“Where is the suit now?” I asked him, or her—whoever wanted to reply. It was clear that the personality of Soldier was in part still tangled up inside him. I wanted to find out if the suit was still functional.
“Dr. Billingham's looking after it,” Klein said.
“Oh, I know what you're thinking,” Augustine broke in on her. “You're thinking that it had a bad effect on me, but all that happened was I saw what was real.” He turned to me again and spat, “I saw inside your rotten head, O'Connell. Self-obsessed, shallow, you used me, and Roy, and Lula, and especially 901 all the time to pretend you were so clever, when really you were nothing but a piece of human ROM, a freak, no brighter than a goddamned secretary. And on that trip, you and 901 did nothing to get me out of there. You let those animals do whatever they wanted when you could have stopped them.”
I thought I could see a way through this, maybe. I tried to block out what he said about me personally, but it hurt. It made fear whirl inside me like the precursor to a tornado.
“How could we have stopped them?” I asked.
“You know,” he hissed, quiet but throwing the words at me, “901 is much stronger than I am. It has access to everything it wants. They were machines. You could have stopped them. But you didn't.” Slowly he pulled his right arm out of the coverings and lifted it awkwardly, painfully, up to show me his hand.
I felt all the blood in my face and limbs rushing back to hide inside the depths of my body. “You got robotics,” I said stupidly, not quite believing the stainless steel and burnished chrome replacement. It even looked like his old right hand, as if the technician had worked from photographs to get as close to the original unique shape as they could. I had expected to see one of the cloned limb replacements now easily available to anyone with insurance. And the glinting gates of the wrist jacks were still there. “Why?” I looked at him in bafflement, completely thrown.
“Can't you guess?” he held it out to me. “Go on, touch it. Shake on it.”
I glanced at Klein. She was very alert and twitched one shoulder in a kind of shrug. It was up to me.
I let go with my left hand—I habitually now clamped my right hand in the left—and moved it towards his. It shook in a continual St. Vitus’ dance—even more than I was shaking myself. As it got closer to his shining metal limb, it shook even harder. With a movement faster and stronger than I expected he suddenly seized it and stilled it in a hard grip, cool and unyielding. I could feel the minute shift of tensors in his palm, working in relay. He quickly increased the grip until I gasped in pain. I was still aware of the strange shake in my muscles, but they didn't cause any movement any more.
“You're hurting me,” I said. “Let go.”
“You cared about that book, about that game, more than me,” he said, giving me the soft, pitying eyes of the psychopath.
“That's not how I remember it,” I said. My knuckles ground against one another. I tried not to move or pull faces, but it was hard. “I remember telling you not to go, but you wouldn't listen. I remember that until Soldier told you not to, you thought that Roy's orrery was something that showed he didn't despise all your ideas—not that he did. I remember that you liked the idea of stealing…” I stopped. I realized that I didn't know what had become of the diary or who knew about it. “You wanted to help me.”
“Well, you would say that,” he said, but nothing further, although he tightened his hold again until I was almost whimpering. I shot a glance of pleading at Klein. She was staring at the machine that beeped—an EEG, I thought.
“You can do better than that, Soldier,” I bit out between gasps. I didn't know if the name would make any difference. “This isn't the Augustine I know at all—not then and not now. He's much more persuasive than you.”
The metal edges of his fingers cut into my skin. He closed his hand another few millimetres and I thought I felt one of my bones crack.
“Go on, crush it,” I said, unable to prevent the pain exposing itself in my rushed voice. “It won't make any difference.”
Klein was busy adjusting her machine.
He opened his hand, but only to get a better flex and hold. The pain returned savagely and then his whole body went limp. He let go and I snatched my hand back to myself. It was agony as it spread out again, the tremor as marked as ever. I swore over it.
Klein straightened up. “He's in an induced sleep state. I think I'll leave him there for a minute.” She came over to examine my hand. “So, what do you think?”
“I think that all the strategies so far are personally directed at me, is what I think,” I said, wincing as she gently straightened the hand. “And the moves are typical of that AI. It might not be connected to him any more, but whatever paths it reinforced inside his head need desensitizing. That might be a start.”
“Hmm.” She nodded. “I asked Billingham what she knew, but she said she never had anything to do with the AI. I was wondering if it might be reprogrammed and used to rehabilitate him to his historic state. Otherwise we're going to be shooting in the dark. Could make him worse.”
“It may fade over time,” I suggested, “if you put him back in his normal environment. I was left with a much slighter version of the same thing…the fact that what he's saying is so paranoid bothers me most. It's as if it worked on him to gang up against me and 901 deliberately.”
“I thought that, too,” she said, staring in puzzlement at the tremor, and prodding my wrist and forearm. “Your palsy stops exactly at the amputation point, did you know that?”
I nodded. “Lucky I didn't have time to get it in the feet, too. Listen, are those robotics on his legs as well?”
“Yeah.” She pressed a couple of nerve points experimentally, but they had no effect: I'd already tried. Looking at me, she smiled sadly. “You're in a real state, O'Connell. I wouldn't clear you for washing dishes.” Her expression became curious. “Did you love him?”
She still had my hand in hers. She felt the increase in vibration, as I did. “I thought so,” I said, “but maybe he was right. I sometimes wonder what love is. I thought that when we shared the suit system we'd feel the same, and then I'd know for sure. But emotion wasn't as clear-cut as I expected: just these little snatches of thought, these glimpses. Very much like one's own version of things, but not. I suppose I'm just too much of a mind person and he has to feel everything. It was a mistake.”
“We could use this system,” she said, “to show people how it really is to be someone else.”
“Well, I'm not going to be here,” I said, “so that'll be your call.”
She tightened her lips at that, but nodded and let my hand go. “If I find a good therapy I'll let you know about it, so you can see to your hand.”
“Yeah,” I said. I looked at Augustine, relaxed and slack-jawed against his pillows. The robot hand twitched. I wondered what he was dreaming about in the heavy theta-wave land she'd fixed him. Apart from the chrome intrusion, he looked just like himself. I found myself going up to him and I laid my head down on his shoulder. “Sleep well,” I said. I closed my eyes. He even smelled the same, but it only took a second to remember that as soon as he woke he'd flinch away from me as if I was poison. I stood up, heavy grey girl, and turned to Klein, who'd kept a respectful distance at the back of the room.
“If you let me connect to the suit again I can tell you what its game was,” I said. I already reckoned I knew, but I wanted to find out for sure and confirm that the person hurting me wasn't really himself. As well as that, I thought it was likely that nobody here even knew it had a chest cavity to hide things in, and I wanted to see if the diary was there. I suppose that did lend some credence to the theory that I was cold and calculating. Following things to their conclusion seemed the only way through.
Klein frowned. “Do you really think that's a good idea?”
“Unless you get some other implanted person, with no experience of it, to take a chance.”
“I'm not sure.” She paused with her hand
on the door. “I got the impression that Augustine's story and 901’s download of the test files isn't the whole thing. If there's something you're not telling me, now would be a good time.”
“There's nothing,” I said. I knew how to lie, even how not to let my voice become quieter and lower in pitch. She seemed full of misgiving but finally said, “All right, let's go and pay Dr. Billingham a visit.”
We abandoned Augustine to the machines—or that's how it felt as I walked through the door and looked back. He was being slowly consumed, inside and out, by them. Ironic how Roy would have been jealous of that, but strangely fitting that Roy was now a part of the ethereal processes and Augustine a mechanoid man. Current and rod, they vibrated like my hand, shaking, shaking, in this dance. I wondered what my fate was going to be. Less romantic than theirs, it looked like.
“Are you coming?” Klein called from halfway down the corridor.
I let the door close.
She showed me to Billingham's makeshift biolab, but on the way got paged. With misgiving she said, “I'll be ten minutes. Set up the connection and wait for me.”
When I walked into the room Billingham jumped. Her face was drawn with anxiety. The familiar suspension tanks were rigged in the corner, and I noticed that even when she came to meet me she wouldn't entirely turn her back on them.
“Hello again,” I said. “I wish we met in better times.”
“Oh, it's dreadful,” she whispered. “I'd no idea that he hadn't changed that thing before this. I'm sorry.”
“How is it?” I nodded towards the tanks.
She cast them a look of loathing mingled with fascination. “We've got the glove back,” she said—nothing about his hand. “It's complete and seems to be recovering well. I've been working on the damaged areas, but it seems as though the whole may regenerate to its previous state if left alone.”
“Is it awake?”
“I don't know. I think…” She gestured weakly towards it. “I think so. Nobody here knew how much power it had left or if they should turn it off, or anything like that.”
“Good,” I said. “I'm going to talk to it.”
“No!” she cried and blocked my path, looking up at me from her disadvantaged height with fear.
“It's all right,” I said. “We've met before. 901 will act as the intermediary. It won't be like with Aug…with Dr. Luria.”
Reluctantly, she let me pass her by and approach the heavy unit. Inside it, the suit was in pieces hung carefully in thick mats of algal slime, dripping fluids. It was warm and humid nearby and the filters hummed loudly. A faint smell of old ponds and peat bogs lingered in the air. The helm unit was on the right, furthest from the hatch opening, but clearly visible through the safety glass.
I said hello to 901 again and asked it to set up the link, but this time so that I could talk to Armour, not be absorbed by it. There was some difficulty at first.
“It's not going to work,” 901 said after a few seconds. “The AI needs the host intelligence to complete itself. But if you link to it you won't be able to interrogate it.”
“I can't plug Og back into it,” I said. “That'll only make things worse.” For a moment I glanced at Billingham where she sat nervously at her workstation, half paying attention to me and half to the reports on the suit section she was examining. Her feet swung high above the ground, toes pointed together like a child's. Anyway, only Augustine had the jacks.
“I can set myself up to link with it,” Nine said cautiously.
“Do you think that you'll have a better time of resisting its action on you?”
“It's possible, but I doubt it. In order to reach full functionality we will fuse at the conscious level.” And Nine's neural systems functioned in a very similar way to the human, as far as learning was concerned. Armour had a good chance of co-opting 901. “But I can revert to prior states if I have to,” it continued. “It will be as if this never happened.”
I thought about it. Even if Armour did compromise 901’s integrity, there was a chance it would not affect it the same way as it had affected Augustine. Og had been vulnerable to it because of his inner doubts, his deep emotions exposed in crisis at the abbey. 901 didn't have that kind of insecurity. Maybe it had other kinds I'd never come across or couldn't recognize, though; and it was much more dangerous if moved to violence, than even an army of this septic AI. On the other hand, what choice did I have? To return to it myself, as I was right now, would be mental suicide. It's Anjuli-breaking strategy was working very nicely despite my every attempt to ignore it. Even now the desperate doubt—the self-hatred—was corroding its way through me.
“All right,” I said, terrified of the responsibility I had taken on and not even wanting to contemplate what might happen. I wondered how the hell I could justify pitting God-knew-what potential mass horror against the interests of Og, myself, and poor old nutty Roy. I suppose the difference was that Og, me, 901, and Roy were my world, and the masses were not, and probably I wouldn't have done it if we weren't respectively mad, miserable, and on both immediate sides of death.
“Quick,” I said, “before Klein gets back.”
Abruptly, the attention of the helm seemed to focus. The green gunk covering it shifted and slithered in patches. I looked for the chest plate and saw it near the hatch, after a long squint. It was so misshapen I could hardly identify it.
I thought it was unlikely that Armour would have any conscious awareness of the methods it used to twist a host's thoughts around, but it probably had a strong recollection of its own words and decisions. “Can you hear me?”
901/Armour replied quietly, “I can hear you, O'Connell.”
If I'd been brighter I would have realized that Armour's direct link with 901 meant a direct link with me. There was a sudden left-of-centre weight in my mind, and then everything became very clear.
Thinking was easy. I knew everything.
Armour wanted to keep on existing, and it needed just one host. Whoever it had, it tried to keep, and if that meant alienating everyone else by persuasion, then so be it.
Roy Croft's only way of interacting with the world was simply that his inner world was stronger than the real one. To feel close to people he had to bring them into his world, engage them directly with himself, by playing a game in which he made all the rules.
Augustine's brain had been altered at the neural level—as had Anjuli's, and now 901’s, by the invasion of Armour. But Augustine was further compromised by the much more aggressive and paranoid Soldier. He could gain recovery through rehabilitation programmes and running through the old pathways of the life he used to live, but he was forever changed.
Anjuli O'Connell had the knowledge and associations to decrypt the code hidden in the book.
Armour had the book. But the book was part of Roy's game. The court case was part of Roy's game. The Shoal was part of Roy's game. 901 was part of Roy's game. Augustine was part of Roy's game. Armour, Jane Croft, and Anjuli were not a part of Roy's game, but Anjuli's memory was. And Lula White, she was one of its victory conditions.
You could call it a three-way brainstorm. Those insights popping through it like kernels of corn exploding on a hotplate. On one level I was aware of all that thinking fizzing through me. On another level I was aware of the vastness of Nine. It was as if Armour and Anjuli were two little electron charges whizzing like gnats around the huge gravitronic mystery of a neutron.
Nine's attention—and so our attention—was focused on Netplatform.
A shuttle plane carrying Vaughn had docked half an hour ago. He and his group of Masons were gathering, coming from their holes like rats to meet in Core Ops Conference. Already there were the pale and exhausted engineers from the other shift teams, and the only other AI psychologist on station, Anna Zaid, a junior who still had her postdoc work to finish. I also knew that the directors on-platform had already approved a plan to separate 901 from its operational functions. The trial verdict was still hours away, but even if it came out in
my favour there was nothing preventing them from removing me from work. If I had been earthbound it might have been possible to involve the police at this stage, but Netplatform was an isolated corporate orbital, and no help was coming. Help wasn't coming from inside either, from the chemists in the drugs unit, from the Ops Team, who suspected, or from the comms staff, blithely ignorant.
I messaged them all and warned them to expect trouble—anything from power-outs to localized depressurization. Within moments there was a surge of activity spread throughout the station, but I sounded no alarms. Until I knew what they were planning, I couldn't know what the danger might be for them.
Vaughn and his associates were almost all gathered in conference. If it had been military conditions I would have sealed the room and gassed the lot of them, but there was no official war, and becoming a multiple murderer would do irreparable harm to the greater AI cause. I knew it was the end. One way or another I wasn't coming out of this undamaged. I wondered if I would lose all sense of reality—of myself. If I would be “dead” or if they would botch things and leave me hopelessly lobotomized. I decided that if that was to be the case, I would end myself more efficiently than they. For the purposes of good records and the chance of resurrection one day, I began to make a final download into the remaining stocks of crystal memory in my archive. Humans make no copy of everything that they are. This was possibly my only advantage over them.
At that moment 901 cut me out of the loop.
“Time we were gone,” rasped the broken voice of the helm unit, the vibration of the noise making it shake like my hand. I staggered with the brief disorientation of finding myself once more a heavy woman, tired and hungry. Behind me I heard a horrified whinny and then a crash as Billingham fell off her chair in confusion at the sound.
I turned around and went to help her up. She was gasping and wheezing so badly I thought she might be on the verge of an asthma attack.
“It's all right,” I said in as soothing a voice as I could manage, easing her off the floor whilst all the time I was desperate to get back to the tank before Klein appeared. “I was just talking to it with 901. To see if I could get any sense out of it that might help Dr. Luria.”
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