Alice looks up from the console and addresses the lab assistants.
“I need the subject properly secured.”
That will be a no, then.
READ-ONLY MEMORY
It is consciousness itself that is an illusion … that process of retrospectively fabricating a continuous narrative is going on at every moment, fooling us into believing we are experiencing the world objectively through our own singular perspective.
Alice is not sure in which order the processes occur, whether the impulse to operate the console has come first and triggered the memories, or whether the impulse has been triggered as a result of the memories. They are like a child’s collage inside her mind, a kaleidoscope of disparate components experienced simultaneously.
Amidst the maelstrom is a memory of a face, speaking directly to her in a video message. It is a woman in her forties or fifties, moist-eyed and tired, burdened by sadness. Alice feels affection, sorrow and regret, but at a remove. This must be what was meant by the watermark effect, because she can sense that this is not her own memory. She has never experienced it before. She doesn’t know if this means that all of her previous memories are genuine, or that the synthetic neuron system works more seamlessly than the mesh.
“I’m sorry that this is the last time I will speak to you,” the woman says. “I’m sorry I didn’t come home to Earth for the end, but I don’t have long left, and I have chosen to use the time I do have to do this.”
More fragments coalesce. She knows who this is. It is Cassandra Shelley.
It is her mother.
No. The watermark. This is not her memory, not her mother. Shelley is the mother of whoever’s memory this is.
“I kept the tumour secret from you, and for that I apologise.”
Alice feels an echo of sadness, the memory of a memory. This is the recollection of someone watching this video message not for the first time. Watching it in a lab, nearby, recently.
“I had to keep my illness from Maria because I didn’t know what she might do if she found out. She still thinks there will be time for her to understand my work. She believes we will get over our disagreements and that I will share with her the elements I have kept to myself. But I have realised that I cannot allow that, and I honestly don’t know what she is capable of were she to learn that I will be taking those secrets to the grave.”
Alice feels another echo of sadness, another coalescence: whoever’s memory this is reflecting on the irony. Shelley designed these synthetic neurons and their cell-cloning replication process as a means to repair brain damage, but her innovation came too late to save herself.
“I’ve seen what she means to do. She has already operated on two infants. Twins. I can’t say for sure how she got them, though I have a strong idea, which I will also have to take with me to my grave. What she has done is beyond unethical, utterly unconscionable, but I can just about forgive her this much. It is her long-term plans that truly frighten me. I am sending you the files along with this transmission, so that you can understand: nothing less than the free will of the human race is at stake here.
“This is why I am going to destroy all of my work, and as much as I can of hers. It will appear as an accident, a fire. She must never know that I was the cause of it, or that it was deliberate, because I do not want suspicion to fall upon you when one day you take up a post here. Maria will not give up. She will rebuild and try again, which is why I am pleading with you to become my own invisible agent.
“I hope you understand what I have done. Please know that I have taken steps to ensure the fire will be contained and nobody else harmed. I also have drugs to ensure I do not suffer. I will be gone before the flames reach me. Forgive me, Leonard. I love you.”
Leonard.
Leonard Slovitz was Shelley’s son. This is his memory, of re-watching an old video message from his mother.
The kaleidoscope resolves again.
“If you are remembering this, it’s because everything else has failed.”
Another second-hand memory: Leonard Slovitz looking in the mirror. He is talking to himself, and yet not talking to himself. He is talking to the intended recipient of his message.
“Gonçalves is moving all her pieces into place. The most powerful of them is you, Alice Blake, through whom she will effectively control the Seguridad. Electromagnetic shielding dictates that her link to your mind will be lost on your ascent to Heinlein. I have sabotaged the system at this end so that it can’t be re-established remotely. Eventually, Gonçalves will have to bring you here, to restore control and to correct anything she doesn’t like. I have hijacked that process too. Instead, she will upload this little care package, my own last resort.
“My plan is to go public by smuggling out a piece of hardware, one I have been involved in designing. It is a prototype remote-access module for the Gen-5 mesh, augmented with an emergency behaviour-control function. With it I will be able to demonstrate what this new technology allows its operator to do. It is power that should be in nobody’s hands: no individual, no government and no corporation.
“Time will be against me. Once my actions are discovered, Gonçalves will move heaven and Earth to recover the machine and to silence me. If that should prove so, then all I have left is to plead to you this echo of my mother’s request if I have become, like her, a ghost in the machine.”
LOYALTIES
“She’s already on the table,” Gonçalves states, sounding a little testy to Nikki’s ears. “Oh, you mean the neck brace.”
“No,” Alice replies, insistent. “I mean I need the subject secured. Freeman is not the subject.”
Acting on some unspoken cue, one of the mercs raises the suppression rifle he took from Alice and shoots Beatrice with it, hitting her just above the collarbone in a cluster of tiny marks. As she reels around in disbelief, the merc she has just turned her back on zaps her with his electro-pulse, taking her out in case she does any damage before the sedative can act.
Then it’s serious déjà vu: the same two mercs moving with speed and efficiency to grab Alice’s twin before she falls, then laying her down on the same operating table Alice just vacated. Restraints simultaneously cycle and clunk around Beatrice’s limbs as they withdraw from around Nikki’s, while Daniels disarms Gonçalves of her stun pistol and secures her in a double armlock.
Nikki climbs to her feet. She’s not sure what just went down, but she’s happy to run with it.
“Release me at once,” Gonçalves demands. “What the hell are you doing?”
“They’re securing the subject,” Alice replies.
Silently they lift Gonçalves on to the other operating table and lock her into place. She strains against the loops in protest. This is in frantic contrast to Beatrice, who is unmoving, the suppression rifle’s sedative having taken hold.
“You’ve been betrayed, Maria. Twice. Leonard Slovitz sabotaged your system so that when you tried to edit my mind just now, my memory was protected and the vital information he needed me to know was uploaded instead. You ought to admire him. He acted out of self-sacrifice and loyalty.”
“Slovitz?” Gonçalves asks, as confused as she is incredulous. “Loyalty? Selling our work to criminals?”
“He wasn’t selling anything. He was throwing a clog into your loom, just like his mother did twenty-five years ago. Slovitz was Cassandra Shelley’s son. The fire was her doing, after she learned what you had done to Beatrice and me, after she realised what you were capable of. Shelley was dying of a brain tumour, so she sacrificed herself because it was the only way to stop you.”
Gonçalves’s face twists into a wordless grimace as a vast and precious piece of her past is ripped up and rewritten in an instant.
Yeah, bitch, that’s what it feels like, Nikki thinks.
“Shelley knew you would rebuild and try again, so she passed the torch to her son. Slovitz did what his mother asked in order to protect her vision, her values, except he didn’t need his brain interfered wit
h in order to do so. But now there’s a simpler way to stop you.”
The tech assistants move in, engaging the neck brace and bringing the cradle into place around their boss’s head. Neither they nor the guards have uttered a single word, nor looked at each other, yet they are acting in concert. It’s the console. Alice is directing them like they are her appendages.
“No. Please. Jason, Michael, you have to release me.”
“Release you? They can’t even hear you. You should be happy. I’m going to follow your vision and take away the painful, damaging memories that have so corrupted you.”
Gonçalves strains against the brace to try and look at Alice. Her neck won’t turn, so she stares in desperate supplication at Nikki instead.
“No, please. I need those memories. I need my pain! It’s what drove me to achieve what I have, so that I might prevent such atrocities happening to other women, other children.”
“And what makes your memories, your pain worth more than everyone else’s?”
Gonçalves closes her eyes. Nikki sees tears leak out either side and run down her cheeks.
“I think she’s finally getting it,” Nikki says.
She looks to Alice, expecting her to stand down, but her fingers continue to work the console, busy and deliberate.
“Her remorse is coming too late as far as I’m concerned. Remorse can’t undo what she did to me and to Beatrice. She edited my mind, appointed herself a controlling voyeur upon my whole life.”
“Alice, you made your point. All threats are neutralised. Now you need to back away.”
“Why should I?”
Nikki walks between the operating tables, approaching the console behind which Alice is standing. Daniels steps into her path, arms folded. She feints to skip past him but he moves with each of her steps, blocking her off. Nikki pretends to give up in exasperation then turns around and tries to cold-cock him. He’s fast. He catches her fist, takes her off-balance and throws her back. She clatters painfully against one of the operating tables and drops to the floor, dazed.
The room spinning, she lifts her head and addresses Alice.
“Doing what she did was the only way Gonçalves could make sense of all the horrible shit that happened to her. Otherwise it was just meaningless suffering. People do terrible things when they can’t find any other way to deal.”
“She doesn’t need you to make her excuses for her, Nikki. She made this bed, so be grateful it’s her lying in it and not you.”
“It’s not an excuse, it’s a warning. You can’t justify tearing up her mind because bad things were done to you: that would make you as bad as her. You need to step away. You need to stop this.”
“Why should I?” she asks again.
Alice’s face is like stone, a cold determination in her eyes. She looks more like her twin in Omega’s grab than the goody two-shoes idealist Nikki has come to know and, she has to admit, kind of like.
Nikki crouches on the floor, catching her breath. There are now all three mercs forming a barrier, while the lab assistants stand over the operating table where Gonçalves’s head is secured inside the cradle. Green lights are flashing all around the crown, same as before. They are ready to rock.
Nikki has to find a way through. She can’t let Alice do this.
She looks around the lab for any kind of weapon, sees that the guards have got them all, even Gonçalves’s little stun pistol. However, they haven’t used any of them against Nikki: they haven’t shot her down or zapped her. Alice has got them programmed to repel, not attack.
Nikki vaults on to the edge of the operating table nearer the console and launches herself through the air. Two strong arms catch her and she is thrown back again, winded by the impact as she thumps against a wall. It is hopeless. Gonçalves is locked in and Alice has total control, in a perfect reversal of the situation a few minutes ago. The one thing that hasn’t changed is that Nikki is powerless to do shit.
Doesn’t mean she’ll stop trying, though.
“Alice, you gotta listen to me. Gonçalves wanted to change you into someone you’re not. You do this and she’s got her wish. How you’re feeling right now, all your anger, this isn’t who you are. But it’s who you’ll be for ever after if you don’t stop. You have to stop.”
Alice looks up from the console, eyes burning with rage. She fires out her reply like a hail of bullets.
“And I ask you again: Why should I?”
Nikki hauls herself upright, and in her exasperation grabs on to the last argument she can think of. It’s the only thing she’s got left, so she screams it out with all the authority she has ever brought to bear.
“BECAUSE IT’S AGAINST THE FUCKING LAW.”
And with that, Alice lifts her hands from the console in a gesture of surrender and composes her face into an expression of placid serenity.
“Thank you, Sergeant Freeman. You just said the magic words.”
S. E. P.
Alice keys her final commands into the console, sending the signals that will cause the guards and the lab assistants to stand down and surrender themselves, the mere stroke of a finger delivering their absolute obedience. She is the puppet master now, but it doesn’t make her feel like she is in control. It doesn’t make her feel powerful.
On her last trip to visit Trick, she glimpsed inside a club beneath Mullane where the patrons can command paid couples to perform any sexual act they choose for their gratification. If you took how that made her feel and multiplied it by a hundred, it still wouldn’t describe the unease she experiences manipulating this device.
She feels nothing but relief when she knows she can step away from it, and greater relief knowing that thanks to Slovitz, she can take the necessary measures to prevent anybody from interfering with her own mind again. She realises she may never know which of her memories are genuine or even unadulterated, but she understands that it doesn’t matter. She is the sum of those memories, for better or worse, true or false, and she will be the sole guardian of that archive from here on in.
She sees Nikki stare in wonder as two of the guards cuff the lab assistants then meekly volunteer their own wrists to be cuffed by Daniels. He in turn offers up his arms to Nikki for her to do the honours.
“Jesus. Future of policing,” Nikki says. “That is some terrifying shit and we seriously need to destroy it before the Seguridad gets here.”
“We’re destroying nothing. It’s evidence.”
“And do you trust the FNG and the Quadriga to keep something as powerful as this safely in isolation while we all wait for a court case? How hard do you think it would be to pay somebody to look the other way while they swapped it out for a decoy?”
“Regardless, what happens to this technology is not ours to decide. Besides, there’s a cop in the Seguridad I reckon I can trust to keep it safe. She’s got a reputation for corruption but I believe her heart’s in the right place when it comes to the big stuff.”
“Yeah, I always said you were dangerously naïve about the ways of CdC.”
They share a smile, but it is Gonçalves’s reaction that catches Alice’s eye. The professor is rousing from her resigned catatonia, like something has reignited her spark.
“You have something you’d like to say?” Alice enquires.
“Would you like to know about your parents?” she replies. “Your natural ones, I mean.”
A combination of longing and wariness stirs inside Alice. It is confusing enough to stall her from answering.
“It’s my last bargaining chip,” Gonçalves says. “I’m prepared to trade it.”
“For what?” asks Nikki, who appears to have noticed that Alice is struggling to find her voice.
“For you to wipe Beatrice’s memory of the things she did, and the memories I implanted in order to make her do them. Please. Before the Seguridad get here and take it out of your hands. She should not have to carry that burden.”
Nikki looks to Alice for a decision. It is a hard one to make, but hard
doesn’t mean difficult.
“That’s not our call either. It should be Beatrice’s decision, though only after the trial.”
“But that is my primary concern. She should not face judgement for acting upon things I falsely put in her mind.”
“That’s a very good point,” Alice concedes. “Do we absolve her on the basis that she might have made different decisions had these memories not been inserted? If these memories were artificially put in her head, can we say she acted of her own free will? Or should she be judged for the decisions she made and acted upon on the basis of what she believed to be true?”
Alice leans over and looks Gonçalves in the eye.
“Thanks to you, Professor, I’ve been privileged to study ethics and the law under some of the greatest minds on planet Earth. Consequently, my perspective on these questions is surprisingly straightforward.”
“And what is that?” she asks, anxious and expectant.
“I’m glad it’s someone else’s problem.”
CHOICES
“They’ll be here in about ten minutes,” Alice informs Nikki, having accessed a terminal to relay her communications beyond the electronic isolation of the lab. “The explaining part comes later, but right now we don’t need to worry about anybody questioning the fact I’ve got Maria Gonçalves under arrest. Ochoba’s got our backs.”
They are standing against the wall furthest from the operating tables, Nikki washing a cut with water from one of the sinks. All of their prisoners are restrained by various means but Nikki has slung the suppression rifle around her shoulder and has assembled the other weapons at her feet. Mind control devices or not, clearly she isn’t taking any chances.
Alice offers her a towel to dab herself dry. She feels some kind of acknowledgement is called for.
Places in the Darkness Page 39
