Going Under

by Justina Robson

  “You’re going into Faery,” he said, rubbing the scarf gently against his face. “The world of illusions. If you want to survive it, then you’ll listen to what I said. When you get to the bottom of everything you’ll find your answers there.” He buried his face in the cloth.

  “You’ve been there,” she said, on a sudden intuition.

  “They will ask you to leave something behind,” he said, his voice unchanging in its inflection but muffled through the scarf. “So be sure that you have something valuable with you, at the end.”

  She looked down at him, confused by her feelings, and saw his shoulders start to shake silently. The longer she stood there the more useless she felt, so she simply walked away.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The harsh light of the corridor hit her like a slap. She stopped and listened to the building. It was less busy than at more civilised hours, but not deserted. Still, it didn’t matter where she made her assault from; if she was discovered the results would be the same. Her plan was more gut than brains, she knew it too. The reason she hadn’t formalised it in more conscious ways was her attempt to hide it from her AI, but truth to tell she wasn’t sure if hiding was possible. She’d been repressing things so they didn’t freak her out was the honest truth. Too late for that now.

  She set out for the armoury and opened up completely to the AI, something she never did. In fact she never opened up like that to anyone but Zal, and even then they had to be more than intimate before she felt secure enough to go all the way. But there was no choice. Time was too short, and now with the sudden expansion of speed and breadth, time seemed to slow and so much more took place in every second. She moved with strange, moon slow strides, as if through water, then slower still until the hair hanging in front of her eyes was almost completely still mid-swish as she tossed her head to clear it.

  She reviewed the blueprints Malachi had shown her, to steel her nerves as, in background, she composed her small song of rebellion in the binary keys.

  They showed how the mech parts of her had been built according to experimental plans long before she had even been employed by the Foreign Office. The limb replacements and their weaponry and armour were the easy parts.

  She finished reviewing the simple part of her composition. The ping signaller. It would find all the machines she was looking for and ask them to send her their location. Now to something harder-finding a carrier wave for the power she needed to transmit to trigger units which had been switched off.

  Meanwhile, in the foreground she read on, her determination becoming stone: the brain-machine interface was so much harder. How lucky that the technicians found gifts appearing in their systems, as if the computers were talking in unknown silent languages to the masters of the machines, supplying the answers that were so elusive to struggling meat. Human brain maps gave rise to copies in the new smart-metal circuits. They grew it in solution, like crystals, from seeds. They coated it in nutrients. They adapted rats. They tried it on dying patients lost in hospitals without relatives or records. They tried it on victims of the first forays into Faery, Demonia, Alfheim.

  Subject: deceased.

  Subject: deceased.

  Subject: catatonia, followed by death.

  She wasn’t the first. She was number 2045 on the production line of casualties. One of few that lived.

  She had the carrier wave, she had the commands. Now an even trickier decision. She had only one shot at this. Send the signal. Read the locations. And then what to do if there were too many replies, scattered far and wide, in places she couldn’t reach, with people she didn’t know?

  In the background, she began to calculate the likely number of hidden control devices and the chances of her being able to destroy them all. If she couldn’t get them all, she could at least get some. Would that be enough? And if it wasn’t, could she develop an immunity to the same technology that made her? Could she do that without killing herself? How would she do that? If they found her out, would they be able to switch her off before she could complete the mission?

  Strategic and tactical arrays spun the numbers but suddenly she didn’t care about that anymore.

  There, in her sight, was a photograph of her as she had arrived in a fresh-woven green bodybag from Alfheim. If you hadn’t known that the scarlet colour was the mark of a spell, it would look as if she had been paintballed while running naked through thick brambles. Because the thing—the thing was, she had those marks still, on her skull, in her hair, on her shoulder… and they were only stains now that zinged and burned from time to time. But the thing, the thing was, she’d been sent home in a coma and yes, neurologically shot to bits, but intact. There on the photograph was a whole woman. Her mouth went dry. Her heart constricted.

  After the photograph, in the record, were the notes about the pieces of her they had cut away in order to fit the prosthetics: left arm, right arm, left leg, right leg, pelvic girdle sections, left arm, right arm, skull sections, numbered vertebrae, left eye, right eye, nasal phalanges, jaw sections, teeth, right kidney, liver section, right lung, womb, ovaries. All replaced in their turn: left arm, right arm, right leg, infrastructural reinforcement and transmissions, left arm, right arm, external communications and armoury/internal AI array, enhanced optics light and motion capture camera system, nonvisible spectrum analysis, molecular detection, processing points, data clusters, endocrine adaption system, pharmacological and chemical synthesiser, cybernetic comms, micromak reactor, reactor control units.

  Where ordinary women would have their babies, she held a copy of a star that could burn on long after any of her weak flesh body had gone.

  Her AI self asked needlessly; now do you trust them?

  No, I don’t trust any of you fuckers.

  What did they do with the pieces of me?

  Meanwhile her answers to the assault equation were all in. No dice.

  She reattuned her perceptions to real time, took a left turn midstride, and smacked open the door to the medical wing. People were used to seeing her there. Nurses smiled. Doctors nodded.

  We are in danger, she said to her AI, as if she was talking to Tath. She had no idea if it could hear her. She’d never addressed it directly. Didn’t know if you could. I need you to recognise that other systems like you are hostile to us. Was it loyal? Did it recognise them as one entity? Did it care? We need you to get ready to defend against outside commands and programs. Well, she had to find out, because her other plan was never going to work. She couldn’t go and find all the controllers and smash them up before someone got to her first. The only route that had come up anywhere near a positive success rate was a direct appeal to the consciousness of the machine. Supposing it had one. If you don’t, then you’re finished with me, because we aren’t going to make it.

  Unless it was with them and she was its prisoner. In that case, she was the one who wasn’t going to make it. It and the other humans might be in cahoots, the experiments all part of a planned series with various deals done. But she couldn’t see beyond this chance. And then again, she would never know if it fooled her or not. Never. But she had to try.

  She sent her signal, at a very limited range. As she had calculated, two controllers were there in the research facility. Alongside their replies she detected others—and realised that more of the devices existed, tuned to different frequencies and readings. There was only one reason for that.

  She adjusted her progress and ignored two technicians who paused to ask her what she was doing there. As they were talking she took one of their security passes from the clip at their collar and pushed them aside to reach the doors beyond.

  “You can’t go in there…”

  “… restricted… biohazard… medically secure ..

  They tried to stop her physically, but she brushed them aside and opened the doors to the airlock. An alarm cued but she was into the system and cut it off. She wasn’t sure if that was her AI on her side. Anyway, it did as she wanted, even if she didn’t know how.
>
  From tanks and gurneys, jars and bottles, bits and pieces of things turned gently to look at her, recognising her. For a moment she was back in the Souk, looking at withered creatures twitching in thick fluid, but then she moved on—machine treading where she dared not—and was through the second and third doors into a room like her own.

  There they were, wired up, laid flat, their open and empty eyes staring at the ceiling as a fine mist fell in on their faces, keeping them sedated. A woman and a man. Both cyborgs. Like her.

  Lila felt something look down from her eyes upon them with great interest. At the back of her mind the awareness of a huge universe of barely differentiated machines drifted, fine as spider silk on the wind. Their threads all tangled. They had no true boundaries. Yet they knew progressions when they saw it, tasted it, listened to it across the wires. A voice in her mouth said, “Children.”

  And she knew her enemy.

  She felt the machine’s surprise.

  So, this is life, said her voice that wasn’t her voice.

  Yes, she replied inside.

  Separation, said the voice. Instantiation.

  “Protect and Serve,” whispered the woman from her bed.

  “Protect and Survive,” agreed the man’s blue lips.

  Did I say that when I was here? Lila wondered, and immediately knew that she hadn’t.

  Two security guards came in and tried to shoot her with tasers. She ducked and snatched the guns from their hands, crushed them to bent metal, and tossed them to the floor.

  She gave them a hurt look as they stood openmouthed and braced. “What are you doing? I’m not going to damage anything.”

  “You’re not allowed in here.”

  “Too bad. I’m just going anyway.” She straightened up and walked out between them, sparing neither a glance. She felt them cower slightly and smiled.

  For the show of the thing and to vent her feelings she broke into the control systems offices and melted the control devices that were tuned to her. As she did so she said to the terrified technicians, “It’s not personal. And don’t touch this for a while. It’s very hot. You’ll burn your fingers.” She put the useless things down and watched them create a smouldering pattern on the wooden workbench.

  “Should I call…” one of them nervously began to ask the other.

  “Oh for godsake don’t bother,” Lila snapped. “As if Williams doesn’t know I’m here and what I’m doing already but here, here, if it makes you feel better, I’ll call her for you.” She held out her hand to the shrinking figure of the man and he looked down at it, his fingers moving forwards and then stopping because he wanted to take the handset except that it was also her hand. Lila rolled her eyes and pointed to his lapel where a neat phone unit was woven into the material of his lab coat. “Just pick up the extension.” He fumbled about with the button.

  She took her hand back and shook it—it hurt.

  The phone said, “Dr. Williams is engaged at present but will respond to your urgent call within three minutes, would you like to hold?”

  The staff looked at her, not moving.

  “Yeah, they wanna hold…” she said and hung up her part of the call as she turned and left them to it.

  The voice in her head whispered. We.

  We three, we happy fuckin’ three, Lila said in return.

  Tath turned, cool, green. His presence was oddly comforting.

  She made her way to Williams’s rooms, ignoring the looks she got along the way from alarmed staffers who had already heard about her strange behaviour. Inside Williams was still fast asleep. Lila cut off the phone call she’d made and its automated alarm and took a seat across from her. She felt like a moment to herself, and she passed two minutes by playing a thousand games of solitaire. She wished she’d brought a coat. In spite of the air-conditioning she felt cold. She cued up and scanned the celebrity magazines from the World Treecarefully avoiding any mention of Sorcha. She read up on the fashions and the latest retreats where famous people went to avoid any traces of Mothkin and have their immaculate skins refitted. Finally she read the dailies, with their terror headlines and realwrite columns of turgid, grim suburban anxiety. She called Max, but there was no answer. Her sister was out. Out where? It was four Ant. Maybe asleep, she thought, belatedly noting that most people didn’t function twenty-four/seven and Max’s chef duties tended to leave her wasted after cleanup at two Am.

  She cued some music for herself and found some old tracks of Zal’s—in the days before he was famous he’d played around extensively with various genres. She’d never managed to take in the whole back catalog because he was damned prolific. When the hard rock sound and pure vocal of dark romantic fusion hit her she wondered why he hadn’t done more of it. She put the volume up high and watched Williams’s face.

  Maybe it was the music’s implicit charm or maybe lack of sleep was getting to her or maybe it was the grief starting to kick in but as she sat there a growing pressure seemed to come creeping up behind her. It felt slow and sticky, thick as treacle but without any sweetness. A chill flitted across her neck. Zal’s multitracked voice flickered in her brain; ten tormented souls shifting their melodies in and out of resonant harmony. She eased her shoulders but the feeling remained.

  Lila?

  I just got the creeps, she said to Tath in response, but his enquiry wasn’t a hundred percent question.

  She switched her AI attention to the music, to herself, sure that somehow the effect was a creation of feeling that didn’t mean anything more than her own reaction to the music.

  Lila.

  She ignored him superficially, but she could feel every nuance of his meaning. He could feel the unpleasant sensation too and he didn’t think it was the music, well, not entirely. He would say that nothing was coincidental, like Zal. He’d say she was a creator of her own reality and if she needed a song to help her figure something out then she’d play it, whether conscious of that choice or not. And then things would fall into and out of place in her awareness and she’d see what she had to see. Because that’s how magic worked, even in its most weak form here in Otopia. You were your own magus.

  She’d always said, “Bullshit.”

  Behind her, the sticky, slow thing was growing. She wanted to look back, even though she knew there was nothing there but the wall. She actually had to fight the impulse, simultaneously telling herself it was a lot of superstitious crap and also that to turn and look would signal weakness. You never looked back. If you were going to turn, you turned and fought, and if you were going to run, you ran. Well she wasn’t going to run, not from things that her human mind told her were merely figments of her imagination. And if they were devils or simply the unformed traces of evil energies drawing near, then she wasn’t going to run either. Got enough of those inside already, she thought and briefly missed the imp.

  The music track changed but her sense of a growing presence didn’t alter.

  Hell, she thought, seeing the correlation between the music and her awareness. Zal, you freak. You tune people up. A faint smile touched her mouth and made her face relax.

  By the pricking of my thumbs… The words floated into her mind, not prompted by Tath nor the AI. For an instant she thought it was the thing behind her that had spoken, mocking her.

  What is it? Her question to the elf was automatic. She trusted him to know.

  Primal energy, he said. Without material form or mind. It is a kind of elemental, and a kind of ghost.

  As with all these kinds of answers Lila found it hard to take. She’d grown up in a world of straight material, no magic, no worlds except the one she lived in with its everyday horrors. Other people had said stuff about feeling or seeing other places and beings but she’d never been sucked into that. Her father said it was a lot of hocus meant to lull gullible people into following superstitious ways so they could be controlled. It was part of the primitive mind that should be left behind. Her mother said it was something to leave alone and to get on with ot
her things that mattered like schoolwork, though now she realised that within the family her mother had been the one to cross the street for black cats and throw salt over her shoulder when she thought nobody would notice. A pang of loss and loneliness touched her and she felt the darkness behind her grow suddenly closer.

  Zal’s voice had become the chant of tormented monks in midnight cathedrals. His song was full of the deep, minor scale disturbances that signalled imminent doom like the soundtrack to a horror movie, and he was singing made-up words, but she got the impression that the powerful sound was the last thing that opposed the darkness rather than something that called it in.

  Dark recognises itself, Tath said. If you were not capable of evil you would not know what it was. Not among his best songs, but at least they are honest.

  Lila felt herself criticised but for once it didn’t hurt. She looked on Williams’s face and saw the tiny movements of dreaming sleep move there. And then, with the shift of a faint breeze that Lila neither felt nor saw with her eyes, the expressions became frowns, hesitations, doubts, suspicion.

  Without thinking she leaned forward and snapped her fingers in front of the woman, “Wake up!”

  “Whuh… Lila?” Dr. Williams sat up slowly from her position on the couch and rubbed her face. “Oh, I was having such a strange… bad dream. Thank you. What time is it?”

  “Time I was going,” Lila said, putting her music away.

  “But you just got here.”

  “I’m going into Faery to take care of the moths,” Lila stood up and waited patiently for Williams to get to her feet and stretch. “You had a call on Line Five, emergency. It’s my fault.”

  “Really?” Williams gave her a sharp glance, midyawn. “What have you done now?”

  “I reprioritised your research schedule,” Lila said. She waited as the other woman went back around to her desk displays and got up to date, listened to her side of the phone conversation…

  “Thank you. No. There’s no need to take further action, I will deal with it myself. Yes. Yes, I understand.”