“Well, yeah. That’s what they do.”
“It couldn’t have been crashing the OS, that was read-only. It was crashing itself.”
He managed a half-shrug.
“But why would it do that? I’ve seen them run a lot longer than five seconds out in the wild. Do you think, maybe—?”
“Sure,” he said. “I can take a look. But you gotta do something too.”
“What’s that?”
“Take those stupid things outta your eyes.”
Reflexively, she stepped back. “Why?”
“I just wanna see them. Your eyes.”
What are you so afraid of? she asked herself. Do you think he’ll see the truth in there?
But of course she was much better than that. Better than he was, anyway: she forced herself to disarm, and afterwards—looking straight into her naked eyes—he didn’t seem to see a thing he didn’t want to.
“You should leave them like that. It’s almost like you’re beautiful.”
“No it isn’t.” She dialed down the membrane and pushed the board through: Ricketts fumbled it; the contraption dropped onto the pallet beside him, the iso membrane sealing seamlessly in its wake. Clarke cranked its surface tension back to maximum while Ricketts, embarrassed by his own clumsiness, studied the board with feigned intensity.
Slowly, carefully, he slipped the headset into place and didn’t fuck up. He sagged onto his back, breathing heavily. The Cohen Board flickered to light.
“Shit,” he hissed suddenly. “Nasty little bitch.” And a moment later: “Oh. There’s your problem.”
“What?”
“Elbow room. She, like, attacks random addresses, only you put her in this really small cage so she ends up just clawing her own code. She’d last longer if you added memory.” He paused, then asked, “Why are you keeping her, anyway?”
“I just wanted to—ask it some things,” Clarke hedged.
“You’re kidding, right?”
She shook her head, although he couldn’t see her. “Um—”
“You do get that she doesn’t, like, understand anything?”
It took a moment for the words to sink in. “What do you mean?”
“She’s nowhere near big enough,” Ricketts told her. “Wouldn’t last two minutes in a Turing test.”
“But it was talking back. Before it crashed.”
“No she wasn’t.”
“Ricketts, I heard it.”
He snorted; the sound turned into a racking cough. “She’s got a dialog tree, sure. She’s got like keyword reflexes and stuff, but that’s not—”
Heat rose in her cheeks. I’m such an idiot.
“I mean, some Shredders are smart enough, I guess,” he added. “Just not this one.”
She ran her fingers over her scalp. “Is there some other way to—interrogate it, maybe? Different interface? Or, I don’t know, decompile the code?”
“It evolved. You ever try to figure out evolved code?”
“No.”
“It’s really messy. Most of it doesn’t even do anything any more, it’s all just junk genes left over from...” his voice trailed off.
“And why don’t you just flush her anyway?” he asked, very softly. “These things aren’t smart. They’re not special. They’re just shitbombs some assholes throw at us to try and crash whatever we got left. They even attack each other if you give ’em half a chance. If it weren’t for the firewalls and the exorcists and stuff they’d have wrecked everything by now.”
Clarke didn’t answer.
Almost sighing, Ricketts said: “You’re really strange, you know?”
She smiled a bit.
“Nobody’s gonna believe me when I tell them about this. Too bad you can’t, you know, come back with me. Just so they won’t think I made it all up.”
“Back?”
“Home. When I get out of here.”
“Well,” she said, “you never know.”
A pathetic, gap-toothed smile bloomed beneath his headset.
“Ricketts,” she said after a while.
No answer. He lay there, patient and inert, still breathing. The telemetry panel continued to scribble out little traces of light, cardio, pulmo, neocort. All way too high; Seppuku had cranked his metabolic rate into the stratosphere.
He’s asleep. He’s dying. Let him be.
She climbed into the cockpit and collapsed into the pilot’s station. The viewports around her glowed with a dim green light, fading to gray. She’d left the cabin lights off; Phocoena was a submerged cave in the dying light, its recesses already hidden in shadow. By now she was almost fond of the blindness afforded her naked eyes.
So often now, darkness seemed the better choice.
Basement Wiring
First he blinded her, put stinging drops into her eyes that reduced the whole world to a vague gray abstraction. He wheeled her out of the cell down corridors and elevators whose presence she could only infer only through ambient acoustics and a sense of forward motion. Those were what she focused on: momentum, and sound, and the blurry photosensitivity that one might get by looking at the world through a thick sheet of waxed paper. She tried to ignore the smell of her own shit pooling beneath her on the gurney. She tried to ignore the pain, not so raw and electric now, but spread across her whole thorax like a great stinging bruise.
It was impossible, of course. But she tried.
Her vision was beginning to clear when the gurney rolled to a stop. She could see blurry shapes in the fog by the time the induction field cut back in and reduced her once more to a rag doll, unable even to struggle within restraint. The view sharpened in small increments as her tormentor installed her in some kind of rigid exoskeleton that would have posed her on all fours, if any part of her had been touching the ground. It was gimbaled; a gentle push from the side and the fuzzy outlines of the room rotated lazily past her eyes, as if she were affixed to a merry-go-round.
By the time she got her motor nerves back, she could see clearly again. She was in a dungeon. There was nothing medieval about it, no torches on the walls. Indirect light glowed from recessed grooves that ran along the edges of the ceiling. The loops and restraints hanging from the wall in front of her were made of memetic polymers. The blades and coils and alligator clips on the bench to her left were stainless gleaming alloy. The floor was a spotless mosaic of Escher tiles, cerulean fish segueing into jade waterfowl. Even the cleansers and stain removers on the cart by the door were, she had no doubt, filled with the latest synthetics. The only anachronistic touch was a pile of rough wooden poles leaning up against one corner of the room. Their tips had been hand-whittled to points.
There was a collar—a pillory, actually—around her neck. It blinded her to anything behind. Perhaps realizing this, Achilles Desjardins stepped accommodatingly into view at her left side, holding a handpad.
It’s only him, she thought, a bit giddily. The others didn’t know. If they had, why had they been wearing body condoms? Why the pretense of a quarantine cell, why not just bring her here directly? The men who’d delivered her didn’t know what was going on. They must have been told she was a vector, a danger, someone who’d try to escape the moment she knew the jig was up. They must have thought they’d been doing the right thing.