Ancestral Night

by Elizabeth Bear

  It made me feel like a nasty, suspicious, slightly off-kilter conspiracy theorist, but I couldn’t help but wonder again about that tip that had sent Connla and Singer and me out to the disabled Jothari ship to begin with. The timelines really didn’t make sense: Why hadn’t we gotten there to find the Jothari ship already claimed by the pirates and removed? That only made sense if we’d gotten our hot tip on the location of fresh salvage before Farweather had murdered the Jothari ship. Or if we’d gotten it after, but the pirates had waited for us to get there.

  Could they have been waiting for their own salvage tug? It took specialized skills to retrieve a derelict from white space, but they had to have Freeport salvage operators, right? How else did they manage to pirate, for crying out loud? And if they’d wanted Singer to use as a tug, they wouldn’t have shot his damned boom off, would they?

  Conspiracy theories are really attractive. Figuring out patterns is one of the things that gets your brain to give you a nice dose of chemical reward, the little ping of dopamine and whatever else that keeps you smiling. As a result, your brain is pretty good at finding patterns, and at disregarding information that doesn’t fit. Which means it’s also pretty good at finding false patterns, and at confirmation bias, and a bunch of other things that can be fatal. Our brains are also really good at making us the center of a narrative, because it’s what we evolved for.

  So maybe I was making things all about me, to a ridiculous level. And yet. If they hadn’t needed salvage operators—specifically Synarche salvage operators—then I came back, again, to the idea that they’d been trying to get their hands on me. Which was not the most reassuring of conclusions, though it certainly did reinforce all my cherished beliefs about the depth of my own importance.

  I wanted to know and I didn’t want to know, and I was having doubts about everything from who I was to my most basic memories. I didn’t think she was telling the truth—not all of it, anyway. But she might be telling enough of the truth that I would have something to gain—self-knowledge or something else—from taking it up with her.

  It occurred to me that if I opened my fox to Farweather, she’d have to open hers to me. Assuming, of course, that she had one—but I couldn’t imagine anybody getting around in civilized space without some kind of access to senso. How would you open doors, for that matter? Talk to systers? Sure, you might be a humanocentric bigot, but you still needed to be able to talk to other ships and stationmasters (Habren, anyone?) if you were going to have anything to do with civilized space at all—and at least some Freeporters patently did so.

  It also occurred to me that the answers to just about everything I wanted to know were probably sitting right out there in the open, shelved neatly in Farweather’s machine memory. Assuming she had machine memory.

  This was a terrible idea. No justification I came up with was going to change that.

  And yet, it was an idea that I kept having.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “How can I believe what you’re telling me?” I asked, sitting down on my own mattress, bleary-eyed. I felt terrible: sweaty, complicated, as if my skin were borrowed and also itched abominably. Farweather, despite being chained to the stanchion by one ankle, managed to look cool and tidy, except where her hair was tangled and greasy. Mine was growing out long—by my standards, anyway—and had started forming a wooly puff that tended to get flattened on one side from sleeping under gravity, when I didn’t go climb into my access tube and float free and comfortable.

  She said, “Of all the things I am, I’m not a liar, Haimey.”

  “I’m still collecting data on that, thank you.”

  This is a terrible idea.

  What would Connla do?

  He’d tell you it was a terrible idea.

  And then?

  And then he’d probably decide to do it. Just to see what happened.

  The still, small voice of my conscience was starting to sound rather a lot like Singer.

  Right, I told myself. Just to see what happens, then.

  “What kind of safeguards can you offer me, if we’re trading machine memories?”

  “I didn’t say anything about trading,” she answered, too quickly.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m not going to just let you have mine. There has to be some kind of quid pro quo.”

  “I’ll help you get control of the ship.”

  “Not good enough.” I was enjoying this. I reminded myself not to enjoy it too much, and that she was probably playing up her investment to make me think I had more control over the situation than I did.

  “You’re an engineer,” she said, after studying her fingernails for a while. “You build the connectors. That way you can assure yourself that I won’t do anything untoward. You can just design it out.”

  I considered it. Farweather seemed to have a more advanced opinion of my jury-rigging skill than I did.

  Huh, who knows? Maybe she was right about that. In the very least, it was flattering.

  Also probably her intention. But I was willing to take it where I could get it for the time being.

  Was I willing to try to steal her memories without her consent?

  It was a matter of life and death, wasn’t it?

  Hell, I thought. I’m already a walking war crime. How much more ethically compromised can I get? But how much more ethically compromised did I want to get? There was Farweather, blinking me, as a perfect example of what moral relativism led to.

  “Look,” she said. “I’m not a neuralistics expert. I know next to nothing about how rightminding works. What do you think I could do to you?”

  “Then what good does it do you to get access to my fox?”

  She smiled. “Well, I do happen to have the codes to unlock your Recon and see what’s under it. So I don’t actually need to be an expert. I just need to input a series of keys that will allow you to access the original memories. It’s unconstitutional for Justice to actually erase old memories; they have to just bury them.”

  I knew enough about Recon and machine memory to know she was broadly accurate. Besides, changing and editing machine memories didn’t actually change meat memories. Time and exposure and the brain editing itself to remove conflicts between what the fox told it and what it remembered for itself handled that problem. Meat memories were notoriously unreliable.

  I frowned down at my fingernails. They were a mess; the poor diet was having an effect on me. “You just . . . happen to have them.”

  Bright-eyed, she shrugged. “Besides, if I harm you too badly, I’ll starve before help gets here.” She rattled her chain significantly.

  “You could eat my corpse,” I said cheerfully.

  “Won’t stay fresh long enough,” she answered, deadpan. “Besides, there’s still the problem of hydration.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I’m an idiot.

  I went for it.

  It took me a couple of diar to take apart and reconstruct some of the equipment from her kit and my kit (including some of my helmet controls and com) to make a rig that I was pretty sure would let her read my senso without writing to it. She could give me the access codes and the encryption keys, and I would enter them. Then I’d share the senso-memory with her, which was the real reason we needed the rig; her tech and mine weren’t entirely compatible, though an AI probably could have navigated it, and we were both a little chary of just hooking up our alien parasites and letting them talk to each other.

  This system also meant that I couldn’t just paralyze her with a virus and go rummaging around in in her machine memory, but I suppose it made me a better person not to be engaged in coercive control of somebody else’s fox in an attempt to steal access to their memories. More’s the pity.

  Not that I would ever have anything so illegal in my possession as a bit of code that could bust into somebody’s fox. Especially after spending a couple of decians in the company of a pirate who wanted to own and control me, without much to do except stare at the walls, fail to get control o
f the ship, and think up projects to keep myself busy.

  Perish the thought.

  She didn’t like my conditions, but she agreed, which suggested to me that whatever might be hidden in my head—if anything was hidden in my head—was something that she and her pirate buddies expected to be very valuable.

  And that meant I wanted to know it too.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I had her come to the very end of her chain, and turn around so her back was facing me. The leads on the primitive rig I’d knocked together weren’t long, and I certainly wasn’t going to come within range of her fists if I could help it. I suppose she could have stretched way out and pummeled me. But all I had to do was scramble away from her, and I would probably manage to escape without being harmed too badly or taken captive.

  It would have been nice if we could have done it all passively, but the helmet receivers I’d salvaged needed to be right up against one’s skull to pick up signals from the fox, and I hadn’t figured out yet how to use our Koregoi symbiotes as antennae to broadcast from our foxes, as if we were dressing up as old-fashioned radio stations.

  That was a joke. Of sorts.

  I adhered two patches to the back of Farweather’s neck, right under the base of her skull, and felt them stick on snugly. The leads ran back to the machine, and while she sat there patiently I drew it as far back as they would allow, and then walked back another couple of steps before adhering the patches to the analogous place on my own body. The stickum was cold, and the receivers a little uncomfortable. Their edges weren’t as rounded as I would have liked; they were meant to be contained inside and padded by the lining of the helmet.

  Still, they ought to work for what we needed. At least, when I flipped the toggles, the tiny lights on my jury-rigged electronics started dancing softly into brilliance, one by one by one.

  I sat staring at her back, feeling . . . nothing, not even the prickle of a microcurrent across my scalp. If it hadn’t been for the pretty little flicker of those status lights, I probably would have thought the thing wasn’t getting any juice and reached out to check that I’d remembered to hit the power button.

  Yes, it happens even to seasoned engineers.

  Then I felt the shape of words forming inside my head, like the sound of my own thoughts.

  Hello, Haimey.

  The voice had a distinct sound to it, and it wasn’t very much like Farweather’s voice—it was deeper and more resonant—but the intonations were the same. Everybody’s voice sounds different in their own head.

  Well, I answered. I guess that worked, then.

  Are you ready for the codes?

  I laughed. Not even . . . remotely.

  There was a pause, and I felt her groan in disbelief and suffering. “That was terrible,” she said out loud.

  It’s who I am, I answered.

  I turned my attention to my internal interfaces, while keeping half my mind’s eye on Farweather. It was even trickier than it sounds, frankly, because I couldn’t safely let the attention I had on her waver, but I also needed to run through the monitors and find my way into their operating system, which was an intentionally complicated task. You didn’t want any random teenager mucking around with the inside of their own head. It had too much potential to end badly.

  I wonder if I consented, I thought, and realized as I thought it that some part of my mind was taking for granted that Farweather was telling me the truth when she claimed that Judicial had reconstructed my machine memories, and thus allowed them to reshape the meat memories in their image.

  I thought about those memories, tried consciously to call one up without accessing my fox for corroboration.

  But it wasn’t memories of Niyara that rose to the surface. Instead, it was memories of a more literal surfacing. I thought of the Prize, rising out of the Saga-star’s accretion disk in mysterious response to my presence.

  As I thought of it, I felt Farweather’s surprised, mocking delight. Oh, babes. You thought that was you?

  What do you mean? I answered.

  The ship. Emerging from the Well. You thought you had something to do with it? It came when you called because you’re so special?

  I didn’t answer. My cheeks burned. My eyes smarted.

  Of course I had.

  How precious. Honey, I control this ship. I always have.

  She hadn’t controlled the gravity when I slammed her against the deck, had she? I reached out to do it again, viciously, wanting to slap the glee out of her—

  I stopped myself. Just in time.

  That was not who I was.

  Assuming I was anybody, I mean.

  Then she asked, point-blank: Did Niyara ever tell you anything she said would be important later? Did she ever give you anything? An upload? Something physical?

  I kept my face and mind as still as I could—not that she could see my face where she was sitting—which was probably as much of an answer as if I had gasped out loud.

  I tried not to think of the little book, the only hard copy book I had ever held in my hands, and which I had for some reason hung on to all these ans. I thought instead about the feeling of Niyara’s blood on my hands as I tried to hold her wounds closed.

  But what I saw—what I remembered, intrusively, compulsively—was Niyara giving me the small package. And me staring at her, without even really registering what she had put in my hands. The thermoplex wrapping dented in my hands. Whatever was inside was moderately flexible without being soft, and made a faint crinkling sound. “What is this?”

  “A gift,” she said.

  “A gift? A physical object?”

  “So I’m old-fashioned,” she had said. “Go on and open it.”

  That was old-fashioned. Wrapping paper, and something that wasn’t just printed and endlessly recyclable. Except it was something printed. The old kind of printed: text on paper. A book.

  I turned a page. It felt fragile and yet somehow strangely substantial. It had, I realized, a faint aroma. Polymer.

  “Keep that safe,” she had said. “It might be important to you somedia”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  I had given the game away already. I said, She sure did. It was on Singer when your people murdered him.

  A book, she said.

  Then, after a pause, she said, Do these numbers mean anything to you?

  They didn’t. There were a lot of them, and I allowed my feelings of blank confusion to fill my mind while I retreated back into what I had been doing when she distracted me. I would think about this new conundrum later. Right now, I was going to have one more crack at breaking into Farweather’s fox. I didn’t think it would work, and I was sure it was unethical. But I wasn’t exactly in a position where I could turn over what I knew to the Synarche and let them detail Judiciary to do a legal search. So I dropped that totally illegal bit of code I didn’t have and hadn’t written, and crossed my aftfingers in my boots.

  The incompatibilities in our hardware and base code were just too much. I didn’t think she’d noticed—I didn’t get knocked back—but it was like throwing spaghetti at a frictionless surface. Maybe if I’d had the time to try a few iterations and adjustments, I could have worked around to something that might find a place to link in and siphon off some data. Possibly I should have tried harder to figure out a way to paralyze her. As it was, I was sure she’d yank the leads off if she got the tiniest inkling of what I was planning.

  It didn’t pay off, and I didn’t have time to keep trying.

  I wanted to use this time for my own purposes. I needed to pry into my own meat, rather than meta, memories of Niyara—and of what we had done. And see how much truth Farweather was telling me.

  I memorized the numbers, though, against later need. You never knew.

  I didn’t believe Farweather would be able to feel what I was thinking as I went deeper into my meat memories; I was intentionally blocking the interface machine and also my machine memories. So the ayatana wouldn’t influence what I recalled, and
so nothing should show up in my senso feed.

  I’d never intentionally blocked out my own ayatana before.

  It was strange, like thinking about a story I’d heard of something that had happened to someone else. It had happened to someone else; I was briefly enmeshed in a memory that could only be Niyara’s, and it left me shivering. I had a vivid sense of a . . . bottle, an old-fashioned wine bottle made of the kind of glass that would break into umpteen tiny shards if struck solidly, and of wiping the screws on the neck very, very carefully before threading a bottle cap into place.

  In the memory I knew that if I didn’t exercise profound diligence, the bottle would detonate. It was full of a highly reactive explosive and a handful of screws and washers to make shrapnel along with the shattering silica glass.

  I wondered if I had read about what I was half experiencing in a court document, or if maybe a bit of Niyara’s senso had been played at the trial and I was recollecting its sensations now. The trial—and the terrorist attack—were both such a long time ago that even if my recollections hadn’t been edited for public safety, the meat ones wouldn’t have been reliable. Especially since I’d been in a state of shock when it happened, and a state of profound trauma afterward, for the inquest and the trial.

  One of the best things about the fox is that it gives everybody unbiased memories of what actually happened on any given dia, or in any given interaction. I can’t imagine what dispute resolution must have been like in the bad old diar, when basically anybody could make any kind of claim about what happened, and unless somebody had had a recorder running, nobody ever could be sure of the truth. Eyewitness reports, they used to call them, and they were notoriously inaccurate and unprovable.

  Those “eyewitness reports” were good records of what people thought they saw, and what they remembered they thought they saw. They were really good records of what confirmation bias led people to believe, and want to believe.

  Trying to get a factual record out of that would be like . . . Like constantly dealing with Farweather, probably.