“So what you’re saying is—let me get this right—someone killed me and my family, not to mention my entire habitat, because I had the temerity to refer to Philip Lascaille in my art?”
“It’s a theory. If someone connected to the Sylveste family perceived your art as a veiled critique of their actions, they might well have considered retaliation.”
“But why not just kill me, if I made them so angry?”
“I don’t know,” Dreyfus admitted.
“But it would help if I knew that you really hadn’t intended that work to embarrass the Sylvestes.”
“Would that have been a crime, if I had?”
“No, but if you’d intended the art to provoke a response, it wouldn’t be too surprising that you got one.”
“I can’t speculate on the motives of the Sylveste family.”
“But you can tell me why you picked Lascaille.” She looked at him witheringly, as if she’d only just appreciated his true worth.
“You think it’s that easy?
You think I can articulate my reasons for choosing that subject matter as if it was no more complicated or involved than picking the colour of a chair?”
“I’m not saying—”.
“You’ve precious little insight into the artistic process, Prefect. It’s a shame; I pity you. You must see the world in such drab, mechanistic terms. What a crushing, regimented, soullessly predictable universe you must inhabit. Art—anything that can’t be described in strictly procedural terms—is utterly alien to you, isn’t it?”
“I knew my wife,” Dreyfus said quietly.
“I’m sorry?”
“She was an artist.” Delphine looked at him for long moments, her expression softening.
“What happened to her?” she asked.
“She died.”
“I’m sorry,” Delphine said, Dreyfus hearing genuine remorse in her voice.
“What I just said to you—that was cruel and unnecessary.”
“You were right, though. I’ve no artistic side. But I spent enough time with my wife to understand something of the creative process.”
“Do you want to tell me what happened to her?” Dreyfus shot her a steely smile.
“Quid pro quo is the phrase, I believe.”
“I don’t need to know about your wife. But you do need to know about my art.”
“You’re curious, though. I can tell.” She breathed out through her nose, looking down it at him.
“Tell me what kind of an artist she was.”
“Valery wasn’t exceptionally talented,” Dreyfus said.
“She discovered that early enough in her career for it not to cause her too much grief and disappointment when she brushed against real genius. But she still wanted to find a way to make art her vocation.”
“And?”
“She succeeded. Valery became interested in art created by machine intelligences. Her mission was to prove that it was as valid as purely human art; that there wasn’t some essential creative spark that required the input of a flesh-and-blood mind.”
“That’s reassuring, given that I’m no longer a flesh-and-blood intelligence myself.”
“Valery would have insisted that your art be taken just as seriously now as when you were alive. But she wasn’t so much interested in what beta-level simulations could produce as she was in art created by intelligences that had no human antecedents. That was what took her to SIAM.”
“That rings a bell.”
“The Sylveste Institute for Artificial Mentation.”
“That family again.”
“Yes, they do tend to crop up.”
“What did they want with your wife, Prefect Dreyfus?”
“In SIAM they were building experimental machine intelligences based on a raft of different neural architectures. Valery was assigned to the Laboratory for Cognitive Studies, a department within SIAM.
Her function was to evaluate the creative potential of these new minds, with the goal of creating a generation of gamma-level intelligences with the ability to solve problems by intuitive breakthrough, rather than step-by-step analysis. In essence, they wanted to create gamma-levels that were not only capable of passing the standard Turing tests, but which had the potential for intuitive thinking.” Dreyfus touched a finger to his upper lip.
“Valery tried to coax these machines into making art. To one degree or another, she usually got something out of them. But it was more like children daubing paint with their fingers than true creative expression. Valery began to despair of finding anything with an artistic impulse. Then she was introduced to a new machine.”
“Wait a minute,” Delphine said, uncrossing her arms.
“I knew I’d heard of SIAM before. Wasn’t that where the Clockmaker happened?”
Dreyfus nodded.
“That was the machine. Its origin was obscure: there was secrecy and interdepartmental rivalry within SIAM, as in any organisation of that nature. What was clear was this: someone had created an artificial mind unlike anything that had gone before. Not just a brain in a bottle, but an autonomous robotic entity with the ability to move and interact with its surroundings. By the time my wife got to see it, it was already making things. Toys. Puzzles. Little ornaments and objets d’art. Clocks and musical boxes. Soon it started making more clocks than anything else.”
“Did you know about it at the time?”
“Only through what my wife told me. I expressed concern. The Clockmaker’s ability to manipulate its surroundings and alter its own structure suggested a robot embodying advanced replicating technology, the kind of thing Panoply was supposed to police.”
“What did Valery say?”
“She told me not to worry. As far as she was concerned, the Clockmaker was no more dangerous than a child eager to please. I told her I hoped it wouldn’t throw a temper tantrum.”
“You sensed the possibilities.”
“No one knew where the thing had come from, or who was responsible for creating it.”
“You were right to be worried.”
“One day it made something evil. Clock number two hundred and fourteen looked no different from a dozen that had preceded it. Valery wasn’t the one who found it. It was another SIAM researcher, a woman named Krafft. At twelve fifty-eight in the morning she picked up the clock, preparing to carry it back to the analysis area. She was still on her way when the clock struck thirteen. A spring-loaded barb rammed out of the dial, pushing its way into Krafft’s chest. It penetrated her ribs and stabbed her in the heart. She died instantly.”
Delphine shuddered.
“That was when it began.”
“We lost contact with SIAM at thirteen twenty-six, less than half an hour after the discovery of clock number two hundred and fourteen. The last clear message was that something was loose, killing or maiming people wherever it encountered them. Yet all the while it found time to stop and make clocks. It would absorb materials into itself, into the flickering wall of its body, and spew out ticking clocks a few seconds later.”
“I have to ask—what happened to your wife? Did the Clockmaker kill her?”
“No,” Dreyfus said.
“That wasn’t how she died. I know because a team of prefects entered SIAM within an hour of the start of the crisis. They established contact with a group of researchers holed up in a different section of the facility. They’d managed to contain the Clockmaker behind emergency decompression barriers, sealing it into one half of the habitat. My wife was one of the survivors, but the prefects couldn’t reach them, or arrange for their evacuation. Instead they concentrated on neutralising the Clockmaker and gathering its artefacts for further study. Jane Aumonier was the only one of those prefects to make it out alive. She was also the only one to survive a direct encounter with the entity.”
“Jane Aumonier?”
“My boss: the supreme prefect. She was still alive when we got to her, but the Clockmaker had attached something to her neck. It had told her that the device would kill her if anyone attempted to remove it. That wasn’t all, though. The prefects had sixty minutes to get Jane back to Panoply and into a weightless sphere. When that sixty minutes was up, the device would execute her if anyone—and almost anything—came within seven and a half metres of her.”