Orlando stopped short, breathing like a mastiff on a choke chain, his whole face disfigured by fury,
"I knew it!" Sam darted a look at Azador. The Gypsy's blood had made a blackish puddle on the shadowy ground beneath him. His dying eyes were still wide in astonishment. "I knew it!" she screamed at the old man. "You liar! You murderer!"
Jongleur laughed. "Liar? Yes, certainly. Murderer? Perhaps, but not if you mean him." He poked Azador with the toe of his Gypsy boot. "He is not even a person. He is another copy, just like the Twins. Just like my Avialle."
"Copy?" asked Paul haltingly.
"Yes—a copy of me," Jongleur said. "A rather poor and incomplete one from early in the process, given a home here by our rogue operating system. Perhaps it was taken while I was sleeping, I cannot remember. It certainly seems to have been dominated by a parade of my boyhood fantasies. That ridiculous Gypsy camp, the kind that only ever existed in Victorian fiction—I recognized it immediately." He smirked. "When I was a child I used to pretend that I came from such a place, not from my so-boring home and my so-boring parents."
"What do you think you have accomplished, Jongleur?" demanded Martine Desroubins, her face still smeared with dirt from Azador's assault. "This is a standoff. We will not let you escape with the lighter."
"Ah, but you cannot stop me." He showed his teeth in a predatory grin. "I have been waiting very patiently for this. Now I am going home to pull the plug on you and my ex-employee and my entire recalcitrant system. Be grateful—there should be no pain. I imagine your hearts will simply stop." Jongleur held the lighter up. "Priority Override," he said. "Tears of Ra."
An instant later he was gone, vanished entirely from the dead lands beside the Well.
CHAPTER 44
Stolen Voices
NETFEED/NEWS: Arizona—The Voucher Society?
(visuaclass="underline" Thornley in front of state capital building)
VO: Arizona's first Libertarian governor, Durwood Thornley, is proposing to extend the school voucher system to a whole variety of taxpayer opt-outs, and his critics are not very happy about it. Thornley's proposed system would allow a variety of ways to reroute taxes for services that the individual taxpayer does not want to support. As an example, Thornley's staffers suggest that people without cars could redeem their roadbuilding vouchers for repair work on patios and sidewalks, or taxpayers without pets could use animal control vouchers to pay for extermination of unwanted house and yard pests. . . .
For a moment he feared that the override had not worked—that somehow the system had managed to undo its own basic programming—but the moment of darkness dissolved into the familiar depthless gray of his own system. He could feel his body again—not the robust physicality of the false form but his actual dying body, floating in its tank, maintained only by the careful attention of countless expensive machines. But for all the horror of returning to his true condition, it was still a wonderful feeling.
Felix Jongleur was home.
And now to trigger the Apep Sequence. There was no question the Other had to be destroyed, especially if Dread had it in his control. It was a shame to lose the millions of hours of work that had gone into it but this particular operating system had long since proved his worst fears to be underestimations.
It would be a shame if the Grail network itself should suffer too much damage, though. It was not the people trapped in it that worried Jongleur—he had not a single qualm about killing Paul Jonas and the rest, especially since as far as he was concerned Jonas had been on borrowed time for two years—but he did not know how well the network would survive being shut down. Even with a backup operating system in place there would doubtless be huge losses in detail and responsiveness, since the system had been geared to the unique and astonishing capacities of the system known as the Other. And beside Jonas and his friends, anyone else still in the network, and thus still hooked into the Other's peculiar matrix, would doubtless die as well. He could not even be sure that the ghost-versions of Avialle would survive, although as code they should remain in memory when the network was revived.
He wished now that his own attempts to find and develop another operating system had borne fruit, or even that there had been time to work with Robert Wells to produce a proper alternative system of a more conventional sort, but it was too late for regrets. This was a war—a war for his own network, which had demanded ludicrous quantities of money, sweat, and blood—and in war there would always be casualties.
The most worrisome thing, of course, was his own safety. He had already been reluctant to commit himself permanently to a virtual body, so how could he trust one of the lesser systems designed by Wells' Telemorphix engineers—more reliable than his own perhaps, but far less sophisticated?
But if Avialle's copies can survive a system shutdown, he thought, then my waiting virtual body should survive the changeover as well. And if I must risk completing the Grail process, even without entirely trusting the new system—well, I have never been afraid of risk. The events of the past days had been unforeseen; he had come close to despair but he had remained strong. To survive and conquer now he would have to remain smarter and more aggressive than those around him, just as he always did.
It had not been easy to stay patient-and meek with Jonas and the others, especially when he had known that one of the access devices was again within his easy reach, being carried by the woman Martine. But a single access device had never been of any use to him, or he could have taken Renie Sulaweyo's by force days earlier. He had feared he might somehow have to find his own way into the heart of the system, but luckily that coarse Sulaweyo woman had stumbled into it on her own. Jongleur had only needed to wait until contact was opened between the two devices so he could risk everything on one gamble, praying that when his override command reached Renie Sulaweyo's end of the communication circuit inside the Other, it would force the system's compliance.
Of course, risk was one thing, foolish risk another: he had prepared for the moment carefully, pretending to help the clownish Azador, quietly urging the pseudo-Gypsy to take back what he stupidly thought was his, so that if the first attempt to steal it should fail, Jongleur himself would still be free to try again.
In fact, he found it a bit disconcerting to discover how easily he could trick and manipulate another version of himself—even a flawed version. It almost wounded his pride.
But that was a small detail. Everything had worked just as he had planned. He had waited, gambled, and won.
And now it is time. Time to play the endgame.
He ordered initialization of the Apep processes, setting in motion the complicated preparations so that he would be able to trigger it as soon as possible and be done with his rebellious operating system, then he rose out of the empty gray system-space into the reality of his great house.
Which, to his definite surprise, seemed to be completely empty.
What is going on here? The building's systems were alive with conflicting alarms—a fire alarm from the underground floors and a secondary alarm warning of a toxic release event from the island's offshore power plant. He brought up his camera-eyes and began to flick through the employee levels. It was Sunday, so of course the building would not be full, but the halls and offices were uniformly deserted. Jongleur put out a priority message to security but no one answered. He brought up the view of the building's security station, two floors below him. It was empty.