Had Bamobah felt like that when she glimpsed a glider in the sky, when she put on her watch, when medical probes from precious inert alloys touched her body while I waited outside?
* * *
One’s identity is a fragile thing. It starts forming deep in the prenatal development and gains its final shape, passing the barrier of consciousness, after several years’ life. It resembles a thin-walled glass bowl: you cannot easily break it in two pieces and seal them again without leaving scars.
The first attempts at writing a human mind into the metal microstructure had ended tragically. Not by death, but something very much resembling death. Yet it was still worth it for the steelworks to invest billions more into continuing research to finally learn this: if metallurgists return into their human bodies after shifts and bring their memories and experience from the ingot with them, they had to bring back and forth their identity, their primary self, unequipped by our evolution to be at two places at once and then be sealed back together.
“I assume you understand the principles of the realliance program,” Faíd said to me. “They prepare a very simplified microstructural being for you and allow you to copy your basic traits into it, just a weak imprint of your identity and a short request to be included in the realliance.”
Yes, I’d tried many times to imagine what it would be like when the steelworks connect me to the metallurgists’ interface. Would I follow Bamobah into the ingot? Actually not, just a shadow of myself would take the journey in there, resembling the shadow I knew as Bamobah, the shadow I clung to so desperately.
That’s what Faíd was saying in different words: “It will be mirroring of sorts – while your primary self will stay in the macroscopic world with the residual personality of your girlfriend, her primary would meet a being bearing a simplified version of your residual. Unless there are compatibility issues, which are quite common, the metallurgist will absorb this being and carry it with herself into her human brain. This prevents greater blurring of secondary memories about you. As the primary self of your lovely friend will continue regaining control over her physical body, she’ll be able to freely decide if she keeps those memories, while experiencing a mild realliance shock, or she filters them out.”
If I could fall in love with a shadow, could she? That was the most important question.
But you don’t say such questions out loud. “So how can you steer the process?”
“I?” Faíd acted his mix of indignant and amused surprise well. “I can’t. But you can. You lack training and experience, your imprint cannot stay in the ingot too long without the risk of damaging it by some ill-advised operation. That is why the microstructure they eventually prepare for you is very simple … and very flexible.”
He handed me a small envelope. When it landed in my palm, I felt something small and metallic in the corner.
“Something else can be covertly copied into the microstructure along with the fragments of your mind. A Trojan horse, if you want. It will adjust the realliance algorithms slightly, so that your friend would suddenly face a much more simple decision. Either she accepts you in the process, or refuses realliance altogether. Refuses to come back.”
“My god,” I breathed out. The envelope slid out of my sweating fingers.
“No one will ever know, I can assure you of that. It’s just that you’ll need to learn to live with a small lie. But you’ll live happily.”
Faíd wasn’t offering me nine point five percent. He was offering me a hundred.
* * *
I couldn’t sleep.
I listened to Bamobah’s soft breathing and the subdued sounds of the hotel. On this background, the creaking of a drawer of my nightstand being slowly pulled out sounded almost deafening. I waited a few seconds to see whether Bamobah would wake up, but when the rhythm of her breath didn’t change, I reached in the drawer for an envelope. The chip was still inside, a small hard clump of a malign tumor inside the pristine paper tissue.
All it would take was to put the chip under my tongue and let it grow into the lower palate. Like when you take a pill. A remedy for your trouble.
Faíd’s plan was good. He thoroughly erased all traces between me and him, and him and the steelworks. I could only speculate what path had led him toward me. Belief in the Cloud, however absurd at first sight, was shifting the bedrock of society, crawling through its subconscious. While the steelworks fed it, while they supported it by the occasional shrouded comments in the press, while they pretended to finance research on the phenomenon of the Cloud, the ingots where metallurgists had become trapped remained in the center of attention of cranks, obscure researchers and loonies. Including the very, very rich. An ingot could be worked normally, molded, sold, put in the accounting. But there was still a lot of space for shreds, allowed waste quotas, shavings. Trash containing tiny fragments of primaries quenched into stillness. Heaps of strange relics to whom some attributed even stranger features.
I wondered how Faíd picked the right clients in the piles of realliance program requests. Those easily manipulated, unscrupulous, who end up with an envelope in their hands. I must have been a sure bet. A naïve European journalist, a reporter who fell in love with a mysterious woman. In fact, I could have been suspicious: am I just pretending all of it to get inside the steelworks’ dirt to expose them in the press? I had to smile wryly at the thought. No, on the very contrary. I was an easy mark and Faíd recognized that.
The chip still lay in its envelope, but I already felt its pressure under my tongue. If you set the rules right, you can’t lose. My rules were set by Faíd and his by the cult of the Cloud. Both of us would win,
