Zephyr said, “You said something about flying?”
“What? Oh. I had a dream.” Had she thought to him about it already? “I was a bird flying over the sea.”
“That sounds like fun. Let’s try it.”
She went to the lab before doing their daily rounds of the station. With Zephyr right there they had an echoing feedback, seeing their own faces through each other, so they cut the link. Tess felt a sense of loss whenever she did that lately. It meant missing intuitive access to an encyclopedia, a memory storehouse, and a friend ready to speak on any topic. She felt dumber, confined to one viewpoint. “How is Caliban?”
“Mostly they’re playing games.” Tess’ tribe of friends on the Net was running a cluster of lesser AIs based on the public version of Mana’s source code, working with Tess’ friends as Zephyr worked with her. They were swapping knowledge between Castor and the tribe’s network, called “Caliban.” Valerie had slipped a disc into the book she’d given Tess, containing notes and software tools. Tess supposed the bot-maker was sort of rooting for Zephyr.
But there was more they could do. “We should be trying to make more money,” said Tess, and the words jammed in her head. She had to don the headset to get at them in the way that made the most sense.
Run a factory, take over a country, fleets of flying swimming things — no violence though, economics maybe — yeah, right — just being silly — If we could build our own circuitry, carve/grow any design with organics, no metal, we could make anything! Fly up to the sky, dive to the lowest trenches — Money, economics, tourism, industry — what? How to get rich?
Tess stripped off the headset again, overwhelmed by the maps and diagrams that flashed before her. She leaned against a wall and squeezed her eyes shut.
“Are you all right?” asked Zephyr.
“It’s too much. You’re smarter than me when it comes to raw data.” The stream-of-consciousness stuff was getting to her too. Maybe it was sloppiness on her part to think that way instead of in careful sentences. It wouldn’t be possible to talk like that with people not using the same system.
“That’s okay. You’re better than me at understanding people. We make a good team.”
Tess busied herself fiddling with a pile of tools. “A team? I don’t feel like I’m thinking straight, lately.”
“It’s us thinking. With you and me and your friends working together, we could work as one giant brain with shared knowledge. Isn’t it fun already?”
“Yeah, but it’s awkward too. Human brains aren’t really equipped for this kind of contact.”
“Why not?”
“Uh, we evolved. You can’t build telepathic communicators out of living protein, so we never got ’em.”
Zephyr said, “Sure you can! My body is mostly plastic and carbon, even some of the circuitry. Those things are organic. Also I found an article about gengineered bacteria that emit and receive radio waves.”
“The ‘Voice of Escherichia’ station, for prokaryotic talk radio, huh?”
“The what?”
Tess laughed and tried to explain her joke, adding, “It’ll broadcast in Germ-an. Sorry for going over your head.”
“It’s all right. As I said, you understand some things better than me. Anyway, what do you think about using bacteria to give yourself telepathy?”
Tess imagined germs seeping into her brain, and shuddered. “That’s awful!”
“Huh? But it’s a logical extension of what we’ve been doing. It means linking minds and sharing thoughts.”
Tess tried to articulate what it was that bothered her, other than the gross-out factor. “How would I even do that?”
“I don’t know an exact method, and there’s no way we could do the procedure here anyway. But eventually we could bypass your actual body like we’ve already bypassed your mouth and ears with that bone-conduction headset. Some kind of gengineered radio unit could pick up what you’re trying to say, and send incoming audiovisual input and other senses directly to you. Hey, want to know what it’s like to have sonar?”
Tess felt off-balance. “With a brain implant?”
“No, right now. I can map it to audiovisual.”
“Okay. No full link though; I’ve got a headache.”
Tess donned the headset once more, and saw only black. Then it hit her.
The world was made of light. Streams of energy flowed and wove through physical space so that everything nearby seemed enchanted, fading to mundanity in the distance. At the center was a gleaming figure with rivers inside, always changing and infinitely complex.
Herself.
She could only whisper. “This is what you ‘see’?” The view was beyond the plain imagery of a camera link, and it made her eyes water.
“This is maximum power,” Zephyr said. “Wasting energy. Can we use the full link while we’re at it? There’s more to show you.”
“No, no, enough.” Finally Tess tossed the headset onto a shelf, blinking repeatedly. The world had gone dull; the magic was hidden away. “Whew. My eyes.”
“That’s not all. Imagine if we could build that ability into you too, and infrared and ultraviolet. Did you know flowers have hidden designs on them in UV? You could see everything at once, feel the Net, even go past speech and link thoughts themselves—”
“It’s too much!” said Tess. “How can you handle all that at once?”
“I usually don’t. It’s confusing. But I thought maybe you’d like it.” He was looking at the floor.
“I do. I mean, it’s amazing, but going that far with implants and stuff, it’s not right.”
Zephyr thought for a moment. “You sound like Leda. She says things are right or wrong ‘just because’.”
Tess felt eager to change the subject. “You’ve been talking with her?”
“I’m making sure she’s okay. But I also agreed to help find God with her, you know. She’s been too preoccupied to work lately. I think she’s got a boyfriend.”
“The new guy?” Tess was still baffled by Zephyr’s promise to Leda.
“Yeah; they’re always together.”
Tess smiled, a little more at ease. “I wish Garrett would pay me that much attention.”
Zephyr’s ears twitched uncertainly. “I wish you’d think about what I suggested. Not now, but someday.”
Tess considered the implant idea again. It wasn’t just the ickiness that bothered her; it was something else. She was here on the sea station away from everyone, able to do anything she wanted. She figured out the problem. “Henweigh.”
“What?”
“My guidance counselor and official school shrink. I barely got her permission to come here, and—”
“I know.”
“She wanted to climb inside my head, to watch and control me and drug me into submission if I wasn’t a good little girl — and she got to define what that meant. It was wrong to treat me like that, but I didn’t know what to say.”
Zephyr stood there, tail flicking. “I’d never do that. Controlling people like that is evil.”
“Evil. Now you sound like the religious nut. Nothing’s really ‘good’ or ‘evil’ like it’s carved on stone tablets.” She looked at him and for a moment saw the machine body, a physical object devoid of the pattern of thoughts that made it meaningful. Without moral judgment, how could he be a good person or a bad one? She said, “You’re cool, but how can I trust you in my head? You could do something terrible to me even by accident. Mind control.”