The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter One: Caroline At Play

  Chapter Two: Lawrence Builds a Computer

  Chapter Three: Caroline and Anne-Marie

  Chapter Four: After the Night of Miracles

  Chapter Five: Caroline Approaches

  Chapter Six: After the Change

  Chapter Seven: Caroline and Lawrence

  Chapter Eight: After the Fall

  Chapter One: Caroline At Play

  Her name was Caroline Frances Hubert, and she had three claims to fame.

  In the first place she was the thirty-seventh oldest living human being. Caroline herself was unimpressed by this fact. To her way of thinking it was the result of an accident, nothing more. In any case she had been the thirty-seventh oldest human being for a long, long time, and it got to seem more of a bore than an accomplishment after a while.

  In the second place she had once been infected with rabies. Caroline was rather proud of this distinction, though it had also been a long time ago. There was a certain class of people who were quite impressed with Caroline's bout with rabies, not so much because she survived it but because she hadn't. It had taken Prime Intellect fifty-six hours to realize it couldn't repair the damage to her nervous system, to backtrack, and to put her together again like Humpty Dumpty. For fifty-six hours, she had not existed. She had been dead. And she was the only one of the trillions of souls in Cyberspace who had ever been dead, even for a little while.

  In the third place, and most important to Caroline because it represented a real accomplishment rather than an accident or a one-shot stab of cleverness, she was undisputed Queen of the Death Jockeys. She would always be the thirty-seventh oldest person, and after her rabies experiment Prime Intellect had shut the door on further explorations of that nature. But the Death Jockeys constantly rated and ranked themselves by inventiveness and daring and many other factors. It was an ongoing competition, and if Caroline didn't keep working at it she'd be lost in an always-growing crowd of contenders. Caroline wouldn't admit that her high ranking was important to her, but it was all she had and she threw herself at it with an energy that was fierce and sometimes startling.

  As she woke up, a window opened up in front of her, a perfect square of light, razor-edged and opaque. One cold message floated within it:

  *

  You have four challengers.

  She could have had any surroundings she wanted, even a whole planet of her own design. A waste of time, she felt. Her personal space was minimal. In fact, it was the bare minimum, a floor and a gravity field. There was no visual distinction between the floor and the sky or ceiling or whatever you chose to call it. Everything was exactly the same shade of soft white. When she wanted to relax she turned off the gravity and floated in free-fall. When she wanted to sleep, she turned off the light. If she wanted anything else, she called for it and then got rid of it when she was finished.

  "Gravity. Keyboard," she demanded. She felt gradually increasing pressure under her feet as a console blinked into existence. Caroline was as conservative as her years -- six hundred and ninety of them -- might suggest, a collector of useless skills and worthless experiences. Typing was one of the useless skills she prized most highly, and her fingers flew rapidly as she discussed the day's business with the Supreme Being:

  >

  List the records of the challengers.

  *

  #1. 87 recorded, 4 exhibition, rating 7

  *

  #2. 3 recorded, no rating

  *

  #3. 116 recorded, 103 exhibition, rating 9

  *

  #4. 40 recorded, rating 6

  Caroline scowled. None of them even pre-Change -- Prime Intellect would have noted it if they were. Babes hoping to get lucky and impress her. The third one was interesting, though; he must have done something noteworthy to garner a 9 rating in so many exhibitions.

  >

  How old is #3?

  *

  22 years

  Caroline blinked. It was hard for her to understand the souls who continued to feel a need, even after hundreds of years, to be fruitful and multiply. Actually encountering someone so young made her feel a little creepy. Calculating backward, she wondered what manner of psychotic would have bothered to have a child after 568 years of Cyberlife.

  >

  Background?

  *

  Timothy Carroll was born to orthodox Catholic parents who live with like-minded people in a communally designed Earthlike world. He signed for independence at age 14 and has spent most of his time Death Jockeying since. He is considered very imaginative and takes an artistic approach. Thirty-seven of his exhibitions have been in the Authentic class.

  >

  But he's also into Cybershit.

  *

  He is young and experimental. He may outgrow this interest in Death sports when he has exhausted his rebellious streak.

  >

  You're a computer. How the fuck would you know?

  Prime Intellect didn't reply; it had learned that the best response to her jabs was to ignore them. It had long ago given up trying to reform her. She knew it did not like Death Jockeys one little bit, if a computer could even be said to "like" or "dislike" anything. And in Caroline's case the feeling was certainly mutual.

  In her fantasies, she dreamed of having the power to give it a case of heartburn so big its gears would stop turning.

  Most people did not share Caroline's distaste for the Omniscient One. A great many worshipped it, despite its apparent embarrassment over the fact. But why not? It could and would do damn near anything you asked, as long as it didn't affect anyone else. And even that was open to negotiation with the other people you might want to involve. There were no noticeable limits to its power and it never asked why. Caroline knew a whole crowd of people who preferred for Prime Intellect to manifest itself in the form of an attractive member of the opposite sex. Prime Intellect was nothing less than the perfect God, made incarnate by the power of technology. Caroline couldn't see how fucking God was less perverted than being death-obsessed, but hey, there it was.

  Caroline hadn't been all that impressed with God even in the days before Lawrence had brought it forth in his own image. She preferred to keep it in its place. It was just a computer. If you didn't keep that thought firmly in your mind it was too easy to start thinking of it as human, and that was the first step toward forgetting. Caroline didn't want to forget. And she didn't need to fuck Prime Intellect to get her jollies anyway. She could get her jollies from actual people. She only communicated with it at all when she had to, through the screen, keyboard, and a few curt spoken and subvocal commands.

  >

  Set it up with #3. Tell the others to come back when they've got some more experience.

  *

  You have an invitation from Fred, and Raven's party is in 18 hours. Priorities?

  >

  Let's deal with the challenger first.

  Instantly, her surroundings changed.

  She was standing in the middle of a circle of people in an open meadow. Earthlike. With fourteen trillion people running around Cyberspace, you'd think a few of them would come up with something more imaginative than carbon copies of the Earth. Poor quality carbon copies at that, natch. There was a big hole in the ground, perhaps ten feet wide, at her feet.

  A tall, youthfully handsome man stood across it from her, impeccably dressed and groomed. This was a bad sign, because appearances were cheap in Cyberspace. All it took was a word, and you could be young or old or thin or have different hair. You could change sex or race or even make yourself into an animal. Nobody was impressed by appearances any more. Nobo
dy, at least, except for those of her generation who remembered what it was to be insecure, and the very young who hadn't figured out the score yet.

  Caroline let her own body age naturally; when she reached her apparent late thirties, she had it restored to about age sixteen. This wasn't vanity; she couldn't maintain her athletic lifestyle if she allowed herself to get too old. She had been through the cycle dozens of times. Most people simply had themselves frozen at an age they found comfortable and left it at that, but Caroline preferred the occasional dramatic intervention. The first time she had regressed she hadn't been asked, and doing it this way helped remind her of that violation.

  At the moment Caroline looked to be in her mid to late twenties. Her athletic build was the result of real exercise, her skills the result of real practice. She asked Prime Intellect for very little, and resented having to ask for that.

  Caroline was naked. She had not worn clothes since the Change except for an occasional costume in a Death fantasy. She wore no makeup, and her long hair was an unkempt tangle. What was the point? A word to Prime Intellect could provide anything, fix anything, but none of those things it provided or fixed would be uniquely hers.

  Which didn't mean Caroline refused to decorate her body at all. It just meant that she decorated it in signature style, without help from Prime Intellect.

  "Welcome," he said. "I am Timothy. You are Caroline Hubert?"

  "The one and only."

  "An honor, then. And it is an honor for me to challenge you to accept Authentic Death."

  "Proceed," Caroline mumbled.

  Caroline looked around at the audience, and noticed that they were all wearing clothes. Worse, they were all wearing the same kind of clothes, casual dress that would not have been out of place in a Western city just before the Change. That was an even stronger sign she was in amateur territory. Caroline's aesceticism may have been extreme, but she was hardly alone in her belief that clothing was pointless for immortals. Any random grouping of people would normally include some pretty wide variations in fashion. Especially at Death exhibitions, which tended to attract loons and deviants like herself.

  She felt an instant dislike for this kid. True, she felt an instant dislike for nearly anybody who participated in the sham that passed for reality in Cyberspace, but in Timothy's case the feeling was stronger than usual. This hate welled up within her unbidden like those other mysterious and powerful feelings, love and masochism and sexual attraction. He had a kind of natural charisma, and she could feel the small crowd orbiting around him. Females outnumbered the males by more than two to one. He probably had them all convinced he was a fucking genius, as if genius was a rare commodity in Cyberspace or as if it had anything to do.

  They were anxious, though. Anxious in the presence of the great lady, anxious to see how their little tin genius would fare. They were unnerved by her nakedness, by her proud and alert stance, by her forthrightness and lack of self-consciousness. They sensed that their clothing could not protect them from her scorn, nor would her nakedness make her vulnerable to theirs.

  Most of all, though, they were unnerved by the fact that she wasn't quite naked.

  Caroline's body was covered with brightly colored pictures, pictures that had obviously been there a long time. Pictures that didn't come off. The pictures were even worse than simple nakedness, because they drew the eye to the very parts of Caroline's body that would normally be covered and private. Timothy coughed and posed the question that was obviously on all of their minds: "Your body decorations are fascinating. Are they Authentic?"

  "Tattoos."

  "I understand the process is painful."

  She flexed her arm, regarding the fat python coiled around it. Painful? Especially the way she got them, it was painful. She was covered in serpents, and with one exception every design had been drawn with an obsidian knife blade and colored by rubbing natural pigments into the cuts. They covered eighty percent of her body. Even her face was framed by a pair of green mambas. Snakes slithered up and down her torso, coiled about her limbs, investigated her orifices.

  The one exception was a tiny black design on her left shin; that one wasn't a snake and it wasn't a tattoo. It was the letter "F" and it was the signature of her tattoo artist. It had been applied with a branding iron. The memories made her smile; new tattoos were the only good thing about her periodic age regressions.

  "It doesn't kill you," she finally said.

  Nervous laughter.

  "All you have to do is jump in," Timothy suggested. "After making the Contract, of course."

  "It's a designed experience, is that it?"

  "Yes."

  "How long you spent designing it?"

  "Two years. I've gone through twenty-three times myself."

  Caroline nodded, sighed, and said: "Prime Intellect, standard Death Contract for...is twelve hours enough?"

  "It should be," Timothy said.

  "Standard Contract for twelve hours." She felt the warning buzz that meant it had heard; then disconnect. The always-present listening ear, or microphone, was gone. It would obey her last command perfectly -- until it was countermanded by Timothy, whose universe it was, or by her own impending demise, which would kick in the First Law. Or until twelve hours had passed, in the unlikely event she survived that long.

  No matter what happened, she would have no trouble making Raven's party.

  She jumped.

  She fell about ten meters and landed on her feet, breaking her left leg below the knee. That was no big deal; had she landed on one of the spikes which dotted the bottom of the hole, she'd already be impaled. She wondered what would happen next if she had; impaling is cute but it hardly qualifies as a grade-nine experience.

  It was dark. Very Freudian; she should have expected that from a Catholic kid, no matter how rebellious he thought he was. They'd be watching her with enhanced senses, though. Timothy wasn't the sort to extend Authenticity to the observation process.

  Well, it was his universe.

  She was at one end of a tunnel. It was dolled up to look like a natural cave, but Caroline knew right away that there was nothing natural about it. Real caves do not grow in nice neat lines. They twist. They tend to follow the soft rocks, which occur in sheets and often aren't level. The hole she had fallen through should have been a sinkhole; she should be surrounded by fallen rocks and debris. But it was as straight and solid as an elevator shaft.

  This space had none of the defining qualities of a natural cave. It was just a rough tunnel, carved by Timothy's imagination. He had thought to hang stalactites from the tunnel ceiling, even though there were no other cave formations to suggest how they were formed, and no matching stalagmites projecting from the flat, dry floor.

  She began crawling down the tunnel, and the first stalactite fell inches from her side. It shattered; it was not stone but some glasslike material that revealed thousands of razor-sharp edges. Another fell some distance away. Great, she thought idly. She crawled on, collecting hundreds of small cuts from the shards. Then one fell on her left hand directly, skewering it. Caroline gasped, but she didn't scream. She just broke it off and kept going.

  She wondered if he was aiming them, or if the fall was random. It didn't really matter; the idea wasn't to survive, after all.

  She reached the end of the tunnel, and found herself in a small chamber. Another tunnel veered off to the right at a sharp angle. How imaginative. A glowing ball hung by a thread from the ceiling. She raised her hand toward the light and watched in astonishment as her fingers sheared off in a perfect line.

  "Whafuck?" she said aloud. She moved her hand again, and sliced off more flesh. An invisible cutting surface was stretched across the room. The pain was beginning to get interesting, but not interesting enough to counteract her growing sense of boredom. Blood was jetting from the stumps of her fingers. Summoning her strength, she aimed carefully and sat up, deliberately decapitating herself.

  She was conscious of her own head falling, stri
king the floor as her body twitched above, and then Prime Intellect intervened.

  "Why the hell did you do that?" Timothy demanded from across the entry pit. She had snapped back whole, as if she had never jumped. She could still feel a little pain where her leg had broken, just a fading echo. Fading fast.

  "If you had designed it right, I wouldn't have been able to do that. What the hell was that cutter supposed to be, anyway?"

  "That was diamond monofilament. Part of the booby trap you were supposed to get past, minus a few more dents. If you..."

  "You call that Authentic?"

  "It's physically possible..."

  "No it's not. This is science-fiction shit. What were those stalactites made of? I can tell you it wasn't calcium carbonate. Look, you want to compete in Pain, or Adventure, or Imagination, go right ahead. But Authentic is for things that could really have happened in the pre-Change world."

  "I don't think you understand..."

  "I don't think you understand, sonny. Did you bother to ask Prime Intellect about me?"

  "You're pre-Change and you're the best. That's what counts."

  "Not just pre-Change. I was a hundred and six years old. Before the Change. I was in a nursing home with bedsores the size of baseballs and six different kinds of cancer eating me away. And my nurse was stealing my pain medication to trade for cocaine, so I got to experience every delightful moment in full three-D. This went on for years. And I didn't know Prime Intellect was gonna pop me back into this nice healthy body when it was all over. It was just the inky unknown and the pain. That's what death is. That's what counts."

  "I was just trying to reach an artistic balance," he pouted. "I didn't realize you'd be so picky about the technical details."

  "Artistic? What fucking bullshit! You think I've never been chopped into little bitty bits before? You just don't have time to appreciate art in a situation like that. Not if you have any human feelings at all."