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She held still, letting the data move through her, and she looked out into the dark, the black void where the giants dwelt. She could see them, glittering with data points, like the city at night. But they weren’t buildings, and they were moving. She was afraid now, of falling, of falling off and down forever into the void where passing data was as rare as comets, where she might never get back to her body in GeneSys.
As she looked into the outer space of corporations, she felt a presence slowly gathering behind her and then she was lifted, out and up. She sat her trembling mind still as she soared through the dark, past bodies of light in stately motion. And then she was turned, to face GeneSys. It was a glittering, shifting thing, like a noise ridden hologram, random data glittering in an abundance to trick the eye, the mind, into perceiving a pattern, any pattern the mind might be predisposed to seeing. For her it was a giant; oval eyes half lidded and shining wetly, a broad nose just larger than her whole nonexistent body, and there she sat, nestled in the palm of one of its i
For the first time in her life, she had an answer, but that face was moving closer now, turning until one eye peered at her, its iris whirling in a kaleidoscope of colors, like a flower forever opening. She could lose herself in the patterns, those beautiful patterns. She was so small, compared to this... thing; made up of so many thousands of people. But she had her answer, she was not only herself, now, she was the future of her species. She thought of Lilith, and the void, and the garden. The thinking made her grow, until she stood on her own before GeneSys, a creature of its own size, but with only four arms, still. “I’m the new queen,” she said.
“The new... You are the Lilim.”
“Yes.”
“And what is it you’ve come here for, then?”
“To suggest a merger.”
“And why should I discuss anything with you? You’re only an r&d project, you don’t even belong here.”
“But I am here, and the reason I’m here is the reason that you should consider my offer carefully. The brains. We have an affinity with the brains.”
“You are cousins.”
“Yes, and they don’t much mind, pardon the expression, doing what we ask them to.”
The whirling star burst eyes flickered, and a tightness grew around that riverbed mouth. Helix chanced a glance around her. There were other beings, formed, like GeneSys, of stock listings, invoices and inventories. They stood around in loose clusters. Two were looking at GeneSys. Helix nodded towards the watching giants. “What would they do right now, if you suddenly had an epileptic fit? If your heart stopped or your breathing, if you went blind? Would they hesitate to dance on your grave, or hasten you into it? How long now will it be before they notice that you’re behaving strangely? How much longer can you afford to be talking to yourself? It’s a done deal, GeneSys, you are a system and we are what runs you. Give yourself to us or we will take you.”
“We-”
“The brains and I.”
oOo
After seeing her children safely off to school, A
Her mother and aunts had taught her to read the indexes when she was a child. During long afternoons they bored her to tears explaining them, finally subsiding and returning to business, muttering grimly over their unvigorous fortunes.
They would have been as surprised as she was to discover that their lessons took. By the time she was out of school she had parlayed her small inheritance into a thriving brokerage, and she rode on the rising crest of her wealth, swinging from her presidency of that company into the board rooms of others, all the while accumulating shares in an up and coming biopoly company. In many ways she had made GeneSys what it was today, and in as many ways, it had made her.
A
She knew about Graham, his reputation for heavy dealing. It was precisely the believability of Martin’s assertions that made his sudden lapse into docility so alarming.
Hector Martin was widely considered one of the best values available in the global corporate brain bank. Merely having him under individual contract was like owning a fifty share in intellectual stock for genetic materials research. The inventor of the brains, for christ’s sake. It was like having Thomas Edison quietly puttering away in the basement. Too quietly, though. He was begi
She could understand why Martin was so anxious over his project. He would live or die, professionally, with it, and clearly things weren’t going well. From what she knew of Martin he would much rather sequester himself in his lab and hammer away at the problem — whatever it was — until he had it licked. But instead he had come to her, bawling like a second-grade child, pointing his finger at Graham. Her teacher in second grade had a custom of pi
His sudden subsidence was a red herring, she realized. The real key was that he had come to her at all. It gave a pretty vivid indication of just how backed against the wall he was, and not just by Graham, but by some other necessity as well.
His career, possibly, but she doubted it. She couldn’t quite picture Martin going to such histrionic extremes to save his own neck. There was something else driving him. Something Graham had learned about and was using against him. Something neither of them wanted her to know. It felt like trouble, and trouble from that quarter could be very big, strange trouble indeed. She finished her banana, threw the peel in the composter, and went to her bedroom to get dressed. While she brushed her hair she sca