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My eyes flicked to the bottom of the window, then back to her. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Bashna is not made of flesh,’ her father explained. ‘She exists; she has free will, is aware of herself and her actions, and her own personality. But she is not organic, as are you and I. She needs no food or water, only power. She is a fluke-’
‘Excuse me,’ Corina tried to interrupt, but her father ignored her.
‘Her functional matrix is the same as any other intelligent processing core, we even have cores much more powerful than Bashna, but somehow — either because of the way her construct was written into the core or through some flaw in the substrate itself — she became aware. She generated a personality. The protocol is very clear; any artificial intelligence that becomes sentient must be destroyed. Immediately. I could not. Bashna evolved quickly, and I have come to love her as if she were my own child. I do not know how to make another.’
All this was going over my head. Mostly. I didn’t get the words, but I got the idea. She wasn’t real. She was some piece of crazy Dag tech. They had been playing with me and messing with my head. I was like a toy to entertain them, and now I was trapped here unless I did exactly what they said. What a mess.
The picture of Corina was sitting on a couch in her room. She had her face in her hands and was weeping. Seemed stupid to me, and I wasn’t buying it. She wasn’t real, how could she cry? I realised my jaw was clenched and my fists were balled, and I forced myself to relax. There was an aching hollow in my chest, and anger boiled out of it like fire, but I couldn’t afford to let them see.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. I thought it was clever the way the voice sounded as though she really was talking through her hands. ‘I didn’t understand. I thought you could make another me later, when it was safe. I’ll stay. I’ll come off the dataweb completely. We can hide me in with the static cores. Central would never find me there.’
The Dag stood up, walked across to the fake window and put his hand – or what passed for it — against the glass. ‘I forget how much more intelligent you are than I. Sometimes.’ And then he turned to face me. ‘Will you protect her?’
Was this my way out? If I said yes then they could smuggle me out, and as soon as I was somewhere safe I could dump the thing and run. If I refused, there was no telling what they would do. I could try blackmailing them to let me go or I would report them, but I didn’t know enough about how things worked around here. It could be that nobody would take my word over a Dag, or they would kill me for shopping him, then kill him for this mess with the tech. That wasn’t my problem. Getting out was.
‘Of course.’ I said.
Corina’s face came out of her hands and she smiled at me. A very pretty smile for something that wasn’t real. The anger surged up again but I beat it back. The Dag looked at me awful hard, too, but I couldn’t read his face or his body, so I didn’t have a clue what he was thinking. A moment later he turned away and opened a panel underneath the sparkly rod. From inside he took a bag that looked like a smaller version of the one Ganger’s carried, and a small white box. A string dangled from the box, and he stuffed it into the bag, which he then held out to me. I stepped forward to take it and got out of his way again. Even though it seemed he wasn’t going to kill me now, he still gave me the creeps, even more now I knew he was happy making fake people.
He reached into the cupboard again, and this time pulled out a hollow white sheath. He spoke to Corina, made a gesture with his hand, and the fake window turned the same colour as the rest of the wall. Lights blinked in the panel around the glowing stick, then went dark. He took the tube, still sparkling, and slid it into the sheath.
For a moment he stood there, looking at it. His body was trembling. Without turning to face me, he held the sheath out. I hesitated for a moment, then stepped forward again and took it. The sensible place to keep it seemed to be the bag. By the time I looked up from stashing it there, I was in time to see his back disappearing through the second door.
I felt for the halo link in my mind. It was still there, even if intangibly and subtly different. I waited for a couple of minutes. ‘Maybe we should make a move,’ I eventually suggested. I heard a sigh, and Corina’s voice was choked and thick. The fakery annoyed me now, but I tried not to let it show.
‘This didn’t go the way I planned. I didn’t expect my father to react like that. I thought he would let you stay here. We have to wait until morning, until the trucks go out again. I’ll take you back to the room where you changed.’
‘Isn’t there any other way?’
‘If there is, it’s too late. My access to the dataweb is all but gone. All I have left are the tricks and traps I set up in advance. If I try to change anything, I’d let them all know where I was.’
I shut up and focused on getting us back to the room. I needed all my concentration not to panic and blow everything as we worked our way back through trains, plazas and elevators. The last thing I wanted was to ruin my chance at escaping.
When we got to the little room, everything was suddenly awkward. It was really hard not thinking about where I was going to dump the bag when I got outside, or when would be the best time. Corina had been very quiet, speaking only to give me directions. I put the bag down on the floor beside the bed and thought into the halo.
‘Is there anything else we need to do? Otherwise, I’d like to take the halo off and...’
‘Do you have to?’
‘I’m tired, and my head is aching. I think I’d sleep better if I did.’
‘How will I wake you? If we miss the trucks in the morning, everything will fall apart.
‘I won’t sleep long, I promise.’
‘OK,’ said Corina, and I had pressed the stud to release the halo almost before she had spoken. As soon as it loosened I ripped it off my head and threw it against the wall. It was a pointless thing to do; neither the wall nor the halo would be damaged, but my anger needed a physical act. I was backed into a corner, little more than a servant to this thing.
The little closet door was open. I couldn’t tell if that was again or still, but I looked inside and saw an outfit of vivid orange clothes, so bright they made may head thump harder. I dropped them on the floor, threw myself back onto the bed and closed my eyes. Sleep seemed a million miles away, but staring at the inside of my eyelids seemed much better than talking to the thing through the halo.
Was this anger boiling inside me because of how stupid I had been to have fallen for its tricks? Or was I being too hard on myself? The fakery was so good it was frightening. If they could invent people that weren’t even there, and could make them look like us, or them, or whatever they wanted to, what chance did we have? And what did they need us for? Fetching and carrying? They had to have more efficient ways of doing that. Or was that the point? They did have better ways to do it, but it looked better for them if they used one of us, like a status symbol.
My hands had curled into fists again. I turned onto my side and smashed my right hand into the pillow, then slowly and deliberately unclenched my fists. I still had to get out of this place, and if I didn’t get some sleep, so I was fresh for the morning, that might never happen. I tensed then relaxed every muscle I could command, slowing my breathing down, trying to stretch each breath out to make each inhale and exhale take ten heartbeats. Deliberately, I pushed the sense of betrayal out of my mind, but my mind would not rest, as though some hidden thought was still tormenting it.
When I opened my eyes nothing happened. The room must have switched the lights off, and it was utterly black. That or I had gone blind. Or they had turned me into one of the bodiless monsters and imprisoned me in one of the crystal tubes. My hands reached out to touch my body, my legs and my face. All present, but what if my mind had been tricked and was imagining they were there. I sat up, a strangled scream hovering in my throat and clawing to get out.
Lights slowly faded up and I could see again. Maybe my movement had triggered them. Still I couldn’t shift the feeling that this wasn’t real, that it was all my mind being manipulated, that I was stuck in a machine somewhere. I rolled to the side of the bed and felt around on the floor for the soft hoop of the halo. I crammed it onto my head and waited, breathless, for the mental click. It was so soft I almost missed it.
‘Jax?’
‘Hello.’
‘Are you all right? You sound... unhappy.’
‘I’m fine,’ I said. Its voice sounded shaken, uncertain. I pushed down a flare of anger at the falsehood, but grudgingly admitted it still sounded convincing. ‘How are we for time?’
‘Hours yet. You only switched the halo off for a few minutes.’
Damn. ‘Could we go now? Get settled early, before everybody else starts moving around?’
The thing paused a moment, and when it spoke it was still faking a sad tone in its voice. I wanted to shout at it to stop playing with me. ‘That’s a good idea. It certainly would not make things any more difficult. But first, go to the closet.’
‘I already did,’ I replied, but didn’t mention I hadn’t changed yet. ‘I got the clothes.’
‘Good, but you need provisions. Do you see a blue square above the closet door? Press your thumb against it three times.’
The closet door closed and a hum buzzed inside. ‘Next to it an orange square? Press twice.’
There was a delay, no more than three minutes, and the door slid open. Inside were three food rations and two water bottles. ‘If I were you I would eat and drink one of each,’ said the thing. ‘It’s been a while, and you might be dehydrating. Put the rest in the bag with me.’
So she wanted to keep her Mule healthy and nimble, and there I was calling it ‘she’ again. I crammed the ration down so fast it stuck in my throat. I had to wash it down with the water, which tasted flat and metallic. I threw the empty bottle to the floor, quickly slipped into the bright orange overall, and picked up the bag. ‘Ready?’
‘I guess so,’ she said, and I walked out of the room.
I don’t know exactly how long it took until we were out. There were half-familiar paths and long waits with little or no conversation. There was passing through the death-wall and then more waiting. Eventually, after a short run on legs stiffened by cramp and inactivity, we broke away from the trucks and ducked into a nearby building.
Where the vehicle had left us I had no idea. I didn’t recognise anything around me, and the building I was in hadn’t been scavenged yet. I sat at a desk and took out my last food ration, and the half-bottle of water I had hoarded through the day. The thing hadn’t said a word since it had told me when to run from the trucks, and that was fine with me. But I could still sense it. When I finished eating I walked over to a window and looked out, searching for anything that made sense as a landmark.
‘So is this where you are going to leave me, Jaxon?’