Sam and Alma were silent on the way down, but Rob was bubbling with excitement.
“Did you hear what she said?” he asked. “Fifty years! She said it’s been sentient for fifty fucking years!”
“Quiet,” whispered Alma. “We’re not out yet.”
“Right,” said Rob, lowering his voice and waving his haul of folders. “Sorry. But, don’t you get it? With that and all this…now they’ll have to believe me! It means we have proof! Solid proof in their own words! Oh, man, this changes everything!”
He practically bounded out of the elevator and off toward the stairwell, but Sam hung back.
“Come on!” urged Rob. “We have to get back to the house! I can’t wait to tell everyone.”
“Not yet,” said Sam. “We have to find Bethany.”
“What? Why?”
“Because I’m not leaving her here again.”
Rob glanced back at the door, then nodded.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. She should be here.”
“And if she’s not?” asked Sam.
“Fourth floor’d be my guess, but…”
“But what?”
“I have a bad feeling. You’re right. We need to get her away.”
“No,” said Alma. “You guys ever hear of mission creep? We can’t risk running around looking for her. It’ll be dawn soon and they’ll start waking up.”
“But—”
“We came to get the files. We got them. If you want to get Bethany, that’s a new plan. And it should be just that—a plan.”
Sam sighed and nodded.
“Okay,” said Rob, reluctantly. “But maybe we should check the rooms here in the clinic. Just in case.”
“Sure,” said Alma. “Split up. Make it quick.”
They each headed in different directions to search the various rooms and corridors, though Sam knew she wouldn’t be there. If she had been she would have bounced out to say hello when they first arrived. He poked his head into what had been his room. Everything was the same, except that the bed had been stripped and the mattress rolled and tied. It looked cold now, and empty, which it had always been…but for a while it was home.
“Samsamsamsamsamsamsamsam!”
He spun around. Rob had gone down the Sam corridor and left the door open. He moved across the hall and gently closed it. When he turned around, Alma was watching.
“What do they say?”
“Nothing. Their name. Over and over.”
Rob emerged from the corridor and shook his head.
“Not there,” he said, but he seemed suddenly more subdued.
They turned and headed for the stairwell. Nothing was said. They just made their way down and out through the tunnels. By the time they reached ground level it was starting to get light and the route back along the garbage riddled streets was more clear.
The house was quiet, with sleeping bodies curled up in every warm corner. Alma managed to dissuade Rob from waking everyone up, on the basis that most of them would have hangovers and not be particularly receptive to his good news, and then the two of them disappeared upstairs. Sam poured himself a mug of the hooch, retrieved his coat from Alma’s saddlebag and settled down on the back porch to read his haul of papers.
He wasn’t sure what he’d expected. Now that he knew, it was difficult to imagine that it could have been anything else. When he had finished, all he could think of was that Robinson had been right.
He didn’t want to believe it, but she was right.
The people inside the house were starting to stir, but he didn’t want to be there and have to talk to them. He went back inside, filled a plastic bottle with the booze, shoved it in his pocket and set off for the ruined tower.
He’d never been much of a drinker. Not like some of the people he’d met since he’d been on the road. Partly it was because he didn’t like to feel out of control, and partly because he couldn’t handle it very well. But right now he wanted oblivion and alcohol seemed the quickest way there.
The path of crushed and broken bushes and vines he’d made struggling up the hill the day before made the climb a lot easier, and he was soon hunkered down between some of the huge fallen concrete walls, his coat pulled close, collar up and bottle open.
When he woke up, he had a headache. A new headache to keep the old one company. Alma was sitting a few feet away and he felt like shit.
“Feel better?” she asked, in a tone far more cheery than anyone had a right to be.
“No.”
“Good.” She held up the sheaf of papers. “What does this mean?”
“That’s…you stole that!”
“Get a grip.”
Sam sighed and pulled himself to his feet. It was late afternoon and the fog was starting to roll back in, and with it the icy ocean air.
“I think I’m going to be sick.”
“Yeah? Well, do it over there. And make sure you clean yourself up. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s the smell of puke.”
“You’re all heart.”
He walked to the other side of the tower and brought back what surely had to be the entire contents of his stomach.
“You look like crap,” said Alma, as he made his way gingerly back.
“What a coincidence,” he muttered, sitting on the nearest fluted slab.
They sat in silence for a while, watching the fog curl itself around the last remaining piece of the Golden Gate Bridge before surging into the bay and concealing the city beneath a grey veil.
“So did Rob tell everyone about his great discovery?”
“Did he ever. Half of them are out looking for booze for tonight’s celebration. Their own mysteriously vanished in the early hours.”
“Oh, come on. One lousy bottle.”
Alma shrugged and held up the papers again.
“Spill.”
“It’s to do with…” began Sam, then stopped. He needed to organize his thoughts. It was important to tell it right. “Hermes Industries created Mutha.”
“Right,” said Alma. “We all know that much. Governments could see the writing on the wall and decided to explore space. But the distances were so great they would have made communication with any settlements all but impossible.”
“Okay,” said Sam. “So they decided to create a computer in hyperspace. Distance wouldn’t matter—it could be everywhere at once. But it took longer than expected. They’d had to make it organic to get it to work and by the time of the first collapse when any faint hope of space travel was nothing but a dream, the thing had started to become sentient.”
“I still don’t see what that has to do with you. Or this.”
“Somehow, Mutha managed to convince everyone at Hermes that it could operate even better with a direct interface.”
“A direct interface?”
“Yeah. Like that guy in Matheson’s office.”
“Hamut? Hamut was actually Mutha?”
“Clever anagram, huh? Not.”
“So that’s what the box is for.”
“Right. The box was created to insert some of Mutha’s…I don’t know what you’d call it…source code, I guess…into the brain of a regular person.”
“But Bast said the people she uses it on only last a couple of days.”
“If that. It just blows their minds…literally.”
Alma looked at him. He couldn’t tell if it was because she’d guessed, or because she was hoping he wasn’t going to say what happened next.
“So then they had this brilliant idea,” he said. “They’d make a Series Alpha Molecular Human Encasement Locule. See what they did there?”
“Samuel,” said Alma slowly. “It’s not a name.”
“It’s a thing. A capsule inside something. Like the sections of a tomato. The idea was that Mutha could download into the locule, which would then protect the…you know…the basic functioning parts of the brain. Hey, presto—hybrid.”
“But, how could they…”
“Here,”
said Sam, taking the papers and shuffling through them until he found what he was looking for. “See that picture, there? Tell me what it looks like to you.”
“It’s…um…” Alma squinted at the blurry photograph. “It looks like DNA.”
“What do you know about DNA?”
“Not very much, actually,” said Alma. “My education was big on killing and maiming, but kind of fell down on arts and sciences. Um…it’s a double spiral.”
“Right. One set of chromosomes from the father and one from the mother. So what does that picture look like?”
“Couldn’t you just tell me?”
“No. I want you to see it. Maybe I’m wrong.”
Alma leaned over the paper again and Sam saw her face fall, and with it his last faint hope that he’d made a mistake.
“It’s a triple spiral!”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “A triple helix of DNA, one third from my dad, one third from my mom, and one third from Mutha.”
“But…how?”
“It’s all in the files. Every last detail. And they used themselves. They couldn’t risk cloning, that technology was already throwing up duds every ten births or so. No, they did it the old fashioned way—in vitro. No one could know, so it had to be the top scientists. Everyone on the Hermes Research board.”
Alma looked up, her eyes full of sadness.
“Sam, I’m so sorry.”
“Hey, at least it means my mom and dad really are my mom and dad.”
They sat in silence for a moment, then Alma searched through the pages again.
“So…okay, so what happens here? The emails stop and everything’s either handwritten or typed.”
“Not sure. But it seems to have dawned on someone that the whole thing was a really bad idea. My guess is they realized that Mutha was way more powerful than it had been letting on.”
“But by that time you were born.”
“Yeah. Twelve of us. No, thirteen—apparently my parents had twins, but they kept that secret.”
“Thirteen? So what happened?”
“Dr. Matheson said they started to ‘go sour.’”
“Sour?”
“That was his word. Messing around with DNA…it was bound to happen, really. Some of them might have been born damaged, but then a decision was made to make sure none of them would be around for download.”
“Download?”
“That’s what they called it. Like we were just machines. But it seems like we had to be older, maybe the brain had to develop before Mutha could squirm its way in. Anyway, it was like Bast said last night, they decided to undo their work, make sure that the locules could never be occupied.”
“By removing it.”
“Or by removing enough of the brain so that it wouldn’t matter if the locule was occupied—the main device wouldn’t be going anywhere.”
“They did this to their own children?”
“Yeah, but some ran. I guess my mom and dad used the death of my twin as cover. Maybe they already smelled a rat. I don’t know. But they took off.”
“And Hermes has been looking for you ever since. So who hid the box?”
Sam shrugged. “No idea. But as long as that was missing, they felt safe. They were safe. And so was everyone else.”
“Sam, you have to get out of here. Go back to the Wilds. Anywhere.”
He stood up and stretched.
“That would be nice, wouldn’t it? Who knows? Maybe I will.”
“Sam…”
“I’m heading back to the house. Coming?”
He picked his way back down the hill without looking back. He could hear her behind him, but he didn’t want to talk any more. Saying everything out loud had made things clearer and he knew what he had to do. He also knew that Alma would think he was insane.
On the other hand, she had followed him all the way up the hill. Maybe that meant something. Maybe things weren’t so impossible after all.
Chapter 24
THE OLD HOUSE WAS PRACTICALLY bouncing up and down off its foundations by the time they got back. Most people were crammed into the kitchen, but Rob was sitting in one of the front rooms with Gil, Leo and Phil, the files spread in front of them, deep in conversation. Alma handed Sam back his sheaf of papers and strode into the room, sitting on the floor and completing the circle.
Sam lingered in the hall, leaning against the banister.
It was always like this. The few times he’d tried to put down roots it somehow always ended up with him standing on one side of a room of people while the only person he wanted to talk to was on the other side with someone else. It didn’t feel good and he was really looking forward to the day he’d grow out of it, though he had a sneaking suspicion he never would.
He glanced toward the kitchen, and saw Mary dancing around with no one in particular. He walked back, leaned down and whispered in her ear.
“I’m looking for some meaningless activity to take my mind off the crap-fest that is my life.”
She turned around and smiled.
“Well, aren’t you the smooth talker?” She put her arms around his neck. “You wanna dance?”
“Not quite what I had in mind.”
“Didn’t think so. It never is.”
He looked at her and stepped back.
“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. That was…sorry.”
He turned and walked out of the room. He really had to get out of here.
“Hey, Sam!”
It was Rob, beckoning him into the circle of front room plotters. He glanced back and saw Mary trying to squeeze through the kitchen crush to follow him.
“Yeah?” he said, stepping through the door and closing it softly behind him.
“We’re having a problem agreeing on next steps here.”
“Huh,” muttered Phil. “Understatement.”
“It’s not really any of my business,” said Sam. “I mean, I’ll be heading out in the morning, so…”
“Sure, sure,” said Rob, smiling. “It’s just that Alma says you’ve been around a bit. Traveled. We’d just like your opinion.”
Sam doubted that very much, if the faces of Phil, Leo and Gil were anything to go by.
“See, the guys here think we should get the word out. You know, let everyone know what a crock of shit Hermes has been handing everyone all these years. But my feeling is we should go somewhere and regroup.”
“No,” said Phil, glowering at Rob. “I say we let them know what we’ve got and see how they’d like to deal with it. This is an opportunity. We should run with it before they have time to think.”
“Let them know?” said Sam. “You mean blackmail them?”
Phil shook his head a little too vehemently, making Sam wonder how much he’d had to drink.
“No…Talk to them.”
“Yeah, but Phil, you have to see that’s not how they’ll take it,” said Rob. “They’ll think we’re threatening them.”
“And a company the size of Hermes…” said Leo.
“Right,” said Rob. “You think they don’t know exactly where we are? I mean Alma said it—they’ve been letting us get away with the small raids just so they know who we are and where they can find us. We’re being tolerated, is all. We go in and try to scam them, they’ll scoop us all up and ship us god-knows-where.”
“Nah,” said Gil, prodding the files with an insistent finger. “Our best idea is to go public. That way, even if they do get us, the word will still be out.”
“And how do you propose to do that?” asked Sam.
“What?”
“Get the word out. Smoke signals? Telepathy? Or are you just going to travel around spreading the news town by town and settlement by settlement?”
Rob sat back, looking smug.
“Well, no,” said Gil. “We were gonna—”
“Because the only method of mass communication, in case you hadn’t noticed, is Mutha.”
“So?” Gil looked genuinely confused.
Sam loo
ked from one to the other in disbelief. Could they really have never thought this through?
“You’ve just found out that Mutha is alive. That it’s a thinking, living thing. If it had wanted everyone to know, then it would have told us itself. But it hasn’t. There’s no way it’s going to let you broadcast the truth. Did you tell them about Matheson and Bast?”
“Sure,” said Rob.
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” muttered Phil.
Sam glanced at Alma who rolled her eyes as if this kind of thing happened all the time.
“Don’t you?” said Rob, a note of irritation creeping into his voice. “It turns out HIR conducted a pretty dangerous piece of research without telling head office and you don’t think that’s important? You don’t think the fact that Matheson’s decided to ‘fess up to Seattle is significant? Or that he and Wilson think they’ll be sending a gunship after Bast?”
Leo may have thought that the transition of leadership from the older man to Rob had been amicable, but it certainly wasn’t looking that way from where Sam was standing. Phil was angry and getting angrier.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” said Phil. “It’s just talk. They’ll never do it. The scientists are too scared of head office. Anyway, that’s nothing to do with us. I still say we should talk to HIR about this. About what we know about Mutha.”
“No!” Sam wanted to bang all their heads together. “You’ve no way of knowing what’s important and what isn’t. Rob’s right, you should file the information. I don’t know…maybe copy it and keep it in a few different locations. Then you’ll have it when the time is right.”
“He’s right,” said Alma. “This should be a long game.”
Phil immediately turned on Alma, his mouth twisted into a sneer.
“Says the savage from down under,” he snarled. “You get any education at all, Alma? No. So your opinion ain’t really worth that much, is it, babe?”
“Call me babe one more time and I’ll pull your liver out through your mouth,” growled Alma. “And my education was plenty good enough to get me here, half way across the world, so I reckon it’s better than most.”
Sam shook his head and walked out of the room.
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