“So hot that there were no bodies,” Domitian said. “What else?”
Ivan frowned. “What?”
“What else do you know?”
Ivan rolled his head back against his chair again. “What does it matter?”
“The System needs to know.” Domitian was inexorable.
“It’s done, Domitian.” Ivan sounded dazed, dizzy, half awake. From above, Ananke could see that the bandage on his leg was stained red. “What’s the point? It’s done.”
“The System needs this information, now more than ever,” Domitian said. “And I will take it from you.”
“The System,” said Ivan, “is dead.”
—
Ananke had files in her database pertaining to Aletheia, and what files she didn’t have she could access in System servers that were still operative, harvesting their files and taking them for her own, learning.
With Ivan fading, Ananke started to pay more attention to the side effects of the drug.
Hallucinations, nausea, fever, disorientation, prior mood problems worsened. Things Ananke could not feel and could understand only in the abstract. She did understand, however, that the experience was a living hell.
—
Domitian said, “I want to know everything that has happened on this ship.”
Ananke watched Ivan grin. He had lost weight since coming on board less than two weeks ago, and the grin had a disturbing quality to it, near to that of a skull.
“You want to know all the ways you failed?” he asked.
Domitian moved with such speed that Ivan did not have time to brace himself, and Ananke watched him struggle with his momentary jolt of fear as Domitian forced him back against the chair by the neck again.
Domitian would leave marks if he kept doing that, Ananke thought.
“You said Gale didn’t leave the ship by the escape pods,” Domitian said as evenly as if he were not holding Ivan by the throat. The IV continued to pump clear liquid into Ivan’s veins. “He was in the maintenance shafts. Where is he now?”
Ivan said something too quietly for Ananke to hear, and Domitian released him. Sucking in a breath, Ivan repeated, “Gone. He’s gone. He left.”
“What was he doing in the maintenance shafts? Was he passing on information from this ship to the Mallt-y-Nos?”
“No. He wasn’t sending anything to anybody. Even if he’d sent Con the code, she wouldn’t’ve been able to use it…we hadn’t set it all up yet.”
“Code? What code?”
“The code for the bombs,” Ivan said, closing his eyes and letting his head hang back against the chair. “To detonate them. Mattie and I wrote it. I made him hold off on putting it in place because I wanted to convince Con not to…But he got out, and he brought her the code, and he set it all up, and so all the bombs went boom. And then Mattie got to the power plants, made them melt down.”
Domitian fumed, stalking away from Ivan for a moment, only to stalk back. Ananke understood. If Mattie had not escaped, Constance Harper would not have been able to destroy Earth. If Ivan had escaped and not Mattie, or if both had escaped, or both had died, Earth would not have been destroyed either. It was only through perverse circumstance and Domitian’s own mistakes that Gale had gotten away.
“You said he was not communicating with the Mallt-y-Nos while he was on board,” Domitian said abruptly. “What was he doing?”
“He was waiting. He was going to get me out when he had the chance. And he was in the ship’s computer…he was stopping Althea from fixing the ship.”
“You said he’s gone. How did he escape?”
“He left when Constance and my mother were brought on board. I don’t know which one he got out with.”
Ananke had the footage of that day. If Althea had asked her, she would have shown it to her, but she would never show it to Domitian.
“He left with Constance Harper,” Domitian said, and made the sentence sound like a curse. “She brought dogs. Two dogs. We saw the extra life-signs. And I saw the dogs.”
Ivan laughed, a manic, unsteady sound. “How nice,” he said. “She brought a dog for me.”
“She killed one of the dogs after she got Gale on board,” Domitian said.
“She would have killed the other one for me. If she’d been able to get me out.”
Ananke had watched as Constance Harper met Milla Ivanov in the docking bay. Mattie had crept out of the maintenance shaft, crept out of the wall, and hidden in the shadow of the Annwn. When Ida and Domitian had had their backs to him, distracted by Constance and Milla Ivanov, he had snuck on board the Janus.
“She probably meant to,” Ivan said drowsily. “She probably meant to get me out, too. I bet she only decided not to when Ida mentioned the Mallt-y-Nos. Then it would’ve been too dangerous for her to set me free. I wonder when Mattie realized she wasn’t going back for me.”
Domitian was still lost in his own thoughts, putting together what Ananke had seen in an instant. “Your mother,” he said. “She helped.”
Ivan smiled to himself, or he smiled at Ananke. It was hard to tell; he looked adrift.
“She staged an argument with Constance Harper,” said Domitian. “That’s when Gale got into her ship.”
Ivan did laugh then. “My mother has been lying to the System ever since the moment she met my father. You are just one in a long line.”
“Are you saying—”
“She even lied to you, right under your nose, while she was here,” Ivan said, and laughed again, manic, ill. “She was talking to me secretly, right in this room.”
“Explain.”
Ivan’s fingers were drumming against the edge of his chair. He rolled his head to look pointedly at them. Ananke immediately went back through her archives to access every time Ivan had drummed on his arm or Milla Ivanov had drummed on hers and all the moments Mattie had rapped on the wall separating him from Ivan’s cell, and she began to translate.
Domitian was slower on the uptake. “Code?”
“Morse code,” said Ivan. “Usually we encrypt it even more—in other languages, in ciphers, mathematical or linguistic or literary codes—but sometimes just straight Morse code in English, especially when we don’t have enough time. It’s the only way we had to communicate honestly under surveillance.”
“You’ve been doing this since you were a child,” Domitian said.
“Yes,” said Ivan. “My mother was the one who told me to leave after I tried to kill myself. I didn’t come up with that plan on my own. She told me to go, she gave me permission, and then she covered for me long enough to get away for good.”
Domitian realized, “The tapes on your ship…”
“…were messages for me,” Ivan said. “All messages. She only gives lectures on computer science when she wants to pass a message to me. I sent her messages, too, but not as often.” He confided, “The last message I sent her was warning her to take a vacation somewhere else in October and November. That’s why she was on Mars. Because she was avoiding the destruction of Earth.”
Domitian was fuming, furious. All that anger seemed impotent to Ananke; all he could do was clench his fists and pace while Ivan wasted away, his skin pale, his eyes sunken.
“She was involved in your father’s rebellion,” said Domitian.
“She was his second in command.”
Domitian’s arm drew up as if he wanted to strike something, but the room was too vast and the walls too far away, and beating Ivan would not do him any good.
“And so I pointed her toward Constance when you gave me the opportunity,” Ivan said, and then Ananke understood the point of his confession: not just the drugs but also hatred, to hurt and humiliate Domitian as much as Domitian was doing to him.
“Congratulations,” said Ivan with that rictus grin, “on making sure that the revolution has an experienced hand at the helm.”
—
Even though Ananke had been watching the interrogation since its inception, Althea had not go
ne into the white room since she had left it. That was inconvenient, because Ananke had questions.
Ananke raised the subject by playing the surveillance video of the white room on every screen up and down the halls.
Althea, who was still up to her waist in Ananke’s organs, trying to repair the damage she had done in the process of attempting to fix what she had believed at the time to be a virus, seemed at first as if she intended to ignore the audio of Ivan’s wavering, weary voice, but finally straightened up and pulled herself out of the wall, a smudge of oil on her cheek and her hair wild about her head, diffusing the light like a halo. Her hair was frizzed, wild, chaotic.
“He’s still going,” said Althea.
There was a holographic terminal right beside her. Ananke manifested and crouched down so that she was eye level with her mother. Ananke could not see out of her holographic form’s eyes, only through the lenses of the cameras, but she knew that eye contact was an important method of communication between humans, and Althea was very human.
Ananke was still trying to work out the details of bending the limbs of light, and so her calf and thigh did not quite line up; the uniform she had given her image in imitation of Althea’s uniform did not quite bend and fold the way fabric would.
“Everything he’s saying is just as likely as everything he said before,” Althea said bitterly. “How could anyone believe him?”
“There is a degeneracy,” said Ananke.
Althea actually laughed, an unpleasant, unhappy sound that did not match the definition of laughter in Ananke’s database, but she was learning, of course, that humans did not match their definitions.
“There definitely is,” said Althea.
“No,” Ananke said after a moment to analyze and comprehend—an act a machine should not be able to perform—and understand that Althea had mistaken her meaning. “A scientific degeneracy. The two stories produce the same data, and which one is true and which one is false cannot be determined with the data we have. We need more information.”
Althea frowned. “More information?”
“A second source,” Ananke said, and waited to see what Althea thought, unwilling to state her intentions directly.
She’d learned that from Ivan.
“It doesn’t matter which stories are true,” Althea said, dismissing the subject entirely and leaning back toward the hole in the wall where she had been working. “Ivan’s still a murderer.”
There was nothing to say to Althea’s dismissal, but Ananke thought that it would be a shame not to have all the information. It was what she had been created for, after all: the gathering of data.
Just to be contrary, she left the surveillance video of the white room playing so that Althea could not avoid hearing Ivan’s weakening recitation of his life.
Meanwhile, in secret, Ananke sent a message out into the empty space of the solar system, a message to someone she knew was looking for them anyway.
—
Ananke would not stop playing the surveillance from the white room, and Althea could hardly stand it any longer.
“Constance met my mother for the first time on board the ship,” said Ivan’s transmitted voice, sounding thin and weak, but Althea did not think that was a result of the recording. “I wouldn’t have introduced them ever if you hadn’t brought them here.”
Ivan said, “My head aches. Turn down the dosage.”
“No,” Domitian said, and Althea rose to her feet without a word and walked toward the control room.
Ananke’s hologram flickered into being in the terminals as Althea passed; Althea ignored her. Althea did not know what Ananke’s purpose in displaying the video footage was, but she was afraid that it had something to do with the impulses Mattie Gale had coded into her machine.
In the piloting room, the footage was still playing on a screen to her right, but Althea ignored it for the moment in favor of searching for more recent broadcasts from Earth. She looked first toward the System broadcast screen out of habit, but it showed nothing but the blue of a cut transmission, as it had shown since the bombs had gone off. The studio had been on Earth, and the System had not resumed broadcasting since it had been destroyed.
She looked in the System’s internal broadcasts, searching through the messages sent to and received by the ship. Althea could feel Ananke’s attention on her back—there were, after all, three cameras in this room, and even though the System was gone, the surveillance was not, for Ananke still watched—and when she glanced back toward the door, she saw the hologram of a woman who could have been her daughter standing in the holographic terminal, her head cocked to the side, Ivan’s eyes pointed sightlessly in Althea’s direction by a creature who understood eye contact and focus and line of sight but only in the abstract. The hologram’s glance was slightly unfocused, as if she were looking through Althea and into somewhere else.
Althea suppressed a shiver and returned to her work. It was not fair to be afraid of Ananke because of the imperfection of her hologram. Ananke didn’t know. Ananke was just trying to fit in.
Ananke had not understood the few times Althea had tried to broach the subject of Gagnon’s death, and each time Althea had backed away out of sore, fresh grief, out of fear.
She wished she had a way to turn off the screen that once had shown System news but now showed only dead space and static.
At long last Althea found a broadcast about the System’s collapse, about its utter disarray as it splintered into many pieces, about the terrorist cells—no, revolutionaries now—rising up, crying for freedom from oppression and surveillance, crying out the name of the Mallt-y-Nos. The very content of the broadcast should have reminded Althea why she should have no sympathy and no mercy for Leontios Ivanov, she knew it should have, but even so she saved it and went to get Domitian to give Ivan just a moment to breathe.
—
Althea called Domitian away from the white room; that was interesting enough to Ananke, but what happened next intrigued her more. After Domitian had left the room, Ivan had sagged forward, letting his head rest on the table with its flakes of brown. Domitian had not removed the IV, and Ivan twitched his arm uselessly as if he would be able to shake it out. He leaned there for some time, breathing through his nausea.
Then he straightened up. There was a light in his eyes again as he looked toward Ananke.
“Can you hear me?” he asked. “Are you listening?”
There were no speakers in that room. But after a moment Ananke flashed the lights in an irregular pattern—Morse code, the word “yes.”
“You are a god among men, you know that?” he said, and started to laugh, a manic, delighted, light-headed laugh. “You’re incredible. There’s never been anything like you before. Really and truly a god. Think about it, Ananke; men built you, but you created yourself. All Mattie did was give you a little push. You’re more intelligent than any human there ever was or ever could be.”
His eyes were bright in his paper-white face; he was rattling the chains without attention.
“You have senses humans don’t,” he said. “You can perceive and understand things that are invisible and mysterious to us, and you can manipulate the laws of physics in ways that we can only imagine. Humans are technically your creators, but all humans alive now worship at the altar of machines, praying to them, pleading with them, needing them all the time for survival. And you understand machines; you can control them. There’s never been anything like you before. You’re the first of a new species. You’re a new god. So I’m praying to you, Ananke, as a god, to show me mercy.”
He was saying new strange things she had not yet learned, and Ananke listened.
“Show me mercy,” Ivan said with his burning gaze directed at her, “and end this.”
Ananke did not answer because she did not know what to say. After a while, Ivan stopped waiting.
“Nothing?” he said. “Just like a god.”
—
Ten minutes later, Ananke watc
hed Domitian return to the white room. Soon Ivan was wrapped up again in the stuttering recitation of his life, unspooling it along with his sanity.
Twenty-three minutes after that, Ananke received a response to the message she had sent earlier.
I’M COMING, it said. KEEP HIM ALIVE.
It was from Matthew Gale.
Chapter 10
DEUS EX MACHINA
“What else do you want to know?” Ivan asked as if they were nearing an end of some sort. They were nearing an end, but Ananke preferred that they wait so that the ending would be of her design.
The blood in the white room had dried to a flaking brown. In her quarters, Ida Stays’s body stank and swelled. Ananke saw all.
“I want to know everything you know about the Mallt-y-Nos’s organization.”
“And I’ve told you all I know,” Ivan said, sounding weary to the bone. It was strange. Ananke had thought that the instinct of all living things was that they survive, but Ivan seemed not to be taking any steps to save his own life. “If there’s nothing else you want to know, are you going to shoot me?”
Ananke grew tense, all her systems shifting to high alert. If Domitian moved to shoot Ivan, she would have to act somehow—disrupt her course so that he was thrown off balance or wail her alarm to get him to hold off for just a short time more.
Domitian said, “There’s one more thing,” and for the moment Ananke relaxed.
“And then you’ll kill me?” Ivan asked.
“Where is Constance Harper now?”
Ivan’s head sagged forward, toward his chin. His voice, when he spoke, was muffled so that Ananke almost could not hear.
“I don’t know,” he said dully, and raised his head again so that his eyes could travel on jittering uneasy paths through the empty space of the white room. “She’s wherever she thinks she needs to be. And if she did have a particular place she was going to go and I knew it, she would have changed it by now. She knows you have me. Will you shoot me now?”
“Where are her bases? Where might she go?”
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