A door had opened in the dark hull of the ship. The door looked far too small to accept even one of the suited, let alone all of them, but as they neared it became obvious that the door was tens of metres wide and would admit them all with ease. Sylveste, his wife and the other two Ultras from the ship, one of whom held the wounded Volyova, vanished inside, and the door closed on them.
Sajaki brought them to a holding area where they sloughed the suits and breathed normally. There was a taste to the air which slammed him back to his last visit aboard. He had forgotten how the ship smelled.
‘You wait here,’ Sajaki said, while their suits tidied themselves up and moved to one wall. ‘I have to attend to my colleague.’
He knelt down and busied himself with Volyova’s armour. Sylveste toyed with the idea of telling Sajaki not to expend too much effort in helping the other Triumvir, then decided that was possibly not the best course of action. He might have already pushed Sajaki to the edge of his patience when he crushed the Cal sim. ‘What exactly happened down there?’
‘I don’t know.’ That was typical Sajaki; like all the genuinely clever people Sylveste had met he knew better than to feign understanding where none existed. ‘I don’t know and for the moment — for the moment — it doesn’t matter.’ He studied a readout in Volyova’s suit. ‘Her injuries, while serious, don’t seem to be fatal. Given time, she can be healed. Also, I now have you. Everything else is detail.’ Then he cocked his head towards the other woman, who had slipped out of her suit. ‘Still, something troubles me, Khouri…’
‘What?’ she said.
‘It doesn’t matter… for the moment.’ He looked back at Sylveste. ‘Incidentally, that little trick you did with the sim — don’t imagine for one instant that I was impressed by that.’
‘You should be. How are you going to get me to fix the Captain now?’
‘With Calvin’s help, of course. Don’t you remember that I kept a back-up the last time you brought Cal aboard? Granted, it’s slightly out-of-date, but the surgical expertise is all there.’
It was a good bluff, Sylveste thought, but that was all it was. Still, there was a back-up, of sorts… or else he would never have destroyed the sim.
‘Talking of which… is the Captain so grievously unwell that he can’t meet me in person?’
‘You’ll meet him,’ Sajaki said. ‘All in good time.’
The other woman and Sajaki were removing scabs of damaged hide from Volyova’s suit, a process which resembled the shelling of a crab. Eventually Sajaki murmured something to the woman and they halted their work, evidently deciding that it was too delicate to be continued here. Presently a trio of servitors glided into the room. Two of the machines lifted Volyova between them and then left with her, accompanied by Sajaki and the woman. Sylveste had not seen her during his last visit aboard, but she seemed to have assumed a fairly elevated role in the ship’s hierarchy. The third servitor squatted down and observed Sylveste and Pascale with one sullen camera eye.
‘He didn’t even ask me to take off my mask and goggles,’ Sylveste said. ‘It’s like he hardly cares that he has me.’
Pascale nodded. She was fingering her clothes, seemingly convinced that the suit’s gel-air should have left some sticky residue behind on them. ‘Whatever happened down there must have thrown his plans completely. Maybe he’d be more triumphant if things had gone according to plan.’
‘Not Sajaki; triumphant just isn’t his style. But I’d at least have expected him to spend a few minutes gloating.’
‘Maybe the fact that you destroyed the sim…’
‘Yes; that’ll have thrown him.’ As he spoke, he did so in the knowledge that his words were almost certainly being recorded. ‘There may still be some residual functionality in the copy he made of Cal, even allowing for the self-destruct routines, though probably not enough for any kind of channelling, even with one-to-one neural congruency between sim and recipient.’ Sylveste found a pair of storage crates and moved them over to use for chairs. ‘I’m sure he already tried to run the sim in some poor fool’s body, though.’
‘And it must have failed.’
‘Messily, probably. He’s probably hoping now that I can work with the damaged copy without channelling; just relying on my knowledge of Cal’s instincts and methodologies.’
Pascale nodded. She was shrewd enough not to ask the obvious question: what kind of plan would Sajaki have if his own copy was too damaged even for that? Instead, she said, ‘Do you have any idea what happened down there?’
‘No — and I think Sajaki was telling the truth when he said the same thing. Whatever it was, it wasn’t to plan. Maybe some kind of power-struggle within the crew, acted out on the surface because whoever was involved never got a chance aboard.’ But while the idea sounded halfway plausible to him, that was as far as his thinking took him. Too much time had gone by, even within Sajaki’s reference frame, for Sylveste to trust his usually infallible processes of insight.
He would have to play things very carefully indeed until he understood the dynamics of the current crew. Assuming they gave him the luxury of time…
Pascale knelt down next to her husband. They had both removed their masks now, but only Pascale had removed her dust-goggles. ‘We’re in a lot of danger, aren’t we? If Sajaki decides he can’t use you…’
‘He’ll return us to the surface unharmed.’ Sylveste took Pascale’s hands. Ranks of empty suits towered around them, as if the two of them were unwanted despoilers in an Egyptian tomb and the suits were mummies. ‘Sajaki can’t ever rule out my being useful to him again, in the future.’
‘I hope you’re right… because that was quite a risk you took.’ She looked at him now with an expression he had rarely seen before. It was one of quiet, calm warning. ‘With my life as well.’
‘Sajaki isn’t my master. I just had to remind him of that; to let him know no matter how clever he gets, I’ll always be ahead of him.’
‘But he is your master now, don’t you understand? He may not have the sim, but he’s got you. That still puts him ahead in my book.’
Sylveste smiled and reached for an answer that was both true and exactly what Sajaki would expect of him. ‘But not as far as he thinks.’
Sajaki and the other woman came back less than an hour later, accompanied by a huge chimeric. Sylveste recognised the man from his previous trip aboard as Triumvir Hegazi, but only just. Hegazi had always been an extreme example of his kind — almost as comprehensively cyborgised as his Captain — but in the intervening time, Hegazi had further submerged his core humanity in machine supplements, exchanging various prosthetic parts for newer or more elegant substitutes, and had gained a whole new entourage of entoptics, most of which were designed to interact with the motion of his body parts, creating an off-spilling cascade of rainbow-coloured ghost limbs which lingered in the air for a second or so before fading. Sajaki wore unassuming shipboard clothes devoid of rank or ornamentation, emphasising the lightness of his build. But Sylveste was wise enough not to judge the man by his lack of bulk and absence of obvious weapons prosthetics. Machines undoubtedly seethed beneath his skin, giving him inhuman speed and strength. He was at least as dangerous as Hegazi and a good deal quicker, Sylveste knew.
‘I can’t exactly say it’s entirely a pleasure,’ Sylveste said, addressing Hegazi. ‘But I admit to experiencing a mild frisson of surprise at the fact that you haven’t imploded under the weight of your prosthetics, Triumvir.’
‘I suggest you take that as a compliment,’ Sajaki said to the other Triumvir. ‘It’s the closest you’ll get from Sylveste.’
Hegazi fingered the moustache which he still cultivated, despite the encroaching prosthetics which cased his skull.
‘Let’s see how witty he sounds when you’ve shown him the Captain, Sajaki-san. That’ll wipe the smile off his face.’
‘Undoubtedly,’ Sajaki said. ‘And talking of faces, why don’t you show us a little more of yours, Dan?’ Sajaki fingere
d the haft of a gun resting in a hip-holster.
‘Gladly,’ Sylveste said. He reached up and pulled away the dust-goggles. He let them clatter to the floor, watching the expressions — or what passed for expressions — on the faces of the people who had taken him prisoner. For the first time they were seeing what had become of his eyes. Perhaps they knew already, but the shock of seeing Calvin’s handiwork could never be underestimated. His eyes were not sleek improvements on the originals, but brutalist substitutes which only approximated the functionality of the human eye. There were more sophisticated things in ancient medical textbooks… not far removed from wooden legs. ‘You knew that I lost my sight, of course?’ he said, examining each of them in turn with his blank, eyeless gaze. ‘It’s common knowledge on Resurgam… hardly even worth mentioning.’
‘What kind of resolution do you get out of those?’ Hegazi said, with what sounded like genuine interest. ‘I know they’re not completely state-of-the-art, but I bet you’ve got full EM sensitivity from the IR into the UV, right? Maybe even acoustic imaging? Got a zoom capability?’
Sylveste looked at Hegazi long and hard before answering. ‘You need to understand one thing, Triumvir. In the right light, when she’s not standing too far away, I can just about recognise my wife.’
‘That good…’ Hegazi kept looking at him, fascinated.
They were escorted deeper into the ship. The last time he had been aboard, they had taken him straight to the medical centre. The Captain had been more or less capable of walking then, at least for short distances. But they were not taking him anywhere he recognised now. Which was not necessarily to say that he was far from the medical centre, for the ship was as intricate as a small city and as difficult to memorise, even though he had once spent nearly a month aboard it. But he sensed that this was entirely new territory; that he was passing through regions of the ship — what Sajaki and the crew called districts — which he had never been shown before. If his reckoning was good, the elevator was carrying them away from the ship’s sleek prow, down to where the conic hull broadened to its maximum width.
‘Minor technical defects in your eyes don’t concern me,’ Sajaki said. ‘We can repair them easily enough.’
‘Without a working version of Calvin? I don’t think so.’
‘Then we rip out your eyes and replace them with something better.’
‘I wouldn’t do that. Besides… you still wouldn’t have Calvin, so what good would it do you?’
Sajaki said something beneath his breath and the elevator crawled to a halt. ‘So you never believed me when I said we had a back-up? Well, you’re right, of course. Our copy had some strange flaws in it. Became quite useless long before we asked anything of it.’
‘That’s software for you.’
‘Yes… perhaps I may kill you after all.’ With one smooth movement he drew the gun from his holster, giving Sylveste time enough to notice the bronze snake which spiralled around the barrel. The weapon’s mode of killing was not at all obvious; it might have been a beam or projectile gun, but he had no doubts that he was comfortably within its lethal range.
‘You wouldn’t kill me now; not after all the time you spent looking for me.’
Sajaki’s finger tightened on the trigger. ‘You underestimate my propensity for acting on a whim, Dan. I might kill you just for the sheer cosmic perversity of the act.’
‘Then you’d have to find someone else to heal the Captain.’
‘What would I have lost?’ Under the snake’s jaw, a status light flicked from green to red. Sajaki’s finger whitened.
‘Wait,’ Sylveste said. ‘You don’t have to kill me. Do you honestly think I’d have destroyed the only copy of Cal left in existence?’
Sajaki’s relief was evident. ‘There’s another?’
‘Yes.’ Sylveste nodded towards his wife. ‘And she knows where to find it. Don’t you, Pascale?’
Some hours later Cal said, ‘I always knew you were a cold, calculating bastard, son.’
They were near the Captain. Sajaki had taken Pascale away, but now she was back again — along with all the other crew-members Sylveste knew about, and the apparition he had hoped never to see again. ‘An insufferable, treacherous… nonentity.’ The apparition was speaking quite calmly, like an actor running through lines purely to judge the timing, without imparting any actual emotion. ‘You unthinking rat.’
‘From nonentity to rat, eh?’ Sylveste said. ‘From some perspectives, that’s almost an improvement.’
‘Don’t believe it, son.’ Calvin leered at him, stretching forward from the seat which held him. ‘Think you’re so intolerably clever, don’t you? Well now I’ve got you by the balls; assuming you have any. They told me what you did. How you killed me purely on the pretext of ruining their plans.’ He raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘I mean, what a pathetic justification for patricide! I’d have at least thought you’d do me the courtesy of killing me for a halfway decent reason. But no. That would have been asking too much. I’d almost say I was disappointed, except that would imply I once had higher expectations.’
‘If I’d actually killed you,’ Sylveste said, ‘this conversation would pose certain ontological problems. Besides, I always knew there was another copy of you.’
‘But you murdered one of me!’
‘Sorry, but that’s a category mistake if ever I heard one. You’re just software, Cal. Being copied and erased is your natural state of being.’ Sylveste steeled himself for another protest from Cal, but for the moment he was silent. ‘I didn’t do it to ruin Sajaki’s plans. I need his… co-operation as much as he needs mine.’
‘My co-operation?’ The Triumvir’s eyes narrowed.
‘We’ll get to that. All I’m saying is that when I destroyed the copy, I knew another existed and that you’d soon force me into revealing its whereabouts.’
‘So the act was pointless?’
‘No; not at all. For a while I had the pleasure of seeing you imagine your plans in ruins, Yuuji-san. The risk was worth it for that glimpse into your soul. It wasn’t a pretty sight, either.’
‘How did you… know?’ Cal said. ‘How did you know I’d been copied?’
‘I thought you couldn’t copy him,’ said the woman he had been introduced to as Khouri. She was small and foxlike, but perhaps, like Sajaki, not entirely to be trusted. ‘I thought they had spoilers… copy-protection… that kind of shit.’
‘That’s alpha-level simulations, dear,’ Calvin said. ‘Which — for better or for worse — I happen not to be. No; I’m just a lowly beta-level. Capable of passing all the standard Turings, but not — from a philosophical standpoint — actually capable of consciousness. Hence, no soul. And therefore no ethical problems about there being more than one of me. However…’ He drew in breath, filling the silence which someone else might have been tempted to fill with their own thoughts ‘… I no longer believe any of that neuro-cognitive rubbish. I can’t speak for my alpha-level self, since my alpha-level self disappeared some two centuries ago, but for whatever reason, I am now fully conscious. Perhaps all beta-levels are capable of this, or perhaps my sheer connectional complexity ensured that I exceeded some state of critical mass. I have no idea. All I know is that I think, and therefore I’m exceedingly angry.’
Sylveste had heard all this before. ‘He’s a Turing-compliant beta-level. They’re meant to say this sort of thing. If they didn’t claim to be conscious, they’d automatically fail the standard Turings. But that doesn’t mean that what he says — the noises he makes… the noises it makes — have any validity.’
‘I could apply the same reasoning to you,’ Calvin said. ‘And where it’s leading to, dear son, is this: since I can’t speculate about the alpha, I have to assume that I’m all that remains. Now, this may be hard for you to understand, but the mere fact that I’m something precious and unique makes me object even more strenuously to the idea of anyone making a copy of me. Every act of copying me cheapens what I am. I am reduced to a
mere commodity; something to be created, duplicated and disposed of whenever I happen to fit someone else’s inadequate notion of usefulness.’ He paused. ‘So — while I’m not saying I wouldn’t take steps to increase my likelihood of survival — I would not willingly have consented to be copied by anyone.’
‘But you did. You allowed Pascale to copy you into Descent into Darkness.’ She had been clever about it, too; for years he had never suspected a thing. He had given her access to Calvin to assist with the construction of the biography. She had allowed him to return to the object of his obsession, the Amarantin, with access to research tools and his dwindling network of sympathisers.
‘It was his idea,’ Pascale said.
‘Yes… I admit that much.’ Cal drew in a lungful of breath, appearing to take stock before his next utterance, despite the fact that the Calvin simulation ‘thought’ far more rapidly than unaugmented humans. ‘Those were dangerous times — no worse than now, of course, from what I’ve gathered since my reawakening — but hazardous all the same. It seemed prudent to ensure some part of me would survive my original’s destruction. I wasn’t thinking of a copy, though — more a sketch, a likeness; perhaps not even fully Turing-compliant.’
‘What made you change your mind?’ Sylveste said.
‘Pascale began to embed parts of me in the biography over a period of time — months, in fact. The encryption was very subtle. But once she had copied enough of the original for the copied parts to start interacting, they — or rather me — became rather less enthralled by the notion of committing cybernetic suicide just to prove a point. In fact I felt rather more alive — more myself — than I ever had before.’ He vouchsafed his audience a smile. ‘Of course, I soon realised why this was the case. Pascale had copied me into a more powerful computer system; the governmental core in Cuvier, where Descent was being assembled. The system was connected to more archives and networks than you ever allowed me, even back in Mantell. For the first time I actually had something to justify the attentions of my massive intellect.’ He held their gaze for a moment before adding, very softly: ‘That’s a joke, by the way.’
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