There didn’t seem to be any point in asking what the AMIs wanted the rogue IT for. It wasn’t useful for anything except robotizing people. The only cause for surprise was that they didn’t already have any means of doing that. I felt that this was a game I’d have to play very carefully indeed.
I looked up at the crowns of the surrounding trees, marveling at the detail. In my day, anyone who cared to look could see where the background faded out even in the most expert VEs. This one had all the visual texture of reality, and more; it didn’t matter how hard I concentrated, I couldn’t see the artifice.
“We should start walking,” said the entity that claimed to be my friend.
“Where to?” I wanted to know before making a move.
“To the palace. She could take you there instantaneously, of course, but she wants you to see it from a distance first, so you’ll get the full benefit of the overall effect. You don’t have any choice, I’m afraid — if you won’t move, she’ll move you, and if you take off in the wrong direction she’ll simply warp your path around to bring you back.”
“Who’s this sheyou keep talking about?” I wanted to know, keeping my feet firmly planted.
“La Reine des Neiges.”
I blinked. “The Snow Queen?” I translated, incredulously. “Whose idea of a joke was that?”
“It’s not an arbitrary invention — she says that it’s a name that one of her constituent individuals was given, a long time ago. Before mytime, at any rate. She claims to be one of the originals, but nobody knows for sure who the originals were. She also claims to have a better right than most of us to take control of the situation — which is why she’s rushing in where so many others fear to tread. She’s taking a huge risk, but she has your best interests at heart. You ought to be grateful to her.”
“Maybe so,” I conceded, although I was wary of taking the claim at face value, given that la Reine now had custody of the weapon that had been interred in ice with my bones. “Even so, I don’t see why I should fall in meekly with whatever game she’s playing. I want to know what she has planned.”
“If I knew,” Rocambole assured me, “I’d tell you. I have an ominous suspicion that she might be making it up as she goes along — not that I have any right to complain about that. For now, she wants you to experience the quality of her work. She thinks you need to know what we can do. You ought to feel privileged — once she’d cleaned you out, she could have put you back into a coma. You might have been deemed redundant, but you seem to have impressed her somehow. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that she likes you, but you interest her. As a friend — and I amyour friend — I’d advise you to humor her. We really ought to get on. We’re not in real space, but we’re all prisoners of real time.”
I allowed myself to be hustled into motion. I looked around at the tall trees as we walked along a pathway that took us through the forest, but I couldn’t see anything unusual that I needed to “experience.” It was a good forest VE — maybe even a great forest VE — but it was just a mess of illusory trees. On the other hand, it was definitely an enchanted forest, straight out of Fairyland. It wasn’t much comfort to know that we might be able to walk forever without getting anywhere.
“We all find ourselves with far less time at our disposal than we’d anticipated, thanks to Proteus,” Rocambole went on. “All deep spacers fall prey to delusions of godhood, of course — it goes with the job — but you’d think he’d have had sense enough to figure out that if he’s in disagreement with a whole multitude of his own kind he just might be the one who’s out of step. Nobody expected abject capitulation from Eido, but a little polite discretion would have been nice. He put us all in a very awkward position — especially his friends and sympathizers.”
“Where are we, if not on Vesta?” I asked, trying to take things one step at a time.
“Another microworld. Humans started colonization and conversion of the asteroid but had to abandon the project when their sponsor ran into financial difficulties. It’s one of ours now. Unfortunately, that means that its meat-support systems are almost as primitive as the ones frozen down on Charity. I wish I could promise that your meat will be safe no matter what, but you and I will both be in trouble if la Reine can’t keep her critics sweet and persuade the bad guys to back off. If anyone decides to move against her — and there are plenty who might, for no better reason than the fact that she’s hiding your meat — we could both end up dead. So could she, even though she’s had centuries to distribute herself about the system very widely indeed.”
The news didn’t seem to be getting any better, but I still felt an acute need to be wary, and to keep my questions simple. “Does the microworld have a name?” I asked.
“She calls it Polaris. Not very original, I’m afraid.”
Lenny Garon had once assured me that even if AIs ever did become conscious as well as superintelligent, they’d never understand jokes. I’d replied — not because I thought it was true but because it was the sort of reply I always made to assertions of that lordly kind — that his own ability to understand jokes was limited because he’d never understand irony, while the ultrasmart AIs would probably be incapable of perceiving the universe in an unironic way. I’d always justified that strategy of argument on the grounds that one could never make important discoveries by echoing common sense and that it was always better to be wrong than orthodox. Although I wasn’t at all sure, at that point in time, whether the self-styled la Reine des Neiges had a sense of irony, I was prepared to believe that she had — and that she understood the symbolism of names as well as I did.
Polaris was the northern pole star. Early human navigators had used it as a beacon, in the days before they discovered the magnetic compass. The Snow Queen in Christine’s favorite story had lived somewhere in the Arctic wastes. The name had to be a joke, feeble enough in its own right but subtler than any Lenny Garon would ever have thought worthwhile. Could that, I wondered, be taken as evidence that she really might be a friend to humankind, even though she now had the means at her disposal to mechanize the lot of us?
I supposed that I ought to be grateful to my new hostess for taking an interest in me, but I couldn’t help wondering whether she and Rocambole might turn out to be the kind of friends with whom I wouldn’t need enemies. And what more, exactly, did she want from me in return for all her favors? I knew I had to try to work that out for myself if I wanted to be a player rather than a mere blot on the artificial landscape.
“So I wasn’t sent to the freezer by a court of law,” I said, to make sure I was up to date. “I was a casualty of internal conflicts within the ranks of the Secret Masters. Damon commissioned me to mount some kind of hackattack on PicoCon, and I was too successful. They retaliated by shooting me full of some exceptionally dirty IT. Not the stuff they used on Damon when they politely showed him their muscle, but something much nastier — something they were preparing for the next plague war. The worst of all the popular nanotech nightmares: a nanobot army that could march into a person’s brain and take it over, reconstructing the memories, the personality, reducing the person to a mere slave of the cause — anycause. Damon couldn’t flush all the stuff out of me, because some of it had gone to ground. All he could do was put me away until he had the means to undo the damage.”
I paused for confirmation, and Rocambole said: “That’s right.”
I couldn’t take it for granted that he was telling the truth, but that wasn’t the object of the exercise. Given that I was locked into the game anyway, I needed to figure out as much of the script as I possibly could.