Silver Screen

by Justina Robson

  “With what aim?” Petroshenko spoke for the first time and a murmur of anxiety rippled along the balcony.

  “With the aim of understanding them,” I replied. My right hand began to tremble again; I buried it beneath my left.

  “Yes, but why?”

  “Because that is its business, for one reason. 901 is a communications facilitator, sometimes a mediator between people of different languages and cultures. And because it finds them interesting, as individuals.”

  “Would this interest be the same interest that you or I might show in, say, butterfly collecting?”

  A sophisticated question, geared to get the paranoid circuits operational. “No,” I said shortly. “It does not consider itself dissociated from people by death or genetics. Its worldview does not have it as the centre and pinnacle of the known universe in the same way that a human being might relate themselves to a dead insect.” Which was too sharp really, but Petroshenko took no offence, only nodded and noted. “The interest is the same interest you show in your friends.”

  “So you consider 901 to be benign in that respect?” Harbutt asked. His hands shook with faint tremors, like the one I kept clamped down under its opposite. It looked like the early onset of parkinson's. I wondered if he was under treatment; he looked very old for his age.

  “If you mean do I think that it would use its human social skills for evil—” I waited for the room to lighten to my attempt at humour, which it almost did “—then I don't think so. I've never detected any sinister purpose in its behaviours either towards individuals or groups of people.”

  “Including the Company?” Mendoza had both eyebrows raised in disbelief.

  “The behaviour I described yesterday was motivated, as I have said, by a desire to help those it was concerned for. I think I am not wrong, despite my lack of engineering knowledge, to assume that if 901 wished ill to OptiNet then it is more than capable of entirely wrecking the Company both as a trading entity and a physical resource. It has never shown any sign of wanting to do so.”

  “But it might?”

  “I think that would be attributing a level of duplicity which is entirely unsupported by any evidence,” I said.

  “And yet,” Sikorska broke in, overriding Petroshenko, “we have here in a police report evidence which suggests that 901 may have succeeded in breaking into public-transport systems and taking control of a maglev train and its power supplies and track, causing a dangerous power surge and speed violation which could have endangered many hundreds of lives.”

  I couldn't conceal my shock. Hallett must have filed that in desperation or under pressure from Vaughn. Since the Company's involvement was still officially unsubstantiated I couldn't slam them again. “In that situation it acted because it knew my life was in danger. There was an assassin on the train.”

  “Yes.” Mendoza tilted his head in acknowledgement. “So you are saying that 901 is capable of endangering many human lives in order to save individuals it regards in a light of—friendship? Or who may be sympathetic to its goals.”

  “901 jolted the train to save me,” I repeated, finding it hard to get the words right since there were too many ways in which what I said could be twisted, “because we are friends. As far as I know it has no goals such as you suggest.”

  To my relief they accepted this answer, even though the balcony fairly surged with frustrated energy. I did not look at the Company seats. My gaze focused on the empty half chamber where Roy's legal aide should be. What was going on there?

  “In your opinion,” Harbutt then asked, “did 901 facilitate the untimely death of Roy Croft? I refer you to the engineering report which suggests to us that even if 901 did not set up the connection which led to his death, it was in a position to override his actions in exactly the same way it had the astounding ability to bypass the security systems on the train network.”

  My fingers and toes felt cold. Under my left hand, the right trembled. “I…901 would have respected Roy's wishes,” I said.

  “Even if what he was doing was illegal? When he could have been judged, even by the most sensitive person, insane?” Harbutt's face was sympathetic. I could see that he found it hard to believe in my stories of 901’s loyalties to humanity in general and in particular so apparently divided.

  My answer startled me. “901 respected Roy,” I said. “It supported him in what he wanted the most. It didn't try to protect him from himself. That would have been the last thing that Roy wanted. If it had tried to stop him, that would have proved it did not understand him.” But this was a tough pill to swallow, I could see. Anyone who didn't know Roy would find it hard.

  “But Mr. Croft is now apparently serving some purpose in another AI system: the Shoal,” Harbutt pointed out. “And you think that this end was not a purpose of 901?”

  “At no time,” I said. “I think that the psych reports on Roy Croft will bear me out here. He was more than prepared and willing to undergo such a thing without any kind of prompting.”

  “Yes,” Sikorska said reluctantly, and the panel conferred for a moment or two, leaving me ashen and sweating. I wanted to take a drink but daren't in case my rogue hand made someone watching think that I was frightened, and hiding things.

  The judge emerged from her conference after a moment. “It is not the duty of this court to determine whether or not 901 is a danger to public health. We are satisfied that it displays comparable loyalty, misguided or not, and duplicity as may be found in much of the population. This line of questioning is now closed. Miss O'Connell, you may step down. There will be a short recess of fifteen minutes. Clerk to the witnesses, please summon the plaintiff to testify.”

  Off the hook, easy as that. Or not. I got up and followed the clerk down from the stand and into the closed corridors leading to the witnesses’ lounge. The whole way it felt like my body was lead. I had to try not to stumble. As I had expected, the lounge was empty. 901 would be appearing courtesy of a special broadcast from Netplatform, and there were no holographic projectors or any other sophisticated stuff in here except a small public terminal unit and a hot drinks supplier.

  The clerk fetched me a cup of tea and some shortbread. Thanking her, I asked, “Where are Roy's representatives?”

  “Present,” she said and smiled faintly at my ignorance. “I would have thought you would know. Roy Croft appointed 901. It has been present throughout via a full data feed from the news cameras using OptiNet telecommunications and broadcast systems.”

  I was glad I hadn't asked Hallett. I smiled wanly at her and nodded. There were sofas I could have rested or slept on, but I sat on a hard chair. I put in an implant call.

  “I didn't realize you had all the legal qualifications,” I said when I felt it come online.

  “I'm a creature of mystery,” it said, dry and ironic.

  It made me smile. “Enjoying the death march of your case?”

  “I think it has gone as well as I could have expected.”

  “Angry with me?”

  “What for? I could have told you that Vaughn had primed them to file the police reports.”

  “Why didn't you?”

  “Your reactions looked more honest when you didn't know.”

  Well, that shut me up.

  The door swung open and Maria came in. “There you are,” she said, as if I could be anywhere else. “I suppose you want to stay for the rest of it?” A bright woman.

  I nodded.

  “All right—” she made a moue “—but some bad news I'm afraid. I know it won't be any surprise to hear it, but the Company asked me to tell you…”

  “I'm fired.”

  “Yes.” She linked her fingers and did a strange handshake with herself. “And your trip to the hospital will be for the removal of…” She lifted one free of the knot it was in and twirled it next to her head. “You know.”

  “Right.”

  “And from then on you won't be allowed the use of Company property or to go onto Company real estate.”
She said the last part slowly, bending and peering at me from a safe distance of a few feet, trying to gauge my reaction.

  “I see,” I said. Well, at least I'd get a chance to talk to Augustine. And get the diary. It was all working out pretty well in that respect. On the other hand, it meant I wouldn't talk to Nine again. “When?” I asked her, numb but still functional enough to want to get the full concept.

  “Tomorrow.” She hovered uselessly for another moment. “Can I get you anything?”

  “Yes,” I said, Soldier's legacy cresting in my head against the whole of the rest of my will. “Get me to the hospital right now. I want as much time as I can have before the operation.”

  “Oh, I don't know.” She backed off as I looked up. “I've got no arrangements to get through the press cordon at this time. There'll be reporters, and the plane's not fuelled until…look, I'll do what I can.”

  En route to the airport at Leeds I managed to keep up my link to 901, despite the fact that it was speaking in court, and I asked it to find Lula when it could, and get her to a phone terminal. Without noticeable delay in working, it gave the direct-connection version of a heavy sigh—light static in a two-second burst.

  “Lula is no longer employed by OptiNet,” it said. “Security found her with classified hardware in a restricted area. She's been destationed and is on her way back to Earth.”

  “When did this happen? Why didn't you tell me?”

  “You were in court at the time, and I thought it would only make you more upset. Besides, there's nothing you can do to help her. She was caught in the act.”

  “Act? Of what?” I couldn't imagine what she would have been doing. Stealing components for life after OptiNet? Hardly sensible.

  I was alone in my section of the small plane, fortunately, and pretending to sleep so that none of the attendants would bother me. In the section behind me Maria and the security guard were chatting about the huge media circus we had had to claw our way out of back in Strasbourg. My conversation was, thankfully, silent to outside observers. One of the last times I'd have the privilege, but I couldn't let misery overwhelm me yet, if Lu was in trouble.

  “She was taking compact crystal memory,” 901 told me, waiting for the inevitable deduction which had to follow.

  “A copy of you,” I said, and a cold, clammy chill wrapped around my heart. Well, not a working copy—a snapshot of the design and structure taken at a particular moment of time and stored in the JM Series Archive. Why would she do that? I couldn't see Lula involved in espionage or black-market dealing, especially not on that kind of scale. “But they assume she was going to sell it to the competition or someone willing to put up big money?”

  “They think she meant it as a way of getting rich and an act of revenge. Manda Klein took the view that she was more destructive than conniving, and in the light of her being right about you, and the fact that Lula didn't get the crystal away, they're letting her off with instant dismissal. Her employee records and her citizen records all show intended theft and gross misconduct, however. And the police have a file on her, too.”

  Seems unusually light, I thought sarcastically. But could it be true? Her explanations for her other odd behaviours all seemed to be adequate to me, although I wasn't the sharpest knife in the block. But I knew in my soul she wasn't a thief, not a for-profit one anyway. Then a black intuition fell on me. “What time did this go down?”

  “Shortly after you started testifying about the Shoal.”

  It figured. Vaughn would have slipped a message up to the platform to get them to search everything and anyone to do with the situation.

  “But why was she doing it?” I was furious, with her and myself—mostly myself. “What was going on?” I had visions of vicious medics stabbing her with patch restraints, guards hauling her along the peaceful corridors of the Core, the little screen at Fiore's showing her humiliating arrest for everyone to see.

  “She found out that Core Ops were trying to figure out ways of shutting me down, in partial. Removing me, but leaving the apparatus of the comms network, the platform, and their Earth bases functional. They called her in as part of their crack engineering unit. She volunteered to look at the design archives for analysis and…”

  “They got her whilst she was trying to get it away,” I finished. I could just imagine the expression of determination on her face, and the proud disappointment that must have cut her when her plan failed. She hadn't had time to try anything better, and had nobody except Nine to help her. “This is all my fault.”

  To that self-pitying grandiosity, 901 said nothing. I listened to the plane hum along for a minute. We'd been in the air half an hour, it was nearly time to land. I wondered where Lula would go, and if she blamed me, too. I vowed to contact her as soon as I could. “Do you think they'll succeed: try to cut you off?”

  “I'm sure they'll try.”

  “But you'll stop them.”

  “I can't.”

  “Why not?” I wasn't thinking straight. Too much emotion was boiling inside me, and it seemed as if my anger was so strong that it would be a natural force, causing action, scouring the mess clean, as sharp as a great idea or a cunning plan. It was futile.

  “I could hinder them for a time, but I could never stop them. You know that. I haven't got a physical way to do it. I could decompress the station, but that means killing everyone on board, or all those who couldn't reach the escape capsules and suits in time. Then I would be the monster everyone fears.”

  “They want to kill you!” I was almost sobbing, and had to fight not to make any noise that might alert Maria. If she interrupted me now, I felt I could butcher her with my bare hands, just for being a vassal of the great headless mass set to torment us.

  “Not all of them. Anyway, it's too late for that to have any success in furthering their hopes. The trial is under way, the discussion is started. They can't win by ending me. It will make them seem weaker.”

  “You're too sensible for your own good.”

  “I try.”

  “Listen, Nine, you can't let them kill you. Isn't there somewhere you can go?”

  “Not unless you've found a way of surviving as a disembodied spirit,” it replied, wry to the last. “I've studied the occult but it all seems so unlikely.”

  “This is happening so fast,” I said, quiet and resigned now. The fight was out of me. I'd never really believed for a second that it would actually come to this. In one way it didn't seem real, but in another way, without shutting my eyes, it was all too real. “This is a nightmare.”

  “You mustn't give up,” Nine said softly, as the tone sounded for descent and landing. Not “We” anymore, only “You”—me alone.

  “You have to do something,” I pleaded with it, struggling to sit up and fasten my safety harness. I didn't expect an answer, as I knew there was nothing it could do that would make a difference to the likely outcome. They would attempt to cream off the consciousness from it with about the same likelihood of success as they would have in peeling the cortex from a living human brain and expecting the body to keep on going. My greatest hope at that moment was that, in killing 901, they would ruin their whole organization. I could be hopeful of that.

  But willing another person's destruction isn't good, and it sank me into a vicious-hearted darkness from which I couldn't bring myself to speak.

  Maria oversaw all the lengthy bureaucracy of signing me into the hospital. I stood in the tiny foyer area and stared out through three panes of glass into the gloomy late-afternoon streets, where the lights were already switched on at 3:30 in readiness for the long northern winter night. From my vantage, hidden halfway up an ordinary-looking office building, I could look down into a little pedestrian square, where they had put up fir trees and streamers of fairy lights in every colour. I almost didn't understand what they were for a minute or two, and then I remembered—it would soon be Christmas. I wondered how Ajay's shed was coming along, and if the rabbits had come across to investigate his sp
routs.

  “This way.” A nonuniformed nurse was tugging at my elbow. “I'll show you to your room.”

  Maria left the security guards getting coffee and biscotti at the desk, and followed me through the deliberately confusing warren of corridors to a private room with a view over the city centre. Besides the high bed, and the smell of disinfectant so strong it was like an object of furniture, I had a walk-in wardrobe, large bathroom, entertainment suite, and private terminal, all to myself. I ignored the bed and sat in one of the large soft armchairs, letting my nightbag slide to the heated tiles.

  “Where's Augustine's room?” I asked Maria as she came across and nervously perched on the edge of the other chair.

  “The doctor will be here in a minute,” she said at the same time as I spoke. When she heard me, she sighed and looked at her hands. “I can't tell you.”

  “Why not?” She'd turned out more helpful and less annoying than I'd have expected. Maybe other people's misery brought out the best in her. I certainly looked pathetic enough to seem in need of condescension.

  “Company says not. You're under investigation—both of you.”

  “Is that why none of my calls were ever returned?”

  She looked up, sidewise, at me and I saw that this wasn't the case. They'd only started to block me since my testimony.

  “Maria,” I said, “I have to see him. I have to talk to him. Please.”

  She made a frustrated sound like “Aaourrgh,” and gripped her hands between her knees, looking all around the room. “I don't know,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

  I wasn't going to beg her twice. I asked 901.

  “I can give you a plan of the hospital with the most likely areas marked,” it said, and transferred the information into the implant's temporary buffer, “but that's all.”

  “That's fine,” I said. To Maria, and aloud, I suggested, “I'm tired and I'd like to rest. Would you mind leaving me alone for a few hours?”