Recursion

Constantine shook his head. “I told you. I can’t say anything. Grey is blocking me.”

Somewhere inside his head he heard laughter.

Jay was shouting into the console in frustration. “Six minutes! Can’t you stall the injunction for six minutes?”

“I don’t know what to do…” Constantine muttered to himself. He appealed to the other voices in his head. “Red, Blue, any ideas?”

– I’m thinking, I’m thinking, Red said frantically.

– Do we really want to help them? asked Blue.

– We’re losing resolution, said White.

“Look! Over there!” Jay seemed very excited. Yet another door had opened in the air. Yellow dawn sunshine poured out of it, a patch of hope on the cold ground beneath the starlit sky. She pulled Constantine through and the door slammed shut.

They were standing in the cornfield again. Damp corn hemmed them in on all sides, shining golden in the light of the new day. They looked at each other. Jay’s hair was tangled with fragments of vegetable matter.

“What now?” Constantine asked.

“I don’t know. We have to maintain ‘radio silence’. 113 BS have us locked up in a bubble of memory. They’re time-slicing it through the processors at irregular intervals in an attempt to avoid detection.”

“Fair enough. Well, let’s get out of this field.”

“No…”

But Constantine had already begun to walk away, pushing aside the tall plants, taller than her head, and clearing a path for them.

“There’s no point,” Jay continued as he pushed through the corn behind her. He looked at her with a surprised expression that quickly faded. He nodded his head in acceptance.

“I suppose they can’t keep too big an area open. I like the wraparound effect.” He crouched down, brushing aside the dead stalks and debris, then sat down.

“We may as well make ourselves comfortable.”

Jay did the same. The ground felt soft and slightly spongy. Less like soil than a piece of Madeira cake.

– We’re losing resolution still, said White.

“Can you speak yet?” asked Jay.

Constantine shook his head. “No. Tell them to hurry up and wipe Grey. How much longer?”

“Too long, I think,” said Jay, tight-lipped. The corn around them was fading.

“Just one more thing,” said Constantine. “I never understood. If they have my mind on their computer, why not just read it directly?”

Jay answered softly.

“How could they do that? They can replicate your memories and your thought patterns electronically, but it’s the interaction of those things with the outside world that produces the mind. You might as well ask a book what it’s thinking. You can’t be a personality in a vacuum; you need something to interact with. Everyone needs an environment in which to be themselves.”

The corn had faded from view. Now the ground beneath them vanished too, then the sky. They floated in grey nothingness.

Jay reached out toward him. Constantine pulled her close. He had just realized something.

When everything else in their world had vanished, when even the bodies that remained were artificial, they still had their humanity to hold onto.

That was important. He knew it.

A voice spoke gently behind him.

“Personality construct Constantine Peregrine Storey.”

“Yes?” He turned. There was nothing there.

The voice continued.

“The firm of Drury, Faiers, Je

“Just a moment!” called Constantine. “I want to protest. I am a sentient being in my own right.”

There was no reply. Constantine felt a tingle at the back of his head. Had he just forgotten something?

The voice continued.

“The firm of Drury, Faiers, Je

Constantine was trying to make sense of the words. The name Jay meant something, but he couldn’t remember what.

“…to be a breach of copyright…”

Copyright? thought Constantine. There was a young woman standing in front of him. What was her name again?

Red was speaking.-Grey has gone. They wiped Grey too soon. Speak now. Tell them what they want to know…

But he didn’t know what this voice meant; what who wanted to know? The other, gentle voice was gabbling now, he didn’t understand what it was saying…

Herb and constantine: 2210

There was an air of rising tension aboard Herb’s ship. Viewing field after viewing field formed in the spaces around his lounge. Green lines representing velocity lengthened on the indicators that had formed on the walls, a faint humming noise could be heard somewhere toward the rear of the ship. Herb, sitting on the edge of the white leather sofa felt his heartbeat accelerating as he realized how much power was now being generated; he had never heard the engine before.

Robert sat opposite, a picture of calm activity.

“Can you think of anything we’ve forgotten?” asked Johnston, his gaze traveling from viewing screen to viewing screen.

“No,” said Herb. He wished he could think of something.

“Okay. Here we go, then.”

They jumped to the heart of the Enemy Domain.

They reinserted themselves into normal space a few tens of kilometers above the surface of an overdeveloped planet. The ship was braking sharply as they dropped with breathtaking speed toward the ground. On the wall displays, Herb could see red acceleration bars climbing to the ceiling, directly opposing the green velocity indicators that were crawling toward zero. They were going to hit the city that sprawled below. Silver spires grew toward them, reaching to engulf the ship…They fell among them and the room shook violently.

Something had just attacked them. The ceiling viewing fields darkened, the walls of the impossibly high skyscrapers that blurred past them in the side viewing fields were bathed in brilliant white light, their windows shining silver in the second dawn.

“Hit the button,” called Robert.

Herb looked at the silver machine that he still held in his right hand, loosely wrapped in a linen napkin, and something occurred to him. Shame blossomed within him, shot through with horror. He had been too self-absorbed to realize…

“But you’ll be eaten, too. You’re a robot…”

Robert gave a nonchalant shrug.

“A robot who backed up his mindset before we jumped,” he said. He reached across and placed his hand around Herb’s. His touch was soft and warm. The red accelerator bars shrank to zero at the same time as the green velocity bars vanished and the ship touched the ground. Robert squeezed Herb’s hand; the silver metal of the sharp little machine pushed into his hand and the button was pressed. Robert smiled at him and the pressure on his hand vanished. Herb saw why: Robert’s arm had vanished, too. A shaft of sunlight lanced down into the interior of the ship, pouring through a hole that had opened up in the roof above him. Through the gap he could see silver spires seemingly converging to a point high above in a brilliant blue sky, a soft white puff of cloud was slowly spreading out up there, a dandelion clock.