by Patty Jansen
Melati hesitated. “You’re not going to watch me?”
“Hey, the guy is strapped to the table. What’s he going to do? I can see from here if there are any problems.” He gave her the thumbs up, winked and went back to the office.
Interesting.
Interesting that he had a much laxer approach to security.
Interesting that he sought to cover this up by winks and smiles, as if she weren’t going to notice that he was too engrossed in whatever game he was playing to bother coming down the corridor with her.
This was something that would send Dolchova into conniptions of rage if she found out. Not that it was Melati’s desire to tattle about it. As usual. Shut up and be a nice girl.
Melati continued down the corridor, her footsteps muffled in the stuffy silence.
She entered the cell where the prisoner was still lying on his back on the table. He was still wearing the yellow overalls with the eyelets, but thankfully, the leads for the immobilising currents had not been reattached.
Melati put her box down on the ground next to him.
He watched her. His eyes blinked and followed the movement of her hands. They were sad eyes. Very expressive, she thought. The lashes were really long and thick quite unlike her own or even those belonging to the boys. His hair was very short but thick, and would probably be curly. The beard was most curious. Not even constructs had heavy beards like that, and certainly not the young men, not even by the time they left her care.
She slid the harness’ base plate under his head, tied the straps on either side over his forehead and pushed the markers until they touched his skin. Then she gingerly stuck the pads of her spider on his head, sometimes having to push away his hair. She tried to do this without touching his skin.
He watched.
He said nothing, so she started explaining what she was doing, because the situation felt really awkward.
“I’m going to read your mindbase.” Mindbase, a Standard word, because B3 didn’t have a word. “I want to know what is going on in the station and why you left. Why they didn’t shoot you. What you know about the station. It is so that we can save the people who live there. Innocent people, who never asked to be involved.”
He blinked and gave no indication that he understood.
She checked that all the pads were in the right positions. They were.
“I’m going to the other room now. The reading will take about ten minutes. You may feel a little tingling, but probably you won’t feel anything.”
He just looked at her. Sad. Lonely. Scared. He really needed a shower. Needed to be treated like a human being.
Melati went back to the computers in the room outside the secure area and activated the program. While the lines of text scrolled over the screen, she checked the program. It went fine and completed in nine minutes and fifty-three seconds.
Then she went back to him to retrieve her pads. They were stuck on quite tightly. Little bits of hair came out with the adhesive surface.
He didn’t complain, cry out or even wince each moment before she pulled off another patch.
It was strange and a bit uncomfortable being so close to him. He said nothing and made no attempt to move. If she had been captured by a strange ship, and held in a cell where she couldn’t move, would she be so calm?
When she turned to the door, Lieutenant Kool leaned against the doorframe. She gasped. When had he appeared there?
He laughed. “That was cute.”
“Cute?” Her heart hammered against her ribcage.
“The way you were tenderly taking the stickers off.”
“Am I supposed to rip them off with half his hair?” What was it with this cruel man?
He flicked his eyebrows up. “Are you finished with him?”
“Yes. Just let me undo the harness and then you can let him in the shower.”
She didn’t wait for his response, but strode past him into the corridor. He didn’t say anything and she didn’t look over her shoulder.
While Melati had been away, Jas had returned to the room. He sat at one of the screens that displayed a large block of mindbase code, presumably the prisoner’s mindbase.
Melati entered the room and looked over his shoulder.
“Hey,” someone said at the door.
Melati turned around.
Lieutenant Kool again. She gave him her best “What now?” glare.
“You know you got spunk?”
What the. . . ?
“I was just having you on. Playing hard. It gets boring down here.”
She stared at him. “I’m sorry I didn’t get your jokes. I’m busy. I don’t have a very good sense of humour.” Her heart was thudding like crazy.
“I noticed. You should relax more, if you want to survive on board this ship . . .”
“I think I’m doing quite fine and don’t need instructions. I’ve been surviving as ISF crew for years.”
He gave her a suspicious look.
“Quit harassing her, mate.” Jas rose and went to the door.
“Jas, stop it. It’s OK.”
Jas didn’t move. He crossed his arms over his chest.
Lieutenant Kool snorted. “Well, I. . . .” He retreated a step. “I better keep working.”
When he was gone, Melati heaved a big sigh. “What is it with these men?”
Jas gave her an intense look, but said nothing.
She sat down, suddenly remembering that she hadn’t checked his hormone levels recently, and thinking that she should probably do that. She also knew that Jas wasn’t anything like her usual charges, who she could just order to give blood samples, and they would do so without questioning.
He’d want to know why she ordered a test.
She would have to explain.
He’d want to know why elevated hormone levels was a bad thing.
And it wasn’t, really, except . . .
Jas was a Taurus Army construct and they did usually reach sexual maturity. Some even had children. And being stranded as a mindbase on Ganymede and having made his own way back meant that Jas wasn’t a normal construct anymore, either.
“Why was he bothering you?” Jas asked.
She turned to him, frowning.
“Lieutenant Kool.”
Oh, him. “He wasn’t. Not really. He was just being stupid.”
“They don’t get to see a pretty young woman down here too often.”
She pressed her lips together to stop herself from adding more useless comments to this issue. She was neither pretty nor young. It was very tiresome. If tier-2 people were constantly trying to get married, some of these men were constantly trying to get her into bed. She wasn’t sure which was worse.
She glanced at the screen. “Well, it looks like this data has finished copying. Let’s have a look at it.”
Melati opened the file on her main computer, hoping . . . she didn’t know what she hoped. That the prisoner was from New Hyderabad and that he had somehow become lost. That he was a bad man and that the correctional department could look after him without her involvement, that his talk of Mecca was planted in his brain, that he was one of those evil half-machine and half-human soldiers that Allion was rumoured to use for warfare. An aggregate.
One look at the file and she was reminded almost immediately why she hated looking at non-construct mindbase files. In constructs, where she helped build the code that was transferred to their brains just prior to waking, the files were ordered and while not exactly easy to understand, at least you had a hope of understanding them. This one . . .
Jas whistled while taking in a breath. “Look at that mess.”
He was right, and as a construct himself, his remark was doubly poignant.
She ran a coherency check and the file came up as having twenty-four percent coherency, which was absurdly low.
Jas whistled again. “Why is this guy even alive?”
That was a good question.
The lines of mindbase code varied wild
ly in length. Parts of code interlaced with other parts of code. Statements were incomplete, broken off with the end sections and closing statements missing. Some end tags turned up a few lines later, incompletely nested with intersecting statements. How did this even work?
“That’s a mess all right.” In fact, she wasn’t sure if she had ever seen anything as bad as this. If she hadn’t seen the man speak, she would have wondered if he could speak at all, because if he was a construct, one look at this file would have made her send him back to the hospital to have his mindbase overwritten.
Jas had drawn back a rickety chair and sat down in front of a second screen. He scrolled through the blocks of irregular text, shaking his head. The expression on his face was haunted, the memory of his misfortune with mindbase technology etched on his face.
He said in a low voice, “This is even worse than . . .”
Melati nodded. She knew. Jas had spent time wandering around in computer systems. He was not supposed to have been sentient, but it seemed that part of the Allion technology that seeped into the station had caused mindbases to become sentient and move themselves through the system. Judging from Jas’ experiences, it was a frightening ride and maintaining coherency was their biggest worry. Without coherency, there was no personality, no personal interaction, no soul.
“Where do you think we should start with this?” she asked Jas. “Why do you think he’s like this?”
He scrolled up and down a bit more. His eyes moved, but the rest of him was perfectly still. “He’s definitely a natural. But I think something has happened to him.” He pointed at the screen. “See, there are sections missing here and there.”
Melati squinted at the screen. Yes, he was right. In amongst all the messy notations, she hadn’t noticed this. It always unnerved her how good constructs were at analysing their own mindbases.
He said, “That’s in his logic section. It would affect his ability to answer questions.”
She gave him a sharp look. The prisoner hadn’t replied to any of her questions, except the ones about religion. By God. “Supposing he was a new construct, what rating would you give him?”
“Based on this? No more than three.” The rating went up to ten. Most constructs scored nine. Any less than seven needed fixes.
She said, in a low voice, “Could it be that he is insane and Allion has sent him to us as decoy to keep us busy while they’re doing something else? Maybe Allion even wanted to get rid of him.”
“Maybe,” Jas said, but he didn’t sound convinced. He was still staring at the screen, biting the nail on his thumb.
“Something bugging you?”
“Yes, but I don’t know what yet. It’s a Jas thing.” He smiled at her. He would say this when he had a thought he couldn’t place. Construct minds tended to be pragmatic and ordered. Anything too emotional confused them, and Jas had spent a good deal of time being confused recently, and yes, that worried her as well, that the ordeal had left him damaged, and that one day, he would come out with something unexpected.
He started, “Well . . .” And he stopped again.
“Try to describe what you’re thinking.”
“You know what it was like, being in the system, right?”
“I saw a bit of it.” When she viewed Jas’ memories of when he went to Ganymede where he met with misfortune. “I can’t say I’ve experienced what it’s like to die and be sucked up into a computer. I don’t know if I have the right type of brain for that.” But she’d seen the maelstrom of memories washing past. She’d seen the colours that interflowed like brightly hued streams of air. She’d experienced the fear. “I wouldn’t call myself an expert.”
“Yes, you are. No one else can understand this. No one else can understand what I’m feeling. Please don’t call yourself ignorant, because you’re not.”
“All right.” Melati shrugged and looked at the screen, giving him a silent prompt to continue about the mindbase. Jas had problems; she knew that. But this was not the time to talk about those.
“I know what a damaged mindbase looks like and feels like. I know what it’s like to have some code stripper go through and rip out relevant information.” He shuddered visibly. “One thing I also know: If the gaps in this mindbase were natural, they would occur at random places. Like one here and one here.” He pointed at the screen. “He might forget his name, but he’d still remember his pilot number. Or he’d remember his brothers’ names, but not where they live. All his memories would make no sense. Like I did when I first came out in the cohort.”
Melati remembered that confusing time when no one knew who he was and he was saying that he was in the wrong body. She thought she understood where this was going. “All the things the prisoner has forgotten are awfully convenient. His name, what he did in the station. Look, he’s even forgotten to speak Standard. How handy.”
“Yeah.” He nodded and pointed at the screen, where there were a couple of lines consisting of only zeroes. “You know, to me, this little part here looks like it’s been tampered with.”
He was right.
“They modified a natural born adult? We don’t even have the know-how to make the precise changes in a mindbase file without killing him. Any time we accidentally damage a mindbase, it’s a complete mess and the construct can’t even survive for more than a few days.”
Fixing existing mindbases was a contentious field of study, populated mainly by research papers on patients who were already severely damaged, like those who had suffered head trauma or early onset dementia. All those concerned the overwriting of entire modules, never the process of changing specific statements. And it went horribly wrong a lot of the time.
He shrugged. “It’s Allion we’re dealing with.” As if that in itself was enough reason.
Melati had had many arguments with Dr Chee about his insistence on destroying every paper written by Allion researchers that was held in the ISF library. He insisted that their results were deliberately doctored to put ISF mindbase workers off track.
But Allion had developed mindbase technology many years before ISF had. In the past hundred years, they were likely to have made a lot of progress. They might well be able to alter parts of the mindbase without messing everything up.
Melati pushed uncomfortable thoughts away and asked Jas to identify and make note of sections which looked odd while she kept scrolling through the mindbase, hoping to catch a clue to the man’s identity. The file was really massive, and opening modules often automatically opened sub-modules which did . . . goodness knew what. In addition, there would be lines from the sub-modules that referred to other sub-modules, and mindbases weren’t supposed to work like that. They were set up in a tree structure, with all branches leading to a common point of attachment.
The more she studied, the odder the file seemed to her. There were massive sections in his logics module that contained only rubbish code, where he had either had some sort of massive memory failure or had been wiped. If, as natural human, he had been wiped, either someone possessed very precise technology to do this, or they’d been extremely lucky that the procedure had missed vital connections in his brain.
Still, with this much information missing, he would be quite incapable of doing a lot of day-to-day things that he would have needed at the station, like how to log into the system that calculated his daily allowances for food and water, and that gave him access to places like the residential areas and the places where he did his work. He might even have forgotten how and when to dress himself.
It was a wonder that he had managed to fly that ship without crashing into anything or accidentally venting the atmosphere into space.
Yet somewhere in all this mess, she found little clues about his identity.
There was a reference to his mother, with whom, judging by statements like she would rather go to a meeting than speak with me, he didn’t have a good relationship. She found out that he was from Pakistani descent—definitely New Hyderabad—and that his name was Mobasha
r Qureshi. She found out that he often came to New Jakarta and that the people at New Jakarta called him Moshi. He sold small electronics supplies mainly to hypertechs. He knew Socrates Finlay. This meant that he had to speak Standard, because Socrates spoke nothing else, but she could find no reference to any knowledge of Standard in the file, as if it had been very neatly excised.
It was very strange.
Other parts of his memories were jumbled up too much to parse.
Those were statements on what he was doing here and why he had been allowed to leave the station. The file would contain random words, like war, in the same statement as New Pyongyang and torture.
The word war returned with regularity. But there wasn’t a war, at least not officially. Allion had quietly assumed control over the station and hadn’t engaged in fighting with any ISF force. Were they planning a straight-out battle? She went over the file several times, but could see nothing that hinted that this was the case. She could see nothing about the prisoner’s relationship with Allion either.
Jas passed her the sections that he found suspicious. After she had seen a number of these, Melati noticed a pattern in all those sections.
Those thoughts and memories looked like they were overlaid with some sort of layer of nonsense code that had grown roots in the original material. It was not unlike the tape the lab workers stuck over fragile new construct skin: pull it too early and too hard and the skin would peel away, but pull it too late and the skin would be thickened and scarred and fused with the layer.
The situation set her senses on edge. The sensitivity and positioning of the nonsense code made her reluctant even to touch the file. It reminded her of the problems with Jas, and of the things she’d seen through Jas’ mindbase. It became clear to her: the manipulation of this mindbase couldn’t be an accident. There was some very precise, very advanced technology involved in this. No, it obviously wasn’t perfect, but it was way more advanced than anything she or Dr Chee could do in the lab.
This mindbase was a masterpiece. A messy masterpiece, but still a masterpiece. It gave her the chills. The main question was: why? And why had he been allowed to escape?