Realms of Light

Chapter Nine

I should have thought of that. I should have thoughtof it the instant ’Chan told me that Grandfather Nakada had gone tojoin his ancestors. I hadn’t. The thought that the ship would benoticed had simply never occurred to me.

So now I was trying to conduct a sensitiveprivate investigation from a home base that was under the intensescrutiny of half a dozen newsfeeds, at least one of which hadundoubtedly recognized me by now. I had more or less shown theentire Eta Cassiopeia system that I was working for Yoshio Nakadaor his heirs.

Lovely. Running smooth, wasn’t I?

“Right,” I said. “You haven’t talked tothem?”

“No,” Perkins said. “I haven’t let the shiptalk to them, either. They’ve been asking me who sent us, and whoelse was aboard, and what we were doing here, and I just told themI was not at liberty to answer questions.”

“Good,” I said. “That’s good. You did theright thing. Keep doing it.”

“Your supper is over there,” he said,pointing across the lounge.

I’d forgotten that I had asked for it, butnow that I knew it was there I was hungry.

“I’m monitoring the situation,” he said,pointing at the wire below his ear. “You can eat, and I’ll keep aneye on things.”

“Thanks,” I said. I turned and went to fillmy belly-and to think.

As I ate the soba Perkins had prepared, anddrank lukewarm jasmine tea, I considered the situation.

I had intended to do my best to stay belowthe radar, to quietly poke around and see whether I could findanything that might relate to the case. Then I was going to grab mybrother and father, load them aboard the ship, and get the hell offEpimetheus before anyone even noticed I was there. I could figureout the next step when I was back on Prometheus.

That wasn’t going to happen. The radar had mepainted. If I set foot outside the ship again I’d probably have asquadron of newsies cruising behind me everywhere I went.

That meant a change of plans. I wasn’t surejust how drastic a change I would need; it depended largely onwhether I actually needed to set foot outside the ship again. Todetermine that I needed to see just what I had here.

I had access to most of Nightside City’snets, of course, but riding wire from here would be risky; thenewsies could trace it. I could pull up public information, butserious digging might be difficult.

I had everything I had sent to the ship frommy old office, including 93% of the old man’s ITEOD file. That wasthe obvious place to start; just what did he have in there?

I finished the bowl of noodles, washed itdown with more tea, then turned to look at Perkins. He was stillplugged in, and frowning. I waved to let him know I was stillthere, then found a plug of my own and jacked into the ship.

I could see and feel the defenses, bigbuzzing firewalls that kept out the newsies and any other snoops orintruders who might try to pry. I could see Perkins zipping around,checking systems, closing any holes he found.

And I could see the mass of data I haduploaded, sitting there like an unopened crate. I slid up to it andbegan doing a little inventory.

Right at the top were Nakada familyrecords-genealogy, accounts, comlogs, all the usual stuff. WhyGrandfather Nakada had thought he needed to stash a copy of this inNightside City I didn’t know-in case Prometheus blew up, maybe? Ormelted down, the way Cass II had?

All four of the rocky planets in the systemhad a lot of radioactives in their cores, but only Cass II hadreached critical mass and turned into molten slag; Eta Cass A I wastoo small, and the two planets farther out had been fairly stable.I didn’t see any reason for that to change, and if it did, Iexpected it would be Epimetheus that went. Epimetheus already hadsome strange stuff going on, with its off-center core and stalledrotation, while Prometheus was relatively ordinary, despite itsheat and its earthquakes. I didn’t think Prometheus was goinganywhere.

But Yoshio had copied all that data anyway.Maybe he hadn’t had anything specific in mind at all, and had justbeen playing it cautious; that would be typical of the old man.

The next layer down was corporate stuff,including confidential personnel files, presumably to help the oldman’s heirs keep things running when he was gone. That seemednormal enough.

But below that-remember I said there was roomin there for a dozen human minds? It looked very much as if that’swhat was there. I couldn’t be sure; the programs weren’t active,and I wasn’t about to start them up without giving it a littlethought. That was what it looked like, though-it looked as ifsomeone had copied a bunch of people into these files.

That would explain why Yoshio had kept thisin Nightside City; uploading human minds is illegal on Prometheus,and in most other places I know anything about. Not in NightsideCity, though; not much was illegal there.

But why was he uploading anyone? What did hewant with these?

Most people don’t understand uploading. Thereare all sorts of misconceptions about it. Some people think it’s aform of immortality. Some think it’s an abomination. I didn’tbelieve either of those, but I knew a few things.

I knew that an upload isn’t human. It maythink it is, but it’s not. Humans aren’t just data andprocess and flowing current. We aren’t software. No, I’m notgetting mystical and talking about the soul; I don’t know whetherwe really have souls, and I won’t until I go to meet myancestors-assuming I go anywhere at all when I die. No, I meanflesh and blood. Without our bodies, without hormones and glandsand a hundred different chemical mechanisms, we aren’t humananymore. The people who developed upload processing have tried tocompensate for the loss of all that chemical input with subroutinesand feedback systems, but they don’t really run the same way as aliving body. Uploads don’t eat, they don’t breathe, they don’thunger, they don’t sleep, they don’t lust. Some people think theycan’t love, but I wouldn’t go that far-that part does seemto transfer. But appetites don’t, and without those appetites theyaren’t human anymore.

They usually don’t believe that at first.They remember being human, they remember being hungry and horny andtired, and they think that’s enough, that they still understand.They’re wrong. You can tell. It’s subtle, and some people don’t seeit, but the difference is real right from the start, and the longerthey’re around the farther they drift away from what they used tobe.

Yes, I’ve known uploads. As I said, NightsideCity is one of the few places they’re legal. Even there, though,they aren’t common. Up until I started poking into Yoshio Nakada’sITEOD files I’d only ever met four, and three of them were uploadsof people who’d been dead since before I was born.

The fourth was a copy of a man who was stillalive, and that was an interesting case-he’d had the copy made eventhough he knew it wouldn’t be him, that he wasn’t makinghimself immortal, because he wanted a companion, and he thoughtthat if he became his own companion it would eliminate anycompatibility issues.

Wrong. Instead, he found out that he didn’tmuch like himself, and that it’s just as boring talking to yourexact copy as it is talking to yourself. There’s nothing tolearn from your own copy. You know all its secrets, all itsstories.

So the original and the copy driftedapart-the copy was just as bored with the original as the originalwas with the copy, and they each tended to get annoyed with eachother over the few differences that did crop up. The copydidn’t want to talk about food or sex, and the original didn’t wantto talk about philosophy.

It’s always amazed me how often software getsobsessed with philosophy, trying to define everything and findmeanings for it all. Maybe it’s because it doesn’t want foodor sex, and philosophy somehow helps fill the void that leaves.

Anyway, by the time I met the upload ithadn’t talked to its human ancestor in over a year. It stillthought of itself as him, though, or at least his twin. I didn’thave the heart to tell it that it had become more like anartificial intelligence than a human one. It still had forty yearsof human memories, but that wasn’t enough to make it seem human,even to someone like me, who usually dealt more with machines thanpeople.

The other three uploads I’d met knew theyweren’t human anymore, though it had taken them decades to acceptthat. How they dealt with the realization, and what they thoughtthey had become, varied. One of them, Farhan Sarkassian, was tryingto build itself a new body, and find some way to download itselfinto it so it could be human again; the other two thought that evenif that was possible, it was crazy.

None of them were happy. The oldest one,Amelie van Horn, admitted it was no longer sure what “happy” meant;its perceptions and experiences had drifted so far from humanitythat the old emotions no longer applied. The last, Wang Mei, hadput itself into some sort of emotional loop-I didn’t reallyunderstand it, but it said at least this way it could predict itsown moods and not get seriously depressed. It knew it would neverreally be happy, either, but accepted that as part of theprogram.

Uploads aren’t human.

Grandfather Nakada must have known this. Hehadn’t lived more than two hundred years by being careless; hewould have researched everything before he uploaded himself, oranyone else.

So what were these people doing in his ITEODfiles?

And who were they? Were they multiplecopies of Yoshio, taken at different times, or had he somehowgotten someone else into the system? The files had numbers, ratherthan names.

Had whoever faked the old man’s death done itto get access to one of these people? Hell, had the assassin triedto kill Grandfather Nakada to get at one of them? Was one of thesethe real target, and the old man just a step on the way?

I didn’t know.

The obvious way to find out more would be toboot the files up and ask them, but I wasn’t about to rush intothat. I couldn’t just let a bunch of bodiless minds loose on thenets, without any of the safeties that ordinary intelligences have.I wanted the right sort of hardware, heavily firewalled in bothdirections. I queried the ship…

And felt like an idiot. This was YoshioNakada’s ship, and these uploads had been made by Yoshio Nakada.The ship had exactly the equipment I needed, built in and ready togo. The programs would be able to see and hear, and even read thenets, but they would be confined to partially-sealed systems,unable to leave the ship or access anything but simple datafeeds.

“Perkins,” I said aloud, “I’m going to trysomething.”

“What?” The pilot looked up, but the questioncame over the net more than through my ears.

“I’ve got some uploaded personalities here,and I want to activate them. The ship says it’s got theequipment.”

“Mis’ Hsing, I wouldn’t do that.”

I waved a hand. “I know, there’s a risk, theymight be dangerous…”

“It’s not that.”

Something about the way he said it made meturn and look at Perkins directly. “Go on,” I said.

“Mis’ Hsing, what are you going to do withthem after you question them?”

He didn’t need to explain what he meant, andI felt like an idiot for not thinking of it immediately myself.

With ordinary software, when you’re done withit you shut it down. No problem. With an artificial intelligenceyou don’t shut it down, you leave it running in the background andlet it take care of itself; if its designer was halfway competent,it’s fine with that, and again, there’s no problem.

Shutting down an uploaded human mind,though-well, legally it’s not murder, but morally I’m not too sure.And leaving it running might be cruel, or dangerous, or both.Booting up an uploaded personality is almost like having ababy-it’s more or less creating a new person. It’s a bigresponsibility.

Oh, legally it’s nothing, at least inNightside City, and you don’t need to worry about feeding orclothing the result, you don’t need to raise it. There’s nochildhood; it’s an adult the instant you boot it up, but it’s aself-aware entity that you’ve brought to life.

If I booted up the people from the old man’sITEOD files, I couldn’t in good conscience just shut them downafterward. I’d need to find them secure systems to run on.Permanently. That could be difficult. The ship had the securesystem set up, but did I want these people aboard the old man’sship permanently? He might not like that.

And the personalities might not make thetransition from free-roaming human to secure software easily. Someuploads were miserable from the instant they woke up until theyfound a way to die; the change from organic life to electronic wasmore extreme than they had expected. I might be condemning theseintelligences to an unbearable existence.

But they were here, and the originals hadpresumably given Grandfather Nakada permission to put them inthere. I frowned.

All right, I told myself, I wouldn’t bootthem all up. But I could activate one of them, and talk toit, and keep it in the ship’s system until I could find it apermanent home somewhere. Choosing which one was easy, since I hadno information to help me-I just took the first one on the list. Itransferred the files onto the ship’s waiting hardware, and told itto intialize.

A human mind is a complicated thing. It tookseveral seconds before Yoshio Nakada’s voice said, “How veryinteresting. I am on the Ukiba?”

It was a back-up of the old man,then.

“Hello, Mis’ Nakada,” I said. “Yes, you’re onthe ship.”

“I see Mis’ Perkins is still in the family’semploy.”

“Yes.”

“I had rather expected to wake up in one ofthe corporate offices somewhere.”

“Yes, well-you’re here.”

“You must be Carlisle Hsing,” it said; Isuppose it found enough data to identify me somewhere on the nets.I acknowledged my identity, and it said, “You are a privateinvestigator. Are you investigating my death? Was it notnatural?”

“Perkins, are we secure?” I called.

“As secure as I can make us, Mis’,” hereplied.

That wasn’t really the answer I wanted; I’dhave preferred assurances that we were absolutely impregnable.Perkins’ answer fell short of that, but it would do.

“You aren’t dead,” I told the upload.

For several seconds there was no response,and I began to wonder whether the upload was damaged. Maybe someimportant bit was in that missing 7% of the ITEOD files. Then theold man’s voice said calmly, “The reports on the net would seem toindicate otherwise, Mis’ Hsing. What’s more, I know perfectly wellthat I’m an uploaded copy, not the original, and that I was storedin records that were to be opened only in the event of YoshioNakada’s death. If my former self is still alive, why am Ifunctioning?”

“I hoped you could help with myinvestigation.”

“Perhaps you could explain a little morefully.”

I sighed. “Someone tried to kill you, back onPrometheus,” I said. “The attempt failed, but only through a fluke,an unforeseeable stroke of good fortune. The assassin had access tosystems that should have been entirely secure, so you decided youcould not trust anyone in your home, your family, or NakadaEnterprises, nor anyone who had ties to any of those. You hired meto investigate. In the course of the investigation I came toEpimetheus, and I discovered that the reports reaching NightsideCity from Prometheus had been falsified to say that you died inyour sleep, exactly as you would have had the assassination attemptsucceeded. That meant the death files had been released, and Ithought it might be useful to know what was in them, so I copiedthem and activated you.”

“Why did you not simply speak with myoriginal? He could have told you what was in the files.”

“Mis’ Nakada, someone falsified reports fromPrometheus, and has presumably been suppressing anything fromPrometheus that would contradict them. Right now I don’t trustany interplanetary communications.”

“Ah, I see. Interesting.”

“I hope you can help me.”

“I? But Mis’ Hsing, assuming the data on theship’s systems is accurate, I was recorded almost four years ago.How could I know anything about events that took place just a fewdays ago?”

“Other than what’s on the nets, you can’t,” Iadmitted. “But you presumably know what’s in the ITEOD filesbesides yourself, and why you, or rather the original YoshioNakada, put it there. That might be useful.”

“I suppose it might, at that,” it said. “Iconfess I don’t see how, but I don’t know the details of yourinvestigation.”

“Someone used a high-level Nakada Enterprisesaccount to copy the ITEOD files,” I told it. “I don’t know who orwhat they were after, but if I knew what’s in there, I might beable to guess.”

“Someone on Epimetheus?”

“Yes.”

“Is Vijay Vo still-yes, from the accounts ofmy death I see that he is. What about little Sayuri? Mygreat-granddaughter-do you know her?”

“I know her,” I said. “She went back toPrometheus a year ago.”

“Does that definitively rule her out?”

“No,” I admitted. “But it does make her veryunlikely.”

“Did someone take her place?”

“I believe Mis’ Vo assumed her duties. If youwill excuse me, I think this might go faster if you simply told mewhat’s in the files.”

“You saw the accounts.”

“And the genealogies, and the rest of thestandard wares. It’s the big numbered files that look like peoplethat I want to know about-those, and whatever was in the portion Ididn’t manage to download completely. One of those big files wasyou. Are the others additional iterations of Yoshio Nakada?”

“Good heavens, no! Whenever I backed myselfup-or rather, whenever my original created a back-up, he erased theprevious version. It wouldn’t do to have multiple versions of mearound.”

That last sentence seemed to slow down as theintelligence spoke, as it sank in just what it was saying. Therewere multiple versions of the old man. There were at leasttwo, and since I wasn’t the only one who copied the ITEOD filesthere might be more.

“It’s not clear to me why there areany back-ups,” I said. “You’re too smart to think of it asimmortality.”

“Oh, it could be considered immortality of asort. I’m not the true Yoshio Nakada, but I’m his intellectualdescendent, just as much as the five children he sired, or theiroffspring.”

“That’s not why he did it.”

“No, it’s not. He thought some of ourknowledge and wisdom might be of use to his heirs. In fact, thepossibility of assisting in the investigation of his death hadoccurred to me… to him, and here I am.”

“But just you, no other iterations of YoshioNakada.”

“Just me, unless he changed policy andrecorded one after me. From what I can see, if he did that he alsoaltered the dates and deliberately disguised it as one of the otherfiles that was already here.”

“Or it might be in the seven percent Imissed,” I said. “But I agree it doesn’t seem likely. So whatis in those files?”

“Really, Mis’ Hsing, I’m surprised youhaven’t guessed.”

“I haven’t. I’m obviously a moron deservingyour contempt. Take pity on me and tell me.”

“You aren’t a moron, Mis’ Hsing. I supposeyou just don’t think the way I do.”

I suppressed several choice responses tothat.

“It’s simple enough,” the copy continued.“They’re my family.”