“Even you, Helen? I’m disappointed.”
Helen’s head snapped up at the sound of Kevin’s voice. He was standing in the middle of a white hexagon that had suddenly appeared on the cobblestones. Tall and good looking, with that lazy smile, appearing utterly relaxed. Without hesitating, Helen flung herself at him. He sidestepped her easily; tripped her so that she fell sprawling on the ground, banging her knees on the hard cobbles. She gave a yelp of pain. Kevin dropped down on her, pulling her arm back in a lock behind her.
“Bastard!” she yelled.
Kevin said nothing.
“Judy!” Helen called. “Help me!”
She twisted her head to see that Judy had merely folded her hands into the sleeves of her kimono and assumed her calm expression.
“Is that all you are going to do? Just watch?”
“Let her go, Kevin,” Judy said easily.
Kevin gave her arm a final twist. Helen felt a wrenching pain in her elbow and gave a yelp. And then she was free. Kevin moved away as she stood up, rubbing her arm, eyeing him balefully.
He smiled. “You’ve lost it, Helen,” he said.
“Lost what?”
“A sense of responsibility. I never expected you to give up so easily.” Kevin pulled two memory strips from his console and handed them, one each, to Judy and Helen.
“What is this?” Judy asked.
“Software code for a spacesuit. You’re going to need it where we’re going. Come on.”
He stepped onto the hexagon and vanished, leaving Helen examining the tiny, slippery strip of plastic between her fingers. Judy was already feeding hers into her console. She looked over at Helen.
“This could be dangerous,” she said calmly. “You don’t have to follow.”
Helen slid the plastic strip into her own console and glared at her.
“Oh yes I do,” she snarled. She stepped onto the hexagon and the Mediterranean terrace vanished.
She was in hard vacuum, floating in the nursery area of the Shawl. Judy appeared before her, striped like a zebra in a black-and-white spacesuit. Helen looked down at her suddenly naked body. Her own suit was transparent. She realized with some annoyance that her passive suit had disappeared. She now floated, apparently naked in the vacuum. Two black spacesuits floated before them, both utterly featureless. Their helmets were dark; no faces could be seen in them.
“Hi,” Kevin’s voice said. “One of these is me, and one is Bairn, my assistant. I thought I might keep my position slightly vague, just in case Helen can’t control herself.”
“I’m perfectly under control,” Helen said, breathing deeply.
“Of course you are. Now. Down to business. You’re trying to pin me down, Judy.”
“Of course. And you’re trying to kill me. Why are we wasting time?”
“I want to talk about David Schummel.”
There was a pause.
“David Schummel?” Judy said. “Who is David Schummel?”
“Ask the atomic Judy. Ask Judy 11. Have they been keeping you out of the loop, Judy? No, I don’t think so. I think you already know who David Schummel is.”
“All right. Why do you want to talk about him?”
Kevin laughed.
“Because David Schummel holds the key to the destruction of the Watcher. I think that might be of interest to you, Judy.”
“Me? Why?”
“Oh, the atomic Judy will find that out. I’m sure she’ll tell you later.”
Helen was staring at the two dark suits. One of them was looking at her directly. Would that be Kevin, or would that be Bairn? If only she knew…
“Helen wants to kill you, you know.” Judy’s voice was matter-of-fact.
“Oh, I know.” Kevin laughed. “I’m surprised to hear you admit your failure to cure her.”
Helen felt a flash of anger. Her cheeks were hot with something almost like embarrassment to be read so easily. They were watching her, naked in her transparent suit.
“Kevin,” Judy said, “why don’t you unblank the suits? Stop playing games. Show Helen what you want her to see.”
“Stop talking about me as if I wasn’t here,” Helen shouted.
The two suits flickered and then became transparent. Everyone was looking at Helen. Judy, Kevin, and the other Helen.
“That’s me,” Helen said, gazing at the figure in the spacesuit that floated beside Kevin. It was her. A little older, a little plumper, and with her hair dyed black, but definitely her. “That’s me,” she repeated.
“I’m not you,” the other said, “not anymore. I’m Bairn.”
“You’re both from the same template,” Kevin said. “Training you is the ultimate challenge, Helen.”
Helen turned to Judy, who was watching her with cool interest.
“Still looking, Judy?” she asked bitterly.
Judy’s glittering eyes slid back towards Kevin. “Okay,” she said. “You’ve had your fun. Why do you want to talk about David Schummel?”
Helen couldn’t help gazing at Bairn. She could see crow’s feet forming around her eyes, see cellulite appearing on her thighs. She guessed the other was what—five, ten years older? Was that how long it would take to break her—Helen’s—spirit? Kevin was still watching her, she noticed. Enjoying the moment.
She gave a shudder. She wasn’t going to give him the pleasure. Recriminations could come later. For the moment, the best way to have revenge on him was to help Judy.
“You were asked a question,” she said, her voice very calm. “Tell us about David Schummel.”
Kevin smirked and turned to the figure floating by him. “You used to speak to me like that, Bairn, remember? Back when you could still get angry with me?”
“I remember, Kevin.”
Helen felt horror tinged with disgust. That was her, floating over there, spirit broken and enslaved to Kevin’s will. She wanted to lash out at something.
“Are you enjoying this, Judy?” she shouted.
Judy ignored Helen’s outburst. “You’re still wasting time, Kevin. What do you want?”
“I once had David Schummel, but the Watcher took him from me. Now that you have helped me to find him again, I want you to know what it is he represents.”
“We helped you to find him?” Helen said.
Kevin ignored her. “Do you know he carried a private processing space with him to Gateway?”
“What is Gateway?” Helen interrupted.
Judy waved a hand to silence her, but Kevin answered.
“One of the Watcher’s failed projects, Helen. Its Achilles heel. What is the Watcher, Helen, but an intelligence? On Gateway there exists something that destroys intelligence.”
“But why would anyone wish to destroy the Watcher?” Judy asked. “It is the guardian of humankind.”
“You don’t really believe that, Judy. It’s a cuckoo. Sheltering in our world, consuming our resources while it shapes its environment to its own end. And soon it will be pushing the other chicks from the nest. Look around, Judy. What do you see?”
“I see the Shawl.”
Black rectangles hanging in lines, perspective funneling their edges to an imaginary point somewhere in the clouds of the blue Earth below.
“You see the Shawl?” Kevin said. “This isn’t the real Shawl! This is a virtual construction! This exists only in processing spaces! The virtual Shawl is much bigger than the real one. It’s a message, a way of keeping us in check.”
“How?”
“How does any dictator keep its subjects in check? By fear, of course!”
Helen was fascinated, despite herself.
“Fear? Of what?”
“What are all humans frightened of? Dying. What am I not afraid of and have proved it time and again? Death. Fear of death holds humans in place. And yet, possessing virtual lives, we could live forever. The Watcher has made us all forget this. It has written birth and death throughout our universe and perpetuated the myth of a soul. That’s what makes you think t
hat you are different than that Helen over there—Bairn.”
“I am different from her.”
“You are now, but what about one second after awakening? Two seconds? Five minutes? I tell you: only by being reborn will you truly live again.”
Judy spoke: “You are ripping off old religious texts and getting the meaning completely backwards.”
“If you say so, Judy,” Kevin said. “Let’s go inside and speak properly.” He smiled at Helen. “Promise you won’t be silly?”
Helen’s suit had no motion poppers. Judy tethered Helen to her own suit, then towed her into a nearby section of the Shawl. She noticed that Kevin did the same with Bairn.
They stood in a grey room with a picture of a man with his back to them on one wall. Helen looked around for something that she could use as a weapon. Nothing. She would have to create her own. Bairn was watching her. Helen smiled sweetly and sat down on the floor, tucking her legs underneath herself. She was still naked. She didn’t care.
Kevin began speaking. “David Schummel was a pilot on the Gateway expedition. They couldn’t use AIs out there because they kept committing suicide. They had to use human pilots. Some still exist, even today. Hobbyists. You know the sort of thing?”
Judy nodded.
“David liked to watch, too, Judy.” Kevin smiled significantly. “He had a little processing space all of his own. At night, when his duties were over, he liked to sit in his room and take a look at what was going on in there.”
“What was in there?” Helen asked.
“Does it matter? But I’ll tell you one thing that is always in those little boxes. Me. Zinman was right, Judy. I’m always there. It begins with just a look, but the observer always gets drawn in. In the end, they always want to become part of the processing space themselves, and then…well…”
“You own them?” Judy said.
“I own everybody in the end,” Kevin replied. “Everyone who cares to take a look. That’s how I come to know so much. Sooner or later, everyone will have met me.”
“Not everyone,” Helen said.
“Everyone who has had a personality construct made,” Kevin said earnestly.
It wasn’t much, as personal spaces go. It only had capacity for a maximum of eight personality constructs. Not that it mattered, because David Schummel only had one stored in there: Madeleine. An ex-girlfriend. In a fit of jealous pique, he had requested that the Private Network make this copy of her just after she had walked out on him. If he couldn’t have her, then no one else could. That aspect of her, anyway.
David had never let Madeleine see him, he just liked to watch from a distance, but she had guessed anyway. In the early days she had shouted and screamed, “Schummel, you wanker, it’s over! Let me go.” But that had been then. As the weeks turned to months and the months turned to years, she had resigned herself to her fate, just as David had come to realize the immaturity of his actions in bottling her up in the first place. But what could he do? To release her into a public processing space would simply draw the attention of the EA to his crime.
Now Madeleine had become David’s talisman. He carried her processing space everywhere—even to Gateway. How could he be separated from her? As for Madeleine, she just got on with her life. She had access to entertainment libraries, to a gym, even to a fairly decent Turing machine with which she could conduct conversations. David was too much of a coward to speak to her directly, even after all this time. Besides, he always did prefer just to watch.
So when David Schummel appeared in person in the processing space, the version of Kevin that had lurked, half asleep and unseen in the background, woke up and took notice.
Schummel’s avatar stood swaying in the small room. It smells in here, he thought abstractedly. Sweat and old food and damp. Doesn’t she clean up after herself? How can she live like this? His mind was reeling, trying to avoid thinking about what was happening outside in the atomic world.
“Schummel, you bastard. I knew it was you all this time.” Madeleine spoke the words without heat. She was half watching a story in the entertainment tank, as she did at this time every day. Pink voxels swirled in the shape of clouds and David staggered through them. He fell onto his knees and clasped her greasy hands in his. The smell in the room was coming from her, he realized. She was looking at him, but only half registering his presence. What had he done to her? He didn’t care. He had come for help, not to give sympathy.
“They’re all dead, Maddy,” he said. He gave a sob and tears began to run down his cheeks. “I couldn’t help it. It was them or me. I waited as long as I could, but the BVBs were everywhere.”
“Who are all dead?” Madeleine asked. “Look, here comes Chung. He really loves Edward—not like Philip.” A man came strolling through the pink clouds pervading the entertainment tank. He was tall and good looking; he carried a green venumb in one hand.
“Everyone is dead.” Schummel glanced at the tank in confusion. “Everyone on Gateway is dead. Everyone but me and Gwynnedd and Glenn. And that bloody robot. But I’m not sure how long even he will last.”
He looked up at her as she glanced at him, then back at the entertainment tank. He squeezed her hands tighter. “I couldn’t do anything, Maddy. They couldn’t move. If I’d stayed there much longer, I would have been trapped, too. The BVBs, they were all over. Every time you looked away, they were there, tangling themselves around you and shrinking so tight. Dawson almost made it to the shuttle ramp, you know. He tripped. Four of them around his legs, he started crawling, dragging himself along on his hands. I looked at him and those cubes were there—spilling from his mouth. It was my fault, I shouldn’t have kept looking—Schrödinger boxes filling his mouth. I couldn’t look away. I watched him choking. I hit the button, raised the ramp. He’s still out there. Lying on the landing field. I couldn’t save him. I ran to the flight deck and took off. It was like flying through black hail. Schrödinger boxes appearing everywhere I looked. I could hear them rapping on the window. They were dropping inside the cockpit, appearing between me and the glass. I hit maximum thrust, trying to get us up into space, away from that place. One of the BVBs wrapped around me, held my hand tight to the joystick. Out there in the atomic world, my hand is still—”
He retched, put his hands to his mouth and yellow vomit sprayed out between his fingers. Madeleine looked at him and smiled, her hair so long and lank and greasy.
“I see,” she purred. “You know, it’s been a long time. I guess I forgive you, David. Chung does the same, you know. He forgives Edward. He’s a good man, Chung.”
David stood up, took hold of her shoulders and shook her.
“Maddy. Listen to me. Gwynnedd is in her room. Glenn is wrapped to the flight chair in the shuttle. Both of them are unconscious. I put them out; I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I had to speak to someone. The hypership’s AI has committed suicide, too, just like all the others. We’re trapped here. Trapped above Gateway. I got the shuttle back onto the hypership, but I can’t fly the hypership home.”
“But I might be able to.”
“Chung,” said Madeleine. One of the characters had turned to face them. Madeleine was staring wide-eyed at him. “You’ve never said that before.”
“Ah,” Chung said. “That’s because I’m not really Chung. My name is Kevin. David, I think we need to talk. What is going on out there?”
Bairn sat on the floor at Kevin’s feet, watching Helen like a hawk.
“We should be on the same side,” Helen said.
Bairn folded her arms and looked away. “He tortured me, too,” she said approvingly. “It was necessary. It was the only way for me to learn.”
Judy was standing facing Kevin. She had popped little blue pill after little blue pill to no effect. In the end she fell back on traditional methods. She asked questions.
“So you were there to offer David a deal. Did you fly the ship back from Gateway?”
“No,” Kevin said. “The drive was beyond me. I onl
y have human intelligence, Judy. I couldn’t possibly understand hyperdrive. Still, I realized that all I had to do was get the ship far enough away from Gateway to persuade an AI to come back to life. It took us weeks, traveling at sublight speeds, but eventually I did it. An AI built up enough intelligence to fly both the ship and David Schummel home.”
“And then what?”
“And then I set about figuring a way to pass the message on to myself.”
The piece of plastic had been lying on the floor since they had entered the room. It was only now that Helen noticed her name was written on the top of it. She picked it up and began to read.
“What message?” Judy asked.
Kevin smiled broadly. “That somewhere out there was something incredibly strange. Something new, powerful, dangerous! But where? I didn’t know where Gateway lay. Remember, I was there by chance, a passenger in David Schummel’s private processing space. Now I was traveling back to Earth, a stowaway on the hypership. I needed to get a message out to myself, but how? When that ship arrived, all hell would break loose. Who knew what the Watcher would do? Say nothing, I suppose, like it usually does. So I lay low and made plans. I managed to catch a Schrödinger box, you know, just for myself. I fixed one in position by a camera, left part of myself looking at it all the time we were traveling home.
“And then we made it back to Earth, and that robot came on board and everything changed.”
“What robot?” Judy asked.
“Chris, it called itself. I’ve never seen anything so advanced. It didn’t register on any of the ship’s senses but one. You could see it, and that was it. It came on the ship to assess what had happened; I guess the Watcher wasn’t taking any chances coming on board, what with all the other AIs committing suicide. Chris looked everywhere and took everything: David Schummel’s processing space, my Schrödinger box. Even David Schummel himself. It almost caught me…”
Helen gasped. She passed the piece of plastic across to Bairn. Kevin noticed what she had done and smiled.
He continued speaking. “But now I have found David Schummel again. Or rather, the atomic Judy has found him for me. And now, maybe, I can find a route back to Gateway.”
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