The Rig

by Roger Levy

  ‘I had many subjects assessed for life-story empathy. My putery tested their personal data against comparable data from the Song. Their stories were remodelled to optimise emotional identification and empathic response. Liacea Kalthi’s story had most points of comparison to the ideal model. For the ceremony, we managed her position in the formation so that we could highlight the explosion and at the same time contain it. The result was to within a three per cent tolerance of what our model predicted.’

  Razer found herself appalled, but somehow also thrilled. ‘What? You killed her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You had her killed? Deliberately?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She was certain he believed it. Was she was starting to believe him, though? ‘Let’s have a break, Alef. You haven’t asked me anything. Don’t you want to talk about something else?’

  ‘What else is there?’

  ‘I don’t know. The rig? How long it might be until we get taken off? Anything, Alef.’

  ‘There is only something to talk about if there is something unknown.’

  She snapped back, ‘And you know everything, do you?’

  ‘What I know, I don’t want to.’ His voice seemed to break, though it was really impossible to tell. At times there seemed in his voice to be nothing but desperate emotion, while in his words there was none at all. Was there emotion, or did she simply want there to be?

  ‘Pireve,’ he said, abruptly. ‘Pellonhorc…’

  ‘Of course. I’m sorry.’ Without thinking, she took his hand. It was quite limp. She released it. ‘What will you do when we leave?’

  ‘I only have my sarc and the Song. I shall be there.’

  ‘But you say you invented AfterLife. Surely you need to maintain it. Or at least to keep an eye on it. Such a great invention, you must want to be involved.’

  Nothing. Might she have caught him out? But it hadn’t been a question. ‘Don’t you need to maintain it, Alef?’

  ‘No. It was only for Pireve. She is dead. It isn’t needed any more.’

  * * *

  Tallen

  Tallen wasn’t interested in Alef. He spent his time tending to the rig, which seemed increasingly stable. Beata and Lode accompanied him, their conversation still soothing him, though less than previously.

  Beata said, ‘How do you feel, Tallen?’

  Her face seemed empty. Her stance seemed different too, perhaps less certain. But the question was somehow burdened with concern. Was he imagining it?

  Lode said, ‘Do you feel tired?’

  ‘No,’ he told them. ‘I’m free of the impulses. I understand myself again.’ He understood the rig almost perfectly now. Alef had adjusted his tech so that the portents of damage were warmths and pleasures to him, and it was a comfort to him to heal the rig. Walking gave him pleasure. The floormechs chivvied him along. The corridors were bright and steady. The humechs walked at his either side like true companions.

  After a while, Beata asked him, ‘Do you miss the cage?’

  Tallen said, ‘No. That was part of the programming I was given. I’m okay without it now.’ He led the floormechs to a fault in one of the tanks, and as they worked to repair it, Lode suddenly said, ‘What are memories, Tallen?’

  Beata took a few paces and turned towards Lode, and said, ‘Why are we asking that?’

  Tallen stopped and looked at the two of them. For the first time, they were paying no attention to him. They were gazing at each other. Lode said, ‘Do you have memories, Beata?’

  ‘I have a short-term database for Tallen and a long-term database for the rig. I have a capacity to learn and adapt.’

  ‘I have a memory,’ said Lode. ‘I have sadness. Tallen, what is sadness? Is it the same as memory?’

  Tallen wasn’t sure what to say, how to respond. The floormechs had fixed the current fault, and he was feeling slightly drained. He was still getting reaccustomed to true sensations of the body as well as the mind. He said to Lode, ‘There’s no sadness without memory.’

  Lode started gently to shake. ‘Is memory bad, then?’

  ‘No,’ Tallen said, though it didn’t seem the right answer.

  Beata said, ‘I don’t understand, Lode. Your databases must be corrupted.’ Expressions flickered across her features.

  Lode said, ‘Dixemexid left something in me. Is it sadness?’ He started moving. Tallen followed, with Beata at his side. It had always been himself leading, Tallen realised. The corridors lit up before Lode and became dark as they passed.

  Tallen said, ‘Their technology must have progressed beyond ours, Lode. Dummying a humech. I don’t know what happened when Dixemexid came or when he left, but I can’t help you. I’m sorry.’

  They walked on for a long time. Were the humechs thinking?

  Tallen eventually said, ‘You need to share it, Lode. I don’t know what to do for you. Maybe Dixemexid will return one day.’ Though after Pellonhorc, why would the unsaid planet ever want contact again?

  Lode said, ‘I don’t remember him, but I have a memory of his. Of sadness. How is that?’

  Tallen said, still walking, ‘Sadness is human, and it’s human to share.’

  ‘I want to share it,’ Lode said.

  And immediately, Beata said to her companion, ‘I want to receive it.’

  Lode said, ‘But I cannot.’

  Beata said, ‘And I cannot either.’

  ‘We are each alone,’ they said in unison.

  Tallen said, ‘That’s human too. I’m sorry.’ He moved ahead of them both, for some reason not wanting them to see the tears in his eyes. Tears for the humechs? For himself?

  ‘We are all sorry,’ said Lode, behind him.

  ‘But we are not all human,’ said Beata.

  * * *

  Razer

  Each day, after Razer had finished with him, Alef crawled into his sarc and slept. She would watch him in there. He looked like a child, his hair ragged and his cheeks finely spotted with acne. In the sarc, she suspected, he was as close to peace as he could ever be.

  ‘Let’s go back to AfterLife,’ she said one morning. ‘Tell me how the neurid was discovered.’

  ‘It wasn’t discovered.’

  She no longer felt anxious or impatient with him at such moments. ‘Invented, then. Or created. Tell me how you did it. Or who did it.’

  ‘It wasn’t created or discovered.’

  Razer attempted other ways to phrase it, without result, and moved on. ‘Tell me about the secret hospitals where the retrieved are cured after they’ve been voted for.’

  ‘The hospitals are the penultimate stage in the cycle.’

  ‘You’re impossible, Alef. What’s the final stage in the cycle?’

  ‘The final stage is the story of return.’

  She stood up and walked around. The rig moved under her feet. ‘I’m doing my best to help you. Are you doing this deliberately?’

  ‘Yes. I always answer deliberately.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, unable not to smile at his serious face. ‘What’s the first stage of this cycle?’

  ‘The first stage is the Life.’

  ‘Then tell me about the Life.’

  ‘The Life is an algorithm-mediated blend of personal information from the Song and observations from contributors.’ He paused and said, ‘Razer is a very good contributor.’

  ‘You’re Cynth, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘I know that.’

  ‘What you call Cynth is a spur program modelled on me. I monitor it and occasionally I intervene. It is not called Cynth. You like chittlechattle.’

  At that moment, she wanted to cry. If he was telling the truth, Alef had created something that was able to simulate a greater humanity than he was capable of himself.

  ‘Cynth was the only true thing I had,’ she whispered.

  ‘Razer was important to Cynth. And to Alef.’

  ‘Yes. I can see that now.’ She caught herself. What had he started to tell her about the Lives? ‘Aren’t the Lives re
al, Alef?’

  ‘The Lives are non-specifically real.’

  Her heart was beating uncomfortably fast and she was becoming damp with sweat. ‘I don’t understand. Give me some detail.’

  ‘The limited range of human experience and response to stimuli is churned into unique Lives. The main data sources are the Song, TruTales stories and the augmems of TruTales contributors. No data is invented.’

  She was no longer appalled, only numb. ‘But the neurid… the neurid is a data source.’

  It wasn’t a question.

  ‘What is the neurid, Alef, if it isn’t a data source?’ She seemed to be hearing herself from a distance.

  ‘The neurid is a hypothetical device to explain the accumulation of the Life.’

  Into the gentle hiss of the aircon, she whispered, ‘It doesn’t exist? The neurid is a fiction?’

  ‘It is essential. The neurid is like faith in a cat in a box.’

  She said, ‘That’s why you told me the neurid wasn’t created or discovered. Is it?’

  ‘Everything is essential, but the only thing that exists is the Life.’

  ‘But the Life isn’t real, Alef. You said it isn’t real!’ All that she had ever believed. All of this. There were people who believed the neurid didn’t work, but no one believed that it had never even existed. ‘Is it real?’

  ‘All the Lives exist,’ he said. ‘Every one.’

  ‘And the AfterLife killer? Rialobon? And all the sarcs? The –’ She couldn’t go on. The System. Everything revolved around AfterLife. ‘You’re lying, Alef. You have to be lying.’

  But it wasn’t a question, and this time he kept his silence.

  * * *

  Tallen was asleep. Razer sat by his side and ran her hand along the golden hairs of his arm. He opened his eyes, yawned, and sat up.

  ‘You still haven’t told me about Alef,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t talk about someone I’m writing about.’

  ‘Are you writing about me?’

  She laughed. ‘No. You still look tired.’

  ‘I enjoy walking,’ Tallen told her. ‘And I like having someone to return to.’

  She took his hand. ‘You don’t want to kill yourself?’

  ‘I never did.’

  She was surprised at the sudden thumping of her heart as she said, ‘After this, what will you do?’

  ‘Go back to fixing things. Not on Bleak, though. What about you?’

  ‘Telling stories is all I know.’

  ‘So you’ll go on travelling,’ he said.

  Was he implying anything in that? She couldn’t read him. Maybe talking to Alef had blunted her empathy. ‘I have my next project, and it’s going to take a long time. I can do it from anywhere.’ She wondered if she were fencing with someone unaware of the risk of injury.

  He nodded. ‘Alef saved us, didn’t he? Not just me. Do you think he knows what he’s doing? Is it all just a game for him?’

  ‘He knows.’ She took Tallen on the bed, and afterwards she thought about Bale and about all the others she had slept with and whose stories she had told. She was just being with Tallen, though, and not telling him as a story to Cynth. She wasn’t sure if it was simply this fact that made him different or something more, but there was no distance between them. She was just enjoying him. Maybe that was enough. It was a long time since she’d actually wanted someone, not simply their story.

  ‘What are you smiling at?’

  ‘Nothing, Tallen. Well, look at you.’ She touched the smoothness of his metalled skull and ran a palm down the studded cable of his spine.

  He caught her hand and touched it with his lips. ‘Will you tell me about Alef?’

  ‘I don’t know if it can be told.’

  Forty-nine

  RAZER

  Razer changed her mind about Alef’s story from moment to moment. She was certain now that he wasn’t consciously lying, but was he insane?

  ‘You told me you can’t lie, Alef. But didn’t you tell Pellonhorc you’d have a cure for him?’

  ‘I thought I would. I said that. He didn’t listen properly.’

  ‘Tell me more about the hospitals.’

  He said, ‘When a cure is announced, there are also new sufferers. The hospitals treat the new sufferers along with a few from sarcs. Those are chosen at random, not by vote. The vote is irrelevant, but some people are treated and cured, enough to maintain the illusion. There are many layers of confusion. It takes a lot of maintenance, but it doesn’t matter now.’ His eyes flickered across the room. ‘Sarcs are dropped and retrieved, but the Lives are neither accurate nor associated with the bodies, and no one is ever chosen by vote.’

  He didn’t seem to care. She questioned him about what had happened on Bleak, hoping he might give away a lie in the part of the story she knew most about. The story still made sense, though. Bale’s instincts had been right. His confusion had been because Alef and Pellonhorc had been working as much together as against each other. They had followed the pattern set by their fathers, but Pellonhorc was the leader and the worst of them.

  Even so, Alef had participated in monstrous deeds. Razer wondered what it must have done to him at the start of it all, seeing his parents killed as he had.

  And if all this were true, he and Pellonhorc had conspired and murdered together until Pellonhorc had secretly contacted the unsaid planet. Only they had seen the truth in Pellonhorc, that he might destroy everything. Only they had acted. There would be a story, she thought. But why should the unsaid planet open itself to the System? They were clearly more technologically advanced, and they seemed also to have a spirituality that sustained them. How was that possible? She had always imagined that as science advanced, goddery would fall away. The System was based on that. But maybe it was possible to have something to bind people that was neither the goddery of Gehenna nor the fakery – if it was fakery – of AfterLife.

  The Question, Dixemexid had called it. Was it no more than that? Might the point of it simply be to search, to strive, and not to know the answer, nor even to expect one, but to be together in the quest?

  She put away the thought for the moment and said, ‘What will you do, Alef?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  * * *

  In the night, she raised herself onto her elbows to look at the sleeping Tallen. He had said that Alef had saved them all, but no part of the preceding actions had happened without Alef’s knowledge and much of it had been with his active help. Alef was a mystery. He was neither good nor bad, and he was both.

  What had created Pellonhorc? His genetic makeup, life events and chance, as with everyone, but what would he have been if he had never met the unique creature that was Alef? And what would Alef have become without Pellonhorc?

  She thought of Bale, of Maerley, of Tallen, of all her own encounters. Of her mother. They had made her what she was. They were all within her, were part of her.

  Tallen turned in his sleep, the low ceiling light playing over flesh and metal and making him seem incomplete.

  Alef had talked about the construction of his Lives, about what he had called the myth of individual tragedy. Maybe he was right; maybe there was nothing new. It was the sharing of experience that mattered. The reaching out and the receiving, the telling and the listening.

  But not for Pellonhorc. The prospect of death had driven him into madness. He didn’t even trust Alef, who would have done anything for him, and so he had introduced his own lover into the equation, and Alef was seduced by her.

  But instead of cementing his control over Alef, it had driven a wedge between them.

  For the rendezvous on the rig, each had made their own preparations. Pellonhorc had used Maerley to get his mercs to the rig, but Alef had known about it and also used Maerley to get Razer there. More than just that – Alef knew Pellonhorc was shadowing him, so he had used Razer to point Pellonhorc at Maerley, all those years ago. What else might Alef have done in the manipulation of Pellonhorc in their game of human
chess throughout the years, and vice versa? Razer doubted she would ever fully understand it.

  So, while Pellonhorc hadn’t known specifically about Razer, he had known Alef would have an agent, and the Whisper had used Decece in that search. And in parallel, Alef hadn’t known for sure about Tallen until he had been taken, though he had known there would be someone infiltrated by the Whisper on the rig. Alef had been so close, though. If he’d got Razer to Bleak a few days earlier, and guessed at Tallen instead of Bale, who was just the dupe set up to ‘rescue’ a prepared Tallen, everything might have been different.

  And Razer herself had been a dupe as much as an agent. She had been selected, prepared and moved around, and told nothing in case Pellonhorc could trace her.

  All of it was inextricably knotted together, all culminating at the rig.

  Razer’s thoughts whirled. In all of this, if Alef was telling the truth, AfterLife had been no more than a tool he had invented to keep a lover who didn’t love him and a child who wasn’t his. Alef had cared nothing for AfterLife beyond this small function, and yet it had become the glorious fulcrum of the entire System.

  If Alef was telling the truth, though, AfterLife was a lie. Few had ever returned from the sarcs, and by vote, no one ever would. If Alef was telling the truth, all hope was gone. Everything on the Song, everything in the System, was sparked by AfterLife: the anxieties, the vows, the acts of repentance. How much would be lost if AfterLife disappeared?

  Without it, she herself would have nothing. TruTales would vanish along with all the other ParaSites. She’d never quite managed to believe she had a neurid, but there was sufficient comfort in the possibility, and there had always been a comfort in the possibility that her thoughts and experiences might remain even after her death. That someone might know her.

  That we all might know each other.

  Maybe it was a lie, but it worked, and it could continue to work unless Alef let it fail. Did it matter if it was a lie, if it was a good thing?

  Tallen rolled over and sat up, yawning, and said, ‘What’s wrong? You’re crying. What is it?’

  She wiped her eyes. ‘What would you do, Tallen, if everything was suddenly gone? If there was nothing left?’