She studied him. “We all make mistakes, Salvo.”
“And they have consequences.”
“… Yes, and we might need Gregorovich when we get to the Jellies. Morven is all well and good, but she’s only a pseudo-intelligence. If we run into trouble, she won’t be much help.”
“No, she won’t.”
Kira put a hand on his shoulder. “Besides, you said it: Gregorovich is one of you, same as Trig. Are you really going to give up on him that easily?”
Falconi stared at her for a good while, the muscles in his jaw flexing. At last, he relented. “Fine. Talk to him. See if you can knock some sense into that lump of concrete he calls a brain. Go find Hwa-jung. She’ll show you where to go and what to do.”
“Thanks.”
“Mmh. Just don’t let Gregorovich get access to the mainframe.”
Kira left him then and went looking for Hwa-jung. She found the machine boss in engineering. When told what Kira wanted, Hwa-jung didn’t seem surprised. “This way,” said Hwa-jung, and led her back up toward Control.
The halls of the Wallfish were dark and cold and eerily quiet. Condensation beaded the bulkheads where the chilled air blew, and Kira and Hwa-jung’s shadows stretched before them like tortured souls as they floated through the ship.
One deck below Control, close to the core of the ship, was a locked door Kira had walked by before but never made much note of. It looked like a closet or a server room.
In a way, it was.
Hwa-jung opened the door to reveal a second door a meter within. “Acts like a mini-airlock, in case the rest of the ship gets vented,” she said.
“Gotcha.”
The second door rolled open. Past it was a small, hot room busy with whirring fans and walled with banks of Christmas-light indicators: each bright point marking a switch or toggle or dial. In the center of the room lay the neural sarcophagus, huge and heavy. A metal edifice twice the width and breadth of Kira’s bed and standing as high as her mid-chest, it had an imposing presence, as if designed to warn off any who came near—as if to say, “Meddle not, lest you regret it.” The fittings were dark, nearly black, and there was a holo-screen along one side, as well as rows of green bars marking the levels of different gasses and liquids.
Although Kira had seen the sarcophagi in games and videos, she’d never been close to one in person. The device, she knew, was hooked into the Wallfish’s plumbing and power, but were it to be separated, it was perfectly capable of keeping Gregorovich alive for months or even years, depending on how efficient the internal power source was. It was both artificial skull and artificial body, and built so securely it could survive reentry at speeds and pressures that would shred most ships. The durability of the cases was legendary. Plenty of times a sarcophagus (and the mind inside) was the only intact part left after the destruction of its parent ship.
It was strange to know that there was a brain hidden within the slab of metal and sapphire. And not an ordinary brain, either. It would be larger—much larger—and more spread out: wrinkled butterfly wings of grey matter surrounding the walnut-shaped core that was the original seat of Gregorovich’s consciousness, now grown to immense proportions. Picturing it made Kira uneasy, and in an irrational bit of imagining, she couldn’t help but feel as if the armored case was alive as well. Alive and watching her, though she knew Hwa-jung had disabled all of Gregorovich’s sensors.
The machine boss fished a pair of wired headphones out of her pocket and gave them to her. “Plug in here. Keep the headphones over your ears while you talk. If he can broadcast sound, he could hack into the system.”
“Really?” said Kira, doubtful.
“Really. Any sort of input would be enough.”
Kira found the jack on the side of the sarcophagus, plugged in, and, not knowing what to expect, said, “Hello?”
The machine boss grunted. “Here.” She flipped a switch next to the jack.
A raging howl filled Kira’s ears. She flinched and scrabbled to lower the volume. The howl trailed off into a torrent of uneven muttering—words without end and hardly a break between them, stream-of-consciousness blathering giving voice to every thought racing through Gregorovich’s mind. There were layers to the muttering: a cloned crowd yammering to itself, for no one tongue could keep pace with the relentless, lightning-fast processes of his consciousness.
I’ll wait outside, mouthed Hwa-jung, and she departed.
“… Hello?” said Kira, wondering what she had gotten herself into.
The muttering never stopped, but it receded, and a single voice—the voice she knew—spoke forth: “Hello?! Hello, my pretty, my darling, my ragtime gal. Have you come to gloat, Ms. Navárez? To point and prod and laugh at my misfortune? To—”
“What? No, of course not.”
A laugh echoed in her ears, a shrieking, broken-glass laugh that made the skin on the back of her neck prickle. There was an odd tone to Gregorovich’s synthesized voice, a distorted waver that made it hard to understand his vowels, and the volume kept swinging soft to loud and there were irregular breaks to the sound, like a radio broadcast cutting in and out. “Then what? To assuage your conscience? This is your doing, O Angst-Ridden Meatsack; your choice; your responsibility. A prison here of your making, and all around a—”
“You were the one who tried to hijack the Wallfish, not me,” said Kira. If she didn’t interrupt, she had a feeling the ship mind would never stop. “I didn’t come here to argue, though.”
“Ahahaha! Then what? But I repeat myself. You are so slow, too slow; your mind like mud, your tongue like tarnished lead, your—”
“My mind is fine,” she snapped. “I just think before I speak, unlike you.”
“Oh, ho! The true colors show; pirates starboard; skull and crossbones and ready to stab a friend in need, ohahaha, when upon rocky reefs a shuttered lighthouse stands and the keeper drowns alone, ‘Malcolm, Malcolm, Malcolm,’ he cries, and the millipede screams in lonely sympathy.”
Kira’s alarm rocketed. Falconi was right. Something was wrong with the ship mind, and it went far beyond his disagreement over their decision to help the Knot of Minds. Gently now. “No,” she said. “I came to see how you were doing before we leave.”
Gregorovich cackled. “Your guilt is as clear as transparent aluminum, yes it is. Yes, yes. How am I doing?…” There was a welcome pause in his verbal vomit, and even the background muttering fell off, and then his tone grew more measured—an unexpected return of something resembling normalcy. “The impermanence of nature long ago drove me as mad as a March hare, or haven’t you noticed?”
“I was trying to be polite and not mention it.”
“Truly, your tact and consideration are without peer.”
That was more like it. Kira half smiled. His semblance of sanity was a fragile thing, though, and she wondered how far she dared push. “Are you going to be okay?”
A snortling giggle escaped Gregorovich, but he quickly suppressed it. “Me? Oh I’ll be fiiiine, sure I will. Right as rain, twice as comfy. I’ll sit here, all by my lonesome, and devote myself to good thoughts and the hope of future deeds, yes I will, I will, I will.”
So that’s a no then. Kira licked her lips. “Why did you do it? You knew Falconi wouldn’t just let you take over. So why do it?”