Elysium Fire

by Alastair Reynolds

  “We probably have,” Dreyfus said, walking with his head down and his hands behind his back.

  “Then the point of these little chats is …?”

  “Maybe all it will take is the hundred and first interview. You’ll let something slip, and that will give me the breakthrough.”

  “Let something slip,” she repeated, mimicking his tone. “As if I’m deliberately withholding something.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Let me get something straight in my mind. I’m a digital artefact: a pattern of algorithms, designed to emulate the responses of the living instantiation of me.”

  “They don’t usually put it so bluntly, but yes—that’s about it.”

  “And you’ve got me sequestered. You’ve moved a copy of my digital code into your machines inside Panoply.”

  “Not just moved, but put a legal and binding embargo on the continued execution of any remaining copies of you beyond Panoply. We only want to deal with one copy of you, and it’s simpler for you if there are no conflicts when we release you back into the world.”

  “Whatever works for you. But one thing’s clear enough to me. You already have the means to pick me apart, to examine my coding structure—my decision-branch algorithms, my life-logs. You can see through my soul like it’s made of glass. So why the time-consuming charade of these interviews? Can’t you just know everything there is to know about me?”

  “Let me explain how that would work,” Dreyfus said. “Only another artificial intelligence would be able to pick through your digital structure and hold all the details of your life-log in its memory. We have machines that can do that, it’s true. But any machine would still have to break everything down into a form that I could assimilate, and I’d still have to phrase my queries as natural language expressions. In which case I’d end up having a conversation much like this one, only with a whole unnecessary layer of mediation between me and you.”

  “Mm.” She made a face that told him she accepted his answer but still found something unsatisfactory in it. “And do my thoughts come into it?”

  “You’re continuing to exist and can interact with other beta-levels. Isn’t that better than being frozen in limbo?”

  “This isn’t living, Prefect Dreyfus—no matter what you might like to think.”

  “You’ll feel differently when we release you.”

  “Why should I? It’ll still be just another pale imitation of life.”

  “Only if you want it to be. Beta-levels can still serve a social function.”

  “Serve a social function?” she echoed. “How thrilling you make it seem. The afterlife as public servitude. I could water some flowers, tend some grass, is that what you mean?”

  “I wish there was something I could say to make it seem better.”

  She had been the first of the dead to come to Panoply’s attention, and her beta-level the first to be sequestered. Dozens more had followed in the ensuing months, but she would always be the first victim, emblematic of those to come. He still remembered the false optimism of the early days, the slowly waning hope that some common link would be found among the cases. Whatever it was, though, it had not come to light through routine interviewing. Even the Search Turbines, programmed to probe into the fine-grained details of a life, had found nothing of significance.

  So why did he keep coming back to Cassandra Leng?

  Because he liked her, he supposed. Her bluntness, her unsentimental acceptance of death. Some of the other betas wanted things from him: information, promises, changes to their terms of sequestration. Cassandra Leng seemed not to care about any of that. And in her directness he believed he was getting as close to a truthful account of her beliefs and opinions as with any of the other dead.

  Something else, too—and with it a prickle of distant guilt. Her directness reminded him of his wife.

  “I’m not really buying this cynicism, Cassandra,” Dreyfus said. “Your living instantiation must have believed there was some worth to a beta-level or you wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of having the emulation created.”

  “I did it for the living, not for myself—the way you make out a will so that people around you will be happier. To make them feel better, not for your own benefit.”

  “Is that really all there was to it?”

  From the lake side they had a good view of the terrain as it swooped up beyond the gardens, rolling up into a tube. Lakes and hamlets glimmered in a haze of silvery distance. A small island rose from the lake, with a skeletal tower jutting into the fog.

  “We may as well face it, Dreyfus,” she said, letting out a quiet sigh. “I’m dead and gone. I died after taking a reckless gamble with my own life.”

  “It wasn’t the risk-taking that killed you, it was just where you happened to be when the neural overload took place.” The hundred-and-twelve-year-old Leng had perished during a high-risk sport, an elaborate and dangerous cross between firewalking and tag, played out in the bowels of the Colfax Orb, a habitat that made a living for itself by courting hedonists, thrill-seekers and the borderline suicidal. “But what were you hoping to get out of that place to begin with?”

  “Shall I let you in on a dirty little secret, Dreyfus?”

  “If you like.”

  “Utopia is stifling. What’s the point in longevity if every day is a grey duplicate of the one before?”

  “Life is still precious,” Dreyfus said. “Still worth cherishing. No matter how it looks most of the time.”

  “I don’t disagree. But you either live on the limits, or you’re not living. I knew that, and I accept the consequences.”

  “You’d see yourself as a risk-taker, then.”

  She glanced at him, rolling her eyes. “Oh, this old hobbyhorse of yours. We’ve been over this, remember?”

  “I still think there’s something to it.”

  “You’re entitled to your theories, Prefect—and I’ll humour them, while I’m here. Ask around, share stories, trade memories—as I’ve been doing for months and months already.”

  They walked a little further. By some degrees the mist had lifted from the lake, and now the central island was more visible than it had been only a few moments earlier. The skeletal tower was actually a pylon, supporting the thin thread of a monorail line, swooping overhead and out across the lake.

  “There’s a new man, Antal Bronner. Have you spoken to him?”

  “He’s only just arrived, the poor confused soul. It would be a little cruel of me to inflict myself on him so soon after he came here, wouldn’t it?”

  “Not everyone shares your view of death.”

  “I’ll talk to him, for what it’s worth. But I wouldn’t get your hopes up. He looks boring to me. Not a risk-taker at all.” She looked at him with something close to amusement. “I think it may be time to find a new theory, Dreyfus, if that’s the best you’ve got.”

  “It is,” he said. “For now.”

  Sparver knocked on the door, waited, knocked a second time. Half a minute passed, then Thalia opened the door just enough to show her face. She was wearing off-duty clothes, her hair wet and glistening as if she had just stepped through a washwall.

  “What?” she asked, caught between irritation and interest. “Come to give me a second dressing-down for overstepping the mark?”

  “Not exactly.”

  He didn’t have to ask to be invited; they understood each other at least that well. Sparver waited until she had closed the door behind them, then moved to the low table in the middle of the room. He was about to conjure himself a chair when Thalia saved him the effort and produced one to his usual specifications, which she knew by heart.

  “You want tea, I suppose?”

  “No, I’m not sure I have the stomach for it.”

  Sparver took the chair and bid Thalia sit opposite him. She wore a black gown cinched at the waist, patterned with green-gold dragons.

  “Something on your conscience?”

  “Yes
, as a matter of fact. I’ve been thinking everything over, especially in the light of our last conversation.” The chair she had made for him was low, almost like something fashioned for a child, but there was no slight in that. She knew his tastes perfectly well and he much preferred a chair that let him keep his feet on the floor, instead of having them swing in mid-air. “You were right, and I was wrong. You are involved in this, and you do deserve to know the fuller picture. But it’s difficult, and this won’t end well for me.”

  “Then you’d better say nothing.” There wasn’t much charity in her tone.

  “No, I’ve made up my mind.” He looked her in the face. “Something bad is happening, Thal, and you’ve only seen a tiny part of it. We don’t know what it is, or where it’s leading. Actually, that’s not quite true. We know it’s getting worse.”

  “All right,” she said, cradling the tea she must have prepared for herself before he arrived. Sparver picked up the smell of ginger, Thalia taking her tea the way Dreyfus liked it. He wondered if she had adopted the habit out of preference, or because she wished to emulate or endear herself to Dreyfus. Whatever the explanation, he had no use for tea made that way. Ginger made him sneeze. “What is it?”

  “You asked about the case codename. It’s Wildfire. People are dying, and we don’t know why. That man you attended to, Antal Bronner. He’s just the latest Wildfire case and there’s no pattern that we can see. They’re going through their lives, and then suddenly something goes wrong with their heads. A malfunction of their neural implants, leading to a thermal overload and massive destruction to surrounding brain tissue. That’s why Demikhov wanted that head frozen as quickly as possible—so he had some chance of working out what’s going on, before the evidence cooked itself. But we weren’t quick enough.”

  “You mean I wasn’t.”

  “You did all you could. I’ve vouched for you in that regard.”

  “Oh. I need vouching for, do I?”

  “They’re on edge, the senior prefects. You can’t blame them. This doesn’t fit any patterns. It’s not confined to one habitat. It’s dispersed, emerging unpredictably. An asymmetric threat.”

  Thalia sipped at her ginger-scented tea. “I guessed that man wasn’t the first. You wouldn’t go to the trouble of preparing for something like that unless you’d already seen it before and were expecting new cases.” She looked up from the tea, as if half fearful of the answer he was about to give.

  “Antal Bronner was the fifty-fourth that we’re aware of. There’s no clear link between them, or where they happen.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  Sparver got up from the conjured chair. “It’s around four hundred days since the first case. But that’s as much as you need to hear from my lips. The rest, you’d better hear from Lady Jane.”

  “Why should she tell me any of it?”

  “The damage has been done,” Sparver said. “You know too much to go back to checking cores now. She’ll have two options: either wipe your memory, or put you to work doing something useful. I know which I’d choose.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Thalia said. “For both our sakes.”

  3

  The atmosphere in the tactical room was exactly as frosty as Thalia had expected. Dreyfus had taken his customary seat to the right of Gaston Clearmountain’s chair, between Clearmountain and a supernumerary analyst. Thalia and Sparver were sitting opposite Aumonier; Sparver’s usual position on the other side of the table was vacant.

  “We had higher hopes for you than this, Ng,” said Lillian Baudry, raising her voice over the soft whispering of one of the analysts who was briefing an Internal Prefect on the extreme left of the table. “It’s a shame to see them dashed.”

  “Ng committed no actual breach of rules,” Aumonier said. “She may have violated commonplace professional etiquette, but that’s an entirely separate matter.”

  “Security was breached,” said Ingvar Tench.

  “The fault for which lies with Sparver Bancal,” Aumonier said, directing her gaze slightly to Thalia’s left. “You knowingly violated a high-level directive. You were under express orders not to disclose the nature of this emergency to any operative below full field status.”

  “With respect—” Sparver began.

  “I’m not done,” Aumonier said, with fierce calm. “Grave damage has been done, Bancal. There’s never been a higher need for secrecy. Panoply is already under pressure with the breakaway problem, our hands are tied, and now we have this developing crisis to contend with. So far we’ve been lucky—extraordinarily so. How many is it now, Tang?”

  Robert Tang, the other Internal Prefect present beyond Ingvar Tench, glanced at his readouts. Tang was a small, fastidious man known for his close attention to detail. “Fifty-four known deaths at present, Supreme Prefect.”

  “Fifty-four,” she said. “Fifty-four dead and no one—beyond us—has yet drawn a line between them. The instant this becomes public knowledge, we’ll have a panic on our hands like nothing we’ve seen. And yet here you are, treating secrets with the utmost disregard—”

  “Why would we have a panic, ma’am?” Thalia cut in, doing her best to take some of the heat off her friend.

  “Speaking.”

  “I’m sorry, Supreme Prefect.” Thalia steeled herself before forging on. “But yesterday I was sawing a man’s head off in a public place. Doesn’t that entitle me to know a little about what’s going on?”

  “It entitles you to nothing,” Aumonier said.

  “She shouldn’t even be in this briefing,” Baudry muttered. “It’s already above her clearance.”

  “That horse has bolted,” Dreyfus said, in a barely awake drawl. “Ten to one she already knows the case codename. You may as well show her the Wildfire curve.”

  “I don’t think—” Aumonier began.

  “She can be asset to us,” Dreyfus said, rousing himself a little. “But if she’s to play her part, she needs to know all of it.”

  “I don’t agree with this,” Baudry said.

  “You don’t have to,” Dreyfus said.

  With a sigh Aumonier nodded at one of the analysts. “The most recent projections—folding in the fifty-fourth death.”

  The analyst made a quick, deft conjuring gesture. A graph lit up on the wall, projected directly over the dark, varnished wood. A scattering of fifty-four dots were clustered around a bunch of curving lines, steepening from left to right. The lines were annotated with thickets of blurred symbols, but the more Thalia squinted the less they came into focus.

  “Prefect Dreyfus says you have the mettle,” Aumonier said. “Let’s see it.”

  Thalia looked at the graph a little longer. “I can’t read the annotation,” she said. “I presume that’s something to do with security dyslexia. But I know an exponential curve when I see one. How far along the time axis are we?”

  “Four hundred days, near enough,” Dreyfus said.

  “Are both axes linear?”

  “Yes,” Robert Tang said.

  Thalia nodded. “Then your curve looks to be reasonably well approximated by e to the power of x, where x is the number of days divided by a hundred. Let’s see. You’ll hit one hundred cases around day four hundred and sixty, or barely two months from now, which sounds manageable. But you’re on a doubling time of about seventy days, which means a thousand cases about two hundred and ninety days from now, and two thousand only seventy days after that. I’m sure I’m over-simplifying it, but …”

  “You’ve grasped the essentials,” Aumonier said. “Based on the present pattern, we lose the entire population of the Glitter Band in less than four years. Half the population would have succumbed only seventy days prior to that point. There’d be nothing resembling civilisation left by then. Critical services, from security to life-support management, would have long since collapsed. By some projections the end-point would be crossed when we lose one tenth of the population, in less than three years. Personally I think that’
s optimistic. Panic would have set in long before that, and far beyond our means to control. We’re a tiny dose of order in a body politic on the constant edge of chaos.”

  “But it won’t come to that, will it?” Thalia asked, looking around those present. “There are only fifty-four cases at the moment. There’ll turn out to be something special about these people, something that predisposes them to … whatever this is.”

  “If there is,” Baudry said, “we haven’t found it yet.”

  “Close the graph,” Aumonier told the analyst, before returning her gaze to Thalia. “Prefect Dreyfus says you could be valuable to us, Ng. Fast, resourceful and able to make connections.”

  “I’d like to help, ma’am, if I’m able.”

  “I’m minded to make the best of this regrettable situation.” She continued giving Thalia her long, level look. “From this moment on, you’ll be given probationary upgrade to Field One, along with Pangolin clearance and full access to all materials relating to Wildfire.”

  “This is highly unorthodox,” said Baudry.

  Aumonier smiled at the woman sitting to her right. “Orthodox or not, Lillian, it’s my decision.”

  Tang and the analysts looked down at their work.

  Thalia’s mouth was dry. She felt obliged to say something. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “Don’t thank me,” Aumonier said curtly. “I’m about to make your life significantly less pleasant.”

  “She’ll need a team,” Dreyfus said.

  Aumonier nodded. “And normally I’d assign two deputies to any Field working on a similarly difficult case, but in this instance security considerations remain paramount. She’ll have to make do with a single subordinate.”

  “Did you have anyone in mind?” Thalia was thinking of the up-and-coming deputies she had scouted in the refectory and training rooms.

  “You’ll be working with Bancal. I’m demoting him from Field Prefect One to Deputy Field Three, with immediate effect.”

  Thalia glanced at Sparver, unsure what to say. Even a mouthed apology seemed insufficient.