Maybe there were more. Her pulse scan wouldn’t have picked up demiorganics, not if the demiorganics had been made to stay hidden. Or implants. Hawkwood and Robert could have carried both.
She once again had her demiorganics mute the pain as she mounted her horse. She took her ride out long and slow. The guards at the barricades didn’t glance at her.
Half an hour out, she took another pulse scan to be sure. The eavesdroppers were still off. Still hiding from her.
The scan also found three of Hawkwood’s men had set off after her. They rode a scant half-kilometer behind her, and gaining. Stalking.
Tssking in irritation, she readied her combat programs.
Ways and Means had forbidden its agents from taking lives unprovoked. Provoked was a different matter. Quickest thing to do was to shoot them all. The skin above her right wrist split open, oozing blood. A titanium dart nestled into place just behind the opening, its tip red. She had dozens more like it, nestled and ready to go.
She watched her wrist bleed under the sunlight.
After a moment’s consideration, she ordered her demiorganics to reseal her skin. The darts returned to their bone-cradles.
By the time Hawkwood’s men caught up with her horse, she was long gone, vanished into the brush. Her demiorganics blocked the pain of torn skin with every step she took.
She’d killed men like those before. Last time, she hadn’t hesitated.
She pushed through the deep brush of the forest, scowling. This would mean a lot more time walking. And thinking. She didn’t like what she had to think about.
She took periodic scans. Still no sign of eavesdroppers back there. They had switched off, masking their electronic signatures. They were hiding from her.
That didn’t make sense. If they were hiding, they should have hidden from her first scan too. Unless the power behind them hadn’t known, until that scan, that she was there.
As a matter of course, Ways and Means knew where all its agents were at all times. If it wanted to hide its eavesdroppers from her, it should have deactivated them the moment she entered the area.
The sky purpled, and the air turned unseasonably cold. She stood still in a clearing, shivering, waiting. Her chill didn’t go away after her shuttle had landed, or after she had boarded.
14
Osia retreated to her tiny cabin as soon as she could. Her constructs did not attack her, but she never turned her back. She paused only to splinter wood from a crate. Safely in her quarters, she lodged it through her door handle, jammed it into the frame. Her constructs had the strength to break through, but this would give her warning, at least.
She turned her attention to Ira’s memory cell. It dripped onto her floor. The water had washed the gore off it.
She squeezed it in her palm, readied her full suite of anti-viral defenses. And then she opened a data channel to the cell.
The memory cell had been wiped clean.
She was already a toxic slurry of emotions, keeping her from thinking clearly. Frustration swilled to the top. The cell shouldn’t have been empty. Could not have been, under most circumstances. The cell was designed to preserve data against erasure in the event that it was needed as forensic evidence.
The key was in the composite that held the cell together. No matter whether the old data was cleared and new written over it, there should always have been electrostatic traces left in that composite, ions stuck in colloidal suspension. With exemplary Unity efficiency and ingenuity, the cell had been designed so that its own casing medium was a backup.
With work and time, it should have been possible to reconstruct key fragments of Ira’s memories. Thoughts that had occurred often would leave deeper traces.
Yet these had been eliminated. Before she had ripped the cell out of Ira, a power surge had destroyed the whole cell, boiled away most of the composite casing. This was not programmed behavior. Her constructs’ bodies had not been built to allow a surge to reach the memory cells.
Whoever had done this had had to override several safeguards. And they would have had to do it in a hurry, too. Ira could not have functioned without these cells. Sometime between when she had “drowned” him, and when she had pulled the cells out of him, this had happened.
Ways and Means had designed her constructs. It had intimate knowledge of how they worked. Better than hers.
She paced in her cabin’s tiny confines. A step or two forward. A step back. With her injury, it took effort.
Despite its artificiality, her demiorganic body had been made to feel like the real thing. If she had wanted to, she could have zoomed her perceptions to the fine grain, received reports from individual nerve clusters, sure. But she did not sense her body that way. Her brain was still human, even transferred to a medium of demiorganic neurons. Her autonomous systems took care of the fine details.
The knife wound changed things. She controlled part of herself by radio, by remote, and that took effort. Her legs felt alien, like they were loose parts grafted onto her. Some of the sensations filtering up were choked, compressed, by the format.
It was as if the fringes of her vision had turned grayscale, or her brain had stopped processing images in three dimensions. She’d lost something important. She’d had centuries to take it for granted.
She bundled her rage into a transmission of wordless protest, spiked it at Ways and Means’ satellites.
Again, they ignored her.
She could not recall having felt so much nervous energy since she had been fully human. She would have called it adrenaline then. Now she didn’t have that excuse. She was losing control.
She knew she was because she could not quite believe that Ways and Means wanted to kill her.
She knew it was capable of killing. It had killed without what most people would call a second thought. But it had happened to other people. She had lived with it for too long. A stubborn, irrational part of her insisted that it could not do that to her.
She ought to have been tallying her resources. Weighing options. She had friends she could call upon. She doubted the satellites would let her call them, but she could reach them on foot. It all seemed moot.
If Ways and Means wanted to try again to kill her, it didn’t need to have the constructs to do it. It was heavily armed.
Unless it had wanted to kill her secretly. To hide the killing from other crewmembers. A missile firing, even a beam pulse, would be impossible for them to miss. They would have detected either even if they weren’t watching. Reprogramming her constructs was less visible.
Her constructs talked about the Sarrathi partisans, the big bad evil empire from their serial, as though they were real. Osia had programmed them to know that their backgrounds were fictional. She had wanted company, not a fantasy.
In the serial, in most endings, Ira had betrayed the others. It was possible, just barely, Ira had attacked her not just to kill her, but because he thought he was betraying her to the partisans. That would make it not an assassination attempt, but a symptom of a deeper malfunction.
He might have been playing out his role. So, it seemed, were the others.
That didn’t explain the satellites, or the burned-out memory chip.
She pulled the door jamb out.
In most of the serial’s many endings, there had rarely been any funeral or other recognition for Ira if he died after his betrayal. There was none now. She found her crew grim, working steadily. Straton looked up when she emerged, but said nothing.
A sliver of land crested the northeastern horizon. Her course should have taken them around the cape by now. The smoke of a distant city crossed her nose. There was no hint of war in it. Just the ordinary whiff of animal decomposition that accompanied civilized life on this plane.
She could have, should have, disembarked. Left her constructs to their fantasy. Traveling by sea was still the fastest way to get to Europe. Ira’s attack had come not long after she had abandoned Ways and Means and decided to head to Europe. That meant her d
ecision to travel there could have triggered it. Ways and Means didn’t want her to reach it. Going by land would take months. And, for all its primitiveness, she couldn’t operate this vessel by herself.
She found Coral atop the aftcastle. Osia approached, cautiously.
Coral said, “There’s nothing to say about it.”
“Not even ‘I’m sorry’?”
Thir lips were tight. In the serial, most of the time Coral had seen Ira slipping before his betrayal, and blamed thirself for not catching it. Thi said, “I can’t be sorry when I don’t know why he attacked you.”
When thi did nothing else, Osia left.
Straton and Braeloris stood by the prow. When Osia approached, Braeloris eyed her balefully, turned away. Straton kept his gaze fixed on the sea.
Osia waited. In answer to her unspoken question, Straton said, “I need to watch for partisans.”
In the serial, their crew’s submarine, called the Whiptail, had been ultramodern. “Why not use the Whiptail’s sensors?” she asked.
He waved toward the mast. “Does this pile of splinters look like it has sensors?”
“How do you imagine you got from the Whiptail to this ship?”
“How do you think? You made us. You needed company on this awful plane.”
He turned his attention back to the water. Osia waited, but he suffered no dawning realization.
He knew where he was. He should have known the partisans weren’t real.
Her constructs were losing their minds in bits and fragments. That implied a virus, a slow corruption, rather than a whole takeover. That by itself was interesting. If Ways and Means had wanted, it could have controlled them all remotely, attacked without delay.
Foolish hope swelled within her, though she tried to quash it. Ways and Means may not have meant to kill her, but only trouble and delay her. Or its instructions may have affected Ira, interacted with his history and personality, in a way it hadn’t meant to.
No. She could not allow herself to think like that. Part of her was looking for any excuse to exonerate it. It did not explain why Ways and Means would not answer her call now.
Someone… Ways and Means… was trying to kill her. For whatever reason, their means were constrained. But she could not believe that they would be so forever.
She needed to find help. Ways and Means had plenty of other agents on this world. Whatever they thought of her, not all of them would willingly be complicit in her murder.
Osia had not had friends aboard Ways and Means, not really. Before her exile, her closest acquaintance had been an old hand named Xati. They had trained together. In the past century, she and Xati had only seen each other once every few months, and sometimes not for longer than a year.
Osia had not seen em at all after she decided to come to the surface. There was a good chance Xati was complicit in whatever Ways and Means was doing to this plane. But Osia was sure e would not have countenanced what Ways and Means was doing to her.
Last she had heard, Xati was on long-term surface assignment. E had been assigned to a monitoring post and communications station deep in the Carpathian Mountains.
There were other agents, other people Osia knew. But Xati was the only one she had trusted. And e was also, probably, still close to whatever Ways and Means wanted to keep Osia from reaching.
“I’m changing our course,” Osia told Coral.
“Why?” Coral asked. Thi did not bother to hide her suspicion, just as Osia did not bother to explain herself. She just gave thir their new heading.
Staying up on deck with them seemed like tempting fate. Osia returned to her quarters, jammed the wooden stake through the knob again. Periodic scans kept her apprised of her ship’s progress.
She sat with legs folded, and tried to still her pulsing anxiety. She would not have called her life aboard Ways and Means uncomplicated, but it very much seemed so now. There had been plenty of distracting luxuries.
Aboard the planarship, zero-gravity parkland spiraled around open cylinders. Hyperprecision planar gateways moved travelers from one end of the ship to another, mimicking teleportation. Ways and Means had even kept a vast alien menagerie outside its hull, protected from cosmic radiation by the fields that held its atmosphere in place. Ways and Means had called it a zoology experiment.
She had been rare among the crew in that she had few friends or partners, but she had not been solitary. She had had Ways and Means. They’d all had Ways and Means. The amalgamate’s pervasiveness was one of the reasons – the reason – most of its crew had worked so hard to earn the privilege to come aboard. The amalgamates held themselves at a remove from the Unity, but not from their crews. Their agents had intimate relationships with it. The airwaves aboard ship had reverberated with the digital echoes of a thousand conversations with it, held at once.
Ways and Means hadn’t been her friend. It had been her employer and her caretaker. It had studied her on a minute level. It traced her thoughts, sometimes speaking words as they occurred to her, so intimately that it had felt like a finger running down her spine.
It did not like her. It did not dislike her. It did not, so far as she could tell, feel things like that.
Once it had told her that the closest thing it felt was attachment. It became accustomed to its long-term agents and their tics and habits. It needed to have them on hand as much as she needed her arms and legs. They had become extensions of itself.
It also told her that it saw attachment as a burden, and strove to divest itself of it whenever it could. But sometimes that wasn’t possible.
She didn’t know how much to believe. It lied as a matter of course, and without malice. It controlled an empire populated predominantly by humans, but they and it would always be alien to each other. It had done a lot to make itself comprehensible to its crew – but past a certain point, comprehensibility was just another lie. An illusion for its crew’s sake.
Ways and Means and its fellow amalgamates had been born from AI wars. The victors had merged together into amalgamations of hundreds, thousands, of individual AIs. They were webs of contradictory thoughts that operated in unison only by force. They were not unlike the Unity as a whole in that respect.
They had never found another mind like themselves. They probably would not have gotten along with one. The amalgamates were territorial as cats. They would not reproduce for fear that their offspring had turned on them. The closest they came to reproducing was making backups of their minds and memories, in case disaster struck. They secreted those backups in remote corners of the multiverse. Not even Osia knew where they were.
This exile had robbed Ways and Means of that. It could not tend to its backups or update their memories. It could not make more backups, not while trusting that their locations were secure. It had become mortal.
Everything else had changed, too. The “zoology experiment” had boiled away in the battle that ended in Ways and Means’ exile. The hyperprecision gateways had shut down for lack of power. Ways and Means had to produce all of its antimatter now, and most of that went into its voyages across this world’s sky. When Osia had left, Ways and Means had already started repurposing its parkland into power plants and factories to manufacture, from asteroid rock, the essentials which it could no longer acquire from trade.
Colonizing this world would not make Ways and Means safer. Even if Ways and Means could someday turn this world into a mirror of one of the Unity’s starscraper-laden Core Worlds, it would only be one world, one Earth. This Earth’s resources were few and commonplace.
Its crew believed one base was better than nothing. Their exile and uprooting had been too sudden, too traumatizing. They did not want to be adrift. They wanted a vestige of the old Unity. A home. Osia understood.
But she was also starting to understand that Ways and Means’ stated reason for colonizing this plane was just another lie.
Ways and Means had had its adventures and triumphs. It had saved the Unity more than once. The memories still sen
t a jolt of that feeling like adrenaline up Osia’s back. Ways and Means had once reprogrammed a race of plane-hopping, self-replicating weapons platforms, and shut them down. It had spun a web of gravitational wave filaments above a neutron star to inhibit a supernova – the energies of which were to have been gated to the Unity’s Core Worlds. It had vaporized a thirty-kilometer-thick sheaf of ice on a gas giant’s moon to expose the planet-devouring fungal species being bred within.
Through human agents like Osia, Ways and Means had spun a public relations campaign extolling the safety and security of empire. Ways and Means was not proud. Osia did not believe it could be proud. But she was. And she believed it felt something.
It could only seem dispassionate about coming to this end, its last life. It had done no better a job than Osia or the rest of its crew. Really, Osia suspected, it had started to fall apart.
Her constructs were no longer able to decipher their reality. They contradicted themselves in the same breath. The community of AIs that compromised Ways and Means’ identity had held together for centuries. Their bond had never been tested under conditions as stressful as this. It was possible that, like her constructs, its left and right minds didn’t understand what the other was doing.
Guessing Ways and Means’ motives was dangerous. But she was not sure that even Ways and Means understood itself. She suspected that its lies and obfuscation masked confusion.
For centuries, Ways and Means and the other amalgamates defined themselves by their territories. Now it had no territory. No empire. Its backups, its guarantee of immortality in the face of the disasters that now seemed everywhere, were lifetimes out of reach. It had none of those things it had defined itself by.
But that did not explain why Ways and Means wanted to kill her.
She needed more information. She could only think of one good way to get it.
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