She inclines her head. 'Yes, he's ill. Some sort of brain tumor they can't hack.'
Franklin nods. 'That's the trouble with cancer – the ones that are left to worry about are the rare ones. No cure.'
'Well, then.' Manfred chugs the remains of his glass of beer. 'That explains his interest in uploading.
Judging by the crusties, he's on the right track. I wonder if he's moved on to vertebrates yet?'
'Cats,' says Pamela. 'He was hoping to trade their uploads to the Pentagon as a new smart bomb guidance system in lieu of income tax payments. Something about remapping enemy targets to look like mice or birds or something before feeding it to their sensorium. The old kitten and laser pointer trick.'
Manfred stares at her, hard. 'That's not very nice. Uploaded cats are a bad idea.'
'Thirty-million-dollar tax bills aren't nice either, Manfred. That's lifetime nursing-home care for a hundred blameless pensioners.'
Franklin leans back, sourly amused, keeping out of the crossfire.
'The lobsters are sentient,' Manfred persists. 'What about those poor kittens? Don't they deserve minimal rights? How about you? How would you like to wake up a thousand times inside a smart bomb, fooled into thinking that some Cheyenne Mountain battle computer's target of the hour is your heart's desire? How would you like to wake up a thousand times, only to die again? Worse: The kittens are probably not going to be allowed to run.
They're too fucking dangerous – they grow up into cats, solitary and highly efficient killing machines. With intelligence and no socialization they'll be too dangerous to have around. They're prisoners, Pam, raised to sentience only to discover they're under a permanent death sentence. How fair is that?'
'But they're only uploads.' Pamela stares at him. 'Software, right? You could reinstantiate them on another hardware platform, like, say, your Aineko. So the argument about killing them doesn't really apply, does it?'
'So? We're going to be uploading humans in a couple of years. I think we need to take a rain check on the utilitarian philosophy, before it bites us on the cerebral cortex. Lobsters, kittens, humans – it's a slippery slope.'
Franklin clears his throat. 'I'll be needing an NDA and various due-diligence statements off you for the crusty pilot idea,' he says to Manfred. 'Then I'll have to approach Jim about buying the IP.'
'No can do.' Manfred leans back and smiles lazily. 'I'm not going to be a party to depriving them of their civil rights. Far as I'm concerned, they're free citizens. Oh, and I patented the whole idea of using lobster-derived AI autopilots for spacecraft this morning – it's logged all over the place, all rights assigned to the FIF. Either you give them a contract of employment, or the whole thing's off.'
'But they're just software! Software based on fucking lobsters, for God's sake! I'm not even sure they are sentient – I mean, they're what, a ten-million-neuron network hooked up to a syntax engine and a crappy knowledge base? What kind of basis for intelligence is that?'
Manfred's finger jabs out: 'That's what they'll say about you, Bob. Do it. Do it or don't even think about uploading out of meatspace when your body packs in, because your life won't be worth living. The precedent you set here determines how things are done tomorrow. Oh, and feel free to use this argument on Jim Bezier. He'll get the point eventually, after you beat him over the head with it. Some kinds of intellectual land grab just shouldn't be allowed.'
'Lobsters – ' Franklin shakes his head. 'Lobsters, cats. You're serious, aren't you? You think they should be treated as human-equivalent?'
'It's not so much that they should be treated as human-equivalent, as that, if they aren't treated as people, it's quite possible that other uploaded beings won't be treated as people either. You're setting a legal precedent, Bob. I know of six other companies doing uploading work right now, and not one of 'em's thinking about the legal status of the uploaded. If you don't start thinking about it now, where are you going to be in three to five years' time?'
Pam is looking back and forth between Franklin and Manfred like a bot stuck in a loop, unable to quite grasp what she's seeing. 'How much is this worth?' she asks plaintively.
'Oh, quite a few million, I guess.' Bob stares at his empty glass. 'Okay. I'll talk to them. If they bite, you're dining out on me for the next century. You really think they'll be able to run the mining complex?'
'They're pretty resourceful for invertebrates.' Manfred grins innocently, enthusiastically. 'They may be prisoners of their evolutionary background, but they can still adapt to a new environment. And just think, you'll be winning civil rights for a whole new minority group – one that won't be a minority for much longer!'
* * *
That evening, Pamela turns up at Manfred's hotel room wearing a strapless black dress, concealing spike- heeled boots and most of the items he bought for her that afternoon. Manfred has opened up his private diary to her agents. She abuses the privilege, zaps him with a stunner on his way out of the shower, and has him gagged, spread-eagled, and trussed to the bed frame before he has a chance to speak. She wraps a large rubber pouch full of mildly anesthetic lube around his tumescent genitals – no point in letting him climax – clips electrodes to his nipples, lubes a rubber plug up his rectum and straps it in place. Before the shower, he removed his goggles. She resets them, plugs them into her handheld, and gently eases them on over his eyes. There's other apparatus, stuff she ran up on the hotel room's 3D printer.
Setup completed, she walks round the bed, inspecting him critically from all angles, figuring out where to begin. This isn't just sex, after all: It's a work of art.
After a moment's thought, she rolls socks onto his exposed feet, then, expertly wielding a tiny tube of cyanoacrylate, glues his fingertips together. Then she switches off the air conditioning. He's twisting and straining, testing the cuffs. Tough, it's about the nearest thing to sensory deprivation she can arrange without a flotation tank and suxamethonium injection. She controls all his senses, only his ears unstoppered. The glasses give her a high- bandwidth channel right into his brain, a fake metacortex to whisper lies at her command. The idea of what she's about to do excites her, puts a tremor in her thighs: It's the first time she's been able to get inside his mind as well as his body. She leans forward and whispers in his ear, 'Manfred, can you hear me?'
He twitches. Mouth gagged, fingers glued. Good. No back channels. He's powerless.
'This is what it's like to be tetraplegic, Manfred. Bedridden with motor neuron disease. Locked inside your own body by nv-CJD from eating too many contaminated burgers. I could spike you with MPTP, and you'd stay in this position for the rest of your life, shitting in a bag, pissing through a tube. Unable to talk and with nobody to look after you. Do you think you'd like that?'
He's trying to grunt or whimper around the ball gag. She hikes her skirt up around her waist and climbs onto the bed, straddling him. The goggles are replaying scenes she picked up around Cambridge the previous winter -
soup kitchen scenes, hospice scenes. She kneels atop him, whispering in his ear.
'Twelve million in tax, baby, that's what they think you owe them. What do you think you owe
He's rolling his head from side to side, as if trying to argue. That won't do; she slaps him hard, thrills to his frightened expression. 'Today I watched you give uncounted millions away, Manny. Millions, to a bunch of crusties and a MassPike pirate! You bastard. Do you know what I should do with you?' He's cringing, unsure whether she's serious or doing this just to get him turned on. Good.
There's no point trying to hold a conversation. She leans forward until she can feel his breath in her ear.
'Meat and mind, Manny. Meat, and mind. You're not interested in meat, are you? Just mind. You could be boiled alive before you noticed what was happening in the meatspace around you. Just another lobster in a pot. The only thing keeping you out of it is how much I love you.' She reaches down and tears away the gel pouch, exposing his penis: it's stiff as a post from the vasodilators, dripping with gel, numb. Straightening up, she eases herself slowly down on it. It doesn't hurt as much as she expected, and the sensation is utterly different from what she's used to.
She begins to lean forward, grabs hold of his straining arms, feels his thrilling helplessness. She can't control herself: She almost bites through her lip with the intensity of the sensation. Afterward, she reaches down and massages him until he begins to spasm, shuddering uncontrollably, emptying the Darwinian river of his source code
