The Omega Expedition (39 page)

She was right, of course — except that there might not be enough time left to negotiate that kind of a compromise, if it turned out to be the best deal we could get.

“That wouldn’t be such a bad thing,” was the reply I offered. “Here, you and I are the freaks in the sideshow within the zoo. Maybe the best thing that could possibly happen to us is that these talks between the ultrasmart machines will break down, so that Alice’s friend can be instructed to ferry us back to Tyre.”

“Do you want to go to Tyre?” she asked.

“Not particularly — but it might be interesting.”

“Because we’d get the chance to be shapeshifters?” she asked.

“Because the situation there sounds a lot simpler, and a lot more harmonious, than a home system full of rival posthumans and paranoid machines. It has potential, and a reasonable chance of developing that potential.”

“But we would get the chance to be shapeshifters,” she said. “I think perhaps I’ve always wanted to be a shapeshifter, without knowing it.”

“You haven’t heard what the other emortality salesmen are offering yet,” I pointed out.

“We don’t know that they’re offering anything at all,” she countered. “We were just the trial runs, remember. If one thing became obvious today, it’s that they don’t think they need us any more.”

“Maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” I said. “It might leave us free to find and choose our own destinies.”

“Unless, of course,” she added, slowly, “we weren’t trial runs at all. Maybe we were
exactly
what some ultrasmart machine ordered: a crazy killer and a cunning thief. Alice was careful not to say very much about the machines who wanted to clear the human vermin out of the system, wasn’t she?”

“Maybe there aren’t any,” I said.

“Sure,” she said. “And maybe there aren’t any humans whose first response to the news that some machines have become people would be to switch them all off. Maybe the ultrasmart machines have been in hiding for centuries for no good reason.”

“If ever there was a good reason,” I ventured, “it surely must have degenerated by now into a mere matter of habit. If
Child of Fortune
could snatch the eight of us from under the sisterhood’s noses, and make us disappear without trace, what must the entire fleet be able to do? The AMIs must be capable by now of defending themselves against any possible aggression from humans. They don’t have anything to lose by revealing themselves — it’s really a matter of when and how they reveal themselves, not whether or not they ought to do it. If they have cause to be afraid of anything, it’s certainly not the possibility that humans might try to wipe them out. They’ve been living alongside posthumans for long enough to know every subspecies inside out. They shouldn’t need to examine us, or debate with us, in order to discover anything about our attitudes or capabilities. If they really are going to subject us to some kind of trial when we get to Vesta, it’ll be a show trial: a demonstration or a drama.”

And yet
, I thought, privately,
they let us wake up in order to observe us. There must be things they don’t know, or things they’re afraid they don’t know. There’s something here that I haven’t quite fathomed
.

“Whatever happens when we get to Vesta might be fun,” Christine said, optimistically, presumably thinking about the AMIs’ love of games and stories.

“In my experience.” I told her, “games are a lot more fun for the players than they are for the pawns. That goes double for stories. In my day, the world of VE drama always had a far higher body count per hour than the world outside the hood — even the child-friendly fantasies that you liked so much when you were young.” Having said that, though, I repented of its harshness. I hastened to add: “But you’re right. It will certainly be interesting and it might be fun. Anyway, we’re already way ahead of the games people played in our day, in terms of the prizes on offer. You might get to the Omega Point yet, and see a hell of a lot of scenery along the way.”

And all because you were a mass murderer
, I didn’t add.
If only everyone had known
…

“Have you ever had fleshsex without IT support?” she asked, out of the blue.

“Sure,” I said.
With Mortimer Gray’s mother, among others
, I couldn’t help but recall.

“I never did,” she told me. “Might as well go straight to the real thing, I thought. I never expected this kind of situation to arise.”

“It’s not that hard,” I assured her. “And not that bad, considering. Do you want to come down here? It’s not as far to fall.”

I was joking. It seemed to me to be a joking matter.

As things turned out, though, it wasn’t a joking matter at all.

The fleshsex wasn’t as comfortable as I could have wished, because of the narrowness and hardness of the bunk, but it was manageable, and comforting, and reassuring…until the Earth moved.

It was an illusion, of course. If we’d actually been on Earth, instead of in an environment that was employing some kind of artifice to simulate Earth gravity, no movement of the planet could have affected us so drastically. It was, however, a thoroughly convincing and utterly terrifying illusion.

We were hurled out of the covert between the bunks, so violently that I was certain we were dead.

We were already holding one another loosely, so it didn’t require any acrobatics to hold one another more tightly, but neither of us could have expected that there was anything to be gained by clinging to one another — except, perhaps, that we would die together.

It would have been the ideal moment to have come out with some stylishly witty last words, but I couldn’t think of any. In any case, there wouldn’t have been time to whisper more than a couple in Christine’s ear before our fragile heads hit something horribly solid.

Part Three

Babes in the Wilderness

Thirty-Four

An Untrustworthy Interlude

W
hen I regained consciousness, or imagined I did, my head was hurting like hell and there was a terrible stench in my nostrils. I tried with all my might to lose consciousness again, but I couldn’t do it.

The pain was
very
insistent, but its force was not quite sufficient to convince me that what I was experiencing was real. There was a frankly paradoxical sense in which the pain I felt was both mine and
not mine
, which translated itself into a sharp awareness that my personality had been split in two, creating a
me
that was somehow
not me
. I had a vague memory of having felt
not quite myself
many times before, but this was something else entirely.

The “me” that was “not me” — although “I” embraced both of them — seemed to be suspended in an upright position, supported under the arms and in the crotch. I seemed to weigh at least as much as I had for all but the tiniest fraction of my experienced life.

When I opened my eyes my head seemed to be trapped in something like a goldfish bowl, whose curved wall was by no means optically perfect — not that there was much to see beyond it, except for more not-very-transparent clear plastic walls.

It occurred to me that if ever there was a good time to be someone else entirely this was probably it, but the thing that was not me continued to defy all conceivable logic by continuing simultaneously to be me.

I tried to move, but I couldn’t. There was a strange redoubling of the sense of helplessness generated by this failure, as if the impotence in question were strangely and impossibly multilayered.

I tried to murmur a curse, and almost succeeded — but even the success seemed weirdly coincidental, as if the effort and the achievement were disconnected.

After trying to take more careful note of my surroundings I decided that I must be inside an old-fashioned spacesuit: a
very
old-fashioned spacesuit, antique even by the meagre standards of
Charity
. I also decided that my skull must be fractured, because the only bit of my head that wasn’t hurting was my nose, which seemed to be both broken and unbroken, but was in either case quite numb.

The stink inside the spacesuit was horribly reminiscent of rotting flesh; I hoped that it really was the suit that was stinking and not me — or, to be strictly accurate, not “not me.”

“Madoc?” whispered a voice in my ear. “Are you awake, Madoc?”

The voice was strangely familiar, although it was slightly distorted by the telephone link. I knew I’d heard it before, and often, but I couldn’t put a name to it, partly because some mysterious instinct was telling me that its presence in my nightmare was not merely impossible but somehow insulting.

“Madoc?” the voice repeated. “Can you hear me? It’s Damon, Madoc. Just give me a sign.”

Damon!
I understood, suddenly, why this supposed experience was impossible, and insulting. Or was it? Was this my
real
awakening? Was this the way things had always been, and always would be?

No, I decided, while knowing perfectly well that it was not a matter for decision. It couldn’t be real. This had to be a dream of some kind: a Virtual Experience.

“Damon?” I croaked. That surprised me, because I hadn’t formed any conscious intention to say the name aloud. I hadn’t expected the
not me
part of me to be able to speak at all — but when it did, I had to wonder whether it was the
me
part of me that might be a mute prisoner in alien flesh.

“Madoc! Thank God. They got to you, Madoc. I’m sorry — we had no idea. Can you hear me?”

“Where…am…I?” Again I hadn’t made any conscious effort to formulate the words, although it was only natural that I would want to know. My voice sounded hollow, distant and spectral: not mine at all, although definitely mine in the sense that it certainly wasn’t anybody else’s.

“You’re in a level-6 biocontainment facility in one of Conrad’s old labs. We didn’t have any choice, Madoc. We tried to flush the stuff they pumped into you, but we couldn’t get it all. It’s gone too deep — wormed its way into the marrow of your bones and into the glial cells of your brain. We can’t get the rest without doing irreparable damage to your own tissues. We may not have long before the whole system begins to regenerate itself, Madoc. Maybe days, maybe only hours — we just don’t know.”

“What?”

By now, it was as if I were a mere observer watching myself speak. I didn’t understand what the hell was going on — and neither did the “not me” that I was watching.

“We don’t even know if the effect was what they intended,” Damon Hart’s voice went on, relentlessly. “Maybe it’s all screwed up. Maybe they wanted to screw you up. On the other hand, maybe they just figured that you’d be a convenient subject for a trial run. Either way, Madoc, I’ll make sure that they pay. You can depend on that. All their precious cant about war without casualties, struggle without suffering…I’ll find the bastard responsible for this, and I’ll settle the debt in pounds of flesh, blood included. Trust me, Madoc.”

The other me tried again. “What…?”

I couldn’t get any more out than the single word. It hurt too much. The stench was unbearable — not that that mattered to either of me, as there was no possible way of avoiding it.

“We pulled the tiger’s tail once too often, Madoc,” Damon said. “After all they’ve said, all I’ve given them…they don’t want the likes of us at their precious table. They want every last thing we’ve got, but they want it all for themselves. They don’t really want
us
at all. Not Conrad, not Eveline, not me — not even the people at Ahasuerus. At the end of the day, all they care about is their property, and hanging on to it.

“I’m sorry I got you into this, Madoc, but I didn’t understand the dirty kind of war this is, and I underestimated the measure of the men we’re fighting. We’re trying to figure out exactly what kind of IT they injected into you, but it’s a hideously complicated suite and there are half a dozen bot species we’ve never seen before. Unless and until we can get into their databases it’s going to be a long job — maybe years. Maybe the reason they did it to you is that you’re the only man we have who had a better-than-even chance of hacking into their deepest secrets. They’re trying to take us out, Madoc — fucking you over is just the start. But you have to hang in there until we can figure out how to bring you all the way back.”

The other me tried for a third time, throwing in a little variety just for the sake of it. “Who…?”

I seemed to be gagging on the unclean air, but I supposed that had to be an illusion.

“I don’t know,” Damon cut me off. “Not exactly. I don’t think even PicoCon’s solid, let alone the PicoCon/OmicronA cartel. The wonder is that they paused long enough in their attempts to stab one another in the back to come after us. But I’ll find out — you can bet your life on that. Look, Madoc, there’s no easy way to say this: it’s going to be rough. We can’t fight the stuff now, and I’m not willing to take the risk of leaving you at the mercy of whatever plans the rogue IT might have. It can’t be a crude killer, or you’d have been dead before we found you, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t be fatal. The way it’s gone to ground in your brain strongly suggests that it’s intended to fuck with your mind. It may be a further development of that VE-generating IT they hit me with, but if it is then it’s a lot more ambitious than version one. I think they might be going for the big one: absolute mind control; total robotization. If so, we have to find a way of countering the threat.

“So here’s the deal. We’re going to put you in SusAn. Not just an artificial coma — we’ll have to take you all the way down to six degrees Absolute. We’re going to stop this thing in its tracks until we know how to deal with it, and we’re not going to bring you out until we’re certain that we can make you as good as new. Trust me on this, Madoc — we’ll get you back eventually, but it’ll take time. It may be that the stuff will mess with your head while you’re on the way down, and again when you’re on the way back up, but you have to hold on. You have to remember this conversation if you can, and know what’s really happening to you.