Mind Over Ship

unstable. A few days in isolation and they implode. Having a body to feed and care for provides a mind with much- needed ballast.>

AS THE PANASONIC fillets hissed and crackled in a casserole dish in the oven, Meewee operated on its head with a cleaver on his kitchenette cutting board. He hadn’t ever bothered with fish brains as a boy, and he found the bony skull difficult to crack. He didn’t know what to expect the brain to look like, so when at last he popped it onto the countertop, he couldn’t say if it looked like a normal panasonic brain. It was the size of a pea, wrinkly, pink, symmetrical.

<Open a zoom frame and slice it in half, right down the middle.>

Meewee did so and examined the cross section under magnification. He vaguely knew what a human brain looked like, with its cerebellum and frontal lobes, and whatnot in between, but this one lacked any of the familiar landmarks.

<Only the outer crust is human, about 1.5 millimeters. See the outer pinkish layer? Beneath that it’s all fish. This one looks to have neocortex tissue. Others have midbrain tissue.>

<And this is what the mentars are doing to us?>

<Not exactly. Keep in mind that we’re not interested in making a permanent human/fish hybrid, or human/dog, human/swine, or what have you. We’re only interested in using transgenic animals for temporary storage, with the goal of transferring back to a human.

<The mentars, on the other hand, want to put a mentar mind into a biological body on a permanent basis, a much more ambitious goal. They have explored different strategies and have had little success. Their most promising trial that I’m aware of involves layering a new neocortex of electrochemical paste over a human brain, mimicking the evolutionary process that produced us.

<But the mentars haven’t perfected their technique yet, and their hybrids fade fast. Their glial tissue seems to reject the domination of the pasty part, and their bodies don’t thrive. We think it’s because mentars don’t have a firsthand understanding of biological reproduction (which is another example of cellular intelligence) or death. The mentar psyche is so liquid, it is hardly aware of its containers, and they treat their transhumans as just a different kind of container. The underlying human personality is not allowed to flourish. The body is used like a peripheral device, like a biological arbeitor.>

Meewee didn’t know what to make of all this. It went beyond anything he’d seen in the media. Was she saying that there were human/mentars among them? <Would I be able to recognize these hybrids if I met one? Do they appear different than normal people?>

Eleanor chuckled. <Who among us can claim normalcy, Bishop? No, there is no reason they need to skew too radically from the norm. Slightly enlarged cranium, perhaps. Our own skulls are bigger than our ancestors’.>

<Are the mentars getting what they want from these bodies? Intuition and gut feelings and all?>

<Perhaps. They’re still working out the kinks. Give them time, though, and they’ll perfect them. What a mentar needs is an industrial-scale cloning shop, like the one Applied People has, where they can evolve their designs across thousands of generations simultaneously.>

Meewee finished the last morsel of baked panasonic, drained his glass of wine, and pushed himself from the table. That was delicious, even if it was, in some way, cannibalistic.

And though the dinner conversation was fascinating, it wasn’t very enlightening. Meewee’s gut had always told him that Eleanor had been killed because of her involvement with the GEP project; now he wasn’t so sure. She had her fingers in so many pies, of which he knew nothing.

And speaking of pie, wasn’t there something for dessert?

As Real As It Gets

Andrea stood naked in the sunlight slanting through the picture window of her always room. It was her real always room. Not the vurt simulation. How marvelous — sun on skin. Though, to be honest, the experience wasn’t quite as sensual as simulated sunbathing in her tank. In fact, everything was slightly duller in the real world: colors, flavors, sex, music. In the vurt world she could dial up or down the intensity of any qualia to her taste. In the real world you had much less control.

Andrea put the thoughts out of her mind — she was always a little depressed at first. After a few weeks in her new body she would be loving it just fine. In the meantime, she spent her afternoons in her real always room in her real house in Oakland. The room, too, seemed duller than its tank analog, but it felt more solid beneath her feet. Her bare feet. She leaned over to consider her new bare feet. You never really walked places in vurt. You floated or zoomed or just appeared where you wanted to be. But these were real feet in need of pampering, and new shoes.

So, what do you think? E-P said.

“About my feet?” She straightened up, and a diorama miniature appeared next to her: a man throwing stones into a pond. “Oh, him,” she said. I honestly don’t know what to make of him.

Can we ignore him? He seems to be spouting nothing but nonsense.

The diorama volume came up, and between stones Meewee was saying, “Then the printed sheets are folded in half and half again and the folds lined up and stitched together. They used to be called signatures.”

A disembodied mechanical voice replied, “At what point are the sides trimmed?”

E-P said, On the surface he seems to be having a conversation about the ancient art of bookbinding.

Is it a code?

If it is, we haven’t managed to decipher it yet. Nor have we been able to trace the identity of his interlocutor.

Andrea lay down on the cool leather sofa and looked sideways across the bay at the Golden Gate, the real Golden Gate outside her window. When you consider the pivotal position this man occupies in our own plans, it is imperative that we know who he is talking to and what they’re talking about. Have you consulted his sidebob?

Several times. In the diorama, a second Meewee appeared beside the first, also casting stones into the water. Unlike the real Meewee, however, the sidebob was silent.

The sidebob is several years old. We built it at the same time we cast the Meewee sim to market the Oships. It no more understands the code than we do. Therefore, the code must be a recent development.

Can’t you update his sim and get it?

Not without his cooperation.

Andrea waved her hand and deleted the pondside diorama. “I can do it.”

It’ll take a skin mission. Are you up for that yet?

Andrea stretched her legs and wiggled her toes. “We’ll manage.”

PUSH at the Helm

The control booth was filled with stars, and in the foreground — a gas giant. A starship approached the planet along a course plotted in red.

What PUSH is practicing is the classic slingshot maneuver. The flight instructor was a TUG woman who towered over Veronica. She rested the mountain ridge of her knuckles on top of Veronica’s head for privacy, even inside their secure facility. It’s taken him longer to learn than I thought possible. This is not a good sign.

As if on cue, a collision alarm sounded, and the trajectory plot, instead of skimming the planet’s gravity well,