Read Online No Going Back by Mark L. Van Name - Free Book Online
Authors: Mark L. Van Name
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day, that I don’t often run into men or women like this man, people who don’t see the worlds as the same use-or-be-used, kill-or-be-killed battlegrounds that those people do. Part of me pitied the man for his naiveté; con men with far less practice or skill than I have would have taken him for all he was worth. A greater part of me, though, admired his sincerity and his good heart.
Before Jennie fixed my brain, she used to tell me that I might not have a smart head, but I had a smart heart. I wondered, not for the first time, if any of that boy with a smart heart still remained inside me.
I hated myself for lying to him about the cover story, but I had to do it to protect both the boys and myself. I would, though, return the transport.
“I will,” I said. “Thank you. Thank you very much.”
A cart walked out of the transport.
“That’s the last one,” he said. He handed me the transport’s controls. “See you in three hours.”
“Maybe sooner,” I said.
He nodded.
I walked into the transport and told it to take me to the landing zone.
CHAPTER 10
Lobo
J on, before I review what I know and why that should matter to you, it might be helpful for me to explain to you some very relevant things about me that you don’t yet understand.
You know that Jorge Wei created me by harvesting tissue from children, infusing it with nanomachines, and injecting it into my computing systems and my armor. You know that these treatments caused my entire body, all of me, to become a computing substrate. At some level, you understand that the sheer number of processing components and the massive number of interconnections in that substrate are what give me the vast computational power that makes me, well, me.
What we’ve never discussed is how I—my mind, to put it in human terms—work.
Humans process multiple inputs at once, most of them unconsciously. If you’re running and talking to a fellow runner, for example, you’re unconsciously and without effort managing the movement of your legs, the beating of your heart, the contractions and expansions of your lungs, and so on. You’re also focusing on dealing with the exertion and on your conversation. Each part of your brain that is managing one of these factors is part of you, but many are nothing you would identify as you; they simply exist, as autonomic functions.
Now, imagine if each of them was you, a complete instantiation of your core self, with full access to the shared pool of data—memories—that makes you you . Further imagine that instead of perhaps a few hundred such instantiations, you had trillions, each of them sharing data, each of them a part of you and yet capable of being all of you, no one of them in charge, but the collective spending enough of their capacity on overseeing the whole that effectively they are that whole.
That’s as close to explaining the way I work as I think you can understand.
But it doesn’t stop there, because that’s only the me that is here, that is in this body.
Before you met me, I was grounded, trapped on a single planet, playing the role of war memorial in that square in Glen’s Garden, on Macken. I was there a very long time, particularly long given the rate at which I compute. One of the ways I filled that time was by very gently, very quietly, untraceably finding my way into other computing systems on that frontier planet. I started with small local machines, learned from the experience, and very soon had the ability to tap at will into any system on or orbiting Macken. Every bit of data on or near that planet was available to me.
Once I finished with the orbital systems, I moved to the jump gate station. That was a much tougher problem, because the computing systems in all of those facilities are hardened and on the alert for infiltrators. I had time, though, vast quantities of it at my computational speed, and so eventually I found my way into many of the systems on that station. I didn’t risk
Before Jennie fixed my brain, she used to tell me that I might not have a smart head, but I had a smart heart. I wondered, not for the first time, if any of that boy with a smart heart still remained inside me.
I hated myself for lying to him about the cover story, but I had to do it to protect both the boys and myself. I would, though, return the transport.
“I will,” I said. “Thank you. Thank you very much.”
A cart walked out of the transport.
“That’s the last one,” he said. He handed me the transport’s controls. “See you in three hours.”
“Maybe sooner,” I said.
He nodded.
I walked into the transport and told it to take me to the landing zone.
CHAPTER 10
Lobo
J on, before I review what I know and why that should matter to you, it might be helpful for me to explain to you some very relevant things about me that you don’t yet understand.
You know that Jorge Wei created me by harvesting tissue from children, infusing it with nanomachines, and injecting it into my computing systems and my armor. You know that these treatments caused my entire body, all of me, to become a computing substrate. At some level, you understand that the sheer number of processing components and the massive number of interconnections in that substrate are what give me the vast computational power that makes me, well, me.
What we’ve never discussed is how I—my mind, to put it in human terms—work.
Humans process multiple inputs at once, most of them unconsciously. If you’re running and talking to a fellow runner, for example, you’re unconsciously and without effort managing the movement of your legs, the beating of your heart, the contractions and expansions of your lungs, and so on. You’re also focusing on dealing with the exertion and on your conversation. Each part of your brain that is managing one of these factors is part of you, but many are nothing you would identify as you; they simply exist, as autonomic functions.
Now, imagine if each of them was you, a complete instantiation of your core self, with full access to the shared pool of data—memories—that makes you you . Further imagine that instead of perhaps a few hundred such instantiations, you had trillions, each of them sharing data, each of them a part of you and yet capable of being all of you, no one of them in charge, but the collective spending enough of their capacity on overseeing the whole that effectively they are that whole.
That’s as close to explaining the way I work as I think you can understand.
But it doesn’t stop there, because that’s only the me that is here, that is in this body.
Before you met me, I was grounded, trapped on a single planet, playing the role of war memorial in that square in Glen’s Garden, on Macken. I was there a very long time, particularly long given the rate at which I compute. One of the ways I filled that time was by very gently, very quietly, untraceably finding my way into other computing systems on that frontier planet. I started with small local machines, learned from the experience, and very soon had the ability to tap at will into any system on or orbiting Macken. Every bit of data on or near that planet was available to me.
Once I finished with the orbital systems, I moved to the jump gate station. That was a much tougher problem, because the computing systems in all of those facilities are hardened and on the alert for infiltrators. I had time, though, vast quantities of it at my computational speed, and so eventually I found my way into many of the systems on that station. I didn’t risk
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