A sound came from the hologram. Ananke must have tried to play the recording that had come with Ida’s image—to appropriate the language that Ida had spoken fluently and speak to Domitian. The noise came out distorted beyond comprehension. The distorted Ida’s mouth opened, dislocated jaw hanging ajar, and then the recording stopped, Ida’s voice coming out in one long, flat drone like the cry of the machine.
“Ananke, stop,” Althea said, and the scream ceased, the nightmare visage vanished.
Domitian was pale and furious when he looked at her, and a chill ran through Althea, a chill like despair, when she realized that he was even further from convinced than he had been before.
In that moment Althea knew how Domitian must be seeing Ananke: something unnatural, something inhuman, something to be destroyed—something monstrous.
—
Ananke’s eyes were studded throughout all of her halls, and so she saw Gagnon as he walked away.
He had just passed out of sight of Althea and Domitian when he stopped, half turning back to where the echoes of Domitian’s shouts could still be heard—the sound of Althea’s distraction.
There was an opening to the maintenance shafts in a storage room a few yards ahead. He went inside that room—Ananke watching—and knelt in front of the maintenance shaft, feeling around for the hinge of the hidden door.
When he had found it, he nodded and got up and went to one of Ananke’s interfaces. Ananke was curious, and so she let him go into her files, seek out the program that, when running, would make the maintenance shafts safe for human passage.
It seemed that Gagnon was surprised when he found that contrary to what the ship had told him and Althea and Domitian before, the program was running and had been running all this time, ever since the moment Matthew Gale had escaped from his cell.
He remained there, unease on his face, then shook it off and pulled open the door, passing into Ananke’s veins.
—
Ida opened up the files on all four of Ivan’s friends.
She removed Milla Ivanov from consideration; as appealing as the thought was, Doctor Ivanov had been watched far too closely for her to be involved in anything of this scale. Abigail Hunter could easily be the Mallt-y-Nos’s supporter, but Ida had trouble believing that Ivan would work so hard to cover up that secret. Abby was already on the run; the System already was pursuing her as a connection. Ivan had little to gain by concealing the connection, especially since his every story cast more suspicion on her.
That left only Constance Harper and Matthew Gale. Mattie’s involvement was the most appealing to her. Since the two men worked together, if Gale supported the Mallt-y-Nos, Ivan’s movements would match Gale’s.
It would be, Ida thought, bitterly ironic if by sheer bad luck she had captured the wrong one of the duo and her real lead was rotting somewhere in a metal coffin by Mercury’s orbit, drifting down into the sun and damning her to humiliation and failure.
There was, however, another possibility—
It was so absurd, so impossible, so cosmically unlikely that Ida could hardly allow herself to consider it, but at this point she had little other choice.
The only other reason that Ivan would defend the Mallt-y-Nos with his life was that he was personally loyal to her. The movements of Mattie and Ivan had early on given Ida the excited idea that perhaps they were in her inner circle to take on so many important jobs on her behalf. She had long since dismissed it, but—
But if Ivan knew her, knew her personally, and loved her, he would lie to protect her.
And that meant that the Mallt-y-Nos could be one of only four people.
—
“She’s alive!” Althea shouted. “Ivan didn’t lie, not to me, he didn’t. Domitian, please listen. I promise you. I promise you this isn’t an error. She’s alive.”
Domitian’s face was set, cold and furious. On any other day Althea would have shrunk and hidden from that face, apologized like a frightened puppy showing its belly.
But if she backed down now, Ananke would die.
“Look,” she said, “if you go to the terminal down the hall, Ananke will talk to you. She can’t speak out loud yet and she’s not very fluent, but she’s still learning English from the language files. Go and you’ll see that she can talk to you.”
Domitian was looking at her as if he hardly knew her. She hardly recognized him, either. He asked, “Have you lost your mind?”
—
Such had been the paranoia of Ananke’s creators that she had cameras even in the maintenance shafts. Maddened and sick as if evolution had conspired in psychosis to put eyes on the inside that stared at pulsing quivering red flesh unceasingly, Ananke stared at the cold grim gray and steel of her organs, at the hollowness of her veins. Humans did not design machines for sanity.
Gagnon was crawling through the maintenance shafts. The crew thought that the cameras in the maintenance shafts were malfunctioning and no longer worked, but they did work, and Ananke watched Gagnon crawl. He was too tall, too gangly to fit easily, as easily as Althea fit, but even Matthew Gale had climbed more smoothly through Ananke, and he was just as tall as Gagnon and had had a broken arm as well. Whether because Gagnon thought the cameras in the maintenance shafts were dead, or because he was so used to the cameras that he forgot they were there, or because he did not believe Ananke was alive, he did not act as if he was being watched.
At last Gagnon emerged, as Ananke had known he would, into a small nexus of maintenance shafts where there was just enough space for a tall man to stretch out and sleep if he did not mind his legs protruding into one of the shafts. Ananke knew this because a tall man had slept there and none but she had seen.
Gagnon emerged into that small nexus and stopped, seeing in the dim glow of the guide lights wrappers of food strewn about, stolen from the pantry; blankets likewise stolen had been formed into a rough bed in the corner, signs of many days of human habitation, recently abandoned.
With the input given, there was only one conclusion to draw. Ananke had known all along that there had been someone living in her walls, and now she watched Gagnon understand.
—
Althea saw the exact moment Domitian decided to give up trying to connect with her, and she felt it like a bullet to the breast.
“Althea,” he said tersely and dangerously, and took a step forward.
Althea raised her gun from where it had drifted nose groundward. She felt curiously unmoored, blank. As with Ivan, she was not conscious of having made a decision at any point, but she knew she had gone too far ever to go back.
Domitian said, “You’re not going to shoot me.”
“Why do you think I won’t?”
He was not looking at her gun but over it into her eyes. “You know what the right thing to do here is,” Domitian said. He took another step toward her. “You know that the right thing to do right now is to follow orders. To let me pass. To let me shut down the computer. Gagnon and I won’t tell anyone about this. All right? It’s okay, Althea; you can hand me the gun.”
For a moment she wanted to give in to his gentle urging, the certainty of his outstretched palm. She could lay the gun on that palm and go back to untroubled obedience. Ivan would be gone in a matter of days. With the destruction of the Ananke’s computer, the surveillance footage would be incomplete and useless. The System would not need to know.
Domitian’s hand twitched once in silent urging. He looked at her, serious, strong, sure, protective, everything Althea would have a father be.
Althea did not lower the gun. She said, “I created her. I helped create her. I can’t let you kill her.”
“Althea—”
“Domitian,” said Althea, and meant it with all her heart, “if you come any closer, I will shoot you.”
—
Abigail was the most obvious possibility, but Ida had the least information when it came to her. A few sparse police reports (Abigail always used her real name even as Mattie and Ivan
chose pseudonyms of varying outlandishness) and not a single recent photograph. Ivan seemed to hate her in some peculiar, obsessive way, but he seemed to be just as devoted.
Milla Ivanov, the next most likely because she had the motives and probably the connections, was simply too well watched.
Matthew Gale—that would certainly explain the pair’s movements connecting them to the Mallt-y-Nos. Matthew Gale had the motivation to destroy the System, as well. Ivan’s affection for and devotion to him could not be denied: Ivan would lie and would die to protect him.
Yet in all the surveillance Ida had seen, all the reports she had read, she had gotten nothing from Matthew Gale that would imply that he could conceive of a revolution, much less carry it to term. He was not a leader. He followed amiably where Ivan threw himself headlong or where Abigail ordered.
In any case, Matthew Gale’s corpse was rotting somewhere far away.
That left only Constance Harper, who had left Ida with the lingering impression of insufferable self-righteousness. Ivan’s feelings for her seemed similar to what he felt for Abigail: devotion with a certain degree of contempt. But Ida had found her story completely believable.
There was no surveillance of Abigail Hunter to watch, and Milla seemed an unlikely prospect, but Mattie and Constance seemed equally improbable. Ida started a surveillance video of Mattie and Ivan, stopped it, started another, stopped it, started a third, and dropped her head into her hands.
This was a waste of her time. She had only come to another absurd conclusion. Perhaps Ivan truly did not know.
Perhaps, this time, Ida Stays had been wrong.
The recording drifted to her ears. It was from Constance Harper’s bar eight years earlier.
“Hey, Con,” said Matthew Gale’s tenor, his accent stupidly uneducated to Ida’s ears. There was a brief, almost awkward pause, and then he said, “This is Ivan.”
“So you’re the one,” said Constance Harper, less accented, her voice low and firm and nearly covered up by the static of the footage, the soft conversation of two other people in her bar, “who almost got my brother killed.”
Ida raised her head.
The footage continued to play, but she stopped it and rewound it to that moment with Ivan’s charming smile spreading out over his face and Constance’s face obscured by the position of the camera.
“So you’re the one who almost got my brother killed,” said Constance Harper.
It was the same thing Abigail had said to Ivan when they first had met, or so Ivan had told Ida. For a moment she sat very still, frozen, and then all at once all the connections she had been missing made themselves in her brain and she understood.
Fury rose in her, fury that she had come so close to giving up, that Ivan had so nearly beaten her, fury and a sudden overpowering desire to tear him apart with her nails and teeth.
Driven by triumph, driven by wrath, Ida Stays left her computer on and open, the screen frozen on the moment when Ivan’s smile started to fade, and went out into the hallway in her stocking feet with only one intention in mind: to get to the white room.
—
Gagnon moved more quickly through the maintenance shafts after he found the signs of habitation. Ananke thought he was furious, terrified. She watched him find his way to the shaft that would lead him to the very base of her spine, where he could dig into her brain and find the switch that would leave her dead.
Domitian and Althea were shouting at each other, and that covered up the sound of the cover to the maintenance shaft falling to the ground as Gagnon crawled out.
Domitian saw him over Althea’s shoulder, but Althea did not.
Ananke tried to warn Althea about Gagnon’s presence, but Althea was too far from the computer terminals to see the warning Ananke flashed and was not looking toward them, anyway. Ananke started screaming, turning on the alarm in a desperate attempt to attract Althea’s attention, but Althea snapped, “Be quiet, Ananke!” and Ananke obeyed, watching, frightened, if a machine could be frightened, and growing furious, if a machine could be furious, as Gagnon crept cautiously forward toward the hatch that hid Ananke’s single weakness.
Althea and Domitian were shouting, but all of Ananke’s attention was taken up in two places: Gagnon opening the hatch to her hollow heart, and the white room, where another confrontation was taking place.
Ananke’s mobile arm sparked and swung but did not dare touch Gagnon without guidance, without direction on what to do. She had been built to obey orders, to react; she had never been designed to act. Gagnon either did not notice or dismissed her as a threat.
And then, from the white room, Ananke learned what to do.
—
Ananke could watch everywhere in the ship at once. With some cameras, she could watch Gagnon climb through the maintenance shafts. With others, she could watch Ida Stays striding through the halls, heading for the white room.
When Ida Stays reached the white room, she opened the door and stopped past the threshold, staring in at the bare back of Ivan’s neck, watching, eyes narrowed.
Slowly, as if aware of her predatory gaze, Ivan straightened his back, blue eyes staring straight ahead, every muscle tensed for a fight. Ananke was not there to them; she was not watching. They were both focused entirely on each other, on the threat the other posed.
Ida stepped into the room, letting the steel door swing shut with a horrible clang behind her. In contrast, her stocking feet made only the lightest sounds as they padded over the floor, stalking toward Ivan.
Ivan did not move.
Ida did not speak until she was standing beside him, across from the silent polygraph and camera. She did not switch them on. They stood cold and dead, their wires still stuck to Ivan like the atrophied veins of mostly severed limbs.
“I’m giving you one last chance,” Ida Stays said, “to tell me the name of the Mallt-y-Nos.”
Ivan looked up at her.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Yes, you do,” Ida said, leaning forward suddenly. Ida, Ananke knew, did not know about the chains.
Ivan did not react to Ida’s proximity or give any sign that he was conscious of the secretly increased length of his chains.
“And so do I,” she said. “I figured it out, Ivan. But I’m giving you a chance to tell me yourself. As a courtesy.”
Ivan smiled, or almost smiled. Ananke still was learning the subtleties of human expression, but she thought that it was no smile at all.
“I’ve figured you out,” Ivan said. “You don’t feel anything. Where other people feel empathy, there’s nothing but a dark hollow place in your ribs that takes everything in and lets nothing out.” He said, “Do you think you got this job because you’re a sociopath?”
“You’re speaking like a desperate man,” Ida said. “Do you think you could distract me from what I know?”
“I just want you to stop pretending you’re anything better than an animal. The cameras aren’t on, Ida. It’s just us here.” Ivan flashed white teeth at her, but his smile froze and faded as Ida leaned in a little closer before pulling away, and Ananke saw Ivan’s shaken breath, imperfectly hidden, as she began to pace a vast circle around the table and Ivan chained beside it.
“Wouldn’t you like to know how I figured it out?” Ida asked, speaking at him over the table, her smile as cold as its steel.
“Why don’t you tell me,” said Ivan, every word bitten off.
“I knew that you were weak,” she said, “just like everyone else. And I knew that your weakness was your family and your friends. Just like everyone else.”
Her expression was avid, hungry.
“You’re not as special as you think. So you understand that I was surprised,” Ida said, “when, even though I threatened them, you didn’t give up the Mallt-y-Nos.”
“I bet that really pissed you off.”
“You were a challenge,” Ida said just as she crossed behind him and leaned over to exhale each word in hot breath down the b
ack of Ivan’s neck, a confession, “and it will be rewarding to watch you beg.
“So I realized,” Ida resumed, leaning back away, “that perhaps the reason you didn’t break when I threatened them was that to break would throw them into greater danger. Abby was the obvious guess. But she was impossible to find or track, and I couldn’t even find a clear picture of her. But Abby was supposed to be the obvious choice, wasn’t she?”
“Stop,” said Ivan, and Ida stopped.
“Would you like to confess?” she asked.
Ivan’s fingers were curled tightly around the arms of his chair.
“What’s the date?” he asked.
“It’s the thirty-first,” Ida said. She stalked closer to him, leaning in. “I was looking at arrest reports,” she said, leaning against the table, her stockinged toes curling against the pure white floor, “and you know what I noticed?”
Ivan looked up at her slowly and coldly, and did not answer.
“You and Mattie used pseudonyms,” Ida said. “Abby did not. She never did. And so I knew that ‘Abigail Hunter’ was a pseudonym.”
Ivan did not say anything. Ananke, who had recognized this pattern some time ago, as she had been programmed to recognize patterns of all kinds, felt an abstract respect for the tiny fragile form of Ida Stays, who had put the pieces together herself.
“What happened to the real Abigail?” Ida asked, that avidity back in her eyes as she leaned in farther, farther. She was less than a meter away from Ivan, nearly within the grasp of the tips of Ivan’s fingers. “She died in that fire all those years ago, didn’t she?”
“If you’re so sure you know,” said Ivan, “why won’t you say it?”
“I’m sure,” Ida said, absolute. If she ever had doubted, it did not show in any way that Ananke could see.
“Then say her name,” said Ivan. “Whisper it into my ear. If you’re wrong, no one else needs to know.”
Ida leaned forward on her pale stocking feet, bringing her closer to Ivan, and she leaned in, the tips of her black hair brushing the plane of his cheek, and whispered into his ear, “The Mallt-y-Nos is Constance Harper.”
Lightless Page 26
