All the mistrust she’d had for Kenelm surfed back in on an adrenalin wave. Her skin grew hot, heart rate soaring upwards. Fight-or-flight reflex dropped her into a kind of crouch, half-forgotten personal combat manoeuvres bubbling up in confusion. She whirled around, hunting urgently.
The brightly lit corridor curved away behind and ahead, completely empty. Innocuous, yet suddenly incredibly sinister.
There was nothing she could use as a weapon. For a second she considered running back to the canteen and arming herself with the cutlery. Yeah, a cake fork; that’ll help. Saints!
Three metres ahead there was a junction. According to the ship schematic, it led to one of the support shafts. She fixated on the junction and whatever lurked beyond as she crept along nervously, feverish thoughts alive with all sorts of nightmare scenarios. A glistening hive of monsters bulging out of the door to the shaft. Huntspheres blasting along the corridor at supersonic speed, chasing her down. Del’s cocoon dangling from the ceiling like some mouldering chunk of spider food.
Stop it.
She peeked around the junction, pulling her head back fast in case something took a shot at her. Because targeting systems are really that slow. Come on, pull yourself together. The brief image she glimpsed made her squeak in shock. Slowly she shuffled forwards to place herself in the middle of the junction, facing towards the support shaft door thirty metres away.
Five metres along the corridor, Kenelm was sprawled face-down on the floor. She knew it was Kenelm; the body was wearing hir green-and-blue tunic. But sie’d been dead for a long time. Yirella could see hir head, the shrunken desiccated skin tufts protruding from a skull that had decayed so far there was very little left. A disgusting stain had spread out from it, organic fluids long since dried.
But . . .
Hir feet were swollen and discoloured, the flesh a vile mid-putrefaction green.
All Yirella could do was stand there staring, muscles rendered useless by shock and incomprehension.
The Olyix haven’t slowed time, she realized. They’ve speeded it up. But how did that kill hir?
It made no sense. If Kenelm had walked into a zone with a faster time flow, then sie would simply live at that rate. Just like the Morgan had lived at a slower rate while they were flying along the wormhole.
She examined the body again. The swollen feet were wrinkling up, the flesh darkening, while the head’s paper-like skin was diminishing away to nothing as wisps of hair fell to the floor.
‘Different rate,’ she whispered. ‘It’s a gradient.’
The zone of faster time flow didn’t have an abrupt border. It built over a few metres from the ordinary rate where she was standing to one where a human corpse decayed in barely a couple of minutes. A databud file told her that kind of decay would take years.
Great Saints! She took an involuntary step backwards. The gradient, short though it was, would be utterly lethal to any living thing. All the parts of your body would be living at different rates as you moved through it. Circulation would be impossible, nerve impulses from the faster sections would flood into the slower ones, overloading axons to burnout while the misfiring synapses of the brain would scramble every thought.
She gagged as bile surged up into her throat. Initial inertia would sustain your motion across the gradient. But . . . parts of you would have been dead for a year, while the rest was still alive as you started to fall.
Yirella dropped to her knees and threw up violently. Even now she couldn’t take her eyes off the corpse.
That’s what was happening to the Morgan. They’d jumbled the time flow so it had been segmented. Some areas were fast, and some were slow; it was why the network dataflow increased from some sections while others slowed so much they didn’t even register. It would be the same with all the corpus aspects. It was not a straight communications failure; they were all separated in time. Alone.
Being briefly separated into just two consciousnesses as all their aspects flew into the enclave had left Immanueel badly perturbed. Now each of their aspects would be solitary. All the corpus human aspects would be divorced. A disconnected armada.
She took a juddering breath, spitting out the last of the bitter juices from her mouth. Slowly she backed away from the junction, terrified by the fate that awaited any unsuspecting soul crossing the boundary. Then she stopped. She had no idea where the other aberrative time flows began.
Think. There must be a way of spotting them.
First was a review of the network failures. Sure enough, the corridor to the service shaft had no operational connection to the section around her. Using that as a baseline, she began to plot other blank areas of the life-support section. A pattern began to build. It was reassuringly simple. The Morgan had been divided up into layers – some slow, some normal, some fast. Comparison of data rates as the network collapsed told her just how different the flows were, but that was only an approximation. She knew the general area where the time flows changed, but there was no way of telling the exact position of the boundaries.
So what would give them away?
Yirella switched her optik to infrared, at the highest sensitivity. The air around her had currents. Purified air at an exact temperature of twenty-one degrees Celsius gusted out of the vents along the floor, while vents along the top of the wall sucked it back in to run through filters. They were slow currents, barely visible. But there were enough minute temperature variants to distinguish the general circulation movements.
She looked down the corridor towards the stairwell. Beyond Kenelm’s corpse, the air was moving like a gas giant’s supersonic cloud stream. She gave it a respectful nod and backed away a little further.
The normal time area she was in seemed to be four decks deep, and over half the diameter of the life-support section. A file showed her the zone that now incarcerated her was all living quarters – individual crew cabins, some lounges, canteens, a gym, a medical bay and various compartments of support machinery. There was no power coming in from the ship’s main generators; everything was running off local backup quantum cells. A quick calculation for one inhabitant showed the decks she was trapped in could provide life support and reprocess nutrients to print food for the next three hundred and seventy-two years – assuming optimum equipment operation. There were no initiators to provide spare parts should anything major fail. Then she realized she had no way of moving between decks. The portals had shut down, and she couldn’t get to the service shafts where the stairs were.
‘Oh, great Saints.’
Yirella went back to the canteen. Without the network, Boulevard Saint-Germain was stuck on a loop, condemning the happy, stylish Parisians to walk through their fresh new morning every seven minutes. The irony of sitting in a temporal bubble watching their closed time cycle was strong enough to burn. She switched the windows off.
Now what?
She wasn’t sure the corpus aspects were smart enough individually to solve this. They had mastered time-flow technology back at the neutron star, creating the domains, but the enclave was on such a colossal scale they would need to combine again to counter it. The obvious – in fact, the only – solution was to destroy the power rings around the star. Without them, the enclave would fall. But the contrasting time flows were a plague that stopped any of them from acting, let alone flying to the star to attack the rings.
So . . .
She needed to reunify the Morgan somehow, to banish all the different time flows. Once it was operational again, she could start to fight back.
The life-support section had its own time flow unit; they’d spent the journey through the wormhole inside it. If I can switch that on, it could shield us from the Olyix’s temporal distortions. But of course she couldn’t switch it on, because the Morgan’s network was down – and even if she did, that would just protect the life-support section from the attack. I need the whole ship, everything inside the hull unified.
Visualizing the ship like that, surrounded by a protective env
elope that repelled the distortions, triggered an idea. At a fundamental level, the internal continuum of the enclave was no different from that of the wormhole. They were both a manipulation of spacetime by a complex pattern of exotic matter. The Morgan’s negative energy conduits also channelled that pseudofabric, allowing the ship to fly along a wormhole. And there were hundreds of conduits all over the fuselage. If she could activate them, and realign their function to deflect the temporal distortions, the Morgan would contain a single time zone again.
But it was a chicken-and-egg problem. You had to provide the ship with a single time flow in order to activate the conduits – which would give the ship a single time flow.
‘I hate paradox,’ she announced to the canteen.
The fuselage conduits had to be activated simultaneously. That might just be possible if each section’s sub-network knew when to switch them on. But to do that would mean having to get a message into each section and load the instructions into the local sub-net. Trying to move between time flows was a death sentence. ‘For humans,’ she shouted triumphantly.
She immediately sent a ping to her cyborg. ‘Oh, fuck the Saints.’ It was no use; the cyborg was in storage in a compartment down on deck forty-six, three time zones away. Completely out of reach. So she pulled an inventory of every remote device on deck thirty-three. More than a dozen small janitor remotes were available, and even three small maintenance units, plus . . . ‘YES!’
She almost ran, but forced herself to keep a sensible pace while using the optik interface to watch for any sign of a boundary she hadn’t plotted. The unused cabin was five doors down from the quarters she and Dellian shared. Makes sense.
The door opened, and she peered in. Lights came on. There, sitting inertly on the untextured raised rectangle of the bed, was the Ainsley android. Her interface immediately connected her to it. The chest cavity contained a huge neural array, which was in standby mode. She carefully selected the routines she’d used before, when she’d elaborated her consciousness out into the Morgan’s network. This time it would be different; this time she wouldn’t stay connected to the android.
The process to elaborate up to corpus level, to become more than one, was complicated. Part of the time she was impatient for it to run, while the rest of the process was spent fearing her personality pattern and memories weren’t just being duplicated, they were being methodically stripped out of her biological brain to be absorbed by the android’s array. Stupid to think that, of course, but still very much her own foible.
In the end, there she was – two Yirella minds, held together in perfect harmony by a single high-capacity link. She cut the link.
She opened her eyes to stare at . . . the android. Thank the Saints, I’m the original me, the real one. She saw the android turn down the corner of its lips.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
‘I’ll be you again,’ it said. ‘When this is all over.’
‘That’s down to you now. Maybe you won’t want to be.’
‘You know the answer to that, and you know you’re just voicing a concern to have it denied, thus gaining reassurance.’
‘Yes.’
‘So I won’t. Corpus is clearly not for us.’
‘Not now. But you and I are asunder. Every instant from now on, the divergence will widen. And in the fast flow sections, you’re going to exist for years – decades, possibly. The difference will become . . . extensive,’ she said.
‘As soon as our aspects rejoin, there will be no difference.’
‘I am not an aspect. I am Yirella.’
‘We are.’
‘No. You’re an artificial personality operating in an array that was never designed for you.’
‘Yet here I am.’ The android stood up, then glanced down at itself and grinned. ‘And it’s not just the array that’s different.’
‘Oh, Saints.’ But there was nothing she could do to stop her own grin; her lips quirked in exactly the same fashion. Maybe thoughts have an entanglement all their own, more spiritual than quantum?
‘We’d better get on with this,’ the android said.
‘Yeah. I thought you should go through riding on something. I’m not sure even you are capable of coordinating yourself while transiting through a gradient.’
‘I know. A chair might work.’
‘Yes.’ There was no point in her saying anything else. She’d spent the time her memories were being copied thinking about the practical aspects of getting to the stairwell. Therefore: it had.
The android picked up a chair from the canteen, one with casters, and carried it effortlessly. When they were back at the junction, it sat down, facing Kenelm’s corpse. The decay had progressed. Hir skeleton had obviously fallen apart as the joints detached from each other, subsiding into a jumble with the tunic deflating around it. Hir skull had rolled to one side, empty sockets staring up at the ceiling.
Yirella gripped the back of the chair and pulled it back, testing how easy it was to roll.
‘Make sure you don’t hit the skeleton,’ the android said.
That didn’t even deserve a response. ‘Ready?’ she asked.
‘Rhetorical question.’
Yirella braced herself and ran at the junction, pushing hard. She let go – and stopped abruptly, arms waving for balance. Do NOT fall forwards. The chair rattled along, sliding easily into the boundary, where the frantic air currents whipped around it. Passed the skeleton –
And the android vanished. So fast it didn’t even leave a blur.
Yirella let out a long breath of relief. The chair remained in the same position for a few seconds then – she thought she saw something behind it, a shadow moving with the speed of a lightning bolt. A small wheeled platform with a single column standing vertically in the middle appeared, racing out of the boundary. The Ainsley android was standing on it, along with a quartet of similar androids – genderless this time, and with a skin colour remarkably similar to her own.
‘What happened?’ she asked.
The four black-skinned androids dismounted and hurried off along the corridor.
‘Hey,’ she spluttered in outrage.
‘I’m really sorry,’ the Ainsley android said, as it left the platform.
‘What? Why?’ That it was acting defensively was giving her a bad feeling.
Her personal icon appeared in her optik. She hesitated to open it, guessing the memories were going to be bad. ‘Just tell me this. Can we deflect the time flows?’
‘I believe so, yes. Our others have gone to begin the process.’
Yirella opened the icon . . .
*
. . . The sensation was like waking, consciousness rising from foggy darkness, bringing with it the memories of who she was and what she’d done to restore her identity. She self-identified – there were no doubts, no biochemical anxiety for the Ainsley android. Nonetheless, its passage through the gradient was excruciating. Its internal network suffered an avalanche of glitches, while the array in its chest underwent random failures. She thought she was losing her mind . . . which in a way she was. She countered by putting the precious memories into deep store while she travelled through the gradient, the chair’s little caster wheels taking agonizing days to complete a single rotation. Full awareness rushed back in as the crazy time fluxes smoothed out and time was whole again. She stood up and hurried into the stairwell, climbing up to deck twenty-five. It had aged. Some of the lights were dark. Every air grille had engendered dust streaks rising like black flames on the walls. Colours had faded on doors, walls, trapping her in a world of bleak pastels. The floor outside the tactical cabin had lost its tread, the thin laminate worn down to the metal below.
How long? she wondered.
There was no one in the cabin. But there had been. A huge dune of rubbish filled more than half of the room – mainly old meal trays with smears of food that had long since dried and hardened but still gave off a putrid stench. Wait. Huh? The android has a sense of smell? Why? She h
urriedly shut the door again. They must have been using the tactical cabin as a rubbish dump. Then the size of the pile registered. Saints, how many trays were in there? Hundreds? No, more like thousands.
How long?
‘Tilliana. Ellici. Alexandre?’ she called. No reply. The android’s management routines were complex; she had to concentrate to use the communication architecture. There was a functional sub-net in this section, though some of the nodes had dropped out. A maintenance log icon expanded, supplying her with failure details. The nodes had started to crash eleven years ago.
Eleven years? She expanded the log’s details. Her mouth opened to cry out in dismay, hand coming up to cover it. The disassociation was complete. The hand was white – her hand – and for a moment she couldn’t understand why. Then she remembered she was in the android body. Strange how she’d adapted within minutes. But the shock of realization had been great enough to break that cosy accommodation. According to the log, the nodes had originally disengaged from the Morgan’s full network ninety-seven years ago.
‘Oh, Saints, no. No, no, no!’ That cannot be right.
She began to run, opening every door. The tenth compartment was a canteen. There were a lot of meal trays piled up here, too, fresher than the conference room. Not all the food was dry, and the smell was intense. The wall panels around the food printers had been removed. Somebody had repaired the machines; two had been opened up and partially dismantled, their intricate components plumbed into the remaining printer with crude hoses and cables. She accessed the printer’s menu; it was very limited, mainly soups and soft bread rolls. Some fruit flavours were still available, and the dairy option could produce milk and cheese. Solids were error-tagged; they only came out as a paste now. All the nutrient tanks were redlined, with barely five per cent left.
Yirella staggered back out of the canteen. There was a clinic on the deck below; if Tilliana, Ellici and Alexandre had survived, they’d need that. She made her way down the stairwell, forcing herself to hurry. The clinic door was open, its mechanism not working. Inside, the five medical bays had all undergone repairs, their casings removed to expose the delicate systems inside and the rudimentary alterations that had been performed on them. The android body didn’t have the routines for involuntary muscle shudders, but she certainly felt as if she’d shivered.
The Saints of Salvation [British Ed.] Page 42
