Two young women tumbled into the room and rolled up to the bar. Both were wearing tight white T-shirts and shorts, spattered with weave sigils. Jack wondered what they became when they were seen by their target audience. They turned and caught sight of the biped. One of them shrieked. The other started giggling. The first one hit her friend, then shouted: ‘My brother. You took my fucking brother.’ She stumbled towards them but her friend pulled at her and stopped her. There were incoherent accusations and tears.
‘Such a shame that so many believe we were responsible for that atrocity,’ said the biped, turning his head away from the girls.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Jack.
‘Pantheon propaganda. You have nothing to apologise for.’
The barman was leaning over the bar, whispering urgently to the women. They staggered back out into the street. The barman glared at Jack and his companion.
‘You see,’ said the biped. ‘That’s what should have happened when I was attacked.’
‘Didn’t her friend stop her? And the barman?’
‘They were reacting to my weaveware. It flashed up a warning. If anything had happened – InSec would have arrested them, he’d have lost his licence.’
‘I guess the kids that attacked you don’t have anything to lose.’
The biped nodded. ‘You can’t threaten people like that,’ it said. ‘We know that from experience.’
‘So, for your diplomatic protocols to work – you must be onweave, then?’
‘We have to be.’
‘I’d have thought the Pantheon wouldn’t have let you.’
‘We like to be permanently linked to each other. The Pantheon understand the need for it. It’s written into the ceasefire agreement.’
‘So why didn’t you call InSec?’
‘I did. They can be a bit slow responding to Totality calls.’
‘Not good.’
‘It comes with the job. And I should introduce myself. I’m a human interface element. IS/2279A0E2/BE/HIE/Biped/723CI4. It shortens to Ifor. I identify as male.’
‘Ifor,’ said Jack, reaching out. ‘Good to meet you. I’m Jack Forster.’
Tiny schools of light shimmered through Ifor’s head as he shook Jack’s hand. Memories carved through Jack’s mind. He thought of how Fist could shock nanogel, make it flare up and burn as he broke the intelligence it embodied. Those colours were strident, the patterns they made harsh. Ifor’s subtler, unpanicked display showed surprise and excitement.
‘You’ve heard of me, then?’ said Jack.
‘Oh yes. We were all very impressed by you.’
‘I did nothing heroic.’
‘You saved one of our most valued hubs.’
Deeper memories awoke in Jack. He’d stumbled on the snowflake Ifor was referring to on a routine ’roid patrol. It was the first time he’d been out since the death of his mother. He didn’t sleep much. Whenever he dreamed he would find and then lose her, over and over again.
Two months out of Mars and he’d been picking his way from rock to rock, sensors set to wide passive scan. The silent days had been filled with the past. When they found the snowflake he felt a huge sense of relief. It was in close orbit around a small asteroid. It had masked its systems, but not well enough. He’d picked up its signature while still a few hundred kilometres away from it. Memories receded as Fist went to work. Forty-eight sleepless hours followed, watching him carve his way through intricate firewalls, creating selective blind spots that allowed Jack to move his little patrol ship in closer and closer. When they were fifty kilometres out, Fist coupled with the ship’s navigation systems and pulled it into a complex evasive dance, always keeping the asteroid between them and the snowflake.
Neither Jack nor Fist realised just what they’d found. After two days of work, Fist still hadn’t even been able to find the snowflake’s core systems, let alone start cutting his way into them. ‘It’s never taken this long, Jack,’ he said sulkily, clacking his teeth with frustration. ‘I’m going to throw myself back in there and I’m not going to come out until I’ve danced us all the way into its little fake head.’ Then he focused all his resources on the struggle. His short body went limp, tumbled to the floor and disappeared.
Jack took to his bed, allowing his own mind to be subsumed by Fist too. He quickly dropped into the strange, confused dreamland that absorbed him at such moments. He was afraid that he would be forced to relive his mother’s death. It was a guilty relief to discover that she would not be present to him. In fact, he could still feel Fist. The puppet pulled him to the edge of the ship and then leapt into space. Jack found it so peaceful, until Fist’s heightened digital senses sang out warnings about solar radiation storms. Fist used them to mask the soft, invisible transmissions that flew him through the night to the snowflake. Once he was there he wormed his soft way into the snowflake’s digital carapace.
He entered in with a dark, secret lover’s touch. He was so attentive, so careful. His fascination with detail at last showed itself as a strength, as he engaged with defence systems more complex than had ever been encountered before. Jack watched in something like awe as the subtlest parts of his mind become components of Fist’s hacking array. Finally, Fist broke through the last of the firewalls that – he thought – protected the core systems of a single mind. He pushed past it, taking Jack with him. Both of them expected to find the machine’s heart buried behind it. Fist would break it, then dance gleefully through the resultant digital chaos. Jack would weep.
But they found something very different, and were amazed. A great family of shapes hung in luminous space before them, moving around each other in a slow, complex, three-dimensional dance. Each one was shaped like a child’s drawing of a star, with luminous spines reaching out from a central shining globe. Dense gouts of light branched out of those spines, connecting with others close to them, falling back from those that were pulling away. Deep information flows pulsed and shone everywhere, leaping through the void. The snowflake was a womb for a new kind of intelligence, alive with an infinity of thought.
‘How many minds can you see, Fist?’
‘I can’t count them.’
‘This is deep Totality. It must be one of their hubs.’
‘This close in? Aren’t they Kuiper Belt only?’
‘They’re getting more and more confident. Isn’t it astonishing?’
‘I suppose so.’ There was a pause, then Fist said ‘Well, let’s fuck ’em all up.’
‘No.’
‘What the actual fuck? Jack, nobody’s ever broken into anything like this. Those other bastards will finally have to take me seriously.’
‘There’s been enough dying. We’re not going after this. It’s too beautiful.’
‘Oh, for gods’ sake. NOW he has an attack of conscience. It’s not your fucking mother in here.’
Jack pulled his mind space back from Fist’s control, feeling connections between them snap as he reclaimed the processing areas of his consciousness. Fist moved from disbelief to rage almost instantly. He howled and snarled impotently as Jack let their shared perception drift further into the Totality hub. Jack knew he would be triggering alarms, but didn’t care. All thoughts of warfare seemed far away, in the face of such perfection.
Jack had forgotten that he was in the little café, that Ifor was sat in front of him. Memories swirled in his head. Even Fist was silent, sulking as he watched Jack replay the moment that had cost them both so much.
Ifor coughed, reminding Jack that he was still there. ‘You are a hero to many of us,’ he said.
‘Then the Totality needs a better class of hero.’
‘Modesty is a fine quality. Very few of you could have broken into that mind. Nobody else would have spared it.’
[ Well, it’s always nice to be appreciated,] preened Fist, [but I bet he’s after something.]
‘So, you’re here as a diplomat?’ said Jack. ‘But what’s your mission? Why are you in Docklands? We saw one of you the other night, but we couldn’t work out what it was doing.’