by Roger Levy
Razer recognised the mix of actual and predictive imagery. The figure blinking at the base shuttled between seven and eighteen per cent. ‘That isn’t much help,’ she pointed out. ‘It’s a guess.’
‘That’s right. They don’t waste resources out there.’
Tallen was right. Why would you spend money on something you’d never dare use? She exchanged a quick smile with him, realising she’d stopped noticing what he looked like.
‘I can go down and fix it,’ Razer said. ‘I’m used to suits and exotools. I’ve done this sort of thing in space.’ She gave him a wry smile. ‘I’ve been trained, it seems.’
Tallen shook his head. ‘Space is quiet. Space is still. I’ve spent my life fixing stuff that can’t be fixed. This is just a shift of scale and environment. I appreciate the offer, but I have to do it.’ He glanced at the screenery. ‘I know where the explosives need to be placed.’
She said, ‘What explosives? You said it just needs to be capped.’
Tallen started towards the far side of the room, where there was a small spinlocked door. He said, ‘The wellhead has to be blown and it has to be me. I know where and how to set the charges. And it has to be now.’
She said, ‘So what can I do?’
‘There’s nothing more,’ Tallen said. He was pulling the heavy door open and ducking through, with Razer right behind him. One of the humechs said, ‘Tallen, this cannot work.’
The other said, ‘Nothing can work. Do not attempt this. It is pointless action in the face of death.’
‘Yes,’ said the first. ‘It is human bravado.’
Razer ran after Tallen. Both humechs stayed behind, and none of the small mechs followed.
The narrow descents were steel and booming, ending at a tiny cell that stank of oil. There was a locker bolted to the wall and what had once been bright strip-tape defining an exit hatch on the floor. Equipment hung from wallhooks – cables, explosives, rivet-drivers and punches. Everything was clouded with grime.
‘Tallen,’ Razer said.
Tallen already had a swimrig out of the locker and was tugging it on. She went to help him, pulling the rig tight and checking the seals. The suit stretched awkwardly over his spine, and the headset as it stretched over his cheeks caught and reopened the fresh knife wounds. Blood started to seep through and spread inside the mask.
‘Wait,’ Razer said. She cradled the back of Tallen’s head with one hand and with the other she worked the skin closed and settled the tight mask so it would hold his face together. Her fingers ran across the biometal. It felt warm and human.
She said, ‘Aren’t there mechs to work outside?’
Tallen took a hank of explosives and strapped them to the suit, then took the riveters and a punch, clipping them to belt and thigh loops. He said, ‘For routine repair. Not for this. If I’m on the spot and I’m fast, and I am fast –’ he tapped his metalled skull – ‘I might be able to blow it in and seal the wellhead. If I succeed, the gas already in the sea will dissipate, the rig will resurface and the mechs can stabilise you.’
He opened the hatch and dropped down to his waist, his boots ringing on the floor below.
‘The mechs,’ she said. ‘You won’t come back, then.’
‘No. Not either way.’
‘There must be something we can do.’ Her raised voice thundered in the small chamber.
‘We can say goodbye,’ Tallen said.
It was suddenly as if they’d known each other for years. She said quietly to him, knowing there was nothing else, ‘You’re quite something, Tallen. Goodbye.’ And then, quickly, she said, ‘You have putery in that skull? Comms?’ Of course he did.
Tallen crouched and started to pull the heavy hatch down over his head. ‘If I manage to blow it, you’ll know in about five minutes. Goodbye, Razer. I wish we’d met before. Met normally, I mean.’ The hatch closed.
Razer ran back to the control room where the humechs were still waiting at the door. She slapped the nearest one and yelled, ‘Come on. We’re not letting him die.’
* * *
‘Okay, Alef,’ Razer said. Her heart was thumping. ‘You have to listen to me.’
He looked up at her and for an instant their eyes were connected. It was still frightening, but she made herself hold the contact until his gaze veered away. She shook him by the shoulders. He was the weight of a child. ‘You must know about putery,’ she said. ‘All this mess. It was you, wasn’t it?’
He did nothing and said nothing.
She screamed, ‘We’re going to die here. Tallen’s going to die. Listen. Do you know about putery?’
‘Yes,’ he said in his high, scratchy voice.
‘Okay. Tallen’s in the sea beneath the rig.’ She paused. ‘You know this is a rig we’re on. Yes? And you know who Tallen is. He needs help. He needs putery. Listen to me! Can you connect to the rig and make its putery work for him?’
This was pointless. There was no sign that Alef was listening. Razer didn’t know if she was speaking slowly enough. ‘If Tallen doesn’t succeed, we’ll all die. You’ll die, Alef.’ Though she wasn’t sure that this would concern him.
He stood up. He was so small, and he was shaking. He looked at the bodies of Pellonhorc and Pireve, and then he went to the grey screenery in the chamber wall and raised his hands to it. After a moment an image came up and it was the same one Tallen had shown her in the subsea chamber, only now there was more turbulence and roiling gas, and the predictive percentage was so high that most of it was just blur. Alef’s hands flicked across the screenery and as he moved them, despite the thumping in her chest, she thought she’d never seen anything so wonderful. It was like silent music. How was he doing that?
The image started to sharpen. An alert came up.
THESE PARAMETERS UNCONFIRMED. INSUFFICIENT DATA. ACTION SHOULD NOT BE TAKEN BASED ON DATA CONTAINING MORE THAN 13% PREDICTIVE PER SECOND. THESE DATA AVERAGE 96% PPS
A voice filled the room. ‘Hey. What’s this?’
Razer said, ‘Tallen?’
‘He can’t hear you,’ Alef said. ‘Only my voice. And I’ve disabled your augmem link to him, too.’ Alef’s fingers played again. The beauty of his movements and what was happening on the screenery didn’t seem connected with that grating, alienating tone.
‘Talk to him, then, Alef,’ Razer said.
‘When there’s something to say.’
The images were subtly altering.
Tallen’s voice filled the room again, gasping. ‘I don’t know what you’ve done back there, but I can see more clearly.’
‘What are you doing?’ Razer wondered if Alef was crazy after all. He wasn’t directing the putery as she’d hoped. ‘Alef?’
Alef said, ‘Wait. Wait.’
On the screenery the currents resembled the contours of a shifting relief map. Tallen was a shaded silhouette setting a charge ring around the black source of the vent, punching the explosives into position. He was being buffeted and was struggling, but the screenery was glowing brightly, showing him where to snap down the charges.
Tallen’s voice came back. ‘I don’t know what happened, but thanks. Okay, it’s all set. I’m going to blow it.’
Alef said, ‘Go back to the hatch. I can blow it from here.’
Tallen said, ‘I’m not risking it. If the remote fails, there won’t be time for me to go out again.’
Alef’s hesitation was almost imperceptible. ‘You are right. This has a significant probability.’
Razer felt heat in her cheeks.
‘Wait,’ Alef said. ‘I need ten seconds to think.’
Tallen burst out, his voice distorting, ‘Hey! What have you done? I can’t see.’
Tallen had vanished from the screenery. The image was flowing more rapidly and a timecode came up
+1SEC
+2SEC
+3SEC
+4SEC
and the numbers kept accelerating along with the image, and the parameter warning was back and blinking fast until t
he PPS figure hit one hundred per cent.
This was crazy, Razer thought. All this was predictive. Alef had calculated – no, that was impossible, surely he must simply have guessed – the ebb and flow patterns of the sea beneath the rig, minutes ahead.
Alef wiped the figure away.
And then, as his hands danced, the image steadied and oscillated about a point where the entire movement of the current was in one direction. The image fixed to a snapshot and the timecode returned. OPTIMAL ACTION AT +19SEC
+18SEC
+17SEC
+16SEC
Alef said, ‘Fin directly due west until I tell you to blow it. I will say the word now. Go fast, Tallen.’
‘This is crazy,’ Tallen said.
‘Just do it,’ Razer yelled.
+8SEC
‘He can’t hear you,’ Alef said. His tone hadn’t changed.
Razer said, ‘Then make him hear me. I know you can.’
‘No. You are a distraction.’
+2SEC
The image sharpened and at its edge Tallen was visible again, finning hard away from the ring of charge, and directly against a sudden huge change of direction of the current.
‘Now,’ said Alef.
The image held its integrity just long enough for Razer to see the seabed start to suck down, and that the main movement of the shockwave and debris was with the current and away from Tallen. And then the screenery failed and there was silence.
‘It worked,’ Alef said.
Razer said, ‘You knew the current would do that? Right then?’
‘There was acceptable probability. It would have been better in eight minutes and ten seconds but that would have been too long.’
She said, ‘Why didn’t you let him blow it as soon as he was ready? He’d have died for sure, but that would have had the best probability, wouldn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘So, why didn’t you?’
He sat down. ‘I like playing with water.’
Razer felt ridiculously lightheaded. She collapsed to her knees, and at the same time she saw all the dead in the room around her, and she choked and threw up.
She wiped her mouth and said to Alef, ‘Could Tallen have survived?’
‘Parameters for that calculation include human variables. The probability is sub-optimal.’
Razer felt her eyes burn, and warm tears falling down her cheeks.
Alef was staring at the returning images on the screenery. There was only a general, directionless turbulence in the sea now. He said, ‘We’re rising. I can stabilise the rig. The rig is a simple game.’
‘A game?’ Razer said. ‘What exactly are you, Alef?’
‘I am alone.’
Razer looked at him standing there and said, ‘No, you’re not, Alef. There’s still me. You know me, don’t you?’
But he looked desperately alone, his eyes jumping around, resting nowhere. She wanted to do something for him, and what else was there for her to do, anyway? Tallen couldn’t have survived that. Alef had only done it for the game. She said, ‘Will you tell me your story? It’s one of the things you made me for, after all.’
He said, ‘Yes. But now –’ He sighed and his face cleared. For a moment his eyes steadied on the image of the turbulent waters and he said, ‘I wish, now.’
Razer went close to him and touched his arm. He flinched and she withdrew from the contact and said, ‘What do you wish, Alef?’
‘I wish my father would be seeing this.’ His gaze lost focus. ‘So long ago. Alef and his father, playing with the water.’
Forty-eight
RAZER
‘So,’ Razer said. ‘Let’s start. Who are you, Alef?’
His head dipped and his mouth moved. She bent closer and after a moment she recognised they were numbers, counted at an immense rate. His eyes were shifting urgently beneath his closed eyelids. She waited a few minutes, but he showed no sign of stopping.
She went back to Tallen’s room, but of course he wasn’t there, so she fell on his bed and slept, waking hours later, shivering and hungry. She had something to eat, and when she returned to Alef, the movement of his eyes was slowing and his lips were becoming still. She waited until he opened his eyes.
‘My name is Alef Selsior,’ he said. ‘I am an only child.’ It took Razer a moment to realise this was in answer to the last question, all that time ago. All those numbers ago.
Unable, suddenly, to think of anything else, she said, ‘What happened here?’
‘Pellonhorc died. Pireve died.’
‘I know that. I’m sorry.’ He didn’t say anything more. There was no emotion in that uncomfortable voice, though his eyes shone with tears.
‘Alef, why are you here on the rig?’
‘I came for Pireve and our child.’
Eventually she realised that although it was possible that he didn’t want to tell her anything, it was just as likely that he didn’t know how to. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Who was Pellonhorc?’
‘He was my friend.’
‘And who was Pireve?’
‘She was my wife.’
‘I already know that, Alef.’
‘Then why did you ask?’
Nothing he said led anywhere. ‘This is impossible, Alef. Tell me something else about Pireve.’
‘She wore yellow shoes when we got married.’
‘Something else. Something important. You know what important means?’
‘Vital. Crucial. Momentous. Pivotal. Major. Urgent. Of significance –’
‘Okay, I’m sorry. Tell me something of significance.’
‘She’s dead.’
And this was how it went until Razer asked, ‘Tell me how you infiltrated AfterLife.’
‘I didn’t infiltrate it.’
‘You must have. You became part of it to contact me.’
‘No. I invented AfterLife.’
‘Wait. No. Stop there.’
His gaze bounced around the room. She tried to see what he was seeing. The ranks of pinlights in the ceiling, the metal doors, the screenery with its views of the raging sea and the sky. His eyes rested nowhere. The bodies had been removed, and the only remaining sarc was his own. What did he see? What did he need?
She rubbed her eyes. Alef had invented AfterLife? He was lying, or else delusional. But she wasn’t sure he was capable of lying, and she’d never seen anybody as focused as Alef could be. Eventually she said, ‘That isn’t true, Alef. Everyone in the System knows AfterLife came from an accidental discovery.’
He said nothing.
Razer felt suddenly frightened.
* * *
Tallen was working the comms, as he did every day, when Razer came and sat with him. He touched her hand and said, ‘You look tired. They’re coming for us as soon as the weather eases. It could be a week, could be months. Are you getting anywhere with Alef?’
‘Not really.’
‘Have you found out who Pellonhorc was? And what brought us all here? It seems like a lot of effort to spend on a domestic split.’ He sat back from the screenery and grinned at her. ‘Most people just slam a few doors as they leave.’
For the first time in years, it seemed, Razer found herself laughing. The sound of it almost shocked her. She wanted to say something to Tallen, something more, but instead she just said, ‘Alef and Pellonhorc, it isn’t straightforward.’
On his screen fragments of code flickered and vanished. He moved patiently through them, nudging them aside and bringing up deeper and more distant symbols.
Razer, watching, said, ‘What are you doing?’
‘These are the verbal triggers they implanted in me.’ He rubbed his spine and winced. ‘Snow and rain and Mountains, ice. I thought perhaps I could erase it all, but I can’t. They’ve corrupted everything.’
‘They’re part of your life,’ she said gently. ‘Like memory.’
Tallen sat back and sighed. He said, ‘I feel sorry for Alef. When Pireve died, it looked like a whole lif
e’s worth of emotion coming out of him in one burst. And then it was all gone.’
Razer hesitated, then said, ‘I don’t think it’s gone. I think maybe he can separate his emotions from everything else.’ Unlike the rest of us, she thought. All of us corrupted by life from the moment we’re born. She looked at Tallen. Here she was on this scrap of metal with two damaged men and a pair of humechs. Nothing had trained her for this.
* * *
Time on the rig had little meaning. Only Alef seemed to operate rigidly on clock time. Regularity suited him, and he seemed more alert in the mornings. Razer developed a routine of talking to him then. His eyes still jerked and his voice jarred, but he seemed to be opening up a little.
‘Okay, Alef. Let’s say you invented AfterLife. How old are you?’
‘Twenty-five years and seventy-two days conscious. Eighty-five years and six days in hypersomnia.’
While she treated him as if everything he told her was a fiction, she couldn’t dismiss the possibility that there was a thread of truth at the heart of it. And no matter what the consequences, she had to know it all.
‘Tell me about the ceremony that launched AfterLife.’
‘It went exactly as I planned it.’
Razer had seen it on AfterLife Live! That image was branded on the memories of everyone in the System. Liacea Kalthi was a hero. The first Life, the famous martyr.
‘But Liacea Kalthi died,’ Razer said.
He said nothing. She had to ask a question. ‘Tell me about Liacea Kalthi’s death. Tell me how – no – why she died.’ She was learning how to phrase her questions, too, just as he was developing the freedom to answer.
‘If AfterLife was to be successful, we would need more than simple spectacle for the ceremony. Analysis of launch events indicated that optimum engagement would require more than the efficient performance of a useful invention.’
His eyes darted even more frantically. Was this a sign that he was lying? She remembered the anguish of his reaction to Pireve’s mockery and rejection. Perhaps he was going to be caught in a contradiction. If he could believe that Pireve had loved him despite her obvious revulsion, he could easily have deluded himself into a story of such grandeur.