The Del Azarchel who appeared on the library file-casts, and made speeches over the radio, was an electronic image, of course. The Xypotech, Ghost Del Azarchel, was now Master of the World, and no one outside his immediate circle knew it.

7. Picnic with the Princess

“Why not tell everyone?” Montrose asked Rania one noon at their picnic. The two of them had ridden out to a sunny glade in the park north of Beausoliel in Monaco. They were “alone” except for a squad from the Corps des Sapeurs-Pompiers in camouflage armor, and a flotilla of two-man rotor-craft gunships shaped like freakish four-leaf clovers floating silently overhead, their cannons like scorpion tails. The troopers were visible only as blurry man-shaped bubbles if the leaves and branches behind them shook in the wind. Montrose did not mind the aircraft: with their four huge hoop-shaped lifting ducts, they looked properly futuristic to him.

“In due time,” she answered, allowing herself a small smile. Rania had noticed the switch over from Man Del Azarchel to Ghost Del Azarchel based on the playing style of their planetary chessgame. Ghost Del Azarchel did not sweat the small stuff: he played for the long-range endgame.

That small smile told him she planned to stir public opinion against the machine. A general church council had been called to debate the matter of artificial intelligence, and its theological and legal implications. Also, Frankenstein themes were appearing in several plays, operas, and interactives on New Bollywood channels, and in smart books, dumb books, and a Parisian musical play. She would play the information that the world government was no longer in human hands as a trump card.

“How is your work coming?” she asked.

Montrose’s latest project, at the moment, was a drawerful of Van Neumann diamonds. These were carbon crystals containing self-replicating software, each “bearded diamond” edged with nano-tube hairs able to pull carbon out of a surrounding environment, and build another of itself, and then link and talk to it. Each diamond sensed pressure differentials on its super-hard refractory skin, and could determine which direction to grow.

As the diamonds grew, the software would build an ever-more complex computer mind, and the upper limits on its growth depended on its mass-to-surface ratio. Its smallest possible shape was a sphere of a few miles wide, but if it grew with a convoluted coral growth according to a fractal pattern, there was no upper limit. A simple calculation showed that this self-replicating machine should, in theory, produce a larger Xypotech logic crystal that the entire production capacity of every nation Del Azarchel could bring to bear. At the moment, Montrose had no idea what software or artificial mind could be stored in the emulation such a robust logic crystal could maintain.

An unanswered question was what environment to put them into, or how to construct the feeding whiskers so that things human beings needed, like oxygen, would be left alone. He could think of nowhere on Earth safe to unleash a Van Neumann machine. The nightmare hazard of Van Neumann replication growing out of control had been known and feared so long before the technology was possible, that a complete, if imaginary, vocabulary existed to describe the various forms of threat.

But he thought she was referring to his other project.

“I have several very promising lines of inquiry,” he said, “and I just translated a section from the Omicron Segment which seems to be a direct run-down of the mathematics of self-correction in multicentric medium-knit self-referencing systems of holographic memory. In other words, since part of you was made right, I think I can reverse-engineer the rest of the instructions on how to make you, and get a set of morphic intermediaries. I can fix you without changing you, if you see what I mean. I want to test it on an emulation first, an Iron Ghost of you.”

“And create a rival for your affection? I would be unhappy as a machine, so she would be unhappy if I made her like me, and if I made a version of me that was so different from me that I would not be unhappy as a machine, I suspect it would hardly be me. I would not bring a child into so dangerous a world: if the Hermeticists made a copy, they would download her into their grotesque gladiatorial games.”

“Why do they do that?”

“Because the human conscience is not infinitely malleable. Despite what you’ve heard, neural tissue changes, or changes in environment or background can only alter the human conscience somewhat. It snaps back: the conscience reacts, and exacts revenge. Not everyone lives by the same rules, but everyone lives by the same spirit.”

“What the pox does that mean? Spirit?”

“In this case, a myth about evolutionary superiority is the tale the Hermeticists told themselves on the ship to soothe their consciences—that the Iberians are superior to the Indians. You see? The ship was awash with blood clouds, and engineering was damaged in the fighting. Corpses were floating everywhere. The slaughterhouse smell could not be cleaned from the ventilation, which was not designed to scrub such volumes. The human mind has only a finite possible set of neurolinguistic responses to deal with death, murder, gnawing guilt.”

“They said that they were the preferred darlings of evolution,” he guessed, grimacing.

She nodded, looking as if she felt ashamed for the men who raised her. “The fact that the noble Kshatriya and peaceful Brahmins died proved that they were never fit to survive: so runs the myth. That myth means the Hermeticists must kill themselves in proxy in their mental wars in dataspace. Such is the Hermetic spirit.”

Something in her poise and expression seemed odd to him. “There is something else.”

Her sea-gray gaze was upon him, glancing from the corners of her eyes, beneath heavily lashed lids. She said nothing.

“They’re fighting over you, aren’t they? In their electronic gladiatorial games. They are all in love with you, not just Del Azarchel. Well…? You don’t seem to be in any hurry to deny it.”

“What do you remember?”

“Nothing. It ain’t coming back to me. But I can picture it in my head. Since you was the only girl, with your girly scent and dancing eyes and your pheromones clogging the ship’s ventilation system, there you must have been, all bobbing around in zero gee, round and curving and giggly. For a while you were a sacralicious fourteen-year-old, then a coltish seventeen-year-old; just a curious, impish, playful, coy, smarter-than-all-get-out cute little package. Next you were a superintelligent, glittering nineteen-year-old, and the only one really fun to talk with, since you made each of them feel special. I seen you got that gift about you. Also, aboard the submarine-like conditions, the nineteen-year-old had to press up too close to them to see the view screens and work the controls and so on. And of course aboard the ship they are either half-nude to save on mass, or wear nothing but ultraskintight web suits which show off a girl’s extremely well-formed buttocks, and, in the cold, I’m thinking your nipples would…”

She hit him with a slab of ham before he could say more. “Men are disgusting creatures! Who in their right mind would design women to be attracted to them!”

But by that point, he had taken a handful of potato salad to her face in counterattack, and then there was nothing to do but settle the matter by wrestling.

“You better let me up,” she said. Her bottom lip was sticking out as she tried to huff and puff and blow a curl of her hair up out of her eyes. She was nonchalantly watching the lack of success with the stubborn hair strand, not looking at his blazing pale eyes, even though his face was inches from her face, his lips inches from her lips. “You’ll make my protectors nervous. Lèse majesté is a still a crime in these hey-ah parts, pardnah.”