by Rick Partlow
The woman tried to spit at her, but Priscilla’s reflexes were too fast for that and she jerked aside, then slapped Valley across the face.
“I can make you tell me,” Pris warned.
Sam frowned, wondering what she meant. Surely she wasn’t speaking of torture…things were dire, but were they really desperate enough to sink to that level?
But there was real fear in Valley’s eyes at the threat, almost panic.
“You wouldn’t,” she said, her voice breaking, her heels digging into the concrete as she tried to push herself backwards. “I’m a Citizen, you can’t do that…”
“Do you think I care about legalities at this point, woman?” Priscilla’s voice was harsh, chilling.
“Are we talking a little of the rough stuff?” Fellows wondered, pushing off the wall, cracking his knuckles. “Because I might be able to help with that, though it’s been a while…”
“Physical torture is unreliable,” Pris told him, not looking away from Valley. “People will tell you what you want to hear to stop the pain, then you have to go over the same questions repeatedly to make sure they weren’t lying and it would take far too long.”
“Then what are you suggesting?” John Gage asked. He was frowning, but Sam thought he was more upset at the idea he was being kept in the dark than at the ethical problem of torture with a possibly ticking nuclear bomb.
Pris looked up finally, regarding them all, and Sam the longest, and he thought he saw an apology in her eyes.
“Most Resolution citizens who go into careers off-world are fitted with a neurolink, a transceiver connected directly to the auditory and visual centers of the brain.”
“We know about ‘em,” Fellows said with a curt nod. “Kinda’ creepy if you ask me, but what’s the point?”
“There are things about the neurolink about which most people aren’t aware. There is necessarily a small computer module to translate the microwave signals to neural code.” She closed her eyes, as if steeling herself for the reaction to what she was about to reveal. “There are…backdoors built into these computers, which can be used, under certain conditions, to compel cooperation.”
Sam’s mouth dropped open and he rocked back a step, feeling as if someone had just slapped him across the face. That couldn’t be true…she had to be bluffing.
“You can’t do that to me!” Valley screamed at her, jerking back and forth against her bonds.
“It’s seldom used,” Pris admitted, “because there are some…side-effects.” She pierced Valley with a cold glare. “It can cause neurological scarring, psychological problems, post-traumatic stress, other things. I’d rather not bring a vegetable back with me to Aphrodite, but I think under the circumstances, they’ll understand.”
Sam swallowed hard. Whether it was true or not, Valley obviously thought it was. He had to help her out; recriminations could wait.
“You’re going to tell us either way,” he pointed out, trying to play good cop to Priscilla’s bad cop. “You tell us voluntarily, you get to keep your personality instead of a mindwipe, which is what you’re looking at right now.”
“Mindwipe?” Gage asked, blanching. “Do you people actually do things like that?”
“Oh, we do,” Sam told him, trying to hide the lurch in his stomach. “I know the Consensus puts people to death for certain crimes, but it’s considered more merciful to just…” He shrugged. “…rewrite them. I don’t know, I’ve always thought I’d rather just die. I mean, everything you are is destroyed anyway, so…”
“Time’s up,” Priscilla decided, grabbing the woman’s temples between her palms and fixing her eyes as if she were going to launch herself through them into her brain. “We’ll do this the hard way.”
“All right,” Valley strained through clenched teeth, trying to pull her head away from Priscilla’s grasp. “I’ll tell you.” Her gaze flickered around them all. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”
“Who sent you here?” Pris asked her, not letting go of her grip on the woman’s face. “Who didn’t want the Gateway to succeed?”
“Mother.” There was something of a perverse satisfaction in the look she gave Priscilla. “I was sent by Mother.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Pris didn’t realize she’d slapped the woman until she felt the sting in her palm, saw Jeddah Valley’s head snap around, blood oozing from her split lip.
“I thought you were smarter than to try to feed me this sort of bullshit,” she snarled at the woman. “Do you think I have any patience left after you murdered dozens of innocent people? Do you really think I’d believe Mother sent you to do this?”
“Mother sent me just as she sent you,” Valley said, spitting blood out to the side. Her chin was up, her expression defiant. “I’m the same as you, Priscilla, I knew it the first time I saw you. I’m an avatar.”
“What the fuck is an avatar?” Fellows wondered, as idly profane as always. “Is that one of them Virtual Reality things?”
Priscilla didn’t answer. She couldn’t; the words were frozen in her brain, behind an ice jam in a river of thoughts.
“At times,” Valley answered the question, “Mother has tasks she needs accomplished, things she trusts no one else to do. When she has these special assignments, she manufactures an avatar.” Valley nodded toward Priscilla, still struck dumb. “A force-aged clone body, with a blank slate for a brain. And into that blank slate, Mother downloads herself, or part of herself, what can fit from a sentient computer as old as Old Earth into a single human brain.”
“That’s…not possible.”
Poor Sam. He refused to believe it, even though he must know it was true.
“It’s not her, of course,” Valley went on. “The second the avatar wakes up and begins to have her own experiences, she becomes a different person, and the longer she exists on her own, the more her own separate personality develops. That’s why most are compelled to return within weeks, at most, to have their memories uploaded into Mother and their bodies reconstituted.”
Pris couldn’t look at Sam, couldn’t speak to him. And she still couldn’t come out and tell him the truth about herself. But she could speak to Valley, could ask her questions still.
“Yet you lived apart for years,” she said to the woman. “Decades even. How would Mother allow that?”
There was a quiet outrush of breath behind her, the sound of Sam Avalon’s exhalation as he realized what Priscilla’s question meant. Pain clenched at her chest, but she couldn’t turn away from Valley.
“My mission wasn’t over,” Valley replied. “It still isn’t. This place has to be destroyed before anyone finds out its secrets.”
“Why?” John Gage interjected, leaning in close to the woman. “What is so important about this place?”
“If I tell you,” Valley insisted, “you won’t believe me.” She nodded toward the metal hatch. “I have to show you.”
“You can’t do this,” Tejado moaned, rolling onto his side. His eyes still seemed unfocused but he was trying to look at Jeddah Valley. “We had a deal!”
“There’s no choice now, Jaime.” Valley shook her head. “The only way out is through.”
“All right,” Priscilla said, turning to Telia. “Open the door.”
She finally made herself meet Sam’s eyes. There was hurt there, and anger, and maybe something else…perhaps a sense of awe? The look a Bronze-Age savage might have reserved for a prophet touched by the gods. She didn’t know which of those made her sadder.
Telia paused a moment before nodding and heading over to the hatch, taking that ancient, metal wheel in her metal fingers and bracing herself.
“I suppose it’s a day for revealing hidden secrets,” the cyborg mused, throwing her weight into the lock.
It squealed in protest, turning slowly and reluctantly, and a massive bolt slid out of its housing with a loud, shuddering bang. The hatch creaked open and on the other side was darkness.
Pris pulled a flas
hlight from Telia’s borrowed gun-belt, switched it on and held it with one hand, grabbing Jeddah Valley by the neck with the other and pushing her ahead into the black.
“Show me this terrible knowledge of yours, sister,” she told the woman. “Show me what’s worth killing a planet for.”
***
Sam should have been helping to guard Jaime Tejado, or watching for threats, or doing anything useful, but he couldn’t force his thoughts into any sort of order. Priscilla was Mother.
Well, not Mother herself, but an avatar, a living representation of what was basically their god transferred to human form. So many things about her made sense now: the way she’d seemed at once almost infinitely knowledgeable and capable and in command while simultaneously childlike and inexperienced; how much she’d changed in the last few years, developing personality quirks in a short period of time which would normally be firmed up by the time someone hit adulthood.
He wanted to be enraged she’d withheld the truth from him, but he’d already known she couldn’t help it, that there were firewalls in her mind, in her implant computer which kept her from telling him the truth. The anger faded quickly, but what it left behind was…what? Horror? Reverence? Awe?
He barely registered his surroundings, letting the darkness on the edges of the flashlights swallow up his perceptions, not perceiving the details of the near distance except as an indistinct grey blur. When the procession stopped, he nearly ran into the back of Telia Proctor.
“I need my hands free,” Jeddah Valley said, her tone sullen but resigned.
Priscilla stared at her for a moment, obviously dubious, but Fellows pulled out his multi-tool and twisted the plastic restraints off her wrists. She shook her hands out as if she were trying to get feeling back into them, then motioned over to the right, nearly disappearing into the grey blur at the edge of the light before Priscilla adjusted the beam.
There was the corner of a wall there, what might have been the beginning of an aisle or a row of…something. A metal panel had been pried open and clamps were pinched on what seemed to be some sort of old-style electrical hookup there. The clamps were connected to insulated wires running down to the square, plastic box of a portable battery pack. Valley touched a control on the box, then threw a physical switch inside the panel and gradually, in fits and starts, lights began to flicker on above them.
“We had to replace some of the wiring,” Valley said quietly, almost reverently, “and fabricate new light panels. The old ones were built with the best they had at the time, to last a thousand years. But not this long.”
Finally, Sam understood where they were. Row after row, flickering into the light as if they were only now coming into existence, shelf after shelf, coming up shoulder high on him, grey and plastic and marked with some sort of ancient text, faded and worn despite being underground and out of the elements. And on every shelf, open plastic sleeves, each alike, hundreds per shelf, hundreds of thousands just in the one chamber he could see. And in those sleeves, some sort of cassette, clear but not plastic, reminding him of nothing so much as the data spikes everyone used for secure storage of information.
“This is a library,” he said, louder than he’d intended.
The words echoed through the room, two hundred meters on a side, curved along the walls into a great cylinder. At the center was a hub, a stairwell he thought, and he had the sense it led to more rooms just like this one.
“It is,” Jeddah Valley confirmed. “The oldest still in existence, commissioned by the original Consensus government under Charles Dauphin himself.”
“How far down does it go?” Sam asked her, motioning at the stairwell.
“There are twenty levels just like this one,” she said. “As well as a small nuclear reactor that’s no longer working, and a few rooms where the curators used to stay.” Her mouth twitched downward, a hint of a frown. “We found their remains there.”
“How is that possible?” John Gage demanded, almost sounding scandalized by the idea. “The nanite swarms of the last war destroyed any metal and plastic, broke it down to its components. This shouldn’t exist at all.”
“That’s not how nanites work,” Priscilla informed him, her manner didactic in a way Sam was sure would piss the old man off. “They don’t just keep going blindly, eating everything, not even nanophage weapons. They’re programmed what to break down or there’d be no ore or oil left in the ground. They’d keep going until their programmed energy sources were gone, then they’d die.”
She waved a hand around them. “This place was far enough away from any civilization and probably secret enough it was never targeted.” Pris frowned, nose wrinkling in confusion. “The question is, why would anyone build it?”
“They knew what was coming.”
Valley led them down the aisles, cutting first to the right and then back to the left until she reached a shelf which looked very much like any of the others to Sam. She picked out one of the sleeves near the upper right of the shelf and took the crystalline cassette out of it. Sam expected someone to object, someone to show caution, but they all simply let her carry the storage cassette towards the center of the chamber, to something set into the curved wall beside the stairwell.
It was some sort of projector, he thought, something simple and primitive but likelier to survive the ravages of time than a more complicated holographic unit or even a flat-screen monitor. Valley slipped the cassette into a notch at the base of the slab-like projector and it locked in place with a solid clack of crystal in crystal.
“Again,” she told them, “we had to replace the light source and re-wire the power, but it’s amazing what’s lasted.”
A circle of light snapped to life against a flattened section of stone cut into the curve of the cylindrical hub, and standing in the light was a man, only his torso visible in the video recording. He was slender and dark, grey shot through his black beard, his hair wild and unruly and his eyes alight with intensity. He wore a long, loose overcoat and beneath it was visible some sort of cravat, lavender silk. Sam knew his face. Every Resolutionist knew that face, had learned it as a young child in the very first lessons they were taught.
“Greetings,” the dark man said, his voice soothing, smooth, almost hypnotic. “My name is Charles Dauphin.”
***
“If you’re watching this video,” the bearded man went on, “then I can only assume the worst has happened, the final war has been fought and there’s nothing left of us.”
“Holy shit,” Fellows murmured.
Telia grunted agreement, though no one else spoke. Charles Dauphin was a legend…or a bogeyman, depending with whom you discussed the subject.
“The end is inevitable,” Dauphin went on. He swept a hand across in front of him and the scene in the video transformed with the motion.
The view of the Earth from orbit was familiar, but the details on that globe were not. Vast swathes of Asia were brown, barren desert and whole coastlines were changed. The globe turned, its rotation sped up in the projection, and then the view sank into an atmosphere brown with pollution, hazy with fires rising from sprawling, ugly cities. They were stacked with cheap, blocky buildings constructed so close together they could have been touching, obviously new and yet just as obviously already falling apart…and burning.
“Eleven billion people live on this world and as the world economy collapses, the population only seems to grow ever faster. In a sane world, a planned world, we could make room for even this many, could rebuild our cities to accommodate them. Yet every attempt we make to do this results in civil unrest and violence.”
The camera eye sank lower, into the streets, hovering over the riots in the hearts of cities across the world, people chanting and screaming and throwing themselves at lines of armored soldiers. Sonic weapons swept across crowds and dozens fell, writhing. Molotov cocktails answered, setting police and military vehicles ablaze, and now rifles chattered in return and blood was spilled on the cracked pavement.
<
br /> “We have perfected fusion power, but the cost of construction is so high and the political instability so great that only two reactors have been built; and much of the world is still dependent on burning fossil fuels, which are more vulnerable to terrorist attack.”
A quick shift again, to somewhere less urban, somewhere arid and rocky and desolate. A pipeline ran across that wasteland and above it remotely-piloted drones buzzed, swarms of them. Some sort of electromagnetic weapon fired from a dish mounted on a truck parked along the pipeline, swinging back and forth, and where it hit, the drones fell out of the sky. There were just too many, though, and one finally hit; a flare of high explosives expanded from the impact and the pipeline burst and caught fire.
“And as the violence spreads and grows, the intensity and the scale of each new act seems to grow exponentially.”
Now an ocean port, with container ships and tankers crowding in, serviced by tugs, loading and unloading on a constant turnover. A shot from kilometers away, perhaps from an automated security camera, showing a city skyline, somewhere neat and orderly and efficient. A light so bright it washed out the camera in a crackling pattern of static for two or three seconds, and then an angry yellow and white mushroom cloud climbed into the morning sky.
“I began my career,” Dauphin said, the playback returning to his calm intensity, “with the idea of saving humanity from itself, of redeeming this ravaged, tortured world.” He shook his head, a tight, controlled motion. “I now realize that is no longer possible, and my current strategy is simply to preserve the human race in some form, somewhere. To this end, I have mortgaged my soul.”
Dauphin turned away from the cameras, a complete circle, his hands wrapping in his hair, a gesture of surrender, Telia thought, but perhaps a calculated one. Was he about to confess or justify himself?
“There was a man, a General. I shall not say his name in the hopes it will be lost to history; he doesn’t deserve to be remembered. He was brutal and efficient, but not overly intelligent and not at all innovative.” He spread his hands. “I designed weapons for him from my specialties, nanotechnology, biotechnology. In exchange, he let me play with my toys.”