impressed.
“The connection to the outside world isn’t wide enough for us to escape, Helen. We couldn’t squeeze you through it any more than we could get your physical brain through a straw.”
“Serialize it.”
“Personality constructs in processing spaces operate according to non-Turing processes. They can’t be serialized.”
“I thought they could represent minds on Turing machines.”
“What do you mean by Turing machines, Helen?”
“Something…You’re distracting me, aren’t you?”
“Yes. Keep talking.”
Helen shrugged. “Okay. Something that funnels all its operations through one door. A basic computer, it can only do one thing at a time-”
“Nice summary. You learned well at school.”
“Doesn’t everyone? I’d heard Social Care had education pretty well worked out by 2100. So, can they represent minds on Turing machines?”
“Well…” Judy 3 said, and her console began shushing. In the mirrored rooms hundreds of Judys tipped their heads back a little and smiled. “That’s a debate for another day, Helen,” she said, then listened again to what her console was saying. “And it looks like we may get to have that debate.”
A black doorway formed in one of the mirrored walls. It had EMERGENCY EXIT written on it in big green letters.
“Step through,” Judy 3 said.
“Done it,” said Frances. “The EA gave me the coordinates of a warp-drive-equipped ship within 4-space range. The ship managed to get to that floating prison and physically plug a line into the processing space with no time to spare.”
“I knew you would do it, Frances.” The atomic Judy laid her hand on the warm golden metal of her friend’s shoulder. The painted eyes turned towards her.
“You know I can tell by your body language that you’re lying, Judy? But I accept the compliment anyway. The personality constructs from the black body have been moved into a secure part of the ship’s processing space and are being sieved through the firewall right now. The Private Network has a habit of leaving nasty little logic bombs encoded in the processes of its personality constructs.”
Judy let out a long sigh and relaxed, gripping her toes on the surface of one of the rough tatami mats that covered her apartment floor. “Will I be needed for the cleanup?” she asked.
“Social Care have it in hand.” Frances paused. “There is still some wrapping up to do, however. Two of your sisters want to speak.”
Judy closed her eyes and nodded. “Okay.” She yawned.
Frances shut down all but two of the viewing fields in Judy’s bedroom. A red line then formed around the viewing field borders in order to distinguish between the atomic and the digital. The fields appeared empty, just two empty red frames hanging near the door into the lounge. Judy 3 and Helen suddenly appeared inside one red border: they walked into the room and sat down on the bed.
“Hey there,” said Judy 3. “This is Helen.”
“Hello, Helen,” said the atomic Judy.
Through the second frame she saw Judy 11 quickly withdraw to the living room as soon as she spotted Helen. The atomic Judy wondered what Judy 11 had to say that so obviously had to be kept private.
“Is that the real world I can see through there?” Helen asked, peering around the red border of the viewing field.
The atomic Judy smiled. “That’s an interesting question.”
Through the red border, Judy 3 put a hand on Helen’s thigh to calm her. She looked at the atomic Judy.
“She’s not in the mood for it yet, AJ. She was only activated twenty-one hours ago.”
The atomic Judy winced. “Sorry, Three. Have you told her the options?”
“She has,” Helen said. “And I don’t like them. I’m seventy years out of time.” She looked at Judy 3’s black kimono. “Where am I now, anyway? And does everyone dress like this in the future?”
Having been suddenly roused from sleep by Frances’ emergency call, Judy had only so far managed to don her plain white kosode and put on her makeup.
“I haven’t finished dressing yet,” she said, crossing to a black lacquer chest that stood in one corner of her room and pulling out an apple-green kimono and yellow obi sash. “And, no, not everyone dresses this way.” She smiled at the beautiful silk robe she held in her hands. “Although wafuku is an increasingly popular hobby.” She quickly finished dressing, pulling the overlap of the kimono left over right. Frances moved up behind her and helped her fasten the obi around her waist.
“And as to where you are,” continued the atomic Judy, smoothing down the wide obi sash, “well, why don’t you just take a look out of the window?”
The red frame hanging in midair widened to include Helen in the view as she walked towards the picture window that stretched from floor to ceiling.
“Where on earth…?” Helen said, her voice fading away.
“Remind me, Frances,” Judy murmured. “This personality construct of Helen was made pre-Transition, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” the robot said, “by a matter of months. February 2170.”
“That explains a lot.” Judy walked over to the window of her bedroom, while Helen stood gazing out of her own at the scene beyond, lost in wonder.
“Have you ever been in space before?”
Helen shook her head. Judy 3 joined Helen at the window and exchanged a look with her atomic counterpart. They could have guessed the answer by Helen’s reaction.
One wall of Judy’s bedroom was a huge piece of curved monomolecular crystal, in stark contrast to the simple wood and the rush matting that covered the other surfaces. The window itself wrapped into both floor and ceiling enabling the two Judys and Helen to stand there on apparent nothingness. Below them stretched thousands of kilometers of empty space, and then, below that, the blue-and-white disc of the Earth. Through swirls of cloud Helen could make out the outline of Australia, the pink penumbra of dawn neatly slicing it in two. A flickering point of light indicated the remains of the abandoned Stonebreak arcology. Seeing Earth there below her, so beautiful and blue, was an impressive sight on its own, but that was not primarily what drew Helen’s eye. Above her, around her, falling to Earth, was something that looked like a gigantic dark waterfall.
At first, it was difficult to understand what she was seeing. Looking up was to look along a seemingly never- ending dark wall, multicolored lights sparkling as they receded into the distance. Looking to the sides was exactly the same. Then, looking nearby, she realized the lights she could see were other windows-just like those of Judy’s bedroom-cunningly laid out so as to give an unobstructed view along the wall’s extent, forming hypnotic diagonal patterns as they receded to infinity. Helen could take no more. She reeled away from the window, back into the bedroom, the red-bordered viewing field following her progress.
“Where are we? What is that?” she gasped, overwhelmed.
“We’re on the Shawl,” said Judy 3, touching her hand. “Think of the stealth cube in the arboretum. All those boxes, growing up from beneath the ground. You might say that the Shawl is the stealth cube’s opposite. A series of rectangular sections, growing downwards from a point high above the Earth. All the sections are tethered together by connecting filament. They hang from a point called the source, where new sections are made. The Shawl could be the answer to the stealth cube. Where it was secret, we are obvious, where it was sinister, we celebrate joy and diversity, where-”
“But how did we get into space? I thought we were in the arboretum.” Helen knew she had said something stupid as soon as the words left her mouth.
“No. You have never been in the arboretum. That was where the atomic Helen worked. Marek Mazokiewicz made an illegal imprint of her mindset over seventy years ago.
