Domitian burst into the white room in a murdering rage, his gun out, and Althea could do nothing but follow at his heels, filled with such a force of anger, of fear, that she wanted to scream. The moment Domitian threw open the door to the white room so that it struck and rang against the wall, he fired his gun high, the crack and roar of the bullet filling the room. It hardly registered in Althea’s ringing ears, but Ivan flinched, jolting as if he would duck and cover his head, but there was nowhere for him to go, and now, off balance and dizzy with loss of blood, he sagged in his chair, trapped and shaking like a wounded animal.
Ida was still lying on the table in front of him, her limbs limp and loose in the nearness of her death, and the sight of her made Althea’s stomach roil.
Domitian had crossed the room before the echoes of his shot had rung out; he grabbed Ivan now and forced him back against the chair, digging the barrel of the gun with its thin wisp of gray smoke into the soft skin under Ivan’s chin, metal pushing against his pulse. That, too, disturbed Althea, disturbed her almost as much as the way Ida’s head was tilted, angled to face between Ivan and Domitian, as if she were watching Althea, her death-dilated eyes without cognizance.
Ivan was breathing hard.
He said, “She did it.”
It was realization, resignation, and Althea said, “How could you let her?” before she could remember not to plead with him.
There was a long silence that stretched taut in Althea’s breast, in which Ivan and Domitian had some unspoken confrontation she could not understand, but at last Ivan spoke, raising his voice to be heard even though Althea was behind him.
“There would have been a genocide one way or another,” he said, speaking as if the muzzle still dug up beneath his chin, its deadly promise, meant nothing to him. “Either Constance destroyed Earth, as she planned, or the System found out about her plans—and how close she was to succeeding—and they killed her and everyone who had ever known her. Half of Mars—everyone who was even the slightest bit suspicious. Miranda and the other Uranian moons. She was a poison, and they would have amputated half their body to get rid of it. The System has done it before. Connor Ivanov was from Saturn; no one lives around Saturn now. Why do you think Con chose to blow up Earth? Because that’s what the System did to her people, time after time. Saturn, Haumea, Oberon. And they used the very bombs she used on them. So one way or another, billions of people would have died. I chose the side that included the people I loved.”
She could not allow herself to believe him again. She could not allow herself to feel for him. A series of bombs had been detonated all over the Earth in sequence, the broadcast had said. All of the System’s most powerful bombs, the seven that had gone missing, had been planted at key points on the planet. Detonated all together, most in populous centers of System government, they had destroyed vast swaths of landmass and irradiated more. On their own, though sufficient to render a planetoid uninhabitable, the bombs could not destroy Earth, but they had not been the only attack. The distraction of the simultaneous detonation of the seven bombs had lasted just long enough for someone to hack into the systems controlling the nuclear power plants dispersed over the planet’s surface and send them into meltdown as well.
It had been run as a con, Althea realized. The System had been so busy looking for the Class 1s in the outer planetary systems, where they had been stolen, and so busy trying to quell the riots on Titania and the other moons, that it had failed to recognize the danger to Earth. They had expected the Mallt-y-Nos to strike in the outer planets, and so they had directed all their resources there and left Earth comparatively undefended. Then, while the System had been distracted, horrified, by the detonation of the seven bombs, the Mallt-y-Nos and her people had struck the killing blow with the power plants. Whatever Terrans survived the explosions and the initial fallout would die in the famine once the smoke turned the sky black and cast nuclear night over the Earth, or they would freeze in the sunless nuclear winter. Some people might survive by escaping from the planet, but no one would live there again, not in a hundred generations.
It would have taken someone very skilled with computers to hack into the mainframe of the power plants in the short time afforded by the shock of the bombs’ detonation, before the planet had gone on lockdown. And the bombs had been detonated in unison, with computerized precision, like the detonation of charges around a vault door. Althea remembered the program she had seen on Ivan and Gale’s computer and was sick at heart.
“The System would have prevented the death of billions,” Domitian said. He dug the gun a little deeper. “You worked to cause them.”
“It’s over,” Ivan said. Neither man was paying attention to her. Althea thought to leave, to creep out and hide in the curves and veins of her ship, but she did not dare to move. “There’s nothing more either of us can do. So do it.”
Domitian’s face grew so dark that for a moment Althea thought he might do it, might fire then and there, and that thought terrified her as much as anything Ivan had said, her hand creeping up to her mouth as if to contain the cry she was not making.
But instead of firing into Ivan’s skull or the cavity of his chest, Domitian drew back and holstered the gun, nearly drawing a gasp of relief from Althea that she suppressed when he slid his arms beneath Ida’s body, lifting her up. Althea flinched when he passed her with Ida’s body hanging in his arms, carrying with her the stench of death, iron and meat.
The door shut behind Domitian, loud and echoing in the silence of the white room, and Althea knew that he would be back.
Ivan was very still, pressed into the chair where Domitian had pushed him, as if he did not dare move. The mark of Ida’s body was still on the table in her congealing blood. Althea felt sick.
She stayed in the room, guarding Ivan as she had been ordered to do ages and ages ago, and they said nothing to each other for a very long time.
“When you shot me,” said Ivan at last, “where were you aiming?”
Althea was still standing behind him. She could not see his face. It was just like being in the hallway again, with Ivan hidden behind his cell door, except that here Althea could see him for what he was, covered in blood and sitting in the blood of one of the people he had murdered, and from that sight she found the venom to spit, “The heart!”
“Is that true?”
He spoke so evenly, so without rancor, that it drained away her hatred and her anger and her desperate confusion and left only the exhaustion and the grief. Two people had died because of her, one of them her friend, and it had been so long since she had last slept, truly slept. “Does it matter?” Althea asked.
“Of course it does,” Ivan said, and Althea, fearing some other trap here, trusting not a word he said, did not answer. Leaning his pale head against the gleaming back of the steel chair, as if he, too, were exhausted, he said, “You should’ve aimed better.”
Ananke knew all about the stages of death. Ida was limp and pale now, but in the next hour or so rigor mortis would set in, reaching a maximum in eight hours. At that point Ida would be frozen in place, stiff, eyelids stretched back, jaw pulled open into a voiceless scream, hands curled into claws. Domitian would not be able to carry her the way he held her now, in his arms; she would lie across them like a board.
Ida’s body was cooling like a blackbody, a beautiful thermodynamic entity, and if she were outside the ship rather than within, Ananke would watch Ida with her outer sensors that could see in more wavelengths than the weak optical lenses of her cameras, and Ananke could watch the loss of Ida’s life in the slow shift of her peaking wavelength. Perhaps, if Ida had died outside the ship, Ananke would have been able to identify the quantum of the human soul leaping from its place into infinity.
Of course, once decomposition set in, after the initial cooling of death, Ida’s corpse would heat up again and grow chaotic, a thousand individual beings now existing where once there had been one will, one organism, one creature, one system. They would destroy the body hosting them, make it swell and stink, limbs bloating, flesh weakening and splitting, liquefying until the body was no longer recognizable as the organized system it once had been.
Domitian laid Ida Stays on the bed in her quarters, and Ananke wondered what he would do once she reached that stage, once what had once been flesh started to stain the sheets beneath her and the soft skin of her face rotted away. Lips usually rotted away the fastest; Ida’s wine-dark mouth probably would go first.
Domitian was at the computer, his back to the cadaver, trying to raise anyone from Earth, anyone from the System. Ananke knew he would not be able to. She was receiving the reports from the moon and running the calculations herself. Earth had been the heart and Earth was destroyed, its people dead or dying. The System was a corpse, too.
“What do you want to know?” Ivan asked after another stretch of silence.
Althea had played the fool enough for him already. She said nothing and stood guard beside the door, though a part of her murmured uneasily that Ivan would not be able to escape, not now, not with one leg unusable.
“I’ll tell you anything,” Ivan said.
“Stop trying to manipulate me,” said Althea. She prayed Domitian would get back soon.
“What do you think he’ll do to me when he gets back?” Ivan asked, like a spoken echo of Althea’s darkening thoughts. “Think he’ll shoot me right away or torture me first?”
“Whatever it is, you’ll deserve it.”
“Whatever Daddy says must be right, huh?” said Ivan, and Althea gritted her teeth. He said, “You have a gun. You could shoot me, right now.”
Naming it seemed to increase the weight of it at her hip, the weight of a gun one bullet short of a full magazine.
“Shoot me again, I mean,” Ivan said, breathing a little more heavily with renewed pain, and whether his amendment came from the reminder of his injury or the breathing was an affectation to emphasize his amendment, Althea could not tell. Maybe that was the worst part, she thought. She could not tell when he was lying or how much even after she had learned what he was.
“Would it have made a difference if I’d tried to kiss you?”
The question was so shocking that it knocked her out of her deliberate silence. “What?”
“If one of my conditions for telling you what was going on with Ananke was that you kiss me,” Ivan said with what sounded like weary curiosity, “would that have changed anything?”
“You are so full of yourself,” she hissed. “You think you could have done something, anything, to make me forget what you did. I had friends on Earth, remember?”
“But you still have your ship,” said Ivan.
“Are you trying to make me hate you?” Althea demanded.
“No,” said Ivan.
Althea said, begged, “How could you let her do it?”
“Do you really believe that Domitian wouldn’t do worse,” Ivan said, “if the System told him to? He’s a dog of the System; if they told him to destroy all the outer moons, he would do it without question. He’d do the same if they told him to destroy Earth.”
Althea wondered bitterly if it were possible for Ivan to stop trying to manipulate. “Anything Domitian did would be under orders.”
“And that makes it any better?” Ivan asked. “You see the System like a god, Althea, but it’s just made out of people like Domitian and Ida, and it’s petty and it’s fallible.”
“There are lots of people in the System,” Althea said. “They keep one another balanced.”
“When people are together,” said Ivan, “they bring out the worst in one another. Not the best, never the best. A single person can be good. A group of people is a mob.”
His audacity was breaking something in her that she did not know could be broken. “So Constance is a good person?” Althea demanded. “And killing people because she said so is a good thing to do?”
Ivan turned his head to the side as far as he could, and she saw the profile of his face, pale and grim and sad.
“I didn’t say that,” he said.
Domitian was moving with purpose through Ananke’s halls. He had left Ida’s body in her quarters and had given up on reaching Earth.
He reached the docking bay, reached Ida’s ship. Ivan already had done half the work in accessing the opening controls; Domitian simply tore the remaining wires until he could force the door open.
When he exited Ida’s ship, he was carrying medical equipment—an IV and a stand—and bags of some clear fluid. He passed at just the right angle beneath one of Ananke’s eyes for her to read the label: ALETHEIA.
“Maybe there’s something Ananke wants to know,” Ivan said, and Althea looked sharply at his hunched shoulders, his lightly trembling hands. “That’s her purpose, isn’t it? Collecting and synthesizing information. I’ve been very careful to keep my secrets. Maybe you’d like to know, Ananke.”
“Leave her alone,” said Althea.
“I know you can’t answer me in here,” Ivan said. His head was angled upward, looking directly into the white room’s camera mounted on the wall. “There aren’t any speakers.”
Althea’s stomach flipped queasily. “I said, leave her alone.”
Still, it was as if Althea did not exist to him any longer. “You know”—he was friendly, charming, almost charming enough to hide the hoarseness in his voice, the slight tension that came from suppressed pain—“you’d be a lot easier to talk to if you had a face. But anything you want to know, Ananke, I’ll tell you, and I won’t even talk to you like you’re a child.”
“Ivan!”
Ivan said, “You’re an incredible creature.”
“You’re trying to manipulate a machine now?” Althea advanced toward him, thinking only to break his attention away from Ananke even if she had to physically stand between them. When she came into Ivan’s range of vision, his blue eyes moved to her like a switch being flicked, electric. “Are you that desperate?”
“I was trying to stop Constance,” said Ivan with desperate force, as if he had to push the words from himself. He was leaning forward in the same degree that Althea had leaned away, but at least, Althea thought, he was looking at her again and not at Ananke.
“If I’d been there with her,” Ivan said harshly, the words coming out of him with visible physical effort, “if you sons of bitches hadn’t caught me, she wouldn’t have done it. I would’ve convinced her not to do it. I could have changed her mind, I know I could have. I’ve been trying to change her mind for years.”
Althea could not have moved if she had wanted to.
“If I turned her over to the System, she’d be killed, and Mattie, too, and everyone they had ever met or might have ever met, their home moon wiped out; the System would be ruthless. The only chance I had of saving my planet and saving her was to convince her not to do it. And I could have done it.” He looked up at her and spoke with utter certainty, with confidence, as if the two of them shared an understanding no one else did. “You know I could have done it.”
It was hard to stay angry; it was bitterly hard. Althea wished again that she were far, far away.
“But without me?” said Ivan, and Althea saw the minute jerks of his hands against the restricting length of his chain, seemingly unconscious, uncontrollable. His breath was unsteady. “Who was going to talk her out of it without me? Mattie? Mattie’s never said no to Constance in his life.”
Ivan stopped and took a long shaken breath. Althea looked away, but there was nothing else for her to see but red on white, Ida’s congealing blood.
“One time,” Ivan said, his voice eerie, soft in the bloodstained silence of that terrible white room, “the three of us were on Eris, and Mattie and I stole a case of bombs for her.”
Althea closed her eyes.
“When I found out what we were stealing,” Ivan said in that same strangely distant tone, “I blew them up. All of them except for one, and I gave her that one bomb to see what she would do, if she would really go through with whatever she was planning.”
Althea could see that moment of transfer: Ivan holding out fire and death in the palm of one hand with the same look of suppressed fear she saw in him now and Constance Harper, who in Althea’s head looked rather like Ida Stays although the two women were physically unalike, Constance Harper reaching out to take it with no expression at all.
“She used it,” said Ivan, his voice bleak, and Althea opened her eyes to stop the images from coming. “She went and used it, blew up a bunch of System administrators. I thought that maybe if I’d given her the whole box, if I’d given her all the bombs, she wouldn’t have actually done it, she wouldn’t have felt like she needed to prove something to me, and she would have stopped herself.”
He took another one of those unsteady breaths.
“I was wrong,” he said.
Althea nearly spoke to him then. She could almost understand, perhaps she could, why he had done the things he had done, why he had lied, why he had used her; she could almost understand him and his pain and his fear—
The door opened, and Althea flinched as if she had indeed been caught in midsentence.
Domitian was carrying something strange, and it took Althea a moment to recognize it as being some sort of medical equipment.
Domitian placed the bundle on the table with a clatter of metal and plastic.
“What are you doing?” Althea asked as Domitian unfurled the wires, revealing the needles and the IV.
“No,” Ivan said, and there was such bare horror in his voice that Althea was afraid in reaction. “Stop.”
“Ida was not allowed to use this until you lied so that it hurt her investigation,” said Domitian. He paused in his assembly to stare Ivan down, still ignoring Althea. “You lied.”
“What’s going on?” Althea pressed, hoping for some explanation that was not what she saw.
“You want information,” Ivan said. “I’ll tell you the truth now. I don’t have any more reason to lie. I will tell you what you want to hear.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Domitian, and took Ivan’s elbow in his hand. Ivan tried to jerk away but could not go far, certainly not far enough to escape Domitian’s iron grip as he slid the needle beneath his flesh. Althea felt light-headed, watching as the needle flashed silver and then welled up red as it sank into Ivan’s arm.
“Get it out of me,” Ivan demanded.
“It’s too bad you broke the polygraph,” Domitian said, and seated himself in Ida’s chair across from Ivan, and only then did he acknowledge Althea.
“Leave,” he said, and Althea flinched hard at his voice, driving startled, reflexive tears from her eyes and down her cheeks, tickling her skin.
Althea looked from Domitian to Ivan as his head rolled back under the first dizzying rush of the drug.
There was nothing she could do here. This was not her responsibility; this was not her place.
She fled.
“You’d be a lot easier to talk to if you had a face,” Ivan had said, and Ananke had heard. It made her conscious of that thing she had been missing, that other people—like Ivan, like Mattie, like Althea—all had: a face. A form.
In the end it had not been very difficult to create. She had used the base of Ida’s hologram, and it had been only a matter of a few alterations to change the face and figure from Ida Stays into a shape Ananke thought was more fitting to herself. She had the faces of Matthew Gale and Althea Bastet scanned in her database from every angle as part of System security measures, and so it had been very simple to imitate the Punnett squares of human genetics to create a combination of the two, with an alteration here and there as Ananke thought fit.
Voice had been equally simple: taking the tones and inflections of the people who had been on board—whose voices she had recorded—and smoothing out the differences, choosing to present herself as female and so picking a higher timbre. There was a slight bias toward Ivan’s turns of phrase, but of course he had spoken the most of all her crew. Emotional expression was a different thing entirely, of course, but Ananke was certain she would learn, as she had learned everything else.
There were glitches still, flaws in her invented form to write out of the programming, but she would find those only when they happened. If every now and then the holograph reverted to a distorted Ida Stays, jaw unhinged like a snake, or Ananke’s adopted voice ran over itself into high white noise like a thousand screams overlaid, it was simple enough to compensate for.
So Ananke did not understand, not really, why Althea’s eyes went round and frightened when she stepped out into the hall from the white room and saw that a young woman stood in the holographic terminal, features an even mix between Althea and Mattie but with Ivan’s clear blue eyes. It was a surprise when Althea gasped more in fear than in wonder when Ananke scattered photons so that her projected face might smile and said, image a beat out of phase with voice, “Is it not easier to speak to me now that I have a face?”
In the white room, where Ananke also watched with her eyes and her attention equally all over the ship, Domitian had commenced his interrogation.
“What’s the point of this?” Ivan demanded. He was trying to hold on to some sort of intensity, but the drug was running through his veins now, driven by the beat of his heart, and Ananke knew that it would take full effect swiftly. Even now he was wavering, his eyes growing unfocused.
“The System will need to know what you know,” Domitian said. “All about Constance Harper and her organization. All the people she knows, all the resources she has.”
“That doesn’t matter anymore,” said Ivan.
“Do you think that one woman alone could destroy the System? The System has suffered a blow. It will come back better, stronger, and it will destroy all those who attempted to harm it.”
“It will never come back; the System is gone,” Ivan said. “It’s a new world, and nothing I know will do you any good.”
“The System,” said Domitian, implacable, “will rise again, and it will destroy all who oppose it. You interrupted Miss Stays’s interrogation before it could be completed. The System needs to know what she wanted to find out from you.”
Ivan laughed. There was a mania to it, a lack of control, that Ananke had not yet recorded in him. “Ida completed her damn interrogation,” he said. “She figured it out in the end. Who Constance was. She came in here to gloat. That’s why I killed her. I wouldn’t have done it if she hadn’t known, and she wouldn’t have died if she hadn’t come back in here.”
Domitian’s shoulders were tense; his hands were curled into claws. Ananke registered that he was a threat to Ivan even though Domitian seemed very small to her.
“Tell me,” he said.
“She figured it out,” said Ivan. “She figured it out, that Connie was…the Mallt-y-Nos. And she came in here to make me beg. She kept her camera off. Only Ananke saw.”
“And you killed her.”
“I picked Althea’s pocket when she made the mistake of coming too close to me,” Ivan said. “When Ida made the same mistake, I killed her for it.”
He could no longer keep his head quite upright and, dizzy, let it fall back against the chair so that he could blink up at Ananke.
“How did she figure it out?” Domitian asked.
Ivan closed his eyes. “She realized that Abigail was a pseudonym for Constance.”
“What?”
“Abigail Hunter,” Ivan said, slitting his eyes open to emphasize his condescension with a look, “is a pseudonym. For Constance Harper.”
“Every time you mentioned Abigail,” Domitian said slowly, “you were talking about Constance.”
“Yes.” Ivan considered him. “How much did Ida tell you?”
“Everything,” said Domitian. Because there was only one camera in the room, Ananke could see only Ivan’s face and not Domitian’s, but it did not trouble her overly much. Ivan’s face was more interesting to see.
Ivan smirked. “I doubt that,” he said.
“Why the pseudonym?” Domitian asked, his voice cold and hard as steel.
“For the same reason anyone ever has a pseudonym,” Ivan said wearily. “So that she could do things that wouldn’t be connected back to her. In Constance’s case, illegal things.”
“But there was once a real Abigail Hunter.”
“Yes,” Ivan said. “She died in the fire.”
Domitian said, “Tell me exactly what happened on the day of the fire.”
Ivan said, sweetly, his words slurring and his face pale, “I wasn’t there, Domitian.”
Domitian’s fist slammed down on the table, rattling the table and rattling Ivan, who jumped as if the drug had eroded his self-control along with his inhibitions. Domitian, other than the swift downward swing of his fist, did not move and remained a dark gray figure hunched like a shadow, watching as Ivan’s breathing steadied again and Ivan said, “Constance was the one who had been planning to burn the place down. They were abusing all three of them, especially Mattie. The foster parents noticed the accelerants but thought it was Mattie. Abby distracted them while Constance took Mattie away—probably Constance convinced her to do it; Connie has that way with people. Constance went back. She says Abby was already beyond help. So she burned the place to ash.”
“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 gone 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 watched 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.