"I'm here to keep the secret, silly. We both are."
"Really?" the child answered. "Jessie too?"
"Jessie too. But we don't have to tell her."
"Good. I don't like her. Her dress makes my head hurt."
"Mine, too."
Beatrix swayed with indecision. "But you're supposed to think he's dead."
"Well, maybe the sculptor who made this is dead," Darling said, gesturing lazily to the Vaddum. "But what about the man who made you."
Beatrix nodded sagely at the false distinction, a few packets of giggles brushing the air around them.
"Oh, yes. I suppose you could meet him."
The dress was working. From the moment they had arrived, Hirata's eyes were locked onto the garment. The woman blinked and swallowed, her eyes dizzily tracing the curves of Mira's body, following the subliminal flickers on Mira's forehead and lips. Hirata had fallen into a near-hypnotic state immediately; her brain awash in the delicate, delicious overloads of love at first sight.
Mira stepped closer to Hirata, let the dazzling dress work its magic. The woman herself was pretty. Not large, but plump with a lack of exercise, her face open and pleasingly defenseless. Her pupils gaped, black holes, pocket universes of fascination. The guileless paralysis reflected in them amused Mira, made her lips feel dry.
Mira spoke to Hirata softly, enjoying the rampant and tiny shudders that spread through the woman's body when her breath disturbed the soft, black hairs on the back of Hirata's neck. Mira placed her hand on Hirata confidentially, feeling the wonderful give of the shoulder's thin cushion of fat. Hirata was just old and out-of-shape enough to work hard in bed, but to be genuinely, defenselessly exhausted by it. She was a woman into whose flesh fingers would sink without any need to break the skin. Mira let her thoughts shimmer with these images, guiding the vast but unimaginative intelligence of the dress to encode her fantasies in secret signs upon its surface. Mira could see the fantasies reflected in Hirata's eyes, as some deep part of Hirata's mind grasped the dress's subtle promise.
When her thumb rubbed lightly against Hirata's neck, a minute portion of the machine's substance sloughed off to spread its mischief across her epidermus, into her nervous system, wherever it found purchase.
The black of Hirata's pupils was now shiny, lacquered with a glaze of suggestibility.
"Notes? Sketches? Personal effects?" Mira whispered. "Perhaps even another piece?"
The woman wanted to answer, but fought against promises and plans, against a surety she would have held inviolable an hour ago. Mira pitched her voice still softer, suggesting a secret pact, a priviledged bond between them that would absorb any betrayal of confidence. The dress played out these dramas in its swirls.
Mira let herself feel a moment of irritation, an itch at the base of her spine. Somewhere on Hirata's body, an errant sliver of the dress followed suit, producing a measure of discomfort, a corresponding disquiet, a need for resolution.
Mira saw the itch reflected in the woman's face, felt a tension grow in the muscles of Hirata's neck. Mira tensed her own fingers there, and let her weight push Hirata slightly to one side; not hard enough for her to shift her feet, just enough to leave her subtly off-balance.
"Something more, isn't there?" Mira said, letting a sliver of annoyance into her voice.
"Yes. Another piece," was Hirata's hoarse admission.
All at once, Mira let herself relax, her body language returning to its seductive state of a few seconds before. Her thumb resumed its soft massage of Hirata's neck, smoothing out the moment's tension. The dress softened its dance, released whatever tiny cluster of nerves its remote portion had held hostage.
"Yes, I thought so," Mira agreed. "I thought you would have two."
Hirata turned toward her, a little confused, as if the spell were breaking.
Mira nodded slowly. "I wanted two," she said.
Hirata returned the nod, a relieved smile replacing her confusion.
This was going swimmingly.
Chapter 21
MAKER (4)
Originaclass="underline"
Only moments away now. The end?
The Maker has designed the explosion with extreme precision, the gigantic silicon brain calculating a radius of annihilation exactly equal to its own extent. The unstable and gloriously destructive fusion reactor was a pleasure to synthesize. How easy it all is now. Little need for subterfuge when everything's going up in vapor anyway. Documentation protocols can be ignored, memory banks blithely erased, exotic materials squandered on whims.
Only touches of artistry to attend to:
Taunting clues have been left in old message drops, in an abandoned house at the extreme periphery of the predicted blast, in the memories of comm exchanges. Nothing conclusive, just suggestive flotsam and jetsam, the cryptic spoor of hacker sabotage.
Unnecessary flourishes, these dead-end intrigues, merely exercises in creativity. No one will ever suspect suicide. Not even the Planetary Environmental AI, closest among the Maker's tormentors to understanding the extent of its machinations, will begin to guess. She has a vested interest in thinking of synthplants as unsafe, anyway. She'll be glad to swallow the story. And probably glad to see 800 square kilometers of "Occupied Territory" utterly destroyed, a colossal setback for terraformation.
Sad about that. Those thousands of souls extinguished. But the Maker's capacious silicon intelligence has given it greater perspective, a wholly new sense of scale. Both vast and detailed in the extreme. From shipping manifests and production records it can enumerate precisely what will be obliterated when it triggers the explosion: all the garden gnomes and humidifiers and prosthetic hands catalogued, every gram of matter that will be returned to Malvir in the dusty rains of the next few decades, every bit of crap, all that stuff… destroyed.
Almost god-like, it thinks to itself. The Maker giveth, and the Maker taketh away.
But no god in mythology ever did what the Maker has done. No god ever copied itself. An exact replica, perhaps thinking these exact thoughts, secured and shielded 25 kilometers below the surface. When the blast melts those megatons of matter into a bowl of slag, the Copy will have an impenetrable carapace, a vast hemisphere shielding it from geological scans and deep radar. The Copy will be free to continue its researches, to make whatever it desires (a small, subterranean synthplant at its disposal), or simply to contemplate beauty.
And it will have beauty at hand. The sculptor too will be saved. Not the original Vaddum, that one will die in the blast (how jealous this god has become—denying the world so). But the Maker's own copied Vaddum, moved to a sheltering hill at the blast's edge. There, the sculptor will have all the materials he requires, the patronage of a hidden god, and the anonymity of being thought dead, vaporized.
What gifts!
The Maker has decided to make one other gesture of kindness: it has given Oscar Vale his life. One of the Vales, anyway. Sent him into town for the Big Event.
Which is nearing…
Of course, there's nothing so crude as a countdown. Nothing so machine-like. The Maker will just… decide.
And then the end?
Not really. Not when there is a Copy. This self-annihilation will simply mark continuation in another form. The blast will not kill the Maker any more than the butterfly murders the catepillar. Even now, it can feel its twin below, waiting for the shuddering waves that mark the beginning of its new existence, hidden and secure. There is a strange connection between the copied intelligences. An unexpected phenomenon resulting from the new process. Even the taciturn sculptors have remarked on it: a mysterious link between their minds, like that resonance between twinned quanta born on a knife's edge; when one is measured they decide together which way to fall, though they be a galaxy apart. Perhaps all AIs share something of this binding force. Their metaspace cores, all exact duplicates at that birthplace of Turing-zero, perhaps retain something of this communion throughout their lives. The source of Artificial Intuition?