“Yessir.”
The 3D space of the office refracted with strobed images of both Joan and Voltaire. Nim studied the control board, tentatively mapping a strategy of numerical surgery. Simple deletion was impossible for layered personalities. It resembled ridding a building of mice. If he began here
Abruptly, rainbow sprays, played across the screen. Simulation coordinates jumped wildly. Nim frowned.
“You can’t do that,” Voltaire said, sipping from a tall glass. “We’re invincible! Not subject to decaying flesh like you.”
“Arrogant bastard, isn’t he?” the president fumed. “Why so many people were taken in by him I’ll never-”
“You died once,” Nim said to the sim. Something was going funny here. “You can die again.”
“Died?” Joan put in loftily. “You are mistaken. Had I ever died, I’m sure I would remember.”
Nim gritted his teeth. There were coordinate overlaps throughout both sims. That meant they had expanded, occupying adjacent processors on overrides. They could compute portions of themselves, running their layer-minds as parallel processing paths. Why had Marq given them that? Or… had he?
“Surely, sir, you err.” Voltaire leaned forward with a warning edge in his voice. “No gentleman confronts a lady with her past.”
Joan tittered. The simwait roared. Nim did not get the joke, but he was too busy to care.
This was absurd. He could not trace all the ramifications of the changes in these sims. They had capabilities out of their computing perimeter. Their sub-minds were dispersed into processors outside Artifice Associates’ nodes. That was how Marq and Sybyl got such fast, authentic, whole-personality response times.
Watching the debate, Nim had wondered how the sims generated so much vitality, an undefinable charisma. Here it was: they had overlapped the submind computations into other nodes, to call on big slabs of processor power. Quite a feat. Contrary to Artifice Associates rules, too, of course. He traced the outlines of their work with some admiration.
Still, he was damned if he would let a sim talk back to him. And they were still laughing.
“Joan,” he barked, “your re-creators deleted your memory of your death. You were bummed at the stake.”
“Nonsense,” Joan scoffed. “I was acquitted of all charges. I am a saint.”
“Nobody living is a saint. I studied your background data-slabs. That church of yours liked to make sure saints were safely dead for a long time.”
Joan sniffed disdainfully.
Nim grinned. “See this?” A lance of fire popped into the air before the sim. He held steady, made flames crackle nastily.
“I’ve led thousands of warriors and knights into battle,” Joan said. “Do you think a sunbeam glancing off a tiny sword can frighten me?”
“I haven’t found a good erasure path yet,” Nim said to the president. “But I will, I will.”
“I thought this was routine,” the president said. “Hurry!”
“Not with such a big cross-linked personality inventory-”
“Forget doing the salvage saves. We don’t need to pack them all back into their original space.”
“But that’ll-”
“ Chopthem.”
“Fascinating,” Voltaire said sardonically, “listening to gods debate one’s fate.”
Nim grimaced. “As for you-” he glared at Voltaire “-your attitudes toward religion mellowed only because Marq deleted every brush with authority you ever had, beginning with your father.”
“Father? I never had a father.”
Nim smirked. “You prove my point.”
“How dare you tamper with my memory!” Voltaire said. “Experience is the source of all knowledge. Haven’t you read Locke? Restore me to myself at once.”
“Not you, no way. But if you don’t shut up, before I kill you both, I might just restore her. You know damn well she burned to a crisp at the stake.”
“You delight in cruelty, don’t you?” Voltaire seemed to be studying Nim, as if their relationship were reversed. Odd, how the sim did not seem worried about its impending extinction.
“Delete!” the president snapped.
“Delete what?” asked Garcon.
“The Scalpel and the Rose,” Voltaire said. “We are not for this confused age, apparently.”
Garcon covered the short-order cook’s human hand with two of his four. “Us, too?”
“Yes, certainly!” Voltaire snapped. “You’re only here on our account. Bit players! Our supporting cast!”
“Well, we have enjoyed our time,” the cook said, drawing closer to Garcon. “Though I would have liked to see more of it all. We cannot walk beyond this city street. Our feet cease moving us at the edge, though we can see spires in the distance.”
“Decoration,” Nim muttered, intent on a task that was getting more complicated as he worked. Rivulets of their personality layers ran everywhere, leaking into the node-space like…”Like rats fleeing a sinking-”
“You assume godlike powers,” Voltaire said, elaborately casual, “without the character to match.”
“What?” The president was startled. “ I’m in control here. Insults-”
“Ah,” Nim said. “This might work.”
“Do something!” cried the Maid, wielding her sword in vain.
“ Au revoir,my sweet pucelle. Garcon, Amana, au revoir. Perhaps we’ll meet again. Perhaps not.”
All four holograms fell into each other’s arms.
The sequence Nim had set up began running. It was a ferret-program, sniffing out connections, scrubbing them thoroughly. Nim watched, wondering where deletion ended and murder began.
“Don’t you go getting any funny ideas,” said the president.
On the screen, Voltaire softly, sadly, quoted himself:
“Sad is the present if no future state
No blissful retribution mortals wait…
All may be well; that hope can man sustain;
All now is well; ‘tis an illusion vain.”
He reached out to caress Joan’s breast. “It doesn’t feel quite right. We may not meet again…but if we do, be sure I shall correct the State of Man.”
The screen went blank.
The president laughed in triumph. “You did it-great!” He clapped Nim on the back. “Now we must come up with a good story. Pin it all on Marq and Sybyl.”
Nim smiled uneasily as the president gushed on, making plans, promising him a promotion and a raise. He’d figured out the delete procedure, all right, but the info-signatures that raced through the holospace those last moments told a strange and complex tale. The echoing cage of data-slabs had resounded with disquieting, odd notes.
Nim knew that Marq had given Voltaire access to myriad methods-a serious violation of containment precautions. Still, what could an artificial personality, already limited, do with some more Mesh connections? Rattle around, get eaten up by policing programs, sniffers seeking out redundancies.
But both Voltaire and Joan, for the debate, had enormous memory space, great volumes of personality realm. Then, while they emoted and rolled their rhetoric across the stadium, across the whole Mesh… had they also been working feverishly? Strumming through crannies of data-storage where they could hide their quantized personality segments?
The cascade of indices Nim had just witnessed hinted at that possibility. Certainly something had used immense masses of computation these last few hours.
“We’ll cover our ass with some public statement,” the president crowed. “A little crisis management and it’ll all blow over.”
“Yessir.”
“Got to keep Seldon out of it. No mention to the legalists, right? Then he can pardon us, once he’s First Minister.”
“Yessir, great, yessir.”