[iv]
“Bet you didn’t dream you were going to be an A.I. whisperer,” Gretyl said. She was on the young side for a member of the university, but still older than most of the B&B crowd, with ten years on Limpopo. With broad hips and bulging bosom, she looked like a fertility idol, and she had an intense, flirty vibe, like you were both in on an erotic joke. Iceweasel thought she was being hit on, but she saw that Gretyl treated everyone the same. But then again, it still felt like she was being hit on. Maybe the feeling persisted out of wishful thinking. Iceweasel idly snuck glances down her cavernous cleavage. She wasn’t Iceweasel’s type, but neither was Seth, and they’d had a multi-year run of semi-monogamy, punctuated by rafter-swinging make-up sex. They still buddied up sometimes, but it was stale and even weird, and was practically nonexistent when she lit out with her A.T.V.
“To be honest, I was ready to spend my time burying the dead and feeding the survivors.”
“That was kind of you, but we take care of ourselves. This wasn’t a complete surprise. Not after Somalia and the others.”
“There were others?”
There had been—every site working on upload had been hit in some way, a series of escalating attacks. Some were open military strikes, undertaken under rubrics ranging from harboring fugitives—a favorite when default clobbers walkaway—to standbys like terrorism and intellectual property violations, terms whose marvelous flexibility made them the go-to excuse for anything.
“We’d assumed that there’d be a lashback,” Gretyl said. “When it started, we stepped up work on the shelters. A lot of the research staff left—everyone with kids and many of the young and healthy types. This is a field that gets more than its share of people with something terminal. Also depressive hypochondriacs.”
“Which one are you?” She was sure they were flirting now. It was like this the day after a lot of Meta, an over-emotional hangover that made her into a larger-than-life character from a soap.
“Hypochondriac. But I’m sure that the latest lump is something bad, so maybe it’s both.”
“You should have someone check it out,” she said.
“You offering?”
This was the weirdest flirting. At least, the most macabre. “I don’t have the medical background, I’m afraid.”
She was worried she’d offend, but Gretyl was unfazed. “I’m sure you’d do fine.” She gave Iceweasel a friendly-but-firm elbow in the ribs.
Iceweasel struggled for a subject-change. “I had no idea anyone had gotten that far with upload. I mean, I’ve seen the dramas, but they’re bullshit, right?”
“They’re bullshit. We’re nowhere near putting people into clones that commit unsolvable murders, cool as that would be. But there’s a lot of progress, the last five years. There’s zottas in default with their hearts set on immortality. Money is no object. It’s traditional. The pharaohs spent three-quarters of their country’s GDP on a nice spot in the afterlife. These days, any university with a neuroimaging lab is drowning in grants—it’s absorbing a ton of the theoretical math and physics world. Say what you will about corrupt capitalism, it can get stuff done, so long as it’s stuff oligarchs love.”
“Is that what you were doing? Neuroimaging?”
“Me? No, I’m pure math.” She grinned. “That lookahead stuff the sim does? Mine. Did the work at Cornell, even got tenure! It’d been so long since they’d tenured anyone that no one could figure out how to enter it into the payroll system!” She laughed with full-throated abandon that made Iceweasel think of the sound of waterfalls. “Then it got tech-transfered to RAND, who licensed the patent to other spook-type organizations, Palantir and that bunch, and suddenly, I couldn’t get any funding to do more work. My grad students disappeared into top-secret Beltway jobs. I put ten and ten together and got one hundred. Everyone in the math world understands the number-one employer of mathematicians is the NSA, and once they start working on something, either you work for them on it or you don’t work. After a couple months of knocking around my lab, I went walkaway.”
“Looks like you weren’t the only one,” Iceweasel said.
The big woman looked serious, and Iceweasel saw a flash of the intellect and passion burning from those dark eyes in her round, brown cheeks. “I mentioned the pharaohs. This is ancient magic. Humans dreamed of it for as long as we’ve wondered where the dead were and what happened when we joined ’em. The idea that this should belong to someone, that the sociopaths who clawed their way to the top of default’s pyramid of skulls should have the power to decide who dies, when no one has to die, ever—fuck that shit.
“My parents were math geeks. I grew up in a big old rambling house filled with their ancient computers. Ithaca was a good place to practice computer archaeology. The computers my dad played with when his parents came from Mexico, they were stone axes. Kludgy and underpowered. By the standards of their day, they were fucking miracles—every year, the power that once ran the space program migrated into stuff they put into toys. Right now, it takes all the computer power we’ve got to run poor old Dis in her shaky, unstable state. But no one would take the other side of a bet on whether we’ll soon be able to do more for less.”
She looked tired. Iceweasel, too—how long had she been awake? Two days? “It’s apparently scared the shit out of zottas who’d been set on keeping immortality to themselves. The dirty secret of upload is that it’s got a serious fucking walkaway problem. When you think you might be able to live forever—your kids might live forever—everyone you know might live forever—something happens.”
She scrubbed at her face with her hands. Her nails were a beautiful shade of pearl-gray that reminded Iceweasel of her mother, who had entire wardrobes in that color. Had been famous in a certain kind of tabloid for it. Iceweasel wondered if her subconscious’s mommy issues had noticed that earlier.