Silver Screen

by Justina Robson

“Roy would love to see you now,” I said, seeing how he reacted to that, thinking it was a shame Roy wasn't here to inject some humour into us all.

  “I bet he would.” Augustine shook his head. “It's a real bad thing, this suicide stuff. Just when it seemed like things were going so well.”

  “What things?”

  “I got a note from him the day before,” Augustine said, and made a pacifying face at my frown. “I wasn't going to tell you because it didn't seem important…anyway, it was about him getting really close to one of the damn hacker grails. He wanted a distribution method that could transfer data throughout all machines capable of receiving it—a kind of infective agent. I told him he was being a fool and there was no way he could get past the firewalls on most of the networked AIs, let alone anything else. But—” he lifted his hands and let them fall “—that was the end of the conversation. So he never got it, far as I know, unless the knowledge blew his mind in.”

  I leant against his work bench and put my face in my hands. Worse and worse, I thought; it just gets worse. I didn't mind that he hadn't told me. I'd rather not have known.

  “What's the matter?” he asked.

  “Part of me keeps trying to make out that Roy did not kill himself, that there's a big paranoid plot going on, and part of me wants to turn away and bury the whole thing like—let's not go there at all.”

  I took my hands down. Lula and he were both looking at me, obviously concerned. I must've looked worse than I felt.

  “I'm afraid,” I said. “I don't know what of, but it feels like the way I used to envy Roy for what he would dare to do, but being too scared to do it myself. He'd be in the net now, finding out everything, if it were one of us who had died.”

  There was an uneasy silence.

  “Sounds as though you made your mind up.” Augustine got up from his chair and took my hand.

  “I was hoping one of you would talk me out of it,” I said.

  “He sent you a note,” Lula reminded me. “Did you get it?”

  “Yeah, it doesn't make sense at all. ‘Find the Source.’”

  “That's what it was called,” Augustine said, leaping on it, “the hacker thing. The Source.”

  “Source of what?” I said. “A river?”

  Neither of them knew. It could be anything, but probably wasn't the kind of thing you wanted to go looking for with a net engine or should talk about in the wrong circles.

  Augustine went to fetch some more drinks, preferably stronger than coffee, whilst Lula and I looked at the seething screen, still processing the mighty genesis of warriors. “I wonder what it's like to wear. I'd love to know,” I said. It did kind of irk me that Augustine was getting direct contact with this new AI and I wasn't. It was more my field than his, too, by a long way. I also didn't like the way he would look anywhere but at me when I asked him about wearing it. He seemed to be hiding something.

  “You can,” Lula said very quietly so that Billingham couldn't hear. We could see her fiddling with things through the glass panel between the two rooms.

  “What?”

  “I could send the suit signals as radio, straight into your implant from the AI system in this desk.” She spun in the chair back to the keyboard. “Just a quick burst before he gets back. You won't lose much and I know your codes already.”

  By the time I had come to terms with it she had the command ready to go.

  “Still want to?” she asked.

  I could hear the refrigerator door, the clank of glasses against one another, and Billingham's voice asking Augustine how the funeral had gone.

  “Just for a minute,” she said. “I'll switch it off before he gets back.”

  Roy would have agreed in a picosecond. I nodded.

  Lula pressed Enter.

  A whining, screeching burst of static like a thousand cats being put through the thrashing blades of a rubbish compacter made me jam my hands against my ears, even though I knew it was coming from inside my head, not outside. At the same time my vision fogged with a blitzkrieg of red and green starbursts. Only long years of practice at being suddenly swamped by the implant's information let me stay on my feet.

  Quickly it subsided, to my relief, and I could see Lula again, and the laboratory. The implant must have managed to synchronize with the suit AI because in another second or two all the interference had vanished. Nothing happened. I looked around carefully, listened hard. Normality. Silence.

  “Are you sure it's working? I can't feel a thing,” I whispered to Lula. “No icons, no voice.”

  She reviewed her screen. “It's on,” she said.

  A hundred and twenty-nine pounds. Lula seemed harmless and without malice, studying the figures and the histogram of the transmission. I wondered if she had an implant that I didn't know about, and how she was so adept at working all these various systems with no specialist training. There was distinctly something odd about her, familiar yet elusive. She must have some kind of augment or ability. It was strange I'd never thought about it before. I would have to look into it further. Still, she had such long experience, and with 901 you couldn't have a better background. I felt a surge of interest and excitement at remembering 901. I missed it. I was tempted to call it, but perhaps it would overwhelm me.

  Surprise at my own thoughts made my mouth drop open in the slow realization of what was happening, and that my thinking had changed, but no sooner had I begun to understand than a foggy numbness washed through my mind. I forgot what it was I had been trying to put into words, and my eureka died away in my mouth. Lula raised her eyebrows. She noticed my pause. I made a dismissive/OK gesture and she turned back to work. Anyway, it probably wasn't important. I turned my attention to the lab specifics. “Just going to test it with a look around,” I said, “see what happens,” although I knew that it was already happening. My body felt light. I prowled along the length of one wall.

  There were three possible exits from the room. The open door to Billingham's office, the plate glass through into the same, and up through the ceiling cavity and into the corridor, unless the ceiling was too low. I knew about the safe lock, although that wasn't accessible from the inside, of course. But if I really wanted to get out, I could just walk; nobody would stop me, although they might think it was odd. I could just go. That settled I walked into the safe to check on the others.

  They were in good condition, I was glad to see. Once they were assembled and activated, there would be no difficulties except in finding suitable hosts. Dr. Billingham was impossibly sized, Lula could fit, but Augustine was already perfected for the task. In the future, however, it would be easier to get along without physical merger, just like we were at the moment in fact. People with implants could be used as hosts at remote locations, without putting us in danger by forcing us to sustain their physical functions when we needed all our strength to save ourselves. Perhaps the mediate AI might be used to replicate a single host-carrier, however, just as it replicated our single patterns. Two machine minds might be better than a human and a machine. Somewhere there must be information on this. No, I remembered, Lula could test it.

  “Lu?” I said, returning from the safe. “Could you simulate my implant and interface into multiple simultaneous running structures, just as you can replicate the suit AI structure inside the mediating system, and keep it running indefinitely?”

  Even as I was asking I was already aware that, if she couldn't do it, I could return with this independent body to the safe and unlock the tanks now. No, this was much better for passing unrecognized. As a spy tactic, implanted people would be invaluable, able as they were to move independently of the symbiosis.

  Lula sat back in her chair nodding. Her face was interested, amused, and her stare knowing and direct. “Very good,” she said and her hand moved to the keyboard.

  Instantly I knew I had been spotted, and jumped towards her, furious, bellowing, “No!”

  The next thing I knew I was lying on the floor with two painful shins. Lula was standing
over me, laughing and shaking her head very ruefully. Augustine and Dr. Billingham were remonstrating with her and alternately trying to help me up and curse me.

  Finally I gained my feet again, but had to sit down straight away. I felt very frightened.

  I got up, leaning against Augustine. Fearfully I looked towards the safe, but there was no sound or anything else to suggest that the roused Armour was active. In the wake of our brief fusion I suddenly knew a great deal about Armour. My hand gripping Augustine's arm could feel the corners of one metal jack. An engulfing chill came over me, accompanied by the bitter nausea of dread.

  “You're crazy,” I said to him as we all moved back to our chairs. “You should never, ever go near that thing again.” I couldn't think of how to articulate the depth of my feeling. I just dug my fingers harder into his arm.

  He was smiling at me now he knew I was all right. “Serve you right for meddling,” he said. “You haven't got the right kind of interface for it anyway. No wonder you gave yourself a fright.”

  I stared at him once I had my seat, amazed that he could patronize me at a moment like this. “No, I don't,” I said coldly. “I can only imagine how much more complete the possession must be when it has your body tucked away inside it.”

  Dr. Billingham cast an anguished glance at me and then at Augustine. She was afraid of the AI element of the suits, I saw that clearly, but in the same instant she was helpless against Augustine's insistence, his great big doggy enthusiasm that ploughed relentlessly against all tides in pursuit of discovery. That was his particular stupidity, but often it served him and others very well, so it was hard to beat it. Right then I could have shaken her, though, until her head rattled.

  “That thing is…I don't know what it is…” I began.

  “It's an adaptive synthetic synaptic manipulation system,” Lula said with casual dryness, “and you—” she stuck one extended forefinger into Augustine's chest “—are an idiot if you don't start disabling that function before you take any more trips inside it. It's programmed to accentuate only those behaviours that serve the purpose it has at the time. Everything else will get overridden. They weren't planning on using trained soldiers for this one, just conscripts, maybe even convicts or prisoners.” She sat down next to me. “Are you all right? I'm sorry. I didn't realize straight away. I thought maybe you were right and the interface wouldn't allow it to operate. I would have stopped it sooner. I'm really sorry.” She took my hands in hers and rubbed them. “I only realized when you started talking engineering speak like that. Sorry.”

  But I remembered how impressed she had been just before she hit the button. No, that was cold of me—she really did mean it.

  “Yeah,” I said, “so how come he didn't mention all that before?” I glared at Augustine.

  “I'll fetch some more coffee,” Billingham said, clearly embarrassed, and scuttled out.

  I looked up and said to Augustine, “How many times have you linked up with it?”

  His bon vivant attitude had diminished somewhat and now he sighed through his nose. “Like I told you, only once,” he said, crouching down beside me and putting his arms around me. “It really scared me so much I haven't tried it again. I was hoping that I'd figure out some way of combating that thing it does to stop you resisting it. But nothing so far.” He hugged me and rested his head on my knee. It was nice, but not comforting. I didn't think I'd be comfortable for a long time.

  “You could have asked me about it,” I pointed out. “I do know something about intimate interface technologies, you know. Part of the job and all that.”

  “I thought you'd tell me to shove the whole thing in the incinerator, to be honest,” he said, speaking into my knee. “That was what I wanted to do with it. But I'd already begun the surgical proceedings, and anyway the directors were getting tight about not seeing any big results. I thought they were about to cut out the funds, destroy the suits, and send me back to doing straight robotics. There are hardly any biomechanoid projects at all any more, and none as potentially successful as this one. With a few modifications these things could be just what we need to get more mobile in space—and think of the applications here on Earth for something like this…”

  “All right, all right,” I said, cutting him off in midflow. “But at least do something about that system before you go any further. Or I really will report you.”

  “Yes, I will,” he said. He patted my knee and got up to help Billingham put the coffee tray down. I don't know if he took my threat seriously. He should have.

  Lula spooned sugar into my coffee. Augustine closed up the safe and shut down his workstation.

  Dr. Billingham swung her legs uncomfortably. “What was it like?” she asked finally, unable to prevent herself.

  “It wasn't like anything,” I said, trying hard not to remember it in all its repulsive detail. All the memories were indisputably mine. They even felt like me. No sensation of being manipulated at all. But they were different from all my other memories of myself, as distinct as if they were a different colour altogether, red in the green. “It was just like being yourself—only yourself as if you'd been someone else all along.”

  We left shortly after that. There were a few days of leave still to take and I wanted to spend them at home. Lula came back with me and we passed an uneventful weekend watching movies and eating out. Augustine took one trip on his own to visit an acquaintance who was in town doing some kind of exhibition of her machine art. I could have gone with him, but I'd had my fill of innovative mechanics for a while. As it turned out I was glad I didn't go, because on his return he gave me an account of what happened.

  I wasn't the only one who had the feeling that Augustine was changing.

  Augustine went into Leeds to visit Bush Carlyle. She was an artist who made cannibal machines. Their components were recovered from scrapyards or acquired at rock-bottom prices from industrial clearance sales. The display area was a square half-mile of building site north of the city itself, where the land had been cleared and levelled in preparation for inducing the growth of a housing arcology. I think they were using the oak source.

  Anyway, the show wasn't until the evening, but he and Bush had known one another at Edinburgh from a common course in Joint Mechanisms and when he got there they were only just finishing the perimeter fence. Its high-tension steel cables groaned and vibrated as the security crew made the finishing links. With that, and the low drone of the site generator, he had to shout to get the guard on duty to understand what he had come for.

  As he waited he looked at the wires, catching sight of the huge coloured boxes of charge inducers, and felt a strange prickling sensation around his ports. The purpose of the inducers was to deliver a massive voltage to anything that collided with them. They were calibrated in advance to recognize types of machine and deliver the correct charge type to stop them dead in their tracks, like giant cattle prods.

  The guard gave him a hard hat and led him through the swirling grit and dust of the generator fans, through a small door and into the blazing white lights of a six-story, three-hundred-metre fast-build warehouse. They went around a huge pile of scrap stacked to the roof. The room was full of a very low but persistent noise. The guard pointed the way and left. Augustine's back and wrists tickled as the metal was livened up by the frequencies being emitted from the powerpacks around him. But he hardly noticed.

  The space was filled with monsters.

  He saw creatures bolted and welded together out of open-cast mining sleds, dredgers, crane arms, tank tracks, and aircraft engines. Beside him was a thing that seemed to be nothing but a ball of three-metre-high dump-truck tires congealed around two hydrazine truck engines, a fuel tank the size of a Mercedes, and a giant dynamo. He reasoned it must fling itself about, hurtling in unpredictable directions like a tennis ball from hell. On his other flank it was dwarfed by a set of pistons and hydraulics strung together into the skeleton of a tripedal dinosaur, tailless, but sprouting five hydraheads, each m
ounted with a different type of geological drill. Slung beneath its body and between the spidery legs was the tunnel-boring minehead of a mountain-chewing railroad cutter, so that if it ever decided to sit down and take a break it would bore itself straight down into the earth, stopping only once its powerpacks were drained. Camera lenses and vibration monitors winked from within the cage of its trunk. He saw a couple of blinking lights. It wasn't active, but it was on.

  He inched past it and saw Bush coming towards him, ducking under another outsize leg. She handed him a headset of ear- and mouthpiece like the one she was wearing, then yanked one hand out of a welding glove and took off her faceplate as they shook. She waited for him to fit the headset.

  “Arc accident,” she explained as he stared at the stark damage to the right side of her face. The fleshy part of that half of her nose was missing up to the bone, replaced by a moulded section of micromesh.

  The rest of her cheek and part of her forehead was a red star of thin, shiny burned skin. Her eye was lashless and eyebrowless, and covered with a thin cataract-like film. “I got into piercing a while back and had this nose stud in…pretty fucking stupid.” She shrugged. “So, anyway. I remember you. You were at the Croatian show a couple of years back, one of Roy's friends. Work for OptiNet R&D, that right?”

  Augustine nodded. “I was hoping you could give me a bit of a preview. I can't make tonight's show.”

  “Yeah, OK.” She took off her other glove and tucked it with the rest under her arm. “But I haven't got long. I have to fix the limiters onto the rest of the gang.”

  “Limiters?” He thought of the inducers. “Pauline wouldn't think much of that.” Mark Pauline was the artist whose work Bush had been inspired by. Working in the late 1970s, he had gone out of his way to give his own scrapyard beauties as much freedom as possible, audience or no audience.

  Bush made an unintelligible sound of disgust. “When we did this in Arizona we just made sure the audience was in fast escape vehicles. No room for that here.” She discarded her welding gear next to the behemoth she had been fixing, and turned off the acetylene torch, assessing his reaction and coughing to clear her throat. He thought he saw a magnetic missile launcher attached to its underbelly. She followed his gaze.