by Roger Levy
I helped him to the outer door where his driver was waiting. A small cluster of people were crowded by his flycykle, staring so intently at its screenery that they had to be shouted at to move aside.
I stayed a moment to watch them watching. There was excitement on their faces, and awe, and disbelief and laughter. Walking back to my room, I found myself laughing, too. Not for the event, but for the fact that I had recognised the expressions and the emotions. I could feel them.
I analysed my reaction to it as well, of course. How could it be, for example, that the sight of ten people so involved in a screen could make more of an impression on me than the certain knowledge that there were millions more elsewhere doing exactly the same thing?
Back in my room, I followed the aftermath of the ceremony and the accident intently.
While the Song had always seemed to have its own mysterious climate, with local clouds of attention forming and fading, its tornados of activity and lacunae of calm, the speed of what followed in this case was phenomenal. The storm of reconstruction and discussion was succeeded by something entirely new. As I had indicated to Malachus, I’d suspected something like it might happen, but the breathtaking speed and extent of it astonished me.
And while the shuttle’s pilot, Liacea Kalthi, was irretrievably lost, her neurid reading was on the AfterLife database, and had been updated just as she’d left the mothership. Within a minute of her death, millions of people had subscribed to AfterLife, and Liacea Kalthi’s story – limited though it was by the maturity-inserted neurid – was being opened throughout the System.
That was one of the wonders of AfterLife: that even the irretrievably dead could be cared about. Far from ruining its launch, the death of Liacea Kalthi fixed AfterLife more securely than I had imagined possible, and embedded it in the heart of the System. From that day, applications for neurids flooded in.
The ceremony, then, was a success. For months to come it would be viewed everywhere, constantly, every detail devoured, dissected and discussed.
On that first day, though, I watched for hours and I checked and roamed the Song, eavesdropping and whispering, and then at three in the morning, exhausted, I ran to Pireve.
‘It’s started, Piri,’ I yelled, waving my arms crazily. ‘All I need to do is make it stronger, but the foundation is solid. AfterLife is more than I ever hoped it could be. It’s magnificent!’ I described it to her until I was barely able to speak. When I stopped, I put my hands on my knees and simply laughed, I was so full of exhaustion and exhilaration.
‘Oh, Pireve,’ I sighed. The hood of the unit was open and she was so very beautiful. I imagined my love flowing to her like a breeze, fluttering her eyelids and entering her mind.
I can’t wait to see you, my Alef.
She had answered me!
No, of course she hadn’t. I had simply been spending so much time in the Song that I’d become accustomed to formless voices responding to mine. I wanted her so much that I had invented her voice.
‘I need to fill the sea,’ I told her when I got my breath back. ‘I need AfterLife to grow, but there’s still so much detail to install, and there are problems.’
Tell me, Alef.
She was my subconscious, but what difference did that make? Over the next days, I spent more time with her, talking over the swiftly unfolding events.
‘Liacea Kalthi had parents and a brother,’ I told her. ‘She had lovers, a complicated life, and now the Song knows it all. There’s no peace for her family, no escape for anyone close to her, and they’re drowning in sympathy and accusation. The Song is destroying them.’
Did you say accusation?
‘She argued with one of her lovers just before embarking on the final trip. He was hounded by the Song. They blamed him for her death. He killed himself.’
In future, make everyone anonymous. Give them false names, Alef, not numbers. And when there are cures, anonymity will make the voting fair, too…
After that, I talked to her all the time, even when I wasn’t with her. Questions I couldn’t solve alone, I’d solve with her, even though the idea of this collaboration was crazy. I imagined Malachus watching me, his finger on some device that would kill me if I made a suspicious move.
‘When they’re retrieved from the sea to be cured, how do I handle that?’
Distribute AfterLife hospitals throughout the System. Let those voted for cure be sent anywhere, no one will know where, and they can start new lives anonymously.
After some months, there was only one remaining problem, and I took it to Pireve.
‘There’s an issue with some of the maturity-inserted neurids, Piri. Their memory retrieval isn’t always quite complete or accurate. Even if I use the archives to help the putery make adjustments for likely actuality of experience, the putery can’t duplicate the participant’s own voice. The voice always sounds false.’
Then don’t use putery, my Alef. Use people.
So I employed interviewers to gather detail, to incorporate the idiosyncrasies of vernacular and accent and jargon into the extrapolations of the putery, to work with and smooth away the awkward creases in our early AfterLives. These writers were only required while we were relying on the maturity-inserted neurids, and I made sure that we were open about it, but it led to the rumours and theories of conspiracy that, in the years to follow, grew up around AfterLife.
It turned out to be impossible to dispel the rumours. To my surprise, however, they seemed to add to the reputation of AfterLife. We simply announced the truth, that the adult Lives could not be one hundred per cent guaranteed, but that in time, as the implanted-at-birth AfterLives became available, accuracy would approach unity.
And so, with a few months to go before Pellonhorc came out of his rv, I was able to concentrate on the final details.
Ligate’s businesses had been fully incorporated into the Whisper, which was the only organisation in the System more extensive than AfterLife.
But we were getting nowhere with a cure for Pellonhorc’s cancer.
I tried not to think of the seeds of death that Pellonhorc had sown. It had struck me that I could now spend my time searching them out, or finding and cutting whatever communication or triggering systems he had, but what if I failed? Pellonhorc was the only person who had ever out-thought me, and I would not take that risk. Whatever triggers and traps I might discover, I was certain that there would be more elsewhere.
Forty-three
RAZER
Razer headed straight out, the vessel diving deeper as the sea floor fell away. Maerley hadn’t been understating the sub’s limited capabilities. There was no way of mooring the vessel. At least it meant the controls were straightforward. She opened the course and destination screenery, and wasn’t surprised to find their putery locked and set. Sending me to Tallen’s rig, are you, Cynth? She had limited control over depth and there was an emergency manual override, but beyond that she was a passenger.
The sea was growing bumpier. She took the vessel down until the ride smoothed, and then she examined her comms. There was a single preset, linked to Maerley’s personal comms.
‘Maerley?’
No answer. She wondered if he was alive. She checked her readings. Eight hours of air, and fuel for a max of that at an even speed. The rig was six hours away, so she had two hours of latitude, which sounded like adequate leeway, but it would quickly be eroded by currents and the need to avoid sarcs.
She brought up the sonar. Nothing was showing. She wouldn’t be in sarc waters for a while. The range of visuals and thermals gave her a variety of options. She prioritised proximity and caught swift glimpses of fish and the swirl of algae in the glittering currents around her. Above was the paler green of the sun on the surface, though the surface itself was no longer visible. To her rear was her bubbled wake. Somewhere below was the seabed, but like the surface, it was now out of range.
When she prioritised distance over proximity, all detail faded. The fish were dark scratches in
a grey void and the seabed was a rolling grey plain, paling into the distance. There were a few scattered scratches ahead, of comparable size to the fish but far lighter, which she puzzled over until she realised they were the first of the faraway sarcs.
To her rear, the receding shore was just visible, refracted by the surface of the sea and pale as dream. It was marbled by flames. She searched for human outlines, but found nothing.
Razer felt suddenly and desperately alone. All she could hear was her own breathing and the thick rumble of the motor. She wanted to say something aloud, but couldn’t bring herself to hear what her voice might sound like.
She had never really been alone before, not since her mother had died. There had always been people, and when there hadn’t been anyone, she wrote, in order not to be alone. She had written in order not to think about herself: inventing, pretending, avoiding.
And then there had been Cynth. And much as she had always imagined Cynth as nothing but a wall to bounce off or occasionally to crash into, Cynth was the only constant in her life. But now she didn’t know what Cynth was.
She spent a moment getting herself pointlessly angry at Maerley. That figure she’d seen on the dock beside him could have been Decece. She should have made sure he was dead.
When she turned the screen back on, she was entering the region of the sarcs. There were only a few at first, restless shapes shadowed by flickering fish, then gradually there were more, crowds of them ordered like books in a sunken library. As she passed through them, they dipped or yawed and then recovered their original positions.
No, she thought. Cynth wasn’t her only constant. That was AfterLife. And that was another pretence of hers, that AfterLife meant nothing to her. She realised that it did matter to her whether she survived to be in one of those sarcs outside, that she might have a chance to be voted for. Even if not for herself, then for the others who hadn’t survived all this. She was one of the holders of the truth about Bale. The TruTale she had written of him was a story, but her own Life, if it were ever uploaded, held what was important about him. And Delta’s Life held something of Bale too, if her body had not been destroyed.
The regiments of sarcs passed around her. All the lives in there, the true stories, the Lives. For the first time in days, contemplating what she might be heading towards, she was not worried. Somehow, despite the likelihood that there was more to Cynth than she had always thought, she still trusted Cynth.
Or maybe she simply had faith in herself. She had got this far.
And Tallen? Nothing concerning him quite made sense. Although Cynth must have known something about him, she couldn’t have known everything, to have allowed Razer to be taken by Decece. And Maerley. Someone other than Cynth had commissioned sea vessels from Maerley, but was it really possible that Cynth and the other agent had been unaware of each other? They weren’t acting together, but there was some connection between them, and something strong. There were too many coincidences for it to be otherwise.
She suddenly remembered Delta’s last flower, and managed to extricate her commer from beneath the tight harness.
The tulip opened. There were arrival dates on Bleak for two vessels. One was the neuro team. She knew about that, nothing new. The other was the audit team. But six ancillary personnel had accompanied the team, walking through on the same documentation.
Razer folded her hand over the commer and worked it out. Two of the extras had been Fleschik and Millasco. That left four. Maerley had built vessels like hers for four people.
They were ahead of her, but now she knew about them. Good.
Next question. Why should she trust Cynth? Cynth was a programmed AI. What was Cynth’s directive, if not to administer TruTales? If Cynth wasn’t self-operating, who was operating her?
Her questions went in circles. The vessel slid steadily on, through the restless sarcs, until she began to feel as if she were in a sarc herself, a repository of memories and thoughts, unable to do a thing other than hope for a destination.
It didn’t make sense, no matter how she broke it down, unless there were two agencies linked intimately, but in mutual opposition.
Razer’s short laugh vanished into the hull. It wouldn’t make a story. Here it was, progressing towards a conclusion of some kind – she was sure of that, if of nothing else – and there was no possible way for the ends to be tied up. It was more like life than any sort of a story; it was a mess.
A small cluster of sarcs glittered and pitched in the sea ahead. All those messy lives held in stasis.
Two powerful factions working towards getting a neuroengineered nobody onto a rig. Were they working against each other, or independently towards the same purpose? It was insane.
Razer was certain of only one thing; that Decece had been right, that she’d been selected and trained for this a very long time ago.
The sonar grew brighter with sarcs until they were like stars around her. She checked the short-link comms. Nothing. She passed on through rank upon rank of sarcs, which shifted as if in acknowledgement.
The experience was beautiful. She imagined the sea as the life of the System, and all the memories within calming it. And she thought of the truly lost – the Bales – with a terrible, bittersweet sadness.
Time passed like this until she no longer thought of her destination. She played with her view, observing the sarcs up close in bright detail, their skins faintly corroding, their trains of fish like attendant thoughts, and she saw them in shadow extending hundreds of metres away, the patterns they made, the grey currents and trails. She dozed, awoke, dozed again.
And then the vibration of the vessel became a more solid judder, and she woke up properly.
Looming ahead of her was the vast undersea framework of a rig.
* * *
Tallen
Tallen felt sick and confused. Beata and Lode were in front of him, and his throbbing head told him there was an urgent problem in the subsea structure. He was moving mechanically, descending through the deepest bowels of the rig, walking so quickly that he almost tripped over the horde of chittering mechs at his feet. This headache was different, already sharp and directing him precisely. There was no uncertainty at all about it.
Beata said, ‘Tallen? You are not acting normally.’
The humechs tried to overtake him, but he pushed them aside. He was heading for the central control chamber, into which the deep pipes rose from the sea bed. His head seemed full of fog.
Lode added, ‘You are not acting as you normally act. We are worried.’
The chamber door opened for them. The console was a bank of screenery and putery controlling all the pipework; the main pipes pumping core into the tanks and the subsidiary pipes bringing up gas. The rig’s gyro-putery was here too, constantly redistributing gas and core around the tanks to maintain the rig’s stability.
It was all working smoothly, and yet Tallen’s head was speared with pain. There was something he had to do here, to stop the pain.
Beata said, ‘What is wrong, Tallen? What needs to be fixed?’
Tallen shook his head, trying to rid himself of the pain. There was nothing wrong here. The gyros were fine. The pumps were fine. The pipes had ninety-nine point nine nine eight per cent integrity. Temperatures were within tolerances. The only thing wrong was Tallen himself. Why was he here?
He felt nauseous, and when the nausea had cleared, he was on the deck and in the cage. The water was bitter cold and his skull was frozen. He screamed and screamed. Against the sea it was nothing.
And then he was back in the rig with Beata and Lode again, and Beata saying to him, ‘What did you fix, Tallen? You are not the same. The sea is not easing you.’
Tallen was sobbing and didn’t know why.
Lode said, ‘You have no ease. Is it your emotions? Do you want to talk about it? Please talk about it.’
He stopped sobbing. The knife in his pocket was still there, still comforting. The original headache was gone, but in its place was anoth
er low and heavy pain.
Lode said ‘We are here for you, Tallen. We are worried about you. We are worried about what you have done.’
‘What have you done?’ said Beata.
But Tallen didn’t know what he had done.
Forty-four
ALEF
SigEv 44 Out of time
I was at my putery when Malachus came to me and said, more sharply than he’d spoken to me in a long while, ‘It’s time, Alef.’
‘Yes, in a week,’ I said, not bothering to look up.
He sighed.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘A week.’
‘What are you doing?’ he said, bending towards the putery. He’d often ask me this, out of politeness.
I was exhausted. I’d completed my sub-program for the maturity-inserted neurids. AfterLife was growing fast so I created an AI-moderated routine that could adapt and recycle every elaboration the writers provided through all similar Life events in the archive.
I told Malachus, ‘Five years is up in a week’s time.’
Malachus rested his hand on my arm and said, ‘I know, but I have my own orders, Alef. I’m sorry. It’s today.’
Again! Even asleep, Pellonhorc had tripped me again. ‘Just one moment,’ I told Malachus. ‘Let me just finish this. Please.’
I set generic Life comparisons rolling down the screen. Lists, parameters, fragments of real lives and the ends of those Lives. Terrible experiences repeated over and again, unappreciated and, until now, unheard. The only ever difference at that final moment was the immediate environment – inside, outside, day, night, alone, accompanied. And the voice of the Life.
‘Look at us, Malachus,’ I begged him, letting images flow before his eyes. ‘Here we are. All of us.’
It was all in the stories: the myth of unique tragedy. The data reeled. Here it all was, catalogued and cross-referenced; damage and death within abusive families, in natural and human-made catastrophe, in relationship breakup, in medical emergency… ‘Look! This is humanity, Malachus!’