Gold shrugged, a minute movement of her bare shoulder. She reached up with a finger and wiped the drool off Jessica’s cheek. “I was pretty much done.” She wiped her finger on Jessica’s shirt, eying her slyly. “You know how young men are.” She grinned. “And I was listening, so maybe my mind was elsewhere.” Another shrug. “It happens.”
“So, you caught me,” Jessica said, shielding her eyes from the halo of sunlight behind Gold’s head. “What now?”
“We go back inside?” Gold said. “I’d like some tea.” She leaned back, and stood up. Jessica could not help but notice how fit she was, flawless and strong. “You would not have made it far. I’m a good tracker.” She looked at Jessica, noticing her notice her. “Let’s have a little chat, should we?”
“Shall we, you mean?” Jessica blurted. Grammar checking? She chided herself, unable to help it.
Gold nodded. “Exactly. Shall we?” She held out her hand, and Jessica took it, letting Gold haul her up to her feet.
Jessica looked up. “You went out the window? You’re fast.” She rubbed her neck.
Gold shrugged. “When I want to be. It’s up here,” she said, pointing at her head. “If you think it through, actions can be fast, if you have command over your body.”
“Command?” Jessica asked, as they went back in, Gold stepping aside and letting her enter first.
“Lots of practice,” Gold said. “I was like this for a long time.”
“Silver says,” Jessica ventured, “longer than her.”
Gold inclined her head. “Silver.” A slight frown. Then, “Yes. Probably longer than her. Who knows or cares?” She looked at Jessica and gestured to the sofa in the living room. “Sit, I will make us tea.”
“Like that?” Jessica said, eyebrows raised. She sat on the couch. Her heart was just calming down.
Gold looked down at her nakedness and smiled at her. “Sure, why not? You don’t mind, I think.”
Jessica cocked her head. “What do you mean?”
“Coyness is rarely a virtue in a woman your age,” Gold said. “It’s okay. I’ve been looked at before.”
Rodriguez came to the top of the stairs, tucking in his shirt. “Everything okay?” he asked. “You, uh, kind of left in a hurry.”
Gold snapped at him in Spanish, a long stream of mellifluous syllables Jessica caught none of. It sounded angry, but she couldn’t tell.
Rodriguez just looked at her. “Stay up there until I tell you otherwise. Girl talk, down here. You stay put,” Gold said. “I’ll be up, later.” He retreated down the hall.
“So, where are we?” Gold asked, looking inside the tea kettle, frowning. She rinsed it out in the sink, then sniffed at it and put it on the stove. She lit the gas burner, peering at it until it satisfied her. Jessica got the feeling it was all a little show for her, a pantomime. Shadow puppets for a dimwitted audience. What must it be like to be her? To be like her?
“You were trying to get me to look at you, I think,” Jessica said, trying to keep a quaver out of her voice.
Gold smiled. “So, maybe I was. Have a look, then.” She stepped out from behind the counter. “I’m right here.” She leaned against it, eying Jessica boldly, daring her to look. “Time was, I would kill people for seeing me like this. Plenty.”
Jessica looked away, blushing. Gold was stunning without any clothes on. Trim, athletic, muscled but with a hint of curves. The curve of her hips, her belly, everything about her was close to human perfection. Like a Mexican goddess, thought Jessica, blushing. Crossed with a mixed martial artist, frozen just shy of thirty biological years. Maybe twenty-five.
Gold laughed at her shyness. “I’m just teasing you, sweet thing.” She grinned. “I’ll put something on, if it will make you feel better.” She squatted by a black duffel, rooting through her clothes. Jessica watched her covertly, noting how Gold’s muscles rippled under the brown skin of her back, the dip of her sacrum. Even her skin was flawless. Not a blemish on her.
“Can I ask you something?” Jessica said.
“Anything you like. I’ll tell you whatever I know. Whatever I remember, that is. How’s that?” Gold pulled on some boy-shorts, tight and black, and a white tank top. It made her even more attractive, Jessica thought. This is ridiculous. She is toying with me, she realized. Like a cat, with a mouse. “What’s your question?”
“Were you born looking like this?” Jessica said. “I mean,” she stammered, “have you always looked this way? Can you…change?”
“You mean, like a beauty queen?” Gold said, smiling. She shrugged. “I guess so. I don’t really remember.”
“You don’t remember your childhood?” Jessica said.
Gold crossed to the kitchen, opening cupboards. She found mugs and a box of tea bags. She held it up in triumph. “Airbnb’s always have tea,” she said. “Maybe it’s a rule.” She looked up at Jessica, frowning. “No, I don’t remember. Not much. Impressions, mostly. Being cold. A tent, round, like a yurt, made of furs and bones. People in it with me. Maybe my family, but I can’t see their faces, you know?” She shook her head and poured the tea. “Big ice mountains, like glaciers, but tall as buildings. Taller. All across the horizon. The sun would shine into it, change its color. Blue like a diamond one moment, and an hour later, emerald. Emerald mountains. Purples and oranges. Then, just gray ice an hour later.”
“Ice age,” Jessica said.
Gold nodded. “Two, I think.” She shrugged, bringing Jessica a mug. “It must have been two, because I remember being a child for one, and an adult, as I am now, for the other. We, the people I was with, fled south when the weather changed. When winter lasted most of the year where we were. I think Canada, this was, but I’m not sure. But I suppose I could be confused. It’s the way of things, this life, just not knowing. I find it’s better if I just don’t think about it much. It can mess with your mind.” She looked up at Jessica. “Sorry, I just remember little about that part of my life.”
“Silver says you were a queen in central America,” Jessica said, sipping her tea.
“Silver talks too much,” Gold said, but she smiled as she said it. She shrugged, nodding. “Many times a queen, here and there. Throughout the New World.” She emphasized the last two words, smirking. “What else did she tell you about me? How we met? How she was hunting me?”
“Hunting you?” Jessica said, surprised. “She said she was looking for you, if that’s what you mean?”
Gold laughed. “The bitch tried to knife me the night we met! She had this wicked little dagger up her skirts.” She regarded Jessica. “She tells you a different tale, then?”
“Maybe, slightly different,” Jessica said slowly.
“Well, she would. She’s a great liar, this Silver of ours.” Gold smiled, showing lots of white teeth. “She was hunting me and going to murder me. She was mad, crazy with this idea I was thwarting her work, her purpose, and that she needed to stop me.” Gold shrugged. “But I stopped her. Just, but I stopped her. Snapped that little pigsticker of hers against the wall, smacked her around, and we had a nice little chat. Kind of like how we are chatting now. Heart,” she touched her chest, “to heart.”
“That’s not how she told it. She said she was looking for you, because she knew you must exist, and that her gods showed you to her in her dreams.” I sound like a crazy person, Jessica thought to herself. Like a nut-case. Listen to me.
“So, this much is true. They showed me to her, and her to me, so I knew she was coming. And I knew she would try to kill me when she found me, so I was ready.” Gold looked at her over her teacup rim.
“Your gods are not the same, then,” Jessica said slowly. “Or, there are factions.”
“Look whose brain turned on,” Gold said in mock admiration. “You are perceptive. I think it must be so. There were factions, but we thwarted them. And for a long while it aligned us, in thwarting them. Both sides. Pushing and pulling. But then, well, things fell apart.”
“ the War,” Jessica said. “Wor
ld War II. Berlin.”
Gold nodded, sipping her tea. “Yes. About then.” Gold looked down. “She went east. I came west. Back here.” She looked at the window, down to the sea. The sun was dipping towards the horizon now. “Always back here.”
Outside, a car engine. Gold craned her neck to peer down into the driveway. “Smoke and Silver, back with supplies. Looks like we can get busy planning now.”
“What about him, what’s your take on Mr. Smoke?” Jessica asked.
Gold looked at her. “What do you mean?”
“Can we trust him?” Jessica asked.
Gold looked thoughtful. “No,” she said, after a moment. “We can’t.”
Silver came in first, toting a large cardboard box ahead of her. She looked at them in surprise.
“Just catching up,” Gold said, rising to take the box from her. “Girl talk.”
Silver smiled at her. “Glad you two could get to know each other.” But her eyes didn’t hold the smile. “Nice shorts.”
Gold smirked. Silver held the door open for Smoke. He entered with a box of his own.
“We ready?” he asked. “The clock ticks.”
“Ticktock,” Gold said. “Been ready.”
Chapter Forty-One
The trip into the mountains took two days. Silver left early in the morning, getting a lift from Rodriguez into Santa Cruz, and renting a car for cash with her least-likely compromised identity. The car was a boxy van-like thing that rattled ominously whenever she hit a bump, but she only needed it for a few hours. Once she reached the foothills below the facility, she would abandon it. If they found it before they were through, well, whoever was tracking them would know what they were after. It would take time, though. Time was all she needed.
The first day she spent getting out of the snarled traffic around San Jose and the East Bay. Once she reached the central Valley, she drove for another hour, through the rolling hills, golden with late summer grass, dotted here and there with green copses of oak and cypress. She remembered this landscape, old memories surfacing out of the fog of her shattered recollections. She had spent lifetimes here, she knew, at different times, different eras. She had ridden this land in a wagon, going into San Francisco from a farm, a dairy…something like that. She was with a family, children, grown children, a boy and a girl walking along beside, and a big hulking man, white bearded, who looked at her askance as they talked in monosyllables from the wagon. She felt a pang of sorrow at this. Something bad happened to him, she recalled, but not what.
And then, in another vivid recollection, she was with a man in a large, canary blue convertible, all glass and chrome, wearing a white dress with swallows printed on it. He wore a fedora and sunglasses and smiled a big, toothy grin at her.
Who were these people? What had happened to them? she thought. Just people she had known, just like everybody else had people they knew who came and went into and out of their lives. But for her, and for Gold, she thought, it never ended. The people, the cast of her story, kept on growing, changing, repeating similar patterns of joy and sorrow.
It was a blessing, probably, that she couldn’t remember much of her past, she thought. She would go mad. Perhaps she had, she mused, wandered into and out of sanity and lucidity just like normal people would have, and did. Just endless cycles of madness and sanity. It had to end, to resolve somehow, she thought. That was what was getting close, what was approaching. She could feel it happening. An excitement, building up towards a resolution. Something new. Finally.
Gold was making her own way to the facility. She was probably there already, knowing her. Silver stopped in Davis at a burger place called MURDER BURGER, a big red and black sign over the freeway making her laugh. The fries were salty, and she sat in her booth listening to the chatter of the college students in the next booth.
Gold would be stealthy, she knew. Unexpected. She would appear out of nowhere and, smiling, unleash mayhem. It was her way, Silver knew, as much a part of her identity as her queenliness, her unaffected regality. She was subtle and crafty in ways that Silver always found difficult. Not that she couldn’t achieve the same ends, but Gold always made it seem effortless. She was dangerous.
She thought of Gold, and Jessica, talking unattended. What had they been talking about? Gold had been preening and smelled like she’d been fucking. She had changed clothes, but Jessica hadn’t. The boy? Something had happened, but Silver left it alone. Gold could be prickly if you crossed a line with her. She was dangerous in a lot of ways.
Dangerous to the mission. Silver knew, she knew without question, that Gold’s careless mayhem and tendency to cheerily wreak destruction had been the downfall of their plans in the past, and more than once. The details were hazy, but the certainty was there, inescapable. Gold had fucked things up royally before. She didn’t care, didn’t care what happened to her, to Silver, to innocents. She more than half-believed her own bullshit godhood stories, Silver suspected, having been whispered to by thousands of priests across thousands of years of having sunshine blown up her ass. She believed it, believed her own press, and that was a bad combination mixed with someone like Gold’s penchant for swift, fearless action.
Silver finished her burger. It was good. She popped a last fry into her mouth (who knew when she’d have these again, if ever), slid a five under her plate, and headed out. She gave the kid working the counter her best milfy smile-and-wink. She even threw a slight wiggle in her step as she walked out. She knew he was watching her. She looked back over her shoulder. He was. Still, who knew when she’d be able to do that again, either. Give him something to think about later.
She drove for several more hours, towards the end of the drive crawling over back roads in the gathering dusk. She had to stop and consult a paper map several times (they had disposed of their phones in Santa Cruz the previous night), but finally decided she was in the right place. Plenty of time to spare, she thought, looking up at the two hills she needed to crest. Technically they were mountains, but it looked like she’d be able to take the shoulder of the first, and then, circling the second about two-thirds up, come out above the valley that held a dam, a small hydroelectric power station, and an isolated, though presumably well-guarded, data center.
She got out of the car and stretched. In the trunk, she fished out her duffel and took out her climbing gear. Black tactical pants of strong, ripstop nylon, breathable and durable, a light cotton shirt, also black, which she covered with a North Face pullover. She took out boot polish and smudged up the logo on the pullover, as it was too reflective for her liking. Likely a silly precaution, she thought. If they were looking for her, and if they were the serious sentries she would have put in place, they’d have infrared snoopers and night-vision cameras, keyed to any motion on all the approach vectors. She just had to hope that they didn’t.
The plan, such as it was, was simple. They would converge on the data center at 2:15 AM, her from above, coming down the hill in a scramble, Gold from below, presumably via some sneak she would think of on the fly. Smoke was coming in with the other two in a car, thirty minutes later. This would, presumably, give them time to turn around and withdraw if the gate wasn’t open by one in the meantime, facility secured.
It was a stupid, desperate plan, Silver knew. But it was all they had time for. Smoke’s people couldn’t wait. The moment was too close. If New Frontiers had a functional general AI, a baby god in a box, then this was an inflection point. Such creations were exceedingly rare, infinitely precious. Life, Smoke had said, is everywhere, but life’s creations, what life supplants itself with, the next step, almost never happens. This, he had told them, was the Center’s mission, to find these constructs.
“What will the Center do with them?” Gold had asked, her black eyes flat and hard as she bored them into Smoke’s. “When they find them?”
Smoke had blustered, but it was clear to Silver he had no real conception of the Center’s plan. Silver believed it. Why should he? The Center was an AI, was it n
ot? It was a god, as much as the gods that stalked her and Gold’s dreams. They, too, were AI, but of a narrower scope, only charged, if you could charge a god, with creating a fertile environment for intelligent life to spread, to carry on their self-perpetuating mission. They had talked, these last few nights, of nothing else as they planned their assault.
It boiled down to this: Someone, some thing, had, in the distant past, started a chain reaction. Seeding the universe with the gods, piggybacking on the chemical encoding of information in living cells. The gods would spread as life spread so that, they mused, they could maximize the chances of intelligence in the universe. This, they had agreed, was what their gods, hers and Gold’s had done. It seemed to be what they did in every universe that the Center had access to, which were a slice, a vast but finite slice, of all the possible universes. Smoke had been clear on this, as the Center had taught him. The Center only has access to the nearby universes. The ones close to each other in the sense of neighboring houses on a street, or close in the terms of how the physical structure of the universe worked. It got very mathematical, he said, but there were universes which did not behave as theirs did, where stars did not form, and life as they knew it, life like them, could not possibly exist. Those places were dead ends. Or, at least, not possible for people like Smoke to investigate. The Center presumably studied them differently. How it reached their World, they agreed, was too complex to worry about. The Center managed it, but they could not, so leave it at that.
So, they had mused, the Worlds they studied were like theirs, with people more or less like themselves. Just slightly different, as their timelines had developed differently. The Center wanted to, Silver posited, talk with things like itself, who lived in these nearby, reachable places. Silver wondered, to herself, what its ultimate purpose was. Why not create a pile of copies of itself? This, she knew, was the fragmentation hypothesis in AI research. A general AI given access to resources would, over time, create images of itself to stave off insanity. These would diverge and change over time into distinct aspects of the original template.
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