“It was always the moral elements of AI that put humans right off it,” I said, concentrating. Now I had been here a few minutes, I thought I was getting the hang of some control about the images and reality I supplied him. From the darkness a room began to emerge. I gave Roy/the Shoal a table and some chairs. He sat down and made attentive, able to tell by my tone that he was in for some listening. “This technology mania that they have, their view of human beings as objects or assets or scenery or tools. Roy had that, too—the old Roy.” I gave him a tablecloth and a drink. Above us, heavy ironwork-shaded lamps glowed with the grey-white monochrome light of old film. “And what you just said makes me think you have it, too. Why else force an evolution which otherwise would roll on in the years naturally? Roy was apart from other people. Jane saved herself at the last moment, maybe,” I suggested, watching him for a reaction.
“Thanks for the analysis, Dr. O'Connell,” he said, “but this is all rather trite and off the point.”
“Oh no. This is exactly the point,” I said.
The bar came into view. And the piano.
“This entire drama swings around two poles. The values of humanity and the continual theme of false witness. You say you loved me, and then in the next breath you damn anyone in the way of your scheme. These things are not compatible. You always acted as if your power with ideas and calculation made you above everyone in other ways. You never had a responsible shred in you, and now you want me to complete your cheap revenge on your father because somehow you hope that untested techno-nightmare suit will kill him. We were your friends, but you always played us like pieces. Give me one good reason why I should get that book and give the code to your Free Machine Republic.”
“If you don't do it, then the Green terrorists loyal to the cause will kill you,” he said. He lifted his glass and sniffed. “Bombay gin—you remembered.” And he smiled.
“I take it they weren't the same people as tried before?”
“No, that was the Masons' misjudgement. They were convinced by Klein that you would agree in principle to lie in court, but then tell the truth on the stand.”
Outmanoeuvred again. But best to continue the fight until everything had come out. “But now the lawyers have convinced them that my testimony is really not the vital component,” I said and he nodded, looking at the clear liquid against the light, a coloured freak in the black and white world.
“How much of this is Roy and how much machine?” I asked. Despite all the odds I couldn't give up the idea that Roy had been good at heart, that we had been friends and he was not this cold manipulative creature created on Jane's principles of logical rectitude.
“I said that Roy was not here and that is so. If it consoles you to think of him as dead, then do.”
Around us Rick's Café was complete, but unpopulated. It was empty and none of the characters fit now. It began to fade.
“Show me him,” I said.
“I cannot.”
It was telling the truth. Roy was no more.
“Who started this?” I asked, not expecting an answer. I was furious and wanted someone to blame. When I looked at him again, he had changed shape. In the chair sat the unctuous figure of Ugarte, the thief. In his hand he held the stolen letters of transit.
“I don't leave you empty-handed,” he said and got up, crossing to the piano. “See? I give you maps of the Abbey defence system. The key. You will find out when you need to know.”
“And Roy has nothing to do with this any more?” I demanded, wanting to know that he would not send Augustine and me to our death.
“Roy has played his part.” Ugarte nodded. He lifted the piano lid and hid the wad of documents inside it, just as Rick had hidden them in the film.
“And 901?”
“I'm not an answering machine,” he said and shifted shape again, becoming Captain Renault and assuming a businesslike manner. “And I think it is time for me to leave.” With a skip and a jump he was the long-legged boy again, untying a kite from his belt which, as I watched, pulled him up away from the ground and through the roof of the faded café into the sky. He became a dot and then he was gone.
And—just as I had—I knew that Roy had walked straight into the trap without thinking about it—just followed the weakness of his heart directly into someone else's big scene, only to find that his dream wasn't what he thought. But whose scene was it? Or was it, as may be, only the machinations of time, cause, and effect at work on complex situations too difficult to understand? Whatever it was, it broke my heart to see him that way, changed forever into a person whose future was completely separated from the past. Dead he was, murdered by his own hand in the grip of a fantasy that was nobody's but its own, a memetic fusion as big and dark as any of Roy's father's dreams of God and the next world.
When I came out of the synch with the Shoal, I still had fifteen minutes before my appointment with Klein. At first I didn't move from my supine slump on the couch. I was too depressed and too frightened to want to move ever again. But the pathetic security I used to feel from putting my head under the cushions with a packet of white chocolate, or even just putting myself to sleep with the boredom of lethargy, was not forthcoming in any form. Everything looked terrible.
I moistened my slack mouth and became aware of a cold patch of drool which had accumulated under my cheek. As I moved to wipe it away on my cuff, Lula heard me and turned around from working.
“At last!” she said. “They nearly had you.” Then she must have seen a very telling expression on my face because she pushed the keypad off her lap and came immediately across to give me a hug. “Don't tell me,” she said, her voice vibrating against my shoulder. “It's worse than you thought.”
“It's worse than that,” I said, hanging onto her gratefully. “It's worse than you thought.”
“Roy didn't get his way, huh?” She let go gently and sat at my feet on the wire-strewn carpet.
“He got part of it,” I replied, easing myself into a more comfortable sitting position. We shared eye contact full of grim resignation. “He's half of it, whatever you want to call it. But he's not Roy any more. God, Lula, it was the strangest thing. He was Roy exactly when he talked about the past: anything before that moment. And after—it was like this completely other being, with his memories, but no connection to them. It had another agenda altogether. Like Roy's, but somehow…look, it implied that Roy was a tool in some bigger plan. That he was manipulated into the Shoal. Have you any idea what that could be about?”
I heard myself starting to gibber on the last sentence, and shut up. I took a few deep breaths. Lula frowned, chestnut brows almost meeting in the middle. “Can you trust what it said?”
“Ah.” I shook my head—she had a good point. “It was lying all the way about the Source algorithm when I tried to find out if the diary was the only record. No, I don't think so.”
“And it isn't the best thing since life after death, then?” she asked, and laughed at her bad taste.
“I don't think we need start the marketing just yet,” I said and tried to smile, but instead a convulsive shiver went through me. Lula stood up and sat by me on the sofa. She took my hand in both of her strong, small ones. We sat for a time not saying anything, but listening to the familiar clunk, chink, and groan of the station structure as the sun and the bitter cold wrestled with it.
I broke the silence by voicing what bothered me most. “If we don't get the diary, it said that the Machine Green group would kill me. I got the impression that it had more than a passing acquaintance with them. And it also said that the guy on the train was a failed Company attempt, when they thought I'd turn on them in court. I can't quite believe it. They were ready to kill me.” Even saying it didn't make it seem real.
“Why not?” Lula said. “They've killed Tito Belle.”
I looked at her, hearing her say it over and over; memory on repeating amazement loop.
“On the news this afternoon, while you were gone,” she said. “I was
listening to Radio Luna. His body was recovered from the wreck of a corporate spaceplane in the Pacific. I'd bet he was holding them to ransom, but they'd rather smash up two billion dollars of hardware than let him walk around with all that dirty information. Police have the wreckage in for examination but…well. They use our equipment and 901 as well, don't they?”
“This can't be happening,” was my genius-level verdict. I stared at her, at my room, at everything which a few weeks ago had been the most familiar, predictable, and reliable things in my universe. “The Company doesn't do this sort of thing.”
“Welcome to the world,” Lula snorted, and I could see that she was on the brink of laughter. Of the hysterical kind, I hoped.
“Did you know it was like this all the time?” I demanded, jogging her hands.
She shook her head, little gasps of giggling bursting from her. “Not really,” she said. “I mean, I guess I did, but it was always a long way from us and not very real. I guess it didn't have—what's that phrase?—immediacy. Yes, it never had that before.”
“Why didn't I know?” I was flabbergasted. A tightness in my chest rose to choke me. I felt myself getting dizzy and thought somewhere in the back of my mind that I was starting a panic attack, something I hadn't had since school. Her reply stopped it cold with shock.
“Because you always wanted things to be all right, and that's what you've always seen.”
False witness, that's what she meant. I lied to myself, not about the information that had come my way, but about what it meant. I'd rather pretend than try to glimpse the truth. The reason it hurt as bad as a dose of explosive decompression was that she was absolutely right, and that it confirmed what I had suspected of myself all along. I was weak and unreliable by nature.
“He said,” I managed, when I could trust myself to speak without sobbing, “that Roy's game was to make me realize I was as sharp as the next person, that I could figure things out for myself, and understand. He said Roy had left it as a puzzle for me because…” But I couldn't tell her that he loved me. That, of all, was the unkindest deception I had laid for him: my stubborn refusal to admit anything which might disrupt my idle beliefs—fortified by sugar, alcohol, and fear; insulated by fat. And I learned to eat right about the time I gave up on truth and settled for the fatal lure of comfort.
Well, that was oversimplifying things a bit in a melodramatic way, but it wasn't far off.
“At least you know now,” Lula said, trying to be positive.
“Yes,” I said, but I realized how late it was. Way late. “He gave me some documents,” I said, shifting as fast as possible to a practical problem in the hope that the strangling sensation in my chest would soon clear. “They're in the implant in compressed format. I need 901 to take them out and sort them.”
“All right,” she said, going along with me and getting up with a show of vigour, “let's see what they're worth. Remember—” she gave me a firm look “—one thing at a time and we'll get through this OK.”
I nodded, but my gut, usually smothered silent, was telling me loudly that this was not so and I shouldn't believe a word of it. But sometimes it's not a mistake to pay no attention to the truth—just necessary. I called 901 and we got to work on the information about Ravenkill and Abbot Croft.
I managed to keep my evidentiary appointment with Manda Klein, and even keep a civil attitude with her despite realizing she must have at least suspected what would happen when she made her uncannily accurate assessment of me to the legal committee preparing for Court. We put together a series of documents in a short time, pausing in our individual researches only to check one another's conclusions. To my surprise she hardly argued over a thing. Once, she was reading my very brief explanation of AI-to-AI communication protocols and looked up squinting.
“Do they really use emotive-meaning constructs when not dealing with human interfaces?”
I glanced at the page displayed on her stadium-sized screen, which she had rigged to project onto the bare wall of her new room. “Yes, they do,” I said, “but so far there is no word assigned to those kinds of transfer. It has seven types of meaningful content: factual, personal-emotive assignment, anticipated public-emotive assignment, summation of intent in communication, connotative, and metaphorical cluster maps of associated concepts, and an array of possible real-world references in order of preference.”
“And do they argue?” She was frowning with one eyebrow only, a comical look which clearly anticipated the answer.
“No,” I said, and added, “It makes up for them not having facial or physical expression—or that was the design intent. Actually, the net result is that they hardly ever misunderstand one another in any way.”
“Really?” Her whole face had joined in being screwed up. She wasn't one for humour so I figured that she was either impressed or disgusted at the idea. “Well, I guess they don't have many jokes, then.”
“Actually they do,” I said, “but if you aren't used to the way they talk, you can't understand them.”
“What about?” she demanded, sitting back. She had quite abandoned her work and seemed genuinely fascinated, gazing at me as if I had said that the station was run by three-eyed mini-aliens.
I hated to disappoint her. “They don't really translate,” I said. “They have myths, too, though. And those aren't much either, but they're persistent. I've traced one which is still doing the rounds from two years ago. It's taken on a kind of ironic cast now.”
“A story?”
“Yes.”
“What about? The world beyond sensory range?” She wanted to laugh, but she was too taken aback to manage it.
“No, I'll show you,” I said and called up the file in which I had stored a simple audiovisual rendering of the tale. “You'll miss most of it,” I said, shrugging awkwardly, “with no direct interface. Too much information to get over this way, but…” I routed it to her wall projector and we watched.
The picture showed us a land which from horizon to horizon was a derelict scour of raw earth, burn marks, and crazing. To the left a small mountain rose, where the land had been thrown up by the grounding of some massive rocket. Its wreckage scattered the foreground. On the near right, a gigantic building sprawled in staggered terraces and towers to scrape the overcast night sky. It glowed fitfully with hundreds of firefly lights, and these in turn lit the clouds.
The structure was composed of what looked like the world's supply of corrugated iron. Large patches of it were laced with ammunition strikes. Through low-level wounds the lights glimmered and pulsed like liquid: a ferocious magnesium-bright fluid as hot as suns—the light of a billion working welding torches. Spreading from the construction like entrails, a host of other buildings, pipes, and structures scattered their way over the plain in a roughly looping sprawl which corralled several square miles of the dead land. More lights, accompanied by steams and sprays of waste, spewed from various holes in this knot. Pools of discarded liquids bubbled. I had always thought they must be tar—the stench now filtering through the little projector's aroma support unit was acridly petrochemical, and in full interface the octane stink was enough to make your eyes water. Now and again, gouts of flame burst into mayfly existence as vapour ignited.
Klein kept her eyebrows raised, but she didn't move. The frame shifted to show that within the corral there was a tower. It was broad at the base, had its roots in the foul ponds, and quickly narrowed to a spire which leapt towards the sky in absolute perpendicular, as if trying to stab the cloud cover. My usual estimate was that the tower was about two miles high, three-quarters wide at the base. It appeared to be a heap of something, but it was hard to see exactly—certainly most of it was metal and had the dysfunctional appearance of scrap. This idea was reinforced when the picture frame scanned the rest of the zone.
Amidst the devastated earth, vast machines were scattered like sheep. Some, hundreds of metres long, were sluggishly and silently visible in motion towards smoke on the horizon. Others, closer a
t hand, seemed to have fallen dead in the act of crawling towards the tower. There were long drag lines behind their crippled treads, wheels, and legs—each and every one of them perfectly straight, arrowing in on that single enormous spike.
“What the hell is that?” Klein whispered so that we could still hear the high whine of the wind and the clashing from inside the building.
“It's a tower,” I said, but I didn't look at her. She made no reply.
Obligingly the picture took flight and made a circuitous swing towards the tower, taking us first past the building. Through the holes we glimpsed working machines. Glistening with oil and sparkling with droplets of condensation, the metal hulls of a civilization of productionline robots toiled over a single great belt. The origin was invisible, but the belt's almost infinitesimal movement ended abruptly at a massive doorway opening into the corral. Here it doubled under itself. Collecting pieces from the line was a chain of smaller machines, passing the portions—each different—along from one to another until they reached the base of the spire. Here, as we skimmed closer, I risked a glance at Klein, who was puzzling over what she saw, until the odd shapes resolved into arms and cranes built into the tower's sides like beating cilia. These manoeuvred each factory piece up into the heights, but the clouds were lowering and it was difficult to see their destination.
The viewframe brought us closer in until we landed upon a large shelf halfway up the tower. The shelf was the upturned bed of a large transport, and almost horizontal. To one side the cables of a crane, each as thick as a tree trunk, moved in silent smoothness but, all the while that we watched, nothing was hauled into view.
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