“He’ll be fine in a minute,” she said. “Just needs to get it out of his system, and he isn’t used to it. Why don’t you all take a walk or something?”
There was a long pause, and then Roger got up and went out the door of the esty, silently. Esmé, Paula, Helen, and Jesús followed, sullenly. I trailed after them.
Outside I discovered that everyone, except Roger, was competing to think of how to complain about Iphwin and “that stupid kid.” I thought Terri was the only one in the bunch that had shown anything like normal human feelings, and when I couldn’t stand the nastiness any longer, I went back inside. The Colonel shrugged and followed me in.
Iphwin was washing his face in a bowl of water, saying softly, “You’re right, that does help to make me feel better. Hello, Lyle. Hello, Roger. I’m really sorry about all this. Are the others still angry?”
“Yeah, but I think they’ll cut you some slack now,” I said. “Terri, before anyone gets a chance to bitch at you about it, I think the way you’ve just treated Iphwin is really a fine thing.”
Roger nodded, emphatically. “I don’t think I have half your compassion and empathy.”
She shrugged. “Hey, I know what it feels like when I feel all alone and like nobody understands me. They say that’s normal for a teenager.”
“It’s normal for a human being,” I said, thinking about Helen and how much I missed the other version of her—and how much she must miss her preferred version of me.
“And is this what it feels like every time you get your feelings hurt?” Iphwin said. “No wonder you all spend so much time on human relations—it’s just sheer self-protection.”
I shrugged. “Most of us got our feelings hurt many times every day when we were children—because we were vulnerable then the way you are now, and not able to defend ourselves. We learned not to feel it so much, or not to admit it, or something. It takes practice to learn to cope with cruelty, but luckily, I guess, human beings will almost always supply enough cruelty to give you all the practice you will ever need. Everyone else here probably experienced things the way you do, once upon a time, but all of us are past it-—or at least we’ve reached a point where we don’t have to be overwhelmed by it.”
“Lyle, I’m really sorry. I had no idea how much disturbance I was causing all of you.”
“Another uncomfortable lesson,” I said, “is that since ‘sorry’ doesn’t fix things, you can really only say it a few times. And you do have to get used to the thought that now and then you are going to hurt somebody’s feelings, and you won’t be able to fix that—you just have to hope to be forgiven sooner or later. Your mechanical progenitor just had no idea what he was going to get you into, did he?”
“Not really.” He splashed the water on his face again. “That really is remarkably refreshing,” he said. “I know that tears carry off some stress-related biochemicals, so I suppose that rinsing the face helps get rid of them.”
“That, and while you’re covered in tears and snot, you don’t have much dignity,” Roger said, practically. “The others are standing outside in the sun, and probably getting bored and angry and cranky and all that. If you’re feeling well enough to talk, maybe we should have Lyle get them in here, in the air-conditioning, where there’s somewhere to sit down.”
Terri added, “It’s called being considerate.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m ignorant about emotions, but I have a great vocabulary.”
I went outside and saw that the bitch session was still going on. “I don’t understand it,” Esmé was saying. “What kind of mission is this? Civilians along for no particular reason anyone can name, except this thing about the mathematics of abduction. No clear-cut job like ‘get to the center of the disturbance’ or ‘find out where everyone went.’ We get shot at and he doesn’t even identify the enemy. I mean, what’s the whole idea?”
“I think we can talk now,” I said.
“Well, fucking great,” Esmé said, and strode toward the bus, Helen at her elbow. The rest sort of shrugged and trailed along.
The story we got out of Iphwin was reasonably simple: the program that had made him wasn’t the only cyberphage that ran in the net as a whole. His job was to reconcile messages, which was why over time he had become concerned with the number of people and places that were disappearing, and set out to find out where so much stuff had gone.
Billie Beard was another cyberphage—in fact, she had brought herself into physical being by copying Iphwin’s process for doing so. “It didn’t bother me to have my work plagiarized when I was entirely a machine intelligence,” he added, “but oddly enough, now that I have a fleshly body, it bothers me. Anyway, you could think of her as the department of pain control. Her job was to prevent things that were too distressing from traveling through the net. Now, as you all well know, the fact that every time you go into contact with the net you come back to a different world is, well, extremely upsetting. The artificial intelligence that was to become Billie Beard spotted this early, since it was part of her job, and began to re-engineer the net to make it harder for people to ‘hurt themselves’ by realizing what was going on.”
“Wait a minute,” Helen said. “She’s also been beating the shit out of us whenever she gets the chance, and she’s tried to kill us—”
“Has killed one of us,” Iphwin agreed. “I think that must have been her, and some assistants, who ambushed us yesterday. As Esmé has pointed out, the behavior didn’t make any sense for bandits but it made perfect sense for someone trying to kill or stop us.”
Helen sighed. “What I’m getting at is, I don’t see how a program that is supposed to prevent pain is doing all this brutality.”
“A little failure of definition,” Iphwin said, sadly, looking down at his feet. “I can see why it’s confusing, but believe it or not, Billie Beard wouldn’t understand what confused you. Her definition of pain is emotional distress you experience while you’re on the net, which is when she can experience your emotions with you. If she kills you or hurts you while you’re offline, she doesn’t experience the pain—and therefore it doesn’t exist, as far as she’s concerned.”
“It sounds as if from her standpoint the world would be a better place if she could kill the whole human race—as long as she did it off-line,” Roger said.
“That’s it,” Iphwin agreed. “When they go mad, machine intelligences go mad in the direction of excessive consistency. She’d need to kill everyone and suppress the news of it, because people receiving the news would feel pain of a kind she could recognize.”
There was a long silence as we thought that over. “Will she be on the other side of the border?”
“Not to my certain knowledge, but if I can get there, she can get there.” Iphwin sat back, folded his arms, and said, “Well, that’s as much really as I know about her. And before one of you points it out, yes, now that I have a body, I have a somewhat better idea of what ‘real’ is, and I know that you don’t much like being in a war between two machine intelligences whose objectives and purposes aren’t as real as the bodies that are being sacrificed to them.”
“True,” Helen said, “but most wars are fought over ideas just as abstract, so let’s not quibble. Now, how was she able to bring along Jesús and Esmé—or versions of Jesús and Esmé— when they already existed here?”
“I myself don’t fully understand the consistency rule,” Iphwin said, “but basically all it says is that the less noticeable a crossover is, the more likely it is. No crossover is prohibited, just more or less likely. I imagine that Jesús and Esmé were two of her best soldiers, and she probably just kept batting at the system till she got a version of them in the place where she wanted them. That’s how I got you all here—leaving a wake of versions of all of you stranded all over trillions of event sequences. Think about the odds of a royal flush in cards, and they ought to be rare. But if you could shuffle and deal a million times per second, and stop whenever you did get a royal flush, you would get them reliably.”