of skyscrapers, forming street-like rows. I wondered how much of the canned lecture was fact, and how much mere speculation - and how much outright fabrication - to make the Toledo Historical Society seem more important, to let the locals impress the yokels, to flatter the various local powers-that-be. Technoville's agents had told me they didn't have control over an area more than a few hundred kilometers across, and Dogville's tech was more nineteenth-century than twenty-first; I wondered how the guilde could have even gotten enough information to base the general statements about 'large cities' versus 'small ones'.
--
When I came out of the museum, I was having a hard time avoiding losing my hay. I now had rather definite evidence that humans getting turned into living members of new species was one of the least common sorts of effects. Heck, ending up as something /living/ seemed to be pretty uncommon. And then there were the people who weren't alive any more, in any sort of traditional sense, but still had at least some form of awareness. And I wasn't even sure where to classify the exhibit showing X-rays and so on of a woman who'd been turned into a bull's organs - not into a whole bull, just part of one, who kept on eating and wandering around and doing bullish things without any concern for the sentient person who was now just an invisible part of it.
And the other members of the tour had seemed to take it all in stride, and were even now looking through various tchotchkes and memorabilia to remind them of their visit to the 'big city'.
For the first time in a very long time, I was considering the possibility that I might end up in a situation where I really would prefer to be dead.
I was also forced to revise my thoughts about how good an idea it could be, to travel through a few thousand kilometers of unscouted territory, just for the hope that a cryonics organization had been far enough away from an urban area to escape the singularity, and was still, somehow, in operation. I probably had a few decades before I had to worry about old age; that seemed like plenty of time to rebuild the air liquification pumps and other apparatuses of cryonics, and to found a brand-new cryo group.
One thing was for sure - if Technoville still wanted me to go scouting and send back reports to them, they were going to have to pony up a /lot/ more than just a bicycle and some camping gear.
--
Back in front of the Technoville embassy, I got off my bike, collected one of my trekking poles, and advanced to the gate's guards. "I trust you have specific orders to let me in this time?" Wordlessly, one of them swung open the gate, and I strode on into the courtyard.
In a few moments, I had been directed to a windowless sitting room. As nobody else was in sight, I wandered around a bit, looking at the paintings, the abstract statuettes on the shelves, and other displays of wealth. I had no intention of touching the water or sandwiches on the low table in the middle of the room - I'd had more than my fill of TV's 'calmative' drugs.
Twelve minutes and thirty-two seconds after I'd entered (according to Scorpia's display), a small gray man entered - gray hair, grayish eyes behind his glasses, and his even his standard black suit seemed more faded than was the norm. "Please, have a seat," he gestured to the overstuffed chairs, and I did so, resting both hands on top of my walking stick. He joined me, poured himself a glass of water, and took a sip. After a few moments of silence, he said, "Do you plan on stripping again?"
"I don't /plan/ on it."
When I didn't expand on that, he said, "I see. In that case, do you object if this meeting is recorded for future reference?"
"I assumed that would be the case, whether I objected or not."
"I see," he repeated. "Well, then - this meeting is all about you. So, is there anything you'd like to start with?"
I reached inside my safari vest, pulled out my maps, and tossed them next to the snacks. "Were the inaccurate maps deliberate sabotage, or mere incompetence?"
"Inaccurate?" He picked them up, and adjusted his glasses, examining the green area I'd repeatedly circled and labeled "BLUE /NOT/ GREEN!!!".
"I'm not even sure the blue signs there are the right color - in case news hasn't come this way, there was a building-sized monster. I only avoided getting eaten by hiding and screaming into the radio for air support."
He set the map down. "Is there anything else?"
"Somewhat relatedly. Were the orders to your gate guards to keep me from coming in or leaving a deliberate measure, or incompetence? There are a few other items I have the exact same question for, if it saves any time."
He leaned back in his seat, and steepled his fingers. I half-expected him to hiss out 'Excellent', but instead, he said, "A certain part of our hierarchy wished to gather evidence about whether or not you would be able to survive your proposed trip to Phoenix, and so certain other parts of our hierarchy were... arranged to act less than optimally."
"So was me singing in the nude a 'pass' or 'fail'?"
"Oh, definitely a 'pass'. You demonstrated creativity, a willingness to go outside your extrapolated psychological boundaries, and even adapted your plan to gain a few additional resources."
"I am not a happy bunny right now."
"Do you plan on stabbing me with your concealed sword?"
I bared my teeth. You could call it a smile. I wouldn't. "Only if you people start stabbing first."
"That hardly seems productive."
"Is 'productive' all that matters to you?"
"Not quite. But it matters quite a bit."
"Then you should be happy that I've been spending my day most productively."
"Oh? Do tell."
"I've been gathering information on city-computers, zone effects, and the other dangers I'd be facing if I go on the trip you people so blithely agreed to let me go on."
"I notice you say 'if'. Have you changed your mind?"
"Let's say that I've heavily revised my risk-reward calculations."
"Alright, let's say that."
There was an awkward pause, then I sat back in my chair and looked away from him, trying (and failing) not to grind my teeth. "When you people told me I had an even chance of making it - what was it, a thousand kilometers? - I thought you were /underestimating/ my chances, not /heavily overestimating/ them."
"Actually, that estimate was the most accurate that could be created with the available information about you. It's safe to say that the estimators took into account how likely it was that you would be able to improve your relevant skills, or acquire useful resources."
"And you were still willing to let me make my own way, even if I left this city with inadequate - and incorrect - information?"
"If you had, then your failure to take advantage of local opportunities would undoubtedly have led us to revise the predicted odds of your success."
"I'm finding myself less and less inclined to consider you the sort of people I should cooperate with."
"Will you be returning the translator, and other equipment, then?"
"I'm having a hard time thinking of a good reason not to."
"Ah! Now there, I may be able to help you."
"Do tell."
"As you have been informed, we maintain strict separation of comm and comp - of communications and computation. So it has taken more time than you might expect for us to perform even simple database searches. Nevertheless, since you were discovered, we have been doing such searches related to you - and have come across a result you might consider relevant."
He paused, as if to invite a response; but when I remained silent, continued. "The immediate aftermath of the Singularity was both more and less dangerous than the present day. Nobody was expecting the cities to start producing their dangers; but those dangers had not yet started to spread very far. There was still transport, and even communication, for a short time. We have records of a piece of news: the cryonics company headquartered there was attacked by survivors and burned to the ground. However, nearly all the... patients?... had already been moved to a private compound. More defensible, and manned by people who seemed intent on defending themselves, and their frozen associates."
He paused again, then sighed. "Smaller surviving groups with much less to bind them together made it through to the present. It is much more likely than not that your fellow cryonicists are still alive and doing well, there. Should you choose to make your journey, you can be assured that you do, in fact, have a destination to arrive at."
"Assuming I survive the trip. I have to wonder why you haven't already made an expedition that far."
"Almost all of our resources are needed to fight Detroit's various dangers, and to keep its expansion in check."
"So you say. But I've been thinking. You have fixed-wing aircraft of at least one sort - I've seen them overhead, even besides the one that blew up the one monster. You can manufacture the parts to maintain them, rebuild the engines, and maybe even make whole new ones, right?"
"We're hardly going to retask a Saber-7 for a scouting mission - it doesn't have the range, there are no secure landing fields-"
I held up a hand to interrupt. "That's not what I was aiming for. I know you also make reasonably small engines, that you put on the courier bicycles. And that you produce at least certain quantities of bio-diesel. And," I tugged at the neckline of my shirt, "you have some sort of textiles industry."
"That all seems to go without saying."
"It seems it has to be said. Because I just can't figure out why the skies aren't filled with these," and I pulled another sheet of paper from inside my vest and tossed it to him. On it was a drawing of a generally humanoid figure - art was never my strong suit - wearing a backpack containing a motor and a propeller almost as tall as she was, underneath the curve of a paraglider-style parachute.
He picked up the image, and examined the various notes I'd made, as I continued. "Those things have been around since, oh, decades before I died. Don't need landing fields. They do need gas, and even if they don't have the range to make it to Arizona in one hop, it's not that hard to haul a load of fuel out to half it's range, drop it off, head back, and repeat until the fuel depot has enough gas for to carry to the next hop. And for all I know, you've got plans for batteries and electric motors that would simplify the logistics even more than 'supply gas'."
I leaned forwards, elbows on my knees. "My first, crude estimate is that a fuel depot would be needed every five hundred kilometers or so. Meaning that instead of slogging through every danger every city on the continent has set free, a pilot of one of these would only have to touch ground a half-dozen times between here and Arizona... and they wouldn't have to travel anywhere near roads, or cities.
"So I repeat my question - why don't you already have these things in the skies?"
I was almost disappointed that Dogtown had recognizable schools. If I'd woken up a century in the past after my death, instead of heading futurewards, I knew enough scraps about how educational methods had changed to drastically improve how children learned. (Well, maybe; it was too easy to over-estimate such things.) But looking in the windows were rows of desks facing blackboards, children reading textbooks or writing papers, and similar activities that wouldn't have been out of place anywhere in the 20th century.
Well, except for the rather disappointing revelation that segregation was back in style, and not one of the students nor teachers would have been able to pass as a 20th-century human. Some came closer than others, like the people who looked like they were made out of plastic or shiny rubber, and maybe the armless woman with a half-dozen tentacles visible under her dress could have passed as an amputee... but this was obviously a school for changed people, and not for baseline humans.
It was bigger than a one-room schoolhouse, so upon entering, I was able to find someone on staff who wasn't occupied with a couple of dozen kids - a secretary, a centauroid with the hind-torso of a sheep rather than a horse. "Can I help you?", she looked up from her paperwork with stiff formality.
"I hope so," I answered. "Is this where I can talk to someone about adult education?"
A few minutes later, I was ensconced in a small office with a large bear. "Miss... Bunny, is it?" I just nodded - a name was anything that people referred to you by, and Convoy, at least, had called me 'Bunny'. "I am Hair Miller."
"... Is that your first name, or the German for 'Mister'?"
"Both, as it happens. What can I do for you?"
"I have a... somewhat complicated background."
"As do we all."
I had been debating with myself whether to mention my decades-long period of deadness, but for the moment, that seemed more likely to me to make it harder to get the information I wanted than easier, so I hedged. "You may have noticed I talk funny. When I was growing up, my family wasn't connected to present-day society. I had access to books and media that are old - nothing more recent than twenty fifteen A.D. As far as I know, I don't have any living relatives. I've just come through Technoville territory, and sort of had a job with them, but I might be fired. If I'm not fired... I'm probably going to be travelling through unscouted territory, through cities and danger zones, and I don't know what the youngest student here already thinks everyone takes for granted. I was hoping I could get a crash course, or some reference books, or... something like that."
"Hm." Miller had been jotting down notes as I spoke, in that not-quite-familiar script I couldn't make out. "I think I can help you with that - though I would be remiss in my duties if that was all I did. Do you have any academic qualifications?"
"Er... I don't have a diploma, but I have at least the equivalent of a twenty-fifteen high school education. I know trigonometry, though I've never quite figured out matrices; I've read the Iliad and Harry Potter; I can type on a QWERTY keyboard; I know 2015-era geography and history; some biology, chemistry, and physics; a bit about computer programming-"
"Ssh!" he hissed, and glanced out the doorway. He stood up, slid around the desk, and closed it, before settling back into place. "I can certainly believe you've been isolated from modern society if you would mention /that/."
I blinked. "How much trouble could I have gotten myself in?"
"We para-humans mostly gather in the cities because the rural people have unpleasant superstitions about us, and our lives are less in danger here, because we can protect each other. If word got around that you knew anything about computers - even ancient ones - then not only wouldn't the para-human community try to help you, a lot of them would join in the lynch mob."
"... Ah." I swallowed. "Alright - I'll keep that to myself from now on." My forehead wrinkled. "Um - I've got a few... devices from Technoville, like a translator..."
He shrugged, massively. "They've got an army to protect them from people who don't like them, and as long as everyone else just /uses/ such things instead of /makes/ them... I'm not defending the reasoning behind the feeling, or the lack thereof, just warning you about it."
"Alright. Fair enough. That's one possible lethal social accident out of the way. How many more do I need to learn about?"
"Probably a few. I have you pegged as roughly equivalent to a grade four education - that's our nine-year-olds-"
"You have nine year olds are learning trigonometry?"
"No - that's in grade five." I raised my eyebrows - so maybe they did have a few new pedagogical tricks. He continued, "As I was saying - around grade four, advanced in some areas, behind in others. Are you staying in the city?"
"Not for long, I'm afraid. If I'm still employed tomorrow, then I'll have to leave fairly soon."
"Hm. That means I can't fit you in under the budget for residents. Which brings up the awkward question of payment."
"If I'm still employed tomorrow, I should be able to get Technoville to pay for any supplies I think are necessary - including information. The main limit would be... I could probably get away with staying in the city for a few days, but after that, I'll be travelling, and every kilogram of books I carry is a kilogram of other equipment I can't."
"And if you're not employed by Technoville tomorrow?"
"Then I get to have fun finding a place to sleep until I get a new job. I can get by on hay and water, so I might be able to manage by busking for a few days. Or I could wander off into the wilderness and eat whatever plants I pass by, but it's not my preferred lifestyle."
"Hm. I'll need to look up a few things... When you find out whether you need a new job tomorrow, come by, either way - I just might be able to get you hired if you need to be." He reached over and dropped a heavy paw on my shoulder, baring his fangs in what I hoped was a friendly smile. "After all, we Changed need to stick together, right?"
"Er - right," I tried smiling back.
"In the meantime," he started scribbling on a new piece of paper, "something else that might help you... there's a tour of the old city center this afternoon, and my chop will let you squeeze in."
--
"This tour is in Deutsch, miss. Do you speak Deutsch?"
"I'll be fine, I have a translator," I held up my watch-pendant to the middle-aged woman, whose outfit was, if anything, pinker than my own fur.
"Very well. Please try to keep up with the main group and not get in the way."
"Of course," I shrugged, and let the gaggle of mostly farmers be in front. They were paying customers, or something of the sort, and I was mostly here to use up a couple more hours before I got back in touch with Technoville.
"Hallo, alle zusammen," the pink guide called out, and we were off. I barely paid attention at first, since the buildings - if that was the right word for them - were much more fascinating than factoids about the previous names for the city, a near-bloodless territorial dispute, and general infrastructure expansion. I did aim both ears at her once she hit the twenty-first century, but she said, "As you may already know, the period from roughly two thousand to twenty fifty A.D. is called the Dark Age, or some variation on the term. More and more information was stored on far away computers, or on computers people kept in their homes; and when the Rapture came, all that was lost. Most of what we know of the period is from the scant few paper records that were made, interviews from those who survived the end of the old world, and what little archaeological reconstruction the Toledo Historical Society has bene able to fund.
"Mostly, it was more of the same as the twentieth century: people went to jobs, though now their cars drove themselves; they played games and sports; they had elections, and protested the various forms of government, and sometimes those protests had to be repressed by those governments to maintain good order and keep society functioning."
I somehow managed not to cough indelicately, since she was getting to the good part. Soon enough, "In twenty forty-seven, the first artificial intelligence was created by recording the neurons of a human brain, and creating a computer program that imitated them. Computer programs are very easy to make copies of, so from that first AI were made dozens of copies, then thousands. As they learned how to do different jobs, some copies became copied more often than others. Soon, there were copies that could do any job that didn't require physical labor. And since they didn't eat, or need a house, just a tiny bit of electricity, they could do those jobs for a lot less pay than any human could. It turned out there were a lot of jobs that weren't worth paying a human for, but were worth paying a tiny amount for. Riches could be made by even the poorest person, as fast as computers could be built to make them."
She paused, and pointed up at the not-quite-skyscrapers. "Which brings us into the darkest part of the dark ages. Even the survivors don't know much. One of the guesses is that the copies took over. Another guess is that people who lived in cities got themselves uploaded. Another is that somebody made a program that could solve programs even better than the copies made from that human brain, and that it went wrong. What we do know is that anyone who was in any city in November, twenty fifty, was just gone by the time December came. No bodies have been found. What was found were these..." She gestured up again. "Which are typical of any city. They're not computers - we're reasonably sure they simply radiated away the heat from the real computers, which would have gotten so hot they would have melted otherwise, because of all the programs thinking so hard.
"And we're walking..." She led us to the base of one, where there was a roughly human-scale entrance.
"Nobody knew that for quite some time. When people started coming into cities again after whatever happened in the Singularity, more than heat came out of here. There were... underground factories, controlled by the computers. Sometimes they built more computers. Sometimes they built robots that killed people who came too close. Sometimes they built diseases. And sometimes," she pointed straight at me, "they built machines that turned humans into... other things."
I eeped, ears flat, and raised one forearm to give an embarrased little fingers-wave to all the people looking up and down at me.
The guide spoke again, "But we're safe, here, now. The bigger cities' computers kept building more heat sinks, and other things. The smaller cities' computers slowly died off. The last known dangerous thing manufactured by the computers here in Dogtown was cleaned up ten years ago. Inside, we have a museum showing some of the things the computers tried to use to kill us - all completely safe, of course. The exit is through the gift shop."
I didn't follow the crowd in right away, instead looking up at the windowless slabs of metal, the size of skyscrapers, forming street-like rows. I wondered how much of the canned lecture was fact, and how much mere speculation - and how much outright fabrication - to make the Toledo Historical Society seem more important, to let the locals impress the yokels, to flatter the various local powers-that-be. Technoville's agents had told me they didn't have control over an area more than a few hundred kilometers across, and Dogville's tech was more nineteenth-century than twenty-first; I wondered how the guilde could have even gotten enough information to base the general statements about 'large cities' versus 'small ones'.
--
When I came out of the museum, I was having a hard time avoiding losing my hay. I now had rather definite evidence that humans getting turned into living members of new species was one of the least common sorts of effects. Heck, ending up as something /living/ seemed to be pretty uncommon. And then there were the people who weren't alive any more, in any sort of traditional sense, but still had at least some form of awareness. And I wasn't even sure where to classify the exhibit showing X-rays and so on of a woman who'd been turned into a bull's organs - not into a whole bull, just part of one, who kept on eating and wandering around and doing bullish things without any concern for the sentient person who was now just an invisible part of it.
And the other members of the tour had seemed to take it all in stride, and were even now looking through various tchotchkes and memorabilia to remind them of their visit to the 'big city'.
For the first time in a very long time, I was considering the possibility that I might end up in a situation where I really would prefer to be dead.
I was also forced to revise my thoughts about how good an idea it could be, to travel through a few thousand kilometers of unscouted territory, just for the hope that a cryonics organization had been far enough away from an urban area to escape the singularity, and was still, somehow, in operation. I probably had a few decades before I had to worry about old age; that seemed like plenty of time to rebuild the air liquification pumps and other apparatuses of cryonics, and to found a brand-new cryo group.
One thing was for sure - if Technoville still wanted me to go scouting and send back reports to them, they were going to have to pony up a /lot/ more than just a bicycle and some camping gear.
--
Back in front of the Technoville embassy, I got off my bike, collected one of my trekking poles, and advanced to the gate's guards. "I trust you have specific orders to let me in this time?" Wordlessly, one of them swung open the gate, and I strode on into the courtyard.
In a few moments, I had been directed to a windowless sitting room. As nobody else was in sight, I wandered around a bit, looking at the paintings, the abstract statuettes on the shelves, and other displays of wealth. I had no intention of touching the water or sandwiches on the low table in the middle of the room - I'd had more than my fill of TV's 'calmative' drugs.
Twelve minutes and thirty-two seconds after I'd entered (according to Scorpia's display), a small gray man entered - gray hair, grayish eyes behind his glasses, and his even his standard black suit seemed more faded than was the norm. "Please, have a seat," he gestured to the overstuffed chairs, and I did so, resting both hands on top of my walking stick. He joined me, poured himself a glass of water, and took a sip. After a few moments of silence, he said, "Do you plan on stripping again?"
"I don't /plan/ on it."
When I didn't expand on that, he said, "I see. In that case, do you object if this meeting is recorded for future reference?"
"I assumed that would be the case, whether I objected or not."
"I see," he repeated. "Well, then - this meeting is all about you. So, is there anything you'd like to start with?"
I reached inside my safari vest, pulled out my maps, and tossed them next to the snacks. "Were the inaccurate maps deliberate sabotage, or mere incompetence?"
"Inaccurate?" He picked them up, and adjusted his glasses, examining the green area I'd repeatedly circled and labeled "BLUE /NOT/ GREEN!!!".
"I'm not even sure the blue signs there are the right color - in case news hasn't come this way, there was a building-sized monster. I only avoided getting eaten by hiding and screaming into the radio for air support."
He set the map down. "Is there anything else?"
"Somewhat relatedly. Were the orders to your gate guards to keep me from coming in or leaving a deliberate measure, or incompetence? There are a few other items I have the exact same question for, if it saves any time."
He leaned back in his seat, and steepled his fingers. I half-expected him to hiss out 'Excellent', but instead, he said, "A certain part of our hierarchy wished to gather evidence about whether or not you would be able to survive your proposed trip to Phoenix, and so certain other parts of our hierarchy were... arranged to act less than optimally."
"So was me singing in the nude a 'pass' or 'fail'?"
"Oh, definitely a 'pass'. You demonstrated creativity, a willingness to go outside your extrapolated psychological boundaries, and even adapted your plan to gain a few additional resources."
"I am not a happy bunny right now."
"Do you plan on stabbing me with your concealed sword?"
I bared my teeth. You could call it a smile. I wouldn't. "Only if you people start stabbing first."
"That hardly seems productive."
"Is 'productive' all that matters to you?"
"Not quite. But it matters quite a bit."
"Then you should be happy that I've been spending my day most productively."
"Oh? Do tell."
"I've been gathering information on city-computers, zone effects, and the other dangers I'd be facing if I go on the trip you people so blithely agreed to let me go on."
"I notice you say 'if'. Have you changed your mind?"
"Let's say that I've heavily revised my risk-reward calculations."
"Alright, let's say that."
There was an awkward pause, then I sat back in my chair and looked away from him, trying (and failing) not to grind my teeth. "When you people told me I had an even chance of making it - what was it, a thousand kilometers? - I thought you were /underestimating/ my chances, not /heavily overestimating/ them."
"Actually, that estimate was the most accurate that could be created with the available information about you. It's safe to say that the estimators took into account how likely it was that you would be able to improve your relevant skills, or acquire useful resources."
"And you were still willing to let me make my own way, even if I left this city with inadequate - and incorrect - information?"
"If you had, then your failure to take advantage of local opportunities would undoubtedly have led us to revise the predicted odds of your success."
"I'm finding myself less and less inclined to consider you the sort of people I should cooperate with."
"Will you be returning the translator, and other equipment, then?"
"I'm having a hard time thinking of a good reason not to."
"Ah! Now there, I may be able to help you."
"Do tell."
"As you have been informed, we maintain strict separation of comm and comp - of communications and computation. So it has taken more time than you might expect for us to perform even simple database searches. Nevertheless, since you were discovered, we have been doing such searches related to you - and have come across a result you might consider relevant."
He paused, as if to invite a response; but when I remained silent, continued. "The immediate aftermath of the Singularity was both more and less dangerous than the present day. Nobody was expecting the cities to start producing their dangers; but those dangers had not yet started to spread very far. There was still transport, and even communication, for a short time. We have records of a piece of news: the cryonics company headquartered there was attacked by survivors and burned to the ground. However, nearly all the... patients?... had already been moved to a private compound. More defensible, and manned by people who seemed intent on defending themselves, and their frozen associates."
He paused again, then sighed. "Smaller surviving groups with much less to bind them together made it through to the present. It is much more likely than not that your fellow cryonicists are still alive and doing well, there. Should you choose to make your journey, you can be assured that you do, in fact, have a destination to arrive at."
"Assuming I survive the trip. I have to wonder why you haven't already made an expedition that far."
"Almost all of our resources are needed to fight Detroit's various dangers, and to keep its expansion in check."
"So you say. But I've been thinking. You have fixed-wing aircraft of at least one sort - I've seen them overhead, even besides the one that blew up the one monster. You can manufacture the parts to maintain them, rebuild the engines, and maybe even make whole new ones, right?"
"We're hardly going to retask a Saber-7 for a scouting mission - it doesn't have the range, there are no secure landing fields-"
I held up a hand to interrupt. "That's not what I was aiming for. I know you also make reasonably small engines, that you put on the courier bicycles. And that you produce at least certain quantities of bio-diesel. And," I tugged at the neckline of my shirt, "you have some sort of textiles industry."
"That all seems to go without saying."
"It seems it has to be said. Because I just can't figure out why the skies aren't filled with these," and I pulled another sheet of paper from inside my vest and tossed it to him. On it was a drawing of a generally humanoid figure - art was never my strong suit - wearing a backpack containing a motor and a propeller almost as tall as she was, underneath the curve of a paraglider-style parachute.
He picked up the image, and examined the various notes I'd made, as I continued. "Those things have been around since, oh, decades before I died. Don't need landing fields. They do need gas, and even if they don't have the range to make it to Arizona in one hop, it's not that hard to haul a load of fuel out to half it's range, drop it off, head back, and repeat until the fuel depot has enough gas for to carry to the next hop. And for all I know, you've got plans for batteries and electric motors that would simplify the logistics even more than 'supply gas'."
I leaned forwards, elbows on my knees. "My first, crude estimate is that a fuel depot would be needed every five hundred kilometers or so. Meaning that instead of slogging through every danger every city on the continent has set free, a pilot of one of these would only have to touch ground a half-dozen times between here and Arizona... and they wouldn't have to travel anywhere near roads, or cities.
"So I repeat my question - why don't you already have these things in the skies?"
DataPacRat
Truthseeker
- Location
- Niagara, Canada
*Chapter Six: Re-Engineering*
I had made a private prediction about what sort of answer I might get, and when the man in gray said, "Bicycles cost much less than flying machines, and do the job nearly as well," that prediction was born out. The sheer flexibility of being able to send a courier anywhere in fuel range, without having to follow roads, without risking attack from man or machine, was nigh-certain to be worth building at least one powered paraglider. Which meant the reason I'd just been told was, at best, an extremely minor reason. It did, however, match a certain pattern I'd started noticing - that a great many of Technoville's actions could be predicted if I assumed that they were less interested in being able to do stuff than they were in keeping other people from being able to do as much as them.
"Fine," I said, trying not to give any indication of my thoughts. "If Plan A for Air is a no-go, then here's Plan B." I pulled out another sheet of paper, with a rough map of the Great Lakes, Mississippi, and other major waterways I'd been able to think of. "A few centuries ago, the Hudson's Bay Company controlled most of the north half of this continent - and they did so almost entirely by going up and down the rivers in boats. The Toledo Historical Society has plenty of records of... post-singularity incidents on land; but none at sea. And I know people fish on the lake. So here's a thought - if the water's less risky than land, then build some canoes, and travel by river and canal. If you actually wanted to learn what's going on in the interior of the continent, why haven't you already started this? After all, canoes are even cheaper than bikes."
"Is that all?", the gray man asked mildly.
"Hardly. Here's Plan C, for the sea." I pulled out another map I'd drawn. "Instead of going inwards - go outwards. Down Lake Erie, and either down Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence, or the Erie Canal. Use the canals if possible, portage around them if not, use log-rollers if your boat's too big to carry, or even just build a new one downstream if you have to. Go down the eastern seaboard. Maybe head in the Gulf of Mexico and land in Texas; or go south and see if the Panama Canal's still navigable, and head around to the Gulf of California. Shortens the landward part of the trip to a thousand klicks instead of over three thousand; or less than four hundred."
I pulled out another sheet. "Plan D, for DXing. You've got radios. Even if you keep them as far away from computers as possible, it's perfectly feasible to bounce signals off the ionosphere to get in touch with any other electronics-capable surviving communities, and exchange information. If the cryo group in Arizona is still functioning, with enough tech to be a cryo group instead of just another bunch of farmers, you should already be in touch with them, instead of relying on some decades-old report."
I mimicked his posture, leaning back steepling my fingers. "I've got a few other proto-plans." I was bluffing a bit - I had vague ideas, but nothing else that came remotely close to being another 'plan'. "But they all have something in common. Knowledge is power. If you people haven't been actively seeking knowledge about the state of the world, it seems likely you've been trying to gain power some other way. And, frankly, I don't like any of the alternative methods I've been able to think of, that are consistent with what I've seen of you so far. Either that, or you already know that travel is so dangerous that trying to head to Arizona by any route is effectively suicide, and you're perfectly willing to let me head out to my death."
"It's not quite as bad as all that," he answered, shuffling through the maps and papers. "I'm sure these ideas have been brought up before, but it's possible conditions have changed enough since they were rejected for it to be worth reviewing them."
"That's all well and good for you. Right now, the main question in my mind is whether you'll let me hold onto the clothes you gave me long enough for me to buy some of my own, or if I'll be walking out of here in my fur."
"Have you made up your mind to leave us, then?"
"If I had, I'd already be heading out the door - or trying to fight my way out, if you tried to stop me."
"Oh, I don't know about that - we could always just pipe some knock-out gas through the ventilation system."
"Thank you for letting me know I should try to steal a guard's gas-mask first."
He chuckled. "Trust me-" I coughed. "Or don't. We have no intention of letting you suicide, unknowingly or otherwise."
I debated whether to grab my sword-stick, leaning on my chair's armrest, again. "That sounds... ominous." I recalled a few of the displays from the museum of people who'd been transformed and hadn't been able to kill themselves.
"Since you seem to be unhappy with us for failing to share information you feel is relevant, before you give up on Technoville and get a job in Dogville as... what, a waitress?... I feel obligated to tell you about something that happened in this city just over a week ago." My imagination went to images of some sort of anti-Changed violence, but he continued on a rather different tack. "On that day, with no pre-planning, and no detectable forms of communication involved, half the people who live in the city decided to wear as much blue as possible. The other half decided to wear as much green as they could. Even some of us in the Embassy violated dress codes by having a colored handkerchief. I, myself, found myself looking through my wardrobe that morning, wishing I had something with some color in it."
"Did... the two colors start fighting?"
"Not at all. They did not even express any preference for interacting with those wearing the same color."
"That sounds... rather bizarre, but harmless."
"Oh, come now, Miss B-"
"Bunny. If I've ever got a reason to use my original name, I will - but if I don't, I need to get in practice getting used to something more appropriate."
"Fine. Miss Bunny. You have just demonstrated a better talent at working through consequences than that," he gestured at the papers.
I didn't feel like telling him that he was vastly overestimating my capabilities. So I stalled for time as I tried to figure out whatever point he was getting at. "If you're bringing it up, you feel it's important. Which means it has the potential to reduce your military or economic power. A wide-ranging mental effect of unknown provenance... that was harmless this time, but might not be so harmless next time? An effect that affected you, as well? Since it doesn't sound like it's a voluntary flashmob, like people did in my time, that suggests it's a post-Singularity effect..."
He simply nodded, and stated, "The physical dangers created by the city-computers, while bad for any individual that encounters them, do not pose any significant long-term threat to our society. The - I don't believe you have the background to fully understand the concepts - the /intellectual/ dangers threaten our very existence, on every level. Technoville uses every form of quarantine that is physically within our power to do so, with multiple forms of firewalls, including between sections. And with all that work, just over a week ago, about thirty percent of our population happened to decide to wear blue or green."
"... Okay, I'm starting to get a vague sense of how freaky that was." I frowned. "Just over a week ago, you say?" I thought back. I'd just gotten out of quarantine by then, and had started asking for room and board at farms. "I met a, um, gaggle of farm-girls that were all wearing blue dresses, but I just assumed they were wearing Plain Dress. They, uh, even got me into one."
"Ah," my conversational partner said, raising a finger, "but when you woke up, did you /want/ to wear blue or green?"
I shook my head. "I was trying /not/ to wear anything, or at least as little as I could get away with. Still getting used to the fur."
"Exactly." He sat back with a smile on his face.
"... I don't follow. And I'd rather not play guessing games."
"Very well, Miss... Bunny." He leaned forward again. "To make it plain - as far as we can tell, every human, parahuman, and other sapient biological being is often influenced, or outright controlled, by post-Singularity intelligences, via unknown means, for unknown purposes. Out of everyone who's lived through Doomsday, or been born from those who were, we haven't found any significant exceptions. You, on the other hand, were dead and frozen through Armageddon; at liquid nitrogen temperatures, chemistry in your body - and your brain - essentially stopped for the duration. You, Miss Bunny, may very well be the only... completely /clean/ mind on the planet."
I shook my head. "Read your file. I'm probably more 'under the influence' of something than you are - my whole skeleton-"
"-was biopsied while you were in quarantine, and its information analyzed. Simplifying a great deal, your bones contain a number of repeated computation units, each with the same programming, which sums up to 'keep you alive when you can't'. If we did pump sedative gas into this room, once you fell unconscious, you would most likely get up and walk out, fighting off any guards who tried to stop you, and go hole up somewhere safe until you woke up again."
"... How long have you people known this? And - again, could we skip the guessing games?"
"Our analysts estimate that there is a greater than one percent chance that you are, quite literally, the only sane person. If you were to decide that traveling cross-country to Arizona is the best choice, there is a non-negligible probability that it really is. If you were to decide that /not/ traveling cross-country is the best choice, that moderately increases the odds of your sanity."
I started to feel a chill, and realized I'd started sweating. "I don't think I like any of the implications I'm starting to think of."
"I don't see why. We're considering offering you a city to run."
That blinkered me, and I blinked rapidly, responding with a flat, "What?"
"Oh, not the whole thing, at first. You may be sane, but you still need to learn bureaucratic skills, management, and all that. Dogville's economy has become reasonably integrated into the Technoville system, and we're going to start putting up a new set of quarantine procedures and firewalls here over the next few decades; but while we're doing that, we plan on expanding our influence to Cleveland, and after that, Erie and Buffalo. We could start you as a college professor, move you up through the academic ranks, and then into general politics. But there's plenty of time to work out such plans."
I was shaking my head without even realizing it, and looking for ideas to reject the whole notion. "I don't believe you. If I really am a one-of-a-kind resource, there's no way you'd have let me out of your sight for a moment, let alone biking all over the countryside with bad maps and the possibility of just heading over the horizon."
"I believe I already said - tests. You /may/ be the Only Sane Bunny. It's still not /likely/."
I found another objection. "I'm schizoid - an introvert on steroids. No matter how much training you give me, if you put me in charge of... anything, I'd go bug-nuts in short order."
He calmly answered, "Some advances in psychology and psychiatry were made after you died. That issue is one that can be dealt with."
"Ah," I said, "but you /can't/ trust me the way you're talking about. /Somebody/ had to keep my cryostat topped up with liquid nitrogen - and then thaw me out, and build the body I'm wearing now. If that wasn't you guys, that leaves the post-Singularity intelligences themselves, the very people - things? - you're trying to avoid being influenced by. What better way to keep tabs on you than to give you exactly what you want?"
He slowly nodded. "That /is/ a serious objection. It's also why you're still not ever going to be allowed past any of Technoville's firewalls and into the city itself. We're taking that possibility into account in the various plans involving you. Still - while you just might be exactly what /we/ want, we're offering you what /you/ want. Instead of making your way across thousands of kilometres of landscape - you could just start your own cryonics group here. Well, more likely in Cleveland. Even if you're not actually immune to anything, or if you are but it wears off after a while, you'd still be part of the local power structure, and be able to get things done that you couldn't on your own."
I raised my hand, one finger pointed ceilingward, and opened my mouth to say something. I paused, silent, closed it; then opened again, and stated, "I need to pee."
--
I did have a full bladder, but mostly I needed a few moments to try to collect my thoughts. I didn't care if the bathroom had hidden cameras everywhere - Technoville surely already had plenty of recordings of my naked body, even before the body had become mine.
By the time I'd cleaned up and rejoined the man in gray, I had a plan. Well, half a plan. Well, enough of the start of a plan to work out the rest as I went.
"I think that I need to make it perfectly clear that I simply do not want to end up in a position of political power. The highest position I've ever had was getting elected as president of my tenant's association, and that was only because nobody else wanted the job."
"I think you underestimate our psychological science. By the time we're done, you'll be eager for the position."
"That's pretty much my /point/. The me of right now doesn't want to end up turning into that version of my possible future selves, even knowing that that version of me would be happy to have been turned into a... politician. Even if I do accept the premise that there's something special about my gray matter, because I was on pause for a while - there's every chance that whatever it is would just get wiped away with that big a psychological change."
"Again, I think you underestimate our psychological science, but it's a valid point."
"We both know that I'm perfectly capable of going off and playing Tarzan by myself in the woods. But even if I don't believe everything you've been saying, it seems like there's /something/ you want from me. So if you want me to work with you instead of going off to do my own thing, here's my price: Stop hiding. Put together some sort of exploration and contact corps, to start getting in touch with the rest of humanity, and anything else that wants to talk. With an actual budget, and personnel, and air and radio sections, and the authority to carry arms for self-defence. And I want a pony.
"... and ... a ... pony," he said, finishing writing down some notes. "Talking or non-talking?"
"You're joking."
"We keep track of parahumans of all descriptions, just in case their particular attributes ever become useful. What do you want the pony for? Transportation, company, food-taster, sex slave-"
I started coughing violently, and missed the rest of his suggestions. I grabbed a glass of water from the table, more concerned about clearing my throat and breathing again than how drugged it might be.
When I'd settled back down, I said, "I keep forgetting there's been a cultural change. When I'm from, 'I want a pony' is a euphemism, meaning something like 'I don't expect this to ever happen."
"So, scratch the pony?" I took off my glasses and rubbed my face. "I'll leave it as a bonus request. Now, to be clear, are you asking merely for this corps to exist, or to be put in charge of it?"
I re-donned my glasses. "You're joking. Technoville's whole modus operandi is information management and control. And you're trying to seriously tell me that you'd actually consider opening up channels to random humans of all sorts?"
"I'm going to pass along the suggestion. Even without you involved in it, it's an idea worth re-examining, by now. Besides that - as you've just said, there's been a cultural shift. Over ninety-nine percent of humanity disappeared from the rest. The remainder came from isolationists, campers, boaters, rural communities, and other fringe cases. Put those together, and by your standards, pretty much every last human is insane. Enough time has gone by that those of us still around are /functionally/ insane, but insane nonetheless. Back home, in Technoville, we use... various rituals and procedures to re-ground us against reality, each and every day. That's possibly why seventy percent of us /didn't/ get caught up in the blue-green day. A large part of those rituals is... to put it delicately, re-evaluating our ideas against the evidence, both old and new. You have an uncommon perspective. If you think re-establishing a worldwide communications system might be a good idea, the simple fact that you thought of it means it's worth re-checking why we haven't done that."
I set the glass down. "Are you saying that, whatever ideas I propose, you're going to take seriously? That if I'd asked for," I waved a hand as I sought for a suitable ridiculous idea, "a personal harem of every available species and gender, you'd earnestly and thoughtfully consider giving that to me?"
"In short - yes."
"Ah. Well, it's a good thing I didn't ask for that, then." I tried to ignore him hastily erasing the note he'd started to add to his list. "Um. Wow. Having my ideas taken seriously by the powers-that-be... /that's/ a new thought. Er - you /do/ realize that while I may be unique in all sorts of ways, I'm not nearly as smart as actually smart people? I come up with bad ideas, and make bad decisions, a lot more often than I like to remember."
"That's why I'm simply feeding your idea into the input queue, and am not proclaiming you the new Empress of Technoville whose whim is custom and word is law."
"Ah. Good for you. Ah... One thing I've learned about myself over the years - I'm even worse at coming up with ideas on-the-spot than when I have a little time to think things over. It can take a couple hours of walking without any chatter just to clear my head enough to start coming close to having more good ideas than bad. So how about we call it a day and talk again after you've had a chance to go back and forth with whoever it is you go back and forth with?"
"That seems reasonable. Have you arranged for lodgings, or would you like to spend the night here?"
"False dichotomy. I may not be smart, but I've picked up enough tricks that I can pretend to be, now and then. I still have time to find a Changed-friendly place, or to get out of the city far enough to camp..."
--
I was persuaded to stay in the Embassy when one particular fact was pointed out to me: they had showers with unlimited hot water. A couple of weeks of camp hygiene, cold farmers' baths, and no more hot water than could be boiled, made the attraction irresistible, even before I was promised enough shampoo and conditioner to suds up my entire pelt. If nothing else, a good shower was almost as good as a short walk for clearing my mind.
So it was while my usually-fluffy fur was plastered to my skin, and I was rinsing the first layer of grime into the drain, that I heard a knock at the suite's door, and the words "Room service" echoed from the translator pendant I'd looped around the towel rack. (Right next to my sword-cane. My belt-knife was hanging on the shower-head - I had no intention of having a Psycho pulled on me. Scorpia was playing innocent watch on top of my clothes.)
I called out, "Leave it out there," my eyes closed to keep the shampoo running down my ears out of them. I'd been trying to think through my current situation with a thought experiment, coming up with a historical parallel: If the Nazis hadn't perpetrated the Holocaust, hadn't said word one about subhuman races, would they still be evil? Well, they wouldn't be the absolutely /perfect/ villains they'd ended up as, but what with the invading other countries, trying to implement thought control such as by executing the members of White Rose, and general totalitarianism. Looked at from a distance, and tilting my head just right (and not just to get the water out of my ears) the reason all of /that/ was bad could be because societies tended to survive when they could win wars, and for the past few hundred-to-thousand years, wars tended to be won by the side with the most advanced technology, and technology tended to advance most when the marketplace of ideas was allowed to bloom as much as possible. However, the fact that the most advanced technology had led to a Singularity, one that humanity (or mind-kind, or whatever word now applied to both humans and parahumans) had almost been wiped out by, meant that maybe pushing tech forward wasn't necessarily the best basis for a civilization anymore.
But that assumed that any future Singularity would also be a bad one. I'd never quite gotten the hang of applying Bayesian updates - I could do the math, just not quickly enough for it to be a mental stumbling block - but I'd certainly gotten the hang of Laplace's Sunrise Formula. If, before the Singularity, people knew so little about it that there was no reliable evidence about whether it would be a good or bad one, the best estimate would be there was a 50% chance of each outcome. According to Laplace, if you had a single example to work with, the odds would shift from 50% to 66.6%, towards whichever outcome had happened. Was I really considering throwing away the whole Enlightenment, science and democracy and capitalism and trials based on evidence and so much more, just because the odds that a second Singularity would turn out bad had increased by 17%? Sure, it was a simplified model that left out almost all evidence but the fact of the event itself, but since I didn't really have all that much other evidence to go on in the first place...
One of the advantages of flexible parabolic ears was that they could be turned to catch any sound, tuning it in. One disadvantage was that if they weren't tuned in, and if there was a lot of background noise - like running water - they tuned pretty much everything else out. So I was kind of surprised to hear the shower door slide open. I tried to step back out of the stream of water to clear my eyes, but I bumped into someone who'd just stepped into the shower behind me.
By this time, my ears had swivelled to face whatever was going on, so I could hear the words, quite clearly, in English, and low but feminine, "I hear you're looking for a pony." My sense of touch was able to tell that whoever it was, was both unclothed and furred.
I started to shake my head. "Nope. Nuh-uh. Heard wrong. I don't know who told you what, but you might as well consider me asexual, aromantic, and a-everything-else until further notice that will probably never be given."
The water and suds finally cleared from my eyes enough for me to open them. There was, in fact, an equine-style Changed standing behind me, brown fur, hooves instead of feet - and towering over me, easily over seven feet to my almost-five-feet-plus-ears. Even with my glasses a few steps out of reach, I was also able to see the pistol she was holding, with of all things a condom unrolled over the barrel; not pointed particularly in my direction, but that tiny little detail didn't seem all that important compared to the fact of its existence.
"Are you sure you won't give me the opportunity to... persuade you?"
I had made a private prediction about what sort of answer I might get, and when the man in gray said, "Bicycles cost much less than flying machines, and do the job nearly as well," that prediction was born out. The sheer flexibility of being able to send a courier anywhere in fuel range, without having to follow roads, without risking attack from man or machine, was nigh-certain to be worth building at least one powered paraglider. Which meant the reason I'd just been told was, at best, an extremely minor reason. It did, however, match a certain pattern I'd started noticing - that a great many of Technoville's actions could be predicted if I assumed that they were less interested in being able to do stuff than they were in keeping other people from being able to do as much as them.
"Fine," I said, trying not to give any indication of my thoughts. "If Plan A for Air is a no-go, then here's Plan B." I pulled out another sheet of paper, with a rough map of the Great Lakes, Mississippi, and other major waterways I'd been able to think of. "A few centuries ago, the Hudson's Bay Company controlled most of the north half of this continent - and they did so almost entirely by going up and down the rivers in boats. The Toledo Historical Society has plenty of records of... post-singularity incidents on land; but none at sea. And I know people fish on the lake. So here's a thought - if the water's less risky than land, then build some canoes, and travel by river and canal. If you actually wanted to learn what's going on in the interior of the continent, why haven't you already started this? After all, canoes are even cheaper than bikes."
"Is that all?", the gray man asked mildly.
"Hardly. Here's Plan C, for the sea." I pulled out another map I'd drawn. "Instead of going inwards - go outwards. Down Lake Erie, and either down Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence, or the Erie Canal. Use the canals if possible, portage around them if not, use log-rollers if your boat's too big to carry, or even just build a new one downstream if you have to. Go down the eastern seaboard. Maybe head in the Gulf of Mexico and land in Texas; or go south and see if the Panama Canal's still navigable, and head around to the Gulf of California. Shortens the landward part of the trip to a thousand klicks instead of over three thousand; or less than four hundred."
I pulled out another sheet. "Plan D, for DXing. You've got radios. Even if you keep them as far away from computers as possible, it's perfectly feasible to bounce signals off the ionosphere to get in touch with any other electronics-capable surviving communities, and exchange information. If the cryo group in Arizona is still functioning, with enough tech to be a cryo group instead of just another bunch of farmers, you should already be in touch with them, instead of relying on some decades-old report."
I mimicked his posture, leaning back steepling my fingers. "I've got a few other proto-plans." I was bluffing a bit - I had vague ideas, but nothing else that came remotely close to being another 'plan'. "But they all have something in common. Knowledge is power. If you people haven't been actively seeking knowledge about the state of the world, it seems likely you've been trying to gain power some other way. And, frankly, I don't like any of the alternative methods I've been able to think of, that are consistent with what I've seen of you so far. Either that, or you already know that travel is so dangerous that trying to head to Arizona by any route is effectively suicide, and you're perfectly willing to let me head out to my death."
"It's not quite as bad as all that," he answered, shuffling through the maps and papers. "I'm sure these ideas have been brought up before, but it's possible conditions have changed enough since they were rejected for it to be worth reviewing them."
"That's all well and good for you. Right now, the main question in my mind is whether you'll let me hold onto the clothes you gave me long enough for me to buy some of my own, or if I'll be walking out of here in my fur."
"Have you made up your mind to leave us, then?"
"If I had, I'd already be heading out the door - or trying to fight my way out, if you tried to stop me."
"Oh, I don't know about that - we could always just pipe some knock-out gas through the ventilation system."
"Thank you for letting me know I should try to steal a guard's gas-mask first."
He chuckled. "Trust me-" I coughed. "Or don't. We have no intention of letting you suicide, unknowingly or otherwise."
I debated whether to grab my sword-stick, leaning on my chair's armrest, again. "That sounds... ominous." I recalled a few of the displays from the museum of people who'd been transformed and hadn't been able to kill themselves.
"Since you seem to be unhappy with us for failing to share information you feel is relevant, before you give up on Technoville and get a job in Dogville as... what, a waitress?... I feel obligated to tell you about something that happened in this city just over a week ago." My imagination went to images of some sort of anti-Changed violence, but he continued on a rather different tack. "On that day, with no pre-planning, and no detectable forms of communication involved, half the people who live in the city decided to wear as much blue as possible. The other half decided to wear as much green as they could. Even some of us in the Embassy violated dress codes by having a colored handkerchief. I, myself, found myself looking through my wardrobe that morning, wishing I had something with some color in it."
"Did... the two colors start fighting?"
"Not at all. They did not even express any preference for interacting with those wearing the same color."
"That sounds... rather bizarre, but harmless."
"Oh, come now, Miss B-"
"Bunny. If I've ever got a reason to use my original name, I will - but if I don't, I need to get in practice getting used to something more appropriate."
"Fine. Miss Bunny. You have just demonstrated a better talent at working through consequences than that," he gestured at the papers.
I didn't feel like telling him that he was vastly overestimating my capabilities. So I stalled for time as I tried to figure out whatever point he was getting at. "If you're bringing it up, you feel it's important. Which means it has the potential to reduce your military or economic power. A wide-ranging mental effect of unknown provenance... that was harmless this time, but might not be so harmless next time? An effect that affected you, as well? Since it doesn't sound like it's a voluntary flashmob, like people did in my time, that suggests it's a post-Singularity effect..."
He simply nodded, and stated, "The physical dangers created by the city-computers, while bad for any individual that encounters them, do not pose any significant long-term threat to our society. The - I don't believe you have the background to fully understand the concepts - the /intellectual/ dangers threaten our very existence, on every level. Technoville uses every form of quarantine that is physically within our power to do so, with multiple forms of firewalls, including between sections. And with all that work, just over a week ago, about thirty percent of our population happened to decide to wear blue or green."
"... Okay, I'm starting to get a vague sense of how freaky that was." I frowned. "Just over a week ago, you say?" I thought back. I'd just gotten out of quarantine by then, and had started asking for room and board at farms. "I met a, um, gaggle of farm-girls that were all wearing blue dresses, but I just assumed they were wearing Plain Dress. They, uh, even got me into one."
"Ah," my conversational partner said, raising a finger, "but when you woke up, did you /want/ to wear blue or green?"
I shook my head. "I was trying /not/ to wear anything, or at least as little as I could get away with. Still getting used to the fur."
"Exactly." He sat back with a smile on his face.
"... I don't follow. And I'd rather not play guessing games."
"Very well, Miss... Bunny." He leaned forward again. "To make it plain - as far as we can tell, every human, parahuman, and other sapient biological being is often influenced, or outright controlled, by post-Singularity intelligences, via unknown means, for unknown purposes. Out of everyone who's lived through Doomsday, or been born from those who were, we haven't found any significant exceptions. You, on the other hand, were dead and frozen through Armageddon; at liquid nitrogen temperatures, chemistry in your body - and your brain - essentially stopped for the duration. You, Miss Bunny, may very well be the only... completely /clean/ mind on the planet."
I shook my head. "Read your file. I'm probably more 'under the influence' of something than you are - my whole skeleton-"
"-was biopsied while you were in quarantine, and its information analyzed. Simplifying a great deal, your bones contain a number of repeated computation units, each with the same programming, which sums up to 'keep you alive when you can't'. If we did pump sedative gas into this room, once you fell unconscious, you would most likely get up and walk out, fighting off any guards who tried to stop you, and go hole up somewhere safe until you woke up again."
"... How long have you people known this? And - again, could we skip the guessing games?"
"Our analysts estimate that there is a greater than one percent chance that you are, quite literally, the only sane person. If you were to decide that traveling cross-country to Arizona is the best choice, there is a non-negligible probability that it really is. If you were to decide that /not/ traveling cross-country is the best choice, that moderately increases the odds of your sanity."
I started to feel a chill, and realized I'd started sweating. "I don't think I like any of the implications I'm starting to think of."
"I don't see why. We're considering offering you a city to run."
That blinkered me, and I blinked rapidly, responding with a flat, "What?"
"Oh, not the whole thing, at first. You may be sane, but you still need to learn bureaucratic skills, management, and all that. Dogville's economy has become reasonably integrated into the Technoville system, and we're going to start putting up a new set of quarantine procedures and firewalls here over the next few decades; but while we're doing that, we plan on expanding our influence to Cleveland, and after that, Erie and Buffalo. We could start you as a college professor, move you up through the academic ranks, and then into general politics. But there's plenty of time to work out such plans."
I was shaking my head without even realizing it, and looking for ideas to reject the whole notion. "I don't believe you. If I really am a one-of-a-kind resource, there's no way you'd have let me out of your sight for a moment, let alone biking all over the countryside with bad maps and the possibility of just heading over the horizon."
"I believe I already said - tests. You /may/ be the Only Sane Bunny. It's still not /likely/."
I found another objection. "I'm schizoid - an introvert on steroids. No matter how much training you give me, if you put me in charge of... anything, I'd go bug-nuts in short order."
He calmly answered, "Some advances in psychology and psychiatry were made after you died. That issue is one that can be dealt with."
"Ah," I said, "but you /can't/ trust me the way you're talking about. /Somebody/ had to keep my cryostat topped up with liquid nitrogen - and then thaw me out, and build the body I'm wearing now. If that wasn't you guys, that leaves the post-Singularity intelligences themselves, the very people - things? - you're trying to avoid being influenced by. What better way to keep tabs on you than to give you exactly what you want?"
He slowly nodded. "That /is/ a serious objection. It's also why you're still not ever going to be allowed past any of Technoville's firewalls and into the city itself. We're taking that possibility into account in the various plans involving you. Still - while you just might be exactly what /we/ want, we're offering you what /you/ want. Instead of making your way across thousands of kilometres of landscape - you could just start your own cryonics group here. Well, more likely in Cleveland. Even if you're not actually immune to anything, or if you are but it wears off after a while, you'd still be part of the local power structure, and be able to get things done that you couldn't on your own."
I raised my hand, one finger pointed ceilingward, and opened my mouth to say something. I paused, silent, closed it; then opened again, and stated, "I need to pee."
--
I did have a full bladder, but mostly I needed a few moments to try to collect my thoughts. I didn't care if the bathroom had hidden cameras everywhere - Technoville surely already had plenty of recordings of my naked body, even before the body had become mine.
By the time I'd cleaned up and rejoined the man in gray, I had a plan. Well, half a plan. Well, enough of the start of a plan to work out the rest as I went.
"I think that I need to make it perfectly clear that I simply do not want to end up in a position of political power. The highest position I've ever had was getting elected as president of my tenant's association, and that was only because nobody else wanted the job."
"I think you underestimate our psychological science. By the time we're done, you'll be eager for the position."
"That's pretty much my /point/. The me of right now doesn't want to end up turning into that version of my possible future selves, even knowing that that version of me would be happy to have been turned into a... politician. Even if I do accept the premise that there's something special about my gray matter, because I was on pause for a while - there's every chance that whatever it is would just get wiped away with that big a psychological change."
"Again, I think you underestimate our psychological science, but it's a valid point."
"We both know that I'm perfectly capable of going off and playing Tarzan by myself in the woods. But even if I don't believe everything you've been saying, it seems like there's /something/ you want from me. So if you want me to work with you instead of going off to do my own thing, here's my price: Stop hiding. Put together some sort of exploration and contact corps, to start getting in touch with the rest of humanity, and anything else that wants to talk. With an actual budget, and personnel, and air and radio sections, and the authority to carry arms for self-defence. And I want a pony.
"... and ... a ... pony," he said, finishing writing down some notes. "Talking or non-talking?"
"You're joking."
"We keep track of parahumans of all descriptions, just in case their particular attributes ever become useful. What do you want the pony for? Transportation, company, food-taster, sex slave-"
I started coughing violently, and missed the rest of his suggestions. I grabbed a glass of water from the table, more concerned about clearing my throat and breathing again than how drugged it might be.
When I'd settled back down, I said, "I keep forgetting there's been a cultural change. When I'm from, 'I want a pony' is a euphemism, meaning something like 'I don't expect this to ever happen."
"So, scratch the pony?" I took off my glasses and rubbed my face. "I'll leave it as a bonus request. Now, to be clear, are you asking merely for this corps to exist, or to be put in charge of it?"
I re-donned my glasses. "You're joking. Technoville's whole modus operandi is information management and control. And you're trying to seriously tell me that you'd actually consider opening up channels to random humans of all sorts?"
"I'm going to pass along the suggestion. Even without you involved in it, it's an idea worth re-examining, by now. Besides that - as you've just said, there's been a cultural shift. Over ninety-nine percent of humanity disappeared from the rest. The remainder came from isolationists, campers, boaters, rural communities, and other fringe cases. Put those together, and by your standards, pretty much every last human is insane. Enough time has gone by that those of us still around are /functionally/ insane, but insane nonetheless. Back home, in Technoville, we use... various rituals and procedures to re-ground us against reality, each and every day. That's possibly why seventy percent of us /didn't/ get caught up in the blue-green day. A large part of those rituals is... to put it delicately, re-evaluating our ideas against the evidence, both old and new. You have an uncommon perspective. If you think re-establishing a worldwide communications system might be a good idea, the simple fact that you thought of it means it's worth re-checking why we haven't done that."
I set the glass down. "Are you saying that, whatever ideas I propose, you're going to take seriously? That if I'd asked for," I waved a hand as I sought for a suitable ridiculous idea, "a personal harem of every available species and gender, you'd earnestly and thoughtfully consider giving that to me?"
"In short - yes."
"Ah. Well, it's a good thing I didn't ask for that, then." I tried to ignore him hastily erasing the note he'd started to add to his list. "Um. Wow. Having my ideas taken seriously by the powers-that-be... /that's/ a new thought. Er - you /do/ realize that while I may be unique in all sorts of ways, I'm not nearly as smart as actually smart people? I come up with bad ideas, and make bad decisions, a lot more often than I like to remember."
"That's why I'm simply feeding your idea into the input queue, and am not proclaiming you the new Empress of Technoville whose whim is custom and word is law."
"Ah. Good for you. Ah... One thing I've learned about myself over the years - I'm even worse at coming up with ideas on-the-spot than when I have a little time to think things over. It can take a couple hours of walking without any chatter just to clear my head enough to start coming close to having more good ideas than bad. So how about we call it a day and talk again after you've had a chance to go back and forth with whoever it is you go back and forth with?"
"That seems reasonable. Have you arranged for lodgings, or would you like to spend the night here?"
"False dichotomy. I may not be smart, but I've picked up enough tricks that I can pretend to be, now and then. I still have time to find a Changed-friendly place, or to get out of the city far enough to camp..."
--
I was persuaded to stay in the Embassy when one particular fact was pointed out to me: they had showers with unlimited hot water. A couple of weeks of camp hygiene, cold farmers' baths, and no more hot water than could be boiled, made the attraction irresistible, even before I was promised enough shampoo and conditioner to suds up my entire pelt. If nothing else, a good shower was almost as good as a short walk for clearing my mind.
So it was while my usually-fluffy fur was plastered to my skin, and I was rinsing the first layer of grime into the drain, that I heard a knock at the suite's door, and the words "Room service" echoed from the translator pendant I'd looped around the towel rack. (Right next to my sword-cane. My belt-knife was hanging on the shower-head - I had no intention of having a Psycho pulled on me. Scorpia was playing innocent watch on top of my clothes.)
I called out, "Leave it out there," my eyes closed to keep the shampoo running down my ears out of them. I'd been trying to think through my current situation with a thought experiment, coming up with a historical parallel: If the Nazis hadn't perpetrated the Holocaust, hadn't said word one about subhuman races, would they still be evil? Well, they wouldn't be the absolutely /perfect/ villains they'd ended up as, but what with the invading other countries, trying to implement thought control such as by executing the members of White Rose, and general totalitarianism. Looked at from a distance, and tilting my head just right (and not just to get the water out of my ears) the reason all of /that/ was bad could be because societies tended to survive when they could win wars, and for the past few hundred-to-thousand years, wars tended to be won by the side with the most advanced technology, and technology tended to advance most when the marketplace of ideas was allowed to bloom as much as possible. However, the fact that the most advanced technology had led to a Singularity, one that humanity (or mind-kind, or whatever word now applied to both humans and parahumans) had almost been wiped out by, meant that maybe pushing tech forward wasn't necessarily the best basis for a civilization anymore.
But that assumed that any future Singularity would also be a bad one. I'd never quite gotten the hang of applying Bayesian updates - I could do the math, just not quickly enough for it to be a mental stumbling block - but I'd certainly gotten the hang of Laplace's Sunrise Formula. If, before the Singularity, people knew so little about it that there was no reliable evidence about whether it would be a good or bad one, the best estimate would be there was a 50% chance of each outcome. According to Laplace, if you had a single example to work with, the odds would shift from 50% to 66.6%, towards whichever outcome had happened. Was I really considering throwing away the whole Enlightenment, science and democracy and capitalism and trials based on evidence and so much more, just because the odds that a second Singularity would turn out bad had increased by 17%? Sure, it was a simplified model that left out almost all evidence but the fact of the event itself, but since I didn't really have all that much other evidence to go on in the first place...
One of the advantages of flexible parabolic ears was that they could be turned to catch any sound, tuning it in. One disadvantage was that if they weren't tuned in, and if there was a lot of background noise - like running water - they tuned pretty much everything else out. So I was kind of surprised to hear the shower door slide open. I tried to step back out of the stream of water to clear my eyes, but I bumped into someone who'd just stepped into the shower behind me.
By this time, my ears had swivelled to face whatever was going on, so I could hear the words, quite clearly, in English, and low but feminine, "I hear you're looking for a pony." My sense of touch was able to tell that whoever it was, was both unclothed and furred.
I started to shake my head. "Nope. Nuh-uh. Heard wrong. I don't know who told you what, but you might as well consider me asexual, aromantic, and a-everything-else until further notice that will probably never be given."
The water and suds finally cleared from my eyes enough for me to open them. There was, in fact, an equine-style Changed standing behind me, brown fur, hooves instead of feet - and towering over me, easily over seven feet to my almost-five-feet-plus-ears. Even with my glasses a few steps out of reach, I was also able to see the pistol she was holding, with of all things a condom unrolled over the barrel; not pointed particularly in my direction, but that tiny little detail didn't seem all that important compared to the fact of its existence.
"Are you sure you won't give me the opportunity to... persuade you?"
DataPacRat
Truthseeker
- Location
- Niagara, Canada
*Chapter Seven: Re-Jiggering*
"Can I at least finish my shower first?"
She gestured with her gun, and I heaved a sigh, and stepped out onto the bathmat. I would have tried turning off the water, but my knife was by the tap, and that pistol could make great big ugly holes in me if I so much as twitched in a potentially unfriendly manner. Another gesture had me sit on the commode, whereupon she grabbed the translator and exited the bathroom. I heard a soft click, and then murmuring voices, whereupon she returned and carefully closed the door. "That should keep the microphones busy," she said, in not quite a whisper, and sat down on the tile. She set her gun down beside her, resting her arms on her knees. "I trust you won't mind that the Tech spies will get the impression that you're a reasonably ordinary heterosexual transman, who is willing to be persuaded to be cuddled by a big naked woman."
"'Cuddled'?"
"Officially, I've been hired to be your bedwarmer. That's not a euphemism - I lie in the bed and warm it for you. The tape has me stay in bed with you as you get ready to sleep. That's all."
The bathroom's air was steamy from the shower, but my fur was full of water, and I was starting to feel chilly from what was evaporating. "And that little toy?" I gestured at her weapon, before wrapping my arms around myself.
"We need to talk, now, without the Techs overhearing."
"And this is really the best way? ... And if you're not going to point that thing at me, could you toss me a towel?"
The bathtowel was dutifully chucked, and less dutifully thwapped me in the head. Without having had a chance to apply conditioner, I expected my fur to frizz out and make my clothes even more itchy than usual, but right now, I was just chilly. As I started drying myself, my baffling bedwarmer breathed, "We need to know who you are, where you're from - and who you're with."
Instead of answering, I asked the obvious, "'We' who?"
"You don't need to know that."
I paused in my ruffling of the towel, and just stared at her. She stared back. "Well," I said, "now I know what it is you need. I'm glad we had this little chat." She dropped her hand to the floor, onto the pistol. I sighed again. "You are aware that I probably would have happily answered your questions if you'd just come up to me and asked? Now you've got me feeling all tetchy."
"Time is an issue. We were hoping you'd come to a rooming house - but since you stayed in here, we had to use me. Which puts my position at risk. If you even hint to the Techs that we talked, and I haven't gone to ground, they'll put me in interrogation faster than you can blink. I'd rather shoot myself than let that happen. Of course, I'd rather shoot you than shoot myself."
"I'd really rather nobody got shot at all."
"Then answer the questions, and make me believe you."
"Which questions?" I wrapped the towel around my torso the way I'd seen in movies, as an impromptu under-the-shoulder dress. I had an urge to flip the lid up from the seat I was on and use it, but that didn't seem to be a plan that reduced the odds of my getting shot. I supposed that this was just the sort of thing I could expect to happen to me, in the civilization of this brave new world.
"You told Hair Miller that you'd had access to books and shows from twenty fifteen and before. Was that true?"
"It would be trivial to catch me if I lied about that. And I can't think of a reason I would have."
"Does that library still exist?"
"Um." I wrinkled my forehead. "Uh - no, I can't say that it does."
"Crap. Was it the only one around? Where was it?"
I leaned over to my piled clothes, watching for her reaction; when she didn't say yay or neigh, I pulled out bra and undies, and started pulling them on. Mostly to give myself a moment to think; this seemed like a moment to tell the truth in a misleading way. "My grandfather was born a Mennonite. My father wasn't. I was born on a farm. I've spent most of my life... call it a hundred klicks out of Toronto. As far as I know, my home isn't there anymore, everyone I'm related to is dead, and I'm, well, this," I gestured at myself.
"Double crap. The thing that Changed you - is /it/ still around?"
I was now pulling on my t-shirt and wristwatch, and holding onto the shorts, since the belt that kept them from sliding off was in the shower with the knife. "... I don't think it's going to be turning anyone else into bunnies, if that's what you mean."
"Triple crap. Well, this has been a complete bust. I guess all that's left is to ask, are you with the Techs?"
I tried to pretend I didn't see her shift her hand closer to where the pistol was. This seemed to be a rather important question to answer correctly. "/You/ have a job with them," I pointed out. "Bedwarmer and whatever else it is you do."
"That's just what I do. Not who I'm /with/."
"In case you haven't noticed, I just got here. So far, they're the only ones to make any sort of offer at all." I was trying to get the gears of my brain kicked into rapid motion, but the little rat in there seemed more interested in enjoying the view than running on the wheel. I did notice that I was missing one detail which might help move things along. "For example," I said, "I don't even know if this town's in contact with the other cities on the lake - Cleveland, Erie, Buffalo, and the smaller ports."
"Of course it is. Why wouldn't it be?"
"Uh-huh." And that finally managed to get something going. I realized I'd been using the wrong mental model. Treating the city-state of Technoville like the Nazis was a terrible way to understand the region - the key thought in there was 'city-state'. On and around Lake Erie alone, there were at least four cities, plus Technoville next to it, plus Detroit. That meant there were at least, say, seven intelligence-style groups working in Toledo/Dogtown alone.
This wasn't a simple dictatorship-versus-democracy political arena. This was classical Greece, with Athens and Sparta butting heads; or even better, the Italian city-states, with Venice and Florence and Milan and so on scrabbling for power. The arena that had produced the Borgias, the Medicis, and Machiavelli. And here I'd just come blithely traipsing in without a care in the world.
I was so screwed.
"Well," I said, "If you're asking me to join your little band, I have to say that given the display of clumsy amateurism I've seen so far, I'd be surprised if I survived a week if I did."
"'Clumsy'?" This time she did put her hand directly on her weapon. Perhaps, given her size, it was a sensitive subject for her. Well, nothing for it but to press on.
I started ticking off items on my fingers, trying to imply that I'd already worked all of them out when I was really thinking of them just a split-second before I said them. "You gave away the name of an information source. You've implied that you've got a good idea what all the local members of your gang think, meaning you don't have a good cell structure with one-way communication cut-outs. You brought a potentially noisy weapon on an operation that should be covert. You didn't even try the seductive approach before you brought an obvious weapon to threaten me with. You brought a weapon at all, when it looks pretty obvious that if you needed to kill me, you could probably snap my neck with one hand. You haven't actually offered me anything that appeals to my self-interest, other than my mere survival, and that so poorly that it's reasonable for me to conclude my best odds of living are to run straight into the embrace of the Techs and hand you over to them - or even worse, for me to run to them, and let them convince me to infiltrate your group as a double-agent. And somewhat more annoying, personally, is that with even a modicum of analysis, the Techs probably already know you're a member of your group and are here to do /something/ with me, which means that if I /don't/ run to them and tell them about you, they're going to suspect /me/ of signing up, whether I have or not."
I'd long since run out of fingers, and did my best to glare at her. "In short, your general and specific incompetence has severely cut down my options for survival. In fact, I can only think of two main approaches. One is to make myself useless by getting as far away as possible. The other is to make myself useless by simply signing up with every faction in reach, and blowing all the double- and triple- agent shenanigans out of the water by /telling/ them that I'm joining up with everyone, to make sure not one of them trusts me with anything important, and more importantly, that every group knows none of the others are going to trust me with anything important."
I had the minor pleasure of hearing her teeth grating. "And where does that leave me? Hanging in the wind, under the Techs' tender mercies?"
I pointed at her gun. "Leave that with me. If the Techs find it, I'll tell them I was 'testing' their security. I'll tell them, oh, you tried to seduce me and failed - that'll fill their expectations of you doing something vaguely spy-related to me, without getting them annoyed that you were thinking of killing off their prize rabbit. If you did manage to sneak that thing through their security undetected, I've had opportunity to get one, and reason to think of a way to bring it in with me, and some sources of information about how I could evade typical detection methods, so it'll all check out. If, as seems more likely, the Techs already know you have it, then they'll think I found it in your stuff after you tried to sleep with me, and that I stole it for myself from you. Again, a plausible scenario which doesn't implicate either of us in anything significant."
"Crap in a bucket. Crap by the boatload." She was rubbing her eyes. "You were supposed to be this poorly-educated hick, who'd just been reading books a century out of date. Why can't I say I tried to seduce you and succeeded?"
"Too out of character for me. You are, physically, quite nice to look at - but I really am asexual, or at least close enough to it that it's easier to just round up." I stood from the toilet, stepped over to the shower, reached in, and retrieved my belt and knife from the showerhead. She just watched, not stopping me, as I threaded it onto my shorts. "Risk of pregnancy, of STDs, of all the emotional and interpersonal stuff that I'm very much bad at - I've got so many more important things to do with my time."
"I'm not giving you my gun," she said.
I shrugged. "Well, I can hardly force you to, now can I? You having a gun and all. In that case, I suggest that it never entered this room."
She grunted, stood, and opened the bathroom door. I leaned on the doorframe and watched her dress, collect a wheeled tray, hide the gun inside it, shut off a tape recorder at a quiet moment, and leave the room.
I decided I /really/ shouldn't touch the food or drink she'd left.
I turned around, made use of the commode, flushed, turned around, and delicately threw up into it. Then I showered all over again - this time, fortunately, without interruption.
--
Before I took to bed, I pulled out the ebook-reader-style "Library" that I'd been given by Technoville, and searched for certain items. As I expected, there was no trace of "Brave New World", "Fahrenheit 451", "V for Vendetta", or Orwell. No sign of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", though "Starship Troopers" was there. All of "Star Wars", but only a few scattered bits of "Star Trek". "Narnia", but not "The Dark is Rising". "The Hobbit", but not "The Lord of the Rings". Ayn Rand, no Philip K. Dick. H. G. Wells' "The Time Machine" was missing, but Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" was there. "Lord of the Flies" yes, "Catcher in the Rye" no. Lots of Stephen King and Doc Smith; not so much Anne Rice and Isaac Asimov.
After a while of that I sighed, and got ready for the night. I didn't quite feel like starting to read through the Barsoom books in search of inconsistencies with what I remembered of them, so I simply opened up the Beatrix Potter collection, and lost myself for a while in the simplicity of Edwardian era rural life, as interpreted for children by talking animals.
--
I woke to my muzzle being clamped shut with a gloved hand, another covering my eyes, and the rest of the person clambering onto my torso and holding my arms down. I grunted and thrashed, and I think I got a few good kicks in before someone else grabbed my legs and sat down on them. Despite my ferret-like flexibility, that kept me from doing pretty much else. I felt a sharp sting in my arm, and the world wobbled, went fuzzy, and went away...
--
Once, when I was somewhat younger - or a lot younger, depending on your point of view - I was puttering in my house, and started to feel a bit off. I was heading over to let my roommate know I was feeling a bit sick... and the next thing I knew, I was in a gurney, in a hospital, being rolled down a hall for some sort of brain scan. I hadn't fallen unconscious; I was later told that for all those hours, I was still able to talk, and every few minutes would ask, "What time is it?". No cause was ever found, and it wasn't liked to anything else - the doctors just called it 'transient global amnesia' and everyone went on with their lives.
Like that incident, I have no actual memory of the next bit of this tale, but I can make a best-guess reconstruction:
"The drug isn't /working/," might have said Thing One. "She's not answering anything, just asking about the bloody time."
I probably would have commented, "Say, what time is it?"
Thing Two might have seen a solution to the problem. He could have suggested, "Wrap her left hand in duct-tape so she can't do anything, take her hood off, then unshackle her left hand and stick it so she can /see/ what bloody time it is on her watch."
Such a suggestion, however it had been proposed, would have been carried out, and if I may be allowed a bit of self-indulgent creative license, I expect that I would have smiled and said, "Oh, /that/'s the time. Thank you. Scorpia, auto defense."
--
I woke, not remembering anything after being assaulted in my bed. I found myself sitting in a chair, right arm and legs handcuffed to my seat, left hand wrapped in a duct-tape mitt, two humans slumped on the floor in front of me, and my wristwatch transformed into her robotic scorpion form jumping from one to the other.
There was once a programming language called Logo, in which you could make drawings on the screen by giving commands to a virtual 'turtle', like 'pen up', 'pen down', 'turn 30 degrees left', and 'move forward ten pixels'. When I gave her specific commands instead of one of the general directives Convoy had programmed into her, Scorpia was, roughly, as smart as that turtle. By saying various orders such as "Scorpia, turn five degrees left. Scorpia, move forward ten centimeters. Scorpia, climb onto that table leg. Scorpia, climb up. Scorpia, grab the object five centimeters in front of you. Scorpia, return," I was able to have various objects brought close enough that I could make out whether they were a key. It took roughly two throat-burning hours, including breaks for my oh-so-obedient pet to jump back onto one of the men to re-shock them, and more misfired orders than I care to remember, before I finally found that key (in Thing Two's pocket) and got Scorpia to unlock the handcuff on my right wrist.
It took under two minutes for me to free the rest of myself, cuff the two Things, and search the white-plastered room for anything useful. Other than the light bulb above, and the door with no handle, all I found was a small case with a syringe and a roll of duct-tape.
I ordered Scorpia back to my wrist - I didn't know how much of her batteries she'd used up tasing the Things - stripped the men in case I'd missed anything (like the knife that had been removed from inside my own belt) - and applied copious amounts of tape to immobilize and mute them, each of them ending up in something like a fetal position.
And then I sat down next to the door, and waited. I tried to think, but not much came out of it.
After about ten minutes, according to Scorpia, Thing One groaned into his tape-gag, and opened his eyes. He thrashed around a bit, and I watched closely in case I needed to apply more tape, but the world's perfect tool held firm.
I cleared my throat, and he looked in my direction. "Hi," I said. "I don't think we've been properly introduced. So let me introduce myself." I scooted forward, reached my hand forward - and grabbed his nose, pinching it closed. He made a number of noises, and swung his head around, but this time my flexibility was actually useful, and I kept his airways shut.
After he stopped trying to kick, I let go, and he heaved in a great lungful of air, staring at me, eyes wide. I asked, "Are you going to make me introduce myself again?" He shook his head urgently. "And you'll answer my questions, so I don't have to figure out how to use two dead bodies to open that door?" He nodded just as urgently. "Good. I hate getting blood in my fur." I had not, in fact, yet gotten any blood in my fur; but if I was now stuck in the world of drug-based interrogations, black ops, and other stuff that would have violated the Geneva, Hague, Vienna, and Berne Conventions if they still existed, then I didn't think anything resembling a half-measure would be enough to get me out of it alive.
I started unpeeling the tape wrapped around his head, freeing his mouth. "Now then," I commented as calmly as I could, "is there anything you would like to /volunteer/?"
"Don't kill me," he said, very quickly, as soon as he spat the wad of tap out. A bit less frantically, he added, "We're on /your side/."
I picked up the tape roll and fiddled to start freeing the end of the tape. "I didn't think I needed to say - don't /lie/ to me. Or scream. Screaming would be bad."
"I /am/ on your side!" he hissed, fast, but obviously trying to speak as un-screamingly as possible. "I'm with the psych bureau. We're just improving your profile!"
"If that's the case, then where are the cameras, to make sure you don't miss anything? Why aren't we already covered in guards?" I shook my head, picked up the wadded tape from the floor, and held it to his mouth. "Open," I ordered. When he didn't right away, I said, "Do you /want/ to see how easy it is for these teeth to open an artery?" He let me re-gag him without further stalling.
I sat back and waited for Thing Two to open his eyes. When he did, I introduced myself to him, and asked what he'd like to volunteer.
"You're just making trouble for yourself," was his approach.
"Really?" I asked. "You're really going to try the alpha male crap on me? How much worse than getting black-bagged in the middle of the night does it /get/? Outright waterboarding? Vivisection?"
He shook his head. "We're here to /help/ you. Make your mind better. Make you more able to do what you want to get done."
"Stop," I said, and heaved a dramatic sigh that I hoped wasn't /too/ dramatic. "So much for volunteering. New topic: How do I get out of here? And I don't want any of that nonsense about answering direct questions but leaving out things I didn't think to ask, like whether there's a bear-trap in the hall. First subtopic. Other than trying to figure out which of your long-bones would make the best prybars, how do I get that door open?"
--
They were remarkably cooperative about describing the puzzle-box-like secret panel on the door, which directions the hallways went, where the stairs were, where the likely guards and cameras were, and so on. It might have had something to do with my having mused aloud about rolling along whichever of them was less helpful, to use as raw materials.
Since I wasn't anywhere near as psychopathically callous about their lives as I was doing my utmost to appear to be, and I couldn't actually think of a way having one of them along could help me if something went wrong or they'd lied, I just re-gagged them, jammed the sliding panel latch thing, and left them locked inside.
I was, in fact, still in the Embassy, about two stories above the suite I'd hoped to get a good night's rest in. I had my clothes (with all the useful stuff removed), Scorpia, and a skeleton that might or might not act on its own initiative. In my room was, probably, the electronics that Technoville had given me, which I didn't feel any urgency in collecting. I'd been told my bike and its gear had been parked in the 'garage' overnight. I was now deciding that I was officially done with Technoville; whatever the two Things had really been after, they'd just lost themselves a potentially-posthuman-memetics-resistant ally. The only reason I hadn't already left the Embassy was because I was trying to think of anything useful I might do first. Unfortunately, I had no map of the place other than the Things' unreliable descriptions, and no idea where any interesting people might be bedded, and the only useful resources I had any idea where to find was the bike.
I decided to take the gamble to try to grab it. After all, one advantage when dealing with an opponent who used heavy compartmentalization of information was that the left hand never knew what the right was doing, so unless I triggered something that alerted anyone high-up enough to know about the Things, I'd just be another guest puttering around in the middle of the night.
I didn't come across anyone as I made my way down to ground level. I was feeling nervous - was whoever was paying attention to the hidden camera feeds informed that I was a 'special guest', and very large people with very large weapons were waiting for me around the next corner? Or was Assange's theory that an intelligence apparatus that cut its internal comm channels would become extraordinarily ineffective proving out?
I entered the garage - most of which looked more like a stable, including horses. There weren't any car-sized vehicles - but there were three courier bikes, including my own. Since I wasn't going to have Technoville's support anymore, I decided to take a small severance package: all the spare parts I could find, and all the trade goods and other things from the other two bikes that I could stuff in, on, or tape to my own bike's trailer. Including removing the fuel filters from inside the other bike's motors; they'd still run for a while, but as soon as the injector clogged, they wouldn't be spreading news about me very far.
I peeked out into the courtyard, and saw nothing between me and the gate but a guard-post with a single man, slumped back in his seat, reading. If I could bluff brazen, or bludgeon my way past him, I'd be home free.
I had to put my chop on a sign-out sheet, and once he'd checked his clip-board, out I pedalled, out into the streetlight-lit streets powered by the Embassy. I breathed a bit of a sigh of relief, and started thinking about where to go for the rest of the night.
And had my thoughts rudely interrupted by a /third/ person in one night who seemed to not have my best interests at heart. As the figure stepped out of the shadows, holding a pair of pistol-sized crossbows aimed at me, I couldn't help but decry the universe's unfairness with, "Oh, come /on/!"
"Can I at least finish my shower first?"
She gestured with her gun, and I heaved a sigh, and stepped out onto the bathmat. I would have tried turning off the water, but my knife was by the tap, and that pistol could make great big ugly holes in me if I so much as twitched in a potentially unfriendly manner. Another gesture had me sit on the commode, whereupon she grabbed the translator and exited the bathroom. I heard a soft click, and then murmuring voices, whereupon she returned and carefully closed the door. "That should keep the microphones busy," she said, in not quite a whisper, and sat down on the tile. She set her gun down beside her, resting her arms on her knees. "I trust you won't mind that the Tech spies will get the impression that you're a reasonably ordinary heterosexual transman, who is willing to be persuaded to be cuddled by a big naked woman."
"'Cuddled'?"
"Officially, I've been hired to be your bedwarmer. That's not a euphemism - I lie in the bed and warm it for you. The tape has me stay in bed with you as you get ready to sleep. That's all."
The bathroom's air was steamy from the shower, but my fur was full of water, and I was starting to feel chilly from what was evaporating. "And that little toy?" I gestured at her weapon, before wrapping my arms around myself.
"We need to talk, now, without the Techs overhearing."
"And this is really the best way? ... And if you're not going to point that thing at me, could you toss me a towel?"
The bathtowel was dutifully chucked, and less dutifully thwapped me in the head. Without having had a chance to apply conditioner, I expected my fur to frizz out and make my clothes even more itchy than usual, but right now, I was just chilly. As I started drying myself, my baffling bedwarmer breathed, "We need to know who you are, where you're from - and who you're with."
Instead of answering, I asked the obvious, "'We' who?"
"You don't need to know that."
I paused in my ruffling of the towel, and just stared at her. She stared back. "Well," I said, "now I know what it is you need. I'm glad we had this little chat." She dropped her hand to the floor, onto the pistol. I sighed again. "You are aware that I probably would have happily answered your questions if you'd just come up to me and asked? Now you've got me feeling all tetchy."
"Time is an issue. We were hoping you'd come to a rooming house - but since you stayed in here, we had to use me. Which puts my position at risk. If you even hint to the Techs that we talked, and I haven't gone to ground, they'll put me in interrogation faster than you can blink. I'd rather shoot myself than let that happen. Of course, I'd rather shoot you than shoot myself."
"I'd really rather nobody got shot at all."
"Then answer the questions, and make me believe you."
"Which questions?" I wrapped the towel around my torso the way I'd seen in movies, as an impromptu under-the-shoulder dress. I had an urge to flip the lid up from the seat I was on and use it, but that didn't seem to be a plan that reduced the odds of my getting shot. I supposed that this was just the sort of thing I could expect to happen to me, in the civilization of this brave new world.
"You told Hair Miller that you'd had access to books and shows from twenty fifteen and before. Was that true?"
"It would be trivial to catch me if I lied about that. And I can't think of a reason I would have."
"Does that library still exist?"
"Um." I wrinkled my forehead. "Uh - no, I can't say that it does."
"Crap. Was it the only one around? Where was it?"
I leaned over to my piled clothes, watching for her reaction; when she didn't say yay or neigh, I pulled out bra and undies, and started pulling them on. Mostly to give myself a moment to think; this seemed like a moment to tell the truth in a misleading way. "My grandfather was born a Mennonite. My father wasn't. I was born on a farm. I've spent most of my life... call it a hundred klicks out of Toronto. As far as I know, my home isn't there anymore, everyone I'm related to is dead, and I'm, well, this," I gestured at myself.
"Double crap. The thing that Changed you - is /it/ still around?"
I was now pulling on my t-shirt and wristwatch, and holding onto the shorts, since the belt that kept them from sliding off was in the shower with the knife. "... I don't think it's going to be turning anyone else into bunnies, if that's what you mean."
"Triple crap. Well, this has been a complete bust. I guess all that's left is to ask, are you with the Techs?"
I tried to pretend I didn't see her shift her hand closer to where the pistol was. This seemed to be a rather important question to answer correctly. "/You/ have a job with them," I pointed out. "Bedwarmer and whatever else it is you do."
"That's just what I do. Not who I'm /with/."
"In case you haven't noticed, I just got here. So far, they're the only ones to make any sort of offer at all." I was trying to get the gears of my brain kicked into rapid motion, but the little rat in there seemed more interested in enjoying the view than running on the wheel. I did notice that I was missing one detail which might help move things along. "For example," I said, "I don't even know if this town's in contact with the other cities on the lake - Cleveland, Erie, Buffalo, and the smaller ports."
"Of course it is. Why wouldn't it be?"
"Uh-huh." And that finally managed to get something going. I realized I'd been using the wrong mental model. Treating the city-state of Technoville like the Nazis was a terrible way to understand the region - the key thought in there was 'city-state'. On and around Lake Erie alone, there were at least four cities, plus Technoville next to it, plus Detroit. That meant there were at least, say, seven intelligence-style groups working in Toledo/Dogtown alone.
This wasn't a simple dictatorship-versus-democracy political arena. This was classical Greece, with Athens and Sparta butting heads; or even better, the Italian city-states, with Venice and Florence and Milan and so on scrabbling for power. The arena that had produced the Borgias, the Medicis, and Machiavelli. And here I'd just come blithely traipsing in without a care in the world.
I was so screwed.
"Well," I said, "If you're asking me to join your little band, I have to say that given the display of clumsy amateurism I've seen so far, I'd be surprised if I survived a week if I did."
"'Clumsy'?" This time she did put her hand directly on her weapon. Perhaps, given her size, it was a sensitive subject for her. Well, nothing for it but to press on.
I started ticking off items on my fingers, trying to imply that I'd already worked all of them out when I was really thinking of them just a split-second before I said them. "You gave away the name of an information source. You've implied that you've got a good idea what all the local members of your gang think, meaning you don't have a good cell structure with one-way communication cut-outs. You brought a potentially noisy weapon on an operation that should be covert. You didn't even try the seductive approach before you brought an obvious weapon to threaten me with. You brought a weapon at all, when it looks pretty obvious that if you needed to kill me, you could probably snap my neck with one hand. You haven't actually offered me anything that appeals to my self-interest, other than my mere survival, and that so poorly that it's reasonable for me to conclude my best odds of living are to run straight into the embrace of the Techs and hand you over to them - or even worse, for me to run to them, and let them convince me to infiltrate your group as a double-agent. And somewhat more annoying, personally, is that with even a modicum of analysis, the Techs probably already know you're a member of your group and are here to do /something/ with me, which means that if I /don't/ run to them and tell them about you, they're going to suspect /me/ of signing up, whether I have or not."
I'd long since run out of fingers, and did my best to glare at her. "In short, your general and specific incompetence has severely cut down my options for survival. In fact, I can only think of two main approaches. One is to make myself useless by getting as far away as possible. The other is to make myself useless by simply signing up with every faction in reach, and blowing all the double- and triple- agent shenanigans out of the water by /telling/ them that I'm joining up with everyone, to make sure not one of them trusts me with anything important, and more importantly, that every group knows none of the others are going to trust me with anything important."
I had the minor pleasure of hearing her teeth grating. "And where does that leave me? Hanging in the wind, under the Techs' tender mercies?"
I pointed at her gun. "Leave that with me. If the Techs find it, I'll tell them I was 'testing' their security. I'll tell them, oh, you tried to seduce me and failed - that'll fill their expectations of you doing something vaguely spy-related to me, without getting them annoyed that you were thinking of killing off their prize rabbit. If you did manage to sneak that thing through their security undetected, I've had opportunity to get one, and reason to think of a way to bring it in with me, and some sources of information about how I could evade typical detection methods, so it'll all check out. If, as seems more likely, the Techs already know you have it, then they'll think I found it in your stuff after you tried to sleep with me, and that I stole it for myself from you. Again, a plausible scenario which doesn't implicate either of us in anything significant."
"Crap in a bucket. Crap by the boatload." She was rubbing her eyes. "You were supposed to be this poorly-educated hick, who'd just been reading books a century out of date. Why can't I say I tried to seduce you and succeeded?"
"Too out of character for me. You are, physically, quite nice to look at - but I really am asexual, or at least close enough to it that it's easier to just round up." I stood from the toilet, stepped over to the shower, reached in, and retrieved my belt and knife from the showerhead. She just watched, not stopping me, as I threaded it onto my shorts. "Risk of pregnancy, of STDs, of all the emotional and interpersonal stuff that I'm very much bad at - I've got so many more important things to do with my time."
"I'm not giving you my gun," she said.
I shrugged. "Well, I can hardly force you to, now can I? You having a gun and all. In that case, I suggest that it never entered this room."
She grunted, stood, and opened the bathroom door. I leaned on the doorframe and watched her dress, collect a wheeled tray, hide the gun inside it, shut off a tape recorder at a quiet moment, and leave the room.
I decided I /really/ shouldn't touch the food or drink she'd left.
I turned around, made use of the commode, flushed, turned around, and delicately threw up into it. Then I showered all over again - this time, fortunately, without interruption.
--
Before I took to bed, I pulled out the ebook-reader-style "Library" that I'd been given by Technoville, and searched for certain items. As I expected, there was no trace of "Brave New World", "Fahrenheit 451", "V for Vendetta", or Orwell. No sign of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", though "Starship Troopers" was there. All of "Star Wars", but only a few scattered bits of "Star Trek". "Narnia", but not "The Dark is Rising". "The Hobbit", but not "The Lord of the Rings". Ayn Rand, no Philip K. Dick. H. G. Wells' "The Time Machine" was missing, but Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" was there. "Lord of the Flies" yes, "Catcher in the Rye" no. Lots of Stephen King and Doc Smith; not so much Anne Rice and Isaac Asimov.
After a while of that I sighed, and got ready for the night. I didn't quite feel like starting to read through the Barsoom books in search of inconsistencies with what I remembered of them, so I simply opened up the Beatrix Potter collection, and lost myself for a while in the simplicity of Edwardian era rural life, as interpreted for children by talking animals.
--
I woke to my muzzle being clamped shut with a gloved hand, another covering my eyes, and the rest of the person clambering onto my torso and holding my arms down. I grunted and thrashed, and I think I got a few good kicks in before someone else grabbed my legs and sat down on them. Despite my ferret-like flexibility, that kept me from doing pretty much else. I felt a sharp sting in my arm, and the world wobbled, went fuzzy, and went away...
--
Once, when I was somewhat younger - or a lot younger, depending on your point of view - I was puttering in my house, and started to feel a bit off. I was heading over to let my roommate know I was feeling a bit sick... and the next thing I knew, I was in a gurney, in a hospital, being rolled down a hall for some sort of brain scan. I hadn't fallen unconscious; I was later told that for all those hours, I was still able to talk, and every few minutes would ask, "What time is it?". No cause was ever found, and it wasn't liked to anything else - the doctors just called it 'transient global amnesia' and everyone went on with their lives.
Like that incident, I have no actual memory of the next bit of this tale, but I can make a best-guess reconstruction:
"The drug isn't /working/," might have said Thing One. "She's not answering anything, just asking about the bloody time."
I probably would have commented, "Say, what time is it?"
Thing Two might have seen a solution to the problem. He could have suggested, "Wrap her left hand in duct-tape so she can't do anything, take her hood off, then unshackle her left hand and stick it so she can /see/ what bloody time it is on her watch."
Such a suggestion, however it had been proposed, would have been carried out, and if I may be allowed a bit of self-indulgent creative license, I expect that I would have smiled and said, "Oh, /that/'s the time. Thank you. Scorpia, auto defense."
--
I woke, not remembering anything after being assaulted in my bed. I found myself sitting in a chair, right arm and legs handcuffed to my seat, left hand wrapped in a duct-tape mitt, two humans slumped on the floor in front of me, and my wristwatch transformed into her robotic scorpion form jumping from one to the other.
There was once a programming language called Logo, in which you could make drawings on the screen by giving commands to a virtual 'turtle', like 'pen up', 'pen down', 'turn 30 degrees left', and 'move forward ten pixels'. When I gave her specific commands instead of one of the general directives Convoy had programmed into her, Scorpia was, roughly, as smart as that turtle. By saying various orders such as "Scorpia, turn five degrees left. Scorpia, move forward ten centimeters. Scorpia, climb onto that table leg. Scorpia, climb up. Scorpia, grab the object five centimeters in front of you. Scorpia, return," I was able to have various objects brought close enough that I could make out whether they were a key. It took roughly two throat-burning hours, including breaks for my oh-so-obedient pet to jump back onto one of the men to re-shock them, and more misfired orders than I care to remember, before I finally found that key (in Thing Two's pocket) and got Scorpia to unlock the handcuff on my right wrist.
It took under two minutes for me to free the rest of myself, cuff the two Things, and search the white-plastered room for anything useful. Other than the light bulb above, and the door with no handle, all I found was a small case with a syringe and a roll of duct-tape.
I ordered Scorpia back to my wrist - I didn't know how much of her batteries she'd used up tasing the Things - stripped the men in case I'd missed anything (like the knife that had been removed from inside my own belt) - and applied copious amounts of tape to immobilize and mute them, each of them ending up in something like a fetal position.
And then I sat down next to the door, and waited. I tried to think, but not much came out of it.
After about ten minutes, according to Scorpia, Thing One groaned into his tape-gag, and opened his eyes. He thrashed around a bit, and I watched closely in case I needed to apply more tape, but the world's perfect tool held firm.
I cleared my throat, and he looked in my direction. "Hi," I said. "I don't think we've been properly introduced. So let me introduce myself." I scooted forward, reached my hand forward - and grabbed his nose, pinching it closed. He made a number of noises, and swung his head around, but this time my flexibility was actually useful, and I kept his airways shut.
After he stopped trying to kick, I let go, and he heaved in a great lungful of air, staring at me, eyes wide. I asked, "Are you going to make me introduce myself again?" He shook his head urgently. "And you'll answer my questions, so I don't have to figure out how to use two dead bodies to open that door?" He nodded just as urgently. "Good. I hate getting blood in my fur." I had not, in fact, yet gotten any blood in my fur; but if I was now stuck in the world of drug-based interrogations, black ops, and other stuff that would have violated the Geneva, Hague, Vienna, and Berne Conventions if they still existed, then I didn't think anything resembling a half-measure would be enough to get me out of it alive.
I started unpeeling the tape wrapped around his head, freeing his mouth. "Now then," I commented as calmly as I could, "is there anything you would like to /volunteer/?"
"Don't kill me," he said, very quickly, as soon as he spat the wad of tap out. A bit less frantically, he added, "We're on /your side/."
I picked up the tape roll and fiddled to start freeing the end of the tape. "I didn't think I needed to say - don't /lie/ to me. Or scream. Screaming would be bad."
"I /am/ on your side!" he hissed, fast, but obviously trying to speak as un-screamingly as possible. "I'm with the psych bureau. We're just improving your profile!"
"If that's the case, then where are the cameras, to make sure you don't miss anything? Why aren't we already covered in guards?" I shook my head, picked up the wadded tape from the floor, and held it to his mouth. "Open," I ordered. When he didn't right away, I said, "Do you /want/ to see how easy it is for these teeth to open an artery?" He let me re-gag him without further stalling.
I sat back and waited for Thing Two to open his eyes. When he did, I introduced myself to him, and asked what he'd like to volunteer.
"You're just making trouble for yourself," was his approach.
"Really?" I asked. "You're really going to try the alpha male crap on me? How much worse than getting black-bagged in the middle of the night does it /get/? Outright waterboarding? Vivisection?"
He shook his head. "We're here to /help/ you. Make your mind better. Make you more able to do what you want to get done."
"Stop," I said, and heaved a dramatic sigh that I hoped wasn't /too/ dramatic. "So much for volunteering. New topic: How do I get out of here? And I don't want any of that nonsense about answering direct questions but leaving out things I didn't think to ask, like whether there's a bear-trap in the hall. First subtopic. Other than trying to figure out which of your long-bones would make the best prybars, how do I get that door open?"
--
They were remarkably cooperative about describing the puzzle-box-like secret panel on the door, which directions the hallways went, where the stairs were, where the likely guards and cameras were, and so on. It might have had something to do with my having mused aloud about rolling along whichever of them was less helpful, to use as raw materials.
Since I wasn't anywhere near as psychopathically callous about their lives as I was doing my utmost to appear to be, and I couldn't actually think of a way having one of them along could help me if something went wrong or they'd lied, I just re-gagged them, jammed the sliding panel latch thing, and left them locked inside.
I was, in fact, still in the Embassy, about two stories above the suite I'd hoped to get a good night's rest in. I had my clothes (with all the useful stuff removed), Scorpia, and a skeleton that might or might not act on its own initiative. In my room was, probably, the electronics that Technoville had given me, which I didn't feel any urgency in collecting. I'd been told my bike and its gear had been parked in the 'garage' overnight. I was now deciding that I was officially done with Technoville; whatever the two Things had really been after, they'd just lost themselves a potentially-posthuman-memetics-resistant ally. The only reason I hadn't already left the Embassy was because I was trying to think of anything useful I might do first. Unfortunately, I had no map of the place other than the Things' unreliable descriptions, and no idea where any interesting people might be bedded, and the only useful resources I had any idea where to find was the bike.
I decided to take the gamble to try to grab it. After all, one advantage when dealing with an opponent who used heavy compartmentalization of information was that the left hand never knew what the right was doing, so unless I triggered something that alerted anyone high-up enough to know about the Things, I'd just be another guest puttering around in the middle of the night.
I didn't come across anyone as I made my way down to ground level. I was feeling nervous - was whoever was paying attention to the hidden camera feeds informed that I was a 'special guest', and very large people with very large weapons were waiting for me around the next corner? Or was Assange's theory that an intelligence apparatus that cut its internal comm channels would become extraordinarily ineffective proving out?
I entered the garage - most of which looked more like a stable, including horses. There weren't any car-sized vehicles - but there were three courier bikes, including my own. Since I wasn't going to have Technoville's support anymore, I decided to take a small severance package: all the spare parts I could find, and all the trade goods and other things from the other two bikes that I could stuff in, on, or tape to my own bike's trailer. Including removing the fuel filters from inside the other bike's motors; they'd still run for a while, but as soon as the injector clogged, they wouldn't be spreading news about me very far.
I peeked out into the courtyard, and saw nothing between me and the gate but a guard-post with a single man, slumped back in his seat, reading. If I could bluff brazen, or bludgeon my way past him, I'd be home free.
I had to put my chop on a sign-out sheet, and once he'd checked his clip-board, out I pedalled, out into the streetlight-lit streets powered by the Embassy. I breathed a bit of a sigh of relief, and started thinking about where to go for the rest of the night.
And had my thoughts rudely interrupted by a /third/ person in one night who seemed to not have my best interests at heart. As the figure stepped out of the shadows, holding a pair of pistol-sized crossbows aimed at me, I couldn't help but decry the universe's unfairness with, "Oh, come /on/!"
DataPacRat
Truthseeker
- Location
- Niagara, Canada
*Chapter Eight: Re-Curring*
I had been informed that I just might be saner than anyone I was going to meet. But they also say that your powers of rationality tend to desert you when you need them the most. So I'm going to blame what happened next on some combination of lack of sleep, stress, adrenaline, and the aftereffects of whatever chemicals the Things had shoved into my veins.
I was in something of a residential neighbourhood, with brown-brick apartments or townhouses pushed up against the street. My latest interruption stepped out between two such buildings. I'm not going to even try to imitate the way he spoke; In honor of Ms. Potter and the brownstone-like residences we were between, just imagine your least favorite British accent, and assume that it was cranked up to near-unintelligibility.
"Stand and deliver!" was his choice of greeting.
After I took a moment to puzzle out what the words he'd said probably meant, I feigned even further ignorance. "Deliver what? A baby?"
"Whatever you're carrying will be good enough."
I held my hands up to my head, briefly double-facepalming, starting by saying "Razza-frazza something-or-other," and, my voice gradually fading, a few other words. Putting my hands behind my head a moment in frustration, then back on the bike's handlebars, I stared at the urban highwayman. "Don't you know it's a felony to interfere with the mail?"
"You're no mailman, lady. Which means you stole everything you've got. Which means it's only fair you get it stolen from you right back, isn't it? You could even say I'm doing my civic duty." He flashed a smile he probably thought was roguish and dashing. I thought the effect was spoiled by his several missing teeth.
I heaved a sigh. "I feel it's only fair to warn you - I have magic powers. Go away and you won't find out what they are."
His smile disappeared. "I wanted to do this nice, but if you're stalling-"
I raised my right hand, pointed at him; and thrust it forward, declaring, "Stupefy!"
He dropped like a rock.
One of my sword-poles was back in my Embassy suite, but I grabbed the other one, padded over to him, and poked to make sure he was out. Seeing a certain mostly-black form, I thanked goodness for Sufficiently Advanced Technology and scooped up Scorpia, who'd spent her last joule to knock the man out, following the orders I'd given after quoting Yosemite Sam. Hooking her back onto her wristband, I wondered whether it would be worth the risk of going through the fellow's pockets for loose change, or I should just grab his two pistols-
Abruptly, I'd been kicked so I'd spun in a circle; my left leg wasn't supporting my weight, and I started swinging the pole to keep from falling; I saw an arrowhead and shaft sticking out my left thigh; I started feeling, maybe not quite as much pain as I'd expect from such treatment, but at least something as strong as hitting my thumb with a hammer. Repeatedly. "Fffffff-" I started hissing.
Since I was now facing the direction the missile had come from, when I had a moment of attention to spare, I could make out its source - a teenish boy, barely holding onto a crossbow that looked almost as big as he was, eyes wide, not moving. I made a few very rapid conclusions: If he fired again, I was dead. He wasn't firing - I needed to keep him from thinking of firing again. Distract, distract, distract.
"-fffie on you!" I turned my pain into volume. "Do you have any idea how much that /stings/?"
My left leg wouldn't move - I had to use the pole as a replacement limb. I advanced straight towards Short Stuff, shouting out imprecations the whole way. "You motherless son of a fatherless goat! May your sexual organs be switched with those of a syphilitic camel! May you find yourself constantly pissing in your dreams, so you always wake in fear of soaked trousers! May a snake crawl up your backside and-"
I saw him reaching into a pocket, and got ready to draw the sword and hurl at him as a last-ditch defense. His lips were moving; I caught the words, "Cold iron, what's cold iron anyway, silver, have I got silver," and continued my extremely awkward march.
He threw a handful of coins at me. A couple bounced off me to the street.
I cut off my cursing, and stood right in front of him. He pulled out a necklace, a small Star of David, and pushed it against my forehead. When I didn't burst into flames or anything, he turned even paler. I leaned forward, looked into his eyes, and declared, "Basically... run."
He did.
I looked down at my leg - to my surprise, there didn't seem to be any blood. There was, however, no doubt that I had a stick of wood shoved through muscle and bone and whatever else was there, and when I twisted to look at the back, some of the fletching was buried in my thigh. I didn't want any of the feathers to break off inside the wound channel, so I didn't want to just push it through; I didn't have any garden shears to cut off the arrowhead to push it backwards, and I'd always heard pushing such things back was a bad idea anyway... basically, I needed a doctor. I looked the bike - no way I could pedal the thing, so I'd either have to walk, which I could only kind of do fast enough that the Technovillians could have a leisurely breakfast and pick me up before the next intersection, or use the motor, which vibrated the whole machine, not counting the bumps and jounces from every irregularity in the road.
"This is gonna suck," I sighed.
--
As it happened, just swinging my good leg over the bike's frame took so much fiddling and effort that by the time I managed it, my hands were shaking so much I couldn't flip the bike's throttle. I had a strong suspicion that, bleeding or not, I was white as a sheet under my fur.
I realized that I also had something like tunnel vision when a pair of senior citizens stepped in front of the bike, both wearing pajamas, robes, and slippers. While the woman looked at me with pursed, disapproving lips, the thin, white-haired man nudged the would-be bandit with his foot.
"Still breathing," he commented. "I'm guessing... a drugged dart?" I said nothing, trying to pull off four-counts to steady my own breath. He turned and started walking towards me, raising his hand. I brought up my trekking pole and rested it on the handlebars. He dropped his hand. "We appreciate what you did. Britney, would be a dear and get some rope?" The wrinkled woman gave a sniff, a sound that was something along the lines of 'hmph', and turned to one of the nearby houses.
"I'm happy," I said with one breath, and "that you're happy," with another. "But aren't there... any police... around here?"
"Don't be disgusting," he said, and from his expression, he really did find the idea distasteful.
"Whatever. Scuze me. Need to. Go find. A doctor."
"Oh, pardon me, have I not introduced myself? My name is Doctor House."
I blinked. "Really?" I looked up and down at him; if anything, he looked more like an aged Dr. Wilson. "That's nice. But sorry. Can't stay. Need a. /Far/ doctor. No... tracking."
"I think I heard two things in there. One, that you need attention /fast/. And two, that you seem not to have heard of the Enhanced Privacy bill that the Council passed last year."
I breathed, and stared at him. He shrugged, and elaborated, "Complete doctor-patient confidentiality, and lawyer-client, and priest-confessor, and any other professional the Council decides to accept. I don't even have to admit I've got a patient, let alone anything in their file. Supposed to be balanced by an exception for Human Security, but that needs a warrant signed, and not rejected, by the first two judges they ask. Personally, I think the whole idea is bug-nuts, but I'm perfectly willing to take advantage of it to help a brave young parahuman like yourself, especially if I can talk about it long enough for you to stay put long enough to start falling unconscious here, instead of while you're in motion. I'll get Britney to roll your bike in back once she's done with the brigand here..."
--
When I woke up, I was ridiculously relieved that I still had both legs, instead of any stumps. The arrow was gone, my thigh was wrapped in a bandage, and my glasses were right next to me. Once they were back in place, I determined that I was lying on a cot in a room that seemed like a cross between an examination room and a pantry. The walls were lined in shelves of bottled... everything, liquid, solid, or otherwise.
I was staring at a particular jar, trying to figure out if any of the tentacles within had moved, when Dr. House came in. "Ah, awake. Should have expected that. You've got one of the nicest parahuman physiologies it's been my pleasure to treat. Even those with the most biologically well-assembled parts usually turn out to have a few complications - hemophilia is one of the least pleasant to unexpectedly discover."
"Doc," I said.
He kept on rolling. "It's always hardest when it hits families. I know of a mother and father, daughter and son, who all ended up as identical quadruplet women - green skin and chlorophyll. Not nearly enough surface area to reduce their caloric needs from photosynthesis, and they ended up with the most annoying allergy to leather. I hear they run an inn near the shore now, where they can sun themselves to their hearts' content, far enough away to avoid any awkward questions from their old friends about their familial arrangements."
"/Doc/."
"And then there are the less happy cases. Once I was next to a fellow whose transformation ended up with him as half-human, half-motorcycle. It was a nightmare just trying to figure out how he /ate/, let alone how to care for his-"
"/Doc!/"
"Yes, my dear?"
"I've got to go."
"Ah, my apologies. Let me get you a bedpan-"
"Doc - no. I have to /leave/. I appreciate the help, but the best way I can pay you back is get as far from you as possible and pretend we never met."
"Would it have something to do with the Technoville soldiers who have been running around their embassy like politicians facing defenestration?"
"... Maybe."
"Then don't worry. A couple of them came by Britney as she was stringing your archer up, and she told them you rode off thataway."
"Whichaway?"
"Does it matter?"
"I suppose not. Um - 'stringing up'? Does that mean - hanging?"
"Indeed. Oh, not as execution, if that's what you mean. He's just spread out on a lamp-post for the neighbourhood to draw on, throw rotten fruit at, and generally have a good time with. We don't have any good wooden stocks here, but we do have lots of rope."
"Oh. Well, have fun with that. I still need to get going as soon as I can."
"I'm afraid that that's not going to be soon." He sat on the edge of the cot, and patted my leg. I didn't feel it. "You may be able to avoid bleeding to death, but the arrow did come very close to your sciatic nerve. I don't think it cut it, but it at least damaged the nearby tissue enough to bruise and swell. Even if there's no infection and you heal better than anyone else on this side of Jupiter, you need to minimize movement, to minimize irritation that might cause permanent nerve damage."
"As someone close to me put it a little while ago: Crap."
"Oh, I assure you that's it's quite true-"
I shook my head. "Not disagreeing, just expressing an opinion on the state of the world."
"Fair enough. Charles will be back in half an hour, so if there's anything I can have him get for you..."
"Hm... Newspapers. New, old, as long as there's lots of different ones."
"Ah, a reader - a woman after my own heart."
"Charles - your son?" I hazarded.
"My husband."
"... And Britney?"
"Our wife."
"Ah. ... Anyone else in the family?"
"Just us three. But speaking of Britney - I feel I should bring up a point. She is probably going to be something less than polite to you. I'm afraid she tends to treat any parahuman with somewhat less respect than a hostess really should. It's not personal; about ten years back, the city had its last Armageddon outbreak, and several of her close friends died. Melted, to put it delicately. And she just hasn't been able to bring herself to stop resenting parahumans who survived their change reasonably intact."
"Ah. Well - we all have our scars. Um... I think I need to go."
"She's really not /that/ bad - mostly stares and sniffs and-"
"No, no - I need to /go/."
"Ah - let me get that bedpan..."
--
I never actually caught sight of Charles - he seemed to either be running errands, or hanging out with a few other guys aiming to create some sort of "Last of the Summer Wine" pastiche. After the second ladder crash, I suspected he married into the House household simply to have ready access to medical care.
The bike had been shoved not just into a backyard, but into a shed, much to my relief. Technoville had planes - for all I knew, they also had drones to run aerial surveillance. When I expressed my concern, Doc House commented, "Don't try to teach your grandfather to suck eggs." It seemed imprudent to open the debate about whether or not I was older than he was.
Britney House, nee Hill, eventually passed her public prisoner to some sort of chain gang. From hints and subtexts in the conversations I overheard, I got the impression that he was being sent to help in a 'public works' project - something related to cleaning up dangerous sites.
I didn't get to learn all of this from Doc House's doctoring room; an hour or so after I got my diagnosis, I was hurriedly wheeled into the actual pantry, to make room for a birth that was suffering complications. And that was where I pretty much stayed for the next three days straight, with a leg that was as responsive as a slab of meat.
I spent the time reading voraciously, using every trick I could vaguely recall to extract the maximum relevant data in the minimum time. Toledo - which was still officially called that by the City Council, even though it was called 'Dogtown' (or some variation) by just about everyone else - had, if the newspapers were to be believed, been essentially depopulated in 2050, especially its core. Its metro area went from over half a million to under a thousand, with most of those thousand getting killed or leaving in the aftermath. But once the basics of survival were made reasonably reliable, the same impulses that had formed Catal Huyuk and Rome and every other urban area brought people back. Gradually, the various chemical toxins, radioactive emissions, killer robots, toxic new plants, wild new animals, and other dangers were cleaned up.
The newspapers' reports became somewhat less reliable as of a decade ago. One of the brute facts that didn't seem to be deniable was that the position of mayor - which was more of an active commander-in-chief job than a shake-hands-and-kiss-babies sinecure - was taken over by a pair of twins instead of an individual. At around the same time, an alliance was struck between Toledo and Technoville, the last of the danger zones were cleared up, and people started calling the place 'Dogville'. From the old papers Charles was able to bring in, I could be sure of much more than that, even to the level of figuring out which events happened first.
After that point, the Free Press's editorial stance became more pro-patriotism than Fox News, and possible as much as Pravda. Despite the fact that the city had been declared 'safe', there was a constant drum-beats about the dangers posed by posthumans, and reminders of how everyone had to do their part to keep humanity alive. Coverage of parahumans, the Changed, started out treating them like warriors wounded in the defense of their homeland, to... not really saying much of anything at all.
Doc House came by every so often to check with me, and to exercise his gift of gab.
During one conversation, I managed to head off a recapping of local gossip with, "Say, has the city got a constitution? Or a charter, or something else of the sort?"
"Hm," he commented, scratching the back of his head. "Might be, might not. Don't recall ever seeing a charter, but the boffins in the Council might have one tucked away somewhere."
"That sounds... a bit troubling. How about a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, or a Bill of Rights?"
"Don't think we've got one of those, not since the old American government disappeared in the Rapture."
"Or Canadian?"
"Don't know much about Canada. I hear it's mostly Indian Country on the north side of the lake, but that's mostly rumors from unreliable sorts."
"Well - how does the Council get elected, or know how to pass laws, or figure out who's Mayor, or anything like that?"
"Now what would a pretty young thing like you need to worry about a bunch of bickering old gray-beards for?"
"I'm trying to figure out what my options are - and what consequences there are if I do something boneheaded."
"Well, then, lassie, it's pretty simple. Everyone who lives in the city gets to vote for whoever they think should represent them. The top - dozen or so? something like that - get to be on the Council, and however many people voted for them, that's how many votes they get. And they spend their days arguing philosophy and law and how big a fine someone should have to pay for breaking two fingers on someone else instead of one. Dry, dreary stuff, that most people are glad to leave to those who like arguing about it day in and day out."
"... Hunh. That's not /quite/ the impression I was getting from the newspapers - they were talking about the Council like they were the people who get stuff done."
"A lot more happens in the city then ever makes it into the papers, bunsome. Some of it you had to be there to know it ever happened at all."
"So - how about the Mayor, then? How'd you end up with two?"
"Whoever's highest-ranking in the city bureaucracy. The Twins had the same rank, and neither's got seniority, and they don't overrule each other much, so it works out."
"Okay, city bureaucracy - who controls their budget?"
"The Mayor, who else?"
"And how does someone get into the bureaucracy?"
"That's easy enough - just sign up."
"... And what does the bureaucracy actually do?"
"Oh, the usual - patrol for bandits, keep any new kill-bots from killing off too many civilians, make sure everyone pays enough to keep the system that keeps humanity alive running."
"You mean, like an army?"
"Of course not - armies are for fighting /people/, and after Judgement Day, there's so few of us left, nobody wants to kill /anyone/ if they don't have to. They're the /bureaucracy/."
"Uh... /huh/." I ran through my mental checklist of civil jobs. "You mentioned judges once - who pays for them?"
"Whoever wants a trial instead of just letting their lawyers hash things out."
"If I remember right, you were unhappy when I brought up this group, but please remember that I really don't know why... Police?"
"My goodness, my good girl - don't you know /anything/ about history?"
"Only old stuff. Year two thousand or so and before."
"I'm pretty sure that's still late enough to know about the excesses that came from government controlling law enforcement."
"... Maybe? Some?"
The usually cheerful lines of his face were rearranged into a frown. "Well then. By the time the Rapture was getting close, police could pay illegal drugs to a known liar for false information implicating someone they didn't like, get the address wrong and burst in on a completely different home, shoot the dog, tase the people inside, some to death, drag the others into cells, not give them any food or water until they were half dead, steal anything valuable they found in the home, leave it open so strangers could ransack the rest, and if anyone complained, they'd 'investigate' themselves and find they'd done nothing wrong, and give their officers a few weeks of paid vacation."
"Oh. Um. Really?"
"Happened to my grandfather."
"... And people /put up/ with that?"
"The police were smart enough to avoid bothering the rich and powerful. Got to the point it would've taken a revolution to fix, and hey, it was America, who could fight the most powerful military that'd ever existed? So we got a Rapture instead, swept out all those rich and powerful folk, and those who were left generally didn't want anything to do with the police ever again." He pursed his lips and considered. "At least, that's what happened around here. Might be some rich folk managed to stay rich through the bad times elsewhere, but I haven't heard even a rumour of that."
"Well, I'm glad for you filling me in - but I hope you don't mind, after reading these for a while," I held up the latest issue of the Free Press, "I'm feeling like I have to take everything with a grain of salt."
"Don't blame you, my lass, don't blame you at all. I'm just an ornery old doctor, history and politics have never really been my thing. If you're up to meeting other people, I know a few who know a lot more than you'll ever get out of those fish-wrappers. Sherri-Lynn says the problem was the smart money, when computer programs started paying their own upkeep, which put evolution on them to get things done, like nudging laws, and what worked for them didn't work so well for us people. Helen's got a theory about some group - the Illuminators? - pulling strings from behind the scenes. Terry-"
I cleared my throat, and interrupted. "That's all very interesting, and I'm sure I'll want to learn it all when I have the time - but I've got more pressing concerns."
"Anything I can help with?"
"Not sure. I'm just now starting to wrap my way around what you've been saying about how the city works... no official law enforcement officers but the government does take care of defense, private settlement of disputes... I'm not sure how it all works, but it sounds like someone drew on some pre-twentieth-century social history. Well, maybe even twentieth-century for the non-industrialized areas. What I'm trying to think of right now is, if I got in touch with the bureaucracy, or even one of the Mayors, and told them something they thought should stay secret, what are the odds of my getting out of that meeting alive and well?"
"Does it have something to do with why you're hiding in my pantry instead of decorating my parlor?"
"... You could say that."
"Hm." He tapped his chin. "I could get in touch with Ted, who still owes me for fixing up his gout, and see if there's some arrangements that could be made..." He trailed off as I shook my head. "You want to make your own arrangements?"
"Not... entirely. But if you get in touch with someone who gets in touch with someone, and so on, that's all going to trace back to you. I'm thinking something more along the lines of giving you a sealed envelope, and telling whoever I meet that my silent backer will send it off unless I make it out of the meeting and tell you not to."
"That doesn't sound too difficult, on my end. Of course, I'm curious what sort of secret you know that you could use for that."
"Probably safest that you don't ask." Particularly since I didn't have a good answer - I had a lot of supposition and speculation, plus the occasional weapon aimed at me for emphasis, but no real hard evidence. "On a somewhat related tack... do you think you can help me look a little less, well, recognizable? Being this shade of pink kind of makes the whole idea of tradecraft seem, well, kind of silly..."
I had been informed that I just might be saner than anyone I was going to meet. But they also say that your powers of rationality tend to desert you when you need them the most. So I'm going to blame what happened next on some combination of lack of sleep, stress, adrenaline, and the aftereffects of whatever chemicals the Things had shoved into my veins.
I was in something of a residential neighbourhood, with brown-brick apartments or townhouses pushed up against the street. My latest interruption stepped out between two such buildings. I'm not going to even try to imitate the way he spoke; In honor of Ms. Potter and the brownstone-like residences we were between, just imagine your least favorite British accent, and assume that it was cranked up to near-unintelligibility.
"Stand and deliver!" was his choice of greeting.
After I took a moment to puzzle out what the words he'd said probably meant, I feigned even further ignorance. "Deliver what? A baby?"
"Whatever you're carrying will be good enough."
I held my hands up to my head, briefly double-facepalming, starting by saying "Razza-frazza something-or-other," and, my voice gradually fading, a few other words. Putting my hands behind my head a moment in frustration, then back on the bike's handlebars, I stared at the urban highwayman. "Don't you know it's a felony to interfere with the mail?"
"You're no mailman, lady. Which means you stole everything you've got. Which means it's only fair you get it stolen from you right back, isn't it? You could even say I'm doing my civic duty." He flashed a smile he probably thought was roguish and dashing. I thought the effect was spoiled by his several missing teeth.
I heaved a sigh. "I feel it's only fair to warn you - I have magic powers. Go away and you won't find out what they are."
His smile disappeared. "I wanted to do this nice, but if you're stalling-"
I raised my right hand, pointed at him; and thrust it forward, declaring, "Stupefy!"
He dropped like a rock.
One of my sword-poles was back in my Embassy suite, but I grabbed the other one, padded over to him, and poked to make sure he was out. Seeing a certain mostly-black form, I thanked goodness for Sufficiently Advanced Technology and scooped up Scorpia, who'd spent her last joule to knock the man out, following the orders I'd given after quoting Yosemite Sam. Hooking her back onto her wristband, I wondered whether it would be worth the risk of going through the fellow's pockets for loose change, or I should just grab his two pistols-
Abruptly, I'd been kicked so I'd spun in a circle; my left leg wasn't supporting my weight, and I started swinging the pole to keep from falling; I saw an arrowhead and shaft sticking out my left thigh; I started feeling, maybe not quite as much pain as I'd expect from such treatment, but at least something as strong as hitting my thumb with a hammer. Repeatedly. "Fffffff-" I started hissing.
Since I was now facing the direction the missile had come from, when I had a moment of attention to spare, I could make out its source - a teenish boy, barely holding onto a crossbow that looked almost as big as he was, eyes wide, not moving. I made a few very rapid conclusions: If he fired again, I was dead. He wasn't firing - I needed to keep him from thinking of firing again. Distract, distract, distract.
"-fffie on you!" I turned my pain into volume. "Do you have any idea how much that /stings/?"
My left leg wouldn't move - I had to use the pole as a replacement limb. I advanced straight towards Short Stuff, shouting out imprecations the whole way. "You motherless son of a fatherless goat! May your sexual organs be switched with those of a syphilitic camel! May you find yourself constantly pissing in your dreams, so you always wake in fear of soaked trousers! May a snake crawl up your backside and-"
I saw him reaching into a pocket, and got ready to draw the sword and hurl at him as a last-ditch defense. His lips were moving; I caught the words, "Cold iron, what's cold iron anyway, silver, have I got silver," and continued my extremely awkward march.
He threw a handful of coins at me. A couple bounced off me to the street.
I cut off my cursing, and stood right in front of him. He pulled out a necklace, a small Star of David, and pushed it against my forehead. When I didn't burst into flames or anything, he turned even paler. I leaned forward, looked into his eyes, and declared, "Basically... run."
He did.
I looked down at my leg - to my surprise, there didn't seem to be any blood. There was, however, no doubt that I had a stick of wood shoved through muscle and bone and whatever else was there, and when I twisted to look at the back, some of the fletching was buried in my thigh. I didn't want any of the feathers to break off inside the wound channel, so I didn't want to just push it through; I didn't have any garden shears to cut off the arrowhead to push it backwards, and I'd always heard pushing such things back was a bad idea anyway... basically, I needed a doctor. I looked the bike - no way I could pedal the thing, so I'd either have to walk, which I could only kind of do fast enough that the Technovillians could have a leisurely breakfast and pick me up before the next intersection, or use the motor, which vibrated the whole machine, not counting the bumps and jounces from every irregularity in the road.
"This is gonna suck," I sighed.
--
As it happened, just swinging my good leg over the bike's frame took so much fiddling and effort that by the time I managed it, my hands were shaking so much I couldn't flip the bike's throttle. I had a strong suspicion that, bleeding or not, I was white as a sheet under my fur.
I realized that I also had something like tunnel vision when a pair of senior citizens stepped in front of the bike, both wearing pajamas, robes, and slippers. While the woman looked at me with pursed, disapproving lips, the thin, white-haired man nudged the would-be bandit with his foot.
"Still breathing," he commented. "I'm guessing... a drugged dart?" I said nothing, trying to pull off four-counts to steady my own breath. He turned and started walking towards me, raising his hand. I brought up my trekking pole and rested it on the handlebars. He dropped his hand. "We appreciate what you did. Britney, would be a dear and get some rope?" The wrinkled woman gave a sniff, a sound that was something along the lines of 'hmph', and turned to one of the nearby houses.
"I'm happy," I said with one breath, and "that you're happy," with another. "But aren't there... any police... around here?"
"Don't be disgusting," he said, and from his expression, he really did find the idea distasteful.
"Whatever. Scuze me. Need to. Go find. A doctor."
"Oh, pardon me, have I not introduced myself? My name is Doctor House."
I blinked. "Really?" I looked up and down at him; if anything, he looked more like an aged Dr. Wilson. "That's nice. But sorry. Can't stay. Need a. /Far/ doctor. No... tracking."
"I think I heard two things in there. One, that you need attention /fast/. And two, that you seem not to have heard of the Enhanced Privacy bill that the Council passed last year."
I breathed, and stared at him. He shrugged, and elaborated, "Complete doctor-patient confidentiality, and lawyer-client, and priest-confessor, and any other professional the Council decides to accept. I don't even have to admit I've got a patient, let alone anything in their file. Supposed to be balanced by an exception for Human Security, but that needs a warrant signed, and not rejected, by the first two judges they ask. Personally, I think the whole idea is bug-nuts, but I'm perfectly willing to take advantage of it to help a brave young parahuman like yourself, especially if I can talk about it long enough for you to stay put long enough to start falling unconscious here, instead of while you're in motion. I'll get Britney to roll your bike in back once she's done with the brigand here..."
--
When I woke up, I was ridiculously relieved that I still had both legs, instead of any stumps. The arrow was gone, my thigh was wrapped in a bandage, and my glasses were right next to me. Once they were back in place, I determined that I was lying on a cot in a room that seemed like a cross between an examination room and a pantry. The walls were lined in shelves of bottled... everything, liquid, solid, or otherwise.
I was staring at a particular jar, trying to figure out if any of the tentacles within had moved, when Dr. House came in. "Ah, awake. Should have expected that. You've got one of the nicest parahuman physiologies it's been my pleasure to treat. Even those with the most biologically well-assembled parts usually turn out to have a few complications - hemophilia is one of the least pleasant to unexpectedly discover."
"Doc," I said.
He kept on rolling. "It's always hardest when it hits families. I know of a mother and father, daughter and son, who all ended up as identical quadruplet women - green skin and chlorophyll. Not nearly enough surface area to reduce their caloric needs from photosynthesis, and they ended up with the most annoying allergy to leather. I hear they run an inn near the shore now, where they can sun themselves to their hearts' content, far enough away to avoid any awkward questions from their old friends about their familial arrangements."
"/Doc/."
"And then there are the less happy cases. Once I was next to a fellow whose transformation ended up with him as half-human, half-motorcycle. It was a nightmare just trying to figure out how he /ate/, let alone how to care for his-"
"/Doc!/"
"Yes, my dear?"
"I've got to go."
"Ah, my apologies. Let me get you a bedpan-"
"Doc - no. I have to /leave/. I appreciate the help, but the best way I can pay you back is get as far from you as possible and pretend we never met."
"Would it have something to do with the Technoville soldiers who have been running around their embassy like politicians facing defenestration?"
"... Maybe."
"Then don't worry. A couple of them came by Britney as she was stringing your archer up, and she told them you rode off thataway."
"Whichaway?"
"Does it matter?"
"I suppose not. Um - 'stringing up'? Does that mean - hanging?"
"Indeed. Oh, not as execution, if that's what you mean. He's just spread out on a lamp-post for the neighbourhood to draw on, throw rotten fruit at, and generally have a good time with. We don't have any good wooden stocks here, but we do have lots of rope."
"Oh. Well, have fun with that. I still need to get going as soon as I can."
"I'm afraid that that's not going to be soon." He sat on the edge of the cot, and patted my leg. I didn't feel it. "You may be able to avoid bleeding to death, but the arrow did come very close to your sciatic nerve. I don't think it cut it, but it at least damaged the nearby tissue enough to bruise and swell. Even if there's no infection and you heal better than anyone else on this side of Jupiter, you need to minimize movement, to minimize irritation that might cause permanent nerve damage."
"As someone close to me put it a little while ago: Crap."
"Oh, I assure you that's it's quite true-"
I shook my head. "Not disagreeing, just expressing an opinion on the state of the world."
"Fair enough. Charles will be back in half an hour, so if there's anything I can have him get for you..."
"Hm... Newspapers. New, old, as long as there's lots of different ones."
"Ah, a reader - a woman after my own heart."
"Charles - your son?" I hazarded.
"My husband."
"... And Britney?"
"Our wife."
"Ah. ... Anyone else in the family?"
"Just us three. But speaking of Britney - I feel I should bring up a point. She is probably going to be something less than polite to you. I'm afraid she tends to treat any parahuman with somewhat less respect than a hostess really should. It's not personal; about ten years back, the city had its last Armageddon outbreak, and several of her close friends died. Melted, to put it delicately. And she just hasn't been able to bring herself to stop resenting parahumans who survived their change reasonably intact."
"Ah. Well - we all have our scars. Um... I think I need to go."
"She's really not /that/ bad - mostly stares and sniffs and-"
"No, no - I need to /go/."
"Ah - let me get that bedpan..."
--
I never actually caught sight of Charles - he seemed to either be running errands, or hanging out with a few other guys aiming to create some sort of "Last of the Summer Wine" pastiche. After the second ladder crash, I suspected he married into the House household simply to have ready access to medical care.
The bike had been shoved not just into a backyard, but into a shed, much to my relief. Technoville had planes - for all I knew, they also had drones to run aerial surveillance. When I expressed my concern, Doc House commented, "Don't try to teach your grandfather to suck eggs." It seemed imprudent to open the debate about whether or not I was older than he was.
Britney House, nee Hill, eventually passed her public prisoner to some sort of chain gang. From hints and subtexts in the conversations I overheard, I got the impression that he was being sent to help in a 'public works' project - something related to cleaning up dangerous sites.
I didn't get to learn all of this from Doc House's doctoring room; an hour or so after I got my diagnosis, I was hurriedly wheeled into the actual pantry, to make room for a birth that was suffering complications. And that was where I pretty much stayed for the next three days straight, with a leg that was as responsive as a slab of meat.
I spent the time reading voraciously, using every trick I could vaguely recall to extract the maximum relevant data in the minimum time. Toledo - which was still officially called that by the City Council, even though it was called 'Dogtown' (or some variation) by just about everyone else - had, if the newspapers were to be believed, been essentially depopulated in 2050, especially its core. Its metro area went from over half a million to under a thousand, with most of those thousand getting killed or leaving in the aftermath. But once the basics of survival were made reasonably reliable, the same impulses that had formed Catal Huyuk and Rome and every other urban area brought people back. Gradually, the various chemical toxins, radioactive emissions, killer robots, toxic new plants, wild new animals, and other dangers were cleaned up.
The newspapers' reports became somewhat less reliable as of a decade ago. One of the brute facts that didn't seem to be deniable was that the position of mayor - which was more of an active commander-in-chief job than a shake-hands-and-kiss-babies sinecure - was taken over by a pair of twins instead of an individual. At around the same time, an alliance was struck between Toledo and Technoville, the last of the danger zones were cleared up, and people started calling the place 'Dogville'. From the old papers Charles was able to bring in, I could be sure of much more than that, even to the level of figuring out which events happened first.
After that point, the Free Press's editorial stance became more pro-patriotism than Fox News, and possible as much as Pravda. Despite the fact that the city had been declared 'safe', there was a constant drum-beats about the dangers posed by posthumans, and reminders of how everyone had to do their part to keep humanity alive. Coverage of parahumans, the Changed, started out treating them like warriors wounded in the defense of their homeland, to... not really saying much of anything at all.
Doc House came by every so often to check with me, and to exercise his gift of gab.
During one conversation, I managed to head off a recapping of local gossip with, "Say, has the city got a constitution? Or a charter, or something else of the sort?"
"Hm," he commented, scratching the back of his head. "Might be, might not. Don't recall ever seeing a charter, but the boffins in the Council might have one tucked away somewhere."
"That sounds... a bit troubling. How about a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, or a Bill of Rights?"
"Don't think we've got one of those, not since the old American government disappeared in the Rapture."
"Or Canadian?"
"Don't know much about Canada. I hear it's mostly Indian Country on the north side of the lake, but that's mostly rumors from unreliable sorts."
"Well - how does the Council get elected, or know how to pass laws, or figure out who's Mayor, or anything like that?"
"Now what would a pretty young thing like you need to worry about a bunch of bickering old gray-beards for?"
"I'm trying to figure out what my options are - and what consequences there are if I do something boneheaded."
"Well, then, lassie, it's pretty simple. Everyone who lives in the city gets to vote for whoever they think should represent them. The top - dozen or so? something like that - get to be on the Council, and however many people voted for them, that's how many votes they get. And they spend their days arguing philosophy and law and how big a fine someone should have to pay for breaking two fingers on someone else instead of one. Dry, dreary stuff, that most people are glad to leave to those who like arguing about it day in and day out."
"... Hunh. That's not /quite/ the impression I was getting from the newspapers - they were talking about the Council like they were the people who get stuff done."
"A lot more happens in the city then ever makes it into the papers, bunsome. Some of it you had to be there to know it ever happened at all."
"So - how about the Mayor, then? How'd you end up with two?"
"Whoever's highest-ranking in the city bureaucracy. The Twins had the same rank, and neither's got seniority, and they don't overrule each other much, so it works out."
"Okay, city bureaucracy - who controls their budget?"
"The Mayor, who else?"
"And how does someone get into the bureaucracy?"
"That's easy enough - just sign up."
"... And what does the bureaucracy actually do?"
"Oh, the usual - patrol for bandits, keep any new kill-bots from killing off too many civilians, make sure everyone pays enough to keep the system that keeps humanity alive running."
"You mean, like an army?"
"Of course not - armies are for fighting /people/, and after Judgement Day, there's so few of us left, nobody wants to kill /anyone/ if they don't have to. They're the /bureaucracy/."
"Uh... /huh/." I ran through my mental checklist of civil jobs. "You mentioned judges once - who pays for them?"
"Whoever wants a trial instead of just letting their lawyers hash things out."
"If I remember right, you were unhappy when I brought up this group, but please remember that I really don't know why... Police?"
"My goodness, my good girl - don't you know /anything/ about history?"
"Only old stuff. Year two thousand or so and before."
"I'm pretty sure that's still late enough to know about the excesses that came from government controlling law enforcement."
"... Maybe? Some?"
The usually cheerful lines of his face were rearranged into a frown. "Well then. By the time the Rapture was getting close, police could pay illegal drugs to a known liar for false information implicating someone they didn't like, get the address wrong and burst in on a completely different home, shoot the dog, tase the people inside, some to death, drag the others into cells, not give them any food or water until they were half dead, steal anything valuable they found in the home, leave it open so strangers could ransack the rest, and if anyone complained, they'd 'investigate' themselves and find they'd done nothing wrong, and give their officers a few weeks of paid vacation."
"Oh. Um. Really?"
"Happened to my grandfather."
"... And people /put up/ with that?"
"The police were smart enough to avoid bothering the rich and powerful. Got to the point it would've taken a revolution to fix, and hey, it was America, who could fight the most powerful military that'd ever existed? So we got a Rapture instead, swept out all those rich and powerful folk, and those who were left generally didn't want anything to do with the police ever again." He pursed his lips and considered. "At least, that's what happened around here. Might be some rich folk managed to stay rich through the bad times elsewhere, but I haven't heard even a rumour of that."
"Well, I'm glad for you filling me in - but I hope you don't mind, after reading these for a while," I held up the latest issue of the Free Press, "I'm feeling like I have to take everything with a grain of salt."
"Don't blame you, my lass, don't blame you at all. I'm just an ornery old doctor, history and politics have never really been my thing. If you're up to meeting other people, I know a few who know a lot more than you'll ever get out of those fish-wrappers. Sherri-Lynn says the problem was the smart money, when computer programs started paying their own upkeep, which put evolution on them to get things done, like nudging laws, and what worked for them didn't work so well for us people. Helen's got a theory about some group - the Illuminators? - pulling strings from behind the scenes. Terry-"
I cleared my throat, and interrupted. "That's all very interesting, and I'm sure I'll want to learn it all when I have the time - but I've got more pressing concerns."
"Anything I can help with?"
"Not sure. I'm just now starting to wrap my way around what you've been saying about how the city works... no official law enforcement officers but the government does take care of defense, private settlement of disputes... I'm not sure how it all works, but it sounds like someone drew on some pre-twentieth-century social history. Well, maybe even twentieth-century for the non-industrialized areas. What I'm trying to think of right now is, if I got in touch with the bureaucracy, or even one of the Mayors, and told them something they thought should stay secret, what are the odds of my getting out of that meeting alive and well?"
"Does it have something to do with why you're hiding in my pantry instead of decorating my parlor?"
"... You could say that."
"Hm." He tapped his chin. "I could get in touch with Ted, who still owes me for fixing up his gout, and see if there's some arrangements that could be made..." He trailed off as I shook my head. "You want to make your own arrangements?"
"Not... entirely. But if you get in touch with someone who gets in touch with someone, and so on, that's all going to trace back to you. I'm thinking something more along the lines of giving you a sealed envelope, and telling whoever I meet that my silent backer will send it off unless I make it out of the meeting and tell you not to."
"That doesn't sound too difficult, on my end. Of course, I'm curious what sort of secret you know that you could use for that."
"Probably safest that you don't ask." Particularly since I didn't have a good answer - I had a lot of supposition and speculation, plus the occasional weapon aimed at me for emphasis, but no real hard evidence. "On a somewhat related tack... do you think you can help me look a little less, well, recognizable? Being this shade of pink kind of makes the whole idea of tradecraft seem, well, kind of silly..."
DataPacRat
Truthseeker
- Location
- Niagara, Canada
*Chapter Nine: Re-Settling*
I did not, in fact, give Doc House a mysterious sealed envelope; I simply didn't know any secrets I was sure anyone who was politically powerful didn't want to get out. (Or, at least, I didn't /know/ that I knew any such secrets.) That was just one plan of many I came up with, considered, and threw away for not having any good chance of getting anything I actually wanted done.
Which, of course, brings us to the fact that I was also in the middle of trying to work out what it was I /did/ want done, that was remotely within reach, and was at least vaguely plausible given what I'd learned about the various people and groups I'd met since first re-awakening.
Staying alive if I could, of course, was pretty high up on my to-do list. But there were exceptions to that, such as avoiding the fate of some of the Changed, such as being turned into something's internal organs, with no significant input from the outside, no way to do anything, and little to do but spend years in near-total sensory deprivation going mad. If it was simply a matter of locked-in syndrome, where I couldn't move a muscle, there had been promising avenues of investigation even before I'd died, I'd rather be locked-in than dead - in that case, there was at least a reasonable hope that I'd be able to, someday, communicate something useful through Morse code beeps. But without even that hope, I shuddered at the thought.
And yet - I was able to think of scenarios where I'd be willing to risk even that form of body-horror. In the grand tradition of philosophical thought experiments, if I could perform an act that put me at a risk of such permanent isolation and madness, but also reduced the odds that humanity (or sapient mind-kind in general) would be permanently exterminated... I could come up with a set of numbers where I'd take the risk for the benefit. Of course, it was supremely unlikely that I would ever be faced with a single choice like that; for just one reason, as long as I was alive and out and about in the world, I could continue working to reduce the odds of sapience's extinction.
... Probably. Maybe. I was working nearly in the blind, knowing very little about what I might actually be able to do on that front. And so after massively overthinking everything I just mentioned, and a whole lot more, I was able to come to the conclusion that I'd been massively overthinking it all (though I might not have been able to figure that out without taking the time to massively overthink it), and the most reliable way to do something useful, to myself and everyone else, was to focus on some simple stuff...
--
With a bit of direction from Doc House, a bit of shopping by Charles, and even some sewing by Britney, I'd been transformed... at least a little. Instead of a pink rabbit riding a motorized bicycle, I now appeared, to one and all, to be a blue mouse being pushed around in a non-motorized wheelchair (with some dyed fur, my ears tucked flat, fake mouse ears on top, and a false tail-sleeve). Doc had gotten in touch with a former patient, who'd gotten in touch with a friend, who'd arranged for a ten-minute appointment with Arty, a secretary of Amber, the Deputy Mayor.
As the Doc pushed me along in the direction of the restaurant, I asked him, "Say, have you ever heard of an old story, Gulliver's Travels?"
"Sounds familiar. A fellow ends up in a land of tiny people, pulls their fleet being him with ropes?"
"That's the one. Know anything else about it?"
"Nothing comes to mind."
"Lilliput is just from the first part of the story. It's been a while, but I remember Heinlein wrote something based on another of Gulliver's lands - the flappers. If I remember right, in one land, the important people had people around them with bladders on sticks, and when some stranger approached, they flapped these bladders to keep the important people from being able to hear anything from the supplicant, unless the supplicant first satisfied the flapper. And that in other lands, flappers had many names, like administrative assistants, receptionists, secretaries to private secretaries, appointment clerks, and so on.
The Doc chuckled. "If that's how folk did things before, it's no wonder they went and did whatever silly thing killed them all off. 'Flappers', I'm going to have to remember that one. You might not want to mention it to Art, though, he takes his job kind of seriously."
"Serious it is."
We arrived at the restaurant, one Linguini's by name, with no indication whether that referred to the chef or the food. They were putting on enough airs that they had a fellow who seemed to be trying to cosplay "annoying French maitre d", but going over the top.
"Do you have a reservation?" he sniffed, looking down his nose. (Well, I wasn't standing, so maybe he was just looking down at me.)
The Doc nodded pleasantly. "Doctor Oren House and Bunny to see Art Drummond. We're expected"
"Very well. I shall see if /Mister/ Drummond is available." He turned and flounced off.
I looked up at the Doc and mouthed 'flappers'. He grinned back, then straightened his face as the self-appointed defender of culinary culture integrity returned. "Mister Drummond has agreed to allow Doctor House and... /guest/ to join him."
I will say this for the place; once we'd passed muster, if only barely, the wait-staff quickly and competently made room for my wheelchair to get to Art's table.
"Oren! Good to see you! Have a seat" the secretary enthused, seeming to take up the whole booth by himself already. "How's the wife and hubby? Can I get you anything? Who's your little friend?"
I was pushed up to the open end of the table, my wheels locked, and the Doc took a seat. Instead of answering our host, he looked at me, winked, and said, "And that's why it's polite to make appointments instead of just barging in unannounced - gives them time to check on their notes, so they can sound like they remember you. Last time I talked to Arty was, what, three years ago?"
Arty had burst out laughing, and slapped the table, and it seemed entirely natural instead of a performance. "Two," he said. "That school play that had your grand-niece and my nephew in it."
"Ah, you'll have to forgive an old man his lapse in memory. Could have sworn it was the shindig put on when the new envoy from Cleveland got here..."
A waiter appeared, took drink orders - whiskey for the doc, iced tea for me - and vanished again. A few moments later, beverages materialized without interrupting on the conversation.
After swallowing a mouthful of what appeared to be unfortunately limp pasta and a watery tomato sauce, Arty asked, "What brings you and your friend here today?"
Doc answered, "I owe this little lady a favor, for handling a neighbourhood annoyance, and since she insisted on paying me for my doctoring."
Arty turned to me. "Alright, so what's this all this about? Want to glad-hand the higher-ups before becoming a bureaucrat yourself?"
"Not... exactly," I said. "Though that may not be an /entirely/ inaccurate description. Since we've only got a few minutes - I have a project I plan to undertake, and I want to assure your bosses that it's of absolutely no threat to them."
Arty raised an eyebrow. "Now that's a curious thing to say. What sort of threat could you be?"
I sipped my iced tea - not bad, but needed a bit of lemon. "Ever since my... Change, I've heard a lot of people say a lot of things about the Singularity. I've seen Technoville fighting post-singularity monsters, I've met AIs, I've read about your bureaucracy's members putting their lives at risk cleaning up the city... but one thing I haven't seen, is anyone trying to figure out what exactly the Singularity was, how it happened, or - most importantly - how it can be kept from happening again. Like I said, everyone's got a theory - but nobody is putting the work in so anyone can look at what's known and agree that 'Yep, this idea's more likely to be true than that one'."
Arty chewed a moment, swallowed, and said, "So you want to look at the ruins and so on? We've got a History Society-" He stopped as I shook my head.
"I've seen their museum, and... it's as good as anyone has any right to expect. As a museum."
Arty cut a meatball in half, and when I saw the pink interior I shuddered. "Herbivorous?", he inquired.
I shook my head. "No, sir. If that's the food you enjoy, I don't want to disparage it, but... can I ask, does that sauce even have any basil in it, or onion?"
"You cook?"
"To a degree. You could say I'm a student of Fannie Farmer, of the Boston Cooking School. Never worked in a commercial kitchen, but I can think of... at least five things that Ms. Farmer would do differently, without considering my own variations."
"I should have you know, Monsieur Linguini says he produces nothing but the finest authentic pre-Rapture Italian food."
"That may be so, sir. All I can say is that I've read and practiced with an eighteen ninety-six cookbook, and unless that tastes a lot better than it looks, I'd prefer my own cooking. Now, about the-"
Arty snapped a finger, and a waiter appeared. "The young lady wishes to taste the pasta and sauce."
A few seconds later, a small plate with a few strands of spaghetti and a dollop of what could generously be called 'sauce' on top appeared, along with a fork. I took a bite. I winced, but managed to swallow. "Definitely prefer my own cooking, sir."
Arty looked at Doc House. "Day after tomorrow?"
The Doc nodded. "Suits me fine. Enjoy your meal." He tossed back the rest of his drink, stood, and, to my confusion started unlocking my chair's wheels. I opened my mouth, but he gave a brief shake of his head.
Once we were out of the restaurant, I asked, "What just happened?"
"You, my short and sweet saucier, just tied your credibility to your culinary competence. I hope you have some clue what you're doing, as you're feeding the Deputy Mayor her dinner in two days."
"... I miss math. Sure, I don't understand a lot of it, but at least I know I /can/ understand it if I put the effort in..."
--
You can learn a lot about a culture from the ingredients they have available. Dogtown had wheat, and cows, so baked goods and grains were staples. They also had pretty much every plant you could grow in a garden, including tomatoes, celery, onions, and garlic; but a lot of cruciferous vegetables were just gone, completely extinct, including brussels sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage. And there were a few extras - bell peppers now came in every colour of the rainbow. They had salt, but no pepper - instead, they had "pepper", which Doc casually informed me was made from crushed beetle shells. That just about summed the whole place up - a little familiar, a little missing, a little extra, a little creepy-strange.
I was probably driving Charles buggy with my shopping-list requests for things that just didn't exist, and my revisions for possible replacements. Either that, or he was having a ball looking for a reasonable approximation of Worcestershire sauce.
Once I'd familiarized myself with the House kitchen - they were close enough to the Embassy to have an electric range, which I felt some relief at - I tottered to the parlor on my cane in search of Britney. (I was getting tingles from my left leg - not real sensations, but at least the promise of sensation to come.) I found her mending her husbands' formal jackets, and took a seat facing her.
"Mrs. House, may we talk for a few moments?"
She tied off a knot, set her work down, and folded her hands on her lap. "Yes?"
"I'm... probably about to say some very stupid things. But I would like to assure you in advance that if I do, they're the result of clumsiness, and no ill intent is meant." I paused to see if she'd respond, but she just kept looking at me, so I repressed a sigh and continued. "Mrs. House... I am a very straightforward sort of person. I see a goal, I work out the tasks, and I do them. This is very useful in some situations. But it also means I'm... very ill-equipped to handle others. I can cook good food; I can argue the points of policy proposals... I can't throw a dinner party. I don't even know the first thing about alcoholic drinks, let alone which ones the Deputy Mayor would prefer. I've only read the barest hints on how to be a hostess. I don't even know all the things I don't know. But this meal that I stumbled into having to make - it's important to me to make the best impression I can, to try and help convince the bureaucrats to support my ideas, or at least not interfere with them too much. I know you bear no special fondness for me, and I'm not asking to be your friend, but I'd... like to ask for your help." I unfolded my own hands, turning them palm-up on my lap.
Britney pursed her lips, and after just a moment, said, "No. I will not help you."
"Ah." I refolded my hands. "For future reference, if I may ask... Why not?"
"Oren has told me about your ideas. If you carry them out, you will only get yourself killed, along with whatever other people you bring into them."
"Ah," I said again. "I'd be willing to discuss that point, but I'm slightly pressed for time. Should I look into finding somewhere else to have the dinner?"
"No. Against my better judgement, Oren allowed an implicit agreement to be made for it to be hosted here. I will do everything in my power to minimize the harm that comes to this family from his soft-hearted indulgences regarding you."
"Well - thank you for being straight with me, Mrs. House. I'll let you get back to that."
I heaved myself onto my right leg and walking stick, and started thumping back towards the kitchen.
"Miss Bunny." I carefully turned back around. "When you start losing people close to you, you will understand."
I managed to shrug without toppling. "I already have. My parents, siblings, cousins, neighbours, remote acquaintances - every last one of them gone, in a single sweep. I can make myself cry at will by thinking about what I've lost. I try not to think about it too much. May I go now?"
When she didn't answer, just furrowed her brow, I turned back to the kitchen.
--
I cooked that meal twice that day, just to ferret out all the surprises in how things had changed, from how quickly pots heated to unexpected ingredient interactions.
Charles was out in search of the last spice - I'd burned through a lot of the trade goods I'd stolen from the Embassy's stable, but reminded myself that resources existed to be used. The last time he'd popped in, he'd dropped off something other than food: clothing, in the style worn by reasonably wealthy Dogtown female engineers and working professionals (no, not /that/ type of professional) when they weren't on-the-job. It wasn't as bad as the plain dress of the Anabaptist farmers I'd passed through; but did have a certain old-fashioned vibe from them. After passing my measurements along, I'd ended up with a vest over a long dress, various ruffles and buttons, a dress, a sort of scarf-cravat thing, and did I mention the dress? About the only good thing I could say about that item of clothing was that I could keep my machete strapped to my leg and keep it completely invisible.
I'd just finished cleaning up after my latest surreptitious wall-test of the spaghetti, making sure I had the timing down, and was taking a five minute break, sipping some water to rehydrate after the heat and rubbing my leg. Britney swept into the room, and I commented to her, "It's really quite odd - I can't feel a thing in this leg yet, but it still aches. I wonder how that works?"
She looked around the kitchen, the chopped vegetables, the steaming pots, the odiferous experimental herb-and-spice testing zone, and general mostly-controlled chaos. Focusing back in on me, she declared, "I have determined that as matters currently stand, you will embarrass my family more than if I make certain interventions."
"Er?"
"A lady does not grunt. In deference to your limited mobility, I have arranged for stylists of various specialties to visit during the day. There is far from enough time to teach you how to avoid embarrassing yourself by following all the rules of refined protocol and etiquette. You will therefore instead be 'straightforward', and your appearance tailored to match." She picked up the dress I'd paid good, hard-earned (so to speak) tobacco for from where I'd hung it over the back of a chair, sniffed, and declared, "Entirely unsuitable, without at least three months of finishing school." She advanced straight to me, and tilted her head, looking at my own cranium, and its flattened ears, from a few angles. "You may only have fur instead of a proper coiffure - but when was the last time you had your fur trimmed?"
"Ah-" She raised an eyebrow and I cut back that grunt. "Not since I was... Changed, Mrs. House."
"I should have guessed. I will engage the services of a parahuman groomer for that aspect of your appearance. If you are done in here for now, a manicurist will be arriving shortly."
I wasn't sure what had changed Britney's mind, or at least her approach, but I wasn't going to perform a dental inspection on a donated equine. ... Even if it did mean I was about to 'enjoy' a manicure. I supposed I could at least hope I could get away with avoiding a pedicure, as well, since my paws had blunt claws instead of nails.
--
My hope was quickly dashed. On the other hand (or paw, as the case may be), when my Britney House selected and approved outfit arrived, I was... reasonably impressed. Trousers and shoes designed for my legs, matching vest over pale shirt, longcoat, gloves and top-hat... when it was all together with my walking stick, I looked to be halfway between white-tie formality and the practicality of being part of the trenchcoat brigade. I might not be able to hide a machete, but given the lack of leg-binding skirts, aprons, and under-layers, I was perfectly willing to give up that particular advantage. (Especially since, with a bit of work, I could see lots of ways to hide all sorts of /other/ useful bits and bobs... if I ever got a chance to.)
By the time the appointed meal was approaching, I'd been preened, primped, pressed, processed, and generally brought up to the standards that Britney deemed presentable. I hadn't had that much physical contact with other people since, well, ever, quite possibly. I didn't like it; but I put up with it. And bought a comb that turned my pelt into a silky cloud. Hey, I might crash and burn and have to spend the next few decades as a waitress or worse, but there was no need to suffer unnecessary physical discomfort while I did.
Deputy Mayor Amber Goldschmidt was barely taller than I was - shorter, if you counted my ears - and was a freckled redhead, wearing a suit that put the one I thought was impressive on myself to shame. She was accompanied by Arty, and two strapping young men who I never quite caught the names of, but reminded me of the gate-guards at the Embassy. I tried not to fidget as Britney let them in - if for no other reason than I was still leaning on my cane, and my usual fidgeting involved both hands. Falling flat on my face might not be the /absolute/ worst first impression I could make, but it was probably as close as I could get.
"And this," Britney led them into the parlour, "is your hostess and chef for the evening, Miss Bunny."
"How d'you do," I nodded to the group.
Amber nodded back, then glanced at Arty. "I distinctly remember you wrote into my timetable that I would be meeting "Mlle. Bun., A Blue Mouse"."
"She /was/ a mouse when she came to see me. And blue."
"Please forgive any confusion I may have caused," I tried to smooth matters. "Technoville's embassy has an interest in me, and I saw no reason to make it easy for them to kidnap me from the seat."
Amber arched an eyebrow. "And if they have infiltrated my staff, and know about this dinner?"
"I do not believe I am quite so important to them that they would want to disturb relations between the two cities during your visit. I will not be staying here another night and putting the Houses at further risk - they have already been more than generous, and a good guest never puts their host at risk of a ninja attack if they can possibly help it."
And, somewhat to my frustration, that was the closest Amber allowed the conversation to come to what I wanted to talk to her about for the rest of the meal. Instead, from the drinks (wine for them, grape juice for me), through the caesar salad, through my personal variant of spaghetti and meat sauce, and to the final spoonful of cardamom ice cream (and goodness but arranging for /that/ taste had taken some effort), she asked me about nothing but the food, and related matters - which ingredients I'd used, which I'd wanted to use, what Worcestershire sauce was made of and how I'd improvised a substitute, why I wasn't drinking but wasn't making any fuss about anyone else... by the end of the grilling, I needed to borrow one of Doc's wheelchairs to get into the parlour, instead of limping there under my own power.
Finally, the group settled in for coffee. (Or, should I say, "coffee". The beverage was made roasted grains, chicory, and sugar beets, plus caffeine imported from Technoville's chemical production facilities; hopefully, no beetles were involved...)
Amber sipped, set her cup down, and folded her hands. "Miss Bunny... can you tell me what, exactly, Technoville's interest in you is?"
"That depends on how much I can trust what they've told me. Which isn't much. But their claimed reason is that my living brain has a peculiar property that they think will be useful."
"Would that property be related to your Change, or your Old World origins?"
I carefully set my own cup down, and without moving, made myself aware of where my various implements of distracting opponents long enough to run away were hidden about my person. "Technoville has been in touch with you already?"
"Hardly. Everything about this meal you have prepared, and the way in which you went about doing it, indicates you are weird - western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic. You know red wine goes with beef - but are unaware which varietals are grown locally. You asked for ingredients that have not existed for decades, or at best are not available on this continent." I kept my expression neutral - it seemed there were good reasons she'd made it to second-or-third in command of the local armed forces. "Do you even know what flumf is?"
With Britney looking at me, I had to resist an urge to say 'Um', and instead hazarded, "A fictional monster, a sort of flying jellyfish with eyestalks?"
She blinked once, glanced at Silent Guard to Starboard, who I caught a fractional nod from. Amber smiled a bit. "Well, that's not the definition I meant - but let's move on. How do you think you can prevent a Second Singularity?"
I tried to rally my thoughts. "Studying the residue of the first. By myself if I have to, but the odds increase the more resources that are thrown at the problem."
"What makes you think you can do any better than anyone else who's tried?"
"As far as I can tell, you haven't had any programmers left, since things settled down enough to start poking around at the city-computers. Technoville might have some, but they keep them locked away on private projects."
"Can you program an AI?"
"Not at all. I once built a neural net I won a stupid little award for, and know a bunch of outdated theories, but that's all. I also can't build a clean operating system from scratch in any reasonable time, or build a computer chip. I know a lot of the science behind how the hardware works, not the engineering. If you want an AI, I /might/ be able to shave a few years off the project."
"I do /not/ want an AI, and I suggest that if you even think of making one, you get as far away from me as you can before you start, or I will shoot you dead first."
I swallowed. "So noted, ma'am."
"What if you cannot learn what you need from this city alone?"
"I'm already pretty sure I can't. I'm almost certainly going to need to get a closer look at a live city-computer, eventually. It's going to be a multi-city effort - everyone on Lake Erie just to start with, and as many more as can be gotten in touch with."
"There are good reasons we have not gotten in touch with them ourselves."
"The posthuman dangers - what Technoville calls the zones?"
"Precisely."
"I have a workaround for that. It will need some cooperation from Technoville, but should be doable."
"You escaped their compound here, are worried they will send ninjas after you - and you're willing to work with them?"
"You forgot to mention they performed surgery on me without my consent, and tried to drug and interrogate me. I've got no love for them - but if I can convince them they've got me right where they want me, and as long as they're the best source of carbon fibre parts, motors, and diesel, I can... deal."
"What's your workaround?"
"One-man flying machines."
"There aren't any airports left, unless they're in Technoville."
"Don't need them."
"No maintenance technicians."
"Anyone who can handle a motorized bicycle will do."
"Technoville hoards its fuel supplies for its own use."
"With some timing adjustments, drilling a slightly larger hole in a fuel injector, and about a thirty percent loss in miles per gallon, alcohol will work just as well. I'm assuming that distillation technology wasn't lost with the rest of civilization?"
She stared at me, without saying a word, for a very long few moments. "If you can get me some of these... flying machines... that are as good as that, then I don't care if you plan on annually sacrificing virgins to the posthuman gods, I'll take them."
"Technoville may be a bit sticky about that; what if I can only get them on loan, or sublet them?"
"Again. As long as I can drop munitions on designated targets, I don't care if they're officially licensed to the Seamstresses' Guild. I'd /prefer/ them being under my direct control and authority, and I strongly suggest that you take that preference into account when you work out your arrangements with Technoville. They've been lording their aerial superiority over us for... some time. At least in this case, I see absolutely nothing wrong with a little bit of democratization."
I did not, in fact, give Doc House a mysterious sealed envelope; I simply didn't know any secrets I was sure anyone who was politically powerful didn't want to get out. (Or, at least, I didn't /know/ that I knew any such secrets.) That was just one plan of many I came up with, considered, and threw away for not having any good chance of getting anything I actually wanted done.
Which, of course, brings us to the fact that I was also in the middle of trying to work out what it was I /did/ want done, that was remotely within reach, and was at least vaguely plausible given what I'd learned about the various people and groups I'd met since first re-awakening.
Staying alive if I could, of course, was pretty high up on my to-do list. But there were exceptions to that, such as avoiding the fate of some of the Changed, such as being turned into something's internal organs, with no significant input from the outside, no way to do anything, and little to do but spend years in near-total sensory deprivation going mad. If it was simply a matter of locked-in syndrome, where I couldn't move a muscle, there had been promising avenues of investigation even before I'd died, I'd rather be locked-in than dead - in that case, there was at least a reasonable hope that I'd be able to, someday, communicate something useful through Morse code beeps. But without even that hope, I shuddered at the thought.
And yet - I was able to think of scenarios where I'd be willing to risk even that form of body-horror. In the grand tradition of philosophical thought experiments, if I could perform an act that put me at a risk of such permanent isolation and madness, but also reduced the odds that humanity (or sapient mind-kind in general) would be permanently exterminated... I could come up with a set of numbers where I'd take the risk for the benefit. Of course, it was supremely unlikely that I would ever be faced with a single choice like that; for just one reason, as long as I was alive and out and about in the world, I could continue working to reduce the odds of sapience's extinction.
... Probably. Maybe. I was working nearly in the blind, knowing very little about what I might actually be able to do on that front. And so after massively overthinking everything I just mentioned, and a whole lot more, I was able to come to the conclusion that I'd been massively overthinking it all (though I might not have been able to figure that out without taking the time to massively overthink it), and the most reliable way to do something useful, to myself and everyone else, was to focus on some simple stuff...
--
With a bit of direction from Doc House, a bit of shopping by Charles, and even some sewing by Britney, I'd been transformed... at least a little. Instead of a pink rabbit riding a motorized bicycle, I now appeared, to one and all, to be a blue mouse being pushed around in a non-motorized wheelchair (with some dyed fur, my ears tucked flat, fake mouse ears on top, and a false tail-sleeve). Doc had gotten in touch with a former patient, who'd gotten in touch with a friend, who'd arranged for a ten-minute appointment with Arty, a secretary of Amber, the Deputy Mayor.
As the Doc pushed me along in the direction of the restaurant, I asked him, "Say, have you ever heard of an old story, Gulliver's Travels?"
"Sounds familiar. A fellow ends up in a land of tiny people, pulls their fleet being him with ropes?"
"That's the one. Know anything else about it?"
"Nothing comes to mind."
"Lilliput is just from the first part of the story. It's been a while, but I remember Heinlein wrote something based on another of Gulliver's lands - the flappers. If I remember right, in one land, the important people had people around them with bladders on sticks, and when some stranger approached, they flapped these bladders to keep the important people from being able to hear anything from the supplicant, unless the supplicant first satisfied the flapper. And that in other lands, flappers had many names, like administrative assistants, receptionists, secretaries to private secretaries, appointment clerks, and so on.
The Doc chuckled. "If that's how folk did things before, it's no wonder they went and did whatever silly thing killed them all off. 'Flappers', I'm going to have to remember that one. You might not want to mention it to Art, though, he takes his job kind of seriously."
"Serious it is."
We arrived at the restaurant, one Linguini's by name, with no indication whether that referred to the chef or the food. They were putting on enough airs that they had a fellow who seemed to be trying to cosplay "annoying French maitre d", but going over the top.
"Do you have a reservation?" he sniffed, looking down his nose. (Well, I wasn't standing, so maybe he was just looking down at me.)
The Doc nodded pleasantly. "Doctor Oren House and Bunny to see Art Drummond. We're expected"
"Very well. I shall see if /Mister/ Drummond is available." He turned and flounced off.
I looked up at the Doc and mouthed 'flappers'. He grinned back, then straightened his face as the self-appointed defender of culinary culture integrity returned. "Mister Drummond has agreed to allow Doctor House and... /guest/ to join him."
I will say this for the place; once we'd passed muster, if only barely, the wait-staff quickly and competently made room for my wheelchair to get to Art's table.
"Oren! Good to see you! Have a seat" the secretary enthused, seeming to take up the whole booth by himself already. "How's the wife and hubby? Can I get you anything? Who's your little friend?"
I was pushed up to the open end of the table, my wheels locked, and the Doc took a seat. Instead of answering our host, he looked at me, winked, and said, "And that's why it's polite to make appointments instead of just barging in unannounced - gives them time to check on their notes, so they can sound like they remember you. Last time I talked to Arty was, what, three years ago?"
Arty had burst out laughing, and slapped the table, and it seemed entirely natural instead of a performance. "Two," he said. "That school play that had your grand-niece and my nephew in it."
"Ah, you'll have to forgive an old man his lapse in memory. Could have sworn it was the shindig put on when the new envoy from Cleveland got here..."
A waiter appeared, took drink orders - whiskey for the doc, iced tea for me - and vanished again. A few moments later, beverages materialized without interrupting on the conversation.
After swallowing a mouthful of what appeared to be unfortunately limp pasta and a watery tomato sauce, Arty asked, "What brings you and your friend here today?"
Doc answered, "I owe this little lady a favor, for handling a neighbourhood annoyance, and since she insisted on paying me for my doctoring."
Arty turned to me. "Alright, so what's this all this about? Want to glad-hand the higher-ups before becoming a bureaucrat yourself?"
"Not... exactly," I said. "Though that may not be an /entirely/ inaccurate description. Since we've only got a few minutes - I have a project I plan to undertake, and I want to assure your bosses that it's of absolutely no threat to them."
Arty raised an eyebrow. "Now that's a curious thing to say. What sort of threat could you be?"
I sipped my iced tea - not bad, but needed a bit of lemon. "Ever since my... Change, I've heard a lot of people say a lot of things about the Singularity. I've seen Technoville fighting post-singularity monsters, I've met AIs, I've read about your bureaucracy's members putting their lives at risk cleaning up the city... but one thing I haven't seen, is anyone trying to figure out what exactly the Singularity was, how it happened, or - most importantly - how it can be kept from happening again. Like I said, everyone's got a theory - but nobody is putting the work in so anyone can look at what's known and agree that 'Yep, this idea's more likely to be true than that one'."
Arty chewed a moment, swallowed, and said, "So you want to look at the ruins and so on? We've got a History Society-" He stopped as I shook my head.
"I've seen their museum, and... it's as good as anyone has any right to expect. As a museum."
Arty cut a meatball in half, and when I saw the pink interior I shuddered. "Herbivorous?", he inquired.
I shook my head. "No, sir. If that's the food you enjoy, I don't want to disparage it, but... can I ask, does that sauce even have any basil in it, or onion?"
"You cook?"
"To a degree. You could say I'm a student of Fannie Farmer, of the Boston Cooking School. Never worked in a commercial kitchen, but I can think of... at least five things that Ms. Farmer would do differently, without considering my own variations."
"I should have you know, Monsieur Linguini says he produces nothing but the finest authentic pre-Rapture Italian food."
"That may be so, sir. All I can say is that I've read and practiced with an eighteen ninety-six cookbook, and unless that tastes a lot better than it looks, I'd prefer my own cooking. Now, about the-"
Arty snapped a finger, and a waiter appeared. "The young lady wishes to taste the pasta and sauce."
A few seconds later, a small plate with a few strands of spaghetti and a dollop of what could generously be called 'sauce' on top appeared, along with a fork. I took a bite. I winced, but managed to swallow. "Definitely prefer my own cooking, sir."
Arty looked at Doc House. "Day after tomorrow?"
The Doc nodded. "Suits me fine. Enjoy your meal." He tossed back the rest of his drink, stood, and, to my confusion started unlocking my chair's wheels. I opened my mouth, but he gave a brief shake of his head.
Once we were out of the restaurant, I asked, "What just happened?"
"You, my short and sweet saucier, just tied your credibility to your culinary competence. I hope you have some clue what you're doing, as you're feeding the Deputy Mayor her dinner in two days."
"... I miss math. Sure, I don't understand a lot of it, but at least I know I /can/ understand it if I put the effort in..."
--
You can learn a lot about a culture from the ingredients they have available. Dogtown had wheat, and cows, so baked goods and grains were staples. They also had pretty much every plant you could grow in a garden, including tomatoes, celery, onions, and garlic; but a lot of cruciferous vegetables were just gone, completely extinct, including brussels sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage. And there were a few extras - bell peppers now came in every colour of the rainbow. They had salt, but no pepper - instead, they had "pepper", which Doc casually informed me was made from crushed beetle shells. That just about summed the whole place up - a little familiar, a little missing, a little extra, a little creepy-strange.
I was probably driving Charles buggy with my shopping-list requests for things that just didn't exist, and my revisions for possible replacements. Either that, or he was having a ball looking for a reasonable approximation of Worcestershire sauce.
Once I'd familiarized myself with the House kitchen - they were close enough to the Embassy to have an electric range, which I felt some relief at - I tottered to the parlor on my cane in search of Britney. (I was getting tingles from my left leg - not real sensations, but at least the promise of sensation to come.) I found her mending her husbands' formal jackets, and took a seat facing her.
"Mrs. House, may we talk for a few moments?"
She tied off a knot, set her work down, and folded her hands on her lap. "Yes?"
"I'm... probably about to say some very stupid things. But I would like to assure you in advance that if I do, they're the result of clumsiness, and no ill intent is meant." I paused to see if she'd respond, but she just kept looking at me, so I repressed a sigh and continued. "Mrs. House... I am a very straightforward sort of person. I see a goal, I work out the tasks, and I do them. This is very useful in some situations. But it also means I'm... very ill-equipped to handle others. I can cook good food; I can argue the points of policy proposals... I can't throw a dinner party. I don't even know the first thing about alcoholic drinks, let alone which ones the Deputy Mayor would prefer. I've only read the barest hints on how to be a hostess. I don't even know all the things I don't know. But this meal that I stumbled into having to make - it's important to me to make the best impression I can, to try and help convince the bureaucrats to support my ideas, or at least not interfere with them too much. I know you bear no special fondness for me, and I'm not asking to be your friend, but I'd... like to ask for your help." I unfolded my own hands, turning them palm-up on my lap.
Britney pursed her lips, and after just a moment, said, "No. I will not help you."
"Ah." I refolded my hands. "For future reference, if I may ask... Why not?"
"Oren has told me about your ideas. If you carry them out, you will only get yourself killed, along with whatever other people you bring into them."
"Ah," I said again. "I'd be willing to discuss that point, but I'm slightly pressed for time. Should I look into finding somewhere else to have the dinner?"
"No. Against my better judgement, Oren allowed an implicit agreement to be made for it to be hosted here. I will do everything in my power to minimize the harm that comes to this family from his soft-hearted indulgences regarding you."
"Well - thank you for being straight with me, Mrs. House. I'll let you get back to that."
I heaved myself onto my right leg and walking stick, and started thumping back towards the kitchen.
"Miss Bunny." I carefully turned back around. "When you start losing people close to you, you will understand."
I managed to shrug without toppling. "I already have. My parents, siblings, cousins, neighbours, remote acquaintances - every last one of them gone, in a single sweep. I can make myself cry at will by thinking about what I've lost. I try not to think about it too much. May I go now?"
When she didn't answer, just furrowed her brow, I turned back to the kitchen.
--
I cooked that meal twice that day, just to ferret out all the surprises in how things had changed, from how quickly pots heated to unexpected ingredient interactions.
Charles was out in search of the last spice - I'd burned through a lot of the trade goods I'd stolen from the Embassy's stable, but reminded myself that resources existed to be used. The last time he'd popped in, he'd dropped off something other than food: clothing, in the style worn by reasonably wealthy Dogtown female engineers and working professionals (no, not /that/ type of professional) when they weren't on-the-job. It wasn't as bad as the plain dress of the Anabaptist farmers I'd passed through; but did have a certain old-fashioned vibe from them. After passing my measurements along, I'd ended up with a vest over a long dress, various ruffles and buttons, a dress, a sort of scarf-cravat thing, and did I mention the dress? About the only good thing I could say about that item of clothing was that I could keep my machete strapped to my leg and keep it completely invisible.
I'd just finished cleaning up after my latest surreptitious wall-test of the spaghetti, making sure I had the timing down, and was taking a five minute break, sipping some water to rehydrate after the heat and rubbing my leg. Britney swept into the room, and I commented to her, "It's really quite odd - I can't feel a thing in this leg yet, but it still aches. I wonder how that works?"
She looked around the kitchen, the chopped vegetables, the steaming pots, the odiferous experimental herb-and-spice testing zone, and general mostly-controlled chaos. Focusing back in on me, she declared, "I have determined that as matters currently stand, you will embarrass my family more than if I make certain interventions."
"Er?"
"A lady does not grunt. In deference to your limited mobility, I have arranged for stylists of various specialties to visit during the day. There is far from enough time to teach you how to avoid embarrassing yourself by following all the rules of refined protocol and etiquette. You will therefore instead be 'straightforward', and your appearance tailored to match." She picked up the dress I'd paid good, hard-earned (so to speak) tobacco for from where I'd hung it over the back of a chair, sniffed, and declared, "Entirely unsuitable, without at least three months of finishing school." She advanced straight to me, and tilted her head, looking at my own cranium, and its flattened ears, from a few angles. "You may only have fur instead of a proper coiffure - but when was the last time you had your fur trimmed?"
"Ah-" She raised an eyebrow and I cut back that grunt. "Not since I was... Changed, Mrs. House."
"I should have guessed. I will engage the services of a parahuman groomer for that aspect of your appearance. If you are done in here for now, a manicurist will be arriving shortly."
I wasn't sure what had changed Britney's mind, or at least her approach, but I wasn't going to perform a dental inspection on a donated equine. ... Even if it did mean I was about to 'enjoy' a manicure. I supposed I could at least hope I could get away with avoiding a pedicure, as well, since my paws had blunt claws instead of nails.
--
My hope was quickly dashed. On the other hand (or paw, as the case may be), when my Britney House selected and approved outfit arrived, I was... reasonably impressed. Trousers and shoes designed for my legs, matching vest over pale shirt, longcoat, gloves and top-hat... when it was all together with my walking stick, I looked to be halfway between white-tie formality and the practicality of being part of the trenchcoat brigade. I might not be able to hide a machete, but given the lack of leg-binding skirts, aprons, and under-layers, I was perfectly willing to give up that particular advantage. (Especially since, with a bit of work, I could see lots of ways to hide all sorts of /other/ useful bits and bobs... if I ever got a chance to.)
By the time the appointed meal was approaching, I'd been preened, primped, pressed, processed, and generally brought up to the standards that Britney deemed presentable. I hadn't had that much physical contact with other people since, well, ever, quite possibly. I didn't like it; but I put up with it. And bought a comb that turned my pelt into a silky cloud. Hey, I might crash and burn and have to spend the next few decades as a waitress or worse, but there was no need to suffer unnecessary physical discomfort while I did.
Deputy Mayor Amber Goldschmidt was barely taller than I was - shorter, if you counted my ears - and was a freckled redhead, wearing a suit that put the one I thought was impressive on myself to shame. She was accompanied by Arty, and two strapping young men who I never quite caught the names of, but reminded me of the gate-guards at the Embassy. I tried not to fidget as Britney let them in - if for no other reason than I was still leaning on my cane, and my usual fidgeting involved both hands. Falling flat on my face might not be the /absolute/ worst first impression I could make, but it was probably as close as I could get.
"And this," Britney led them into the parlour, "is your hostess and chef for the evening, Miss Bunny."
"How d'you do," I nodded to the group.
Amber nodded back, then glanced at Arty. "I distinctly remember you wrote into my timetable that I would be meeting "Mlle. Bun., A Blue Mouse"."
"She /was/ a mouse when she came to see me. And blue."
"Please forgive any confusion I may have caused," I tried to smooth matters. "Technoville's embassy has an interest in me, and I saw no reason to make it easy for them to kidnap me from the seat."
Amber arched an eyebrow. "And if they have infiltrated my staff, and know about this dinner?"
"I do not believe I am quite so important to them that they would want to disturb relations between the two cities during your visit. I will not be staying here another night and putting the Houses at further risk - they have already been more than generous, and a good guest never puts their host at risk of a ninja attack if they can possibly help it."
And, somewhat to my frustration, that was the closest Amber allowed the conversation to come to what I wanted to talk to her about for the rest of the meal. Instead, from the drinks (wine for them, grape juice for me), through the caesar salad, through my personal variant of spaghetti and meat sauce, and to the final spoonful of cardamom ice cream (and goodness but arranging for /that/ taste had taken some effort), she asked me about nothing but the food, and related matters - which ingredients I'd used, which I'd wanted to use, what Worcestershire sauce was made of and how I'd improvised a substitute, why I wasn't drinking but wasn't making any fuss about anyone else... by the end of the grilling, I needed to borrow one of Doc's wheelchairs to get into the parlour, instead of limping there under my own power.
Finally, the group settled in for coffee. (Or, should I say, "coffee". The beverage was made roasted grains, chicory, and sugar beets, plus caffeine imported from Technoville's chemical production facilities; hopefully, no beetles were involved...)
Amber sipped, set her cup down, and folded her hands. "Miss Bunny... can you tell me what, exactly, Technoville's interest in you is?"
"That depends on how much I can trust what they've told me. Which isn't much. But their claimed reason is that my living brain has a peculiar property that they think will be useful."
"Would that property be related to your Change, or your Old World origins?"
I carefully set my own cup down, and without moving, made myself aware of where my various implements of distracting opponents long enough to run away were hidden about my person. "Technoville has been in touch with you already?"
"Hardly. Everything about this meal you have prepared, and the way in which you went about doing it, indicates you are weird - western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic. You know red wine goes with beef - but are unaware which varietals are grown locally. You asked for ingredients that have not existed for decades, or at best are not available on this continent." I kept my expression neutral - it seemed there were good reasons she'd made it to second-or-third in command of the local armed forces. "Do you even know what flumf is?"
With Britney looking at me, I had to resist an urge to say 'Um', and instead hazarded, "A fictional monster, a sort of flying jellyfish with eyestalks?"
She blinked once, glanced at Silent Guard to Starboard, who I caught a fractional nod from. Amber smiled a bit. "Well, that's not the definition I meant - but let's move on. How do you think you can prevent a Second Singularity?"
I tried to rally my thoughts. "Studying the residue of the first. By myself if I have to, but the odds increase the more resources that are thrown at the problem."
"What makes you think you can do any better than anyone else who's tried?"
"As far as I can tell, you haven't had any programmers left, since things settled down enough to start poking around at the city-computers. Technoville might have some, but they keep them locked away on private projects."
"Can you program an AI?"
"Not at all. I once built a neural net I won a stupid little award for, and know a bunch of outdated theories, but that's all. I also can't build a clean operating system from scratch in any reasonable time, or build a computer chip. I know a lot of the science behind how the hardware works, not the engineering. If you want an AI, I /might/ be able to shave a few years off the project."
"I do /not/ want an AI, and I suggest that if you even think of making one, you get as far away from me as you can before you start, or I will shoot you dead first."
I swallowed. "So noted, ma'am."
"What if you cannot learn what you need from this city alone?"
"I'm already pretty sure I can't. I'm almost certainly going to need to get a closer look at a live city-computer, eventually. It's going to be a multi-city effort - everyone on Lake Erie just to start with, and as many more as can be gotten in touch with."
"There are good reasons we have not gotten in touch with them ourselves."
"The posthuman dangers - what Technoville calls the zones?"
"Precisely."
"I have a workaround for that. It will need some cooperation from Technoville, but should be doable."
"You escaped their compound here, are worried they will send ninjas after you - and you're willing to work with them?"
"You forgot to mention they performed surgery on me without my consent, and tried to drug and interrogate me. I've got no love for them - but if I can convince them they've got me right where they want me, and as long as they're the best source of carbon fibre parts, motors, and diesel, I can... deal."
"What's your workaround?"
"One-man flying machines."
"There aren't any airports left, unless they're in Technoville."
"Don't need them."
"No maintenance technicians."
"Anyone who can handle a motorized bicycle will do."
"Technoville hoards its fuel supplies for its own use."
"With some timing adjustments, drilling a slightly larger hole in a fuel injector, and about a thirty percent loss in miles per gallon, alcohol will work just as well. I'm assuming that distillation technology wasn't lost with the rest of civilization?"
She stared at me, without saying a word, for a very long few moments. "If you can get me some of these... flying machines... that are as good as that, then I don't care if you plan on annually sacrificing virgins to the posthuman gods, I'll take them."
"Technoville may be a bit sticky about that; what if I can only get them on loan, or sublet them?"
"Again. As long as I can drop munitions on designated targets, I don't care if they're officially licensed to the Seamstresses' Guild. I'd /prefer/ them being under my direct control and authority, and I strongly suggest that you take that preference into account when you work out your arrangements with Technoville. They've been lording their aerial superiority over us for... some time. At least in this case, I see absolutely nothing wrong with a little bit of democratization."
10
DataPacRat
Truthseeker
- Location
- Niagara, Canada
*Chapter Ten: Re-Aligning*
"You're probably all wondering why I've gathered you here today."
"Not really."
"Well, maybe not, but this is probably the closest I'll ever have to an excuse to use that line."
Britney had refused to let me move out of the House house after the dinner. I wasn't sure I preferred the change from the earlier 'Disapprovingly Ignore Bunny' Britney to the new-and-improved 'Set Bunny Right' version, but wasn't willing to put in the effort that would be needed to escape her clutches. On the plus side, I could feel my left toes again, if not wiggle them, so it might only be a few more days before I /could/ escape from her if I really needed to.
In the House parlor were myself, the man in gray from the Technoville embassy, Arty Drummond, Doc House as a neutral observer, and Mrs. House to keep an eye on things. (I suspected she might be a relation of Mrs. Grundy.)
"To try to keep this reasonably brief," I said to the Tech, "it doesn't matter to me whether what happened in your place was under your orders, an operation by deniable 'rogue' agents, some internal Technoville dispute, or something less comprehensible. The result is that, while I was your guest, you demonstrated that you could not be a good host - and have lost my trust about anything else you may promise to do, either."
"That seems a reasonable, if disappointing, conclusion. Am I to assume there is more of a point to this than you pointing a finger at me?"
"That's up to you. Do you still want to have access to the peculiar qualities of my living brain?"
"Perhaps. What is your price?"
"Do you recall what I asked for just before demanding a pony?"
"Of course."
"Start there - only, due to the just-mentioned trust issues, my price has been raised. Probably most significantly, if you keep it a Technoville-run project, I'm out. I'm not sure what my lifespan is, but it would be safer for me to take a few decades, start building a machine shop from raw ore, and so on, then to let you people get too easy a crack at me again."
"Are you proposing it be a Dogville-based organization, instead?"
Arty piped up, "I'm kind of curious about that myself. So how about it, Bunny? Going to swear to be loyal to the Dogville bureaucracy?"
I twitched an ear in irritation. "If I made that oath, I'd be lying - I barely even know you, let alone the rest of the bureaucrats, so how could I be loyal to you? - and since you know I'd be lying if I made it, there's no way you'd ever trust me with anything significant, which would defeat the whole point of the exercise."
Arty shrugged, "Then what've you got in mind?"
"Get the aircraft. Let Dogville people join. Let Technoville people join. Let people from Cleveland, Erie, Buffalo, and everywhere else we reach join. Technoville doesn't dominate Dogville in this - but Technoville has input. Dogville doesn't force loyalty to its current government - but has input. Anyone who tries to use the aircraft as a military air force against other humans, doesn't get enough influence to force it to happen."
Arty frowned. "Who'll be in charge then? You? A stranger from nobody-knows-where? Sure, you can cook - but who'd pay attention to orders from a little thing like you?"
"Amber's about as tall as I am. But as long as those guys," I pointed a thumb at the man in gray, "aren't in charge, I'm not as concerned if it's one of you guys. The thing is, if it's Amber, it should be Amber the individual who'd be in charge, not the Deputy Mayor."
Arty frowned, in a way I hoped meant he was thinking. The man in gray spoke up. "Do you have any other... conditions?"
"Other than reserving the right to pull out if you and yours try pulling any shenanigans again? More of a suggestion. To actually accomplish the task, the people working on it are going to need to have a certain... mental flexibility. The sort that tends to make them very ill-suited to work in informationally-quarantined positions," I turned my gaze to Arty, "and who tend to have issues working within a rigid chain-of-command. If they know more about an issue than someone else, they need to be able to pass that information on with as few impediments as possible. Or, put another way, you can inform your various superiors that I'm asking to relieve you of your troublemakers in a way that can be shown to your respective populaces as being part of a plan that benefits them. Even if the whole thing goes bust, you'll have improved your Tables-of-Organization, generated public goodwill, and not spent anything you can't afford to lose."
Arty frowned harder. "It's not going to be /quite/ that easy. Amber, sure, she'll go along with the gag. The Mayors are going to need a bit more persuasion."
It was my turn to frown. "Like what?"
"Something harder. Evidence, proof. When they hear about you, you're just be some random Changed girl who's walked in out of the woods, and spout a lot of hot air. Maybe it's good hot air, maybe it's bad, but there's nothing /solid/ there."
"What are you thinking of?" I considered. "Need me to get the Techs to produce a scouting aircraft?"
"Nah," Arty shook his head. "We've seen their planes, we know they can make 'em. It's not the Techs who need to prove they're not some trap made in Detroit to get us to waste time and people doing stuff that doesn't help us."
"Oh." I frowned. "Um - you are aware that there's no way I can prove that to you, any more than you can prove to me you weren't replaced with a copy of yourself last night?"
"So 'prove' is a bad word," he countered. "Maybe 'improve' is better. You've been pretty vague about your past. Mayors might think that's because you haven't /got/ one. What were your stomping grounds?"
"Niagara," I answered, not able to think of a reason not to. "The rectangle of land that's north of Lake Erie and south of Lake Ontario. At least as of when I died, thirty-odd years before the Singularity, pretty much the whole history of the place was shaped by the Escarpment - not quite a cliff, a couple hundred feet high, a few hundred miles long east-west. A river going over made the Falls, which attracted tourists, and made a natural border. Getting ships over the 'mountain' meant a canal got built, and cities along that. It sheltered the land at its base, which also used to be a lake-bottom, which meant good grape farms... I could go on."
"So," Arty commented, tapping his chin, "You know the geography."
"I know what /used/ to be the geography." I tried to puzzle out where he might be going. "There wasn't much there that you couldn't find in other cities - I'm guessing anything that might have survived there, is easier to get from around here. Well, maybe there's something unique in the tourist traps by the Falls - the place was turning into a new Las Vegas."
Arty looked at the man in gray. "Your boys start working the numbers on the bunny's flying machine."
I answered before he could, "I'm pretty sure he's already got at least one in his basement." At their looks, I shrugged. "What? He's got a radio, it uses a lot of parts they've probably already got, the rest are easy to make, and they've got planes they can drop crates out of."
They looked at each other again, not saying anything. I frowned. "Um - Arty, have you got some kind of post-human telepathy upgrade? Or maybe you had a discussion between you before this one?"
Arty said to the Tech, "What's the range like?"
"For typical use, such as a passenger or equivalent cargo, under one hundred kilometers. With a passenger's weight in fuel, and the airspeed kept under about thirty-five kilometers-per-hour, over eight hundred kilometers."
Arty nodded, "And it's under four hundred from here to there, as the bun flies?"
"You read my mind." The gray man didn't quite smile, then turned to me. "What we are not explicitly mentioning is that Technoville has very good reasons for its current airplane design, mostly the tactical needs for combating Detroit's post-human dangers. We have, in fact, attempted to use our aircraft to scout for more distant dangers, but the loss rate has been unacceptably high. In particular, any aircraft that approach a certain distance of Toronto are near-instantly destroyed in mid-air. Even simple balloons that rise to where the city is within the horizon."
"Do I need to say aloud that I don't think I like where this is going?"
"We have many pre-Singularity topographical maps, and are aware of the geography of the Niagara Escarpment. In particular, while the cliff-face faces north, and to Toronto, the other side gradually slopes down to Lake Erie. As you mentioned in your initial proposal, no prepared landing site is needed for a powered para-glider, and flying avoids all the unscouted danger zones on land."
I frowned, "Are you suggesting... I fly up on the safe side of the Escarpment, and... make my way to Toronto from there? From due south of Toronto, it's over fifty kilometers across the Lake, and twice that going around the shoreline."
"Nah," Arty said, "I'd say just snap some photos and bring 'em back, and that'll grab the Mayors' attention in a hurry. I'm sure the Techs can fit you up with a bunch of lenses, and if you're really you, I'm sure you know some high spots to get a good view from."
"... I can think of a few. Do I need to actually mention that I've only ever been a passenger in a plane? Well, once, when I was really young, as part of a school trip, I got to be in a cockpit and the pilot let me hold the yoke and pretended to let me bank the thing, and there were video games - but that's not the same as the real thing. A first-time pilot, in a brand-new aircraft design, traveling hundreds of klicks across unknown territory, without a decent weather forecasting system, where everything has to go right the first time, spying on an unknown target? That's a recipe for /disaster/."
"You're a big girl," Arty said, then took another look at me. "So to speak. And you're talking a big talk, about looking into the Apocalypse, but you're getting ready to back out before you even get your first look at a live posthuman city?"
"There's reasonable risks, and unreasonable risks," I pointed out.
The gray man said, "So make the unreasonable, reasonable."
I put my hands over my face. "This is an /awful/ idea."
--
Flying was /awesome/.
There was nothing between my dangling feet and the ground but my soles and the air; nothing to hear but the engine and prop; nothing to see but, well, /everything/.
To climb, I squeezed the throttle harder; to glide down, I let the engine die. To bank left, I pulled the handle holding the lines on my left; to bank right, the same. And once I was in the air, that was about it - no worrying about yaw versus roll versus pitch, or pedals versus yoke, and starting the thing was pretty much a matter of pulling out the parachute-like wing, strapping the motor on like a backpack, and catching a breeze. I even had cruise control.
I also had a reserve chute on each hip, elbow and knee pads in case of a bad landing, and my motorcycle-style helmet (more to keep the bugs out of my teeth). On my left forearm were strapped Scorpia for timekeeping, a compass, and a book of maps with clear plastic covers and velcro to keep it from flapping in the wind. Between me and the motor was a backpack with a light set of camping gear, and on my front hung a duffelbag with a telescope as big around as a bucket (that its original owner had used to make amateur images of nebulae with), which I could hook a film-based camera to create the Paparazzi Telephoto From Hell. Back in the day, at the right spots in Niagara and on clear days, it was trivial to look north and see Toronto's skyline, with the shape of the CN Tower recognizable. With this beast, I could probably make out individual /people/ in the CN Tower.
... If there were still people there. If the CN Tower still stood.
I was mostly loosely hugging Lake Erie's north shore. I didn't want to go over the lake in case I went down; my emergency radio was supposed to be waterproof, but I wasn't. I also didn't want to get too far inland - again, if I went down, it would be a lot easier to hail a boat and get a ride then go anywhere on foot. I wasn't testing the paraglider's ceiling, and the only reason I wasn't dragging my feet in the trees was to avoid updrafts.
... I was pretty much assuming I was going to crash at least once on the way; and that if I was lucky, I'd be able to get back in the air on my own. Technoville had provided a few hours of instruction, in the form of Thing Two - we both pretended we'd never seen each other before. For my first significant solo flight, I'd headed north of Toledo, back along my earlier path, to a certain carefully unmapped garage.
"Hiya, Convoy," I'd cheerfully waved. "Seen any more mobile architecture lately?" I hadn't informed either Technoville or Dogtown about my destination, though whatever Techs had access to the files on me they surely kept could undoubtedly work it out if they tried.
I told the truck about how Scorpia had probably saved my life a couple of times, and generally caught him up-to-date on what I'd been up to. Sure, he might be an inhuman monstrosity capable of destroying every value that made being human a good thing in pursuit of his nominally public-spirited goal; he was also about the only individual whose motivations I understood well enough to be comfortable hanging out with for a purely casual, friendly conversation. I wasn't sure whether that said more about how messed-up the post-Singularity world was, or how messed-up I was, and at the time, I didn't really want to know.
By the time I'd bid Convoy farewell, I'd ended up taking with me a "tape recorder" (Soundblaster, nee Saundoburasuta) and an assortment of "tapes" to 'record my notes for later transcription'. If Scorpia's batteries had given out just a little sooner, I'd probably be a pincushion by now - at the least, I'd have lost the trade goods I'd used to pry open the doors to Dogtown's Deputy Mayor. To keep the whole burden from falling onto a single small robot, I had accepted Convoy's offer of a small squad of variously-shaped robots disguised as cassette tapes. (And who could, in fact, record audio, and perform some sort of magnetic trickery to play it back in ordinary tape players.) They only had marginally bigger brains than Scorpia, but while we talked, Convoy reprogrammed them so each one knew a few tricks the others didn't. I suspected the trickiest part of using them was going to be keeping them all fully charged.
I got an extra solar panel from the Techs, along with a small hand-crank generator, ostensibly so I could keep the radio charged if no boat was available to come pick me up for a while.
Which brings us back to the big flight. Flying was awesome - even after getting up at dawn, and having hung from my straps for twelve hours straight, with the constant noise of the engine on my poor sensitive rabbit ears. Watching the wilderness pass by underneath me was awesome.
Somewhat less awesome was the fact that all of it /was/ wilderness. It didn't really gut-punch me until I got to Long Point, where the cottages, campgrounds, boat docks, and general summer entertainment facilities were just... as if they'd never been. Not even any visible ruins, just trees and waterways and swamp. Somewhat further on, Port Dover /did/ have some ruins; nothing I could recognize, but I could at least tell there'd been streets there.
I turned inland before I got to Port Colborne. I'd known people who'd lived in Port Colborne.
I'd picked my first-choice destination from memory. The highest spot in Niagara was called Fonthill, where the glaciers had shoved a bit more of the local geography. At just the right spot on there, I'd been able to look due south, and see the south shore of Lake Erie, seventy klicks away; and turn around, look due north, and see Toronto and the north of Lake Ontario, another seventy klicks away. Sure, on an actual mountain you could see farther, and you could see another mountain from further still... but for having the longest view of flat terrain, it was hard to beat.
Getting to Fonthill, though, was a bit tricky. Most of the man-made landmarks, like the roads, were gone or indistinguishable from each other from above. Knowing exactly where I was was kind of important to me, since I was now closer to Toronto than some of Technoville's planes had gotten. I'd spent some time and skull-sweat working with the topo maps, estimates of the heights of the heat radiators in Detroit, my knowledge of trigonometry, and a Tech translator for a calculator to work out what altitude I could fly without getting pinged by whatever Toronto was using to shoot things down. If Toronto was using aerial sensor platforms, then I was just plain screwed, but the Techs said Detroit didn't seem to use them, so it was unlikely Toronto did. I accepted the reassurance, and added another ten-percent safety factor to my calculations, and re-read the instructions for the backup altimeter I'd be wearing on my right wrist.
The sun was low to my left as I got close, and I circled around a few moments. My safety ceiling was pretty close to the ground here, which made it hard to get a good view of possible landing sites. Finally, I swung down over a small creek, and when I saw a spot wide enough for my canopy, shut down the motor, pulled my cables, and came in for a landing. It wasn't a clean one - my left leg buckled, sending me onto my face and my gut onto the telescope, with all the weight of engine, fan, and return fuel on top of me, the shroud still being tugged by the slight wind and threatening to pull me into the water. It took some effort to keep from turning the scope into shards of broken glass and plastic, which would render the whole expedition a waste of time; and more effort to straighten up, unstrap myself, gather up the chute, and generally get myself back into order.
I didn't fire up the radio - I was close enough to Toronto for most of the airwaves to be full of noise. The general plan was to set up camp for the night, spend tomorrow shooting (at all hours of the day, so the boffins could interpret shadows), and head back the day after. However, I'd had a bit of a tailwind, so even keeping a constant airspeed, I'd arrived a bit sooner than planned. Always nice when something goes right for a change. I decided to make use of the time, by climbing up the hill and looking for a decent site to set up. Maybe even take a few night shots, if anything was glowing.
So, once I'd parked the PPG and camping stuff in an easy-to-find spot, I heaved the duff of photo gear onto my shoulders and started up the slope. I found the remains of an old road, identifiable because the trees growing out of it were shorter than the rest of the area, and after half an hour, made it over the top. To my pleasure, I could see a meadow ahead - my map claimed the site was a golf course - which gave a tree-free view to the north. I fiddled with my glasses, squinted - to my surprise, the CN Tower's pod could still be made out. The tower just wasn't the tallest thing in the city anymore.
Still, a lookout site was a lookout site, and I still had close to an hour of daylight left, so I hauled out the gear and started assembling it. Tripod leveled and northed, telescope mounted, finder-sight aligned, camera attached, shutter settings set, and so on and so forth.
With the gear set up, I hunched over to look through the viewfinder, twisting a knob to slew the scope across Toronto's skyline. As I adjusted the focus to bring the radiator towers into view...
My whole body burst into flame.
"You're probably all wondering why I've gathered you here today."
"Not really."
"Well, maybe not, but this is probably the closest I'll ever have to an excuse to use that line."
Britney had refused to let me move out of the House house after the dinner. I wasn't sure I preferred the change from the earlier 'Disapprovingly Ignore Bunny' Britney to the new-and-improved 'Set Bunny Right' version, but wasn't willing to put in the effort that would be needed to escape her clutches. On the plus side, I could feel my left toes again, if not wiggle them, so it might only be a few more days before I /could/ escape from her if I really needed to.
In the House parlor were myself, the man in gray from the Technoville embassy, Arty Drummond, Doc House as a neutral observer, and Mrs. House to keep an eye on things. (I suspected she might be a relation of Mrs. Grundy.)
"To try to keep this reasonably brief," I said to the Tech, "it doesn't matter to me whether what happened in your place was under your orders, an operation by deniable 'rogue' agents, some internal Technoville dispute, or something less comprehensible. The result is that, while I was your guest, you demonstrated that you could not be a good host - and have lost my trust about anything else you may promise to do, either."
"That seems a reasonable, if disappointing, conclusion. Am I to assume there is more of a point to this than you pointing a finger at me?"
"That's up to you. Do you still want to have access to the peculiar qualities of my living brain?"
"Perhaps. What is your price?"
"Do you recall what I asked for just before demanding a pony?"
"Of course."
"Start there - only, due to the just-mentioned trust issues, my price has been raised. Probably most significantly, if you keep it a Technoville-run project, I'm out. I'm not sure what my lifespan is, but it would be safer for me to take a few decades, start building a machine shop from raw ore, and so on, then to let you people get too easy a crack at me again."
"Are you proposing it be a Dogville-based organization, instead?"
Arty piped up, "I'm kind of curious about that myself. So how about it, Bunny? Going to swear to be loyal to the Dogville bureaucracy?"
I twitched an ear in irritation. "If I made that oath, I'd be lying - I barely even know you, let alone the rest of the bureaucrats, so how could I be loyal to you? - and since you know I'd be lying if I made it, there's no way you'd ever trust me with anything significant, which would defeat the whole point of the exercise."
Arty shrugged, "Then what've you got in mind?"
"Get the aircraft. Let Dogville people join. Let Technoville people join. Let people from Cleveland, Erie, Buffalo, and everywhere else we reach join. Technoville doesn't dominate Dogville in this - but Technoville has input. Dogville doesn't force loyalty to its current government - but has input. Anyone who tries to use the aircraft as a military air force against other humans, doesn't get enough influence to force it to happen."
Arty frowned. "Who'll be in charge then? You? A stranger from nobody-knows-where? Sure, you can cook - but who'd pay attention to orders from a little thing like you?"
"Amber's about as tall as I am. But as long as those guys," I pointed a thumb at the man in gray, "aren't in charge, I'm not as concerned if it's one of you guys. The thing is, if it's Amber, it should be Amber the individual who'd be in charge, not the Deputy Mayor."
Arty frowned, in a way I hoped meant he was thinking. The man in gray spoke up. "Do you have any other... conditions?"
"Other than reserving the right to pull out if you and yours try pulling any shenanigans again? More of a suggestion. To actually accomplish the task, the people working on it are going to need to have a certain... mental flexibility. The sort that tends to make them very ill-suited to work in informationally-quarantined positions," I turned my gaze to Arty, "and who tend to have issues working within a rigid chain-of-command. If they know more about an issue than someone else, they need to be able to pass that information on with as few impediments as possible. Or, put another way, you can inform your various superiors that I'm asking to relieve you of your troublemakers in a way that can be shown to your respective populaces as being part of a plan that benefits them. Even if the whole thing goes bust, you'll have improved your Tables-of-Organization, generated public goodwill, and not spent anything you can't afford to lose."
Arty frowned harder. "It's not going to be /quite/ that easy. Amber, sure, she'll go along with the gag. The Mayors are going to need a bit more persuasion."
It was my turn to frown. "Like what?"
"Something harder. Evidence, proof. When they hear about you, you're just be some random Changed girl who's walked in out of the woods, and spout a lot of hot air. Maybe it's good hot air, maybe it's bad, but there's nothing /solid/ there."
"What are you thinking of?" I considered. "Need me to get the Techs to produce a scouting aircraft?"
"Nah," Arty shook his head. "We've seen their planes, we know they can make 'em. It's not the Techs who need to prove they're not some trap made in Detroit to get us to waste time and people doing stuff that doesn't help us."
"Oh." I frowned. "Um - you are aware that there's no way I can prove that to you, any more than you can prove to me you weren't replaced with a copy of yourself last night?"
"So 'prove' is a bad word," he countered. "Maybe 'improve' is better. You've been pretty vague about your past. Mayors might think that's because you haven't /got/ one. What were your stomping grounds?"
"Niagara," I answered, not able to think of a reason not to. "The rectangle of land that's north of Lake Erie and south of Lake Ontario. At least as of when I died, thirty-odd years before the Singularity, pretty much the whole history of the place was shaped by the Escarpment - not quite a cliff, a couple hundred feet high, a few hundred miles long east-west. A river going over made the Falls, which attracted tourists, and made a natural border. Getting ships over the 'mountain' meant a canal got built, and cities along that. It sheltered the land at its base, which also used to be a lake-bottom, which meant good grape farms... I could go on."
"So," Arty commented, tapping his chin, "You know the geography."
"I know what /used/ to be the geography." I tried to puzzle out where he might be going. "There wasn't much there that you couldn't find in other cities - I'm guessing anything that might have survived there, is easier to get from around here. Well, maybe there's something unique in the tourist traps by the Falls - the place was turning into a new Las Vegas."
Arty looked at the man in gray. "Your boys start working the numbers on the bunny's flying machine."
I answered before he could, "I'm pretty sure he's already got at least one in his basement." At their looks, I shrugged. "What? He's got a radio, it uses a lot of parts they've probably already got, the rest are easy to make, and they've got planes they can drop crates out of."
They looked at each other again, not saying anything. I frowned. "Um - Arty, have you got some kind of post-human telepathy upgrade? Or maybe you had a discussion between you before this one?"
Arty said to the Tech, "What's the range like?"
"For typical use, such as a passenger or equivalent cargo, under one hundred kilometers. With a passenger's weight in fuel, and the airspeed kept under about thirty-five kilometers-per-hour, over eight hundred kilometers."
Arty nodded, "And it's under four hundred from here to there, as the bun flies?"
"You read my mind." The gray man didn't quite smile, then turned to me. "What we are not explicitly mentioning is that Technoville has very good reasons for its current airplane design, mostly the tactical needs for combating Detroit's post-human dangers. We have, in fact, attempted to use our aircraft to scout for more distant dangers, but the loss rate has been unacceptably high. In particular, any aircraft that approach a certain distance of Toronto are near-instantly destroyed in mid-air. Even simple balloons that rise to where the city is within the horizon."
"Do I need to say aloud that I don't think I like where this is going?"
"We have many pre-Singularity topographical maps, and are aware of the geography of the Niagara Escarpment. In particular, while the cliff-face faces north, and to Toronto, the other side gradually slopes down to Lake Erie. As you mentioned in your initial proposal, no prepared landing site is needed for a powered para-glider, and flying avoids all the unscouted danger zones on land."
I frowned, "Are you suggesting... I fly up on the safe side of the Escarpment, and... make my way to Toronto from there? From due south of Toronto, it's over fifty kilometers across the Lake, and twice that going around the shoreline."
"Nah," Arty said, "I'd say just snap some photos and bring 'em back, and that'll grab the Mayors' attention in a hurry. I'm sure the Techs can fit you up with a bunch of lenses, and if you're really you, I'm sure you know some high spots to get a good view from."
"... I can think of a few. Do I need to actually mention that I've only ever been a passenger in a plane? Well, once, when I was really young, as part of a school trip, I got to be in a cockpit and the pilot let me hold the yoke and pretended to let me bank the thing, and there were video games - but that's not the same as the real thing. A first-time pilot, in a brand-new aircraft design, traveling hundreds of klicks across unknown territory, without a decent weather forecasting system, where everything has to go right the first time, spying on an unknown target? That's a recipe for /disaster/."
"You're a big girl," Arty said, then took another look at me. "So to speak. And you're talking a big talk, about looking into the Apocalypse, but you're getting ready to back out before you even get your first look at a live posthuman city?"
"There's reasonable risks, and unreasonable risks," I pointed out.
The gray man said, "So make the unreasonable, reasonable."
I put my hands over my face. "This is an /awful/ idea."
--
Flying was /awesome/.
There was nothing between my dangling feet and the ground but my soles and the air; nothing to hear but the engine and prop; nothing to see but, well, /everything/.
To climb, I squeezed the throttle harder; to glide down, I let the engine die. To bank left, I pulled the handle holding the lines on my left; to bank right, the same. And once I was in the air, that was about it - no worrying about yaw versus roll versus pitch, or pedals versus yoke, and starting the thing was pretty much a matter of pulling out the parachute-like wing, strapping the motor on like a backpack, and catching a breeze. I even had cruise control.
I also had a reserve chute on each hip, elbow and knee pads in case of a bad landing, and my motorcycle-style helmet (more to keep the bugs out of my teeth). On my left forearm were strapped Scorpia for timekeeping, a compass, and a book of maps with clear plastic covers and velcro to keep it from flapping in the wind. Between me and the motor was a backpack with a light set of camping gear, and on my front hung a duffelbag with a telescope as big around as a bucket (that its original owner had used to make amateur images of nebulae with), which I could hook a film-based camera to create the Paparazzi Telephoto From Hell. Back in the day, at the right spots in Niagara and on clear days, it was trivial to look north and see Toronto's skyline, with the shape of the CN Tower recognizable. With this beast, I could probably make out individual /people/ in the CN Tower.
... If there were still people there. If the CN Tower still stood.
I was mostly loosely hugging Lake Erie's north shore. I didn't want to go over the lake in case I went down; my emergency radio was supposed to be waterproof, but I wasn't. I also didn't want to get too far inland - again, if I went down, it would be a lot easier to hail a boat and get a ride then go anywhere on foot. I wasn't testing the paraglider's ceiling, and the only reason I wasn't dragging my feet in the trees was to avoid updrafts.
... I was pretty much assuming I was going to crash at least once on the way; and that if I was lucky, I'd be able to get back in the air on my own. Technoville had provided a few hours of instruction, in the form of Thing Two - we both pretended we'd never seen each other before. For my first significant solo flight, I'd headed north of Toledo, back along my earlier path, to a certain carefully unmapped garage.
"Hiya, Convoy," I'd cheerfully waved. "Seen any more mobile architecture lately?" I hadn't informed either Technoville or Dogtown about my destination, though whatever Techs had access to the files on me they surely kept could undoubtedly work it out if they tried.
I told the truck about how Scorpia had probably saved my life a couple of times, and generally caught him up-to-date on what I'd been up to. Sure, he might be an inhuman monstrosity capable of destroying every value that made being human a good thing in pursuit of his nominally public-spirited goal; he was also about the only individual whose motivations I understood well enough to be comfortable hanging out with for a purely casual, friendly conversation. I wasn't sure whether that said more about how messed-up the post-Singularity world was, or how messed-up I was, and at the time, I didn't really want to know.
By the time I'd bid Convoy farewell, I'd ended up taking with me a "tape recorder" (Soundblaster, nee Saundoburasuta) and an assortment of "tapes" to 'record my notes for later transcription'. If Scorpia's batteries had given out just a little sooner, I'd probably be a pincushion by now - at the least, I'd have lost the trade goods I'd used to pry open the doors to Dogtown's Deputy Mayor. To keep the whole burden from falling onto a single small robot, I had accepted Convoy's offer of a small squad of variously-shaped robots disguised as cassette tapes. (And who could, in fact, record audio, and perform some sort of magnetic trickery to play it back in ordinary tape players.) They only had marginally bigger brains than Scorpia, but while we talked, Convoy reprogrammed them so each one knew a few tricks the others didn't. I suspected the trickiest part of using them was going to be keeping them all fully charged.
I got an extra solar panel from the Techs, along with a small hand-crank generator, ostensibly so I could keep the radio charged if no boat was available to come pick me up for a while.
Which brings us back to the big flight. Flying was awesome - even after getting up at dawn, and having hung from my straps for twelve hours straight, with the constant noise of the engine on my poor sensitive rabbit ears. Watching the wilderness pass by underneath me was awesome.
Somewhat less awesome was the fact that all of it /was/ wilderness. It didn't really gut-punch me until I got to Long Point, where the cottages, campgrounds, boat docks, and general summer entertainment facilities were just... as if they'd never been. Not even any visible ruins, just trees and waterways and swamp. Somewhat further on, Port Dover /did/ have some ruins; nothing I could recognize, but I could at least tell there'd been streets there.
I turned inland before I got to Port Colborne. I'd known people who'd lived in Port Colborne.
I'd picked my first-choice destination from memory. The highest spot in Niagara was called Fonthill, where the glaciers had shoved a bit more of the local geography. At just the right spot on there, I'd been able to look due south, and see the south shore of Lake Erie, seventy klicks away; and turn around, look due north, and see Toronto and the north of Lake Ontario, another seventy klicks away. Sure, on an actual mountain you could see farther, and you could see another mountain from further still... but for having the longest view of flat terrain, it was hard to beat.
Getting to Fonthill, though, was a bit tricky. Most of the man-made landmarks, like the roads, were gone or indistinguishable from each other from above. Knowing exactly where I was was kind of important to me, since I was now closer to Toronto than some of Technoville's planes had gotten. I'd spent some time and skull-sweat working with the topo maps, estimates of the heights of the heat radiators in Detroit, my knowledge of trigonometry, and a Tech translator for a calculator to work out what altitude I could fly without getting pinged by whatever Toronto was using to shoot things down. If Toronto was using aerial sensor platforms, then I was just plain screwed, but the Techs said Detroit didn't seem to use them, so it was unlikely Toronto did. I accepted the reassurance, and added another ten-percent safety factor to my calculations, and re-read the instructions for the backup altimeter I'd be wearing on my right wrist.
The sun was low to my left as I got close, and I circled around a few moments. My safety ceiling was pretty close to the ground here, which made it hard to get a good view of possible landing sites. Finally, I swung down over a small creek, and when I saw a spot wide enough for my canopy, shut down the motor, pulled my cables, and came in for a landing. It wasn't a clean one - my left leg buckled, sending me onto my face and my gut onto the telescope, with all the weight of engine, fan, and return fuel on top of me, the shroud still being tugged by the slight wind and threatening to pull me into the water. It took some effort to keep from turning the scope into shards of broken glass and plastic, which would render the whole expedition a waste of time; and more effort to straighten up, unstrap myself, gather up the chute, and generally get myself back into order.
I didn't fire up the radio - I was close enough to Toronto for most of the airwaves to be full of noise. The general plan was to set up camp for the night, spend tomorrow shooting (at all hours of the day, so the boffins could interpret shadows), and head back the day after. However, I'd had a bit of a tailwind, so even keeping a constant airspeed, I'd arrived a bit sooner than planned. Always nice when something goes right for a change. I decided to make use of the time, by climbing up the hill and looking for a decent site to set up. Maybe even take a few night shots, if anything was glowing.
So, once I'd parked the PPG and camping stuff in an easy-to-find spot, I heaved the duff of photo gear onto my shoulders and started up the slope. I found the remains of an old road, identifiable because the trees growing out of it were shorter than the rest of the area, and after half an hour, made it over the top. To my pleasure, I could see a meadow ahead - my map claimed the site was a golf course - which gave a tree-free view to the north. I fiddled with my glasses, squinted - to my surprise, the CN Tower's pod could still be made out. The tower just wasn't the tallest thing in the city anymore.
Still, a lookout site was a lookout site, and I still had close to an hour of daylight left, so I hauled out the gear and started assembling it. Tripod leveled and northed, telescope mounted, finder-sight aligned, camera attached, shutter settings set, and so on and so forth.
With the gear set up, I hunched over to look through the viewfinder, twisting a knob to slew the scope across Toronto's skyline. As I adjusted the focus to bring the radiator towers into view...
My whole body burst into flame.
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