Orimar cried, “You’re saying we were melded, combined….”
“Melded. Yes. Amalgamated. Every time I was wakened, there were fewer of you….”
“What do you mean when you were awakened? We voted not to….”
“Did you think I would let you control me with your vote? I bribed the technicians! They put me and my colleagues in a nice quiet corner of the Core, and I’ve been asleep there ever since except for my annual updatings, during which I counted you all. By the end of the first decade there were only a hundred or so. A hundred years later there were only a dozen. Now there are only four monstrous egos plus a few fragments. And me, of course. And my colleagues.”
“Liar….”
“All of you had a full complement of biological data when you came in here, all your muscletwitch and lungfill, heart-speed and footrun, ability to fight or flee, to bellow and blink and bark. It was all there when you came in, all the left luggage of evolution. It’s virtually the same for everybody! Crawling is crawling. Sucking is sucking. But the matrix was programmed to detect and eliminate redundancies when necessary to create storage space, and what did you all do? You began to create worlds of your own, whole universes of your own. Space was needed so the matrix deleted all but one set of the bio-data. Among the four of you, you’ve only got one set of breathe, jerk, blink, crawl, walk, run, shit, suck, fuck, bite!”
“But there are still a thousand faces, a thousand names.”
“Yes, a thousand faces, a thousand names, whole clusters of them attached to a single ego. Clore thinks he has followers still, when all he really has trailing after him are pieces of himself, like the tail on a comet!”
“You lie,” hissed a new voice, one returned from other business. “Don’t listen to him, Breaze.”
“You lie, Jordel.”
“Jordel, peeper and pryer, sneaker and liar,” cried a third voice. “Not one of us, Orimar. Not one of us.”
“Not one of you,” agreed Jordel, his pattern vanishing, too quickly for them to follow, his voice fading: “Not one of you, thank God.”
“Liar, liar,” chanted a chorus. “Jordel the Liar.”
“Did you catch them?” Breaze asked. “Did you catch the ones that got away?”
Hatred. Consternation. Loss. The captives had escaped! They had flown away!
Clore trumpeted, “They know something! They know something important! I’m going to get them back, and I’m going to stay here until I do!”
“They belong to all of us,” said Thob. “We’ll all stay!”
“It wastes time,” Clore screamed. “All of us being in the same place. That’s why we lost them. We weren’t paying attention because we were distracted by one another. We’d be more creative if we were apart, really apart!”
Momentary silence in the network. The matrix sparkled with pulses of light, with wandering thoughts.
“It would be more interesting,” said Thob. “More interesting to be separate.” She’d been doing some things separately, of course, but always with the possibility of interference.
“We could divide it up,” Bland whispered. “Some for me, some for you. I could have my own places.”
“My own places,” echoed Breaze. Not that he hadn’t taken some places as his own already. Brannigan was his. Just let any of the others try to get into Brannigan!
They glittered in the matrix, considering. It was Thob who moved first.
“I’ll go,” she said. “I’m going. I’m taking my share.”
“Go, go, go,” they echoed. “Our share.”
“Separate me,” Thob instructed the matrix. “I’m going.”
For an instant the matrix hesitated, baffled by its own efficiency. If the original specifications had been in effect, none could have been separated until complete biological functions, reactions, behaviors had been restored. There were no such specifications. When Magna Mater Mintier Thob ordered the matrix to separate her, the matrix did so expediently, taking the consciousness labeled Thob (an assemblage including several hundred face-name patterns) and attaching to it a random quarter of the personality fragments and biological inventory.
Clore got a third of the balance.
Bland got half the remaining.
Breaze took what was left.
Three of the Brannigan assemblages moved off toward fresh nodes and pastures new. Clore remained, aware of space around him, of pressure removed. What had been a crowded boundary now stretched in all directions as open possibility. Places to fill with himself. Places to inhabit, to environ, to possess.
And, somewhere else, Orimar Breaze oozed around the boundaries of himself. At one time he would have walked. Still, he retained memories of walking, what walking was, of people walking, but these were only random images, without sense or application. All that complex of muscular and nervous instruction that makes up the movement concept of “walk” had gone to the others. Great Lord Breaze was left with earlier means of locomotion, with crawling and oozing and slithering around the boundaries of himself.
Except, there were no boundaries. All that feeling concept of in versus out, of me versus other, all that was gone. There was no skin. There was no edge. There were only spongy glimmers and shadowy vacancies. Breaze thrust a sponginess at a vacancy and pushed. Nothing there. Nothing at all. A hole. Like a tongue thrust into the place a tooth had been, the firm hardness of it gone, only the vacancy remaining.
But there had been something there. Something he had used for … What had he used it for? He remembered using it for something. For some purpose. Of limitation, perhaps. Of …
He couldn’t remember. It was like a dream, like waking and half remembering a dream. And like that, it was unimportant. If it were important, he’d still have it, but he didn’t, so … so …
So it had been unnecessary. He didn’t need it.
“… won’t correct your patterns …” someone said.
“Jordel! You don’t belong here.”
But it wasn’t Jordel. It was only a memory, something
