Places in the Darkness

by Chris Brookmyre

  There is movement, the ceiling coming closer. Whatever he is strapped to is being elevated: a hydraulic gurney, perhaps. It was a stretcher, now it’s a table.

  An operating table.

  Alice isn’t sure she can watch any more, but she knows she must. She slides down the opacity just for a moment, reminding herself where she is by way of minor respite. She knows he is going to be tortured. She recalls the bag of skin, wonders with a shudder at what point he was flayed.

  He is choking, breathless from the effort of his screams, and above it Alice hears another voice. His killer is speaking to him. It is a whisper, barely audible over his groaning and panting, but unmistakably the voice of a woman.

  “Let’s talk about Project Sentinel,” she says.

  A shadow passes over the field of view. A laser scalpel is held up so that Korlakian is forced to view it. Then the killer leans over, staring at her victim.

  Which is when Alice sees her own face looking back.

  PART THREE

  WASTE DISPOSAL

  Some mornings when Nikki opens her eyes, it takes a while for the picture to fit together. On this occasion, the second she sees the blank wall of the holding cell, it all slots instantly into place. Everything that could possibly be wrong is wrong, and she didn’t even need to get drunk for that to happen.

  She sits up on the edge of the narrow cot, catches a whiff of herself as she moves. She’s not smelling too fresh. She wonders how long she’s been out. She has no way of knowing, as they’ve taken away her lens. Not merely taken away connectivity, but physically removed the hardware. That’s when you know you’re officially a non-person on CdC, when you are cut off from all channels of information, truly isolated.

  She yawns and stretches, reflecting how it used to be an old standby for cops: put a number of suspects in a cell, and the guy who goes to sleep is the guilty one. The others are too anxious, but the one who did it knows he can’t change anything from inside the cell, so he might as well get some rest. Nikki knows she’s not guilty of what she’s been arrested for, but she’s guilty of plenty more.

  She uses the slide-out toilet, vaguely aware she’s being watched. She’s put plenty of people in these tanks, usually just to cool off. There are cameras embedded high on the walls where the prisoners can’t reach to gouge them out.

  As though to confirm that she is being monitored, and her waking state noted, a slot opens in one wall and a tray slides through bearing an offering of what she interprets to be breakfast. The logging systems track whether a prisoner is on Pacific, Atlantic or Meridian phase, allocating meals accordingly, but if she’s being perfectly honest Nikki doesn’t really know what breakfast looks like to most other human beings.

  She knows the food isn’t automated. There’s somebody outside the cell.

  “Who is that?” she asks. “What’s your name?”

  “I’m not supposed to talk to you,” comes the reply. Sounds male, maybe around her age. Possibly a real cop once upon a time.

  “Come on. I work Seguridad a decade and a half and I don’t deserve the courtesy of a few words?”

  “Alonso,” comes the answer, his tone grudging. “Miguel Alonso.”

  “Don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure.”

  “No, I’m over from Wheel Two.”

  “One of Jaganathan’s boys, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Jag must be pretty excited. First time he’s ever caught a real criminal, I’m guessing. Maybe even the first time he’s seen one.”

  She hears him snicker despite himself. Yeah, he’s an ex-cop.

  “Food meet your dietary requirements?” he asks, voice dripping sarcasm. “Or can I get you anything else?”

  “How about a lawyer?”

  “Oh, you’ll get one of those, soon as your feet touch the ground. They’re shipping you back to Earth today. Taking you for processing in about a half-hour.”

  Of course. There are no courts up here, so most legal procedure has to happen down below, particularly if it’s serious. On the very few occasions someone was deemed a genuine danger or facing severe criminal charges, the authorities expedited an immediate transfer. It gave rise to the term “jump-seat offence” among Seguridad officers, though it is more commonly used in the negative. “Not a jump-seat offence” is a call for perspective, like “not the end of the world.”

  Nikki is being charged with eight jump-seat offences. It is very definitely the end of her world.

  She wonders whose jurisdiction a murder case will come under, thinking of how far the Quadriga and the FNG have gone in the past to avoid answering that question.

  “You won’t be missing much,” says Alonso, an edge coming into his voice. “The Seedee you know is finished anyway. FNG are taking over, sending up new captains to run Seguridad. They’re going to close down all the illegal operations. You gave them the excuse they needed, so we’ll all be drinking Qola from here on in. Thanks a fuckload, Nikki Fixx.”

  He slams the hatch closed. Nikki picks up the hunk of bread from her plate then puts it down again. She doesn’t have an appetite, not for food, not for anything.

  She’s out of allies, out of colleagues, out of friends, but she knows she’s really fucked when she doesn’t have any enemies left either. Whoever is behind this shit doesn’t count, because she suspects it wasn’t personal, any more than what happened to Giselle. They were both used, albeit in different ways, pieces on someone’s board.

  The hardest thing is dealing with Candace’s betrayal, not because they were particularly close, but because she knows she deserved it. It was Candace who sold her out, but it could have been any one of them. It’s not like Nikki is in a position to say: “How could they, after all I did for them?”

  She’s been nothing but a mercenary, the real whore working Mullane. She told herself she was doing whatever it took just to get by, one day at a time, but in truth Alice was right: she was instrumental in making Mullane what it is. It’s like she decided to live in a world where nobody helps each other out except for a price; where everything is bought and sold, whether it’s flesh or favours.

  She came here to get away, to start over, but she didn’t let herself believe in a better world, and CdC is for people who truly believe in building a better future. It is a place for idealists, for optimists, for dreamers, for goody-two-shoes. Nikki has been acting contemptuous of Alice from the get-go, but the truth is she admires the girl. She’s got game, she’s got guts, she’s got heart and she still believes in something. The only thing that really bothers Nikki about Alice is that she represents the antithesis of everything she has come to despise about herself.

  The cell wall suddenly alters to reveal a door, through which a squad of four officers enters, bearing electro-pulse batons. They are here to take her away. They put the cuffs on her but she doesn’t need restraints. She’ll go quietly. She deserves to be flushed out of here like the human waste that she’s become.

  MEMORIES ARE MADE OF THIS

  There is only so much of the grab Alice can bring herself to watch. With Omega’s head fixed in place, the view mostly shows the ceiling above, but the cries and the shuddering are unbearable, punctuated by the occasional chilling glimpse of her own blood-speckled visage. She holds out a while, hoping the image will go black from Omega’s eyes closing, lapsing into the merciful oblivion of unconsciousness. It doesn’t happen before she gives up and stops the play.

  She rolls back the file and pauses on that single moment, the clearest shot of herself staring down at her victim, willing the face to change into something else. Her hair is blonde, jarringly unnatural. Clearly a wig. The light in the chamber is not the best, and focus is affected by misting from Omega’s eyes watering in agony, but there is no mistaking who she is looking at. Or should that be what she is looking at.

  Alice has no recollection of these deeds, and yet clearly she carried them out.

  She feels a cold inside her like nothing she has ever known. Someth
ing harsh and inescapable, something she has been hiding from, or more accurately whose existence she has sought to deny. It has been stalking her, occasionally glimpsed in the shadows, but now that she has seen its face, it cannot be outrun.

  She doesn’t have a mesh. No artificial augmentations necessary for the remarkable Alice Blake. Yet she has this perfect recall: an infallible memory for names and faces, for facts, images, places, routes. A prodigious ability to retain and process information that has allowed her to excel academically. She always told herself it was down to hard work, focus, diligence, maximising her natural gifts. But just as deep down she always suspected her parents’ status opened doors for her, deep down she also suspected this was not her only unfair advantage. Somewhere inside, she knew that the ratio of effort to attainment seemed skewed in her case, compared to her peers. The fear she would not name, the thing glimpsed in the shadows, was the notion that this superior mental capacity she enjoyed was not entirely natural.

  There’s always rumours that they have invented super-intelligent androids that pass for human, but they never told nobody.

  She has been dogged by this feeling of disconnection since she got here: of not quite being in control, either of her situation or sometimes of herself. It ties into that horrible disorientation every time she wakes up, as she struggles to piece recent memories together. She thought it was merely a symptom of the adjustment process in acclimatising to life in space. Now she deduces that this could explain why she feels so tired, why her limbs are heavy and she reckons she could use another seven hours’ shut-eye. She thought she had been asleep when in fact she may have been very busy elsewhere.

  At Habitek.

  She can think only of the dark little seed that Freeman planted.

  You could be an android yourself and not even know.

  Anything made by man can be controlled by man, such as an augmented brain, particularly one not voluntarily enhanced. Everyone who has a mesh knows they have a mesh. So if Alice has always had some kind of artificial superbrain, imposed upon her without her knowledge, what does that make her?

  It makes her a robot. An android. A machine.

  She flashes back to their argument at Klaws.

  There’s usually a lot of drinking and fucking involved in conceiving the child. Maybe not you, I’m guessing. Which is why you don’t feel part of this society.

  At the time, she thought this was a dig to convey that Freeman knew she had been adopted, but now she wonders if she meant something else.

  How indeed would you know you are not an android?

  She never truly asked herself this question at the time, but she is searching desperately for possibilities now.

  Would an android get tired? she asks herself. Of course it could, logic tells her. It might be the cue that instructs her to shut down so that she can be used for other tasks: shedding this persona, this consciousness and slipping into another, like slipping in and out of the profiles Trick gave her.

  Her mind flashes on the bodies scattered about the floor, the blood she was able to smell before she even entered the chamber.

  She begins to weep silently, tears clouding her lenses and rolling down her face.

  Would an android cry?

  If it was programmed to.

  Can an android feel?

  She recalls an old tech-philosophy paper on the subject.

  Robots can see much better than we can but they don’t understand what they see. Robots can also hear much better than we can but they don’t understand what they hear.

  An android can be told that it is feeling, but does that mean it knows what feeling is?

  Alice knows what feeling is, because this hurts. And if it turns out she is an android, then she wouldn’t want to be human if it means sorrow feels worse than this.

  “Everything okay?” asks Trick, and it takes her a moment to even remember there is someone else in the room.

  “No,” she says, getting up on unsteady legs.

  “Not a feel-good picture show,” he suggests. “Was it Nikki?”

  “That’s classified,” she answers, making for the door.

  As she exits into the passageway, the true significance of this remark sinks in. She controls this information absolutely, the only clue that she is guilty. Even if they get hold of Korlakian’s sister, the Seguridad will find the grab gone from his legacy archive.

  Nobody will suspect her of anything.

  She wonders if this is what really motivated her to come here, and not some nebulous notion about cultivating Trick as an asset. After transferring the file, before even watching the thing, the first thing she did was delete the original so that Trick couldn’t see it, so that nobody could see it. Some process was triggered when she learned that Omega may have recorded his killer, feeding her the subconscious instruction to secure this evidence.

  So it could be worse than what she is doing when she thinks she’s asleep. She may not even be sure what is motivating her actions when she is conscious. She hears Professor Gonçalves’ voice, at that lecture that now seems such a long time ago.

  Multiple competing systems are permanently striving for attention … The brain retrospectively … constructs a narrative to give the impression that a solitary unified entity was at the helm the whole time. In short, consciousness is a lie your brain tells you to make you think you know what you’re doing.

  She is stumbling against the walls as she navigates a passageway that seems narrower than it was before. She can see the main underground thoroughfare beneath Mullane up ahead, thronged with people as always. Thronged with humans. She needs to find the stairs. There’s no outside but she needs to get above ground. She feels like the walls are closing in.

  She was charged with finding a killer, when all the time the killer was hiding in the one place she would never think to look. There is some hidden second animus within herself, a stone-cold assassin, and somewhere out there is an individual or organisation whose purpose it serves for her to play both parts.

  Still she searches for reasons this can’t be true, the most compelling of which is that an android would be manufactured. It wouldn’t be a child, it wouldn’t grow up, go to school, have a career, forge a lifetime of memories. But no sooner has this thought granted her comfort than it begins to tarnish.

  Memories: the very things that can be artificially inserted here on CdC. Memories of her life on Earth, of childhood, school, college, career, family, colleagues, friends: how does she know any of them are real?

  Get a grip, she urges herself. Get practical. If she was an android, she wouldn’t need to eat, or drink, or go to the bathroom, or shower, and she has done all those things in the past few hours.

  Or has she?

  It hits her that all her memories could be inserted, large and small, recent or old. That if her mind is an AI, then loops could be written to cover something that happened or didn’t happen five minutes ago. She wouldn’t even need to have been unconscious: bang, a subroutine kicks in telling her she just ate dinner, had a shower.

  Verification, she thinks, corroboration. She could simply ask someone: Did you just see me eat that meal, drink that drink? Did I just wash my hair? But that would only prove she ate, drank and showered, which does not preclude her being an android—a machine—that does all those things.

  It does mean that she could verify all her memories since arriving on CdC, but equally, nobody up here can verify anything that happened in her life before that. She could have been activated for the very first time when she “woke” in that capsule, already arrived at Heinlein, significantly the only one left in the elevator.

  Barely admitting to herself why she is doing it, Alice stops against a wall and accesses her parents’ contacts, sending out a comm request to each of them.

  Both of them come back as currently unavailable.

  Convenient.

  Her adoptive parents.

  Also convenient.

  Alice looks at their headshots, staring ba
ck serious and unsmiling, and can’t bring herself to feel anything. Maybe they don’t really mean anything to her. Or maybe she can’t feel anything for anybody.

  She knows she doesn’t miss them. Her relationship with them feels more like you’d have with colleagues than relatives. Theirs wasn’t a warm or tactile family. But surely if her memories of them were false, implanted for a purpose, they would be happy ones?

  Not necessarily, she reasons. She has memories of discipline, hard work, study, a career mapped out ultimately leading here, to this role, this place.

  There is a simple test, then. She could disobey. Couldn’t she? She has free will. Or would her artificial brain retrospectively rationalise her actions and decisions, like Professor Gonçalves described in her lecture: create a narrative that justifies in her conscious mind what her subconscious mind has already been instructed to do?

  She has been telling herself she is better than Nikki, for whom “do as thou wilt” is the whole of the law. But is Alice better if she never actually had a choice but to obey? She’s been following rules her whole life: is that because she chose to, or because she was programmed to? And if she truly believes she chose to, does that mean she has the free will to choose not to?

  In short, can Alice Blake misbehave?

  She climbs a staircase and all but bursts through a door onto Mullane topside. It’s busy but calm, nothing like the hysterical media reports are depicting it down on Earth. The FNG are sending a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.

  Nobody should have to sell themselves for sex, or fight in a basement in order to get by. But the solution is better wages, not a moral crackdown.

  She thinks again of what Nikki told her in Klaws, about little people distracting themselves with little games, while bigger games are being played above their heads.

  No kidding.

  She should hand herself in, confess what she knows, surrender this grab. That would be the right thing to do. That would blow this wide open. The question is, confess to who? Alice has no idea who could be in on this, or what it might trigger within herself if she threatens to reveal what she knows. Some emergency shutdown procedure could be invoked if she violates a prime directive protecting her puppet master. Or worse: if she tells the wrong innocent person, then she might be sent after them to clean up her own mess, another death at her oblivious hands.