Omega point

CHAPTER 24

Cricket's was cool and dark, buried deep in one of the less wellheeled levels of the Wellington arcology of New London, far enough from the area damaged when k52 blew up Richards and Klein's main office to remain open. Antique sporting gear hung from the walls in odd juxtaposition with gelscreens and fashionable decor, bringing with it smells of leather and old wood to fight with the prickly tinge of EM energy that saturated everything in the modern world. There were a lot of screens. Cricket played on all of them.

Richards and Klein did not much care for cricket. But they liked the place anyway. They sat there at the bar, annoying the head barman by drinking fine single malts in whiskey sours, with ice, of all things.

They had had a dozen or so already. Neither of them was drunk, because neither of them could become drunk, or rather one could, but with difficulty, while the other could appear so but it was a lie, like so much else about him.

Otherwise, they were happy.

"What troubles me," said Otto, hunched and somewhat morose, though calmer and more at ease than he had been for the last few weeks, "is that it is only by chance that we won over k52 — if the construct of Waldo's had not been there, he would have achieved his goals without a problem. What does all this mean for the world, if k52 nearly succeeded but for a fortuitous happenstance?"

"Nice English, Otto." Richards' sheath drank down a goodly slug of cocktail, tinkled the ice in the glass, then tipped a cube in, sucked it and crunched down.

"I aim to improve my vocabulary without recourse to the Grid."

"Well, good." Richards smiled plastic teeth through plastic lips. "But it wasn't chance."

"Fate then? I do not believe in that."

"Damn right, that's k52 talk. What I mean is this, Otto. Waldo's world was what tripped k52 up, yes, and it was kind of handy that it did. What I'm talking about is why it was there at all. Thing is, old buddy, it was there because a brother loved his sister so much he was willing to go to jail for her, to throw everything in his life over, and eventually to die."

Otto shrugged. "He felt guilty."

"Exactly!" said Richards emphatically. "There's a complex brew in there, guilt, anger, arrogance, but also a whole lot of love. I won't be so trite as to say love saved the world, and we were lucky…"

"We often are," interrupted Otto.

Richards grinned. "That's why we're the best. But seriously, man, love, family ties, shame — all that chemical stuff you meat people have whizzing round in your systems — " he rattled his glass in a circle, carbon plastic finger pointing at his head "- we'll never have that. Never. We're superior to you in some ways…"

Otto opened his mouth.

"Now come on! Don't disagree, you know it, but we'll never have all that. How many million years' worth of evolution made you? Two thousand, seven hundred and forty-three geeks and who knows how many doughnuts made me. There's no comparison."

"Doughnuts?"

"Geeks like doughnuts," pronounced Richards, with all the solemnity of a priest. "Fact. But listen, family ties stopped k52 from realising his plans, Otto. That's not small beer, it's not chance. We machines might surpass you in many things, but we will never be you, and that is why you will survive." He smiled. "With a little help, of course."

"You forget your father, Richards."

Richards frowned, his softgel face crinkling awkwardly. "Yeah, yeah, maybe I do."

The bartender put another glass in front of Richards on the uplit bar, a paper coaster underneath. Richards saluted the man's scowl, pushed back his hat and downed the drink, ice cubes and all. "I've got to get back, someone to see. I'd just go from here, but I've wasted too many sheaths recently. I don't want to leave this one lying around; losing these things is costing us serious money."

"Hughie?" said Otto, and sipped at his whisky.

"Hughie," confirmed Richards. " Gehst du nach Hause, oder bleibst du hier?"

Otto held up his glass in salute and smiled a rare smile. Funny, he thought, how Richards could coax that out of him, for all that he annoyed the shit out of him. " Ich mochte eine weitere." He took a sip. " Guten Nacht, Herr Richards," he said.

Richards stood and set his hat on his head, turned up the collar of his trenchcoat, ran a robot finger round the peak and gave a little smile. " Bitte, mein Freund, es ist einfach Richards."

And he left Otto to it.

Otto rattled his ice round his empty glass. " Er geht mir auf den Sack," he said, and shook his head.

"What was that, sir?" said the bartender.

"Nothing," said Otto. "Get me another, would you?"

Richards took his sheath back to their garage, thankfully one hundred floors below the radioactive sphere of nothing where their office had once been. He shunted himself back into the Grid, popped over to his virtual office to see how the regrowth of his facsimile of ancient Chicago was going, and went over the plans for their reconstructed office. Then he put in a request to see Hughie.

For once, he was piped right into Hughie's garden. Hughie sat at his wirework table, his arms crossed and face grumpy.

There was no cake. It was going to be one of those meetings.

"I suppose you feel oh-so-pleased with yourself," said Hughie.

"Hiya, Hughie, nice to see you too," said Richards, and plonked his saggy-faced avatar down in front of Hughie. "Don't mention me saving your shiny arse, no problem at all. Nothing's too good for my old friend Hughie."

Hughie gave a dismissive little grunt. "Don't irritate me today, Richards, I've a hundred bureaucrats the world over badgering me about, one — " he ticked the points off on his fingers "- the complete destruction of the RealWorld Reality Realms, two, the detonation of three atomic bombs, three, the destruction of 13 per cent of Nevada's energy disruption, four, the loss of three Class Five AIs, five, a violent incursion into the Sinosiberian demilitarised zone that culminated in another atomic detonation, six, a UN-led review on AI policy…" He stopped. "Have you seen the news, by the way? They're calling this the biggest catastrophe since the Five crisis. This is not going to go away. Things are bad enough for us as it is, we don't need more enemies. Need I go on?"

"Jeez," said Richards sarcastically, "it's a good job that I thwarted k52's plans to rule the human race until the end of time, or people might be really pissed off. Don't be a cock, Hughie."

"Hmmm, well, yes," grumbled Hughie, his electric eyes shining ovals of light onto the table. "I suppose we should be grateful k52's plans did not come to fruition."

Richards gaped and slumped back. "'Did not come to fruition?'" he parroted. "Sheesh, you really are a cock."

"Stop calling me a cock, Richards."

"Wanker."

Hughie threw up his hands. "You are exceptionally juvenile and frustrating to deal with," he said.

"And you're a cock. We all have our crosses to bear."

"Stop it now, stop it now! Oh, I am trying to be thankful, I'm, alright, damn you, I'm not very good at it. Thanks to you we've avoided some kind of artificial Singularity."

Richards shrugged. "What? Another? There's no such thing as the Singularity, Hughie. Things change all the time. And people live through them. Things change, people don't. Why put a name on it?"

"We will have to disagree on that. I thought you might like to know that all charges against Valdaire have been dropped. Swan has been impounded, and the Chinese aren't going to start a war over your partner's gung-ho shenanigans in their territory."

"Jolly good."

"We've also been invited to a memorial service for Chures. I expect you to attend."

"Since when were you the boss of me?"

"Richards," warned Hughie.

"We'll be there," he said, serious for a moment. "What about Launcey?"

"Later," said Hughie. "We'll get to him later." Hughie stood and clapped his hands. "Now, I am extremely busy," said Hughie.

The garden began its slow dissolve, and Richards was before a titanic Hughie in the VR replica of his underground home.

"And what's this?"

"A little reminder," said the giant Hughie. "Don't forget where you stand on the foodchain, Richards. These are challenging times. We could do without incidents like this. Do try not to overstep the mark, or there will be consequences."

Hughie faded away and Richards was left in the cavernous space of Hughie's virtual representation of his equally cavernous home, the sinister rustling of his choir at work again, free now once more, parsing trillions of bits of information as they ran the lives of a billion European citizens.

"Yeah, and who gets to decide what kind of incidents we do get, Hughie?" shouted Richards. His voice echoed back at him. "You?"

The lights went out.

"There's more to this than you and I will ever understand," he muttered. He dug into his pocket, pulled something out. "Cock."

Richards winked out of the hall, leaving something small hanging in the air. A tinkle as bright as a dropped penny sounded as it hit the foamcrete, an impudent noise in Hughie's cavern. Hughie zoomed his perception down to the source of the noise.

There, upon the drab grey representation of drab grey concrete, glittered a tiny skull, perfectly carved from quartz.

"What your wife is suffering from, Mr Klein, is unusual." Ms Dinez was tall and dark, an exotic mix of races from dried-up Brazil. She must have had a mass of immigration credits to get in through the Atlantic Wall, thought Otto. Lucky her.

Otto could see Honour through the one-way glass. He stared at her pale face. Uncalled-for data hopped into his mind off the Grid, broadening his understanding of what the surgeon had said. Honour looked so fragile. Tubes snaked out of her arm; her cerebral implant had been cracked wide and a dozen delicate carbon-sheathed cables wriggled into it. The same in her chest, where more leads plugged into her governor, monitoring her healthtech. He pressed his hands, palms flat, against the glass.

Ms Dinez looked to the side. Readouts of skin temperature and icons guessing her emotional state flickered in his mind. This can't be easy, thought Otto. He felt sympathy for her.

"You are in the army?" A fair assumption. The sheer amount of hardware embedded in his body made that obvious.

"Not any more. I was done killing innocent people a long time ago. There's enough room here, no matter what the government says." He hadn't meant that as a remark on her status; he hoped she did not take it as such. Diplomacy was never his strong suit.

"Then you are obviously a man who does not like to be kept waiting, Mr Klein. So I will be brief. She is going to die." She seemed unconcerned, cold even. Was this her professional manner, wondered Otto, or had she had her emotions capped? Some of the refugees did that. It helped them cope. Those that had mentaugs could, of course, wipe the records of their experiences if they chose, but they could do little more than inhibit the natural memory, and that was often not enough.

"I have known that for some time," he said. "What is killing her?"

"She has Bergstrom's Syndrome."

Otto's mouth went dry. He'd suspected as much. He'd heard rumours, about other cyborgs getting sick, about mismatches between machine and man.

"It is so rare," continued Dinez, "that we know little about it. Guesses, mostly, theory. But, in effect, her body is rejecting the mentaug; a feedback loop builds between the nanotech and the body's natural defences, and each attacks the other. Over time, the nerve fibres entangled with the interface begin to decay. Tremors, muscular weakness, these are the symptoms in a mild case, but it can directly affect the cerebral cortex with few warning signs, causing a shrinkage in the grey matter. It is not dissimilar to the prion diseases of the brain. The technology takes over to an extent, meaning the effects are less pronounced, though the ultimate outcome is always the same."

"She's been getting headaches for the last few months," said Otto. "Her mentaug's link to the Grid went a couple of weeks back. But she's seemed otherwise OK, normal, even." At the end of the corridor, the monsoon rain ran down the window in rippled sheets.

Dinez nodded. "It can appear so. The mentaug fights hard, putting out more and more synthetic nerve junctures. This provokes the body further, speeding the progress of the disease. The mentaug takes on the brain's functions, but the augmentations were never designed to replace the cerebral cortex. Failure occurs, usually when the frontal lobes reach a state of heavy decay. The mentaug can only do so much. Once it fails, the collapse is swift and catastrophic. She has, in a sense, been fortunate. Bergstrom's Syndrome can kill within weeks. Sometimes, as in her case, the mentaug takes over so much function that this atrophying can go unnoticed."

"Fortunate," said Otto flatly.

"Yes, Mr Klein."

Otto expected some platitudes about the time they'd had together, but she was too canny for that, and they stood and listened to the storm, Otto counting out his wife's life in raindrops.

"What now?" he asked. Otto already knew the answer, for it was popping off the Grid into his head. His unit had been among the first Ky-tech; Bergstrom's Syndrome had come later. As soon as the tech had been declared safe, he'd cajoled Honour until she'd agreed to undergo the augmentation. He'd told her of all the benefits, but the truth was he needed her to be closer to what he had become, so she could understand. How was he to know there would be a whole new disease to go with it?

"When it does become manifest, it is too late to provide anything other than palliative care," the surgeon said. "Had we caught it earlier, a complete removal of healthtech and the cerebral implant would have been recommended, but that is a complex and risky operation, far more so than the installation procedure, as it involves actual ganglionic separation of nerve from machine. If it is successful, the patient has to readjust to the life of the unenhanced, which provides a great shock and many inconveniences. If this is overcome, they suffer from many infirmities, and a greatly shortened lifespan. Most of them suffer profound mental problems." Her accent was soft but still apparent, and Otto wondered which part of Brazil she'd fled. "This is all academic. I am sorry, Mr Klein. It is too late. The best we can do is boost her tech from a base unit, prepare her for the end and make her comfortable. The hospital computer is running her mind now."

"There are other options." Otto looked at the consultant.

"Yes. There is one more option: neural patterning. It needn't be painful; we can gather much of her information from her mentaug."

"Copy her? A post-mortem simulation?"

"Together with her soul-capture data from the mentaug, a pattern taken directly from her mind now would be her entirely, to all intents and purposes. She would have her memories, right up to the moment we moved her across. We would cease life functions in your wife's original body at the same moment we brought the AI unit online, to avoid confrontation between the two. From there, she can operate a variety of sheaths, and interact with the world normally."

"Would it be her?"

Dinez shrugged. "I am not a philosopher. In effect, yes. In actuality? Some say no. This is new technology."

Newer than him. New technology every damn day. "What do we need to do?"

"First," said Dinez, "we need to ask her."

"No," she said. She was small, Honour, but she had the heart of a lion, one of the reasons Otto loved her. "Absolutely not. Don't make me into a machine."

Otto gripped his wife's hand "There is no other way. You'll just go to sleep and wake up in a new body and we can carry on like before."

Honour spoke levelly and with force, although her voice was weak. A unit by the bed boosted it, investing her objections with a quality of digital perfection; too smooth, fake, like a damned number. "Don't you see? You will lose me, it won't be me! It'll be a copy, not me, a facsimile, a Frankenstein."

"It is the only way."

"Don't you dare do it, Otto Klein, don't you dare! If you ever loved me like you say…"

"I still do, I always will." He meant it, he hoped she could see that.

"Then don't soil my memory by having me copied, like a, like a spreadsheet! I'll be dead, and you will be being unfaithful to me with something that is not me. It will only think that it is, something with my memories. Can't you see that that would be horrible? A sex toy, a monster."

"That's not true."

She looked deep into his eyes, her sclera reddened with clots. "Darling Otto, you know it is." She struggled up onto her elbows. Slowly, painfully, she leaned forward, moving the tubes aside like a curtain so she could hold him as best she could. "You don't have to be alone. Find someone new, but don't try to keep me. It is my time, don't you see?" She turned her head from him, painfully. She was getting weaker. "Ms Dinez, how long do I have?"

The consultant moved out of the shadows, where she had been keeping a discreet watch. "I am sorry, but it is not long. We had to amplify the healthtech input and reactivate your mentaug so your husband could talk to you. As the technology is the cause of your condition, your wakefulness is accelerating it. If we put you back under now, you could have another few months, but you will be rarely conscious, and the level of dementia would be such that you will have little idea of who you are."

"And if you let the machines run?"

"Then you have hours, a day at most. I am sorry."

"Don't be, we all have to die. Even you will, Otto, but not for a long time, not for the longest time. Promise me that, won't you, Otto?"

"Yes," he whispered. "I will try."

"I love you," she said. They held each other for a long while, then she pushed him away a little. "Ms Dinez."

"Yes?"

"Let the machines run."

It took, in the end, less time than Otto had expected, and that time galloped by. He told Honour over and over again how much he loved her, whereas she seemed intent on reliving all the things that had made them laugh together. It annoyed him that she did not share his sense of gravity, his anger rising, and that shamed him. He was always so angry. But that was her through and through, contrary to the last, and she scolded him fondly for his tendency to melodrama.

"You know that I love you, and I know that you love me. So why lie in each other's arms crying like babies? I want to remember our life. It has been a good life, a happy one. I would not change a moment of it."

So they did, the good and the bad. The long nights together, their travels. She confessed that she had never liked his mother, and he wasn't surprised. They talked, and they giggled, and they cried. And then the end came, so suddenly, a tremor, a cry from Honour: "I am frightened, Otto, don't let me go."

"Don't be frightened," he said, though he was more scared than he had ever been before, and he had seen things that would test the sanity of most.

"Don't let me go." Her real voice was nearly inaudible, the ghost of a voice, overwritten by the smooth boosting of the hospital machine.

"I won't." And he didn't. A harder shudder passed through her, as if she were about to have a fit. She became limp. Her chest continued to rise and fall, pushed in and out by the machines, but Otto had seen enough of death to know that she was gone. For an hour he held her, then gently he laid her down, smoothed her hair and stepped away.

"We have all of her post-augmentation data, all soul captured, together with impressions of her pre-mentaug organic memories," said Dinez to him, entering quietly through the door. "What shall we do with it?" She hesitated, examined his face, then went on carefully. "I, I am not inclined to lose life, Mr Klein, not when there is a way of preserving it. All lives… they are precious, every one. I have seen a lot of death." Her words hung on the air between them.

"The war?"

"The war."

A lifetime of memories. Every waking minute, every dream, recorded. And within, like a phantom, perhaps an echo of what Honour had been. He considered asking Dinez if she was really proposing that he break the law, and was tempted to say yes, upload her; only for a second, but that was long enough.

He exhaled a shuddery breath that tasted of tears. He tried to sound strong. He had never felt weaker, a weak child in a titan's body. "Archive it," he said.

Dinez raised an elegant eyebrow.

"I will keep the memories; her imprint. But I will not bring her back. It is not what she wanted."

"As you wish," said the surgeon.

Otto disengaged the mentaug, and realised with some embarrassment that his face was wet. The barman looked at him as if to ask if he were OK, but the returning glare Otto favoured him with changed his mind.

Otto downed his drink and left.

He'd left the hospital with nothing of Honour but a plastic lattice containing a terabyte of soulless events. It wasn't enough. It never would be.

It was not what he had wished. He wanted her back. If he had had his own way, he would have had her uploaded into a pimsim. In the course of the years to come, he would often wonder if he had done the right thing, putting the temptation there in front of him. That the pimsims he'd met seemed to be as real as the people they once were had made feeling that worse.

If he couldn't have her, at least he had his memories, and the mentaug helped with that. He knew why he ailed when he could simply turn the mem-refresh function off. As painful as it was to wake up to Honour's absence, the mentaug let him see her every night. While he slept, she lived. Ekbaum was wrong, to an extent. It wasn't the trauma of losing her that was fucking him up; he was doing this to himself. He couldn't let go.

Maybe it was time, finally time to lay her to rest.

He ascended the arco in a fast lift, using his and Richards' subscription key. To get to his apartment he had to go past the floor the office had occupied. He stopped off to look. The AllPass got him through the exclusion barriers. That part of the arco was dark, windows black. Light came from far below, glimmering from the active markings of construction drones repairing the damage. Otto stopped at the edge of the blast zone. They had a lot to do. He clambered over buckled floor plating, past main structural beams exposed to the air. Where the bomb had gone off was a radioactive void. The walls and floor glittered with tiny biolights, monotasked nanobots scouring the area for residual radioactives, lights going from green to red once they had retrieved dangerous particles, trooping dutifully off into shielded containers to patiently await disposal.

Otto looked into the blackness of the hole in the arco for a while. Amazing, he thought, that the whole damn thing hadn't come down. But away from where their office had once been the damage was minimal. A testimony to modern construction and woven carbons and, he thought, perhaps to k52's genuine but misguided attempts to work for the human race — he could have employed a much bigger bomb.

Otto doubled back, let himself be screened for contamination. He underwent a nanobot wash at the edge of the construction site, and went back home.

His apartment was neat, as he'd left it several weeks ago, keeping itself clean and biding its time, far away enough to be unaffected by the micro-nuke.

Otto caught a smell of himself. He hadn't changed in days. He decided there and then to have a shower, and then call Ekbaum. Damn the hour — if he was going to force him into his lab, he could lose a little sleep in return.

First there was one thing he needed to do.

He had to say goodbye.

He went into his room and opened the closet. He pressed the security switch to his gunlocker. It slid open.

Honour's memory cube was where it always was, ensconced in a specially cut recess lined with felt, like his guns.

He smiled, wondering what Honour would think of the man who kept his wife in the gun closet.

He hefted the cube in his hand. It was slightly smaller than Honour's fist, opaque and faulted in the way that memory cubes were, mysterious with potent fractals.

It was all he had of her.

That, and the memory of a Jerusalem built of trumpets upon a December night, and a smiling face, happy in the candlelight.

He closed his eyes and pressed the cube to his forehead for a moment, the memory of her strong in his mind. He stood like that for a long time.

He wiped his eye with the back of his hand and pushed the cube gently back into its recess.

He would call Ekbaum. Later.