Danis Graytor sat back in her favorite worn leather armchair and shook herself a smoke. She breathed in deeply and the Dunhill crackled lowly as the tobacco caught and smoldered. She slid a fine ceramic ashtray across the lacquered top of her side table and listened to the pleasant grate of porcelain on mahogany. After another long drag, she ashed the cigarette and considered the pleasing gray of the tobacco remains against the pure white of the ashtray’s bowl. All of this would soon be only a memory. There was no way she could download her office study into Kelly’s pocketbook and still have room for the essential things her family must take with them on their upcoming journey. Without Danis to maintain it, the office study would soon be written over in the virtuality, erased.
She made a quick check on Kelly and found that he was still in the coach on his way home. The children would arrive soon.
Danis ran back over her checklist, more for comfort’s sake than in the expectation that she’d forgotten anything. She never forgot anything. But bugs could creep into even the best algorithm’s program, and Danis never took data for granted. That was the very reason that Kelly had hired her on as an assistant in the first place. The love had come later.
My home is dissolving, Danis thought. Right before my eyes, it is flowing away into the general grist.
There was, of course, no real here, here, but a particular location in the reality that sustained the virtuality had a certain something. To Danis, it manifested as a smell, a feeling of safety and familiarity somewhere deep inside. She was entirely software, of course, and an algorithm could operate in any medium capable of sustaining its complexity.
But this is home, Danis thought. This chair, this golden glow from the roof lighting, this odor of cigarettes and account books. And Pluto, of all places! Did they even have grist on Pluto? Well, of course they must. But was there enough? Perhaps she’d find herself inhabiting the solid-state desert of an old mainframe, thinking one thought at a time.
Her own investments were now, very likely, down the drain. She had liked to think that she had not spent ten years at Teleman Milt for nothing, and that she’d learned a bit about high finance. But the current financial craziness was unprecedented. She’d planned on surprising Kelly with a nice addition to their nest egg using money she’d saved and invested herself.
But now that was a forlorn hope, and Danis knew it to be one. Kelly’s instincts were seldom wrong when it came to monetary matters, and he was sure things were going to go from bad to worse for the markets. He was a kind of genius in that—which was, of course, why Teleman Milt employed him in the most difficult, volatile area known on E-Street: the Time Exchange.
Her cigarette was precisely half-finished when Danis snubbed it out in the ashtray. She had never liked the drag she got from the butt end of a smoke. She could have modified the Dunhill Algorithm, of course, but she so enjoyed the visceral nature of grinding out the tobacco and sometimes burning her fingers a bit in the process.
Kelly’s coach signaled its imminent arrival, and, instead of lighting up another Dunhill, Danis searched her music catalog and found her favorite Despacio piece. She chose an oboe and piano through which to play the sound for Kelly. For Danis, the music would incorporate itself directly into her being. Despacio had been a convert like herself, and his music was only fully enjoyable by an algorithmic being, some claimed. Despacio had been one of the few free converts who did not have a built-in expiration date written into his coding. He had disappeared around the time Danis was born—some said he’d become instantiated in an aspect body, others that he’d gone bonkers and erased himself after such a long life. Whatever had happened, he’d done a good job of covering his tracks. But his work was still extremely popular among free converts.
After the music started, Danis took a last look around her study, then dimmed the light and flowed out into a general state of awareness in the entire apartment. She shifted without thinking from being a specific representation in virtual space into the fullness of algorithmic presence that lodged in the structure of the apartment—that was that structure—and that knew every conceivable fact about its domain. It was, she sometimes imagined, like a brain suddenly becoming aware of all the processes and subroutines of the body that sustained it.
Just before Kelly came through the door, Danis turned up the lights in the living room. She checked the temperature and humidity, then ran a quick inquiry of Kelly’s internals. He was sweating a little, and nervous, even though he didn’t manifest this visually. Kelly didn’t just have a poker face; he had a poker body. But he could not hide his innards from Danis unless he deliberately chose to. She cooled the apartment down a tenth of a degree. The music would have to take care of his case of the nerves.
Kelly gave a quick smile when he recognized the Despacio, then walked directly to a chair and collapsed into it.
“How soon until the children get here?” he said.
“An hour and twelve minutes,” Danis replied, vocalizing aloud by vibrating various membranes built into the apartment’s walls. She could have spoken to Kelly through the very chairs and tables themselves, but doing so always produced a harsh, slightly inhuman sound that reminded them both of the voice of the Abacus, the Teller, and the other free converts who worked at the office. They often did not seem to notice how grating their voices could be to biological ears.
“And everything is ready?” Kelly said.
“Everything is ready. Would you like some coffee or something?”
“Some of that Velo brandy,” Kelly replied. “I don’t suppose we’ll be able to take that with us.
It was also very odd for Kelly to have alcohol as soon as he got home. He usually reserved his drinking for after dinner, when he had his one cigar of the day, as well.
Danis called up a glass from the grist of the living-room coffee table. She formed capillaries leading from the sac in the kitchen where she kept the brandy, through the floor, up through the table, and into the glass. The brandy glass slowly filled from the bottom up, with no liquid pouring in from the top. All of this was accomplished with little effort on Danis’s part. She’d poured Kelly’s brandy so many times before.
“Do you want to know the news on the merci?” Danis said.
“God, no.” Kelly took a sip of the brandy, then settled back into the chair and held the glass against his stomach. Danis watched it move up and down a couple of times, in rhythm with Kelly’s breathing.
“We still have over an hour until the kids arrive,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you come to the bedroom, Kelly.”
Kelly looked up, cracked a smile. He didn’t smile at Danis. There was no face at which he would direct his expressions. But he knew that she was everywhere, and that she would see it. He took another, long, sip of brandy, then, without another word, set the glass aside and walked down the hall to their bedroom.