Was that us? Or were we being manipulated?'
'Our memories, are they real? Did any of that stuff actually
She's standing about twenty centimeters away from him, and Manfred realizes that he's acutely aware of her presence, of the smell of her skin, the heave of her bosom as she breathes, the dilation of her pupils. For an endless moment he stares into her eyes and sees his own reflection – her theory of his mind – staring back.
– I'll meet you, then we can go and ask Aineko some hard questions.'
Manfred takes a deep breath and nods. 'I suppose so…'
* * *
Little Manni – a clone off the family tree, which is actually a directed cyclic graph – doesn't understand what all the fuss is about but he can tell when momma, Rita, is upset. It's something to do with the pussycat-thing, that much he knows, but Momma doesn't want to tell him: 'Go play with your friends, dear,' she says distractedly, not even bothering to spawn a ghost to watch over him.
Manni goes into his room and rummages around in toyspace for a bit, but there's nothing quite as interesting as the cat. The pussycat-thing smells of adventure, the illicit made explicit. Manni wonders where daddy's taken it.
He tries to call big-Manni-ghost, but big-self isn't answering: He's probably sleeping or something. So after a distracted irritated fit of play – which leaves the toyspace in total disarray, Sendak-things cowering under a big bass drum – Manni gets bored. And because he's still basically a little kid, and not fully in control of his own metaprogramming, instead of adjusting his outlook so that he isn't bored anymore, he sneaks out through his bedroom gate (which big-Manni-ghost reprogrammed for him sometime ago so that it would forward to an underused public A-gate that he'd run a man-in-the-middle hack on, so he could use it as a proxy teleport server) then down to the underside of Red Plaza, where skinless things gibber and howl at their tormentors, broken angels are crucified on the pillars that hold up the sky, and gangs of semiferal children act out their psychotic fantasies on mouthless android replicas of parents and authorities.
Lis is there, and Vipul and Kareen and Morgan. Lis has changed into a warbody, an ominous gray battlebot husk with protruding spikes and a belt of morningstars that whirl threateningly around her. 'Manni! Play war?'
Morgan's got great crushing pincers instead of hands, and Manni is glad he came motie-style, his third arm a bony scythe from the elbow down. He nods excitedly. 'Who's the enemy?'
'Them.' Lis precesses and points at a bunch of kids on the far side of a pile of artistically arranged rubble who are gathered around a gibbet, poking things that glow into the flinching flesh of whatever is incarcerated in the cast-iron cage. It's all make-believe, but the screams are convincing, all the same, and they take Manni back for an instant to the last time he died down here, the uneasy edit around a black hole of pain surrounding his disemboweling. 'They've got Lucy, and they're torturing her, we've got to get her back.' Nobody really dies in these games, not permanently, but children can be very rough indeed, and the adults of New Japan have found that it's best to let them have at each other and rely on City to redact the damage later. Allowing them this outlet makes it easier to stop them doing really dangerous things that threaten the structural integrity of the biosphere.
'Fun.' Manni's eyes light up as Vipul yanks the arsenal doors open and starts handing out clubs, chibs, spikies, shuriken, and garrotes. 'Let's go!'
About ten minutes of gouging, running, fighting, and screaming later, Manni is leaning against the back of a crucifixion pillar, panting for breath. It's been a good war for him so far, and his arm aches and itches from the stabbing, but he's got a bad feeling it's going to change. Lis went in hard and got her chains tangled up around the gibbet supports – they're roasting her over a fire now, her electronically boosted screams drowning out his own hoarse gasps. Blood drips down his arm – not his – spattering from the tip of his claw. He shakes with a crazed hunger for hurt, a cruel need to inflict pain. Something above his head makes a scritch, scritch sound, and he looks up. It's a crucified angel, wings ripped where they've thrust the spikes in between the joints that support the great, thin low-gee flight membranes. It's still breathing, nobody's bothered disemboweling it yet, and it wouldn't be here unless it was bad, so -
Manni stands, but as he reaches out to touch the angel's thin, blue-skinned stomach with his third arm fingernail, he hears a voice: ' Wait.' It's innerspeech, and it bears ackles of coercion, superuser privileges that lock his elbow joint in place. He mewls frustratedly and turns round, ready to fight.
It's the cat. He sits hunched on a boulder behind him – this is the odd thing – right where he was looking a moment ago, watching him with slitty eyes. Manni feels the urge to lash out at him, but his arms won't move, and neither will his legs: This may be the Dark Side of Red Plaza, where the bloody children play and anything goes, and Manni may have a much bigger claw here than anything the cat can muster, but City still has some degree of control, and the cat's ackles effectively immunize it from the carnage to either side. 'Hello, Manni,' says the pussy- thing. 'Your Dad's worried: You're supposed to be in your room, and he's looking for you. Big-you gave you a back door, didn't he?'
Manni nods jerkily, his eyes going wide. He wants to shout and lash out at the pussy-thing but he can't.
'What are you?'
'I'm your… fairy godfather.' The cat stares at him intently. 'You know, I do believe you don't resemble your archetype very closely – not as he was at your age – but yes, I think on balance you'll do.'
'Do what?' Manni lets his motie-arm drop, perplexed.
'Put me in touch with your other self. Big-you.'
'I can't,' Manni begins to explain. But before he can continue, the pile of rock whines slightly and rotates beneath the cat, who has to stand and do a little twirl in place, tail bushing up in annoyance.
Manni's father steps out of the T-gate and glances around, his face a mask of disapproval. 'Manni! What do you think you're doing here? Come home at -'
'He's with me, history-boy,' interrupts the cat, nettled by Sirhan's arrival. 'I was just rounding him up.'
'Damn you, I don't need your help to control my son! In fact -'
'Mom said I could -' Manni begins.
'And what's that on your sword?' Sirhan's glare takes in the whole scene, the impromptu game of capture- the-gibbeted-torture-victim, the bonfires and screams. The mask of disapproval cracks, revealing a core of icy anger. 'You're coming home with me!' He glances at the cat. 'You too, if you want to talk to him – he's grounded.'
* * *
Once upon a time there was a pet cat.
Except, it wasn't a cat.
Back when a young entrepreneur called Manfred Macx was jetting around
the not-yet-disassembled structures of an old continent called Europe,
making strangers rich and fixing up friends with serendipitous business
plans – a desperate displacement activity, spinning his wheels in a vain
attempt to outrun his own shadow – he used to travel with a robotic toy
of feline form. Programmable and upgradeable, Aineko was a third-
generation descendant of the original luxury Japanese companion robots.
It was all Manfred had room for in his life, and he loved that robot, despite
the alarming way decerebrated kittens kept turning up on his doorstep.
He loved it nearly as much as Pamela, his fiancee, loved him, and she
knew it. Pamela, being a whole lot smarter than Manfred gave her credit
for, realized that the quickest way to a man's heart was through whatever
he loved. And Pamela, being a whole lot more of a control freak than
