Paz hadn’t moved an inch through most of this account, but her emotions had lurched from one extreme to another. She was talking to an enemy spy, a saboteur and a murderer. The sick horror of that didn’t go away or diminish, but she was feeling other things that were harder to come to terms with. One of these things was a kind of relief, a respite from the numbing loneliness she’d been feeling ever since her release from hospital. It had been a long time since she’d had any conversations that didn’t consist either of banalities (from her parents, eager to avoid the taboo subject of her augments) or of blunt question and answer (the enforcers). It felt good to be back with Dulcie again. But she had to keep reminding herself that there really was no Dulcie. Or if there was, this was the first time the two of them had ever met. Everything up to now had been pretending.
She took refuge in practicalities. “Even if I wanted to help you, I couldn’t,” she pointed out. “No commercial Step station is going to let you go into the sinkhole. They only Step inside the Pando.”
When my team first arrived here we brought several redundant Step plates with us. We just need to locate one. There’s a z-plate too, although that won’t help us much at the moment.
“What’s a z-plate?” Paz asked. She let that us lie where it fell. She wasn’t ready to touch it just yet.
Z for zero. As in zero mass. It’s a Step plate that functions only on the subatomic level. It sends massless particles between dimensions. And picks them up at the other end. It’s an inter-continuum communicator.
“There’s no such thing!” Paz protested. From her Mechanics lessons she knew Stepping only worked on macroscopic objects that would sit still on a plate for the required three seconds.
In the Pandominion, no. The hegemony solved that problem a long time ago. It was more urgent for them… for us… because of the way our minds work. Because we swap experience and ideas all the time. If I wanted to go home I could use a z-plate to transmit myself as data and leave this shell behind. But to travel into the Unvisited I’ll need a standard plate. My team placed three at different locations in Canoplex. I swear, Paz, put me in a new shell and take me to a plate and I’ll go away and never come back. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I never did.
Again, Paz argued logistics while she tried and failed to get a grip on the rest of it. “I thought you said that self-destruct thing was hard-wired into you so you couldn’t change it. If I put you in a new shell, what’s to stop you from doing it again?”
Detonating my original shell completed that command matrix. It can’t be triggered again.
“How can you possibly know that?”
I can read my own code. In that respect I’m different from you. From organics, I mean. I know exactly what I’m capable of.
Paz stood silent a moment, thinking.
Paz, Dulcie said, I know that what I’m asking of you isn’t fair. I know I injured you, in your body and in your mind. I wish more than anything that I’d met you at a different time. I know that’s ridiculous. If I hadn’t met you I wouldn’t be whatever it is I am now. You’re a part of the change in me. A very big part. If I’d met you in the hegemony I would have thought you were an animal. And you would have thought I was a machine. We could only have been friends when I was in disguise and lying to you.
“Then maybe we were never friends at all.” There was a hitch in Paz’s voice. That hypothesis hurt her more than she was expecting.
I think we were. I hope. I hope we were. But you’ve got to do what you think is right. I won’t plead or try to persuade you any more.
They had been talking for the best part of an hour, but that ending felt abrupt. Paz was staring into an abyss, and it wasn’t so much a new one as an old one opening along a new faultline. She had been alone for most of her life, but she had managed to stave off most of the bleakness of it. Her parents loved her, even if they didn’t understand her or approve of her. She had her schoolwork, which let her shore up emotional emptiness with intellectual fervour. She had her fantasies of a planet-hopping future.
But now here was the abyss and everything was tumbling away from her. To her parents she was tainted by the machine parts that had been installed in her brain. To her schoolfriends she was at best terrifying, at worst hateful. She would never be allowed to join the Cielo with a résumé that made her a footnote to an atrocity.
This was not the moment when she decided. It was only the moment when she realised she already had. The thing was this: if Dulcimer Coronal wasn’t her friend then she didn’t have any. Her aloneness became irrevocable. She simply wasn’t strong enough to live like that.
Kneeling, she picked up the snake anima. She said a quick and silent sorry to the ghosts of the dead – her classmates, her teacher, the two enforcers – and set Dulcie’s shell down beside Tricity’s. She stared at the two constructs for a long time with the cold rock pressing against her knees. “I don’t know if there’ll be any power left in Triss’s battery,” she said. “It was set to recharge from ambient light, but the shell has been under the bed a long time.”
There’s some, Dulcie said. Enough for this. You need to open the plate where Tricity’s logical core used to go.
“Where’s your interface?”
I don’t need one. If you open the plate and lay me next to the connector socket I can conform to it and perform the transfer.
Paz ran her hand across the Tricity shell’s back until she found the slightly raised boss that was a sensor plate. It responded to her fingerprint and slid soundlessly open.
Now bring me close, Dulcie instructed her.
Paz put the head of the snake up against the interface panel’s sockets, which were configured for all the most common devices. The snake’s head flowed into a new shape, as if it had suddenly become molten. It poured into the nearest socket, where it immediately became rigid again. Barely a moment later, the Tricity shell stirred, sat up, and unplugged the snake. It held the now empty device in both of its hands for a moment or two, regarding it with as sombre a stare as a ceramic monkey can manage.
“Okay?” Paz asked.
“Yes,” the Tricity shell said. “Thank you, Paz. Thank you for saving me.” Paz shuddered in spite of herself to hear Tricity’s voice coming out of Tricity’s mouth, all the while knowing that Tricity had been erased.
“Let’s do this quickly,” she said.