The Weapon - Oblivion - part 4 By Diana the Valkyrie Wendy, stop crying, it doesn't solve anything. Update: 24/07/2003 to valkyrie05 The slipstream from our passage through the air was blowing her tears rapidly down her face; some of them splashed on to me, and I could taste the saltiness of them. When Wendy emulated something, she got the details accurate. Right now, she was emulating one very unhappy human, which meant that she was one very unhappy Guardian. Scared and unhappy. Sadness was no stranger to her; fear was new. I guessed that the People didn't have much of either of those in their native habitat. When you're a virtually indestructible black-hole-quadrupole, there isn't much that can damage you, so there isn't much that can scare you. Or maybe there is, I didn't really know much about them. But I didn't need to ask what was scaring Wendy. Her emulation of Duncan was, essentially, software that she was running internally. If her memory was giving intermittent problems, then that would affect Duncan. In the worst case, if she lost all her memory of Duncan, then he would no longer exist. And if she lost all her own memories, she wouldn't exist either. "Wendy, stop crying, it doesn't solve anything. We have to work out what to do, we need to plan how to deal with this." She sniffled a bit, and then one of those great white feathery wings curved round and wiped the tears away from her face. "Please don't blow your nose on it," I begged her, offering her the tissue I had in my pocket. She smiled slightly, and I got a facefull of feathers as she wiped her face with my tissue. It was a bit tickly, but rather nice. "So what do you think I should do," she asked. "If you were a human, I'd suggest seeing a doctor." "Yes, but a human doctor isn't going to have the first clue. I can see it now - he goes to take my pulse, and I ask him what he'd like it to be so that I can set it to that." "So what do the People do, you have doctors?" "No. We don't get ill, we don't break bones, we don't have appendicitis." "OK, OK. But it would still make sense to consult them, maybe there's some experience of this?" "Easier said than done, David. The nearest Person is several thousand years away." "You mean light-years?" "Same thing, light speed is a consequence of the fine structure of space-time, nothing can go faster. If I send a message, they wouldn't get it for several thousand years, and I get the feeling that if this really is a problem, then I don't want to wait that long." "Mmm." "But David, we don't really know that it's a problem. All that we've seen is that I temporarily forgot the Rite of Binding." "I hate to be pessimistic, Wendy, but most things, if you forgot them, you wouldn't even know that you'd forgotten them. It's only things that you know that must have happened, that you'd notice that you'd forgotten them. Your memory is your version of reality. Forget something, and your version of reality is changed, and you don't know that anything happened." "Oh." "And it's worse than that." I explained to her about false memories, remembering things that didn't happen. "Oh." And then I explained to her about changed memories, remembering something wrongly. "Oh. Oh oh oh. Oh David, what am I going to do?" she wailed. "I don't know anything about this damage stuff. It's not in my manual." "You have a manual?" "Sure, there's a quickstart guide, a user manual and a technical reference manual. No, don't be silly, I wish I did have a manual. You know what I mean. I mean I don't know what to do." "Does Duncan have any ideas?" I asked. "He's asleep right now." "Huh?" "Sawing up logs, you know?" "I thought you guys didn't need sleep." "That's true. I wonder why he's asleep, then?" I didn't like to tell Wendy what I suspected - that this might be another manifestation of her memory problem. "So who can we talk to who might know about your, well, your internals?" "David, how would I know? A human doctor would be no use at all. Anything I have that's remotely human, is just an emulation." She extended her wings and stirred the air with them, then put them away again. "I see what you mean. Maybe we need someone who understands about your physics." "Like who?" I'm an academic, sure, but what I know about quantum physics can be written on a grain of rice, and you won't need small handwriting to do it. But I do know that Imperial University has a physics department, and I could use my influence as Chair of Guardian Studies to get to talk to whoever was the right sort of person in that specialty. So I phoned around a bit, found out the number of the Physics Faculty, found out the name of our top quantum physicist, Dr Meredith, and set up a meeting. It didn't exactly hurt when I said that the Guardian of Humanity was involved in this, and that she'd be attending the meeting. "Would tomorrow be soon enough?" I was asked. "Tomorrow it is, we'll fly over there after lunch." Boasting again. So, in bed that night, I tried to reassure her. "At least tomorrow we'll be making a start on your memory problem." "What memory problem?" Uh. I felt tired. I felt depressed. I felt like I was going round and round in circles. "We'll talk about it tomorrow, Wendy. Just hold me honey, hmm?" She did a bit more than just hold me.