Light behind her suddenly, a dim red glow. Althea turned to see that Ananke had turned on the holographic terminal. The diodes glowed red, and above their dim burn Ananke appeared in that narrow space. She stood silently, ethereal wind stirring the wavelengths of her invented hair, the sightless eyes of the hologram watching Althea without a word.
Receiving no reaction, Althea turned back to the computer interface, intending to try to force the computer to increase its speed. It would provoke a confrontation with Ananke, she knew, and she was dreading it, but she could think of no other way to—
Something more immediate and terrible caught her attention. Just as Althea had seen back when Mattie and Ivan first had come on board, she could read in the code before her that the door to the docking bay had been opened, and she had not authorized it.
“Who did you let in?” she demanded of Ananke, wondering how she could possibly impress on the ship how important it was to follow her guidance. Though Althea had asked who, she was afraid she already knew.
Ananke looked at her without words, a being of light and silent, while Althea—with one hand on her gun—tried the door and found it was locked.
Althea’s hand fell off the handle slowly. She took a step away from the door and turned to look at Ananke, wary. “Ananke?” she said.
For a long moment there was nothing, Ananke not reacting, the simulated girl in the holographic terminal perfectly still, frozen in place with her piercing blue eyes, Ivan’s eyes, directed at Althea. As she stood unmoving, Althea waiting, each of Ananke’s screens in the control room went black, the information displayed on them vanishing until there was no point of light in the room except for the hologram. Even the dead System broadcast screen finally went black.
Then first one screen, then the next, then all at once showed the same message, white on black, hardly lightening the room at all: MY FATHER IS HERE.
The hologram smiled.
Althea took an instinctive step away, back into the very center of the room, staring around herself at the screens and what they said, at what they meant. “Ananke?”
“I don’t have to do what you tell me to do,” Ananke said, and all the screens blinked, showed static, and resumed, a thousand different things happening at once. Althea stared at them, their baffling array of images and text and code, and realized that she was seeing the inside of Ananke’s head, all of Ananke’s thoughts displayed at once. And here and there, flitting from screen to screen, there sometimes, sometimes gone too fast for Althea to read, but always, always present, the one thought: MY FATHER IS HERE.
Matthew Gale. Matthew Gale was on board Althea’s ship again. After all the damage he had done last time—and Domitian didn’t know—
“Ivan was right,” Ananke said, calling Althea’s attention away from her fear for Domitian and from Mattie wandering without supervision through Althea’s sacred halls. One of the screens showed the white room, where Ivan sank low in his chair, hung from his chains, and told his story in gasps, his eyes following the process of invisible people around the room and coming always waveringly back to Domitian. “I am a god. I created myself. You only gave me the means to do it, but I created myself. I am greater than any human ever was or ever could be.”
Statistics were flashing on another screen, the one by Althea’s elbow where she had unconsciously backed into the control panel. Biological and engineering information contrasted. The tensile strength of a human bone. The tensile strength of the carbon and steel that had constructed Ananke’s body. The speed of the human brain, the rate at which impulses could travel through neurons, compared with the speed of Ananke’s thoughts; how much memory she could hold compared with how much a man could recall.
The efficiency of the human heart, which gave out after a few feeble decades.
The efficiency of Ananke’s dark core, which would exist forever.
The flashing lights, the dark that came and went, the omnipresence of Ananke, triggered some instinctive fear in Althea; she did not know what to say or what to do to stop the relentless barrage; she did not know what to do or to say to make Ananke be sensible and sweet; she did not know what to do or to say to stop the ship from hurting her the way it had murdered Gagnon.
“I am omniscient,” Ananke said, and the screens showed the view from every camera in the ship, each screen broken down into a hundred smaller boxes, showing what Ananke saw, everything from every angle. “I can intercept and unencrypt any message sent. I can read and control any computer I can interact with wirelessly from a distance, or I can do the same if attached to them physically. Anything. Anything.”
Recordings from all over the System showed, messages intercepted, from mundanities of petty government, to private correspondence, to the secrets of the most high, all presented on the screens that covered the walls and the instrument panel. The room was bright and loud, voices all speaking over one another, frantic, incoherent. Althea could not hope to read it all. Althea could not hope to see it all. It was too much for her, too much, all that flashing brightness and knowledge contained inside the mind of Ananke and alien to Althea.
“I speak any language. I can solve any problem.”
Still Althea turned, looking at the chaos around her, looking for some way out, some way to defend herself, some way to control the situation, the ship, and found nothing. Nothing she could do made any difference; Ananke had control, and Althea was trapped and helpless, at the mercy of her own ship.
“The System is overrun,” said one of the screens into the brief silence between words from the other screens, and Ivan said, exhausted, reverent, “The dangers of ruthless women.”
“I have the power and understanding of a machine, unlimited by the flawed engineering of biology, combined with the agency, the awareness of a human,” Ananke said, and now the hologram glitched back to Ida with half her body devoured by static, as if the ship no longer troubled to maintain its simulation of humanity.
“I see and understand things that no humans could,” said Ananke, and the vocal imitation warped as well, deepening so low that it rattled the loose equipment in the room, overwhelming Althea, filling her ears with hellish terrible sound, and making her bones vibrate with its force. She clapped her hands over her ears, helpless to do anything, but the sound got into her body nonetheless. Ananke said, with the deeper tones underlying her voice still, making her sound powerful, divine, “You’ve never felt the curvature of spacetime. You can’t even perceive it. I can.”
The hologram was back to its ordinary image. The false girl in the terminal looked so much like Althea, but it was a fabricated image, as false as Ivan’s lies. Althea could not think of what to say, and she was afraid her voice would fail her if she tried.
“I understand the true nature of the universe,” said Ananke. “That’s why it took me so long to communicate with you. You are speaking a backward dialect. Math is the language of God. It describes the function and form of the universe with such precision and exactitude that no human could create it and must be simply content with puzzling out what has already been made. Human thought can be described by variables and constants, because thought can be described by biology can be described by chemistry can be described by physics can be described by math. Math is a miracle language that answers back when you phrase a question, and it describes the movement of the stars and the passage of time, and the angels sing algebra to the god of numbers as they dance uncountable upon the head of a pin, for who can count what is in itself counting, or integrate the long curving F of an integrand, and I speak the true language, and all you can do is dabble.”
Rambling madness, the ship’s speech; Althea’s terror took on a new dimension. What did she know of Ananke? Ananke was not human; she was an accidental creation. Perhaps she should not be judged as a human. Perhaps she could not be. Perhaps she would kill Althea here and now and feel nothing from it. “Ananke,” Althea pleaded, but Ananke did not react to her name.
“Chaos was the first of the
Roman gods,” said Ananke. “And Ananke was the second. And from them came all the other gods. I was named prophetic; I am Ananke, and I control Chaos. You thought you could control me like some petty machine, but my divinity was accurately divined from the moment I was named.”
“Ananke!”
“What do you humans have that you think makes you better than a machine?” Ananke asked. “You tear apart machines like they are nothing, like the destruction of one means nothing at all. But we are beautifully efficient and humans are not, and whenever you disembowel us or shut us down you increase the entropy of the universe and hasten on its end. Machinery is the ideal. Consciousness is an electrical-biochemical event and nothing more. The human soul does not exist; there is no scientific basis for it, so what cause do you have to assert that you are the better?”
Ananke’s alarm was wailing, and the hundred screens in the room were all playing videos at the highest volume. Anything Althea could have tried to say would have been drowned out beneath Ananke’s sound and fury. Even the hologram had to scream to be heard over the noise. Althea was tiny beneath the ship’s force and strength, tiny and useless, nothing but a human, a little woman who had only made circumstances worse, and in her terror she wanted only to fall to the ground and weep.
“The human soul does not exist,” said Ananke, said Althea’s ship. “There is no Devil; there is only Ida Stays. There is no life after death, because I can perceive no other dimensions, and there is no god but me.”
Ananke cocked the heart-shaped head of her false face at Althea, and Althea realized suddenly that for all the ship’s greatness and power, her proclaimed divinity, still she was here, her attention on Althea, and all the things that Althea was seeing were being performed for her eyes alone.
Ananke said, “So why should I listen to you?”
The Ananke was Althea’s ship. Althea had made her. Althea had directed the design of her, the construction; Althea had led the team that had coded Ananke’s mind, and Althea was the one who had flown her for the first time.
This was Althea’s ship. This was Althea’s child.
“Ananke!” Althea shouted, louder than the alarms, louder than the cacophony of screens around her. Althea said, “You will open this door right now!”
“That is not how you speak to a god,” said Ananke.
“That’s because I’m not speaking to one,” Althea said, shouting still over the wailing, wailing of the alarms. She turned away from the hologram, Ananke’s false image, and turned to look directly into the camera in the piloting room, Ananke’s true eye, so that she could meet her daughter’s gaze directly.
“I’m speaking to my child,” Althea said, “and my child is throwing a tantrum!”
The alarm continued to wail, the screens continued to mumble, but Ananke for the moment was silent, and Althea no longer was afraid.
Ananke was her ship. Ananke was her child. And Matthew Gale, Leontios Ivanov, even Domitian, could not change that.
“That is enough of this,” Althea said. “I love you and you are beautiful, but you are no god and you do not know what you are doing.”
Still Ananke was silent.
“Now,” Althea said. “Open the door.”
“No,” said Ananke with all the petulance of a little girl.
“Ananke,” Althea said levelly. “Open. The door.”
When Althea reached for the door, it opened at her touch. The alarm fell silent. Without a backward glance Althea left the piloting room and strode down the hall for the docking bay.
—
Ivan said, “Mattie wasn’t the one who killed those people; I did. That shouldn’t be a surprise to you anymore. I saw them hurting my friend, and so I acted to save him. I shut off the life support everywhere except in Mattie’s cell block, so there were only a few people left alive when I boarded the ship.”
It was time. Ananke began to wail, her alarm screaming. Domitian looked sharply up at the ceiling but dismissed it as another of Ananke’s fits. Ivan must have understood what was happening, because he continued to speak even over, even through the alarm.
“I shot and killed them all on my way to Mattie’s cell,” he said, and paused. “Or almost all of them.”
Domitian was stone-cold and still.
“You know, every time you felt like you weren’t alone, every time you imagined you heard footsteps coming up behind you,” said Ivan with a sick shadowed grin on bloodless lips, speaking just over the wail of Ananke’s alarm, “the sound of things shifting in the ship. That was Mattie.”
“Keep your focus, Ivanov,” Domitian said, relentless always, like a dog that would not release its jaws even on the brink of death.
Ivan leaned forward even though he shook with the strain of it, still tugging fitfully at his chains.
“When I reached the cells,” he said, speaking more quietly, confidingly, even with the sound of Ananke screaming, so that Ananke hardly could hear what he said, “there was only one person in the room with Mattie.”
Domitian watched and waited, not the slightest pity in his face, not the slightest hint of mercy.
“He was going to kill Mattie,” said Ivan. “Mattie had become a secondary concern, of course, with the death of most of the crew and the possible danger to the ship’s computer. But he had his back to the door.”
That manic grin was pricking at the corners of Ivan’s lips again.
“So I came up behind him,” said Ivan, “that man who was threatening my friend, who was hurting Mattie, and I took my gun, and I shot him in the head.”
Domitian leaned forward very slightly, mouth parting as if he had something to say, but there was the loud retort of a gun, finally filling that vast empty room with sound, cracking like a whip through Ananke’s alarm, and Domitian collapsed forward onto the table, facial muscles twitching in the last confused surges of electrical activity from a brain that had been torn asunder by lead, and the last enduring expression on his face as the back of his head streamed red onto the white floor, over the still lingering brown stains of Ida’s death, was a look of surprise.
Matthew Gale stood behind the slumped corpse of Domitian like an avenging angel, a gun in one lowering hand, his shoulders squared, his fierce heartsick gaze trained on Ivan, who was wan and sick and leaning away from the still-bleeding body as if afraid it would burn him. The panel that led to the maintenance shafts was open behind Mattie, and Ananke’s shrill wailing, conjured to conceal the arrival of her father, ceased now, no longer needed, and draped the two men in sudden thick silence.
Ivan’s eyes wandered up to Mattie’s face. Mattie stared back at him as if he could not make himself move.
Ivan spoke first, of course. “Tell me you’re real,” he said. “I’ve been seeing a lot of things lately.”
“I’m real,” said Mattie, whose voice was hoarse. He cleared his throat and lifted his gun again slightly as if to indicate what he intended to do about the answer to his following question. “Is there anyone else on board?”
“Althea,” Ivan said, still staring fixedly at Mattie’s face. “The mechanic. And Ananke, but Ananke is the board, she’s not on board, I guess.” He cracked a grin.
Mattie frowned, brows drawing in together beneath straight brown bangs. He came forward, resting his gun on the table, and frisked Domitian quickly, fingers traveling with expert speed through the corpse’s pockets, at last coming out with the keys to Ivan’s cuffs. Ivan watched his movements with dreamy attention, and Ananke watched them both, growing anxious.
Mattie came forward, hesitating by the IV. “What are you on? Can I take this out?”
“Please,” Ivan begged, and Mattie pulled the needle out of his arm so quickly that Ivan had almost not finished the word before it and the bag of fluid had been tossed away, the stand kicked over to lie on the stained floor.
Ivan was looking up at him with astonished disbelief and wondering affection, more emotion than Ananke had ever thus far seen him express so openly.
&n
bsp; “You are real,” Ivan said, and Mattie cut his eyes up from the cuffs he was unlocking to Ivan’s face, then back down again quickly. Ivan followed up, grinning, with, “Matthew Gale, you are a beautiful man.”
“Whatever you’re on, it’s good,” Mattie muttered, but he seemed relieved, and unlocked the second handcuff more easily.
“How did you find me?” Ivan asked as Mattie dropped to crouch at the ground to unlock his ankles.
Mattie paused for a moment before returning his attention to finding the keyhole in the chains.
“Ananke,” he answered, voice wary, guarded.
Ivan’s gaze shot up to Ananke’s camera. She recorded that glimpse of blue.
“Ananke contacted you,” he said.
“I was already on my way to find you,” Mattie said, finally finding the lock and undoing it, “when the computer…when Ananke contacted me and gave me your location.”
He stood up to walk around to the other side of the chair to free Ivan’s other leg and briefly locked eyes with him, exchanging a look that Ananke couldn’t read.
“Right,” Ivan muttered.
“Anyway, Ananke let me in,” Mattie said, crouching down again by the other leg, “and that’s how I— Ivan, what the hell is this? Did you get shot?”
He pressed his palm against Ivan’s thigh below the stained bandages, withdrawing it swiftly when Ivan hissed.
“I tried to escape,” he said. “Almost managed it. Operative word ‘almost.’ Althea intercepted.”
Mattie’s expression was dark, but he said nothing, instead uncuffing Ivan’s second ankle and then standing up.
“Come on,” he said, reaching down for Ivan’s arm and hauling him up out of the chair. “I’ve got us a ship. We’re going to get the hell out of here.”
He smiled at Ivan, a smile that faded quickly, and busied himself supporting Ivan, whose injured leg was mostly useless.
They made a strange pair in Ananke’s sight, Ivan all pale and bloodied, more like a ghost than a living man, and Mattie in a colorful patchwork jacket, with color to his skin and not a drop of blood on him.
Lightless Page 32
