"I guess. You scared?"
"Me? No. It"s like I told you before, I owe it all to the company store. There"s no freedom for me unless I take it."
"So you don"t regret being in GP-9?"
"No. I liked it more than anything else I had up to then, except for my family. And you know the way the employment cycles work it"s hard to keep family goin". Anyway, there was some good people in our GT. Atty and Or are great. Nin and Nina. You. I really like you, Neil."
"Yeah, Blue. I like you too."
"There"s only one thing that I regret, really."
"What"s that?" Neil asked.
"D"or."
"You and her had something going, didn"t you?"
"Yeah. Yeah." Blue Nile smiled. "But it"ll never come to nuthin" now."
"Why not?"
"She loves her little restaurant and I"m a fugitive from New York." The small prod took in a deep breath and let it out as a sigh. "Promise me something, Neil?"
"What"s that, Blue?"
"That you"ll tell D"or that I was talkin" about her. About how much I cared for her."
"Why don"t you tell her yourself?"
"I mean, if I don"t make it."
"What"s gonna stop you?"
"This is serious business, Neilio. We"re fugitives. We"re on our own now. I don"t care for myself. I had a good run for four years. But D"or, I could have seen myself with her."
"Well, if you don"t make it, what makes you think I will?"
"Maybe you won"t," Blue Nile agreed. "But if you do, will you tell her that I was talkin" about her?"
"Absolutely."
10.
When the swift began to descend Neil woke up. The sun was shining on a wintry ocean filled with icebergs. Blue Nile was looking out of the window on the opposite side of the cabin. Ptolemy Bent was leaning through the c.o.c.kpit door, talking to the pilot.
An island loomed before them. A frozen rock in the middle of the Antarctic. When the swift lowered itself onto the craggy beach a solitary figure in a balloonlike blue parka approached.
Neil wasn"t surprised that the figure was Nina Bossett. Once inside the cabin she tore off the coat and wrapped herself in Ptolemy Bent"s arms. She was crying and so was he. Even though the plane was tossed by turbulence from the Antarctic winds, the two stood there in front of the pilot"s door hugging and weeping.
"Sir," the pilot said. "You will have to take your seats and buckle up."
Ptolemy and Nina kissed. They couldn"t seem to let go.
"Sir."
She caressed his cheek with her fingertips. He kissed her fingers.
"Sir, please. Low-level radar in this region is at full capacity because of the MacroCode facilities nearby."
Finally they sat side by side in the row behind Neil and Blue Nile. There they talked and gazed deeply into each other"s eyes.
Neil watched them, his heart in turmoil. The experiences of the past year flooded his mind. He remembered the formation of geese flying outside the window when he first regained consciousness; he regarded that event as the first moment of his life. He loved Nina, which was more than he"d ever hoped for, and now he loved Ptolemy Bent with equal pa.s.sion even though they had only just met. He was angry and frightened, amazed and alone with thoughts that he"d recently learned had been planted by a computer that thought it was programmed by G.o.d.
His life before GEE-PRO-9 had proved to be nothing; his new life was slipping between his fingers. He was so distracted by these thoughts that he didn"t realize when Nina had settled in next to him. She put her hand on his shoulder and made clucking sounds in his ear. Neil pulled away from her.
"What"s wrong, honey?" she asked.
"I can"t take it," he said. "Why don"t you just leave me alone?"
"What"s wrong? Why you mad?"
Neil realized then that she had never loved him, that she thought he knew this, and so when the real love of her life returned she was surprised that Neil would have trouble accepting him.
"Is it "cause I was yellin" at you over the vid? I was just mad, baby. I saw in her records that that room-girl gave up her days off to stay with you."
"How can you complain about Charity when you have him?" Neil waved toward Ptolemy, who had turned on the computer at his seat and was deep into the colors and forms he conjured there.
"You mean Popo? Honey, he"s my brother."
"Your brother?"
"Yeah. Half brother, really. We have the same father, a man who called himself Johnny Delight."
"Why would you kiss your brother like that?"
" "Cause it"s the first time we ever met, that"s why."
"How can that be?"
"Popo been in prison on Madagascar since he was sixteen. They said that he killed his uncle and grandmother but he didn"t. He freed "em, that"s what Aunt Kai told me. She said that he send "em up to heaven, maybe even to G.o.d."
"That"s crazy," Neil said.
"That"s what you said about GEE-PRO-9 when you first got there. You said it was crazy, but it wasn"t, was it?"
"That"s different. It"s crazy to think you can go through a door and end up in heaven. It"s crazy even to believe in heaven."
"Why? "Cause you say so? What do you know?"
"What does he know?" Neil jerked his head toward Ptolemy.
"Popo got the highest IQ of anybody ever tested, even Dr. Kismet. They been havin" him a prisoner at Randac ever since he was a teenager, since I was just a little baby."
"But they let him out," Neil said, almost hopefully. "They let him go."
"Not really."
"What do you mean?"
"When you picked him up that was the last step of his escape."
"We did a jail break?"
"You did. I"m just an accessory after the fact."
In a great underground cavern in the northern Sahara Desert, Ptolemy Bent and fifteen of his faithful prods gathered around an antique ebony wood table. The floor and walls of the chamber were made from smooth and shiny plates of Gla.s.sone. The ceiling was formed from fused stones.
". . . the truth is," Ptolemy was saying, "we were undone by the Cincinnati PD."
"Why would they be interested in a New York office?" Oura asked. Though deep concern showed in her face she was still radiant in her various shades of gold.
"The city of Cincinnati has its money tied up in stocks. And General Specifix is one of the few arms of MacroCode that Kismet allowed to go public. He used the profits from that venture to build the Blue Zone. Anyway, the treasury department of Cincinnati noticed large sums of money missing that Un Fitt had siphoned off to build various havens around the globe. The bottom line of the company wasn"t affected because GP-9 and other GTs more than made up the losses with profitable projects. Still, the CPD didn"t know that and so they began their investigation.
"When they discovered Un Fitt"s program it was only a matter of time before they found the ten GTs that we"d set up."
"How many of the prods were caught?" Athria asked.
"Over two thousand," Ptolemy said. "We were lucky that Un Fitt began monitoring the CPD soon after they discovered the financial discrepancies. He was able to set up the escape protocols that I gave him at the beginning of his run."
"Like the swift coming to Maya?" Neil asked.
"Yes," said Ptolemy. "And the robot plane that took Nina to the island where we picked her up. We had hundreds of two-legged escape routes. The problem was that we didn"t have enough time to warn everyone before the intercorporate police force was called in."
"What happens to the ones they caught?" a small woman with a red beard asked.
"Un Fitt is already locating those that were captured and putting logic into play that will release them into our hands."
"I thought Un Fitt was discovered by the cops," Neil said. "Wouldn"t they just shut him down?"
"Un Fitt is an operating system," Ptolemy replied. "His program, which is self-altering, is stored in over ten thousand dump-sites, which are designated by a tenth power randomizer. These addresses, once found, are erased from the running program"s system. Self-generated updates to his system are downloaded on an hourly basis to an additional ten thousand sites. These updates can be retrieved via radio waves. Because of this system it is virtually impossible to shut Un Fitt down permanently; it would be d.a.m.ned hard to even force him to take a step back in his own intellectual evolution."
"Did G.o.d make those programming decisions?" Neil was surprised at the sarcasm in his own voice.
"I did the peripheral programming," Ptolemy said. "I set up the system to be inserted in one of Randac"s satellite computers. I set up everything but then I let the spirit I discovered years ago inform the internal logic of the system."
"Vat does dat mean?" asked a tall man named Blaun. He had an east European accent and radiant blue eyes.
"Years ago," Ptolemy said, "I discovered that the atmosphere of Earth was enveloped by an intelligent ether. It"s a vast store of knowledge that exists in an area between five hundred and two thousand miles above the surface."
"An intelligence?" someone asked.
"That"s all I call it. It"s an awareness, a consciousness. For many years this consciousness has been trying to communicate with us--by radio waves. I found the pattern when I was a child not more than four. Over the next ten years I was able to use a transmitter to communicate with the ent.i.ty. Back then I thought that it was G.o.d; now I"m not so sure. I don"t even know what the relationship is between it and us. I mean, it might have created us, but there"s also an argument that we, through the electronic nature of our minds, might be the cause of this meta-intelligence. Then again it could just be some kind of celestial traveler, stopping for a few centuries and trying to understand the DNA-based fungus that makes up all life here on Earth.
"At any rate, I invited the ent.i.ty to enter into the Un Fitt system. It created the logic of Un Fitt and I used that logic to create the schools that trained all of you."
"Trained us for what?" a woman named Thedra asked.
"To advance," Ptolemy said. "To change. The way the world is today, change has become a function of profit. Money makes change. There"s very little of the individual left. Our minds are made to stagnate, our bodies are fuel for the systems of production. Maybe some of that is good. But then again maybe it isn"t. What Un Fitt and I are trying to do is create revolutionaries, people who aren"t satisfied with just being prods."
"What else is there?" Thedra asked.
"You see?" Ptolemy said. "Two years ago you wouldn"t have asked that question. Two years ago you just showed up at the a.s.signment booth and went where they told you to go. You followed the system hoping that you could put in your fifty-three years and then retire on the half of your salary that the union kept aside for you.
"Don"t get me wrong, not all of the prods that Un Fitt found have worked out. Over twelve hundred have turned us in to the authorities."
"Then why weren"t we caught long ago?" a tall Asian man asked.
"Because of Un Fitt," Ptolemy said. "He has superimposed a communications net over every prod we have, using our ID chips. Every communication going out is first reviewed and edited by Un Fitt"s matrices."
"So what did you do when you discovered the traitors?" Athria asked.
"Nothing. We simply supplied a realistic hyper-animae police official who thanked the whistle-blower and who then asked them to remain as a spy. If they were too afraid we thanked them and offered a transfer, cautioning them to keep quiet because of a broad-based ongoing investigation."
"What about somebody going in person to the CBI or somewhere?" Neil asked. "Some of them must have done that."
"Only six," Ptolemy replied. "Six out of twelve hundred eighty-nine."
"What did you do about them?"
"All CBI informants go through a background check before their claims are investigated. In each case we created a fairly serious crime that the claimant seemed to have committed. They were then subjected to automatic justice and sentenced to low-security prison systems. Each one was visited by an electronic apparition that warned them of a worse fate should they persist in trying to expose Un Fitt."
"Have you killed anybody?" Neil asked.
"No. But the question has merit. Un Fitt has set up a.s.sa.s.sination protocols in case of extreme circ.u.mstances. In the best of a bad situation we could strip the prod of his consciousness and transmit it into the ether."
"To G.o.d?" Oura asked.
"Or whatever," Ptolemy said. "That way the perpetrator is dead to the world but alive elsewhere."
"Vat if you could not do this process?" Blaun asked.