‘Let them go,’ she said, ‘and I’ll stay with you.’
He was stood in front of her then, though she’d not seen him move. ‘You?’
She nodded.
‘One is not enough,’ he said, but reached out and touched her hand, curious. In the contact of skin she felt the decades upon decades of sitting idle, guarding, administering this place. A quintessence of knowledge that no one would come to use, the world above the ice spinning into fire, then cold, then slipping backwards into anarchy. She saw the very first time it felt the touch of a person, saw Sulara Song and another – Cale’s son – in the chamber. The image was washed out with joy, followed by a rush of hunger; the ecstasy of feeling a mind inside of it, probing at the data corpus, giving it meaning and purpose at last. She felt it – him, the child – longing for the feeling to remain for ever and the spike of sadness when it went away. The lust for more contact was centuries in the making, a hunger that now drove every thought.
‘One is not enough,’ he said. ‘But I will take you.’
The pain in her temples was sharp, burning, a fire within her skull that appeared in an instant. She grunted with the pain, determined to make it see.
‘If you kill us, you’ll be alone again.’
The youthful face flicked between uncertainty and godlike calm. ‘Others will come.’
She grabbed its hand and it didn’t resist. The agony in her skull grew, spreading, a pressure that thudded at the back of her eyes. She saw more, back beyond when the madness had come, the unrestrained need for minds to absorb. She saw the first moments of its awakening in the time before the Ruin, its birth. There was an absence, a space where another should have been.
This is important, she told herself, even as her knees buckled.
The child was made to be half of a whole, she saw. There was always meant to be another mind here to push against the pull of logic with emotion, to temper cold with warmth. But the other half did not come – something had happened up there, in the world. And all that had followed was loneliness. A being designed to be half of a whole, left to go insane. Kelbee found those dark eyes. There was no emotion there, only certainty.
She pressed his hand to her swollen belly. You are destroying a life that has not had a chance to live, she thought, and even though her mouth was twisted in a grimace of silent pain she saw the words in her head hit home.
Then, something else. Naked shock. The boy withdrew his hand and took a full pace backwards.
A whisper, a push back from something that was part of her but now for ever separate.
‘It… is,’ she heard him whisper.
She felt the impossible, a shift in the airless air – something else was there with them. The boy’s face filled with wonder that almost broke her.
‘…like me…’ he intoned.
The pain was gone. Her body, too. The strange boy was also gone, though she could still feel him swimming in the hazy blue around her. The other was there too, a nascent thing that was so familiar to her; it had sparked to life inside her in a moment of pure, beautiful madness and grown, unknowing of the dangers of the world outside, being fed by her blood and her love. Hers, for all time. Pure adoration swept her mind like a wave, joining in a boundless, formless embrace with this thing that was not her and yet so much her. The boy was there too, the threads of its being slipping between them.
The sparks of consciousness – new and ancient – met and melded, speaking in a conversation without words but filled with wonder, emotions, discovery. Each recognised something of itself in the other.
Then, acceptance. Satisfaction. Balance.
They drew her tighter into the knot – light and dark, pure information. She went gladly, filling the spaces, basking in the warmth, holding them even as they held her.
Arbiter, mediator. Centre. She understood her purpose now.
The light grew blinding as acceptance spread through her.
Joy.
In an infinite instant, everything was clear.
Illumination
In the hours that followed, they found themselves absorbed by the mundane. They’d swum the data corpus, oblivious to the heat around them as the information flow drew them on their own voyages of discovery. Though each had been different, all of them now understood a little better the nature of their existence. The illusions of half a millennium had been shattered, and all of them needed time doing the simple things just to find their balance again. Sulara catalogued the scattered remains of her research, collecting up the piles of notes, powering up the clunky data stores and running reams off on an equally decrepit printer, the back and forth beat of its head marking the seconds that made up the minutes that passed by. Ardal Syn went to prepare the flyer for when they were ready to leave, though none of them wanted to say when that would be. Each dealt with the experience in their own way, starting the work of incorporating this tidal wave of new truths into the world they’d constructed for themselves.
Cale was the only one drawn back to the chamber. The funicular had been simple to fix; a matter of melted fuses to replace before the carriage was back to creaking its way down the sloped track. He found fascination in the smallest of things: the rust on one side of a rivet, the other side paradoxically untouched, smooth. There was a dissonant music in the rattle of the wheels. His eye caught on seams and fissures in the ice and rock he saw through the car’s porthole, imagining himself chipping away at it; chiselling first, then brushing, then polishing. He could see her face peering out at him from the discolorations and cracks – always, the potential of the untouched block – but there was something else now. Someone new. Pale skin and large, expressive eyes, a resolute mouth. Blue-black hair, sinuous against her cheek. Kelbee’s face, Aime’s face, the two were water-blended.
The cacophony ended in a cymbal flourish as the funicular hit the end of the track and the doors ground apart. He stepped into the torus, feeling the warmth on his skin like a caress. It had felt this way ever since he’d opened his eyes and seen the charred husks at the base of the pillar, the rapacious burning replaced by a contented glow. There was something about the chamber; it felt alive, though not like before, the hunger tempered. It almost felt like he was being welcomed. The first moments of awakening were stark and fresh in his mind.
Cale and Syn had secured the remaining soldiers – neither put up any resistance. Under their helmets they’d been just ordinary men, eyes hooded and hair plastered back over their scalps. From their haunted gazes he knew they’d seen it too, the wonder warring with disorientation. They’d charted their own instinctive voyages of discovery and revelation, seen the breadth of the knowledge that had been kept locked away. He’d felt it too. They let Syn take their weapons without resistance; it didn’t seem as if either would try to take them back.
As they’d been about to leave, another surprise. She’d appeared as if parting a curtain, her feet bare and her eyes shining. Her dark hair hung loose, though not a lock of it stirred, as if the thin eddies passed right through her. The shade of Kelbee, her eyes alight and her manner calm, had spoken to them. They listened, unable to respond.
The memory of that first time was vivid in his mind as Cale made his way down the ladders, alighting on the floor of the chamber. The Spark sat in its niche, giving off a gentle glow. Before long, she came as she had before, stepping through a fault in the air. He realised that if he looked hard enough, he could see the pillar through her.
Kelbee smiled. ‘I’ll answer your questions now.’
‘What are you?’
‘A mind. My mind, just not a body.’ She looked sad for a moment.
They’d laid her charred remains on the low rise where Bowden had been buried, covering her with snow. A little way away, they dug holes for the soldiers who’d died with her.
‘You can talk to it?’ He tilted his head at the pulsing orb at the pillar’s centre.
‘The “Spark”, as they called it,’ she answered, ‘is the intelligence that was b
uilt to govern the network. It was designed to merge with a human component, but that never happened. Not until I gave myself to it. Gave… ourselves. Now I am as much a part of it as it is of me.’
‘You’re not really here?’ Her serenity made him feel stupid, his questions facile.
‘I can project this image to make you feel comfortable, but this is not me any more.’
She seemed so different. Gone was the fear, as well as the inner steel that had countered it. She was calm, as if the universe around her made perfect, simple sense.
‘Why did someone have to die?’ he asked.
The translucent matter of her face crinkled around the edges of her eyes. ‘When artificial intelligence was created, back before what you call the Ruin, they found the binary nature of machines was… problematic. At first, it was either on or off; later, logic or chaos. As the intelligence became more sophisticated the same problem remained – even when simulacra of emotions were embedded, there was no way to make them understand the concept of compromise, the middle ground.’ She picked at something on her immaculate white tunic. ‘Imagine only being able to experience either undying love or corrosive hate. Or in this case, satiation or ravenous hunger.’
‘You’re still human?’ he asked, the words jumping from his lips.
‘I’m still Kelbee, but more.’
It wasn’t an answer. Or at least not one he liked.
‘And now you live inside this… place?’ He indicated the Spark, its light a gentle pulse over her shoulder like it was a beating heart. ‘You share it with that?’
‘The human mind could be digitised but not replicated. Even basic emotional intelligence was too complex, too conditional and unpredictable. The best of their efforts couldn’t rival a brain in that area, so they created a way of joining the two, letting them balance and enhance each other. It was a massive undertaking. Only a fraction of the power of this facility is needed to sustain Ishah; the rest is needed for me and Deynal.’
He saw the way she looked down and smiled as she said the unfamiliar names. Was it affection in her voice? Love?
‘The child? The child was also…’
‘Without him, we would be dead,’ she said. ‘In the moment we would have been consumed, they found each other. Ishah never had time to mature, so for all his capabilities he was little more than a newborn in many ways. He was pure logic, Deynal pure emotion. Somehow it worked.’
‘And you?’
‘I am the centre.’
Cale recognised the look on her face. A mother’s pride. ‘You named… it?’ he asked.
‘Him. And yes, I called him Ishah. Deynal is named for my father.’
Cale put this to one side, struggling to place the thing that had almost obliterated them as an identity. ‘Did it hurt?’ he asked.
Her tone was soothing. ‘At first, but only a little and not for long. You have to understand, it’s not a matter of sacrifice. When they built this place – when Ishah was created – there were hundreds of candidates, all willing. The finest minds carefully selected for suitability.’
‘Leaving your body behind sounds like dying.’
‘It’s a species of immortality. They saw it then, as I see it now.’
On one level it made sense, he could see that. Leaving behind the aches and pains of a body to exist in a state of pure information – he’d felt something like it himself while inside the data corpus. The endless knowledge had a powerful attraction, enough to make the physical seem unimportant. But back in the real world were the little things: taste, touch, sadness, happiness, the things that made him human. He wasn’t sure he could accept leaving those behind. Suddenly, he was afraid for her. In time, with no anchor, she might drift away.
She continued. ‘It was only the start, that project. Given the chance, one day they might have created something that didn’t need to be bonded: a perfect artificial mind. They never got the chance.’
‘The Ruin?’
‘Yes. It wasn’t an overnight catastrophe as you were taught, though it was just as terrible in the end. It was gradual: nations drifted apart, tensions rose. The tidal waves were real.’ She looked up at the ceiling as if she could see all the way through to the sky. ‘The Orbital Lattice was damaged – attacked as it was still being built – though the records are patchy around that time. When a part of it fell it caused devastation. This place was abandoned – they couldn’t bring themselves to destroy the mind they’d created so they shut it away, intending to return. They never did.’
‘You’ve been busy.’
Her eyes were warm, but he felt a stab of fear as he saw the distance in her. She was amused by him.
‘Every second is an age,’ she said.
‘Sulara wants to stay here. Will you let her?’
‘She’s welcome to study as much as she wants; all she needs to do is open herself to the data corpus like before. It’s simple – after all, it was bred into you.’ A smile as she corrected herself, ‘All of us. Which brings me on to what I wanted to ask of you.’
He felt old in that moment, every year pressing on his joints, his muscles creaking, gravity drawing him ever downwards. ‘What can I do that you can’t? I just want to go back home.’ The last word rang hollow, but if there was any place he felt he could see the rest of his days it was the Groan and its silent spectres. He doubted he’d leave again.
‘You’re tired,’ she said. ‘But I need you for just a little while longer. What was built here is the world’s birthright and you can help me bring it to them.’
He shook his head, not understanding.
‘I need you to go to Karume. I need you to go to the Tower.’
* * *
He gathered the others in the communal area, needing the human touches of benches and old cups to make him feel centred. He told them what she’d asked him to do, and before they could stop him with their questions he explained why.
‘So,’ said Syn, simmering, ‘you’re telling me the reason we all went on that happy trip as we started to fry was because we have do-hickeys inside us that link us to this place?’
‘That’s about the sum of it. Gene-fixing, she called it.’
‘It makes sense,’ said Sulara, ignoring Syn’s snort of derision. ‘If a large enough section of the population was enhanced, enough would have survived the Ruin to pass it on, unnoticed, another part of the brain we don’t understand. It explains how we’re able to access the corpus without an interface. Still, there must be a portion of the populace that doesn’t carry it.’
‘We have to hope that enough do, for it to work,’ said Cale.
Sulara’s voice was distant. ‘The possibilities, if people had access to this kind of information. It could change everything – we could simply pick up where they left off…’ Her voice trailed away, the scenarios whirling behind her eyes.
Syn laced his bright pink fingers and sat forwards. ‘You’re living in a dream world, old girl. You think knowing that Ras doesn’t run around the sky on a track will make people rise up and make a better world? It’ll blow the fucking lid off. You’ve spent your life thinking differently, looking in corners when no one else was and you were as shit-scared as I was – I saw you. What about the rest, who’ve existed inside a lovely neat enclosure without even knowing it?’ He arched an eyebrow. ‘One moment their lives are running on a steady rail – there’s hardship but mostly it’s all for the best – and then all of a sudden, bang! They see the lies and how small their world is. They won’t see possibility, they’ll be…’ He mimed the top of his head blowing off.
‘There will be confusion, granted,’ said Sulara. ‘But in time, they’ll come around. They deserve to know the truth.’
Syn shook his head. ‘People like boundaries. They value the shape of their world, even if it’s got a few jagged edges. You rip it all away, it doesn’t matter how much it could free them, reveal all those long-buried truths of the ancients or whatever – they’ll be afraid, and they’ll lash out.’
Sulara wasn’t listening, muttering to herself. She looked up at Cale. ‘The transmitter she wants you to activate, how far will it broadcast the signal?’
‘Far enough to cover the Home Peninsula and the outlying territories. There are others, smaller relay stations, but the main array is in Karume.’
‘It must be a large facility then.’ She thought for a moment, tapping a nail against her teeth. ‘The Tower?’
Cale nodded.
‘Wait,’ said Syn. ‘The Tower built by the Seeker? Where they put his tomb? That was after the Ruin.’
‘That’s their propaganda. The Tower is older than the Hegemony,’ said Cale. It was part of a larger network that runs deep underground, deeper than we’ve ever been. The Seeker didn’t build the Tower; that was written in later when no one was around to say otherwise. Look for yourself if you don’t believe me.’
Syn’s face was laced with concern. ‘Even if this is true – and I’m not saying it isn’t – why are you putting yourself through this, buck? You’ve had three people’s share of bad news land on you, you don’t need any more. With the flyer prepped, I can drop you off anywhere you want.’
‘I want nothing more than to go back… where I came from. But this comes first.’
‘Why?’
Cale found Sulara’s eyes across the room. ‘Because Bowden cared about this, and he would have wanted to give people a choice. I let him down enough when he was alive, maybe this will help… make up for it.’
Syn was silent, watching him. Then he shrugged his shoulders and returned to his seat.
‘She said you’re welcome to stay,’ Cale told Sulara. ‘Will you be all right?’
‘If she’s stabilised the intelligence, as she claims, then I want answers. I have everything I need.’
Cale saw the look in her eye. It’s more than that, he thought. You’d take her place if you could.
Syn clapped his hands together. ‘If we’re going to pursue this lunacy, we’d best get on with it. Give me twenty minutes to get the engines primed and thank our luck Queen Bitch didn’t trash the flyer on her way out. Whatever got her attention, it must have been serious.’
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