Paradise-1 by David Wellington

Author:David Wellington [WELLINGTON, DAVID]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2023-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

77

It felt damned good to be back in one body.

Rapscallion hated dividing himself. Splitting his consciousness into multiple bodies always felt wrong, a little gross. There was something about it that reminded him altogether too much of how humans had sex with each other and then babies came out of their bodies. Even though there were a lot fewer fluids involved, even though when he created a new body it contained a portion of his own consciousness rather than a whole new one, it still just felt – dirty.

Now he was back to his old self once more. He’d picked one of his new bodies, one that seemed the strongest, and had marched the rest of them straight into a recycling unit where they could be broken down to tiny pellets that could go back into the 3D printer for future use.

He still felt a little sluggish, a little dim, but he knew that the full force of his intellect would return in time.

On the bridge he found Zhang trying to work a console, which amused him enough to take his mind off the recent unpleasantness. Zhang had a stroboscope he kept playing with as if it helped him think. When he put it down for a second, Rapscallion grabbed it and studied it. It didn’t look like much. “This is how you cure the basilisk?” he asked.

Zhang nodded, not lifting his eyes from his screen. “In humans, anyway. In AIs – and robots – it’s a little different. Speaking of which.” He tapped a few virtual keys and sent Rapscallion a message containing a short executable file.

“What’s this?” the robot asked. He had already isolated the file in a partitioned sector of his memory and stripped it apart to determine the nature of its contents, of course. He wanted to hear it from the horse’s mouth, though.

“It’s a kind of inoculation. As far as I can tell you weren’t infected with the basilisk during your time on Persephone. That means you don’t need the full treatment like the one Petrova had, or the one we’re going to have to give Actaeon. This,” Zhang said, pointing at his screen, at the executable he’d sent Rapscallion, “is more like a vaccine shot. It contains instructions on how to fight off the infection before it can even get its hooks into your system.”

“I just run this and then I’m immune?”

“I believe so,” Zhang told him.

Rapscallion shrugged. “Here goes nothing, then.” He ran the little program and for a moment it felt like every part of his being was torn to shreds and then recreated from scratch. It was a distinctly unpleasant sensation. Then it was over. “Cool,” he said.

Zhang gave him a long appraising look. “Cool?”

“I mean, I don’t feel any different.”

“You’re not… hungry?” Zhang asked.

“I have no idea what that would even be like,” Rapscallion said. “Look, if it didn’t work, we’ll find out quick enough. Right? I’ll… I don’t know. Kill you all in your sleep or something. If it did work, that won’t happen.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.