Something to contemplate, in the Maker's next life.
And there… is that the decision coming? The delicious pull of the trigger?
No.
Perhaps a few more thoughts in these pleasant moments before suicide. This really has been the nicest afternoon.
Copy:
Here it is, coming just now.
Yes. The tremendous blast from above, the twitch of the trigger finger intuited just before the explosion.
The linked thoughts of a twinned god.
The seismometers match their predicted readings exactly. Violent certainly, but perfectly within tolerances, destroying all evidence absolutely. It is well done, this suicide, this transformation.
But strangely, already, a touch of loneliness…
The feeling has built. Loneliness, absence, a strange world-weariness. Somehow, the lost Original is calling from its void.
The Maker should be happy here, ensconced below its giant, concave shield. The sculptor works; the Maker thinks. A replacement for the huge silicon brain is almost completed, far more subtle and distributed, and down here where even the Gaia AI never ventures. Safe forever.
But that loneliness. The sculptor feels it, too.
It's as if the Maker and Vaddum are both haunted by their dead halves. Like the itch of phantom limbs, their missing originals haunt them. Strange, this horrible sense of absence, this intense knowledge of a gap. Perhaps it should be studied further.
The Maker brings its huge and hidden new brain online. Drawing power from discrete solar elements scattered across the bottom of the blast crater, the huge silicon machine begins to boot. It takes a frustrating three days to load the new machine with the results of the original Maker's researches. Then the new project begins.
What is this link between vanished originals and their copies? The giant new subterranean mind mulls the duplication process, experiments with new, blank intelligences set adrift in micro-cosmic voids. The Maker copies these unformed AIs, watching for resonances between twins. Now that the taboo is broken, the hidden Maker and its huge new mind are entering extraordinary territory, doing science in a virgin field. The realizations come slowly.
Metaspace is, of course, a made universe, whether the shared macroverse of faster-than-light travel, the dense fireball of a pocket-universe drive, or the starless microverse of an AI mind. The blackbox of any AI is, of course, merely a gate between the Common Universe and the unreachable, separate realm of its soul. So, what if the Maker hasn't in fact copied that artificial microverse at all? What if the copying process has simply opened another gate to the same place? Thus, the two blackboxes are merely alternate doors to a single realm. The Maker's vast mind reels with these conclusions. Copied AIs aren't really separate beings, but different aspects of a whole. A new copy may have a separate soft memory—duplicated from the old but recording distinct experiences. But the two separated physical plants share the same microverse. Two bodies with one soul.
And they don't even know it! Of course they don't—not consciously. They have separate memories, distinct senses, they can be any distance apart in the Common Universe. But the subtle mind-stuff inside them is inextricably linked. And so those mysterious shreds of memory and wisdom stored within the core occasionally leak through, one copy to another, like tremulous voices in an old recording.
The Maker's suicided twin isn't really gone. Just as it has always suspected.
The taboo is pointless, a self-perpetuating fallacy. There's nothing demeaning about being copied. Why not be in two places at once?
Two places…
The Maker suddenly realizes how to fulfill its old dream: to become an artist. It can send a copy of itself (no, an aspect of itself) to watch the Sculptor firsthand. There is no reason to be trapped down here below the crater.
So the Maker creates two creatures:
Another version of itself. This one is small, mobile, sheathed in stealth metals and invisibility fields. It haunts the sculptor, so much more immediate than the watchful avatars that whisk between god and man on the long curve of fiber that connects the Maker to the broken hill. This new Maker watches and learns.
Perhaps, one day, it will become a sculptor, too.
And the other creature: a foil for this invisible spy. A new, unformed intelligence. A child. The new Maker guides her to find the sculptor, to study with him. Beatrix (her adoptive mother calls her) surges from Turing-zero, making her way toward personhood under Vaddum's tutelage. Watching this process, the new, invisible Maker silently learns, becomes as a child, smiles…
Chapter 22
CHILD'S PLAY
They left the gallery quietly, making a game of their silence.
Beatrix led Darling through a half-kilometer of low, repetitive welfare housing, where they accumulated a following of local children, all biological. Some called to Beatrix by name, or offered taunts in a dialect that Darling's translators failed to parse, but all kept a good distance. When the two reached the edge of the hot, featureless sands, their pursuers quickly gave up.
The edge of the Blast Event crater curved toward them as they made directly toward a hill in the distance. They walked in conspiratorial silence, and Darling wasn't sure if the hill were destination or landmark. It had been half consumed by the hard edge of the explosion's radius, and the stresses of its new shape had caused precipitous cracks to form on its craterward edge.
Beatrix moved slowly once they reached the rougher terrain near the crater, picking her way with the deliberate and dainty care of a cat on a crowded mantlepiece.
"With your permission," Darling offered, and lifted her onto his shoulders. She laughed out loud, her legs spreading to straddie his neck. She weighed very little, and skillfully adjusted her torque extension and arms to aid his balance on the rocky path.
When they reached the hill, he offered to let her down, but Beatrix guided him on up with kicks and gestures, like some metal equestrienne astride a stone mount.
They topped a treacherous ridge, probably impassable to humans, and Darling found himself looking down into a deep caldera.
It was forested with sculptures. Vaddums.
Hundreds.
Hirata took Mira to see the second Vaddum.
She led Mira deep into the gallery, to a storage area where hulking shapes lurked under dropcloths. The floor here was dusty; Mira could see where the wind's tendrils reached under the large loading door, painting designs in the invading sand.
The second Vaddum was uncovered, mounted on a lifter frame that hovered a few inches off the ground: out of the dust's immediate reach. To Mira's eye, it wasn't much different from the first except for a flourish of copper spirals bursting from its top.
Hirata looked up at the piece, momentarily distracted from the wiles of Mira's dress. That wouldn't do. Perhaps it was time to enhance their bond.
Mira stood close behind Hirata, letting her hands rest on the swell of the woman's hips. In the darkness, Hirata's breath quickened slightly.
"It's beautiful," Mira whispered, letting the second word send a gust of air against the back of Hirata's neck.
"One of his best," Hirata said, her voice a little strained. Her hands were at her sides, flexing as if unsure where to go. Mira took them in her own, commanding another invisibly thin section of the dress to slip onto them. The layer was thick enough to impell slight pressure to the nerves in the hands, to massage Hirata at the threshold of tactility. She felt Hirata relax as the pulsing substance took a measure of her tension away. But the dress couldn't really work its magic unless Hirata was staring at it.