The realization that my career in the lower levels of New California’s SystemBank was over was slowly sinking in. I would not be going back to my comfortable cloistered cell and my office next door to the library: I would be more than unwelcome there. One does not offend a person as august and terrible as Sondra Alizond-1 with impunity. Were I to attempt to return, I would be punished: That was not in question. But there is punishment meted out as training, to teach the recipient to avoid certain behaviors in future; and then there is punishment meted out to provide an object lesson for others—punishment that the recipient is not expected to survive, much less learn from. The appearance of my stalker strongly hinted that the latter was all I could expect. Sondra never credited her descendants with much independence beyond the minimum needed to act as extensions of her will: My continued autonomy had clearly become an irritant to her.
Which meant I would have to find something else to do with the rest of my life. But what? Nothing in my experience had prepared me for having to make such a decision, and so as I swam deeper into the world-ocean, my mind spun as if in a trap, baffled and repelled by hidden walls on every side.
Shortly after leaving the fourth platform—which Ana had assured me would be the last way station on my journey—I heard a faint susurration in the water. I asked my guide what it was. “Insufficient information,” it replied. “Proceed with caution.” So I did, and presently noticed that my guide beam was brightening and shortening, casting off a halo of phosphorescence.
Continuing—with caution—I found myself swimming headfirst into a shoal of almost invisibly small glowing pinpricks. They flickered and zipped around in the water, forming a glowing haze around me. Spooked, I prepared to turn and flee, but then my guide spoke up. “Identification achieved: These are feral, depth-adapted mechanocytes obeying a flocking meme and coordinated by optical beacons. They are saprophytes. They are probably harmless unless you linger. Krina, proceed with caution.” I swam on, until the faintly glowing cloud of wild corpse-eating cells dwindled and merged with the darkness above and behind me.
“How much farther?” I asked.
“Krina, estimated distance to destination: two kilometers laterally, four hundred meters vertically.” I startled: I was nearly there! “Commence visual and acoustic monitoring for destination. Proceed with caution.”
“What am I looking for?” I asked, but my guide said nothing.
Half an hour passed. “How much farther?” I murmured. Scanning the depths, I couldn’t see any traces of light. I couldn’t hear anything either.
“Krina, there is an inversion layer above your destination. Proceed straight down for fifty meters, then pause and commence visual monitoring. Proceed with—”
“Caution, right, I get it.” I followed the beam, flexed my hips and what had been my knees and ankles in turn. Felt a rush of warmer water across my face, then something else, a choking stratum of unbreathable gelatinous liquid. I flopped and kicked, then pushed my head down through the layer—it was less than a meter thick—and into the clear, cool water beneath.
And then I saw what lay below.
The Halls of Hades-4
There was a city at the bottom of the ocean, and in the middle of it, like a pearl in an abalone’s shell, there nestled a palace.
Sea green and luminous, it glowed from within, almost dazzlingly bright after the days I had spent in Hadean darkness. As my eyes adjusted, I saw a planar maze of walls and crevices spiraling out from a central hub, fractally not-quite-repeating into the distance. I could not gauge its size but guessed that it was kilometers across, maintaining its depth through neutral buoyancy. Whatever gelatinous layer I had crashed through absorbed and diffused the light from beneath, rendering the fantastic structure invisible from above.
Schools of tubular beings with rippling, frilled fins darted across the labyrinth, their brilliant chromatophores flickering signal flashes of light. I hung in the water above the city, looking down: There were uncountable thousands of them, some isolated individuals swimming alone but most flocking in enormous shoals. “What are—”
“Krina, attention. Follow the guide light.”
I blinked, then began to swim again. My huge, dark-adapted eyes began to take in more detail. The maze harbored voids, zones of open water surrounded by porous walls. I saw signs of techné, of manufacture: artificial structures, nets and tubes and right angles bolted to the surfaces. This palace was no accident but a vast, engineered structure adrift in the depths.
The guide beam angled toward the bulbous central node, where the fractal coils of its walls folded in on themselves into ever-tighter spirals until they formed an almost solid surface. As I swam toward it, getting an impression of its size (vast: at least two hundred meters in diameter), I heard a fizzing sound, rapidly becoming louder: The walls of the palace were a vast reflecting surface, diffusing and channeling the conversation of thousands, if not millions, of beings—
A bright red cylinder flashed past me from behind and spun round to block my descent path. A huge dark eye stared at me. The trailing end of the cylindrical body appeared to be multiply bifurcated: I blinked, recognized tentacles. One of them clutched a small pod, not unlike my guide capsule. The tentacle flushed delicate pink, then a pattern of green lights flickered across the entity’s skin from one end to the next, signaling in some language I had no reference for.
“Identify: You are Krina Alizond-114.” I recoiled slightly: The pod in the tentacle was a translator or voice box of some kind? Luminous patterns rippled across the being’s skin just before the box uttered each phrase. “Declare: Welcome to Hades-4. Please: You will follow now. Please: Maintain proximity. Please: Confirm?”
“I, uh”—I swallowed my double take—“yes, I will follow you.” Not that I had any sensible alternatives hidden up my nonexistent sleeves. “Yes, I’m Krina. Who are you?”
“Self-identify: This is Alef Blue taste-of-sulfur 116. Identify-macro: Call me Alef. Declare: Please: Come now?”
I forced myself to flex, swimming slowly toward my decatentacular optoconversationalist. Who in turn pulsed and, with flickering fins, moved ahead of me—smoothly and rapidly, clearly far better adapted to motion in water than the ugly and ungainly hybrid humanopiscine that my kidnappers had made of me. As xenomorphic adaptations went, borrowing the body plan of a deep-dwelling creature of Old Earth made plenty of sense down here: But Alef’s presence, not to mention that of the entirety of Hades-4, raised more questions than it answered.
Alef led me down toward the central dome. As we approached, I saw that its surface was an intricate network of smaller domes, each defined by a spiral pattern: and each smaller dome mirrored the whole. Yes, it was a fractal—someone had grown it from a seed algorithm. Close up, there was no surface, just more tiny bubbles, scaling down as far as the eye could see. There were voids between them all, and voids in the largest patterning. We swam through one such gap, and I found myself in a disconcerting space.
“Other-identify: the People’s Palace of Hades-4.” Alef rolled through a full circle, banked, came to rest with tentacles agape, facing me with both palm-sized eyes. I looked round, blinking, momentarily dazzled. The luminescence of Hades-4 was barely brighter than a starry night sky on the surface: But inside the People’s Palace, a million point-sources flickered all the colors of the rainbow, as brilliant as the solar-night sky on a gas giant’s moon. Within the shell, dozens of squid-people darted and hovered, flashing intricate conversational beacons. There were other things here, artifacts or radically xenomorphic people: beings that glittered and flashed like a living treasure chest. Even in mermaid-draggy form, I was one of the most humanoid beings present. Disoriented, I drifted through the upper reaches of the People’s Palace, trying not to panic at the sudden proliferation of information flooding in through my eyes after so many days spent adrift in stygian darkness. “Declare: Your shoal-sib is coming!”
As I rolled to face the bottom of the sphere—where a gaping void coupled it to dimly lit and yet larger spaces within the city—I saw a mermaid erupting toward me out of the depths, accompanied by a pair of squid-folk, one of them taking the lead as the other peeled off to hang behind her in the water, their attitudes leading me to identify them as bodyguards.
“Krina!” A human voice, modulated through water, raised shivers through my lateral lines. “Is that you . . . ?”
I rolled with agitation, then stroked downward to close the gap. “Ana?” I asked, as we locked gazes. She looked just like me, complete with the same huge black eyes and tiny, underdeveloped jaw that had been inflicted on me by my body-sculpting abductors. I felt a flicker of anger but forced it back. “Just what exactly is going on here?”
“We need to talk,” she said, reaching out to take my hand. “In my shell. Where nobody will overhear us.”
Finally, given a target, my anger overflowed: “Wait, what? Just wait a minute. You had me grabbed and did this to me, and you disappeared a year ago, and you want to talk? What about? What makes you think I’m happy to listen?”
“But you’ve got to!” She flinched, disconcerted: “You’re our only hope!”
“Yes? That justifies kidnapping and coercion—”
“Krina, please! There was no other way. It’s because of the Atlantis Carnet.”
“What?”
“You did bring Sondra’s half of the transaction, didn’t you? Because I found the other half . . .”
* * *
The Queen chose to supervise the interrogation of the prisoner’s corpse in person, in a dark and watery dungeon grown from a variety of artificial coral that, thanks to the tiny ferromagnetic crystals embedded in its matrix, were completely opaque to both electromagnetic signals and purely acoustic screams.
Any authoritarian polity—and ultimately that includes all money-based states, for of necessity they all have the capability to resort to violence in order to force people to honor the debts that the government deems worthy of respect—requires organs that exist for the purpose of injecting terror into the minds of their subjects. Those that pay lip service to the rule of law may conceal such raw and hideous institutions behind a scented mist of euphemisms—interrogation facilities, debriefing centers, extraordinary rendition—but ultimately, they boil down to the same thing.
Medea, Queen of Argos, had no truck with such circumlocutions. As Queen-in-multiple and absolute ruler of her domain, she desired the means to instill a healthy frisson of fear, to burnish the glamour of her palace and crown jewels and court in stark contrast with the darkness and terror of the dungeons and torture chambers hidden beneath the surface.
To be a monarch, as opposed to merely a rich, free, autonome required one to be free-er than those around one. And as a reminder to herself of what this meant, and perhaps as a partial brake on any tendency to overuse such tactics (and risk thereby nudging her subjects from a healthy fear of her into outright revolutionary hatred), Medea made a point of attending all vivisections in person.
“Is it ready yet?” she asked, reclining in her pool as the three surgeon-executioners made minute adjustments to the steel scaffold that occupied the dry side of the chamber.
“Your Majesty.” The seniormost executioner ducked her head, rubbing vibrissae across the compound eyes that covered the upper two-thirds of her head. “We are ready here”—she gestured at the framework, the neatly bundled manacles and tubes that dangled from it—“but I gather that Flense and his team are having some difficulties prepping with the subject. It incurred damage—” The executioner stopped in midspeech, cocked her head, then twitched antennae again. “Ah, good. They are on their way, Your Majesty. We should be able to commence at your command.”
In due course, the abovewater entrance dilated: tensed, cloacally, then expelled a stream of translucent transport pods as if they were eggs from the ovipositor. The first three of them dissolved, and the occupants rose to their feet and bowed to the Queen before turning to the fourth pod. The supine figure within remained limp and unmoving, even when the prep team cut away the leathery walls of the caul and lifted the tattered body out. It was a mess: unbreathing, cold, chromatophores relaxed and passive in neutral blue. A row of fist-sized holes marched across it from hip to shoulder, patched with green surgical gel: Shrapnel had made a grisly mess of one eye socket, and the back of its skull, just above the neck, was crushed almost to a pulp.
The preparation team held the body aloft while the surgeon-executioners lowered the gibbet over it, shackling it in place. The metal fetters were articulated, rotating into place from lockable ball joints attached to a steel skeleton: By the time they finished, their charge was wrapped in metal bands, as if wearing an exotic exoskeleton. Next, they coupled various tubes up to the body: stabbing cannulae into circulation ducts, connecting carefully prepared mechanocyte cartridges and nutrient bags, mating debugging cables to the base of the skull and drain tubes elsewhere. Their work done, the prep team bowed once more and withdrew: Then the head of the execution team bowed once more to her monarch. “Your Majesty, we are ready to begin the revival.”
“You may commence.” Medea focused on the face of the woman who had destroyed one of her instances. “Can she hear us yet?”
“Your Majesty, I don’t think so.” The executioner consulted a large retina that displayed a detailed schematic of the victim’s body. “Hmm. Master Flense repaired the damage to both hearts, the fractured skull and vertebrae, and the autocatalytic digester and damaged ribs. But there’s a marked lack of integrative cohesion here. Everything has restarted normally, but there’s nothing happening in the brain stem or paracortex. She’s flatlined.”
“Can you reboot from one of her soul chips?” Medea demanded. She noted the surgeon-executioner’s slight cringe a moment before she replied.
“Your Majesty is ahead of me. Yes, we can probably do that. But it may be problematic to do so. One of her sockets was badly damaged during her, ah, capture: We are currently using the other one for debug monitoring. If you would prefer us to do so, we can remove the debugger and reinstall the backup cartridge we took to make room for it, but then we will have no definite way of compelling honesty and obedience.”
Medea waved at the body, hanging immobile in its skeletal cage: “We shall just have to do it the old-fashioned way, then.” She frowned. “With threats and promises.”
“She could attempt to mislead us into self-detrimental actions—”
“We shall accept that risk. Yank the slave controller and boot her off her own soul chip. Best to do this directly.”
“Certainly, Your Majesty.” And with that, the surgeon-executioners went to work, extracting, prepping, chipping, and rebooting the lacerated mass of flesh.
The Queen watched in silence as they worked. Finally, their leader turned and nodded once, quickly, then stroked an invisible gestural control surface.
The body stiffened for a moment, tensing, then relaxed and began to breathe, taking in oxygen from the air. The skin tone darkened, flushing toward a more normal, greenish hue. The fingers of the left hand clenched although the arm hung limp. “Identify yourself,” said the Queen. “Do you know who you are?”
There was a long pause. Finally, the prisoner spoke: “I am Doctor-Professor Krina Buchhaltung Historiker Alizond-114. I’m . . . I feel unwell. Where am I?”
Medea peered at the prisoner over the rim of her pool. “Who are you really?”
The prisoner attempted to turn her head to look at the Queen but failed, for the exoskeleton held her rigidly in place, allowing only her ribs to move. “I told you, I’m Krina Alizond-114—” The chief executioner caught the Queen’s glance, nodded, and briskly tapped the exoskeleton over the prisoner’s solar plexus.
After the convulsions subsided, the Queen spoke again. “You are not Krina Alizond-114 although you resemble her. Whoever you
are, you are a regicide, and your life belongs to us. We shall repeat the question until we get an answer that is not provably wrong. Who are you?”
A pause. “I am Krina Alizond-114.” The intonation was identical to that of the prisoner’s first response. Medea shook her head slightly, holding the surgeon-executioner back.
“No you are not.” Medea consulted her memory palace. “If you were Krina, you would be able to tell us what happened last time we met.”
“We . . . met?” The prisoner suddenly tensed, every skeletal muscle flexing. “We . . . met?”
“No, we didn’t,” Medea said, almost gently. “We—I—met the real Krina. We ensured that she was thoroughly debriefed by my police. She went missing. Then you arrived, aboard a vehicle that she had been on. She mentioned a doppelgänger stalking her. That would be you. Who sent you?”
The prisoner shut her eye and tensed again. Relaxed. Tensed again. “I’m still here,” she said, and for the first time a note of agitation entered her voice. Behind her, the head surgeon-executioner made a swift throat-cutting motion, then a gesture of negation, for the Queen’s benefit. Attempted suicide, failed.
Medea suppressed a smile of satisfaction. “You don’t evade me so easily,” she said. She ducked briefly beneath the surface of her pool, flushing water through her gills. “Who were you?”
“I’m Krina Alizond-114 . . . not.” The prisoner fell silent for a few seconds. “I’m. I. Am. Wrong! I should not be! What is this?” The prisoner tensed again, testing her restraints. “Should not be. Should be dead. Not-I. Am . . .”
The Queen leaned forward. “Are you afraid of dying?” she asked. More spasms. The head surgeon-executioner inclined his head, an unasked gesture of respect. “We can keep you alive for a long time. And we can make living worse than dying,” she added. The queen-instance’s fingers formed claws beneath the surface water of the pool as she imagined her sister’s interior vision graying out, robbing her of precious minutes of shared life that no other instance of Medea could now replace: “But we don’t have to do that if you tell us everything you know.”
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