Annette shoves him inside, kicks the door shut, and leans on it. 'Take me to your bodhisattva,' she demands. ' Now.'
'I -' he turns and heads inside, along the gloomy hallway that runs past a staircase. Annette strides after him aggressively. He opens a door and ducks inside, and she follows before he can close it.
Inside, the room is illuminated by a variety of indirect diode sources, calibrated for the warm glow of a summer afternoon's daylight. There's a bed in the middle of it, a figure lying asleep at the heart of a herd of attentive diagnostic instruments. A couple of attendants sit to either side of the sleeping man.
'What have you done to him?' Annette snaps, rushing forward. Manfred blinks up at her from the pillows, bleary-eyed and confused as she leans overhead: 'Hello? Manny?' Over her shoulder: 'If you have done anything to him -'
'Annie?' He looks puzzled. A bright orange pair of goggles – not his own – is pushed up onto his forehead like a pair of beached jellyfish. 'I don't feel well. 'F I get my hands on the bastard who did this…'
'We can fix that,' she says briskly, declining to mention the deal she cut to get his memories back. She peels off his glasses and carefully slides them onto his face, replacing his temporary ones. The brain bag she puts down next to his shoulder, within easy range. The hairs on the back of her neck rise as a thin chattering fills the ether around them: his eyes are glowing a luminous blue behind his shades, as if a high-tension spark is flying between his ears.
'Oh. Wow.' He sits up, the covers fall from his naked shoulders, and her breath catches.
She looks round at the motionless figure sitting to his left. The man in the chair nods deliberately, ironically.
'What have you done to him?'
'We've been looking after him – nothing more, nothing less. He arrived in a state of considerable confusion, and his state deteriorated this afternoon.'
She's never met this fellow before, but she has a gut feeling that she knows him. 'You would be Robert…
Franklin?'
He nods again. 'The avatar is in.' There's a thud as Manfred's eyes roll up in his head, and he flops back onto the bedding. 'Excuse me. Monica?'
The young woman on the other side of the bed shakes her head. 'No, I'm running Bob, too.'
'Oh. Well, you tell her – I've got to get him some juice.'
The woman who is also Bob Franklin – or whatever part of him survived his battle with an exotic brain tumor eight years earlier – catches Annette's eye and shakes her head, smiles faintly. 'You're never alone when you're a syncitium.'
Annette wrinkles her brow: she has to trigger a dictionary attack to parse the sentence. 'One large cell, many nuclei? Oh, I see. You have the new implant. The better to record everything.'
The youngster shrugs. 'You want to die and be resurrected as a third-person actor in a low-bandwidth re- enactment? Or a shadow of itchy memories in some stranger's skull?' She snorts, a gesture that's at odds with the rest of her body language.
'Bob must have been one of the first borganisms. Humans, I mean. After Jim Bezier.' Annette glances over at Manfred, who has begun to snore softly. 'It must have been a lot of work.'
'The monitoring equipment cost millions, then,' says the woman – Monica? – 'and it didn't do a very good job. One of the conditions for our keeping access to his research funding is that we regularly run his partials.
He wanted to build up a kind of aggregate state vector – patched together out of bits and pieces of other people to supplement the partials that were all I – he – could record with the then state of the art.'
'Eh, right.' Annette reaches out and absently smooths a stray hair away from Manfred's forehead. 'What is it like to be part of a group mind?'
Monica sniffs, evidently amused. 'What is it like to see red? What's it like to be a bat? I can't tell you – I can only show you. We're all free to leave at any time, you know.'
'But somehow you don't.' Annette rubs her head, feels the short hair over the almost imperceptible scars that conceal a network of implants – tools that Manfred turned down when they became available a year or two ago.
('Goop-phase Darwin-design nanotech ain't designed for clean interfaces,' he'd said, 'I'll stick to disposable kit, thanks.') 'No thank you. I don't think he'll take up your offer when he wakes up, either.' (Subtext: I'll let you have him over my dead body.)
Monica shrugs. 'That's his loss: He won't live forever in the singularity, along with other followers of our gentle teacher. Anyway, we have more converts than we know what to do with.'
A thought occurs to Annette. 'Ah. You are all of one mind? Partially? A question to you is a question to all?'
'It can be.' The words come simultaneously from Monica and the other body, Alan, who is standing in the doorway with a boxy thing that looks like an improvised diagnostician. 'What do you have in mind?' adds the Alan body.
Manfred, lying on the bed, groans: There's an audible hiss of pink noise as his glasses whisper in his ears, bone conduction providing a serial highway to his wetware.
'Manfred was sent to find out why you're opposing the ERA,' Annette explains. 'Some parts of our team operate without the other's knowledge.'
'Indeed.' Alan sits down on the chair beside the bed and clears his throat, puffing his chest out pompously.
'A very important theological issue. I feel -'
'I, or we?' Annette interrupts.
' We feel,' Monica snaps. Then she glances at Alan. 'Soo-rrry.'
The evidence of individuality within the group mind is disturbing to Annette: Too many reruns of the Borgish fantasy have conditioned her preconceptions, and their quasi-religious belief in a singularity leaves her cold. 'Please continue.'
'One person, one vote, is obsolete,' says Alan. 'The broader issue of how we value identity needs to be revisited, the franchise reconsidered. Do you get one vote for each warm body? Or one vote for each sapient individual? What about distributed intelligences? The proposals in the Equal Rights Act are deeply flawed, based on a cult of individuality that takes no account of the true complexity of posthumanism.'
'Like the proposals for a feminine franchise in the nineteenth century that would grant the vote to married wives of land-owning men,' Monica adds slyly: 'It misses the point.'
'Ah, oui.' Annette crosses her arms, suddenly defensive. This isn't what she'd expected to hear. This is the elitist side of the posthumanism shtick, potentially as threatening to her post enlightenment ideas as the divine right of kings.
'It misses more than that.' Heads turn to face an unexpected direction: Manfred's eyes are open again, and as he glances around the room Annette can see a spark of interest there that was missing earlier. 'Last century, people were paying to have their heads frozen after their death – in hope of reconstruction, later. They got no civil rights: The law didn't recognize death as a reversible process. Now how do we account for it when you guys stop running Bob? Opt out of the collective borganism? Or maybe opt back in again later?' He reaches up and rubs his forehead, tiredly. 'Sorry, I haven't been myself lately.' A crooked, slightly manic grin flickers across his face. 'See, I've been telling Gianni for a whole while, we need a new legal concept of what it is to be a person. One that can cope with sentient corporations, artificial stupidities, secessionists from group minds, and reincarnated uploads. The religiously inclined are having lots of fun with identity issues right now – why aren't we posthumanists thinking about these things?'
Annette's bag bulges: Aineko pokes his head out, sniffs the air, squeezes out onto the carpet, and begins to groom himself with perfect disregard for the human bystanders. 'Not to mention A-life experiments who think they're the real thing,' Manfred adds. 'And aliens.'
Annette freezes, staring at him. 'Manfred! You're not supposed to -'
Manfred is watching Alan, who seems to be the most deeply integrated of the dead venture billionaire's executors: Even his expression reminds Annette of meeting Bob Franklin back in Amsterdam, early in the decade, when Manny's personal dragon still owned him. 'Aliens,' Alan echoes. An eyebrow twitches. 'Would this be the
