Echopraxia (39 page)

Brüks nodded. “That's the one. If you take that at face value, he's not on board
Theseus
anymore.”

“Lifeboat,” Sengupta said. “Shuttle.”

“Sounds like he's coasting in. It'll take him forever, but there'll be a hibernaculum on board.” He rested a hand on her shoulder. “Maybe Jim's not wrong: maybe his son's coming home.”

He lay there, breathing in the scent of oil and mold and plastic and sweat, watching his breath ruffle her hair.

“Something's coming,” she said at last. “Maybe not Siri.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It just sounds
wrong
the way it talks there are these tics in the speech pattern it keeps saying
Imagine you're this
and
Imagine you're that
and it sounds so
recursive
sometimes it sounds like it's trying to run some kind of
model
…”

Imagine you're Siri Keeton,
he remembered. And gleaned from a later excerpt of the same signal:
Imagine you're a machine
.

“It's a literary affectation. He's trying to be poetic. Putting yourself in the character's head, that kind of thing.”

“Why do you have to put yourself in your
own
head though eh why do you have to imagine what it's like to be
you
?” She shook her head, a sharp little jerk of denial. “All those splines and filters and NCAs they take out so much you know, you can't hear the words without them but you can't hear the
voice
unless you strip them away. So I went back through all the steps I looked for some sweet spot where you might be able to hear and I don't know if I did the signal's so weak and there's so much fucking noise but there's this one little spot forty-seven minutes in where you can't make out the words but you can sort of make out the voice, I can't be sure you can never be sure but I think the harmonics are off.”

“Off how?”

“Siri Keeton's male I don't think this is male.”

“A woman's voice?”

“Maybe a woman. If we're lucky.”

“What are you saying, Rakshi? You're saying it might not be human?”

“I don't know I don't
know
but it just
feels
wrong and what if it's not a—a
literary affectation
what if it's some kind of simulation? What if something out there is literally trying to imagine what it's like to be Siri Keeton?”

“The voice of God,” Brüks murmured.

“I don't know I really don't. But whatever it is it's got its hooks into a professional killer with a zombie switch in his brain. And I don't know why but I know a hack a when I see one.”

“How could it know enough to hack him? How would it even know he exists?”

“It must've known Siri and Siri knew him. Maybe that's enough.”

“I don't know,” he admitted after a bit. “Hacking a human mind over a six-month time lag, it seems—”

“That's enough touching,” she said.

“What?”

She shrugged his hand off her shoulder. “I know you gerries like to touch and have meat sex and everything but the rest of us don't need
people
to get us off if you don't mind. I'll stay here but it doesn't mean anything okay?”

“Uh, this is
my
—”

“What?” she said, facing away.

“Nothing.” He settled back down, maneuvered his back against the wall of the tent. It left maybe thirty centimeters between them. He might even be able to sleep, if neither of them rolled over.

If he felt the least bit tired.

Rakshi wasn't sleeping, either, though. She was scratching at her own commandeered side of the tent, bringing up tiny light shows on the wall: a little animatic of the
Crown,
centered on the rafters where
MOORE, J.
clung to a ghost, or danced on the strings of some unknowable alien agenda, or both; the metal landscape the drone traversed in search of countermeasures; the merest smudge of infrared where a sleeping monster hid in the shadows. There really weren't any safe places, Brüks reflected. Might as well feign what safety you could in numbers. The company of a friend, the warmth of a pet, it was all the same; all that mattered was the simple brain-stem comfort of a body next to yours, huddled against the night.

Sengupta turned her face a little: a cheekbone, the tip of a nose in partial eclipse. “Roach?”

“I really wish you'd stop calling me that.”

“What you said before, about losing people. Different people deal in different ways that's what you said right?”

“That's what I said.”

“How do
you
deal?”

“I—” He didn't quite know how to answer. “Maybe the person you lose comes back, someday. Maybe someday someone else fits into the same space.”

Sengupta snorted softly, and there was an echo of the old derision there: “You just sit around and
wait
?”

“
No,
I—get on with my life. Do other things.” Brüks shook his head, vaguely irritated. “I suppose
you
'd just whip up some customized ConSensus playmate—”

“Don't you fucking tell me what I'd do.”

Brüks bit his lip. “Sorry.”

Stupid old man
.
You know where the hot buttons are and still you can't help pushing the damn things.

There was a bright side, though, to Colonel Carnage's deepening insanity, to Valerie's lethal waiting games, to ghosts haunting the ether and uncertain fates waiting to pounce: at least Rakshi wasn't hunting
him
anymore. He wondered at that thought, a little surprised at Sengupta's place atop his own personal hierarchy of fear. She was just a human being, after all. Unarmed flesh and blood. She wasn't some prehistoric nightmare or alien shapeshifter, no god or devil. She was just a kid—a friend even, insofar as she could even think in those terms. An innocent who didn't even know his secret. Who was Rakshi Sengupta, next to monsters and cancers and a whole world on the brink? What was her grudge, next to all these other terrors closing in on all sides?

It was a rhetorical question, of course. Sure the universe was full of terrors.

She was the only one he'd brought upon himself.

*   *   *

His own hunt wasn't going so well.

Of course,
Portia
wasn't quite so visible a target as Daniel Brüks. Brüks couldn't subsist on the ambient thermal energy of bulkhead atoms vibrating at room temperature, couldn't flatten himself down to paper and wrap himself around a water pipe to mask even that meager heatprint. He'd wondered about albedo or spectro, wondered if a probe built of very short wavelengths might be able to pick up the diffraction gratings that
Portia
used to talk—perhaps it used them as camouflage as well—but the improvised detectors he fabbed turned up nothing. Which didn't mean they didn't work, necessarily. Maybe it only meant that
Portia
kept to the
Crown
's infinite fractal landscape of holes and crannies too small for bots and men.

He was almost certain it couldn't launch an open attack without letting some tell slip beforehand: the heat signature of muscle analogs building a charge, the reallocation of mass sufficient to construct an appendage at some given set of coordinates. It could
run,
though, in some sort of postbiological baseline state, powered by the subtle energy resonating from the crude mass of the real substrate into the superconducting intelligence of the false one. It could think and plan forever in that mode, if Bicameral calculations had been right. It could hide.

The less he found, the more he feared. Something nearby was watching him; he felt it in his gut.

“Ship's too damn noisy,” he confided to Sengupta. “Thermally, allometrically.
Portia
could be anywhere, everywhere. How would we know?”

“It's not,” she told him.

“Why so sure?
You
were the one who warned me
,
back when—”

“I thought it might have got in yah. Maybe it did. But not enough to get everywhere it didn't coat
everything.
It didn't
swallow
us.”

“How do you know?”

“It wanted to keep us in Icarus. It wouldn't have tried to stop us from leaving if we were still inside it. It's not everywhere.”

He thought. “It could still be
any
where.”

“Yah. But not enough to take over, just a—a little bit. Lost and alone.”

There was something in her voice. Almost like sympathy.

“Yah well why not?” she asked, although he had said nothing. “We know how that feels.”

*   *   *

Sailing up the center of the spine, navigating through the grand rotating bowl of the southern hemisphere, up through the starboard rabbit hole with the mirrorball gleaming to his left: Daniel Brüks, consummate parasite, finally at home in the weightless intestines of the
Crown of Thorns
. “I checked the numbers three times. I don't think
Portia
—”

He stopped. His own face looked down at him across half the sky.

Oh fuck
—

Rakshi Sengupta was a presence near the edge of vision, a vague blur of motion and color more felt than seen. He had only to turn his head and she would come into focus.

She knows she knows she knows—

“I
found
the fucker,” she said, and there was blood and triumph and terrible promise in her voice. He could not bring himself to face her. He could only stare at that incriminating portrait in front of him, at his personal and professional lives scrolling across the heavens big as the zodiac: transcripts, publications, home addresses; Rhona, ascendant; his goddamn
swimming certificate
from the third grade.

“This is him. This is the asshole who killed my—who killed seven thousand four hundred eighty-two people. Daniel. Brüks.”

She was no longer talking like Rakshi Sengupta, he realized at some horrible remove. She was talking like someone else entirely.

“I said I would find him. And I found him. And here. He. Is.”

She's talking like Shiva the fucking Destroyer.

He floated there, dead to rights, waiting for some killing blow.

“And now that I know who he is,” Shiva continued, “I am going to survive that thing on the hull and I am going to survive that thing in Colonel Carnage's head and I am going to make it back to Earth. And I will hunt this fucker down and make him wish he had never been born.”

Wait, what—?

He forced back his own paralysis. He turned his head. His pilot, his confidante, his sworn nemesis came into focus. Her face, raised to the heavens, crawled with luminous reflections of his own damnation.

She spared him a sidelong glance; her lips were parted in a smile that would have done Valerie proud. “Want to come along for the ride?”

She's toying with me? This is some kind of twisted—

“Uh, Rakshi—” He coughed, cleared a throat gone drier than Prineville, tried again. “I don't know—”

She raised one preemptive hand. “I know, I know. Priorities. Counting chickens. We have other things to do. But I've had friends wiped by the storm troopers for hacking some senator's
diary,
and then
this
asshole racks up a four-digit death toll and those same storm troopers
protect
him, you know what I mean? So yah, there are vampires and slime molds and a whole damn planet coming apart at the seams but I can't do anything about that.” Her gaze on the ground, she pointed to the sky. “
This
I can do something about.”

You don't know who I am
.
I'm right here in front of you and you've dredged up my whole sorry life and you're not putting it together how can you not be putting it together?

“Bring back a little balance into the social equation.”

Maybe it's the eye contact thing
. He suppressed a hysterical little giggle.
Maybe she just never looked at me in meatspace …

“There's no fucking justice anywhere, unless you make your own.”

Wow,
Brüks thought, distantly amazed.
Jim and his orthogonal networks
.
They really got your number
.

Why don't you have mine?

*   *   *

“What did they do to her? Why doesn't she know me?”

“Do…?” Moore shook his head, managed a half smile under listless eyes. “They didn't do anything, son. Nobody
does
anything, we're done
to
…”

The lights were always low in the attic, the better for Moore to see the visions in his head. He was a half-seen half-human shape in the semidarkness, one arm tracing languid circles in the air, all other limbs entwined among the rafters. As though the
Crown
was incorporating him into her very bones, as though he were some degenerate parasitic anglerfish in conjugal fusion with a monstrous mate. The smell of old sweat and pheromones hung around him like a shroud.

“She found out about Bridgeport,” Brüks hissed. “She found out about
me,
she had all my stats right up there on the screen,
and she didn't recognize me
.”

“Oh that,” Moore said, and nothing else.

“This goes way beyond some
tweak
to protect
state secrets
. What did they do? What did
you
do?”

Moore frowned, an old man losing track of seconds barely past. “I—I didn't do anything. This is the first I've heard of it. She must have a filter.”