To Hold Infinity

by John Meaney

  “Shit! We need medical—quick, try the house system.”

  Yoshiko waved the bedside terminal into life. A pulsing blue diagram swam above it: Tetsuo's info, the display she and Vin had been looking at, before the ball…

  “There's a pulse.” Maggie's voice cut through Yoshiko's thoughts. “Oh, God.”

  “What is it?” Ice flowed through Yoshiko.

  “It—” Maggie looked up, her eyes hollow with despair. “It's brain stem function only.”

  The body began to breathe again, forced to respire by the machine's insistence, but no mental activity registered upon the display.

  Dear God. Let her live.

  Please.

  “Are you—all right?” A man's voice, trailing off.

  Please let her live—

  Yoshiko wiped tears from her eyes and turned.

  Rafael de la Vega was standing in the doorway. His eyes, glittering, were fastened upon the holo display by the bed: the pulsing blue diagram of a Luculentus mind, not the readouts from the autodoc.

  “What is that?”

  His voice flayed Yoshiko's soul.

  Then a smaller form was pushing past Rafael, into the room. Brian Donnelly rushed over, and staggered to a halt by the bed.

  “Medics!” he shouted into his wrist terminal. “This location. Quickly!”

  Rafael blinked, and a transformation spread over his features.

  “They're coming,” he said to Brian. “I'm in contact—” He pointed at his headgear. “—and there's a team headed this way.”

  Yoshiko looked up at Rafael.

  “I have to go.” His expression was sombre. “Good luck.”

  It was you…

  She glanced quickly at the bedside holo, then back at Rafael. His eyes followed hers, involuntarily.

  Icy certainty descended upon her.

  Rafael.

  “Come on!” Brian was almost screaming into his wrist terminal. “What's keeping you?”

  Red jumpsuited men and women burst in through the doorway, pushing their way past Rafael. Behind them, a big white armoured drone rumbled in.

  “Code alpha,” said one of the medics, and placed a hand on Brian's shoulder. “Stand aside.”

  The drone's upper lid slid open as the medics, working furiously, grabbed Vin and the autodoc both, and lowered them into the drone.

  “Femtofacts active.” Another medic, a young woman, stabbed frantic control gestures beside the drone. “AIs up. Diagnostics on.”

  Black gel engulfed Vin's pale body, while urgent phase-space displays blossomed above the drone.

  Rafael…

  “OK.” The medic was intent upon the displays. “Seal it.”

  Gone. Rafael was gone.

  The drone slammed shut.

  “We've got her.”

  “How is—?” Maggie started.

  A medic brushed her aside.

  “OK, troops,” the woman said. “Move it.”

  “Flyer in ten.”

  “I want it in three. Tell them.” The woman glanced around at her team. “Right. We're taking her to the main steps. Let's go.”

  She moved out at a run, flanked by the drone.

  “You.” Her finger stabbed, as she called back over her shoulder, “Stay. Help the woman.”

  One of the medics stopped, while the rest of the team sprinted after their leader and the drone.

  Yoshiko started to follow, but the remaining medic held her by the shoulder.

  “Just a minute, ma'am.”

  No sign of Rafael. He must have slipped out when the medics arrived.

  “What's wrong?” she said. “Vin's—”

  “Well, for one thing, your left arm's broken.”

  “What?”

  Yoshiko looked down, and for the first time saw how unnaturally twisted her forearm was. Pain flooded through her, at the realization.

  “Yoshiko…” Maggie's voice trailed off.

  “Go on.”

  Maggie nodded abruptly, and moved out at a broken run.

  “Just hold still.” The medic slapped an anaesthesia patch on Yoshiko's neck, then snapped a cylindrical cast into place around her forearm. “This'll hurt.”

  Not pain, but an unpleasant grinding. Micro-servos drilled into her flesh, forcing the two halves of her snapped ulna into alignment.

  “I'm going with Vin,” she said through gritted teeth.

  Rafael.

  “You shouldn't—OK, I'll come with you.”

  You bastard. You're behind it.

  A swelling sensation. Fluid-borne femtocytes, pumped into her arm.

  Tetsuo. And Xanthia, I'm sure of it.

  “Mind that debris.”

  The medic helped her out into the corridor. He turned at the sound of an anguished voice, said “Excuse me,” to Yoshiko, then left to help someone else.

  Rafael…

  Red jumpsuits mingled with torn finery, a mêlée of victims and rescuers. Up ahead, Maggie was walking with her arm round Brian's shoulders, following the medical drone, with its most precious cargo.

  Vin…

  Just for a moment, among the milling confusion, Yoshiko thought she saw Rafael's darkly handsome features, but then he was gone.

  Vengeance.

  Steel hardened Yoshiko's grim heart.

  I'm going to get you, Rafael.

  Vengeance.

  I swear it.

  A torn bouquet of flowers under foot.

  By my family's blood…

  She slipped, corrected her balance.

  …I swear it.

  Cold enveloped Yoshiko's forearm, and beads of condensation formed on the cast. She imagined she could feel the femtocytes at work, knitting her bone together.

  There were people in worse shape.

  Maggie, still holding on to Brian, looked back, concerned.

  Shaking her head, Yoshiko motioned Maggie on.

  Yoshiko stepped around a grey-skinned man whose eyes were closed, as though in sleep. A haggard woman, kneeling beside him, looked up in sudden hope at Yoshiko.

  Yoshiko halted, not knowing what to say, but one of the medics came up behind her, and crouched to examine the fallen man.

  Yoshiko moved on.

  Near the centre of the house, clouds of dust still swirled, and Yoshiko put her right forearm across her mouth and nose, trying to breathe through her sleeve's fabric.

  Many of the rooms they passed contained medical drones, treating people who had taken refuge there. Mostly, the drones merely extruded fibres and other appendages to their patients; in two cases, people were inside their drones, but sitting up. Not sealed away.

  The drones were so capable, it was better to treat the patients in situ than subject them to the trauma of travel to a med-centre.

  Shards of ceramic and glass scrunched underfoot as Yoshiko reached the main atrium. She skirted round a pile of rubble which had slid like an avalanche from a ballroom doorway.

  One of the big bronze doors was ripped and bent, hanging on by a torn hinge.

  The medical drone was negotiating its way past the debris and dazed people.

  “Vin?”

  It was Lori, limping to the drone, her face as pale as its casing. She was incongruously lopsided, one foot suspended centimetres in the air by the lev-field, the other on the ground.

  Her eyes, when she looked at Yoshiko, were filled with distress.

  “They're taking her to Lucis.”

  Vin's body, Yoshiko thought. Taking it to be examined, certified, and disposed of.

  Words failed her. All she could do was hug Lori, and hold her tight.

  Over Lori's shoulder, the drone's status displays were visible: Vin's body, held in stasis, its slow pulse a sad illusion. Her soul was surely gone.

  A shudder passed through Lori, and Yoshiko had an intuition of the reason why—deep in interface, Lori was linked with the medical drone, its continuous scans delivering nothing but bad news.

  “I'm OK.” Lori backed away, dabbing at her e
yes.

  She lurched, almost tripping, her suspended foot wobbling in the EM field.

  “Hang on a moment.”

  Yoshiko crouched down, and picked up a triangular shard of ceramic. Holding Lori's ankle steady, she sawed at Lori's sandal until she could prise away the hardened gel. Yoshiko pulled, and it tore off in one piece. She flicked the stuff aside.

  It whisked upwards in the EM field, then blew away in a draught towards the outer doors.

  Lori smiled wanly.

  “Thanks, Yoshiko.”

  A medic came up to her.

  “The flyer's ready, Luculenta Maximilian.”

  “I'm ready.” Lori swallowed.

  Yoshiko gently touched her arm.

  “Take Brian with you.”

  As the medics manoeuvred the drone out through the doors, Brian stepped mechanically aside, face drained and pale. Maggie was watching him, to make sure he did not fall.

  Lori's chin lifted.

  She turned to look at a broad-shouldered Luculentus, clad in black and grey, who was directing a newly arrived team of engineers and drones. He stopped his verbal commands, and returned Lori's regard.

  Their nonverbal communication lasted only a second.

  “This is Professor Sunadomari.” Lori briefly touched Yoshiko. “She's in charge while I'm gone.”

  Speaking for Yoshiko's benefit.

  The Luculentus bowed. “Professor.”

  He turned back to his team, and delivered a rapid-fire series of instructions to a Fulgida engineer.

  Lori walked up to Brian and took his arm. Together, while Yoshiko watched from the doorway, they followed the drone down the broad marble steps. The lawn, lit by big emergency glowglobes floating overhead, shone with an eerie pallor.

  The medical flyers were the colour of dead bones.

  Flanked by Lori and Brian, the drone moved up a ramp, into the nearest flyer.

  As the ramp retreated into the vessel, a sick feeling took hold of Yoshiko's stomach, reminding her of long helpless days at the medical complex, while Ken lay dying. The smartvirus ravaged his femtocytes, destroying his body in the process. Medical AIs battled for days, but she knew from the first that the struggle was lost. She could only wait for the inevitable.

  Warning ripples of amber light strobed across the hull.

  The flyer rose smoothly into the high darkness, then sped in the direction of Lucis City, dwindling to become an orange spark in the night, and winked out.

  Yoshiko stared, unseeing, at the far cold stars.

  Rousing herself, she turned back inside, and saw Maggie in the entranceway, video-globe floating over her shoulder.

  “I can't apologize.” Maggie shrugged, her eyes lost in sorrow. “It's what I do. Whatever's going on, however bad, there's always a part of me watching and analysing and filing for later, and drawing up a voice-over commentary. To give things meaning.”

  Yoshiko wondered what certainty had been lost from Maggie's life, that she was so obsessive in granting it a framework of significance.

  It didn't matter. She had seen the tears in Maggie's eyes, watched her furiously helping to get Vin attached to the autodoc.

  For all the good it had done.

  “Walk with me, Maggie?”

  “Yeah. You bet.”

  Side by side, they went back inside the ruined house.

  “The bastard!” A man's aggrieved shout drifted from a far corridor.

  Yoshiko looked, but could see nothing. Shrugging, she turned away, and followed Maggie to the ballroom entrance.

  She stood in a current of warm air delivered by a honeycombed chemical heater, hugged herself, and watched the engineers at work.

  The torn roof was mostly open to the cold night sky. Beneath the dark rent, tiny drones spun monomer webs, strengthening the building's basic structure. Black filaments were strung across the open spaces, and wrapped tightly around pillars on the verge of collapse.

  From outside, an hysterical wail, and the slapping sound of a dermal patch hastily applied. It sent a shiver down Yoshiko's spine: someone had just been told the worst of news.

  “Let's go back,” she said, and Maggie nodded.

  They ducked out through a gaping hole which should not have been there, avoiding a trickle of water from a torn pipe. More medical drones, more red jumpsuits. Another medic team running alongside a sealed drone. An engineer looked blankly after them, cutting graser dangled limply at her side.

  Maggie's voice was grim. “Looks like they cut someone out of the rubble.”

  Glancing up, Yoshiko saw the video-globe was tracking them.

  “I wonder where Septor is.” She knew her voice could be edited out, later.

  “He and Lori had an argument,” Maggie said. “Vin told me. He went to stay with some buddies, I think.”

  “Oh, no.”

  Yoshiko felt wretched, for Septor's sake as well as Lori's.

  “Damn it!” A curse sounded from around a comer. “Bastard thing clawed me!”

  Exchanging glances, Yoshiko and Maggie went to investigate.

  A blue-jumpsuited engineer was kneeling before a pile of rubble, swearing softly. Thin parallel lines of blood broke the skin on the back of his hand. He sucked at the wound.

  A low growling sounded from beneath the heap of debris.

  “Let me.” Yoshiko crouched down beside the engineer.

  “Watch it.” From a med-kit, the engineer sprayed gel onto his hand. “Damned thing's pissed, and I don't blame it.”

  “I'll be careful.”

  Yoshiko got down on hands and knees. Ducking low, she could see a dark cavity in the rubble, framed by a bent but unbroken classic carbon chair.

  “Come on, sweetheart.” Yoshiko kept her voice low, almost crooning. “Let's get you out of there.”

  Another growl, softer this time.

  “Yes, I know. Come on, everything's OK.”

  Nothing.

  “Come on, then.”

  A wide paw appeared in the shadowed hole.

  “Good girl. That's a good girl.”

  A cautious whiskered nose followed, then the lynxette crawled out into the open, shook herself, and stropped her long whiskers against Yoshiko's face.

  “I'll be damned.” The engineer sat back on his heels, eyes wondering.

  Yoshiko rubbed the bridge of the lynxette's nose.

  Behind her, Maggie spoke: “You're a natural.”

  Overhead, the floating video-globe bobbed as though in agreement.

  Xanthia pulsed inside him.

  Stumbling, half-blinded by the urgency of his desire, he made his way down the wide marble steps and across the lawn. Paramedics and engineers rushed past him, heading into the building.

  “Are you OK, sir?” A concerned face, above a red jumpsuit.

  Rafael nodded, and walked urgently on.

  A group of proctors—their uniforms torn, their faces bloody—were helping walking wounded up a big flyer's ramp.

  “Mind your backs! Coming through!”

  Medics escorted a sealed drone into the flyer.

  Bright amber shimmered and strobed: another flyer taking off, its warning lights beating counterpoint to the insistence in Rafael's breast, its urgency matching the hot overspills from cache which threatened to engulf him.

  He staggered, caught himself, forced himself to walk on.

  Just hold on for a minute more, that's all. One minute more.

  He avoided an enquiring look from another medic. Almost immediately, someone touched her arm and she was caught up in the emergency evacuation of some dead or dying victim, and Rafael ducked away, out of her sight.

  Bright, silvery white, the glowglobes.

  Head pounding, he sighted his flyer.

  {{{HeaderBegin: Module =A34…<<>>}}}

  <<>>

  He moaned softly, unable to enter command interface without losing control entirely.

  If a
medic spotted him then, he would be taken for medical exam; even a cursory examination would reveal the additional plexcores in his body. A deep scan would tell them everything.

  Just hold back.

  Hold back hold back hold back.

  His flyer. A small one, a crimson Phirina Duo, the colour of burning strontium.

  He slapped a hand on its hull, and a ramp extruded, then pulled him inside the small cabin.

  “Command:—” His voice shook; he hoped the system recognized it. “Darken…cockpit.”

  The bubble membrane polarized to inky black, shutting out the busy swarm of emergency flyers.

  Xanthia.

  Yoshiko's diagram: a Luculentus mind, which might, just might, be his. The selected parameters had not revealed the full extent of VSI, the full size of the plexcore nexus which formed the mind's substrate. But the swirling patterns of thought had been of such complexity—

  Yearning, yearning, to break free from cache.

  He held her in, just for a moment more. Consider the danger. What did Yoshiko know? Suspect? Was the diagram from Tetsuo, somehow?

  Did he have to take action now?

  He saw again the shock on the Earther woman's face, reflected that the house was swarming with proctors but none seemed to be seeking him, and decided that the risk was negligible. Riskier to deal with her now, in fact, than to bide his time.

  Hold back. You want to let go, but stop and consider first.

  That damned Earther woman.

  Tetsuo was the source of Rafael's own mu-space tech. But Tetsuo should have had no access to LuxPrime info: his commsware had nothing to do with Luculenti minds. Not until Rafael had copied it and turned it to his own uses.

  Why a Luculentus mind? The diagram looked like phase maps from a deep scan, output from the kind of scanware used only in the Baton Ceremony—or Rafael's own infiltration code. Either way, it was from the kind of quantum-level measurement which destroyed the original even as it recorded the variables exactly.

  Perhaps it was a simulation, like the simulation he had built yesterday—using three ghost-Rafaels—to test his infiltration code's tightness and security. But, if it were a simulation, it must be finely detailed, in that case, built up from the lowest levels. Who, other than LuxPrime, would create a model like that?

  Low level. Levels, levels…

  Why does maths lie at the heart of science? Why are features of the universe algorithmically compressible? Of what strange substrate is maths itself an emergent property?