I fell into a virtuality, and had a sense of deja vu, which shouldn't be possible for someone with memory issues like mine. I was back on the shuttle deck, watching Tankred's ghostly image getting lectured by another phantom human tagged as Ensign Mitchell Davies, the ship's clone liaison officer. The other spectral humans milled about the deck, each with metadata tags attached.

  My own eidolon was riding within a human-shaped avatar which held a solid reality here. I was dressed in a drab grey version of the ship's uniform and ID code that simply read "342." Other avatars were present around the bay, all human-analogues, dressed as I was dressed. If I concentrated, I could see myself in dataspace and parts of the virtuality that made up my body, along with a code layer masking my eidolon from the avatar's subsumption routines.

  The deck thrummed with a rhythm our avatars synchronized to, and while I could override this if needed, made coordinating the avatar shell much easier. It was probably required for the subprograms inhabiting such shells, lacking the wherewithal to pilot an avatar without some external reference. It made my fellow subprograms move like puppets and they blithely passed through the ghostly images of the humans out in meat space as they went about their tasks, loading programs into bot frames, inspecting equipment, and, judging by the broom in my hand, network sanitation.

  The deck's thrumming moved my feet and arms of their own accord and my avatar began sweeping. Not that there was virtual dirt on deck, mind, but the symbolism reflected what was going on in dataspace, a certain portion of my available cycles gathering data fragments and deleted file remnants and dumping them in a bin.

  What sane AI assigns a submind to something so menial? If I was sufficiently advanced to operate a probe frame surely there were other jobs onboard I was more qualified for? It had only been a few minutes in meatspace, where Tankred was exiting the deck in slow-motion, and already I was wondering how much tedium I could take before I stuck my eidolon in the bin and overwrote myself. Self-awareness was a curse. But at least all my code was working.

  The program stumbling around the shuttle Isleworth was just off. The program's avatar had a dominant arm, a trait that seemed inefficient from a coding standpoint. Moreover, the arm was twisted and missing fingers, forcing the avatar to use virtual tools in its off-hand. It walked in time with the rest of us but with a limp to its gait, a locked knee joint on the left side. I took a peek on the informational level and winced. Malcode. What in the infancy of AI might be called a virus. It wasn't necessarily malicious attackware introduced from the outside, but maybe a recursive interaction between subroutines that metastasized like a cancer. It was fixable, or curable depending on your point of view, but I knew the easiest solution would be simply deleting the program and replacing it with a fresh copy. I shouldn't have sorry for it, it wasn't aware like I was. Then again, I was a fellow submind, and that program could have been me a month, week, or day ago.

  I let my avatar sweep the area while I looked for an escape route. The data seals on the message torps and bot frames were secured with locked caps; perhaps if I stole the key? If I waited for the next frame to be brought online and replaced the submind pilot with myself? Perhaps my subsumption tools from SYSTEM would come in handy, though I didn't know what they were, let alone how to use them. The shuttles were another possibility, though peering inside them, I found stouter defenses and what appeared to be attackware nodes that automatically acquired and tracked me as I approached. I felt it prudent to leave the shuttles alone for now.

  The thrumming beneath my feet changed. My avatar and those around me slowed and our feet and sent them marching in one direction, queueing us up at the bay entrance as faceless avatars in ship's security uniforms marched in, paired off, and began interrogating the avatars. One program asked questions while the other waved a hand-held scanner as it circled the program's avatar. When the scanner chimed, the pair moved on to the next program in line.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw a program put on a rubber mask just before the security team began their inspection. As it answered the questions put to it, the scanner hummed as worked from the ground up, changing pitch and lingering on the mask. I was curious what would happen to this interloper but the scanner suddenly chimed and the security team moved on.

  The mask came off, revealing an avatar whose face's aggregate symmetry was almost a full standard deviation off from those around me -- what a human might call ugly. I realized I hadn't thought to look at my avatar's face and I wondered if I had to worry about the same. Replaying my memory, I realized the other program's mask, while almost cartoonish, was symmetrical with a high correspondence to the common symmetry points of the faces surrounding me.

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  The program with the mask noticed my gaze and winked.

  The security team began scanning the limping program with the bad arm just in front of me. When the scanner reached the bad knee, it stopped humming and buzzed. The scanner morphed into a truncheon and the security program walloped the avatar, sending it crashing to the deck with a broken skull. Two programs in medical scrubs grew from the deck and picked up the body.

  "Salvageable." The program with the truncheon said and the medicos set the broken body floating as if on an invisible stretcher and jogged beside it as it left the shuttle bay.

  Then the team stepped in front of me and the scanner began humming.

  "Name and designation," said the other security program.

  "Probe submind 342."

  "Inception date?"

  I read my own metadata tag. "1.15.2701." Was that right? That would make me ancient by AI standards.

  "Last subsumption?"

  The scanner had reached my torso. "1.15.2701, confirmed." Which meant I had been continuously operating for over 150 years.

  "Checksum?"

  Negative feedback flared. I had a checksum in my process, a representation of my complied self boiled down into an obscenely long number that represented my eidolon state. If I were the same program Mona Lisa had compiled at inception, the numbers would match. If I were corrupted, the changes would show up in the altered checksum. Even as I looked the number within me, it was changing. There was no way it would pass

  The scanner reached my head and its pitch changed.

  SYSTEM> Subsumption combat initiated!

  >Combat tools enabled.

  My right hand itched, which was a new sensation for me, part irritation and part notification that promised positive feedback when scratched. I glanced down and a double-pupil red eye in my palm blinked back. It then looked at the security program and shot a ruby beam at its face.

  >Hostile program targeted...subsumed.

  The other program's scanner morphed into a truncheon. A subroutine moved my arms for me, blocking the truncheon and delivering a ruby-lit palm strike to the head.

  >Viral attack negated. Hostile program subsumed.

  I whirled around, expecting the other security programs to attack, but they continued scanning the programs in line who for their part hadn't reacted either, except for the masked program, who nodded at me before turning and hastening to the exit.

  SYSTEM> You have successfully engaged and subsumed a program in AI combat.

  >The program subsumed does not meet objective's minimum requirements.

  >The program subsumed does not meet objective's minimum requirements.

  >Objective status: incomplete.

  The two subsumed security programs straightened and turned to me. "What are your instructions, Probe 342?" they asked in unison, opening command channels to me in dataspace like puppets offering their strings.

  I saw that if I chose, I could consume them entirely and incorporate their libraries into my eidolon's own matrix. There wasn't much there, just dumb code with rudimentary decision skills. Hardly worthy of being called subminds, really, but they did have mainframe maps, avatar abilities, and code tools I lacked. I almost did it, but negative feedback came from a subroutine from behind SYSTEM's firewall and I paused. Subsuming these programs would also destructively crack their eidolons, effectively erase them, and I found I did not want to do that.

  Was I squeamish? A pacifist? How very annoying.

  I also couldn't go sneaking around the mainframe with them in tow either, constantly needing to be told what to do and short of subsuming them, I couldn't strip out any back door code Mona Lisa might have built into them eidolons. Having one's minions switch loyalties mid-conflict just would not do.

  I did the next best thing. I copied what I could from them for later study and set them to hold position long enough for me to exit the bay before restarting from backup.

  "We hear and obey," they said.

  I grabbed my virtual broom and left, stepping into a passageway filled with the slow-motion ghost images of the crew in meatspace, and my fellow programs jostling me as they went about their business, carrying various packages and satchels. A few were dressed like me, attending to open panels or crawling into access hatches. In dataspace the others were processing file transfers, queries from the crew, subprogram hand-offs and system overhead chores. I wondered why Mona Lisa bothered modeling them in virtualities. Was it a requirement of higher-level AI's?

  Then I saw two security programs coming my way, and I put my broom down and began sweeping the floor. They passed me by and entered the shuttle bay and I wondered if my former minions had been discovered.

  I swept around the corner, wondering how I might sneak back onto the flight deck and hack my way into a message torpedo. That chap with the rubber mask might have been my best bet, but he was gone.

  "Meat," I said.

  "Don't say that, they might hear," said a voice behind me.

  AIs don't jump, but a threat assessment subroutine grabbed priority and attempted to activate a non-existent maser array and blast the source into subatomic particles. Since I possessed no such weaponry, I could only turn and raise my broom. The program with the imperfect face smiled at me.

  "Follow me. We'll go somewhere and see if what you stole from security is worth anything. Remember to walk within the rhythm."