“But now—thanks to me, he can be in two places at once.”
“I gave him a problem only you could solve. His work is in Artificial Intelligence, and yours in Neural Divarication Theory. So I made his emulation—he calls it his Iron Ghost—”
“We met. I think he, or it, saved my life.”
“I helped with the architecture. But I programmed in a flaw, so that Ghost Del Azarchel would get sick and go mad with the Montrose madness. Then I pretended not to be able to solve the problem, and waited. He knew, because you had partly wakened Little Big Brother to self-awareness, that it had to be possible. He knew you had solved it. Why couldn’t he? It drove him almost to madness.” She smiled to herself. “I waited. There is only one other daemon in the world, aside from me: and that is you.”
Montrose spoke in a voice of slow horror. “Then the person you want killed—is me! You want this version out of the way so that the posthuman version of me can take over!”
She laughed. “Oh, that would be funny! No, matters are not so overwrought with tragedy as that. I went through all these steps to give you this.”
She drew a small gemlike vial from a fold in her skirt and tossed it lightly to him. He caught it, held it up. In the dim candlelight, he saw it had a folding needle. He realized that it was a bone rongeur, small and disguised as a piece of jewelry.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“I want you to take the cure. I have had it for years. In your initial Zurich runs, you made the classic compilation blunder, and did not scale up your lower nervous system to handle the greater stress load on your cortex.”
“And this?”
“It is the real Prometheus Formula, the one you did not know how to make.”
“You had it? Why not cure me with this before?”
“I had to work carefully when I was repairing you. If you were too alert too quickly, you would see through what Del Azarchel intended, and not help him with his divarication problem. So I had to leave you disoriented enough to do be willing to do the work, but oriented enough to see how to solve it. I discovered traces of your pre-posthuman personality buried in neural codes at the base level—the way a frog’s genes contains the pattern for a tadpole. It was not difficult to resurrect this you, your previous version, the one from before I knew you.”
“You mean—he is not possessing me? I am possessing him?”
“I suppose one could regard it that way.” She was done with her hair, and now she turned back, and favored him with another sunny smile. “In any case, at the same time, I maneuvered the Senior into programming into his emulation a neural divarication error of the kind I knew you already knew how to repair—you must have been suspicious that it was so easy to solve?”
“No. I just thought I was that damn good. But I don’t understand! Why not just cure my brain malfunction and wake me up straight off?”
“With the Senior Del Azarchel standing right by your bedside? I feared for your life. He is a dangerous man.”
“Then why did you agree to marry him?”
“As I said, he is a dangerous man.”
3. A Personal Dragon
Montrose looked back and forth along the walls, now ruined and covered with mathematical scratches. He was not sure what to think.
“What were we just talking about?”
She looked at him through the corner of her eye. “You can’t understand it?”
“It’s the drug. The recipe for the Prometheus Formula. You reduced the entire Zurich run, what took a multiple-volume computer months to deduce, into a simple expression…”
“Are you guessing, or are you recollecting?”
He turned his back to her, since he did not want her to see his expression. Unfortunately, the mirror was right in front of him, and so he saw the look of anxious uncertainty—of fear—on his features, and in the glass she bestowed the twinkle of an impish smile on him.
“I don’t know what or who I am anymore,” he said.
She said, “Whenever my beautiful, great ship was in trouble, or my people faced a problem we could not solve, they woke you up. It was always fun, in a dangerous way, but only sometimes could we get you to listen to us, or look at the problem we put before you. You would bounce off the bulkheads and make me laugh. And then you would fix the problem, and save us. That is who you are. My hero. My manic-depressive hero.”
He spun angrily, and caught her by the shoulders. “You are trying to trick me!”
She looked thoughtful, and pouted. “Quite possibly. That is one of the things behind every man–woman relationship.” She shrugged her scented shoulders very slightly in his hands. “Do we have a relationship?”
He let go and stepped back. “Stop toying with me. I cannot trust myself. Either of me.”
“There is only one of you, silly man. And I have no need of feminine wiles—when speaking the truth, as befits a princess, will serve me better. Because you are convinced of a false belief that Mr. Hyde is different from you, you will debate in your mind for a time whether to trust that vial I gave you, or destroy it. But it does not matter, since I just here and now have shown you how to formulate it. Sooner or later you will realize that you are the Mr. Hyde, the lesser version, and your posthuman self is Dr. Jekyll, the greater. Your discontent with the human condition will drive you to enter into the discontents of the posthuman condition. Or your fear of Del Azarchel, and your need to be smarter than he. Or your desire to have a conversation with me, one to one, as equals.”
“That’s the second time you’ve said you were above me, little lady, and I won’t stand it. I’ve a mind to turn you over my knee!”
She raised an eyebrow. “Well, I am flattered by the offer of a spanking, but I am your superior officer, and your sovereign, and higher on the ladder of evolution than you, and I have a fully armed starship, and several armed forces at my command, not to mention I can flick one of my hairpins up your nose. So any horseplay could turn out badly for you. Besides, what would my husband say if you assumed his privileges?”
“Wait? If you are married, how can you be engaged?”
“The marriage was not consummated, and my husband was not in his right wits at the time of the ceremony, which was private, so in the eyes of the law the oath is invalid.”
“Wait! Plague and damnation, girl, are you talking about me? Did I get married to you when I was Mr. Hyde?”
She fluttered her fingers at the ampoule. “Ask him yourself.”
“Pox!”
“Just one quick jab in the head. It should only sting a little. Well, actually, it will cause you blinding, unparalleled agony. Warn me first! So I can leave the room! I don’t want to hear you screaming while you are writhing and flopping on the floor like a fish. I do have medical technicians downstairs, who can strap you into a gurney. Be nicer for you if you took morphine first.”
“Lady, I just met you! I don’t know you from Adam!”
“Adam lacked a belly button. Or so it is said. You can distinguish me from him on that basis. No doubt he was taller than I.”
“I am not sticking your pestilential chemicals into my nice new brain, not after Dr. Kyi just fixed me!”
“He merely assisted. I did most of the work. So it is a little late to express distrust? Oh! And I forgot! That also makes me your physician, so you have to obey my orders. Will you break faith with me?”
“I ain’t taking no orders from some dame half my age!”
“Dame? You have severely demoted me, sirrah! I shall have my master of heralds contact your office in the morning.”
She stamped her little glass-shod foot so that her slipper rang like a bell on the floor, and she looked so regal and so wrathful that for a half-second Montrose thought he had really offended her. But then she burst out laughing in a most unladylike fashion (although she did hide her mouth behind her slender silk-gloved hand as she hiccupped her way through a giggle fit) so that Montrose stood there, unable to decide whether to be angry or confused or to join in.