Talavera let her have a beach house and a golden retriever to run along the sands with and some fishing rods and a low wooden jetty and a white rowing boat. And Julia would sit out on the veranda with a tall glass of vargr wine, enjoying the sun’s heat on her skin even though she was enveloped in cascades of information, a cloud of data in continual motion.
And she worked on tailored heuristic navigator systems for a hundred anti-dark matter missiles to be launched from hyperspace, targeted on a hundred planets, on a hundred deadly people who had to die.
Or so Talavera’s story went: that whole process of kidnapping Julia and the other Enhanced and making them modify thermonuclear missiles for use against the ships orbiting Darien, then confining them to full-body virtuality tanks, was only her way of testing their abilities and mettle before revealing this most vital of projects. And it was a great shame that the distrust felt by the Enhanced had required Talavera and her people to resort to a certain degree of coercion. She had told Julia all this two subjective days after the foiling of her attempt to escape from the Sacrament, the Chaurixa terrorists’ mothership. Julia had listened and nodded thoughtfully, not believing a word.
So as a demonstration of her warm-hearted good will, Talavera allowed her the house, the dog, the boat and so forth, and when Julia asked for a Human companion the terrorist seemed to consider for a moment before giving her assent.
Now it was the fifth s-day since her arrival at the beach, although objectively only a day had passed. Relaxing on the veranda, she teased coils and lattices of info from the raw data cloud which hung over her like an immense, slowly gyring tornado, its dense grey and slate-blue flows speckled with glittering motes, glints caught in the intertwining braids.
Down on the beach, further along the shore, a female figure ran, laughed and played with the dog, throwing sticks and splashing in the shallows. Joyful barks drifted on the breeze.
The imagery was representational. In drawing down data from the cloudy tornado she was actually configuring it for the computational macros she had already prepared in certain areas of her cortex, those tightly clustered webs of neural pathways that were under her conscious and practised control. But this was her meta-cosm so it amused her to watch those braids of information snakily float over to the brassy, bell-shaped intake of a small but fabulously archaic-looking machine that sat on the veranda’s low table. It had a sequence of bizarre sections complete with electrical sparks, wheezing bellows, flashing lights, and puffs of steam. Every hour or so a tinny fanfare would sound and a glassy sphere the size of her thumb would roll out at the other end, landing in a padded basket. Julia would transfer it to a triangular tray and over time build a gleaming pyramid which on completion would vanish when her eyes were averted.
Yet she remained perfectly aware that despite the pleasant surroundings and the placid comforts, her body still lay stretched and motionless in one of Talavera’s virtuality tanks. With any luck they wouldn’t have disturbed or forensically examined her since her incarceration.
More barks and the sound of footsteps climbing to the veranda heralded her companion’s return.
‘Och, Julia!–all work and no play is no way to stay sharp, ye know!’
Wearing a pale blue windbreaker and flowery slacks, Catriona Macreadie pulled up a wicker stool and sat down. The golden retriever followed her in and lay down by her feet.
‘It’s an urgent project, Cat,’ she said. ‘And it’s my responsibility so I have to stick with it.’
‘Well, when it’s done, me and Benny’ll take you along to some rock pools we found–you should see the ammonite crabs…’
Julia smiled and nodded, inwardly puzzled as she’d neither imagined rock pools on the shore nor given the dog a name. But then this wasn’t meant to be that close a copy of the real Catriona, who had an altogether more morose demeanour. Julia was about to ask how far off these rock pools were when the tabletop contraption sounded its little fanfare and another glassy sphere was produced. Catriona chuckled and went over to pick it out of its little basket.
‘Beautiful,’ she said, peering into its foggy, latticed heart.
Then the dog stood up and looked at Julia.
‘Template match compiled,’ it said. ‘Instructions?’
‘Copy yourself and overwrite.’
Catriona froze in the act of dropping the sphere onto the triangular tray. Her form turned opaque as a bright transecting plane passed through her from head to toe. When it was over solidity returned, the sphere clinked onto the tray, and Catriona straightened, features blank, awaiting orders.
Julia smiled. When Talavera and her goons stuck her in the virtuality tank they didn’t know that she had hidden one last polymote in her hair, next to her scalp. Days ago she had repro-grammed a batch of polymotes–nanoscale builders–and deployed them through the Chaurixa vessel, the Sacrament, to assist in their escape attempt. The escape failed and all five Enhanced were confined in solitary. Julia was still able to regain control of the handful of polymotes not yet tracked down, then broke out of her cell only to be recaptured while trying to reprogram the cargo handler system.
It would be different this time. It had to be–Talavera had infected her with the nanodust.
She got to her feet. ‘What is the trigger word to suspend the sensory lockdown?’ she said to the dog. ‘And how long before it locks down again?’
‘The word is “continuity” and lockdown will resume after fifteen seconds.’
The dog was now host to the polymote’s limited AI, as was the Catriona shell, and very soon hers too. All they had to do was to keep the performance going long enough for her to make good an escape. Leaving the others was a wrench but a solo breakout stood the best chance.
‘I have incorporated a buffer into this image shell,’ she told the dog. ‘As soon as I speak, copy yourself into it then overwrite any residual code. Then you will maintain a behaviour façade.’ She breathed in deep. ‘Continuity…’
She almost made it. Awaking in the tank, she crept out into a shadowy corridor. Unobserved, she got to the Sacrament’s evac capsules, hacked into the controls with a polymote-built codegen key, set them all to autolaunch in one minute, long enough to get inside one of them and bypass its survival/nav system. So while the other eleven fired their thrusters and sped away into space, Julia manually steered hers along the Sacrament’s outer hull and latched onto an aft auxiliary hatch.
But Talavera somehow deduced that she was not aboard any of the evac capsules and nearly thirty minutes later the aft hatch’s locking clamps were activated. Then the hatch itself opened and she was dragged into the airlock, where a pair of Henkayans bound and gagged her.
Back in the virtuality chamber they tipped her into the tank, reattached the waste and nutrient tubes and refastened the neural cutout around her head. By now she had abandoned all pretence at composure and was yelling wordlessly behind the heavy tape covering her mouth. Then the cutout was activated and her body grew heavy and numb and misty and distant as her awareness was pulled back into Talavera’s virtual prison.
Julia opened her eyes and saw blue sky. She sat up and found she was back on the beach. Wavelets lapped at the shore, darkening the sand, but there was no beach house, no dog, no Catriona.
‘To say I’m disappointed, well…’
Talavera was suddenly standing a few feet away, attired in a red lacy bodice, green skin-tight leggings and her trademark heavy boots. As she stood there, black snakelike creatures emerged from the sand and wound up her legs. They had no features and were tapered at either end, so apart from their direction of movement there was no way to tell head from tail.
‘I explained what our work’s for, how important it is,’ Talavera went on.
‘And I don’t believe you,’ Julia said. ‘Don’t believe you, don’t trust you, don’t even… know what you are. What are those things?–why make up things like that?’
‘Hmm, sounds like pride to me. Yeah, the hubris of the oh-so-superior mind.’ Talavera leaned forward and hate glittered in her eyes. ‘But hang on a second–I’m the one who’s foiled your plans and dragged you back three times in a row so I guess that makes me your nemesis, maybe even arch-nemesis.’ She laughed. ‘And I didn’t make up my little snaky friends here–they’re messengers from someone called…’ She paused, as if deciding what to say. ‘… called the Godhead. He helped me escape when I was marooned and surrounded by death. You’ve no idea how powerful he is, or how powerful he is going to make me. Do you have someone like that, someone who’ll reach down and protect you and save you? I think we both know what the answer is.’
Julia kept her face expressionless and looked out across the placid waters, not knowing who this Godhead was, feeling empty.
‘What happens now?’ she said.
‘There’s still work to be done,’ said Talavera. ‘So we need that magnificent brain of yours in order to finish the project on time. But we can’t risk any more meddling or plotting on your part. In short, it’s time for a Julia-ectomy!’
Darkness slammed in from all sides. Her field of vision suddenly shrank to just her right eye and she couldn’t feel her body, no hands, legs, no mouth, nose, no feeling, no senses apart from one eye and a section of blue sky.
‘That Hegemony nanodust… really, it is such versatile stuff,’ came Talavera’s voice, close and rich with an unreal intensity. ‘I’ve got it shutting down pathways around your personality centres, mainly those to do with motivation and mood. Should keep you nicely torpid, and when you wake up after it’s all over, it’ll be a very different galaxy. Who knows, you might like it!’
Silence closed in. The blue sky turned grey-silver and an array of square silvery recesses emerged, a lattice of them, lines converging towards the distance. She was herself sinking into one of the recesses, drifting down into its shadows. There was brief flash of anger but it soon faded. The need to oppose Talavera frayed away and defiance dissolved into passivity. Becalmed, Julia’s awareness was simply content now to stare up out of her square niche. Even when the light above shaded away into unbroken darkness, there was nothing in her that felt like responding.
… initialising contingency state… initialising contingency state…
The odd phrase appeared on the niche wall, pale blue glowing letters that pulsed over and over. … initialising contingency state…
It seemed familiar, one of the autofeatures she’d coded into the polymotes at the start.
… initialised… nano-intrusion has been mapped… reroute partitioned cortical nodes? y/n…
A small glowing star sat above the y/n options and she found that she could will it to move in any direction. When she placed it over the y, other words appeared.
… stepped reconnection initiated… pov focus translocation initiated…
Suddenly she was in motion, a headlong blurring rush that made a bewildering number of abrupt changes in direction. All while a sharpness of mood crept back into her thoughts, bringing understanding in its wake. This reprieve had been effected by one of the polymote copies following its imperatives–subvert enemy systems, enhance and expand Julia’s scope for action. By now the dizzying, angular journey had slowed and it seemed that she hovered next to a dazzling, quivering, thrumming geyser of light passing horizontally through a sequence of crystalline rings. It was the dataflow of the virtuality chamber, the inflows and outflows, currents specific to each of the five metacosms that Talavera was running.
Time is limited, said the polymote. Do you wish to send a message via this vessel’s tiernet connection?
Hearing the polymote as a disembodied voice in her mind was unsettling. I have no mouth, she wanted to say. How can I…
You may do so by speaking the words in your mind.
‘I see. How much time is left?’
The nano-intrusion was easily fooled. However, cortical imbalances will exceed their capture tolerances in less than an objective minute and trigger alerts. Subjectively you have a longer period.
‘I want to observe the other Enhanced. I want to see what she’s done.’
Without warning her point of view plunged straight into the searing brightness of the dataflow.
She saw Konstantin’s laboratory, vast and intricate as a city, its districts cluttered with complex arrays of glassware, or stacks of analytical devices, or towers of monitors and servers. Yet a dark hush hung over it and many areas were shadowy or swathed in inky darkness. Toward the city centre there were still lights and flickering glows, signs of activity.
Irenya’s metacosm was a garden with a fountain and a stream and a wooden bridge and a bird table and willow trees. Only the garden was overgrown, the willows were half-strangled by masses of thorns, the fountain was dried up and cracked and the stream stank of decay. It was raining and from behind the tangled bushes came the sound of crying.
Thorold had not succumbed, not completely. Under an icy grey sky he was hauling a cart of stones up a bare mountain track.
The last was Arkady’s. Talavera had already infected him with the Hegemony nanodust so Julia didn’t know what to expect when she saw a vast foggy plain and the outlines of a solitary mountain. As she drew nearer the fog thinned and she saw that an immense seated figure had been formed from the mountainside. It was headless.
‘I’ve seen enough.’
Again the dataflow, its torrid brightness, its furious density. She considered the ship’s tiernet connection, a cluster of data channels whose multiplexity made perfect security a near-impossibility. Which is why Talavera wanted the Enhanced; their wetware was harder to infiltrate via the tiernet, and they were easier to coerce than an AI. Easy victims, weak, friendless. Talavera’s words came back to her:
‘Do you have someone like that, someone who’ll reach down and save you and protect you?… we both know what the answer is…’
‘Can you make a copy of my mindstate?’ she said. ‘Then open a channel to the tiernet and upstream it?’
A close, fractal-based approximation can be created… the virtuality monitors have discovered the anomalous imbalance in your brain. There is no time to create the copy then upstream it, but there is time to fractalise and upstream it in continual realtime transfer.
She hesitated, but only for a moment. ‘That will suffice.’
The fractalisation process may cause irreparable neural damage–it will certainly mean the end of your self-aware existence.
‘If I am cogent and aware when the nanodust shifts into its second phase I will experience suffering and self-death anyway. I have seen what it does. Please proceed with the scan.’
It is commencing. You will soon experience a scaleback in the visual and auditory senses. Also, old memories may appear for a short time.
The furious brightness of the dataflow grew pale then blurred into haze, and she imagined that she could hear a sound like the roar of a waterfall fading away. As it quietened it turned into something else, a crackling sound interspersed with pops and clicks. She saw a blob of light, a wavering yellowness which resolved out of the blur to become a bonfire on a beach by night. Ash specks and gleaming motes flew up on the swirling heat. Branches glowed red at the heart of the flames, bark curled and crisped and smoke flowed off the outer kindling in pale, rising rivulets.
Then it was as if the fire was within her. A wave of strange sensations surged, some memories, ideas, words, her name even, burst forth then melted away. Somehow she felt unburdened as her last thoughts rose up out of her like an ascending cascade of singing stars.
Flanked by two Kiskashin techs, Corazon Talavera gazed down at the unresponsive but still breathing form of Julia Bryce. As she stood there comparing the data on her analyser pad with the tank’s readouts, a creature like a snake made of dense black smoke coiled and slithered from thigh to torso to upper arm and back. The Kiskashin were both terrified of it but strove to show no fear, not in Talavera’s presence anyway.
‘She’s gone,’ Talavera said at last. ‘Use the dust again. Make a fine, new instrument for me.’