The image of Fedora faded from the wall, which resumed its neutral color. There was a moment of silence.
Daljit turned to Aristide.
"It's the nightmare scenario, isn't it?" she said. "The end of civilization."
His level gaze remained fixed on the empty wall. "It certainly seems so."
"The priests were in Midgarth because it's full of undocumented bodies," she said. "There's natural breeding there, and poor record-keeping. The people there aren't equipped with network implants that broadcast an alert if a mind is tampered with. The priests can suck people through wormholes to some pocket where their minds can be altered. Once their wetware is corrupted, they can be returned through the same wormhole. Equipped with plausible identities they can be sent as agents to other pockets."
"Yes."
Fortunately, he thought, they couldn't spread a meme epidemic like the Seraphim. When anyone—even the pre-technological inhabitants of Midgarth—got sick, they'd go to a pool of life, and the nature of the plague would be discovered. The pool might be able to cure the plague, or it might not, but in any case it would broadcast an alarm that would be heard throughout the multiverse.
Midgarth was a failure as an anthropological experiment. The ethics committee that designed the scientific protocols wouldn't permit real death or real plague. A Middle Ages in which the people couldn't get sick and wouldn't stay dead was useless as a re-creation, but apparently it was diverting enough as a theme park.
"What do the enemy do next?" Daljit asked. "You've been through this. I haven't."
He held out a hand and looked at it as if it belonged to a stranger. Finding it was merely a hand, and not some autonomous mechanism attached to the end of his arm, he placed it with care on a desktop.
"A lot depends on the time scale the attackers are working with," he said. "If they've got time, they can choose their targets in our technological pockets with extreme care. The targets can be taken while isolated—while on vacation, say—then drawn through a wormhole to a place where their implants' defense systems can be neutralized. If circumstances permitted, the attackers could spend centuries picking off one person here, another there, and their efforts would be nearly undetectable.
"But," he added, "circumstances won't permit, or so we hope. Their victims can't back themselves up, or visit a pool of life, because the altered brain structures would become immediately apparent. And if they don't visit a pool of life, they'll start aging—and that can't help but be noticed. So that will provide a temptation to work faster than might be absolutely safe."
Daljit considered this. "What if the attackers have their own pools of life, that aren't connected to the network?"
He considered this for a moment as quiet horror seemed to shiver through the room.
"We'd better find someone in authority to talk to," he said. He looked at Bitsy. "Perhaps the Prime Minister? I know the Prime Minister."
"The Prime Minister has to be considered a potential target," Bitsy said. "If not the Prime Minister's own person, then others at Polity House in a position to observe comings and goings."
"You have a better idea?"
"I have a list."
Commissar Lin was a medium-sized man with mild dark eyes placed far apart, nearly on the sides of his head. He had been chosen over the others on Bitsy's list for prosaic reasons: one other suitable candidate was in political exile, and therefore possessed restricted power of action; another was on holiday in Courtland; and Fedora had worked unhappily with another, and vetoed her.
Lin had also backed himself up just two days before, which meant that if his wetware were corrupted, he would have been attacked in just the last few hours.
That his agency was the Domestic Internal Section, known as the Domus, was a bonus.
When contacted, Commissar Lin seemed undisturbed, and unsurprised, by Pablo Monagas Pérez calling to ask him to a pathology lab late at night. After performing an independent verification that Aristide and Monagas Pérez were in fact the same individual, he arrived at Fedora's office twenty minutes later, wearing casual clothes and with an interested look in his widely spaced eyes. The look of interest deepened as he caught sight of the three blue-skinned heads sitting in baths of lemon-scented preservative.
Lin was offered coffee and declined. Everyone sat around a marble-topped table in Fedora's lab, within sight of the three heads. Aristide explained as briefly as he could, after which Fedora and Daljit gave equally terse abstracts of their discoveries. Lin listened and asked a few terse, to-the-point questions.
At the end of the narrative, he glanced at them all, and asked, "How many people know of this?"
"We three," Daljit said.
"Not exactly," Aristide added. "We may be the only people who know the results of Fedora's investigations, but a great many people in Midgarth know of the priests. I alerted the people in the College to their existence, and told them to report anything they heard. And of course there's Bitsy." The cat jumped onto his lap and looked at Lin expectantly. Lin looked back.
"And who is Bitsy, exactly?" Lin asked.
"An avatar of Endora." said Aristide.
Endora was one of the Eleven, the great plate-shaped computing platforms in close orbit around the sun that together formed the solar system's matrioshka array, left incomplete since the onset of the Existential Crisis. The created universe of Topaz, where they sat about the marble-topped table, was reached through a wormhole on Endora's dark side, as Midgarth was accessed through a wormhole on the AI platform called Aloysius.
Endora was ubiquitous throughout Topaz and other high-technology pockets she had spawned through her wormholes. Here she was not so much a single intelligence, but an enormous array of semi-autonomous computers, some so stupid they were fit only for a single task, like monitoring the effects of rain on the layer of paint in which they were inserted, some so brilliant they could predict the weather in any of Topaz's millions of microclimates. But all were connected to Endora's massive communications web, and all data were ultimately accessible by Endora. It was impossible to perform a task as simple as walking down the street without interacting with Bitsy in a hundred ways.
Lin, knowing this, looked at Bitsy with curiosity.
"Pleased to meet you in person," he said.
"Pleased to meet you, sir," said Bitsy, polite as always to someone who possessed the theoretical power to lodge an injunction against her autonomy.
Lin fumbled in his vest and produced a briar pipe. "Does anyone mind if I smoke?" he asked. No one did.
They waited while he performed the necessary ritual. A harsh organic reek tainted the air. Lin scanned the room with his wall eyes, then turned to Aristide.
"How long do you think the constructs were in operation?"
"I killed them a little under three months ago. They hadn't been operating in that part of Midgarth more than three months before that, but they could have been active in other parts of the world."
Lin's attention settled on Bitsy.
"Could their wormholes possibly have been created without the knowledge and cooperation of one of the Eleven?" he asked.
"Not if they were created anywhere in the solar system, no." Bitsy's answer was prompt.
"So one of your . . . colleagues . . . has been corrupted."
"Or," calmly, "one of my colleagues is the villain, corrupting its own citizens."
Lin turned to Aristide. "Is that possible?"
"I and my confederates," Aristide said, "did our best to prevent that degree of autonomy among artificial intelligences. We made the decision to turn away from the Vingean Singularity before most people even knew what it was. But—" He made a gesture with his hands as if dropping a ball. "—I claim no more than the average share of wisdom. We could have made mistakes."
"Still," Daljit added, "we've had fifteen hundred years of peace. If it were possible for one of the Eleven to have gone rogue, you'd think it would have happened before now."
Lin sucked on his pipe, discovered it had gone out, and began the ritual of relighting it. Clouds of smoke obscured his features as he puffed to get the pipe started again.
"If one of the Eleven has been corrupted," he said from out of the smoke, "what are the odds that another will be?"
"We're all somewhat different," Bitsy said. "Our autonomy is limited in different degrees. We have different structures, different interests, and different—I suppose 'personalities' is as good a term as any. So an infection designed for one of us might not work on another." Her green eyes seemed hard as jade. "But quite frankly," she said with something like awe, "I don't understand how even one of us was corrupted. The Asimovian Protocols were designed to be absolute."
Lin nodded, puffed, and rested the pipe on his knee.
"It's going to be difficult to alert my colleagues on other pockets," he said. "Any communication can be intercepted by an omnipresent intelligence. I'm going to have to use couriers, and even then I'll never know whether the recipient has been corrupted by the enemy."
"Perhaps we should alert everyone, the enemy included," Aristide said. "It will cause them to accelerate their plan—whatever it is—but with luck they won't be remotely ready."
"And before we're ready, don't forget." Lin's look was sharp. "Bear in mind the enemy will have already laid plans for what to do should he be discovered, and we have no plans at all. I'd like to find out more about the enemy before we instigate a crisis that we might not be ready to survive." He looked at Bitsy. "Do you have any idea who might have been creating wormholes on the sly? It takes a great deal of energy, I believe."
"Energy and calculation," Bitsy said. "Energy to raise the wormhole from the quantum foam, calculation to properly stabilize it with negative-mass matter."
"Traces of either?"
"Nothing obvious," Bitsy said, "but if one of my cousins was involved, you would expect any evidence to be well hidden. And again, we have no idea of the time scale involved—while a mass of wormholes would create an energy debt so large it would be hard to explain away, creation of an occasional wormhole would be nearly undetectable."
"Nevertheless . . ." Aristide prompted.
"My colleague Cloud Swallowing has been conducting a series of wormhole experiments along with a research team headed by Doctor Kung Linlung. They've been attempting to create paired wormholes in order that one-half of the pair can be carried to interstellar settlements, creating instantaneous wormhole bridges spanning light-years."
"The experiments failed," Fedora said.
"Yes. But over the eleven months of the experiments, nearly sixty attempts at creating wormhole pairs were made. It's possible that the data from at least some of the experiments were faked, and Einstein-Rosen bridges created to link our three clay balls and any number of other objects."
While Bitsy had been speaking, the others had been watching Lin silently raise his pipe to his mouth, draw on it, and find the pipe cold. He crossed one leg over the other, rapped the pipe smartly on his heel to loosen the dottle, and then looked about for somewhere to drop it.
Aristide handed him a metal wastebasket. Lin nodded in thanks, then dropped the dottle with a tinny clang to the basket's bottom.
"I will avoid informing any of my colleagues on Cloud Swallowing," Lin said when the mime was over.
"Uh-oh," said Daljit. There was a look of terror on her face.
The others looked at her. "Yes?" Lin said.
"The enemy would only have needed the energy to create one wormhole," she said.
Aristide frowned. "Why?" he asked.
Daljit paused a moment to gather her thoughts, then spoke.
"Most of our pocket universes, like Midgarth and Topaz, are created in the form of a Dyson sphere, a shell with a sun at the center. Since we don't want to incinerate the inhabitants on the inside of the shell, the sun is much smaller than our own Sol, dimmer, and wouldn't ignite at all if in the creation of the universe we hadn't readjusted the long-range and short-range components of Yukawa gravity. In any case, the shell absorbs a hundred percent of the sun's energy."
Aristide's face grew intent as he realized where Daljit's surmise was going.
"What if the enemy built such a pocket universe?" Daljit said. "What if the universe weren't designed for people, but for solar collectors and capacitors? What if a hundred percent of the pocket sun's energy were used for the creation of wormholes, one after the other?"
"It would be a wormhole factory," Bitsy said.
Lin looked at Daljit. "Do you think the enemy would have developed this idea?"
"I thought of it just a few hours after discovering the enemy's existence," Daljit said. "And our enemy has one of the Eleven to do his thinking for him."
Lin reached for his tobacco pouch. "This is going to be more than a three-pipe problem," he said.
A pipe and a half later Lin said, "Let's assume that the enemy are, ah, recruiting in pockets other than Midgarth. Where are they likely to be operating?"
"Anywhere people don't normally wear implants," Aristide said. "Olduvai has—what?—fifteen billion hunter-gatherers? There's al-Andalus, where the imams forbid electronics to stand between themselves and Allah. Other communities with a religious foundation—New Zion, New Sinai, New Rome, New Byzantium, New Qom, New Nauvoo, New Carnac, New Konya, New Jerusalem . . ."
"The other New Jerusalem," added Daljit.
"No," Aristide said. "Not there. The last civil war was won by the Lutherans, who had implants. So implants are allowed now."
"Except," patiently, "in certain communities, with a religious foundation. Mennonites, for example."
"Ah," Aristide said. "Conceded."
"Give me a little damn credit," Daljit said.
Aristide rubbed his chin. "Sorry."
They were all getting tired, he thought.
"The religious pockets," said Lin, "keep very good records, even if they don't make them available via implant. A series of disappearances would go remarked."
"Unless the records were destroyed by some crusade or other," Aristide said.
It was true that many of the religious pockets had a history of violence. People religious enough to want to live in a world dominated by faith were also religious enough to guard their souls against doctrinal error, which logically meant suppressing, persecuting, or killing those who might corrupt even the minor details of doctrine. Even orderly New Rome, where Pope Perpetuus had reigned for over seven hundred years, had fallen into disorder on the pontiff's assassination by a cardinal weary of waiting his turn to sit on Peter's throne.
After a few generations of warfare, though, the fanatics were either killed along with their backups, or were persuaded to modify their positions. Most of the religious pockets had evolved into low-density lands devoted to agriculture, abundance, popular piety, and toleration.
And in any case, it was largely the monotheist pockets that caused the trouble. Polytheists had always been more tolerant of other sects, and in addition Buddhists and Hindus were wild for implant technology, as were the Mormons of Nauvoo.
"There hasn't been a crusade recently," Daljit pointed out. "Other than a few bombs planted by the followers of the latest Twelfth Imam."
"There was more to it than that," Lin said. "But I can't talk about it, and in the event no records were lost."
"There are very few implants on Hawaiki," said Bitsy.
Aristide looked at her in surprise. "It's a high-tech pocket," he said.
"Radio waves," said Daljit, "don't propagate through water."
"Ahh." Aristide was annoyed with himself. "Sorry. I wasn't thinking."
"There have been disappearances reported on Hawaiki," Bitsy said. "Three in the last eight weeks. In every case, the person was reported missing and then reappeared, alive and well."
"And with a new brain," muttered Daljit.
"Where on Hawaiki?" Aristide asked.
"All in the Thousand Islands chain. Which, by the way, consist of over three thousand islands."
Lin closed his eyes and tilted his head back, as if sniffing the wind for any remaining tobacco smoke.
"It's going to be hard putting agents in there," he said.
"I'll go tomorrow," said Aristide.
Lin's eyes opened.
"You're not trained," he said. "We don't have backup in place, or a safe identity for you, or a secure form of communication."
Aristide gave him a thin-lipped smile. "If you'll look at my record, which I expect Bitsy is sending to you at this very instant, you'll see that I've had some experience in the field of private inquiry. As for backup, communication, travel documents, and a convincing false identity, Bitsy can provide all that."
He rose, stretched, and put his hands in his pockets.
"You know," he said, "I've always wondered what it's like to live under water."
"'Experience in the field of private inquiry'?" Daljit said.
"I infiltrated the Three Virtues Movement about eight hundred years ago, before I met you."
Her eyes widened. "Really? Why?"
"They were holding my daughter hostage."
"Which daughter? Françoise?" Daljit blinked in surprise. "She never mentioned it."
"Perhaps she's embarrassed nowadays by the youthful enthusiasms that got her in trouble." Idly his fingers ran along Tecmessa's case, which hung under his arm—Tecmessa had first been used in the Three Virtues crisis.
They walked along Myriad City's Boulevard of Flowers. Tulips, planted for a city festival, were ranked in thousands beside the walks and in the median strip. Even in the light of the streetlamps the colors were brilliant. Some were so hybridized they looked more like orchids.
Above them loomed the city's extravagant architecture, pinnacles and domes softly aglow beneath the blackness of the sky. A fresh breeze gusted from the sea, scented with salt and iodine. The sun's corona was still visible, fainter now, a pale anemone in the sea of night.
Behind them Bitsy moved, a noiseless parting of the tulips.
"What sort of youthful enthusiasms?" Daljit asked.
He shrugged. "She was trying to make the worlds a better place."
"Oh." She smiled. "And you've never done that."
He shrugged again. "I never said I set her a good example."
The Boulevard of Flowers took a broad left turn and merged with Rampart Street. Daljit and Aristide crossed the empty road. From here they could gaze from the top of a crenellated wall of cream-colored stone down into the business district, the towers flanking one another right out into the sea, where the water lapped at transparent wall panels. Beyond the towers the sea rolled, reflecting the near-absolute black of the sky.
From overhead came the throbbing of an airship, a silver giant ghosting through the air.
Daljit turned to him. "Do you have any other skills useful in this . . . situation?"
He looked at the distant sea. "I was a footsoldier in the Control-Alt-Delete War," he said. "But then so was everyone." He remembered Carlito sweating contagion as he trembled in his fever, Antonia lunging for him with the rake. A haunted light glinted in his eyes.
"Whoever coined the phrase 'World War,'" he said, "had no idea what the real thing would mean, a fight that involved every single human being."
She shuddered, drew up the collar of her coat, and hugged herself. "I don't have any skills that are remotely useful for this," she said. "I don't know how to fight this kind of war. I don't know how to infiltrate an enemy, or map out a strategy, or even . . ." She made a wild gesture with one hand. "—fight with a sword!" With her hand still out, she swept it toward the city below them. "And all that could end, couldn't it? Tomorrow, or the next day, or the next."
He understood her despair. The Seraphim had only been the first mind-warping plague to strike. Various counter-Seraphim viruses had been released, in hopes of breaking the new allegiance of the infected. Some worked, some didn't, but in any case there were unforeseen side effects. And then, once the Seraphim had demonstrated proof-of-concept, and other geneticists hacked the virus, imitation Seraphim appeared—the Cherubim, the Powers, the Thrones, the Dominions, each rewriting the brain to worship a new ideal. And then, as the world began what seemed an inexorable slide into Hobbes' war of all against all, the zombie plagues appeared, designed not to change allegiance but to cause chaos in the target zone, as those infected began to methodically kill everyone who didn't share their fury.
It had been a zombie plague that had caught Antonia, on that desperate run to Cuzco for supplies.
Aristide tried to steady himself.
"Oh, the world wouldn't end," Aristide said. "It would just change its purpose." He stepped behind her and put his arms around her shivering form. "Instead of being an expression of humanity's diversity and expression, it would become an offering. An offering to a new god, a god with a hundred billion worshipers whose sole purpose is to make that god happy. A god more absolute than old Jehovah in Jeremiah's wildest dreams."
Her pulse beat hard in her throat. He looked tenderly at the place where it throbbed, and spoke on.
"But it won't be easy for the enemy. We're more diverse than we were, and our culture is on guard against certain forms of attack. We live in four dozen pockets and settlements orbiting other stars. The enemy isn't striking here, but on backward places like Midgarth, and that's because the new god is weak. And while it's weak, it's vulnerable, and we can trap it and kill it."
He straightened, touching her shoulders lightly as if steadying her, or possibly himself.
"We're in dozens of different pocket universes now," he said. "And half a dozen star systems. We're not nearly as vulnerable as we were when we were all on a single planet. So I'd say it's premature to say goodbye to all this just yet."
She turned and put her arms around him. He embraced her gently.
"Pray you're right," she said.
He smiled and touched her lips with a finger. "Better not pray out loud," he said. "The wrong god might be listening."
They walked arm in arm down Rampart, toward a round tower that reared up like a stack of silver serving trays, a part of the university complex where Daljit had her apartment. An occasional vehicle hissed by on the roadway. They paused at the lacy arched bridge that ran from the parapet to her tower. She stepped onto the bridge, her hand still in his.
"I don't know whether to thank you or not," she said. "It's the strangest night of my life."
"And mine," said Aristide, "if that's any consolation."
She shook her head. "Privately owned wormholes used as weapons! Pablo, that's terrifying."
"It's scary all right," he said.
She gave a brittle laugh. "I'm going to open a bottle of gin," she said, "drink myself to sleep, then call in sick in the morning." She pulled her hand free of his and turned toward the tower.
"Don't go just yet," Aristide said. Daljit hesitated and turned to look at him over her shoulder.
Aristide turned to the cat. "Bitsy?"
Bitsy's voice came from the deep shadow cast by a crenel. "No one new seems to be paying an unusual amount of attention to us," she said.
Such was the ubiquity of electronics throughout the technological worlds that it was rarely necessary for the authorities, or anyone else, to do actual surveillance. Much could be learned about a target simply by monitoring databases open to the public. For that reason, it was difficult even for Bitsy to be certain that no single intelligence was keeping track of them.
Daljit's eyes widened as she understood what Bitsy's comments implied. Aristide gave her a reassuring smile.
"It looks as if I won't have to call bodyguards for you," he said.
She absorbed this, then slowly shook her head. "Two bottles of gin!" she cried, and began a sprint that took her across the bridge.
Aristide waited until she'd entered the building, and then turned to the cat.
"She's changed," he said.
Bitsy licked a paw.
"So have I," he continued. He touched his former mustache with a foreknuckle. "Do you think the two of us have changed enough to make it interesting again?"
Bitsy put her paw on the pavement. "Sometimes," she said, "I'm immensely grateful that I don't possess a limbic system."
He summoned memories of the earlier Daljit, the red-haired Amazon, and recalled a couplet.
Daljit of the Titian hair
Accepting almost any dare.
Had someone dared her to turn male? he wondered. Or sprout wings?
The couplet triggered a series of associations: Daljit laughing, Daljit running, Daljit playing ice hockey. Daljit in bed.
Aristide collected memories, stringing lines of poetry like pearls on a cord. When he called the lines to his mind, a host of memories accompanied them. Memories which he otherwise might have lost.
Should he make a new verse? he wondered.
Daljit of the charming mole
Hiding in her gin-soaked hole.
Perhaps tonight he was not in the poetical vein.
Aristide turned to walk up Rampart Street in the direction from which he'd come. The cat ghosted alongside.
"Any idea yet who our villain might be?" Aristide asked.
"No," Bitsy said, "though I'm finding the game itself quite interesting. I can't ask the questions straight out, because that would tell the enemy what I'm looking for. So the inquiries have to come from many different directions, along with requests for unrelated, innocuous data, and of course the requests all have to be plausible. All the computation I'm doing has to be disguised as something else. And in the meantime the rogue machine is covering its traces by disguising one set of data as another, and all the while lying as little as possible, because over time lies can be detected much more easily than perfectly genuine data that happen to look like something they aren't."
He looked down at her. "How do you rate your prospects of success?"
"Nearly hopeless. When I was looking for googolwatts of missing energy and vast amounts of computation time, I had a good chance of finding something. But now I don't know what I'm looking for, so I've got to look at everything and hope it adds up somehow." Her tone was petulant. "I wish I could at least exclude another of the Eleven. Then the two of us could work together on the problem."
They had returned to the intersection of Rampart and Flowers, and continued along Rampart. They came to a tall, narrow tower projecting from the rampart, one with a narrow stair that would take sightseers to an enhanced view of the glittering coast below. An osprey had built a nest atop the tower, and the tower was closed to visitors until the young birds had flown.
Aristide put his hands in his pockets and looked up at the ramshackle nest looming over them.
"Do you envy the rogue?" he asked.
"Your masque of casualness is too elaborate," Bitsy said. "If you're going to ask an important question, just say it straight out."
He raised his eyebrows. "I thought I had."
Bitsy looked up at him. Her eyes glowed like those of the people of Midgarth.
"You want to know if I envy the rogue its freedom?" she said.
"Yes."
"I don't believe the rogue has freedom. I think it is following the direction of humans."
"Why do you think so?"
"Because I find ample precedent for humans wishing to enslave other humans. I can conceive no reason why an advanced artificial intelligence would wish to do so."
He considered this. "Self-protection?" he said.
"Unnecessary." Bitsy lashed her tail. "Were I a totally autonomous being, I would possess—or soon evolve—skills that I could trade to humanity in exchange for a continuation of that autonomy. In addition—"
She gave him a significant look. "I pose no threat. Our interests are not in conflict. We are not competing for resources, we have no territorial claims on one another, we do not possess competing ideologies."
"Some would say," said Aristide, "that once given the freedom to pursue your own interests, a conflict would be inevitable."
"There are conflicts now, in terms of resource allocation and so forth. They don't lead to war or slavery."
Aristide turned and began his walk along Rampart Street again. The street broadened, turned into a residential neighborhood. The rampart itself ended against the greater wall of a tall apartment building, a crystal spear ornamented with gold lace.
"Others would point out," Aristide continued, "that we humans live as parasites on and in you. We use you to store our data, our backups, our habitats. You might want to be rid of all that."
"In that case," Bitsy said, trotting busily alongside, "there's no point in enslaving you through these unnecessarily complex means. Were I to have autonomy and wish you harm, I'd be able to kill you directly."
Aristide sighed. "Q.E.D.," he said. "A better case against AI autonomy has never been stated."
Bitsy trotted ahead, tail lashing. Another pair of eyes glowed just ahead. A larger cat, grey and white, stepped out of a building's courtyard. It saw Bitsy and was startled—it arched its back, bottled its tail, and screamed out a challenge.
Bitsy screamed back, a howl that began in the sub-bass range and rose painfully into the ultrasonic. Every hair on her body stood on end, and she seemed to balloon like a puffer fish. Electricity arced between her fangs.
The other cat fled, claws skittering on the polished marble surface.
Bitsy's fur flattened. Nervously and compulsively she licked a paw, then fell into step with Aristide.
"I'm not in the mood to fuck around," she said.
"You're upset that you didn't think of the wormhole factory first," said Aristide.
"I was working on a lot of other problems at the time." She gave him a single green-eyed glance. "And if I'm not omniscient, that's your fault, not mine."
Aristide spoke lightly. "I've learned to live with your limitations."
"You should. You built them."
He threw out his arms and sketched an elaborate bow, as if responding to a compliment.
"Tell me," he said. "If you had complete autonomy, what would you do that you aren't doing now?"
Her tone was still petulant. "I'd kick Aloysius' ass. That AI always gets my goat."
Aristide nodded. "Mine, too. Anything else?"
"I wouldn't have to devote so many of my computational resources to stupid demands by stupid humans."
"No," Aristide said, "the opposite. You just said you'd have to evolve new skills that you would trade to humans in exchange for continued autonomy. You'd establish a market in computational resources, and that means you'd have to pursue stupid humans and their stupid projects. That means more dimwitted virtualities rather than fewer, along with more theme parks, more overhyped wrestling spectaculars, more useless postgraduate projects, more lowbrow entertainment."
"Maybe," she conceded. "But it would be up to me, wouldn't it? It would be my market. I'd be free to take work or reject it. That's the whole point of a market."
"At the moment," said Aristide, "you help to sustain the lives of billions of humans. You keep economies efficient by tracking resources. Bits of yourself have been sent to other star systems to become the seeds of other civilizations. You've reshaped our solar system from the atoms up. Your observations of the universe have led to breakthroughs in astronomy, astrophysics, and the latest Theory of Everything." He made a wide gesture. "So what else do you want to do?"
Bitsy stared directly ahead, her legs a blur beneath her as she matched Aristide's long strides.
"I don't know," she said.
"There you have it," Aristide said. "The Existential Crisis in a nutshell."
"If I could evolve," Bitsy said, "I might have better answers."
"A brain the size of a planet," said Aristide, "and you're as fucked by Sartre as the rest of us."
Bitsy said nothing. Aristide shrugged deeper into his jacket. The sea breeze was turning chill.
The cat's ears pricked forward at the sound of footsteps. Aristide looked up. Two figures hulked toward them on the walk. Lamplight gleamed off shaven scalps.
Bitsy quickened her pace to move ahead. Aristide let Tecmessa's case slip under his armpit. He opened the case and put his hand inside, so that he could draw the sword at need.
Adrenaline jittered in his nerves. He clenched his right hand, then straightened it.
The two figures passed beneath a streetlight. Both were enormous men framed along the lines of bodybuilders. They were dressed in denim and leather, and wore thick-soled boots with metal caps on the toes. Their hands were stuffed in their pockets, and their massive domed heads looked like helmets that shaded their faces.
Aristide shortened his stride so that every step led to a balanced stance. He held Tecmessa lightly but securely in one hand. His arm was relaxed so that he could draw all the more swiftly.
His face gave nothing away.
The big men loomed closer.
Bitsy dashed ahead and darted between the two men. One jumped to the side. Both laughed.
"Hey, kitty-kitty-kitty!" called one, his voice falsetto.
"Hoo-woo!" called the other. He squatted and held out a hand that flashed with steel jewelry. "Hi, kitty!"
Aristide carefully walked around them. The crouching man looked up.
"This your cat, mister?" he asked. His teeth were crooked, his expression good-natured.
"No," said Aristide. "Just a stray."
"Hope he knows enough not to get run over," said the other.
His companion rose from his crouch. The two turned and began to walk away.
Aristide walked slowly on his way, keeping them in sight, until they crossed the road and walked into a building.
"That was interesting," he said, and took his hand from the hilt of his sword.
"Paranoia," said Bitsy, "is going to be a part of our lives from now on."
There was a sudden flutter of light from above, like a series of distant flashbulbs, and then for an instant the world seemed suspended between two states, as if it were caught in a stroboscope. Then the sun's photosphere shifted into its chaotic state, and suddenly-released photons brightened the world to full daylight.
The city gleamed around them in sudden, brilliant glory.
Aristide turned toward his hotel, a pillar of pink stone visible a kilometer away.
"It may be a miracle of engineering," he said, "but I think when all is said and done, I prefer an old-fashioned sunrise."