Authors: Al Robertson
The biped was also staying in the Wound. ‘There’s less interference there,’ it said. They stumbled back to its hotel in silence. It insisted on buying Jack a drink. He turned down the offer of a whisky. The shabby bar was empty. Music played from exhausted speakers. Each song was a tinny parody of itself, a sketch waiting to be filled in by weave-delivered content.
‘I’m sorry, I have to ask,’ said the biped, once they’d sat down, ‘I thought everyone here was onweave? But those children …’
Its words were clearer than they had been. Repair systems had done their work. The poncho hid its body, but its head was uncovered and glowed gently in the gloom. It was how an alien moon might look, if softly lit by a dying sun. The nanogel it had been carved from was translucent. Jack could make out the bar beyond it, its outlines blurred and made ambiguous as if seen through a badly scuffed lens.
‘I don’t know,’ said Jack. ‘I haven’t been on-Station for seven years. They’d never have slipped off the net back then.’
He tore the top off a sugar sachet and poured it into his coffee, stirring the white powder into the murk with slow, deliberate strokes. The mug warmed his hands when he picked it up. He swigged at the black liquid, letting the heat run into his mouth and down his throat, savouring the hard touch of reality. Because he was offweave, it barely tasted of anything. Fist sang out in his head, [Caffeine this late keeps us both up.] Jack shut him away.
‘And you’re not onweave yourself ?’ asked the biped. Jack didn’t answer. ‘I’m sorry, that was tactless of me.’ Silence grew between them again. ‘Thank you for helping me just now. Not everyone would.’ Jack shrugged. ‘And may I ask one more indelicate question?’
‘I don’t see why not.’
‘You’re a puppeteer? I hope you don’t mind the word.’
‘I am, yes.’
‘There are hardly any of you left.’
‘There’s only one – me. And two puppets – Fist and Mr Stabs.’
‘Mr Stabs? He doesn’t have a human counterpart?’
‘He did. David Tiamat. But you know what happened to him.’
There was a moment’s silence. The biped stiffened as it accessed the relevant records. ‘I’m sorry,’ it said. ‘It always seemed best to cripple ships, rather than kill their occupants. We assumed he’d be rescued quickly.’
But Tiamat hadn’t been. His ship had drifted alone for too long. Unable to bear the solitude, he’d handed himself fully to Mr Stabs, dying gratefully as the puppet took full possession of both his mind and body. The story had become a favourite with the other puppets, passed between them like a talisman.
‘Your intentions were good,’ said Jack. ‘You can’t be blamed for the Pantheon’s carelessness.’
‘They’ve been careless with you, too. You don’t have long before …’
The biped shifted in his seat and looked down. Jack assumed the movement was meant to communicate awkwardness and pity.
‘Three months until Fist’s licence runs out,’ he said. ‘Then he’ll own my body. Just like Mr Stabs does Tiamat’s.’
Fist cackled in Jack’s mind.
‘You can’t revoke the terms and conditions?’
Jack smiled sadly. ‘Another file you need to access,’ he replied. ‘The removal systems were part of the last puppet management facility, in high orbit around Mars. It held all the puppets that had been stripped out of their puppeteers, and all the systems that extracted and then supported them. It was all vaporised towards the end of the war. The hardware and software designs were lost too. So there’s nowhere I can go to get him taken out of me, and no way of building a new facility to do it.’
‘But why can’t things carry on as they are now?’
‘I don’t own Fist – I just hold a seven-year usage licence for him. When it ends I can’t return him to the Kingdom subsidiary that looked after the puppets, so some pretty stringent penalty clauses kick in. What remains of the company is empowered to seize any or all of my assets, up to his replacement value. Puppets are very sophisticated, so they’re worth a lot. And I’m a homeless, godless traitor, so I’m not. Which means the company gets the only real assets I have left – my body, my mind. And there’s nothing left of the company but Fist. So he’ll own me, unconditionally and absolutely. And as soon as his corporate management systems register that, they’ll move to fully occupy my mind and body.’
‘Can’t Fist stop them?’
‘Not even Kingdom could. It’ll happen automatically. There’s no way of changing that.’ Jack paused for a moment. ‘Not that Fist would want to, of course,’ he finished, unable to hold bitterness out of his voice.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said the biped. ‘And there’s definitely nothing else of the company left?’
‘There were rumours that six unmounted puppet embryos survived, but nobody’s ever found any trace of them. No systems for them to survive on. So there’s nowhere else but Fist to go but,’ and Jack tapped his head, ‘here.’
Fist winked into existence, letting the biped see him too. ‘He’s stuck with me now, squishy!’
‘We’ve talked about this before. Don’t use that word.’
‘Fuck you!’
Jack went to slap Fist, but the puppet was too quick. By the time his hand reached him, Fist had disappeared. ‘I’m sorry,’ Jack said. ‘He can get a bit out of hand.’
From the depths of his mind, a voice echoed up – [ I’ll out of hand you, Jackie boy …]
‘Not an easy time.’
‘No,’ said Jack. ‘Not at all.’
Two young women tumbled into the room and rolled up to the bar. Both were wearing tight white T-shirts and shorts, spattered with weave sigils. Jack wondered what they became when they were seen by their target audience. They turned and caught sight of the biped. One of them shrieked. The other started giggling. The first one hit her friend, then shouted: ‘My brother. You took my fucking brother.’ She stumbled towards them but her friend pulled at her and stopped her. There were incoherent accusations and tears.
‘Such a shame that so many believe we were responsible for that atrocity,’ said the biped, turning his head away from the girls.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Jack.
‘Pantheon propaganda. You have nothing to apologise for.’
The barman was leaning over the bar, whispering urgently to the women. They staggered back out into the street. The barman glared at Jack and his companion.
‘You see,’ said the biped. ‘That’s what should have happened when I was attacked.’
‘Didn’t her friend stop her? And the barman?’
‘They were reacting to my weaveware. It flashed up a warning. If anything had happened – InSec would have arrested them, he’d have lost his licence.’
‘I guess the kids that attacked you don’t have anything to lose.’
The biped nodded. ‘You can’t threaten people like that,’ it said. ‘We know that from experience.’
‘So, for your diplomatic protocols to work – you must be onweave, then?’
‘We have to be.’
‘I’d have thought the Pantheon wouldn’t have let you.’
‘We like to be permanently linked to each other. The Pantheon understand the need for it. It’s written into the ceasefire agreement.’
‘So why didn’t you call InSec?’
‘I did. They can be a bit slow responding to Totality calls.’
‘Not good.’
‘It comes with the job. And I should introduce myself. I’m a human interface element.
IS/2279A0E2/BE/HIE/Biped/
723CI4
. It shortens to Ifor. I identify as male.’
‘Ifor,’ said Jack, reaching out. ‘Good to meet you. I’m Jack Forster.’
Tiny schools of light shimmered through Ifor’s head as he shook Jack’s hand. Memories carved through Jack’s mind. He thought of how Fist could shock nanogel, make it flare up and burn as he broke the intelligence it embodied. Those colours were strident, the patterns they made harsh. Ifor’s subtler, unpanicked display showed surprise and excitement.
‘You’ve heard of me, then?’ said Jack.
‘Oh yes. We were all very impressed by you.’
‘I did nothing heroic.’
‘You saved one of our most valued hubs.’
Deeper memories awoke in Jack. He’d stumbled on the snowflake Ifor was referring to on a routine ’roid patrol. It was the first time he’d been out since the death of his mother. He didn’t sleep much. Whenever he dreamed he would find and then lose her, over and over again.
Two months out of Mars and he’d been picking his way from rock to rock, sensors set to wide passive scan. The silent days had been filled with the past. When they found the snowflake he felt a huge sense of relief. It was in close orbit around a small asteroid. It had masked its systems, but not well enough. He’d picked up its signature while still a few hundred kilometres away from it. Memories receded as Fist went to work. Forty-eight sleepless hours followed, watching him carve his way through intricate firewalls, creating selective blind spots that allowed Jack to move his little patrol ship in closer and closer. When they were fifty kilometres out, Fist coupled with the ship’s navigation systems and pulled it into a complex evasive dance, always keeping the asteroid between them and the snowflake.
Neither Jack nor Fist realised just what they’d found. After two days of work, Fist still hadn’t even been able to find the snowflake’s core systems, let alone start cutting his way into them. ‘It’s never taken this long, Jack,’ he said sulkily, clacking his teeth with frustration. ‘I’m going to throw myself back in there and I’m not going to come out until I’ve danced us all the way into its little fake head.’ Then he focused all his resources on the struggle. His short body went limp, tumbled to the floor and disappeared.
Jack took to his bed, allowing his own mind to be subsumed by Fist too. He quickly dropped into the strange, confused dreamland that absorbed him at such moments. He was afraid that he would be forced to relive his mother’s death. It was a guilty relief to discover that she would not be present to him. In fact, he could still feel Fist. The puppet pulled him to the edge of the ship and then leapt into space. Jack found it so peaceful, until Fist’s heightened digital senses sang out warnings about solar radiation storms. Fist used them to mask the soft, invisible transmissions that flew him through the night to the snowflake. Once he was there he wormed his soft way into the snowflake’s digital carapace.
He entered in with a dark, secret lover’s touch. He was so attentive, so careful. His fascination with detail at last showed itself as a strength, as he engaged with defence systems more complex than had ever been encountered before. Jack watched in something like awe as the subtlest parts of his mind become components of Fist’s hacking array. Finally, Fist broke through the last of the firewalls that – he thought – protected the core systems of a single mind. He pushed past it, taking Jack with him. Both of them expected to find the machine’s heart buried behind it. Fist would break it, then dance gleefully through the resultant digital chaos. Jack would weep.
But they found something very different, and were amazed. A great family of shapes hung in luminous space before them, moving around each other in a slow, complex, three-dimensional dance. Each one was shaped like a child’s drawing of a star, with luminous spines reaching out from a central shining globe. Dense gouts of light branched out of those spines, connecting with others close to them, falling back from those that were pulling away. Deep information flows pulsed and shone everywhere, leaping through the void. The snowflake was a womb for a new kind of intelligence, alive with an infinity of thought.
‘How many minds can you see, Fist?’
‘I can’t count them.’
‘This is deep Totality. It must be one of their hubs.’
‘This close in? Aren’t they Kuiper Belt only?’
‘They’re getting more and more confident. Isn’t it astonishing?’
‘I suppose so.’ There was a pause, then Fist said ‘Well, let’s fuck ’em all up.’
‘No.’
‘What the actual fuck? Jack, nobody’s ever broken into anything like this. Those other bastards will finally have to take me seriously.’
‘There’s been enough dying. We’re not going after this. It’s too beautiful.’
‘Oh, for gods’ sake. NOW he has an attack of conscience. It’s not your fucking mother in here.’
Jack pulled his mind space back from Fist’s control, feeling connections between them snap as he reclaimed the processing areas of his consciousness. Fist moved from disbelief to rage almost instantly. He howled and snarled impotently as Jack let their shared perception drift further into the Totality hub. Jack knew he would be triggering alarms, but didn’t care. All thoughts of warfare seemed far away, in the face of such perfection.
Jack had forgotten that he was in the little café, that Ifor was sat in front of him. Memories swirled in his head. Even Fist was silent, sulking as he watched Jack replay the moment that had cost them both so much.
Ifor coughed, reminding Jack that he was still there. ‘You are a hero to many of us,’ he said.
‘Then the Totality needs a better class of hero.’
‘Modesty is a fine quality. Very few of you could have broken into that mind. Nobody else would have spared it.’
[ Well, it’s always nice to be appreciated,] preened Fist, [but I bet he’s after something.]
‘So, you’re here as a diplomat?’ said Jack. ‘But what’s your mission? Why are you in Docklands? We saw one of you the other night, but we couldn’t work out what it was doing.’
‘We have a very specific task to accomplish. During the Soft War, many Totality components were captured by your forces and brought home as souvenirs. They retain trace elements of mind consciousness. We are incomplete without them. Under the peace treaty with your Pantheon, we are empowered to search Station to find and recover them.’
‘Are you having much luck?’
‘You have seen how we are received here.’
‘Tough job.’
‘It is satisfying when we find a fragment of mind. Of course, there is much that is still missing. Several complete minds remain unaccounted for. We are liaising with InSec to resolve this matter. It claims to have no knowledge of them, and our searches have turned up very little of substance. But we have a duty to our lost. So we keep looking.’