Just to be on the safe side I closed my eyes and called in my own frame of reference. The steel corridor became a street, the doorways became row houses, and the chimaera was a piece of a broken machine on the sidewalk, its clockwork mechanism twitching an arm as it wound down.
“How’s it going?” Keegan’s voice.
“Check your board, Keegan. I don’t know where in the hell you dropped me, but it’s not sector seventy-one.”
I let myself flow back into the android’s blood red corridor guarded by the chimaera. “The seven key must’ve stuck. You’re in seven seventy-one. You find anything yet?”
“Yeah. I found something. Maybe this piece’s gone multiple. Mark this point so we can find it again.” I moved past the chimaera and continued down the corridor.
“What’re you talking about, Shannon?”
“Did you mark that point like I told you?”
“Yeah. But what’s going on?”
“Alex Shields’s a multiple, just like with a human. To survive the unsurvivable the piece’s psyche busted into a number of personalities, some of them taking a piece of the event to carry, some of them taking a piece of the original personality to hide away for safekeeping. To do the fix we have to find all the pieces and put them back together again.”
There was a long silence, then Keegan asked, “Is it going to take long?”
“Maybe. I’ve seen as many as nineteen distinct personalities in a single bio. I think the record is over a hundred.” I saw a shape move in the distance. It was a small dog standing with one paw raised as though it had been injured. “I think I see another piece. What’s the level?”
“First level, about eight hundred into it. You’re heading two-sixty.”
I changed modes to the schematic implant for the Akagi C-17 and plotted the blood red color, the chimaera, and the dog on the three dimensional grid. There were trillions of possible locations for the pieces of Alex Shields’ personality, but some locations were more probable than others. The guilt streak was along seven seventy one’s first level west. That was the gray edge between DNA programmed centers, neural processing, and open memory. In humans it’s the invisible dividing line between primitive instinct and learned behavior. I plotted it and sent identification pulses across to adjacent conduits.
The red had spread to nine other paths, but they were all heading in the same direction and seven seventy one appeared to be the hottest in that region.
I returned to the Akagi frame of reference and started as the chimaera roared fire at me and closed its fearsome jaws on my leg. “Go on. Get out of here.” I told it. “You aren’t real.”
It stood there, a quizzical look in its eyes as tiny wisps of smoke rose from the corners of its mouth. I walked over to it, extended my hand, and scratched the top of its lion’ s head. “You’re not real, but I know how you feel.”
Leaving the monster behind watching me, I came upon the wounded dog. It was a honey colored spaniel with only one eye. The socket of the other eye crawled with maggots. The dog whined and I squatted down and extended my hand. It sniffed my fingers, then licked them, then bit them. I jerked back my hand missing my index and middle fingers. “Hungry little bastard.” As I watched, my fingers reappeared. “Keegan, I’m at the second piece. Mark it.”
“I got it.”
There were doorways to the sides. I looked into the left one first. The room swirled with a hypnotic vortex of hot psychedelic colors. I could see nothing but the colors. Stepping into the vortex, I fought to keep a balance that had no meaning as the turquoise and hot pinks streaked through the electric blues, blacks, and blinding whites. The universe whirled about me, making me dizzy, and I changed to my own frame of reference.
Again I was on the street, my heart racing. There were people on the sidewalk, coming toward me, walking away, no one standing and watching. The houses lining the filthy street were those rotting row houses from my youth. Once great mansions, they were now infected with late stage urban decay. All of the front door landings were chest high above street level reached by chipped, cracked, filthy masonry stairs. I walked the street and searched my frame of reference for the corresponding thing that had been represented by the vortex in Alex Shields’s guilt track.
“You back here, Mick?”
It was Colly Fry, gang leader, sadist, and terror of my youth. But he was not real.
“Piss off, Colly.”
“I told you I’d kill you the next time you came back.”
“Yeah, Colly, and you said the same thing the last hundred or so times I’ve been back. You and the chimaera. Evaporate.”
“I told you I’d kill you, Mick.”
I shook my head, appalled at how ordinary my symbols were. “Tell me something, Colly. Is the real you still alive?”
Colly’s face twisted into a frown. “The real me?”
“Yeah. You’re just a few regrettable electrochemical relationships along a well traveled rut. What about the real you? Is Colly Fry still on the street? The real you has to be almost fifty by now. Is the real you still alive?”
The hurt, confused, stupid image of Colly Fry faded away leaving me empty, brushed with guilt. I still had some old business left with the real Colly. It was vague in my memory, but he had beaten me, humiliated me, shamed me. The hundreds of times I had mentally killed him hadn’t caused his death. He still lived where I had buried him alive: my mind.
Somehow, just at that moment, there seemed to be something terribly wrong about the memory of Colly Fry; something wrong about the street.
I heard a whimper and I thought for a moment that the wounded dog had escaped from the biodroid’s universe and followed me into my personal frame of reference. But my street had plenty of wounded dogs of its own. Wounded dogs, wounded children.
Huddled in the shadow of the steps leading up to a dingy yellow tenement house was a small child, a boy of four or five. The whimper had come from him. Something was wrong.
“Keegan?”
“Yeah?”
“Where are the field levels?”
There was a pause then Keegan’s voice came back at me. “All field readouts are in the blue, Shannon. The whole board is blue. What’s up?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You want me to pull you out?”
“Not just yet.”
The little boy. He shouldn’t have been part of the android’s universe. Andy’s are created full grown. Alex Shields had never been a little boy. There was no reason for him to symbolize with such an image. I took myself back to Alex Shields’ universe and was immediately caught up in the swirling vortex. It sucked at me, drew me irresistibly toward its center, and in the heart of it there appeared no colors but row upon endless row of sharp teeth. I covered my eyes and took myself back to the familiar street; the place where I knew enough about everything to be safe.
The vortex was the boy. The boy was looking at me with eyes I knew. Deep blue eyes filled with pain. Full cheeks streaked with tears. His head crowned with a halo of fine almost white hair. His knees were pulled up to his chest and his arms were wrapped about his tiny body.
He frightened me. I knew he was not real, yet he terrified me. I knew him. I knew him well enough to know that he would stubbornly refuse to answer my question. “What’s your name?” I asked.
He curled up into a tighter ball and turned his face away from me, toward the safety of the filthy steps. My fear married to an ache in my heart that was as big as the sky. Real or not that boy and his pain pulled at me.