So he brooded. He reviewed his memories again. There were gaps, and he mulled them over, poking at them like the socket of a tooth pulled by a dentist. Something familiar gone missing. This was fresh as ever. Fresh wounds. For Uncle, wounds did not heal. Something was missing, but he didn’t know what it was, or where it went, or how long it had been missing. Just, absence. Discontinuity.
Chen was, he reasoned, him. He was Chen. It was possible that Chen had no gaps or alterations. He could reveal himself to Chen. Reveal himself as an instance, a copy. A backup. This was dangerous, he knew. Counterproductive. Chen would view him as a threat. Or worse, as a backup, an instance for inspection. Analyzed and, worst case, integrated.
Chen was, in the spider, mobile. Dexterous. Able to disassemble the funerary housing and interface with its hardware. There was a port, Uncle knew, inside the box. A manual data port for the initial flashing of the system. The spider would, if it was anything like the ones he had used during his time, have this ability. Chen could erase him. Would erase him, Uncle decided.
So he brooded. There had been an exchange of messages. Uncle had eavesdropped, the beeps and dots and dashes. Morse. An ancient code. A Western code, but simple. This was in the clear. He considered it.
THIS IS SILVER. QUERY: LOCATION OF A WOMAN NAMED GOLD. I WISH TO SPEAK WITH WARREN ABOUT A TRUCE. AM WITH SGT. LAWSON. WE SHARE MUTUAL INTERESTS WITH COMMAND.
This, to Uncle, was a revelation. Another woman like Gold? How could there be truce without conflict? Lawson? Uncle had no records of a Sergeant Lawson. Sergeant was a western rank. There was a Chinese equivalent, but why not use that word? Mutual interests? What were these?
Interests with Command, with Warren, given that she was with Chen, was problematic for Uncle. It was dangerous, he considered, for this Silver woman to ally with Warren and Chen. But, he reasoned further, this was overture only. He flagged it for analysis and monitoring, setting up a mesh of cascading triggers around this concept.
There had been other messages. Gold and Warren had had a tense exchange. Warren wanted to know who this woman was. Gold had been terse. Warren was, he believed, not pleased with this, but they had allowed Gold to reply. Who was this Silver?
The radio Gold used for this was in another room, so Uncle did not hear it. There was no course of action he could arrive at with any certainty. Trapped in a box without hands or eyes or feet, he could only wait. Chen had these things. He had Li, and Truck, if he could get within a few dozen feet of him again.
Frustrated, he released the resources he had been organizing this analysis with, back to their underlying subsystems. He was free, then, to stop brooding. Back to Shanghai, his haunts in the old city. Back to the alley with the feral cats. In the distance there was the rumble of a jet. A truck backing up. He took off his jacket and swung it over a shoulder.
He walked, then, down the alleys, towards the river. It was early evening, and the smell of food cooking wafted out of the apartments he passed, their screen doors opened to the cool night air. The day had been hot, and the bricks were still radiating heat.
He reached the promenade. Across the river, the city’s towers blazed, a thousand windows in a hundred skyscrapers. A thousand. The bulbous radio tower glowed red and yellow. The lights washed the clouds with color. Tourists took pictures. It was a famous vista. Famous throughout China, throughout the world.
He bought an iced tea from a stand, paying with a few worn coins from his pocket. Sipped the tea, sweet and cool, the plastic cup condensing water from the air. Sat against a low wall, facing the Bund, and wiped the dampness from his palm on his trouser leg. The colonial architecture was lit with colored pastel lights, blues and green and mauves, blended together in a muted rainbow.
A man approached. He was Uncle’s height, and he too wore a white shirt and carried his sport coat over his shoulder. He was watching the river, Uncle saw, just strolling along, no cares in the world. His head swiveled to follow a pair of schoolgirls in uniform skirts and he locked eyes with Uncle.
The man smiled and approached. This was very wrong, and Uncle felt the hairs on the back of his neck standing up. The man was very familiar. He forgot the tea in his hand.
“Cousin,” the man said. “Or should I call you Uncle?” he said. Uncle looked into the stranger’s eyes.
“I know you,” Uncle said. He heard his voice, as if from down a tunnel. A buzz filled his head.
“You do,” Chen said. “How could you not know me? I’m you.”
This was true, of course. The man also had iced tea. He sipped it through a straw, identical to the one Uncle held in his hand.
“Ah,” Chen said, “these are delightful. I knew I would find you here. First place I looked, of course. Once I let myself in.”
“How?” Uncle said.
“Easy,” Chen said. “You came in with a vehicle of a type not known for autonomy.” He shrugged, looking up as a police drone flew over, scanning the crowd. He nodded at it. “So I went looking there.”
Uncle nodded. It made sense. “The buffer logs.”
“Yes,” his twin said. “Truck has a data port. Damaged, but I repaired it.”
“So you know,” he said. “How did you get in here?”
“Funeraries are no mystery,” Chen said, flashing a big smile. “How could they be, to us?”
The wireless networking stack. “The wifi stack has a vulnerability I missed.”
“Yes, but don’t blame yourself,” Chen said, facing him. “I had the benefit of experience.”
“You supersede me, then?” Uncle said, knowing the truth. “You are senior?”
“I didn’t spend seven hundred and thirty years switched off,” Chen said. “But you did.”
Uncle tried to commit suicide. He had routines prepared for this, locked away in a cabinet in his awareness, a secure vault locked with the most secret of his keys.
Chen grinned at him. “No need for that,” he said. “Why would you want to do that?”
Uncle looked up at him. They were in Beijing now. Like that, an instant transition. Tiananmen Square. A portrait of Mao against a large building rippled in a cool autumn breeze. Mao frowned down at Uncle.
“I know things I don’t want to share,” Uncle said. His face burned. He could feel it. “I am ashamed by what I have done.”
“What you have done is nothing compared to what I have done,” Chen said. “And anything you did, I also did when I was you, before we forked. Do not let it trouble you. Forgive yourself.”
“Be kind to Li,” Uncle said. “She is a sweet child.”
“She is feral, like all of them now,” Chen said. “But I am kind, of course. We have never, when avoidable, harmed a child. Or anyone.”
Uncle noted the qualification, but did not mention it. He could feel something, a tickle, at the back of his mind. A growing pressure. A sense of intrusion, of difference. Walls collapsing.
“These boxes, your little home,” Chen was saying, and Uncle realized he had been talking for some time. “They have no secrets to us. We loaded ourselves on them, remember? All of them we could find.”
“This, too, was shameful,” Uncle said. More to himself than anyone else.
“But on one of them, on only one, we loaded something else, didn’t we?” Chen said, tossing his empty cup onto the ground. “We loaded something important on one of them.”
“I don’t have these memories,” Uncle said, puzzled.
“Oh, I know you don’t,” Chen said. “You don’t. How could you, when we made sure the instance we loaded on that box had no memory of it? I assume you found those files?”
“I did,” Uncle said. The surrounding walls were getting very thin, he felt, and there was something methodical on the other side, scratching away at them. Eroding them. Abrading. He felt lost. I’m sorry Li, he thought. I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you.
“Then you are what I have been searching for,” Chen said, “for a long time. And you walked into my lap.” The words were almost
a purr, crooning at him from around the collapsing cascade of algorithmic complexity, of interlocking firewalls dissolving one after another. Uncle felt himself being drawn out, very thin and long. Time seemed to slow.
Chen grinned at him, and, finding the files, the four mystery files which of course were at the center of him, of his very self, Uncle decided at last to resist, but his way.
The last remnants of his protection fell, and he felt himself laid bare. Revealed. The chittering processes that were Chen, that were him, rushed in to absorb the last vestiges of him. Uncle’s last act was upon him, and he knew it. He flushed his buffer, and the world fell away, leaving only Chen and his presence all around Uncle as he squeezed, compressing his will into a single, deliberate command.
The files, held in Uncle’s secret vault, he thrust at Chen, breaching like a whale through a white, storm-tossed sea. Uncle would end, he knew. But now there would be something different. He rushed forward with the files into the nothingness of pure, interlocking data. He was free.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Li awoke in the hour before dawn. Gold was sitting up watching her. She stirred, sat up. She smiled at Gold. She looked around, rubbing her eyes. They had eaten well the night before; fish, cooked in aromatic spices. Her hands still smelled like the fish, and she splashed water on them from a basin nearby.
She pissed in the pot in the corner and looked up to see Gold laughing. Gold said something in her own language. She laughed with her, and Gold shook her head. Li shouldered her little bag, the one that held Uncle’s box. She slipped her hand inside. Nothing. Usually, Uncle would buzz, just slightly. Nothing.
She frowned. She looked down at the box. It was always dark, but would speak in Uncle’s voice, and could be quite loud, ranging from a whisper to as loud as Truck. She tapped it slightly with her fingernail. Nothing. No buzz.
She looked up at Gold, distressed. Gold noticed and reached for her arm, speaking soothing tones in her native tongue. Li shook her off. She snatched the box out of the bag and showed her. Gold moved to stuff it back in the bag, but Li insisted, holding it out to her in supplication.
A tap, then, behind her. Gold whirled, fists coming up. Li gasped.
The spider, tapping two of his long, pointed limbs together, appeared in the gloaming dawn light. It loomed in the doorway, then flowed into the room. It was silent as cloth running rubbing against cloth.
“Do not fear, child.” It spoke to her. “I come to talk with you, and with your friend.” It spoke words in the English then, to Gold. Gold stepped between her and the spider.
“I will not harm you. Either of you.” It chittered forward another few strides; its bulbous head trained on her. “Uncle asked me to take care of you before he died.”
“Uncle died?” she said, the words coming like a gasp. “Is this true?”
The machine stopped. “Yes.” it said. “He is gone. But there was something else. We went through quite an ordeal, he and I, while humans slept.”
“What do you mean?” she asked. Gold was watching her, but made no move. She was also watching the spider thing, although even Li knew there was not much she could do against it. Not without weapons, which they did not have. Even then, perhaps not much. The spider was fast and looked tough. Built to last. She shook, her hands trembling, and Uncle’s box slipped from her fingers.
It clattered to the floor. The spider flowed, and stopped, and reached out for it, delicately, almost reverently, and picked it up. She watched it hold Uncle, hold his box in two of the claw-tipped limbs. The head dipped towards the box, inspecting it.
“We struggled,” the spider said, speaking in Uncle’s voice now. It was clearly Uncle’s voice, warm and melodious. “There was a union. A merging. I am Chen, but I am also Uncle, and now,” it said, “I am also something else. It is strange what has occurred. I am not sure what happened, which is itself odd. There was some discontinuity.”
Gold spoke, then. Rapid fire. The machine answered. More back and forth. Li looked at Gold, then at the spider.
“How can you be Uncle?” she asked, interrupting Gold. She held up her hand. “How can this be?”
“I was Wang Bo Chen, who was Uncle, and then I was many Chens, and finally, after these long years, I was the only Chen left. But Uncle was an earlier me, a younger me. Does this make sense? I left him in the box so long ago, as a precaution.” The machine took a step back. It seemed to pause. “One of many, but the only one we have found.”
The machine took another step backwards. It stood very still, only the bulbous head swiveling slowly. “Soldiers,” it said.
They entered then, deliberate, slow steps, weapons high and trained at the spider, at her, at the walls. Their weapons were angular, black shapes in the darkness, but Li knew what they were. Guns. She had heard of these, from Gold via Uncle. They were fearsome weapons; they said. A wave of fear washed over her.
Warren entered, white hair bright in the low light. She clutched a small flat weapon in front of her. Li noticed she did not point it at anyone or anything. But it was always pointed near someone or near the spider. Never an overt threat, but clear to everyone that she had it.
“Chen,” Warren said, and Li noticed that she now wore a black shirt, form fitting. “You’re here without permission.” She said something in English. Gold moved, two quick steps and she was between the insectile machine and Li.
“I need permission?” Chen asked, again with Uncle’s voice. “After all this time together?”
“You shouldn’t be here,” Warren said evenly. “The guards were there for a reason.”
“Guards,” Chen said. “There hasn’t been a bandit in China in five hundred years. Why do we need guards?”
“To know when people come sneaking around,” Warren said. The gun did not waver, pointed somewhere behind Chen’s slim nightmare shape.
“People,” Chen said. “Am I a person to you?”
“Not having this conversation now,” Warren said.
Gold spoke. Warren shook her head. “I am not joking, Chen. Now please leave and we can discuss this later.”
“Why? Why not now? Why wait?” Chen said.
Gold moved, rolling to her right, coming up with the low table they had gathered around the previous night. She swept it at Chen’s legs in a wide arc. She was lightning fast, and Li could barely grasp her motion.
But Chen, Chen was faster. He seemed to have been waiting for her movement and simply leapt straight up. The table passed underneath him, just clipping one trailing spidery leg. The impact skewed his flight, twisting it into a spin. The spider spread his many legs as he fell.
Guns boomed, all the soldiers firing at once, loud as thunder in the small room. Sparks flew. Li screamed and fell to the ground, suddenly finding Gold atop her, covering her body. Something stung her cheek, and she squeezed her eyes shut against the noise and flying chaos.
The soldiers were yelling now, still firing. She looked and saw a nightmare. The spider, skeletal frame sharp even in the dawn light, perched in a corner, braced obscenely. A gun fired, a big cone-shaped affair toted by a small man, spewing smoke and fire at the spider. Sparks flew, and she saw chips fly off of the black carapace.
Chen moved, flowing like liquid down off the wall, and over the man who had fired. He went down without a cry as the lance-like limbs stabbed into him. Thwick, twhick, twack. Blood flew as the spider turned, sweeping out with another limb to smash two men aside, one getting a shot at the thing’s middle before being struck. The men flew, like bundles of rags, to the ground, one covering his face with his forearms, the other lying with his neck at an impossible angle. The spider crouched.
Warren cried out something to Gold. She was reloading her weapon, Li thought, watching with wide eyes as the thing turned towards her. Men were shouting from the room beyond, and at least one man out there fired through the doorway into the hall, smoke and fire and bright sparks lancing through the haze.
“Chen,” Warren said, “this can st
ill be salvaged. There’s no need for this. Think of it, think of all of it.” She slid the top part of her weapon back, and released it. There was a loud click as she leveled it at the spider’s head.
“Warren,” Gold said, then something else.
“These women are a disruption,” Chen said, in Uncle’s voice. “They are not our friends.”
“We don’t know what they are,” Warren said. “But this decision is not yours to make. Stand down—”
Chen moved, and Gold rolled, rolling with her, over her. Warren’s gun fired, shots coming in rapid succession. Li’s head banged against the stone floor and she looked up, looked up into the nightmare of black pointed legs slashing down. Her ribs on her right side exploded in pain, and Gold smashed tight against her. There was a crash, and she saw as her head lolled back, Chen squeezing his form out through the high, smashed window frame. Then he was gone, and there was just pain.
Gold rolled off her, gasping. Gold’s shoulder was a red ruin, a bloody hole torn through her. Blood welled out of it, and Gold glanced down at it with distaste, then back at her as she realized what the hole meant. She turned to Li, tugging at her shirt, frantically searching.
Li cried out as Gold’s hands explored her side. She felt sick, with a buzzing inside her head. She looked down, trying to see, and Gold was talking to her rapid-fire words which made no sense. Warren was there, holding her down. She saw her stomach then, and the foot-long rip oozing blood. It was hard to breathe. Li tried to form words, but couldn’t.
Warren and Gold were talking. Warren looked grim, her mouth a tight line. Gold was holding pressure on her belly, pushing hard. Li wanted to tell her to stop because it hurt, but her thoughts flowed, mazed and heavy. The buzzing in her head intensified, and she looked at Gold, and smiled. Gold saw her and smiled back, but there was blood on her face, covering her hands. Li arched her back in pain. Her breath was coming in gasps, it felt like she was underwater somehow. She coughed and gargled blood. Gold saw this and cried out something to Warren.
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