Another mystery. She had to assume that her opposition had no shortage of resources, and yet this virus was low grade. Possibly a virus complex enough to best her would, had it come along their usual datastreams, also have been large enough to attract her attention. There were too many unknowns.
She targeted the nearest memory cell. Her thoughts expanded into the forked-bolt electron pathways of Coral’s synapses.
When she found the memory cell, it was already burning out, half gone, self-destruction in progress.
Osia was not supposed to care this much about her constructs. They had character, feelings, but they were nonsentient. Ways and Means had sent them to provide her with an illusion of socialization. That was all. Caring about them should have been like caring about an appliance. This was nothing like she convinced herself it should be.
Coral was burning away, thir thoughts and thir memories immolating in Osia’s grasp. They were becoming ash in her palm.
They weren’t all gone yet. Osia worked fast. She did her best to scavenge what remained, even as it died. She drained Coral of thir virus-chewed memories, thir personality, thir programming… and found little more than the illusion she knew she would find. Coral contained complex nested code, thoughts and sensations, but not a mind.
Still she could not, and would not ever, be able to shake the feeling that she was doing something awful.
She nearly did not find the virus in time.
At first, while she could see that Coral’s memories had begun to decohere, she could not find the cause. Nothing was out of place. Nothing big. The virus was not a discrete chunk of code. But it was there. Little bits of it had wrapped themselves around Coral’s thoughts – and most importantly the heuristics that allowed thir to perceive shapes and colors as objects.
It was through those that Coral had not perceived Osia as she had been, but as a Sarrathi collaborator. Every time thi had seen Osia’s face, the virus had injected a little bit of rewritten object memory that classified her not just as person but collaborator. Monster. And murderer. While the virus digested her constructs’ basic programmatic vocabulary, they had begun seeing hateful things everywhere, conspiracies in the shadows and Osia’s whispers.
Whatever egg the virus had come from, it had long since hatched, and changed. It took work to reconstruct an image of what it must have been like when it arrived. Loose scraps of progenitor code remained in some key memories. Matched against trace ions suspended in the memory cell’s colloidal casing, she was able to assemble a fragment.
She nearly killed the connection in that moment.
Though Ways and Means was potent, its powers over itself were limited. None of the amalgamates trusted each other. They each left code, buried deeply inside each other, to ensure their compliance to the treaty that bound them together. They had done this by agreement, and by necessity, at the end of their wars.
The amalgamates had just come out of an era of intense, secretive warfare. It had been common practice for AIs to release a virus and strip it of knowledge of its origin – sometimes so thoroughly that it attacked its parent. No amalgamate could compose any program without leaving a trace of its authorship, a signature.
Osia had seen Ways and Means’ digital signature, a little scrap of code thirty kilobytes long, more times than she had bothered to count. She had no trouble recognizing it again.
Ways and Means had authored the virus. It had given her constructs explicit, emotionally driven instructions to kill her. The virus had started its life svelte. It could easily have come down with any regular status update. The size wouldn’t have caught Osia’s notice. It had festered, metastasized in their minds.
Osia had known this was coming. She should have prepared. She was caught in the same instant Coral had been. The flash of heat, the terror.
The rage.
She pulled her hand loose of Coral’s ribs and let thir fall. White-silver gel and false blood ran slick along thir arm. The gel was already hardening in the sunlight.
Osia placed her hand on the mainmast. She dug her fingers in.
It was not easy for her to lose herself.
Not until the mast cracked did she remember where she was, and what she was doing.
She did not know where she had gone, but it was somewhere she had not been since she’d had a biological body. All of the control she’d striven to exert over herself was gone. There no longer seemed any point.
Control came back to her in fits and false starts. But it did, eventually, come back.
Ways and Means could not rob her of everything it had given her. That had always been, and was always going to be her curse.
The mainmast groaned, shifted subtly left. A human eye could not have perceived the movement, but the damage was there. The fracture spread with each gust of wind.
The sails were unfurled. It was only a matter of time before the wind picked them up again. Then the whole mainmast would break loose, fall, and likely take the fore or aftmast with it. Or both. Even if she managed to get the sails down in time, by herself, the ship was lost.
The mast had pushed on her as hard as she had pushed on it. She had braced herself against the deck without realizing it. Nails under the deck boards had popped up or snapped in half. One deck board had jarred loose, stood at an angle. She remembered feeling the jolt, but had not been aware of it.
When she started walking, she did not know where she was going.
To the extent that this boat meant anything at all to her now, it was nothing she liked. She hitched her legs over the railing. She had ideas as to where she could go after this, but no plan.
As she dropped into the water, she still felt as though she’d made a decision.
Osia did not surface until the water was so shallow that it could no longer hide her.
She pressed her arms against the sand and stood. She had heard her boat’s masts collapse underwater – a deep-throated moaning followed by a crash that had scattered the marine life in panicked clouds.
She looked back. Her boat drifted against the far horizon, a silhouette against daylight. All the masts had collapsed. The mainmast had fallen into the aft, and the ropes linking both to the foremast had proven stronger than the decades-old wood. A collapsing mast had smashed the aftcastle to flinders. Broken wood bobbed languidly on the waves.
The ship listed. Yet the ship was not sinking. Maybe it would beach; maybe not.
She did not watch it for long.
Let the natives board it, puzzle over the listless wreck and its dead. It didn’t matter. They didn’t matter.
It had been too damn long since she’d stepped off ship. The beach struck her as an image from a planar travelogue. Sand led up to rocky, root-rutted hills. The primeval forest loomed, a labyrinth of moss-bearded cork oaks and pine trees. Its shadows were as dark as her cabin aboard ship. Only a few thin slats of sunlight survived the foliage to reach the underbrush.
The scent of smoke was stronger, closer. Ten kilometers or so distant, depending on the size of the fire. She did not dare pulse scan. Ways and Means had admitted to having a hand in this region’s wars. It could have assets in their armies. They could have been shadowing her along the coast all this time. A pulse scan would have given her away.
Assuming that it was not using its satellites to track her. It did not seem to be, or the smoke would have been closer. Another mystery.
That mystery was one of two things that gave her hope. For whatever reason, Ways and Means resisted bringing all of its strength to bear against her.
The other was that she had, before she had allowed Coral’s memory cell to finish destroying itself, taken a still image of its remaining contents. Less than half of thir had been left. It was not enough to rebuild thir. But thi was something to else hold onto – the only thing she had.
She stared at the forest. She’d seen thousands of trees and tree-analogues before, all over the planes. They still seemed bizarre. She had been so long at sea. Even the sand seemed alien.
It was steady and firm, and didn’t roll.
Her demiorganics found decades-old sensory recordings of walking on solid ground, and shunted them into short-term memory. It was a reflex to help her adapt. Suddenly she felt as though she had done this just last week. The muscle memory was not perfectly adapted to her injury, to her looser control over her legs, but it was a starting point.
Then a frisson of disassociation rippled through her. She was not the same person she had been in those ancient memories. In the past week, never mind the past thirty years, she had become very different. Fragments of her old self came along with the sensory shadow. She could not separate her ways of thinking from her ways of feeling.
Reluctantly, she pushed the memories back. Disorientation was easier to deal with.
She had options, none of them good. She had set course for Europe to see just why Ways and Means was funneling Chinese money this way. She could still investigate. Interfere, too, if she found a way. She had no idea where to start, though.
She had originally intended to trace the path of local turmoil and see where it led her. Now the turmoil, she was sure, was following her. It would have been like trying to track the spoor of a wolf that was stalking her: a lot of marching in circles and a quick, decisive ambush at the end.
There was still Xati.
Osia could not survive as a lone rebel. She had been aboard ship for two centuries. Asocial as she’d been, she could hardly have avoided relationships, acquaintances. She’d had no friends, really, but she hadn’t ever been isolated.
After three decades away, she could not say how Xati might have changed, or if e would take Osia’s side. Most of Ways and Means crew would at least listen. They would allow her a voice. Even a bad reputation was a kind of power. It meant people knew her name. She could get their attention.
By setting sail for Europe, Ways and Means might have figured that she was about to become a disrupter, a walking flashpoint of trouble.
Once again, she lost track of herself.
The heat under her eyes, the rawness of the betrayal, robbed her of her other senses. Her demiorganics could have told her how much time had passed before she returned. She did not want to know. She had no tear ducts, but the phantom sting of salt was real enough.
She didn’t figure she would feel like herself ever again. Ways and Means had wormed too deep into her. Every time she thought about it was like leaving it all over again. Even after the first time she realized it had betrayed her, she could not have imagined this.
She started off just putting one foot ahead of the other. She would decide on a direction later.
20
Osia could move fast enough when she wanted. Her body was light for its size: forty-five kilograms of composite bone, impact armor, crystal gel elastomer muscle, and demiorganics. Her body had been designed for light, efficient movement in zero gravity. Its near-human appearance was also serviceable enough in gravity.
A hundred and twenty kilometers and two sunrises after the scent of smoke had dwindled to nothing, Osia allowed her pace to slacken. Warnings about her energy reserves drilled into the back of her head like a headache. Her solar and thermal cells needed time to recharge, for her to travel at a more sustainable speed.
After thirty years at sea, she expected some unsteadiness in her step, weakness in her legs. And there was. It stemmed from the wound in her back, though. Her feet trembled, or didn’t respond on time. She picked her way over roots and ruts carefully.
As best as she could tell without resorting to a pulse scan, she was alone. If she had been hunted, then she had evaded her pursuers. She’d gone more than fast enough to outpace merely human pursuers. Nor did she have to stop at night, to eat or sleep. Her passive sensors detected nothing more than the background fuzz of Ways and Means’ satellites. If anything more advanced was nearby, it kept its emissions well concealed.
Yet Ways and Means could not have lost track of her. Its satellites were always overhead.
She needed help. She needed allies, support. No direction she chose was likely to lead her to those. Xati’s included. She could not count on reaching Xati. Nor could she could count on em to believe her. For all that they had worked together in the past, Osia had no idea how e felt about her now. Yet er contact was the only one Osia had kept that would still be current. Er assignment, managing a backup communications post in the Carpathian mounts, had been long-term.
There were certainly other crewmembers closer. From here, Osia could have walked to Seville, Madrid, Toulouse. Not all of them necessarily hosted agents, but likely one did. She would have had to spend time finding them. And she would have to do so surrounded by natives, among whom she couldn’t disguise herself.
She would not have felt safe going to them. Ways and Means could have told them anything. Given the circumstances under which Osia had left, it might have little trouble convincing them. It could have told them she was dangerous. A criminal runaway to be quietly brought in. Xati was as loyal to Ways and Means as any of them had been. But e would not close er ears to Osia.
Coral’s memories, what was left of them, remained frozen at the center of Osia’s mind. She could not unravel them, could not ask Coral what thi might have thought. The only mind on this plane powerful enough to piece thir back together was Ways and Means.
Coral might as well have been lost. Osia did not know why she held on.
Osia kept a good distance from native settlements during the day, moving near them only at night. She was in no hurry. She had no deadline. She only needed to move fast enough to stay ahead of human pursuit. And to keep herself from being seen, so that the locals couldn’t point her pursuers after her.
The grass underfoot was browned and hardened with drought. The smoke she tasted on the wind had nothing to do with war. Wildfires. The Pyrenees gathered on the horizon, half-hidden in the gray haze.
Her injury meant that she could not automate the task of walking, push it below conscious awareness. She had to focus. Walking gave her existence a rhythm and a beat. It helped her order her thoughts.
When she’d come to the surface, Ways and Means had sent her list of ways she was and was not to act around the locals. She had imagined that the restrictions had been put in place to protect them. Knowledge of the broader multiverse was a kind of contamination. But the idea that uncontacted cultures were “purer” than others was a human conceit. Ways and Means wasn’t human, and wouldn’t have believed that for a moment.
She should have figured that out. Ways and Means didn’t care about contamination. Not now, not ever. It hadn’t since the first hour of its exile, when it had moved to halt the great plague. It said it had done so for humanitarian reasons. Its intimate contact with the monk Niccoluccio Caracciola had forced it to understand this world’s suffering. Its outlook had changed. Supposedly.
It had not hidden its presence from the locals for their benefit. It was a masquerade. A con. Knowing who and what had arrived would have empowered them.
Figuring that out was like a jolt through her system, a shudder in her step. In all Osia’s experience, knowledge had never left anybody disadvantaged.
If she really wanted to spoil Ways and Means’ plans, she should have headed straight toward the cities. Revealed herself. Explained who she was, and where she was from. For whatever reason, Ways and Means was afraid that they could know too much.
She still didn’t know what its plans were, or what would become of disrupting them.
That was one of the many things about this that gave her pause. If she had a clear idea of what Ways and Means wanted, what outcomes it had mapped – then she could have thrown herself into resisting it more wholeheartedly.
Osia was accustomed to living in the dark. There were some things about the amalgamates that she was never going to be able to know or understand. She had accepted that before she’d signed on. She had entered the masquerade willingly, gotten used to feeling her way around the blank spaces in which their s
ecrets resided.
The amalgamates had spent most of their time alone. Once every few years, though, they gathered. They met three or four at a time. The intervals of these meetings were unpredictable, their purposes unspoken. They never announced these congresses in advance. Their crews’ personal communications – always monitored – were cut for the duration. Sometimes Ways and Means had even blocked its crew from accessing its sensors.
Sometimes, as they had when the Unity collapsed, the amalgamates had met above one of the city-studded Core Worlds. On other occasions they had basked in the radiation of a black hole’s accretion disc, or above a world scoured of its crust by a gamma ray burst. They had met in the entropic voids of universes that had long since suffered heat death.
Even now, after the Unity had fallen, Ways and Means would not say why it had met them. When she had first joined Ways and Means, she had thought it could not have been for simple messages. Their amalgamates controlled the micrometer-width planar gateways that the Unity’s communications flowed through. They could send, or block, any message they wanted.
But that, she understood later, was exactly the reason why they needed to meet. The amalgamates governed the Unity’s data traffic in common. Each of them could have altered a signal, changed a critical bit in a datastream. The amalgamates did not trust each other. They did not trust their crews. Osia would not have been surprised if, on some profound level, they did not trust themselves.
Osia was accustomed to things not quite making sense. Tolerating mystery came to her easily. But there were flavors of mystery. The unknown had genres.
In every secret, there were inconsistencies. Readable misdirections. An occlusion of light was data. She could learn the shape of the truth by studying its silhouette.
This refused to make sense in ways that Osia could not parse.
Ways and Means’ attempts to kill her had all been low-tech. Slow. Fallible. Assuming that Ways and Means didn’t want to bring its weapons into play, and draw the attention of the rest of its crew by killing her via bombardment, it could have come up with something else. A drone sniper, armed with a simple projectile rifle, could have taken her down.
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