And suddenly she had it. The first life had prospered by exploiting non-life. She couldn't read non-life's mind, because it had no mind, but her empathy enabled her to understand how it should feel if it could feel. It would resent the exploitation, and want to protect itself. But it lacked a representative to defend its case.
I will do that, she thought.
She felt acceptance. Then the power came, infusing her, magnifying her, so much of it that she knew it would take her years just to learn how to use all of it properly. But she also knew she would have competent guidance. An immense horizon had appeared, infinitely promising. Yet also a kind of separation, as if she was losing part of her being.
Then she was looking at Havoc, amazed. "I found it."
"Awareness." He pointed to a spot beside her on the bed.
She looked. It was a little metallic wheel or gear. She reached to pick it up—and her hand shied away. "Question?"
"Ikon."
Her ikon! It had formed when she turned Glamor. She couldn't touch it; it was what she had lost.
"Symbol!" she called.
The woman entered the bedroom. "Question?"
"Please take my ikon."
"Oh!" Symbol practically leaped onto the bed, sweeping up the ikon and tucking it into her invisible bosom. "Gratitude!"
"Returned," Shee said. "I would hug you, but I don't think I can."
"Possible." Symbol fished out the ikon and held it out to the side at arm's length. Then she moved into Shee, and Shee hugged her. They had abruptly become specially close.
"I know you will keep it safe," Shee said.
"Absolutely! But what is its environment? I don't want to take it out of that."
"Matter. Charm is matter. Your body is matter. It relates to the inanimate. Stay close to a planet." Symbol laughed. "Commitment." She looked at Havoc. "You two need to be alone now." She left.
"Question?" Shee asked.
"Glamors have enhanced sexuality."
"So we do!" she agreed, realizing the urgency that infused her. She had given sex to him because she loved him and desperately wanted to please him. Now she also wanted sex for itself. She moved into Havoc. Then thought of something. "If no Glamor can touch any ikon, how can a Glamor touch a Glamor?"
"Mystery," he said. "We seem to represent the touchable part." He kissed her.
Then they merged in a session that seemed to put even the fifteen minute empathy effort to shame. It was true: the status of Glamor intensified sexual awareness and performance.
But it wasn't over, even after the fierce sex. "I must serve my constituency."
"Affirmation. What is its prime desire?"
She focused, and it came to her. "To be whole. Originally it was a single entity. Now it is fragmented into myriad lesser entities. It wants to stop further fragmentation."
"Clarification."
"The larger the units of matter, the more at rest it is. So it wants to prevent fragmentation, and promote unification. I need to ascertain how to best promote that process."
"It proceeds naturally," Havoc said. "Our twin star Void is drawing matter in to itself, and will eventually swallow Vivid and our planets."
"That will help. But it will not be complete until all matter is united, as it was in the beginning, the perfect state."
"According to Earth astronomers, that will not happen. Instead the universe will fly apart."
"Horror! That must be reversed."
He shrugged. "Maybe you will find a way, once the war with the machines is finished."
"It is a long-term goal," she agreed. "But in the interim, do not fragment any planets."
"It is the machines that do that, to abolish the living cultures."
"Affirmation," she said. "They must be stopped." she looked at him. "You knew this would happen."
"Voila saw it coming. But there is a mystery."
"Question?"
"The machines knew it too, as they see more than a month ahead. So why did they send you to me?"
"My mission is a pretense?"
He shook his head. "Negation. It is merely not the whole reason. The machines want Voila to join them. But they know the price of that is losing you to me. Making you a Glamor, and their enemy. That is an extremely heavy price. Is it worth it, or is there something we do not yet fathom?"
She nodded. "Voila is their top recruiting target, but even she may be merely a means to another end. They have a very long view. There is surely more. We must fathom it."
"Affirmation. But how?"
"Idea: I am a machine, with machine programming in every part of my body, just as your DNA is in yours. Your DNA is mostly junk."
"Question?"
"There are masses of irrelevant instructions in it. Only a small portion is used to formulate your being. The rest was relevant once, but was cast aside when better instructions evolved. That left over junk DNA contains among other things the history of your species, its ancestors, and life itself. It can be read to recreate your evolution from the dawn of life to the present. If my machine coding is similar, there will be a history of the machine species in the junk. That could indicate their real motive."
He grabbed her and kissed her. "You are my favorite robot mistress!"
"Gratification," she said, laughing. "Now you have a choice: continue working me up until I explode sexually, or allow me to explore my coding history."
"Unfair. I want both."
"Method?"
He hauled her to him and sat her on his lap. "I will attend to your body while you attend to your coding." He kissed her left breast as his member rose between her legs.
"Doubt." But she let him continue while she focused again on her own finger. If the distraction prevented her from discovering the code, she would be satisfied with his passion. She was, after all, made for it. "Lend me your paths seeing." For that seemed to enhance the exploration. The Glamors used it to see the near future, but it was really a way of studying all aspects of a situation simultaneously, organizing them into seeming paths that could be followed individually or collectively. She would have given her soul, if she had one, for that ability.
The enhanced perception came. Now she oriented with confidence. Her finger expanded in her view as his penis nudged her cleft. Men, regardless of their other qualities, were intensely oriented on sex. Her attention penetrated her digit as his digit penetrated her vagina. There was a satisfying unity in the two processes. They seemed to become one activity in her awareness. She enclosed and squeezed his member as she spread the microscopic components of her finger.
Living things were organized around cells, which were really little animals subordinated to the larger entity.
Her body was organized around similarly sized units, each a tiny device contributing to the larger machine. Each had its power source, its wiring, its working fluids and connections, and its programming nucleus.
She found the coding. It was indeed mostly switched-off junk, with only the key aspects activated. It might have been more efficient to reprogram to exclude all unnecessary coding, but patches had evidently been easier, and as long as they worked, they were left alone.
With Havoc's paths seeing ability she studied the junk. It was a huge junkyard of little immediate interest. Then she realized that what she wanted was the early coding, the start of the process. She could ignore thy myriad bypaths between the start and the finish.
She found the earliest trace, which was comparatively primitive—type 2 level—and traced it forward. It was confusing; it didn't make complete sense. There seemed to be a vital step missing, so that the process came into being from nothing. That couldn't be. Where was the origin?