Luck and a clean shot saved her; he was dead by the time she reached him. She looked at him, hot blood welling up in her mouth. An image of Nguyen flashed through her mind, sitting behind her graceful desk, wearing silk, talking about need-to-know security and how she’d be on her own if the Alba raid went wrong. She spit, and it wasn’t only her blood that tasted bitter to her. 04:09:50.
She walked back across the room and jacked back in.
She felt her still-frozen side.
An infinitesimal pause.
She jacked out and ran.
04:11:01.
She hit two guards at the first intersection and barreled past before they could even draw on her. The pressure suit’s sealed hood hid her face, and she didn’t plan to shoot anyone else. Not for this. Now it was only her flagging body and the clock she was fighting.
She hit the first hydroponics dome at a tendon-snapping sprint and was through the open containment door and halfway across before she realized she had made it.
The dome was separate from the main curve of the station—a self-contained, light-flooded globe of zerog-manufactured viruflex. Li’s feet clattered on a narrow catwalk between stacked, dripping algae flats. High overhead, bright heating panels blazed on the station’s underbelly. Below her, clearly visible between the catwalk’s gridplate, curved a finger’s width of clear viruglass … and beyond that only bright, blinding sunlight.
She looked back and saw her pursuers charging through the open pressure door behind her. Okay. Next dome. And she’d have to be quicker this time. She sprinted across the slick decking, skidding on a wet patch, wrenching herself upright, pushing her ligaments and tendons to near rupture. Another corridor, ribbed with heavy struts, armored with virusteel. At the end, like the lights of an oncoming train, more sunlight.
She raced into the second dome, whirled to face her pursuers, leveled the Beretta at them. They skidded to a stop and threw themselves into the inadequate shelter of the corridor’s pressure struts. “What the hell are you doing?” one of them shouted.
She jerked the gun at him. “I’d stay there if I were you.”
He looked at her, and she knew he was thinking about whether she would shoot or not, whether he could talk her down or not. She saw his eyes flick toward her shoulder, note the blood on her sleeve, the partly repaired rent in her suit. She watched him consider what it meant to go into hard vac in an emergency pressure suit, even one that wasn’t compromised. She saw him think about suicide attacks. That thought, and the single heartbeat of indecision that accompanied it, gave her the time she needed. She stepped to the catwalk railing and let herself fall backwards over it like a diver flipping off the side of a landing boat.
She’d planned to catch herself and hang from the walkway just long enough to get the first few critical shots off before she fell. But she’d forgotten about her shoulder. Her hand came up a fraction of a second too late. She felt the rail slip between her weakened fingers, just too far away to grab hold of.
This would be the time to pop that emergency chute, she thought, and remembered an idiotic joke from jump school about a malfunctioning parachute. She aimed the Beretta between her feet and squeezed off two shots. As the shots hit the dome, the containment plates slammed down at both ends of the catwalk, locking the guards out. A spider’s web of fractures raced across the dome, but it held. Then the curve of cold, hard viruflex was rushing up at her and it was time to think about not getting her legs broken.
She landed hard, but she kept her knees together, thank God. She even managed to hang on to the Beretta through her tuck and roll. As she hit the dome, she felt a ripple run through the viruflex like an earthquake. She caught her breath, twisted onto her stomach. For a fraction of a second, she lay there belly to space, blinking at the blazing infinity of stars reflected in the shattered viruflex. Then the dome blew and launched her into a blinding, glittering glass storm.
She couldn’t orient herself in the spinning chaos of algae, metal, viruflex shards, so she let herself drift. She’d played her whole hand, maybe her last hand. Now it was up to Cohen to pull it out of the hole. If he could. If he was willing to risk it.
She counted to seventy, but no ship showed up to rescue her. According to her scans, she and her debris field were the only things moving this side of the vast station.
She opened her eyes. The glittering storm still whirled around her, but it had dispersed enough for her to see open space beyond it. Stars wheeled across the far horizon. The station rose and set in her visor as if it were orbiting her. She watched its gossamer wings flash in the perfect, blinding light of the void and thought about the life she’d lived.
Then a door opened, blinding white in the black star field, and a silver line rippled out like the hand of God and caught her.
COLLAPSE OF THE WAVE FUNCTION
Imagine a card game. The dealer—let’s call her Life—shuffles her deck, which is a little larger than the usual fifty-two. She draws one card, shuffles again, draws again. We see one and only one card at each draw, and it is from this one card—one among an infinite number of undrawn cards—that we construct all our theories, all our notions of the universe.
But what does the dealer see? If Coherence Theory is right, she sees every card. In fact, she does more than see them. She deals them. Every card. On every draw.
Can we construct meaning from a universe in which anything is possible and everything that is possible actually happens? Of course we can. We do it every day. Consciousness, memory, causality are the architecture of that meaning—the architecture of the universe-as-we-see-it.
The real question is: can we construct a theory that transcends the universe-as-we-see-it and tells us something about the universe-as-it-is? Can we look into the shuffle?
—Tape 934.12. Physics 2004. Lecture 1 (H. Sharifi): Introduction to Quantum Gravity.
Shantytown: 3.11.48.
She woke up in dark water, cradled in the hot salt tears of a medtank.
She imagined she was breathing though she knew she was hooked to an umbilical line, her lungs suffused with superoxygenated saline solution. She imagined she could feel smart bugs swarming over her organs and membranes though she knew she couldn’t.
Her arm was mercifully silent for the first time since Metz, but a new pain had replaced it. It radiated from her backbrain and licked hotly at her eyes and temples.
The intraface.
She had bleary memories of Cohen explaining the process and the risks to her, but she hadn’t paid much attention. It was an equipment upgrade. Routine maintenance. You trusted the mechanics not to damage a pricey piece of technology and hoped they put you under for longer than the pain lasted. Start thinking more than that and you were well on your way to a career-ending wetware phobia.
She slipped in and out of consciousness several more times before she really surfaced. Once the lights came on. Someone in a scrub suit peered down at her and spoke to another person outside her line of vision. She tried to ask where she was, but her lungs were full of saline, useless. Later there was prodding, splashing, the cold bite of air on her skin. Then a sense of being rolled under bright lights, of warm blankets and merciful quiet.
* * *
“Catherine,” Bella said, taking Li’s dripping hand in hers. “Are you bac
k with us?”
Only it wasn’t Bella behind the violet eyes. Bella had never looked at her that way. It was Cohen. Where were they? What had happened on Alba? Did she even remember?
“Shantytown,” Cohen said, answering her unspoken questions. “Daahl’s safe house. Arkady and I managed to pick you up after you shot your way out of there. That was, er, characteristically unsubtle. And impressive.”
“How long … how long was I under?”
“Five days.” He put a hand to her brow, brushing her hair back. “You were dreaming. Do you remember?”
She shook her head. Her skull was buzzing, humming, drowning out his words.
“About a man. Dark. Thin. He had a blue scar on his face.” Cohen ran a finger down Bella’s smooth cheek.
“My father,” Li said.
“You killed your father?”
“What?” Li asked, her heart suddenly hammering in her chest. “Are you crazy?” He blinked. “I saw it.”
“You—that’s a dream. A nightmare. It didn’t happen.”
“How do you know?”
“Because … I just do, that’s all. Sweet Jesus!” Li closed her eyes and tried to still the spinning of the room around her.
“You love him,” Cohen said after a minute or two. “I don’t even remember him.”
“Even so.”
She shook her head again. The noise kept drumming on her ears. Like rainwater running down a spout. Like standing in a crowded room full of people speaking a foreign language.
“So.” Cohen spoke slowly, as if he were thinking through a complex equation. “How do you keep straight what’s a dream and what’s not?”
“Don’t you dream? I thought all sentients dreamed.”
“Not like that.” He looked horrified. “If I think it, even when I’m asleep, it happened. Exactly the way I remember it. But your brain just … lied to you.”
“Cohen,” Li asked, as the hum inside her head climbed to a higher, more urgent pitch, “how did you see that dream?”
The violet eyes sparkled. “I’ll give you three guesses.”
She started to answer, but the noise in her skull exploded, drowning out every thought but pain. She grabbed her head and curled into fetal position on the narrow bed. Red spots swam before her eyes, hemorrhaged, flooded her vision. The buzzing rose to a high wail. Her sight tunneled down to a pinprick of light, blacked out altogether. “Hush,” he said, bending over her.
Slowly the wail trailed off to a low moan and her vision cleared. “What the hell was that?” she panted.
“Traffic.” She heard him stand up and cross the room, heard running water, felt the cool touch of water as he wiped a damp cloth across her forehead.
Traffic?
“Comm traffic. Mine. You’re hearing me.”
“No,” she whispered. “Something’s wrong, Cohen.”
“Nothing’s wrong. Korchow’s had me running tests all morning. Accessing your internals, running checks, startup subroutines, downloading data. Your commsys is a dinosaur, by the way. A disgrace. I ran a Schor check on your oracle workspace though. Properly. Which those idiots at Alba never do. That should help a bit.”
She opened her eyes to find him smiling down at her. “Feeling better now?”
She had to think about it for a moment. “Yes.” “Hmm.”
“What does that mean? Am I adjusting?” “No. I just took the intraface off-line.” They looked at each other. “Oh,” Li said.
Cohen stood up, patting her hand. “Don’t worry. You’re still barely conscious. We’ll get on top of it tomorrow.”
* * *
But they didn’t get on top of it the next day. Or the day after that. Korchow had set up a lab and medical facility in the safe house, and over the next three days, Li’s universe narrowed to two sterile rooms of monitoring equipment, her own cramped bunk, and the empty echoing dome that functioned as the safe house’s common room.
The first time they brought the intraface on-line, she ended up curled on the floor, hands over her ears, screaming for someone—anyone—to turn it off. Cohen shut the link down so fast it took him half an hour to get himself straightened out.
“I’ll go crazy,” Li said when she’d recovered enough to speak. “It’s like a hundred people fighting in my head.”
“Forty-seven,” Cohen interjected. “Well, this week.”
“What’s gone wrong?” Korchow asked Cohen. He didn’t even look at Li, just talked past her like she was a piece of tech.
“Nothing,” Cohen answered, tapping a fingernail on the console in front of him. “It’s an organic software problem.”
Cohen was shunting through Ramirez, and Li noticed again the cold fire in Leo’s dark eyes, the extra measure of decisiveness in his already-powerful movements. Those two I’d like to have next to me in a fight, she thought—and felt a sudden razor-sharp stab of grief for Kolodny.
“Sharifi didn’t have these problems,” Korchow said, a threat lurking behind the words.
Cohen shrugged. “She wouldn’t have, would she? She was interfacing with a simple field AI. And she wasn’t wired for anything but communications. Catherine’s a different beast entirely. You try to crowbar new programs into a military system and all bets are off. You knew that before we started.”
“Well, what do we do about it?” Li asked.
Cohen crossed the room more quickly than Li would have thought Ramirez could move. He leaned over and put a cool hand to her forehead. “You don’t do anything. You get your pulse rate down and go to bed. I’ll figure out where we go from here.”
But the next session was worse. After three hours Li collapsed into a chair, pressing the heels of her hands into her burning eye sockets. “I can’t. I can’t do it again.”
“Yes you can,” Korchow said. He was still being patient. “Why didn’t the pulse compression work?” he asked Cohen over her head.
“If I knew, I’d be able to fix it.”
“Does she need a new signal processor?”
Li didn’t have to see Cohen to imagine his dismissive shrug. “Well, what then?”
Cohen shook his head. “I have to think.”
“Let’s check the settings and try it again.”
Li wanted to say no. That she’d throw up if they tried again. That everything she’d eaten in the last two days had come up already, and she couldn’t stand it anymore. But she was too sick and too tired to say anything.
It was Cohen who finally came up with the idea of the memory palace. He was shunting through Arkady when he explained it to her, and his excitement set the construct’s dark eyes glinting like freshly fired coal. “It’s an organic problem,” he explained. “We’re trying to integrate AI-scale parallel-processing nets with an organic system that was already obsolete the first time a person put pen to paper. So. If we can’t fight it, we work with it. We try one of the oldest tricks there is—Matteo Ricci’s trick. We build you a memory palace.” Arkady’s lips twisted into a wry smile. “Or rather, we give you the keys to mine.”
It took him twenty hours to put the keys together. Hours she slept through in a desperate attempt to hoard her energy for their final push. It was late morning of the third day after her awakening when she lay down on the couch Arkady had dragged into the lab for her, closed her eyes, jacked in, and found herself alone in a featureles white room.
“You may have to hunt for the door a bit,” Cohen said at her shoulder. “I haven’t quite got that sorted out yet.” He had a smaller, thinner feeling than usual, she thought. And when she looked around, sure enough, there was Hyacinthe, shoes slung over his shoulders, standing a hair shorter than her in his socks. “The door,” he said insistently.
She turned and saw a gleaming, intricately carved mahogany door. More of a window than a door, really; its sill was set into the wall at about knee level, and even Li had to duck her head to clear the lintel.
“Go on,” Cohen said.
It was so bright on the other side that it too
k a moment for her eyes to clear. She stood in a five-cornered courtyard. Arcades bright with mosaics surrounded her. Beyond the walls she glimpsed the knife-edged mountains of a dry country.
She heard the sound of running water and felt cold spray on her face before she saw the fountain. The water poured from a shallow stone shelf as if rising from a spring and riffled down a long sloping stair that ran to the other end of the great courtyard. Li followed the water’s course down to a shadowy portico whose mosaics glinted like eyes in the occasional stray sunbeam. The watercourse ended in a narrow reflecting pool that emptied mysteriously into who knew what. Li stepped across the pool and walked along the portico, her heels clicking on the pavement. She came to a door and opened it.
A riot of smell and color swept over her. She stood in a long, high-ceilinged hall paved with spiral patterns of marble tesserae. Bright flowers rocketed out of vases painted with rampant lions and romping, grinning dragons. Cabinets lined the walls, their polished glass fronts filled with books, fossils, photographs, playing cards. As she started down the hall, something moved in her peripheral vision. She jumped around—only to realize that one of the painted dragons was tapping its scaled feet and winking at her. She shook her head and snorted. Hyacinthe laughed.
One side of the hall opened onto a high terrace, and when she looked out she could see the stony ramparts of a crusader’s castle digging their feet into the face of a mountainside that dropped away for miles above a long, green windswept valley. She stepped to the balustrade and leaned out over the void. The stone under her hand felt as hot as if it had been warming under the afternoon sun, but when she looked to the sky it seemed to be morning—the fresh, cool morning of a fall day.
The heat was in the stone, she realized, part of the teeming life the place radiated. Was this all Cohen? The castle? The mountain? This whole world, wherever and whatever it was? She leaned out farther, squinting down the dizzying fall of buttress and mountain, trying to see where the active code stopped and the backdrop started. Instinctively, she dropped out of VR and into the numbers.
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