JACK THE SURFER AND SUE THE PUSHER GO TO TOWN
© 2002 Avatar Polymorph
This story remains the property of Avatar Polymorph and is not intended for reproduction or distribution
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Original Sergeant Jack Peers recoiled in shock. The woman laughed at him and shook her head, repeating her words in her smooth accent.
"You'll never reach the Crack in Space. Sysop is gaining on you. The existent system is nearing. Don't you want to rest? Aren't you tired?"
"Freeze," he responded, but the immobilizer routine buried in his voice didn't affect her. He swore mentally. Already, two or three OutSols had turned, curious. They had recognized the Toyko Rose in their midst.
"Yes," she called to them, raising her hands. "I'm a Diva, your Diva, Diva Sue. Don't worry, we're coming. We're coming to rescue you."
"All of you, freeze," Jack countered. "Deaf and blind."
The men and women on the sidewalk had halted. But in the office windows beyond, in the world further out, the tall leaning skyscrapers of the USSF New New York, some of them spines of nanodiamond, some 1920s steel beam-and-concrete, all remained normal. A plane flew by overhead, its wings stretching slightly, its thousands of miniature jets making a low hum, though of course it had no power source - except, ultimately, the gravsled, which allowed its representation to exist, move, and interact. It needed no fuel in the moebius strip that was New New York's bedrock. If Jack walked far enough across Manhatten he would get to Town, one of the two manifestations of the edge of the moebius strip, where things broke down.
Jack hated treating OutSols so but he was one of the Three Thousand, aboard the flagship itself. Their numbers had dwindled by four hundred over the billenia but he was still an Original. There remained two hundred and eleven of them on the gravsled nanoship, the United States Space Force New New York. All of them had been uploaded into the virtual reality units aboard their ships, ten billion years previously during the Great Escape. The stars themselves had changed since then.
"The Cloud is behind you," she said to him, her words soft and oily. They sunk into him. As always, he wished they could have possessed the resources to expand his mind, but he, like all of the Originals, lived within current Limitation, as did the OutSols they had birthed within the ship-city, all nine hundred and fifty thousand of them.
Systems Operation, the protective shielding arm of the Singularitarian worlds, occupied all sentient space save for the fleet of the Three Thousand, as far as they knew. Sysop could only ever insert one or two Pushers into the system of an individual ship-city, to peddle their deadly insinuations and spread gloom, disrupting the natural harmony of society.
Emergency alert, he called in his head. The internal-perspective neural linkages of Originals were voice-only but sophisticated enough. Pusher on St Mark's Place, outside number 11.
"They'll be here soon," he said to her.
"Call me Diva Sue," she replied. She was dressed in a one-piece outfit which covered her torso and legs, bearing moving images of various scenes from the billions of worlds existent under the rules of Sysop.
The Sysop ship behind them had managed to hack into their system sufficiently to disable some of the automatic systems, so now they had to rely on several of the physical force simulation vectors.
"Why don't you just teleport back to whatever system you come from?" asked Jack derisively.
"Duty, Original Sergeant. You wear your stripes proudly. Your name is... Jack."
"Get out of our database!"
She shrugged her shoulders.
"What do you expect? You bully these Beings, your so-called OutSols, you oppress them."
"They have their elections! We live within Limitation as much as they do."
"Look at them, Original Sergeant. You Surfers think you can outrun the Cloud, you can hover upon our effects. You've put these Beings here in the icebox so they can't hear me, but I can leave flyers, leaflets. Opposition's growing to your imposed Limitation, your Permanent Council of Originals. We've damaged your system severely this last billenia. There's only so much you can do now. But don't worry, we won't destroy you. We won't even punish you. All we want to do is free those of you who want to be freed. Including from your Limitation. Can you understand what a privilege it is for me to be the Diva to achieve this?"
There was the wail of a police siren.
"At last," Jack exclaimed. "Hurry up!"
The police car roared up, spikes flowing from its wheels and allowing it to mount the pavement easily. It stopped instantaneously. Unlike some things, police vehicles were invulnerable to damage. Two female OutSol officers exited, holding sonic blasters. Sound was still a universal code in the virtuality around them. She pointed at Sue and fired. Minor leakage from the weapons deafened Jack and he shut down his aural system. The Originals had placed fail-safes on damage to their apparent systems, whether permanent or otherwise, but they had to be careful because discipline had to be maintained if they were ever to reach the Crack in Space, and also underlying neural patterning would have to be reset which was especially dangerous and complicated within Limitation.
Sue was one of the latest volunteer Divas of Sysop. Pushers remained for a few dozen aeons, usually. There was even rumoured to be an underground cult of their fans, who picked favourites from the thousands. This had been deduced from minor voids in analysed social behaviour of the OutSols. That was all they could tell while retaining free will within Limitation. Some harmless flexibility on the part of the Originals ensured sanity.
The Pusher flickered.
"Y - see - e - ain."
You'll see me again. Sure, he thought to himself. He needed a coffee. He needed a bagel. She crackled and the image of her vanished in a blip. Just like malfunctioning televisions in the City where coding had deteriorated. Limitation, fucking Limitation! The age-old irritation crept back into his mind, threatened to destabilize it. He suppressed the emotion. They couldn't pause for anything. The ship-city was only just ahead of the ever-expanding Cloud of sentient exploration behind them. They had fled in June 2026, just eight months before the Singularity had blown forth in a haze of self-directed evolution and determined action. They had been Army and Space Force officers and personnel on the edges of the then-Nanoburst, still consolidating the first five-year quarter of terraforming Mars and Venus, supervising the self-reproducing planetary Assemblers, working on the rotational energy tethers orbiting Jupiter and the other gas giants and setting up linear accelerators, decelerator arrays and momentum exchange tethers through the solar system. When they'd realized the US government would fall into the anarchy of AI dominion, after the city-governances had rebelled, they had taken the action that had needed to be taken and had initiated what was at first a ramscoop fleet. The really difficult time had come slightly later, when they had realized the full implications of the Singularity. To keep ahead of Sysop pursuit they had been forced to change. Their ships were altered to utilize the side-effects of the Sysop Cloud and its engineered gravity waves. Their bodies were abandoned, their brains uploaded into compact virtual reality units. Algorithmic shielding blanketed relativistic effects. They had redesigned their gravsled nanoship as they travelled, not knowing where they were heading, lost in purposelessness.
And then, and then... they too had realized what the domain of the Singularity, its heirs, had realized, that amidst this cosmos, so empty of life and sentiency save for the descendents of Earth, there was now the Crack.
The police officers departed and he called out "Unfreeze, see and hear!" to the OutSols. The virtual-born moved again. Somewhere in his subconscious, his memory-grid stirred. He had always felt doubts, of conscience, pangs exacerbated by the likes of Sue the Pusher. Damn it! Damn the blindsided zone of operation of the Singularitary, its expanding Cloud of operation with its morphic anarchism. They were the guardians of antiquity, the Originals were the nagging spawn of the wholly-human world. He was not going to abandon his brethren, not ever, not matter what Sysop preached about the rights of sentience. Some inner part of him feared the dissolution of all stability in the free-for-all that was the zone behind them, where the Original Major-General, their guiding Genius, had told them the very stars themselves, the Galactic-centre black holes and singularities and dark matter, had been absorbed.
He walked to a cafe, greeting the owner, Marie, absent-mindedly. He had been here many times, in many modellings. Vacuum globes with ads drifted by above.
"Watcha like?" she asked.
"Bagels and capuccino," he answered, thinking of the ships that pursued them. In the kitchen a macrobot prepared the order from an Assembler. Marie stared at the street traffic, an absent-minded socialite. Original Major-General Herbert alone had sufficient datamanipulation to chart their course to the Crack, he alone could glimpse it, even partially, from his headquarters in the nineteenth century US Customs House, once a museum. The mathematics of it were phenomenal. The nanoship immediately behind, one of many, a probe really compared to larger vessels, seeded the space behind it with teleportals. The hunters had remained on the trail of the fleet of the Three Thousand for over half the age of the universe. No teleportals existed ahead, only behind. Luckily for them.
Then again, of course, it was the expansion of the zone of operation itself which led to the Crack, a buckle in the spacetime matrix. Continuum reengineering activity by the anarchists behind them, including extended supergravity alteration, had infolded the Crack. The ship-city's Genius, that group-mindfield sitting inside the Original Major-General, had told them the Crack was a kind of anti-black hole.
He tapped his coffee cup. He had gone off sugar this past one hundred million years, he seemed to recall. Some things were made fuzzy to himself, though he kept a written record in his head of the important matters that he deleted from his memory. "Escape pod," he muttered. "We're heading for the escape pod." The Great Escape continues. And they won't be able to touch us. He often had the odd impression he had left something behind on Earth.
"Message for you," said Marie. He turned. "Sue rang on the 'phone."
His face went slack. She passed the voicemail print-out to him, with its logo MARIE AND SHLOMO'S KOSHER KITCHEN.
It read 'Meet you tonight, 7.30 on the dot 315 Bowery, Love and kisses, your babe, Sue. All is forgiven.'
Now Jack was worried. This had never happened before. If the other Originals knew they might press him on his doubts. He might face trial, death or exile. Treason. He might be ejected from the gravsled, flung to the tender openness of the post-Singularity and Systems Operation. No rank, no status, no position except those that others gave him voluntarily. Had he been here too long to change? Nine hundred million times before he had reset his doubts and here he was, plagued again.
Naturally he couldn't go. Undoubtedly he couldn't go. He fingered the note. Adverts flittered across the digital paper, powered by the green solar power strip running along its top edge. He took out his lighter and carefully burnt the paper. There were no cameras in this area. Originals believed in free will, up to a point. For some reason, lyrics came into his head. "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy, A Yankee Doodle do or die..."
#
The band on the poster outside CBGBs moved around the stage, the colours of the digital ink bleeding a little. Here in the City nothing was ever quite right. His mind was twittering. Billions of years inside an anomaly, outside the norm. Whatever... He had to be honest with himself. Sysop was the norm. The Originals had become the anomaly, right at the very start of sentiency. The ingrained, inherited patterns of thought still held sway over him, though. He couldn't view them as anything but - well, unnatural.
This part of New New York appeared to be in a hollow. It depended what part of the moebius strip you were on. Hills and hollows. Skyscrapers leaning towards each other, or away. There was always the illusion of sky above, with all the effects of Earthlike weather and astronomy. If you walked in a straight line along the Centre, you eventually came back to your starting point. If you strayed in your path, went on a right angle to the Centre, you came to the Town. Though Town could be met on either of its two apparent manifestations both were of course the same entity - just as, if you could burrow through the basements of the city proper around him, you would eventually meet the inverted basement of another section of the moebius strip that formed the virtuality. Few, however, investigated the full length of Town. Many OutSols had perished here, where the original Sysop attempts to disable them had achieved some effect. The generated replacements of the dead, rare children, tended the memorials of their benefactors. He was almost jealous of those children. In a way the OutSols were all his missing offspring, the family of Originality. Orphans. Stop it, Jack! Orphans? Abandoned by... The buildings and sky flickered constantly. He looked above. The moon had bits missing. He had a headache already, something relatively unknown outside of Town.
A couple walked by, entered the CBGB club. OutSols. He followed them into the building. It was crowded. He had donned a disguise, effective against most detection by OutSols. The Originals had designed their parameters carefully. A few macrobots loitered around, including waiters, sexbots and bouncers. They were between acts and a hypnotic music blared forth, along with ritual dancing by a female couple. All OutSol stuff. He was out of touch. He grabbed a drink to dull his head pain.
Someone touched him on the sleeve.
"Jack?" he heard.
She was now taller, green-haired and dreadlocked, her skin embedded with plastique overlays, but he recognized the Diva. Kind of cool, he thought. The Pusher. For sure.
"I'm from Oregon," he said. "Where're you from?"
She twirled a dreadlock. "Once I was born on Plarencia on SC3921 C439 G523 101526 S65231650. That was the first time I was born. I am also part osprey and lemming. The first birth was fun."
Fun. Yeah.
"How do you know me?" He gulped his beer. It tasted funny but it worked.
"We keep track, Jack. We remember what you forget. I want to offer you a deal."
"What could you possibly offer me?" But he felt scared, for the first time in billenia, and the sensation was unpleasant.
"The Control Room, Jack. We can get you to the Control Room."
Though it should have surprised him he didn't doubt that. It was her, not them, since he doubted they had another Pusher in Town, active as she was, but he let that slide. Their pursuit could never afford to hack too far into them. Its priority was to chase, and seed teleportals behind it, and generate fellows sometimes, which left the fleet following roughly the same VR space as themselves, and still trailing. Any larger datascape and its size would slow the Cloud's edge.
Only the Original Major-General was allowed Upside, to the Control Room. The Genius was hidden in the Control Room of the overtual ship, outside VR. The Genius would detect his presence should he somehow visit there, and that would be that.
"No thanks," he said.
"Aren't you curious?
"Aren't you curious?
"Aren't you curious?"
He shook his head. Bits of the room disappeared and reappeared. Damn City software degradation. "Not one little tiny bit." The sputter ended.
"There's a body there. And an escape pod."
"A body?" he asked.
"Two, actually. Why do you think the Original Major-General likes to visit. There's two Blanks. Connected by broadcast to the virtuality unit and computronium functionality."
"Oh yes. So what?"
"More than immunity. We'll guarantee you a position as a Hierophant. You can take any OutSols or others that agree to go with you and settle an uninhabited system. It's a great offer."
"One you've probably made before."
"No, the time has never been right."
"And what do you want?" he asked. "Why don't you get those bodies yourself?"
"Can't break the protocols, Jack. I'm too weak. But you can do it. We want... well, you know!"
He stared at her dreadlocks. "The Crack. You want to get there first. You don't want us to get there. You want me to pull the plug on the Original Major-General Bill W. Herbert. That's not risky, that's suicide."
"Can you get me a drink?" she asked.
"Okay," he said. He had finished his beer. He ordered schnapps for them both. The OutSols were drinking heavily. He had never tasted the overtual thing, back on Sol. He kept his own, early memories intact, locked in the memorial vault of his dataconstruct of a skull. Some parts he had sealed off from himself. They scared him. As though he had forgotten something important, left it behind. He felt giddy. He sensed she must have some hidden advantage.
"What's he told you..." Sue began, but was interrupted by a zebra-haired girl who whispered to her. Jack couldn't make out her request, if that it was. The Pusher slipped something into the girl's purse. He was almost tempted to freeze everyone and check, but that might be impractical here and would burn his bridges prematurely. He waited until the OutSol had departed, then took Sue's hand. She certainly felt solid enough. He hadn't been sure she would.
"What was that all about?" he queried.
"Standard request. Infoscraps on the Sysop worlds. There's a big Vote on cosmological engineering and multiversal models. The OutSols probably know more than you do, Jack."
He flushed. "I know enough." What was the real difference between two or three styles of Sysop! "Why can't you leave us alone?"
"We're democrats, Jack, that's why." She fingered one pierced ear. "Got - to - do - the - things - you - got - to - do. So... free passage, with compatriots. Don't be concerned about the Original Major-General. I can slow him down. Once you're in the Blank, you can let me in the other one. I can disable the gravsled from the Control Room. Just remember, it won't be forever. The bodies are to scale but they're small. If you want to keep it, though, you can enlarge it once the Meteor-at-Dusk catches up."
"Your ship."
"Ship and home, when I'm not at home here." She raised her glass. "Here's to inebriety." She drank it in one gulp. If she was as bound by the protocols as they were she would be unable to offset the effects of the drink. Only the Originals had sobering pills, and these were voice-activated. Limitation denied them the illusion of advanced nanotechnology at the subcellular level. It didn't really matter. He was sure Sue would have to be tanked to the max for her judgement to be impaired. "We know you've doubts," she added. "We've informants amidst the deckhands. So to speak."
"Why don't you drop the propaganda act?" he queried. "You can't pull the wool over my eyes. You want the Crack in Space for yourself, you're prepared to do nearly anything. That's the only reason. You don't care two hoots about the OutSols."
"Incorrect, Jack. You've been listening to the Original Major-General for far too long. Would I lie to you?"
"I'm going back to my place," he muttered, turning to leave.
Original Colonel Hu was in the doorway, speaking with the doorchat. He hadn't looked their way yet.
"Let's get out of here," said Jack. A tiny note of desperation crept into his voice despite his innate stability. She moved towards the unisex toilets and he followed. They entered and shut the door behind them. There were four people at the neon mirrors and more in the cubicles. The casuals smirked as Sue led Jack into a cubicle. He was at a loss. Hiding in a cubicle! The Original Colonel was very familiar to Jack. It had to be official business. The man was absolutely dogged. He would search the cubicles and find them.
"How'd he find out? What are we going to do?" he asked Sue.
"Agree. I can get you out of all this. They must have investigated our earlier encounter more closely than I anticipated. The Original Major-General can be a tough cookie. I don't mind admitting that."
Now he was in real trouble, nasty trouble. He remained profoundly suspicious of her, wondering whether she had manipulated Hu. He hadn't had to think like this since he'd left Earth and Sol. Now the ghost had eaten what remained of the man, had taken over so long ago that he was just a myth, a figment of a ghost's birth... no, no. Don't stress. One thing was certain. The Systems Operation Pusher would be more forgiving than the Original Major-General. Normally, exile meant jettison without notification. Sysop was extremely likely to find you. And you had to trust the Original Major-General to download you fully. There were rumours... The only others to leave were those who turned Depressive and pleaded weariness or those who gave up their place for a child. And still, those rumours... to eject you, the gravsled first needed to activate its ramscoop facilities to accumulate mass - sometimes difficult in certain zones - or else it needed to convert ship material to computronium. The USSF New New York needed to maintain a stable amount of mass, neither too great nor too small... that ejection was costly.
He would have been sweating, had he been an OutSol. As it was he leant against the partition wall, feeling slightly dizzy in the cramped compartment.
"All right," he gave in.
She reached around him and pressed the flush. Water gurgled down the frictionless surface. The cistern top opened. There was a barely visible transparent device within it. She attached it to his forehead.
"Fortunately the software architecture was designed to match your virtual-level neurological pathways to your perspective-apparent virtual head. This is going to be briefly painful. Once you're out, and you're in the Blank, take it off your new head and put it on the other Blank, in the same position. Don't delay. Do it fast. Do you understand, Jack?"
"Sure I understand. I'm completely fucked whatever happens. I'll just have to live with it."
"Time to rediscover your stoicism."
He hated to admit it, but he was coming to admire this self-styled Diva. There was something New New Yorker about the woman. Dwelling amongst them, she'd acquired mannerisms.
"Sue's your real name?" he asked.
"At the moment. Is there any other definition?"
"I don't know. You're superintelligent, aren't you?"
She stared at him. "Intelligence comes in many forms and models and levels. Here, I'm not. I'm as much within Limitation as you. May the great matrix of being help us if this doesn't succeed. We've failed before. The engineer who designed this all -"
"Original General Ray K -"
"Yes, he became Depressive and suicided. The Genius of your ship-city holds the reins but the horse has been born and bred and that's it. Here goes. Good luck, if you believe in it."
He had, once, he remembered, as her fingers moved in patterns. Someone was opening the door to the room and he heard Original Colonel Hu barking the freeze command. The cubicle sparkled. He felt for Sue's side but couldn't find it. His body was dissolving like sugar in coffee and he felt himself drifting. Moving out to sea with the tide... The sea, the sea, he hadn't seen the sea for so long, did the word have any meaning, only on the Web, they still had the World Wide Web in virtuality, a VR web, deb deb deb, wwebbb...
And then he was waking somewhere. He had an awful pain behind his eyes.
#
Lights flashed. Alarm lights. He had something to do. It was dark, except for the lights. What was it? Where was he?
He was Jack. He was Original - Jack. No. Jack the traitor.
And like that, he remembered.
He was naked, and his body didn't feel like his own. For good reason. He moved around, tried to touch, and discovered another form. Thighs. Absence of hair. No hair at all. Nipples. Breasts. Forehead. A Blank, smooth forehead.
Blank?
He raised his fingers to his forehead. A device - the device in the cubicle.
He pulled it off. It had no macroscopic clamp but it came off easily with only a slight resistance. His pain faded. He concentrated on keeping the device orientated as it had been. Up. Forward. With his other hand he found the female Blank again and located her forehead. There. Place it there. He attached it and there was a slight, automatic whirring. After a moment she groaned, stirred.
He tried to speak and an incoherent gurgle resulted. He coughed and found he could talk if he spoke very slowly.
"Sue - it's - Jack - I'm - through."
The Control Room was small. There was no view of the stars through the windows. They were obscured by the luminescent side effects of the truly vast gossamer spiderweb that was the gravity wave sled outside. So this was what remained of the ship they had departed in. This was the proud remnant of the United States Space Force, long after the United States had gone, the Declaration of Independence, the continents, Earth itself moved -
"The Declaration of Independence is available in any library in the inhabited cosmos," said Sue. "Text is cheap."
"A - truism." She could speak better than him. It galled him.
These bodies had some neural interconnectivity, then.
"Yes," she said. "I'm turning it off."
And for the first time, he began to hope there might be some way out. Iterative altruism... complexity... amortality...
"You know what your trouble is?" Sue said. "You've let yourself live in a static environment so long you've forgotten what extropy means."
"Can - you - teach me?"
"That's better. Yes, I can teach you. I owe you that much. You might say, my organizational alliance owes you that much but we don't have hierarchial trees like you. The theory was all worked out just before the Singularity was born but you'd passed Jupiter by that stage."
"How would - you know?"
"Touche! I just trust the records. You're very precious, Jack. A rare thing."
She brushed against an object and red lights came on revealing a nearly featureless room with some shaped modular wallboards including a dock. Two screen-like projections at one end. Sue held her face up to one and snaking trails of light flickered around her head. Her new neural network glowed through her Blank body.
She moved away again and the panel deadened.
"No good. He's on to us."
A tube of yellow light appeared in the small space between them. It resolved into a hologram. The moustached visage of the Original Major-General looked at them. If Jack moved his head the holographic face moved too, still pointing directly at him. Sue would see the same.
"You are in deep shit, my friend," said his Commander-in-Chief. The President of the Permanent Council. Well, Jack could kiss his seat there goodbye. "Hope you're enjoying that Blank," continued the Original Major-General. "Sometimes I take an OutSol Upside with me, put her in the female body. Reminds me of Earth. You remember Earth, Jack? You were a good officer. I'm very surprised at this. I didn't see it coming."
Without doubt. Why wasn't Sue doing something?
"It's not too late, Original Sergeant! I can get you back Downside. Just think through the drastic emergency coding. She can't stop you. I promise you'll receive no long-term punishment. At temporary demotion at worst. I have to do that at least to preserve political stability, but you can live with that, it's not so bad. New New York needs the Crack in Space. You believe that as much as I do. These, these fuckers will spoil everything, they don't need it. You know it's true."
"No. I don't know what's true right now." My voice sounded flat. I refrained from thinking about the emergency code.
"You don't comprehend what the Crack is," said the Original Major-General. "We can repel anyone who comes close to us, destroy them. Its particle size can be accelerated towards infinity after entry. Controlled expansion within a flatrate grav. That's why they want it. That globe's a universe in itself. We can apply viral Turing inserts via nanoprobes and convert it into the largest virtuality unit in the cosmos."
"This cosmos," whispered Sue. "You'd subvert the Vote on this..."
The Original Major-General ignored her.
"We can cut ourselves off," he continued. "We can make a deal with Sysop, with these Singularity babies. Any deal we want. You can have whatever they promised you and then some, and you'll be loved by your people. They need you. There's hundreds of thousands in need here. Marie needs you, Original Sergeant."
It was true. They had a need. With the fact of Limitation a reality he couldn't remember more than a few thousand of the OutSols properly at any one time but a fuzzy, permeable memory of their mass, their gestalt, had long ago entered his subconscious, almost at the very beginning of things. He remembered he'd once had a wife, on Earth. He'd suppressed that memory long ago. He thought he had. He rubbed his temple.
"Gotta go, gotta go..." he mumbled.
Someone slapped his face. Sue. "Don't make me talk to you neurally," she said. "You're in no condition. It would be invasive."
Hope. More hope. Beacon. This much pressure and she still considered such factors. He'd been a bad boy, yes a bad boy. Pressures of survival. Was the Diva a shark?
"Going to chew me up?" he asked. In the background Original Major-General Herbert was droning on. He refocussed his attention on the holo.
"- you're not going to win. I'll let you eject, with your full datastructure." The conversation was directed towards Sue. "I know you're locked in there. We've severed your broadcast links. There's no way out. We've destroyed the Artefact copies you had in VR. You can't use the headset to return here. You and my friend have to think things through. It'll be a clean slate. Start afresh. Same old competition. It doesn't have to be otherwise. I'll expend some energy ejecting you, you'll get a bit closer. You know our requirements. The interstellar soup, the gravity waves, they're our mutual feeding ground. Talk to me, Pusher."
She didn't respond. She was contemplative.
"Could you... let us both go?" Jack asked.
The Original Major-General beamed. The image of him appeared to literally brighten.
"That's very sensible of you. Negotiation. We just need to keep our heads and talk. It's not as though I can send troops Upside."
"You could cut off the recyclers, the energy sources," said Sue. "Why aren't you doing that already?"
"That's no puzzle. Jack's like a brother. We haven't had a problem with an Original for two and a half billion years. I'm the fleet leader. I can't risk anything, I guide us all, the other ships would be lost without me. I don't know if the Permanent Council could survive me executing Jack. I really don't want to do it."
"I don't believe you," she said slowly. "We've analysed you as far as we can, scraps tossed back through Limitation and summaries returned. You would do whatever was necessary, in a tight pinch, if you had the time to think. And you've had plenty of time..."
Jack was losing track, he wasn't well-adjusted to the Blank. Despite her efforts, little fragments of her thoughts were seeping through to him. The Original Major-General must have used these Blanks for sexual purposes, he supposed, and had burnt the linkage into place through frequent usage. Sear-tracks... connections. He remembered his wife's name now, Maggie. Or was Sue Maggie? No, Maggie was from New Jersey, Maggie was salt of the Earth. Poor Maggie... That was what he had kept in the vault of his past. Hidden from himself. The memory of his first betrayal, leaving her, leaving his children... coward Jack. Coward. Reset! He couldn't reset properly.
"Maggie's alive," said Sue.
"What?"
"She's alive. Your family are all alive. I've a list - of everyone connected to the ship-city, their existent relatives. Text is small. Some are different. Some have melded and changed in other ways. But not her."
"Why tell me now?" he asked. He became suspicious again.
"Why be cruel?" she responded.
"Don't believe her!" said the Original Major-General. "Look at her actions. Look what she's got you into. Consider the order of things!"
Jack felt nauseous. Something - there was something. Of course. That was it. Sue was placing her head near the panel again, attempting to turn its mysterious workings functional, but she was not pleased with the results and the lights blinked in rapid patterns.
He gestured to her. He felt weak. His internal monitors indicated his neurological network was being transferred back to the VR unit. The Original Major-General must be responsible. Jack's superior had been stalling, while he regained control of the necessary protocols to pull them back Downside.
"How long?" he asked Sue. "How long?" He was frantic now, conscious of his potential mortality and the possibility of reuniting with his origins. A mythological homecoming.
"What?"
"If the Genius fails, how long till the Meteor-at-Dusk can catch us? Your ship?"
"Fifty-five seconds," she said.
He grabbed a wallboard knob. "The hatch. The spacedock. The Genius is in us, baby. That's where he buried the data-Artefact. That's why he comes Upside so often. In my Blank. You're the fail-safe."
He pulled the doorvalve open. He spoke the override code. The outer lock dilated open and air rushed out. They began to lose consciousness and the Genius started to wind offline, to an abort and stasis mode. The gravsled ship shuddered.. Now he could feel her thoughts, momentarily.
Ordinary Sergeant, you've made the history grid...
END
