The Sea is Full of Stars

needed to know was that she worshiped Jules like he was a god, lived for any attention he might give her, and believed everything he said and did whatever he commanded. Jules had a lot of these kind of love-slaves, both male and female, but he tended to favor women more with this sort of stuff and act out his more violent urges on the males.

When the two women were safely away, Ari turned back to Ming and Angel, who were still patiently standing there. “Have you been having sessions with anyone here?” he asked them. “I mean, who else is here that you have been seeing and working with?”

“Only the house, sir,” they both responded in unison, neither having been specifically addressed. “We have seen no one else since last we saw the Master.”

“Then you remember that. How much more do you remember? I’m talking to Ming now. Do you remember yourself before you came here?”

“Yes, sir,” Ming replied.

“Can you bring your old personality forward, be like the old Ming?”

“Sir, I am programmed not to do that.”

It was true; she couldn’t do it even if he ordered it, even though she was still there inside. Wallinchky wanted to make sure that nobody could trigger some deeply implanted suicide impulse, standard with people in her old profession. Only Wallinchky himself could do that.

“You’re not—who programs you?”

“I am self-programming, sir.” And that was true now on both levels.

He was amazed, and increasingly upset by the two. Both of the women had to wonder if Jules Wallinchky hadn’t somehow planned it that way. He worked by keeping even those on his staff and closest to him off balance.

For Ari Martinez, there wasn’t any way past that wall that he could see. Normally, even if somebody was under complete control or lying paralyzed on the ground, you could read something in the eyes, but both of these women had wholly or partially artificial eyes that showed nothing of what might lay behind them.

The perfect slave, he thought sourly. And totally secure. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to think that this is the future for a lot of those around dear old Jules. He began to think about his own neck.

That jarred him into more dutiful action. “Your master is due in sometime later on today, but I do not know the exact schedule. He’s shuttling off a larger vessel, and it’s difficult to say precisely when, but it will be today. In the meantime, I have to set up some things for a meeting. I’ll not require your services—not now, anyway.”

He walked away, perhaps a bit too quickly and nervously, and both the women felt the first amusement they’d had in a very long time.

He is guilt-stricken!

And frightened! He knows that what was done to us can be done to him or anyone else.

They had long since gotten over the novelty of mental dialogue without knowing which of them was speaking which lines.

What do you think he meant by Madam Kharkov having a reunion? And where is the lab? Do you think there might have been other natural beings here all the time?

With that, the information on the labs and the full layout of the house was suddenly provided to them in full in three dimensions, and for the first time they saw how vast this complex really was and how many floors it contained. Ivan Kharkov had been here all the time, it appeared, along with a ton of specialized equipment. Data they could now access showed that Madam Kharkov had been here as well, but had left to retrieve some needed materials. They were clearly doing extensive restoration work of some kind.

Why didn’t we know of them before? Angel wondered.

We didn’t need to, nor have access to this data. We were not ready yet. Remember, each time we gain more awareness of the net and databases, the more we lose of ourselves. Those differences that make us separate people, and beyond which we could not go, are slowly being cataloged and stored and deemed irrelevant. We now have near complete access because we can no longer act in any way except to serve our server and in turn our server’s master. We are in the last stages. Did you not feel the mild pleasure when addressed, when answering his questions?

Yes. This has been the case for some time when doing what the program states correctly. It was why they could be handed loaded pistols and would use them only as Jules Wallinchky directed.

This was the final stage, then. The core computer consciousness that controlled the net had never had this kind of outlet before. Now, when its living units served, they got a mild pleasure jolt. If they displeased, they would get a moment of unpleasantness that would be noticed, but not enough to cause any problems. It had not yet decided if the units were of any added value, and hedged its bets on that score. Storing their memories took a lot of space, but that was to be expected. Storing the personalities and ratios that created self-identity was more complex, but didn’t take up a lot of extra space. It did not, however, file it where it was obvious.

Ari Martinez was discovering some of how it had been done on his own, by searching the standard files on the procedure from the interface in the comfortable study. A self-programming total conditioning system. It was incredible, and scary. He didn’t think somebody as paranoid as Jules Wallinchky would trust any computer that could think with this kind of power. How did he sleep, knowing that the computer might well figure out that all living beings in the complex were just extensions?

You couldn’t even interrupt the signals, the data flow to and from the little self-repairing, self-maintaining nanoma-chines that acted as transmitter and receiver inside their brains and nervous systems. Computers put most of the data on the server and accessed that when they needed it. God didn’t need a computer everywhere to run the universe; He just needed a good network with sufficient bandwidth and a server with the capacity to hold all that detail. Still—and this was even scarier—it was possible to download a lot of information into a human brain and then switch off frequencies and bandwidth so that you could switch these robotic humans the same way you could swap a robot carpet sweeper.

This was scaring Ari to death. Where in hell had somebody like Jules Wallinchky come up with an idea like this, even to order it? Of course, he probably stole it, or swapped for it, but still…

“Have Ming report to me immediately,” he said into the desk communicator.

Ming appeared in less than a minute, indicating that she hadn’t been doing anything but waiting. She entered and bowed. “At your command, sir.”

“Ming, you said that all your memories were still present in the system.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you know what the master traded to Josich Hadun for the Jewels of the Pleiades?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Would it cause you to harm yourself or anyone else by telling me?”

“No, sir. It would be a matter of telling the seller what he sold.”

Ari Martinez took a deep breath. “Ming, tell me exactly what was traded.”

“Sir, it was an alleged prototypical interface with the potential to establish a comm link with an Ancient Ones remote computer system.”

He was absolutely stunned by that. Even more, he now knew just where Jules, or somebody working for him, got the idea for the self-programming slave. He had been out to that ancient city on the horizon that the two women had wondered about; he’d been to many such places now and again. Beautiful, strange, bizarre cities, works of art from minds far too alien to comprehend. The only things really known about them were that they left cities that had absolutely no artifacts in them beyond their own structures, not so much as a potsherd, a tiny coin, or a single bit of mosaic, and that they seemed batty for the number 6. That was why a lot of religious groups had always considered them demonic places; 666 was supposed to be the number of the Beast, or Devil.

Scientists, discovering that worlds like this one had hollowed-out cores filled with vast quasiorganic matter that seemed inert although not exactly dead, had a lot of theories. One of them was that the matter inside was a local computer that had provided everything the inhabitants required, as well as maintaining whatever conditions they needed for life, which was why they’d found no artifacts. And they also postulated that something happened to sever contact between this vast galactic civilization and the inevitable server that kept all the data, all the details,