"Okay, Jay," said Corva. "Time to work your magic again."
He waved his hands in the air, for all the world like a stage magician preparing a trick, then said, "I'm freezing the heat-sensors. They'll register the first person to step out, but nobody else. And as long as that person doesn't go any further inside, they'll stay in an infinite loop. So somebody will have to stay here by the elevator."
"You didn't mention that earlier." She was annoyed.
"Wasn't sure this would be the setup." He shrugged. "I'll stay if you want."
"No, we might need you. Shylif?"
The normally placid Shylif frowned. "I want to come."
"It's you or me," said Corva. "I could stay, I suppose..."
He turned away. "No. This is... your show."
Jaysir pressed the key combination next to the elevator doors. Nothing happened for a moment, then the car shifted with a strange sucking sound, and the doors opened. A gasp of cold came in, followed by fresh warm air. The denners poked their heads out, Wrecks above, Orpheus below, and Corva stepped carefully over them. After the strange and wonderful skies of Wallop, and the weirdness of an elevator ride to nowhere, this vestibule lit by low lamps behind potted palms was jarringly prosaic. Shylif stepped out, and they all listened for the sound of alarms—ridiculous, really, since those might sound only in some security office kilometers above. In any case nothing happened, and they followed him out.
"Shy, keep your coms open," Corva said to the big man. "If anything happens, we need to know instantly." He nodded.
After his initial surprise, Toby found the hum of the air circulation and the spot-lit plants in the little antechamber reassuring. Just do this one thing, he told himself, and then you can make a run for Destrier.
Orpheus took off around a corner and, with a mild curse, Toby followed him. The denner was bounding down a long carpeted hall, at the end of which a set of shallow steps led down in a spiral. The only decoration in the hallway was a single table with a bronze Buddha on it. Or was it the Emperor of Time—a Toby McGonigal? He was careful not to look too closely at it as he passed by.
"Stay in sight, damnit!" Corva and Jaysir had caught up. Toby saw how her lips were pressed together; she was scared. This was nerve-wracking, but Toby didn't know enough to know what they should be scared of down here. He was curiously numb, in fac. He'd been through too many changes lately to really register a sense of danger here.
"Where are we?" Jaysir was looking around.
"Top reception area," Corva said. The only way was down a short corridor to an arch that exited onto a broad, curving balcony. Toby and Corva stepped onto this, with Jaysir and the denners following.
The gallery was suspended near the ceiling of a geodesic dome about thirty meters across. Toby looked down at a sculpted landscape of trees and pools lit by arc lights. The glass walls of the dome were an opaque black in this light.
"Oh yeah," said Corva. "Staging area for the elevators. I remember having lunch in one of these."
Toby looked at her. "You wouldn't be having lunch in a passenger lounge if you were a stowaway."
"No, of course not."
"Wallop is where you were going to school!" For some reason he'd assumed her school was on Lowdown.
She shrugged impatiently. "You only just figured that out? Why else would my brother come here if he wanted to find me and bring me home?
"Anyway, this isn't the same lounge as the one I came through. There's lots of these stations, but most of them are way up in the stratosphere. The only reason this one's down here is because it's on ice."
Toby could see potted orange trees down there. Looking at them, he felt achingly homesick for Earth. Wrecks and Orpheus were already on their way down a broad stairway that swept along the wall of the dome. "Come on," said Corva as she followed them.
"Some of the rich estates are built like this," mused Corva as she trailed her fingers along the dark glass of the outside wall. As he followed her Toby heard the faint drumming of rain, and fainter murmur of distant thunder, filtering in from outside. "There are whole chandelier neighborhoods, hanging down off the city-spheres by the dozen. I thought it was so wonderful when I first came here." Her voice held something in between regret and disappointment.
Jaysir was distracted, staring at a small grove of red-leafed maples. "Look at the trees! They're not green. They're red! Are they fake?"
Toby laughed. "No, they do that every autumn. Just before they lose 'em for winter."
"Oh, yeah, winter. They wake up the trees months before us, so it's always summer when we're awake. They spend a few months cooling them down after we go into hibernation, so maybe some of them lose their leaves then—but I've never seen it."
Toby walked with Corva under the canopies of red. The sound of rain receded, but the illusion of being outside was still hard to shake.
Jaysir had slept through all the autumns of his life. For some reason, this thought made Toby's heart ache, and he remembered leaving home for Sedna, and how he and Evayne had both cried.
Peter had been silent.
Corva pointed out a set of low-lit steps that descended under the grass. "This should go down to where they dock the passenger modules."
They went that way, and neither spoke for a while; but something was on Toby's mind. He'd been thinking about it ever since he'd learned the significance of his family in this world.
Finally, during a short period while Jaysir was out of earshot, he asked: "What does it mean to you, that I'm a McGonigal?"
She darted a quick look at him. Toby suddenly realized that Shylif, at least, could still hear them; uncomfortable, he pressed on. "I mean, that first time in the courtyard. Did you know who I was? And all that stuff about... about me being the Emperor of Time, this cult figure, you knew about that..." He shook his head. "Are there really people out there who think I'm some sort of god?"
She'd drawn her shoulders in and wouldn't look at him. "You have your sister to thank for that," she said curtly.
"I'm asking about what you believe."
"I was raised to believe you never existed at all."
"You mean that the Emperor of Time never existed. But what about me?"
"You? As a person? A human being?" Now she met his eyes briefly. "Toby, nobody thinks about you that way."
He didn't ask any more questions, and she didn't speak either.
At last they stood in the final, lowest chamber. This was a hexagonal, metal-walled drum with a suit locker in one wall and an airlock built into the floor. The sound of running, dripping rain filled the room.
"This is it," said Jaysir. "The passenger module's behind that door. Fire up the interface, Toby."
He tapped the side of his glasses and awoke its augmented reality interface. "I still think we should have tested it before," he said. "We might have been able to do all this from the city, through the net—"
"Bad idea, I told you," said Jaysir. "If it didn't work, and the network trapped your query, we'd have been caught. Safest to do it from here, 'cause I know we're close enough that you can get a direct link to the module's timer."
Toby sighed. "All right. I'll try." He pinged the ship's hibernation system.
Instantly, a bank of colorful rectangular buttons and data windows popped into view. They seemed to float, translucent, half a meter in front of him. "Hmph. Well, I do have something." He peered at the virtual console. "It's... it's a passenger manifest."
Jaysir did a little dance. "Hot damn! What about the frequency—the timing?"
Toby examined the virtual board. It was actually quite ridiculously simple. There were some clocks showing current time and a kind of alarm—rather like Orpheus's setup, strangely. Of course, since this was a three-dimensional and virtual display, the interface elements also had little tags. He reached out to tap a little red flag attached to the main timer, and a larger window opened.
It read, OVERRIDDEN BY EVAYNE MCGONIGAL, 38.2/14372.2.
Toby swore.
<
br /> "What is it?" Corva was gnawing at her fingernails again. "Is something wrong?"
"No no, it's fine. I just won't know if I can reset the clock until I try."
"Toby..." He glanced over at Corva. She was looking more distressed by the second. "Can you check... is he here? Halen, I mean. Halen Keishion?"
He looked at the manifest—momentarily distracted by the discovery that he could apparently reset individual cicada beds or select some or all at once—and ran his finger down the air until he saw it. "Yes, Corva. He's here. His bed's registering green. He's okay."
She blew out a heavy sigh, smiling weakly.
"How about Sebastine Coley?" It was Shylif's voice, coming through the open link. Toby glanced down the list.
"Sure—" But Jaysir and Corva were both waving their hands and Corva was shouting, "No!"
Toby blinked at them, then remembered the story Jay had told him about Shylif's past. Something about a woman, and a man who had lured her into a lockstep fortress...
"Shy? Shy? Answer me!" Corva stared at Jaysir in horror. "Oh, no," she whispered.
"What?" Toby looked from one to the other. "What's happening?"
"The alarm's been triggered," said Jaysir. "Shy's left his post. He's on his way down here.
"To kill Sebastine Coley."
Chapter 11
"I don't like police," Peter had told Toby once, as they were arguing over yet another point of design for Consensus. "They're people and how can you trust people? But I hate bot-cops too, 'cause, well, they're not people." In their next version of Consensus, he'd provided a solution to both problems.
Toby sat on the floor with Corva and Jay, looking up at that solution.
They had raced up from the bottom of the facility, hoping to head off Shylif. Toby couldn't believe he was intending to kill one of the passengers in the module—but Corva had confirmed it. "He joined us because he was hunting this man Coley and he'd tracked him to Thisbe," she'd said as they ran. "I never thought he'd actually find him!"
Apparently, now that he had, all other considerations had ceased to have any meaning for him; so he'd left his post and in that instant, the alarms that his presence there kept suspended, had gone off.
It had taken surprisingly little time for the police dirigible to arrive.
In Consensus, red lights on the heads of bots like these four meant they were being "ridden" remotely by professional law officers. Telepresence had been decent in Toby's day; he had no doubt it was perfect now. The people remotely controlling these bots would feel they were right here, and had to be aware that they stood two heads taller than any normal human and had enough strength to tear off an airlock door with their bare hands—if their robot bodies would let them.
The bots had overrides to prevent their human drivers from killing or badly injuring anyone. The humans, in turn, had overrides on the kinds of simple assumptions a bot might make about what kind of situation they were in. Peter had thought it was a nearly perfect solution.
What made it actually perfect was the fifth bot that hung back from these four. Its headlights were green, meaning it was being ridden by a civilian observer, who would also be recording everything that happened here.
The cop-bots didn't seem too concerned about that fifth guy. One of the red-lit ones crouched with a gnashing sound in front of Toby. "Facial's not getting a match on this guy. They must be stowaways."
"They had denners," said a second one, which stood with crossed arms over Corva. "Saw 'em scamper off that way."
What about Shylif? Toby exchanged a glance with Jaysir, who gave a tiny shake of his head. Had they found him up top? Or was he hiding somewhere?
"Denners..." The first cop leaned toward Toby. "Is it true what they say? Those things're altered to work like cicada beds?"
"I wouldn't know," said Toby.
"Shut up," snapped Corva. "They've got lie detection built into those suits. You just said 'yes,' you know."
"Oh." He felt himself flush.
"Ha," said the cop-bot, tilting its head to one side. "Good readings off this one. So, kid, who are you, and where are you from?"
Toby looked the cop in its lenses. "I am Toby Wyatt McGonigal, I was born on Earth fourteen thousand years ago, and I own this lockstep and everything in it. Including you."
There was a second's pause, then the cop-bot stood up, shaking its head. "Detector's not working after all. It says he's telling the truth!" There was a general laugh at that idea. The cop-bot shook its head again. "What he said about the denner's might not be admissible. We'll have to catch them."
"Hell!" said another cop-bot. "I'll get 'em." It raised its arms, much like a professional wrestler showing off his muscles, but in this case the maneuver just made room for two cat-size bots to detach themselves from its torso and leap to the floor. They shook themselves and then flitted silently away.
Corva shouted, "Don't hurt them!"
"Call them, then," said the first cop-bot. "Save us all a lot of trouble."
Corva sent him one of her most withering glares. It was the first time, Toby reflected, that he'd seen that look directed at somebody other than himself.
"On your feet, then. We'll catch up to them." The cop hauled Jaysir up and reached down a metal hand for Toby, but he brushed it off.
"They're down this way," said the cop whose cat-bots were on the hunt. He stalked off into one of the corridors and everybody followed him in a tight group.
"So," said the first cop. It had hooked its white metal thumbs into the conspicuous holsters at its waist, and was sauntering next to Toby like a man with his hands in his pockets. "You came here to do some looting, then? No, no, don't answer, it happens all the time, and, hey, I wouldn't want to put words in your mouth or anything."
"Yeah," said Toby. "That's why we came."
The cop-bot shrugged at the civilian observer. "Don't know what's wrong with this detector."
"Has this happened before?" asked the observer. Unlike the flat artificial voice of the cops, its was clearly human. Female, mature, perhaps even elderly. Though, as with Kirstana's white-haired priest of Anti-Origin, you could never be sure.
"What the—" The cop whose body parts were hunting Wrecks and Orpheus paused. Then he swore and started running. From somewhere up ahead came a strange swishing sound.
They caught up with him in a big industrial kitchen. Everything was chrome steel and ceiling-mounted chef assemblers. These were all dormant, but there was a lot happening at floor level.
The cat-bots were trapped back-to-back in the middle of the room. Careering and hopping around them were six spinning pinwheels of white spray: pressurized dessert-topping bottles whose valves had somehow come loose. They were coating every nearby surface with white topping, and the cat-bots had gotten a liberal layer. The things were back on their haunches now, scrabbling at their cameras to try to clear them.
And then, with majestic slowness, the heavy industrial fridge behind them began to lean in their direction.
"Hell!" The cop-bot leaped forward, but skidded in the icing and ended up on its back just as the fridge came down like a hammer on it and the cat-bots.
The fridge bounced once then settled a few centimeters. The cop-bot lay on its back, arms and feet splayed and its head under the heavy fridge. Suddenly it crossed its arms and ankles, and Toby heard a muffled voice say, "Well, this is just great."
"Get it off him," said the lead cop. It was impossible to tell, but Toby imagined his voice sounding tired.
Two other cops lifted the fridge as if it weighed nothing, and the one on the floor clambered to its feet. Its head was a bit lopsided, which was nothing compared to the state of the two cat-bots.
The civilian observer shook her head. "But how did they...? Oh!"
Behind the fridge were boxes, and a long metal tray that must have been used as a lever. Toby felt a prickle up his spine as he realized that the denners could have had only a few seconds to improvise this trap.
He looke
d to the others. "Are they as smart as...?"
Jaysir shrugged. "Best not to worry your head about it."
A couple of meters away, an icing-smeared cop-bot was trying to fit two squashed subunits into slots in its torso. They wouldn't fit, and finally it threw them away in disgust. "I'm gonna kill those little freaks," it said.
Another cop gestured from a nearby doorway. "They went up," it said. "They're somewhere in the greenhouse."
"On civilized worlds," said the iced cop, "they make crime impossible."
Corva quirked a smile at it. "Where would be the fun in that?"
It cursed and walked away. Instantly Corva's smile disappeared. She turned to Toby and he could see the worry and disappointment that were her true feelings.
"Time to earn your pay, heir to the lockstep," she murmured.
"What?" He nearly tripped as they were hustled up a flight of steps to the open, window-wrapped greenhouse. "You think I can?" He nodded at the cops.
"I really think you can," she said, and next to her, Jay nodded. "If you are who you say you are, you can override any Cicada Corp equipment." When he just stared at her, she rolled her eyes and said, "These bots are Cicada Corp bots."
Toby swallowed. If he ordered these bots to shut down, he'd reveal himself. There was no going back from it. These cops would be kicked out of their system and find themselves back at headquarters, and they'd see that it was a McGonigal override that had taken them out. As if that weren't enough, they'd have it in his own words: "I am Toby Wyatt McGonigal..." There'd be no hiding anymore; he'd be meeting Evayne and Peter soon, but too soon, far too soon.
Corva hissed at him. "What are you waiting for?"
Toby called up the Cicada Corp console. He could see the activation symbol hovering over the heads of the cops. All he had to do was tweak that, and they'd fall right over. Similarly, he could open the doors. He'd woken the dead just now... he could do this.
Analog Science Fiction and Fact - 2014-01 Page 9
