“Now.”

  “I—” he turns and heads inside, along the gloomy hall-

  way that runs past a staircase. Annette strides after him aggressively. He opens a door and ducks inside, and she

  follows before he can close it.

  Inside, the room is illuminated by a variety of indirect

  diode sources, calibrated for the warm glow of a summer

  afternoon’s daylight. There’s a bed in the middle of it, a figure lying asleep at the heart of a herd of attentive diagnostic instruments. A couple of attendants sit to either side of the sleeping man.

  “What have you done to him?” Annette snaps, rushing

  forwards. Manfred blinks up at her from the pillows,

  bleary-eyed and confused as she leans overhead: “hello?

  Manny?” Over her shoulder: “if you ’ave done anything

  to him—”

  “Annie?” He looks puzzled. A bright orange pair of

  goggles—not his own—is pushed up onto his forehead like

  a pair of beached jellyfish. “I don’t feel well.”

  “We can fix that,” she says briskly. She peels off his

  glasses and carefully slides them onto his face. The brain bag she puts down next to his shoulder, within easy

  range. The hairs on the back of her neck rises as a thin

  chattering keen fills the ether around them: his eyes are glowing a luminous blue behind his shades, as if a high-tension spark is flying between his ears.

  “Oh. Wow.” He sits up; the covers fall from his naked

  shoulders and her breath catches.

  She looks around at the motionless figure sitting to his

  3 4

  T O U R I S T

  left. The main in the chair nods deliberately, ironically.

  “What have you done to him?”

  “We’ve been looking after him: nothing more, nothing

  less. He arrived in a state of considerable confusion and his state deteriorated this afternoon.”

  She’s never met this fellow before but she has a gut

  feeling that she knows him. “You would be Robert . . .

  Franklin?”

  He nods again. “The avatar is in.” There’s a thud as Manfred’s eyes roll up in his head and he flops back onto the bedding. “Excuse me. Monica?”

  The young woman on the other side of the bed shakes

  her head. “No, I’m running Bob, too.”

  “Oh. Well, you tell her; I’ve got to get him some juice.”

  The woman who is also Bob Franklin—or whatever

  part of him survived his battle with an exotic brain tu-

  mour eight years ago—catches Annette’s eye and shakes

  her head. Smiles faintly. “You’re never alone when you’re a syncitium.”

  Annette wrinkles her brow: has to trigger a dictionary

  attack to parse the sentence. “One large cell, many nu-

  clei? Oh, I see. You have the new implant. The better to

  record everything.”

  The youngster shrugs. “You want to die and be resur-

  rected as a third-person actor in a low-bandwidth re-

  enactment? Or a shadow of itchy memories in some

  stranger’s skull?” She snorts, a gesture that’s at odds with the rest of her body language.

  “Bob must have been one of the first borganisms. Hu-

  mans, I mean.” Annette glances over at Manfred, who has

  begun to snore softly. “It must have been a lot of work.”

  “The monitoring equipment cost millions, then,” says

  3 5

  C H A R L E S S T R O S S

  the woman—Monica?—“and it didn’t do a very good job.

  One of the conditions for our keeping access to his re-

  search funding is that we regularly run his partials. He

  wanted to build up a kind of aggregate state vector—

  patched together out of bits and pieces of other people to supplement the partials that were all I—he—could record

  with the then state of the art.”

  “Eh, right.” Annette reaches out and absently smooths

  a stray hair away from Manfred’s forehead. “What is it

  like to be part of a group mind?”

  Monica sniffs, evidently amused. “What is it like to see

  red? What’s it like to be a bat? I can’t tell you—I can only show you. We’re all free to leave at any time, you know.”

  “But somehow you don’t.” Annette rubs her head, feels

  the short hair over the almost imperceptible scars that

  conceal a network of implants: tools that Manfred turned

  down when they became available a year or two ago.

  (“Goop-phase Darwin-design nanotech ain’t designed for

  clean interfaces,” he’d said: “I’ll stick to disposable kit, thanks.”) “No thanks. I don’t think he’ll take up your offer when he wakes up, either.”

  Monica shrugs. “That’s his loss: he won’t live forever

  in the singularity, along with other followers of our gentle teacher. Anyway, we have more converts than we

  know what to do with.”

  A thought occurs to Annette. “Ah. You are all of one

  mind? Partially? A question to you is a question to all?”

  “It can be.” The words come simultaneously from

  Monica and the other body, Alan, who is standing in the

  doorway with a boxy thing that looks like an impro-

  vised diagnostician. “What do you have in mind?” Alan

  continues.

  Manfred, lying on the bed, groans: there’s an audible

  3 6

  T O U R I S T

  hiss of pink noise as his glasses whisper in his ears, bone conduction providing a serial highway to his wetware.

  “Manfred was sent to find out why you’re opposing

  the ERA,” Annette explains. “Some parts of our team op-

  erate without the other’s knowledge.”

  “Indeed.” Alan sits down on the chair beside the bed

  and clears his throat, puffing his chest out pompously. “A very important theological issue. I feel—”

  “I, or we?” Annette interrupts.

  “We feel,” Monica snaps. Then she glances at Alan.

  “Soo-rrry.”

  The evidence of individuality within the group mind is

  disturbing to Annette: too many re-runs of the Borgish

  fantasy have conditioned her preconceptions. “Please

  continue.”

  “One person, one vote, is obsolete,” says Alan. “The

  broader issue of how we value identity needs to be revis-

  ited, the franchise reconsidered. Do you get one vote for each warm body? Or one vote for each sapient individual? What about distributed intelligences? The proposals

  in the Equal Rights Act are deeply flawed, based on a cult of individuality that takes no account of the true complexity of posthumanism.”

  “Like the proposals for a feminine franchise in the

  nineteeth century, that would grant the vote to married

  wives of land-owning men,” Monica adds slyly: “it

  misses the point.”

  “Ah, oui.” Annette crosses her arms, suddenly defen-

  sive. This isn’t what she’d expected to hear.

  “It misses more than that.” Heads turn to face an un-

  expected direction: Manfred’s eyes are open again, and as he glances around the room Annette can see a spark of

  interest there that was missing earlier. “Last century, peo-3 7

  C H A R L E S S T R O S S

  ple were paying to have their heads frozen after their

  death—in hope of reconstruction, later. They got no civil rights: the law didn’t recognize death as a reversible process. Now how do we account for it when you guys stop running Bob? Opt out of the collective borganism? Or

  maybe opt back in again?” He reaches up and rubs his

  forehead, tiredly. “Sorry, I haven’t been myself lately.” A crooked, slightly manic grin flickers across his face. “See, I’ve been telling Gianni for a whole while, we need a new legal concept of what it is to be a person. One that can

  cope with sentient corporations, artificial stupidities, se-cessionists from group minds, and reincarnated uploads.

  The religiously-inclined are having lots of fun with identity issues right now—why aren’t we posthumans think-

  ing about these things?”

  Annette’s bag bulges: Aineko pokes his head out,

  sniffs the air, squeezes out onto the carpet, and begins to groom himself with perfect disregard for the human by-standers. “Not to mention a-life experiments who think

  they’re the real thing,” Manfred adds. “And aliens.”

  Annette freezes, staring at him. “Manfred! You’re not

  supposed to—”

  Manfred is watching Alan, who seems to be the most

  deeply integrated of the dead venture billionaire’s executors: even his expression reminds Annette of meeting Bob

  Franklin back in Amsterdam, early in the decade, when

  Manny’s personal dragon still owned him. “Aliens,” Alan

  echoes. An eyebrow twitches. “How long have you

  known?”

  “Gianni has his fingers in a lot of pies,” Manfred com-

  ments blandly. “And we still talk to the lobsters from time to time—you know, they’re only a couple of light hours

  away, right?” The first-generation uploads, Californian

  3 8

  T O U R I S T

  spiny lobsters in wobbly symbiosis with Russian expert

  systems, found refuge aboard Franklin’s asteroid mining

  project—which Manfred prodded Franklin into setting up.

  The factory had needed sapient control software, and the

  state of the art in AI was inadequate: the lobsters had

  needed sanctuary, a home away from the bewilderingly

  weird cybersphere of earth’s anthropoids. “They told us

  about the signal.”

  “Er.” Alan’s eyes glaze over for a moment; Annette’s

  prostheses paint her a picture of false light spraying from the back of his head, his entire sensory bandwidth momentarily soaking up a huge peer-to-peer download from

  the servers that wallpaper every room in this building.

  Monica looks irritated, taps her fingernails on the back of her chair. “The signal. Right. Why wasn’t this publicised?”

  “It was.” Annette’s eyebrows furrow. “Most people

  who’d be interested in hearing about an alien contact al-

  ready believe that they drop round on alternate Tuesdays

  and Thursdays to administer a rectal exam. Most of the

  rest think it’s a hoax. Quite a few of the remainder are

  scratching their heads and wondering whether it isn’t just a new kind of cosmological phenomenon that emits a

  very low entropy directional signal. And of the six who

  are left over, five are trying to get a handle on the message contents and the last is convinced it’s a practical

  joke.”

  Manfred fiddles with the bed control system. “It’s not

  a practical joke,” he adds. “But they only captured about sixteen megabits of data. There’s quite a bit of noise, the signal doesn’t repeat, its length doesn’t appear to be a

  prime, there’s no obvious metainformation that describes

  the internal format, so there’s no easy way of getting a

  handle on it. To make matters worse, pointy-haired man-

  3 9

  C H A R L E S S T R O S S

  agement at Arianespace—” he glances at Annette, as if

  seeking a response to the naming of her ex-employers—

  “decided the best thing to do was to turn it into a piece of music, then copyright the hell out of it and hire the

  CCAA’s lawyers to prosecute anyone else who works on

  it. So nobody really knows how long it’ll take to figure

  out whether it’s a ping from the galactic root domain

  servers or a pulsar that’s taken to grinding out the

  eighteen-quadrillionth digits of pi, or whatever.”

  “But.” Monica glances around. “You can’t be sure.”

  “I think it may be sapient,” says Manfred. He finds the

  right button at last, and the bed begins to fold itself back into a lounger. Then he finds the wrong button; the duvet dissolves into viscous turquoise slime that slurps and gurgles away through a multitude of tiny nozzles in the headboard. “Bloody aerogel. Um. Where was I?” He sits up.

  “Sapient network packet?” asks Alan.

  “Nope.” Manfred shakes his head, grins. “Should have

  known you’d read Vinge . . . or was it the movie? No,

  what I think is that there’s only one logical thing to beam backwards and forwards out there, and you may remember I asked you to beam it out about, oh, nine years ago?”

  “The lobsters.” Alan’s eyes go blank. “Nine years. Time

  to Proxima Centauri and back?”

  “About that distance, yes,” says Manfred. “Officially,

  the signal came from a couple of degrees off and more

  than hundred light years further out. Unofficially, this

  was disinformation to prevent panic. And no, the signal

  didn’t contain any canned crusties: I think it’s an ex-

  change embassy. Now do you see why we have to crow-bar the civil rights issue open again? We need a

  framework for rights that can encompass non-humans,

  and we need it as fast as possible. Otherwise . . .”

  4 0

  T O U R I S T

  “Okay,” says Alan. “I’ll have to talk with myselves.

  Maybe we can agree something, as long as it’s clear that

  it’s a provisional stab at the framework and not a perma-

  nent solution?”

  Annette snorts. “No solution is final!” Monica catches

  her eyes and winks: Annette is startled by the blatant display of dissent within the syncitium.

  “Well,” says Manfred. “I guess that’s all we can ask

  for?” He looks hopeful. “Thanks for the hospitality, but I feel the need to lie down in my own bed for a while,” he

  adds. “I had to commit a lot to memory while I was of-

  fline and I want to record it before I forget myself.”

  Later that night, a doorbell rings.

  “Who’s there?” asks the entryphone.

  “Uh, me,” says the man on the steps. He looks a little

  confused. “Ah’m Macx. Ah’m here tae see—” the name is

  on the tip of his tongue—“someone.”

  “Come in.” A solenoid buzzes; he pushes the door

  open, and it closes behind him. His metal-shod boots ring on the hard stone floor, and the cool air smells faintly of unburned jet fuel.

  “Ah’m Macx,” he repeats uncertainly, “or Ah wis for a

  wee while, an’ it made ma heid hurt. But noo Ah’m me

  agin an’ Ah wannae be somebody else . . . can ye help?”

  Later still, a cat sits on a window ledge, watching the interior of a darkened room from behind the concealment

  of curtains. The room is dark to human eyes, but bright to the cat: moonlight cascades silently off the walls and furniture, the twisted bedding, the two naked humans lying

  curled together in the middle of the bed.

  Both the humans are in their early thirties: her close-

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  C H A R L E S S T R O S S

  cropped hair is beginning to grey, distinguished threads

  of gunmetal wire threading it, while his brown mop is not yet showing signs of age. To the cat, who watches with a

  variety of unnatural senses, her head glows in the mi-

  crowave spectrum with a gentle radiance of polarised

  emissions spread across a wide range of channels. The

  male shows no such aura: he’s unnaturally natural for

  this day and age, although—oddly—he’s wearing specta-

  cles in bed, and the frames shine similarly. An invisible soup of radiation connects both humans to items of

  clothing scattered across the room—clothing that seethes

  with unsleeping sentience, dribbling over to their suit-

  cases and hand luggage and (though it doesn’t enjoy

  noticing it) the cat’s tail, which is itself a rather sensitive antenna.

  The two humans have just finished making love: they

  do this less often than in their first few years, but with more tenderness and expertise—lengths of shocking pink

  Hello Kitty bondage tape still hang from the bedposts,

  and a lump of programmable memory plastic sits cooling

  on the side table. The male is sprawled with his head and upper torso resting in the crook of the female’s left arm and shoulder. Shifting visualisation to infrared, the cat sees that she is glowing, capillaries dilating to enhance the blood flow around her throat and chest.

  “I’m getting old,” the male mumbles. “I’m slowing

  down.”

  “Not where it counts,” the female replies, gently

  squeezing his right buttock.

  “No, I’m sure of it,” he says. “The bits of me that still exist in this old head—how many types of processor can

  you name that are still in use thirty-plus years after

  they’re born?”

  4 2

  T O U R I S T

  “You’re thinking about the implants again,” she says

  carefully. The cat remembers this as a sore point; from

  being a medical procedure to help the blind see and the

  autistic talk, intrathecal implants have blossomed into a must-have accessory for the now-clade. But the male is reluctant. “It’s not as risky as it used to be. If they screw up, there’re neural growth cofactors and cheap replacement stem cells. I’m sure one of your sponsors can

  arrange for extra cover.”

  “Hush: I’m still thinking about it.” He’s silent for a

  while. “I wasn’t myself yesterday. I was someone else.

  Someone too slow to keep up. Puts a new perspective on

  everything: I’ve been afraid of losing my biological plasticity, of being trapped in an obsolete chunk of skullware while everything moves on—but how much of me lives