Terra Novans had a strict approach to synthetic intelligences. You couldn’t just create and destroy them here. Bringing one in required processing. In the desert, Bob decided to free Robert from his service, to abandon the use of a proxxi. The priest’s lessons had sunk in. The only problem was that he was sure Robert wouldn’t want to be freed, but that was another bridge for another day.
“It’ll take a few days for the legal process to engage. You can still converse with him in a secure space, but his essence will be held in a holding world.”
Bob nodded.
Mohesha paused. “I do have one question for you.”
“What’s that?”
“This data beacon from Patricia, did you share it with anyone else?”
Bob stared into her eyes. It wasn’t a time to hide information, but something made him want to keep these cards close to his chest. “Nobody,” he replied.
28
“Can’t we just cut off the connection to Terra Nova?” Sibeal asked.
The excitement of finding Willy’s body—with Willy’s proxxi—wore off fast. Now they were trying to figure out how to reconnect Willy’s mind to Willy’s body directly. Sibeal was sitting at the cooking fire in the New Guinea village, together with Sid and Vince. Connors was observing through an avatar, and Bunky and Shaky and the rest of the gang from the White Horse Pub were ghosting through Sibeal.
Before any of that, though, one thing needed to be cleared up.
Sitting next to Sibeal on the log by the fire, Sid turned to face her. “Are you still planning on turning him in for bounty?” A part of him had thought that they’d never find Willy’s body, but all of a sudden everything had changed. He’d almost forgotten the reason why they’d struck a bargain, why Sibeal and her friends kidnapped him in the first place. Was the friendship routine just a sham? Just a scheme? In the background he was readying a systems attack that would disable the Midtown den. He waited for her answer.
She crinkled her nose. “Well, we didn’t really find him.”
Sid frowned. “What do you mean?” Was she trying to be clever?
“Vince found him. I mean, we couldn’t take credit for someone else’s work.”
Sid relaxed his attack vectors. “Otherwise you would?”
Now she laughed. “Cool off, hot shot, of course we wouldn’t. This is about more than just money now.”
“Good.”
“Good. Now can we work on Willy?” She began filling a shared workspace with Willy’s brain’s network connection topographies. “And you can let go of your sneak attacks.” She smiled. “Do you think I didn’t let you trap Zoraster that time?”
Sid laughed, shaking his head, and relaxed. He began highlighting paths on the connection diagrams. “Willy’s mind is working inside there.” He pointed at Willy’s head, and Willy’s proxxi smiled with it. “But it’s routed through Terra Nova. If we cut the connection, his consciousness will remain stuck in his head without any sensory input.” Full sensory deprivation was a fate worse than death.
Sibeal nodded. “So we need to open a channel to Terra Nova?”
“I’m trying.” With mounting cyberattacks and an impending physical attack, Terra Nova kept only a few diplomatic connections open. The connection to Willy’s head wasn’t one of them.
“Maybe we could just stick a wire in there…” Sibeal waved a hand at the base of Willy’s skull.
“Are you kidding? We’d need surgical isolation—”
“I am kidding.” Sibeal looked at Vince and rolled her eyes. He smiled back.
A silent pause was punctuated by barking howler monkeys. For the moment they were stumped.
“Okay, Wally, time to tell us what happened,” Vince said. “Why did you steal Willy’s body?”
Willy’s proxxi stared at the smoldering fire at the bottom of the cooking pit, his face smeared with Yupno warrior paint, caked around his forehead and into his hair. Taking a deep breath, he looked up at the gang.
“Jimmy Scadden is stealing peoples’ souls inside the Atopian system.”
Now Sid rolled his eyes. Please, tell us something we don’t know. “And that’s why you left, because you found out?”
Willy’s proxxi nodded.
More silence while monkeys howled.
“That’s just great,” Sid said, throwing a sweet potato into the fire. A whole lot of work for nothing. But it wasn’t nothing. They had finally found Willy’s body. That was something. He picked up another potato.
“There’s more.” Willy’s proxxi looked at Sid. “He’s not crazy, not some psychopath. It’s not Jimmy’s fault. He’s been infected—his mind breached—he’s not in control.”
Sid stopped mid-swing. “And you know who this person is?”
Wally shook his head. “I found out when Jimmy helped me re-program the Atopian perimeter. He gave me access to his personal conscious firewall subroutines. A communication leaked out.”
“And that’s when you left?” Vince asked.
“I had to. Whatever was controlling Jimmy, it knew I’d found out. It would have killed us.”
“And what are these crystals you went and looked at?” asked Sibeal. Her research revealed that they interacted with neural potentials.
Wally smiled. “So you saw that. I found some embedded in the Atopian infrastructure. When Jimmy leaked the communication to me, it mapped back to a set of nodal points.”
Sid tried to put it together. “So what, this is like a different version of synthetic reality technology?”
“If it is, it’s far advanced of anything I’ve seen,” Sibeal observed.
“Is this why they tried to destroy Atopia?” Sid frowned. Even if Jimmy was being controlled by someone else, sacrificing hundreds of thousands of lives aboard Atopia seemed a heavy price.
“I don’t know.” Wally shook his head. “I was just trying to protect Willy. When I saw Vince drop the repeater connection point here, it seemed about as far away as I could get.” He looked away.
“Are you okay?” Sid asked. Willy’s proxxi looked like he was going to cry.
Wally took a deep breath. “I’m not scared, not for me.” He sniffled and smeared the war paint across his face with the back of one hand. “Have you talked to Willy? Is he okay? It’s been so frustrating—he’s right inside here”—he tapped his skull with one finger—“but I have no way of talking with him.”
“Don’t worry. Your brain activity looks normal.” Sid had done an external scan. “Bob’s at Terra Nova now. He’ll get in touch and we’ll be able to sort this out soon.”
“I still don’t understand why the Terra Novans wouldn’t just try to isolate Jimmy,” Sibeal said. “Why try to destroy the entire Atopian colony?”
Sid nodded. It seemed like overkill no matter which way he tried to look at it. Suspicious overkill. “We’d need to get a channel into Terra Nova—”
“That won’t be a problem.”
Everyone turned around.
Bob stood at the edge of the jungle, still in his white robe and sandals. “The Terra Novan Council is about to start. I suggest we look for answers there.”
29
The light came from within and without, the surface function of the meeting space like a stone worn smooth in the river of time. The space was thought-plastic, molding itself around each attendee. At the head of the table-concept was Tyrel, leader of the Terra Novan Council. At his side was Mohesha, surrounded by a halo of the other members of the Terra Novan leadership. Their faces appeared both young and old at the same time, their features harmonizing with the thought patterns of the observer. In the background, fleeting images shifted in dark forests, thoughts and ideas and images spinning through the meta-cognition systems of the assembled, each merging with the other through virtual-synaptic connections that brought the separate parts into a single, cohesive whole.