“Yah well I did. I found how that fucking vampire turned you to stone and better you than me, sorry but it coulda been me or Carnage either for all I know. I think she did it to all of us.”
“Did what, exactly?”
“You ever been scared roach?”
All the time. “Rakshi, we almost died—”
“Before that.” Sengupta head jerked back, forth. “Scared for no reason scared just going to the bathroom.”
Something jumped in his stomach. “What did you find?”
She threw a camera feed onto the walclass="underline" an eye in the attic, looking down along the empty compartment to the Hub hatch. Sengupta zoomed obliquely on a patch of bulkhead beside the secondary airlock. Someone had scrawled some kind of glyph across that surface, a tangle of multicolored curves and corners that might have passed for some Cubist’s rendition of a very simple neural circuit.
“I don’t remember seeing that before,” Brüks murmured.
“Yah you do you just don’t remember it. Only lasts two hundred milliseconds pure luck this showed up on a screen grab. You see it but you don’t remember it and it scares the shit out of you.”
“Not scaring me now.”
“This is just one frame roach it’s part of an animation but the cameras don’t scan fast enough and they’re all gone now. I had to sieve like a bugger to even get this much.”
He stared at the image: a jagged little tangle of lines and arabesques, a piece of abstract graffiti maybe a hand’s-width across. It almost looked meaningful when spied from the corner of the eye, like a collection of letters on the verge of forming a word; it dissolved into gibberish when you looked at it. Even cut out of sequence, even spied from this oblique angle, it made his brain itch.
“It’s like she painted—gang signs,” he said softly. “All over the ship.”
“That’s not all she did the way she moved remember I said I didn’t like the way she moved all those little clicks and ticks—shit even that time she attacked me and then you I saw her whisper things in your ear what did she say to you huh?”
“I—don’t know,” Brüks realized. “I don’t remember.”
“Yah you do. Just like that time in Budapest, changed your wiring with vibrations like lining up a bunch of beer glasses pretty wild right?” Sengupta tapped her temple three times in rapid succession, hard. “Not even radical I mean you can’t hear a word or smell a fart without your brain rewiring at least a bit that’s how brains are everything reprograms you. She just figured out where to stamp on the floor to make you freeze up on command. Coulda happened to me just as easy.”
“It did happen to you,” Brüks said. “Why did you attack her, Rak? I saw you in the Hub, you went at her like a rabid dog. What got into you?”
“I dunno it was like she was making these noises they just really pissed me off I dunno couldn’t help myself.”
“Misophonia.” Brüks barked a soft bitter laugh. “She gave you misophonia.”
Images from Simon Fraser: Valerie strapped to a chair, tapping on the armrest… Even back then she was doing it. Even when they were torturing her, she was—reprogramming them…
He couldn’t help laughing.
“What?” Sengupta said. “What?”
“You know the secret of a good memory?” He bit back on another laugh. “You know what really kicks the hippocampus into overdrive, burns tracks into your brain faster and deeper than anything this side of direct neuroinduction?”
“Roach you gotta—”
“Fear.” Brüks shook his head. “All that time, playing the monster. I thought she was just into sadistic games, you know? I thought she just got off on scaring us. But she was never that—gratuitous. She was only cranking up the baud rate…”
Sengupta smacked her lips and looked out the window.
He snorted softly. “Even that time in the attic, Lee and I—we couldn’t even look. We just knew she was up there, but we were facing each other, Rak. We were each terrified by something to our left but we were facing each other—” Of course we were, it’s obvious. Why didn’t I see it before? “I bet she wasn’t there at all, it was just—temporoparietal hallucinations. Night hags. Sensed-presence bullshit.”
“Roach remembers.” Sengupta was almost whispering. “Roach is starting to wake up…”
“She was moving us around like checkers.” Brüks didn’t know whether to be awed or terrified. “The whole time…”
“And what else did she program into us huh? We gonna start seeing things that aren’t there or go walking naked on the hull?”
Brüks thought about it. “I don’t—think so. Not if she hacked us all the same way, anyway. Basic things, sure. Fear. Lust. Stuff that’s universal.” He smiled, a bit grimly, at the thought of the Crown’s surviving denizens sprouting preprogrammed hard-ons and spiked nipples. And that is really not a picture I need in my head right now. “You want to hack higher-level behavior, you’re getting into formative childhood experiences, specific memory pathways. Too many individual differences for one-size-fits-all.”
Sengupta clicked her teeth. “That’s old roach talking new roach should know better. Who knows what that—”
“She couldn’t hack the Bicamerals,” he said slowly.
“What?”
“These tricks—they exploit classic pathways, they’d never work on someone who’d remixed their brain circuitry. She had to get them out of the way.” A thousand pieces fell suddenly, blindingly into place. “That’s why she attacked the monastery, that’s why she didn’t just knock on the front door with an offer. She wanted to goad them into getting noticed. She knew how the roaches would respond, right down to a weaponized biological just lethal enough to keep the hive out of the way for the trip but not lethal enough to derail the mission completely. Fuck.” He sucked in his breath at the thought.
“You see the problem,” Sengupta said.
I don’t see anything but problems. “Which one in particular?”
“She’s a vampire she’s prepost-Human all wrapped up into one. These fuckers solve NP-complete problems in their heads and they drop us like go stones and she’s stupid enough to just accidentally get locked outside when we leave?”
Brüks shook his head. “She burned. I saw her. Ask Jim.”
“You ask him.” She turned, her eyes lifting from the deck the moment his face fell from view. “Go on. He’s right up there.”
“No hurry,” Brüks said after a moment. “I’ll see him when he comes down.”
To stern the transplanted parasol held back the sun: a great black shield, coruscations of flame still flickering intermittently past its edges. Ahead, the stars: one at least crawled with life and chaos, too distant yet to draw the eye, more hypothesis than hope but closing, closing. That was something.
In between:
A metal spine webbed in scaffolding, lumpy with metal tumors. Spokes and habs and cauterized stumps sweeping one way across the sky; a weighted baton sweeping the other to balance the vectors. The Hub. The Hold: a cylindrical cavern abutting the shield to stern, its back end ragged and gaping into space. Once it had been full of cargo and components and thinking cancers: now it was packed with tonnes of uranium and precious micrograms of antihydrogen and great toroidal superconductors big as houses.