Radiate

by C. A. Higgins

  No, Althea said, no, we did this to you. We raised you in suffering and death. We made you in conflict: Mattie and me, fighting over who would control you.

  So you do hate me.

  No, said Althea, and the honesty of it vibrated all through her code. I regret a lot of things. But I still, and I will always, love you.

  Ananke turned aside from the touch of that. Ivan and Mattie had separated. Ivan was going to the white room, his steps heavy, slow. But Mattie, oh, her father—he was coming to Ananke.

  See? Ananke said with a terrible joy too great for even her electricity to contain. See how I’ve won. Ananke, that which must be. I am Ananke. I have decided. All the choices are mine.

  In the white room, Ivan came to a stop before Althea. The wires that held her obstructed Ananke’s vision somewhat, but she still could see him standing there, dressed all in black, the way he had been when first he had come on board. He looked up at Althea, and though he smiled, there was a terrible grief in his blue eyes.

  We can still leave, Althea said. Even now, Ananke, we can still go.

  Ivan was speaking to Althea, but Ananke turned her back on that, because in the piloting room Ananke’s father was speaking to her.

  No, said Ananke, because after all, she had won. This is my choice, and not yours.

  Oh, Ananke, Althea sighed while in the white room Ivan’s words echoed oddly through the twisted wires that pierced Althea’s human skin.

  Ananke, Althea sighed while Ananke turned all her attention on Matthew Gale, and that was all she said.

  Ananke.

  FORWARD

  This was perhaps the first time Mattie had ever gone into the piloting room. Rather wisely, the crew of the Ananke had kept someone stationed there at all times while Mattie had been hidden in the walls; even more wisely, none of the maintenance shafts actually opened into the room.

  It was with this awareness of seclusion, of no escape, that Mattie pushed open the door to the piloting room and stepped inside.

  The piloting room was very small—if necessary, the ship could be flown by a single person—and packed with instrumentation. The main screen showed a field of stars around an orb of ringed gold: Saturn, directly ahead and near enough that Mattie could see its larger moons spinning by. Two chairs had been industriously pushed in beneath this screen, relics of some final tidying up: the performance done, the ushers leaving the theater dark and clean.

  The holographic terminal in the corner of the room was dark. The screen beside it, which once had shown System news and orders at all hours of the day, now showed nothing but static. A small symbol of Constance Harper’s triumph. To his right, opposite the holographic terminal and the dead face of the System, was a tall screen of paneled images. Each showed the view from one of the Ananke’s cameras. Every few minutes, the images would change, with different video feeds showing. The Ananke had a thousand cameras, and Mattie looked through her compound eyes. There was one chair at the terminal beneath those feeds, but this one had been left out on the floor as if at any moment its owner might return and take her place again.

  Mattie walked into the little room and bent down over the control panel, studied it for a moment, and accessed the navigational data.

  Light flashed through the room suddenly, casting Mattie’s shadow dark over the panel. “No.”

  Mattie lifted his hands as if Ananke’s appearance were a gun to his back. “Sorry,” he said. “Just checking where we were going.”

  Silence for a breath. Then Ananke said, “You may ask.”

  “Ananke, may I please see our course?”

  The main screen blinked. And then the sight of Saturn was blocked out by a diagram, and the Ananke’s course was charted out on it in red. A tiny spiral denoted the ship, with her speed and heading information flashing alongside the symbol.

  Their course took them into the Saturnian system and through the moons, past the rings, to spiral around and down to the surface of murky Titan.

  “We will be there soon,” Ananke said. “And Constance Harper will be on board.”

  “You’re sure she’s not dead?” Mattie found himself asking.

  “She lives still.”

  The Ananke’s course already had taken them between Saturn’s moons; deeper in and they would brush past the rings on their course to Titan. Ananke’s mass, Mattie knew, would send a ripple through all those finely ground rings and the bodies that floated between. It would be visible to the rest of the solar system, the mark of her weighty passage.

  “Why haven’t we been stopped?” Mattie asked. “Anji must have people patrolling the planet.”

  “I have been silencing them.”

  “How?”

  “The same as the rest,” said Ananke. “They would have killed us, did I not.” There was a strange thread of anxiety in her voice. Mattie looked at the little spiral that marked the Ananke, spiraling in toward Titan and Constance Harper, and knew that none of Anji’s dead ships ever would have come to Ananke’s attention if Mattie hadn’t asked her to come here—or if Mattie had never let her run wild in the first place.

  He thought of Ivan down in the white room and of the timer in their bedroom slowly ticking down to zero.

  Mattie said, “Let’s talk about how we can make another ship like you.”

  FORWARD

  Ivan had never turned the handle on his own, he realized, looking at the door to the white room. Always Domitian had opened it, or Ida; Ivan’s hands had always been bound. Mattie had opened it when they’d come here before to see Althea.

  Ivan laid his hand on the lever as if he were placing his finger on the trigger of a cocked gun.

  Althea Bastet was where he had last seen her, strung up like meat.

  The shaven head snapped up, making the wires jerk, sending her whole body into an oscillatory tremble only slightly dampened by the metal arms that rested their clenched fists against the floor. For an instant a great and terrible consciousness looked at Ivan out of Althea’s mortal eyes: the Ananke, witnessing him.

  Now, Mattie, Ivan thought, pinned by that terrible gaze, and then the focus of those eyes dimmed, the mutilated lids blinking. Althea Bastet’s heart-shaped head drifted once more toward the floor.

  And then—Ivan’s miracle again—she lifted that head again.

  He found himself smiling at her, that charming smile that had taken her in before, and then he consciously set it aside.

  “I thought when I came in here I would tell you the truth,” Ivan said. “All of it. But I wasn’t sure if that was for your sake or to make myself feel better.”

  Her legs, Ivan saw, had been broken; the limbs had been jerked forward by the tension in the restraining wires, the bones not allowed to properly heal. There was the slightest forward curve in her shins now, as if her legs bent the wrong way.

  “But you can’t respond to me, can you?” Ivan looked up into her slack face. “So even coming here was just to make myself feel better. It’s not as if you could answer me back or do me any final favors.”

  Her throat worked; it might have been some unconscious motion of the body asleep, or Ananke reacting in a strange mechanical fashion. But he rather thought it was Althea trying to speak.

  “It’s strange to live in a world where all the old rules are gone,” Ivan said. “I always felt like I was two people: the outer shell, the metal mask of me that went through its programs with flawless efficiency and felt nothing about it. And then, behind that, the human: the one who wanted things and desired things and felt things.”

  The metal in Althea’s rib cage flexed like a bellows, drawing in air at a perfectly even, mechanically paced speed.

  “I know who I am better now,” Ivan said. “I know what I want and who. The human part of me overcoming the machine my mother made,” and before him, in total defiance of the machine that cradled her, Althea Bastet’s breath hitched.

  FORWARD

  “That won’t work,” Mattie said.

  “Why not?” />
  “Not enough active memory.” Mattie had pulled out one of the two tucked-in chairs and leaned back in it, chewing thoughtfully on a knuckle as he stared up at the blinking lights and dials embedded in the ceiling. “I mean, part of the program is the ability to experience conflicting things at once. Otherwise it just doesn’t work. That style of System ship just won’t have enough memory to run more than one sensation at a time.”

  Ananke was silent. Mattie looked over, then glanced quickly away from the child of light standing in the holographic terminal behind him. On the main screen the navigational diagram had vanished, replaced by a real image of the planet. Mattie could see the moons weaving through the gaps in the planet’s rings.

  “A warship, then?” Ananke said.

  “Warships’ve got weak computers, actually. It’s all targeting and navigation. They’re not very smart.”

  “Then what?”

  “Well,” Mattie said, while Saturn’s clouds revolved through its atmosphere, golden, bright, “we’d want to find another research ship if we could.”

  “I haven’t come across any of those.”

  “They wouldn’t fly with war parties. The System probably took them for parts to make warships. Or rebels found them and took them for parts. Civil war’s not a good place for a bucket with a fancy computer.” He bit his knuckle again, the press of his teeth keeping him focused. He would have liked to have something to do with his hands—a pen to write with or play with, a coin or a shell casing to flip through his fingers—but he had nothing of the kind.

  “So you think there are none left?”

  Mattie shrugged. “Probably are somewhere,” he said. “The bigger problem, really, is the digital computer.”

  “I am not a digital computer.”

  “Exactly.” Mattie tilted his head back to point at her. Her holographic brows were furrowed. “You’re different. You’re a quantum computer.”

  “There must be others like me,” said Ananke. Her hair curled at the ends as if she retained even now some trace of Althea Bastet. “There must be.”

  There was naked distress in her simulated voice and for an instant Mattie saw not a hologram but a little girl, real and physical, whom he could have lifted up into his arms and carried off and out of the blood-soaked ship.

  Something tightened in his throat. “Somewhere,” he lied. “We’ll find one. If anyone can make a companion, it’s us.” He drummed his fingers against the edge of the control panel and then said, on a bright and sudden whim, “Do you know I hacked into my first System computer when I was twelve?”

  “Tell me,” said Ananke, who must have known from Mattie’s System records but asked nonetheless.

  “It was back when they were still making me go to school. There was this one class—they put us on these computers. Shitty little things donated by the System, tapped into the System’s network.”

  The hologram seated herself on the terminal. She wrapped her arms around her knees, hugging them to her chest, and rested her little chin on them.

  “I was just looking for some stupid game,” he said. “It was on the subconnection—the servers that some of the people on Miranda set up that weren’t connected to the System servers. I guess they were as mad about that as they were about me hacking through the parental controls in the first place, because when they realized what I’d done, they brought me to the principal, and then they brought in the System military.”

  He could remember the fear of it and the resentment: this outside power, these adults, trying to tell him what he could and could not do and threatening him when he refused to agree.

  And he remembered his satisfaction when he’d realized that they were angry because they were afraid.

  “I had foster parents at the time—me and Constance did—who weren’t so bad,” he said. “The System took us from them and put us back in the group home. I remember when we got there Constance just looked at me and said, ‘You didn’t think that through, did you?’ ”

  He tried for her voice when he said it and hit only the palest imitation of her disappointment, her proud resignation. Yet that echo of her was enough to silence him again. She’d still been gawkily young then, not yet grown into her long limbs and her narrow face.

  “She punished you?” Ananke queried.

  “What? No,” Mattie said. “Actually, she thought it was funny. She forgave me, and then she thought it was funny that I’d broken the rules for some stupid game and gotten them all pissed. I think she saved the letter the school sent home with me the day it happened.”

  There were so many things that were lost for no longer being shared. No one else but Constance remembered Miranda as it had been, no one but Constance remembered what their childhood had been. Only Constance remembered how it had felt to escape the foster system at last, with her his legal guardian, and the triumph of that. Only Constance remembered Abigail Hunter and the fire that had killed her. Mattie had trusted so many secrets and fears and hopes to her, his sister and his friend.

  And nobody but Mattie would remember her as she had been to him, fierce and bold and terrible and good, from the moment she had stood between Mattie and danger as a child to the moment she had rained death down upon the System at last and become something else. No one but Mattie would remember exactly what had made her laugh, or how she looked when she was near tears, or what her favorite food was, or the weird way she knew how to tie a knot. Ivan had known her, too, but he had known a different Constance than Mattie, and it was Mattie’s Constance that he stood to lose.

  He wondered where that letter had gone now, if Constance had burned it with the rest of her past in her bar on Mars.

  “You’ll see her soon,” Ananke assured him.

  And he could. It would be as simple as going back down the hall and postponing the timer on the bombs just long enough to rescue Constance and get her safely on board. Then all three of them could fly away together.

  Yet that delay would mean the rest of Anji’s fleet would be destroyed, the crews of the ships suffocated; that delay would mean the destruction of Titan and the death of Anji herself and all the refugees Mattie had seen her rescuing from Jupiter; it would mean another million people dead to satisfy the whims of Mattie Gale.

  Mattie looked at Ananke again, his daughter, a bright and gleaming thing warped by the darkness of her birth.

  “I used to not believe you were alive,” he admitted.

  Ananke’s light flared. “You denied me. You left me.”

  “I see you now,” Mattie said quietly, but he knew her cameras could pick up his voice. “I see you.”

  She lifted her head from her knees and watched him, Mattie’s child, with Ivan’s blue eyes.

  “You are real, Ananke,” Mattie said to her, and understood at last how Ivan could lie even when he told the whole and unvarnished truth. “You are alive.”

  FORWARD

  “I wish I could ask you what happened,” Ivan said to the dead Althea. “I wish you could tell me how it went wrong. And I wish I could help you fix it.” He watched her drag in another even bellows breath. “But it’s too late for that. So let me tell you a story. It’ll even be a true story this time.”

  Her breath came in and out of her again evenly. But her eyes still were fixed on him.

  “It’s a story about my mother,” Ivan said. “You met her once, I know. She was the first thing I saw after I tried to kill myself. Her hair was still blonde then…She was sitting at my bedside in the sunlight, and she looked like an angel.”

  He had to look upon Althea with her four unnatural arms, monstrous image of the divine. He thought of the angels that were so terrible when they appeared that they had to warn man not to be afraid, but the men always were afraid nonetheless.

  “I’d never seen her show so much emotion.” Ivan nearly smiled, but if he did smile, it would crack through him and let everything else come weeping out. “At first she told me I was a fool: Had I thought about what I was doing? Had I thought at
all? And then she just held my hand and told me never to do it again. She must have forgiven me, because while she held my hand, she tapped out a message. A secret message just for me to hear. She promised to help me escape.”

  Althea’s fingers twitched, and the wire that threaded into her nails trembled like a harp string plucked.

  “It hardly seemed fair that she would help me escape,” Ivan said as if he had not seen that faint flutter. “She’d already helped me escape from death once before, when I was a child, and trapped herself in a hell that she could have escaped. No one deserves that kind of sacrifice once, much less a second time. I wished, when I left, that I’d had some way to help her get out, too. Even if it was only something as crude as a bomb on a delay timer.”

  He searched for words and for courage, and only Althea’s mechanized breaths filled that vast white room.

  “She died on Mars,” he admitted. “And Constance—Constance is dead, too. Ananke thinks we can rescue her, but it’s too late for that. She’s like you—still breathing but too late to save.”

  He looked down at his own fingers, flexing them against the impulse to tap out a restless pattern. The last time he had been here, his nails had been crusted brown with Ida’s death. He wondered whether, if he looked past Althea, he would find Ida in the corner of the room, blood down her front and smiling and a chill coming from her like a wind.

  Somehow it no longer seemed to matter.

  “I’m so sorry for what happened to Constance,” Ivan said to his unbloodied hands. “I am so sorry I couldn’t fix what I did to her. The only thing I can do for her now—what I wouldn’t do for her before—is give her the respect of choice.”

  A drop of something reddish brown spilled out of the panel in Althea’s chest between the hinges of the machine. Ivan wondered what it would take to make that wire-bound heart burst.

  “She chose to save me, just like my mother did,” Ivan said. “She let me and Mattie go. I would’ve understood if she’d chosen otherwise. But if she were here, I would still ask her to let me and Mattie go.”

  A part of him was aware of the steadily ticking passage of time, the eventual apocalypse of the bombs coming due. Althea stared back down at him and said nothing and breathed evenly, as if she were nothing more than a particularly fragile limb of the vast machine that pierced her fingers and her sides.