‘Please, Richard. Think carefully, won’t you?’
I said I would. But we both knew it was a lie.
NINE
Childe and I went back.
I gazed up at it, towering over us like some brutal cenotaph. I saw it with astonishing, diamond-hard clarity. It was as if a smoky veil had been lifted from my vision, permitting thousands of new details and nuances of hue and shade to blast through. Only the tiniest, faintest hint of pixelation — seen whenever I changed my angle of view too sharply — betrayed the fact that this was not quite normal vision, but a cybernetic augmentation.
Our eyes had been removed, the sockets scrubbed and packed with far more efficient sensory devices, wired back into our visual cortices. Our eyeballs waited back at the shuttle, floating in jars like grotesque delicacies. They could be popped back in when we had conquered the Spire.
‘Why not goggles?’ I said when Trintignant had first explained his plans.
‘Too bulky, and too liable to be snatched away. The Spire has a definite taste for metal. From now on, anything vital had better be carried as part of us — not just worn, but internalised.’ The Doctor steepled his silver fingers. ‘If that repulses you, I suggest you concede defeat now.’
‘I’ll decide what repulses me,’ I said.
‘What else?’ Childe said. ‘Without Celestine we’ll need to crack those problems ourselves.’
‘I will increase the density of medichines in your brains,’ Trintignant said. ‘They will weave a web of fullerene tubes, artificial neuronal connections supplanting your existing synaptic topology. ’
‘What good will that do?’
‘The fullerene tubes will conduct nerve signals hundreds of times more rapidly than your existing synaptic pathways. Your neural computation rate will increase. Your subjective sense of elapsed time will slow.’
I stared at the Doctor, horrified and fascinated at the same time. ‘You can do that?’
‘It’s actually rather trivial. The Conjoiners have been doing it since the Transenlightenment, and their methods are well documented. With them I can make time slow to a subjective crawl. The Spire may give you only twenty minutes to solve a room, but I can make it feel like several hours; even one or two days.’
I turned to Childe. ‘You think that’ll be enough?’
‘I think it’ll be a lot better than nothing, but we’ll see.’
But it was better than that.
Trintignant’s machines did more than just supplant our existing and clumsily slow neural pathways. They reshaped them, configuring the topology to enhance mathematical prowess, which took us onto a plateau beyond what the neural modifiers had been capable of doing. We lacked Celestine’s intuitive brilliance, but we had the advantage of being able to spend longer — subjectively, at least — on a given problem.
And, for a while at least, it worked.
TEN
‘You’re turning into a monster,’ she said.
I answered, ‘I’m turning into whatever it takes to beat the Spire.’
I stalked away from the shuttle, moving on slender, articulated legs like piston-driven stilts. I no longer needed armour now: Trintignant had grafted it to my skin. Tough black plaques slid over each other like the carapacial segments of a lobster.
‘You even sound like Trintignant now,’ Celestine said, following me. I watched her asymmetric shadow loom next to mine: she lopsided; me a thin, elongated wraith.
‘I can’t help that,’ I said, my voice piping from the speech synthesiser that replaced my sealed-up mouth.
‘You can stop. It isn’t too late.’
‘Not until Childe stops.’
‘And then? Will even that be enough to make you give up, Richard?’
I turned to face her. Behind her faceplate I watched her try to conceal the revulsion she obviously felt.
‘He won’t give up,’ I said.
Celestine held out her hand. At first I thought she was beckoning me, but then I saw there was something in her palm. Small, dark and hard.
‘Trintignant found this outside, by the Spire. It’s what he left in my room. I think he was trying to tell us something. Trying to redeem himself. Do you recognise it, Richard?’
I zoomed in on the object. Numbers flickered around it. Enhancement phased in. Surface irregularity. Topological contours. Albedo. Likely composition. I drank in the data like a drunkard.
Data was what I lived for now.
‘No.’
ELEVEN
‘I can hear something.’
‘Of course you can. It’s the Spire, the same as it’s always been.’
‘No.’ I was silent for several moments, wondering whether my augmented auditory system was sending false signals into my brain.
But there it was again: an occasional rumble of distant machinery, but one that was coming closer.
‘I hear it now,’ Childe said. ‘It’s coming from behind us. Along the way we’ve come.’
‘It sounds like the doors opening and closing in sequence.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why would they do that?’
‘Something must be coming through the rooms towards us.’
Childe thought about that for what felt like minutes, but was probably only a matter of actual seconds. Then he shook his head, dismissively. ‘We have eleven minutes to get through this door, or we’ll be punished. We don’t have time to worry about anything extraneous.’
Reluctantly, I agreed.
I forced my attention back to the puzzle, feeling the machinery in my head pluck at the mathematical barbs of the problem. The ferocious clockwork that Trintignant had installed in my skull spun giddily. I had never understood mathematics with any great agility, but now I sensed it as a hard grid of truth underlying everything: bones shining through the thin flesh of the world.
It was almost the only thing I was now capable of thinking of at all. Everything else felt painfully abstract, whereas before the opposite had been the case. This, I knew, must be what it felt like to an idiot savant, gifted with astonishing skill in one highly specialised field of human expertise.
I had become a tool shaped so efficiently for one purpose that it could serve no other.
I had become a machine for solving the Spire.
Now that we were alone — and no longer reliant on Celestine — Childe had revealed himself as a more than adequately capable problem-solver. Several times I had found myself staring at a problem, with even my new mathematical skills momentarily unable to crack the solution, when Childe had seen the answer. Generally he was able to articulate the reasoning behind his choice, but sometimes there was nothing for it but for me to either accept his judgement or wait for my own sluggard thought processes to arrive at the same conclusion.
And I began to wonder.
Childe was brilliant now, but I sensed there was more to it than the extra layers of cognitive machinery Trintignant had installed. He was so confident now that I began to wonder if he had merely been holding back before, preferring to let the rest of us make the decisions. If that was the case, he was in some way responsible for the deaths that had already happened.
But, I reminded myself, we had all volunteered.
With three minutes to spare, the door eased open, revealing the room beyond. At the same moment the door we had come through opened as well, as it always did at this point. We could leave now, if we wished. At this time, as had been the case with every room we had passed through, Childe and I made a decision on whether to proceed further or not. There was always the danger that the next room would be the one that killed us — and every second that we spent before stepping through the doorway meant one second less available for cracking the next problem.