Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (120 page)

Louise shoved her face forward, seeking understanding in the Virtual’s bland, simulated expression. ‘What timescales? How long-term?’

‘
Infinite
,’ Virtual-Poole said quietly. ‘Paradoxa’s backers are people who wish to invest in the survival of the species itself, Louise.’

There was a long silence.

‘Good grief.’ Milpitas shook her head. ‘I don’t know about you, but I need to sit down. And how about that drink, Poole?’

L
ieserl was suspended inside the body of the Sun.

She spread her arms wide and lifted up her face. She was deep within the Sun’s convective zone, the broad mantle of turbulent material beneath the glowing photosphere. Convective cells larger than the Earth, tangled with ropes of magnetic flux, filled the world around her with a complex, dynamic, three-dimensional tapestry. She could hear the roar of the great gas founts, smell the stale photons diffusing out towards space from the remote core.

She felt as if she were alone in some huge cavern. Looking up she could see how the photosphere formed a glowing roof over her world perhaps fifty thousand miles above her, and the inner radiative zone was a shining, impenetrable sea another fifty thousand miles beneath her. The radiative zone was a ball of plasma which occupied eighty per cent of the Sun’s diameter - with the fusing core itself buried deep within - and the convective zone was a comparatively thin layer above the plasma, with the photosphere a crust at the boundary of space. She could see huge waves crossing the surface of the radiative-zone ‘sea’: the waves were g-modes - gravity waves, like ocean waves on Earth - with crests thousands of miles across, and periods of days.

She thrust her arms down by her sides and swooped up into the convective-zone ‘air’; she looped the loop backwards, letting the floor and roof of this cavern-world wheel around her. She opened up her new senses, so that she could feel the turbulence of the gas, with its almost terrestrial density, as a breeze against her skin, and the warm glow of hard photons diffusing out from the core was no more than a gentle warmth against her face.

She suppressed a sigh.

‘Yes. Yes, Kevan. I’m perfectly all right.’

‘I know. I’m sorry. How are
you
feeling, anyway?’

‘You mean I’m not down here to enjoy myself?’

‘Yeah. Okay, electromagnetic first.’ She adjusted her sensorium. ‘I’m plunged into darkness,’ she said dryly. ‘There’s very little free radiation at any frequency - perhaps an X-ray glow from the photosphere; it looks a little like a late evening sky. And—’

‘What I feel?’

She spread her arms and sailed backwards through the buffeting air. She
opened
her eyes again.

The huge semistable convection cells around her reached from the photosphere to the base of the convective zone; they buffeted against each other like living things, huge whales in this insubstantial sea of gas. And the honeycomb of activity was driven by the endless flux of energetic photons out of the radiative sea of plasma beneath her.

‘I feel wonderful,’ she said. ‘I see fountains. A cave-f of them.’

‘Fine.’ She rolled over onto her belly, so that she was gliding face-down, surveying the plasma sea below her.

She adjusted her eyes once more. The flux tubes came into prominence, solidifying out of the air; beyond them the convective pattern was a sketchy framework, overlaid. ‘I see the magnetic flux,’ she reported. ‘I can see what I want to see. It’s all working the way it’s supposed to, I think; I can pick out whatever feature of the world I choose, here.’

‘
World
’?

‘Yes, Kevan.’ She glanced up at the photosphere, the symbolic barrier separating her forever from the Universe of humanity. ‘This is my world, now.’

Maybe. Just don’t lose yourself down there, Lieserl
.

‘I won’t.’

It sounded as if there was some sympathy in his voice - knowing Kevan, there probably was; they had grown almost close in the few days she’d had left after her tour with him around the Sun.

But it was hard to tell. The communication channel linking them was a path through the wormhole, from the Interface fixed among the habitats outside the Sun to the portal which had been dropped into the Sun, and which now sustained her. The comms link was ingenious, and seemed reliable, but it wasn’t too good at relaying complex intonations.

Tell me about the flux tubes
.

The tubes were each a hundred yards broad, channels of magnetic energy cutting through the air; they were thousands of miles long, and they filled the air around her, all the way down to the plasma sea.

Lieserl dipped into a tube, into its interior; she felt the tingle of enhanced magnetic strength. She lowered her head and allowed herself to soar along the length of the tube, so that its walls rushed past her, curving gracefully. ‘It’s terrific,’ she said. ‘I’m in an immense tunnel; it’s like a fairground ride. I could follow this path all the way round the Sun.’

‘Yes.’ She turned her head, and induced currents in her Virtual body made her face sparkle with radiation. ‘I can see hundreds, thousands of the tubes, all curving through the air—’

‘The convective zone gases. The other tubes are parallel with mine, more or less.’ She sought for a way to convey the sensation. ‘I feel as if I’m sliding around the scalp of some immense giant, Kevan, following the lines of hairs.’

Scholes laughed.
Well, that’s not a bad image. The flux tubes can tangle, or break, but they can’t intersect. Just like hair.

‘You know, this is almost relaxing . . .’

Good
. Again she detected that hint of sympathy - or was it pity? - in Kevan’s voice.
I’m glad you’re feeling - ah - happy in yourself, Lieserl.

She let the crisp magnetic flux play over her cheeks, sharp, bright, vivid. ‘My new self. Well, it’s an improvement on the old; you have to admit.’

Now the flux tube curved away, consistently, to the right; she was forced to deflect to avoid crashing through the tube’s insubstantial walls.

In following the tube she became aware that she was tracing out a spiral path. She let herself relax into the motion, and watched the cave-world beyond the tube wheel around her. The flux tubes neighbouring her own had become twisted into spirals, too, she realized; she was following one strand in a rope of twisted-together flux tubes.

‘I’m fine, Kevan. I’ve got myself into a rope, that’s all . . .’

She let the tube’s path sweep her around. ‘Why? This is fun.’

Lieserl sighed and let herself slow. ‘Oh, damn it, Kevan, you’re just no fun. I would have enjoyed bursting out through the middle of a sunspot. What a great way to go.’

She slid out of the flux tube, relishing the sharp scent of the magnetic field as she cut across it. ‘All right, Kevan. I’m at your service. What next?’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Just tell me.’

Run a full self-check, Lieserl. Just for a few minutes . . . Drop the Virtual constructs.
She hesitated. ‘Why? I thought you said you could tell the systems were functioning to specification, and—’

‘Integrated into my sensorium. Why don’t you just say what you’re after, Kevan? You want to test how
conscious
this machine called Lieserl is. Right?’

Lieserl, you don’t need to make this difficult for me
. Scholes sounded defensive.
This is a standard suite of tests for any AI which—

‘All right, damn it.’

She closed her eyes, and with a sudden, impulsive, stab of will, she let her Virtual image of herself - the illusion of a human body around her - crumble.

It was like - what? Like waking from a dream, a soft, comfortable dream of childhood, waking to find herself entombed in a machine, a crude construct of bolts and cords and gears.

But even
that
was an illusion, she thought, a metaphor for herself behind which she was hiding.

She considered herself.

The wormhole Interface was suspended in the body of the Sun. The thin, searing-hot gas of the convective zone poured into its triangular faces, so that the Interface was embedded in a sculpture of inflowing gas, a flower carved dynamically from the Sun’s flesh. That material was being pumped through the wormhole to the second Interface in orbit around the Sun; there, convection zone gases emerged, blazing, making the drifting tetrahedron into a second, miniature Sun around which orbited the fragile human habitat called Thoth.

Thus the Interface refrigerated itself, enabling it to survive with its precious, fragile cargo of data stores . . . The stores which sustained the awareness of herself. And the flux of matter through the Interface’s planes was controlled, to enable her to move the Interface through the body of the Sun.

She inspected herself, at many levels, simultaneously.

At the
physical
level she studied crisp matrices of data, shifting, coalescing, the patterns of bits which, together, comprised her memories. Then, overlaid on that - visually, if she willed it, like a ghostly superstructure - was her
logical
level, the data storage and access paths which represented the components of her consciousness.

She traced paths and linkages through the interleaved and interdependent structures of her own personality. ‘It’s functioning well. To specification. Even beyond. I—’

‘You keep asking me that, damn it. I feel—’

Enhanced.

No longer trapped in a single point, in a box of bone a few inches behind eyes made of jelly.

She was supremely
conscious
.

What was her consciousness? It was the ability to be aware of what was happening in her mind, and in the world around her, and in the past.

Even in her old, battered, rapidly ageing body, she had been conscious, of course. She could remember a little of what had happened to her, or in her mind, a few moments earlier.

But now, with her trace-function memory, she could
relive
her experiences, bit by data bit if she wanted to. Her senses went far beyond the human. And as for inner perception - why, she could see herself laid open now in a kind of dynamic blueprint.

By any test, she was more conscious than any other human had ever been - because she had more of the
mechanism
of consciousness. She was the most conscious human who had ever lived.

. . .
If
, she thought uneasily,
I am still human.

‘Yes, Kevan. I can hear you.’

‘I’m a lot more conscious.’ She laughed. ‘But possibly not much smarter.’

She heard him laugh in reply. It was a ghostly Virtual sound, she thought, transmitted through a defect in spacetime, and - perhaps - across a boundary between species.

She let her awareness implode, once more, into a Virtual-human form.

Her perception was immediately simplified. To be seeing through apparently human eyes was comforting . . . in a way. And yet, she thought,
restrictive.

No wonder Paradoxa had been so concerned to imprint her with sympathy for mankind . . . before it had robbed her completely of her humanity.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be much longer before she felt ready to abandon even this thin vestige of humanity.

And then what?

Bathed in Jovian light, Louise, Uvarov, Milpitas and Mark sat in the soft, reclined couches. The Virtual of Michael Poole held a snifter of old brandy; the glass was filled with convincing blue-gold Interface light sparkles, and Virtual-Poole sipped it with every sign of enjoyment - as if it were the first, and last, such glass he would ever enjoy.

As, probably, it was, for this particular autonomous sentient copy, Louise thought.

‘To the survival of the species.’ Louise raised her own glass and sipped at whisky, a fine peaty Scotch. ‘But what’s it got to do with me? I don’t even have any kids.’

‘Paradoxa has a long history,’ Virtual-Poole said stiffly. ‘You may not be aware of it, but Paradoxa is already a thousand years old. It took its name from an ancient, obscure religious sect in North America that worshipped the mathematics of quantum physics . . .’