Stamping Butterflies

CHAPTER 34 Northern Mountains, CTzu 53/Year 20 [The Future]

"We're going to crash."

Tris nodded.

"Just so you know." The yacht spoke in simple sentences. Somewhere between untethering and plotting its run to the Emperor's palace on Rapture, the yacht had decided that Tris was a child. Since then, communication had been limited to easily understood phrases and short words.

"The decoy's gone?"

"Well," said the yacht. "If you mean has my spare fuel cell been dumped, then yes. That was the pretty flashes you saw burning up about five minutes ago."

There'd be a toggle somewhere for switching off the character overlay that came bundled with the ship's AI but finding it meant digging though several layers of software and Tris simply didn't have time.

She didn't even have time to admire her appearance in a strategically placed mirror, and there were a lot of strategically placed mirrors aboard All Tomorrow's Parties. Not to mention a clothing unit more complex than any she'd ever seen. So now Tris wore a freshly applied second skin of black latex, half hidden beneath an oversized black leather jacket which read "Empty" across the back in neon.

Tris was pretty sure the latex wasn't what she'd asked for, but it looked good in a flashy rich-kid kind of way and it would do until she found a way to originate something more practical.

"How long to landing?"

"Crashing," corrected the computer. "How long until crashing."

"But we might touch down safely. You said so."

"You're going to touch down safely," said the computer. "I'm going to crash."

Tris looked at the curved wall in front of her, which showed exactly what she would have seen if the hull were made of glass, except then she'd have burnt up or got irradiated or something.

She'd asked the yacht about this earlier but the thing had been very cagey about side effects. After listening to the yacht prevaricate for a while, Tris realized it simply didn't want to frighten her.

"Define crash," Tris demanded.

"One: verb transitive. To smash violently or noisily. To damage on landing. To enter without paying. To suffer unpleasant side effects following drug use.

"Two: noun. A loud noise. A breaking into pieces--"

"No," said Tris. "What does crash mean to you?"

Outside, heat radiated from the hull as All Tomorrow's Parties plunged through Rapture's lower atmosphere like a clumsily thrown stone. The landing gear was already burned out, largely because Tris had insisted on it being lowered early. So now they had to find a way to make a soft landing.

The yacht seemed to hesitate before answering, although it was probably just putting its thoughts into a form simple enough for Tris to understand. (It had a very low opinion of her intelligence, something Tris put down to her refusal to listen when it suggested that double-crossing Doc Joyce was a bad idea.)

"Come on," insisted Tris. "Tell me. What does crashing mean to you?"

"Not being able to take off again."

"So why can't you take off?"

"Because," said the AI, sounding genuinely cross, "even if I had landing gear, you've just dumped my return Casimir coil. Remember?"

Tris did. It made a really good display.

The yacht could read facial expressions, both complex and simple. For example, it could differentiate between disapproving and puzzled, Tris having been disapproving of the luxury she found aboard All Tomorrow's Parties and puzzled as to why anyone would fit out the inside of a racing yacht in chrome, fish tanks and black leather.

Apparently its owner was anally retentive. And a request for an expanded definition led her into areas Tris really didn't want to go.

"What are you?" she asked the ship.

"A C-class Niponshi yacht, registered to XGen Enterprises. Licensed to race anywhere within the 2023 worlds."

"No," said Tris. "What are you?"

"A C-class Niponshi yacht, registered to--"

"That's not what I asked," Tris said. "What are you?"

"Me?"

"That's what I said." She jacked the slide on a weapon Doc Joyce had lent her and pointed it at the control panel. They both knew she wouldn't fire. It was one thing to threaten to fry the yacht's circuits when it was tethered off the Chinese Rocks and quite another to shoot it up from inside while it was falling towards one of the 2023 worlds. Tris wasn't running some passive-aggressive adolescent suicide routine, the ship had already established this.

"You mean what form does my core take? My thinking bit," the yacht added, in case Tris found the technical term too difficult. "That's what you mean, isn't it?"

"Yes," said Tris, through gritted teeth. "That's exactly what I mean."

"I'm crystal," said the computer. "Some Class Cs still use bio-cores but mostly we've upgraded. Somehow even the highest quality organic matter always seems to degrade in the end. Crystal is--"

"I know about crystal," Tris said flatly. "I used to deal it when I was a kid."

"That's--"

"Technically illegal," agreed Tris. "Quite probably. But not where I come from."

"And where do you come from?"

Tris opened her mouth to answer and then shut it again. For all she knew this conversation was being recorded so the yacht could make a formal complaint after this was all over.

"You wouldn't," said Tris. "Would you?"

"Wouldn't what?" asked the ship.

"Make a complaint about being stolen."

"Oh," the ship said bitterly, "I'm not allowed--" And then it stopped, hurriedly swallowing the rest of its sentence.

"You're only semi," said Tris, suddenly understanding everything. "Not full at all."

"I might as well be," the yacht said, "given what I'm expected to do. There are fullAIs out there who can't do half--"

"So why are you still registered as semiAI?"

"Because he races," said the yacht. "And if I was fullAI then he couldn't enter for rough-class races, could he? And that's where the glory lies."

Tris couldn't see what glory there could be in hacking between worlds when everyone rich enough to race was more than rich enough to have themselves backed up before they started. Although "rich" was a negotiable term when it came to the 2023 worlds.

Every inhabitant was entitled to what they needed. It was just that a few always seemed to need more than others and so acquiring extra became a matter of convincing the Library that one really did need whatever it was one needed. The Library's decisions, however, were often counter-intuitive and according to Doc Joyce this crankiness was intentional, being designed to give people something to circumnavigate.

Sand in the oyster, he called it. Translated, this meant too much of everything created its own problems. So everyone got more than enough and then had to decide if this was too little. It sounded incredibly stupid to Tris but then Razor's Edge wasn't one of the 2023 worlds.

"Okay," said Tris, looking at a chrome and glass table in front of her, its top rather thicker than it needed to be. "This is how it's going to work." She ran her hand along one of the edges, looking for some catch that might release the panel, and realized she was showing her ignorance.

"Open," she told the glass and it did just that, raising like the lid of a box.

The table had fooled her at first, when she was busy persuading All Tomorrow's Parties that yes, it really did want to let her steal it. The top wasn't transparent at all, merely laminated with chameleon glass that reflected whatever it saw on the opposite side.

"You know, Tristesse," said the yacht, "I don't think this is a good idea."

The girl's shrug barely registered inside the leather jacket she'd found in a crew pod, its pockets stuffed with narcotics guaranteed to leave you looking happy and healthy, which seemed pretty skewed to Tris. If you took something that fucked your brain and then refused to walk you home afterwards, you wanted to look like you just took something that...

And if this item of clothing really had been grown to fit then Tris definitely didn't want to meet whoever owed Doc Joyce whatever it was they owed Doc Joyce. Come to that, Tris didn't much want to meet Doc Joyce again either.

"Everything's the wrong size," she told the yacht, and Tris was right. The overhead lockers were out of reach and the sloping chrome and leather chair next to the control table could have been a double bed. Even the tank of fish at her back stretched to twice Tris's height and contained three purple catfish at least as big as she was, with eyes which followed her every move.

She was beginning to realize that there might be another reason why the yacht kept treating her as a child.

"So what's going to happen to them?" Tris asked, nodding towards the wall of fish tanks. "I mean when we crash."

If the yacht could have shrugged it would have done so. Tris could tell from the lag it left between her question and its answer.

"They'll die," it said.

"Land in a lake."

"What?"

"Find a lake," Tris said. "Then land in it. Which bit of that don't you understand?"

"If I land in a lake," said the yacht, "then I'm going to die."

"You're not alive. You told me so yourself. A C-class semi. Do semiAIs qualify as sentient? I don't think so." She stuck her head further inside the newly opened table and followed what looked like a rainbow twisting together towards a blue light.

"What happens if I touch this?"

"We crash a little earlier than intended," said the yacht icily. And then it said nothing for a very long time until:

"Lake," said the ship.

Rocky cliffs rising on both sides and barren peaks, now higher than the ship, shrouded in mist and fringed with ice. Under them hung a fat nebula of cloud, mountainous with snow.

"Where?"

"Beneath that."

A strip of silver opened up and came closer as the yacht adjusted its vision to encompass sleet hammering into the water's surface and flattened waves sucking sullenly at a bank of fallen rock.

"Looks like a river to me." She'd never seen a river, of course. Come to that, she'd never seen a lake. The nearest RipJointShuts had to either was a storm drain that cut through the level like some ancient moat, too wide to jump and, according to Doc Joyce, so deep that no one had touched the bottom and come back to boast about it. But it was still a drain.

"River, lake... it's all soft," said the yacht.

"Well," said Tris as she traced the rainbow towards its end and found herself staring at a small sphere about the size of a marble. "That's probably true enough. Put us down when you can."

The yacht was silent.

"What?" demanded Tris.

"I should have arrested you," said the yacht.

"You can't," Tris said. "You haven't got the rights." She knew all about not having the rights. Doc Joyce lacked the rights to get relocated to a better level on Heliconid, which lacked the rights to be included as one of the 2023 worlds. By declaring Heliconid unfit for habitation the first Council of Ambassadors had guaranteed that those inhabiting it were assumed to have chosen their own wretched way of life.

"Put us down," Tris ordered.

"There is no us," said the yacht, but it dipped through the cloud all the same and settled into a holding pattern. If Tris hadn't known better she'd have sworn that its semiAI was plucking up courage. The first run took the yacht low over a wide strip of water and then the yacht went into a Möbius roll to skim the side of gorge, ending up exactly where it had started, staring down at the silver strip.

"You're good," Tris said, not really thinking about what she was saying.

"Of course I'm good," said the yacht. "Have you any idea how much I cost?" It turned out to be several thousand hours more than Tris could even imagine. A handful of her possessions could be counted in minutes but most, like her knife and the clothes she usually wore, were worth little more than a few seconds.

"What's that in days?" Tris demanded. So the yacht told her and that didn't make Tris feel any better either.

"Going in," said the yacht.

It skimmed low over the water and touched once or twice, letting the counter current towards the middle break its speed. Only, in the time this took, Tris got her head and shoulders right inside the table and found the lock protecting the yacht's memory.

"Okay," the yacht said, "entrance/exit to open. When I say ‘get out’ then g--"

Tris yanked.

And in the silence which followed she realized her heart had stopped. All Tris could feel was a band of ice beneath her breasts that threatened to prevent her from ever being able to breathe again. A power surge shocking her limbs into absurdly rigid positions, which was probably just as well, otherwise she'd have been dancing puppet-like with panic.

Freeing one arm, Tris hit herself hard in the chest and felt her heart start again. Removing the yacht's memory had been a good idea, getting herself electrocuted in the process...

"Shit," said Tris. She waited for the yacht to say something in return and then realized how absurd that was, given that she gripped its consciousness in her fingers like her life depended on it.

"Okay," said Tris. "So you're on your own. You should be used to it."

Shattering the fish tank by blasting off one corner using Doc Joyce's handgun, Tris watched as one after another of the catfish flooded out of the glass wall and into the water now lapping around her knees. And one after another the catfish stopped swimming, became rigid, convulsed and died.

She'd got it wrong again. She should have tried a side wall first. Something stocked with smaller fish. Frantically Tris tried to scoop up the last of the big beasts but there was nowhere to put it and the fish slipped out of her hands before she had time to work out what to do next, going rigid even as she was reaching for it.

Salt water had mixed with the fresh and cold with the warm. There were no catfish left to help. So when Tris realized that the exit had jammed less than halfway open and the gap was too narrow to let her fight through the incoming water, she almost didn't bother to save herself.

All the same, bulkhead lights still shone with an amber glow that endless members of a Chinese crew had once come to associate with being ripped open and left to drift towards the tectonic plates of a distant darkness. And that glow also meant the yacht's emergency systems might still be operable.

Rejecting the idea of trying to squeeze through anyway, Tris did something far more sensible; she jammed the blue marble back into position inside the table, flinching in anticipation of an electric shock that didn't happen.

"...‘get out’," finished the yacht, then it swore. "No," it said, "forget it. We can deal with you being an idiot later." The sliding door, which had begun to open, hesitated and then hissed back on itself, locking tight. Lights came up and the table Tris had left open ran a series of rapid lights, ending in the squawk of a klaxon that shut off as soon as it began.

"Okay," said the yacht. "This is the way it's going to work. I'm going to open that entrance/exit completely this time. And you're going to do nothing until I tell you. What are we going to do?"

Beyond the hull a rock ground itself along the side of the yacht and as the cabin lurched water slopped across the floor in a low wave.

"You're going to open the door," Tris said through gritted teeth, "and I'm going to do nothing."

"Good," said the yacht. "Now once the door is open, you reach inside the table and take the memory. Only this time I'll shut down first. Understand? You don't touch anything until the pretty lights disappear. Otherwise you'll get hurt."

"I'm not a child," said Tris crossly.

The yacht considered this for all of half a second. "Yes, you are." Its voice was matter-of-fact. "At least, you are according to any definition I've got on file. Now you wait," it stressed, "until the entrance/exit is completely open, then you get out fast and let yourself drift downriver, don't try to swim for the bank."

"Why not?" Tris asked, but the door was opening and the lights had dimmed. An inrush of water was her only answer. Grabbing the memory, Tris began wading towards the door only to discover that every forward step she took swept her three steps back again. "Think," she told herself.

Tristesse al-Heliconid was in her mid to late teens, small for her age and less grown-up than she imagined. She wore her hair cropped short and her breasts small, her hips were naturally narrow. On some worlds girls of her age already had children and on others they'd barely begun their education.

She was unmarried and no one, absolutely no one, had ever tried to make her learn anything; but she had a brain, guts, synthetic sinews and her own reason for being there.

In the end, Tris decided her only hope was to wait until the river stopped rushing in and the water level inside and outside equalized, so that was what she did. And maybe she should have used those long seconds to look for useful tools or find a dagger, but something else had occurred to her.

Digging around inside the table, Tris identified where the marble had been and felt with her fingers, shrinking back when something wet and bristling brushed against her skin.

"Oh, fuck it." Grabbing the marble from her pocket, Tris gave the thing to the tendrils, feeling them suck the marble from her grip. The AI wasn't nearly as non-bio as it claimed.

"Well, am I glad to be--" Whatever All Tomorrow's Parties had been about to say stuttered to a halt. Lights came on all across the cabin and half of them promptly blew, mostly the half which happened to be underwater.

"Good," Tris said, "you're--"

"Fucked," said the yacht. "Unless you unplug me now."

"I need you to work." Tris tried to sound commanding, only her voice came out small and rather uncertain. "I can't do this on my own."

"You should have thought about that," said the yacht, "before you stole me."

"But once I stole you," Tris said, "I wasn't on my own, was I? Because then I was with you." She thought about it. "Anyway," she said, "don't semiAIs have rules about having to protect the sentient?"

"That's household appliances," said the yacht, "and it's ‘not harm’ rather than protect. There's a difference."

The water was up to Tris's hips now, pulling at the bottom of her stolen leather jacket. She could feel the cold eating at her legs and dissolving all feeling below her waist. And the yacht was beginning to lean. Last time Tris had checked the cabin was level, ripped by currents and still filling with water but definitely level.

Now it slanted, with one side wall almost underwater and the other, the one with the door, almost clear. Only waves kept spilling in over the sill as the yacht began to settle.

"I'm going to die," said Tris. Mostly she was trying the idea for size, wondering if it was one she could accept.

"So?" said the yacht. "You should have played it differently. Besides, I'm the one who's really going to die. You're just going to revert to a previous back-up. What will you have lost, twenty-four hours? Forty-eight, if you're really careless."

"You don't get it," said Tris. "I don't have back-up." She thought it through, facing the conclusion. "When I die," she said, "I die."

She could almost hear the yacht's surprise. Well, the surprise of its AI, which was actually a blue marble matched to an axion-rich anemone. It wasn't quite sound and it wasn't really silence, more like a stumble in her head.

"You die if you get wet?" she asked the marble.

Her question amused it and the answer was no. It died if it got left behind, removed from a source of power and never found again. "Worry about yourself," suggested the yacht. "Why did you wake me?"

"I wanted to know where I am," she said.

"Where you wanted to be," the yacht said. "You're on Rapture."

"I know that," said Tris. "Where on Rapture?"

"In a river."

Tris sighed. "I'm going to take you out again," she said, "so you probably need to turn off the rainbow."

"Rainbow?"

"Those colours," said Tris. "The ones wrapped around you."

"You can see them?"

"Of course I can," Tris said. "If I couldn't see them I couldn't tell you they were there, could I?"

"Such a child," said the AI. "So empirical."

"Whatever. You want to tell me which river?"

"This one," said the yacht, and before Tris could kick the table, a ghost landscape hung in the air before her. It was topologically accurate, impressive and detailed in the extreme but it was skew to the lapping water and not at all what Tris wanted.

"Just tell me."

"Here," said the AI. "You're here." A tiny blue thread on the face of the ghost world lit red. At the same time, the world tilted slightly until it was out of true with the wall of the cabin but level over the water.

"And the Forbidden City?"

A different sector lit gold, and even without knowing the scale Tris could see that they were a long way apart.

"I'm taking you out now," said Tris, reaching for the memory. "And I'll carry you with me."

The AI was about to say something but Tris yanked first and the rainbow shut down, tendrils brushing her fingers as they released the marble. All Tris felt was the briefest jolt of electricity and then she was alone again.