‘Don’t try to remember too much,’ she tells Meshner. ‘Just listen to me.’ And then he is actually listening to her, desperately waiting for the answers, and she has nothing to tell him. The silence stretches between them until he snaps it, stating:
‘I was attacked.’
Her virtual persona can only nod, while the wheels spin behind it, trying to find a way to deal with him now she has isolated him from everything else.
She sees him thinking more, and that is a problem because Meshner’s thoughts are like a network of roots that lead to a dark and corrupted place. At the same time, without his thoughts, what is the point in trying to rescue him? The thoughts make the man. She does her best to throw up barriers that restrict him to the cognitive resources immediately around them, feeling that other presence sniffing about the boundaries, like a wolf at the cave mouth of her Palaeolithic ancestors.
‘This is . . . the implant,’ Meshner says. She feels a weird stab of pride that he’s worked it out so quickly with his limited means. ‘Everything I’m experiencing is just thrown up by the implant. It must be malfunctioning.’
‘It is functioning well beyond its intended capacity. You and Fabian did well to design it.’ And Kern feels like kicking herself because the reference to his Portiid collaborator will just trigger more memory pathways better left silent.
‘My mind isn’t working properly.’ There is a real anguish trying to claw its way through his baffled tone. Meshner is a creature of intellect, after all. Take away his mind, what has he got left? ‘Why are you here, Avrana?’
‘I got you out.’ Technically true, to the letter of the law, for a given value of ‘you’.
‘Out . . . inside the implant? I’m trapped in the implant. It’s gone wrong, I can’t get back to my body.’ His voice trembles a little. ‘So what’s chasing me? I can feel it, just behind me.’
‘There’s nothing behind you.’ Not in my simulation. Not yet.
‘I can feel it there. Why am I trapped in the implant? Avrana, Doctor Kern, please.’
And as he gets more agitated, the heightened emotion begins to supplant all the thin lines and angles of the Brin 2, a beacon to the thing that waits outside. She knows she must say something of the truth and hope that knowledge, even dreadful knowledge, will calm him.
‘This implant drew inspiration from a variety of past technologies including the most sophisticated neuralware my own people produced. Although it was not designed as an Upload system, its ability to record and replicate experience has resulted in a facility similar enough to function as one. In your and Fabian’s design this was intended only as a buffering state to allow a temporary copy of the biological persona to interact with the qualia of the Understanding, as a filter to permit the original to assimilate the information. Are you with me so far?’
Meshner’s eyes say No, but he nods.
‘However, it is possible with minimal reworking to extend the buffering period indefinitely and run an uploaded copy of the personality as part of the implant’s experiential program. A facility that, I might add, is profoundly swifter to upload and more resource-efficient than the original that I used. You really should be very proud.’
Meshner looks at her bleakly. She suspects that the smile she has slapped on her avatar has probably missed reassuring and gone straight to grotesque.
‘I see,’ he says flatly. ‘So what you’re telling me – if I’ve got this right – is that I’m the upload. That’s right, isn’t it? I can’t think properly or remember things because I’m not . . . me.’
‘That is substantially correct, yes.’ She ratchets up the smile another notch. She feels like she has never had need of reassuring smiles in life, not part of her minimal people-skills toolset, and now she cannot simulate one properly. She is giving her virtual face expressions that no human visage should have to bear.
‘Could you maybe reunite me with the rest of me, you know, the real me? Stop buffering, or whatever?’ He is really taking this very well, but they have come to the crux and she suddenly hears voices from her very distant past: her own peevish tones snapping, Just give me something to get my memories back together, and a calm, fake woman’s voice replying, That is not recommended, because the knowledge would drive her mad, and had in time. Perhaps she is still missing a core of sanity because of it. And now she has become the calm, artificial voice playing psychopomp to poor Meshner, telling him things he does not want to hear.
‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible,’ Kern says. ‘Meshner, your suit was compromised by an alien life form that entered your system.’
‘The implant’s system?’
‘Your biological system.’ And was the interior of the Brin 2 station always this cramped? She looks down the curved corridors and sees only closed doors, blank walls. Everything is smaller than it used to be. Claustrophobia is not something computers are prone to, but it was the close companion of the woman she once was, for thousands and thousands of years. ‘Meshner,’ she soldiers on, ‘the entity is some manner of endoparasite. It is within your body and has encapsulated itself within your brain.’ That part of her still within the Lightfoot is drawing off the research Fabian is putting together, the collected works of Erma Lante, or the thing that Lante became: where natural history became navel-gazing. ‘It has interfaced with your brain in some manner, using behavioural adaptations it must have developed when it encountered the terraforming crew here thousands of years ago.’
Meshner is still staring at her and the Brin 2 is just this one room and shrinking, and she knows with a terrible certainty that it is becoming the sentry pod, that tiny prison that degraded her and uplifted her and made her what she is today in all her broken glory. She is experiencing emotions now, courtesy of Meshner’s implant, and she wishes she wasn’t.
‘I . . .’ he says, and then he blinks and says, ‘We . . .’ and she knows it’s too late. The simulation has been compromised because of her, because of him. The other presence has found them. So she grabs his wrist again and tears away the uplifted persona, abandoning the Brin 2 before it can clench tight about her once more, heading somewhere, anywhere else.
They are at a party. Meshner cannot understand why. This stern, pale woman has his arm and everyone else has no face. He reaches into his mind for a reason and it is like searching fog.
Kern, she is Avrana Kern. The chain of logic builds with a sense that the pieces only just disarticulated in some moment-before-now he cannot quite recall. Avrana Kern is dead. She isn’t real. He is in the implant. He is in the implant still. This is not the first time he has done this. Only the place has changed. Why has the place changed? Because they are on the run.
They don’t seem to be on the run right now. Kern glides through the crowd, a tall, severe woman in a long gown of unfamiliar, impractical cut, surrounded by other people, mostly tall, more than half as corpse-pale as she, but none of them have features, and even their bodies are sketchy, see-through. Beyond them only a hint of walls and potted greenery; on the air, the ghost of a long-dead tune.
‘It’s odd to find what you don’t remember,’ Kern remarks. ‘To be honest, this isn’t a memory. My records tell me such a gathering occurred, but it’s no more than a bullet point. This was important to me, once. It’s in my honour. I get confirmed as the head of the terraforming program here. I also turn down one proposition and end up clandestinely breaking the nose of the Dean of . . . I don’t know – Someplace College, Nowheresville.’
‘I don’t understand anything of what you just said.’ Meshner feels that this admission has been drawn from him quite a lot, recently. ‘How can you clandestinely break someone’s nose?’