It's the most undignified sound she's made in years. Lenie arches an eyebrow.
"Sorry," Rowan says.
"No problem. It was pretty hilarious." The rifter's patented half-smile flickers at the corner of her mouth.
But it's gone in the next second. "Pat, I don't think we can stop this."
"We have to."
"Nobody's talking any more. Nobody's listening. Just one little push could send it all over the edge. If they even knew we were talking here…"
Rowan shakes her head in hopeful, reassuring denial. But Lenie's right. Rowan knows her history, after all. She knows her politics. You're well past the point of no return when simply communicating with the other side constitutes an act of treason.
"Remember the very first time we met?" Lenie asks. "Face to face?"
Rowan nods. She'd turned the corner and Lenie Clarke was just there, right in front of her, fifty kilograms of black rage inexplicably transported to the heart of their secret hideaway. "Eighty meters in that direction," she says, pointing over her shoulder.
"You sure about that?" Lenie asks.
"Most certainly," Rowan says. "I thought you were going to kill m—"
And stops, ashamed.
"Yes," she says after a while. "That was the first time we met. Really."
Lenie faces forward, at her own bank of dead readouts. "I thought you might have, you know, been part of the interview process. Back before your people did their cut'n'paste in my head. You can never tell what bits might have got edited out, you know?"
"I saw the footage afterwards," Rowan admits. "When Yves was making his recommendations. But we never actually met."
"Course not. You were way up in the strat. No time to hang around with the hired help." Rowan is a bit surprised at the note of anger in Lenie's voice. After all that's been done to her, after all she's come to terms with since, it seems strange that such a small, universal neglect would be a hot button.
"They said you'd be better off," Rowan says softly. "Honestly. They said you'd be happier."
"Who said?"
"Neurocog. The psych people."
"Happier." Lenie digests that a moment. "False memories of Dad raping me made me happier? Jesus, Pat, if that's true my real childhood must have been a major treat."
"I mean, happier at Beebe Station. They swore that that any so-called well-adjusted person would crack down there in under a month."
"I know the brochure, Pat. Preadaption to chronic stress, dopamine addiction to hazardous environments. You bought all that?"
"But they were right. You saw what happened to the control group we sent down. But you—you liked the place so much we were worried you wouldn't want to come back."
"At first," Lenie adds unnecessarily.
After a moment she turns to face Rowan. "But tell me this, Pat. Supposing they told you I wasn't going to like it so much? What if they'd said, she'll hate the life, she'll hate her life, but we have to do it anyway because it's the only way to keep her from going stark raving mad down there? Would you tell me if they'd told you that?"
"Yes." It's an honest answer. Now.
"And would you have let them rewire me and turn me into someone else, give me monsters for parents, and send me down there anyway?"
"…Yes."
"Because you served the Greater Good."
"I tried to," Rowan says.
"An altruistic corpse," the rifter remarks. "How do you explain that?"
"Explain?"
"It kind of goes against what they taught us in school. Why sociopaths rise to the top of the corporate ladder, and why we should all be grateful that the world's tough economic decisions are being made by people who aren't hamstrung by the touchy-feelies."
"It's a bit more complicated than that."
"Was, you mean."
"Is," Rowan insists.
They sit in silence for while.
"Would you have it reversed, if you could?" Rowan asks.
"What, the rewire? Get my real memories back? Lose the whole Daddy Rapist thing?"
Rowan nods.
Lenie's silent for so long that Rowan wonders if she's refusing to answer. But finally, almost hesitantly, she says: "This is who I am. I guess maybe there was a different person in here before, but now it's only me. And when it comes right down to it I guess I just don't want to die. Bringing back that other person would almost be a kind of suicide, don't you think?"
"I don't know. I guess I never thought about it that way before."
"It took a while for me to. You people killed someone else in the process, but you made me." Rowan glimpses a frown, strobe-frozen. "You were right, you know. I did want to kill you that time. It wasn't the plan, but I saw you there and everything just caught up with me and you know, for a few moments there I almost…"
"Thanks for holding back," Rowan says.
"I did, didn't I? And if any two people ever had reason to go for each other's throats, it had to be us. I mean, you were trying to kill me, and I was trying to kill—everyone else…" Her voice catches for an instant. "But we didn't. We got along. Eventually.»
"We did," Rowan says.
The rifter looks at her with blank, pleading eyes. "So why can't they? Why can't they just—I don't know, follow our lead…"
"Lenie, we destroyed the world. I think they're following our lead a bit too closely."
"Back in Beebe, you know, I was the boss. I didn't want to be, that was the last thing I wanted, but people just kept—" Lenie shakes her head. "And I still don't want to be, but I have to be, you know? Somehow I have to keep these idiots from blowing everything up. Only now, nobody will even tell me tell me what fucking time zone I'm in, and Grace…"
She looks at Rowan, struck by some thought. "What happened to her, anyway?"
"What do you mean?" Rowan asks.
"She really hates you guys. Did you kill her whole family or something? Did you fuck with her head somehow?"
"No," Rowan says. "Nothing."
"Come on, Pat. She wouldn't be down here if there wasn't some—"
"Grace was in the control group. Her background was entirely unremarkable. She was—"
But Lenie's suddenly straight up in her seat, capped eyes sweeping across the ceiling. "Did you hear that?", she asks.
"Hear what?" The cockpit's hardly a silent place—gurgles, creaks, the occasional metallic pop have punctuated their conversation since it began—but Rowan hasn't heard anything out of the ordinary. "I didn't—"
"Shhh," Lenie hisses.
And now Rowan does hear something, but it's not what the other woman's listening for. It's a little burble of sound from her own earbud, a sudden alert from Comm: a voice worried unto near-panic, audible only to her. She listens, and feels a sick, dread sense of inevitability. She turns to her friend.
"You better get back out there," she says softly.
Lenie spares an impatient glance, catches the expression on Rowan's face and double-takes. "What?"
"Comm's been monitoring your LFAM chatter," Rowan says. "They're saying… Erickson. He died.
"They're looking for you."
The Bloodhound Iterations
N=1:
Snarling, unaware, she searches for targets and finds none. She looks for landmarks and comes up empty. She can't even find anything that passes for topography—an endless void extends in all directions, an expanse of vacant memory extending far beyond the range of any whiskers she copies into the distance. She can find no trace of the ragged, digital network she usually inhabits. There is no prey here, no predators beyond herself, no files or executables upon which to feast. She can't even find the local operating system. She must be accessing it on some level—she wouldn't run without some share of system resources and clock cycles—but the fangs and claws she evolved to tear open that substrate can't get any kind of grip. She is a lean, lone wolf with rottweiller jaws, optimised for life in some frayed and impoverished jungle that has vanished into oblivion. Even a cage would have recognizable boundaries, walls or bars that she could hurl herself against, however ineffectually. This featureless nullscape is utterly beyond her ken.