“Someone like you, anyway.” Aim. Fire. Snap.
“Not necessarily.”
Brüks looked up from the weld. Jim Moore stared back impassively.
“Jim, you told me how it works. Herded into the service of agendas they’d never support in a thousand years, remember? Somebody thought that up.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Moore’s eyes focused on some spot just past Brüks’s left shoulder.
You’re barely even here, Brüks thought. Even now, half of you is caught up in some kind of—séance…
“There’s a whole other network out there,” Moore was saying. “Orthogonal to all the clouds, interacting with them like—I don’t know, the way dark matter interacts with baryonic matter maybe. Weak effects, and subtle. Very tough to trace, but omnipresent. Ideally suited for the kind of tweaks we use to marshal our forces, as we like to say. And do you know what’s really remarkable about it, Daniel?”
“Tell me.”
“As far as we know, nobody built the damn thing. We just discovered it. Turned it to our own ends. The theorists say it could just be an emergent property of networked social systems. Like your wife’s supraconscious networks.”
“Uh-huh,” Brüks said after a moment.
“You don’t buy it.”
He shook his head. “A stealth supernet fine-tuned for the manipulation of pawns with a specific skill set suited to military applications. And it just emerged?”
Moore smiled faintly. “Of course. No complex finely tuned system could ever just evolve. Something must have created it.”
Ouch, Brüks thought.
“I’ll admit I’ve heard that argument before,” Moore said. “I just never thought I’d hear it from a biologist.”
Evidently half of him was enough.
AN INSTRUMENT HAS BEEN DEVELOPED IN ADVANCE OF THE NEEDS OF ITS POSSESSOR
HE AWOKE TO the sound of jagged breathing. Shadows moved across the skin of his tent.
“Rak?”
The flap split down the middle. She crawled inside like some heartbroken infant returning to the womb. Even in here, cheek to jowl, she would not look at his face; she squirmed around and lay down with her back to him, curled up, fists clenched.
“Uh…,” Brüks began.
“I told you I didn’t like him I never did and now look,” Sengupta said softly. “We can’t trust him roach, I never really liked him but you could count on him at least you knew where he stood. Now he’s just—gone all the time. Don’t know what he is anymore.”
“He lost his son. He blames himself. People deal with it in different ways.”
“It’s more than that he lost his kid years ago.”
“But then he got him back. In a small way, for a little while. Can you imagine what that must be like—to, to deal with the loss of someone you loved only to find out that they’re still out there somewhere, and they’re talking and it doesn’t matter if they’re talking to you or not it’s still them, it’s new, you’re not just playing a sim or wallowing in the same old video she’s actually out there and—”
He caught himself, and wondered if she’d noticed.
I could have her back, he told himself. Not in the flesh maybe, not here in the real world but real time at least, better than this thin graveside monologue Jim clings to. All I have to do is knock on Heaven’s door…
Which was, of course, the one thing he’d sworn to never do.
“He says Siri’s alive,” Sengupta whispered. “Says he’s coming home.”
“Maybe he is. That clip from the transmission, right near the beginning, you know? The coffin.”
She ran her finger across the inside of the tent. Words wrote themselves in her wake: Point of view matters: I see that now, blind, talking to myself, trapped in a coffin falling past the edge of the solar system.
Brüks nodded. “That’s the one. If you take that at face value, he’s not on board Theseus anymore.”
“Lifeboat,” Sengupta said. “Shuttle.”
“Sounds like he’s coasting in. It’ll take him forever, but there’ll be a hibernaculum on board.” He rested a hand on her shoulder. “Maybe Jim’s not wrong: maybe his son’s coming home.”
He lay there, breathing in the scent of oil and mold and plastic and sweat, watching his breath ruffle her hair.
“Something’s coming,” she said at last. “Maybe not Siri.”
“Why do you say that?”
“It just sounds wrong the way it talks there are these tics in the speech pattern it keeps saying Imagine you’re this and Imagine you’re that and it sounds so recursive sometimes it sounds like it’s trying to run some kind of model…”
Imagine you’re Siri Keeton, he remembered. And gleaned from a later excerpt of the same signaclass="underline" Imagine you’re a machine.
“It’s a literary affectation. He’s trying to be poetic. Putting yourself in the character’s head, that kind of thing.”
“Why do you have to put yourself in your own head though eh why do you have to imagine what it’s like to be you?” She shook her head, a sharp little jerk of denial. “All those splines and filters and NCAs they take out so much you know, you can’t hear the words without them but you can’t hear the voice unless you strip them away. So I went back through all the steps I looked for some sweet spot where you might be able to hear and I don’t know if I did the signal’s so weak and there’s so much fucking noise but there’s this one little spot forty-seven minutes in where you can’t make out the words but you can sort of make out the voice, I can’t be sure you can never be sure but I think the harmonics are off.”
“Off how?”
“Siri Keeton’s male I don’t think this is male.”
“A woman’s voice?”
“Maybe a woman. If we’re lucky.”
“What are you saying, Rakshi? You’re saying it might not be human?”
“I don’t know I don’t know but it just feels wrong and what if it’s not a—a literary affectation what if it’s some kind of simulation? What if something out there is literally trying to imagine what it’s like to be Siri Keeton?”
“The voice of God,” Brüks murmured.
“I don’t know I really don’t. But whatever it is it’s got its hooks into a professional killer with a zombie switch in his brain. And I don’t know why but I know a hack a when I see one.”
“How could it know enough to hack him? How would it even know he exists?”
“It must’ve known Siri and Siri knew him. Maybe that’s enough.”
“I don’t know,” he admitted after a bit. “Hacking a human mind over a six-month time lag, it seems—”
“That’s enough touching,” she said.
“What?”
She shrugged his hand off her shoulder. “I know you gerries like to touch and have meat sex and everything but the rest of us don’t need people to get us off if you don’t mind. I’ll stay here but it doesn’t mean anything okay?”