moaned about the firewall protocols that were blocking it from leaving (before rather rudely trying to eat its conversationalist). He waits patiently, looking around at the swampy landscape, mudflats punctuated by clumps of spiky violet ferns. The corporation has to be desperate, to be thinking of the bizarre proposition Amber has dreamed up for him to pitch to it.
'Sounds interesting,' the Slug declares after a brief confirmatory debate with the membrane. 'If I supply a suitable genome, can you customize a container for it?'
'I believe so,' Pierre says carefully. 'For your part, can you deliver the energy we need?'
'From a gate?' For a moment the translation membrane hallucinates a stick-human, shrugging. 'Easy. Gates are all entangled: Dump coherent radiation in at one, get it out at another. Just get me out of this firewall first.'
'But the lightspeed lag -'
'No problem. You go first, then a dumb instrument I leave behind buys up power and sends it after. Router network is synchronous, within framework of state machines that run Universe 1.0; messages propagate at same speed, speed of light in vacuum, except use wormholes to shorten distances between nodes. Whole point of the network is that it is nonlossy. Who would trust their mind to a communications channel that might partially randomize them in transit?'
Pierre goes cross-eyed, trying to understand the implications of the Slug's cosmology. But there isn't really time, here and now: They've got on the order of a minute of wall-clock time left to get everything sorted out, if Aineko is right. One minute to go before the angry ghosts start trying to break into the DMZ by other means. 'If you are willing to try this, we'd be happy to accommodate you,' he says, thinking of crossed fingers and rabbits' feet and firewalls.
'It's a deal,' the membrane translates the Slug's response back at him. 'Now we exchange shares/plasmids/ownership? Then merger complete?'
Pierre stares at the Slug: 'But this is a business arrangement!' he protests. 'What's sex got to do with it?'
'Apologies offered. I am thinking we have a translation error. You said this was to be a merging of businesses?'
'Not
And so on.
* * *
Steeling herself, Amber recalls the address the ghost gave her for Sadeq's afterlife universe. In her own subjective time it's been about half an hour since he left. 'Coming?' she asks her cat.
'Don't think I will,' says Aineko. It looks away, blissfully unconcerned.
'Bah.' Amber tenses, then opens the port to Sadeq's pocket universe.
As usual she finds herself indoors, standing on an ornate mosaic floor in a room with whitewashed walls and peaked windows. But there's something different about it, and after a moment, she realizes what it is. The sound of vehicle traffic from outside, the cooing of pigeons on the rooftops, someone shouting across the street: There are people here.
She walks over to the nearest window and looks out, then recoils. It's hot outside. Dust and fumes hang in air the color of cement over rough-finished concrete apartment buildings, their roofs covered in satellite uplinks and cheap, garish LED advertising panels. Looking down she sees motor scooters, cars – filthy, fossil-fueled behemoths, a tonne of steel and explosives in motion to carry only one human, a mass ratio worse than an archaic ICBM – brightly dressed people walking to and fro. A news helicam buzzes overhead, lenses darting and glinting at the traffic.
'Just like home, isn't it?' says Sadeq, behind her.
Amber starts. 'This is where you grew up? This is Yazd?'
'It doesn't exist anymore, in real space.' Sadeq looks thoughtful, but far more animated than the barely conscious parody of himself that she'd rescued from this building – back when it was a mediaeval vision of the afterlife – scant subjective hours ago. He cracks a smile: 'Probably a good thing. We were dismantling it even while we were preparing to leave, you know?'
'It's detailed.' Amber throws her eyes at the scene out the window, multiplexes them, and tells them to send little virtual ghosts dancing through the streets of the Iranian industrial 'burb. Overhead, big Airbuses ply the skyways, bearing pilgrims on the hajj, tourists to the coastal resorts on the Persian Gulf, produce to the foreign markets.
'It's the best time I could recall,' Sadeq says. 'I didn't spend many days here then – I was in Qom, studying, and Kazakhstan, for cosmonaut training – but it's meant to be the early twenties. After the troubles, after the fall of the guardians; a young, energetic, liberal country full of optimism and faith in democracy. Values that weren't doing well elsewhere.'
'I thought democracy was a new thing there?'
'No.' Sadeq shakes his head. 'There were prodemocracy riots in Tehran in the nineteenth century, did you know that? That's why the first revolution – no.' He makes a cutting gesture. 'Politics and faith are a combustible combination.' He frowns. 'But look. Is this what you wanted?'
Amber recalls her scattered eyes – some of which have flown as much as a thousand kilometers from her locus – and concentrates on reintegrating their visions of Sadeq's re-creation. 'It looks convincing. But not too convincing.'
'That was the idea.'
'Well, then.' She smiles. 'Is it just Iran? Or did you take any liberties around the edges?'
'Who, me?' He raises an eyebrow. 'I have enough doubts about the morality of this – project – without trying to trespass on Allah's territory, peace be unto him. I promise you, there are no sapients in this world but us.
The people are the hollow shells of my dreaming, storefront dummies. The animals are crude bitmaps. This is what you asked for, and no more.'
'Well, then.' Amber pauses. She recalls the expression on the dirt-smudged face of a little boy, bouncing a ball at his companions by the boarded-up front of a gas station on a desert road; remembers the animated chatter of two synthetic housewives, one in traditional black and the other in some imported Eurotrash fashion. 'Are you sure they aren't real?' she asks.
'Quite sure.' But for a moment, she sees Sadeq looking uncertain. 'Shall we go? Do you have the occupiers ready to move in yet?'
'Yes to the first, and Pierre's working on the second. Come on, we don't want to get trampled by the squatters.' She waves and opens a door back onto the piazza where her robot cat – the alien's nightmare intruder in the DMZ – sleeps, chasing superintelligent dream mice through multidimensional realities. 'Sometimes I wonder if I'm conscious. Thinking these thoughts gives me the creeps. Let's go and sell some aliens a bridge in Brooklyn.'
* * *
Amber confronts the mendacious ghost in the windowless room stolen from 2001.
'You have confined the monster,' the ghost states.
'Yes.' Amber waits for a subjective moment, feeling delicate fronds tickle at the edges of her awareness in what seems to be a timing channel attack. She feels a momentary urge to sneeze, and a hot flash of anger that passes almost immediately.
'And you have modified yourself to lock out external control,' the ghost adds. 'What is it that you want, Autonome Amber?'
'Don't you have any concept of individuality?' she asks, annoyed by its presumption at meddling with her internal states.
'Individuality is an unnecessary barrier to information transfer,' says the ghost, morphing into its original
