Orphans of Earth (35 page)

The ghost hesitated. “I’m not sure.”

“No, but I am,” he said. “I’ll pin my faith on your survival instead, thanks. I’m sure you’ll fix the problem one of these days and bring me back.” He forced a smile, although it felt awful. “You are me, after all, right? Nominally.”

The ghost looked down, then nodded. “All right,” it said. “If that’s what you want, we’ll shut you down and put you into hard storage.”

“That’s what I want.” He grimaced. “And tell her I said hello, won’t you?”

“Who?”

“Lucia, of course,” he said.

The ghost didn’t say anything. There was something going on in that stubbled fleshy head, and he couldn’t read it for the life of him. It wasn’t like looking into a mirror at all. It was more like looking at the face of a complete stranger.

When the silence had stretched on a moment too long, he said, “Okay. Do it.”

The ghost didn’t wish him good luck or farewell; he just nodded, once, and then blackness rushed in.

2.1.5

FUCK.

WHAT HAPPENED, SOL?

HE TOOK THE SHUTDOWN OPTION, THAT’S WHAT.

DOES IT REALLY MAKE A DIFFERENCE?

MAYBE NOT, BUT I WAS HOPING HE’D SET A GOOD EXAMPLE. DAMN HIM!

Sol felt Gou Mang reach in via conSense to take control of the sagging android body inside the room. In the seconds before Alander emerged, Sol took the faltering engram’s memories anyway. Just in case. If he thought he was going to take any secrets with him, he would be sorely mistaken. There were none, but that didn’t reassure her. It certainly didn’t solve her problem.

The door opened, and Alander from Adrasteia stepped through it. She tried software probes again to penetrate the interfaces connecting him to the outside world, but they encountered the same blocks she had run up against in
Silent Liquidity.
His mind was a blank wall. It was totally frustrating. Just when she really needed to, she couldn’t gain access to the information within him.

“You saw how it went?” he asked unnecessarily. He knew she would have been watching.

She nodded. “I can’t say I’m unhappy,” she lied. “He was a disruptive influence and a waste of resources. I know that’s putting it bluntly, but we’re not running a resort here.”

He was about to say something when the android nudged him from behind.

WHERE WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO TAKE IT, SOL?

“J Habitat,” she said aloud, for Alander’s benefit.

The android headed off along the hallway. It would be used to house a new mind as soon as its diagnostics could be properly checked. There were plenty of colonists on and around Sothis who wanted to dirty their hands on reality while they still could.

Alander watched with an indefinable expression as it lumbered away under Gou Mang’s control, clearly unnerved by the experience. The impact of seeing the old version of him had been dramatic enough for her. She couldn’t even begin to understand how it must have made him feel. For a moment there, he had been like the others, a multiplicity rather than a sole individual. Then to see that old version being shut down, to be alone once more...

Hatzis cursed the failure of her gambit yet again. She had sent him in to deal with the faulty engram in the hope that he might be able to convince it to voluntarily give up its memories before being shut down. Had it worked, it would have set a precedent for what she wanted Alander to do for her. She needed to know as much as possible about the Yuhl, quickly, and he was her only trustworthy source. If she couldn’t steal the information, then she would need him to hand it over willingly.

Her software, backed up by the twenty-second century know-how of the Vincula, bounced off his defenses like waves against a cliff face. She withdrew the probes with a mental wince. What had the Yuhl
done
to him?

He turned to face her.

“We need to talk,” he said. “All of us: you, me, Ueh, and Axford—if we can find him, that is.”

“He’s here,” she said.

Alander frowned. “So soon?”

“It’s not the same one you were traveling with,” she explained. “This one arrived earlier today. He came to tell me I was mad for declaring war.”

“Just like me.”

She half smiled. “Only you did it twice.”

He almost laughed. “Are you getting the hint yet, Caryl?”

“This isn’t a democracy, Peter,” she said, suddenly serious again.

“I realize that only too well, Caryl,” he said soberly.

“One of you does, at least,” she said, turning away from him to avoid the bitterness in his eyes. “It might surprise you to know that I don’t want it to be this way. I wish I didn’t feel like I was the only one with the capacity to run things properly. I don’t like the things I have to do just to keep what little there is left together. I’d rather hand it all over to someone else so I can retreat into a corner and wait for it all to blow over.” She faced him again. “Do you want the job?”

The question obviously startled him. Even if he’d never considered it before, he was certainly doing so now—and very carefully, too. “Me? I don’t think so. I might’ve taken it, once, if you’d meant the offer seriously. But now?” He shook his head. “I’m not interested in being in charge.”

“Then what do you want, Peter?”

“I want to make sure people do the right thing,” he said. “That’s all. But that takes sacrifices, too, I guess.” He took a deep breath as though steeling himself for something. “I can’t blame you for the decision you’ve made, since you’ve arrived at it in the absence of what I’ve learned about the Yuhl. The only way I can hope to change your mind is to give you what I know. And the best way to do
that
is to let you in. Into my head, I mean.” He paused, fixing her with a steady gaze. “I’m going to let you take what you need, and then we can talk.”

For almost a second, Hatzis wondered if he was enacting some twisted revenge upon her by handing her what she wanted when all her manipulations had failed, knowing full well that she couldn’t take advantage of it because of the barriers the Yuhl had installed in his new mind. But when she sent a tentative probe to test the waters, she found that the barriers had gone. His mind was as clear and transparent as it had been before. She saw changes there that she was aching to explore.

But she forced herself to retreat. The other possibility was that he had been sent to her containing destructive viruses or other software traps: a smart weapon from the Yuhl, targeted squarely at her. Any exploration of his mind would have to be conducted most carefully.

“Thank you, Peter,” she said, nodding graciously. “Not here, though. Come to Arachne. It shouldn’t take long.”

“And afterward?”

“Afterward, we’ll talk—you, me, and Ueh and Axford. I promise. I can’t guarantee I’ll change my mind, but—”

“I know,” he put in quickly. “It’s a start.”

She nodded. “That it is,” she said.

They stared awkwardly at each other for a long moment, then looked away.

Fuck
, she thought.
I’ve got what I wanted, so why the second thoughts?

Indicating that he should move ahead of her through the cramped habitat corridors, she told herself not to be so stupid. He was just another mind to pick through, no different in essence from his version from Vahagn, from his old self. There was no reason to be nervous.

It was the Yuhl, she decided. It had to be. The Yuhl, and nothing else. It had nothing to do with him, per se. Nothing at all.

* * *

The first thing she did when they reached
Arachne
was
check to make sure
Silent Liquidity
was still sealed and docked. It was. Alander’s alien friend appeared to be waiting calmly and patiently for his return.

Then she sealed
Arachne’
s own airlock in turn.

GOU MANG? I’M GOING TO BE OUT OF CONTACT FOR A
WHILE. YOU’RE IN CHARGE UNTIL I COME OUT.

UNDERSTOOD, SOL.

IF I
DON’T
COME OUT...

She wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence. What
could
Gou Mang do if she didn’t? There was only one thing she could think of.

SPEAK TO AXFORD. HE’LL KNOW WHAT TO DO.

Gou Mang hesitated, then said,
understood, sol.

Then, with some apprehensions niggling at the back of her mind, she cut all connections with the outside world. If the Yuhl
had
prepared a surprise for her, then it would end here, in
Arachne.
She wasn’t going to take everyone down with her.

She turned to Alander, who had seated himself on the couch. She sat facing him and tested the edges of his mind for anything untoward. For all intents and purposes, it seemed perfectly clear.

“Here,” he said, offering her his hand.

At first she didn’t know what he meant. When it came to her, however, she suddenly felt embarrassed on his behalf. The first time she had invaded him in
Arachne,
she had gained access via infrared ports in his android body’s palms. He wasn’t aware that she had already trawled extensively through his mind in Sol System, and he had clearly assumed that she would use the same route. His naïveté disarmed and disturbed her. She decided to humor it, taking his hand and continuing her exploration. He closed his eyes as though preparing himself for an injection.

She probed gently—too gently for him to notice. The difference between this time and the previous time he remembered was that then she had been trying to hurt him. Her world had just been destroyed, and he had been about to blindly rush both of them to their deaths. Stopping him had been a priority, and dumping her grief onto him had been a fitting method of achieving that. Or so it had seemed at the time. Later, when the crisis had passed, she had lifted the bulk of the memories from his mind to ease the load on his already burdened psyche. As a result he remembered little of the actual experience, just the distress it had caused him.

She visualized this intrusion less as a hammer blow and more as though her thoughts were comprised of a school of tiny, darting fish infiltrating the nooks and crannies of a giant coral outcropping. The fish spread in an expanding cloud around and through the coral, penetrating the inner layers with increasing caution. Soon enough, she had its broad structure mapped out, and she paused to study it before taking in the details she was looking for.

His mind had definitely changed. The Yuhl had done more to him than just transfer his Overseer into a body of genuine flesh. For one thing, the distinction between his engram and the Overseer that ran it seemed markedly blurred. They embraced each other in a tangle of hard- and software that looked like something grown rather than built. She thought she could probably unravel it, given time, but for the moment she had to content herself with only the briefest of passes. There didn’t seem to be any obvious Yuhl traps lurking in the strange operating structure, and she had to be satisfied with that for now.

She needed his memories, though, not the finer points of his thought-to-thought processes. She sent her “fish” in search of the conceptual markers corresponding to the Yuhl which, she assumed, should be relatively fresh, given that all his experiences with them had occurred in only a few days. Results came in quickly, and she began to scan the flagged loci. That was when she encountered her next hurdle.

Memories in engrams were laid down in an extensive but functionally simple register, associating gross experiential data with their emotional tags and saving them, one after the other, in various dedicated locations. In the human brain, the process was much more complicated and had not been cracked at the time of the UNESSPRO probes. The rough engram analog had worked well enough to simulate human behavior and therefore allow the engrams to function, to a point, but it contained the seeds that ultimately led to senescence. The memories Alander had inherited from his original had come with internal conflicts that resulted in instability and dysfunction. She recognized the signatures of those conflicts, even if she didn’t know exactly how to erase them without erasing him at the same time.

What she saw when she looked into him now was not that the conflicts were gone but rather that they had been absorbed. They were part of a new and very complex tapestry that wove everything together in a fashion not dissimilar to the memories in her own mind. It was difficult to pull at one thread without teasing out another with it.

Structure and memories
... The realization of how deeply he had been altered brought to mind something his version from Vahagn had said to him: “You are me, after all. Nominally.”

But
was
he, anymore? She didn’t even know which version of Alander she should compare this one to. The original, the dysfunctional engram, the fragile cripple she had first met, or the slightly randomized version she had turned him into? She wondered if it made any difference. An outdated, primeval part of her wanted to know who exactly she was talking to, but did it really matter?

Putting aside the problem for the time being, she began searching for the information she required. She found Axford first, and the encounter in Vega. She saw herself through Alander’s eyes, not in her original form but as Thor. She saw Thor’s attack on the Yuhl prisoners and gained an insight into the trauma her copy had undergone upon learning of the destruction of her colony. She earmarked that information for future consideration: the subtle adjustments she’d made to Thor’s engram had clearly destabilized that aspect of her personality instead of fixing it.

The Yuhl loomed large in Alander’s mind, once she found them. She followed their thread and found everything she needed. She saw the
Mantissa
in Alsafi, and its much larger counterpart in Beid—the “asteroid belt” of ships; she experienced being eaten by the Praxis and swallowed by the organic helmet by which he had communicated with the Fit; she followed the negotiations between Alander and the aliens, noting the conflicts within the Yuhl and understanding for the first time that they weren’t a unified group as she had assumed them to be. She had perceived a front, based on a few interactions, but they were actually as fractured and divisive behind it as the human survivors. The arguments between the Yuhl that Alander had perceived as
Zealot/Shrieking, Status Quo/Mellifluous, Stoic/Enduring,
and
Radical/Provocative
were proof of that.