The door chime clears its throat, to announce a visitor: "Ren Fuller would like to visit, m'lord and lady."
"What's she doing here?" Rita asks irritably. Sirhan can feel her unease, the tenuous grasping of her ghosts as she searches for reason in an unreasonable world, simulating outcomes, living through bad dreams, and backtracking to adjust her responses accordingly. "Show her in, by all means." Ren is one of their neighbor-cognates (most of her dwelling is several light-years away, but in terms of transit time, it's a hop, skip, and a jump); she and her extruded family are raising a small herd of ill-behaved kids who occasionally hang out with Manni.
A small blue eeyore whinnies mournfully and dashes past the adults, pursued by a couple of children waving spears and shrieking. Eloise makes a grab for her own and misses, just as the door to the exercise room disappears and Manni's little friend Lis darts inside like a pint-sized guided missile. "Sam, come here right now —" Eloise calls, heading toward the door.
"Look, what do you want?" Sirhan demands, hugging his son and looking down at the cat.
"Oh, not much," Aineko says, turning to lick a mussed patch of fur on his flank. "I just want to play with him."
"You want to —" Rita stops.
"Daddy!" Manni wants down.
Sirhan lowers him carefully, as if his bones are glass. "Run along and play," he suggests. Turning to Rita: "Why don't you go and find out what Ren wants, dear?" he asks. "She's probably here to collect Lis, but you can never be sure."
"I was just leaving," Eloise adds, "as soon as I can catch up with Sam." She glances over her shoulder at Rita apologetically, then dives into the exercise room.
Sirhan takes a step toward the hallway. "Let's talk," he says tightly. "In my study." He glares at the cat. "I want an explanation. I want to know the truth."
Meanwhile, in a cognitive wonderland his parents know about but deeply underestimate, parts of Manni are engaging in activities far less innocent than they imagine.
Back in the twenty-first century, Sirhan lived through loads of alternate childhoods in simulation, his parents' fingers pressing firmly on the fast-forward button until they came up with someone who seemed to match their preconceptions. The experience scarred him as badly as any nineteenth-century boarding school experience, until he promised himself no child he raised would be subjected to such; but there's a difference between being shoved through a multiplicity of avatars, and voluntarily diving into an exciting universe of myth and magic where your childhood fantasies take fleshy form, stalking those of your friends and enemies through the forests of the night.
Manni has grown up with neural interfaces to City's mindspace an order of magnitude more complex than those of Sirhan's youth, and parts of him – ghosts derived from a starting image of his neural state vector, fertilized with a scattering borrowed from the original Manfred, simulated on a meat machine far faster than real time – are fully adult. Of course, they can't fit inside his seven-year-old skull, but they still watch over him. And when he's in danger, they try to take care of their once and future body.
Manni's primary adult ghost lives in some of New Japan's virtual mindspaces (which are a few billion times more extensive than the physical spaces available to stubborn biologicals, for the computational density of human habitats have long since ceased to make much sense when measured in MIPS per kilogram). They're modeled on presingularity Earth. Time is forever frozen on the eve of the real twenty-first century, zero eight-forty-six hours on September 11: An onrushing wide-body airliner hangs motionless in the air forty meters below the picture window of Manni's penthouse apartment on the one hundred and eighth floor of the North Tower. In historical reality, the one hundred and eighth floor was occupied by corporate offices; but the mindspace is a consensual fiction, and it is Manni's conceit to live at this pivotal point. (Not that it means much to him – he was born well over a century after the War on Terror – but it's part of his childhood folklore, the fall of the Two Towers that shattered the myth of Western exceptionalism and paved the way for the world he was born into.)
Adult-Manni wears an avatar roughly modeled on his clone-father Manfred – skinnier, pegged at a youthful twentysomething, black-clad, and gothic. He's taking time out from a game of Matrix to listen to music, Type O Negative blaring over the sound system as he twitches in the grip of an ice-cold coke high. He's expecting a visit from a couple of call girls – themselves the gamespace avatars of force-grown adult ghosts whose primaries may not be adult, or female, or even human – which is why he's flopped bonelessly back in his Arne Jacobsen recliner, waiting for something to happen.
The door opens behind him. He doesn't show any sign of noticing the intrusion, although his pupils dilate slightly at the faint reflection of a woman, stalking toward him, glimpsed dimly in the window glass. "You're late," he says tonelessly. "You were supposed to be here ten minutes ago —" He begins to look round, and now his eyes widen.
"Who were you expecting?" asks the ice blond in the black business suit, long-skirted and uptight. There's something predatory about her expression: "No, don't tell me. So you're Manni, eh? Manni's partial?" She sniffs, disapproval. "Fin de siècle decadence. I'm sure Sirhan wouldn't approve."
"My father can go fuck himself," Manni says truculently. "Who the hell are you?"
The blond snaps her fingers: An office chair appears on the carpet between Manni and the window, and she sits on the edge of it, smoothing her skirt obsessively. "I'm Pamela," she says tightly. "Has your father told you about me?"
Manni looks puzzled. In the back of his mind, raw instincts alien to anyone instantiated before the midpoint of the twenty-first century tug on the fabric of pseudoreality. "You're dead, aren't you?" he asks. "One of my ancestors."
"I'm as dead as you are." She gives him a wintry smile. "Nobody stays dead these days, least of all people who know Aineko."
Manni blinks. Now he's beginning to feel a surge of mild irritation. "This is all very well, but I was expecting company," he says with heavy emphasis. "Not a family reunion, or a tiresome attempt to preach your puritanism —"
Pamela snorts. "Wallow in your pigsty for all I care, kid, I've got more important things to worry about. Have you looked at your primary recently?"
"My primary?" Manni tenses. "He's doing okay." For a moment his eyes focus on infinity, a thousand-yard stare as he loads and replays the latest brain dump from his infant self. "Who's the cat he's playing with? That's no companion!"
"Aineko. I told you." Pamela taps the arm of her chair impatiently. "The family curse has come for another generation. And if you don't do something about it —"
"About what?" Manni sits up. "What are you talking about?" He comes to his feet and turns toward her. Outside the window, the sky is growing dark with an echo of his own foreboding. Pamela is on her feet before him, the chair evaporated in a puff of continuity clipping, her expression a cold-eyed challenge.
"I think you know exactly what I'm talking about, Manni. It's time to stop playing this fucking game. Grow up, while you've still got the chance!"
"I'm —" He stops. "Who am I?" he asks, a chill wind of uncertainty drying the sweat that has sprung up and down his spine. "And what are you doing here?"
"Do you really want to know the answer? I'm dead, remember. The dead know everything. And that isn't necessarily good for the living …"
He takes a deep breath. "Am I dead too?" He looks puzzled. "There's an adult-me in Seventh Cube Heaven, what's he doing here?"
"It's the kind of coincidence that isn't." She reaches out and takes his hand, dumping encrypted tokens deep into his sensorium, a trail of bread crumbs leading into a dark and trackless part of mindspace. "Want to find out? Follow me." Then she vanishes.
Manni leans forward, baffled and frightened, staring down at the frozen majesty of the onrushing airliner below his window. "Shit," he whispers. She came right through my defenses without leaving a trace. Who is she? The ghost of his dead great-grandmother, or something else?
I'll have to follow her if I want to find out, he realizes. He holds up his left hand, stares at the invisible token glowing brightly inside his husk of flesh. "Resynchronize me with my primary," he says.
A fraction of a second later, the floor of the penthouse bucks and quakes wildly and fire alarms begin to shriek as time comes to an end and the frozen airliner completes its journey. But Manni isn't there anymore. And if a skyscraper falls in a simulation with nobody to see it, has anything actually happened?
"I've come for the boy," says the cat. It sits on the hand woven rug in the middle of the hardwood floor with one hind leg sticking out at an odd angle, as if it's forgotten about it. Sirhan teeters on the edge of hysteria for a moment as he apprehends the sheer size of the entity before him, the whimsical posthuman creation of his ancestors. Originally a robotic toy companion, Aineko was progressively upgraded and patched. By the eighties, when Sirhan first met the cat in the flesh, he was already a terrifyingly alien intelligence, subtle and ironic. And now …
Sirhan knows Aineko manipulated his eigenmother, bending her natural affections away from his real father and toward another man. In moments of black introspection, he sometimes wonders if the cat wasn't also responsible in some way for his own broken upbringing, the failure to relate to his real parents. After all, it was a pawn in the vicious divorce battle between Manfred and Pamela – decades before his birth – and there might be long-term instructions buried in its preconscious drives. What if the pawn is actually a hidden king, scheming in the darkness?
"I've come for Manny."
"You're not having him." Sirhan maintains an outer facade of calm, even though his first inclination is to snap at Aineko. "Haven't you done enough damage already?"
"You're not going to make this easy, are you?" The cat stretches his head forward and begins to lick obsessively between the splayed toes of his raised foot. "I'm not making a demand, kid, I said I've come for him, and you're not really in the frame at all. In fact, I'm going out of my way to warn you."
"And I say —" Sirhan stops. "Shit!" Sirhan doesn't approve of swearing: The curse is an outward demonstration of his inner turmoil. "Forget what I was about to say, I'm sure you already know it. Let me begin again, please."
"Sure. Let's play this your way." The cat chews on a loose nail sheath but his innerspeech is perfectly clear, a casual intimacy that keeps Sirhan on edge. "You've got some idea of what I am, clearly. You know – I ascribe intentionality to you – that my theory of mind is intrinsically stronger than yours, that my cognitive model of human consciousness is complete. You might well suspect that I use a Turing Oracle to think my way around your halting states." The cat isn't worrying at a loose claw now, he's grinning, pointy teeth gleaming in the light from Sirhan's study window. The window looks out onto the inner space of the habitat cylinder, up at a sky with hillsides and lakes and forests plastered across it: It's like an Escher landscape, modeled with complete perfection. "You've realized that I can think my way around the outside of your box while you're flailing away inside it, and I'm always one jump ahead of you. What else do you know I know?"
Sirhan shivers. Aineko is staring up at him, unblinking. For a moment, he feels at gut level that he is in the presence of an alien god: It's the simple truth, isn't it? But – "Okay, I concede the point," Sirhan says after a moment in which he spawns a blizzard of panicky cognitive ghosts, fractional personalities each tasked with the examination of a different facet of the same problem. "You're smarter than I am. I'm just a boringly augmented human being, but you've got a flashy new theory of mind that lets you work around creatures like me the way I can think my way around a real cat." He crosses his arms defensively. "You do not normally rub this in. It's not in your interests to do so, is it? You prefer to hide your manipulative capabilities under an affable exterior, to play with us. So you're revealing all this for a reason." There's a note of bitterness in his voice now. Glancing round, Sirhan summons up a chair – and, as an afterthought, a cat basket. "Have a seat. Why now , Aineko? What makes you think you can take my eigenson?"
"I didn't say I was going to take him, I said I'd come for him." Aineko's tail lashes from side to side in agitation. "I don't deal in primate politics, Sirhan: I'm not a monkey-boy. But I knew you'd react badly because the way your species socializes" – a dozen metaghosts reconverge in Sirhan's mind, drowning Aineko's voice in an inner cacophony – "would enter into the situation, and it seemed preferable to trigger your territorial/reproductive threat display early, rather than risk it exploding in my face during a more delicate situation."
Sirhan waves a hand vaguely at the cat: "Please wait." He's trying to integrate his false memories – the output from the ghosts, their thinking finished – and his eyes narrow suspiciously. "It must be bad. You don't normally get confrontational – you script your interactions with humans ahead of time, so that you maneuver them into doing what you want them to do and thinking it was their idea all along." He tenses. "What is it about Manni that brought you here? What do you want with him? He's just a kid."
"You're confusing Manni with Manfred." Aineko sends a glyph of a smile to Sirhan: "That's your first mistake, even though they're clones in different subjective states. Think what he's like when he's grown up."
"But he isn't grown-up!" Sirhan complains. "He hasn't been grown-up for —"
"– Years, Sirhan. That's the problem. I need to talk to your grandfather, really, not your son, and not the goddamn stateless ghost in the temple of history, I need a Manfred with a sense of continuity. He's got something that I need, and I promise you I'm not going away until I get it. Do you understand?"
"Yes." Sirhan wonders if his voice sounds as hollow as the feeling in his chest. "But he's our kid, Aineko. We're human. You know what that means to us?"
"Second childhood." Aineko stands up, stretches, then curls up in the cat basket. "That's the trouble with hacking you naked apes for long life, you keep needing a flush and reset job – and then you lose continuity. That's not my problem, Sirhan. I got a signal from the far edge of the router network, a ghost that claims to be family. Says they finally made it out to the big beyond, out past the Böotes supercluster, found something concrete and important that's worth my while to visit. But I want to make sure it's not like the Wunch before I answer. I'm not letting that into my mind, even with a sandbox. Do you understand that? I need to instantiate a real-live adult Manfred with all his memories, one who hasn't been a part of me, and get him to vouch for the sapient data packet. It takes a conscious being to authenticate that kind of messenger. Unfortunately, the history temple is annoyingly resistant to unauthorized extraction – I can't just go in and steal a copy of him – and I don't want to use my own model of Manfred: It knows too much. So —"