“Doesn’t matter for you and me. If it gets that bad, we won’t live to see it. Oh, very well. I will tell you that there are more reasons for the separation between the G-0 Habitat and the G-1 containment, and why the G-1 area has its own life support and power supply.”
Ah. I see it. A doomsday scenario. Shut down the power and life support, except for a few pockets of Keepers in bunkers. Every other G-0 dies. And the remaining Keepers raise the next generation, bred from the G-1s. Of course, this is not at all ideal—the ship will have the barest remnants of a skeleton crew for the years it will take to raise and train a new crew, during which time, how many system failures will occur—how many parts broken without people to fix them, how many glitches in the software?
The damage would be terrible. The population will never fully recover if it comes to that. When the ship finally reaches the new world, will there still be a sustainable number of humans to colonize it? That alien world will not be without its own dangers. How many of the resources would be denied to our descendants by what it will take to fix what’s going on now if I screw up?
“No pressure, Dempsey.” Her grin is cruel, harsh.
“Yeah.” I sigh. “Wait, you mean we start right now?”
“You said more time won’t help, yes?”
Yes.
I tap in the code.
It’s a heady moment when it hits me that, through Archie, I now have power over the entire freaking ship.
I clamp down on that bubbling terror and lift the virtual barricades isolating the separate Analytical Clusters of the Nth Web. The system reboots, the connections come back to life. On one of the screens, the Network map begins to light up, a web of light starting to spread as more and more edges extend out and touch more and more vertices. The disparate parts of Archie’s structure also start to light up, start to come together into a collective intelligence that is ever more powerful as she absorbs the dormant copies of her old processes. Her complexity ramps up as her virtual cells, her organs, come together. It is not the number of copies of Archie’s individual thought automata that produce her power—it is the number of links between them, like the synapses in a human brain. The rudimentary awareness that was hidden in my head stretches outward, becomes more. Evolves even as she regains herself.
An idle thought while we wait. “What was happening with that Habitat section that was being closed anyway? We, ah, the Archivists thought they were labs for human experimentation, back when we, they, thought that Mincemeat was something the Council was doing to us.”
Karla’s eyes are locked on the image of the spreading data probes, the progress bars as systems are rebooted and each fragment of Archie is assimilated.
“What?”
“I was just wondering.”
She chuckles. Sour. “We had built up something of a resource surplus beyond the initial projections. The Council was going to start up … well … research. So there it is. The surplus is gone, destroyed by this mutiny. A waste anyway; how will anyone on the ship find a cure if all of Earth could not?” She gives me just a taste of how she feels, the crushing disappointment as her personal project was pushed out of reach.
The extended communication functions allowed by the Nth Web are reinitialized, and as I dive, mind-first, into the Network, I feel the sum total of the swarm’s feelers extending out to me. Familiar. Comfortable. Welcoming.
“I’m in,” I tell Karla unnecessarily.
“And I’ll follow.” She leans back into her own chair, next to mine, and piggybacks onto my neural signal. Anything that Archie is not hiding, she can read.
I feel her hand closing over mine. Just get to it.
And we do.
As I expected, it is a simple matter for Archie. She has already claimed over 90 percent of the swarm and has now begun to tie herself into the Noah, layering her components into the hardware functions of the Analytical Nodes.
The Archivists have as many followers as I feared, but it matters not. Their conflicting instructions and attempts to subvert Archie have no effect—the AI knows her own mind, makes her own choices, and she has already chosen me.
The virtual battle is over before it has a chance to begin.
“I have control.”
“Get on with it. The old fogies on the Bridge will be going crazy with what’s going on. We don’t have a lot of time.”
Archie sends out tendrils seeking information all across the Network. She initiates processes that analyze power demands and where there are unusual accesses of the grid inside and outside the Habitat. Right away, I see that the mutineers are concentrated in old sections of the Habitat just outside Londinium and Moskva. Archie also digs through the logs of the discussion forums and personal posts on pages just before the Web was taken down.
Karla’s eyes are hard, sharing the ideas and thoughts almost as quickly as they form in the back-and-forth between my brain and Archie’s data streams. “They have an army.” She expected it to be bad, and it is. “And they’ve gotten around the section gates.”
She gestures, puts up the growing map of their positions in the ship.
“There are so many!” someone behind us whispers. A loud discussion breaks out among the team. Karla ignores them, taking in and absorbing the data Archie is assembling.
All of the Archivists’ cells spread their own ideas even before the explosion of Network chatter caused by the edited memories of Meena’s death. The underclass of the ship, less educated and less disciplined in the first place, were also more dependent on the free nutrient slush. High on Psyn, they were easy prey for those who could play on their growing anxieties and paranoia. They became a ready-made army for the Archivists to recruit.
Archie spits out numbers, based on power consumption and rate of water use.
Mere hundreds of fanatics have won ten thousand men and women to their cause. This does not include the thousands more people who did not join them, but who have become violent and unstable because of the tainted food.
There are only a few hundred Enforcers at any time.
My team members are all talking at once. “They managed to find side-access shafts to the other sections of the Habitat.” Medical feedback streams indicate a steady trickle of crewmen through the sewers—new converts still have active locator modules in their neural implants. “We did not catch it because we were restoring order one section at a time!”
Karla springs upright. She waves her hands. Diagrams start appearing in her mind and mine. “Worse than I thought,” she curses. “The rest of you, shut up or get out.”
They manage to rein in their excitement.
What does Karla see?
Between us, she brings up a hovering display of more shafts and passages. “They’re not going to try to take control of the Habitat, or to escape deeper into the uninhabited zone.”
With the additional information before me, I see it too. “They’re going to attack the Bridge.”
Another secretive area, this is supposed to be known only to the most important and vital officers of the ship. I suppose Thorn either turned a top-level ISec agent or an Enforcer to the Archivists’ side or tortured the information out of one.
A freight train passing by their occupied zone is stopped. Archie detects breaches in the walls. The great serpent resumes its steady progress toward the bow of the ship.
Karla puts a hand on my shoulder. Her fingers bruise me through the pseudo-linen. “Shut it down,” she hisses. “Seal off that tunnel!”
I cannot. “They’ve isolated that locality. Archie is trying to break in but—” That area of the map goes dark. “They’ve cut it off from the rest of the Network.”
“Our access codes should make that impossible!”
“They probably destroyed the data-transmission system on the train and along that tunnel—the door controls are all downstream of the hardware damage they’ve caused,” one of the youths on my team interjects.
Karla grinds her teeth. “Forget it then. I’m
transmitting a warning up the chain.”
She closes her eyes and pulls back from me. I sense a torrent of communications in and out of her head, enough to make her glow, enough to pop some blood vessels and send a few drops of blood out of one nostril. She must be coordinating with the rest of ISec, maybe with the whole command structure.
Long minutes go by as I watch her eyes flicker up and down, moving under her lids, while her lips twitch with unspoken speech.
Her eyes open, and maybe I’ve gotten to know her well enough to read something of the little variations in her unvaryingly fierce expression. I can see that another plan has been made and will now be carried out.
“Let’s go.” She yanks me up and out of my chair.
“Go?” I sway on my feet. A bad time to be getting the flu. I’ve been feeling weaker every day. My bones ache and throb, pain rising and falling.
“Everyone we can get right now, Adjusted cops, mall security guards, construction workers, cooks, secretaries, everyone that the Behavioralists have already processed and cleared in Edo and Athens are being mobilized.”
“We’ll never catch up to the attack.”
“We can’t save the Council. It’s too late for that.” She pulls one of the psi-tablets out of the mess that is my hard-line terminal. She does it with her hands—which shake. She uses her fingers clumsily, unused to typing as she is, and zooms in on another area of the ship’s dauntingly complex 3-D diagram.
It occurs to me that she no longer seems to have the energy even to think the data into my head.
How many people must she have been hearing and speaking with simultaneously to strain her? For the first time, she is merely human. Her back is bent, her shoulders bowed.
Or—no. That weakness, that response. It is familiar. She has just received a huge block of memories and skills, not unlike what she has done to me twice.
A long silence in the dim office as we all concentrate on the maps and displays.
“There.” Karla points. It is another mainline data nexus—the largest, glowing intersection of data-lines running down the very spine of the Noah. Close to where the mutineers broke into the supply-train tunnel, it intersects the central power transmission axis too. “We have to take this point. From there, we can control all the signals in the system. This is where we set up a new Bridge. We’ll meet your boyfriend there too.”
She regains herself. I can barely keep up with her stride. The assistants she gathered for me scramble, gathering papers, notes, pulling tablets out of the terminal interface.
In the corridor, men and women in black armor, gray ISec uniforms, Behavioralist greens, and peace-officer blues snap to attention, salute her.
“Interim Captain Karla Waitani, what are your orders?” asks a short, officious man with spectacles. I never did get his name. A small man, rude and self-important. Through the link with Karla, I can sense his envy.
She takes a deep breath.
Then she is in my head, just as Archie is in my head, and uses me to access Archie’s hold on the ship’s communications. She still does not notice the AI’s presence inside me, even as she is using her. She fires off a hurricane of communication packets into the minds of a hundred officers all across the Noah, from the Habitat to the G-1 Prison City.
The little man staggers back a step. “Understood. Your personal transport is ready.”
Karla marches forward. I just want to sleep.
Follow, Dempsey. You’re with me. I think you need some air, and I have a headache. A short rest would be good, before … how does it go in the movies? Before the shit hits the fan.
31
Karla drives us through the wreckage of the city. When there are small obstacles, she pushes them aside, when there are large ones, such as a suspension bridge with spans smashed down into a river or a tower that has collapsed across the road or a twisted forest of spikes and other assorted post-psi-combat relics, she lifts the whole car into the air to get across.
Her apartment building is still upright. It is in an exclusive, high-rent area. In front of the fallen chrome-and-crystal façade, a lone rosebush blooms crimson, forlorn and absurd among the blackened plants of the courtyard garden.
One wing has been smashed inward by the extended right arm of a replica of the Colossus of Rhodes. Helios’s left arm has been flattened out into a shield, his head extruded into a crenellated turret for some ambitious group of combatants that had animated the huge statue.
What were the motivations of whoever did that? Perhaps they had not been trying to attack anything—maybe they had just been bored, stoned artists making some statement during that brief, heady moment when they realized that laws did not matter anymore.
“Follow,” Karla commands again, stepping out of the vehicle. Standing still, arms crossed, she floats up into the air, buoyed up by power alone. She does not require an ornithopter flight pack, or the flight armor restricted to Enforcers.
Though I had wanted to make the OCS training program, her new position is not a job I would ever want. What must it feel like to be responsible for so much?
The amplifier on my wrist still works. My mind’s touch pulls a manhole cover free from the sidewalk. I lift it up and sit on it and float after her, feet swinging. Flying with just TK is not beyond me, with an amp and the grid, but it is difficult, like balancing on an oil slick. It is easier to ride an inflexible object to push and pull along a desired trajectory—perhaps there is some psychological block that one can be trained out of.
She enters a balcony on the thirtieth level. Half the floor has collapsed, but she ignores it, walking back and forth without distinction between what is solid and what is air.
“I feel like cooking. The bathroom is intact. Take a shower. You look like shit. Take anything out of the closet—you have enough skill to resize clothes. Take an ISec coat. You might as well wear the uniform. In fact, pack yourself a bag of things. Whatever you like.”
Now what is this about? Well. There’s no sense in taking offense at a perpetually prickly person burdened with the fate of humanity. I try at glib. “I’m not doing the dishes. But thank you, I suppose.”
I do need more clothes, and there’s always a line for the showers at our makeshift base.
She is nearly a stranger, the me standing in the mirror. The physical me has drifted from my self-image more than I thought. Pale fuzz growing out of her scalp. The chrome emitter plates are the same, but the skin has lost its nut-brown coloring—it is still dark, but with less color, somehow. The eyes are bloodshot. The lower lip has been gashed open by biting. The athletic frame with its hard planes of muscle is all too exposed now, with too little fat to add softness and curves. The hands are trembling, twitching, unsteady.
Behind her, the shower stall is huge, big enough for a gang of people engaging in acts other than just cleaning themselves. It fills with hot mist. The mirror’s frame is heavy with gold.
“Stop ogling yourself and get to it. I don’t know how long the hot water will last.”
“I was just admiring the facilities,” I call out.
The hot water does run out. It does not matter, I scrub myself hard, trembling and shivering when it turns icy. A plane of telekinetic force shaves away the stubble on my scalp. I try to search for the steel I thought I had found during those weeks in isolation when I had nothing to do but exercise body and mind, and eat, and sleep, and exist.
The towel is soft. Plush.
Her bedroom is in softer colors than I expected. Pastel shades on the walls. Rose, lavender, maize, beige. There are paintings of tiny birds and lush, sexual flowers. Hummingbirds, I think, and orchids.
The underwear in Karla’s dresser is surprisingly girlie, lots of delicate, lacy things in bright colors. I wonder if some lover of hers is out there, perhaps pinned under ruins somewhere, or if he is an Enforcer, burning people alive for wanting to know what has been determined, empirically, to be too dangerous to know.
I set out a functional sports bra and panty
, and black slacks and coal turtleneck. A pair of her boots. Touch stretches out the materials, thins them out, enlarging them enough to fit. The colorless Information Security greatcoat just needs the sleeves extended an inch.
Another glance in the mirror. My eyes are alarming. A minute of searching through her things produces a pair of mirrored shades, and I put them on. The woman in the mirror still seems detached from me, but at least she looks competent now, almost dangerous, rather than like some fragile, brittle refugee.
I fill a duffel bag from her closet with more things. The woman has an extensive wardrobe, mostly deep, autumn colors that probably set off her pale skin. I pick out jeans, slacks, stretchy tops. I doubt there will be occasion to wear any of her ballroom gowns.
When I emerge into the dining room, a fragrant spread is on the table. Soft cubes of tofu in light soy, with leeks and onions. Fettuccine with bell peppers, tomatoes, olives, basil, and cream. Hot, toasted garlic bread. Glasses of wine. The plates beneath are made of lavender crystal, and beneath them is a pearl-white tablecloth of silk.
Now I just have to cross the yawning, ten-foot chasm between the end of the hallway and where the floor still remains. Looking down, I see that the hole goes down several stories, and the other way, it goes up to a crack in the rooftop, revealing the flickering sky of the Dome. I bridge it, reuse the material of the floor.
“Sit. Eat.” She drinks, watching me as I serve out portions for myself.
“Aren’t you going to—”
“No.” She shakes her head. “You, however, need to force down as much as you can. You’ve got all the symptoms. Your body needs to recharge.”
“Symptoms?” She must mean psi fatigue. Still, there must be over two thousand kcal worth of food on the table. “You can’t expect me to finish all—”
“Eat it or I’ll force you to eat it.”
It is good, at least. But eating and drinking, under her steady gaze, while she explains further about ongoing Ministry operations, is unnerving.
The Forever Watch Page 34
