The cold bites at my bones as my fingers grip the end of the rail, where it vanishes into nothing. There could be anything here. An endless void into which I would fall like a stone, a discontinuity, a place in which dreams come alive and the shadow of Anubis stretches overhead. I shudder. I ask myself, why didn't I start asking questions sooner? But the question comes years too late. I raise the torch and hold it next to the bolter then, just for a moment, blink it on.
I'm a fly – and I'm about to fall into a giant's pupil.
It's the tunnel. I'm on the edge of the abyss; it stretches ahead of me for twenty metres, narrowing to a black vanishing point. Sick green shadows, ghastly reflections. I see myself in a burnished hatch cover: I look like death's envoy, holes instead of eye sockets. Flick and the torch is out. I saw the doors. One of them is nearby: the system access bay, nerve centre of the Bronstein, where the main flight control processors are racked in banks behind anonymous screen panels. Its seal is open, but I doubt the feeble torchlight will have penetrated.
I yank myself hand-over-hand towards it and balance just behind the rim, holding my breath. Bolter, left hand: torch, right hand. Ready? Breathe out ... wait ... breathe in. Ready to roll forward and hit the door? Ack. Now ... go!
Thump. The hatch bounces inwards and I follow it into the cramped cabin which lights up like the inside of a decaying log, heart in my mouth, right arm outstretched with the torch and there's a faint whine, globules on black drifting in the air on a familiar smell of shit and something more basic, more metallic, the smell of death itself.
“Ye-AHH!” I yell. Bodies floating, moving, blood still spouting from a ripped throat – “ hold it!” Cloud of darkness in front of me, point the bolter inward and use the hatch for body-cover –
“Freeze.”
All she has is a knife, but I freeze all the same. The cabin emergency light winks on and etches everything on my memory like an acid burst. She's on the other side of the room, and she has a powerknife. It's where the point is placed that stops me breathing.
Mikhail drifts against his straps, eyes blindly staring at the ceiling, mouth wide. The second mouth in his throat is dry, raw, its false lips peeled back from his carotid vein. The other one, I can't recall her name, floats like a loose sack of bones in a web of restraints. A great black bubble of liquid glistens and quivers below her chin like a goitre the size of a skull. The third one is still thrashing, pulled out of interface involution by the knife Raisa has drawn across her throat.
Raisa opens her eyes and looks at me, asking hey, why are you here? Is it time yet? before I see her pupils dilate and she opens her mouth because she is just realising what is happening –
“Let her go,” I say quietly. I feel hollow, scooped-out because I know it won't work, so I try it again: “let her go.”
Something happens to her face. It warps into an expression of animal cunning, supercilious contempt, overweening arrogance.
“Oshi: if I let her go now she won't dump to Dreamtime. You know that. Cognitive bandwidth blocks are in effect. Why make things harder? You know it makes sense.”
It's the Boss. Inside Raisa's skull, the way he was inside mine. Only Raisa doesn't have any of the anti-tampering wetware I've got. She's a prisoner in her own body.
He sounds like sweet reason on cyanide. I grind my teeth, keep my finger loose on the trigger although I'm longing to mash it down and smear his head across the wall – but that would take Raisa with him.
“Let her go,” I repeat. “Do it. I won't shoot. Trust me.”
The Superbright fragment laughs: “trust me! You never listened before. You asked questions when I told you not to. And now you expect me to trust you? You put too much faith in your own reliability.”
The Boss keeps the knife pointed at me. It's a stand-off: the knife is powered up, liable to cut through metal like tissue. If it gets loose in here it could take out half the ship's control systems before I could catch it. More importantly, it will certainly break the Dreamtime pipe, destroying millions of minds in upload.
“When did you take her?”
“Earlier than you thought. Not in the medicentre – that was just a meat puppet. I must say I am disappointed in you, my dear. Even the tapeworm was smart enough to see how you could be manipulated. No: I laid the groundwork earlier, in the Necropolis. But I only moved house, as it were, recently: when she downloaded. Flesh is frail, is it not? I think she may even have thought it was her own idea. Would you like to ask her?”
I don't move. I don't trust myself to speak.
The Boss adds, just a little petulantly: “I'm doing this for your own good.”
“Let me be the judge of that,” I say. Calm is a small bird fluttering within my ribs. Everything is red and grainy, shadows long and huge. A great tearing fills my head, raw data seething through the coopted wisdom channels on its way to the downlink into the berserker expansion space. A waterfall of memes, filling the hollow head. I remember Dragulic, the front door bursting open. I remember the castle, a face crumbling under my fingers. Laughing, loving. My uncle, preparing to cut, a mockery of a smile. Trust me.
“Won't you let me go?” Raisa asks in a small voice: I can tell it's her, not the Boss. “I'll do anything you want –”
Her face warps again. “No. You'll just change your mind.”
I shudder. I see Raisa go limp in his grip. Red-out anger. “ Why?” I demand.
“Why anything?” He sounds almost amused by my presumption in questioning him. “I exist. You exist. Isn't that enough for you? Little monkey, you are a fool. You think about betrayal, but you could never betray me. I've been two steps ahead of you all along. Your little contrivances, your thought-experiments with treachery, serve to impress no-one. Your resolution to learn who you are, to lead an independent life, all wavers at the first offer of a warm bed and an empty mind. You do not have what it takes to understand this universe, Oshi. Leave destiny to the real intellects, and go pick fleas from your simian partners! I'd be doing you a favour if I –” the knife blade twitches.
I shiver hot and cold, but nothing much happens. Am I dealing with a psychopath? This is the Boss – but without the cool, unsympathetic intellect. He's a pale shadow leering out of Raisa's stolen face. Then the shadow fades from view for a moment. Raisa looks at me with her own eyes, then sideways, at the corpse floating open-throated near the centre of the room. “He's mad, Oshi. Think what you will about me but I couldn't ...” She stops.
I try to breathe: “Let her go. Times change. The outside ... we don't know what's going on, Boss. These may be the only human survivors left. You need them, need us. If this works, if we succeed –”
“It won't.” The hateful face is back. I wouldn't have believed how alien the same skin, same muscle could look with a different occupant behind it. I think I know what is happening, and I would gladly die rather than participate, but there's no way out. “The monkeys have stolen the tool of their betters. If you succeed, if this dump works – and it can – you'll have a whole new mobile Dreamtime; a starship capable of carrying you out of this place. I can't allow that.”
“Why not?” I ask; keep him talking ...
I can't let the bolter drift off-target. He'd have the control bay open like a clamshell. My fingers are slimy where they grip the ceramic moulding of the one-shot. The Boss sounds increasingly raw: “You think you have seen evil, but what you have seen is just a mirror of what humanity has inflicted on itself for milennia. There is worse! Would you open the gates of Hell, plunging billions into terror just because the next generation of Intelligence has transcended your petty comprehension? Would you fight your betters, for having the temerity to exist? Oshi, you have lost. Your kind lost centuries ago, before they built the first laboratory prototype of the Dreamtime. That I am here now is a sign of your defeat.”
“Is that all?” I ask. It's so cold in here, my breath mists before me. But the coldest place in the room is inside my heart.
Raisa opens her mou
th, closes it again. She's bursting to say something, just bursting. And it is her.
“Is that the truth, Oshi?” she asks plaintively. “Is – he – telling the truth?” She glances at me, slightly cross-eyed: trust me, she seems to be saying, smiling really serene, as if she knows that the dance movement she's choreographing has only one possible ending ...
“It is,” I say.
“Then – I think I could have loved you –” She starts to twist round. Some kind of struggle is going on. The powerknife curls towards the vital control racks, and – forgive me – I pull the trigger because the Boss is determined, and I can see his target. (The front panel installation on the autopilot bay. Next to the airlock controls.) And I can't justify that risk, no way – not with eight hundred million lives at stake.
I think Raisa's occulted completely, her personality driven under by the force of his will. It makes no difference, because the outcome is the same. One body, one death. It's a big SPLAT noise: it thumps my ears as it sprays blood everywhere, just like a sack of juice dropped out of a tenth-story window onto white sunbleached concrete, and it's not even human, really, not so you'd recognize it afterwards.
Everything is grainy and black and glistening and my forehead is wet and my ears are ringing and I can't see too well. There's water or something in my eyes. Upload is impossible; the white noise in my wisdom interface roars on and on forever, a nation in flight to their new home. Raisa is dead. She won't be joining them, now or ever. I feel like a hollow statue, just a shell really, not human any more. I've been trying to get there for years, somewhere safe from trauma, somewhere where they won't keep dragging me through hell, only now I've found it I don't want it. Because I need to hurt. I don't want to feel this ... absence. I want to hurt. Raisa: I don't know whether I was obsessed with you because the Boss was deviously diddling my responses, or because I really meant it. But now I'll never have a chance to say what I wanted to say, which was mainly, “I want to love you”. It's all over again, the way it always ends. They put me together and send me out again and I kid myself that this time will be different, but it never is. I'm the scratch monkey: use it like a scratch pad, throw it away, or maybe fix it up and use it again 'til it breaks. I've had enough. All the pain is boiling up, demanding recognition.
I'm holding the power knife. I look at it, carefully switch off the vibrator so it won't do any real damage, and hold it real close. It's shimmery, kind of pretty in a sort of gunmetal way. The handle is slick with shit stitched through with blood. Raisa, why did you do it? Did you know something you never told me? Or did you just get tired of trying to break on through? Shit. I love that moire effect on the knife blade: it's, magnetic. The pain is threatening to boil over, and I want to hurt. There's only one way I know how to do it to myself, because I'm made of sheet steel and ice and nothing can touch me any more except –
I hold it closer. Then I cut out my eyes.
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