Alice exits the static station and races down Resnik, pedestrians stepping clear and sending her curious looks as she runs flat out in the direction of the shuttle dock. One of them doesn’t see her, obliviously veering into her path, causing her to slow and to divert her course.
She lets out an angry sigh, a percussive exhalation. Most anyone else would swear, she is sure. Alice never swears. She even censors internally. Can she swear? Perhaps the Alice Blake persona is not allowed to, but whoever else is hiding in here must have looser moral parameters. If she can kill, she can surely curse.
She can see the entrance up ahead, further than she was hoping. With Nikki in custody, she thought she had more time. She was on her way to the holding cells when she learned that the prisoner was being escorted to Dock Nine for a shuttle to Heinlein. The order for immediate transfer back to Earth came from Boutsikari, but Alice suspects Ochoba’s hand. Ochoba needs a quick and visible win on this, and parading the one bad apple in leg-irons would do it.
That’s why Alice is hurrying to get there in person. If she contacts the officer in charge via his lens, he could quickly verify that Alice doesn’t have the authority to stall the transfer. On the spot, she can tell him she has received updated instructions, and he is unlikely to defy the Principal of the SOE to her face.
If he does, however, she has no idea what her move is. Does she really think she’s capable of springing a prisoner? Never mind the practicalities, would she do it even if she knew it was physically possible? Or is there some override protocol that is about to restrain her if she attempts an action that will obstruct Ochoba’s orders, or interferes with the unseen plans of whoever else the puppet master might be? Will it kick in even to prevent her from lying to the head of the Seguridad detail?
Her mind is a storm, has been since she saw Omega’s grab. She is feverishly deconstructing her own personal history, disoriented by the questions of whether any of it is real. She recalls the childhood memory of a tortured lizard that was sparked by the sight of the dry dock from the shuttle window. She doesn’t know if the incident really happened or if it was put there so that she would view the world a certain way, sympathetic to an ideology that would guide her decisions in a manner her invisible controller intended.
Her thoughts flick back further, to when she first woke up in the capsule and the ensuing shuttle journey.
There will be no children, she was told. And yet among the first people she saw were children.
There are no androids here.
And yet …
There are worse implications than merely the veracity of her memories. One in particular is quietly crushing her from the inside.
There will be no children.
She can’t have any. If she is not truly human, then she can’t have children. It wasn’t exactly a pressing priority, but contemplating that the possibility may have been taken away, she feels an emptiness she can barely explain.
There are other voids too. Can she have a relationship? Can she fall in love?
She’s had a couple of boyfriends, back in college. Nothing serious, but they were relationships.
No: not verifiable. Not admissible. Nothing she remembers before arriving here on CdC counts.
Does the past matter now? Is she defined by memories that may be fictions, or is she defined by her actions from here on in? And if she acts here in defiance of Ochoba, does this mean she is exercising free will?
She’s almost there. Ahead of her the concourse is empty, a lens overlay reporting that the dock is temporarily closed. She endures a moment of concern that the doors won’t open as she seeks out the prompt and sends it her credentials, but the outline turns green as she approaches.
A few seconds later, Alice Blake swears for the first time, if only to herself.
She’s too goddamn late.