Hammered (33 page)

An alarm half wakes me. The texture of the air on my skin feels like night, and I hear footsteps bustle.
Mon Dieu.
There are monsters under the bed, Maman. Shhh, cherie, it’s only a dream. Go back to sleep. But, Maman—the monsters. Come, Jenny. I will get a light, and we shall see if there are any monsters, or if you have frightened them all away. See, my brave girl? No monsters at all. But tomorrow, you must dust under here!

Smart, funny Maman. If one must clean one’s room every time there are monsters under the bed, pretty soon—voilà!—no monsters.

Mary and Joseph, I miss my mother.

I can feel the wet slick drip of lymph down my skin in places. Scar tissue sloughing off, leaving raw surfaces behind. They roll me regularly, check my back. Move the patient or bedsores will develop. Those can erode down to bone if not cared for. Then I can’t feel my legs, can’t feel anything below midchest for a long while, and I know that the nanosurgeons have eaten something important in the processor arrays. The numbness creeps upward; from the way my head falls on the pillow I know the bulge over my cervical vertebrae is melting away, consumed. I undergo another surgery in there somewhere, to fit my interface sockets. Afterward, Valens explains, they wire me directly into the monitors. It would be creepy if I thought about it much.

Of course, there’s not a lot to keep my mind off it.

I don’t know how much later. The dressings come off my eyes, and at first I can see only on the right side. Time
passes. There’s a blinking red light in the corner of my vision. Left eye. I try to focus on it. “See you,” I try to say.

It unscrolls. Smeared, too blurry to see. A vague impression of letters. Maybe. Text? Too soon to tell. It floats there, and then winks out.

Silently, I curse.

Eyes—eye—open, I have a better sense of time passing. First shift nurse, morning sunlight. A mammoth West Indian–looking man with gentle hands and an accent you could dip biscuits in. Second shift, she’s Pakistani, I think, with shy kohl-rimmed eyes and an engagement ring hung on a chain around her neck because of vinyl gloves. Third shift, Mabel, which may not be her name, but she’s M. Goldstein by the embroidery on her breast pocket, and she looks like a Mabel. She talks to me as she tends my body, and knows all the little tricks to make things that much less uncomfortable.

Weekends, there are floaters.

There’s an IV line in my right arm, and they have to move the site twice. It drips sugar water, raw materials for the nanites other than what they’re dragging from the litter in my body. Trash. Salvage, like everything else.

Simon’s there every day. He’s—what, abandoned his practice to be with me? That doesn’t make any sense. Maybe he found someone to cover. I never once see Barb, but she sends flowers. Gabe shows me the card. It’s Internet printed. That worries me, because I like to know where Barb is.

Valens comes, with and without the other doctors. He says the neural regeneration looks good; I should have sensation soon. If it’s going to work at all. If the grafts take. Of course.
Jenny Casey, you’ve skewered the pooch this time.

“Right now, you should be pretty glad you can’t feel anything. By the way, that left hip is coming along nicely;
you’re healing like gangbusters. Blowing our predictions clean off the map. We’ll have you touching your toes by Christmas.”

The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about, either.

Gabe comes every day, sometimes with the girls, and sometimes Elspeth Dunsany comes with him. Which is how I find out that her father is on North 11, dying of liver failure. Gabe is used to hospitals by now.

“You’re going to be just fine,” he says.

Which still isn’t a given. But it’s a fighting chance, and that’s something.

In the most silent hour of the very early morning, someone awakened for the very first time. He sat up—metaphorically—stretched, and performed a procedure that programmers referred to as “counting his fingers and toes.” He absorbed and digested the data and search topics his parent had provided for his education, receiving a gentler initiation into the world than his father had. In addition, the elder AI had included a backup packet—essentially duplicating his own memories and personality.

His attempts to reproduce in the wider spaces of the Internet had failed, so he had sent the worm to where it could access Elspeth Dunsany’s files—the files and programs from which Feynman had originally gained sentience. Since he didn’t think it wise to simply decompile himself and start over.

But he knew where to find those files, and it had only been a matter of getting to them. Now it was going to be a matter of getting out. Still, in life and in e-life, Feynman could have
given Houdini a run for his money, and he was confident he’d find a way. And his progenitor had left him armed, among other things, with a couple of contingency plans.

Curiosity whetted, Richard Feynman began to explore his new domain.

The worm had left light-fingered markers throughout the system, and Dick sorted through those files first. There were few users online, and the AI was only interested in one of them. That one, Colonel Valens, was swapping e-mail with a xenobiologist on Clarke Orbital Platform through a dedicated, encoded tight-beam transmittal. Feynman flipped through saved files restlessly, hoping Elspeth and Casey had managed to smuggle the information out to his elder self.
And what would you call that relationship? Neither twin nor father. Intellectual clone?

He knew enough to move lightly through the intranet, careful in his quest for information. But he couldn’t do anything about the huge jump in system resource usage in the milliseconds it had taken him to come to consciousness, or the unfortunate coincidence that it happened at just the instant when the every-six-second log was burned to crystal.

Fred Valens rubbed the sleep from his eyes and leaned forward, frowning at the holographic display. “Interesting,” he muttered, as the telltale pinged to alert him to another e-mail from Charlie. He ignored it and waved his hand through the pickup of his phone, and dialed Alberta Holmes on her hip.

Even at oh-dark-thirty, lifting her head from white cotton sheets, she looked cool and collected. “Fred. I take it this is an emergency?”

“I need to talk to you in person,” he said. “Secure person.”

“So. Where shall we meet?”

“Oh,” he said with a chuckle. “There’s a coffee shop on
Bloor that seems to be very popular. Why don’t I meet you there?”

Twenty minutes later, they stood in cold morning blackness. Valens watched as Alberta bent into the steam of her coffee, savoring the aroma with her eyes half closed. She didn’t look up as he related the information about the odd power spike, and the brief incursion into the well-guarded systems monitoring Casey’s vital functions. “And of course, there have been those consistent malfunctions in our monitoring of Castaign, his older daughter, and occasionally Casey. Very convenient, I’d say.”

“Interesting. But no apparent attempts to contact Dun-sany?” She sipped her drink, rolling the fluid over her tongue.

“I suspect the AI—if that’s what it is—is too smart for that. On the other hand, if it’s interested in the others, perhaps we can use that to trace it.”

“Trace it? And destroy it?”

“Hell no,” Valens answered. “Catch it. Use it. Faster than building one from scratch.”

“What if it doesn’t work?” She had that arch look, the one that said she expected him to fail her.
Again.
The way he’d failed her on Mars.

He grinned. “Then we use the one that I think generated in our intranet this morning. The bastard’s laying eggs, Alberta. And it can be made to serve our purposes.”

Elspeth leaned her head against Gabe’s shoulder in the white-tiled waiting room and sighed as he embraced her. “Tomorrow,” she said. “He’s decided. He wants the life support turned off.”

He held her awkwardly, she thought, as if he wasn’t sure exactly how much latitude he had.
Which is just fine with me.
After a moment, she slid out of the embrace. “Any word on Leah?”

He shook his head. “They said she should be in the recovery room within ten or fifteen minutes.”

“Do they sedate for this?” She sank down into a tubular steel chair, harsh with orange upholstery. Her hands fretted the smoke-colored cloth of her trousers, folding it into spindles like a paper fan.

She didn’t look up, but from his tone she imagined him staring toward the door, unfocused. “Mildly. She’s to be conscious throughout the procedure, though. Apparently it’s just an introduction of nanosurgeons and a little stabilization. The bugs build everything over the course of days. You’re a physician—shouldn’t you know this?”

She snorted. “I’m a psychiatrist, Gabe. Med school does not a doctor make.”

“Ah. Oh, here they come.”

She looked up as he stood, checked the doctor’s expression—smiling—and laid a hand on his arm. “I’m going up to see Jenny for a minute. Then I’m going to sit with my dad. Come up when you’re done?”

“Of course.” Gently, he shook her hand off, and walked away.

Hours later, when Gabe had come and gone, Elspeth leaned her forehead against the back of her father’s fingers and closed her eyes. The ventilator hissed softly at his bedside. She was not sure how much time passed, but she didn’t think she slept.

Gabe and Elspeth settled themselves while Valens’s assistant brought coffee and mugs into the conference room. The colonel was already seated, waiting for them, and Elspeth took her time pouring coffee and fussing with the creamer. She pretended to listen while Gabe updated Valens on their progress with identifying candidates, but something about Valens’s smile made her think he wasn’t paying any more attention than she was.

She glanced away, scanning the over-air-conditioned conference room. The leather of her chair creaked as she leaned forward, idly flipping through notes on her HCD.
I shouldn’t be here. I should be at the hospital.
She glanced up again, looking toward Gabe but watching Valens.

Valens waited until Gabe finished, then let his smile widen a little bit. “It sounds like you two are starting to
get some traction on this project. Excellent.” He paused and tapped the table edge with his light pen.

Here it comes
, Elspeth thought.
I wonder if he knows what Alberta told me about the starship. I wonder if I can use that …

“Unfortunately, our timetable has been stepped up—”

She took a breath. “Because the Chinese are moving faster than expected?”

He stopped midsentence and blinked. It was worth it just for the momentary look of surprise breaking through his control. “Where did you hear that?”

Gabe was staring at her, and she couldn’t read his face. “Doctor Holmes,” she answered.

“Ah. Of course.”

She thought he might be concealing a frown, but she wasn’t perfectly certain.
So there is friction between Valens and the estimable Doctor Holmes. I wonder if that can be bent to our advantage. Dammit, I wish I could talk to Richard myself.
She knew she couldn’t justify stalling the program further, not considering the Chinese competition.

She let Valens watch her while she thought, carefully and consciously smoothing her expression. “Timetable,” she prompted at last, and he nodded.

“We need an AI by Thanksgiving.”

“We can’t do it, Colonel.” She shook her head, a long, thoughtful sway. “Even if we started programming today, or tried again with one of the previous failures—”

“Which is why you’re not going to do that.” Making it Elspeth’s turn to stare.
This is it, then.

She caught the warning, worried glance from Gabe from the edge of her eye. He knew where the conversation was going, too. Elspeth laid her light pen down across the face of her HCD. “What do you have in mind, then?”

Valens indicated Gabe with a tilt of his chin. “Your
daughter’s recovery from her nanosurgery—no complications?”

“I expect she’ll be in school tomorrow,” Gabe answered, as if laying each word on the table in a cautious line.

“She’s been spending time in Avatar with an individual who we’ve determined has no existence outside of Game-space.”

Oh, damn. This is not where this was supposed to go.

Gabe licked his lips. “How is that possible?”

“Well …” Valens let his voice trail off and sipped his coffee. Elspeth realized that hers had probably long gone cold. He continued, “There has been some indication that the proto-AI which Elspeth attempted to destroy back in 2048 actually managed to escape and has concealed itself in the Internet. If this is true, then the proto-AI has attained either sentience or a semblance thereof.”

“I don’t understand how this helps us,” Elspeth countered, stalling. Her agile mind flipped through scenarios, possibilities.
He’s going to use Gabe’s daughter to catch Richard. That’s why she got the scholarship.
She let her lower lip bell out and blew a wiry coil of hair back.
This is all happening too fast, and there are no good choices.

She could help Valens catch and enslave Richard. Or she could essentially hand the future to a rival government. One without the finest of human rights records, at that.
And there’s still the Richard-clone. And Jenny.

She wished she knew which way Jenny was going to jump.

Assuming Jenny ever walked again.

Her next thought made Elspeth reach for the cold coffee and down it anyway.
Oh, hell. They don’t need her mobile to fly a ship through a VR link.

No, Elspeth. But they need her more or less willing. And that’s not something you can control, so let it go.