The Eternal Prison (39 page)

 

I am coherent, you terrible woman,
Squalor huffed.
I see more clearly than you. Certainly it is not possible. The human mind is infinite. The intelligence and personality matrix is artificial and will not accept an imprint of over one hundred percent. The human mind has endless capacity. That is why I rejected Amblen’s designs and integrated the brain into
my
design.

 

I closed my eyes and imagined what Gleason would have said, her soft, sarcastic voice so real I wondered for a second if I had her inside me, too, or if maybe I’d finally gone bonkers, resurrecting everyone inside me:
Oh, Avery’s going batshit,
she would have said.
Avery’s cracked under the
pressure.

 

I opened my eyes and put a blank expression on my face. I nodded. “Go ahead.
Prove
it to me.”

 

He didn’t move for some time, just staring back at me with a half smile on his face, perfectly still. I wondered if he was conferring with his Prime or gathering data from hundreds of other Marins throughout the System. I could ask him about Michaleen, but I had no way to compel him to answer me or to verify that the answer he gave was accurate. And I didn’t like him knowing anything about me.

 

He stood up suddenly. “I don’t need to prove it to you, Avery. Your belief in your own reality is immaterial to my needs. You’re back here as the only inmate of Chengara Penitentiary. This facility was designed and maintained as a place where people who
knew
things could be warehoused until we could extract their consciousness and peruse them at will. A database was being built from all these combined minds, you understand, and eventually—thirty, forty years from now—we would be able to simply search and find out everything you people knew on some subject or other. You were here because you knew things that might have been
potentially
useful, Avery. But others were here because they knew
specific
things. Because of Ruberto’s raid, this project was terminated prematurely, and we did not secure all of the information we’d planned on.”

 

He turned and started walking briskly away. “
You,
Avery—this specific unit—are here because somehow when you were processed, something went wrong and you ended up with something extra, didn’t you?”

 

I think he means
us,
Avery,
I heard Little Dick whisper in my head.

 

“You’re back here, Avery,” he said over his shoulder as a heavy-sounding metal door snapped open on his approach, “because now you know something
specific.
You certainly don’t know what it
is,
but that is why you’re here. So we can extract it from you… or whomever we need to extract it from.” He stopped short of the door, standing aside as a second figure stepped into my roomy cell. “I’d like to introduce you to your interrogator, Avery.”

 

The newcomer turned to approach me, and a shiver went through me. Not surprise, because while I hadn’t considered the possibility, it now struck me as perfect, the obvious choice. I saw my own face approaching, with a perfect little hitch to his stride as if his hip bothered him—it was me again, sprouting up like a fucking mushroom whenever I tore him out of the ground. Another goddamn avatar of me, walking the System.

 

He looked clean and well rested, the artificial bastard. I couldn’t move my numb hands, or I would have clenched my fists. Instead I watched him pick up the chair Marin had just vacated, spin it around, and sit down in an easy motion with his arms crossed over the back. He didn’t say anything, just gave me a grin and a wink. If I could have moved, I would have launched myself at him, biting and tearing.

 

“I’ll leave you to it, then,” Marin said flatly, stepping out. The door swung shut automatically behind him, ending in a deep, echoing click that hinted at a magnetically sealed portal.

 

I looked up at myself. The avatar leaned back and reached into its coat, producing a small black case. It popped it open and set it down on the floor between us with a deliberate, slow movement. I glanced down at it, surprised, somehow, to find a single shiny-new autohypo and a large clear bottle of slimy-looking liquid. I looked up again, and my avatar had rested its chin on its hands, a hint of a smile—my smile—on its face.

 

“Tell me,” it said in my voice, a perfect replication except for the complete lack of fear, panic, and desperation, “about System of Federated Nations Undersecretary Dolores Salgado.”

 

 

 

 

XXXIV

THE BEST IDEA I’D HAD IN
YEARS

 

 

 

 

I drifted in and out.

 

I opened my eyes to find myself sitting in front of me, with that same static smile as if it’d been in low-power mode for hours. Cold water dripped from my nose and hair, the shock of my revival rippling down through me, humming in my bones. The grunt with the bucket was just stepping out of the cell, so I figured I’d been out about a minute.

 

I shook my head, feeling my brain rattling around as if it had become unglued. I was naked. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been naked—decades ago, at least. I watched the avatar put down the electric prod it had been using creatively and sat there struggling to suck in enough air to survive on, waiting for the next round.

 

The rounds tended to end with me passing out.

 

“I know what you’re thinking,” the avatar said. It was amazing, and terrible, to think how perfectly it imitated me. I thought of the unit back at The Star, how beat-up it had been, so believably bloody and bruised—no wonder everyone had bought it as me, prowling around New York again, covered in shit and trying to find a way to kill someone. This one was so shiny and perfect no one would have believed it for a second.

 

“You’re thinking you don’t
know
what we’re trying to get out of you, right?”

 

I didn’t react—or didn’t think I reacted; my nerve connection to my face had been shut down in self-defense a long time ago, and I may have been making faces and weeping openly for all I knew. I’d tried asking Salgado—or the version of her somehow locked up in my brain—what they wanted, but she’d gone mute, refusing to answer. Which was typical. When I was trying to act sane in front of everyone, she’d chattered on and on. Now that her voice in my head might actually do me some good, give me something to barter with, she was gone.

 

“The answer, brother, is that you appear to have a near-complete imprint of Undersecretary Salgado in your memory somehow, and while you may not know what we’re looking for,
she
does. And we believe that whatever we do to you, she will experience also. You don’t have enough memory capacity to house complete imprints—the people living inside you, Avery, are using your own subsystems. They exist as separate intelligences only in the abstract, in the higher level operations. So, for example, if I do this —”

 

It suddenly leaned down and plucked the electric prod from the floor, spinning neatly and jabbing it into a well-worn area approximately near my crotch. Pain flooded me, intense and jagged, but only for a second, not long enough to knock me out or make me shit myself again.

 

“She experiences it as well. So, you see, we’re torturing you to torture
her.
Eventually, even though you don’t know the information, she will tell you, and then you will tell us.”

 

I tried opening my mouth to say something, but this proved more difficult than I’d imagined.

 

“What’s that?” my avatar said, leaning in and cupping one perfect hand to its perfect ear—a sculpture of my ear that should have won awards. “Why bother torturing you if you’re just an avatar? Glad you asked, Avery. For one thing, you don’t
think
you’re an avatar—you don’t believe it—so this is just as effective as if you were really flesh and bone in front of me. And we can’t just suck out your digitized intelligences and sift them because they’re so fucking mangled and tied up with each other we’d just destroy whatever one-in-a-million balance you’ve got going in there. No, sorry, brother, it has to be the slow, old-fashioned way.” It put a cold hand under my chin and tilted my head up, peering down at me. The stubble on its face, a mix of black and white whiskers, was stunning. Vaguely, I wanted to know where the factories were that built these things in a world where I hadn’t been able to buy a decent handgun in years.

 

My avatar flipped the prod into the air and caught it deftly behind its back, whirling and raising it up into the air. “Let’s stop —”

 

 

I opened my eyes to find myself sitting in front of me, with that same static smile as if it’d been in low-power mode for hours.

 

“Thought I might have short-circuited something that time,” my avatar said, grinning.

 

My head was ringing, a persistent static noise deep inside, embedded in my cells. I let my head drop down and studied the floor blearily. My chair was seated on a shallow pool of thick liquid. My blood, I realized stupidly.

 

“Guess we have to wake you up,” my avatar said. I pulled my head up with immense effort in time to see it pulling the black case from its coat. I couldn’t remember what it was, at first. Just a black case that I’d seen before, that made me uneasy.

 

Dolores,
I whispered to myself, my own thoughts lost in the static.
If you were maybe thinking of telling me what the fuck they want to know, now might be a good time.

 

There was no response. I wondered if maybe I’d been crazy all these months, hearing voices. My head was all echoes and cobwebs, now.

 

The avatar stood up with the autohypo in its hand and leaned down to twist one of my arms painfully, exposing the bruised vein. It pushed the hypo against my skin, and there was the tiniest prick—just a drop of extra pain in the ocean of misery.

 

“There,” my avatar said. “No rest for the wicked, huh?”

 

My heart lurched in my chest, and my whole body went rigid, straining me against my bonds. My tongue snaked back into my throat, choking me, and I shut my eyes tightly as they bulged against my eyelids. Suddenly shivering, fire flowed through me, pushing every tendon rigid and turning every nerve on full throttle. The chair beneath me creaked as I surged upward, trembling.

 

My avatar knelt down in front of me. “I was just thinking about how everyone around you dies, huh, Avery?” It held up one hand and began ticking off fingers. “Pickering—dead. Kev Gatz—dead, and we never treated him very well, did we? Melody, dead. Gleason—ah, poor old sweetheart. Vicious and near feral, but cute in her way, huh?” It winked at me leeringly. “At least
we
thought so, huh?”

 

My heart managed an extra beat and I pushed hard, trying to leap up out of the chair and smash into this fucking demon. I wanted to rip its head off, gouge out those shining, expensive polymer eyes.

 

“Too bad they all died before this technology was perfected. They could be here now, with you. Dancing. Singing. Telling jokes. Beating the shit out of you.”

 

Too late,
I thought.
Glee and Kev already did that part.
What was it about the fucking cosmos that it always wanted to bring my ghosts back, one more time, expressly to assault me?

 

“Have you asked her yet?” my avatar suddenly said, cocking its head in a way I was pretty sure I’d never done in my life. “Salgado, I mean. Have you tried just
asking
her directly?”

 

I nodded. “She told me to go fuck myself. Untie me so I can get started on you.”

 

For a moment the avatar froze the way I’d seen Dick Marin do a dozen times, just hovering there with one expression on its face, its eyes glittering and seemingly alive but everything about it suddenly completely still—no breathing, no twitching skin, no movement of the irises. Then it ticked its head in the opposite direction and smiled, the expression flashing onto its face as if it had always been there and I just hadn’t noticed before.

 

It moved fast, swinging its fist around toward me like a cudgel, knocking my head around hard. I felt a tooth torn from its roots, flying out of my mouth damp and warm. The ringing in my head swelled up like a thousand street bands tuning up for different songs all at once.

 

It didn’t pause, swinging the fist back again and hitting me just as hard. The chair lifted up off the floor for a moment, and I half spun, bodily, purple light flashing inside my head, and I was suddenly and completely blind.

 

Detached retina,
I heard Dolores whisper.
Maybe something worse. Or better.

 

What does he want to know, you goddamn ghost? What the fuck does he want to
know?

 

No answer. To that, the only fucking piece of information I wanted, nothing.

 

“Well, Avery,” I heard the avatar say, and I could hear the fucking
grin
in it—wide and shit-eating and nothing at all like what I would ever put on my face. “My fists weigh a fucking
ton,
and there aren’t many people who can take two punches and stay online—but can you take —”