looked down into her eyes; there was an edge of amusement to the low rumble of his voice.
“I wasn’t talking about food. I was talking about lifestyle.”
He paused, glanced down at the console on his wrist.
“Ah, and speaking of lifestyles, I see that our black-and-white friend has located yet another of our lifestyle zones.”
Bairn looked at Kevin questioningly. “She seems to pop up everywhere lately,” she said carefully.
Kevin smiled. “True, true-still, the processing space she has so rudely invaded is now sealed off completely. It is being shut down even as we speak. In five minutes time may well have reduced our Judy problem by ninety percent.” He brushed a black strand of hair from Bairn’s brow. “That could turn out to be a shame, really.”
The EA ran several public processing spaces that supposedly replicated atomic space exactly. Those who still spoke out for digital rights claimed that this was a subtle form of discrimination. There was only one atomic world, and its uniqueness placed it in a favored position. Those who inhabited it could claim they were unique themselves, that their digital copies were therefore in some way inferior. It was a view that the atomic Judy secretly subscribed to. Well, it wasn’t much of a secret, not when she and the twelve digital Judys shared the same memories up to the point of
Out in the unique world of atoms, the atomic Judy dreamed that her bedroom was falling towards Earth. The first bright flicker of plasma haze could be seen through the window and, in her dream, she realized with heart- pounding horror that somehow she had got her dates wrong and had stayed on in the apartment a night too long. The floor was vibrating as the room slowly spun, and through the window she saw the rest of the Shawl apparently rotating as it receded into the distance.
Someone was calling to her. “Judy, wake up! We’ve got trouble.”
The voice was coming from her console. Judy rolled across the low bed and picked it up from the floor. She puffed a dose of something to wake her quickly.
“What is it, Frances?”
The lights slowly came up to brightness in her room. The console showed that Frances was waiting in her lounge.
“Thirty-seven minutes ago one of the EA’s monitoring AIs noticed a ship sending a diminishing narrow-beam signal off into the middle of nowhere, a patch of space thirty-two degrees above the solar plane, and four AUs out. High-resolution scans of the region revealed a processing space floating out there.”
“A pirate space?” Judy said, rolling out of bed. “Frances, get in here! Why are you lurking in the living room?” She pulled on a long white kosode, the intelligent material lazily tightening around her body.
“I know how funny you are about your…privacy.” Frances sounded indignant.
“I’m not a body fetishist. Anyway, you’re a robot. Just get in here.”
“I’m coming. Listen, a number of your digital selves went in there. They almost caught Kevin.”
Judy dipped her fingertip into a blob of makeup and felt the tiny VNMs rushing to cover her hand. Frances slid open the paper door to Judy’s bedroom and stepped carefully inside. The robot elegantly complemented the simple Japanese décor of Judy’s apartment; Frances had had her body built to her own design and had made no attempt to look more than vaguely human. She was covered in lustrous golden metal, her head a smooth bullet shape upon which had been painted a bright white smile and two blue eyes. Other than that, her body was entirely featureless save for one thing, the only physical indicator of Frances’ mindset: between her legs was a set of numbered push buttons.
As Judy serenely dipped her toe into the makeup, the robot began opening viewing fields. Patches of color sprang to life around the room, vivid against the calm yellow wood and rice-paper panels. Frances walked over to the low bed and continued with her explanation.
“Just as we managed to fix our feed into the processing space, the Private Network detonated an explosive charge attached to the antenna. They’ve seeded the processing space with something on the order of fifteen hundred billion memory leaks. It’s deflating like an old balloon: it will be gone in about three minutes.”
As the robot spoke, a series of pictures ran across one of the viewing fields. Judy saw a matte-black lozenge hanging in space, and she gave a shiver. The poor individuals trapped inside it would be generally unaware of their true situation: personality constructs running in a tiny processing space, floating invisibly in empty space. A little pocket of hell, abandoned to the mercy of the unseen perverts who made use of the Private Network. It was easy to feel what it was like in there. Empathy was her job, after all.
She picked up a band and used it to pull her long black hair back from her face, glancing around the other viewing fields as she did so. Digital Judys were moving around inside the processing space with a calm purpose that made her feel rather proud. With the comm link broken, they were effectively marooned, and yet they quietly got on with their work without fuss.
She nodded and followed their example.
“We’ve been in worse situations than this in the past. How confident are you of getting them out of there, Frances?”
“I’ll tell you in about thirty-five seconds. As I said, the comm link isn’t entirely gone. I’ve managed to force a narrow path through the remnants of the antenna. Now I just need to find a way to slow down those leaks sufficiently…”
Judy tore a piece of black paper from a pad and moistened it with her lips, little VNMs creeping across the cherry-red skin. She turned to a viewing field floating near the bed showing a view into the distant processing space. It revealed one of her digital selves standing in a mirrored room, speaking to a young woman with daisies plaited in her blond hair.
“The young woman speaking to Judy 3 is Helen,” explained Frances.
“Oh yes,” Judy said, “I thought I recognized her.”
Helen stared into the impassive white face of the woman who stood in front of her.
“Well? Answer me! You must have made a backup of this processing space. Surely that would be your first action on invading a pirate space?”
Judy 3’s lips curled in a faint smile.
“Well, no. We do make a topological outline for possible forensic pattern-matching routines, but nothing else. Why should we? Even if we run a backup copy, you’ll still be dead.”
“Yes, but-”
“But nothing. That was decided long ago. You are the here and now, not the backup copy. Remember what Eva Rye told the Watcher.”
“Eva Rye…” began Helen, but Judy 3 had tilted her head slightly, listening to the shushing of her console.
“Ah, the atomic Judy has made contact. Hello, AJ. Glad you could join us.”
Helen’s eyes narrowed. “That means you’ve got a connection to the outside world. Why don’t you use it to get us out of here?”
Four AUs and another order of existence away, the atomic Judy looked away from the viewing field towards Frances.
“She’s sharp, isn’t she?”
“That’s part of her appeal,” the robot said. “They’ve had one copy after another of her running in their private torture chambers for the past seventy years… Sorry, but it’s going to take me an additional forty seconds before I’ll know whether or not I can get them out of there. The destructor routines they are running are simple, but there are too many of them. All I can do is slow the rate of collapse. Our only real chance is to get a wider comm link into there and extract the personality constructs before the processing space is wiped completely.”
Judy picked up her console, set in its usual form of a piece of heavy, lacquered wood, and began to wind it into her hair. She looked over to the viewing field by the bathroom.
“Let’s see how Judy 3 handles Helen. Let’s see if she can keep her distracted.”
Back in the processing space, Judy 3 remained calm through a combination of her basic training and Tao meditation. Helen, however, was remaining calm through nothing more than self-control. Judy 3 was
