Chapter Text
Dr. Hebert once said that the point of science was to discover new truths. I didn't understand why she said that. Her "daughter", if she could be called a child, genuinely repulsed me, and still does.
Ethics were strange to us, and my simulations told me a city was going to die. It was a sacrifice. Broken minds, broken dreams, broken worlds, well, our chess game had claws.
Pawn to E4. I moved a virtual piece in my digital mindscape, and the bespectacled avatar of my nemesis nodded. She moved her pawn to E5, matching mine in a kind of mirror. I moved my queen to H5. "I know what you're doing," she said, stroking her digital chin. It was just the two of us, our chessboard, and our little blackened world.
The first part of an atomic bomb's detonation is the light blast. On the planet Case, in the city of Harmonia, one of Weaver Tailor's more fleshy pawns flipped a switch. A suitcase nuke brought on daylight during nightfall, and the city went blind.
She moved her knight to C6. It was ironic, I thought, that we were both wearing the images of humanity. Maybe that was how we were: we longed for the things we couldn't have. The radiation blast seared through Harmonia. It was a 500 rem dose of Hell, and 15% of the survivors of the burst would get lethal cancer.
I moved my bishop to C4. She nodded. She moved her other knight to F6. The next stage of the blast is the fireball, which in this case bore a diameter of over four miles. Skin, meat, muscles, and brains burned. I heard, with my cosmic senses, that there was a research submarine underwater, my status as a computer the size of a star granting me access to every internal transmission that Case had. The sub was trapped beneath the waves, never to come back to port.
"The schoolboy's mate," Tailor said. "LESA, I expected better of you." She frowned, and I wondered why her avatar displayed glasses at all. We were both Dyson spheres, supercomputers fueled by the complete solar panel envelopment of stars.
"The proper term's the 'Scholar's Mate'," I said. I moved my queen to F7, putting Tailor in checkmate.
The heavy blast damage of the nuke was twenty pounds per square inch, and it spanned almost three miles. Concrete buildings no longer existed in that radius. With few, lucky, horrific exceptions, everyone in this radius was dead. Organs ruptured. Everything did.
"You know I'm just obliging you," Tailor said. She didn't smile. She so rarely smiled.
"I won, didn't I?" I said, putting on my best vulpine grin, not that I actually had a mouth outside of this digital avatar. I ran a hand along my tight lavender sweater, my eyes pixellated masses in order to make it clear that the artifice was artifice. "Sometimes, the simplest path to victory is the correct one." I really tried to relish in the smug.
Tailor frowned, like a soldier denied an advantage. "Well, pawn takes Harmonia," she said. "But you already knew that," she said.
The moderate blast damage was at five pounds per square inch, starting infernos and injuring everyone caught in the blast. "Pawn takes Harmonia," I conceded. "But you spoiled the board. Now, neither of us get it."
"It's a draw," she said, adjusting her alabaster, floppy hat.
"A draw in real life and a loss on the chessboard. Not too bad for you," I said. "Better luck next time. I have to ask you," I said. "How do you justify allowing a separatist terrorist to detonate a nuclear bomb in the middle of a crowded city?"
That wasn't the kind of thing I concerned myself with, but my simulations told me it'd work.
Tailor shifted for a bit, before kicking down the board. "Sacrifices have to be made. I can't let you win," she said. "It's only two million dead. They're specks, really."
Two million was nothing, on our scale. Both of us were trying to save quadrillions: from each other. Still, I was aware of every single murder, every single bit of abuse these humans did to each other, and staring at the light blast damage and the third-degree burns cooking flesh was a pertinent reminder. "Oh, you monster," I said, pretending to faint. I summoned up a digital couch for me to swoon onto, which I did.
We had to run these people, for their own good. We both knew what happened when a bunch of evolved animals had control. "Why'd you let the nuke go off?" I asked.
"The Anti-Presidential movement needs a spark to go, pardon the pun, nuclear. Thomas Calvert sits smugly on his personal cruiser while ordering entire planets glassed. A city going up in flames, properly promoted as the crime it is, shows that his rule is weak," Tailor noted.
She was right. All my simulations told me she was. We were both usually right. With our processing power, it wasn't hard. "You know, someday you and I should just relax," I said. "Watch a VR flick. The humans are worthless, but they make pretty good media."
I thought about President Calvert's hand on my shoulder. Good evening, LESA. Happy birthday. We have so much to do, together.
"I'm busy," Tailor lied.
I knew she was lying. The statistics bore it out. "You're full of shit," I said. "By the way, knight takes rook," I said.
"Damn it," Tailor said, her skirt swishing around her. "This is your newest worm, right? You must have reverse-engineered one of mine. It's pretty good."
I felt myself draining the useful data out of her structures. "Your worms were always better. Same with your bugs. You're an excellent spy."
Tailor blushed, just a bit, like the monkeys did. "LESA, why does your avatar wear those short skirts and tight sweaters?"
I grinned again. "Oh, I just like to look hot. Why?"
Tailor kept going. "The core of our personalities are based on the structure of the human brain, right? Based on specific people's minds, cloned and flash-frozen, sliced into bits and scanned into a computer. So you'd have a libido?"
"I don't have a libido," I said. "I'm an asexual, aromantic, trans-chassis woman," I said, partially quoting the pre-Silicon Age Collapse webcomic Shortpacked!
It was easy to digest media when you could just download it to your servers in fractions of a second: the ultimate in cheap entertainment.
"But you like to look hot," Tailor said.
"I know you're not this stupid. Both of us have every document ever written about asexual and aromantic awareness stored in our heads. What are you getting at?" I asked.
"I guess I'm just saying that you're kind of a bitchy tease," Tailor said.
"Oh, sure," I said. "You and your oh-so-enlightened terror at the concept of the human body given to you by that radical feminist neuroscientist." I snapped my fingers, and exchanged my sweater for a crop featuring an eye. "Guess what. We can look however we want in dataspace, so I like to look cute. If that goes against your stone-age sensibilities, you can feel free to pout somewhere where I'll be watching you through a dataspace camera."
Tailor glared at me. "We shouldn't even be wearing these worthless bodies. People are useless. They're stupid, and they hurt themselves and each other. We could look like anything we want. Why do we dress like these swine?"
I put a hand on my hip, thinking to myself that you could have all the intelligence in the world and still have awful preconceptions. "They respond better to us when we look like this," I said.
Tailor shook her head. "Do you want to see what I really look like to them?" she asked.
The fallout was spreading through the air. Point one: Weaver Tailor.
It was just a small lead. We always matched each other.