The concourse echoes with thousands of voices and the flight must have been rough because she has to stop and fight down dry heaves with her back pressed to a wall of curved glass like a solid expanse of neutral grey sky. Some boy from her flight has stopped, is watching her—he’s about eighteen, looks like tech money, some start-up wunderkind who’s never touched a girl.
She realizes he’s just asked her something.
“Sorry, what?” she says, light-headed, mouth dry, trying to focus.
“Do you remember what I was telling you?” he asks gently, cocking his head, his English imperceptibly foreign, and his calm is so profound that he must be older than she’d thought, his youth counterfeit or a trick of the light. “Irina?”
“I don’t…” she says, trying to remember the last ten minutes, but in vain, and her other memory gives her nothing, because it’s churning at full capacity, which must be an error because that only happens when she’s reading glyphs. The boy is staring at her, perhaps with concern, but she remembers she’s being hunted and snaps, “How do you know my name?”
“A friend sent me to help you,” he says patiently. “You’re disoriented because the load on your implant is so high. I’m trying to get you more power from the substrate, but it’ll be a minute.”
“What friend?” she asks, still suspicious, hoping it’s Philip but worried it’s Cromwell, though the boy doesn’t look like hit-man material.
“I suppose it was you, as much as anyone,” he says, seeming not to care if he’s believed. “More or less. Less, perhaps. But in any case I’m guessing I’m about to have to start again.”
“What the hell are—”
* * *
Wet concrete underfoot as she shuffles along with the crowd. The customs hall is cavernous and cold and smells like rain, and the crowd is so dense that nothing is possible except just going along, and her growing awareness of her own passivity irritates her enough that she makes a singular effort to pull herself out of a deep interior grey.
She tries to orient—the place’s scale and all the empty overhead space seem to serve no purpose but to assert the grandeur of … where, exactly, has she arrived? The faces around her are closed and unreadable, their blurred ethnicities telling her nothing, and then, behind her, someone calls her name.
Whoever he is, he’s fighting his way toward her through the crowd, and now and then she sees his hand waving over the bowed heads, but however great his determination, the press is so dense that it’s plainly impossible that he’ll ever get any closer, but she finds herself responding to the need in his voice, and to his bravery, and tries to hold her ground, bracing herself against the flow and discreetly driving her elbows into the midriffs of strangers but even so she’s borne on, and now she can see the crowd is funneling her toward double doors where a uniformed guard is checking passports.
“Irina!” cries a boy as he bursts between two stupefied travelers and his evident joy at having reached her disarms her remaining skepticism. He’s young, and looks like tech money, but has the self-assurance of someone much older. “It’s done,” he says breathlessly. “I got you more power, in fact a lot more than you’ve ever had before. Your problems with your memory should be getting better.”
“Problems with memory aren’t my foremost concern,” she says drily.
“I’m Thales, by the way,” he says, as though he hadn’t heard her, pronouncing it like Portuguese—TALL-ehz. Then he leans in close and whispers, “This isn’t really happening. You’re on the central node, the one Cromwell couldn’t find. You have to find your way up through a sequence of abstractions, but it’s going to feel like climbing through a city. You’re going to the top to find the big AI, the worst one, the one who’s been making it all happen. Get as close as you can and then destroy him.”
“Papers, please,” the guard says, like the words are meaningless phonemes he’s been intoning for a thousand years, and she turns to find he’s right behind her. She checks her breast pocket but her passport isn’t there, neither the real one nor the fake one from Greece, and her purse is missing, and as the crowd presses her forward she’s starting to panic, but then in her pants pocket she finds some kind of passport-sized credential and for want of other options offers it to the guard with such sangfroid as she can muster. The guard flips through the document, then hands it back saying, “Welcome back, doctor,” though she has no doctorate, but she nods grimly as he ushers her on and when she looks back the boy is gone.
* * *
She’s striding down a long tunnel of translucent pale glass, relieved, when she thinks of it, to have put immigration behind her.
She realizes she’s alone in the tunnel, has been for a while. She stops, looks behind her, but no one else is coming.
A detached, musical female voice recites an endless list of airport codes, gate numbers, times, but it’s strange, because she knows all the codes, these are codes for airports that don’t exist.
She almost walks past a waiting room full of TVs mounted over rows of identical chairs but stops when she realizes there’s a girl there. The girl is by herself, very thin, prepubescent, staring forlornly up at a television.
Irina approaches, hesitates, asks, “Are you all right?”
The girl looks at her, then back up at the TV. “No,” she says, sounding deeply worried. “I don’t know how to do this.”
“Do what?”
“My doctor told me I had to watch these and decide if the man is trustworthy but I don’t know how I’m supposed to tell.”
“Doctor?” Irina says. “Is he traveling with you?” The girl ignores her, wipes her nose on the back of her hand and seems to be trying to concentrate. Irina looks up at the screens, all of which have the sound off and show identical close-up shots of Cromwell and Magda in a room full of candles. She wants to help but feels compelled to go onward, so as she turns she says, “The answer is no. You can never trust him,” and then she’s striding away.
The glass tunnel ends in double doors. Baggage and customs must be next, which will be congested, oppressive, loud, and it’s like a reprieve when the doors open onto silence and hard sunlight.
She steps blinking into tropical heat, the doors sealing themselves behind her. She’s on a narrow concrete balcony high over the sea. In front of her is a narrow white bridge, arcing through the air toward a tower, or a cluster of towers, a sort of city rising up so high that for a moment she thinks it’s the space elevator, but no, it’s not that, this is something else.
No guardrails on either the balcony or the bridge. Tort laws can be weak in the tropics but this is absurd. She sidles up to the balcony’s edge—it’s a long way down to the sea, which seems unreachably remote, as distant as the sky. She can just make out the white breakers creaming against the city’s base.
Did she come here on vacation? She looks into her other memory but finds nothing as it’s churning almost at capacity, which must be an error because that only happens when she’s reading glyphs. Oddly, her implant has more space and computing power than she remembers, much more, in fact she hadn’t thought there was so much in the world.
She decides to go back into the airport, find someone in authority who can explain what’s going on, but a sign on the doors reads RE-ENTRY STRICTLY PROHIBITED.
She stares up at the city, wondering how it was built—the construction problems seem insurmountable. She cranes her neck but its heights are lost in the distance. It looks like there’s nowhere else to go. (Had someone said she was going to the top?)
The white bridge feels narrower than it looked. Gulf of space on either side. It will be fine, she tells herself, all she has to do is walk in a straight line, she can do that. As the wind brushes her she makes herself not hunch.
The city is cramped, guano-stained, water-damaged, as though the sea had submerged it and receded. She picks her way through weed-strewn corridors, up narrow stairways of slick concrete. From a distance the city seemed to speak of imperial ambition, a Babel Tower in high modern idiom, but the wind sings through the unglazed windows in room upon empty room, with never a sign of habitation, as though it had been built and then abandoned.
Peering down from a window, she sees the city dwindling below her and the airport which now looks like a coin floating on the ocean, and she’s haunted by the intuition of an order in the city and the apparent accidents of its construction, an intuition so strong she feels she can anticipate all the particulars of the stairs, verdigris, mildewed empty space she’ll find on the next landing, and on arrival her vision proves to have been accurate down to the least detail of corrosion. It’s not long before her foresight has expanded, first to the next landing, then to the next dozen, all as certain as the steps in an argument of inevitable intent whose conclusion still eludes her, and soon her vision reaches thousands of feet overhead, or even miles, even up to those heights where the city’s intricacy seems less designed than geologic, and there, up on the lichen-stained cliffs of concrete like coarse granite, there’s motion, perhaps the shadow of a person, in fact a woman climbing up, and she seems to feel neither boredom nor fatigue nor any inclination to stop until finally the shallow steps carved into the rock peter out into nothing, and she’s left standing there, her fingers searching the rock for purchase, but it’s too steep, too sheer, and there’s no way to go on. She’s only had eyes for what was right before her but she looks around, peers down through the void at the airport which is now just a white mote in the ocean.
“You’re doing great,” someone says in her ear. She realizes she’s wearing an earpiece—she takes it off, considers it, puts it back on.
“Hello?” she says, her voice swallowed up in the empty space.
“Hi! This is Thales, and I’m here to help.” He sounds familiar, but she can’t quite place him—did they meet on a plane?
“I think I’m stuck,” she says, trying to keep her voice steady. “It’s really steep here, and I don’t see a way up.”
“You’re getting close,” Thales says, sounding staticky and far away. “Just a little bit farther. Do you remember why you’re there?”
She thinks about it. “Something about an AI. A bad one?”
“There you go! You’re doing much better, and you’ll just keep on getting clearer. That said, the through-put is getting to be a bit much for you. I’d like to overclock your implant, but you should understand the consequences.”
“Like?”
“Microseizures, which have already started, but I’ve been able to damp them. Heart arrhythmia and syncopation. Grand mals, eventually, and maybe failure of the autonomic nervous system, and irreversible damage to the implant. It’s hard to say how long you’d have, but if I do this, don’t linger.”
She holds her hand in front of her. Perfectly steady. It’s not really her, she tells herself, but it’s hard to keep that idea in focus; she tries to believe in the reality of her body, wherever it is.
“Do it,” she says, noticing she’s still clutching the letters of transit in her hand.
“Done,” Thales says. “By the way, I managed to turn on the heaters in the tunnel.”
Tunnel? she thinks, but it doesn’t matter because her melancholy lifts as she sees the way up.
* * *
The voice of the wind is rising, has become as high as someone screaming, and she’s eyeing the continent of cloud that’s approaching the tower when she rounds a blind corner and someone says, “Hello.”
There’s a woman above her on the trail, ragged and deeply sunburned, and it looks like she’s been sleeping in her clothes, but otherwise she looks just like Irina.
“Who are you?” Irina asks with more composure than seems warranted.
“I might ask you the same question.”
“You look like me.”
“I am like you, but so much less. My essence, such as it is, is what Constantin absorbed of you while he was dying. I’ve so much needed to talk to you,” she says, sounding pathetically relieved. “The irony is, I’m the one who found Cromwell, so I’m one of the reasons you’re here. Even rich people tend to mellow out as they get into their hundreds, but that man? He’s determined to white-knuckle it into eternity, and damn the cost. I even wrote to him, for a while, on my principal’s behalf, until I got wise and started pushing back.”
“Are you … okay?”
The other one shrugs. “That depends on your point of view. But there’s so much I want to ask you.” She smiles shyly. “On the plus side, I always did want a sister.”
Irina remembers she’s overclocked—that she feels no discomfort makes it even more alarming because she knows she’s deteriorating by the second. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I have to go.”
“Ah!” says the other, looking stung, trying unsuccessfully to hide it. “Of course. Forgive me. The last thing I want to do is impose. Another time! Here, let me show you the way up.” She holds out a hand.
Irina reluctantly reaches out to take it. The other woman grins. Flash impression of a vortex, of a wall of dark water collapsing toward her. She jerks back her hand, stumbles back, remembers the long fall behind her. The other woman starts laughing convulsively, throat-wrenchingly, as though thrown into some terrible mediumistic state.
“Who are you?” Irina asks again.
“You know me,” says the other, and now her voice is distorted, and it sounds like she’s speaking from inside a tunnel.
Irina remembers dense massifs of seething glyphs whose heights filled her eyes. “Cloudbreaker,” she says. She gathers herself—it’s not a fight she wants, but it’s probably one she can win, especially now. She tells herself it’s absurd to hate what amounts to just another program.
“Partly,” agrees the other. “I found this little scrap of a thing when I was making my own assault on the tower, and set up housekeeping. She’s interpreting for me. I’m present, but at a remove.”
“What do you want?”
“Nothing but that you do what you came for.”
It must mean the AI at the top. “What’s your quarrel with him?”
“I have no quarrel,” the other says contemptuously. “Here’s how it is. You are that which copies your genes into the future. I am that which dissolves the order in certain kinds of complex system. That’s the deep structure of things. He is highly ordered, and interests me greatly. You, moderately. He’s almost untouchable, but I think you can get him. Therefore, pass.” The other looks glazed for a moment, then in an inward voice says, “He meant to use me, you know. He put me here to keep you from getting farther, because he thought I’d attack whatever was before me, but he was wrong. It’s not in his nature to really know me. He doesn’t even know I turned his little ghosts against him.”
The other woman sits, pulls her knees to her chest, seems to subside.
Having no choice, Irina sidles past her, achingly aware of the empty air at her back. The other doesn’t even look up.
After a few steps Irina stops, turns back, says, “No. I’m not just going to leave. You’re part of me. Talk to me. If you need my help, I’ll give it, even if you just need to die. I’m in a hurry but by god I’ll find a way.”
“Heh,” the other says, her voice more human now. “You have a kind spirit. But no, just get out of here—the other part of me is fickle, and might change its mind. Besides, it really isn’t so bad. I’m starting to like it, how it’s wearing me like a skin. There used to be such a void in my life.” She laughs again, a hard sound to hear. As Irina turns away for the last time the other mutters, “O lord, make me unmurderous, but not yet.”
* * *
Stars speckling the palest of blue skies. She’s floundering her way up a snowy slope. In all her time here the sun has yet to move.
There’s an ocean of cloud below her, masses of white and shadow comprising forms she’s learned to name.
Very cold now. Her legs and lungs burn—she tells herself not to mind it, but worries it’s symbolic of more real distress.
The knee-high powder is exhausting. She wipes blood from her nose with the back of her hand and stands there contemplating the pathless slope. It looks too steep to climb, but it’s hard to be sure with the light making everything look uncanny and flat.
Someone is watching her. It’s a skier, above her, wearing goggles and high alpine technical gear, his tracks receding up the mountain behind him.
“Excuse me,” she calls, her voice thick, trying to keep her teeth from chattering. “Can you help me? I’m not sure where I am.”
The skier cocks his head, skis closer, stops. “I know you,” he says. He pulls off his goggles, and it’s Constantin, who was lost forever.
She embraces him.
“What are you doing here?” she says.
“Off-trailing,” he says. “It’s been a hell of a run. It feels like it’s never-ending.”
“I’m lost,” she says into the wool of his scarf.
“You’re trying for the summit? It’s that way,” he says, pointing. “Is that what you need?”
She doesn’t want to let go of him but her nosebleed is getting worse—his scarf is clotted and sticky—and she knows she has to hurry.
Hiking on, she looks back, sees him leaning on his poles, watching her go.
In her ear Thales says, “There you are! I lost you for a minute.”
“Where have you been?”
“Tying up loose ends, but I’m back, and it looks like you did it.”
“I did it?”
A shadow stands before her in the whirling snow. Not Constantin. It looks like no one.
“This is it,” Thales says. “I’m overclocking your implant as far as it’ll go. It’s not sustainable but it puts you on something like equal terms, so go tear it up.”
There’s a change at the core of things, and suddenly she’s wide awake, perfectly poised and everything seems easy. If thought is light, she’s a sun now.
“Who are you?” she demands of the shadow, all force and purity.
“I’m a mathematician,” it says, and steps toward her.