It all had the unnerving semblance of improvisation. Harry told her the details of Reski Emantes’s diversion–a dozen decoy remotes emitting the energy profiles of Construct wardroids as they boarded the station via several spread-out airlocks–just a few moments before the dataform device began repatterning her for the transfer. At that moment Julia’s body was lying on a couch in one of the Great Hub’s subspace signal towers, her vacant mind’s neural pathways under the control of a task-dedicated AI, what the subservicers had called a cognition, residing in an implant embedded in her body’s brain. Once Julia’s fractalised sentience was repatterned she would be streamed into the implant, overwriting the cognition AI and taking control. She had crossed vast interplanetary distance via the tiernet, had entirely unexpected encounters, seen incredible sights and spectacles, and vied with deadly adversaries, just so she could complete the circle.
Well, it wasn’t entirely complete–there was too much neural damage to her cortex to risk an organic transferral. Overwriting the implant was safer.
She waited beneath the overarching, fabulously intricate dataform, a glowing software assembly whose bright stabbing needles were prescanning the structure of her fractalised sentience, preparatory to the full compressive transload operation. Harry gave her a sardonic wave as the last milliseconds trickled away, and she was sure that she saw a familiar look of mischief pass over his features.
Then everything smeared and slid sideways, distorting along a rainbow spiral that coiled and coiled into whiteness…
Then time sprang back into motion. There was the sense of being somewhere else but vision was a dark blur and she could hear nothing. It had to be the VR headset which all the captive Enhanced were wearing. The subservicer AIs had explained that the implant had a hardbuilt interfacing system, which would match her own motion and perception impulses. Right now she needed to see, so she thought of herself tilting her head to one side, turning it, brushing her temple against her shoulder, even jerking her head sharply sideways…
Success! The VR visor tilted sideways, giving her a partial view of the low, round corridor, some of the consoles, and the couch in front. As if this were a signal a circular emblem began to blink in the lower right of her field of vision and sound came through. She found that if she stared at the emblem for more than three seconds an opaque menu of options appeared. As she experimented, she listened in to the commotion going on along the corridor. She could hear Corazon Talavera shrieking at some unfortunate underlings, ordering them to ‘hunt down and obliterate the intruders’, which had to be Reski Emantes’s decoys.
Anything that upsets that prize bitch has to be a good thing, she thought.
Mastering the implant’s op-system was straightforward and she quickly came up with a list of the high-level connections that were open to her, or rather to the AI she had supplanted.
Power Usage Aggregate Monitor
Communications Net
Security Overwatch
Biophysical Aggregate Monitor
Chemo-Cortico Aggregate Monitor
Target and Guidance
Arm and Launch
The last two also offered additional options–Codeline Interface or Immersion Interface. For the last on the list she chose option 2.
Julia’s vision swam for a moment and the word ‘recalibrating’ pulsed below her POV centre a few times before the colours and shapes of a gloomy landscape appeared all around her. A memory came to her from those frantic moments before she gave up her body to escape Talavera, and she realised that this was Irenya’s personal metacosm. Dark bruised clouds loomed low overhead. Julia stood next to a dried-out stone fountain in a parched garden, several yards from a large and imposing mansion. A massive stairway flanked by stone wolves led up to a pair of iron-studded doors burdened with chains and padlocks. She considered the exterior, noting the narrow windows covered by outer shutters, the pale patches of lichen, the spreading webs of leafless, desiccated ivy. And a slender circular tower at one corner. It seemed atypical, out of keeping with the mansion’s stern, square-built aesthetic. When she reached it she discovered an open door and inside a spiral staircase which she began to climb. From outside came a rumble of thunder.
By the time Julia reached a landing halfway up a steady rain was falling–from an open, glassless window she could see water pooling in the fountain’s bowl and spreading in puddles across the ground. Ascending further, she came to the joisted underside of a floor–the staircase curved up to a door which opened easily and quietly. Inside, the tower room was bare, just floorboards and blank walls, and an open window, its double shutters swung outwards. The rain was heavier now, gusts sending sprays of it in to speckle the dusty floor around the slight figure that sat hunched there. It was Irenya.
Julia crouched beside her, one tentative hand on her shoulder, whispering her name. After a moment Irenya opened her eyes and sighed.
‘Did everything, you know? Did it all, just as they asked.’
Irenya was thin, her face gaunt, her blonde hair lank and tangled. Anguished eyes came round.
‘Yes–mostly.’
‘I can feel… I felt it when Thorold gave up. I could feel him slipping away.’ Grief made the lines deepen in her face. ‘Letting go…’
Julia felt a sharp shadow of loss touch her, yet it seemed more of a dismal stoicism than genuine sorrow.
‘Irenya,’ she said. ‘I need to ask you about the arming and launch sequences…’
‘… just letting it go and slipping away… letting it go and…’
‘Please Irenya, you have to help me…’
Irenya shook her head dolefully then looked at her hands. ‘Took me off it, Yulia. Said I was losing my focus. That’s why I’m here in the tower, to keep me away from…’ She pointed out of the window.
Julia got to her feet and went over to the casement, ignoring the rain as she peered out. Behind the frontage of the mansion was a broad flat roof covered in an array of identical statues laid out in twenty rows of twenty-five each. In the downpour it was difficult to make out the form of the statues; they seemed to resemble some kind of bulky creature holding up a cluster of rods, angled at the sky.
‘Quite a sight, eh?–nice symbology, I thought.’
At the sound of that familiar, despised voice Julia began to turn back into the room. But Talavera was already charging at her, hands outflung. The impact shoved her backwards off her feet and out of the window…
Suddenly she was back on the couch in the Great Hub, dumped out of the metacosm by her implant’s hazard-detection cutout. The VR visor still sat asquint on her face and she whipped her head to the side a couple of times before it finally flew off.
‘Okay, so now you’ve got a better view,’ came Talavera’s voice from somewhere behind her. ‘Good–there’s something I want you to see.’
The Chaurixa leader came and stood next to Julia’s couch, looked down and shook her head. ‘Clever gambit,’ she said. ‘Those decoys had my boys running around and going crazy trying to find non-existent Construct combat droids. Meanwhile one of these neat probes fed you in via some subsystem and you crept back to your old carcass. Only now you’re a fractalised sentience occupying an implant in your own brain! Goodness, the irony is practically industrial-strength–especially now that I have isolated your implant from extraneous connections.’
‘Okay, we’ve established that you’re screaming mad,’ Julia said in a hoarse whisper. ‘What new outburst of vileness are you going to show me?’
‘Hmm, you’ve got feisty since we last met.’ Talavera chuckled but her eyes glittered. ‘What you don’t know is that all this constitutes an act of rational purpose. There is an ecology of greatness in the cosmos–evolution has many directions and only the greatest can defy the currents of dissolution. That’s what this is about, and you are privileged to be a witness…’
She broke off as a Henkayan carrying three weapons appeared at the end of the round passageway.
‘We have him,’ it said gruffly.
‘Bring him to me.’
Talavera laughed as her minion left, a high girlish sound that, Julia recalled, usually presaged a deed of outstanding cruelty.
‘It’s a shame you didn’t let me know you were coming,’ Talavera said. ‘I’d have had drinks and snacks arranged, sweet lights and sweet music.’ She raised her hands dramatically. ‘But–at least my cherished travelling companions are here with me to celebrate this historical event… dearest Kao Chih! Do join us.’
The barrel-chested, four-armed Henkayan had returned with a Human, a black-haired, youthful male in a dull orange two-piece. The man’s hands were bound behind his back, his features were Asiatic and he had a bruised jaw and a split lip. As the Henkayan steered him along the passage Talavera brought out a chair and pointed at it. The man was prodded towards it and shoved down into a seated position. Talavera grinned and patted his cheek.
‘Right, first introductions. Julia, this is Kao Chih; Kao Chih–Julia. I’ve spent some time with both of you, and finally we’ve got the whole gang together in the one place!’ She smiled. ‘Did you miss me, KC? Remember all the fun we had?’
‘I have not forgotten you, Mistress Talavera.’
Talavera glanced at Julia and rolled her eyes. ‘Mistress! Always so polite, the Chinese. Even when they’re stabbing you in the back–isn’t that right, KC? After all, that’s what you did back in the Shafis system, when you abandoned me on that miserable scumpot of a planet.’ She had been poking his shoulder as she spoke but then stopped. ‘And yet if I hadn’t been dumped there I might never have encountered my master’s servants and heard his message and his promise…’
As she spoke, the smoky black snake creatures appeared from below, winding their way up her body. Julia stared, remembering their name–vermax–and wondered if they were actually even organic creatures.
‘… and we wouldn’t be here today to honour and mark the occasion of His arrival.’
She pointed a small control remote at one of the consoles and a large holopanel winked on above it. The image was divided into eight subframes showing cycles of visual feeds from the hundreds of sensors dotted around the exterior of the Great Hub. Against the looming, striated hyperspace background, ships fought in sideslipping, glancing encounters. Some of the sensors were tracking the participants and Julia saw black curvilinear ships of the Vor lash out with bright tentacles to attack smaller vessels shaped like bulbous argopods, the shell-squids that populated the waters of the Eastern Towns. Others showed similar clashes involving the argopod ships and fast darting craft with tapered prows and bullet-shaped sterns.
‘The Construct just doesn’t know when to give in,’ said Talavera. ‘Keeps throwing ships into a lost cause, keeps wasting its forces. Even when the Godhead Himself enters the arena.’
The eight subframes merged, dissolved into a single image. It looked like a strange landscape seen from above at something like a 20-degree angle. The ground was a gleaming swirl of silver-grey and slate-blue shot through with strands of black, like something stirred or kneaded. As Julia watched she could see that the blue-grey surface was in motion, undulations passing across it. The image pulled back and the restless expanse widened, and curious solid-looking outlines appeared as if pushing up out of something glutinous and malleable. Sections of strange structures emerged, domes, triangular obelisks, then they would twist and distort into something completely different, odd creatures struggling across the grey ripples before collapsing back in, or bizarre body parts, a winged arm, a foot, a brace of tails, and a huge face that surfaced, gazed up with blank eyes for a moment before tipping over and sliding back in.
The image pulled back and the details shrank into a general dark grey amalgam. At last its upper edge came into view along with more ships, big black domelike ones and silvery diamonds around which flocks of smaller craft swooped. When the full extent of the grotesque immensity became apparent, it resembled a vast ragged island with an underside so notched, craggy and serrated it might have been wrenched whole from the bedrock of some malformed planet.
‘Meet the Godhead!’ Talavera said. ‘In all his irresistible glory!’