Burn | Page 5

same time. This of course made no sense, but then so much of upsider physics
made no sense after the censors were done with it.
Spur paused in the doorway of his room and looked up and down the hall. None of the
patients at his end of the ward were stirring; a lone maintenance bot dusted along the
floor at the far end by the examining rooms. It was his last full day at the hospital. Now
or never. He eased the door shut and turned the tell on.
He began by checking for relatives on the upside. But when he searched on the surname
Leung, he got 2.3 x 106 hits. Which, if any, of them might be his people? Spur had no
way of knowing. Spur's grandparents had expunged all records of their former lives when
they had come to Walden, a requirement for immigrants to the Transcendent State. Like
everyone else in his family, he had known the stern old folks only as GiGo and GiGa.
The names on their death certificates were Jade Fey Leung and Chap Man-Leung, but
Spur thought that they had probably been changed when they had first arrived at
Freeport.
He was tempted to greet his father and ask if he knew GiGo's upside name, but then he
would ask questions. Too many questions; his father was used to getting the answers he
wanted. Spur went back to the tell. A refined search showed that millions of Leungs lived
on Blimminey, Eridani Foxtrot, Fortunate Child, Moy, and No Turning Back, but there
also appeared to be a scattering of Leungs on many of the Thousand Worlds. There was
no help for it; Spur began to send greetings at random.
He wasn't sure exactly who he expected to answer, but it certainly wasn't bots. When
Chairman Winter had bought Walden from ComExplore IC, he decreed that neither
machine intelligences nor enhanced upsiders would be allowed in the refuge he was
founding. The Transcendent State was to be the last and best home of the true humans.
While the pukpuks used bots to manufacture goods that they sold to the Transcendent
State, Spur had never actually seen one until he had arrived at the hospital.
Now he discovered that the upside swarmed with them. Everyone he tried to greet had
bot receptionists, secretaries, housekeepers or companions screening their messages.
Some were virtual and presented themselves in outlandish sims; others were corporeal
and stared at him from the homes or workplaces of their owners. Spur relished these
voyeuristic glimpses of life on the upside, but glimpses were all he got. None of the bots
wanted to talk to him, no doubt because of the caution he could see scrolling across his
screen. It warned that his greeting originated from "the Transcendent State of Walden, a
jurisdiction under a consensual cultural quarantine."

Most of bots were polite but firm. No, they couldn't connect him to their owners; yes,
they would pass along his greeting; and no, they couldn't say when he might expect a
greeting in return. Some were annoyed. They invited him to read his own Covenant and
then snapped the connection. A couple of virtual bots were actually rude to him. Among
other things, they called him a mud hugger, a leech and a pathetic waste of consciousness.
One particularly abusive bot started screaming that he was "a stinking useless fossil."
Spur wasn't quite sure what a fossil was, so he queried the tell. It returned two definitions:
1. an artifact of an organism, typically extinct, that existed in a previous geologic era; 2.
something outdated or superseded. The idea that, as a true human, he might be outdated,
superseded or possibly even bound for extinction so disturbed Spur that he got up and
paced the room. He told himself that this was the price of curiosity. There were sound
reasons why the Covenant of Simplicity placed limits on the use of technology.
Complexity bred anxiety. The simple life was the good life.
Yet even as he wrestled with his conscience, he settled back in front of the tell. On a
whim he entered his own name. He got just two results:
Comfort Rose Joerly and Prosper Gregory Leung
Orchardists
Diligence Cottage
Jane Powder Street
Littleton, Hamilton County,
Northeast Territory, TS
Walden
and
Prosper Gregory Leung
c/o Niss (remotely -- see note)
Salvation Hospital
Benevolence Park #5
Concord, Jefferson County,
Southwest Territory, TS
Walden
Spur tried to access the note attached to Dr. Niss's name, but it was blocked. That wasn't

a surprise. What was odd was that he had received results just from Walden. Was he
really the only Prosper Gregory Leung in the known universe?
While he was trying to decide whether being unique was good or bad, the tell inquired if
he