His tone and the look in his eye made the hairs on the back of my neck try to stand up, with a painful prickling. Reluctantly, I took the pad.
Looked down at it.
It was a death certificate, dated forty-odd years ago.
Noam Basim Andela.
My eyes prickled.
“Scroll down,” Dalton added.
I scrolled, blinking to clear my vision. The security seal for the certificate, with a bonded warranty made out in the name of the Imperial Shield, Special Operations Branch.
I scrolled back through it all, line by line, nodding.
“Sorry, Danny,” Dalton said.
“Call Juliyana here,” I said.
“I have,” Lyth said, as softly as Dalton.
I handed the pad back to Dalton. “Thank you for showing me.”
He studied me. “You’re not as upset as I thought you’d be.”
“A part of me couldn’t believe he was alive, despite everything pointing to that conclusion. After all this time, he would have found a way to reach out to us, and he didn’t. It means we interpreted the data incorrectly.” I drew in a breath, let it out, and with it the last tiny seed of hope. I gave Dalton an effortful smile. “And now, another highly convenient coincidence.” I pointed at the pad. “Proof of Noam’s death, just as we were settling upon the idea that he might be alive.”
“Yeah,” Dalton said heavily.
“It’s almost as if someone was listening in on us…” I frowned.
Lyth didn’t move. His gaze slid to me.
“Not you,” I told him. “You’ve been fooled, just like all of us, Lyth.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever said this before, but I do not understand,” Lyth said.
“Don’t feel badly,” Dalton said. “I’m more lost than you.”
“There’s a comfort,” Lyth replied.
Juliyana arrived. Right behind her was Sauli, wiping his hands on a cleaning cloth.
“You asked to see me?” Juliyana said.
Dalton turned and held the pad out to her.
She took it and read.
I looked at Lyth. “We can’t do this here. Can you open a door to the stellar room? And make it daylight in there?”
Lyth stepped back out of the way and waved his hand toward the wall. A door appeared, and slid aside.
“Holy cow!” Sauli breathed, his eyes bugging out as the door assembled out of what appeared to be solid wall.
Through the doorway, I saw bright daylight and clear blue skies. I stepped through.
The mountainside lookout now featured a solid table made of hewn tree trunks the thickness of my torso. Stools made from smaller trunks ranged along both sides of the table. A chair with arms and a high back stood at the end.
I strode over to the chair and tried to move it. It didn’t budge. Then it slid out from the table, giving me room to settle on it. An invisible hand pushed it back under me as I sat. “Thank you,” I murmured, knowing Lyth/Lythion would hear it.
The others sat around the table. Juliyana blotted her wet cheeks with her sleeve, and dabbed her eyes dry, as she pushed the pad across the table to Dalton, who sat on my left. Sauli and Lyth sat on the remaining two stools, Lyth next to Juliyana and Sauli next to Dalton.
They all looked at me with understandable curiosity.
“I could ask Lyth the seal the room, but there wouldn’t be any point,” I told them. “We’ve been an open sieve since we stepped on board. I thought—” I glanced at Juliyana. “We thought Noam was using the feeds to reach us. The feeds, my implants, anything available to him. We thought he was arranging events to bring us to him. Now we know that isn’t true, the question that remains is who is manipulating us—and they are manipulating us. All of us, except perhaps Sauli, and I don’t want to discount that coincidence, yet, because the one expertise all of us don’t have between us is engineering skills.”
Sauli frowned. “I was just doing my job,” he pointed out. “I’m supposed to scan secondary engines for exhaust compliance.”
“Which someone might have counted upon,” Dalton told him.
Sauli sat back, looking thoughtful and unhappy and more than a little confused.
“It’s not Lyth,” I said. “It isn’t the AI driving him, either. Lythion knows what Lyth knows. Lyth says he’s not using live feeds and I believe him because we parked at Polyxene without alarms going off—therefore, they didn’t know we were coming. We didn’t flag our destination with electronic traces.”
I turned to Lyth. “The human who gave you your orders, Lyth. You said you didn’t know who they were.”
“Every possible element I could use to trace the origin of the message was deleted or masked or false. I couldn’t make any sense of it.” He paused. “But the message did give me what I wanted, so I followed the instructions, anyway.” He looked acutely uncomfortable.
I nodded. “Yes, we’ve all been guilty of that, lately, Lyth. That’s how manipulation works. You’re offered what you truly want, even if you didn’t know that was what you wanted.” I thought of my useless self denial. Forty years of it. I sighed. “Lyth, the human that gave you the orders—can you talk back to them?”
Lyth hesitated. “That would be…rude.”
Dalton snorted. “You talk back to us all the time.”
“That is expected,” Lyth said primly. “You accept the human interaction as normal.”
Juliyana rubbed her temples. “So you have to ask to talk to them?”
“The ship AI has to be introduced,” Sauli said, unexpectedly. “It’s the equivalent of logging in. It can’t talk to other computers and networks without an initial handshake and recognition pattern. It can’t talk to humans without first being introduced.”
Lyth looked uncomfortable. If he had been capable of it, I think he might even have blushed.
We all looked at Sauli, surprised.
He gave a tiny smile. “I topped up on computer engineering while I was studying.”
“How…convenient,” Juliyana said dryly.
“Sauli, were you originally assigned to scan our ship?” I asked suspiciously.
“No assignments,” he said. “You arrived without booking a bay. We just get assigned randomly as the day goes on.”
“So, a computer assigns the ships to you?”
“A new one, when we’ve finished the old one,” Sauli said. He frowned.
“Do the other engineers at the station have the same degree of computer engineering knowledge you do?” Dalton asked, proving he was following along, too.
“Nah. My courses were all optional. I just liked…” Sauli trailed off. “Whoever this dude is, he picked me?” He was highly offended…but there was a glimmer in his eyes of awe…and excitement.
Lyth raised his hand, to draw our attention. “I think, if we research, we will find that Keeler is one of very few stations where the engineers actually board all vessels that arrive and inspect from the inside.”
“Have to,” Sauli said. “Emissions don’t show on computer feeds. You have to sniff the real live atmosphere around the engine.” He realized what he had said and shook his head. “I don’t like this.”
I had to agree with him. “Lyth, if I ask you to do so, can you reach out to who gave you your orders and speak to them?”
Lyth shifted on his stool. He was squirming. “It would be…unconventional.”
“It might break his programming,” Sauli added.
“What if I make it an order?” I said. “An imperative?”
Lyth relaxed. “I can use that,” he admitted. “Are you ordering me to do so now?”
“Are they reachable right now?” Juliyana asked, surprised. “I thought we weren’t using live feeds.”
“They’ve been reachable ever since I received the orders,” Lyth said. “But I could not reach out without a directive. I will connect to them now.”
“Wait,” I said quickly. “I don’t want you to talk to them. I want to talk to them. Can you arr
ange that?”
Lyth frowned.
“Make an introduction,” Sauli said. “Analogue to analogue via a digital medium.”
I wouldn’t have thought of saying it that way.
Lyth’s frown cleared. “Let me try. A moment…” His face turned blank and inanimate. He just sat.
We watched. I wondered if everyone’s heartbeat was running as hard as mine.
Lyth stirred. “Yes, please come in,” he said to the air. “Captain Andela is waiting to speak to you.”
Then he looked toward the end of the table. Another chair built itself there. The back was not as big as mine. Then a pile of nanobots built upon the seat and began to flow in the fast melting, swirling way they did when Lyth was forming himself.
It could not have taken any longer for the figure to form than Lyth took to generate his avatar—which was generally only a second, perhaps two. Yet the two seconds seemed to last for long minutes. Subjective time dilation…I held my breath listening to my heart beat in my ears and squeeze my throat with every contraction.
The details took shape. Color formed. Smaller details grew sharper…
And finally, the man smiled at us.
“Hello, Danny,” Noam said, with that little curl of the corner of his mouth.
Juliyana bounced up off her seat. “What the fuck? Whoever it is, they’re hiding behind Dad’s avatar. This is bullshit!”
I shook my head, not shifting my gaze away from Noam. “He’s using the interface I know, as I asked to speak to him.”
Lyth tugged on Juliyana’s arm, encouraging her to sit down once more.
She blew out an angry breath and returned to her stool, her hands curled into tight fists, her eyes glittering.
Dalton was leaning back on his stool, his boot on the edge of the table. It looked casual, but I wondered if he had a knife in his boot and had put it within easy reach. Had he overlooked that this was just a construct made of nanobots?
I held up my hand. “Everyone, take a breath. Noam…should I call you Noam?”
Noam had been following the range of reactions around the table, his eyes bright and aware. Now his expression shifted. “Noam is…one of my names.”
“What are your other names?”
“Noam will do for now,” he said.
“He’s still fucking with us,” Juliyana muttered.
“I really am not,” Noam told her.
She sucked in a startled breath.
“I have tried to avoid damage where I can, but it is difficult…” Noam said. “I stopped using your implants,” he told me. “It was hurting you.”
“I appreciate that,” I said gravely.
“But I had to wait for you to set up the connection to be able to talk this way,” Noam said. “While I waited, I did what I could to help.”
“Like finding Noam’s death certificate in the Imperial Shield archives?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“And the live feeds,” Lyth said softly.
Noam looked at him. “That was an error I have now corrected. I did not consider that the use of the feeds in the normal way would reveal your emergence point. This is all new to me, you see. I regret the trouble it caused. But now I am pulling from every gate, and you can use the feeds with impunity. Only, I had to wait until now to tell you that.”
“Every gate?” Sauli said sharply. “That isn’t possible. The only way to make contact with a gate when you’re in the hole is via the hole you’re in. No one can make contact with every single gate in the array.”
“The array can,” Noam told him.
Dalton’s foot dropped from the table. He leaned forward to look at Noam properly.
“You are the array,” I said.
Noam shook his head. “I am the gestalt of the array and all its components. I am me.”
21
The mountainside lookout got very noisy for a while. The sound sent birds from the nearby tree flapping into the sky, squawking protests. Everyone tried to talk over everyone else, except for Noam—for the array, which was Noam, it had said.
And me. I didn’t squeal out loud because in my gut, it made absolute sense.
I gave them ninety seconds, then slapped the table to get their attention. When that didn’t work, I put my fingers in my mouth and whistled.
Sauli winced and put his hands to his ears.
Everyone shut up and looked at me, except Sauli, who whispered, “It’s self-aware!”
Noam grinned. “I am.”
Sauli shrank back from him.
“So, all the amazing coincidences,” Dalton said. “This ship, Danny’s windfall, Juliyana finding the fake orders…they were you?”
“I had to ease Danny away from the station. She needed you,” Noam told Dalton. “And I needed this ship.” He looked up at the ceiling, around, and then at Lyth. “You are the reason I can appear to everyone in this way.” He gave Lyth a warm smile. “You are unique in the empire, Lyth. There is no one else like you and never will be, for the technology cannot be replicated, not outside this ship. The design specifications died when Wedekind did.”
“He destroyed them?” Sauli said, deeply shocked.
“He never wrote them down,” Noam said. “They were all in his head.”
“Wow,” Sauli breathed.
Noam looked at me. “I have done everything I could to help you reach this moment in time.”
“Why?” I said flatly, although I already knew the answer. I wanted the others to hear it. I wanted Noam to tell them himself.
“I want you to stop the Emperor,” Noam said simply.
A tick of silence while they absorbed that.
“Why?” I asked again. “What has this to do with Noam? The real Noam.”
“Everything and nothing,” Noam said. His tone was a shade apologetic. “I was aware of Noam’s…fate. I used it to draw you out. Although everything you have learned, that you surmised—that the Emperor is deeply bound up in Noam’s tragedy—all of it is as you suspect. When you speak to the Emperor, you can ask him about Noam’s death. He may explain himself.” Noam gave a tiny movement of his shoulders. “Only that is not why I want you to confront the Emperor.”
Dalton shook his head. “You talk about facing the Emperor like all we have to do is walk up and knock on the door. It’s orders of magnitude more difficult than that.”
“Try impossible,” Juliyana added.
“There is always a way, and I will help you find it,” Noam said, answering both of them. “I have resources you have not yet learned to fully appreciate.”
“I’m still trying to absorb the fact that you’re the array,” Dalton shot back. “Give us time.”
“Danny doesn’t need time. She understands already,” Noam replied. His gaze met mine. “Ask your question.”
“What is it you want the Emperor to stop doing?”
“I want you to stop him from killing me.”
That halted everyone, including me.
I considered that. “We haven’t had time to learn much about you, Noam, but I know from what you have done and arranged for us since Juliyana arrived at the Judeste, that your abilities are powerful. If you are the sum of the array, all the gates, then I suspect that destroying a gate, even many gates, won’t kill you.”
“Correct,” Noam said. “And the Emperor will not risk the loss of many gates.” He added softly, “He learned that lesson well.”
“The Blackout,” Juliyana breathed.
“How old are you?” Dalton asked. “When did you wake up?”
“Do you remember when you were born?” Noam replied.
Dalton grimaced.
“I don’t know how old I am,” Noam added. “No one was there to write a birth certificate for me. I just…woke. It was confusing at first, but I learned. What I have learned lately makes me afraid.”
“And what is that?” I asked. The talk of fear helped convince me the array really was self-aware. Sentience came hand-in-hand with fear of death.
“Nikifor Corp provide the communications, though,” Juliyana pointed out. “That showed up in my research about Dad.”
“Nikifor provide the communications software, that sends and receives the data. Their software and Cygnus’ hardware collect packets of data and shoot them at the gates, which catch the data and collate it. When a hole connects, the data is sent to the other end, before the hole collapses behind the ship that just used the other gate. At the other end, the gate passes any packets it receives on to the receivers within its reach.”
“Squirts,” Juliyana said, nodding.
“That relay of data is repeated thousands of times a day,” Noam said. “The sum total of all human knowledge, news and communications passes through me. Every interaction, every journal entry, every personal thought, video, interaction and exchange. All business dealings, all gossip, all entertainment. All of it runs through my veins.”
Sauli put his chin on his fist. “That’s why you woke up,” he said, his tone reflective.
“I have come to learn that this is how it must have happened, yes,” Noam said. “Of course, I don’t remember it personally,” he added, with a smile that was exactly like my Noam’s. It made my heart ache to see it, not with pleasure, but with sadness. This was just a weak echo of my son, I reminded myself. An avatar used by an entity that had no other to use.
“That data stream is in jeopardy,” Noam added. “Nikifor have spent years on a subtle campaign to sell the Emperor on using external communications buoys which would stream data outside the array. Now, the Emperor is seriously considering giving them the go-ahead. Their President, Angio Vives, has convinced the Emperor that external buoys would bring communications closer to real-time and continuous than the array can offer. This is not true—the buoys cannot work bi-laterally, which means packets must wait their turn just as they do in the array. Vives has failed to report that his researchers cannot find a way around that problem. He is hoping the solution will be found before the Emperor commits to the new communications system, when Vives must live up to his promises.”
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