Places in the Darkness

by Chris Brookmyre

  “Yes,” says a voice off-camera.

  “Okay. And you can edit this out?”

  “Of course.”

  Alice feels her pulse surge. It is her on the table, and this was recorded for her benefit, but never shown to her. From what the guard said, perhaps it was thought lost in the fire, but she suspects that is not the only reason.

  “What I have set in motion inside your head is a nano-process developed by my esteemed colleague Dr. Shelley, whereby your neurons will be individually replaced by synthetic equivalents as you grow and develop. The synthetic neuron clones the information and processes of the original, organic neuron before switching it out. Ideally, in the future we will be able to commence this process in the womb. The earlier the better.

  “It is projected that by the time your brain is fully developed, it will comprise one hundred percent artificial neurons, effecting a seamless transition from organic to synthetic, without you being conscious of any change.”

  Gonçalves blurs out of focus. It takes Alice a moment to realise that this is because she is weeping. She glances towards the door. The guard is hovering around but he isn’t looking her way.

  “Prior to this advent, the great existential question was always, if you upload a human mind to an artificial construct, aren’t you essentially just creating a duplicate and terminating the original, even if it remains housed in the same human body? While the artificial consciousness might be indistinguishable from its organic equivalent in terms of all the information encoded within, nonetheless the original consciousness would die.

  “In this process, the developing consciousness will gradually become mounted on the artificial, neuron by neuron. The subject—you, Alice—will never be aware of the transition. Then once the brain is fully synthetic, it continues to be fully replaceable, neuron by neuron. As technology allows us to replace other body parts, whether through organic transplantation or through artificial organs and limbs, your consciousness will be able to endure for centuries, conceivably millennia.”

  Alice is aware of physically shivering, feeling as though she could melt into a puddle and be mopped away. She has just learned that she is effectively immortal and yet she has never felt so fragile.

  “You and your sister will be the first of our Sentinels, who will guide and protect the pilgrims striking out aboard the Arca when finally it sails. You will be their guardians, their teachers, their judges and defenders, but always anonymous. They will not know what walks among them, but you will be protecting invisibly, from the shadows: shaping the new humanity, our interplanetary diaspora, for centuries to come.

  “It is said that twins are especially close, but none will ever be as close as you and Beatrice, as you will be able to rapidly share what is in each other’s minds. It is my vision that all of the sentinels will be able to communicate thus, so that if something were to befall one of them, all that they have seen and heard—right up until the moment of their death—will be accessible to the others, who will be able to identify and deal with that threat all the more effectively.”

  Gonçalves smiles warmly into the camera, though there is a hint of uncertainty in her expression.

  “This is my gift to you,” she says, “but I realise that it is one you have no option to refuse. For that, I—”

  Alice feels a hand on her shoulder and jolts in fright.

  The guard’s expression is stern, but he seems wary at having disturbed her. Having seen what she just has, Alice can understand why he might be treading lightly.

  “Sorry to interrupt, but I’m guessing you missed the security alert. We have an intruder.”

  “Where?”

  “The nursery,” he adds, his voice grave.

  “Let’s go,” she says, getting to her feet, a subtle hand gesture indicating he should take the lead. This is not merely so that he can open the doors, but because she has no idea where this nursery is.

  He strides at a brisk pace without running. There is an assured control about this, a discipline that supersedes panicky urgency.

  Alice reaches into her bag and begins reassembling the suppression rifle as she follows behind, occasionally having to break into a jog to match his longer stride.

  “Where did you get that?” he enquires, his tone a mixture of awe and disapproval, like she’s just produced a blood-spattered broadsword.

  “Picked it up on my travels.”

  A bladed aperture gapes open ahead, a second such door awaiting beyond it. In order to pass into the next sector, they are going to be held in an antechamber, the security equivalent of an airlock. Alice steels herself. She knows that the second door won’t be opened until some unseen observer is satisfied that all is well, but the real threat lies in the fact that once inside, there is no way out if said observer decides otherwise.

  This particular antechamber is intended to keep out more than unauthorised personnel. They are scanned by a multitude of sensors, observed at light frequencies either side of the visible spectrum, even their exhalations sampled and scrutinised. She has experienced similar analysis entering a hospital intensive care unit back in New York, checking bacteria levels and identifying any vectors of possible infection.

  Alice wonders how Nikki managed to bypass all of this. She can hear her speak, transmitting an interrogation that Alice is unavoidably about to bring to an end.

  “I’m looking for a girl named Amber. Where is she?”

  “She’s in isolation. I don’t have clearance.”

  Alice sends Nikki the files she has just seen with a note directing her immediately towards the grab, though she’s not exactly sure when Nikki is going to get peace to check it out. It fills a few seconds, at least, keeping her from worrying whether she is ever going to get the green light.

  Finally the second aperture swishes open and they step forward into a very different environment. While the last one was cramped and cluttered, veering randomly from the clinical to the chaotic, the ambience here is instantly more welcoming and relaxed. The corridors are broader, the walls pastel, the lighting soft.

  Alice can hear children’s voices from behind a nearby door, muted but unmistakable; excited, exclamatory, joyous.

  She can’t say if it is this sound, or the environment, or a combination of the two, but she is struck by an almost debilitating surge of déjà vu. It is disorienting, like a splintering crack in the lens of reality. She has the unmistakable sense that she has been here before, or that she is experiencing something for the second time.

  She knows for a fact that she has never been in this place before.

  No. She knows almost nothing for a fact where her own past is concerned. Nonetheless, something in her is convinced she knows this place, but the memory feels obscured by cloud, as though she is trying to remember something glimpsed in a dream.

  She was here. She has just seen video of Gonçalves operating on herself as an infant. She was probably born here, or somewhere very like it: the original Neurosophy facility on Wheel One.

  Why didn’t she remember it before? Perhaps because she left it when she was too young. But if so, why can she half-remember?

  Further along the corridor she passes a window, through which she can see children playing on a cushioned floor. There are four of them, plus a babe in arms.

  There will be no children.

  She remembers this declaration but she can’t remember who said it to her.

  There will be no children.

  She can’t recall the conversation, a face, anything. Only these words, sounding in her head, like they’ve been placed there in isolation.

  She knows her brain is synthetic. She knows Neurosophy has been developing the technology to remotely edit memories. She knows Gonçalves has been trying to reconstruct the technology that was devised by her colleague Shelley but lost in the fire. Thus everything that followed has been an attempt to catch up to what was already possible at the time of the Sentinel programme.

  The implication hits her like a blast
wave.

  Maria Gonçalves has had control of her memory since shortly after her birth. Maria Gonçalves is the curator of her soul.

  An ashen-faced woman hurries down the corridor to meet them, the angst in her expression a mirror into Alice’s own feelings at this point.

  “Beatrice, Daniels, come quickly. The intruder is in the gardens. She’s got Toby.”

  Alice has to put everything else from her mind and concentrate on the matter at hand. Reeling as she is from what she has discovered, her strategy is nonetheless tantalisingly close to coming off. The plan was to successfully impersonate her doppelganger in order to gather evidence of what Gonçalves was secretly doing, and if possible to take Nikki as her “prisoner” in order to gain access to wherever they might be keeping Amber. To her relief, according to Muller’s testimony, it would appear the fugitive is still alive.

  What Alice has already learned should be enough to force Ochoba’s hand, though her intention is to make it public first, so that Quadriga influence and FNG politics can’t contrive to suppress anything. She now knows Ochoba is not the puppet master, but that doesn’t mean Alice is ready to trust her to do the right thing—as opposed to the politically expedient thing.

  “Get the door,” Alice commands, raising her rifle. “I’ll cover, you cuff. Then we’ll take her to Isolation.”

  “No,” Daniels replies.

  A jolt of fear pulses through her.

  “What do you mean, no?” she demands.

  “Didn’t you just get the order?”

  “I’m still logged in as Wendy Goodfellow. She’s not in the loop.”

  “Professor Gonçalves says we’re to bring Sergeant Freeman directly to her.”

  Alice swallows. This suddenly went somewhere it wasn’t supposed to, and from the look he just gave her she is worried she just made strike three, but the opportunity here is huge. If she can get Gonçalves to incriminate herself on record, it’s a slam-dunk. And besides, it doesn’t look like she has any choice.

  “Let’s do it,” she says.

  Daniels unlocks the entrance to the gardens and Alice steps through at speed, on light feet. In a second and a half she is on top of Nikki, levelling the rifle at her as she rolls off Muller on the grass.

  “Officer Nicola Madeleine Freeman,” she declares. “I think it’s time for you to meet my maker.”

  She keeps the rifle on Nikki while Daniels moves in and puts the cuffs on her. He then turns and faces Alice, expression neutral.

  “Your prisoner,” he says, taking a step away.

  Alice doesn’t know where she is supposed to be going. She wonders if he is aware of this. Is this a game of bluff, or a situation she can get through if she holds her nerve?

  “Daniels, you take the vanguard,” she suggests. “I’ll keep the prisoner covered from the rear. She’s given her escorts the slip once already.”

  With this thought she checks the time. The shuttle shouldn’t have reached Heinlein yet. She still has around forty minutes. With Nikki having turned up here, the guards will have questions, not least about why their colleagues are not responding, but as long as they don’t know the identity of Nikki’s confederate, then she still has a window.

  They follow Daniels out of the gardens and back through the nursery, wary staff stepping into side doors to give them a wide berth. At the end of a corridor Alice can see another bladed aperture, above which a sign reads: “Cassandra Shelley Memorial Laboratories.”

  They pass into another antechamber, where Alice suspects cardiac monitoring would be enough to give her away. The relief of knowing that she does indeed have a heart is not enough to calm its thumping as the stakes keep rising.

  Once the aperture closes behind the three of them, it occurs to her that as she was not party to the order Daniels referred to, she has no idea whether it was genuine. He could be leading them both to a jail cell or an ambush. This whole thing could be over in a few more seconds.

  Daniels tells them both to hold still. They are not being swept for bacteria this time, but Alice suspects they are nonetheless being closely screened.

  Then the second aperture dilates and reveals not a jail cell but a clinically white laboratory suite. She sees banks of machinery and equipment ranged along one wall, and as she steps fully into the room she notices faucets, basins and sluices. It is not merely a laboratory but a surgical theatre, and standing expectantly between two operating tables is the slight but unmistakable figure of Maria Gonçalves.

  Alice notes that there are two assistants in lab coats standing by the machines, as well as two more of the unidentifiable guards flanking the professor, giving her space but ready to move should there be a problem. Nikki described them as private military security, but Alice sees they are more than that: they are Gonçalves’ secret police. She thinks of the people who flocked so quickly to protect Gonçalves on the Ver Eterna terrace. They were trusted senior colleagues, acting out of loyalty and devotion, but crucially identifiable members of staff. They were expected to be visibly part of her entourage. Her real Praetorian guard officially doesn’t exist. They are “protecting invisibly, from the shadows,” the way she likes it.

  They all have a similar look, but not because they are twins or clones or androids. It’s because they are all of a kind: elite soldiers, elite mercenaries. Hired guns, and very expensively hired, Alice estimates. The kind of money Gonçalves can offer would buy a lot of loyalty. But could it buy silence?

  Then she realises that it wouldn’t have to. It may well be in their contract conditions that they submit to memory erasure at her discretion, and that would probably suit them, because it would confer complete deniability regarding anything they do in carrying out her orders.

  Daniels commands the prisoner to halt and steps aside, clearing his boss’s line of sight. Gonçalves casts a brief, distasteful eye over Nikki, then looks to her other guest with a warm smile.

  “Home again, home again,” she greets Alice breezily, before raising a pistol and shooting her.

  THE END OF PAIN

  Nikki will say this much for Gonçalves, for a woman in her eighties, the bitch can handle a piece. She drew that flechette pistol and got off a shot in the blink of an eye, the tiniest dart hitting Alice in the chest before there was any time to react. It stuns her for a few seconds, though she doesn’t have time to drop before two of the mercs move in and catch her.

  Nikki flashes back to Kobra, falling on his face on Dock Nine. Now she knows what did it: Gonçalves is packing the same kind of heat, a miniature goodnight gun.

  The guards lay Alice out flat on one of the operating tables and engage the restraints before the dart wears off. Her limbs and trunk are clamped by steel bands that emerge from the surface while a neck brace pulls her head down into a cradle comprising a kaleidoscope of sensors, which the two lab geeks immediately start checking.

  Nikki scans the area and calculates her options. A locked room, three highly trained soldiers, probably armed with multiple short-range and close-combat suppressing devices, two lab assistants plus dead-eye Maria, all versus an unarmed woman in handcuffs. Normally on CdC, to be this thoroughly fucked would cost you good money.

  Alice begins to come round again after a few seconds, probably trying to work out how she went from upright holding a rifle to horizontal and pinned without noticing the process in between.

  Gonçalves stands over her, looking down with unmistakable affection.

  “The old-fashioned version of facial recognition is more reliable in some circumstances,” she says. “A lens probably couldn’t differentiate between you and Beatrice without sustained-focus analysis, but I could tell at a glance. I could tell you apart within moments of you being born, and I’ve been watching you closely ever since. You and your younger sister.”

  On the forced march here, Nikki was quietly parsing the grab Alice sent. She was relieved on the girl’s behalf that she isn’t any kind of robot after all, but can’t imagine Alice was comforted by what she h
as learned.

  “You performed non-consensual and non-essential surgery on us as infants,” Alice replies, anger spilling into her voice. “You made us your experiment. What gave you the right? Who gave you us?”

  Gonçalves ignores the question, though there is a hint of regret in her expression.

  “You have to understand, from a scientist’s point of view, twins are an especially precious phenomenon. I could observe the differences your respective experiences made, knowing that so many other elements were identical. I learned so much from you both, things I could never have learned had you even been dizygotic, or mere siblings.”

  “You separated us,” Alice states, the accusation causing her voice to wobble. “I never knew I had a sister.”

  Gonçalves’s answer runs at a tangent. It’s not so much like she’s skirting the point as that the point has led her on to something she considers more important.

  “I placed you each with well-connected families, ensuring you the best of upbringing, education and opportunity. Your role was to learn statecraft, diplomacy, politics, the dynamics of how societies are run, which is why you were raised by parents who would ensure you ultimately rose to take a senior position in the FNG. Beatrice, meanwhile, was placed in a family with high-ranking connections to both the Quadriga and the defence industry. It was my intention to reunite you when the time was right, which would have been soon, but certain events took the timetable out of my hands.”

  “You mean somebody boosting one of your gizmos,” Nikki suggests. “Not to mention liberating a woman kept prisoner here as a brain-butchered baby-maker. Yeah, that would fuck with your calendar pretty bad. Wouldn’t do for the rank and file to find out what their betters literally have in mind for them.”

  One of the mercs makes to move in but Gonçalves halts him with a stare. It’s not an act of mercy, more like she barely thinks Nikki is worth the attention.

  “I lost almost everything in the fire, including a good friend and the brightest mind I ever knew. I have been rebuilding ever since, trying to recreate Cassandra Shelley’s work in parallel with the further development of my own. And all of that was almost lost because of one greedy, corrupt individual and some opportunist petty-criminal low lifes. I couldn’t allow that to happen. It would be like losing a cure for a terminal disease because some burglar trashed the lab while stealing clamp stands for their scrap value.