Recursion Read Free Page A

beside hot vents deep at the heart of the planet?” He flicked his right hand in a dismissive fashion. “Or did you just run a five-minute local sweep for Earthlike life-forms?”
    Herb opened his mouth to speak but Johnston interrupted.
    “Don’t!” he shouted, holding up a hand. “We both know the answer to that, don’t we?”
    Herb cringed. Johnston remained perfectly still, his arm raised as if to strike, the edge of one perfectly pressed and gleaming white cuff emerging from the sleeve of his jacket, the tide line between the pale and the midnight black skin that traveled around his hand, dead center in Herb’s vision.
    Johnston held that position, held it and held it, then his eyes moved slowly to the left to gaze at his own hand. His mouth creased back into a wide smile and he relaxed. The upraised hand was dropped.
    “…but that’s all in the past now. A crime has been committed, and now we must decide upon the punishment.”
    Herb felt his stomach tighten again. Maybe the effect of the drugged whisky was wearing off, because he felt more panicky than before.
    He began to babble. “We don’t have to do this, you know. My father is a very important man. I’m sure we can come to some arrangement. Besides, I’m sorry. I’ve learned my lesson. I won’t do anything like this again. Look, face it, I’ve got a lot to offer society. I put together those VNMs to my own design. My technical skills have got to be worth something; it would be a real waste to lock me away where I couldn’t achieve anything worthwhile…”
    “Preemptive Multitasking?” said Johnston, innocently.
    Herb paused in mid flow, his mouth moving soundlessly.
    Johnston began to adjust the viewing field. The greyish square hanging in the air above the coffee table began to grow.
    “I mean, I know that it reduces the overall intelligence slightly, but it does mean that a perfectly good brain can work on five or six different jobs at the same time.”
    The viewing field had now expanded to a square about three meters across the diagonal. Johnston began to apply a slight curve across its surface, continuing to speak as he did so.
    “So, we could have your body locked up in a nutrient vat in a station in the Oort cloud, while we apply your intelligence to controlling five or six different maintenance craft.”
    The viewing field darkened and a few stars began to appear.
    “We could leave you a time slice of consciousness for your own use: a time for you to think and dream, to be yourself. Depending on how you cooperate, we could locate that consciousness inside your body, in the vat…though that would be very boring—” Johnston turned from the viewing field to smile at Herb “—or maybe controlling a robot with the run of the station. That way you could get to mix with some members of the crew.”
    Depth was added to the picture in the viewing field. A section of a black sphere grew in the lounge, diamond stars winking into existence inside it. Herb was looking at a star field. His mind, however, was far away across the galaxy, trapped in a tight-fitting metal coffin filled with lukewarm nutrient soup, while his eyes stared into infrared and the empty drones under his control crept and crawled beneath the cold remnants of starlight.
    “I don’t want that,” Herb said softly. His eyes were filling with tears.
    “What makes you think you have a choice?” Johnston asked. “You’re not a child anymore; your father isn’t going to come along and say, ‘Okay, maybe not this time if you really, really promise not to do it again.’ We’re dealing with cause and effect here. You do the crime, you do the time. That’s it; you can’t go back, any more than we can restore the life to this planet that your self-replicating machines have just spent the last few months destroying.”
    “Oh.” Herb couldn’t think of anything else to say. He looked around the lounge of his spaceship and already it seemed to belong to someone else.