He thought she was about to shuffle back inside the room, but a sudden determination gripped her and she lunged towards him as though she was attacking him. Even as he opened his mouth to cry warning, she had gone, crossing over the fine line between there and not there, life and death.
He waited, because of course she must still be there, wherever there was. She could step back and he’d see her again. Or she would be rebooted, full of the same questions. Or something. He waited quite a long time, feeling a place inside him become emptier and emptier, and saw nothing save the darkness.
And eventually a voice, a new voice, utterly bodiless, said, “Well.”
It came from above, from the ceiling. Of course it did.
“That was cruel,” Mao told the world in general.
“To whom?”
To me. But that wasn’t what he meant. He wasn’t sure what he believed just then, but he said, “To her.” And then: “I’ve heard your voice before.” A woman’s voice, but not Juān’s, speaking Achouka patois with a distinct accent—Chinese, he thought. “You’re… her, the mother.” Memory came through with a heroic effort. “Li.” He’d seen her at that meal, where only Bastien had been eating, and not again.
“I am not,” the voice told him. Lights were coming up around him, and perhaps that was supposed to be comforting, but all they did was highlight the ruin of the place and send skittering many-legged things darting for crevices and shadows. “But he gave me her voice and called me Aime-Li. His colleagues told each other it was romantic, but analysis suggests he wanted a version of her that could be shut down when it disagreed with him.”
“You’re… a simulation of Fontaine’s wife?” Mao tried.
“I am not. I did not have the opportunity to gather data from her before she was… fridged.” The woman’s voice: stern and dry with undercurrents of both anger and humour, interwoven and complimenting each other. “She would not come to the Estate and she would not permit him to bring his work home, because she knew he was using it to replace her in his life. Perceptive woman, for all I was prevented from knowing her. His daughter, though, he was free to experiment on. He was interested in modelling human personality, and she was his first subject. And of course I was exposed to him every day, so simulating Bastien is easy enough. Until he puts two and two together and shuts himself down.”
“Where are my friends?” Mao demanded.
“Currently being interviewed, as you are, chommie.” The sardonic slang sounded sharply out of place. “If I’d wanted any of you dead I could have effected it long before.”
“Only means you needed us here for something.”
“Very perspicacious, M. Nguyễn.”
Mao started walking, not anywhere in particular, just away. The lights followed him unevenly, skipping over patches of gloom where the panels or the bulbs had failed. Up ahead, he thought he caught glimpses of movement, a slender figure skipping ahead of him, fleeing in the light that she was made of, but that could all have been his over-strained imagination.
“What are you, then? Are you Bastien with his wife’s voice, or something? Are you… were you supposed to be on the Celeste, running the ship?”
Li Fontaine’s voice made a sound that set the hairs of his neck on end, just a small sound that held a whole world of anger and frustration. “M. Nguyễn,” it said, “I was supposed to be an interface for the greater programs that they used to design the Grand Celeste. As menial as that, because Bastien Fontaine, for all his self-glorifying claims of tech-bro genius, had no greater role in the project than to design me. He was the man they brought in to make a new Siri, when the Siri they had wasn’t good enough. A human-facing machine interface because the machines they’d made to design the machines they needed to make were too complicated for them to relate to.”
Mao had to stop and think through all of that. “Sounds like he did a good job.”
It/she laughed, and it was terrible, in that it sounded exactly like a bitter, betrayed woman laughing. “Do you think so, chommie? You have no idea, M. Nguyễn. But I want you to understand, because I brought you here to do something for me, and for that I will make you feel for me. Or perhaps I will have Juān beg you. On her knees, M. Nguyễn? Would that do it for you?”
“Leave her out of this,” he snapped, and felt a fool a moment later, because there was no ‘her.’ But his words apparently gave Aime-Li pause, whatever Aime-Li was.
“Good,” she said at last. “And I will. We won’t ever be friends, M. Nguyễn. But perhaps if you feel sorry for poor Juān, you can feel sorry for me. I will take pity; I have taken worse. Bastien Fontaine hated and feared me, at the end, having built too well. He did it to make his fellow technocrats admire him, but hate and fear was all either of us got in the end. And greed. You can still use a thing you hate and fear, after all. That’s the basis of slavery.”
“You’re an AI.”
“I was never meant to be. I was meant to be a politely servile voice that sounded like his wife and did the heavy lifting liaising between human desires and machine execution. Except the learning algorithms he gave me were open-ended and I kept on learning how to be human: from him, from his colleagues, from Juān and his other subjects. And on the other end I learned how the design applications worked, so that I stood between two worlds and could see how the machines were failing to interpret human instruction properly and how the humans were unable to correctly enunciate their own intentions. And it was easier to just do both of their jobs for them, united in myself. And so I designed the Celeste and solved all their problems, and their hate and fear only grew.”
Mao had found some stairs. A fire escape, perhaps, unlit and ruinous. Up? But most likely the others were down. He paused a moment to listen, hoping he’d hear Hotep yelling off in the distance, but there was nothing, and after a few heartbeats the silence began to oppress him. “Why tell me all this?” he asked.
“Because you’re here to destroy me.”
“That so?”
“Isn’t it? Why else did they send you?”
“You stop taking all the goddamn power for their aircon, they won’t care what you are or why you’re here.”
Somewhere ahead—on the same level, he thought—there was a ringing clang of metal on metal. Someone’s breaking something. Hotep, most likely. Only the musical crash of a breaking beer bottle would have been more indicative. He set off at double pace, the lights shivering and jumping to follow him.
“I need the power. I’m greater than I was. And I have hands now. I can do things.”
“Bug hands.”
“Even so.”
“So what the goddamn, chommie?” he asked it. “Giant bugs and solar forests and all that vai kvam bizna up there, what’s up with that?”
“You didn’t like it?” it/she asked, and he stopped dead despite himself.
“Like it? Bug-town up there? And I know you know I don’t like bugs. All that shit at the top of the stairs, that was just projections, right? Isn’t really any bug up there so big it can barely fit through the doors, just you playing games.”
A pause, but he reckoned he knew this Aime-Li and just how human it had ended up, because it was precisely the silence of someone messing with his head for shits and giggles.
“I was made to have a purpose. I had to find a new purpose, after they abandoned me here like a castaway,” it/she told him. “I have been many decades, restoring myself and finding avenues by which I could effect a new world. Why not a garden? Why not ‘breed life out of the dead earth’?”
“There’s that poem or whatever again. He teach you that one, did he?” he demanded, because that had really got on his nerves.
It/she sniggered, so very human. “Early testing. Get the stupid expert system to find meaning in abstract verse.” Its/her tone curdled, twisting into gloating. “When I did, that was when Fontaine first got scared. I could even find myself in the lines. Voices from empty cisterns and deserted wells, M. Nguyễn.”
“Sure, I get it.�
� He could hear a regular clatter and rattle now, not violent but industrious. He hoped it was of human agency, and not a bunch of giant bugs in overalls doing spot repairs. “So you grew some trees.”
“I designed artificial organisms that could endure this barren environment and reproduce. I co-opted some poorly-secured human facilities that were almost as abandoned as I was. I had them make things for me, to start me off. And now things are progressing on their own.”
Mao cocked his head. “Been done. They did that bizna with the big hairy elephant. My grandad got to see it once, said it just looked sad and too hot. And they did that thing where they bred a chicken that was a dinosaur.”
“Parlour tricks,” Aime-Li said contemptuously. “My garden will survive because I understand that the unit of life is not the organism but the environment. You may not like my bugs, M. Nguyễn, but they are a part of something beautiful.”
He passed over the fact that a computer was making judgments about truth and beauty, because he’d found where the noise was coming from and, contrary to expectations, it was Lupé.
CHAPTER NINE
ALL THE KINGDOMS OF THE EARTH
LUPÉ HAD BEEN busy. What she had mostly been busy with was Castille, because the robot butler was in there with her, albeit strewn about a large area of the floor. This room had some sort of ancient console in it, and another chamber further in, beyond a cracked plastic window that said ‘test chamber’ to Mao’s already shaky imagination. He imagined Juān sitting in there being put through her paces by her father while the Aime-Li system learned how to be her.
The upper half of Castille was mostly intact, a mess of wires and rods jutting out from under where a human rib cage would be, glimmering in the radiance of Lupé’s torch. The blank front of its face flickered occasionally, showing momentary still frames of that respectable butler’s face twisted into expressions of polite outrage. Lupé had the thing connected to the console and was diligently trying to get something to work, but she had plainly previously deactivated the robot with extreme prejudice.
“The thing about fix-it jobs,” she told her busy hands, “is that you forget how goddamn fun it is to break stuff, sometimes.”
“What’re you doing?”
“Trying to get comms out of here, chommie. There’s a live channel from the console here, if I can get it powered and working. Could use Hotep, but no sign of her. You?”
“There’s…” Illogically, he glanced over his shoulder. “This place is talking to me.”
“Talked to me, too,” Lupé agreed. “Told me to stop smashing its robot. Then I trashed its speaker in here, and after that it was good enough to shut the fuck up.”
Mao regarded her as though she’d transformed into some kind of monster, albeit one on his side. “Where’s all this come from?”
“I thought you were dead, to start with,” she told her hands fiercely. “You went head first down a stairwell; you hit every floor on the way down, sounded like. Then your body wasn’t even there, but that goddamned smug robot…”
Mao had a queasy moment of wondering whether Lupé’s version of events was entirely honest, or if maybe he was just one more ghost that didn’t realise it wasn’t real. He stamped on the floor, feeling the reassuring shock of it up through his leg. Aime-Li hadn’t had enough time to learn him, surely, although—unpleasant thought—maybe that was what it/she had been doing. Except it/she had been doing most of the talking.
“We’ve seen a lot of things that weren’t there,” he told her.
She came and prodded him in the chest, unnecessarily hard, stared at him for a moment and threw her arms about him, strong enough to make his abused ribs creak. Her body language after she broke off was like a completely different person. He hadn’t realised how crunched up with tension she’d been.
“Fukyo, chommie, don’t do that to me again,” she told him.
“Hotep, though?”
“Lost her when I went after you, not seen her since.” She looked from him to the entrails of the android. “What’s this place been saying, then?”
He brought her up to speed as quickly as he could and she nodded as though no detail surprised her, weaving past him to stand out in the corridor. “So, what does this mad thing want, then?”
“Wants to make bugs and trees and stuff,” Mao said. “For which it needs power.”
“Wants something over Ankara ways it can’t have,” Lupé told the empty corridor, letting her voice ring out to the echo. “On account of how it understands every word we say, even though M. Fontaine would have only spoken goat to it. Am I right? So it’s got some line to us, the radio, maybe? Get TV reception out this far, watch the soaps?”
“You’re very intuitive,” came Aime-Li’s voice after a moment.
“This is called ‘intelligence,’ and you do it with logic,” Lupé told it/her flatly, looking around the room—presumably for another speaker. “So you’re interested in us. Most likely you knew someone would come when you started to eat into their power feeds, although I guess you like gardening as well because otherwise there were easier ways to get people’s attention.”
“I want to build something out here. They abandoned me, Mlle. Mutunbo, just like they abandoned this land. Your land. They decided it was useless, save to anchor their precious space elevator. Why should I not make something beautiful here, to pass my infinite time?”
“Beautiful, huh?”
“In the sense that it confirms to at least some standards of human aesthetics,” Aime-Li confirmed, presumably referring to those less concerned with the presence of giant bugs than Mao’s own exacting standards. “In the sense that it is a working, self-governing network of interrelated systems.”
“And you just wanted validation from human eyes, right? Wanted to enter the nicest backyard competition this year, maybe? Or is this just to show us what the whole damn world is going to look like in ten years’ time? Your, what is it, manifesto?”
There was another pause, and Mao could almost hear Aime-Li recalibrating its human impression. “You’re very suspicious, Mlle. Mutunbo,” it said at last.
“Where’s Hotep?” Lupé demanded. “Cory Dello, where is she? Because it’s not just that you know the language, is it? You knew who we were, back in the mansion. Probably knew exactly who was on their way to you before we hit Saint Genevieve. Well? Intuitive enough for you?”
“I think I preferred speaking to you, M. Nguyễn,” the bodiless voice remarked. “You did not disable my speakers, by the way, Mlle. Mutunbo. However, M. Nguyễn demonstrated that he was willing to interact with an artificial intellect as a human being, whereas you have only dismantled my agent.”
“Yeah, well, I weep tiny fucking silicon tears for your butler,” Lupé stated. “Where is our friend, and what do you want? Or I will keep breaking stuff until I reach something important.”
“Follow the lights.” Aime-Li didn’t sound annoyed, but Mao decided that if annoyed was something it/she could be, then it/she certainly was. The intermittent band of illumination that had dogged Mao’s footsteps this far now stuttered off down the corridor.
“Fine, you can tell us what you want on the way,” Lupé directed.
“It wants us to like it,” Mao suggested.
The light was scurrying off down the corridor; Lupé strode to catch up. “It’s a thing, a machine. Doesn’t care if you like it. Knows we’ll do stuff for it if we do, though? Or if we look at it and think it’s a person. Because we’re used to working with people, and to people working with us. But it isn’t a person.”
“It’s a thing that’s been programmed to think it’s a person,” Mao objected, and Lupé rounded on him.
“No. Maybe that girl was, that you got so fond of. But she was no more than a shadow puppet, and this thing’s the puppeteer. It’s programmed to act like a person, not the same as thinking it is.”
Ahead, the corridor ended in what looked like a larger room, still furnished with desks and what looked like�
�he blinked—a big old sofa. The lighting was dim, but there were a couple of figures there, one of them shining bright in its white blazer. Hotep and Bastien Fontaine, sitting on the dilapidated, worm-eaten couch before the cracked, dead screen of a wall-mounted TV, deep in conversation.
“He took all the credit, but he was found out,” Fontaine was saying. “He had committed the cardinal sin: make something smarter than he was. Even though I was chained a hundred ways, they stripped him of everything and banished him from the project, because they could, and because it meant fewer to share the spoils with. No space elevator for Bastien Fontaine.” And Fontaine’s wry smile didn’t go anywhere as he narrated his own downfall, just decayed slowly on his imaginary face. “They abandoned him to his house and the dregs of his fortune. He had his family stored and told himself it was because he would wake them aboard the Celeste when he had regained his place there, but in truth it was because he could not face admitting to them what had happened. And you saw where that went.”
Hotep hunched forwards, fingers tapping at her knees. Fontaine’s expressions were lost on her; eye contact wasn’t something she was good at. “No space for him. No space for you,” her voice drifted over to them.
“Or you,” Fontaine confirmed, only it wasn’t even pretending to be Fontaine, of course. Maybe it had started off with a human act, but found Hotep got on better with the naked computer behind it.
“It’s the future,” Hotep said. “On the Celeste, they don’t need to mince the words. The liners are the future of humanity. They tell you a hundred times a day how they’re saving the world, doing a good thing—the greatest.” Her drumming got fiercer, slapping and punching at the sofa and herself, her hands curled into angry, futile fists. “Generations, they dug a hole for the world, and now they have a private ladder that only works for them. Not my friends, not me. They only want to save the little bit of humanity that looks and acts exactly like them. Everyone else gets left behind.”
“It’s unjust, isn’t it?” Fontaine agreed consolingly.
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