Then the screaming started, screaming like I’d never heard before.
My head felt crushed under the weight of that godless sound. The screaming went on forever, like a choir from hell.
I heard, as if from another world, Gideon’s voice, shouting, “Zette!”
All my biostats could do now was flood me with painkillers and sedatives. My pain floated away like my supposed soul. In the absence of agony, I got my eyes open just a bit. I saw that the light had found shape and focus.
Surrounding me stood a squad of tall spectral warriors, wicked swords and armor gleaming with unnatural light. One picked me up; in its arms I felt euphoric. My interface was showing me a physical damage report that was nothing but flashing red warnings. I did not feel even remotely bothered. I was safe; there was no pain.
Squinting through the glimmering, I saw countless tattered shreds and scraps of darkness scattered across the room, all fleeing, squealing, like panicked rats towards the air vents, where they disappeared as quickly as they had come.
The four warriors bowed deeply towards me, then all but the one supporting me turned and vanished, as if walking into a hidden room.
The ominous chill wind was gone. I could just barely hear the ventilation system quietly humming again.
Gideon was hugging me very carefully, squeezing himself between the ghostly samurai. “I thought I’d lost you!” he said, his voice thick with emotion.
CHAPTER 29
When Gideon let me go, I found myself wishing that hug could have gone on a little longer. I giggled, but it was probably the drugs doing their thing. We looked at each other, briefly. “I love you, too,” I said, grinning like the happiest drunk in the world.
He looked startled out of his mind. “I beg your…?” he said, running a hand through his dark hair, and actually blushing. “Well … uh…”
“This,” I said, glancing at the remaining samurai, “is my boy. His name is Bob.” I giggled again and blathered on for a bit.
Then I noticed Gideon was injured. Half his face was beginning to swell into what promised to be a monstrous bruise. “Smith, you’ve…” I did my best to point with my shattered hand — and continued to marvel at the lack of screaming agony.
He flinched from me, and winced. “Those things certainly pack a wallop.”
Through the haze of state-of-the-art analgesia I began to understand. “You tried to rescue me?”
“You know. Right thing to do.” He shrugged, making conspicuous light of what he must have done.
“But there were…” I thought dreamily back. “There were at least a dozen…”
“Had to do something, McGee.”
Resting there in the luminous arms of the samurai, looking up at him, feeling my biostats start the enormous task of stabilizing my bodily systems I looked over the damage. There were numerous fractures, head trauma, severe blood loss and lacerations. And I began to notice other things too. Gideon’s clothes were torn. His hands were bleeding freely, dark drops falling slowly in the low gravity to the floor. “Smith, Smith, you’re…” I couldn’t think of what to say. My mouth flapped and I stared at his beaten form.
Gideon flashed a winning smile, and, while looking like a wreck, he also somehow looked pretty good. Really good. The word that suggested itself was “scrumptious”.
“If I’d had a gun, McGee. If I’d had a gun, those bastards wouldn’t have known what hit them!”
Personally, I didn’t think guns of any conventional variety would have made much of a dent on those things, but I went along with it, because I was still grinning like a twit. My samurai bodyguards were still supporting me as we headed into the lobby. I looked over at Gideon. “Did you get Airlie’s stuff?”
He looked like he’d temporarily forgotten about it. “Oh, yes. That.” He reached into his coat pocket, wincing as he bent his arm.
I wondered if there was any kind of emergency medical kit aboard the elevator car that would take us to the surface. I was still being carried by the samurai, as we headed out of the lobby and back towards the airlock that would get us onto the elevator car.
Gideon produced a nanocoated skin patch, and another set of memory pods. Quick investigation revealed that Airlie had bought herself a new identity; the patch contained not only a spoofware hack which would interfere with non-physical identification systems, but also a tailored viroid that would change Airlie’s eye color, fingerprints (hands and feet) and make subtle changes to her face. It was expensive gear, and highly sought after in some circles. She’d also arranged all the necessary papers and files, including a lot more cash, and a use-anytime economy class travel pass out to the Aldebaran system. I thought, still doped up on biostatic painkillers, God, why would you go out there?
There was also a handwritten letter on what looked like handmade paper; the purple ink looked like it, too, had been handmade. Gideon sniffed both it and the envelope and, gently, shook his head. “Not even a trace of odor.”
“You mean it’s just a letter?”
“It’s more than just a letter, McGee. Have a look.”
I did my best to focus as Gideon held it up for me to read. It was a love letter. From Airlie’s secret lover, one Javier Mondragon. This individual included a return address on the Heart of Darkness habitat. That meant the Aldebaran star system.
Which meant it was outside the current border of human space by about nine lightyears. The Heart of Darkness habitat had what one might think of as either a very poor reputation, or a really great one, depending on who you were. It was an independent political and economic entity that had never aligned itself with any of the large states or spheres in human space. Its own nasty little empire, it attracted all manner of people, many of them heavily modified, looking for a different sort of existence. It was notorious as a source of almost every kind of drug, illegal software, organized (and disorganized) crime. It attracted crazy people with extremist views and manifestos, mad bombers, hardcore artists, writers, and musicians. Naïve, restless kids who never felt like they belonged anywhere else often wound up there, thinking it would be the coolest place in the universe, only to find themselves exploited in cheap and unregulated food joints, dodgy export operations and/or pornography of various kinds.
If I hadn’t been a copper, it might have been fun to at least visit. As well as the considerable criminal element, there were people with visionary ideas, people working on the border of what was possible and impossible, revolutionaries in the classic sense, people who wanted to make a positive difference in the galaxy. It was paradise and the inferno in one big round package. You either loved it or you didn’t. Too bad if you didn’t; you probably wouldn’t get out again.
Javier Mondragon had an anonymous maildrop account somewhere in the place. Which didn’t mean he lived there. Heart of Darkness was the sort of place where you could keep a very low profile indeed … for a price.
Gideon, no doubt thinking along these lines too — and not nearly as medicated as I was — reached the inevitable conclusion first: “What’s a retired scientist and a former disposable android turned housewife like Airlie Fallow, doing mixed up with someone involved with the Heart of Darkness?”
“Beats me,” I said, unhelpfully. Then, remembering something important, I stopped Gideon. “Oh, Smith! Wait!”
“McGee?”
“Our favorite firemind just destroyed the Otaru Emulation ship.”
He raised his left eyebrow half a centimeter. “When did that happen?” His voice was very quiet. “How do you know?”
“I just know,” I said. “I sensed it somehow. It happened just before our buddies showed up.”
“Just before our buddies showed up.”
He swore, speaking quietly and carefully. “What about our personal ship?”
“No idea. Give it a phone, see what it says.”
However, I didn’t hear what he found out.
The world shifted around me, one reality merging into another.
“Ooooh, drug-related psychosis…” I said to myself. Then I was gone.
It was a sunny day. I was sitting on a red tartan picnic blanket on some soft grass in the shade of a stand of old flame trees with two other people. I felt fine; my body was intact. We were sitting in a park on the shore of a wide blue-green bay. Spectacular, jagged rock formations loomed in the distance to one side; a small town stood not far from here on the other. Out in the water, white yachts rode at anchor, seagulls perched on their rigging. There were groups of brown ducks paddling along. I spotted a cormorant swimming near the ducks, its long skinny neck and head the only part of it sticking out the water. After a moment it dove and swam through the clear water, hunting fish. I could just make out its shadowy image as it darted about.
The flies were bad, too. I was waving them away from my face. It made me think of the virtuum sims of Australia I’d experienced growing up.
The two people with me were a man and a woman, both in their early twenties. The woman, with startling red hair arranged in a thick braid down her back, was laughing at something the man said. He grinned and glanced at me. “All right, Zette?”
The woman looked my way, too. “You’ve been very quiet.”
I felt a sharp surge of confusion and panic. “What?” I clearly remembered everything that had been happening to me a minute ago in the bank, when I’d come within a moment of dying.
“You look like you’ve been away with the fairies. Something on your mind?” This was the young woman, who was idly picking at the grass next to the blanket. She had vivid blue eyes.
“Could be a glitch,” the man said. “Let’s see…” He paused a moment, staring off over the water, then looked back at me, this time with a keen scrutiny. “You’re getting the dropouts again. Is that right?”
The woman rolled her eyes and smiled reassuringly. “You’d think they’d get it right after all these years, eh?”
“Um,” I said, confused, “get what right?”
“Ah,” the man said, “there you go. Memory dropout. Not to worry, Zette, I’ve got a patch right here.” He reached into the picnic basket, past the pineapple upside-down cake, the bottle of white wine, the flask of coffee, the small packet of expensive mints, and retrieved what looked like a boiled sweet, a reddish thing the size of a grape, wrapped in a bit of clear cellophane. He pulled on each end, the sweet spun, and he handed it to me. “Try this. Should fix you right up.”
“No,” I said, leaning away from my chummy companions. “I don’t know who you are and I don’t know what’s going on!”
Then I noticed the wrapper on the sweet. Repeated over and over was a familiar logo.
Cytex Systems.
I blinked and stared. “No…” I said. “This is a trick.”
The woman looked concerned and sad. “We’ve been through this, Zette. It’s all right.”
“You’re getting those flashes, too, aren’t you?” said the man, also looking concerned, and now rummaging in the picnic basket for something else. “Where did I put the thing?”
The woman said, “Kell? What thing?”
Kell said, rotating his hand around and around as he tried to think of its name, “You know, the thing!”
I got up. My legs worked. My back was fine. For a long moment, the shock of an operational body was such that I nearly forgot the salient point. “You,” I said, pointing to the man. “You’re Kell?”
He didn’t look up. “I know I packed the bloody thing.”
The woman looked up at me, again with that very understanding, concerned look. “That’s right,” she said. “He’s Kell, and I’m Airlie. We’re all in the same test group.”
Recognition shot through me.
This wasn’t a picnic. This was a socialization interaction session. We were all plugged into the “cloud” interface, which I knew was a simulator presenting photoreal representations of the other people also linked into the system. It was projecting lifelike images of each of us into a sealed world and testing our personalities and social skills. I remembered this. We were androids, but not like the others. For one thing, we knew we were androids.
Awash in memory, I sat back down. “You’re both dead,” I said to Kell and Airlie. “And you…” I said, looking at the beautiful Airlie, “you were having some kind of affair. You found out something.” It was weird. I had all my memories from the “real” world, even while here, decades in the past. It made no sense.
Airlie and Kell smiled. He had given up on his rummaging for the moment.
“The cop thing again?” he said to me.
“What?”
“You know, the thing where you’re a cop, or ex-cop, and you’re up against this thing called a ‘firemind’…” He made pronounced air-quotes when he used the word “firemind”. “And there’s all this hairy, nasty stuff going on and people are dying, and there’s a big conspiracy, and only you can sort it out?”
“You know about…?” I said, more confused than ever.
Airlie giggled. “Know about it! We helped you write it.”
“Hang on, I just remembered,” Kell said suddenly. He produced a compact cylindrical case, which he opened. “I forgot which object association identity I’d assigned it. I’m such a moron.” Grinning, he pulled out what looked like a small brass telescope. It gleamed in the afternoon sunlight. He extended and locked it into place, and handed it to me. “Here you go. This should help.”
I held it like it was a dead rat. “And what do I do with it?”
“Just look around. It’s an infosphere interface.”
“It’ll remind you about where we are and what’s going on,” said Airlie. You can download and install memory patches from our group’s directory. Fix you right up.”
The telescope was heavy in my hand, and cold. Looking at it, I could see intricate and ornate engraving all over its barrel. The lenses looked remarkably clean; the big one at the “front” of the telescope reflected the sun perfectly, and I squinted at the reflection.
I held it up to my face. “Where do I point it?”
“Wherever you like,” said Airlie.
Was this something I wanted to do? If these people could be believed, and I was inclined to believe them, I was now living in something like my true life. The whole “Hydrogen Steel” thing was a story we were all writing together, and I’d written them into it as tragic lovers, victims of a malign conspiracy. It all looked so plausible. What Airlie and Kell told me sounded so plausible, too. And I knew from my own experience that I had been built at Cytex Systems, and that Kell Fallow had known me during that time. When he phoned me that day, long ago, he said we knew each other from time spent in the cloud. At the time it rang enough of a bell to keep me on the line, but not enough that I knew what he meant. Cloud? What cloud? I’d forgotten all about cloud interfaces. They were an increasingly common interface technology.
I thought hard about everything. If what these two were telling me was true, then Gideon wasn’t real? My whole career as a copper, my retirement, my relationship with Gideon, and the imminent collapse of human space civilization, all of that was just a story we three had made up as an entertaining diversion?
Sure, why not?
The irony was good, though. All along I’d had all this anxiety that I wasn’t a real person, but the whole time it was Gideon who was fictional?
What nagged at me, though, was that the story felt so believable. We were a special type of android, but could we write this well? That didn’t make sense. We were just learning to express our personalities and get along with each other and with “real” people. What did we use for psychological ins
ight? Or was that just another patch you could download from the infosphere?
Or were we just naturally disposed towards thinking that our own fictional world was convincing and believable? That made a certain fractured sense. Of course we would think that our story reality was convincing.
Hmm.
I thought about Gideon, the way he looked, the way he smelled good even when broken and battered, and coming to my rescue, whether I wanted rescuing or not. I wanted him to be real. He was one of the best things in my life. It occurred to me, suddenly, that while I’d been out of my mind on painkilling drugs I’d told him I loved him.
I swore, thinking about that. What the hell was I doing? What the hell was I feeling? Did I actually love Gideon? He was old enough to be my remote ancestor. Except, of course, that he had recently been poured into a spiffy young body. It made my head hurt to think about it. But was it true that I loved him? Good God, as if I didn’t have enough trouble in my life as it was.
With a heavy heart, I looked through the telescope.
Information walloped me as soon as I looked. It didn’t matter where I pointed the telescope, as Airlie had said. It was, I realized afterwards, very much like when Otaru and Hydrogen Steel had infused me with information. It suddenly felt like my brain was bursting with knowledge. “Good God!” I said, holding my head.
As the information began unpacking and filing itself away in my mind, I started to “realize” things. Knowledge accumulated like a torrent of sudden ideas. It was hard to know where to start.
One thing out of countless topics, threads, ideas, opinions and summaries stood out. “What’s the Parallax Corporation?” I said to my companions.
“It’s all in there, Zette,” said Kell.
“They’re the client,” said Airlie.
And, just as she said it, that piece of information occurred to me. This Parallax Corporation had commissioned Cytex Systems to produce a number of very special units. There was a great deal of untraceable money involved. We were not granted access to anything that would tell us why Parallax wanted us, or why we had to be as human as regular people.
Hydrogen Steel Page 29
