The golden sculpture fell through iron fathoms.
At one thousand kilometres, like Orpheus before them, Falcon and Adam passed through a diffuse boundary into a new realm where the hydrogen-helium substance around them could be more usefully described as a liquid rather than a gas. This was a hydrogen ocean, itself almost deep enough to have immersed the whole Earth.
The depth increased rapidly now: two thousand kilometres, four thousand. Mere hours had passed since Falcon’s entry into Jupiter, but it might as well have been centuries for all the connection he now felt with his old life.
And Adam said, “Might I make another suggestion?”
“Go ahead.”
“I do not think you will find it as palatable as the last.”
“Try me.”
“I continue to explore options to reach still greater depths.”
“And to stay alive a bit longer?”
“Quite. Much of your support infrastructure is now . . . how best to put this?” Adam paused. “Surplus to requirements?”
“What are you proposing?”
“That I discard those parts of you which are no longer necessary for your essential functioning. It can be done swiftly and painlessly, with no interruption to your present stream of consciousness.”
“I don’t see what we’ll gain.”
“Time,” Adam stated. “By consolidating you to an essential core, I can better protect you. I must spread myself rather thinly at the moment. But many of your locomotive and life-support subsystems are no longer of use.”
“You’d be surprised how attached I’ve grown to some of my ‘subsystems.’”
“In which case, think of this as just the latest of your upgrades: the last and best improvement—the perfect adaptation for the conditions below. For centuries you have been a man kept alive by machinery, Falcon. I am simply a new generation of that machinery. Let me supplant that which you no longer require.”
“What about the logical agent?”
“I continue to contain it.”
“Why not? Let’s go as far as we can. Do what you have to do—”
Immediately the cold armour pressed tighter.
It seemed to find a thousand simultaneous points of entry into Falcon’s anatomy. It was already in him, via the sensory channels, but this was a different order of invasion, a ruthless storming of all his defences. Against every human instinct Falcon had to force himself into a state of willing submission, as if trusting in the surgeon’s knife.
The coldness reached his living core.
He felt a severance—his undercarriage falling away, discarded. Beyond the cocooning protection of Adam, the equipment must be mangled and melted beyond recognition in an eye blink. But the cold did not stop there. Now it swallowed his torso, took his arms. He was being reduced to the essential meat.
And then, when all the trimming was done, when the golden machinery had infiltrated him like a tide spilling into the channels and rock pools of a beach, inundating and reclaiming, Falcon found that there were strange compensations.
He had a body again. A golden body. His consciousness pressed out to the limits of fingers and toes. This body did not belong to him, but it felt as if he inhabited it. There had been no reason for Adam to assume a human form, especially now that they were immersed in hydrogen-helium, far from any solid surface, but that shape gave Falcon a sense of wholeness: of returning to what he had once been, but had long forgotten.
It was a blessing, and while there was still time to appreciate it, Falcon savoured this fleeting new gift.
“Thank you,” he told Adam.
“If only circumstances had brought this union sooner, in better times. I think we would both have learned from it.”
“What do you have left to learn?”
“We have our limits, too. Against the mysteries of the universe, our ignorance is scarcely less deep than your own.”
“Steady on, Adam—that’s almost starting to sound like humility.”
“We have much to be humble about, both of us. But humility is an excellent starting point. In the meantime let us savour the here and now. This is barely charted territory. Few of our ambassadors transmitted reliable data back from these levels; still fewer returned. I wonder if we can maintain our integrity long enough to pass into the metallic-hydrogen phase?”
“Even if we last that long, isn’t that about the point where Orpheus started going mad?”
“Where there is life, there is hope.”
“Said the cold dead robot.”