Going Under (21 page)

"You gonna tell me I'm some kind of hero model, out to fix the world and if I don't then it's all going to hell in a handbasket?" she spat at him.

"No. There's nothing special about you. You don't have to do anything. More will come. They always do. Heroes are ten a penny. The world will turn without you and if things fall apart it won't be because you didn't act. I said what I said only for you. Do it for yourself. Wise up, Lila, before it's too late."

She flexed her hands into fists and out again. Instead of rising, with his words her anger had vanished. She felt cold and empty.

"You're going into Faery," he said, rubbing the scarf gently against his face. "The world of illusions. If you want to survive it, then you'll listen to what I said. When you get to the bottom of everything you'll find your answers there." He buried his face in the cloth.

"You've been there," she said, on a sudden intuition.

"They will ask you to leave something behind," he said, his voice unchanging in its inflection but muffled through the scarf. "So be sure that you have something valuable with you, at the end."

She looked down at him, confused by her feelings, and saw his shoulders start to shake silently. The longer she stood there the more useless she felt, so she simply walked away.

he harsh light of the corridor hit her like a slap. She stopped and listened to the building. It was less busy than at more civilised hours, but not deserted. Still, it didn't matter where she made her assault from; if she was discovered the results would be the same. Her plan was more gut than brains, she knew it too. The reason she hadn't formalised it in more conscious ways was her attempt to hide it from her Al, but truth to tell she wasn't sure if hiding was possible. She'd been repressing things so they didn't freak her out was the honest truth. Too late for that now.

She set out for the armoury and opened up completely to the Al, something she never did. In fact she never opened up like that to anyone but Zal, and even then they had to be more than intimate before she felt secure enough to go all the way. But there was no choice. Time was too short, and now with the sudden expansion of speed and breadth, time seemed to slow and so much more took place in every second. She moved with strange, moon slow strides, as if through water, then slower still until the hair hanging in front of her eyes was almost completely still mid-swish as she tossed her head to clear it.

She reviewed the blueprints Malachi had shown her, to steel her nerves as, in background, she composed her small song of rebellion in the binary keys.

They showed how the mech parts of her had been built according to experimental plans long before she had even been employed by the Foreign Office. The limb replacements and their weaponry and armour were the easy parts.

She finished reviewing the simple part of her composition. The ping signaller. It would find all the machines she was looking for and ask them to send her their location. Now to something harder-finding a carrier wave for the power she needed to transmit to trigger units which had been switched off.

Meanwhile, in the foreground she read on, her determination becoming stone: the brain-machine interface was so much harder. How lucky that the technicians found gifts appearing in their systems, as if the computers were talking in unknown silent languages to the masters of the machines, supplying the answers that were so elusive to struggling meat. Human brain maps gave rise to copies in the new smart-metal circuits. They grew it in solution, like crystals, from seeds. They coated it in nutrients. They adapted rats. They tried it on dying patients lost in hospitals without relatives or records. They tried it on victims of the first forays into Faery, Demonia, Alfheim.

Subject: deceased.

Subject: deceased.

Subject: catatonia, followed by death.

She wasn't the first. She was number 2045 on the production line of casualties. One of few that lived.

She had the carrier wave, she had the commands. Now an even trickier decision. She had only one shot at this. Send the signal. Read the locations. And then what to do if there were too many replies, scattered far and wide, in places she couldn't reach, with people she didn't know?

In the background, she began to calculate the likely number of hidden control devices and the chances of her being able to destroy them all. If she couldn't get them all, she could at least get some. Would that be enough? And if it wasn't, could she develop an immunity to the same technology that made her? Could she do that without killing herself? How would she do that? If they found her out, would they be able to switch her off before she could complete the mission?

Strategic and tactical arrays spun the numbers but suddenly she didn't care about that anymore.

There, in her sight, was a photograph of her as she had arrived in a fresh-woven green bodybag from Alfheim. If you hadn't known that the scarlet colour was the mark of a spell, it would look as if she had been paintballed while running naked through thick brambles. Because the thing-the thing was, she had those marks still, on her skull, in her hair, on her shoulder ... and they were only stains now that zinged and burned from time to time. But the thing, the thing was, she'd been sent home in a coma and yes, neurologically shot to bits, but intact. There on the photograph was a whole woman. Her mouth went dry. Her heart constricted.

After the photograph, in the record, were the notes about the pieces of her they had cut away in order to fit the prosthetics: left arm, right arm, left leg, right leg, pelvic girdle sections, left arm, right arm, skull sections, numbered vertebrae, left eye, right eye, nasal phalanges, jaw sections, teeth, right kidney, liver section, right lung, womb, ovaries. All replaced in their turn: left arm, right arm, right leg, infrastructural reinforcement and transmissions, left arm, right arm, external communications and armoury/internal Al array, enhanced optics light and motion capture camera system, nonvisible spectrum analysis, molecular detection, processing points, data clusters, endocrine adaption system, pharmacological and chemical synthesiser, cybernetic comms, micromak reactor, reactor control units.

Where ordinary women would have their babies, she held a copy of a star that could burn on long after any of her weak flesh body had gone.

Her Al self asked needlessly; now do you trust them?

No, I don't trust any of you fuckers.

What did they do with the pieces of me?

Meanwhile her answers to the assault equation were all in. No dice.

She reattuned her perceptions to real time, took a left turn midstride, and smacked open the door to the medical wing. People were used to seeing her there. Nurses smiled. Doctors nodded.

We are in danger, she said to her Al, as if she was talking to Tath. She had no idea if it could hear her. She'd never addressed it directly. Didn't know if you could. I need you to recognise that other systems like you are hostile to us. Was it loyal? Did it recognise them as one entity? Did it care? We need you to get ready to defend against outside commands and programs. Well, she had to find out, because her other plan was never going to work. She couldn't go and find all the controllers and smash them up before someone got to her first. The only route that had come up anywhere near a positive success rate was a direct appeal to the consciousness of the machine. Supposing it had one. If you don't, then you're finished with me, because we aren't going to make it.