On the Steel Breeze

CHAPTER FORTY

It was a different time of day, and the girl who looked like Lin Wei had been replaced by Travertine. Chiku had the queasy sense that this moment had happened before. How had Travertine arrived? When? Was it even Travertine, or just a simulated figment? Ve looked real enough, it was true, right down to the cuff around vis wrist, which was still emitting a metronomic red pulse every few seconds.

‘I could ask you the same question,’ Travertine said.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Are you real, or a figment? That’s what you just asked. Or speculated. Or thought aloud. I’ve been through this with the others. There’s probably no way we’ll ever know for sure – I mean, ontologically speaking, this is pretty deep water. But the most efficient information-gathering strategy may be to assume that we’re all real, or are having a real conversation, at least.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I mean that we might not be in our bodies exactly. For all we know, the machines could be keeping us asleep while they open us up, like frogs on a dissection table. Even if they aren’t invading our bodies and minds, they’re clearly manipulating our perceptions on some level – probably addressing brain function through the existing pathways of our neural implants but using forbidden protocols, functions and backdoors that not even the Mech or ching services would normally be allowed to access. Skipping time, rewinding time, that sort of thing. It’s been happening to all of us, and I doubt you’re an exception.’

‘You said “all of us”. Have you seen the others?’

‘I’ve spoken to Namboze directly, and Namboze has spoken to Doctor Aziba. Doctor Aziba claimed to have had contact with Guochang, although we’re not sure who Guochang’s spoken to. No one appears to have spoken to you until now, unless it was Guochang.’

‘You’re the first, I think.’

‘In which case, let me be the first to say I’m glad you’re still alive, Chiku, but I think we’re in the shit, so to speak.’

‘Do you know what’s happening? Do you know where we are?’

‘I haven’t been in this room before,’ Travertine said. ‘I know the view from my room, and I’ve seen the view from Namboze’s place. The placement of the towers is different, and you can make out some variation in the tree cover if you pay attention. You can also take note of sun angle, that sort of thing. My assumption is that these rooms are real, that they’re actual structures on Crucible’s surface, and that they’re moving us around from tower to tower as and when it suits them. I think there’s more than one version of the little girl, although it’s not easy to tell with all this interrupted time-perception stuff.’

‘The little girl is Arachne. She looks like a real person who used to be called Lin Wei, but that’s only because Lin Wei played a part in shaping Arachne’s persona. And yes, it makes sense that she can be in more than once place at a time – she’s an artilect, after all. Dealing with five of us must be like… I don’t know, some incredibly trivial activity. Has she asked you lots of questions?’

‘Until my ears are bleeding. And after I spoke to Namboze, she had a thousand more questions about our conversation. Forget any illusion of privacy – she’s listening in now.’

‘I don’t care. It’s not as if we’ve anything to lose by saying what’s on our minds. All I’ve got is speculation.’

‘All right,’ Travertine said, pausing to prepare a cup of chai for verself, and then another for Chiku. ‘Then here’s a bit more. See what you make of it.’

‘Go on.’

‘Arachne – this thing that speaks to us – hasn’t got a clue.’

Chiku almost laughed. It was as if they were being rude about a host while she was out of the room, and there was a delicious sense of naughtiness about it.

‘About what?’

‘Anything. But especially anything happening outside the immediate realm of her senses. She keeps asking me about Earth and the solar system and life on the holoships.’

‘Same with me,’ Chiku said.

‘But why wouldn’t she know what’s going on in all those places? We’ve seen the relay satellites, and the Providers are capable of transmitting a high-powered signal into interstellar space. The seed packages were also meant to deploy a listening capability just as effective – a wide baseline network, spread across the system – so Arachne should be receiving a rich stream of data, telling her everything she could ever want to know about life back home. So why would she keep asking us stuff she ought to know already?’

Travertine’s words confirmed what Chiku had already been thinking. ‘She needs validation. She can receive the data, but she can’t authenticate it. She’s in exactly the same position we were in when we started doubting the Provider data stream from Crucible!’

‘Yes – we came here to validate – or invalidate – the false data received about Crucible. But our memories and the files on Icebreaker are the only means Arachne has of validating the data coming from Earth.’

‘Wait, though,’ said Chiku. ‘We had reason to doubt the Provider uplink. Why would Arachne doubt the signal coming from Earth? She’s a splinter of another artificial intelligence that’s still active around the solar system – the artilect that manipulated events to send Providers here in the first place. Distrusting the Earth data would be like distrusting herself.’

‘She’s a splinter, separated from her source by twenty-eight light-years,’ Travertine said. ‘Maybe she’s begun to feel isolated, cut off from her other self. Maybe there was some discontinuity, some interruption of the data stream – just enough to force this Arachne to start examining and questioning her assumptions. She’s an intelligence, after all, and that’s what intelligences do.’

Chiku thought on this some more, trying to slot this vast new assumption into her existing mental framework.

‘I still don’t get it.’

‘Look at it from her perspective. Logically, she can’t prove the truthfulness of the Earth transmissions, but she can keep trying to falsify them, by testing her picture of Earth against our accounts and the data on Icebreaker. That’s why she keeps circling around the same details – it’s her way of testing us, trying to trap us in a contradiction. That’s why we’re being kept isolated, for now, and why she’ll only allow us very limited interaction. She doesn’t want to risk cross-contamination.’

Chiku shifted in her kneeling position. ‘Why allow us to interact at all, in that case?’

‘I suppose she knows there are things she can only learn about us via conversations between us. She’s probably reading our brains as we speak, watching our mirror neurons light up, trying to work out whether we’re actually having a conversation or are engaged in some elaborate choreographed bluff. I think she’s worried that we’re some kind of weapon – infectious information agents, perhaps, a physical embodiment of the lies she suspects she’s been receiving from Earth.’

‘If that’s the case, what happens when she makes her mind up? Do we get to live or die?’

‘I don’t know, although I suspect she’ll keep us fed and watered for as long as she considers us useful.’

‘Have you asked her about the pine cones?’

Travertine nodded. ‘Yes, and so did Namboze and Doctor Aziba – and Guochang, for all I know. What conclusions did you draw from her answers?’

‘Nothing much – she seemed cagey.’

‘I had the same impression,’ Travertine replied.

‘There could be a hundred reasons for that, though. She either knows far more than she’s telling, or she’s unwilling to admit exactly how little she knows after all this time. She looks human, but she’s not, and it’s difficult to get a read on a machine.’

‘I’m not sure she’s imaginative enough to try to deceive us. Cunning as a weasel, yes, and brilliantly quick and clever, but not very good at outright fabulation. It’s only a hunch, mind, but if I’m right, she’d find it very difficult to create a self-consistent fiction concerning the progress she’s made with the pine cones.’

‘You might be on to something there,’ Chiku said. ‘From what we observed coming in, the Providers only made the minimum changes necessary to the uplink information. I haven’t been out into that forest, but I bet the botanical data they sent us wasn’t far off the mark.’

‘It makes sense that they’d change as little as possible – less chance of being caught out that way.’

‘Absolutely – but as you say, it might also tell us that she’s not very good at wholesale invention.’ Chiku thought back to her earlier conversation with the artilect, trusting that her recollection of it was accurate despite the time slippages she had experienced since. ‘When I asked her how much progress she’d made, she hedged around a lot before saying there’d been preliminaries to deeper communication, as if all they’ve done is sniff around each other. Could she really have achieved so little after all this time?’

‘It’s possible. But from her viewpoint it must be absolutely galling – called across space by this vast, ancient alien intelligence, only to be met with indifference or even hostility when the Providers actually arrived. Perhaps Arachne and her friends don’t measure up – Arachne’s smart by human standards, but the pine cones might have different ideas. Perhaps she doesn’t impress them. Maybe they regard her as a subspecies, some kind of annoying machine vermin.’

‘If that’s the case, she’s lucky to still be here – they look powerful enough to sterilise this whole planet in an afternoon if they felt like it.’

‘It’s interesting to speculate, but who knows what really goes on between machine intelligences?’

‘Speaking of which.’ Chiku’s hands were clasped tight together above her knees. ‘I’ve been catching up on news from Zanzibar, via those transmissions Icebreaker picked up en route, and I need to tell you a couple of things.’

‘I was going to ask you about those before we were so rudely interrupted.’

‘Noah’s dead. He was arrested, interrogated, pushed through a series of show trials and then executed by Teslenko’s thugs. I know we were no longer close, but I still had feelings for him – he was the father of my children, after all.’

Travertine closed vis eyes. ‘I’m truly sorry, Chiku. All the stupidity in the world can’t excuse this.’ Ve opened his eyes and met Chiku’s gaze, vis expression puzzled. ‘Explain this to me: why do people have to keep on being such fucking idiots?’

‘I wish I knew.’

Travertine took a deep breath. ‘I hate to ask this, but… but you’re certain it’s real, the news about Noah? Not some bomb planted by Arachne?’

‘No – Mposi knew things he definitely couldn’t make up, things he could only have learned from Noah. Which brings me to the second thing I need to mention.’

Travertine took Chiku’s hands. ‘Go on.’

‘Arachne isn’t the first artilect I’ve encountered – I’ve met another one along the way. I don’t know much about her capabilities, but I can say this: she’s cleverer than Arachne. I know this because Arachne tried to destroy her and failed, and now she’s stronger than she used to be, and also much better at emulating human reactions. That makes her the superior artilect from where I’m sitting.’

Travertine was staring at her. For once, ve had nothing to say.

Chiku’s decision to reveal Eunice’s existence was not a spur-of-the-moment gamble. The more useful Arachne thought Chiku to be, the longer she would stay alive, and divulging her knowledge of the other artilect only strengthened her position. If Arachne already knew of Eunice’s presence on Zanzibar, Chiku lost nothing by mentioning her. But if Arachne had no knowledge of Eunice, she would realise that she was not capable of extracting all the deep information from her prisoners’ skulls – and that was guaranteed to intrigue the artilect no end.

‘Where is she?’ Travertine asked.

‘Close,’ Chiku said. ‘And getting closer.’