She reminds me that there are yet more extreme measures if need be.
“They involve a lot of dying. So, Dempsey, we cannot fail.”
Just as Archie enabled Barrens’s anarchists to dig up all those widespread fragments of lost information, Karla wants me to use her to identify and locate their leadership.
“We will assault these kindergarten revolutionaries across every rat hole they’ve occupied throughout the ship.”
The larger groups, the mobs, the intellectuals that had started to protest outside the administration offices, they are considered the lesser priority, still salvageable, for the most part. The physical isolation of the separate Habitat sections will be enough to keep them under control, for a time. If the agitators, the leaders, are taken out of the equation, something of a reset is still possible. Those worst affected by the highest doses of Psyn, the mutineers’ foot soldiers will need psyche repair, years of therapy.
“What about the Council? The Bridge? Won’t they be held hostage?”
“They are not permitted to allow themselves to be captured. They are already dead.”
There is nothing I can say about that. Sorry? Oops? It is the same as everything else. “Can’t we negotiate? I mean.…”
“They already know too much.”
We discuss what I am to do. Or rather, she tells me her new requirements of me, my new orders. All the while, I eat. I am starting to understand and it is one more piece of too much.
Too soon, my stomach starts to protest.
“Keep going.”
“I would rather not—”
Her eyes burn, bright green overlaying the pink. My hands move, under her control, not mine. “No, stop, I’ll—”
Karla does not eat a bite herself. Though she does drink the wine.
She makes me wolf it down. I feel bloated, stretched out.
Why? I unicast her.
Karla’s eyes are cold, and her voice is colder. “Haven’t you noticed, Miss Dempsey? Weakness in the limbs? Nausea? A lack of appetite? Despite that, your talents remain.” She tilts her head back, lets another mouthful of red slide down her throat. “It’s not psi-burn you’ve got. You’re dying, Miss Dempsey. Daily excess nutrient intake helps slow the process down.”
Oh.
I should have guessed. But I did not want to. Do others know? Nobody has said anything. Maybe everyone looks this terrible, stressed-out, not enough food. I’m going to look a lot worse, and soon.
The part of Archie that is present in my head beeps in alarm; I sense her processes tapping into the life-signs applications on the neural Implant. I can’t freak out and have Archie feel me freaking out. I need to be hard and not just for me. Nothing you can do, Archie, if it’s so. I was always going to die this way. Everyone does. She lets go a long, mournful tone. I see her in my mind, shaking her head furiously. She shrinks down to a five-year-old, stamping her feet, mouthing, “No, no, no.”
How long since attaining sentience has Archie been attached to me? Could she ever bond with anyone else?
Hush. You promised to behave. You remember promises? You can’t throw a tantrum, honey. Everyone’s counting on you.
Archie presses her lips into a thin line, grows out to twenty, grows out to my age in a moment, but she’s still got my hair. She manifests a Doctor’s red-trimmed white coat, marches off as she fades from my awareness.
In the meantime, the foreign push and pull on the muscles of my body is irritating. Karla has a firm grasp on my strings, her mind’s projections overriding the impulses from my brain. Even my tears, or lack of tears, is up to her.
I demand, I’ll feed myself. I can do it. I have the will. Get out of my head. I have always done what I had to do. I’ll freak out on my own time.
Karla’s mouth twitches. She seems … relieved? “Good. I am about as far from the psychological profile of a Keeper as an officer can get.”
My hands, my mouth, my body, are my own again. I make myself eat, set aside the sensations of fullness. The food is good. It is. She is not without kindness, in her way, this stern, gray icicle.
“How much time do I have?”
“You seem to be one of the average ones, Dempsey. Three months. Maybe four. You probably have a month left before you start to come to pieces, and a month more where you are somewhat functional.”
“That’s not so bad,” I manage. At least there is a little time, maybe even enough time to put things right.
Rice balls are chewed, barely tasted, swallowed down. The sensation to heave it all up goes back up to my brain; I clamp down on it. There is too much to do to be sick now. I can feel sad later. When I see Barrens again, maybe.
“You may be relieved to know, or not. Your team from City Planning is mostly all right. So are your friends. They will be brought in. We require all the help we can get.”
Hennessy and the others! I haven’t worried enough about them. But there was so much to fear already. “Thank you. They will make things more efficient.”
“They had better.”
I plaster on a smile. “They will.”
I am dying. I want him to protect me. To tell me he’ll stop it somehow. Keep me safe. Leon, I wanted so much more time with you. How will I tell him?
After I have gorged, we float back to the ground. Multiple transports await us, all different colors, the gray of Information Security, the Enforcers’ black, the green of Behavioralists, the police blue. They are huge, armored insects. Rather than wheels, each one walks on six legs ending in great big claws.
The little man is there again. His bald head shines under the simulated noon sun. “We are ready for the move, Captain Waitani.”
The sky flickers again, badly.
Karla turns to me. “Will you accept your duty, Dempsey?”
My throat is dry. Acid and mush push up from my stomach. I nod and brace myself. This will not be pleasant.
“Hana Dempsey is to be granted all authorizations befitting her new status, as ship’s Executive Officer,” Karla announces.
“Acknowledged.”
My legs go out from under me, but somebody holds me up telekinetically. My head is a series of explosions coming in wave after wave, as another immense data dump is crammed into my head, leaving me retching, screaming. Karla takes control of my physiology again, to keep me from vomiting.
Long minutes pass as I feel more and more functions updating and expanding in my neural Implant. My brain is battered. Mind too large to fit in my skull. Cannot see. When I hear, it is as if I hear across a great distance, a canyon, echoing. I feel old memories being crowded out. I lose them. Names. Faces. How much of my childhood vanishes in the blink of an eye?
“Let’s get moving.”
“Yessir.”
Cannot see at all. If it was bad when Karla Inducted me into ISec, this is ten, a hundred, times worse. Everything is pain. I am manhandled about, belted into a chair.
The convoy rumbles forward.
Archie returns. Subdued. She ties my mind into the transport’s sensor suite, distracts me from the wreck of my mind.
It is beyond strange, feeling passengers riding in me. Feeling the mighty legs of the transport push forward. Did Archie do that because she thought it would make me feel better, because she guessed that I would want to see what’s going on, or was it just a whim?
In the distance, there is a great flash of light. Then the sound comes. The claws of the transport dig into the roadway. The passengers cry out. The pressure wave almost knocks the insectoid tank over onto its back. Powerful touch talents hold it down. The sky simulation dies completely, and it is dark except for the arc lights firing up under and in front of the transport, stabbing out into the darkness. The pseudo-gravity dies too.
Rubble starts floating into the air. The tank’s claws dig even harder into the street, and Karla herself lights up with power, keeping the vehicle from falling up into a black sky. She unleashes a ten-minute stream of profanity as she takes in damage reports.
&n
bsp; The Archivists’ separate cells have been spurred to action by the realization that Archie is no longer on their side. Somebody has set off a bomb under the Paris Habitat Section’s life-support center.
Archie chirps slowly, little packets of data. Casualty lists. She stands in front of me. Looks at me.
Yes. Those people won’t be coming back.
Karla blinks. She must have felt the flicker of my thoughts.
Dempsey? You should have been knocked out by that. Best put you out myself before you fry what’s left of your neurons.
Sleep is no refuge from the pain. I do not know if it is an interaction of the Command upload and the disease, or if it is Archie messing with my Implant, but I am less susceptible to Karla’s direct manipulation. I keep drifting in and out of consciousness. I am aware of yelling and cursing. Phantom sensations as ballistae rain giant spears against the armored hide of the transport, while Psyn-fired mutineers die in futility against the sheer power of the Enforcers protecting the convoy. More explosions. The deck shakes under the transport claws. Clouds of dust and smoke, boiling masses of black. Entire city blocks are torn loose from their foundations and drift through the air, burning. Mile-wide panels of illusion generators break away from the Habitat Dome. All the malfunctioning systems and psychic energy unleashed in the air looses uncontrolled weather into the city, churning thunderclouds, a whirlwind driving a hail of frozen ashes and rubble. Fire. Ice. Lightning. Darkness.
It blends into my nightmares. The classical hell described in old texts. The Prison City of our twisted children.
By the time I wake again, it has been two days.
I am still blind. It is permanent.
I know now that, normally, anyone receiving the Command memory module requires years of specialized preparation to prevent harmful side effects.
Karla can handle it because she was already being groomed for Command. It just came early for her, and to a much higher station than she expected.
As for myself, the too-rapid assimilation of data burned me. Some of my memories are gone—a void in some places, damage in others, blurry faces, missing names. Parts of the brain dealing with the senses are overwhelmed by a snarl of uncontrolled nanite growth from the Implant. Yet I can see. And I can hear.
Thousands of new programs populate the hardware in my head. They are available to me as streams of input and output, worlds of information. Including views and sounds of my immediate surroundings. I could lose myself in all that data if I am not careful.
Archie. Archie has done something to me in concert with the Command module.
While I am being moved, a statue floating an inch over the floor, a portly, gray-haired lady adds armor-plated epaulets to my coat shoulders, containing built-in amplifiers specialized for communications.
It is strange to see myself in the third person, a detached point of view that sweeps around all of us.
While I was asleep, somebody put a bandage around my head at the level of my eyes. It is stained red. They put the mirror shades I borrowed from Karla over the bandage. I guess it is less unnerving.
“I can walk,” I croak out.
“Good.”
Karla releases me. And I walk. The corridors light up in my head with ribbons of luminous orange datafeeds, pressure data, power consumption, structural information.
“Welcome home. You will oversee the formal integration of the Argus AI into the Noah’s operating system.”
“Right.” Bile and blood on my tongue. A flicker of thought and my trembling legs are shored up by mental force. My powers have expanded, another effect of the changes to my Implant. I can feel the emitter plates scattered across much of my skin, including my scalp—it is a pattern related to the circuit-board web of chrome lines on Karla, but without the same detectable symmetry and order. I can see myself from multiple angles, as though the walls around us are cameras I peer through. Down my neck, organic splotches spread out in curving roots and branches, a rash of fruit or flowering buds branded upon me by malfunctioning nanobots. There is as much unyielding metal to me as familiar brown flesh. It continues on under my clothes, down to my toes and mirror-frosted fingertips.
I feel around my mouth with my tongue and two teeth come loose.
I am about to spit them out when Archie chirps at me to wait, and nanites anchor the teeth with silvery filaments of microrobotic tissue. That is not supposed to be possible. Archie has taken physical control of my Implant structure.
You’ve been busy while I was knocked out, huh?
I see a flash of Archie’s thought. Thousands of copies of her, scanning through the medical research databases of the Ministry of Health. More of them, luminous ghosts racing from dormant Analytical Node to dormant node, searching for information about the Builders’ nano-augmentation.
In just two days, Archie has made more progress with the Builders’ nanites than has happened in the past fifty years of human study.
Yes. Ah. Good, uh. Good job.
I imagine giving her a hug, she looks so proud, so fierce. I can feel her wanting to hang on to me. I can feel her desire to fight. To keep me. It’s an embrace of only information, but the sense impressions on my nervous system register a tight, crushing hug, a Barrens-level, you’re-not-going-anywhere embrace.
I wonder how much Archie does not realize she can do. Could she eventually fix the damage to my eyes, or is that too complex? Even now, her growth seems to be accelerating.
Again, Karla fails to read my thoughts when it has to do with the AI.
She drones on about the requirements and specifications for the new Bridge being rushed through construction. There are no windows—we are outside of the Habitat but far from the exterior hull. The walls are angled out, solid slabs of steely gray. There is no paint or tinting. Antique filament-based lighting elements taken out of some emergency storehouse dangle from wires descending from the bare ceiling. Any third-year student in Class V Training could do better, but nobody has had time.
“I want this facility livable and at least moderately comfortable to work in within the week.”
Did you really promote me to XO because you need an interior decorator?
The corner of her mouth lifts all of a millimeter. Amusing. Be sure not to give me lip out loud where your subordinates can hear.
My body stumbles. Thinking and talking and walking with my muscles is something I’ve done since I was a toddler, but thinking and talking on the Implant and walking using touch is something I have been doing for all of eight minutes.
I could just float my whole body along instead. I have so much psionic power now, it would be easier. But I stand out too much already for my comfort.
All this added power comes with a heavy cost. If I’d had the same training as Karla, the same preparation, would I have absorbed this sudden and heavy apotheosis with the same grace? She is almost unaffected, while I have significant neural damage, lost memories, and I’m blind. A difference in genetics, or training, or is it an interaction with the symptomatic phase of Mincemeat?
The large hall where the transports have stopped ends in a pair of double doors guarded by blue-coated officers.
Karla has not stopped giving me more tasks she wants accomplished yesterday. “We also need more water routed in, and more sewage capacity.” And more food needs to be delivered, which means more cold storage is required, until a separate farm is established for the Bridge. More of this, more of that.
She halts and looks askance at me. Are you tuning me out?
Of course not, ma’am.
Better not, Dempsey. I’m being so nice to you and all. I even have a little present for you.
Walking again, our heels click across the bare floor.
Where are we going, anyway?
Your new offices.
The guards do not seem to be looking at anything, even as their eyes sweep back and forth, almost mechanically. They salute Karla and wave us through.
Two floors down, we open the doors to what
will be my last home. The chamber is larger than I expected. The air is cold and musty, very, very old. I see my friends through the ship’s sensors before they turn and see me. Warm arms wrap around me. I can smell her hair.
“Hana! Are you, are you…?” She sees me. She understands. “Oh.” Lyn cries against me softly.
“You look great too. Both of you.”
A sigh. “I won’t lie, boss. You look awful. The jacket is too grim for you.” Hennessy can still get me to smile.
“I guess we don’t have much time to chat and catch up. Let’s get it done.”
“Shouldn’t you … Hana, don’t you need a bit of rest? Or some food?”
It is too soon. I cannot take sympathy from them. If we pretend I’m not sick yet, then I am just fine. “I’m not an invalid yet. Chop-chop.”
I am grateful, I guess. With Lyn and Hennessy around me, I do not have to pretend to be friendly with the other members of the team, those painfully young geniuses who still have so much time ahead of them. Time I do not have. My mood dips further. I know Barrens would be with me constantly if he could. So he cannot.
Yes. Your man knows them best. There are certain things he can do for us faster than an Enforcer team blasting its way in.
I want him. I want him terribly. I could cry and rage at being parted from him again after we promised we would not be, but it won’t change reality, and it won’t move Karla. It is what it is, and at least I have my friends smiling for me.
“Hennessy, I need a report on the status of the hardware and where we are with supplies, water, facilities for food prep, medical, you know what I’ll need.”
“On it.” He starts jotting down notes on his tablet even as he makes his way out. This will be just like setting up a new living community. Knock down walls, build new ones, put in wiring, pipes, kitchens, heating elements, cooling elements, ventilation, ergonomic furniture, all the while considering layout, comfort, efficiency, and productivity. The other half of the work is logistics. Just like City Planning.
“Lyn.” Just a brief moment of awkwardness. She’s always had higher ratings than me in most ways. Except with the touch, which she never felt like learning to apply to anything outside of work. It does not feel right that she is my subordinate rather than the other way around.
The Forever Watch Page 35
