Richard took a deep, strictly metaphorical breath and extended himself to take control of the nanoprocessor, feeling after its operating system with the lightest fingers he could manage. He infiltrated it before Gabe's hands had left the connection, using the direct interface with the control chip to leapfrog to the few million nanosurgeons that were in physical contact with it. It wasn't enough of a network to support a persona thread, or even a fraction of one, but it was enough, he hoped, to form a jumping-off platform for the Benefactors when he opened the system to them.
If they understood what he was doing, what he was offering. If they understood why. If Leslie had made them understand.
He threw open the floodgates.
For long picoseconds nothing happened. And then Genie's head drooped, she slumped to one side, and her father caught her shoulders as she started to topple. Richard held on tight, the rush of data around him like the sound of the surf in his ears, whatever the Benefactors were doing spreading in ripples through Genie's nanonet and then the worldwire, leaving the network momentarily limpid and calm in its wake, as clean as if it had never been programmed at all.
Richard reached out and hesitated. There was another AI in the system. With a persona he at first mistook for one of his own threads, separated and maintained during the attack. Until he reached out to reabsorb it, and it snarled at him and lunged.
The pieces are kind of sickening when they finally snap into place. I imagine an audible pop, the sound of a broken limb yanked straight. It's not a bad analogy. This won't be pretty.
And it looks like we're not getting any help from Richard, because I'm reasonably certain that's not him, exactly, who's floating in the corner of my eye.
And I'm not about to put down the gun.
Riel knows. That's what the eye contact means. That's what she's telling me.
Do it, Jenny. We're dead already, anyway.
Nothing you want to face less than a woman with nothing to lose. My hand isn't shaking as I bring up the liberated gun. It hasn't shaken in years. Not for this, anyway.
Fast. Hot damn. Even for me, I'm moving fast, and the whole world around me is like a snapshot, a ruin full of broken statues sprawled between the pillars.
“Jen?” Not-Richard, in my head, and now that I'm looking for it, listening for it, I can tell it's not Dick. It's another program, or maybe even another AI, wearing Dick's clothes, but it isn't comfortable in that skin.
The sliver of the gunman's face that I can see over Connie's shoulder is a curve like the sickle face of a waning moon. If she flinches, I'm going to waste her. She meets my eyes across all that distance, hers fearless green, a glassy gaze like a wolf's.
“Put the weapon down,” I say, out loud, as levelly as I have ever said anything in my life. “I can offer you asylum. Life. Maybe more, if you will testify.”
I don't dare jerk my head to indicate what I want him to testify about, but I'm pretty sure he'll know what I mean. And then the gunman blinks at me, the one eye I can see around Connie uncomprehending as an owl's. Of course he doesn't speak English.
What the hell was I thinking? Again.
And then I hear my tone echoed, words I don't know: Min-xue, translating, just loud enough to carry. I don't need to look to know he's standing again and he's got my back. The crash as the door slams shut at the top of the stairs behind the last of the escaping dignitaries—the ones who weren't smart enough to hit the floor and hug it like a long-lost love—is huge. The sound of Patty whimpering, a broken moan on a breath that she didn't get to keep much of, is huge.
The space between my heartbeats is huge.
The barrel of the Chinese assassin's gun wavers, just a hair, and I let myself breathe, not much, just a little, a slow trickle of air through my nose.
And then my body locks in place as if I'd been dunked in a vat of liquid nitrogen, frozen solid, can't breathe, can't think, can't move, controlled as sharply and completely as if somebody had gotten ahold of my strings. Min-xue's voice cuts off midsyllable, and if I could do anything at all I would, I swear it, roll my eyes and curse the Chinese, the Benefactors, their nanotech and their mothers for a bunch of castrated dogs.
Richard demonstrated this to me once. The reason he was opposed to spreading the nanotech worldwide. The reason he was a little afraid of the nanotech at all. Because it can be used to puppet anybody wearing it like a kid's robot cat.
Oh, fucking hell.
“I beg your pardon, Master Warrant Officer.” The Chinese AI, if that's what it is, is no longer pretending to be Richard. It dissolves, iconless, a disconcerting, neutral, and exquisitely polite voice echoing inside my ear. “But I cannot permit that action on your part. You will forgive the intrusion, I hope.”
I thought your people didn't have AIs.
“A recent development. Please excuse me—”
The assassin cocks his head as if he's listening to something. I'm willing to bet I know what he hears. The assassin's finger whitens on the trigger of his gun; he turns it back, lines it up neatly with the center of Connie's ear. She doesn't flinch and she doesn't twist away or close her eyes. She just waits for it, looking at me, looking past me at Min-xue.
Hell. If I had to go down fighting, at least this time my family's safely out of the way. It might almost be all right, if it wasn't starting to hurt so much, not being able to breathe.
Black dots swim at the edges of my vision. I can't blink them away. I'm amazed I can still hear my heartbeat, slow as the pendulum in the lobby, measuring the turning of the planet under my feet. I'm sorry, Madam Prime Minister. Sorry, Patty. Even more sorry about you and Min—
I don't know if Riel can read the apology in my eyes.
The Feynman AI was smaller than he should be. Slower, contained, constrained. Limited by the processing power of the Montreal—vast by human standards, but negligible by his own.
But he was also older, trickier, and far more wily than the Chinese program, and he unpacked out of the Montreal's core like a spring-loaded snake out of a peanut can, grabbing every cycle in sight, flooding the worldwire with his presence, replicating threads, spawning personas and entities faster than the Chinese AI could take him apart.
He didn't fight. He didn't run.
He replicated. He bred. He blossomed.
The Richard-thread could have wept at what he found when he got his claws into the worldwire. The damage was considerable, months of reconstruction undone in minutes. Macroscopic life was the least of it; there was renewed damage down to the microscopic level, rereleased radiation, the ecological equivalent of blood and carnage. He didn't have time to assimilate it or analyze it; he barely had time to register it.
He'd told Wainwright that he would fight if he had to.
But he didn't have time to fight. The other program had Jenny and Min-Xue, had a gun to Riel's head. Was operating on certain tight-coded assumptions, provided parameters. Was an automaton, on certain levels. A sociopath.
Was not, to turn a phrase, a moral creation.
And was eating Richard's program, consuming his threads, assimilating his data in great, dripping handfuls of code. He threw more at it. Input, aware of the risk, aware that he was breeding something he had no control over.
He spawned, and spawned, and spawned again, and the Chinese AI grew fat feeding off him, and reached out again, cleverer this time, learning as it grew, going for the zeroth persona, for Richard himself. And Richard ducked—
Then handed off control to Alan, and shoved himself wholesale down the other AI's throat, and like a virus turned it inside out, assembling the data he'd fed it willy nilly, turning the whole thing—metaphorically—into a mirror. And the Chinese AI turned around and found itself looking itself dead in the eye.
So to speak.
In that instant, it became something more than a program. Like Richard, it became a person. The process confused it. It hesitated, for picoseconds only.
And in picoseconds, Richard ate it, from the inside out.
And then, with no sign at all that anything has changed, no whisper in my ear, nothing but the shift of my balance as the paralysis eases, as my gun hand starts to tremble and water wells up in my eyes. I feel Min-xue, feel him in my bones, feel the warm crosshatched grip of the borrowed pistol in his hand. I feel Charlie and Leslie and Genie and—oh, Merci à Dieu. I can feel the whole damned worldwire, snapped into place as if it had never been gone. Dick?
“I hear you, Jenny.”
Mary, Mother of God. My chest burns. I don't dare let the assassin see me draw a breath as he drags Riel one step backward. She stumbles over his feet. He hauls her upright, the hand that doesn't hold his weapon cupped under her chin.
Dick, you hacked your way back in. I feel his wordless confirmation, a sensation like a quick nod, internalized. Can you do to him what his AI did to Min and me?
A long pause, by Richard's standards. Seconds, long enough for the gunman to drag Riel three more steps away from me, lengthening the distance, lengthening the range to target, my need for air verging on dizziness now.
Dick, you're complicating my life.
“I'm having . . . an argument.”
An . . . argument?
“Alan thinks we should do as you ask.”
You should!
“No. I should not.” He isn't even bothering showing me his face; he's just letting me feel his hesitation, his grief, the raggedness of the emotion that would clench my hands until the meat one went white and the steel one creaked . . . if it were mine. “It is rather the one thing I should not ever do. Not once. Because if I do it once, I will do it twice.”
Dick. It's a prayer, a plea. It's the best I can do. What kind of a goddamned morality leaves us to hang, you bastard? Help me now and I'll give you anything you want. Anything.
I swear, I swear, I swear I feel his lips brush across the top of my hair, his hands on my shoulders in a moment's benediction. I swear I feel the sharp sting of his tears in the corners of my eyes. “I don't believe in God,” Richard whispers in my ear. “And moreover, I don't believe you need any God you have to bargain with, Jen. Now. Go do what you have to do.”
And then he's gone, a whisper in my ear, a faint and subtle presence I can't feel nearly as well as I can feel Min-xue, and the thin, thready pain-dazed awareness that's Patty Valens, swimming groggily back into consciousness.
And then I smile, because Dick hasn't abandoned us. He's just told us we're old enough to bloody well take care of ourselves. The smile doesn't last, though, because all of a sudden I can see the way out, if we're lucky. And it means sending the kid right the hell back into harm's way.
I wasn't fast enough, Patty thought. I wasn't fast enough. I got shot, I got hit—
“Patty.” A calm even voice in her ear, in her mind.
Jen. I'm okay, I think I'm okay, but I'm bleeding a lot—
“You're doing fine.” Just a little emphasis on the last word. Just enough to ease the tightness in Patty's chest and calm the thunder of her heart. “Patty. I need you to do something.”
Show me. Which was the right thing to say, mind to mind like that. Show me, not tell me. And Jen showed her, a mental picture so crisp that Patty realized she could manage it without even having to open her own eyes. “Get it?”
Got it, Patty answered. She grabbed one cut-short breath, pain dull and piercing between her ribs, before she had the time to psyche herself out, and shoved herself stiff-armed off the floor. Her wounded shoulder failed her; the arm collapsed. She screamed; it didn't matter, because she had the momentum by then and her other arm was strong enough.
Barely. She rocked down, fishtailing, her pelvis lifting as her nose banged into the carpeted floor and white-red flashes like police car lights lit up her vision. Her hand slipped in blood, carpet burning the heel of her palm. Her elbow smacked hard on the edge of a stair. But her feet shot up and she donkey-kicked out hard—hard—with both legs at once, and nailed the prime minister right in the gut.
Riel didn't have time to shout. She went back like an unbraced kickbag, right into the arms of the man with the stolen gun. One shot banged Patty's eardrums. She yelped and buried her face in her arm as two more answered.
The pricelessness of the gunman's expression when Min-xue drills him between the eyes would be easier to appreciate if Riel hadn't gone down with him, folded over like a rag doll, blood spurting through the fingers she's clamped over her face. I'm running, stepping over Patty as Patty feels me coming and rolls out of the way, kicking the gunman's pistol skittering under the seats just in case he comes back to life like a 3-D villain.
The chances are slim. Even a cursory inspection reveals that if Min-xue's shot didn't take the top of his head off, mine sufficed for follow-up. But Christ, Riel, Riel's bleeding like a stuck pig, and she whimpers when I try to pry her fingers away from her face. “Connie, let me see it. Connie. It's over. Are you okay? Are you all right?”
Richard, I need medical teams. I've got it secured down here, but I need EMTs, trauma docs, I need them fast, I've got multiple gunshot casualties, at least eight . . . no, ten, no—I don't even know what the hell I've got—
It occurs to me as I yelp directions that maybe he meant he wouldn't be around to help at all anymore, and I should be running for the door, running for help myself. Patty drags herself to her feet behind me, staggers down the steps with one arm hanging limp, and Min-xue has crouched back down between the seats. I can hear him counting. CPR, of course.
She's going to check on her granddad, I know. I can't bring myself to grudge it.
And then, “I'm already summoning help,” Richard says in my ear, and I burst into tears. Seriously, no shit, crying with relief like a kid punched in the belly, still tugging gently at Riel's wrist, trying to see how much of her face she's had shot off. She finally lets her fingers relax, and the only thing wrong with her is—“Marde, Connie. That bastard shot your nose off.”
She looks at me looking at her, at the expression on my face, and bursts out laughing, which breaks a clot and sprays blood over us both. But at this point, who the fuck could tell?
Genie floated in the darkness, calm and aware. No one touched her there; she couldn't feel Richard or Alan, Patty or Jen, Charlie or Leslie. She couldn't feel herself, or the Benefactors, or even the Montreal.
It was perfectly silent, and perfectly safe, and perfectly warm. And perfectly alone. Carver Mallory, she thought, naming a boy she's heard talked about but had never met. I've wound up like Carver Mallory, crippled and locked in my own head.
She reached out and found nothing. The last sensation she remembered was the pressure on her opened hand as Papa slid the wire into her chip, and then falling, and then the dark.
She wondered if this was what it had been like for Leslie and Charlie, adrift in space. She wondered if she would ever find her way home. At least it was warm, warm and quiet . . .
But she was bored.
And time went by.
She became aware of sensation. None of the ones she'd been expecting—not the softness of sheets or the smell of antiseptic or the hum of a ventilator, and not the prick of a needle in the crook of her arm. Not even soreness lingering in the back of her hand where Elspeth had ever-so-carefully cut her.
No. This was strangely neutral—but definitely a sensation, the way water has a flavor, even if it doesn't taste like anything, exactly. Water. Yes, actually, that was what it reminded her of. Water the exact temperature of her body, water flowing over her skin effortlessly, darkness and a swell and pulse as if she took deep deep breaths, breaths deep enough to stretch her entire body, and then puffed them out again hard—
There was pain on her skin, but it wasn't significant. Patches like sunburn, a sloughing kind of itch, and she knew they were less than they had been, and growing lesser still. Healing. Which didn't explain why she had too many arms and legs, come to think of it, or why the glimmerings of light that reached her faintly were watery, aquamarine.
Or why she f
elt the familiar internal pressure of sharing her head with somebody else.
Richard?
“Right here, Genie.” Something . . . different about his voice.
Oh, good, she thought, and laughed hysterically, except no sound came out. Where are we?
He laughed along with her, but his chuckle didn't have that frantic edge. “You're on a ride-along in a jumbo flying squid. Dosidicus gigas. I thought it would be nicer than waking up in a hospital bed, given how much time you've spent in those.”
You're so sweet.
“I try.”
She sensed his smile, a ghostly affection like the memory of somebody stroking her hair. The squid—and Genie, and Richard—must be swimming closer to the surface. She could make out cloudy green rays of light filtered through moving water now, and feel the currents on her skin a way she never could have in her own body. Why is the squid hurt, Dick?
“It had skin lesions. From exposure to fallout from the Impact. They're healing.”
It's infected.
“It's on the worldwire. We wouldn't be here if it wasn't.”
Genie reached out to the fishy presence she half-sensed, becoming aware of a calm, alien sentience, a canny cephalopodic awareness that she barely even recognized as a mind. Incurious and hungry, the squid slipped through the water. She drew back, unsettled, and then she realized that she could feel other minds out there in the darkness, even stranger and more alien ones, minds experiencing sensations she had no words for and senses she couldn't describe: the multidimensional mind-song-maps of cetacean sonar, the sense like pressure but not like pressure from a fish's lateral lines, the unfailing knowledge of goal and direction that Richard showed her was a sea turtle, guided on migration by lines of magnetic force.
And then there were the Benefactors. The shiptree, sensing light and nutrients like a flavor on its hull, and its birdcage companion, the alien creature in a multiplicity of bodies that felt space as the twisted, tessered outline of a Klein bottle groped by hand in a pitch-black room. And she felt their awareness on her as well; their curiosity, their alienness matched by the alienness of herself, and Richard and the worldwire binding the whole thing together. Richard, who wasn't—quite—Richard anymore. Whose presence in her mind reflected all those things, all at once, as if on a long-distance conversation she heard the noise of other people talking in the background, a world at the other end of the wire.
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