“No, of course.” She seemed grateful for the excuse to leave. When she had gone I got the schematic from the implant and erased the file. No need for archiving with a memory like mine.
An idea struck me.
“Nine,” I called, “how big were those memory crystals?”
“Don't even think about it,” it said in reply. “Too big.”
“How big?” An ordinary human being was supposed to collect about twelve gigabytes worth in a lifetime, but only retain and recall two consciously. I already had more than twelve, by my calculations, and no signs of fatigue so far.
“Forty-one gigabytes or so.”
Four lifetimes’ worth on top of my own memories. I had no idea what trying to memorize that much information might do to me. “Let me think about this,” I said. My op was scheduled for the afternoon on the next day. Leaving several hours for transfer and review, I hadn't got much time. I had to speak to Augustine.
Quickly I assessed the map. It was likely that on my way I would be noticed by staff on duty and possibly blocked by fingerprint-sensitive doors. There didn't seem to be any easy route.
My puzzling was interrupted by the arrival of the surgeon, Dr. Schmidt. I remembered him attending the operations when we had had the implants fitted in the first place. He tactfully ignored the surrounding circumstances and concentrated on telling me how he would disconnect the interfaces and attempt to reassemble the neurons in their original connections, although the surgery was rarely done in reversal and damage was possible.
I wasn't in much of a position to contemplate the prospect of being incapacitated.
“What kind of damage?” I asked.
“Some patients have lost the sharpness of one sense or another. Or they have memory gaps, a small amount of skill loss, most of it quite temporary.”
“But sometimes not?”
“Sometimes.” He shrugged. “I will do my best.”
“No compensation, I take it?” I asked in a feeble attempt at humour.
“I'm afraid not. You signed against it in your original employment contract.”
“So I did.” The clause stood out at me, now I thought about it. I had no comeback, even if he slipped up and turned me into a paraplegic or a retard. “How's Dr. Luria progressing?”
“He's stable. The prosthetics are functioning well, so far. He'll be discharged in a few days.”
At last someone didn't seem to have a problem talking about him. “And how is he, in himself?”
“He's under the care of Dr. Klein's team,” he informed me, which was reassuring and chilling at once, “but I would say he is still undergoing a certain amount of traumatic shock.”
“Can I see him?” No harm in asking.
“I'm afraid Dr. Luria is in a secure section of the hospital. I could ask Dr. Klein if you can have access. She's resident here until the end of the week.”
“Thanks.” I was grateful and shook his hand warmly before he left, although I was sure his efforts would do no good.
Meanwhile, in an attempt to find out a tiny amount of any extra horror I might have visited, I turned on the wallscreen and switched to a continuous news channel. My egomania remained unfulfilled. They were covering the Winter Olympics.
I switched it off. It was 9:30 in the evening. I didn't want to try Lula's number from any of the hospital lines, so I asked Nine to send the call, but there was no answer. The nurse brought me a tray of dinner at ten: a modest arrangement of two dry biscuits, some tea, and a bunch of grapes. It was to be my last meal before the operation. I left it on the bedtray, untouched. If what happened this time was anything like the last time I'd be seeing it all again when they started the neurological pre-med in the morning.
Instead I dragged one of the heavy armchairs over to the static terminal fixed in a small desk set near the windows. It was dusty and unused, but came on readily at the touch of my fingers on the keypad. I didn't have any skill of my own as a hacker, but Roy Croft had had that in spades, and I had watched him several times. I paused for a moment or two to wonder if there was anything legitimate I had to do before I started. Nervously I booted up my cashcard as high as I could go with most of the money from my bank account. No telling what OptiNet might see as reasonable to reclaim given the chance. After that I stared at the welcome menus and began to try to see anything which matched the configurations Roy had been working on as I had looked cynically over his shoulder, but no matter how hard I stared I couldn't make any of the pixels resolve into a familiar word, shape, or instruction.
Finally I accepted defeat.
“Nine, are you sure you can't bust the security at this place?”
“It isn't even connected to the network,” 901 said. “Not by wire, not by radio, and not by anything else. I can't touch it.”
“Well, can you help me break into it?”
“It might be easier just to ask Manda Klein to authorize you.”
I took the hint that I was overwired on paranoid illicit action, and sent a message to the duty nurse, asking for Klein to come see me. I was kind of surprised she hadn't already been. We used to be colleagues, after all.
“I got Dr. Schmidt's message,” she said, as soon as she arrived twenty minutes later.
I knew she probably was well aware by now of the circumstances surrounding Augustine's wounding. “I have to talk to him, please,” I said, no attempt at duplicity now.
“Yes, if I were in your position, I would, too—” she gave me a pitying look “—but the real problem is that he doesn't want to see you.”
I stared at her and sank deeper into the chair like a mollusk. “Why?” My voice was childish and tremulous. Deep down I'd known that this must be the case—it was the only thing which explained the silence.
Klein moved forward and sat in my chair's partner, easy in her duty suit, whilst my short two-piece cut into my waist and dug me under the arms for forcing it into such an inelegant posture. She made a preparatory movement with her lips that told me what she was about to say was bad news.
“It seems that the contact he experienced with the AI involved in the biosuit has altered his mental state.”
“That's not information; that's bluster. What's wrong with him?”
“He thinks that you're a two-faced liar. He says the suit let him see into your mind and what was really there.” She dished it out in a monotone, attempting not to be judgmental about it, and continued. “To be honest I'd like to hear your side of it myself, maybe even corroborated by the implant recordings. I don't think his experience is genuine—that is, not genuinely of himself. I think the suit altered it.”
I don't know if that was her effort to make me feel better. “But I…” I said, desperate to protest my innocence of whatever treachery he thought he'd seen, frightened at the sudden sensation of myself slipping. Doubt clutched me. I looked at Klein, so suave and assured, so orderly and correct, and then at myself: a quaking lump of nervous idiocy, sweating and abruptly terrified, all exterior shattered. I felt myself falling away inside, shrinking from her and the news she brought. The wings of my chair, her face, the walls, all loomed over me, massive as cathedrals.
“I didn't do it!” I heard myself cry in a loud, brutal, and agonized voice not my own. “I didn't do it!”
My right hand and arm were shaking violently and I couldn't control them. I saw them from a distance as if the real me was deep inside myself, detached, a cool and mocking observer of my shell's pitiful torment. Vaguely I wondered what on earth I was talking about, but the actual fact of whatever it was didn't really matter. I meant, as Klein clearly saw, that of all the foolish and ignorant things I had done or omitted to do, I hadn't meant to cause harm, specifically sufficient harm to make the people I loved turn against me. I was in the pit and the person I hoped might provide me a line was standing at the top and wishing me further in.
Rigid, I stared ahead of me, and saw Klein in my peripheral vision as she made calming, sense-inducing analysis intended to bring me back to a sense of pro
portion. “Nobody is saying that his experience is the whole truth…” she was iterating.
It had little effect on me because I knew that line and that it was part of a technique. In my present state I despised it as sham concern, and floated off—a remove from the world—as her voice marked the minutes in long-legged black steps around the dial on the wall.
The world greyed. I felt myself take on its colour. Even the fear left me, slinking back beneath me; a greasy dustball under an old rug. I tried to make myself even smaller in the chair but, despite my poor recent eating habits, trying to fit my legs on the seat was akin to folding two bolsters, and the effort and my failure made me start to cry. Soldier's sharpness—the thing I would have expected to save me with an ironic gesture in the face of despair—failed to make me act. Even it seemed defeated in the face of this completely nonphysical danger.
Depression. The last-trench outpost of those who have come to the end of their tether. I looked longingly at the waxy grapes and the stale biscuits on the other side of the room, but I hadn't the will or the energy to get them. In any case, they seemed to fit the room better than I did, and had more cause to be there.
“Anjuli!” Klein was shaking me. I gave her a contemptuous look through my tears, able to shame myself in front of her this way because I hadn't the energy to care what she thought. She thought I was weak and a fool.
“You can't do this now!” she was saying. “There's still a chance of putting things right. I think you should see him. He might show some resistance to the inhabitor if you start to put up a fight. He's had it all his own way so far. Are you listening?”
I was. In my faraway place I heard her. I felt like a stranger to myself, knowing the way I was behaving was odd but not quite able to stop yet, as if the craziness was a train which had to run to the end of the line.
“I can persuade him, I think—” she seemed very keen to rehabilitate me “—but you have to help. Tell me what you know of that AI, Anjuli.” She took hold of my face, tentatively as if she thought I might bite her, and turned my head to look at her. “This technology is very dangerous. You know that. It's not just Luria I'm worried about right now. I know the Company has this stuff elsewhere, squirrelled away in case this half of the project screwed up. Are you listening? If you don't help me get a grip on methods of guarding against it, you could be seeing this ’ware in a lot of products in the next few years. Do you understand?”
I tried to answer her, but nothing came out. She was right, of course. I realized that underneath her driven exterior she maybe wasn't that bad. She'd helped them cover up on Roy, but compared to slow memetic takeover bids Roy's isolated case was peanuts. Even as I tried to hang on to my misery, a part of my brain was slowly imagining the state of things once Soldier's aggressive infiltration tactics started trailing around on ideas like faulty chromosomes on a line of DNA. You could attach their strategies to anything and use them to literally alter people's minds. Maybe at the moment they didn't have that strong an effect unless experienced directly, but it wouldn't take that long to change them. In other circumstances I'd have enjoyed being a researcher on that project myself, just to figure them out.
Now, looking into Manda Klein's sad grey eyes, I saw that whatever was lost personally to me there might still be something to do worth a damn. It was enough to let Soldier's imposed convictions snap back into place. I nodded slowly and wiped my wet face on my left cuff. My right hand trembled on my leg. For a moment Klein took hold of it in her hands and pressed it.
“I'll go and talk to Augustine,” she said, “and get the nurse to bring you some more comfortable clothes. You clean up, and get ready to do some hard thinking.”
I nodded again and she stood up, pressing my shaking hand close against my thigh. I saw her connect its tremor to his missing hand, and her eyes narrowed in angry speculation, then she smiled and whirled away in a haze of delicate floral scent. I sat in my chair for a minute or two, gathering myself together—an apt phrase, it did feel like collecting pieces and squeezing them into shape. When I was not going to cry, and my mind had hardened off to a fine sealant against bullshit from me or anyone else, I climbed out of the expensive suit and into the shower.
As I was lathering my hair the second time, feeling my way through its tangles, I realized that at no time had 901 closed my channel. Since last night it had been there, silent, constant. The fact that it hadn't spoken when I was at my lowest made me respect its kind presence even more. It would let me save myself.
I touched the crown of my head, pressed my hands against the bone.
“I don't want you to go.”
“I don't want to go.”
I thought of what I could do. I could do a runner: take their expensive ’ware and hotfoot it somewhere they couldn't find me. Would have to go right now. But that meant leaving Augustine in whatever miserable way he was, running out on him at perhaps the only time he had ever really needed me. If I did that, I wasn't sure I could live with myself. And where would I go, and who to? I knew no one outside our charmed circle. My pay was good, but that wouldn't last long without a job.
“It will be all right,” 901 said. “Something else will happen. Something new.”
“What do you mean?” I rinsed myself down with the hot water. I didn't want to hear about new. I wanted my old friends with me: Lula, Augustine, Roy, Peaches, 901, Ajay.
“You'll go on, and something new will happen,” it said. “If it didn't, there wouldn't be any hope. The change will do you good.”
“No it won't.” Defiant to the last. I knew I was talking rubbish, but I longed for stillness, not changes.
“It will,” said 901’s human voice, suddenly so strong and vibrant I felt my body resonate to it.
I let the shower run.
As I was putting on some makeup I watched the news. The trial was over. I saw a picture of the judges sitting on their panel, listening to the disembodied voice which had so recently spoken to me. It was unusual that it was not accompanied by a human hologram, but that was not allowed. Instead a three-dimensional blue star spun slowly in the witness box, animated by a projector “my” clerk was monitoring. It made me snort at the TV.
“901 doesn't look like that.”
“What do I look like?”
“I don't know.” I'd never really thought about it. I was used to all its faces. I didn't know what its physical appearance was but, whatever it was, there was no box of circuits that looked like 901. “Sometimes you look like James Dean,” I said. “And sometimes like Vivien Leigh. I don't know—anyone you want.”
Klein came in, swinging straight through the door without knocking. “Are you up to it?”
“As I'll ever be.” I got up, put away my toiletry case, and smoothed the shirt and trousers the nurse had brought. They were plain, but nice enough. Certainly nicer than I felt. Sackcloth and ashes might have been more in keeping. I followed her out the door.
Augustine's room was, as I had suspected, located through more than one fingerprint-secured door. It was smaller than mine and much more austere, fitted out for intensive care with banks of instrumentation running down both sides of, and beneath, the high bed. We entered after being fogged in a chamber of sterilizing gases, imbued with viral phages among the battery of antiseptic weapons. The heavy vapour drifted with us so that we came in like sea ghosts. By the look on Augustine's face, that's what he thought, too. He wasn't just suspicious of me; he was frightened.
“Hi,” I said, in a way I hoped was innocuous. Klein moved aside so that I could take the chair nearest the bed head.
Augustine was sitting up, nested in a very light but bulky cover over which only his good left arm protruded. Of the rest of him the soft snowy mounds of insulation gave no clues. I walked forward gingerly. His expression really took the wind out of my sails.
“Hello,” he said, watching me and following my every movement as I sat down. The brown eyes I had used to love for their soft good humour looked at me coldly.
“How are you?”
“I'll be fine,” he said. “How are you?”
“Been better,” I said, constantly reviewing his face for any melting or warmth that might seep in. “They're taking the implant out tomorrow.”
“I know,” he said. “Manda told me.”
“Lula, erm, is leaving,” I said, trying to find a subject of common concern.
“I heard.”
So he was going to leave all the going to me. I thought I'd give it one last try before jumping forward and smashing the hateful contempt out of his smug face with my fist. “So, really, that field test of the old suit was a great success. All the functions were…”
“You tricked me, you lying bitch!” he said, tearing his eyes away to stare straight ahead, neck rigid, military fashion.
“Bollocks,” I said. “I don't know what you're talking about.” But as I spoke my heart thudded against my ribs and I felt my stomach plunge. Something attached to him started to beep. Klein moved forward to take a readout.
“Oh, don't give me that. I saw it as clear as day. All this time you've been paying lip service to me, saying you loved me, and you never felt one iota more for me than you do for any of your other friends,” he said with venom.
Strange words for Augustine. He hadn't been much of one for romance in the past. And it sounded like a script rather than his own words. I was foxed, but the sick feeling started to fade in my gut.
“When did you realize this?”
“In the suit, of course. When you and 901 ganged up against me and left me to rot on the end of that line.” He didn't move except to speak, but his eyes brimmed with tears which spilled over and ran down his cheeks in two darting rushes.
“Og,” I said, “there were four of us involved in the link.”
“Oh yeah, of course there were,” he snarled, “and who was the fourth one—the ghost of Roy Croft I'll bet. He was there, too. Oh yes. Down in Daddy's hole. He was there as well, waiting for me to come in so he could laugh at me again.”
Manda Klein had moved slowly around the bed to the far side, taking readings, and now she glanced up at me.
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