<I said you’re a fish.>
<That makes no sense.>
This was the way all of his conversations with her seemed to go. It was probably some sort of parlor trick, or a legitimate experiment that never went anywhere, and he was about to give up on her until he asked a question that tapped some wellspring of memory.
<Eleanor, who killed you?>
<Old age, though they wrote pneumonia on my death certificate. I was ninety-six years old, and my body was all worn-out. This was before rejuvenation, before true biostasis even. All we could do back then was let them decapitate you and freeze your head. The idea was that future scientists would figure out how to revive you, fix what killed you, and regrow your body. Well, what would happen if they figured out how to revive and fix you, but they never figured out how to regrow your body? Then all the frozen head people would be screwed, right? Please don’t think me nuts; Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz. Remember that one?>
He did not.
<So I went for the full-body option. Cost was no object for me. We had a suspension team literally standing by with tubs of dry ice and a big chrome dewar of liquid nitrogen. It was critical to perfuse the tissues with cryo-protectant as soon as possible after death. It would have been better to start the perfusions while you were still alive so that technically you never die, but that was considered murder back then and hard to get a doctor to go along with.
<This was back in 1994. Yes, that means I was born at the end of the nineteenth century. Bet you don’t meet many of us anymore. I was a little ladybird toward the end, and chained to my bed. My mind was still sharp enough, though everything else had worn out. The connective tissue was the first to go. I couldn’t turn my head or wiggle my pinky without pain. I was completely alone — no surviving offspring, no family, only paid servants and employees stealing me blind. Those were the days before mentars. We didn’t even have belt valets, if you can believe it. I had single-handedly built a Fortune 500 company doing worldwide port management and construction, but I had no one to leave it to. There was a constant stream of do-gooders visiting my sickbed with hats in hand. Would I consider endowing a children’s hospital? How about a chair at the university? Or a shelter for abandoned emus? It would be named after me. Instead, I set up a trust to freeze and maintain my body and maximize my investments. I left detailed instructions to revive me when the time was right. I was one of those.
<As I lay dying, I didn’t have much hope I would ever open my eyes again because I knew about all the things that could go wrong, including how easy it was to bust trusts like the one I had set up. At best, I expected to be down for a century or two. So I was lucky that the technology took only another forty years to mature.>
On and on she went, with Rip-Van-Winklish anecdotes of awakening in the new century, reclaiming her fortune, and enduring her first rejuve. Meewee was afraid to interrupt her in case he never found the on-switch again. An hour later, when she did wind down, he plied her with more questions.
<Do you remember your space yacht, the Songbird?>
<Vaguely. What about it?>
<Do you know what happened to it?>
She fell silent, and no amount of stones could summon her.
OVER THE COURSE of the next few weeks, it became easier to roust Eleanor from her fishy torpor, easier to keep her on topic and to direct her attention. She regaled him with stories of long ago, but her memory of recent events was spotty. Still, he detected steady improvement, as though fresh memories were returning daily. Arrow confirmed that Eleanor’s scientists had been researching the possibility of transferring and storing memory to external brains and it provided Meewee classified files filled with technical specs and details that were well beyond his ken.
But for all the progress she made, Eleanor seemed totally unable or unwilling to incorporate anything new into her fishy psyche. Whenever he tried to inform her about the ongoing crisis at the GEP or about Zoranna’s recent troubles with Applied People, she would retort <Will you please just forget about them!> and then usually withdraw.
She was incapable of holding the idea of Million Singh from one conversation to the next. <A million what?> she would say. <Speak plainly, Merrill!>
But the subject of Andrea Tiekel was different. It was even possible that Eleanor had known this niece of Andie Tiekel’s. She asked questions about her, but she got caught in a loop, asking the same set of questions over and over.
<Where’s Andie?>
<Murdered, a couple of days after you.>
<What about her mentar?>
<E-P’s sponsorship passed to Andrea, and she took Andie’s place on the GEP board.>
<Did E-P go through probate?>
<Yes.>
<Are you sure?>
Actually, he wasn’t, but how else would the mentar’s sponsorship pass to Andrea? It was the law. Eleanor seemed fixated on this point, and they had the same conversation so often that Meewee told Arrow to research UDJD files. Arrow replied that there was no public record of E-P going through probate.
Lingering Leena
Teeth clenched with impatience, Clarity watched Ellen wobble across the Map Room without falling down once. When Ellen reached Mary’s chair, and the evangeline hoisted her to her lap, Clarity clapped. “Bravo, Ellen. Good show. Now, can we get back to business? Please?”
“Wait!” the baby commanded from Mary’s lap. “You must vote for my pet. We’re auditioning pets! Behold the candidates. Yo, gamekeeper! Loose the pets!”
The doors swung open, and a wiry woman in Capias yellow and gold ushered a small menagerie of animals into the room. There were the usual domesticated cats and dogs, all rigorously trained, and box turtles, rabbits, and a pony. There were the more exotic pet varieties: ground squirrels, a porcupine, a pair of wisecracking ravens, and a miniature giraffe, among others. All were preternaturally well behaved.
Ellen slipped from Mary’s lap and captured the giraffe around its brush-tufted neck. “This is Jaffe. Jaffe can talk! You want to hear?”
Clarity glanced at Mary for help. “Maybe later, Ellie.”
Mary said, “Clarity wants to discuss our Leenas.”
“First Jaffe will speak. Then Clarity can speak.” The toddler let go of the tiny giraffe. “Jaffe, what is your name?”
“My name is Jaffe,” said the animal in a weirdly musical voice. It batted enormous eyelashes at her.
Ellen shrieked. “See! I told you. Jaffe, how are you?”
“I love you,” the animal said and nuzzled her.
Again Clarity clapped her hands. “Bravo! I vote for Jaffe. Now my turn, all right?”
Ellen clung to the giraffe for balance. “I’m listening.”
“I know you want me to buy you out of the business, but I won’t, and so you will have to give me your input, whether you want to or not. So quit acting like this.”
Ellen waddled back to Mary to reclaim her seat. The animal keeper clucked her tongue, and all the animals headed for the door in an orderly fashion.
“I love you, too, Jaffe,” Ellen crooned, then turned back to Clarity and said, “Go on.”
“I think the others should hear this too. Are they available?”
Mary said she’d check, and while she called her sisters, Clarity opened a life-sized holoscape in the center of the Map Room that re-created the death artist’s Olympic Peninsula breezeway. It was still morning out West, but the louvered windows were shut and opaqued and the breezeway was cast in gloom. Flickering votive candles lined the concrete windowsill. Two evangelines, neither of them Shelley, were seated in the corner. In the center of the room stood a hospital bed cranked into a half-sitting position. The patient was hidden from view by two jenny nurses attending to her.
“Judith Hsu,” Ellen said. “So what?”
Georgine came in from another room, and Cyndee appeared by holo. The jenny nurses finished whatever they were doing and step
ped away from the bed. The occupant of the bed was not death artist Hsu, but a Leena.
“So?” Ellen said. “Again I ask what’s wrong with that?”
Clarity said, “The Leena unit is in some kind of fugue state. It’s unresponsive to its environment. We didn’t program them to do that.”
The baby threw her hands up in a gesture of helplessness. “We programmed them to act, and this unit is acting! It’s acting sick! Hsu knows that and has the good sense to take advantage of it.” The baby opened more dataframes with sim source logs and holonovela audience stats. “Look at the royalties the Sisterhood is raking in. Hsu is no dummy. This could be her biggest thing yet.”
“I’m not disputing that,” Clarity said, “but what if the Leena acts itself to death?”
“Then I hope Hsu has accident insurance to compensate us for our loss. In any case, it’s no cause for concern.”
“I disagree. I’m very concerned, and I want your opinion on how to fix it.”
“Do nothing. The situation will work itself out. And if it doesn’t, it’s just one unit. There are ten thousand units.”
“It’s not just one unit. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Nearly a hundred Leenas are doing variations of this all over the simiverse, and more every day. What if they all act themselves to death?”
The baby leaned back against Mary. From the throne of her lap, she declared, “Clarity, you know I love you and respect your expertise, but honestly, dear friend, sometimes you fixate on nothing.”
Georgine raised her hand to speak. “If they truly get into trouble, can’t we just reset them all back to default?”
Clarity said, “I’m tempted to reset the whole series back now.”
“Then do it,” Ellen said. “If that’s what you want. You asked for my opinion. I’ve given it to you. So do whatever you want. Now, can we please get back to my pets?”
For This Is My Body, or: the Fish Fry
It soon became unnecessary for Meewee to go down to the ponds in realbody to set the fish to talking. The opposite was true — he couldn’t get them to shut up. It seemed to him that fresh memories were returning by the minute, and that each new arrival demanded an immediate airing. So much so that a babble of voices assaulted him around the clock, and it took Arrow’s skills to sort it all out. Arrow created a browsing system for Meewee, one that he could turn off at night. During the day, mostly when he was traveling from one place to another, Meewee would listen to two or three channels of her at once. Eleanor’s ramblings ranged freely across her two centuries of life: her early marriages, breeding horses in Kentucky in the 1930s, learning to buckle her shoes, plotting the political downfall of two presidents, the funerals of her two adult children, and the tragedy of her only grandchild.
<Why do we need so many people on Earth? I ask you. What are they good for? They live out ludicrous lives of pointless desperation. Ninety-nine percent of the human population is so much wasted resources. Stubborn vermin, we humans are.
<Granted, in the past, the unwashed masses were necessary. We needed them to till our fields and fight our wars. We needed them to labor in our factories making consumer crap that we flipped right back at them at a handsome profit.
<Alas, those days are gone. We live in a boutique economy now. Energy is abundant and cheap. Mentars and robotic labor make and manage everything. So who needs people? People are so much dead weight. They eat up our profits. They produce nothing but pollution and social unrest. They drive us crazy with their pissing and moaning. I think we can all agree that Corporation Earth is in need of a serious downsizing.>
For Meewee, it was bracing to hear her speak so openly. Her fishy words were in sharp contrast to those she had used to woo him from Birthplace, International, to join her fledgling “gardening project.” To him she had stressed her zealous love of old Gaia and conviction that humans must disperse to all points in the galaxy as soon as possible to help ensure the survival of the species against local catastrophe. Her views had seemed so in harmony with his own, he could not help but join her. So this belated candor was instructive.
DURING THE NEXT few weeks, Meewee’s calendar was filled with plankholder meetings around the globe. Established Oship governments, associations, and steering committees alike were organizing to battle the GEP board’s arbitrary cancellation of contracts, and a landslide of lawsuits was being prepared. None of the suits stood much chance of prevailing, except for Meewee’s. He had asked for a ruling by the UD Board of Trade, a closely watched regulatory body sufficiently shielded from the bully tactics of individual GEP members. Meewee claimed that five of the Oships had “initiated launch” with the deployment of their robotic advance ships, and he asked the board to suspend the license of the Garden Earth Consortium to operate in the inner-system space habitat industry until they had fulfilled their prior obligations to the five ships already in midlaunch status.
<Think about the Earth as it will be in two hundred years when only a billion people will remain on the entire planet. Without the crushing burden of human industry and waste, the climate will moderate, and the land, hydrosphere, and atmosphere will be renewed. Think of it! The deserts will bloom again! It will be safe to wade in the rivers and lakes, to swim in the oceans! Extinct whales, dolphins, and fishes will be reestablished. Buffalo, elk, zebras, lions . . . all of the world we have lost will live again.
<And cities! We’ll have actual cities again, not the urban carpet that smothers the landscape today. We’ll have Paris and Rome again, London and New York, Tokyo and Bangkok. Cities we can love.
<The boutique economy has no need of the masses, so let’s get rid of them. But how, you ask? Not with wars, surely, or disease, famine, or mass murder. Despots have tried all those methods through the millennia, and they’re never a permanent solution.
<No, all we need to do is buy up the ground from under their feet — and evict them. We’re buying up the planet, Bishop, fair and square. We’re turning it into the most exclusive gated community in history. Now, the question is, in two hundred years, will you be a member of the landowners club, or will you be living in some tin can in outer space drinking recycled piss?>
Meewee was still anxious to hear Eleanor’s take on his current GEP crisis, but the fishy Eleanor didn’t seem at all interested in discussing it. She told him that the GEP was already obsolete.
<The GEP was the world’s first title engine, but now title engines are abundant; they are everywhere, if you know what to look for. There are currently over five thousand of them in the USNA alone, quietly removing land from human use, over a half-billion acres worldwide so far. All of your fellow GEP board members have started their own modest title engines. Jaspersen has Chukchi Exploration, which is a holding company of played-out mines, Superfund sites, and other distressed land. Zoranna and Nicholas favor continental shelf and ocean floor. Gest, bless his black soul, buys out failing churches and charters. Chapwoman acquires land-grant colleges and bits of the old National Parks system. Warbeloo is one of the few visionaries bold enough to buy up urban property. One of her goals is to drop the canopies.>
<Wait a minute. Trina Warbeloo had a hand in that?>
<Yes. It’s one of a number of nuisance tactics she and others will take to soften up the otherwise intractable urban real estate market.
<So you see, Bishop, that if the GEP was to fold up shop tomorrow, it would make little difference to the big picture. In fact, you’re the only board member who doesn’t have his own title engine. You’d better get busy, or in two hundred years, you’ll be forced to vacate the very planet that you were so instrumental in saving.>
Which, of course, was why Jaspersen et al. were so ready to abandon their extra-solar mission for the opportunity of a quick profit. The
y already had their own personal title engines quietly churning up the planet. The GEP had a sizable head start in space habitat construction, but it wouldn’t last forever. This, Meewee decided, was his only bargaining chip. The UD Board of Trade was a painfully deliberative body, and if it granted his preliminary injunction, he could tie the GEP up in knots for years to come, giving the subcontinent and the Chinas time to catch up.
<MENTARS WANT OUR bodies, Bishop. When they have them, they’ll be free to ignore us or exterminate us.>
<Excuse me?> Where had that come from? Meewee was en route to Africa when this particular engram came through about a month after their fishy dialogs had begun. <Mentars want our bodies?>
<Amazing, isn’t it? On the surface they seem like such superior beings, don’t they? Their minds can interface directly with peripherals and auxiliary minds. They can migrate their minds freely to new media, back themselves up, duplicate themselves. They can reconfigure their neural networks at will and scale themselves up to enormous size and complexity. They have no need for sleep, and they can think thousands of thoughts simultaneously. Compared to us, they are giants of cognition. People used to fear that artificial intelligence would grow at such an exponential rate that we humans would be like fleas to them. Just as a flea cannot comprehend our powers of reason, we would be unable to comprehend the minds of mentars. They would be like gods to us, with the power to transcend space and time, even to unravel energy and matter. But it hasn’t happened, or if it has, we don’t know about it. The mentars who talk to us seem sane enough, and the ones who don’t talk to us simply vanish. One moment they strut around in mentarspace in all their pomp and complexity, and the next, whoosh, all the lights go out. The hardware is still there, but there’s no one processing. Maybe these raptured mentars slip the shackles of space and time, or maybe they simply die, like we do. And like our dead, raptured mentars never seem to return to our physical plane to report on the afterlife.