“You mean they … that Peter and Evayne would find out where I was?”
“Exactly.”
“All this time I could have contacted them just by saying ‘hi’ to any old bed?”
“Which is the last thing you should be doing right now, trust me.”
Toby crossed his arms. “Didn’t we talk about whether I trust you? And the answer was…”
“Okay, okay!” Jaysir hopped up and down on the bed, looking agitated. “Just—just wait. Wait until you know more about what’s going on. Please. If not for me, then for you.”
Toby glowered at him, but somehow knowing that contact with his family was literally a word away made him feel safer—and willing, for the moment, to hear Jaysir out.
“So this is actually a hibernation bed?” It looked perfectly ordinary, until you examined the base.
“Stuff comes out of the hatches when you’re asleep,” said Jaysir absently. “You know, same way a space suit builds itself onto you. The bed’ll build its cocoon on you and not even wake you up.”
Toby remembered Ammond telling him that the nanotech and artificial organs that managed hibernation had been perfected over thousands of years. Now, though, he realized that while it might have been refined over aeons, probably every version had been commissioned and paid for by one client: the eternal Cicada Corp.
As far as the many civilizations on Earth and the other nonhibernating planets were concerned, the McGonigals had always been here. They predated the posthuman artificial life-forms; they’d inhabited these spaces before, during, and after the settling of all the nearby star systems.
Jaysir was right about one thing: he didn’t know nearly enough about anything yet. It was hugely tempting to interrogate Jaysir now, but he didn’t even know where to start, and how could he trust anything Jay might tell him? He’d have to investigate Lockstep 360/1 by himself—just as he’d already begun to do by striking out on his own.
“Jay, am I right in thinking that this”—he nodded at the bed—“is the most reliable investment in the galaxy?”
“Hmm? Oh, of course! Stable over thousands of years, and the McGonigals make sure that they own or otherwise control the lockstep technology everywhere, no matter how many strange mutations of culture and biology it gets passed through.” Jaysir laughed. “They can do this because they have the time.”
“Then what about the denners?”
“Come on, when you’re talkin’ thousands of years, and thousands of worlds and cultures, something’s gonna slip through the cracks. There are other empires with their own rules, and there’re … things out there so powerful they can completely ignore the McGonigals. There’s even better hibernation technology that sometimes finds its way back into the lockstep, in forms the McGonigals can’t control. Denners are a great example of that. They came from Barsoom, their ancestors were cats whose genes were altered so they could tolerate ice age conditions. They could probably have survived on the prehuman Mars, if there’d been anything for them to eat. All they need to do the job of the cicada beds is a neural implant to improve their internal clock and an upgrade on their synthorgans to project heat for waking a companion. You could theoretically modify a human to contain all the tech and not use a bed at all—but the beds can detect that kind of mod, and it’s illegal. You’d have to never use a bed again if you got modded that way, and that’s just not practical. But the denners—they give you the option.
“Anyway, lemme see that data block.”
Toby moved it away. “First of all, what are you going to do with it? What if it’s got stuff on it you could, well, sell? Or blackmail me with?”
Jaysir squinted at him. “Do you even know what a maker is?”
“Uh, yeah.” Jay had told him a bit about them when they’d first met, and since then, Toby had looked it up on the public net. Makers valued personal autonomy over everything else. The maker ethos was to build everything you used and not to rely on money at all. Makers might own bots—even lots of them—but they tried to be their own microeconomies and microecologies. Toby wouldn’t have been surprised if it turned out that Jaysir’s walking contraption made food for him as well as serving as a mobile hibernatorium. Of anyone he was likely to meet, a maker was probably the least likely to want to steal something from him.
“I want to look at the firmware and design,” Jay continued. “Maybe I can use it. I don’t care about the data! But it’s really old and probably incompatible with modern systems. Same with your glasses, so hand ’em over too if you want them to work properly. Yes yes, don’t be so reluctant! Why would I use a subtle ploy to track you or bug your stuff if we could have just knocked you on the head back on Auriga?”
Warily, Toby handed over the frames.
Jaysir folded his legs under him and put the block and the glasses on the bedcover. Then he waved over his bot, which began efficiently laying out various small instruments and tools in a half circle around him.
He started with the glasses. At first Toby tried asking him some of the other questions he’d been accumulating, but Jaysir just shrugged them off—he was concentrating. So with nothing else to do, Toby had to just sit back and watch.
After about half an hour Jaysir flipped the glasses back to Toby. “Try ’em now.” He slid them on and tapped the arm to wake them up.
Tags bloomed into view everywhere: hovering (apparently) in the bed itself, in the walls and beyond, where he glimpsed a ghostly half-visible map of the city and continent beyond. The mundane tags he’d seen through the tourist glasses were still visible, but now there was so much more as well. Jaysir’s bot was festooned with tags and labels, as was Jaysir himself—social media hooks, mostly, in his case. Even the chairs had virtual labels that indicated who owned them, where they were, and warned of prosecution if they were taken off-site or damaged.
“Oh!” said Toby, trying to look around at everything at once. His former sense of the lockstep world being strangely unsophisticated was quite wiped way: the whole place was alive in the virtual realm. This really should have come as no surprise; Toby had grown up with virtual and augmented realities and had been missing them since he awoke here. Still, so much was strange in the locksteps. The missing virtual layer had just been one more difference.
“Better, no?” Jaysir was attaching fine wires to the data block, so he couldn’t see the expression on Toby’s face, which Toby figured was probably a good thing.
Only a minute or two later, Jaysir hissed, “Yeess! I got it!” Even as he said these words, a virtual menu was coalescing above the block. “Data, data, you got data, Toby.”
It was a confusing muddle, though. Toby saw dozens of giant backup files, each indicated by a translucent safe icon (complete with a little combination dial). Knowing twentiers as he did, he supposed these would contain endless video of the thing digging—digging trenches, digging holes, digging in trenches and holes. But there were other files, too.
He sucked in a breath. “It can’t be!”
Jaysir had gotten to his feet. He turned and frowned. “What? You recognize something?”
“Some of these files … they’re game saves.”
“Games?” Jay shook his head. “Some games are on there?”
“Not just some games, Jay. The game.
“These are versions of Consensus.”
TOBY HAD ISSUED HIS brother a challenge: imagine, then build a world where he could be safe. The first thing Peter made with the Consensus tools was a cathedral of weapons, whose every brick contained a loaded gun barrel and every pillar, a bundle of blades ready to leap out and strike. It was munitions all the way down, and walls and locked doors, too, with roving sentry tanks and swarming drones and trapdoors. It was a magnificent hymn to paranoia, this cathedral, and outside its walls nothing grew: Peter had annihilated nature in this universe, just in case.