The Prefect (74 page)

‘I will show it to you,' she said, ‘but you can forget any idea of negotiating with it. It is not a rational intellect.'

‘It doesn't have to be rational to understand that Aurora wants it dead,' Dreyfus replied.

‘You think that will give you leverage?'

‘It's all I've got. Better make the most of it.'

‘How did you manage to install a containment facility down here at such short notice?' Sparver asked.

‘We didn't. There was only just time to clear out of Ruskin-Sartorious before it was destroyed. Fortunately, there was a kind of cage already here. It needed some alterations, but nothing beyond our resources.'

‘You're talking about the tokamak,' Dreyfus said, wonderingly.

‘The what?' Sparver asked.

‘He means the fusion reactor that would have powered this facility during the Amerikano era,' Saavedra said loftily. ‘And he's right. That's exactly what we used. It's one large magnetic containment bottle. Hideously inefficient compared to the portable generators we brought with us, but it has its uses. It needed to be checked, and the field geometry adjusted, but none of that was particularly taxing. It was much easier than installing our own containment equipment: we'd have needed to hollow out another cavern for that.'

‘I hope you trust Amerikano engineering,' Dreyfus said. ‘Keeping a psychopathic machine prisoner wasn't exactly in the design specs.'

‘I trust it not to fail. Do you think I'd have come here if I didn't?'

‘Where's everyone else?' Dreyfus asked.

‘The rest of Firebrand? Apart from Simon Veitch, I'm the only one down here.'

Dreyfus remembered that name from the list of Firebrand members Jane had given him. It had impressed itself on his memory for a reason.

‘Where are the others?'

‘Wherever their duties require them to be. Since Jane pulled the plug on us, we've all had to live dual lives. How do you imagine we managed to maintain Firebrand while we also had our regular duties to attend to?'

‘I did wonder.'

‘The same therapeutic regime designed to keep Aumonier awake proved equally useful to the agents of Firebrand. Most of us have been getting by on only a few hours of sleep a week.' Saavedra lifted her arm and spoke into the bracelet clamped around the pale stick of her wrist. ‘Simon? I've found the intruders.' She paused, listening to Veitch's reply. ‘Yes, just the two. I'm bringing them down to the reactor.' She paused again. ‘Yes, I have them under control. Why else would I have allowed them to live?'

The tunnel levelled out. They passed along a corridor lined with equipment storage rooms, then emerged onto a balcony overlooking a chamber only slightly smaller than the atrium they'd left behind. There was enough room for all three of them on the balcony without triggering the whiphound into action. The reactor filled most of the chamber, squatting on shockproof supports like an enormous magic cauldron. It was painted a pale green, with faint lines of rust along panel joints. A handful of panels and parts shone like chrome. Other than that it appeared superficially intact. Dreyfus guessed that little repair had been necessary before its magnetic generators were coaxed back to strength.

A catwalk girdled the reactor at its fattest point. A figure, dressed in black, was attending a monitor panel next to a dark observation window. The figure looked around and up, a grimace on his face. Veitch was as thin and cadaverous-looking as Saavedra, but conveyed the same impression of wiry strength.

‘You should have killed them,' he said, raising his voice above the low hum of the reactor.

‘They have information about the Clockmaker,' she said. ‘Dreyfus says he knows where it came from. I'd like to hear what he has to tell us.'

Veitch looked irritated. ‘We know where it came from. They made it in SIAM. That's where it ran amok.'

‘But it didn't begin there,' Dreyfus said. ‘It came of age in SIAM, reached its true potential there, but it originated somewhere else entirely.'

‘Descend the stairs,' Saavedra snapped.

‘You can call the whiphound off now,' Dreyfus said. ‘I'm not going to hurt you.'

‘Just descend the stairs. I'll worry about the whiphound.'

Dreyfus and Sparver edged past Saavedra, taking care not to come closer to her than five metres. They clattered down the stairs and crossed the chamber's equipment-cluttered floor until the reactor was looming over them.

‘Climb to the observation deck,' Saavedra said, ‘and tell Veitch why you want the Clockmaker.'

Looking up at Veitch, Dreyfus reiterated the argument he had already presented to Saavedra - that the Clockmaker was now the only effective weapon against Aurora.

‘So what are you proposing? That we just let it loose and hope it crawls back to us when it's done?'

Dreyfus placed a hand on the railing and began to climb the stairs to the observation deck, Sparver immediately behind him.

‘I'm hoping we won't have to let it loose at all. It's a matter of self-preservation. If I can impress upon it how much Aurora wants to destroy it, I can make it see the sense in defeating her. It will help us by helping itself.'

‘From inside the cage?'

‘It's a form of machine intelligence,' Dreyfus said. ‘So is Aurora, no matter what she started out as.'

‘How does that help us?'

‘Aurora isn't a disembodied intelligence. She's a collection of software routines emulating the structure of an individual human brain. But she's nothing unless she has a physical architecture to run on.'

Above him, Veitch nodded impatiently. ‘And your point is?'

‘Somewhere out there, a machine has to be simulating her. More than likely she's controlling her takeover from within a single habitat. It probably isn't one of those she's already taken over, since she wouldn't want to risk being wiped out by one of our nukes. Unfortunately, that leaves almost ten thousand other candidates to consider. If we had all the time in the world, we could comb through network traffic records and pin her down. But we don't have all the time in the world. We have a few days.'

‘You think she has free roam of the networks?'

‘Almost certainly. She's stayed under our radar for fifty-five years, which means she can move herself from point to point without difficulty. But she can't duplicate herself. That's a limitation embedded in the deep structure of alpha-level simulations by Cal Sylveste himself. They cannot be copied, or even backed-up.'

‘Perhaps she's got around that one by now.'

‘I don't think so. If she could copy herself, she wouldn't be so concerned about safeguarding her own survival. She's scared precisely because there's only one of her.'

‘But the notion of “machine is nebulous, Prefect. Aurora might not be able to copy herself, but there's surely nothing to prevent her from spreading herself thinly, using thousands of habitats instead of one.'

‘There is,' Dreyfus said, puffing as he reached the observation deck. ‘It's called execution speed. The more distributed she is, the more she has to contend with light-speed timelag between processor centres. If part of her was running on one side of the Glitter Band, and another part on the far side of the Band, she could be afflicted by unacceptable latencies, whole fractions of a second. She'd still be just as clever as she is now, but the clock rate of her consciousness would have slowed by an intolerable factor. And that's her problem. Being clever isn't good enough on its own, especially when she's trying to win a war on ten thousand fronts. She has to be fast as well.'

‘There's a lot of supposition there,' Veitch said as Dreyfus approached him cautiously, Sparver, Saavedra and her whiphound close behind.

‘I agree, but I think it's watertight. Aurora can't afford to be spread out, therefore she has to be running on a single machine, inside a single habitat. And that means she's vulnerable to a counterstrike if that habitat can be identified.'

‘And you're hoping the Clockmaker can pin her down?'

‘Something along those lines.'

Veitch looked puzzled, as if he knew he was missing something obvious. ‘It would need access to the networks.'

‘I know.'

‘You're insane. What if it escapes, loses itself in the networks the same way Aurora did?'

‘There'd be a risk of that, but it's one I'm prepared to take given the alternative. I'd rather have a monster on the loose if it's a choice between that or dying under Aurora.'

‘Do you have any idea what the Clockmaker did to its victims?'

Dreyfus thought of everything he had learned since gaining Manticore. Examining those new, fresh memories was like opening a wound that had just begun to scab over. ‘I know it did bad things. But it wasn't indiscriminate. It spared more than it killed. Aurora won't spare a soul.'

‘Show him what it is,' Saavedra said. ‘He may as well know what he's talking about letting loose.'

‘You've searched him for weapons?'

‘He's clean. Show him the window.'

Veitch stood back from the monitor panel. ‘Take a look for yourself, Prefect.'

‘It's on the other side of this glass?'

‘Nearly. We usually keep it away from the window. I'll rotate the magnets to bring it into view for a few moments.'

Dreyfus glanced back at Saavedra, waiting for her permission to move. She nodded. He joined Veitch and stepped onto the small pedestal beneath the viewing window. Two upright handrails provided support on either side of the armoured porthole. Dreyfus touched the pale-green skin of the reactor and felt it tremble under his hands. The tremor was irregular, with powerful surges.

‘How did you get it in here?'

‘There's a door on the other side, for swapping out the magnets. We kept the Clockmaker in a portable confinement rig while we moved it from Ruskin-Sartorious. We had to move fast, since the rig's only good for about six hours. The Clockmaker was testing it all the time, flexing its muscles, trying to break out, even though we did our best to stun it before the relocation.'

‘Stun it how?' Dreyfus asked.

‘With a heavy electromagnetic pulse. It doesn't put it under completely, but it does subdue it. But by the time we arrived here, it was back up to full strength. We got it inside and locked down with the big magnets just in time. You know how a tokamak works?'

‘More or less.'

‘Normally the magnets trap a ring-shaped plasma, steering it away from the walls. You heat and squeeze the plasma to a few hundred million degrees, until you get fusion. There's no fusion going on inside there now. Just hard vacuum, and the Clockmaker. We had to adjust the magnets to create a localised bottle, but it wasn't too difficult.'

‘It's still trying to get out, isn't it?' He touched a hand to the reactor's throbbing skin again. He was feeling the Clockmaker's exertions as it tested the resilience of those magnetic shackles.

‘It never stops trying.'

Dreyfus looked through the window. At first he saw nothing save a deep-blue darkness. Then he became aware of a faint pink glow encroaching on the darkness from his right. The glow flickered and intensified. To his left, Veitch made delicate adjustments to the configuration of the trapping magnets. The pink became a halo of flickering silver. The silver brightened to incandescent white.

‘Why does it glow?'

‘The field's stripping ions off its outer layer, a kind of plasma cocoon. When we collapse the field, the Clockmaker appears to suck the plasma back into itself. It doesn't suffer any net mass loss as far as we can tell.'

‘I can see it now,' Dreyfus said, very quietly.

‘It's beautiful, isn't it?'

Dreyfus said nothing. He wasn't exactly sure how he felt. He had thought of the Clockmaker many times since losing Valery, but the appearance of the thing had never been something he dwelled upon. He had been concerned only with its effects, not its nature. He knew from the victims' testimonies that the Clockmaker was amorphous, capable of shifting its shape with fluid ease, or at least of conveying that impression. He knew also that some of the survivors had spoken of a humanoid form underpinning its quicksilver transformations, like a stable attractor at the heart of a chaotic process. But those accounts had barely registered. It was only now that he truly appreciated that this was no ordinary machine, but something more like an angel, rendered in glowing white metal.

It hung in the tokamak, pinned in place by magnetic fields fierce enough to boil the electrons off hydrogen. Any normal machine, anything forged from orthodox matter - be it inert or quick - would have been simultaneously shredded and vaporised by those wrenching stresses. And yet the Clockmaker endured, with only that silver-pink halo conveying the extreme physical conditions in which it floated. It had the vague shape of a man: a torso, arms and legs, the suggestion of a head - but the humanoid form was elongated and spectral. The details shimmered and blurred, layers phasing in and out of clarity. For a moment the Clockmaker was a thing of jointed armour, recognisable mechanisms. Then it became a smooth-surfaced, mercurial form.

‘He's seen enough,' Saavedra said. ‘Move it away from the window before it breaks confinement.'

Veitch worked the controls. Dreyfus watched the Clockmaker recede from view. He was glad when it had gone. Though its face was featureless, he'd had the overwhelming impression that it was looking straight at him, marking him as a subject for future attention.

‘That's my side of the arrangement,' Saavedra said. ‘Now tell me what you know about it.'