Kiln People

Whose fault is it if the Universal Kilns mainframe gets two of us mixed up, confusing this me with a completely different me?

Normally, at this point in a mission, I’d try to report in. Find a public phone jack — I see one right across the lobby — and dump an encrypted copy of the report I’ve been dictating almost nonstop since this morning. Let Nell know where I am. Let Albert in on what’s been done.

But that’s contractually forbidden this time. Gineen Wammaker doesn’t even want me to call her. Nothing that might be traced to Studio Neo or her strange comrades. One result is a thwarted feeling as I crave to spill the contents of my built-in recorder, like a penitent’s impulse to confess.

Well, add it to all the other irritating traits of this oddball mission. I’m riding the down escalator now, dropping into a huge anthill complex underneath the glittering corporate domes, worrying about the next phase — looking for clues that Vic Aeneas Kaolin is illegally withholding scientific breakthroughs.

All right, let’s suppose — as the maestra and Queen Irene suspect — that Universal Kilns has solved a nagging problem of our age, how to transmit the Standing Wave of human consciousness across distances greater than a meter. Will there be clues or signs that a layman like me might recognize? Pairs of giant ante

Or might UK executives already have perfected the technology? Could they be using it right now, in secret, to “beam” copies of themselves all over the planet?

How about the other breakthroughs that Wammaker and Irene and Collins suspect? Ditto life extension? Ditto-to-ditto copying? Modern wish-fantasies, but what if they’re about to come true?

My employers want me to seek evidence, but the other half of my job is just as urgent … do nothing illegal. Whatever I happen to glimpse by wandering around can be blamed on poor UK security. But I won’t pick any locks for Gineen and her friends.

I could lose my license.

Damn. Something’s been bugging me all afternoon. Like an itch that won’t localize. Normally I’d follow the intuition, but there’s so much that’s unconventional about this job — the non-disclosure contract, the ban on inloading — plus the fact that I’m working for the maestra, which I swore I’d never do again. Add that violent episode back at the Rainbow Lounge and now this tightrope act, trying to a spy on a major corporation without breaking laws. Any of that would make a guy feel creepy.

So it’s strangely easy to dismiss my uneasy feelings. Attribute them to this assortment of known irritations … not something even worse, glimmering on the edge of awareness …

Here’s were I should get off. First sublevel. RESEARCH DIVISION, it says in bright letters over a friendly, campuslike entry portal. Beyond another simple security kiosk I glimpse high-class gray and black dittos — even some high-sensory whites — moving about with lively animation, frenetically busy and apparently enjoying it. Scientists and techies generally love copying, since it lets them run experiments around the clock. Like creating whole armies of yourself to raid Nature’s storehouse, day and night, grabbing every grain of data while your real brain stays well rested for theorizing.

Irene said it should be easy to get past security here, too. Yosil Maharal was head of Research and an Albert gray was hired to investigate the poor man’s death, so these folks should expect a visit. Heck, even if they turn me away, I can peer around from the entrance -

Now what are you doing?

Crum, I didn’t get off!

I stayed on the moving way, letting it carry me right past the entry portal, downward past Sublevel One, heading deeper underground!

This isn’t according to plan …

But it kind of makes sense, right? I think I see what unconscious impulse made me keep going. Won’t the Research Department have its own back routes to the deeper caverns, where large-scale experiments can run? Techies hate security, so those back routes will be less formal, less guarded than the central shaft. In fact, I’ll bet there are no guard-kiosks below at all. Anyway, my cover story will seem more plausible if I wander in through the industrial plant, having gotten “lost” somewhere along the way.

Sounds good. But does it explain why my legs locked moments ago, preventing me from getting off? Dammit. Dittotech would be a whole lot more convenient and rational if soul-copying didn’t require dragging your whole subconscious along, every time.

More basement levels rise slowly past while I grapple with the question. A wide portal labeled TESTING offers a glimpse into a kind of hell — warrens of experimental chambers where new golem models undergo torturous ordeals, like crash dummies of old, but aware, able to report the effects of every mangling or indignity. And none of the deliberate mutilations can be called immoral, since you’ll find eager volunteers for anything nowadays.

Yay, diversity.

Still riding the down escalator, I find that I’m rubbing my side — the long bulge of numb scar tissue covering that wound I got during the fight at the Rainbow Lounge. There’s no pain, yet I find it increasingly bothersome. Is the irritation psychocermaic?

I buy grays that are hyper-tuned for concentration, compelled to recite and analyze while roving in the field. Beyond that, all of them partake in Al’s quirky subconscious — the part of me that worries, correlates, then worries more. Looking back, it now seems awfully strange how that fellow zeroed in on me at Irene’s club … coincidentally the same punk that Monday’s green ran into last night, on Odeon Square, before taking that walk under the river.

And strange that Queen Irene — eager to see me and with many selves to spare — left me waiting in that violent club, where trouble found me.

Was it meant to find me?

I’ve dropped down to the first industrial level. Sprawling around me now, huge stainless steel tanks array into the distance like regiments of stout, shining giants.

The air fills with pungent, earthy aromas of peptide-soaked clay. Only a fraction comes from new material. The rest gets recycled, delivered every day in great slurry tubes from collection points all over the city — a frothy pureé that only hours ago made up individual humanoid beings, walking and talking, pursuing ambitions and countless distinctive yearnings. Now their physical substance reunites, blending together again in these tanks … the ultimate democratic commingling.

Mixing paddles stir as sparkling powders rain into the concoction, seeding nano-coalescent sites that will grow into rox cells, pre-energized for one frenetic day of mayfly activity. My limbs twitch. I can’t help picturing the entropy steadily seeping into my own cells as they rapidly use up the élan vital they absorbed in these same tanks.

In a few hours that depletion will lead to the pang. A wish to return, like some ageing salmon, to the one who imprinted me. For inloading, a ditto’s only chance at an afterlife, before this body rejoins the everlasting river of recycled clay.

Only there will be no inloading this time. No continuity. Not for me.

The floor rises past me, leading to another subterranean level, bigger and noisier than the last. Those big tanks that I saw — now overhead — fu