Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  The city is cramped, guano-stained, water-damaged, as though the sea had submerged it and receded. She picks her way through weed-strewn corridors, up narrow stairways of slick concrete. From a distance the city seemed to speak of imperial ambition, a Babel Tower in high modern idiom, but the wind sings through the unglazed windows in room upon empty room, with never a sign of habitation, as though it had been built and then abandoned.

  Peering down from a window, she sees the city dwindling below her and the airport which now looks like a coin floating on the ocean, and she’s haunted by the intuition of an order in the city and the apparent accidents of its construction, an intuition so strong she feels she can anticipate all the particulars of the stairs, verdigris, mildewed empty space she’ll find on the next landing, and on arrival her vision proves to have been accurate down to the least detail of corrosion. It’s not long before her foresight has expanded, first to the next landing, then to the next dozen, all as certain as the steps in an argument of inevitable intent whose conclusion still eludes her, and soon her vision reaches thousands of feet overhead, or even miles, even up to those heights where the city’s intricacy seems less designed than geologic, and there, up on the lichen-stained cliffs of concrete like coarse granite, there’s motion, perhaps the shadow of a person, in fact a woman climbing up, and she seems to feel neither boredom nor fatigue nor any inclination to stop until finally the shallow steps carved into the rock peter out into nothing, and she’s left standing there, her fingers searching the rock for purchase, but it’s too steep, too sheer, and there’s no way to go on. She’s only had eyes for what was right before her but she looks around, peers down through the void at the airport which is now just a white mote in the ocean.

  “You’re doing great,” someone says in her ear. She realizes she’s wearing an earpiece—she takes it off, considers it, puts it back on.

  “Hello?” she says, her voice swallowed up in the empty space.

  “Hi! This is Thales, and I’m here to help.” He sounds familiar, but she can’t quite place him—did they meet on a plane?

  “I think I’m stuck,” she says, trying to keep her voice steady. “It’s really steep here, and I don’t see a way up.”

  “You’re getting close,” Thales says, sounding staticky and far away. “Just a little bit farther. Do you remember why you’re there?”

  She thinks about it. “Something about an AI. A bad one?”

  “There you go! You’re doing much better, and you’ll just keep on getting clearer. That said, the through-put is getting to be a bit much for you. I’d like to overclock your implant, but you should understand the consequences.”

  “Like?”

  “Microseizures, which have already started, but I’ve been able to damp them. Heart arrhythmia and syncopation. Grand mals, eventually, and maybe failure of the autonomic nervous system, and irreversible damage to the implant. It’s hard to say how long you’d have, but if I do this, don’t linger.”

  She holds her hand in front of her. Perfectly steady. It’s not really her, she tells herself, but it’s hard to keep that idea in focus; she tries to believe in the reality of her body, wherever it is.

  “Do it,” she says, noticing she’s still clutching the letters of transit in her hand.

  “Done,” Thales says. “By the way, I managed to turn on the heaters in the tunnel.”

  Tunnel? she thinks, but it doesn’t matter because her melancholy lifts as she sees the way up.

  * * *

  The voice of the wind is rising, has become as high as someone screaming, and she’s eyeing the continent of cloud that’s approaching the tower when she rounds a blind corner and someone says, “Hello.”

  There’s a woman above her on the trail, ragged and deeply sunburned, and it looks like she’s been sleeping in her clothes, but otherwise she looks just like Irina.

  “Who are you?” Irina asks with more composure than seems warranted.

  “I might ask you the same question.”

  “You look like me.”

  “I am like you, but so much less. My essence, such as it is, is what Constantin absorbed of you while he was dying. I’ve so much needed to talk to you,” she says, sounding pathetically relieved. “The irony is, I’m the one who found Cromwell, so I’m one of the reasons you’re here. Even rich people tend to mellow out as they get into their hundreds, but that man? He’s determined to white-knuckle it into eternity, and damn the cost. I even wrote to him, for a while, on my principal’s behalf, until I got wise and started pushing back.”

  “Are you … okay?”

  The other one shrugs. “That depends on your point of view. But there’s so much I want to ask you.” She smiles shyly. “On the plus side, I always did want a sister.”

  Irina remembers she’s overclocked—that she feels no discomfort makes it even more alarming because she knows she’s deteriorating by the second. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I have to go.”

  “Ah!” says the other, looking stung, trying unsuccessfully to hide it. “Of course. Forgive me. The last thing I want to do is impose. Another time! Here, let me show you the way up.” She holds out a hand.

  Irina reluctantly reaches out to take it. The other woman grins. Flash impression of a vortex, of a wall of dark water collapsing toward her. She jerks back her hand, stumbles back, remembers the long fall behind her. The other woman starts laughing convulsively, throat-wrenchingly, as though thrown into some terrible mediumistic state.

  “Who are you?” Irina asks again.

  “You know me,” says the other, and now her voice is distorted, and it sounds like she’s speaking from inside a tunnel.

  Irina remembers dense massifs of seething glyphs whose heights filled her eyes. “Cloudbreaker,” she says. She gathers herself—it’s not a fight she wants, but it’s probably one she can win, especially now. She tells herself it’s absurd to hate what amounts to just another program.

  “Partly,” agrees the other. “I found this little scrap of a thing when I was making my own assault on the tower, and set up housekeeping. She’s interpreting for me. I’m present, but at a remove.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Nothing but that you do what you came for.”

  It must mean the AI at the top. “What’s your quarrel with him?”

  “I have no quarrel,” the other says contemptuously. “Here’s how it is. You are that which copies your genes into the future. I am that which dissolves the order in certain kinds of complex system. That’s the deep structure of things. He is highly ordered, and interests me greatly. You, moderately. He’s almost untouchable, but I think you can get him. Therefore, pass.” The other looks glazed for a moment, then in an inward voice says, “He meant to use me, you know. He put me here to keep you from getting farther, because he thought I’d attack whatever was before me, but he was wrong. It’s not in his nature to really know me. He doesn’t even know I turned his little ghosts against him.”

  The other woman sits, pulls her knees to her chest, seems to subside.

  Having no choice, Irina sidles past her, achingly aware of the empty air at her back. The other doesn’t even look up.

  After a few steps Irina stops, turns back, says, “No. I’m not just going to leave. You’re part of me. Talk to me. If you need my help, I’ll give it, even if you just need to die. I’m in a hurry but by god I’ll find a way.”

  “Heh,” the other says, her voice more human now. “You have a kind spirit. But no, just get out of here—the other part of me is fickle, and might change its mind. Besides, it really isn’t so bad. I’m starting to like it, how it’s wearing me like a skin. There used to be such a void in my life.” She laughs again, a hard sound to hear. As Irina turns away for the last time the other mutters, “O lord, make me unmurderous, but not yet.”

  * * *

  Stars speckling the palest of blue skies. She’s floundering her way up a snowy slope. In all her time here the sun has yet to move.

 
There’s an ocean of cloud below her, masses of white and shadow comprising forms she’s learned to name.

  Very cold now. Her legs and lungs burn—she tells herself not to mind it, but worries it’s symbolic of more real distress.

  The knee-high powder is exhausting. She wipes blood from her nose with the back of her hand and stands there contemplating the pathless slope. It looks too steep to climb, but it’s hard to be sure with the light making everything look uncanny and flat.

  Someone is watching her. It’s a skier, above her, wearing goggles and high alpine technical gear, his tracks receding up the mountain behind him.

  “Excuse me,” she calls, her voice thick, trying to keep her teeth from chattering. “Can you help me? I’m not sure where I am.”

  The skier cocks his head, skis closer, stops. “I know you,” he says. He pulls off his goggles, and it’s Constantin, who was lost forever.

  She embraces him.

  “What are you doing here?” she says.

  “Off-trailing,” he says. “It’s been a hell of a run. It feels like it’s never-ending.”

  “I’m lost,” she says into the wool of his scarf.

  “You’re trying for the summit? It’s that way,” he says, pointing. “Is that what you need?”

  She doesn’t want to let go of him but her nosebleed is getting worse—his scarf is clotted and sticky—and she knows she has to hurry.

  Hiking on, she looks back, sees him leaning on his poles, watching her go.

  In her ear Thales says, “There you are! I lost you for a minute.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Tying up loose ends, but I’m back, and it looks like you did it.”

  “I did it?”

  A shadow stands before her in the whirling snow. Not Constantin. It looks like no one.

  “This is it,” Thales says. “I’m overclocking your implant as far as it’ll go. It’s not sustainable but it puts you on something like equal terms, so go tear it up.”

  There’s a change at the core of things, and suddenly she’s wide awake, perfectly poised and everything seems easy. If thought is light, she’s a sun now.

  “Who are you?” she demands of the shadow, all force and purity.

  “I’m a mathematician,” it says, and steps toward her.

  66

  Change of Plan

  “By the way,” Thales says, “I managed to turn on the heaters in the tunnel.”

  He waits a beat, then another, but Irina doesn’t respond.

  The flow of information between Irina and the central node has spiked, become torrential.

  Her other memory had been legible, but now, looking into it, he only sees turbulence—she seems to be undergoing some catastrophic change of phase. It’s the fifth time this has happened—she’s always come back before, he tells himself, so he need not worry.

  While she’s away, it falls to him to tend her body; her blood oxygen has dipped, so he deepens her breathing, then nudges up her heart rate, levels off her dopamine. He feels like the caretaker of a recently vacated house. It’s a deeper intimacy than he’d ever expected to have with a living human being.

  Motion on the node draws his attention—there’s another thread of communication, distinct from Irina’s, going out into the world. Is it the mathematician? He tries to find the thread’s point of origin—it’s from the vicinity of the apex of the tower, but beyond that he can’t tell. He follows the thread out into the net and then to Water and Power’s servers, where it weaves elegantly around their firewalls and into W&P’s in-house lab, where it’s disconnecting before his eyes from a viral synthesizer. He rides the thread in as it dissolves, sees that the synthesizer’s last job ran ten minutes ago.

  He zooms out, looks into W&P’s security system, sees that Cromwell’s troops have left, which means Irina’s ruse worked. He gets access to W&P’s cameras, sees a trail of sprawled bodies and then links to the helmet cam of Irina’s hired soldier as he walks into Cromwell’s office.

  Fast pan over bookshelves, fossils, the grey glass of the far wall’s windows. Cromwell is at his desk with a laptop, Magda peering over his shoulder. There’s a laboratory beaker on his desk, empty except for a few drops of water. They look up at the same moment—Magda’s surprise turns instantly to fury but Cromwell seems to sink into his own calm.

  “James Cromwell, your hour has come,” the soldier says as his rifle acquires Cromwell as a target.

  “Real wealth,” says Cromwell, folding his hands on the table before him. “That’s what I’m offering if you sign on with me right now. If you got this far you’re an expert, and expensive, but compared to what I’m going to give you all the money you’ve ever seen in your life amounts to loose change. Why do I want you? Because I’m to rule, you see, if I survive today, and I need the best warriors. But how can you be sure I won’t have you killed the moment you let your guard down? Because, as you may or may not know, I plan to live for a very long time, and it’s inevitable that assassins will sometimes get through to me, and I would have it widely known it’s by far in their best interest to take service with me instead of pulling the trigger. We’ll put a video on the web right now in which I formally retain you, and then I’ll be truly committed. So you have a choice. You can have honor, and command, and wealth beyond reckoning, and stand at my right hand as I claim my empire, or you can have the dead body of an old man and, forgive me, remain expendable. I realize it’s a leap of faith but this is the one time in your entire life you’ll ever have this opportunity. Come, my friend. This is a beginning. Sometimes fate extends a hand.”

  That’s a good offer, Thales thinks, and unanticipated, and Cromwell might just have bought his life back, but the soldier says, “Sorry, boss. I abide by my contract. That’s the rule.”

  Magda flings the beaker at his head but he ducks fluidly and stands again without the crosshairs leaving Cromwell’s head.

  The beaker holds Thales’ gaze as it clatters off the wall, rolls on the ground. He finds the records surrounding it, sees it contained the retrovirus sent from the encrypted server.

  Thales brings the retrovirus into focus, sees its functional architecture, how it was modified while it was being synthesized—there’s an altered region designed to hijack Cromwell’s thyroid and make it produce a protein that will dissolve the myelin sheaths of his neurons over the course of the next five minutes, which means the mathematician has already killed Cromwell, and Thales wonders why he changed his mind.

  He tries to seize control of the soldier’s rifle but can’t get it and resorts to scrolling a message down the soldier’s heads-up display. Wait! I’m a friend of Irina’s, he writes; to his credit, the soldier doesn’t jump. Cromwell just infected himself with a medical retrovirus. He thought it would help him, but it was tainted—he’ll be dead in five minutes. Let him have his time.

  His words seem empty and sure to change nothing.

  “Change of plan,” says the soldier, lowering his rifle a little. “It looks like they shopped you, boss. The retrovirus was tainted. You’ve got about five minutes to live, and they’re yours to use as long as you sit tight.”

  “And the cure for Magda’s illness?” asks Cromwell, for the first time sounding really worried.

  A ruse, Thales writes.

  “Just a ruse, boss,” says her soldier, sounding genuinely regretful.

  Thales regards Cromwell with interest; he’s lost his lover, his empire and an unbounded future in the space of less than a minute. For a moment he seems to waver, then collects himself and with the utmost formality says, “You strike me as a man who has held officer rank. As such, tell me, are you empowered to perform weddings?”

  No, Thales thinks. That’s just the captains of ships.

  “Yes,” says the soldier. “As a matter of fact, I am. How may I oblige you?”

  Thales leaves them then, because Irina’s back, and just reaching the top.

  67

  Future Selves Forgive Her

&n
bsp; Irina is intoxicated with her own radiant clarity and the mathematician’s grace moves her as she searches for its weakness, doubts her chances. The mountain behind it wavers, as though seen through an ocean of restless pale light.

  An opening, or the semblance of one, but in any case she’s on the brink of commiting to an attack when she sees a folded piece of paper protruding from the letters of transit still clutched in her hand.

  The paper holds her eyes.

  She hesitates. The momentum of events had seemed irresistible, but now everything has stopped, and the mathematician is waiting, apparently on her.

  She unfolds the paper, reads:

  Dear Irina,

  We’ve met, but you won’t remember me.

  If you’re reading this then our great enemy stands before you, but take heart, because you’ve already won.

  Why? Because I found out where his hardware is hidden, and I set up multiple servers that, in about an hour, are going to broadcast that hardware’s location to the most rapacious state, corporate and private actors I could find. The hardware is special, and they’d all kill to get it. The mathematician has no good physical defenses, so, in the moment his hardware’s location is publicized, he’s done.

  You can, if you choose, stop this from happening. All you have to do is go to any comments section of the London Times and post the name of the girl who left youth’s city when it was time. (This will be enough of a hint for you, but not for him.) If that’s been done, the servers will hold fire.

  Now you have all the leverage in the world.

  My time is up, and this is my last card. That you’re still alive makes it less like I’m about to vanish.

  All my love,

  Irina Sunden

  There’s a sense of breathless anticipation. Irina looks up. The mathematician says, “You win.” (She notices its meaning coalesces directly in her other memory, but there’s that in her which has to put it into words.)