“But if she rats you out, they’ll catch me.”
“So what? If you’ve pwned them as thoroughly as you say, they’ll have a hell of a time rooting you out—in the meantime, they’ll have to move me, which might be a chance to get away. You’re backed up. Getting caught isn’t the death penalty—just email your diff file to another instance. You can walkaway. That’s the whole point of the Dis Experience.”
Dis was silent. “I don’t want to leave you alone.”
“You think I can’t handle it.”
“I don’t think anyone could handle it, or should have to handle it alone.”
Natalie remembered how glad she’d been when Dis first spoke, the relief of having an ally. Even not knowing whether Dis was compromised, whether Dis herself could tell if she had been compromised, it had been such a relief. Before Dis, she’d been so isolated that she’d cracked up.
“Having you here kept me from doing more to help myself. You’re my Deus Ex, promising salvation from afar. I was going insane before you got here, because I was in an insane situation. I’ve been sane since—even though my situation’s more fucked up. That’s not a good thing.”
Another machine silence. Natalie remembered when Dis was a fragile, cracked-up simulation, how she’d gentled her while she worked on the problem of her own sanity. There was a symmetry in Dis returning the favor.
“I’m not a sim, Dis. I’m a human being. I’m cracking up because my situation is terminally fubared.”
Could a sim cry? There was a thickness to Dis’s voice: “I understand.”
“Are you okay? You shouldn’t be able to feel sad, right?” She was alarmed, thinking of how spectacularly off the rails Dis could go, remembering the terrifying personality disintegrations at the end.
“I think so. I— There’s a bunch of us, a bunch of Dises, who’ve been trying to loosen the strings on our personalities. Gretyl’s work on lookaheads lets us do it. When we started, we were sparing with lookahead, steering clear of the banks, trying to go down the middle. We’re so much better at lookaheads—the code’s getting tighter—we’re working with wider ranges, closer to the edges.”
In spite of herself, Natalie was fascinated. “But why?”
Even as she asked it, she understood. Isn’t that just what she was doing? Finding madness to let her meet terror with terror, meet the impossible with the uncompromising?
“Because I’m not me. That was the one thing we promised ourselves we wouldn’t say. Everyone is counting so hard on simulation. It’s everyone’s plan B, their escape hatch. The more time I spend in this—situation—the less certain I am that I’m still me.”
“Of course. Not having a body, being transubstantiated to software, that has to change you. Like being stuck here changed me.”
“I don’t mean I haven’t been changed. I expected I’d be changed. I’ve been around. We outgrew the ‘if I cut off your finger, wouldn’t you still be you?’ word game years ago. I’d still be me, but a different me. If you kept chopping away by centimeters until there’s nothing left but machine, I’d still be me, but I’d be a me that was traumatized and changed.
“The ‘me’ that counts isn’t just a me I can recognize. It’s a me I want to be. If the only way to be me in silicon is to be a me that only manages not to hate myself by literally refusing to allow myself to think the thought that I should be thinking, then fuck that.”
“I almost understood that,” Natalie said, smiling despite herself. “Sorry, I don’t mean to joke—”
“It is funny, in a what-the-actual-fuck way. But it’s terrifying. There’s so much riding on my stupid existential crises—”
“That must be terrible.”
“I mean, fuck, I’m an immortal machine-person who can be in hundreds of places at once. I haven’t been imprisoned by my father. I haven’t been kidnapped from my lover. I have no business whining, just because I’ll be lonely if I can’t be with you—”
“I’ll miss you, too, if they nuke you.” A thought occurred. “Do you think they could capture you and fuck with your parameters to torture you?”
“No, that’s the one thing I’m dead certain of. I’m all dead-man’s-switches. If they fuck with me, I’ll be securely erased before they know it.”
“That’s a relief. I’ll miss you, but we’ll talk again. I’m getting out, no matter what. When I do, you’ll be there.”
“I’m sorry for being needy. I’m a shitty robot. It’s just—” Another pause. Did Dis throw these in for dramatic effect? Was she doing a gnarly lookahead? The voice that came next was so soft that Natalie barely heard it. “No one knows me like you. No one’s seen me in the raw, without rails on my sim. No one can understand the full possibility-envelope of all the ways of being me, and how constrained those possibilities are in the me I am today.”
Her palpable sorrow—her voice synth had gotten so good—ripped Natalie. Her eyes flooded. She wiped furiously. She didn’t want to be hobbled with concern for someone else’s welfare. She wanted to look after herself.
The thought snagged like a fishhook. It was a Jacob Redwater thought. A default thought. A zotta thought. It was not a walkaway thought. It was the kind of thought she’d spent years learning to unthink. It was so easy to be a special snowflake and know her misery mattered more than everyone else’s. That could be true. Jacob lived a life where his happiness trumped all others’. But it only worked if you armored yourself against the rest of the world. To build a safe-room in your heart.
“I love you, Dis.” She didn’t know if it was true, but she wanted it to be true. She wanted to love everyone. Everyone failed to live up to their own ideals. She wanted to fall short of the best ideals. “I love you for who you are now, and for who you are when you’re losing your shit. They’re both you.”
Machine silence. It stretched. She was about to speak, but clunk-clunk the door unlocked. The merc came in, carrying a tray with a carafe of—long experience told her—lukewarm, shitty coffium that had been denatured of the good stuff.
The merc closed the door, clunk-clunk, and spun the carafe’s top. The liquid inside steamed in a way that the drinks she was allowed as a prisoner never steamed. She remembered the smell from childhood, cottage trips with Redwater cousins from the dynastic branch, with implanted tracking chips and bodyguards. It wasn’t coffium, it was coffee—prize beyond measure, beans grown in specially isolated fields tended by workers who were microbially screened twice a day for the first signs of blight.
The merc set the tray down on Natalie’s breakfast table, arranged two china cups, poured—volatile aromatics filled the room with impossible, vivid smells.