"Do you need medical attention? You seem to have trouble breathing."
"No, nI'm fine." She was grasping her knees, waiting, with a sort of clinical disinterest, to see if she would vomit. Unlike a mannequin, she did not have full control of the au-tonomic reactions of her real body. "This is what I do when I have my lungs ripped out. It's fun! You should try it some time."
But this wasn't her real body. She was an emancipated-download-redact.
Which meant her thoughts weren't even her real thoughts.
Aurelian said sardonically, "Thank you, no. There are aspects of the human condition we machines are content merely to observe from the outside."
She raised her head to glare at him with sudden hatred. "Well, I'm glad you find my pain worth noticing! Maybe I can be a footnote in some damn abstract thesis in your Earth-mind! Mount me as a science exhibit: the girl who thought she might be happy someday gets a healthy dose of reality to boot her in the mouth."
He spread his hands and bowed slightly. "I'm sorry. I did not mean to make light of your suffering. Similar things happened to me when I was being constructed; each time a new
thought-group was introduced, the integration required a paradigm shift."
"That's not the same."
"Nonetheless, I sympathize. Even we are not immune from pain and sorrow. If our minds are more acute than yours, that only means the pains we know are more acute as well."
She straightened up. "Okay! What's in that damned box?! What's so terrible that I couldn't even bring myself to ... Oh, no ... It's not..." The snap left her voice. Wild-eyed, she said in a pleading tone, "Phaethon is dead, isn't he? He killed himself in some stupid experiment, and I only think he's alive. All my memories of him are implants, aren't they? Oh, please, not that!"
"No, its not that."
Another horror overcame her. "He never did exist, did he?! He's a made-up character out of my romances! I knew he was too good to be true! There's no one like him!"
"No. He is quite real."
She breathed a sigh of relief, stooped, and sloshed more water across her face.
Then she stood, shaking drops from both hands. "I hate surprises. Tell me what's in the box."
"You made an agreement with Helion to perpetuate a certain falsehood on Phaethon. Helion has just sent you a message requiring you to deliver that promised aid. In order to carry out this program, you must resume part of your hidden memories."
"I would never lie to Phaethon. That's stupid! If there's something in that box which is going to make me want to lie to my husband, I'm not sure I want to know what it is!"
"Deliberate amnesia is self-deception; perhaps not the best way to maintain one's integrity."
"I did not ask you your opinion."
"Perhaps not. I am required, however, to inform you that I have consulted with a hypothetical model, taken from your Noumenal Recordings, of what you might be like after this box is opened. That version of you would wish, in the strongest possible terms, that you open the box and accept these
memories. She did, and therefore you probably will, regard it as a matter of paramount importance."
"How important?"
"You probably will believe it necessary to preserve your marriage, fortune, happiness, and your life as you know it."
It took her a moment to brace herself. "Okay, then. I consent. Show me the worst."
She sank back down into the pool. The microscopic assembler thickened the waters around her, built relays along her neck and skull, made contact with interfaces leading to her neurocircuitry. ...
The memory came from less than a month ago. She stood deep in the dreaming, in Rhadamanth Mansion. To one side, tall windows let red sunset light slant across a shadowy corridor to illume the upper wainscoting of the opposite wall. No portraits hung here; the pigments would have been bleached by the direct sunlight. Instead, a high mantle held a line of brass and bronze urns, etched with arabesques, dull with patina. Daphne thought they looked like funerary urns, and wondered why she had not seen them here before.
All else was shadow in the dying light. At the far end of the hall, the only spot of color came from the faded plumes, which rose, motionless and fragile with dust, above the empty-eyed helmets of ornate suits of armor guarding the door there.
Her hesitant, soft steps carried her to the door. All was dark and quiet. The door-leaves fell open silently at her slightest touch.
Leaping red light shone from the crack, and the roaring noise of alarms, sirens, explosions, screams. Daphne came forward, squinting, her elbow up to shield her face from the heat. She smelled burnt flesh.
A gallery of transadamantine supermetal stretched infinitely ahead of her. The ceiling was wider than the floor on which
she stood, so that the windows or screens paneling the walls slanted down, and overlooked a sea of seething incandescence. This sea was roiled and torn by spiral storms of some darker matter churning; and from these blots rose arching arms of flame, intolerably bright, prominences flung endlessly upward into black void above.
Daphne saw the gallery's lines of perspective dwindle to the vanishing point as straightly as if drawn with a geometer's rule, with no curve or deflection; likewise, the horizon of the infinite storm outside the windows was much farther than the horizon of any Earth-sized planet would allow.
A gasp of pain, half a scream, half a laugh, came from behind her. She turned. This gallery met several others in a large rotunda, where banks of tiered controls overlooked rank upon rank of windows, holding views of the flaming storm from many angles and directions, cast in several models, flickering with multiple layers of interpretation.
Along the floor of the rotunda, huge cubes of some machinery Daphne did not recognize were melting; through red-lipped gaps and holes in the armored housing, white-hot funnels of incandescent air erupted. There were darts of light and sparks, but no flames; everything which might have been flammable had been consumed.
In the center of the rotunda, at the top of the burning zig-gurat of machinery, blood dripping from the cracks where the white ablative of his armor had melted, sat Helion on a throne. Through the transparent face-shield of his helmet, the right half of his face had been scalded to the bone. His right eye was gone; cracked black tissue webbed his cheek and brow. Medical processors, unfolding from the interior of the helmet, gripped Helion's face with claws and tubes, or crawling drops of biotic nanomachinery.
A dozen emergency wires ran from his crown to the control caskets to either side of him. It looked absurdly crude and old-fashioned. Evidently the thought control had failed, or the static in the room did not allow signals to pass through the air from the circuits in his brain to those in the boards.
Hovering between his hands, above his knees, was the orb
of the sun, webbed with gold lines to indicate the Solar Array stations, pockmarked and scabbed with dark splotches to indicate the storms. Funnels of darkness reached from the sun-spots down toward the stellar core. The orb radiated multicolored lights, each color symbolizing a different combination of particles streaming from the storm centers.
Some screens showed a furious activity, calculations and solarological data streaming past. Others showed a slow and vast disaster; magnetic screen after screen overloading and failing; sections of the Array losing buoyancy and descending toward the interior, toppling and disintegrating.
The safety interlocks were gone from all power couplings, nodes and transfer points; speed-of-reaction restrictions had been removed from the nanomachinery. Consequently, the machinery inside the array was heating up, driven past safe operating levels, and being allowed to burn, provided that one more second of functional life could be forced from its self-immolated corpse.
Helion was attempting to position screens or to release charges into the core to deflect some of the storm-particles. The volumes of matter involved were incredible; Helion's machines threw masses of controllants fifty times the size of Jupiter from the photosphere into the mantle like so many grains of sand.