“Rhona—what—”
“I know, Dan. Of course I know. You didn’t have to hide it from me. You couldn’t hide it from me, I’m more plugged in than you are.” The voice was gentle, and kind, and still the face of that thing did not move. “The moment they quarantined Bridgeport I knew. I almost called you then, I thought maybe you’d finally give up and come inside but—”
A mountain smashed into the back of his skull. His forehead smacked the wall of the cubby, rebounded; he toppled backward in his chair and sprawled across the deck. A red-shifted galaxy ignited, pulsing, in his head: light-years away, an upside-down giant stood silhouetted in the doorway.
He blinked, moaned, tried to focus. The starfield dimmed; the roaring in his head faded a little; the giant shrank down to merely life-size. Its depths were so black they almost glowed.
Rakshi Sengupta, meet Backdoor Brüks.
Somewhere far away, a computer called out in the voice of his dead wife. Brüks tried to bring his hand to his head; Sengupta stomped on it and leaned over him. Fresh pain erupted off the midline and shot up his arm.
“I want you to imagine something, you fucking roach.” Sengupta’s fingers danced and dipped overhead.
Oh God no, Brüks thought dully. Not you, too… He let his head loll to the side, let his eyes stray somewhere anywhere else; Sengupta kicked him in the head and made him pay attention. Her fingers clenched and interlaced and bent backwards so far he thought they’d break.
“Want you to imagine Christ on the Cross—”
He was barely even surprised when the spasms started.
Sengupta leaned in to admire her handiwork. Even now she could not look at his face. “Oh yes I have been waiting for this I have been working for this I have—”
A sound: sharp, short, loud. Sengupta fell instantly silent. Stood up.
A dark stain bloomed on her left breast.
She collapsed onto Brüks like a rag doll. They lay there a moment, cheek to cheek, like slow-dancing lovers. She coughed, tried to rise; sprawled downhill to Brüks’s side. Her dimming eyes focused, unfocused, settled finally on some point near the hatch. Jim Moore stood there like a statue, his eyes so full of grief they might as well have been dead already.
Something crossed Sengupta’s face in that moment. Not happiness, not quite. Not surprise. Enlightenment, maybe. After a moment, for the very first time, she looked Dan Brüks straight in the eye.
“Oh fuck,” she whispered as her eyes went out. “Are you ever screwed.”
“I know it doesn’t make any sense,” Moore was saying, turning the gun over in his hands. “We were never close. That may have been my fault, I suppose. Although, you know, he wasn’t what you’d call an easy child…”
He’d pulled up a chair, sat hunched and leaning against the slant with his knees on his elbows, the light from the corridor catching him in quarter-profile. Brüks lay on the floor while Sengupta’s blood pooled against his side. It soaked through his clothing, stuck his jumpsuit to his ribs. His head throbbed. His throat was parched. He tried to swallow, was relieved and a bit surprised to find that he could.
“Now, though… he’s a half a light-year away, and for the first time in his life I feel that we’re actually able to talk…”
Pale nebulae clouded Sengupta’s open eyes. Brüks could see them clearly even in this dim light; could even turn his head a little to bring them into proper focus. Not Valerie’s best-laid glitch, not the total paralysis the vampire had layered down with weeks of graffiti and subtle gesticulation—or at least, not the same precision in the trigger stimulus. It probably was the same program, the same chain of photons to mirror neurons to motor nerves, still dozing in the back of his head should anyone sound the call to arms; Sengupta must have just improvised after the fact, gone back over old footage, figured out the basic moves and acted them out as best she could.
“It’s as though he knew I’d be listening all those months ago, as though he knew what I’d be thinking when his words arrived…”
She probably hadn’t even been planning for vendetta. It had probably been just another pattern-matching puzzle to keep that hyperactive brain occupied, fortuitously available when it turned out that her wife’s murderer and her adopted roach were one and the same. This rigor was half-assed and short-lived; he could feel it in his tendons. The tightness was already beginning to subside.
Still pretty impressive, though.
“I feel closer to Siri than I ever did when we were on the same planet,” Moore said. He leaned forward, assessed the living and the dead. “Does that make any sense to you?”
Brüks tried to move his tongue: it barely trembled against the palate. He focused on moving his lips. A sound emerged. A groan. It contained nothing but frustration and distress.
“I know,” Moore agreed. “And at first it felt more like just—reports, you know? Letters home, but full of facts. About the mission. I listened to that signal, oh, I would have listened forever, even if all he’d ever done was tell the tale. I learned so much about the boy, so much I never suspected.”
Take two…: “Jim…”
“And then it—changed. As though he ran out of facts and had nothing left but feelings. He stopped the reportage and started talking to me…”
“Jim—Rak—Rakshi thought—”
“I can even hear him now, Daniel. That’s the remarkable thing. The signal’s so weak it shouldn’t even be able to penetrate the atmosphere, especially with all the broadband chatter going on. And yet I can hear him, right here in the room.”
“Rakshi thought—your zombie switch—”
“I think he’s trying to warn me about something…”
“—you might have been—hacked—”
“Something about you.”
“She said you—you might not be in—control—”
Moore stopped turning the gun in his hands. Looked down at it. Brüks fired every command he could, along every motor nerve in his body. His fingers wiggled.
Moore smiled a sad little smile. “Nobody’s in control, Daniel. Do you really think you don’t have one of these zombie switches in your own head, you don’t think everyone does? We’re all just along for the ride, it’s the coming of the Lord is what it is. God’s on Its way. It’s the Angels of the Asteroids, calling the shots…”
Angels again. Divine teleoperators, powerful creatures with neither soul nor will. God’s sock puppets.
Jim Moore was turning into one before his eyes.
“What if it’s not—Siri?” Brüks managed. His tongue seemed to be thawing a bit. “What if, what if it’s something else…”
The Colonel smiled again. “You don’t think I’d know my own son.”
“It knows your son, Jim.” Of course it knows him, it mutilated him, can’t you remember the goddamn slide show? “It knows Siri, and Siri knows you, and—and it’s smart Jim, it’s so fucking smart…”
“So are you.” Moore eyed him curiously. “Smarter than you let on, anyway.”
If only.