But you saw it.
A long time agothat is, a long time before I was put away. My memory of it is vague. I was more interested in the technical production than the story I was in the business at the time. Fight tapes, sex tapesbut nothing like Bad Karma . The business had already moved on by the time I was frozen down. The technics were evolving at an incredible pace, thanks to nanotech enhancements. Bad Karma must have become a museum piece long before the end of the twenty-third century. It was probably lost more than five hundred years ago.
Thats bullshit, she said. All VE tapes were routinely
upgraded to take aboard new developments. I saw six different updates of The Snow Queen when I was a kid, and four of Peter Pan .
The Snow Queen and Peter Pan were classic VE tapes made for children. The twenty-second-century versions Christine was referring to had been modeled on much earlier webware, but dozens of writers over the course of half a century had added more and more code to them, building up the backgrounds and making the special effects more elaborate. Even Damon had done a little hackwork on The Snow Queen at one time.
Its not the same thing, I told her. The hoods you and I used got better and better, but the basic design and coding routines remained the same. Those technics were already reaching their limit when I got out of the business. The next generation of hoods was about to restart from scratch, using an entirely different set of electronic substrates. They might have remade The Snow Queen yet again after I was put away, but if they did theyd have had to do it from the bottom up rather than continuing the series of add-ons. More likely it was filed away, replaced with some new favorite specifically designed to show what the new technics could do. When Bad Karma was made your case was still relatively fresh in the older generations memory, but it couldnt have stayed that way. We were supposed to be living in the New Utopia, but there was no shortage of killers around. Compared with the Eliminators you were old news and Davida assures me that there were plenty more to come.
Whos Davida? It was a stall, to give her time to think.
She was sitting where I am when I woke up where you are. Davida Berenike Columella. Here on Excelsior, they seem to have done away with surnames. Maybe we should have done that ourselves, as soon as Helier wombs wrested the burdens and privileges of reproduction from the nuclear family.
Caine can pass for a given name, she observed, sardonically. Only too well.
Tamlin too, I told her. But maybe not Zimmerman. That comes with heritage attached.
She looked around again. So this is a holding cell, right? she said. Do we have to share it, or can I get one of my own?
Its not a cell, exactly, I reassured her. The sisterhood assures me that well have freedom of movement when their preliminary observations are complete. They want us to remain here for the time being, but we have our own spaces. Mines on the other side of that wall over there if you want a connecting door to open all you have to do is ask. In the meantime, we can go anywhere we want in virtual space.
I dont see any hoods, let alone a bodysuit.
The walls are a lot cleverer than they look. The sisters havent rigged them for direct speech activation, but the people listening in will facilitate any requests we care to make within reason. If you want a bed, or a fully laden dining table, or an immersion suit, you only have to say so. The foods lousy, but its edible and your IT will take away the nasty taste if you persist with it. You can summon up a screen and talk to any kind of sim you care to nominate.
She pounced on that one. But youre not a sim, she was quick to say. Youre real meat.
Im prepared to accept the working hypothesis that Im real meat, I said, wryly. Davida too. Apparently, were in something called the Counter-Earth Cluster, which means that information from Earth has to be bounced halfway around the orbit, with an uncomfortably long time delay. I have a sneaking suspicion, though, that the real reason the sisterhood cant get near immediate and unlimited access to Earths datastores is that the good folks on Earth wont give it to them. Ditto the outer system. If there ever was an age of free and unlimited access between our time and now, its over. But were used to that, arent we? We come from a world where people who couldnt or wouldnt pay for information had to steal it, and where people who could manufacture and manage false information could make a good living secreting it into the system for the dubious benefit of the paying customers.
Thats what you were put away for? she guessed.
Perhaps. If I was put away. Even if I was, I should have been out in seven years. Ten at most.
And now youre a time-tourist with a one-way open ticket. Count your blessings, Mr Tamlin.
You can call me Madoc. Im trying to count my blessings. Its not as easy as you might think.
She raised her right hand, made a fist, and elevated the right forefinger. One, she said, defiantly. She meant the blessing that she