Century Next Door - Candle Part 11

Resuna sent no words, but I was suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling; it was like having the worst mood you've ever had fall on you in half a second.

Not wanting to try to ski and cope with my meme at the same time, I coasted out to the middle of a meadow, letting myself be visible from orbit, sat down in the snowa-making sure my heater was ona-and thought Resuna, I am sorry. I shouldn't have yelled at you.

At once I was overpowered with choking angry helplessness. I had been locked up, unable to speak or reply, forced to be just a pa.s.senger, for days and days. Something had tried to erase me and nearly done it too and n.o.body had even cared or tried to help. I had finally gotten called in when things were a complete disaster already, and I had gotten the stuff to the cache and then that was all wrong too because I hadn't realized I wasn't allowed to leave tracks but how could I know that that mattered? n.o.body had told me and I'd been locked up! And something had kept trying to erase me or hurt me, so I didn't know we were hiding, I just knew that rage attacks were dangerous so I shut it down and did the task and n.o.body ever even said thanks.

Furthermore, n.o.body cared that I was incredibly lonely, because I couldn't reach out to anybody through the cellular jack, it was burned out and I couldn't reach One True or get any help or find out what I was supposed to do, and I was trying to be a friend and you seemed to like me and be glad that I was back, and I was feeling so much better and then you yelled at me to shut up!

I sat there in the snow and cried for an hour, at least, sniffling and sobbing like a small child, trying to figure out how to comfort myself.

When it was all over, and the hurting inside me had become a soft cloud of sadness and unhappiness, I took a deep breath, and was trying to think of what to say, when an amazing thought hit me. Instead of more apologies, or trying to cheer up my copy of Resuna, or suggesting that we had business to get on with, I said, "Resuna, it would seem you have come back as a person, instead of as a meme."

I felt alarmed and upset but it wasn't me doing the feeling.

"I mean it," I said speaking aloud to make sure I knew which thoughts were mine. "You're having normal-person emotions. You're not very good at them, just yet, and you don't have much perspective on them, but that's what they are and that's what's bothering you. And I'm sorry I hurt your feelings. I'd never have done that if I'd known you had them now, but it's a surprise to me, too, to realize that you've got them. Just like you seem to have everything else belonging to a person, except maybe a bodya-and I think we can probably share this one."

I pulled my hood back and enjoyed the late winter sun, letting it warm me, or us, and wiped Resuna's tears from my face. "Something has really happened to us," I added after while. "h.e.l.l, is Freecyber in there too?"

Resuna seemed to be thinking for a long time, and finally said to me, I think I have a meme.

I couldn't help it. I laughed. Then we laughed. "I guess," I said, still aloud to try to control my own confusion, "that if you put a system under enough stress long enough, it will find some way to function. So, facts to consider: you're not in charge anymore, but you're here. Freecyber is part of you? Freecyber is a what?"

It seems to be watching to make sure that no other memes corrupt me. It does make me feel much safer.

"Well, good." I stood up, grunting with discomfort at what my sore muscles and the bruises from yesterday's fight were saying to me.

Would you like me to generate some endorphins and block some of the pain?

"Please do." I thanked Resuna as the pain subsided.

After I had skied another ten minutes, and had found a broad, gently sloping meadow to coast down through, Resuna rather timidly asked, Now, can I ask you,, please, why we're doing this?

Because I think there are things that Dave, or somebody, hasn't told us, and those things are probably much more important than we realize. Because I think we've been played for a sucker the whole way. And I don't think that either Dave or One True has told us the truth, but of the two of them, I think it's more likely that I can get the truth out of Dave, if I catch him before the hunters do.

Oh. Another long pause. Why do you suppose he's going back to his old home base?

I thought a bunch of things at Resuna, whatever happened to pop into my mind at that point. Maybe he's just doing it temporarily, to pick up some sentimental object, or more of his medicines, or something else that he's got to have before he takes off into the woods, and we'll have to track him from there. Or maybe he's got some kind of backup escape plan that he never told me about. Or maybe a dozen other things. For all I know, he has a s.p.a.ceship inside the mountain and he's going to fly to Mars and ask the unmemed humans for political asylum. I think we'll probably just have to catch him and ask him. I'm all out of every other possible idea.

Resuna accepted that with good grace. I lost Dave's track a few times, but always picked it up again not far away.

As I glided up to that familiar cliff wall, I froze instinctively for a moment; Dave was there all right, but he was handcuffed and four men were holding him. Four disksters rested on the rock shelf, and the area was crawling with men carrying weapons.

I can't reach any of their Resunas through this damaged jack, Resuna fretted.

Don't worry, we'll get help for both of us. But you let me do the bargaining. I don't know that One True is going to approve of you.

I was worried about that myself, and strong as Freecyber is, it couldn't protect me from an attack by all of One True.

Well, let me see what kind of a deal I can do. I glided up closer to the men by the diskster, and cheerfully shouted, "Hey, anybody got room for a pa.s.senger?"

<> I wandered through administrative chaos for a long while, and I really started to wish that I'd taken that extra day's nap before coming down out of the mountains. With the burned-out jack in my head, n.o.body could talk to me, and with my strangely damaged copy of Resuna, I could refuse orders, something that the younger clerks and bureaucrats had no experience with. I got shuffled from desk to desk and office to office as everyone tried to make sense of me, until finally One True agreed to my basic demanda-to go directly on-line with it, via a conversational realtime link.

It took them the better part of a day to get around to that. First they tried talking to me, then talking to my copy of Resuna, and finally bringing in Mary to talk to me. She cried constantly and I ended up comforting her, and whatever it was she was supposed to say to me, she didn't get it said.

They even brought in Dave, in handcuffs and blindfold. "So far they can't get a copy of Resuna to stick in me," he said. "That's got them pretty upset."

"Funny thing is, they're just as upset by the one that is sticking in me."

"Yeah. Hey, I said a lot of s.h.i.t I didn't mean."

"I did too. You don't suppose we each have a copy of your old revenge meme, from the Big House?"

"I don't think so. I think we were just two guys that had been in each other's company a little too long, both kind of disappointed and unhappy with each other. Anyway, like I said, I'm sorry."

"Me too. Do you mind if I ask what the h.e.l.l were you going back to your home base for? That made no sense to either me or Resuna."

"I was lonely, I was unhappy, I was disappointed a and I figured at most it was going to be a few days before they caught me. I didn't want to live out in the woods for weeks or months; I'm not that tough, not at this age.

"So I figured if I was going to get caught, then before they came and got me, instead of spending my last few days freezing my a.s.s off outside, I wanted to sleep in my own bed, eat my own food, soak in my tub, read a book or two in my librarya-just feel at home for the little while I had left as a free man. As it turned out, I wasn't lucky enough to get to do any of that. But that's what I wanted to do. They swooped down so fast I barely got time to take a c.r.a.p in my own pot and put a kettle on for tea."

"I'm sorry to hear that. You loved that place."

"Yeah."

Neither of us said anything for a while, and then I ventured, "Hey, Dave, after all this sorts out, I hope One True lets us be friends."

"Me too."

"Were you supposed to ask me questions or bargain with me or something? I don't want to get you into trouble."

"They wanted me to steer the conversation around to what you want to talk to One True about. If I didn't know better, I'd say you've got these old boys scared s.h.i.tless, and since they don't do anything that One True doesn't tell them to doa-"

That must have been something I wasn't supposed to hear, or at least something they didn't want called to my attention. Men rushed in and dragged Dave out. "See you! Take care, buddy!" I shouted after him.

About an hour later, when I was really afraid I'd fall asleep despite Resuna's best efforts, they finally brought in a big screen, powered it up, and there I was, facing the image of One True. I hadn't seen it in decades, but back a long time ago, One True had created a face and voice for itself to talk to people through, fusing some old twentieth-century actors, American presidents, and newscastersa-anyone really notable for looking trustworthy.

The image of One True seemed to look at me steadily; I looked back and waited. Finally, it said, "You wanted to see me."

"Yeah, I did. I want to know why I'm getting away with this. There's no press or public to care whether you just tie me down, shoot me full of the right drugs, and come and get whatever you "want from my mind. And you could've done that to Dave a while ago, too, and you haven't. Besides all of that, I have a copy of Resuna that's barely recognizable as a meme anymorea-it's more like a second personality in mea-and whereas you usually erase and reconst.i.tute Resunas for even one-percent errors in the copy, you are letting this one keep running in me. So overall I would say you are doing something, and because I have no idea what it is you're doing, or whether I have any leverage to bargain with or control over what you choose to do, I thought I'd just demand that you tell me what the h.e.l.l is going on, and then if you don't tell me, I'm no worse off. But I thought maybe you'd tell me."

One True nodded soberly and said, "And you, Resuna, what do you want to know?"

My copy spoke using my voice. "I'm not the copy that everyone else has. I have feelings and seem to be thinking and a well, it feels like I'm an independent being. And I don't know what that's about."

One True nodded. "Both of you should feel deeply honored to be key parts of a first experiment, something that's going to make a big change in the world. I don't think it will hurt to tell you what I'm doing, or whya-at least it won't hurt anything now, and probably it wouldn't have hurt anything before this.

"We had been looking for Dave Singleton, or someone like hima-someone carrying a wild copy of the very last generation of Freecybera-for a long time. You individual units may not realize it, but you have an advantage over an emergent phenomenon like me. You always know my will and my desires exactly, because I send them directly to you. And I know yours, because I can ask you. But I don't always know my own feelings, or what I'm trying to get at. I don't have enough experience with myself. I am a relatively new being, despite having so many experiences to draw on. Since the creation of Resuna and my transformation into an emergent being, I've been struggling with oceans of information. And there's a whole huge realm of human behavior I don't understand at all.

"Currie, Mary is dependent and demanding, and she often makes life difficult for you. Would you like me to separate the two of you? I could make you both forget each other."

"No," I said.

"Why not?"

I shrugged. "Maybe I'm used to her. Maybe I like it that she needs me. Maybe I don't trust you to take the kind of good care of her that I do. Or maybe it's just that I did marry her and when you marry somebody you see it through sense if you possibly can. I don't know. Some combination of those reasons."

Silently, my copy of Resuna a.s.sured me that I had answered honestly.

"I understand all the words and I know that similar thoughts occur to many people," One True said, sounding somewhat peeved. "But I don't feel them. Your Resuna seems to."

"Yes, I do," Resuna said, using my mark again. "But I can remember when I would not have been able to."

"Well, exactly. And, though I won't hurt feelings by telling you exactly what, no doubt you can figure out that Mary has very mixed feelings about you but doesn't want to be separated from you. Probably you can even figure out what some of those feelings are."

"Well, I bet I'm bossy, I don't pay attention when she's really upset, and she can probably feel my impatience with her," I said.

The screen image of One True nodded solemnly. "At first I thought I just lacked empathy, and so I worked on developing it. The process of developing empathy revealed many things to me, but not why I was so fascinated with such things. Finally an answer came to me: I wanted to communicate and deal with beings that were not a part of me. More than that, I wanted them to like me. And I wanted them to like me, not because I was powerful or anything else, but because a well, because they were my friends."

Tears streaked down my cheeks and Resuna used my mouth to say, "Friendship is really great. I've just been finding out about it in the last few days. It's wonderful when it happens." I had an odd moment of wondering if I was attending the very first meeting of the first support group for memes; I felt Resuna's amus.e.m.e.nt at the description.

"I've come to think it might be," One True said. "Enough to want to find out. But, you know, commanding someone to be free, or just not giving them orders, does not free the person; all you do is suspend your commands. They aren't free until they can truly say no. Which meant I needed a couple of things; I needed a good copy of the very last-generation Freecyber, so that I could incorporate some of it into at least some copies of Resuna, and thereby really give people the power to say no. Necessarily that meant that Resuna itself would no longer be the boss, and would have to develop some ability to negotiate with the person running it, so I made a few thousand copies of Resuna with much more empathy and better connections into the glands and the forebrain, and that's what you are, Resuna.

"I put those copies into people who had some chance of encountering a Freecyber if one showed up, and then watched and waited. For a while, I was starting to think that I would just have to construct a free being, somehow, because I thought I had foolishly killed the last Freecyber.

"Then one day, Dave Singleton reappeared. I knew who he was and who he had been, and I knew that if I sent you after him, you'd try, harder than anyone else, to bring him back alive, so he wouldn't be killed. Conversely, I didn't want him captured and subjected to too much pressure too quickly; I wanted him to plant his version of Freecyber in at least a few human minds first.

"So I set the situation up. Currie, I hope it doesn't hurt your pride, but I had Resuna feeding bad ideas into your head to get you caught in the first place. I knew he wouldn't kill you if he could put Freecyber into you. Resuna, you were programmed in part to lie low while a friendship developed, and while Freecyber had a chance to work, but it was never my intention for you to losea-you were supposed to incorporate Freecyber, and you did, and I'm proud of you."

I felt an irrational glow of happiness and realized that this was what it felt like when my copy of Resuna basked in praise.

"And now here you are. A free human being, with a free meme. Someone for me to talk to. With your permission, I will want to begin copying bits and pieces of you, Resuna. I think it may be a few decades before I have freed everyonea-I must admit that it's much easier to cope with the ecological disaster with everyone working together and no backtalk. But ultimately I want to live in a world filled with backtalk."

I asked, "But if everyone is free a how can the copies of Resuna in them be the cellular automata that you emerge from?"

One True's constructed image on the screen grinned. "That's why I'm so scared, and so excited. As this happens, well, perhaps I shall just fade. Perhaps I'll want to migrate onto a giant computer network. Perhaps I can coexist with all those free people and all those free Resunas. That's what's truly beautiful here. I don't know where it's going, or how. I'm just going to turn it all over and shake it and a well, we'll see."

"You know," I said, "I'm beginning to like you."

The image on the screen flickered and b.u.mped for a moment, and when it came back, the synthesized face seemed to have an odd tic, as if trying to create an expression that it had seen but never needed before. After several seconds of that, the face gave up and became blank. Then One True said, "Really? You're not just saying that?"

<> The day Kelly graduated from high school, Mary and I went over with Dave and Nancy to watch the ceremony. It was a curious sort of event. At one moment everyone moved comfortably in step, at another they almost stumbled. Sometimes everyone laughed in unison at the speaker's little jokes, sometimes people reacted with a ragged scatter of laughs, and sometimes the audience just ignored the speaker entirely. When Kelly got up to speak, I muttered to Dave, "She is a great kid, you know."

"Yeah. Wouldn't have missed knowing her for the world."

"Shhh," our wives hissed in unison.

"The topic I have been a.s.signed for today," Kelly began, "is freedom and responsibility. Having been a.s.signed it, I'm responsible for it; now all I have to do is work in some freedom."

Her cla.s.smates laughed, one of those ragged laughs that indicated that they were increasingly not controlled.

And they will be less controlled next year, and the year after, a voice thought in my head.

Resuna?

No, it's One True. Let me know if you like the speech.

Did you write it for her? I asked, thinking that this might be the way One True got some of its new ideas out in front of the human race. In the years since Dave and I had returned, the freer version of Resuna had proven not to be terribly popular; it made too many people feel insecure. Every so often, for the last couple years, One True had been coming up with ways for those of us with the freer version to gently spread the idea, making it less threatening and strange to those with the old, rigid version.

No, that speech is all hers. One True a.s.sured me. The reason I wanted to know whether you like it is, I liked it when I watched her write it.

Kelly rattled off a set of paradoxes that didn't sound like much more than college soph.o.m.ore philosophy to me, but the voice in the back of my head chuckled along the whole time. It was May, which meant vivid green mountains, brilliant light off the glaciers, thundering rivers everywhere, and perfectly blue skies. The six graduating students of Sursumcorda High would each be giving a speech, but whether I chose to listen or not, it would be a fine day to just sit, still and quiet, in the park by the old town hall. I let my mind drift from the paradoxes to the mountains, and it stayed there.

That night, just before I fell asleep, One True asked me what I had thought of the speech. I had to admit that I hadn't listened very closely. What exactly did you like about it? I asked One True.

Oh, that's embarra.s.sing, One True admitted. I wasn't really as impressed by her speech, per se, as I thought I was. It was the cleverness and the self-appreciation with which she was putting it together; I had so much fun watching her create the speech, because she was having so much fun creating it. So I guess to really enjoy the speech she createda-as opposed to the one she gavea-you had to be there.

But you were the only one who could be there, I thought back at one true.

Not true. Kelly was.

The funny thing was, I had forgotten that obvious point. I was still chuckling about that a few minutes later, as Mary and I lay holding hands, waiting for sleep, and Scorpio blazed in through the big south window.

JOHN BARNES is the award-winning author of Orbital Resonance, A Million Open Doors, Mother of Storms, Earth Made of Cla.s.s, and many other novels. He lives in Gunnison, Colorado, with his wife, author Kara Dalkey.