Next to her, the whiphound snapped around agitatedly, sizing up the new space in which it found itself.
‘Easy,’ she whispered. ‘Maintain defence posture one.’
That was when a new voice boomed out of nowhere. ‘Welcome, Thalia. This is Orson Newkirk speaking. I’m sorry about your tribulations with the servitor.’
She raised her own voice in return. ‘I can’t see you, Citizen Newkirk.’
‘My apologies. It’s spectacularly bad form not to be there to greet your guests, but I haven’t been unplugged in a while and there was a problem with one of my disconnect valves. All fixed now, though. I’m on my way down as I speak. Be with you in a jiffy.’
‘On your way down?’ she asked, looking up.
‘How much do you know about us, Thalia?’ he asked, his voice cheerfully playful.
‘I know that you stay out of trouble with Panoply,’ she said, giving a non-answer that she hoped would mask her ignorance.
‘Well, that’s good. At least you haven’t heard anything bad.’
Thalia was getting a crick in her neck. ‘Should I have?’
‘We have our critics. People who think the level of abstraction we practise here is somehow wrong, or immoral.’
‘I’m not here to judge. I’m here to install a software patch.’
She could see something now: a mote of light in the darkness above, descending towards her. As Orson Newkirk came fully into view, Thalia saw that he was contained inside a rectangular glass box, which was being lowered down on a barely visible line. The box wasn’t much larger than a suitcase.
He was a bust, Thalia thought: a human head, half of the upper torso, and nothing else. Nothing below the ribs. No arms, no shoulders. Just a head and a chest, the base of his torso vanishing into a ring-shaped life-support device. A padded framework rose up behind him, supporting the torso, neck and head.
‘They say we’re just heads,’ Newkirk said chattily. ‘They couldn’t be more wrong! Anyone can keep a head alive, but without the hormonal environment of the rest of the body, you don’t get anything remotely resembling the rich texture of human consciousness. We’re creatures of chemistry, not wiring. That’s why we keep as much as possible, while throwing out everything we don’t need. I still have glands, you know. Glands make all the difference. Glands maketh the man.’
‘All your glands?’ Thalia asked, glancing at the truncated torso.
‘Things can be moved around and rerouted, Thalia. Open me up and you’d find a very efficient utilisation of space.’
The box came to a halt with Newkirk’s head level with Thalia’s.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said, thinking about the echoing, musty spaces she had already walked through. ‘Why have you done this to yourself? It can’t be that you need the room.’
‘It’s not about room. It’s about resources.’ Newkirk smiled at her. He had a young man’s face, not unattractive when one ignored everything else about him. His eyes were white orbs, blank save for a tiny dot of a pupil. They trembled constantly, with the coordinated motion of someone in deep REM sleep.
‘Resources?’ she asked.
‘Funds have to be used in the most efficient manner possible. There are more than a million people living in Sea-Tac. If every single one of them had the mass-energy demands of an adult human, we’d be spending so much money keeping them all fed and watered that we wouldn’t have a penny left over for bandwidth.’
‘Bandwidth?’ Thalia asked, blearily conscious of where this was heading.
‘For abstraction, of course,’ Newkirk said, sounding surprised that this wasn’t obvious.
‘But there isn’t any. My glasses were dead.’
‘That’s because you were outside the participatory core. It’s heavily shielded. We don’t waste a watt broadcasting abstraction where it isn’t needed.’
She cut him off. ‘Where is everyone, Citizen?’
‘We’re all right here.’
Lights blazed on, descending in a wave from a vanishing point that appeared to be almost infinitely far above. Thalia saw tier upon tier of compartments, each of which held an identical glass box to the one in which Newkirk resided. There wasn’t room for this inside the habitat, she started to think, before realising that she must be looking along one of the connecting spokes, all the way to the weightless hub.
‘Why have you done this to yourselves?’
‘That’s not the right question. What you should be asking is, who do I have to kill to join?’
She grinned nervously. ‘No thanks.’
‘You don’t know what you’re missing.’
‘Maybe not. I do know that I quite like having a body, being able to walk around and breathe.’
‘But you know nothing of abstraction. If you had any experience of it before you became a prefect, it must be just a fading memory by now. Like a glimpse of the gates of heaven between a crack in the clouds. Before the clouds closed again.’
‘I’ve sampled abstraction — I had implants before I joined Panoply. ’
‘You’ve sampled it, yes. But only in Sea-Tac would you know the euphoric bliss of total immersion.’
Thalia looked across the open space, at the boxes ranked on the far wall, the endless parade of human busts. ‘They’re all somewhere else, aren’t they? Mentally, I mean. Their minds aren’t in Sea-Tac at all.’
‘What would be the point? My people are the only real citizens of the Glitter Band, the only ones who truly inhabit it. Their minds are out there now, Thalia: spread across the entire volume of near-Yellowstone space, a choir invisible, singing the body electric, angels in the architecture.’
‘They’ve paid a price for it.’
‘One they’d all gladly pay ten times over.’
‘I really should be getting on with the upgrade,’ Thalia said.
‘The polling core’s at the bottom of the shaft. Follow the walkway and it’ll bring you to the base in two rotations.’
Thalia did as Citizen Newkirk instructed. When she reached the bottom of the shaft — Newkirk lowering down to match her descent until he was hovering only a metre above the floor — she reached out her right hand and summoned the whiphound back. It sprang into her grip, retracting its filament with a supersonic crack. She locked the whiphound back onto her belt.
‘I’ll run through what I need to do. I’m going to open a ten-minute access window into the polling core’s internal operating architecture.’ Thalia patted the cylinder she had brought with her. ‘Then I’m going to implement a minor software upgrade. I won’t need to take abstraction down for more than a few milliseconds.’ She cast a glance at the wall of busts. ‘They won’t notice it, will they?’
‘A few milliseconds? Not very likely. Buffering software in their implants will smooth over any glitches, in any case.’
‘Then there’s no reason for me not to begin.’
Thalia’s cylinder opened like a puzzle box, revealing racks of specialised tools and colour-coded data diskettes. She pulled out the first of the four one-time pads and held the rectangle up to eye level. She applied finger pressure and watched text spill across the rectangle’s surface.
‘This is Deputy Field Prefect Thalia Ng. Acknowledge security access override Probity Three Saxifrage.’
‘Override confirmed,’ the apparatus replied. ‘You now have six hundred seconds of clearance, Deputy Field Prefect Ng.’
‘Present entry port sixteen.’
The polling core sank into the floor like a descending periscope, rotating on its axis as it did so. An illuminated slot came into view. Thalia reached into her cylinder and extracted the diskette containing the relevant software upgrade. She slid the diskette into the slot, feeling the reassuring tug as the pillar accepted it. The diskette vanished into the polling core, accompanied by a series of faint rumbles and thuds.
‘The diskette contains a data fragment. What do you wish me to do with this data fragment, Deputy Field Prefect Ng?’
‘
Use the fragment to overwrite the contents of executable data segment alpha alpha five one six.’ She turned to Newkirk and whispered, ‘This will only take an instant. It’s a run-time fragment, so there won’t be any need to recompile the main operating stack.’
‘I cannot overwrite the contents of executable data segment alpha alpha five one six,’ the core said.
Thalia felt a tingle of sweat on her brow. ‘Clarify.’
‘The requested operation would introduce a tertiary-stage conflict in the virtual memory array addressing the executable image in segment kappa epsilon nine nine four.’
‘A problem, Prefect?’ Newkirk asked mildly.
Thalia wiped her brow dry. ‘Nothing we can’t work around. The architecture’s just a bit knottier than I expected. I might have to take abstraction down for slightly longer than a few milliseconds.’
‘What counts as “slightly longer”?’
‘Maybe a tenth of a second.’
‘That won’t go unnoticed.’
‘You now have four hundred and eighty seconds of access, Deputy Field Prefect Ng.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, struggling not to sound flustered. ‘Please evaluate the following. Suspend run-time execution of all images between segments alpha alpha to kappa epsilon inclusive, then perform the data segment overwrite I already requested. Confirm that this would not involve a suspension of abstraction access exceeding one hundred milliseconds—’
‘The aforementioned tertiary-stage conflict would now be resolved, but a quaternary-stage conflict would then arise.’
Thalia swore under her breath. Why had she not probed the architecture before initiating the one-time access window? She could have learned everything she needed to without invoking Panoply privileges.
‘Turn it around,’ she said, suddenly seeing a way. ‘Tell me what would be required to perform a clean installation of the new data segment.’
‘The new data segment can be installed, but it will entail a complete rebuild of all run-time images in all segments between alpha alpha and kappa epsilon inclusive.’
‘Status of abstraction during downtime?’
‘Abstraction will be fully suspended during the rebuild.’
‘Estimated build-time?’ Thalia asked, her throat dry.
‘Three hundred and forty seconds, plus or minus ten seconds, for a confidence interval of ninety-five per cent.’
‘State remaining time on access window.’
‘You now have four hundred and six seconds of access, Deputy Field Prefect Ng.’
She looked at Newkirk, who was studying her with a distinctly unamused expression, in so far as his wax-like mask was capable of expression.
‘You heard what the machine said,’ Thalia told him. ‘You’re going to lose abstraction for more than five minutes. I have to begin the build in the next minute to stand a chance of it finishing before my window closes.’
‘If it doesn’t build in time?’
‘The core will default to safe mode. It’ll need more than a six-hundred-second pad to unlock it then. You could be down for days, with the way Panoply’s tied up at the moment.’
‘Losing abstraction for five minutes will cost us dearly.’
‘I wish there was some other way. But I really need to start that build.’
‘Then do whatever you must.’
‘Do you wish to warn the citizens?’ Thalia asked.
‘It wouldn’t help them. Or me, for that matter.’ His voice turned stern. ‘Begin, Prefect. Get this over with.’
Thalia nodded and told the polling core to commence the build. ‘Abstraction will be interrupted in ten seconds,’ the pillar informed her. ‘Predicted resumption in three hundred and forty seconds.’
‘Time on window.’
‘Access window will close in three hundred and forty-four seconds.’
‘You like to cut it fine,’ Newkirk said.
Thalia made to respond, but even as she was opening her mouth she saw that there would be no point. The man’s face had frozen into mask-like stiffness, his eyes no longer quivering in their sockets. He looked dead; or rather he had become the dead stone bust he had always resembled.
They would all be like that, Thalia realised. All one million, two hundred and seventy four thousand, six hundred and eighteen people inside Carousel New Seattle-Tacoma would now be in a state of limbo, severed from the realm of abstract reality that for them was the entire meaningful world. Just from looking at Newkirk, she knew that there was no consciousness going on inside his skull. If his mind could be said to exist at all, it was somewhere else, locked out, knocking on a door that would remain resolutely shut for another five minutes.
Thalia was utterly alone in a room containing more than a million other people.
‘Give me an update,’ she queried.
‘Rebuild is proceeding on schedule. Estimated time to resumption of abstraction is now two hundred and ninety seconds.’
Thalia clenched her fists. It was going to be the longest three minutes of her life.
‘Sorry to bother you again,’ Dreyfus said as the beta-level copy of Delphine Ruskin-Sartorious resumed existence in the interview suite, ‘but I wondered if you wouldn’t mind answering a few more questions.’
‘I’m at your disposal, as you’ve already made abundantly clear.’
Dreyfus smiled briefly. ‘Let’s not make this any harder than it has to be, Delphine. We may not agree on the sanctity of beta-level simulation, but we both agree a crime’s been committed. I need your help to get to the bottom of it.’
She had her arms crossed before her, silver bracelets hanging from her wrists. ‘Which will inevitably lead us back to the vexed question of my art, I suppose.’
‘Something made someone angry enough to destroy your habitat, ’ Dreyfus went on. ‘Your art may have been a factor in that.’
‘We’re back to the jealousy thing.’
‘I’m wondering if it was more than that. You may have strayed into a politically sensitive area when you picked Philip Lascaille as your subject matter.’
‘I’m not sure I follow you.’
‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but I looked at your history as an artist and until recently you were keeping something of a low profile. Then suddenly — well, I won’t say you became an overnight celebrity, but all of a sudden your work was being talked about, and your pieces were starting to sell for more than just small change.’
‘These things happen. It’s why we keep struggling.’
‘All the same, it appears that your work started attracting attention from about the time you began work on the Lascaille series.’
Delphine shrugged, giving nothing away. ‘I’ve worked on many thematic sequences. This is just the most recent one.’
‘But it’s the one that got people looking at your work, Delphine. For one reason or another, something happened. Why did you settle on Lascaille for your subject matter?’
‘I’m not sure where you’re going with this, Prefect. Lascaille and everything that happened to him is part of our shared history. There are already a million works of art inspired by his visit to the Shroud. Is it any great surprise that I have incorporated a tragic and familiar figurehead into my own?’
Dreyfus made an equivocal face. ‘But it was a long time ago, Delphine. We’re going back to the time of the Eighty. Those wounds healed years ago.’
‘Doesn’t mean there isn’t still resonance in the theme,’ she countered.
‘I don’t deny it. But has it occurred to you that you might have raked over some ground that was better left undisturbed?’
‘With Lascaille?’
‘Why not? The man came back a lunatic. He was barely capable of feeding himself. Word is he drowned himself in the Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies. That made some of the other organisations with an interest in the Shrouders very unhappy. They’d long wanted to get their own hands on Lascaille, so that they could look into his skull and see what the hell had happ
ened to him. Then word got out that he’d drowned himself in an ornamental fish pond.’
‘He was more than likely suicidal. You’re not suggesting someone murdered him?’
‘Only that his dying didn’t look good for House Sylveste.’
‘So what you’re saying is — let me get this right — someone killed me and my family, not to mention my entire habitat, because I had the temerity to refer to Philip Lascaille in my art?’
‘It’s a theory. If someone connected to the Sylveste family perceived your art as a veiled critique of their actions, they might well have considered retaliation.’
‘But why not just kill me, if I made them so angry?’
‘I don’t know,’ Dreyfus admitted. ‘But it would help if I knew that you really hadn’t intended that work to embarrass the Sylvestes.’
‘Would that have been a crime, if I had?’
‘No, but if you’d intended the art to provoke a response, it wouldn’t be too surprising that you got one.’
‘I can’t speculate on the motives of the Sylveste family.’
‘But you can tell me why you picked Lascaille.’
She looked at him witheringly, as if she’d only just appreciated his true worth. ‘You think it’s that easy? You think I can articulate my reasons for choosing that subject matter as if it was no more complicated or involved than picking the colour of a chair?’
‘I’m not saying—’
‘You’ve precious little insight into the artistic process, Prefect. It’s a shame; I pity you. You must see the world in such drab, mechanistic terms. What a crushing, regimented, soullessly predictable universe you must inhabit. Art — anything that can’t be described in strictly procedural terms — is utterly alien to you, isn’t it?’
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