“I am forging a better future. Those children you saw: it took us all this time and a few missteps, but we have recreated Shelley’s neuron-replacement technology. They are the first in a new generation of Sentinels. You and Beatrice will oversee them when I cannot go on. At first there will be one Arca, but it will send back word of its colonies. More vessels will follow, and each of them will have guardians to ensure that it is the best of humanity that evolves aboard.”
Nikki gets it now, should have recognised it sooner. She sure saw it enough times back in LA. Gonçalves doesn’t think she’s the bad guy here. Nobody ever does, but that’s not the same as believing you’ve done nothing wrong. Gonçalves knows she’s done things that are wrong, but she believes she was right to do them for the greater good, and that’s why she is so dangerous.
“Why didn’t you trust your little private army here to get the job done?” Nikki asks.
Gonçalves acts like the question is unworthy of her time, then Nikki realises that this aloofness is a posture to mask the truth.
“You were still experimenting,” Nikki deduces.
“You brought in Beatrice as your secret assassin?” Alice asks, almost tearful in her outrage. “What kind of upbringing did you give the girl?”
Gonçalves sighs, casting a glance towards the assistants, who are busy flipping switches and checking settings.
Nikki isn’t sure how many more questions the professor is likely to tolerate, then asks herself why she is tolerating any. The answer is not because she is filling time while her techs get the kit up to speed. It is because she needs to talk, needs to justify herself. Nikki has little doubt that Gonçalves means to neutralise their threat, and does not like to consider what that will soon entail, but on some human level she knows it’s not the same as persuasion. Particularly in the case of Alice, she needs to feel the common purpose of a shared goal. Gonçalves craves affirmation, to reassure herself that she is in the right.
“Beatrice has been trained in multiple combat techniques at the highest level. But being trained is not the same thing as being capable of the deeds recently required of her. That’s why I commissioned Slovitz’s work on mechanisms to inhibit certain behaviours and disinhibit others.”
Gonçalves swallows. Nikki is sure she can see a hint of a tear.
“In combination with selective uploading of certain memories, I empowered her to carry out terrible deeds,” she admits, leaning over Alice and speaking softly. “I accept responsibility for this. The burden will not be hers to carry. I will not let her keep those memories: neither the inserted ones nor the genuine horrific recollections of what she has done. Beatrice will be clear of conscience, happy, at peace. As will you, I promise. You will be fully committed to what we are building, and you will have a part in it that will last centuries.”
“Committed because you’re going to edit my memories to make it so?”
“You speak as though you believe that hasn’t already happened. Do you believe your ideologies and perspectives are entirely a construct of happenstance? All throughout your life I have had a hand in shaping the way you’ve come to view the world. Values, manners, politeness, appropriate language. You never swear, for instance, do you? It’s no different to what any mother tries to do, but I had to work from a distance. Your synthetic mind has always had a two-way connection, allowing some judicious editing to make you see things from a carefully cultivated perspective.”
Nikki is reeling at this. Not only has Gonçalves been selecting and censoring Alice’s memories, bitch has been doing it from off-planet, on high, not so much playing puppet master as playing God.
The enormity must be hitting Alice too. She looks hollowed out, defeated. But then she raises her head just as much as she can and replies:
“So how come my perspective over the past few days has led me to conclude that you are full of shit?”
Nikki couldn’t say if it is she or Gonçalves who looks the more shocked that the girl has learned to swear. It only lasts a moment though.
“I’m not quite sure. I lost the connection when you were in the elevator to Heinlein Station. There is a lot of electromagnetic activity around that thing, many combinations of forces that could have created a shield. I might expect it to suspend the link, but it outright severed it. I made multiple attempts to restore communications, which you may have experienced as moments of confusion each time you woke up. The dart you were shot with outside the Ver Eterna hotel was actually a covert means of implanting a subcutaneous signal relay. As far as I am aware, it successfully embedded, so I don’t know why it didn’t work, but as you can see, we are about to re-establish the connection manually.
“In fact, it’s the only connection that will be established in here, in case you had notions of transmitting incriminating evidence and calling out for intercession. This suite is electrically isolated in order to carry out the experimental procedures that allow us to develop new meshes. That’s why I’ve been talking openly about this.”
And this is when Nikki realises where they are. She looks up at the blank ceiling, sees what Alice must have recognised already. This is the place where Omega was taken, the place from which he could not send a plea for help as he was butchered and skinned.
“No, you’re talking about this because you need to,” Nikki tells her. “Trying to clear your conscience so you can sleep later.”
Gonçalves gestures to the mercs.
“Can you deal with the prisoner?” she asks.
Nikki takes a step forward. She knows it will result in her being hauled back by a burly pair of arms, but she wants to ensure that she draws Gonçalves’s attention.
“Look me in the eye,” she demands. “And don’t excuse yourself with euphemisms and deniability. You can delegate your dirty work, but if you’re going to have me killed, you should have the decency to meet my gaze and admit to us both that it’s what you’re doing.”
Gonçalves takes a step closer and does as she is asked, staring back at Nikki with a placid expression.
“I am not going to allow any harm to befall you, Sergeant Freeman. I refuse to tolerate any further violence than was absolutely necessary to clean up the mess made by the gangsters whose activities you utterly failed to discourage. So how dare you talk about me being able to look you in the eye. You are the one who was supposed to uphold the law, but your sins of the flesh and sins of omission, your self-indulgence and your lack of self-respect allowed this culture to fester, a culture of criminality and corruption.”
“Those greedy assholes at the Quadriga not paying people a decent wage is what causes criminality and corruption,” Nikki replies, but she can’t pretend Gonçalves hasn’t landed a blow. Gonçalves knows it too.
“Which is why it is right and fitting that your fate is to stand trial for the bloodshed your negligence and laxity ultimately precipitated.”
“Suits me. I was always good on the stand, back in the day. I’m sure I could give a convincing account of all the damning evidence I’ve uncovered about you and Neurosophy. But I don’t imagine my testimony is likely to reflect my present knowledge, is it?”
“Correct, Sergeant Freeman. You will confess all and you will plead guilty, because I am going to erase your recollection of what you have learned here, and replace it with Beatrice’s memories of what she did. As far as you will know, you are the guilty one. You will tell the court that, and justice will not only be done, but seen to be done.”
“Yeah. Says the bitch who was just lecturing me about corruption.”
This bounces off Gonçalves, who looks at her with unfiltered disgust.
“After all these years, it’s a little late to act like you’re suddenly interested in justice.”
Another gesture. Nikki is lifted bodily by two of the mercs and slapped down on to the other table. The rings spin into place around her wrists and ankles with solid clunks. The techs advance, conspicuously untroubled by any ethical issues.
Nikki jerks her head back
in an attempt to damage the cradle, but they have anticipated this. They keep it tucked back and don’t engage the neck restraints. She’s guessing they will have a means of sedating her when they’re good and ready.
“I still know the difference between low-level palm-greasing and the greater corruption that’s eating you, Professor. I know what a murderer is, even if she ain’t the one wielding the blade.”
“No. You still don’t know the difference between your tiny, blinkered perspective and the bigger picture. You don’t think I’ve weighed these crimes against the benefit they protect? You don’t think I’ve contemplated their enormity but seen that this was a burden I must not shirk from carrying?”
“Actually, no. Because I heard this kind of shit all the time back on the job.”
“And why did you leave the job?” Gonçalves asks, and something turns to ice inside Nikki.
“That’s none of your goddamn business.”
“Wasn’t it for the same reason: that you were unable to recognise the greater importance of what was right in front of you because you were too busy doing the job to recognise what your real responsibility was?”
“Fuck you.”
It’s a pointless defiance. She wishes she could put her hands over her ears. She’s scared of what this woman might know, what she might force Nikki to confront. Gonçalves will have done her research, and she is as thorough as she is connected.
“It was tough as a single mom, I don’t doubt it, but maybe if you hadn’t been so intent on feeding your ego by busting cases, you might have noticed the signs.”
“Fuck you.”
She’s trying to hold it back but the waters are spilling over the floodgates.
“Were you too busy doing the job the night your son shot himself at the age of, what was it, twelve? Just approaching his thirteenth birthday. Killed himself with your spare service weapon, according to your files. Would you change it now, if you could? Would you let a few low-life criminal deaths slide down the priority list in exchange for paying more attention to Lawrence, and the mental health issues his teachers reported he was having?”
Nikki can’t speak. The deluge is coming now, choking her throat, drowning her voice.
“I’m sorry for your pain, Sergeant Freeman. Sorry to tap into it like this, but I have to make you see. I am trying to spare people from suffering like you have ever again. I can create a future without crime, without violence. And in the short term, I will take your pain away, all these agonising memories.”
Nikki’s voice feels like it is drowning, unable to break the surface and call out her objection. She doesn’t care if she ends up in jail, or even if she has Beatrice’s murders inserted into her mind, but she needs her pain. She needs the worst of her memories because they are inextricably entangled in the best.
“Or rather, I will delegate, as you suggested. It will be Alice who does it, and she will be happy to.”
Nikki can barely see now, unable to wipe her overflowing eyes because her hands are restrained. She hears Alice find her voice, lying parallel a few yards away.
“So why didn’t you simply erase the memories of Omega and Julio and everybody else? Why did the path to your world without violence require a detour via torture and murder?”
“We had to find out how much they knew, who else had been told. But equally, there was an opportunity both to eliminate a toxic element from CdC and expose to people on Earth—particularly the FNG—the corrupt, hedonistic culture that had taken root here. This place will be policed properly from now on, but more than that, we will effect a culture-wide change in people’s philosophy as to what they are on CdC for.”
“You’re going to edit people’s minds,” Alice says. “And it won’t stop here. As above, so below. Thought crime eradicated at source. A whole species enslaved by your vision of morality.”
“You don’t want to talk about my vision, Alice. You who have enjoyed the privileged existence I so painstakingly ensured. You haven’t seen the things I witnessed, had the things done to you that I did, as a child. You have no idea what humanity is truly capable of when it allows its basest instincts to run unchecked.”
Nikki swallows, finally rediscovers her voice.
“And what about the base part of humanity that’s obsessed with controlling people and having power over everybody else? You working on a plan to eradicate that?”
“This isn’t about power and control. This is about being a responsible mother. But I guess that’s not something you could relate to.”
Gonçalves walks over towards the wall, where she begins tapping on a console.
Nikki strains against the clamps. It is futile, but it is instinctive, a search for any possible way out of this as the clock counts down the last few seconds to defeat.
“This won’t take long,” Gonçalves tells Alice. “Your synthetic brain can transfer data back and forth far faster than it takes to upload to a mesh. In a matter of minutes, you’re going to feel like a whole new woman.”
WOKE
Alice can hear voices, distant at first then gradually becoming clearer as her consciousness attempts to resolve itself.
“Okay, final checks. Transfer status?”
“Confirmed complete.”
“Non-native data integrity?”
“Confirmed at one hundred per cent.”
“Overwrite of targeted memory sectors?”
“Confirmed.”
“Roger that. Subject is coming round. Go-ahead to disengage restraints?”
“Confirmed.”
The clamps withdrawn, she pulls herself into a sitting position, taking in her surroundings. Her mind is fuzzy, a storm of information cohering in places, chaotic in others, but she recognises where she is. She is waking up where she expected to find herself.
She slides off the table and walks towards the wall, watched carefully by assistants and security personnel. Before the procedure, she didn’t know their names, didn’t know their roles. She does now. She knows so much more now.
Memories are continuing to assemble themselves as she approaches a bank of machines and accesses a console. She understands the device it controls, knows in exhaustive detail how to operate it: every parameter, every calibration, every setting.
When it was stolen, the thieves were like illiterates blindly stabbing at individual letters on a keyboard to see the pretty shapes they printed. With what has just been uploaded into her memory, Alice could use this thing to write any story she likes. And most importantly, she knows what she must do with it first.
FAMILY TIES
With the head restraints still not fully deployed, Nikki is able to twist and crane her neck in an effort to see what is going on in the rest of the room. It doesn’t make her feel any less helpless, but it always exacerbates the sense of vulnerability when she can’t see her enemy’s line of attack.
The most horrible thing is the calm, the quiet. She wants to go down fighting in a storm of noise and struggle, but as Alice lies there motionless, Nikki understands what absolute defeat truly looks like.
Green lights flash all around the edge of the cradle, and Gonçalves is good to go.
There is barely a word for several minutes, then the lab assistants break the silence by methodically checking that their act of electronic butchery has run its course to their technical satisfaction.
“Subject is coming round. Go-ahead to disengage restraints?”
“Confirmed.”
Alice sits up slowly, looking like nothing has changed, and yet Nikki knows they wouldn’t be letting her loose if everything hadn’t.
She watches Alice walk across to a bank of machines and begin to calmly operate a device she knew nothing about when she walked into this lab. That is when it truly hits home. Nikki feels a mixture of marvel and horror as she contemplates how Alice’s mind has been literally changed: the memories informing her beliefs and consequent actions swapped out so that she opened her eyes a different person. Then a sickness takes hold
as she confronts the inescapable reality that the same thing is now about to happen to her.
Alice raises her hands from the console and looks towards Gonçalves, who has given no exterior indication of satisfaction or relief at Alice’s transformation. It’s just business as usual to her, merely another step on the long path that began in that refugee camp and ends with her vision of a better humanity colonising the cosmos.
“What are you waiting for?” Gonçalves asks.
“A reunion,” Alice answers.
A moment after she speaks, the aperture opens with a swish, and in walks Beatrice, the lethal twin.
“I saw her approach on my cam feed,” Alice explains, then turns to greet the new arrival. “My dear sister,” she says, her voice warm, threatening to break with emotion. “I’m overcome to finally restore our acquaintance.”
“The feeling’s mutual,” Beatrice replies. “Believe me, it’s been harder for me watching you at a distance. Glad to see you’re all caught up so we can, you know, catch up.”
“Which there will be plenty of time for later,” says Gonçalves, gently reminding Alice she has a job to do.
“Of course,” she responds, casting a neutral, unfeeling glance towards the operating tables. It’s like Nikki isn’t even there, not as an individual at least. All Alice is seeing is the tools for a job.
Nikki wishes she could feel resignation, but she can’t give up the fight. She focuses on her memories of Lawrence, like this will somehow protect them, then realises it will probably just make them easier for the process to identify.
Her mind searches for any last sliver of hope. She thinks about the people who have had erasures, and even what she has learned about Amber. The memory is taken, but some part of them still knows something is missing. Will that be her fate when she cannot remember her son? Or does this mean some part of Alice still instinctively recognises who are the bad guys here?
Places in the Darkness Page 38
