Originator (43 page)

“Like the Talee,” Sandy added. Ragi looked at her with nodding comprehension, perhaps considering one reason why she'd brought them here.

Rhian appeared, blinking with her suddenly-good eye as she readjusted to binocular vision. “Auntie Rhian!” Kiril shouted, and ran to her for a hug.

Rhian picked him up. “Wow,” she said, “Sandy really outdid herself this time, didn't she? I think you might be a reincarnated Roman, Sandy.”

“So it's just us?” Amirah asked. “Just GIs and Kiril?” With a questioning eyebrow at the latter choice.

“I brought Kiril because he's a part of this conversation,” Sandy explained. “I know he's too young to understand a lot of it, but this is about him, now. I always hated other people making my life's decisions behind my back, I won't do it to my kid.”

“Ari would be a useful contributor,” Ragi added. “He can't help me too much at the far end of the Talee technology we're deciphering, but he knows far more about adapting it to regular humans than I do.”

“And Vanessa's going to be essential once we need an actual plan,” Sandy agreed. “Sure, we can't do this entirely alone. But this part is about us. Synthetic humanity. There are things we understand, and things we can do, that organic humanity can't share. We're in a position here to make decisions that could shape not only humanity's future, but our own.”

Rhian put Kiril down. “It's sad Kiet's not here to hear you say that,” she said.

“Sad, sure,” Poole said flatly. “But probably better this way. The guy would go full speed ahead at any available cliff, he didn't help.”

Amirah rolled her eyes. “Jason! A bit of tact, please. The man just died.”

“And I'm finding the bright side,” said Poole. “And don't call me Jason.”

Another figure appeared between the training posts and materialised into a brown-skinned man, handsome, clearly a combat GI. He looked around in mild interest, with a frown of curiosity at the huge stadium surrounding. Amirah, Rhian, and Ragi stared.

“Hafeez,” Sandy introduced the League man. “Internal Security Organisation, but you already know that.”

“Hello again,” Hafeez greeted them. “Under much nicer circumstances than before. And surroundings.” He glanced at the racked weapons. “I think.”

“So you're running a VR matrix that simultaneously incorporates Jane, who is in an FSA secure cell in some farther part of the city, and Hafeez, who is in an even more secure cell in the basement,” Amirah observed. “Ragi?”

“Sure,” said Ragi. “And I think Jane knows why.”

They all looked at Jane. Jane pulled the trident Poole had thrown from the post and twirled it. Even here in VR, she preferred a baseball cap, down over her eyes. Was she hiding, Sandy wondered? Or was anonymity a reflex beyond conscious thought?

“Hi, Hafeez,” said Jane, giving the trident a twirl.

“Hello, Jane,” said Hafeez in measured tones. “I'm sorry about Takewashi.”

“Yeah, him too.”

Amirah looked from one to the other. “You two know each other?”

“Renaldo Takewashi was in regular contact with the ISO,” Hafeez explained. He looked like he might want to take a weapon and fidget, as GIs often might. But uncertain in this company, he shoved hands into his pockets. “I saw Jane a few times. Other ISO agents reported her presence there at others.”

“What'd you
do
there?” Poole asked. “Learn to pot plants? Read philosophy?”

“Actually, kinda, yeah.” Jane took up a shield as well, testing its grip. “I did lots of reading. And I was Takewashi's busybody. General purpose bodyguard. Odd jobs.”

“Occasional assassin,” Hafeez added.

Sandy frowned and stared at her. Jane rolled her eyes a little. “Hey,” she said to Sandy, “what'd you expect? Monk's robes? Some bad folks were never friendly with Takewashi, and his work was important. I kept him safe.”

“How?” Sandy asked Hafeez.

“It's classified,” the ISO agent replied.

“I don't kill civvies any more, sis,” said Jane. She thrust with the trident, with effortless balance. “That was stupid, you were right to be mad. I didn't understand it then, and every bad thing you said about me at the time was right. I'm making amends.”

“Yeah,” Poole said drily. “You seem real cut-up about it.”

Jane's eyes met his, a hard stare. “Allah gives me the strength to change what I can, the patience to tolerate what I can't, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

“Dear lord,” said Amirah unhappily. “So it's Allah now.”

Jane pulled the trident to attention, then down once more, testing. “Call it what you like. A substitute for universal morality by any other name, I don't care. I read the damn book and I liked it.”

“Why?” Amirah challenged. “Like having someone tell you what to do?”

“No,” said Jane. “I like being reminded that I'm not the center of the universe. Psychopaths and atheists forget.”

“Ami,” said Sandy, cutting her off. Amirah rolled her eyes. What a strange bunch of synthetics they were, Sandy thought. Atheist GIs were as rare as believers, both required watertight belief systems and a personal investment in narratives. GIs rarely did that to the same extent as straights, leaving most as curious agnostics. Save for Jane and Amirah, at opposite ends of the spectrum. “Given where Jane's come from, that actually makes sense to me.”

“You mean she was a psychopath before,” Poole said unhelpfully.

“Well, yeah,” said Sandy. “And now she's not. And it's important, given where we are right now. Ragi, what did you mean when you said Jane knows why this VR matrix is so advanced?”

“Because I think Takewashi was planning on spilling a lot more of his secrets in coming here,” said Ragi, watching calmly and quietly as usual. Ragi had even less visible ego than most GIs. Easily the smartest person present, he could have dominated the conversation with brilliance and conjecture, but he listened instead. “But beneath that gruff exterior, it seems logical that Jane is really quite intelligent.”

“I'm not,” Jane deadpanned. “I'm as dumb as a box of hammers.”

“She is basically your designation, after all,” Ragi continued, looking at Sandy. “And any basic psych profile of Takewashi suggests that his fifty-series GIs were always his favourites. You in particular, Cassandra. He had closure issues with you, and given that he only had a few months to live regardless, I speculate that a part of his motivation for coming here was to tell you some things. He indicated as much to me, in our brief time talking.”

Sandy glanced aside at Kiril. He had a gladiator shield before him, held up by Poole, who seemed as interested in Kiril's attempts to get his arm in the grip as in the ongoing conversation. Kiril wasn't understanding much, but he was listening, as was his habit when interesting adults were talking.

“Jane?” she said. “What else did Takewashi tell you?”

Jane hung up the shield and leaned on the trident. She was right—no GI would ever use the shield. Defence was not a GI strongpoint. “Not much,” she said. “Only that we're all wrong in thinking the Talee are so advanced. Sure, their uplinks, that's freaky advanced hardware, but it's only hardware, we can catch that up pretty quick.”

“What do you mean, not so advanced?” asked Amirah, frowning. “After what they just did?”

Jane smiled and sighed. “You're too close to it, you don't see it. The original mystery that none of you ever figured out, but you got so used to not knowing that you stopped asking the question.”

“Sandy?” said Rhian. “I don't like it when she talks in riddles. Make her stop.”

“Why the fifty-series are so advanced,” said Jane. And looked at Ragi. “And why Ragi is.”

“Whatever the hell designation I am,” Ragi murmured. “I still don't know.”

“Same as us,” said Jane. Indicating herself and Sandy. “Same brain. Different body. You're noncombat, so you don't waste all that brain space running what is basically a combat chassis. It takes up about half of Sandy's and my active neurons, all that spatial perception and motor skills. You don't need it, Ragi, being the total pussy that you are. And your uplinks are better, by virtue that you've actually got a brain big enough to run them—with Sandy or me it'd be like trying to power a city block with a hand battery.
But otherwise you're basically a fifty-series GI like the rest of us—me, Sandy, Hafeez. But a noncombat model, which is why you can do wizard tricks in a network, almost like a Talee.”

Silence in the Colosseum, save for the whisk brooms of the cleaners, and the distant sound of ancient Rome, floating up beyond the walls.

“Wait wait wait,” said Amirah. “No no no, we've done thorough scans on Sandy and Ragi, their brain structure is completely different.”

Jane rolled her eyes. “No, it just
grows
differently. That's the point of fifty-series, we're flexible.”

“Without the combat chassis,” Sandy murmured, eyes wide. It made sense. She stared at Ragi. He looked astonished. “But Ragi can . . . I mean, I can't do what Ragi does on the net, not even close.”

Ragi blinked. “Which means that . . .” he stared at Jane. “You say the Talee aren't as advanced as we think? You mean . . . you mean that the most advanced Talee . . . are just fifty-series GIs themselves?”

Jane pursed her lips in mild approval. “Pretty slow for a so-called smart guy, but yeah. Basically. That's what Takewashi did in creating fifty-series. Took the Talee's most advanced synthetic neural tech and ran it on humans. And
you
,” she reprimanded Sandy, “never gave him enough credit, because the guy truly
was
a genius. But he couldn't tell you exactly how and why, because he couldn't admit where it all came from. But translating it to human biology, all from scratch, took crazy smarts. I'm not sure anyone else could have done it.”

Sandy stared up at the farthest heights of the stadium. Dazed. “So Cai was just a fifty-series too?”

Jane nodded. “All of them. No doubt a few extra bells and whistles, and of course crazy-advanced uplinks and other integrations. But us having their technology really won't change human society
that
much, because we already had their technology. It was us.”

“And . . . son of a bitch,” said Sandy as the full implication came to her. “It's what I've been saying all along. Talee synthetics don't just have crazy alien skills that we'll never match. They're our
potential
. They're what we
could
become, in time. Not some new, more advanced model. Us.”

“There is no more advanced model,” Jane affirmed. “More advanced marks, versions of the model, but the model itself is advanced even for Talee.
And you never noticed, because you'd all become used to how advanced fifty-series are, and used to the fact that you still had no real idea why.”

“What Sandy argued for intervening in Pantala that first time,” Rhian said sombrely. “That GI progression could go in dangerous directions. That it had to be steered carefully.”

“Well, I can promise you one thing,” said Amirah. “FedInt will not be happy.”

“Well, we can't let them know,” said Rhian. Looking around, very seriously. “Right?”

“Not from me,” Poole muttered. “If they find out you guys could do
that
in a few years, they'd have you killed, and all the rest of us too for good measure.”

“We should have heard from Pantala by now,” said Amirah, concerned. “If Takewashi was right. It's suspicious that we haven't.” She looked at Hafeez. “What was the situation on Pantala last you heard?”

Hafeez considered for a moment. No doubt wondering how much to say. “Negotiations were continuing, between our two sides. If the Talee attacked, they'd have to get through a number of our warships to do it. League and Federation.”

“They were docked at Antibe Station?” Sandy asked.

“And near it,” Hafeez confirmed.

“Cai took out that station with a VR matrix,” said Sandy. “If the ships were all within range, the whole lot could have been taken out by on-station Talee agents without a shot being fired.”

“Which would explain why no one's come to warn us,” Amirah finished. “And any outer-system recon wouldn't reveal what's happened, the Talee could even be fooling them with fake transmissions, making it sound like business as usual.”

“Hell,” said Rhian, “we used to do that during the war. Take a station, then broadcast regular ops chatter to fool anyone listening.”

“Takewashi said they'd be after other kids like Kiril,” Sandy said to Jane. “Other kids that Chancelry did the operation on.”

Jane made a face. “There's a lot more on Droze than that,” she said. “Whole research centres, devoted to that technology. They might have just nuked it.”

“Maybe. But remember, Pantala's where League discovered the Talee's
synth tech in the first place. It's our place of origin, from Talee bases abandoned, probably from the last catastrophe. And those bases are presumably still there, Kiet showed me caves, on VR, with evidence of Talee habitation.”

“We don't actually know
which
catastrophe,” Ragi cautioned. “Cai said the first was thermonuclear, which from Earth's technological timelines would seem to indicate pre-FTL, but not necessarily. Maybe the time gap between the Talee's invention of nuclear weapons and faster-than-light wasn't as big as ours was. Or maybe they had a thermonuclear war very late on the time scale.”

“Seems unlikely that they'd have FTL and not use it in a self-inflicted ELE,” said Amirah. “FTL is deadly from inception, it makes nuclear weapons look tame.”

“Still, Ragi's right to be careful,” said Sandy. “And Cai has told us true things while still bending that truth. If those bases were abandoned after the
first
catastrophe, they could be very old. And if the Talee were attempting to destroy all human knowledge of that technology, they'd have to get all those bases. They won't know where all of them are, and after five thousand years they could be very well hidden. They'll need time, to search the whole planet.”