What?
Uh, Hargreave must’ve—Yeah, that’s right. Hargreave told me. I mean, how else would I know? It’s not like those controls looked like anything I’d ever seen before.
Damn good question. You should ask him.
Oh. Right.
Pre-Testimony Interview, Partial Transcript, 27/08/2023
Subject: Nathan Gould
Excerpt begins:
You know how dreams work, right? Our brains are full of static; neurons just fire off at random sometimes, not thoughts or anything, just—background noise. The visual cortex gets its share, but normally you don’t notice ’cause the signals coming in over your optic nerves are so much stronger, they just swamp everything else.
When you’re asleep, though, there’s nothing coming in through the main cables. Nothing to drown out the static. And the brain—notices. It’s got these pattern-matching circuits and when static’s all they’ve got to work with, they’ll find signal in that noise even if there isn’t any signal to find. They try and shoehorn these random flickers into the experiential database. Same reason we see faces in clouds.
That’s what I thought those visions were, when they first started coming over the feeds. Just static. So I laid some dynamic filters over them, just to try and clean up the signal, and wouldn’t you know the residuals weren’t random. There was a whole other AV track embedded in there, and holy shit the things it showed.
Fragments, mainly. A few seconds, maybe the longest was getting up around a minute. Glimpses of the inside of some weird gloomy structure, blue end of the spectrum, like it was deep underwater or way out around Neptune or something. Architecture. Machinery. Some kind of twisted plumbing everywhere, all tangled and messed up. Not human, though. Not even close.
One fragment looked like a cross between a junkyard and a museum, full of things that had to be vehicles. Another looked like some kind of lab, Ceph running around everywhere, operating various bits of equipment. Not your usual Ceph, though, nothing we’ve seen in Manhattan. Some new geek caste, maybe. I saw a magic mirror once, a swirly portal that looked like some kind of teleportation device. Oh, and I kept seeing constellations: a cluster of blue stars, little sapphire pinpricks connected by a network of dim glowing filaments, rotating in midair. Arranged along the surface of an invisible sphere, you know, like a star globe. Ceph planetarium or something, I thought at first. Saw that track a few times, the suit must’ve had it listed as a favorite. Anyway, you’ve got the files. You must have turned my place inside out by now.
No comment. Right.
At first I thought this was all just a contaminant from the suit’s camera feed, right? Quantum echo of old footage, something from archival storage seeping into the signal. You could hardly blame the N2 for springing a leak or two after all the shit it had been through. And it was pretty fucking creepy, I mean finally I’m getting a glimpse of where Prophet’s actually been all those months, and wouldn’t you know he didn’t spend all that time getting pissed in some Taiwanese dive.
It never occurred to me that Alcatraz would even be aware of it. Even if he called up the cam feed, I’d had to squeeze the signal through a whole shitload of amps and filters to find the embed. Even if he had the wherewithal to do that from his end—which he does not—why would he? I didn’t even mention anything to him at the time. Poor fucker already had his hands full, he didn’t need me freaking him out with the news that his suit was haunted by the previous owner.
But once I figured out what was going on, I went back and looked at all those other burps and hiccups I’d written off as static the first time around. If there was anything useful in there, I figured I could pass it on. And then I run into that hive sequence, you know, the logs from when Hargreave was leading him around by the nose, and the only way that makes any sense at all is if Alcatraz already knows this shit. I mean, you must’ve seen the feed, right? He plays those Ceph controls like a fucking maestro, things I’d never have even tagged as controls. And sure enough, just before he pulls those moves out of his ass there’s static on the line, and when I squeeze out the signal it’s Prophet doing the same thing. Alcatraz was just going thou and doing likewise, bra.
So the suit isn’t just leaking these signals into the camera feed. It must be laying those images right across Alky’s visual cortex, poking those voxels the way you’d light up an LED. Far as I can figure the brain feed was the main feed; what I was getting off the camera was just an induction leak or something.
Now, I’m not saying Alcatraz is hiding anything, you understand? I know you fuckers, I know that’s the first place you’re gonna go with this, but most of the inputs our brains operate on are subconscious. You’re thinking Oooh, Alcatraz was seeing movies in his brain but for all we know he’s not even aware of the stimulus. It might all operate below the level of conscious perception, he could just get a feeling that this is how you’re supposed to work this or that control. So you might want to go easy on the poor bastard, unless you’ve started beating the shit out of people for having flashes of intuition.
You want something to blame, blame the N2. But really, it was only doing what it was supposed to. It’s programmed for mission success, right? It’s designed to analyze data from a thousand sources, figure out what’s most mission-relevant, serve up the intel most vital to current objectives. That’s all it was doing. That’s all it’s ever done.
We just had no idea it was going to be so goddamn good at it.
You ever have any direct dealings with Jack Hargreave, Roger?
Well of course you wouldn’t have actually met. I’m asking if you ever got into a conversation with the man: text chat, Third Life, online chess club. That sort of thing.
Ah. Then you may not know that he liked to play things really close to the chest.
I was halfway through the sequence before I knew what I was actually doing, and even then it wasn’t because Hargreave let me in on his master plan. I was just kick-starting these damn spokes, one after another, fighting off grunts and stalkers every goddamn step of the way, and I basically put it together myself. We’re priming the pump, right? We’re booting up this spire to shoot a huge wadge of spore all over central Manhattan, which on the face of it doesn’t make a lot of sense if you’re actually fighting for the home team. But I remember what Hargreave said, that one insight Nathan Gould’s synapses were too drug-addled to parse: The suit doesn’t contain the specs for a weapon, the suit is the weapon. And the suit, it’s pirated, right? It’s Cephtech on a leash. And I’m remembering that first stalker, my hand going into whatever goo those fuckers use for blood, and the N2 trying to interface with it . . .
So finally I figure it out. The suit is a weapon. The suit is a virus—Prophet said as much before he blew his brains out and left me holding the bag. And Jack Hargreave, he’s the tenth-degree goddamn black belt in battlefield judo, he’s the absolute master at using your opponent’s strength against him. So I’m wearing a virus, and all this spore, and the spear over my head—that’s the delivery platform.