“No, I was somewhat less clueless than you. Politics is life, Fox. You can’t run from it. It’s a question of who has the power.”
Garrett clenched his fists against his sides. A good punch to the face would be in order. In Dockside he’d held a gun to a man’s head; that was power, the ability to dominate and destroy. Martin had dragged him out here to play primate dominance games with the whole world, and told him it was for Garrett’s own good. People were dying around him for stupid ideals, to recreate some kind of theocratic petty tyranny con game disguised as — “A farm! That’s all I was trying to build here.”
“Liar,” said Martin. “You had a dream for this place. I saw it in your eyes when you came to me looking like a scared puppy, begging for money.”
“And I trusted you.”
“So go home, if you don’t think you can handle all this. If the angst is too much for you.”
Garrett had been goaded enough. Martin deserved to suffer --
And was inviting it, mocking Garrett on purpose, watching Garrett with a mad enthusiasm and an upturned chin. Offering to trade guilt for pain, after Martin’s own role in getting people killed.
Garrett raised one hand, and pointed to the door. “Get out of here. You can make peace with your God without me. I haven’t got one, so I’m going to work for redemption.”
Martin seemed about to protest, to demand that Garrett punish him, but Garrett faced him down until he walked away.
Garrett shut the door and slumped into his chair, head on hands. After a moment of self-pity he brought up the map of Castor again, letting it glow and spin on the wall. He stared at it, wishing that the damn thing hadn’t gotten so out of control. Still, it needed him.
It wasn’t worth giving up on his ambition, not because of a storm or a gang of thugs. Not for anything.
2. Tess
She needed out.
Tess couldn’t sleep for the nightmares; she’d seen Phillip’s face break and watched Garrett kill in cold blood, and had men shouting and pointing guns at her. She’d been asleep when the alarm went off, with Zephyr saying, “Bad guys!” She’d woken from one nightmare to a worse one.
Within a few days she was on the phone, not letting her parents see how ragged she looked. Blank screen on their end. “We want you back,” said Dad. “It’s nearly Christmas already.”
Tess was startled. The Pilgrims didn’t believe in Christmas, and she’d been too distracted to notice the red-and-green in the little restaurant. That meant her time here was nearly over anyway; she was due back in school in January. School, after everything she’d done here! She started to laugh, with great heaving breaths like during the hurricane.
Her parents looked out from the screen, saying nothing.
So Tess spent her parents’ money for a ticket from Cuba to Maryland. She waited, brooding in her room in Castor, and imagining she wasn’t living at a murder scene. There was a knock on the door and Zephyr’s voice said, “Hello?”
She opened the door. “Are you really leaving?” he asked, looking as grim as his mech-body would allow.
She tried to make her face a mask, to keep him from seeing how she felt, but that was impossible. He knew her. “I was only going to be here for the summer and fall anyway,” she said, trying to look nonchalant.
“You don’t have to go! You can change your plans.”
They’d tried to build something new and different here, and it had gone to hell. It wasn’t safe. “I have to go. I don’t have any choice.”
Zephyr stepped into the room, saying, “Of course you do! You have at least as much free will as I do. What will happen if you stay?”
“My parents want me back.” Sure, she didn’t want to leave Zephyr or Garrett behind, but she had to go back to school and she couldn’t abandon her family.
“You can visit them and return.”
Tess looked to the headset that lay on a shelf, abandoned since the attack. “When I was freaked out, and Garrett saw me babbling about dying and shooting and everything, was that me or you?” The thoughts of death had seemed to echo through her, making her more and more afraid.
Zephyr’s eyes flickered in thought. “It was us. We’ve been working together more closely than even Valerie and I had, and I felt what you were feeling. I knew. We’re becoming something better than a human or an AI alone. I don’t want to give that up.”
Tess thought of the months spent communing with him. His voice was in her bones; her thoughts she’d trained to fly away in sub-speech, telling him things she’d never say aloud. Stupid jokes, fantasies, wild schemes. Even now her jaw stuttered as she subconsciously told him all this. She missed the stream of incoming nonsense, data, analysis. With him she was — well, why not try it again now? She snatched up the headset and fixed it in place, watching him watch her.
I don’t want to let you go, they said. Look here at the view from space, the view from Squeaky in the water, from my eyes and yours. See all we’ve done? We can keep going, and see what happens. I’m missing something and you’re part of it.
I’m afraid, thought Tess, and didn’t know whether the words started with her or him. She saw the fighting and killing and drowning in the waves and wanted it to end, even if that meant the normality of school again, then college. Besides: I already decided; I bought the ticket and said I’d go. It’s out of my hands. It’s a relief to know that.
We need you. I’m not smart enough to work without you. I don’t want to work alone or with someone else.
“But you still have people,” Tess said aloud.
Have people --
“What?” asked Tess. The link had been hastily paused, hiding their thoughts.
Zephyr’s intact ear perked up. “There’s something I should show you. Please, don’t hate me.”
Now Tess was alarmed. “I can’t hate you. You’re practically part of me.”
Zephyr seemed distracted. “Can’t you hate yourself?”
“Yes. But I don’t.” If the link had been open Zephyr would have caught the undercurrent of, I’m abandoning everyone, I’m weak and stupid, I can’t do anything, why’d I ever come here?
“Then, look. Simple video link.” Zephyr beamed a glowing pattern to Tess’ headset. She recognized it as an AI constellation, this one a simple collection of a few thousand nodes floating in space. It communicated in sparks and puffs of vapor with itself and a tiny simulated world. “This is a fragment of a surveillance system, that I was once sent. See how it’s organized?”
Tess stared into the clusters and let her mind focus, sensing the structure. Normally Zephyr would be whispering in her ear with rapid annotation, flitting to the exact aspect she needed to see, helping her have insights that impressed them both. She tried to summon the kind of analysis Zephyr would provide, seeing it as Zephyr would. “It’s aggressive. All of the little plan-fragments it keeps building are about getting more power, more control.”
“It’s scared, too. I keep the fragment bottled up and inactive. Now, this one is yours.”
A different cluster appeared, much more complex, flashing and shifting. Tess stared into it and fell in, caught up in trying to understand what it was thinking. There was a piece that looked like Zephyr in there, but the rest boggled her. “This network is based on me?”
“You know how if you’ve been friends with someone for a long time, you can predict what they’ll think and do? Or how people say someone isn’t really dead so long as some aspect of them keeps existing? I think it’s because humans create structures like this based on the patterns of other people. The structures are approximations of what they know, how they think. I made this one. I couldn’t help doing it, from thinking of you.”