Good. I am not too late.
I step into the firmament and tell it to carry me there.
‘Matjek.’
The vir is a stark black space, with the jewel in the middle. It looks like a pair of folded, glowing hands. Matjek is surrounded by a flurry of partials of himself, all manipulating tactile software constructs and networks of graphical zoku language in the air.
For a moment, he stares at me in horror. I realise my mistake and let my features melt back into my own.
‘Matjek, this isn’t right.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I came to stop you. You don’t have to do this. Whatever you are trying to do, it won’t even work. Mieli told me—’
‘Who cares what she told you! I never wanted to be this! Have you seen this place? It’s like a giant cancer wearing my face.’ His eyes are bright and hard. ‘I’ve almost got this thing figured out. It’s meant to be opened by a chen. There is a recursively self-improving algorithm inside. It’s meant to overwrite all the data it finds with zeroes. I just need a remote trigger so I can open it from afar.’
I swallow. A recursively self-improving algorithm. It sounds an awful lot like a Dragon, only a Dragon that does not recognise a chen as its daddy. I remember that poor Chekhova was working on weapons like that. Barbicane, what have you done? There is no telling what the thing will do if Matjek or anybody else lets it loose.
‘Matjek, give it to me.’
I search for words. What can I possibly tell him to make him understand?
‘No! Get out of here, or you can die with them!’
I take a step forward and grab him by both shoulders. His partials back off. He blurs in my grasp for a moment, trying his time-speedup trick, but this time, I’m ready, and I have a Chen Founder code. He stares at my face, defiantly. He has never grown up. His parents were a distracted quantum trader and a beemee star. He was so lonely that his only friends were imaginary, and he made them real.
And he is being an insufferable brat.
‘Matjek Chen!’ I say firmly. ‘You stop playing with that doomsday weapon right now and listen to me!’
He blinks, astonished, and suddenly I’m sure that no one has ever used that tone with him before.
‘You don’t have a right to hurt people just because you don’t like them. Not even if they are you. I know you don’t really know what truedeath is, and I hope you don’t have to find out very soon. But you don’t want to inflict that on anybody, not unless there is no other way to protect others. Like your mum and dad wanted to protect you. But if you do this, you become the opposite of that. Something much worse than this evil Matjek Chen of the future you hate so much.
‘Trust me, I know about hating myself. But this is not going to fix things. It won’t make you feel better. You want to hurt the other Matjek, the old Matjek?’ I let my face flicker into his stern visage for a moment. ‘Do something he would never do. Help me to help people who are dying out there, dying truedeaths, not like in your games, dying and never coming back. Help me to take away what he wants. It’s not dying that hurts him, Matjek. It’s losing.’
He looks up at me. There are tears streaming down his face.
‘I just want my mum and dad,’ he says in a small, choked voice.
I squeeze him tight for a moment, unsure what to do. He grabs my neck with surprisingly strong arms and clings onto me. It takes a while before he lets go.
I smile at him, and suddenly I’m all out of words.
‘Can we go home now?’ he asks.
I take the false jewel spime carefully.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘But we still have work to do, and I will need your help.’
‘All right,’ he says, and takes my hand.
‘He is lying to you, Matjek,’ says a female voice. ‘It’s not losing that hurts the most, it’s losing people. And Jean should know all about that. Isn’t that right, Jean?’
Joséphine. I hurl my mind at the firmament to trigger the escape route I prepared, but something is locking the vir’s structure, trapping us inside, a higher-generation Founder code. A Prime. Despair tears at my chest. The ground sinks beneath my feet.
And then we are standing on a beach of soft sand, looking at a clear blue sea. There are footprints on it, small ones, and far away, a little boy is making wild splashes in the waves. When he sees us, he stops to look, and comes up running.
Joséphine Pellegrini smiles a serpent smile at me and Matjek both.
‘Don’t worry,’ she says softly. ‘We are going to make sure that no one loses anyone, ever again.’
Joséphine looks old. It is a cruel joke to force her into such a mindshell, all bones, and strained, stretched skin. She plays with her diamond necklace with dark, mottled fingers.
‘You were a fool to come here, Jean,’ she whispers.
Matjek is staring at the other Matjek, the smaller one from the sea. The new boy has an aura that betrays him as the Prime here. But in his eyes, there is an infinite hunger that does not belong to Matjek Chen. The last time I saw it was in the Dilemma Prison, and the eyes were my own.
I lay a hand on my Matjek’s shoulder.
‘You are not me,’ Matjek says. ‘What are you?
‘All-Defector,’ I say, nodding. ‘It’s been a while.’ I squeeze the false jewel in my hand, mind racing. I know only fragments of Prison legend about its true nature. A game-theoretic anomaly that becomes you, that predicts what you are going to do and always wins. And I am in a vir it controls: it can probably see every neuron firing in my brain. Fear makes my chest heavy. It is difficult to breathe.
‘Thank you, Jean le Flambeur,’ All-D says. ‘You have played your part well, better than I could have ever expected. I have enjoyed being you. Without you, this conflict with the zoku would have been prolonged and tiresome.’
‘Let the boy go,’ I say. ‘He does not understand what is happening here.’
My Matjek gives me a dark look, but does not say anything. Joséphine smiles at him. ‘Dear Matjek,’ she says. ‘You don’t have to be afraid. You said you wanted to see your mum and dad again. Well, in just a little while, we are going to bring them back.’
Matjek frowns. ‘I don’t believe you,’ he says. ‘I know liars, and you are one.’
There is mock shock on Joséphine’s face. ‘How rude! But then you have been spending time in very bad company! Jean, you have been a terrible influence on the boy.’ She looks at me, and for the first time, I see a plea for help flash in her eyes, just for an instant. She is a prisoner here, too.
‘I don’t think you are much better, Joséphine,’ I say, holding her gaze. ‘I see you have graduated from thieves to monsters.’
‘I don’t think you understand either, Jean,’ the All-Defector says. ‘There are no monsters here. It is not easy to explain what I am – but I have noticed that whatever I become leaves … traces. I spent a long time inside you. So I find that I want to explain. I want to be liked. I suspect that comes from you.’
‘And how is that working out for you?’
A smile flickers on All-D’s lips, a smile that has just a hint of my own.