A sense of enormous energies filled her, though the wind whistled through silence and traffic was still thinner than along Fell. The cybercosm sent communications to work scenes far oftener than it dispatched material bodies. Perhaps a score of machines were in her visual field. A huge, torpedo-shaped transport murmured by, self-steered. Two little flyers buzzed overhead, optics bulging out of bluish metal, arms trailing aft below the wings. A fractally dendritic manipulator glided past, three meters tall; its finest extremities quivered and shimmered in the gusts. A wheeled, multiply tentacular globe was a sight new to her. And on and on … Which were robots, which were intelligent and aware, which were puppets of a thing that might reside halfway around the planet? How much did the question mean? Electrophotonic minds could mesh at will in every possible configuration, achieving every potential—
She was not quite the sole human. A man strode by, so purposefully that he must have some occupation here. A consultant, a technician? A woman stood at a distance, apparently discoursing with an anthropo-morph that could almost have been taken for a spacesuit. Could she be a synnoiont? Two other men, grizzled and vaguely shabby, walked in surly conversation. Local residents? Probably. Those would be few, -because flesh and blood tended to feel uncomfortable in environs like this, but on that account lodgings in side streets would be cheap.
“Mary Carfax” had one. The seething data traffic everywhere around must help screen hers. She’d be free of people living close by, who might wonder why she never left home. All that had been necessary was to smuggle the apparatus in and install it. The precaution of slipping a false registry into the database would have been more difficult to take, but, given Lilisaire’s connections, not impossible. Aleka knew something about that kind of trick.
She turned on Greenwich and, a few blocks down, found the place. It was a leftover house in the sleek pastel-plastic style of eighty or ninety years ago. Those flanking and facing it looked deserted. Evidently city robots kept them in good repair, but Aleka wondered fleetingly how long it would be before other machines obliterated them to make room for more machines.
Or would they? Why? Sophotects didn’t proliferate for the sake of proliferation, as humans used to. The growth they strove for was ethereal, capabilities of the intellect, up toward the Teramind and beyond. Aleka shivered in the bleak wind.
She confronted the door and spoke her name. Carfax had obviously entered instructions, with a recorded image, for it retracted at once. She ran tongue across lips, clamped teeth together, and went inside.
A cramped room held obsolete furniture and banal pictures. Surprised, Aleka then decided this was for the benefit of any unwanted person, a constable or whoever, who could not be refused admission. She passed on into a space big and still. Walls had withdrawn to make a single chamber. Windows had blanked. The ceiling imitated sunlight and the air lay warm, but she guessed that was on her account, likewise a lounger in the middle of the otherwise empty floor. At the far end she saw a large gray panel, blank except for sensors, a screen, a speaker, and sliders that doubtless covered specialized outlets. A general-purpose robot stood in a corner adjoining. She assumed the sophotect took direct control of it. The mind itself, the physical system, was—elsewhere in the house.
“Salud,” she greeted out of a tight throat.
The voice that replied had become a resonant baritone. “Bienvenida, Senorita Kame. For favor, remove your outer garment, be seated, make yourself comfortable. What can I offer you? Food, beverage, narcotic, stimulant? I regret the choice is limited, because visitors like you are rare, but the usual things are on hand.”
“N-no, gracias.” Aleka feared that if she tried to deal with a cup or plate, it would tremble. She felt grateful for Mama’s wine.
Reaction flared. Why the Q should she be nervous? Here was no god, but a machine—a single machine, sealed off from the rest of the cybercosm. Yes, it had awareness, it had gifts that in certain respects must be greater than hers, but in other ways it was surely circumscribed, naive, dedicated to this one service. When that ended and a new program was entered, it would not be the same mind, the same being, at all.