meant to manipulate or mindfuck, not enlighten or amuse.
Horn, frowning at Lizzie, said, 'If the operation becomes
problematized, threatening to seriously impact other more
essentialized Halo priorities, then we require immediate
resolution through proper SenTrax procedures.'
Showalter said, 'If you screw up, we shut you down.' She
nodded to Horn, and they both stood and left.
Lizzie said, 'You notice they held off on the heavy stuff
until the collective had cleared the screen.'
Charley asked, 'Do you want to call them on it? They're in
violation of the group's compact.'
'No,' she said. 'I expected all that.' She looked at Diana
and Gonzales and said, 'Doctor Chow, your show.'
'Thank you,' Chow said. His voice was oddly high-pitched for
such a big man; Gonzales had been expecting something on the order
of a basso profundo. Chow said, 'In the late twentieth century,
the idea emerged of a person's identity as something
transferrable. People spoke, in the idiom of the time, of
'downloading' a person.' On the screen, where the IC had been,
appeared a cartoon drawing of a nude woman, her expression
stunned, the top of her skull covered with a metal cap. From the
cap a thick metal cable led to a large black cabinet faced with
arrays of blinking lights.
'Absurd,' Chow said, and the woman disappeared. 'To see why,
let us ask, what is a person? Is it a pure spirit, fluid in a jar
that one can decant into the proper container? Hardly. It is a
dynamic field made of thousands of disparate elements, held in a
loose sack of skin that perambulates the universe at large. And
of course it is perceptions, histories, possibilities, actions,
and the states and affects pertaining to all these.
'I can be found in the motion of my hand' He spread his
fingers like a magician about to materialize a coin or colored
scarf, and on the screen, the hand and its motion were doubled.
'And in my own perceptions of the handfor instance, from within,
through proprioceptors. And of course I see I.' Chow turned and
held his hand in front of his face. He dropped his hand in a
chopping motion, and the screen cleared. 'And I am that which
thinks about, talks about, and remembers the hand and has the
special relation of ownership to it. I am also the will to use
that hand.' He held the hand in front of his face, made a
clenched fist. 'So, to download even a portion of I would be to
download all these things and their entire somatic context.
'Also, of course, I am that which has my experiences, stored
as motor possibilities, recalled as memory, dream, manifest as
characteristic ways of being and knowing. To download I would
require duplicating this fluid chaos.
'Downloading the I thus becomes a most daunting task, perhaps
beyond even Aleph's capabilities. However, when cyborged to an
existing I, even one as damaged as Jerry Chapman, Aleph can create
a virtual person, one who functions as a human being, not a
disembodied intelligence, one who is capable of all the somatic
possibilities he had when healthy. The physical Jerry Chapman is
a shattered thing, but the Jerry Chapman latent in this hulk can
live.'
Looking at Diana, Chow said, 'We want you to share Jerry's
world. He must invest there, must experience other people and the
bonds of affection that engage us in this world. Otherwise he
will languish quickly; his neural maps will decay, and he will
die.'
Gonzales easily followed that line of reasoning: monkey man
had to have other monkey men or women around or else go crazynot
an absolute rule, perhaps, but good in most circumstances.
Diana said, 'Assuming that he becomes at home in this world,
what then? For how long can this simulated reality sustain him?'
The Aleph-figure spoke for the first time. It said, 'I have
only conjectural answers to these questions but would prefer not
to entertain them right now. First we must rescue him from the
degenerative state he lives in and the certain death it entails.'
'I understand that,' Diana said. 'That's why I am here, to
help in any fashion I can. It's just that I have questions.'
Lizzie said, 'And you'll get whatever answers Aleph wants to
give. Get used to it; we all do.'
'Of course you do,' the creature of light said. 'And how
about you, Mister Gonzales? Do you have questions?'
'Not really. I'm an observer, little more.'
'A difficult position to maintain,' the Aleph-figure said.
'Epistemologically, of course, an untenable position.'
Lizzie laughed. She said, 'It is indeed. Look, how about I
take you two out to dinner tonight, Mister Gonzales, Doctor
Heywood?'
'Call me Diana,' she said.
'You bet,' Lizzie said. 'And I'm Lizzie, you're ?' She
looked at Gonzales.
'Mikhail,' he said. 'But call me Gonzalesmy friends do.'
'Good,' Lizzie said. 'We've got work to do, so let's cut the
shit. This thing, I'm still not a believer about it, but I know
it's got to happen quickly or not at all. Tomorrow Charley does
his preliminary examination of Diana, then we move.'
9. Virtual Caf
Gonzales and Diana sat in Halo's Central Plaza with Lizzie.
Colored lightsred, blue, and greenclustered in the branches of
thick-leaved maples that ringed the square. The smoke of vendors'
grills filled the air with the smells of grilled meat and fish.
In the middle distance, elevators in pools of yellow light climbed
Spoke 6. Some people strolled across the Plaza; others sat in
small groups; their voices made a soft background murmur.
'Waiter,' Lizzie said, and a sam came rolling toward them.
