Wend-E dives into the net-node, passing ghostlike through it and into the airframe of the copter itself. Isabella’s virtual vision depicts Wend-E inside the craft’s body, negotiating virtual gateways, casting code as she fights miniature battles within the craft’s tiny brain, changing shape as she presents false identities to the copter’s security. Isabella holds her breath, aware they must be close to the range limit of the communications unit in her car. Wend-E must gain control of the copter’s communications to maintain contact. The companisim tells the copter she’s a systems security audit and three diagnostic routines, which manifests to Isabella as Wend-E’s doll-like avatar trying on various carnival masks. A fractal gateway opens, and Wend-E steps through, and reappears sat in an imaginary pilot’s chair within the nose of the aircraft. She has control and establishes a high-quality link to her physical component in the boot of Isabella’s car. The copter is now their communications hub and mission control.
‘Don’t break anything in there, or this’ll become a submarine,’ mutters Isabella.
Out in the vast darkness, a light twinkles on the surface of the sea. Isabella scrambles back down the copter’s leg, heading back to the concealment of the shipping container. In her mind’s eye she sees Wend-E working the copter’s communications, arms blurring as she manipulates flowing, glowing streams of code, downloading instruments of intrusion into the aircraft’s data space, from where she’ll use them to attack the Villa Wanderlust itself.
The storm of rotors changes pitch as the copter throttles back for landing. Isabella holds the container door a little open so she can watch their descent towards the festival of light that is the Wanderlust after dark. The ship’s deck is buried beneath a verdant paradise of palm trees, streams vaulted by pretty little bridges, fountains, pools and pagodas. Only the white control towers betray that somewhere under all this is the cold steel of a flight deck. Isabella realises that in all her adult life she’s never owned so much as a shrub, while her sister owns a floating Eden.
The aircraft alights so perfectly that Isabella never feels the touchdown. The gyrocopter creaks and servos whine as its rotors and engine-pods fold out of harm’s way for the ride on one of the two aircraft lifts to the hanger deck. Wend-E is still battling as the carrier swallows them. She must at least gain control of the security in the hanger deck before Isabella can leave the container.
The door to Isabella’s shipping-crate prison unlatches. She flattens herself against a steel wall, her stealth-suit matching its colour and texture. An autonomous forklift rolls into the container, carrying a small piano. Isabella wonders that Nicola would discard such a thing: maybe she’s bought a better one. Overlaid upon the real world Isabella sees four Wend-Es dancing around the forklift, each trying different techniques to subvert it, but getting no response. The lumbering machine is too dumb to be hacked. If Wend-E is trying this she must have failed to break into the ship’s systems via communications and is trying other avenues.
Wend-E has the copter register a complaint about one of the tip-jets misfiring. Answering that call comes a service drone that looks like a Jack-in-the-box on wheels, if Jack were a metal velociraptor. The gyrocopter unfolds its rotors for inspection, and the service drone cranes up to study the jets at their tips. An image of Wend-E appears standing on one rotor. She bends down and starts feeding the drone something with a spoon. Whatever intrusion method this represents, it seems to work, because when the service drone rolls away once more, Wend-E is riding on it.
There’s the distinctive ‘snap’ of a large circuit breaker tripping, and the deck lighting goes out. Wend-E’s image appears, beckoning Isabella from her hiding place. Isabella crouch-runs towards a hatchway, beyond which is light and...
Carpets. She steps into a corridor that once heard the call to battle stations, but is now burdened with deep-pile carpet and tasteful lighting. Not so much swords-into-ploughshares, as swords-into-evening-gowns, thinks Isabella, and vulgar as hell. Wend-E must have control of local security, for she beckons Isabella along the decorated corridors. But Isabella goes cautiously: Even though she’s seen so much automation, there must be people here. Nicola was never a hermit. She passes ballrooms and boardrooms and banqueting halls. She imagines the life her sister lives here: Important meetings to which she was never invited, glittering parties to which she was never invited, debased orgies to which she was never invited. Envy boils in the witch’s cauldron of her heart. She notices dust on the furnishings. Nicola has probably forgotten she even owns some of these rooms.
Eventually Isabella arrives at the holy of holies, doors of tastefully tinted bullet-resistant glass, the entry to Nicola’s private museum. In the world of data and security systems Isabella sees Wend-E has multiplied herself throughout the portion of the ship’s systems she now controls. A thousand floating Wend-Es assault the museum doors. The companisim is evidently trying to brute-force her way past this particular barrier, to overwhelm the security with a million requests for entry. Isabella can only crouch and wait; and hope that nothing goes wrong.
The museum’s doors swing open and Wend-E collects her many selves back into one image and floats through. Isabella follows into a space almost totally dark but for uplighters illuminating relics and artefacts within glass cases: treasures seen only by Nicola and her sycophants. Centre stage is taken by some hideous chunk of cubist overindulgence, an affront that makes Isabella gasp out loud, thinking: Why is this in pride of place? Where is our mother’s legacy?
Isabella has to search for her target, and for panicked moments she thinks it’s not here. But in the end she finds it, shunted into a corner, labelled simply ‘Globe. Circa 1800.’ Isabella looks down on the sepia shapes of Russia, Mongolia, China and India. Childhood memories surge up from their burial places and she recalls running her finger along the crenelated edges of continents, imagining her fingertip was an airliner bound for places with hard-to-read names. She realizes the horrible truth; that it was the last time she was happy, and here is the last fragment of that time, kept imprisoned and forgotten in a dark corner under a three-word description. Nicola clearly cares nothing for it and only keeps it to deprive her sister.
Looking about, Isabella sees Wend-E’s LCD face peering back at her from every corner of the room, floating superimposed over every hidden camera and passive infra-red sensor, big black eyes going ‘plink, plink’. ‘Is it safe?’ Isabella asks.
The many Wend-Es nod vigorously. She’s in control of the room’s security systems.
Isabella steps to the globe’s glass prison. Her heart beats, her skin heats. She reaches out trembling hands, feeling the edges of the case, seeking its weaknesses and entry points.
She sees the camera-lens looking out at her like the black eye of a rattlesnake, and knows instantly what it means. The case has its own in-built security, disconnected from all networks like a tiny private universe, or Wend-E would already have dealt with it. But to what purpose? By now Wend-E is in control of so much of the ship that it’s too late to issue a warning signal. Surely nothing can stop them now?
The floor of the case splits and folds, moving with clockwork smoothness. Isabella draws a sharp breath, and it’s as loud as a shout in the silence of the room. Arms bearing fanged wheels rise out of the depths of the case. Isabella only has time to scream ‘No!’ as the wheels spin up, before they touch wood and sawdust plumes within the case like blood in water. She smashes her fist against the toughened glass, claws at it, screeching, as the antique globe explodes into a whirling maelstrom of splinters and broken pieces. Then the rending clawed arms retreat, leaving Isabella looking down at a mound of kindling and tan dust.
‘Hello, sister,’ says a voice in her head.
Isabella feels a coldness prickle across her back, for though she heard the voice through her neural implants, it still maps to a position in the real world… right behind her.
She turns.
Nicola Sauber stands, arms crossed and head tilted, smiling knowingly. S
he’s slightly transparent and her feet don’t touch the ground. She’s a projection, something conveyed into Isabella’s implants through the ship’s data-systems. So Wend-E is not in complete control after all. ‘Knew you’d come for it one day,’ says Nicola.
‘Why?’ asks Isabella. ‘Why? It was our mother’s.’ She realises there are tears on her face, wipes them away furiously.
‘Because it’s the last remnant of our childhood, of a world you tried to force me out of. You hated me from the moment I was born. I was competition, and you’ve never been able to stand that, always thought you were entitled to everything by birth. I had to work to get noticed, I had to work for everything. You expected everything to be given to you. That’s why I built an empire, and you’re a common thief. That’s why Mother liked me more. All I ever wanted was a sister like other girls had, but I had you. You made me hate you, I didn’t want to do it. You taught me, trained me, made me in your image. And I carried that darkness inside me all my life, unable to really trust anyone.’
‘Oh, always the victim!’ says Isabella, throwing up her hands. ‘The one role you play really well! You’re richer than fruitcake but still deprived!’
‘Riches aren’t much use to the dead.’
‘Dead?’ says Isabella, ‘No, this is one of your tricks.’
‘No tricks. Five years now. Cancer. That’s what a lifetime of hating does to you. My money keeps the machines running, keeps the empire online, like the Soviet Union after Stalin died.’
‘Then who am I speaking to?’
‘No-one. Just a ghost, a simulation. Guaranteed non-sentient or it’d be illegal, though I don’t understand how they can guarantee that. Supposedly it predicts with high accuracy what I would do and say in this situation. The game’s over, sister, and at least I died rich. What have you got?’
‘Oh, you always had to have the last word-’
‘I’ll have better than that, sister dear. Because there’s one great advantage to being dead.’ The smile widens, revealing perfect, virtual, teeth. ‘You can’t be tried for murder.’
The floor beneath Nicola’s feet folds away just like the interior of the globe’s display case. Isabella watches, startled, as all the display cases sink into recesses in the deck, like they know trouble’s coming and are slinking away to hide. Through the opening beneath Nicola’s floating image a familiar figure rises: Black Edo-period Tosei-gusoku armour, topped with a horned helmet. Isabella steps away from it, eyes widening.
‘Oh yes, this fell on you when you were seven, didn’t it?’ sneers Nicola’s ghost. ‘You were terrified of it ever after. Mother had to get rid of it to stop the nightmares. Took a lot to find it. I’ve made some alterations, of course.’
Red LEDs illuminate in the helmet, forming ridiculous horror-movie eyes like something from a cheap theme-park. It should be laughable but the smell of lacquered iron unlocks forgotten terrors that rise up out of Isabella’s guts and strangle her reason. A tide of irrational childhood fear breaks over her, and she’s drowning.
The armour moves, whipping an antique blade up and into a guard position with a faint whirr of servos. A shriek echoes through the room, and Isabella sees her screaming face reflected in the sword’s mirror-smooth surface. The sound is coming from her. She throws herself sideways as the sword scythes down, singing through the still air. She lands hard on the tile floor and scrambles up and away. The animate armour raises its blade and marches after her with the comic clockwork gait of a child’s toy. Isabella looks about for an escape, a weapon, anything, but the room is empty and the door sealed and Wend-E has vanished from her mind’s eye. She can run from this thing, but she knows it will march after her in endless, ever-decreasing circles until she falls down, exhausted. It’s futile.
She does it anyway. Her sister’s ghost watches with a Mona Lisa smile as the clockwork assassin chases Isabella about the room. It doesn’t take long for fearful flesh to fade and falter, to become clumsy and slow. The sword slashes, Isabella dodges, the sword twists and stabs, and its point enters her thigh. Her leg collapses under her and Isabella finds herself sitting in a spreading pool of blood. The armour raises its sword to slice her in two...
...and stops. Freezes in that position. The LED eyes flicker like activity lights on a net-node. In her implant-enhanced mind’s eye Isabella sees Wend-E standing over her, arms outstretched like a wizard commanding a demon.
‘What’s this?’ says Nicola’s ghost. She crouches to bring her face level with Wend-E’s determined LCD visage. ‘And who are you, little one?’
There seems to be a reply, though Isabella doesn’t hear it.
‘She hurt you, didn’t she?’ says Nicola’s ghost, translucent face a portrait of maternal concern. Isabella remembers this. Even when she was flesh, Nicola could turn emotions on and off like stage-show lighting.
Wend-E’s eggshell head nods miserably. Nicola leans like an actor pretending to listen to a rag-doll in an old children’s program. ‘She did all that? How wicked. But now the boot is on the other foot. How would you like to choose which bits we cut out first, while she screams and screams?’
Isabella’s chest lurches with the desire to speak, to protest, to plead, but what can she say? She can’t threaten or command Wend-E. All she can hope is that the idea of forgiveness is stored somewhere in Wend-E’s conceptual matrix. But now, considering all the things she’s done, Isabella finds that hope very unlikely. Who knows, the concept could have been there, but later burned out during one of the many punishments Isabella inflicted.
‘Well, would you like that?’ the ghost asks.
Wend-E’s head shakes vigorously side to side.
‘But surely you want revenge? It’s only human.’
Wend-E shakes her head again. Nicola tilts hers as though listening once more. ‘Good point,’ she says. ‘Perhaps they made you better than nature made us.’ She stands and turns her attention to Isabella. ‘Well, I’m forced to make a decision in unforeseen circumstances where I’ve no idea what the real Nicola have done.’ She grasps her chin in thoughtful fingers. ‘What do you think she’d have done?’
‘We’re s-sisters,’ stammers Isabella. ‘She’d-’
The ghost raises an eyebrow, and the words die on Isabella’s tongue. Nicola’s ghost looks long at Wend-E, who still stands with her arms held commandingly up, holding back the antique assassin.
‘I think I’ll take my revenge in another form,’ says Nicola. She pulls something from the air with a magician’s flourish and holds it out to Isabella. ‘A lifetime allowance of one million dollars a year, to keep my wayward sister out of trouble,’ she says. ‘You’re getting too old for thievery, after all, and you’ve wasted every cent you stole. How will you live without my support?’
Isabella sets her jaw and shakes her head.
‘Take it, or die.’
Isabella considers the choice. Maybe she’d refuse if Nicola was alive, but there’s no point feuding with the recorded soul of a dead woman. She reaches out to touch the phantom document. Her neural implant translates the motion into a digitally signed message of acceptance. Her hand passes through the ghost contract and it explodes into cartoon coins that tumble about her and vanish. She’s rich.
‘What will you do with so much money, sister?’ asks Nicola. ‘You won’t be able to resist it, but every cent you spend you’ll know you owe to me. It will feed your selfish greed and bitterness. It will destroy you. Or perhaps not, but I know you and that’s the way I’d bet.’ She stands again and says to Wend-E, ‘Get her out of here.’
Isabella rides home as a passenger, not a stowaway, in one of the smaller gyrocopters with seats and windows so she can watch her sister’s floating paradise sail away into the endless sea. Back on shore it’s raining, and she feels foolish in her custom-made chameleon-suit: A limping middle-aged woman staggering back from a fancy dress party she’s been thrown out of. The wind brings her the sound of cheering. The port crew must have gotten the feed for the Pan Africa
Championships working. She feels she’s a ghost, like her sister, as she slips by their cabin. Nicola was right, she is getting too old for thievery, and the one thing she wanted to steal is gone. With her sister dead there’s not even revenge to get out of bed for in the mornings. She’s soaked through by the time she reaches the car, where Wend-E lies imprisoned in the boot. Wend-E’s image is waiting there for her, floating above the ground with its arms sternly folded.
Isabella has had all the return journey to compose her words, but all she can say is, ‘I’m sorry.’
Wend-E turns her back with a haughty flounce that no-one burdened by flesh could pull off and fades from sight, leaving Isabella alone.
‘I... I thought it was best if I brought her back,’ says Isabella Sauber. ‘She should be among her friends. She won’t manifest to me anymore.’
‘What did you do?’ growls Marcus-Sebastian.
‘I used her as a pawn in my private chess-game. I’m just like everyone else. Worse, if I’m honest. I don’t want to tell you the things I did.’
Tales of Eve Page 5
