"Homework. I'm a freshman CS major at NYU. I wanna work on Comnet someday." He nodded slowly. So, he thought, they're making her start at the beginning and work her way up. That way she understands it. I wonder what they'd do with me? "I'm a bum."
"Same thing."
In the morning they arose together and went to have breakfast at a little outdoor cafe down on the corner. The bright sun of late spring was shining down on them.
After breakfast she took him around. At the Statue Stump, they got him registered as a landed immigrant. Brendan pointed to the fee schedule posted on the wall, but the fat, grandmotherly type behind the counter only laughed. "Don't let it throw ya, kid. We'll send a bill to Deseret." He could imagine his parents' expression when they got it, but they'd pay. The Contract Police had rules about the movement of people between enclaves.
He followed her to NYU that day. He noticed that most of the students liked to dress up in rather idiosyncratic costumes. He went to the registrar's office and found, to his surprise, that he could take classes for free. "We'll send a bill to someone," they said.
They gave him a battery of tests and seemed impressed. "Maybe we won't send a bill. Deseret's loss is our gain," they said. "Stay forever if you like." It went on and on. In time he made some adjustments and failed to make others. He enjoyed sleeping in Cara's bed, but then, she'd fuck anyone, anywhere. Sometimes he'd awake in the middle of the night to find her with someone else, right there beside him. Sometimes he grew angry. Sometimes he watched. Sometimes he joined in. He had sex with a man for the first time in her bed. Sometimes he went out alone at night. Finally he found himself sitting on a man's chest in a dark alleyway. The man had attacked him and had been beaten. He brought his heavy fist high and drove it down with all his might. It hurt his hand. The man hadn't died, but he'd needed extensive plastic surgery after that.
In a cafeteria argument with a philosophy major at NYU he was referred to as a soulless monster. He didn't know why, and felt hurt. Sometimes the feeling of directionlessness and growing insanity almost overwhelmed him.
He kept on moving, of his own accord, dancing to an internal rhythm of increasingly feverish proportions. He began to realize that he liked beating people up, hurting them as much as possible, almost as much as he liked fucking women. He thought of combining the two but didn't. Someone said he'd fuck anything that couldn't outrun him. He laughed at that. Someone else said he'd step on bugs if they could scream loud enough. He beat that person up.
Outside of his own pillaged memory, Sealock could feel himself being changed as the swift time reversal being wrought by Centrum progressed. He knew, intellectually, that it was all a result of software synchronization, but the imagery forced on him came with an odd emotional jolt. He changed and, changing, cried out with a commingling of wonder and fear. Head, arms, legs, torso. Gone. Like that. It was a mechanical-seeming thing, and swift. A succession of ticks, the beating of a clock, and Sealock the man was gone. Another such succession and Sealock the—what— thing was there in his place. Cephalosome and tail-sheath. Eight machinelike arms with two-fingered hands; eight matching anchorelles for pseudoautotrophic feeding. Retractile anophagomotor apparatus, for eating, eliminating, and propulsion. Here. Like this.
He remembered. We called ourselves a small, unbroken bubble of pheromonic oil. The message it contained meant, "That which has accepted a seed."
The being he had become had no discernible sensory apparatuses—instead, it had a hypertrophied sense of "touch," a subtle response to pressure waves and chemical changes in the surrounding methane. This, combined with a data-processing kinesthetic sense, was all it needed. The externally generated image-form which now occupied him did not come with very much in the way of memory, notyet, but he knew it would arrive, one piece at a time, as he developed the necessary complexity.
Stop time.
The world-lines unreversed and he was still Brendan Sea-lock, yet still changed. The Seedees were all around him now; he could sense them far away. Some flew through the sea, propelled on their jets like hard squid. Others clambered about the still ways on stalky legs. Still more were swept along by the standing waves of the great, endless transport matrix. They went about their tasks, filling the World Ship in uncounted trillions. Now, in the everlasting memory of Centrum, Mother Ocean lived. Sealock blew himself steadily along, knowing he must go to the central sphere, and looked at the pressure waves that brought him a bright window on this new reality. The matrix machine awaited him and still he saw.
When the messenger cell met him, he was hanging in delighted awe below a self-orienting photovoltaic generator, which would turn to suck up the light of passing suns, hanging in happy contemplation of its crystalline complexity. It was Machine, in its most quintessential form. He boarded the messenger cell. His anchorelles plugged in, there was a current flow, then he soared singing above the world.
At NYU . . .
Brendan Sealock studied. A man, growing up, may be accused of all sorts of infelicities. The various rites of passage that most societies induce are intended to demonstrate to the adult-candidate that a great change of estate is coming over him. They say, "You may now do whatever you please. You must now be prepared to suffer the consequences of your own actions." He was generally regarded as mean, petty, and vicious, with a mind centered on the concept of self. They all thought him dangerous and deranged, a
"thug." A few people even looked on him as a little bit stupid, but no one ever called him lazy. He worked. Though the colleges of the twenty-first century had given up the folly of a "liberal" education, recognizing itas an impediment to the technologists and a detriment to the artists, they insisted that a student learn a great deal about his own specialty. Gone were the days when a student could limp along learning "just enough." During the periodic examinations, if you couldn't handle any aspect of a task, you were sent back to study until you could.
Though the tests he had taken revealed a phenomenal raw potential and a fair amount of preparation, the Deseret educational system being nothing if not effective, Brendan had to start at a lower level than he'd expected. It angered him, at first, but he soon came to see the sense behind it. They made him study physics in a developmental-analytical fashion and gave him a quick grounding in historical electronics, then plunged into the twinned evolutions of Quantum Transformational Dynamics and Comnet theory. They said, "These are the things that you have to learn in order to earn our certification. If you want to learn anything else while you're here, fine. It's up to you. If you don't, well, most prospective employers don't care."
In the classroom . . .
The professor said, "We used to start with the basics, but we don't anymore. If you're interested, it's in the library. If you've studied all the various calculi, you're all set; if you haven't, don't worry. Boab analysis rests on a somewhat different underpinning from the rest of math. In the trade, we like to call it asshole calculus." He grinned as he drew them into the Tradition. "There are no instruments to guide you through this jungle, boys and girls. It's strictly seat-of-the-pants navigation." Cara giggled and the professor's grin widened. "Whatever," he said. "Anyway, put on your circlets." The poster-cluttered wall behind him vanished, displaced by a smooth, blackboard-like image. "It goes like this: Newton and Einstein went wrong in some very curious ways. Mr. Boab finally got it figured out about thirty-five years ago. The unified force field still exists—it just has nothing to act upon, so it's a little hard to work with. . . ."He waved a hand at the wall and fiery letters began to appear. "There're eleven variables and forty-one physical constants here. I know you all know how to solve for individual unknowns. That won't do usany good, unfortunately. I will now show you how to arrive at a simultaneous solution for the Blanchard-Higgins Inequality. It's called the Desrosiers Transform and is considered the root of QTD." The letters began to dance. . . .