—You’ve got to hand it to Gillian, said Red.—Look how she’s holding her composure. I can hear her toe tapping inside her shoe. That’s about it for the nerves. Jay’s right. She is good.
Jay continued. “You think this company is all about machines and VNMs and money. That may be true, but it’s the people inside it who pump those things around. They’re the bloodstream. And who moves through that bloodstream, checking that everything is healthy and looking out for infections?” Jay nodded toward Constantine. “Him.”
Gillian looked from one to the other, then folded her hands gently in her lap. Bangles jingled on the white material of her shift. “You may be right, Jay. Maybe I have spent too long in the Oort cloud. However, my conscience is clear. My time there has been spent working to the good of the company and for all humanity. I’m not worried about spies.”
“I’m not a spy,” said Constantine simply.
Gillian flashed him an angry look. “I don’t care what you are. I came here for advice. You say I don’t spend enough time worrying about other people,” she turned her angry look toward Jay, “but that’s because I think we have far more urgent things to worry about. We have it in our power to unleash something we do not understand upon the universe. AIs! Admittedly more intelligent than ourselves and with the power to replicate themselves. For all we know, we may have already let the genie out of the bottle. I think that at times like this, personal advancement counts for little.”
Marion tapped a glass on the table. The dull thudding gradually captured their attention. “Thank you. Gillian. No one is questioning your integrity. I think it’s fair to say that we all understand the problem as well as you do.”
“What about him?” Gillian pointed her finger accusingly at Constantine. “He claimed to know nothing about working hyperdrives or AIs when this meeting started. Was that a lie, too?”
Constantine bowed his head slightly. “I’m sorry, Gillian. I deliberately misled you. I was trying to get a handle on what you believed was happening out there.”
“Why? Because you don’t trust me?”
“No. Well, not exactly. What if the AIs had manipulated you in some way? What if you were acting for them, even unwittingly?”
There was frosty silence from Gillian. When she spoke, it was with hurt dignity. “And? Do I pass your test?”
Constantine quickly polled his intelligences.
—I think so, said Red.—Except…
Constantine paused.
—Nothing, said Red.—Leave it.
—No opinion, said White.
—I’m pretty sure she’s clean, said Blue.
Grey remained silent.
“We think that you do,” said Constantine “Although, how can we ever be sure?” he added hurriedly.
“We always return to this same argument,” interrupted Masaharu. “The AIs are admittedly more intelligent than we are. If they are really that much more intelligent, then we cannot hope to outwit them. If we are to achieve anything, we have no choice but to hope that they’re not.”
Constantine nodded. “He’s right. I’ve lived the last two years of my life believing that.”
Gillian looked from Constantine to Masaharu and back again. She appeared to relax, leaning back in her chair. She spoke softly. “Okay. I understand that. So if you already know everything that I’ve told you, why am I here?”
Marion spoke. “Because we need your knowledge. You won’t be able to return to the Oort cloud, you know. We can’t take the risk of those AIs finding out anything that you hear at this meeting.”
“But what about my work?”
“Your work here is far more important now.” Marion turned to Constantine. “Would you like to explain?”
He nodded. “I’m sorry, Gillian. It’s true. The reason that I am here…”
He paused as a strange lightheadedness washed over him. For a moment, the table had seemed to flicker. Looking up he saw two Gillians…No, that wasn’t right, he saw one Gillian sitting inside another. One Gillian seemed frozen in place, her hand paused in the motion of scratching herself behind the ear. The second Gillian seemed to sit inside her and overlap the first, a normal young woman; she looked at Constantine with an expression of interest, shifting in her chair as she did so.
Constantine blinked hard. He reached out and placed a hand on the table’s surface. Cool and solid, it seemed reassuringly real.
“Are you feeling okay, Constantine?” asked Jay.
“Fine.” Constantine rubbed his hand back and forth for a moment, and then picked up his glass and took a sip of water. When he blinked again, the second Gillian had gone.
“Okay,” he continued. “I’m here to set in motion a train of events I have been leading toward for the past two years. We are here to safeguard against a possible future that has been increasingly apparent to humankind for at least two centuries. It seems to me that everything is finally in place. It is our duty to decide if we are right to take the course of action that is before us.”
There was a slight pause at this announcement.
—Look at Jay smiling, said Red.—She’s taken a shine to you. She likes a man with spirit.
Constantine coughed, then continued. “Okay. So, the order of events is as follows. First, we need to decide if we believe the AIs are working for or against us. Second, and this may or may not be relevant to the first point, do we go ahead with the plan?”
He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of Jay—Jay who sat motionless, a frozen expression on her face, while a second Jay leaned forward to pour herself a glass of water.
Damn,
he thought.
Not now. I’m going mad. Right here at the end, I’m finally going mad
. All the effort, all the drive suddenly just left him. Weak and exhausted, he slumped in his chair.
“I’m sorry. I don’t think this is such a good idea anymore,” he mumbled. Jay and the rest stared at him with expressions that ranged from shock to concern to faint scorn.
He didn’t care. Something seemed to be stirring in his mind, a little tickle, a tiny little feeling so small that it could barely be grasped. He thought about hugging a tree and rubbing a matchstick between his fingers at the same time. It made him feel uncomfortable. What was all that about?
“Excuse me,” he said. “I don’t feel…”
The tickling increased.
“Red, what is it?” he mumbled.
—I don’t know. It’s like one of the other personae…
“Red? Are you there? Blue? What’s happening?”
He held the glass of water close to his lips, hiding their movement. He was fooling nobody: the rest of the group looked on in concern.
He could feel something inside him waking up, something beginning to speak. Dizzily, he put the glass down. He heard a voice deep inside him, old and dry and incredibly strange. It was Grey, he realized. The grey pill was having an effect at last.
—Act normally, you fool. Don’t let them know you’ve noticed anything wrong.
“But…What…Can’t you see…?”
The others watched him mumbling to himself.
Grey spoke again, and his voice was petulant.—What’s up with Red? Why hasn’t he noticed? Gillian just got off a shuttle this morning that came from the edge of the solar system. Where did she get the white dress and the bangles? That’s this month’s fashion.
“Oh…I don’t know…It’s all too…” Constantine was still reeling. Punch-drunk…
—That’s it. I’m taking over, said Grey.
Suddenly Constantine began to speak: it was his voice, but the words weren’t his.
“I’m sorry, but I think I need a drink. It must have been hotter out there than I thought. I’m feeling a little dehydrated.”
His hand reached out for the glass of water of its own accord, adding supporting evidence to the words he was now being forced to speak.
It was Grey; Grey was controlling him. But that was impossible.
He was still reeling from the shock when Grey made him pass out.
Herb 3: 2210
…into darkness.
Darkness and silence.
Herb could touch, smell, taste, feel nothing.
A set of memories and no more.
He could remember their long climb up the tower into space, flickering from room to room and then, without warning, they had stopped. Robert Johnston had paused just long enough to announce that they could go no further with certainty, that they must now jump into the unknown—and they had jumped.
That was when the memories of a world ended. Memories of touch and sight and taste. Now there was…nothing.
So where was he? Robert had said that Herb’s consciousness had existed in the processors remaining after the VNMs of the Necropolis had failed to commit suicide correctly. He had therefore viewed the world through the senses of those machines. What if he had now jumped to a place where those senses no longer existed? What if his consciousness now existed in a processor with no connection to the outside world? How long would he remain here? Forever? To spend eternity without any senses, cut off from everyone and everything: the thought was enough to send his nonexistent pulse racing in panic. And then a second, more sinister, thought occurred to him.
Robert had said that many copies of his personality had been dispersed throughout the Enemy Domain to seek out the secret of its origin. What if other copies of Herb Kirkham were even now trapped in eternal darkness? Tiny bubbles of consciousness glittering unnoticed, suspended in endless silence throughout the dark ocean of the Enemy Domain.
Nothing, still nothing. A scream was building in Herb’s imaginary throat…
“Hey, buddy. What’s the matter?”
Robert Johnston thrust his face over Herb’s left shoulder, his features illuminated from below by some invisible light source. Herb blinked as his imaginary eyes adjusted to the darkness: his senses had switched on again. He
felt
the weak pull of gravity,
smelled
the cold, tinny air. Stretching away beneath his feet was a regular pattern of shadows, picking out the edges of a triangular grid. Around and above him, nothing. Only gloom.
“Where are we? What happened?” Herb’s voice was hoarse with emotion. Robert stepped before him.
Am I imagining it, or does he look shaken too?
Robert was poised on his toes, gently shifting his weight from one foot to the other as he regained his sense of reality. Noticing Herb’s curious expression, he changed his movement into a little dance.
“Come on, Herb. Get with the beat.”
“Don’t give me that,” said Herb. “You were as frightened as I was. What happened back there?”
“Nothing I couldn’t handle. There was nothing at the top of that elevator. Nothing. I think we lodged ourselves among the unused seed VNMs. I suppose they didn’t see the need to set them growing, once they realized the Necropolis had gone so badly wrong. There were no senses up there for me to use: they hadn’t been grown. I had to make an educated guess and jump us off in the direction of one of those ships hovering above the planet. I remembered the pattern they formed and sent us off on the path through the lattice that would most likely intersect with one of them. I got it right, but only just. We’re right at the far edge of the formation.”
Robert turned around and began to dance his way along the narrow walkway on which they stood, suspended over what Herb now recognized to be a spaceship’s outer hull. It looked surprisingly old-fashioned: struts and bracing were virtually unknown in these days of shell construction. Herb had a sudden sense of the otherness of the Enemy Domain. He wondered under which alien sun these ships had replicated. He imagined their juvenile forms, floating in bright blackness, the cold glare of some star picking out the stretching and sliding as the braces and struts tensed and tore themselves apart while the ships reproduced by binary fission.
“Look up.”
Herb obeyed as row upon row of silent coffins suddenly appeared above him.
“I just found the ship’s monitoring system for those things. I’ve linked them into our personalities as a visual feed. It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?”
Herb licked his lips. “Are they occupied?” he whispered.
Robert paused a moment. “Let me see…No. They’re empty. I wonder. Do you think that they were supposed to be filled from that planet beneath us? Let me think about that. It would make sense, wouldn’t it? Hmm.”
He lapsed into silence again and strode off along the walkway, his dancing forgotten now that his nerves were calmed. Yet again, Herb found himself following Robert Johnston into the unknown.
They were standing on the bridge of the spaceship. At least, that’s what Robert called it. Herb didn’t understand the concept. There was a wraparound window that made for ideal star-viewing, three comfortable padded chairs, equipped with straps for some reason, and between the chairs and the window, blocking the best standing position to take in the view, a bewildering array of controls.
“I don’t understand. What is this place for?”
Robert grinned. “For flying the spaceship, of course.”
Herb frowned. He ran his finger over the green, webbed material covering one of the chairs, then began to fiddle with one of the straps.
“I still don’t understand. How will these help fly the spaceship?”
Robert was watching him intently, saying nothing; it made Herb nervous. He was being tested, he was sure of it.
Robert spoke. “You don’t understand, do you? Don’t you remember your history lessons? I imagine that the Enemy Domain is thinking ahead. It’s thinking about what would happen if someone was forced to land this ship with the AIs knocked out. All this is intended for human pilots.”
“Human pilots? Is that possible?”
Again Robert said nothing, and Herb cursed himself internally. Of course it was possible. Isn’t that how all ships used to be controlled? Then another question occurred to him.
“Human pilots? Robert, I thought the Enemy Domain was an alien construction.”
Robert gave one of his enigmatic smiles. “It depends what you mean by alien.”
Herb sat down in one of the chairs. It was extremely comfortable, fitting itself to his body perfectly, except for where the straps dug into his back. He wriggled them aside and relaxed.
“You let me think the Enemy Domain was of alien origin. It’s not, is it? The Necropolis was built for humans, before it went wrong. These ships have spaces on them for human beings. Robert, what’s going on?”