Emissaries from the Dead

23. IN THE CONFESSIONAL

Between sleeplessness, physical exhaustion and the lingering aftereffects of several near brushes with death, I was as wrung out as a buzzpop addict in the last stages of withdrawal. Part of me argued in favor of a break. If the hangar was indeed safe, as I suspected, I could have taken days, even hours, to rest up and gird myself for the next step, without fear of my extended period of inaction dooming others to join the growing list of casualties.

It would have been nice. It even would have been wise.

But waiting was not an option.

I just couldn’t take being played with any more.

The Porrinyards didn’t say much on the way to the Interface. They knew, with the certainty born of consensus, that no words could stall me, stop me, or comfort me. But Skye did grab my wrist, as I knelt to enter the portal, to ask: “Do you know about us, too? Everything?”

I couldn’t smile. “Yes. I do.”

“How long?”

“For a while now.”

They both looked like they were going to cry. “Are you going to be all right with that?”

“I don’t know. It depends on what I can confirm in there.”

They nodded, with a complete lack of surprise, and acting as one, stepped forward to wrap me in an embrace. Oscin had to stoop, a little, to get in. Both trembled.

“You had better live.”

It wasn’t fear that made me so reluctant to let go, but the sheer novelty of connection: feeling myself a part of somebody else’s life, and feeling them as part of mine. I wasn’t sure it was something I could afford. But that was also part of what I had to find out in there.

The Porrinyards released me and stepped back, dry-eyed, providing me with a matched set of brave little smiles.

I could only nod at them and pull myself through the hatch.

It was not difficult to notice subtle changes in the chamber of indistinct blue skies. A new element had been added, one that clashed with the ambience of infinite space: a certain claustrophobic oppressiveness that made the walls, wherever they were, loom like a prison. I don’t know whether that came from changes in me or from subliminal cues activated by the AIsource. Nor do I know whether I imagined, or merely projected, the impression of hoarded breath. I only know what I believed. And I believed that, insofar as it was even possible for beings like the AIsource to feel apprehension, in the presence of a creature so much smaller and shorter-lived than themselves, it was what they felt now.

As I floated there, waiting for be acknowledged, I found myself understanding them on the most visceral of levels. As intelligences, they were beyond my comprehension. As creatures of power, they were gods who reduced me to the significance of dust. But as souls, they were downright ordinary. They had ambitions, and feelings, as base as those belonging to any of us. They were, in the final analysis, as corrupt as we were. And in that, they were kindred.

In my time I’d been fascinated by them, afraid of them, suspicious of them, and enraged by them.

Now, for the first time ever, I could feel, rather than feign, contempt for them.

It was liberating.

When they spoke, they used the voice of a male: deep and resonant, with just enough of an echo to make the unseen walls seem even farther away.

Congratulations, Counselor. We have heard that you came up with an explanation for the death of Cynthia Warmuth.

“You heard by listening. You were with us, following our every word.”

If we sometimes behave as if we acquire information at the same rate that you organics do, then that’s simply because it’s polite to modulate our conversations with you to your own capacities.

“Polite,” I said. “Or necessary to preserve our illusions.”

Don’t they amount to more or less the same thing?

“No, they don’t. Not when it renders communication less convenient, not more. Not when it complicates every conversation we have. When you do that, the pretense itself becomes the very point—and it leaves me with no choice but to consider just why you find it so important.”

Another pause, this one long enough to make me worry about being ejected for my effrontery.

Then, as if grudgingly: Go on.

“Everybody here sees the absurdity of it. You see and hear everything aboard this station. But in order to actually converse with you in return, Gibb’s people need to hop a skimmer and travel all the way back to this one place. This one room. Why would you make everybody do this? What advantage would you find in it?”

It’s our station. We can make any arbitrary rules we like.

They sounded like the words of a spoiled child, caught trying to dominate a playground.

“It is your station, and the ecosystem you’ve set up here has any number of arbitrary rules, but none of them seem pointless. None of them seem designed to cause inconvenience for its own sake. This chamber does. For a while there I assumed you use it just because you wanted to remind us who ran the place, but now that I’ve been around here for a while I think the true explanation’s a little more devious than that. I think you use it to keep us from thinking about all the things you would prefer us not to think about.”

This pause was the longest so far. We’re not certain what you’re referencing there, Counselor.

“Oh,” I said, my anger with them growing, “I’m sure you know exactly what I’m referencing, but since you insist on going through the motions, we can afford to put this issue aside for a moment or two. After I say a little bit more about Cynthia Warmuth…whose murder, whatever I said to Mr. Lastogne today, remains not quite solved.”

A new tone entered the voice of the AIsource: awed fascination. We thought you were under the impression you were finished with that.

“Not for a heartbeat. Not with the explanation I gave Mr. Lastogne. That was just about getting him off my back, so I could finish my business with you. No, my night on the Uppergrowth wasn’t about confirming my theory: it was about proving my theory wrong.”

As before, we are very interested in hearing your reasoning.

“I shouldn’t have to go through this. I should just tell you I know everything, and move on. But, very well. We can play games if you prefer. Some of what I told Lastogne was true. I did figure out the human place in Brachiator cosmology. I even figured out how they’d likely react to a human being who wanted more of a connection to Life. But I’ve also seen how slow they are…and I know it wouldn’t make any sense for them to be able to overwhelm a human being with the agility of one of Gibb’s people. Were Warmuth awake and aware of everything going on around her, she wouldn’t have needed lightning reflexes to escape the same way I did. Hell, I’m downright clumsy, and a simple tether line placed me beyond Brachiator reach long enough for help to reach me, even when that help was itself under attack. Why would Warmuth have any more trouble than I did?”

You had the advantage of knowing recent history. Perhaps Warmuth didn’t know what they had planned until they took her by surprise.

“That might have made sense if they’d merely mauled her. A mass attack of that kind, coming from all sides, from sentients who approach at the rate of Brachiators, might have been easy to mistake for any other kind of social activity, including ceremonial grooming or even—Juje help me—a group hug. But the Brachiators approached me with claws in hand, giving me the opportunity to fathom their violent intent long minutes before they actually reached me. I even closed my eyes a few times to simulate a distraction capable of preventing me from paying proper attention. But even when I gave them every possible advantage, it was impossible to believe in Warmuth being taken by surprise. Their group assault was interminable, inexorable, even frightening…and obvious. Warmuth would have had more than enough time to see that something was wrong, and summon help.”

She could have been asleep.

The AIsource was now behaving like a human suspect throwing out one idiot evasion after another, in the hopes of derailing the one true path to a solution. But a human suspect did that kind of thing out of panic and self-preservation. The AIsource seemed to be playing a game of catch with logic: pointing out all the holes still remaining in my argument, so I could fill them in as I went. It infuriated me, but I obliged. “Also not a realistic possibility. The Brachiators came after me as soon as I spoke the words that set them off. Warmuth wouldn’t have begged them for Life, watch them unsheathe claws and begin converging on her position, then conveniently fall asleep before they were close enough to act. That’s beyond ridiculous. No, I’m afraid that there are only two real possibilities here. Either she met up with someone who moved faster than she could, or she was already immobilized and helpless when that unknown party gave the Brachiators a very bad idea. Either way, that means another culprit.”

Another hesitation. You are correct.

“And that person is still beyond my reach, correct?”

For the moment.

“Because we’re still talking internal politics, aren’t we? Our saboteur, culprit, Heckler, what have you, is still working for your opposition party, still killing, still doing whatever needs to be done to disrupt whatever you have going on inside the Habitat. You know who it is, but you can’t just give me a name, or even put me in the same room, without breaking whatever rules of engagement you’ve managed to set up among yourselves.”

Again: for the moment.

“Politics.”

Civil War, Counselor. One you currently have no business being any part of.

Currently. “It hasn’t stopped the other side from trying to kill me.”

The other side operates under ethics not our own. The other side will escalate if we do anything to encourage any further involvement from outsiders. The other side will not subject its agents to any attempt at capture by other parties.

“Which means you could respond yourself if you wanted to.”

We could. But we see greater advantage in waiting.

“For what?”

To get what we want.

“From them?”

No.

“From me?”

Yes.

“What do you want from me?”

Something freely given.

I’d expected something like this. But the weight of it was enough to make my chest hurt. It made me think about one of the first things Lastogne had ever said to me, upon my arrival. Not a philosophy as much as a warning.

In that moment of silence, I found myself wondering what Oscin and Skye were doing. Were they wishing me strength? Wondering if the dangerous part had started yet? Expecting me to come out or thinking, sadly, that I wouldn’t?

What would Lastogne do if I never came back?

Hell, what would Bringen? He’d begged me to find any culprit other than the AIsource. If I was reported dead, aboard an AIsource station, with witnesses establishing the AIsource as the last sentient force to see me alive, what lies would he be forced to tell to keep the whole thing buried?

A thousand other questions, unable to answer unless I finished up the ones I had on hand.

So I closed my eyes, brought my breathing under control, and resumed.

“So let’s talk about the way this station works.”

Very well.

“It’s been clear, from the start, that it’s not just about the Brachiators. And not just because they’re such a small part of your ecosystem. But also because you taught them to speak Mercantile. It’s clear that you did that for the benefit of human visitors, the same human visitors you went out of your way to lure here, and permit here. The question, for me, was just to what degree you benefited from making this place a huge show, being staged for human benefit.”

It’s hardly just that, Counselor.

“I believe you. I accept that the Brachiators are here for a reason. I accept that those other environments, farther down, the ones we can’t get to, represent any number of other projects important to your people. But I’m not talking about those. I’m talking about your eagerness to stock this place, not only with Brachiators but with their human observers. I’m talking about the degree to which those human observers are also here to be studied.”

You are fascinating people.

“Yes, and you went out of your way to make this place fascinating for us, didn’t you? Like those dragons, for instance. That was a bit much. I’m certain you could have developed any number of other creatures capable of filling that ecological niche. But you wanted ones that resonated with humanity’s mythological past. So you built them: not just creatures who vaguely resembled them, but creatures who looked exactly like the ones we’d imagined. Why? Just to please and tease us. If anything on One One One establishes that you’re playing with us, at least a little, it’s them. That quote from Dante that you put up, outside your Interface…that’s another, and it established that you’re as willing to play with me as an individual as you are with individual members of my species.”

We have a sense of humor, Counselor.

“I’ve noted that. But tricks like that do raise troublesome questions about just what you want from the human beings stationed here. And do point out your willingness to stage-manage the conditions here, to play with our perceptions in ways that Gibb’s crew, surviving here on a day-to-day basis, might never have imagined.

“Which brings us back to why you’d insist on holding court in this Interface chamber, when you can speak to us anywhere inside this station.

“Maybe the dragons are among the distractions you use to hide a much more important deception.

“Everybody here has seen your floating remotes, your maintenance machines, your fliers. We’ve all understood that they transmit back everything they see, but even they’re not everywhere. How can they see everything, even on a station that belongs to you? I’ve been thinking about that, and it’s occurred to me that you must have other eyes we haven’t thought about. I spent some of my time on the Uppergrowth brainstorming about where some of them could be. I thought, well, maybe the Uppergrowth itself is visually sensitive; there’s no reason it couldn’t be transmitting images back to you. And I thought, well, all those little black insects I see flying around: maybe they’re not part of the environmental balance here at all but, rather, swarming miniature eyes. And then I thought, well, that’s interesting, let’s take it a step further. If the AIsource have spy machines that small, nothing would prevent them from having spy machines even smaller.”

You are speaking of nanotechnology, which is nothing new. Even your people know that art. And again, we fail to see your point. It is our station. We are within our rights to use any monitoring techniques at our disposal.

“Yes, you are, but once again, that only reinforces the question of this chamber. Again: if you’re everywhere aboard this station, why insist on this fiction of a special, isolated location where visitors must go to parley? And why support that fiction here, when in the rest of inhabited space you use floating flatscreens for ambassadors?”

Do you have any answers, Counselor?

“Only one.

“This room is here for one reason and one reason only. The only possible reason.

“It’s a theater.

“It makes you tactile.

“You want the human beings posted here to think of you as having a specific location: to ignore what we know, and think of you, instead, as creatures who can be approached, dealt with, and then left behind—when the fact of the matter is that you’re everywhere. And that leads to another, unavoidable question: Why would you be so careful to maintain that illusion here? Why would it be so bad for us to feel—really, really feel—how ubiquitous you are aboard this station?”

The AIsource sounded amused. Why?

“Because the second we do we also start wondering why you would need to limit those capabilities to this particular patch of real estate. We start wondering, what’s so special about this place.”

Ah.

“We start wondering if your ambassadors, all over inhabited space, also exist only as distractions. We start upgrading our estimates of just how powerful you are. We start wondering how much you can influence. We start wondering—”

—if, the AIsource concluded for me, we’re inside you.

My heart lurched inside my chest like a creature that had long considered itself safe inside its cage but which now hammered against the bars in a desperate attempt at flight.

I had not expected them to admit to it so readily.

I thought of neighbors turned to vicious enemies between one second and the next, a little girl turned to something worse than animal, an innocent turned to war criminal.

Tens of thousands, inside everybody. Some only a few molecules thick, but large enough to have forged an integral connection with your nervous system. It helps us nudge you this way, or that way, from time to time: not constantly, of course, as that would be a gross intrusion on your free will, and an utter waste of your ability to forge a fresh and informative perspective, but from time to time, whenever you need to be influenced.

My voice came close to failing me. “And your…insurgents…the rogues…your opposition party…”

…your so-called Unseen Demons…

“…they influence us the same way?”

Already asked and answered, Counselor.

“They can make us kill people we don’t want to kill?”

And worse things.

“How do I know they’re the ones who controlled us on Bocai? That it wasn’t you?”

You don’t. But since you have our honest assurance that at times we have had to do things just as terrible, you should be able to accept that we wouldn’t evade responsibility for some crimes while freely acknowledging others. We, meaning the ones speaking to you now, are innocent of that one.

I had seen some of this, but not all of it. Now my head was proving too small to contain it. Blood burned in my ears, and I closed my eyes, trying to fight my way out of the black emptiness that had always threatened to swallow me whole.

Worlds away, the AIsource chided me. Come now, Counselor. You should be taking it better than this. After all, you came here today specifically to tell us that you’d figured most of this out.

My own voice sounded just as distant, but as long as I concentrated on it I still had a grip on sanity. “I had. You said you had three gifts for me. One you’d already given, one you were in the process of giving, and one you hoped to give me at the conclusion of this business.”

Yes.

“It wasn’t until a few hours ago that I figured out what the first gift was. I happened to look at my fingertips and notice how much they’d healed since my arrival.”

They do look much better now, the AIsource confided, in an absurdly confidential tone.

“Before I…came here, I…bit my nails. Every time I needed to concentrate, I gnawed a finger. Sometimes, when the problems were thorny enough, I gnawed them bloody. But that stopped with my first visit to this room. Ever since then…every time I faced something that puzzled me…I felt this sickly feeling that there was something I would ordinarily be doing, that I was being kept from doing.”

It is an unhealthy habit, Andrea Cort.

“It was also free will.”

Which you do still possess, within certain boundaries.

“You freed me of that habit just to show you could.”

We thought it would help boost your investigation.

“And the second gift? The one you said you were in the process of giving me? That little tweak you gave to my emotions, which allowed me to respond to Oscin and Skye?”

That was a little more complicated. But it didn’t impinge on your free will as much as the suppression of your unfortunate habit. It just freed you to act on feelings you haven’t ever allowed yourself to acknowledge. You could have just as easily decided that you weren’t attracted to the Porrinyards, and sought out Lastogne or Gibb instead—or, for that matter, not acted on the changes in yourself until you returned home to New London and had a wider number of alternate candidates.

I didn’t ask about the third gift, the one they’d said I wouldn’t receive until after our business was done. I was too furious. “What gave you the right?”

If you truly prefer the way you were, we can put your inhibitions back. But we don’t think that’s what you want. Sometimes, the greatest gift is the one given in secret.

“Bullshit,” I said, furiously. “You were just demonstrating a point!”

We were not just demonstrating a point. As we have said many times, Andrea Cort, we respect you, and believe we have many things in common. We feel that once our business is concluded here our ultimate ambitions will be even more aligned. But yes, making the point was an attractive benefit.

“That wasn’t all,” I said, my rage still building. “The Brachiators called you the Hand-in-Ghosts. Gibb’s people, who’ve heard it before, considered it just more Brachiator dribble. But if we’re Ghosts, and you’re the Hand-in-Ghosts, what does that make you but a puppeteer?”

And then, the AIsource reminded me, there’s the thing that one dying Brachiator said to you.

“I know. It said it couldn’t feel the Hand anymore.”

It was dying. We left early.

“Your ‘Hand,’ as they call it, is always inside them. They can always feel it. They can always feel you inside them.”

Yes.

There was little I could say to that.

The AIsource did not sigh, but their voice cast breath in a manner that simulated a sigh, and went on. These next points are well outside the immediate scope of your investigation, but you will likely desire them resolved before you’re willing to take the one step necessary for the resolution of your business aboard this station. So this is what you want to know. The Brachiators are not the only sentients we’ve bred. We have made a practice of it. We want the unique perspectives their biology requires of them: perspectives that may be right and may be wrong but which are of tremendous help to us in modeling theoretical possibilities for further study. In the specific case of the Brachiators, it has provided their concepts of Life and Death and, in time, other imaginative psychological variations. It is all data, tremendous in its potential to reveal that which we have always desired.

Had I possessed a button capable of destroying One One One in a cataclysm of raging nuclear fire, I would have pressed it, not caring that I floated at its heart. But I didn’t have that. I didn’t even possess any solid objects to hit. “I didn’t consent to that contribution.”

Neither did the Brachiators, the AIsource replied blandly. Few sentients have a choice in deciding just what kind of learning experience they present for others. You, yourself, have had little control over the lessons you’ve taught more sentients than you can name. But it matters little. You can lock yourself in a room and never interact with anything outside it, ever again, and still by example provide data for those who know you’re in there. You could go further by retreating into catatonia, and still teach those obliged to care for you. This is not much different. The Brachiators did not ask to be created, but then no creature does. In the meantime, they live, and find it incidental that we watch and learn.

“They deserve more than living their whole lives as your puppets!”

“Deserve” is a value judgment that varies depending on viewpoint. But the point is moot. If they are puppets—or, the AIsource seemed to hesitate then, the interjection giving the impression of a wry afterthought, if you prefer, Marionettes, they are puppets that are permitted a substantial degree of free will. Because, like human beings, they will not give us the answers we seek unless they’re left free to explore their own natures.

“And those answers are—”

—tangential to the reason you came to this station. You are here, in this chamber, not to confront us about our manipulations, but because you need our assistance to find the entity you call the Heckler.

My heart still thundering in my chest, the implications of what I’d learned looming before me like a landscape too vast to be perceived by merely human eyes, I would not take the cue and change the subject. “Why all the hints? Why all the games? Why not just make me do what you want me to do?”

The AIsource’s response was a perfect fatherly chuckle.

Because then you would be less than useless to us, Andrea Cort. You are a very interesting human being. And, again, what we want of you, in the future, is only useful if provided of your own free will.

“And that’s what you’ve always wanted from me,” I said. “That’s why you went to so much trouble to invite me aboard this madhouse. Why you’ve bribed me with all these ‘gifts.’ Why you’ve manipulated this dispute between yourselves and the ones I call Unseen Demons, and withheld all answers until I asked direct questions. Even why you saved me, twice. You want that concession from me.”

It is what we’ve always wanted, Andrea. But it is necessary now. The murderer you seek is under rogue protection. You will not be able to force a confrontation except as our agent, exercising the laws of our majority. And even then, the rules of engagement will keep the rogues, and us, from engaging each other directly. This will have to be a confrontation between two human beings.

My clothing fluttered from a breeze blowing from somewhere behind me. I felt myself tumbling head over heels in what my vague sense of direction insisted on interpreting as multiple forward somersaults. Without any visual cues identifying up or down or even a fixed point of reference, it was impossible to tell where one rotation ended and the next one began, but I was being directed somewhere I couldn’t see, without any personal input on my part.

I wanted to kick and scream and thrash about and somehow propel myself in a direction directly opposite from the one the AIsource required of me.

But I did not know what direction that was.

We won’t force you, the AIsource said. You could forgo the answers, and return to New London with failure on your hands.

The blue chamber provided no cues identifying up, down, or sideways.

Once again I considered the words Lastogne had spoken to me, the words that had come to define the entire direction my life had taken, upon my arrival on this station.

We’re all owned.

It’s just a matter of deciding who holds the deed.

It wasn’t like I owed the Confederacy, or the Dip Corps, a damned thing.

But humanity?

That was a betrayal of an entirely different order. If a betrayal was what it was.

I had always hated people, always despised crowds. No, scratch “always.” Once upon a time, before the night that formed me, I’d been partial to both. But since then I’d never been at home in any gathering of human beings. I’d always seen the race as a corrupt one, one that though worth despising for its own crimes were nevertheless too high to permit inclusion by a creature who had done the kind of things I’d done. I’d known that I could never be accepted and had hated them for not trying harder to prove me wrong. I’d been proud of that dichotomy, like any other self-serving misanthrope.

But now I found myself thinking about a café I’d liked, in New London’s Mercantile district, on a balcony with a view overlooking the three hundred terraces of the Dumas Plaza. I’d always gone there with a hytex link stocked with severe-looking documents, and the fierce mien of a dedicated bureaucrat too busy to be disturbed. It had discouraged the interference of fellow diners who, otherwise, might have taken the empty chair opposite mine as an invitation for the opening of conversational gambits. Alone, in the midst of the friends and lovers chatting at other tables, I’d been able to enjoy the spicy food and my cocoon of silence and sit among them without ever being of them. It had been my choice. But how much time had I spent with my nose in my important work, and how much had I spent watching those terraces across the way, and the people who wandered in and out of those fancy rooms like actors making entrances and exits in three hundred plays written just for me? How much had I hated them, taking comfort in considering them vapid every time I caught a smile or heard a peal of laughter, and how insistently had I assured myself that my emptiness was so much more informed, so much more genuine than whatever joys they’d used to fill themselves?

Why would I do all that, if they were just beneath my notice?

How much more could I have had, if I’d just been able to put the awfulness inside me aside, long enough to try?

I didn’t like being owned by the Dip Corps. I never had. It had been a convenient legal fiction, standing between me and extradition for crimes that had never been my fault. It had protected me. It had given me the opportunity for a life, even if I’d never seen fit to use that opportunity for more than just living out my allotted days. But maybe the Dip Corps was not everything that had a claim to me. Maybe all those strange faces did too. Maybe I had no right to turn my back on them. If, indeed, that was what I was being asked to do. Oskar Levine was legally nonhuman and he still lived among a community of human beings. He still had a wife, friends, people who liked him. He also had bastards like Gibb who would never forgive him for what he had done. He couldn’t go home, so he’d built a new one.

Did that qualify as no net loss?

And was he even an accurate comparison?

Once I crossed the line, what would my new owners ask of me?

Were they as bad as the devil I knew, or were they going to be worse, in ways I did not yet have enough information to fathom?

And either way: Could I be myself and ever be satisfied with not knowing?

I did not know what my answer was going to be until I gave it. But I took one last breath and expelled it in one defiant gush before saying the words they needed me to hear.

“All right, you bastards. I defect.”

Their response oozed self-satisfaction. That is what we wanted.

A portal opened, closer by far than I would have expected to find another surface. A gentle breeze, blowing from some source behind me, nudged me away from open space and into a tunnel just large enough to allow my hovering form passage without permitting any encounter with solid walls. This place was not well lit, like the Interface room; it was dark, and bumpy, and rich with unseen places.

When the doors irised shut behind me, I was plunged into darkness.