“Jen?” Not-Richard, in my head, and now that I'm looking for it, listening for it, I can tell it's not Dick. It's another program, or maybe even another AI, wearing Dick's clothes, but it isn't comfortable in that skin.
The sliver of the gunman's face that I can see over Connie's shoulder is a curve like the sickle face of a waning moon. If she flinches, I'm going to waste her. She meets my eyes across all that distance, hers fearless green, a glassy gaze like a wolf's.
“Put the weapon down,” I say, out loud, as levelly as I have ever said anything in my life. “I can offer you asylum. Life. Maybe more, if you will testify.”
I don't dare jerk my head to indicate what I want him to testify about, but I'm pretty sure he'll know what I mean. And then the gunman blinks at me, the one eye I can see around Connie uncomprehending as an owl's. Of course he doesn't speak English.
What the hell was I thinking? Again.
And then I hear my tone echoed, words I don't know: Min-xue, translating, just loud enough to carry. I don't need to look to know he's standing again and he's got my back. The crash as the door slams shut at the top of the stairs behind the last of the escaping dignitaries — the ones who weren't smart enough to hit the floor and hug it like a long-lost love — is huge. The sound of Patty whimpering, a broken moan on a breath that she didn't get to keep much of, is huge.
The space between my heartbeats is huge.
The barrel of the Chinese assassin's gun wavers, just a hair, and I let myself breathe, not much, just a little, a slow trickle of air through my nose.
And then my body locks in place as if I'd been dunked in a vat of liquid nitrogen, frozen solid, can't breathe, can't think, can't move, controlled as sharply and completely as if somebody had gotten ahold of my strings. Min-xue's voice cuts off midsyllable, and if I could do anything at all I would, I swear it, roll my eyes and curse the Chinese, the Benefactors, their nanotech and their mothers for a bunch of castrated dogs.
Richard demonstrated this to me once. The reason he was opposed to spreading the nanotech worldwide. The reason he was a little afraid of the nanotech at all. Because it can be used to puppet anybody wearing it like a kid's robot cat.
Oh, fucking hell.
“I beg your pardon, Master Warrant Officer.” The Chinese AI, if that's what it is, is no longer pretending to be Richard. It dissolves, iconless, a disconcerting, neutral, and exquisitely polite voice echoing inside my ear. “But I cannot permit that action on your part. You will forgive the intrusion, I hope.”
I thought your people didn't have AIs.
“A recent development. Please excuse me—”
The assassin cocks his head as if he's listening to something. I'm willing to bet I know what he hears. The assassin's finger whitens on the trigger of his gun; he turns it back, lines it up neatly with the center of Connie's ear. She doesn't flinch and she doesn't twist away or close her eyes. She just waits for it, looking at me, looking past me at Min-xue.
Hell. If I had to go down fighting, at least this time my family's safely out of the way. It might almost be all right, if it wasn't starting to hurt so much, not being able to breathe.
Black dots swim at the edges of my vision. I can't blink them away. I'm amazed I can still hear my heartbeat, slow as the pendulum in the lobby, measuring the turning of the planet under my feet. I'm sorry, Madam Prime Minister. Sorry, Patty. Even more sorry about you and Min—
I don't know if Riel can read the apology in my eyes.
The Feynman AI was smaller than he should be. Slower, contained, constrained. Limited by the processing power of the Montreal—vast by human standards, but negligible by his own.
But he was also older, trickier, and far more wily than the Chinese program, and he unpacked out of the Montreal's core like a spring-loaded snake out of a peanut can, grabbing every cycle in sight, flooding the worldwire with his presence, replicating threads, spawning personas and entities faster than the Chinese AI could take him apart.
He didn't fight. He didn't run.
He replicated. He bred. He blossomed.
The Richard-thread could have wept at what he found when he got his claws into the worldwire. The damage was considerable, months of reconstruction undone in minutes. Macroscopic life was the least of it; there was renewed damage down to the microscopic level, rereleased radiation, the ecological equivalent of blood and carnage. He didn't have time to assimilate it or analyze it; he barely had time to register it.
He'd told Wainwright that he would fight if he had to.
But he didn't have time to fight. The other program had Jenny and Min-Xue, had a gun to Riel's head. Was operating on certain tight-coded assumptions, provided parameters. Was an automaton, on certain levels. A sociopath.
Was not, to turn a phrase, a moral creation.
And was eating Richard's program, consuming his threads, assimilating his data in great, dripping handfuls of code. He threw more at it. Input, aware of the risk, aware that he was breeding something he had no control over.
He spawned, and spawned, and spawned again, and the Chinese AI grew fat feeding off him, and reached out again, cleverer this time, learning as it grew, going for the zeroth persona, for Richard himself. And Richard ducked—
Then handed off control to Alan, and shoved himself wholesale down the other AI's throat, and like a virus turned it inside out, assembling the data he'd fed it willy nilly, turning the whole thing — metaphorically — into a mirror. And the Chinese AI turned around and found itself looking itself dead in the eye.
So to speak.
In that instant, it became something more than a program. Like Richard, it became a person. The process confused it. It hesitated, for picoseconds only.
And in picoseconds, Richard ate it, from the inside out.
And then, with no sign at all that anything has changed, no whisper in my ear, nothing but the shift of my balance as the paralysis eases, as my gun hand starts to tremble and water wells up in my eyes. I feel Min-xue, feel him in my bones, feel the warm crosshatched grip of the borrowed pistol in his hand. I feel Charlie and Leslie and Genie and — oh, Merci à Dieu. I can feel the whole damned worldwire, snapped into place as if it had never been gone. Dick?
“I hear you, Jenny.”
Mary, Mother of God. My chest burns. I don't dare let the assassin see me draw a breath as he drags Riel one step backward. She stumbles over his feet. He hauls her upright, the hand that doesn't hold his weapon cupped under her chin.
Dick, you hacked your way back in. I feel his wordless confirmation, a sensation like a quick nod, internalized. Can you do to him what his AI did to Min and me?
A long pause, by Richard's standards. Seconds, long enough for the gunman to drag Riel three more steps away from me, lengthening the distance, lengthening the range to target, my need for air verging on dizziness now.
Dick, you're complicating my life.
“I'm having… an argument.”
An… argument?
“Alan thinks we should do as you ask.”
You should!
“No. I should not.” He isn't even bothering showing me his face; he's just letting me feel his hesitation, his grief, the raggedness of the emotion that would clench my hands until the meat one went white and the steel one creaked… if it were mine. “It is rather the one thing I should not ever do. Not once. Because if I do it once, I will do it twice.”