Neurolink

by M M Buckner

  Adrenaline surged through his muscles. He could have run all night, but instead, he laid his hands on Qi’s shoulders and searched her ink black eyes. “Where can I go?”

  She lifted her eyebrows. “The colony, of course. They’re waiting to welcome you.”

  “The NP will find the colony.”

  “No, I swear!” She gripped his hands. “That bit-brain won’t find our tanker. We’re using the sonic noise field. I stole the design from Gig.”

  “Let’s hope so, Qi.” He kneaded her shoulders. “But the genie will keep looking.”

  Tears welled up in her eyes. “I bought medicines for cell hygiene. I bought a lot of nice things for you, Nick.”

  He pressed her head to his shoulder and kissed her hair, wishing he could stop time. “There’s only one way to make the miners safe. I have to settle with the NP.”

  She squeezed him hard enough to crack ribs. In her misery, she bit the fabric of his uniform, and her words came out muffled. “You can’t trust him. He’ll turn you into a living robot.”

  “I know.”

  “You think you’re a match for him, but you’re not.”

  “Qi, the NP will never stop hunting unless I go back and make a deal.”

  She gripped the front of his uniform and shook him. “What are you trying to prove? No one expects you to do this.”

  “Qi, stop. Listen to me.”

  “No, I won’t listen! You’re going back to save your scuzzy bank, that’s what!”

  Her accusation brought him up short. He didn’t know how to answer, and when she punched him in the shoulder, he staggered.

  “Stupid, arrogant stiff.” She pounded him in time to her words. “All right, if you insist on going back, I’ll go with you.”

  “That would be suicide, Qi. You can’t.”

  “And I say yes!” She shoved him hard against the wall. “You don’t stand a chance without my help.”

  “Qi, the colony needs you.”

  “Don’t give me that sappy line.” She leaned against him and kissed him on the mouth.

  Dominic felt desperate. He held Qi in his arms and pressed her body tight against his, drawing out the kiss, feeling the firm shape of her thigh against his groin. He couldn’t let Qi sacrifice herself. She was dear to him. He had to make her leave.

  Abruptly, he shoved her away. “You’re right! I’m going back to save my bank. Did you really expect me to side with protes?”

  Qi’s dark face went noticeably pale. “Nick?”

  “That grubby colony. You mink I want to live there?” He let out a short harsh laugh. “Major, I’ll stick with my own kind, thank you very much.”

  Qi backed away from him.

  He gritted his teeth. “That’s right. I’m an executive, born and bred. And you, you’re nothing but a prote.”

  Qi tripped and almost stumbled. “I don’t know you.”

  Dominic hated himself, almost as much as he hated the expression in Qi’s black eyes. Her nostrils flared, and she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, where he had kissed her.

  “Go!” he shouted.

  Without another word, she turned and left him. He saw her dodging through the exchanger stacks, her torch beam rippling over the pipes, her boots slapping the concrete. Only once did she glance back, but she was so far away by then, he couldn’t read her face. He told himself he no longer owned a personal life—and with his one good eye, he watched until she was gone.

  Then he felt in his pocket for Elsa’s loose change. One copper coin left. He tossed it and caught it in his palm. A burnished Z gleamed up at him, and he smiled. One coin would be enough. He didn’t have far to travel because the NP would find him soon. With a gentle grunt, he stepped into the air chute, slotted the coin and thumbed the keypad for the top floor.

  CHAPTER 24

  * * *

  WILL AND TESTAMENT

  HOW quickly the smoldering dawn brightened to white-hot morning as Dominic watched through the conference room window. The NP had chosen this ground for their final negotiation, this room where Dominic had once been master. Smog rolled in ochre waves against the broken pane, now repaired with glue. The seams glittered like veins of gold, but soon they would fade and disappear. Every sign of his recent forced entry, every bead of glass, grappling hook, bullet hole in the wall, had been cleared away. As he sat in a chair that was deep and enfolding and difficult to move, he reminded himself: There is no me. He placed his hands on the U-shaped table and fixed his one eye on the NP’s hologram. His new artificial eye hadn’t come online yet.

  “I gave you what you wanted,” the NP said.

  “You couldn’t stop me from taking it.” Dominic sat perfectly still in his chair, telling himself he had nothing to lose.

  “You stole from your own bank. You’re the lowest kind of traitor.”

  “I’ve come to deal.”

  The NP strode up and down, clenching its fists in its pockets. Dominic might have been watching a video of himself, a year ago, working through the points of some hard-fought negotiation. There is no me, he chanted silently. But his heart walloped in his chest. This deal mattered to him. He couldn’t help it. The ambitions that drove him before seemed like ashes and dust compared to this aching new desire to succeed.

  And so, as he sat in the awful chair, facing the most potent adversary of his career, he was handicapped by the negotiator’s worst nemesis, emotion. He kept picturing Qi’s narrow back as she ran away from him, and he kept seeing Benito’s sketches of stick-man heroes. Outside the double doors, he pictured surgeons waiting to inject nanoquans into his bloodstream, to transform him into a mindless, living depravity, but that wasn’t what he dreaded most. He was afraid of letting Qi and Benito down.

  Focus on the deal, he told himself. This is the work you were made for.

  Then he remembered one of his father’s favorite sayings: “There’s no such thing as a simple deal.”

  The genie marched up through the center of the U-shaped table, twisting the linings of its holographic pockets. “Here’s what I don’t get. You have precisely the same intellect as Richter, and he taught you how to think. Me, I’m a complete neural-net archive of his mind. Why are we so different?”

  Dominic breathed through his nose. “I ask myself the same thing.”

  The NP snickered. Then it raised its right hand and used some laser beam wizardry to shoot a ball of lightning from its fingertip. Dominic jumped in his chair. The holographic fireball expanded in rapid stages to fill the space inside the U-shaped table, and colors swirled over its surface, forming continents and oceans. Next, it sprouted a grid of latitudes and longitudes, and began very slowly to rotate on its axis.

  The NP pressed both hands against the holographic globe to stop it from spinning, then leaned over the northern pole and squinted at a small red light blinking just off the coast of Canada. “Hiding in a garbage dump! Damn me, no wonder my scans missed ’em.”

  Forgetting his dignity, Dominic climbed over the table for a closer look. Had the NP already tracked down the colony? He knelt on the table to examine the globe from above. Yes, in the shallow waters of the Hudson Sea, offshore from Nouveau Manitoba, the red light throbbed like a tiny heartbeat. He touched it with his finger and thought of Benito drawing pictures on the floor. As he watched, a net of sapphire blue jewels materialized around the globe and cruised in uneven rings.

  “My satellites.” The NP pointed to half a dozen sapphires orbiting within close proximity to the miners. “One word from me, and they fire.”

  Dominic thumped the table. “Enough theatrics. You won’t destroy them. You need my consent for your insane merger.”

  The NP pulled thoughtfully at its lower lip. “Protes are a dime a gross. You were all set to ditch ’em before. Then you had some experience in that submarine, and you came back here and robbed me. Tell me why.”

  With a show of outward calm, Dominic slid off the table and resumed his seat. “Give the miners a repayment schedule. You’ll
get your money back.”

  The NP’s hologram rippled like a bad video. “They’ll destroy us! We’ll lose control. If protes think they can walk off the job anytime they please—”

  “They’ll repay the loan with interest.”

  “They’re defying us!”

  Dominic shot to his feet, and his chair scraped across the floor. Old angers and frustrations came rushing back as he recalled how many times he’d stood on this very spot arguing with Richter. He found himself jamming his fists in his pockets and twisting the linings, and when he realized what he was doing, his arms stiffened. The conversation was heating up too fast. This wasn’t how he meant to start. As he turned and paced, an odd tingling spread through his ruined left socket. His vision hazed, and he felt queasy. The new eye must be coming online.

  The NP sauntered to the globe and trailed a holographic finger through the net of satellites. In the finger’s wake, each blue jewel glowed with a brighter sparkle. Was the genie arming its weapons?

  Dominic said, “I’m offering my flesh. That’s what you want.”

  “Your flesh isn’t all I need, boy. I can take that anytime.”

  Then what? Dominic didn’t understand this new tack. He watched the NP stretch to its full height, square its shoulders and stroll to the window to gaze wistfully at the smog. How often he had used that identical bit of melodrama to gain an opponent’s sympathy. He felt shivers and wanted to laugh at the same time.

  With a mournful tone that sounded much too familiar, the NP spoke to its reflection in the window. “I have identity issues.”

  “What?” Dominic bit his lip. He felt a nervous urge to snicker.

  “Richter Jedes lived 279 years,” the NP went on, examining its reflection. “He was a hundred different people, and I have a vivid record of each version. They’re all equally available to me. Which Richter am I supposed to imitate?”

  Dominic blurted, “You want my advice about who to be?”

  The genie flashed him a peeved, martyred look. “Richter wasn’t consistent. Some versions contradict each other. From a distance, he looks cohesive, like a drop of oil. But when I try to put my finger on the real man, he runs all over the place.”

  Dominic grimaced. “Funny, I thought he was made of pure brass.”

  “Quicksilver. Helium. I don’t know what he was.” The NP touched its mirrored fingertips in the window and left no prints. “That’s me problem. He had some screwy interior monologue that kept shifting his recollections and redefining his nature. My archive didn’t record it, and I can’t impersonate him without it.”

  Dominic couldn’t keep from grinning, though he covered it quickly with a sober scowl. He would bide his time and let the genie talk.

  The NP faced him with glittering eyes and gestured at the net of satellites. “I record more facts every nanosecond than your sponge brain sucks up in a lifetime. But it turns out people don’t trust me.”

  Dominic struggled to keep a straight face.

  “Richter had a knack,” the genie went on. “He was personable. People confided in him.” The NP pressed its holographic forehead to the window. Its brooding tone mimicked a style Dominic had patented, though its breath failed to fog the glass. “I can’t seem to reproduce that quality, so it must be flesh-based. You have it.”

  Of all the problems the bit-brain might encounter, this one caught Dominic off guard. He lowered his head to hide his pleasure. This disclosure gave him a bargaining edge. “You ask a traitor to teach you about trust?”

  “What I need is your… your…” The NP paused and pretended to search for the right words. Finally, it puffed up its cheeks and sighed. “I need you to like me.”

  Dominic burst out laughing. He couldn’t stop himself. This was too rich. But then the laughter strangled in his throat, and he was back on the Jedes bridge, losing control, jerking up the stairs like a marionette. That humiliation. He gritted his teeth and couldn’t swallow. The thought of living out his life as the NP’s mindless slave almost unmanned him. He sensed the hologram observing him, so he met its luminous gray eyes. “Cut to the bottom line.”

  “Stand by me, son, the way you used to stand by Richter. The others’ll follow your lead.” The genie nodded its holographic head. “And when we merge, you’ll show me how the fuck you flesh types keep revising yourselves. I have to simulate that.”

  “So you can win friends and influence people,” Dominic said.

  “Exactly. Starting with you. I want your allegiance, boy. The same allegiance you gave Richter. No faking. Everyone’ll know if you pretend. And no second-guessing my decisions. That’ll slow down my processing time.”

  “If you want a sycophant, call Klas Lorn.”

  Dominic glared at the hologram, and the hologram glared back. In sync, their jaws moved very slightly from side to side. Silhouetted against the window, the NP’s immaterial features almost washed out in the harsh sunlight. Then the silhouette divided in two.

  Dominic blinked. Was he seeing things? As he glanced around, every object in the sunlit room split apart The U-shaped table produced a shadowy doppelganger. The globe went binary. A duplicate yellow window slid out of register with its original, and light splintered in sharp twin rays. He rubbed his eyes. Double vision! He saw two of everything. The documentation for his new eye warned him this might happen at first.

  “This is not a one-sided deal,” the NP said. “I’ll bring you light-speed genius, a global knowledge base, nearly three centuries of recorded banking experience. We’ll be a new kind of organism, and together, we’ll rule ZahlenBank for the next thousand years.”

  Dominic blinked his artificial eye, but his vision wouldn’t clear. “Let’s say I develop this sudden fondness for you, and our merger succeeds. You’ll give the miners a favorable line of credit?”

  “Don’t mock me, boy!” The genie advanced toward him and growled, “Our whole future’s at stake. My shareholders doubt my intentions. My execs question my authority. And my idiot customers are switching to other banks in the South. If I can’t convince people I’m reliable, ZahlenBank will fall to pieces.”

  Dominic crossed his arms. “Quid pro quo. You get my blood, flesh and tears. The miners get revolving credit.”

  “Forget it. That’s not an option.”

  “Then we have no deal.”

  A blurry pair of NPs slapped the holographic globe, and the net of satellites glowed white-hot. “Yield now, or your friends get cremated.”

  Dominic strained to see, but his eyes wouldn’t work together. Concentrate, he told himself. He pictured Ane Zaki lying on her couch, luminous with fever, dreaming up new ways to generate energy. But how could he dream up loyalty to this genie when everything it did revolted him? He massaged his new eye. Cheap artificial contraption—he should have waited to install it. The genie held a twinned hand suspended over the globe, poised for his answer.

  Instinct told him the NP was bluffing. He couldn’t back down, so he prayed to whatever logic ruled a gambler’s luck, and he answered in a low, dangerous whisper. “Do it.”

  The genie sliced its hand through the air, and the satellites erupted with a brilliant blue flash.

  “Wait! Don’t kill them! I concede everything!” Dominic lurched toward the globe as if he could shield the miners with his bare hands.

  “You give your word? You’ll be my loyal son again, and merge with me of your own free will?”

  “Yes. Everything.” Dominic bit his lip.

  Instantly, the holographic eruptions froze—like a video on pause. He raised an eyebrow and squinted at the fuzzy, motionless starbursts hovering around the globe. Real laser fire wouldn’t freeze like that.

  “It’s just a light show. You bastard.”

  “I want your respect, boy.”

  Dominic swung around and shouted in the genie’s face. “Then do something I can respect!”

  They stood toe to toe, leaning into each other, showing teeth, If the NP had been real, they would have started a shoving
contest.

  “Look at me. I’m you. We’re Richter,” said the genie. “We built the Ark. We single-handedly turned ZahlenBank into a world power.”

  “Power.” Dominic spat the word.

  “Our power is what keeps the markets alive, boy. That means food in every belly, coins in every pocket. That means, even though we pissed away our atmosphere, 12 billion people get to keep on breathing. Even your bullshit miners depend on ZahlenBank.”

  Dominic held out his hands, almost pleading. “Be dependable. Let the miners trust you.”

  The genie’s holographic face went dark. “Hear me once and for all. No deals with protes! Richter wrote that policy in my hard code.”

  “Then change your code! Change, goddamn you! Change your mind!”

  Dominic balled his fists, but his father was dead. There was no one to bit. He stepped through the hologram as if it weren’t there and leaned his knuckles on the table. A smoky double reflection gazed up at him from its polished surface.

  “You ask which version of Richter to be?” he said. “I’d like to tell you to choose a young Richter, one who still believed in honor. But the truth is, if Richter were still alive, he’d be someone new. That’s what we flesh types do. For good or ill, we alter.”

  The NP moved around in front of him. “Like the markets?”

  Dominic had never thought of it that way before. He pictured the erratic highs and lows of the indexes. Chaotic, unpredictable, forever mysterious. “Yes, like the markets.”

  “How do you revise yourself?” the NP said. “What’s the process?”

  Dominic’s mouth twisted in a wry smile as he remembered his journey through the tunnels. “Things foul up, you lose familiar ground, you take prisoners when you don’t mean to.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. That’s worthless. You have to be more specific.”

  Dominic’s left eye watered freely, and he didn’t bother to wipe it. He felt the deal slipping through his fingers. Somewhere real satellites circled the earth, armed with real weapons, and the NP would always have a finger on the trigger. The miners would never be free, because he simply didn’t know how to explain himself to this bit-brain. It was impossible.