They were escorted deeper into the ship. The last time he had been aboard, they had taken him straight to the medical centre. The Captain had been more or less capable of walking then, at least for short distances. But they were not taking him anywhere he recognised now. Which was not necessarily to say that he was far from the medical centre, for the ship was as intricate as a small city and as difficult to memorise, even though he had once spent nearly a month aboard it. But he sensed that this was entirely new territory; that he was passing through regions of the ship — what Sajaki and the crew called districts — which he had never been shown before. If his reckoning was good, the elevator was carrying them away from the ship’s sleek prow, down to where the conic hull broadened to its maximum width.
‘Minor technical defects in your eyes don’t concern me,’ Sajaki said. ‘We can repair them easily enough.’
‘Without a working version of Calvin? I don’t think so.’
‘Then we rip out your eyes and replace them with something better.’
‘I wouldn’t do that. Besides… you still wouldn’t have Calvin, so what good would it do you?’
Sajaki said something beneath his breath and the elevator crawled to a halt. ‘So you never believed me when I said we had a back-up? Well, you’re right, of course. Our copy had some strange flaws in it. Became quite useless long before we asked anything of it.’
‘That’s software for you.’
‘Yes… perhaps I may kill you after all.’ With one smooth movement he drew the gun from his holster, giving Sylveste time enough to notice the bronze snake which spiralled around the barrel. The weapon’s mode of killing was not at all obvious; it might have been a beam or projectile gun, but he had no doubts that he was comfortably within its lethal range.
‘You wouldn’t kill me now; not after all the time you spent looking for me.’
Sajaki’s finger tightened on the trigger. ‘You underestimate my propensity for acting on a whim, Dan. I might kill you just for the sheer cosmic perversity of the act.’
‘Then you’d have to find someone else to heal the Captain.’
‘What would I have lost?’ Under the snake’s jaw, a status light flicked from green to red. Sajaki’s finger whitened.
‘Wait,’ Sylveste said. ‘You don’t have to kill me. Do you honestly think I’d have destroyed the only copy of Cal left in existence?’
Sajaki’s relief was evident. ‘There’s another?’
‘Yes.’ Sylveste nodded towards his wife. ‘And she knows where to find it. Don’t you, Pascale?’
Some hours later Cal said, ‘I always knew you were a cold, calculating bastard, son.’
They were near the Captain. Sajaki had taken Pascale away, but now she was back again — along with all the other crew-members Sylveste knew about, and the apparition he had hoped never to see again. ‘An insufferable, treacherous… nonentity.’ The apparition was speaking quite calmly, like an actor running through lines purely to judge the timing, without imparting any actual emotion. ‘You unthinking rat.’
‘From nonentity to rat, eh?’ Sylveste said. ‘From some perspectives, that’s almost an improvement.’
‘Don’t believe it, son.’ Calvin leered at him, stretching forward from the seat which held him. ‘Think you’re so intolerably clever, don’t you? Well now I’ve got you by the balls; assuming you have any. They told me what you did. How you killed me purely on the pretext of ruining their plans.’ He raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘I mean, what a pathetic justification for patricide! I’d have at least thought you’d do me the courtesy of killing me for a halfway decent reason. But no. That would have been asking too much. I’d almost say I was disappointed, except that would imply I once had higher expectations.’
‘If I’d actually killed you,’ Sylveste said, ‘this conversation would pose certain ontological problems. Besides, I always knew there was another copy of you.’
‘But you murdered one of me!’
‘Sorry, but that’s a category mistake if ever I heard one. You’re just software, Cal. Being copied and erased is your natural state of being.’ Sylveste steeled himself for another protest from Cal, but for the moment he was silent. ‘I didn’t do it to ruin Sajaki’s plans. I need his… co-operation as much as he needs mine.’
‘My co-operation?’ The Triumvir’s eyes narrowed.
‘We’ll get to that. All I’m saying is that when I destroyed the copy, I knew another existed and that you’d soon force me into revealing its whereabouts.’
‘So the act was pointless?’
‘No; not at all. For a while I had the pleasure of seeing you imagine your plans in ruins, Yuuji-san. The risk was worth it for that glimpse into your soul. It wasn’t a pretty sight, either.’
‘How did you… know?’ Cal said. ‘How did you know I’d been copied?’
‘I thought you couldn’t copy him,’ said the woman he had been introduced to as Khouri. She was small and foxlike, but perhaps, like Sajaki, not entirely to be trusted. ‘I thought they had spoilers… copy-protection… that kind of shit.’
‘That’s alpha-level simulations, dear,’ Calvin said. ‘Which — for better or for worse — I happen not to be. No; I’m just a lowly beta-level. Capable of passing all the standard Turings, but not — from a philosophical standpoint — actually capable of consciousness. Hence, no soul. And therefore no ethical problems about there being more than one of me. However…’ He drew in breath, filling the silence which someone else might have been tempted to fill with their own thoughts ‘… I no longer believe any of that neuro-cognitive rubbish. I can’t speak for my alpha-level self, since my alpha-level self disappeared some two centuries ago, but for whatever reason, I am now fully conscious. Perhaps all beta-levels are capable of this, or perhaps my sheer connectional complexity ensured that I exceeded some state of critical mass. I have no idea. All I know is that I think, and therefore I’m exceedingly angry.’
Sylveste had heard all this before. ‘He’s a Turing-compliant beta-level. They’re meant to say this sort of thing. If they didn’t claim to be conscious, they’d automatically fail the standard Turings. But that doesn’t mean that what he says — the noises he makes… the noises it makes — have any validity.’
‘I could apply the same reasoning to you,’ Calvin said. ‘And where it’s leading to, dear son, is this: since I can’t speculate about the alpha, I have to assume that I’m all that remains. Now, this may be hard for you to understand, but the mere fact that I’m something precious and unique makes me object even more strenuously to the idea of anyone making a copy of me. Every act of copying me cheapens what I am. I am reduced to a mere commodity; something to be created, duplicated and disposed of whenever I happen to fit someone else’s inadequate notion of usefulness.’ He paused. ‘So — while I’m not saying I wouldn’t take steps to increase my likelihood of survival — I would not willingly have consented to be copied by anyone.’
‘But you did. You allowed Pascale to copy you into Descent into Darkness.’ She had been clever about it, too; for years he had never suspected a thing. He had given her access to Calvin to assist with the construction of the biography. She had allowed him to return to the object of his obsession, the Amarantin, with access to research tools and his dwindling network of sympathisers.
‘It was his idea,’ Pascale said.
‘Yes… I admit that much.’ Cal drew in a lungful of breath, appearing to take stock before his next utterance, despite the fact that the Calvin simulation ‘thought’ far more rapidly than unaugmented humans. ‘Those were dangerous times — no worse than now, of course, from what I’ve gathered since my reawakening — but hazardous all the same. It seemed prudent to ensure some part of me would survive my original’s destruction. I wasn’t thinking of a copy, though — more a sketch, a likeness; perhaps not even fully Turing-compliant.’