The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect (5 page)

"How long you spent designing it?"
"Two years. I've gone through twenty-three times myself."
Caroline nodded, sighed, and said: "Prime Intellect, standard Death Contract for...is twelve hours enough?"
"It should be," Timothy said.
"Standard Contract for twelve hours." She felt the warning buzz that meant it had heard; then disconnect. The always-present listening ear, or microphone, was gone. It would obey her last command perfectly -- until it was countermanded by Timothy, whose universe it was, or by her own impending demise, which would kick in the First Law. Or until twelve hours had passed, in the unlikely event she survived that long.
No matter what happened, she would have no trouble making Raven's party.
She jumped.

She fell about ten meters and landed on her feet, breaking her left leg below the knee. That was no big deal; had she landed on one of the spikes which dotted the bottom of the hole, she'd already be impaled. She wondered what would happen next if she had; impaling is cute but it hardly qualifies as a grade-nine experience.
It was dark. Very Freudian; she should have expected that from a Catholic kid, no matter how rebellious he thought he was. They'd be watching her with enhanced senses, though. Timothy wasn't the sort to extend Authenticity to the observation process.
Well, it was his universe.
She was at one end of a tunnel. It was dolled up to look like a natural cave, but Caroline knew right away that there was nothing natural about it. Real caves do not grow in nice neat lines. They twist. They tend to follow the soft rocks, which occur in sheets and often aren't level. The hole she had fallen through should have been a sinkhole; she should be surrounded by fallen rocks and debris. But it was as straight and solid as an elevator shaft.
This space had
none
of the defining qualities of a natural cave. It was just a rough tunnel, carved by Timothy's imagination. He had thought to hang stalactites from the tunnel ceiling, even though there were no other cave formations to suggest how they were formed, and no matching stalagmites projecting from the flat, dry floor.
She began crawling down the tunnel, and the first stalactite fell inches from her side. It shattered; it was not stone but some glasslike material that revealed thousands of razor-sharp edges. Another fell some distance away. Great, she thought idly. She crawled on, collecting hundreds of small cuts from the shards. Then one fell on her left hand directly, skewering it. Caroline gasped, but she didn't scream. She just broke it off and kept going.
She wondered if he was aiming them, or if the fall was random. It didn't really matter; the idea wasn't to survive, after all.
She reached the end of the tunnel, and found herself in a small chamber. Another tunnel veered off to the right at a sharp angle. How imaginative. A glowing ball hung by a thread from the ceiling. She raised her hand toward the light and watched in astonishment as her fingers sheared off in a perfect line.
"
Whafuck
?" she said aloud. She moved her hand again, and sliced off more flesh. An invisible cutting surface was stretched across the room. The pain was beginning to get interesting, but not interesting enough to counteract her growing sense of boredom. Blood was jetting from the stumps of her fingers. Summoning her strength, she aimed carefully and sat up, deliberately decapitating herself.
She was conscious of her own head falling, striking the floor as her body twitched above, and then Prime Intellect intervened.
"Why the hell did you do that?" Timothy demanded from across the entry pit. She had snapped back whole, as if she had never jumped. She could still feel a little pain where her leg had broken, just a fading echo. Fading fast.
"If you had designed it right, I wouldn't have been
able
to do that. What the hell was that cutter supposed to be, anyway?"