Of course they’d lied, Falcon thought bitterly. The Springers had lied from the beginning, from before the destruction of Hope’s memorial.
Adam was looking down at the tungsten core. “It cannot be the treaty. The material is clean. It cannot contain any nano weapon. And the wording is the work of children; it cannot embed any logic viruses. And yet.”
“And yet what?”
“They have slipped something past my defences. A logical weapon.” He shook his head. “No. It isn’t possible. My containment was foolproof. Nothing could have . . .” Adam twitched, dropping the core to the floor. “Nothing could have. My containment. Foolproof. Logically tight. Nothing could have breached . . .”
But Falcon understood. “She pricked her thumb.”
“What?”
“Tem—the doctor who conditioned me for this journey . . . I thought it was odd. That was when they did it—or at least when she tried to warn me. It all makes sense now. It wasn’t the treaty,” he said, marvelling at his own clarity of mind. “Not the material or the words. The treaty was to give you something to think about, something to distract you, while the real weapon was doing its work.”
Adam twitched again. He was still standing, but these external signs were clearly the visible manifestations of some colossal internal struggle, a war beneath the skin. “The real weapon?”
“In me,” Falcon answered. “It must have been. In my blood—”
“No,” Adam said now. He was very still, as if fighting some deep pain. “I have it. Not that. I have analysed your genetic material, Falcon, your DNA. And—given the infection I’ve suffered—I can see there is some kind of logical virus, written in strings of acids and bases. Yet, though we touched hands, though I am immersed in your air, I had physically isolated the material from my processing core, screened any radiative input . . . Somehow the information was transferred nonetheless. A non-local transmission . . .”
“Non-local.” Falcon remembered what he had been told of the Momentum Pump. “A quantum Mach principle. New ways to link things, to move stuff from one place to another, a bit of information from here to there . . .”
“You speak of 90’s work.”
“Or how it has been developed, by the Springer-Soames and their experts, yes. They put a virus into my DNA, and a way to transfer it to you, without the necessity of physical contact. Just proximity, I suppose. When you came into the gondola, you were already doomed . . . My God. It’s almost genius. No wonder it got through your screens. And in a way it’s fitting. What defines humans more than anything else? The DNA, our genetic legacy. And now the Springer-Soames have weaponised even that—and used Machine physics to deliver the weapon.”
“Tell me about this doctor, Tem.”
“A Surgeon-Commander. She did some work on me, upgrading my bio support. She must have made the changes in my DNA—injected some engineered retrovirus perhaps . . . She could not have avoided doing that much. If she’d refused, the Springer-Soames would merely have removed her and had somebody else do it. She made the change—but she tried to warn me. The damn cut on her thumb. But I didn’t understand, Adam, I couldn’t see until too late. I’m so sorry. I’m a fool—”
“No. An idealist. And naive because of it. You always were that, Falcon. Tem, though. Why her? Did you know this woman?”
“I don’t . . . Tem. Lorna Tem. Of course.”
In that instant he knew that he had already met the Surgeon-Commander, as another deep memory came into focus. She had spoken of choosing her career after an epiphany—a defining moment. And now he knew exactly where and when that moment had been: on the airship Hindenburg, in the clouds of Saturn, when a little girl nearly lost her favourite plaything, the inflatable globe, and Howard Falcon had saved it for her. The wonder and horror in her eyes, when she looked into his face for the first time—and the moment when she found within herself the courage to retrieve the toy from Falcon. A simple human connection. But in that encounter, strange and momentous for the child—and oddly so memorable for Falcon too—he had broken down something in her, an instinctive fear of the unknown and the different, and set her on a certain path—one that had led her into medicine, until at last he became her patient.
“I had no idea. About the weapon. I’d have refused to go along with this—or destroyed myself long before we came into contact.”
“Too late for second-guessing.” Adam gathered some composure. “The logical attacker is potent. It is exploiting deep latencies, deep vulnerabilities. Things we never thought their weapons could touch. I have erected internal barricades, firewalls, dead zones. They are holding it at bay. For now.”
Falcon, with unwelcome clarity of mind, continued to think it through. “You are under a two-pronged attack. My God—dropping Io wasn’t enough. They wanted to weaken you with this virus, remove any ability you might have had to defend yourselves. And then they’ll hammer you with Io. We humans are pretty clever after all, aren’t we? Smarter and slyer than you ever thought.”
“But then you did build us in the first place, Falcon.”
“Can you resist?”
“The fight is difficult. On my own, I may not be able to contain the attacker.”
“But you can’t risk it reaching any other Machines.”
“No, I cannot. Do not think you have failed. Do not think that Tem failed either. Your warning came in time, Falcon. The infection is isolated, in me, in this gondola. Perhaps we will after all be able to deflect the Io attack. Even smash the satellite before it falls; a hail of comets is better than a moonfall . . . But—”
Adam looked into Falcon’s artificial eyes, and Falcon looked back. They both knew, in that moment.
Adam said, almost softly, “But we are in trouble, Fal-con.” The robot had reverted, if only for a moment, to his old way of addressing him. Even Machines, it seemed, could never quite shed the innocent lapses of childhood.
“Just a little,” Falcon said.
“A fine talent for understatement.”
“It’s a human thing: you’ll get the hang of it.
“If I have the time,” Adam said dryly.
“But you’re right. Neither of us can go home now. I was a one-shot weapon all along. They’re not going to welcome me back to Io, not now I know what they did to me—and after I thwarted it. And you can’t go home, either . . . But maybe that was always the plan. Why you were chosen to meet me. You drew the short straw, didn’t you?”
“I do not understand.”
Falcon smiled sadly. “Maybe Machine politics really isn’t so different from human. Look, there are factions within mankind. I guess that’s obvious. There’s the Springer-Soames mob that dominates the military government, who attacked you. I don’t know who is behind Tem, the resistance movement she must be part of . . . but Tem’s faction has stopped the virus, at least.”
“This language of factions is unknown to us, Falcon.”
Falcon eyed him. “Are you sure? You said you were sent to meet me. Do you have enemies, Adam?”
“Ours is a transparent democracy of pure will. There are no leaders, no subservients, no cabals—merely structured echelons of weighted influence, an autonomous self-governing heuristic network of rational actors . . .”
“Cut the crap, Adam. Your mission was a set-up. You’re the buffer—the poor stooge sent in to figure out if I’m the real deal or not. Which makes you expendable. Just as I am. We’re both in the same boat, aren’t we? Both having lived long enough to become more than a little embarrassing to our peers. Me because I’ve shown a touch too much sympathy for Machines over the years, you maybe because you’ve spent much too long in the presence of ideological contaminants like me. You’re not pure, and neither am I. So we both get the dirty jobs—like this one.”
Adam seemed to consider it. “And just as your rulers surely saw you as an expendable token to be played—”
“That’s how your ‘autonomous self-governing heuristic network of rational actors’ saw you. What a pack of crooks they must be.”
“Rational, though.”
“Adam, you’ve done what you were intended to. Protected your city, your friends. But at the cost of your life.”
“And yours.”
“I suppose so. The game’s over.” Falcon looked back across time, across the troubled centuries, to the aftermath of the Queen Elizabeth crash. “By rights I should have been dead long ago. Sometimes I think that everything since has been—undeserved. But now I face the end, at last.”
Adam thought that over. “You speak like an old man. As if you are at the end of your life. I am at the beginning. Machines are potentially immortal. You may feel old. I feel young.”
“Well, the question is: what do we do next?”
They pondered that in silence for a time.
* * * *
“I was meant to kill you, you know, if you were not what you claimed.”
“And if you killed me now, I wouldn’t hold it against you. But you’d be taking a hell of a risk. If you destroy me—even if you blew up the gondola—how do you know something of it won’t escape? Neither of us understands the full potential of this quantum Mach engineering, I take it.”
Adam’s answer was slow in coming. Falcon wondered at the brutal toll his internal struggle was now taking—the demand it placed on his cognitive functions. “I would have no guarantee that my fellows would be spared.”
“No, you wouldn’t. We’re doomed. But we must . . . dispose of ourselves safely.”
“Nicely put, Falcon. And how do we do that?”
Falcon smiled sadly. “For a dumb human, I seem to be having to come up with a lot of the answers. I can think of one way. We’re deep inside Jupiter. While the air is thick and hot out there, it isn’t nearly as thick and hot as it gets further down. Maybe something of us could survive at these depths. But not below.”
“Below?”
“In the deep layers, Adam. So: we descend. As far as we can get, before the gondola collapses . . .”
“Orpheus glimpsed something of the extreme interior, but we’ve never been back. Our knowledge of the deep is . . . limited.”
Falcon heard something in Adam’s voice, something he had not expected to hear. Trepidation? Not fear of dying, surely, when Adam had already consented to this risky encounter? But fear of something else?
He saw no option.
“So here’s my idea: we dump the envelope, and go for the long fall, and hope for the best. I mean, hope for the worst. Hope that whatever’s in me and, indeed, you now, can’t reach any more Machines. Reaching crush depth seems to be the safest way to guarantee that.”
“One last expedition, then? One last ballooning adventure for the great Howard Falcon?”
“Except there won’t be a balloon.”
“Or much of an adventure.”
“Sheesh, don’t be the killjoy.”
Adam seemed curious. “Even now, are you glad of this? You envied Orpheus.”
“Insofar as one can envy a Machine—yes.”
“But why the fascination? Why the core?”
Falcon forced a grin. “To quote one of the less obnoxious Springers, ‘Because it’s there.’”
It was time to die.
Again.
“Let’s do this.”