Worldwired by Elizabeth Bear Page B

place, or even
appear
to.
Richard?
    “Right here.” Always, like an interface left on standby; just wiggle your fingers and it flickers to life. “And yes, Genie's fine. About Min-xue—”
    I'm getting there. You never did tell me why our conversation about Hercules made you jump like a shocked colt.
    “I'm still running equations. I don't want to raise any false hopes until I know it can be done.”
    Richard—
But he's adamant, and I can feel it. The bastard always did like to spring surprises. And if
he's
still working on it, it's one hell of a problem. Something I've noticed lately about him and his mostly-silent alter ego. “Gabe, does Richard seem faster to you lately?”
    “Gossiping, Jen?”
    I can't be talking behind your back when you're in my head.
    “Fair enough,” he says, as Gabe checks his step a half-stride to let me catch up with him and gives me a thoughtful look. Patty looks up as well, hazel eyes glittering under a mahogany fringe. “Yes,” Gabe says. “And I can tell you why.”
    “All right. Patty, do you want something to drink now that we're out of the crush?” Not that a couple of handfuls of people is really a crush, but I remember how claustrophobic the wiring made me at first. And I had what they call a good adaptation.
    “No, thank you, Jenny.” The kid's had entirely too much respect for authority stomped into her. And I don't even think it's
all
Fred Valens's fault.
    “Well,” I say, “I do. Let's go find a chair in the lounge nobody uses, and Gabe can tell us his theory. What do you say?”
    Gabe's got that raised eyebrow like he knows I'm up to something, but he nods, the corners of his mouth writhing with the effort of wrestling his smirk back into the cage.
    I manage to get Patty to take a Coke, once we're seated in the fat, plush chairs of the smaller crew lounge. She draws her feet up under her butt with enviable flexibility and holds the unbreakable cup in both hands, staring past me and out the porthole. I never get tired of looking either, but I don't think the view really has her attention.
    “Okay. Tell me about the AIs, Gabe.”
    “Well,” he says, and threads his fingers together. “Based on my conversations with Richard, what's going on is that, in addition to acting as directors for the nanites as they breed through Earth's ecosystem, Richard and Alan are running on the spare cycles in the nanocritters themselves. It's a distributed network in the truest sense—no, it's a distributed
brain
; neurons and synapses and glial cells, or a mechanical approximation of the same.”
    “A planet-sized brain,” Patty says, suddenly engaged.
    “So the more the worldwire breeds, the more processing power Richard and Alan have available.”
    “Yes,” Gabe says. He grins at me, and grins a little bit wider at Patty. He knows perfectly well I don't have a handle on this stuff; hand me a wrench and I'm happy. “But more than that. When we created the two Richards and remerged them, and then created Alan and gave him a direct link to Richard, what we did was build a multithreaded personality.”
    “Elspeth called it disassociative identity disorder.”
    “Elspeth's training is biased toward the conclusion that everyone is crazy,” Richard said. “Gabe's on the money so far.”
    Gabe's a smart boy.
    “So are we all,” Richard says, with the air of somebody quoting something. “All smart boys—”
    Gabe's still talking, mostly to Patty now. I hope he didn't see me glaze over. “—got is a system where Richard and Alan have learned to divide themselves at will, to spawn self-directed processes that are, to all intents and purposes, new AIs, and then reabsorb these threads of themselves or each other, or allow different threads—I'm calling them
personas,
and I'm calling the whole AI structure an
entity,
for lack of a better name—allow different threads to rise in importance in the hierarchy as their job becomes more urgent or demands more system resources. So