But now the suit was a wreck, and just to repair it meant ruining many of his paintings. I had to plate over some, weld over others. I thought of all the time he had put into them and felt myself complicit in an act of vandalism against his memory. But Branco wouldn’t have wanted it any other way, I told myself. He’d have wanted me to make the best use of the suit.
The mechanical repairs turned out to be the easiest of all. After sealing the punctures, I was able to restore pressure integrity and get the life-support mechanism working again. Air and thermal control came back on line without much difficulty. I got the waste recycler operational with only a little more effort. Confident that the suit would be able to keep me alive almost indefinitely, I then turned my attention to the motive power sub-systems, ensuring that the servo-motors were still functional and receiving energy. One by one I tested the limb joints and verified that the suit was still capable of moving itself. This was vital because the bulky, hard-shelled contraption was much too cumbersome to be operated by muscle power alone. For the kind of repair work Branco had often been engaged in, massive power-amplification had been essential.
But something still wasn’t quite right. When I finally sealed myself into the suit—telling myself that it was only my imagination that the suit still smelled of Branco—I couldn’t get it to move.
That wasn’t quite true. The suit moved, but only sluggishly. I had to start moving an arm or a leg before the suit responded and followed my lead. I recalled watching Branco traverse the hull with almost balletic grace, moving fluidly and quickly, and knew that what was missing here was something more than my own inexperience with this particular suit. The servo-motors were all good, and the power distribution and command lines were all functioning.
That meant the problem was in the volition box.
Most suits are capable of reading their wearer’s minds to some extent, anticipating movements before nerve-signals have time to reach muscle. A volition box goes further than that, though. It detects the readiness potentional, the rising electrical surge that happens in the brain several tenths of a second before we are consciously aware that we are about to do something. That gave the suit an edge, since it didn’t have to wait for Branco to know that he’d made a decision to move. It was tapping into his subconscious brain, bypassing the conscious part entirely. Tenths of a second might make all the difference in a crisis.
Not all Ultras are fond of volition boxes. They prefer the illusion of free will, the belief that their conscious minds are running the show. Branco either didn’t care, or cared more about getting the job done. It was the volition box that allowed him to skip and dance around the hull, like he was born to it. But now it wasn’t working properly.
I suppose I shouldn’t have been too surprised. A volition box has to train itself to read the precursor signals accurately, slowly adapting to the person inside. It does so by assembling a predictive model, what—back on Yellowstone—we’d have called a beta-level simulation. Instead of a piece of crudely automated machinery, the suit becomes a dancer, expertly attuned to its partner. And now I was expecting Branco’s suit, which over years and decades had adapted itself to him, to suddenly switch its allegiance to me. Obviously it wasn’t going to be that easy. It wasn’t that the volition box was resisting me, just that it was going to be a long time before it made the necessary adjustments.
My own suit didn’t even have a volition box, but swapping them wouldn’t have been an option anyway. The way Branco had modified his suit, switching one box for another would have been about as easy as performing a head transplant. If I’d had weeks or months I could have traced every dependency, but I simply did not have that time. Nor could I just switch the box out of the control loop and accept that the suit’s movements would lag a little behind my intentions. Branco’s augmentations were so convoluted that switching out the box locked the suit into complete immobility. Against my better judgement, I began to wonder if he’d actually made it purposefully difficult for anyone else to use the suit after him.
It occurred to me then, as it hadn’t done before, that there was a part of Branco still inside the box, maybe the last part of him that had any claim on life. By forcing the box to tune itself to me, rather than him, I’d be committing a kind of murder.
I could see Branco now, laughing at me for even thinking that way. And I felt faintly ridiculous that I’d even entertained the thought. The suit was a tool with his fingerprints on, that was all. Wipe them off, get on with the job in hand. All that remained of Branco was a dead body in a casket speeding towards Andromeda.
Yet no matter how much I kept telling myself that, I couldn’t stop thinking of the box as a holy receptacle, treasuring a tiny flickering spark, one that—with callous disregard—I was about to snuff out.
But I still had a job to do.
The climb from the nearest lock to the point where the starboard spar jutted away from the hull involved a kilometre and a half of nerve-racking descent. I’d seen Branco cross that kind of distance in half an hour, spidering his way down without a visible care, seemingly oblivious to the infinite, endless fall that would follow the slightest mistake. He knew the hull expertly, every ledge, fissure and crenellation, and his suit knew him just as well. Together the combination was almost magical. He seldom bothered with the cumbersome business of tethers and anchorages, preferring to place his trust in balance and the suit’s own musculature. Of necessity, my own descent was a much more protracted and inelegant affair. The suit moved, but each action was accompanied by a maddening timelag, as if the suit were a dull servant that needed to think hard about every command it was given. I used lines wherever possible, and because I did not yet know which ledges and handholds were secure and which were not, I placed as little faith as possible in the fabric of the hull. I reminded myself that even Branco’s knowledge hadn’t protected him in the end.
At last—it had taken nearly four hours of painful progress—I arrived near the engine spar. My relief at reaching my destination was tempered by the realisation that the suit was, if anything, becoming even less willing to accommodate my movements. I ran a check on the servo-motors, and they were all still operating within normal limits. So that couldn’t be the answer. Nor did there appear to be much wrong with the nervous system, which only left the volition box.
I didn’t know what to make of that. I could understand it not being well adapted to me at the start of the excursion, but I saw no obvious reason for it to worsen. If anything the suit should be slowly easing into the habits of its new wearer.
Fine; it was something to worry about when I got back inside. For now, I estimated that the rate of decline was not so rapid that I wouldn’t be able to complete my inspection and climb back. But the margins were tight and I didn’t have time to delay.