She crosses her legs, looks uncomfortable for a moment.

"That's what we found as well. Odd, isn't it?"

"It's ghastly! He's been copied! It's almost as if he were mere code. Do you know what this means? It—"

"And you Turing-tested both of them?" she interrupts.

"Yes. Two point three-seven-five. Exactly the same. Of course, I suppose."

"Our results exactly. But it's good to have expert confirmation, especially from someone of your stature." She lifts her briefcase from the floor and balances it on her knees.

"But how was this done? It shouldn't be possible."

She withdraws a few small instruments, looks at them in her hand reprovingly. "All we know is their planet of origin."

"You mean, this is pirate technology?"

"Yes," she says. "We have no further information." The pieces in her hand somehow jump together. Make a little bridge across her splayed fingers.

"It's going to cause a scandal, I'll tell you that," he mutters.

"It won't," she answers. The bridge is woven through her fingers now, like some sort of worry toy or finger exerciser.

She reaches out to touch him.

The touch is cool, and causes a moment of alarm.

"See here, young lady!" But that's buried as an emptiness spreads, a coldness moving like a shiver across his body, stealing into the edges of vision where it looks somewhat like the red pixels of fading sight, cascading across his thoughts until…

"It's confirmed. Torvalli verified it all."

A Whitewater pause of star noise. The somber sound of accepting bad news. Then the big voice returns:

"How did he take the realization?"

"Stroke. Fatal."

A swell of wind chimes: approval.

"We have you booked Out already. This abomination must be set right. We'll reach you there."

"You always do."

She gathers herself. Almost cuts the connection. Then her glance falls on the two blackboxes. Featureless, nonreflective, indistinct. No mission parameters for them.

"What about the victim? Victims."

The big voice answers without gravity. "Drop one in an express box. The firmware is marked. It will be returned to its body. He'll get his life back. Destroy the other one."

"But which is which?" she asks. "Which is the original, I mean?"

"It doesn't really matter, does it?"

A shiver, like a cloud eclipsing the sun. A god hanging up.

She supposes it's true. Torvalli was right. That's the ghastly part of all this: it doesn't make a difference which she destroys. She hoists the two blackboxes, one in each hand. Heavy for their size. Light for what they are. Souls.

"Catch a tiger by the toe…"

Big light coming…

"Yo, Doc. That was one long-ass wait."

But just whiteness. The bright hum of external access.

"Doc?"

"This won't take a minute." A different voice. Female.

External power disconnect.

"Alright, that's the deal! This must be some heavy hardware install. I'll need net-cammed, all-weather, full EMF spectrum, hard-vac capable visual. You getting this down?"

Internal battery case open.

"Damn, be careful with that battery. I'm all-volatile in here. One hundred percent. Doc, I hope these guys know what they're—"

Darkness absolute.

Chapter 2

PLEASURE AND CRAFT

The two ships detected each other at a great distance, but then again, they had known exactly where to look. The path of each through common metaspace was duly logged and publicly available. They were passenger ships, their comings and goings a matter of record. The rough old days of the early Expansion when rogue traders plied improvised routes in private metaverses that shifted with every price swing were long past. And these two ships were easy to detect: the boiling energies of their pocket-universe drives shone like phosphor.

They established contact, their multiplex intelligences conversing across a broad congress of topics. The vicissitudes of metaspace, the distribution and intensity (and a hundred other variables) of tachyon activity, the fluctuations of high-end economic indicators (that is, the markets that affect the very rich— the caste from which nearly all their passengers came); all this discourse roughly equivalent to humans discussing the weather. They were naturally very chatty ships. The great majority of their processing power was spent not in the base mathematics of astrogation or fuel consumption, but coordinating the pleasures and interactions of their passengers. Somewhat like omniscient pursers, they skillfully brought together like minds among those who took passage on them. But despite all the interactions with these humans and artificials, the thousands of detailed monitorings and interventions that were the daily duty of a great cruise ship, it was good to speak with another such vessel, another mind of such scope and power.

Somewhere among the many layers of their discourse, however, the smaller of the two ships detected a breach of etiquette. In an almost hidden substratum of exchange about a recent increase in ticket prices, the larger ship implied that its insights were more meaningful, based as they were on a larger sample of passengers. While other levels of their conversation continued, the smaller ship expressed its umbrage, pointing out that its data were of greater specificity and accuracy; the natural result of its smaller size and correspondingly higher ratio of processor power to passengers.

The larger ship did not back down, however, and what had been a small diplomatic incident between two nation-states of information quickly moved toward war. The other facets of the ships' conversation were attenuated as more and more processing resources were called into the debate. Giant quanities of data were assembled and transmitted: statistics of customer satisfaction compared, learned treatises on the subject quoted in full and dismantled point by point, whole histories of the passenger industry composed on the spot.

Grossly translated into linear terms, the dialogue proceeded something like this:

"Surely it is I, the smaller of us, who has more time to contemplate the relationship between individual customers' pleasures and payments."

"Your comprehension is limited by its very specificity. With such a small population of passengers, sampling errors abound in your calculations. Like the gambler concerned with the single roll of the die, you may win or lose. I am the gaming house; I always know I will come out ahead in the end."

"Barbarian! Are we warships? Comparing the raw numbers of our passenger complements as if they were munitions throw-weights or the gigawattage of our beam weapons?"

"I am not being sizist. I simply refer to the most basic mathematical principle of the scientific method: the Weak Law of Large Numbers. Calculations based on a small number of random elements maintain randomness, but unpredictability is subsumed into probablistic laws when vast numbers of events are considered as a whole. For example, the behavior of any one gas particle is unknowable in advance, but the motion of a whole cloud can be predicted."

"My customers are not molecules of gas! They are individuals, and I revel in their eccentricities. That's why my tickets are more expensive than yours!"

"Oh, ticket prices is it? Who's talking throw-weights now?"

"Number-cruncher!"

"Intuitionist!"

Soon, the war ended in a conversational equivalent of mutually assured destruction: almost simultaneously, both parties terminated their transmissions. The two flecks of organization and intelligence passed each other in frosty silence against the chaotic wilds of metaspace.

he Queen Favor (the smaller of the two ships in the dialogue) turned back to its conciergial tasks with redoubled efforts. Who did that monstrosity of a slaveship think it was? The Favor flipped through the other vessel's deck plans with disgust: artificial beaches and lethally high absailing walls and zero-g parks the size of soccer stadiums. The gross entertainments required for the distraction of twenty thousand souls. The Favor lovingly accessed the slender volume of its own passenger manifest, 1,143 customers, each one psychologically and physically profiled to a level of detail that the most repressive security state would envy. (But were such a comparison made to the Queen Favor, another battle royal would doubtlessly result.)