Writers of the Future, Volume 28 (46 page)

While Ireland Holds These Graves

D
ev Martin surrendered his exterior electronic devices, then submitted to a scan of his head chip while it received the new cultural downloads. Exiting customs, he moved against the human tide of the Shannon Air and Compiler Portal. Around him flowed the fleeing hundreds—slow, wide, orderly, not panicked and poor like the North Korean Implosion, but of the same weary tradition. Their worldly goods, already shipped or decompiled, still seemed to weigh on their shoulders. The departing gazed at Dev with a disbelief and dark humor that assumed the new arrival didn’t know what awaited him.

Dev could have told the refugees that he understood, that he had lost everything too, but they wouldn’t believe him. They’d probably kill him. So Dev kept walking, avoiding their gaze, hoping that no one in this disconnected zone would recognize him.

A
Garda
officer stopped him. “Forget something
?
” she asked.

“I’ve just arrived.”

“Haven’t you already caused enough hurt
?
”

“Yes,” he agreed. Shite, she knew who he was.

The big woman smiled like an Irish wolfhound at a hare. “Why don’t you just turn yourself around then, before I tell these good people who you are
?
”

Dev pulled out some hard-copy papers. The
garda
’s brow furrowed, then she waved the papers away. “UNI can kiss my Irish arse. No one here cares anymore what they say, boyo.” But she didn’t tell him again to leave. “You know the terms of the Referendum
?
”

“Yes,” he said, knowing that she would give him the bad news anyway. Some Irish just couldn’t resist giving the bad news.

“Then you are aware that the final Cúchulainn Barrier goes up in three days, and entry and departure for Referendum Ireland will be sharply curtailed. If you decide to remain after that time, you’ll be committing to stay for one year.”

“Yes.”

She studied his face. “You’re not just here to write reports for UNI.”

“I’m looking for someone.”

She shook her head, but spared him most of that bad news. “Don’t look for too long. You have three days.”

“Right. Cheers.”

“Oh, don’t forget to turn on your Irish.”

“Turn on my what
?
”

She tapped her head. “Language.”

“Right.” Dev told his head chip to switch to Irish Gaelic. He said “thank you” and out came
“go raibh maith agat.”
Christ, what a gobstopper. He strode to the terminal exit, and Shannon kept flowing around him, an Irish wake en masse.

When he stepped outside, his head chip synced with the circumscribed Irish net. From overhead, a cry of challenge. A large dark bird, perhaps a raven, circled in the morning sky.
Just a bird,
Dev thought, somewhere between statement and prayer.
Not that AI goddess. Not the bloody Morrigan. Not before lunch.

I
n Galway, Dev sat alfresco with his third pint and his untouched fish and chips. Seagulls and pigeons hounded him, probing for any opening, but no raven-like AI joined them. Dev should’ve been looking for Anna or leaving town, and shouldn’t have been drinking, but he had ample time and means for his future failures, so he got pissed and took in the view.

The traditional music of an afternoon session cut through the other pub noise. Analog instruments and “one touch, one note” were again the rules. The biologicals and Personality Reconstructs mixed with easy familiarity: football-jerseyed drinkers laughed with baroque and Victorian PRs. The June sun and brisk breeze were busy drying the fresh paint covering all English language signs. A banner over Eyre Square declared in Irish that Galway/Gaillimh was “The Capital of the 2nd War of Independence.”

With her unerring eye for the heart of the matter, Anna might be here if Galway was to be the new capital. Even if not, this protean town of gossip was a fine place to start hunting for his ex.

As Dev finally tasted a chip, nanobots slowly chewed down global-style buildings they had fabricated only a few years before, their work sustained by generated energy fields in this often sunless city. Other nanobots were restoring castles, reroofing monasteries and extending the wall of the Spanish Arch; Galway had no room for nonfunctional ruins. The nanos were also busy redecorating any modern structures spared to accommodate the biological population. All buildings would be in Celtic harmony. Light gray flakes of nano-trash floated away from the sites and fell in small drifts.

“The newspapers are right: snow is general all over Ireland.” A lanky-looking galoot with an eye patch and thin mustache wandered past Dev’s table, swinging an ashplant walking stick. Dev about choked on his chip. “Jim
?
” The galoot walked faster. Dev got up and sprinted after him. “Jim. It’s me, Dev Martin.”

“My apologies, sir, I’m very busy right now with my work in progress. I’ll have your money soon.”

“Jim, what’s feckin’ wrong with you
?
You don’t owe anybody shite. Though it’s grand to hear you’re writing again.”

James Joyce stopped cold and slapped his forehead. His face seemed to ripple with the impact. The eye patch disappeared. “Shite and onions! I’m sorry, Dev. The new Sinn Fein have been at my inner organs again. It seems I’m not Irish enough for them.”

“You never were. Why should you change now
?
”

Joyce whispered, “The revolution has plans for Dublin. They want to rebuild it as it was on the sixteenth of June, 1904.”

The day of Joyce’s
Ulysses
. “Bloody Bloomsday every day, forever.”

“World without end amen,” said Joyce. “I was just feckin’ joking when I said they could do it. If I fight it, they’ll have me utterly domesticated, like poor Roddy Doyle. Or they’ll set the Morrigan on me.”

Dev winced. He wasn’t sure which was worse. The revolutionaries kept the uncooperative Doyle PR confined to a working-class living room in front of an old-fashioned telly. Day after day, he spouted the Da’s bits from
The Commitments
. The Morrigan would be quicker in objective time, but an AI could do almost anything with subjective time.

“Jim, have you seen Anna
?
”

“The mother of my resurrection
?
You can’t find her
?
”

“I couldn’t track her on the global, and the Irish net isn’t cooperating. I need to find her. I need . . .” Dev opened his hands.

“My young father and artificer, I’ll assist you, but,” and Joyce lowered his voice again, “you must get me out of here. Even if they leave my ballocks attached, I’m cut off from the broadbands, and these other PRs—even you have no idea.”

Dev nodded. “I’ll do whatever I can.”
Probably less than bugger all, sorry.
“As for the PRs, you’re right, I don’t have an iota of an idea—my access is desperate. For example, what are you doing here in the Wesht
?
”

“It’s June, and I thought things were all up with me—I wanted to see Nora’s house one last time.”

“Oh, right. Let’s go then.” Dev wouldn’t press the tetchy, deadline-adverse Joyce for an immediate response to his question.

They walked the short distance from the square to Nora Barnacle Joyce’s childhood home. They passed tourist shops, shuttered since the Referendum. The irony that the PRs were designed to improve tourism was not lost on Dev, their codesigner.

Joyce stopped across the street from Nora’s house and looked it over up and down. “It seems so small now.” Two windows on two single-room floors, for a whole family. “Dev, I never asked you—why didn’t you bring her back
?
”

Because I didn’t think she was worth trying and trying again until we got her right
?
Now, having lost the love of his own life, Dev knew better. “What can I say
?
She didn’t write literature. Anna and I tried a PR like that once, and it didn’t work. I’m sorry.”

“Barnacle. Stuck to me, all her life.”

“You could, maybe, you know, do it yourself
?
” Dev felt like he was talking about sex and death with an adult son.

“No, you’re right,” said Joyce. “I’ve seen some of our solo efforts, like Swift’s Stella. Poor ghosts. They don’t pass the Joyce Test.”

“The Joyce Test
?
”

Near tears, Joyce cackled. “You can’t have a decent drink with them.”

Dev laughed and wiped his eyes. This good friend could distract him for years, but Dev only had hours. “So, where’s Anna
?
”

“I may have been addled by Sinn Fein attacks, but I’m certain your flower of the mountain left here after I arrived. She had been asking for Yeats.”

“Which one
?
”

“She didn’t seem particular.”

Sligo was Yeats country. Dev couldn’t know where Old Yeats or Young Yeats might haunt—the town, the old family house, anywhere. But Dev knew where Newly Dead Yeats was. Dev had put him there himself.

If Anna and the Morrigan had discovered the true reason behind Newly Dead Yeats, then Dev would soon join him in the grave.

T
hree years before, as a grad student in America, Dev pursued a dodgy thesis—that
Finnegans Wake
was the first cybernetic book, that its twentieth-century origin was like finding an integrated circuit diagram in an Egyptian pyramid. Everyone with the right language and literature enhancements understood and enjoyed the multi-/neolingual
Wake
now; few claimed to then.

To help argue his point, Dev decided to bring back Joyce. Of course, this had already been tried—in the earlier days of AI, almost everything had been done and done badly. Previous Joyce reconstructs could pass a full-sensory Turing Test, but they didn’t have the distinctive responses of an
exceptional
human.

The traditional scholars sniffed that Dev hadn’t “heard of the death of the author generally and of Mr. Joyce specifically.” Undaunted, Dev started his design work, and ran immediately into two difficulties—money and ability.

For money, Dev found the Irish Tourism Board, one of the last vestiges of Irish national governance. To encourage people to visit Ireland physically rather than virtually, the ITB wanted more than Joyce—they wanted all the Irish greats. Greats to argue with in a pub or hang out with in a tower. Greats that would stay local.

For ability, Dev found Anna. She was playing violin in the quadrangle, alone and digitally unenhanced—a freak show to most. Dev bought her coffee and discovered a brilliant grad student in AI. Her full name was omen: Anna Livia Plurabella Vico (her Italian-American parents were
Wake
fans). With her long black hair and sea-gray eyes, Anna was an Irishman’s dream of the Mediterranean.

Anna designed reconstructs, but she had run up against the limits of historical sources. Dev jived Anna about literature to interest her in Joyce and in himself. “What if every word choice in a text reflected the peculiar genius, the particular thought process, of the author
?
That’s what great fiction is, and what makes it different from most speeches and letters.”

This stimulated Anna to excited multitasking. One part of her brain investigated love with Dev; the other designed the fiction algorithm for converting analog source text to digital synapses and combined that algorithm with biographical data and Dev’s unorthodox insights. Still, the process would not have worked, except Lingua, one of the great global AIs, took an interest. Lingua was short on human personality, but astronomically long on sheer intelligence and processing power. The AI had started as a translator, but enjoyed modeling other aspects of the human mind.

Thus, a trinity came together and made a baby: James Joyce. Snappers change everything.

Joyce was a hit, and the ITB ordered more literary figures for re-creation. Dev and Anna quit school. Business was grand; even minor authors were in demand. The first sign of trouble seemed more feature than flaw: the PRs had an unsettling way of reminding people of what it meant to be Irish as distinct from anything else. Some non-Irish even wanted to become Irish after listening to the “Returned,” as they called the PRs. With global prosperity, parochial politics didn’t seem rational, and Dev thought the fad wouldn’t last.

Then, out of nowhere, Anna decided that they should recreate Maud Gonne, Irish nationalist and muse of W.B. Yeats. They had her autobiography and letters, but no literary fiction. As Dev expected, her PR came out physically beautiful but mentally thin, and even the Yeats PRs would have nothing to do with her. So, Dev boxed her with the other failures.

Anna took Maud’s premature retirement hard, and Lingua seemed oddly disappointed as well. Thinking back on it, Dev wondered if he could have done something to change what followed. But he just went on to the next project.

Anna went back to work too, but she also had more frequent conversations with the Irish PRs already deployed. She asked Dev for countless details about being Irish, and suggested moving to Galway long term. Clearly, the PRs were getting to her as they had gotten to so many in Ireland. Ridiculous shite, and Dev said so, but seeing the effect of the PRs so close to home rattled him.

One day, the local United Nations and Intelligences office summoned Dev and Anna to a “program integration meeting.” A UNI rep bristling with several generations of cyber-access nodes drew Anna into an extended discussion of the technical aspects of her work. Another rep, to all appearances unenhanced, sat with Dev over coffee.

“We’ve modeled your future,” said the rep.

“Grand. Am I a very rich man
?
”

“We anticipate that one day soon, you’ll want some insurance.”

That was when Dev came up with Newly Dead Yeats.

D
ev drove north with Joyce towards Sligo. Human-driven autos on killer narrow roads were a tradition and sport, so cars would continue to terrorize the new Ireland. Joyce hunted for music feeds and found “Irish rock,” which amused, appalled and intrigued him all at once. “G-L-O-R-I-A,
in te domine,
” he quipped.