"Wasn't I supposed to?" He pushed the eyephones up on a forehead beaded with sweat and stared, frowning. He seemed to be having trouble focusing on her. "You said I could use the onboard."
"I meant games."
"Oh," Ricketts said. "I don't really…you know, I didn't…"
"It's okay," she told him.
"I was just looking around. Didn't rewrite anything. It's not like there was security or, you know." Then added, a moment later, "Hardly any."
Clarke shook her head. Ken would kill me if he knew I'd let this kid in. He'd at least kick my ass for not putting a few passwords in place.
Something scratched at the back of her mind, something Ricketts had just said. You said I could use the onboard. I was just looking around. I didn't rewrite any—
"Wait a second," she said, "Are you saying you could rewrite the nav code if you wanted to?"
Ricketts licked his lips. "Prob'ly not. Don't even really know what it's for. I mean, I could tweak it all right, but it'd just be like random changes."
"But you're saying you can code."
"Well, yeah. Kinda."
"Out there in the wilds. Poking around in the ruins. You learned to code."
"No more'n anyone else." He seemed honestly confused. "What, you think the claves took all our watches and stuff before they hived up? You think we don't have electricity or something?"
Of course there'd be power sources. Left-over Ballard Stacks, private windmills, the photoelectric paint that kept those stupid billboards hawking neutriceuts and fashion accessories into the middle of the apocalypse itself. But that hardly meant—
"You can code," she murmured, incredulous even as she remembered the programming tips she'd seen on public television.
"You can't grow a little code here and there, you can forget about using your watch 'cept for time and bulls. How'd you think I found you guys, you think GPS fixes itself when worms and Shredders get in there?"
He was breathing fast and shallow, as if the effort of so many words had winded him. But he was proud, too, Clarke could tell. Feral Kid On Last Legs Impresses Exotic Older Woman.
And she was impressed, despite herself.
Ricketts could code.
She showed him her Cohen board. Curled up in his cage he tapped his own headset, arm wobbling with the effort. He frowned, apparently taken aback by his own weakness.
"So pipe it through," he said after a moment
She shook her head. "No wireless. Too risky. It might get out."
He looked at her knowingly. "Lenie?"
"I think they call it a—a shredder."
He nodded. "Shredders, Lenies, Madonnas. Same thing."
"It keeps crashing."
"Well, yeah. That's what they do."
"It couldn't have been crashing the OS, that was read-only. It was crashing itself."
He managed a half-shrug.
"But why would it do that? I've seen them run a lot longer than five seconds out in the wild. Do you think, maybe—?"
"Sure," he said. "I can take a look. But you gotta do something too."
"What's that?"
"Take those stupid things outta your eyes."
Reflexively, she stepped back. "Why?"
"I just wanna see them. Your eyes."
What are you so afraid of? she asked herself. Do you think he'll see the truth in there?
But of course she was much better than that. Better than he was, anyway: she forced herself to disarm, and afterwards—looking straight into her naked eyes—he didn't seem to see a thing he didn't want to.
"You should leave them like that. It's almost like you're beautiful."
"No it isn't." She dialed down the membrane and pushed the board through: Ricketts fumbled it; the contraption dropped onto the pallet beside him, the iso membrane sealing seamlessly in its wake. Clarke cranked its surface tension back to maximum while Ricketts, embarrassed by his own clumsiness, studied the board with feigned intensity.
Slowly, carefully, he slipped the headset into place and didn't fuck up. He sagged onto his back, breathing heavily. The Cohen Board flickered to light.
"Shit," he hissed suddenly. "Nasty little bitch." And a moment later: "Oh. There's your problem."
"What?"
"Elbow room. She, like, attacks random addresses, only you put her in this really small cage so she ends up just clawing her own code. She'd last longer if you added memory." He paused, then asked, "Why are you keeping her, anyway?"
"I just wanted to—ask it some things," Clarke hedged.
"You're kidding, right?"
She shook her head, although he couldn't see her. "Um—"
"You do get that she doesn't, like, understand anything?"
It took a moment for the words to sink in. "What do you mean?"
"She's nowhere near big enough," Ricketts told her. "Wouldn't last two minutes in a Turing test."
"But it was talking back. Before it crashed."
"No she wasn't."
"Ricketts, I heard it."
He snorted; the sound turned into a racking cough. "She's got a dialog tree, sure. She's got like keyword reflexes and stuff, but that's not—"
Heat rose in her cheeks. I'm such an idiot.
"I mean, some Shredders are smart enough, I guess," he added. "Just not this one."
She ran her fingers over her scalp. "Is there some other way to—interrogate it, maybe? Different interface? Or, I don't know, decompile the code?"
"It evolved. You ever try to figure out evolved code?"
"No."
"It's really messy. Most of it doesn't even do anything any more, it's all just junk genes left over from…" his voice trailed off.
"And why don't you just flush her anyway?" he asked, very softly. "These things aren't smart. They're not special. They're just shitbombs some assholes throw at us to try and crash whatever we got left. They even attack each other if you give 'em half a chance. If it weren't for the firewalls and the exorcists and stuff they'd have wrecked everything by now."
Clarke didn't answer.
Almost sighing, Ricketts said: "You're really strange, you know?"
She smiled a bit.
"Nobody's gonna believe me when I tell them about this. Too bad you can't, you know, come back with me. Just so they won't think I made it all up."
"Back?"
"Home. When I get out of here."
"Well," she said, "you never know."
A pathetic, gap-toothed smile bloomed beneath his headset.
"Ricketts," she said after a while.
No answer. He lay there, patient and inert, still breathing. The telemetry panel continued to scribble out little traces of light, cardio, pulmo, neocort. All way too high; Seppuku had cranked his metabolic rate into the stratosphere.
He's asleep. He's dying. Let him be.
She climbed into the cockpit and collapsed into the pilot's station. The viewports around her glowed with a dim green light, fading to gray. She'd left the cabin lights off; Phocoena was a submerged cave in the dying light, its recesses already hidden in shadow. By now she was almost fond of the blindness afforded her naked eyes.
So often now, darkness seemed the better choice.
Basement Wiring
First he blinded her, put stinging drops into her eyes that reduced the whole world to a vague gray abstraction. He wheeled her out of the cell down corridors and elevators whose presence she could only infer only through ambient acoustics and a sense of forward motion. Those were what she focused on: momentum, and sound, and the blurry photosensitivity that one might get by looking at the world through a thick sheet of waxed paper. She tried to ignore the smell of her own shit pooling beneath her on the gurney. She tried to ignore the pain, not so raw and electric now, but spread across her whole thorax like a great stinging bruise.