Proteus in the Underworld Read Online Free PDF Page A

there. And if you change your mind, I won't be surprised."
    As Sondra left Morrone's office and began the eighty-floor dropchute descent toward ground level she reviewed the meeting. Using Wolf's name had been a disaster. Bey obviously had no idea how much his successor resented his fame. But in spite of that, Sondra had not been given an actual refusal. She would certainly do what Morrone suggested and find out more about the Carcon Colony. She had been assuming that it was just another of the thousand small groups who populated the Kuiper Belt and the Halo. Apparently there was something more to the colony than she had realized.
    "Strange territory, strange people," Bey Wolf had said. How strange? And strange how?
    As she reached the ground floor, Sondra noticed something else. More and more of the staff she passed looked like male and female versions of Denzel Morrone. Apparently his internal campaign for an Office of Form Control identity that went well beyond clothing was succeeding.
    * * *
    Sondra had been born on Earth. She had been given a rather standard planetary education, which meant that she knew a great deal about the Inner System out to Pluto, and less and less about the rest of Sol's retinue as the distance from the Sun increased.
    She had spent tourist time on Mars and Ceres and cruised the Europan deep ocean. She had flown past the off-limits planet of Saturn, with its Logian forms busy on projects beyond the comprehension of any human. She had visited the moons of Uranus, and in derived reality aboard a deep submersible she had watched the Ergatandromorphs, constructed synthetic forms, as they worked on the Uranian Link deep within their mother planet.
    And there her first-hand experience ended. Beyond the Inner System, in order, came the Kuiper Belt, the Kernel Ring, and the vast extended region of the Oort Cloud. Cloudland, diffuse and underpopulated (by Inner System standards, not by its own) reached out to a full third of a light-year from the Sun. Beyond that, and last of all, came the Dry Tortugas. Those arid, volatile-free shards of rock marked the edge of Sol's domain and shared their gravitational allegiance with other stars.
    Sondra knew that the regions were all different, with their own inhabitants and customs and life-styles. The Kuiper Belt almost qualified as part of the Inner System. It was a collection of planetoids and cometary fragments, orbiting from the distance of Persephone, only fifty times Earth's distance from the Sun, to about six times that far. The inhabitants of its numerous colonies preferred to wear the forms of the Inner System, rather than the skeletal and elongated shapes of the Cloudlanders.
    Or at least, most of them did. Sondra, connected to the Form Control general data bank, watched in astonishment as numerical, descriptive, and pictorial information flowed in about the Carcon Colony.
    ] The Carcon Colony (employ directed hyper-trail reference OP/M), a contraction of Carbon-silicon Colony, was established in 2112. Its founders rejected the philosophical dualism that separates carbon-based intelligences (e.g. humans, Logians) from silicon intelligences (e.g. computers, Ergas; employ directed hyper-trail reference HI/AI). They argued that the path of evolution dictates a direct synthesis of the two forms, and they set out to create that synthesis within their own persons and progeny. The assignment of functions, both physical and mental, was to be made on the basis of efficiency, not prior prejudice or historical roles. The resulting organisms are true Cyborgs, although the residents of the Carcon Colony reject this designation, preferring to use the term Optimorphs.
    Sondra followed the trail keys and found before her the Optimorph image bank. The displayed entities were not, as she had expected, a bizarre mixture of elements— human trunks, maybe, with mechanical arms and legs and glittering inorganic eyes. They were superficially human. But the torsos and heads