“Damn,” I whispered. There were three other farcaster portals there and none were in constant use. Johnny could have farcast out immediately.
Instead of ’casting back to Lusus, I spent a few minutes checking the plaza and side streets. By this time the melanin pill I’d swallowed had worked and I was a young black woman—or man, it was hard to tell in my trendy red balloon jacket and polarized visor, strolling idly while taking pictures with my tourist imager.
The trace pellet I’d dissolved in Johnny’s second German beer had had more than enough time to work. The UV-positive microspores were almost hanging in the air by now—I could almost follow the trail of exhalations he had left. Instead, I found a bright yellow handprint on a dark wall (bright yellow to my especially fitted visor of course, invisible out of the UV spectrum) and then followed the trail of vague blotches where saturated clothing had touched market stalls or stone.
Johnny was eating in a Cantonese restaurant less than two blocks from the terminex plaza. The frying food smelled delicious but I restrained myself from entering—checking prices in alley bookstalls and haggling in the market for almost an hour before he finished, returned to the plaza, and farcast out. This time he used a chip code—a private portal, certainly, possibly a private home—and I took two chances by using my pilot-fish card to follow him. Two chances because first the card is totally illegal and would someday cost me my license if caught—less than likely if I kept using Daddy Silva’s obscenely expensive but aesthetically perfect shapechanger chips—and, second, I ran a better than even chance of ending up in the living room of Johnny’s house … never an easy situation to talk one’s way out of.
It was not his living room. Even before I’d located the street signs I recognized the familiar extra tug of gravity, the dim, bronze light, the scent of oil and ozone in the air, and knew I was home on Lusus.
Johnny had ’cast into a medium-security private residential tower in one of the Bergson Hives. Perhaps that was why he’d chosen my agency—we were almost neighbors, less than six hundred klicks apart.
My cybrid was not in sight. I walked purposefully so as not to alert any security vids programmed to respond to loitering. There was no residents’ directory, no numbers or names on the apartment doorways, and no listings accessible by comlog. I guessed that there were about twenty thousand residential cubbies in East Bergson Hive.
The telltales were fading as the spore soup died, but I checked only two of the radial corridors before I found a trail. Johnny lived far out on a glass-floored wing about a methane lake. His palmlock showed a faintly glowing handprint. I used my cat-burglar tools to take a reading of the lock and then I ’cast home.
All in all, I’d watched my man go out for Chinese food and then go home for the night. Enough accomplished for one day.
BB Surbringer was my AI expert. BB worked in Hegemony Flow Control Records and Statistics and spent most of his life reclining on a free-fall couch with half a dozen microleads running from his skull while he communed with other bureaucrats in datumplane. I’d known him in college when he was a pure cyberpuke, a twentieth-generation hacker, cortically shunted when he was twelve standard. His real name was Ernest but he’d earned the nickname BB when he went out with a friend of mine named Shayla Toyo. Shayla’d seen him naked on their second date and had laughed for a solid half hour: Ernest was—and is—almost two meters tall but masses less than fifty kilos. Shayla said that he had a butt like two BBs and—like most cruel things do—the nickname stuck.
I visited him in one of the windowless worker monoliths on TC2. No cloud towers for BB and his ilk.
“So, Brawne,” he said, “how come you’re getting information-literate in your old age? You’re too old to get a real job.”
“I just want to know about AIs, BB.”
“Only one of the most complex topics in the known universe,” he sighed and looked longingly at his disconnected neural shunt and metacortex leads. Cyberpukes never come down, but civil servants are required to dismount for lunch. BB was like most cyberpukes in that he never felt comfortable exchanging information when he wasn’t riding a data wave. “So what do you want to know?” he said.
“Why did the AIs drop out?” I had to start somewhere.
BB made a convoluted gesture with his hands. “They said they had projects which were not compatible with total immersion in Hegemony—read human—affairs. Truth is, nobody knows.”
“But they’re still around. Still managing things?”
“Sure. The system couldn’t run without them. You know that, Brawne. Even the All Thing couldn’t work without AI management of the real-time Swarzschild patterning …”
“Okay,” I said, cutting him off before he lapsed into cyberpukese, “but what are their ‘other projects’?”
“No one knows. Branner and Swayze up at Artintel Corp think that the AIs are pursuing the evolution of consciousness on a galactic scale. We know they have their own probes out far deeper into the Outback than …”
“What about cybrids?”
“Cybrids?” BB sat up and looked interested for the first time. “Why do you mention cybrids?”
“Why are you surprised that I mentioned them, BB?”
He absently rubbed his shunt socket. “Well, first of all, most people forget they exist. Two centuries ago it was all alarmism and pod people taking over and all that, but now nobody thinks about them. Also, I just ran across an anomaly advisory yesterday that said that cybrids were disappearing.”
“Disappearing?” It was my turn to sit up.
“You know, being phased out. The AIs used to maintain about a thousand licensed cybrids in the Web. About half of them based right here on TC2. Last week’s census showed about two thirds of those’d been recalled in the past month or so.”
“What happens when an AI recalls its cybrid?”
“I dunno. They’re destroyed, I suppose. AIs don’t like to waste things, so I imagine the genetic material’s recycled somehow.”
“Why are they being recycled?”
“Nobody knows, Brawne. But then most of us don’t know why the AIs do most of the things they do.”
“Do experts see them—the AIs—as a threat?”
“Are you kidding? Six hundred years ago, maybe. Two centuries ago the Secession made us leery. But if the things wanted to hurt humanity, they could’ve done it long before this. Worrying about AIs turning on us is about as productive as worrying that farm animals are going to revolt.”
“Except the AIs are smarter than we,” I said.
“Yeah, well, there is that.”
“BB, have you heard of personality retrieval projects?”
“Like the Glennon-Height thing? Sure. Everyone has. I even worked on one at Reichs University a few years ago. But they’re passé. No one’s doing them anymore.”
“Why’s that?”
“Jesus, you don’t know shit about anything, do you, Brawne? The personality retrieval projects were all washouts. Even with the best sim control … they got the FORCE OCS:HTN network involved … you can’t factor all variables successfully. The persona template becomes self-aware … I don’t mean just self-aware, like you and me, but self-aware that it’s an artificially self-aware persona—and that leads to terminal Strange Loops and nonharmonic labyrinths that go straight to Escher-space.”
“Translate,” I said.
BB sighed and glanced at the blue and gold time band on the wall. Five minutes and his mandatory lunch hour was over. He could rejoin the real world. “Translated,” he said, “the retrieved personality breaks down. Goes crazy. Psycho City. Bugfuck.”