by Alex Lamb
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Rachel.
He summoned half of the robots and fanned them outwards, covering the space as best he could. Clath had taken up much of their remaining comms-bandwidth for her research operation – a choice that left him infuriated. Ann wouldn’t have tolerated it.
‘You’ve changed,’ Rachel told him when they were virtually alone. ‘You should have shut Clath down rather than letting her play. We’re working against the clock here.’
‘She’s running this team,’ he pointed out.
‘Bullshit,’ she said. ‘You might be physically younger than last time I saw you, Ira, but you’re way more passive. What happened to you?’
He bristled but decided to spare her the emotional distress of a thorough explanation.
‘We’re all damaged,’ he observed.
‘And what is Ann to you now?’ she asked. ‘You’re obsessed with her. Don’t think I haven’t noticed how you stare.’
‘She’s a fellow amputee, that’s all,’ he replied, and knew she’d smell the lie the moment the words left his mouth. Ann had become much more than that. How much, he was still figuring out.
‘Don’t bullshit me, Ira. I’ve known you too long.’
‘Let’s check over here,’ he proposed tersely. ‘There’s another ramp-structure we haven’t looked at.’
She let it slide.
A survey of the lake chamber revealed little of value – just a few more wine-glass rooms tucked away in polygonal buildings. After an hour of fruitless searching for recognisable computer interfaces, Clath pinged them.
‘You might want to take a look at this.’
Ira blinked their avatars back to her location. This time, Clath had been far more conservative in her manipulation of the airlock and restricted herself to sending through a single microdrone. She swapped their virt to a projection of its sensor data.
The inside of the sphere was indeed a machine – less dense than the exohull tech and more obviously related to warp-field manipulation, though equally foreign. The accelerator tracks curved down instead of up, meeting at a knobbled kernel at the ship’s centre.
‘Do you understand any of this?’ said Rachel.
‘No,’ said Clath, delighted. ‘But it’s awesome.’
‘Why?’ Ira snapped, his patience finally fading. ‘What do you think it does?’
Clath grinned. ‘I suspect it makes black holes,’ she said.
‘It’s a singularity generator?’ said Rachel.
‘What else could supply a gravity source for all this?’ Clath said. ‘We know black holes can be manipulated because that’s what the Transcended do. We also know that this race that Mark calls the Subtle were terrific at emulating Transcended science. Who’s to say this isn’t just another example of that?’
‘So what’s this ship for?’ said Ira. ‘Is it a giant suicide machine? Why bother with a singularity when spin will stick your feet to the floor just as well?’
‘Still no idea,’ said Clath. ‘But think about this – if I’m right, they could make their own curvon flow.’
‘Meaning what?’ said Rachel. ‘Flow is only useful for travel if you’re warping at a tangent to the source. If you put the source on your ship, how can you go anywhere?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ said Clath. ‘But it’s still cool.’
Judj pinged them. A vid-window opened in the gloomy void, breaking the illusion that they were floating in a mechanistic abyss.
‘We’re in,’ he said, his half-smile looking more distorted than ever.
‘Already?’ Clath exclaimed.
‘It was too easy,’ said Judj. ‘I have the connection running through every malware filter on the ship and the ark barely notices. The code Mark gave us is a perfect mapping. And I mean perfect. I’d hate it if it wasn’t amazing.’ He looked torn between deep distrust and enormous satisfaction. ‘Want to see something impressive?’ he added.
‘Of course!’ said Clath.
‘Come back upstairs, then,’ he said. ‘One level up.’
They blinked back to the chamber with the frozen lake and hovered next to the waldobots. The lights came on. A pale glow suffused the ceiling, bathing the landscape in a clean, dappled illumination as if they were standing beneath a canopy of real trees.
Clath clapped with delight. ‘Amazing!’ she squeaked.
‘So far I’ve only explored their level one,’ Judj warned. ‘You were absolutely right, Clath – those things are workstations. They map to something like our virt, and it’s incredibly complex. I’m taking it slowly, just in case, but it looks like we have the data stores of an entire civilisation in here.’
He half-beamed. Ira wondered what it would take to make his entire mouth smile.
‘Our handle on their systems is still crude, but growing. I’m seeing an air supply ready to be pumped. Protein banks. Fusion reactors. You name it. The power’s warming up right now.’
Clath laughed aloud. ‘I love you!’
Judj chuckled at her. ‘Don’t get used to it.’
‘That’s great,’ said Ira, ‘but none of it is a solution. This ship is still killing us. If we don’t solve that problem, none of this matters.’
‘Oh, that,’ said Judj, amused. ‘Hold on.’
The ground beneath them started to hum.
‘What did you do?’ said Clath.
She darted back down the machine below. Ira followed to see. Some of the accelerator lines had taken on a soft blue glow.
‘Something that my best translator SAPs are calling frameshift stabilisers are now active,’ said Judj. ‘Theoretically, at least, further slippage shouldn’t be a problem.’
Ira blinked in astonishment. He hadn’t expected a free pass on this crisis, but then again, the Transcended were now involved. An unpredictable journey had just taken an even more extreme turn for the strange. He grunted with relief.
Clath caught his gaze, a sly expression on her face. ‘Ira, are you still sure we should get rid of this thing?’ she said. ‘I mean, if it’s not a risk any more, why bother? We can just switch back to ember-warp now and leave the Photes in the dust. Plus this space should be safe to inhabit once we get some real air into it. Don’t you think Ann deserves something bigger than a prison cell to walk around in? I think she’d like a break from the cabin, don’t you? And given the comms problem, it would be so helpful to have a real person down here to help us explore.’
He stared at her. All at once, his opinions about the alien ark started to shift.
14: ADJUSTMENT
14.1: WILL
Will sat down at the table and poured himself a glass of vodka. He looked up at Moneko. She wore a simple khaki shirt and trousers, her meticulous persona abandoned in the panic of the last few hours. She seemed to expect rage from him, but Will had none left. Something different burned inside him now: a cold, pure determination to better himself and the world.
‘The Carnevale doesn’t give out stealthware, does it?’ he said. ‘It serves up denial.’
She cautiously pulled out a chair to join him. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘Usually that upsets you.’
‘It upset me, all right, but ripping a few threads won’t fix it. The problem’s systemic. The denialware comes from Balance, I take it?’
Moneko nodded. ‘There’s nowhere else it could come from.’
‘How does it work?’
‘You remember Nem-shielding?’ she said. ‘When Snakepit’s monsters first got loose, before they turned themselves into the Photurians, you could make yourself invisible to them by instructing them not to see. The Carnevale screen is just like that. In fact, if your siblings are right, it’s the same protocol. We’re running on the planet’s hardware, after all.’
Will nodded to himself. He’d suspected as much. Everything Will-themed about this world was really icing on an alien cake. Its core nature hadn’t changed. A plan started to gel in his mind.
‘I want to know how soft-space works,’ he said. ‘Thr
ead-ripping, Cancers, the tricks you do – all of it.’
‘Why?’ she said nervously. ‘What are you planning?’
‘I’m going to get to the bottom of this place,’ he said. ‘Balance is trying to hold on to his sanity by keeping things the same. What he doesn’t see is that by doing that, he’s making it worse – just like I did in my job with IPSO. Balance is sick. He’s a twisted extrapolation of what I was – a man drowning in loneliness and claustrophobia. We can’t fix that by nudging suntaps. We have to go to the source. If I can get as far as his subconscious, I should be able to reach his interior mechanisms, too.’
She watched him avidly. ‘And how are you going to do that?’
‘I can’t tell you,’ said Will, ‘in case it leaks. Your mind is still a part of his at some level. But if I succeed, I’ll come back here. I’ll tell you what I found and what I did. I promise. I’m taking your vision of what the Underground is about and using that as my inspiration. You grew out of me, and now I’m learning from you. That’s how it should be. I’m proud that a version of me ended up as brave and persistent as you.’
Moneko blinked at him. Her brow crinkled.
‘That might be the nicest thing any of you has ever said to me,’ she told him.
‘Then I must be on the right track,’ said Will with a smile.
Unlike Balance, Smiley or himself, Moneko wasn’t broken. He could tell. Somewhere in all her self-editing, she’d healed herself. He hoped that swapping genders wasn’t a prerequisite for that.
She leaned across the table and kissed him once on the lips, quickly. Will stared at her in surprise.
‘Let’s talk soft-space,’ she said earnestly. ‘The thread mode you saw is a map of local instances. We use it for favour exchange and contract negotiation. If you touch threads instead of reaping them, you’ll learn public information about their status. Go ahead and try.’
‘Later,’ said Will. ‘Explain the chocolates. Where do they come from? How many more are there?’
She paused. ‘You know it’s dangerous to understand.’
‘Yet you manage it,’ he pointed out.
‘Sure, with careful use of denialware and occasional memory redaction.’
‘So there are ways around those problems,’ he insisted. ‘Too much understanding in one head is an issue, I get that, but shouldn’t I be able to branch my thread and store knowledge in siblings?’
She looked pleased. ‘Absolutely right. But be wary of that, too. The early Glitches turned themselves into armies, so Balance found ways to detect that.’
‘An army isn’t what I had in mind. More like a small walking library. It’s not weapons I want, it’s diagnostic tools.’
She regarded him as if in a new light. ‘You’re not usually so interested in learning.’
He grinned. ‘If I’m the first Glitch to follow this line of reasoning, that has to be good, doesn’t it? Exploring diversity and all that?’
Moneko gazed at him with what might have been hope. ‘I curated the SAP-icon chocolates from all over. Some are public programs available via the branch-market, others we developed under denial-shields. They all unpack as subminds and explain themselves. Hold on, I’m going to give you everything I have.’
She braced herself against the table and sagged for a moment. Will felt tickling in the back of his head as something downloaded there.
‘I’m taking a risk with you,’ she said. ‘I’ve never worked with a Glitch this way before. I’ve always followed John’s plan.’
‘For how long?’ he said.
‘About ten years,’ she replied, colouring slightly. ‘Maybe a little less.’
‘How many Glitches?’
‘Me personally?’ She looked away. ‘Thirty-eight.’
‘Maybe this will be better,’ he said.
‘Let’s hope. We may not have long. Balance is combing the city for the rest of us and the station is a death trap.’
She took his hand and led him back to the gravesite in the other room.
‘Good luck in there,’ she told him. ‘I wish I could go with you. I’m jealous.’
Then she kissed him again in a way that wasn’t remotely sisterly. Something in Mark told him it should have felt wrong. It didn’t.
He climbed into the pit and virt-surfaced in an anonymous pavilion outside the Mettaburg soft-space station. Fifteen minutes later, he’d refreshed his denialware and made his way back to the commuter-train memory he’d visited in the Underlayer. He closed the secret door behind him and breathed in the plastic-scented air. The train was still rushing past the same scree-field he’d seen last time.
Will searched the floor panels for the anchor where he’d buried Moneko’s handkerchief. It was still there. Will tucked the lacy fabric back into his doublet and then yanked the suntap from its hiding place. He hefted the canister out onto the floor.
Will knew there was no going back from what he intended to do. He checked the icons Moneko had given him. There were dozens. He picked a security-cracking tool disguised as an almond crunch and swallowed it. As new knowledge opened in his head, Will reached down to the suntap and squeezed the casing like cardboard, wiping the anchor from soft-space entirely. When the police sirens started, he moved quickly to the wall and stood extremely still.
As he expected, a portal opened in the air. Balance agents spilled out and took up positions around the suntap’s hiding place, sniffing for his scent and sprouting extra limbs. Will didn’t waste any time. He ran to the portal they’d made and bolted through it while the agents were still orientating themselves.
His heart pounded as he sprinted down their search corridor. The metal grating covering the floor clattered with his every step, though the agents appeared not to notice. He prayed that his ruse was so ridiculous it wouldn’t have been tried before. But then again, who knew? Any other Glitches who had attempted it might simply be too dead to talk.
The other end of the passage opened onto a platform of metal grillwork suspended in a machine room so vast that it hurt the mind to look at it. Will had to grip the railing to steady himself as he stepped through.
He remembered this place – the near-infinite clockwork of a living world. Self-similar cog mechanisms operated on thousands of levels, turning against each other like a giant mechanical fractal. It had been the first humanised view of Snakepit’s internal systems the planet had shown him before it absorbed him whole.
Will struggled to focus. The room didn’t obey normal spatial laws. The geometry was hyperbolic, cramming an insane amount of detail into the distance and slewing weirdly when he moved. Cogs distorted as they turned, their teeth growing and shrinking. Worse still, the rules of optical focus were different. Everything was picked out in attention-seizing detail no matter how far away, making just glancing at the far machinery painful. It didn’t help that the place smelled overpoweringly of metal and oil. The result was an industrial-scale migraine.
Will fought off nausea and struggled to orientate himself. When he’d been here the first time, the place had conformed to a strict order: big cogs above and small ones below. That had changed. As before, cogs shrank below him, but those above grew to a certain point only to have the levels yet higher shrink again, branching off into delicate constellations of machinery. It was as if he stood in the workings of a mechanical Yggdrasil, somewhere among its titanic upper roots, about forty storeys below the base of the tree’s mighty trunk.
The labyrinth of walkways he found himself on was another new addition and appeared to grant access to every part of the machine. There were other changes too: above each major cog, a bright network of winking nodes pulsed like a chain gang of tethered fireflies. They were SAP diagrams – almost certainly submind reductions of his own consciousness template. What had previously been a purely alien machine was now fused to copies of his identity from its roots to its leaves.
As soon as his balance restored itself, Will hurried onwards into the guts of the mechanism, past an endless parade
of labelled grillwork stairways. When he dared to look into the distance, he could make out Balance agents at work like tiny ants lost among the roots. They strode around in matching industrial coveralls, tending the vast machine like robots in one of Galatea’s early air factories. They passed through each other as they toiled. Avatar-interaction norms had apparently been abandoned here along with conventional physics. Clearly, normal Wills were never supposed to come down here, let alone Glitches.
Will found a stairway going up and took it. He reasoned that the master cog at the trunk, turning above him like a steel continent, would represent Balance’s global awareness. Any edits he wanted to make needed to happen there. He froze as a squad of giants clumped along a causeway above him, their footfalls ringing on the metal. While Will was sure he was still invisible, he felt certain that physical contact would mean capture, just as it had in the Underlayer. He waited until they’d passed to sneak upwards again.
The stairway ended a dozen levels short of the master cog, forcing him to look for another route closer to the rim. He jogged from one platform to the next, avoiding the blindly stomping giants like a character in a primitive software game. However, it soon became clear that the closer he got to the heart of the system, the more agents he would have to avoid. Reaching the centre was going to be difficult.
While he paused to revise his faltering plan, a squad of agents appeared on the causeway ahead of him. He turned back only to see another group approaching from the rear. With no other option, Will scurried down the nearest staircase to make room for the avatars to walk through each other like robotic ghosts. It was at that point that he noticed the marker plaque for the subsystem where he now stood.
Orbital Defence, it read.
His breath caught. What were the chances? But then again, this close to the main cog, almost every platform was likely to correspond to something important. He hesitated, torn. He’d come to heal Balance but here lay the very exit he’d dreamed of finding. He scanned the dependent machinery below him. It looked empty. The stairway descended into the oddly warped gloom without any sign of occupants. Apparently, the whole branch was mothballed.
