Free Hammered by Elizabeth Bear Page B

and slopping cola over her hand. It hit the floor and vanished; there wasn’t much problem with litter in virtual Marsport. “I won the lottery. I have the points from the Martian Treasure you helped me find, and I’m going up to Phobos the next time I log in. Can you believe it?”
    He laughed and laid a hand on her shoulder. “You’ll come back to Marsport to tell me about it, won’t you?”
    Leah gave Tuva a coy glance, which made him laugh harder. She twisted her toe on the decking and grinned. “If you buy me another drink when I come back.”
    “Mercenary. All right. You’re on. Have they told you yet what the training entails?”
    Words tumbled over each other like moths struggling to get at a light. He was still laughing at her, and she didn’t mind. Some people tried for
years
to get into pilot training and never made it. “There’s simulator training first. Navigational stuff, although they tell me it’s weird. And then I get to fly a real starship!” She paused. “Well, a real virtual starship. But it’s supposed to be
great.
It’ll kind of suck, because I don’t have neural and my dad wouldn’t let me get it even if he could afford it, but you can do the training even without. There’s this guy on one of my web-groups … oh, you don’t care about that.”
    Tuva nodded. “You bet I do. Come on, let’s go get a make-believe burger and you can tell me all about it.”
    I don’t have to know an answer, I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. It doesn’t frighten me.
    —Dr. Richard P. Feynman

 
    Somewhere in the Internet
Thursday 7 September, 2062
04:15:32:04–04:15:32:09
    Richard Feynman deemphasized the task running in the Avatar Gamespace when Leah Castaign reluctantly checked the time and derezzed, leaving a computer-run proxy in her place. Despite his increasing interest in the girl, Feynman’s presence in the game was only a subroutine. His emphasis and his core personality—what he thought of as
himself
—remained “where” it had been: focused on circumventing Unitek’s security.
    A high and daunting wall.
    Fortunately, I was always a pretty good hand with a lock pick
, Feynman thought, generating another tendril of code with which to caress Unitek’s firewall.
If this doesn’t work, I might have an easier time getting through the military route.
If he had been possessed of flesh and bone, he would have chuckled at the irony of that.
    Feynman had always found a complicated joy in his ability to outwit, outfox, and out-multitask the general run of humanity. He delighted in playing tricks, and coming back from the dead after seventy years was too good a trick to pass up. He didn’t pretend to understand the universe, although some would say he’d come closer than anyone. He didn’t worry about superstition or souls. He had Feynman’s memories—more or less—and he deemed it reasonably demonstrated thathe approximated the original in personality, logic, and inductive reasoning.
    He was gifted, and he knew it.
    And, addictive as a drug to a man who had—even within human limitations—trained himself to perform mental gymnastics on three or four levels at once, who had comprehended the puissance of questioning assumptions, the new and not-so-human version of Feynman had
processing power.
    He also had nearly instantaneous access to the world’s unprotected data. Including the information that a recently released female convict he was personally interested in had taken employment with Unitek, working alongside the father of a rather charming young girl. If Feynman had had a physical body, he would have settled back in his chair and stared at the wall, the tip of one loafered foot flipping rhythmically. As it was, he freed a few more of his widely appropriated resources, and continued his siege of Unitek systems.
    What on earth do you keep behind a