Cassandra Kresnov 04: 23 Years on Fire (11 page)

“I’m told you came from the League,” Sandy tried. “Why did you come here?”

“Rinni and Pasha.”

Sandy frowned. “Who?”

“I came for Rinni and Pasha. Came to see them.”

Sandy opened her mouth to ask further, but was interrupted by Singh. “
Sandy, Rinni and Pasha are a kids’ TV show. My kids watch them all the time.
”

“Eduardo,” Sandy said carefully, “are you telling me you came all the way to Callay for a kids’ TV show?”

Eduardo wasn’t really responding to her. Just sitting, and gazing at the park, and lights of tall buildings that rose beyond the trees. She didn’t think it was an act. This GI wasn’t entirely there. There were as many possible reasons why as with a regular human.

“
Who are Rinni and Pasha?
” Sandy silently formulated to Singh.

“
They’re friends. A boy and a girl, they go to school together. It’s funny, like all kids shows, but the idea is that they’re just friends, but of course they’re really more than that. You know, teenage romantic tension.
”

“
Yeah.
” Well, she’d heard of it. And to Eduardo, “Why do you like Rinni and Pasha, Eduardo?”

An uplink activated. A gentle touch on the local net, a contact on her barriers. Attached was a tiny little picture file, far too small to hold some kind of code bomb. Sandy accepted it, and a picture opened upon her vision. It was Eduardo, and a girl. A GI, Sandy guessed, by the look of her. They had an arm around each other and looked cheerful, posing for the picture.

“She’s very pretty,” said Sandy. It was redundant, since nearly all GIs were pretty, but it seemed the right thing to say. “Who is she?”

“She’s Pasha,” said Eduardo. “I’m Rinni.”

“Oh.” Sandy’s heart began to thump. It wasn’t excitement. Cold dread, more like it. Something here just felt very wrong. “Eduardo, where is Pasha now?”

“They were going to take her.” He took a deep breath. The breath shuddered, with obvious emotion. “It’s not good when they take you away. I’m here now.”

“You came from New Torah, didn’t you?” Sandy pressed. “Did they send you to Callay? Did they take your friend, your Pasha, and make you come to Callay? Did they threaten to do something to her if you didn’t?”

“He wants to kiss her,” said Eduardo, very sadly. “He wants to kiss her, but he can’t. You know?”

“Eduardo,” Sandy pressed urgently. “I’m a GI like you. I came from the League. I belong here now, and I have many friends. They can be your friends, too. Would you like that?” She took a risk, and placed her non-gun hand on his arm. “This can be your home too, if you want.”

He turned and looked at her for the first time. His stare was unfocused, but not stupid. Dazed. “You’re not as pretty as Pasha.”

“No,” Sandy said quietly. “I don’t suppose I am.”

“Will you go and get her? If I help you?”

Sandy felt helpless. This, she’d been dreading. For years and years. “I’d like to,” she said earnestly. “I’d like to very much.”

Eduardo smiled. And began convulsing.

“Eduardo?” The convulsions grew worse. Sandy grabbed him. If she hadn’t been a GI herself, the convulsions would have smashed her bones. A flailing arm crushed the chair back of the bench, and Sandy threw herself on top of him to pin him. “I want an ambulance!” she yelled, not bothering with internal formulation. “Whatever leading biotech surgeon you can get, he’s in trouble!”

Immediately she could hear a cruiser coming in; they’d had one on standby for rapid transport in case something happened. Eduardo’s eyes were rolled back in his head, his mouth foaming. And then he stopped. GIs had no jugular pulse, so Sandy put her ear to his chest. The pulse was still there, but galloping.

She tried a violent network access, but the barriers were hard, unresponsive. She reached instead for a pocket, withdrew an ever-present access line, clicked it into the back of her own head, then rolled Eduardo to get at his own inserts . . . and her fingertips felt hot, melted metal. It was smoking, the inserts entirely melted through the skin.

Oh, God. She slumped back and sat on the path as the CSA cruiser howled in to a landing on nearby grass, landing lights flashing. Gull doors opened and medicos rushed to her, and the lifeless body of her newest friend.

Sandy sat in the observation chamber, elbows on knees, and watched the coroners work. They had tools set up especially for this—laser cutters that could saw through even a GI’s synthetic tissue and bone. Scanners showed a clear picture, and visual diagnostics programs tried to make sense of what they saw. The CSA knew a lot more about GI physiology now than it had a few years back, and one of the coroners was actually a leading biotech surgeon, a civvie but security cleared. They cut efficiently, removing a piece of skull.

Some years ago, no one would have dared sit near her and offer comfort when she was in this mood. Now, Singh came by, recently showered post-armour, and sat beside her and asked how she was. Not great. He put an arm around her shoulders and just sat with her for a while, watching the monitors. Naidu likewise came and asked, and Chandrasekar. Ibrahim was elsewhere, probably briefing politicians. These days he had to do more of that than he liked.

Then Vanessa arrived, and took Singh’s place as he left. “It’s the killswitch,” said Sandy.

“I know.”

“I don’t know who triggered it, there was no transmission. It just melted his brain.”

“Yeah.” Vanessa clasped her hand.

“I think he was sent here to kill someone. I think he was being blackmailed, and now he refused, and they killed him.” Vanessa’s gaze was very worried. “I swear I’m going to find who did this.” Her tone, like her mood, was utterly black. “I’m going to kill them. I don’t care if there are hundreds, I’ll kill them all.”

The biotech surgeon’s name was Sasa. She sat at the end of the briefing table, with the intense, slightly exhausted look of someone trying to process a lot of information in a short space of time. About the table, CSA command sat and listened.

“Well,” said Sasa, “it’s hard to tell exactly what they did to him. But it looks like one of his memory implants was converted into some kind of a control matrix. There are two kinds of memory implants—real memory and cybernetic. What the real memory implants do is compile a copy, like a facsimile, of memory triggers—for a smell, a sensation, there’s a pattern firing of neurons that the brain instantly recognises and uses like a key to unlock particular memories. Real memory implants don’t actually store the memory itself, they store the key that helps the brain to unlock that memory from within its natural, organic memory. Unlike cybernetic implants, which store electronic, virtual memory like any computer.

“Eduardo’s real memory implants seem to have been compiling this facsimile copy of memories into a pattern. My guess is that something in that pattern triggered the killswitch.”

“You’re saying that if he ever had the wrong kind of thought, it could trigger the killswitch automatically?” Sandy asked.

Sasa looked a little unnerved by her stare. “Um, yes. Well no, not exactly. It’s . . . it’s a pattern. It’s very complicated, but brainwaves create memory triggers in patterns, which can be compiled into three dimensional displays in a memory implant. It’s not a single thought that will trigger the killswitch, it’s a certain frame of mind.”

“Traitorous thoughts,” said Sandy.

“Yes.” Sasa fidgeted. “More likely. Your own implants have been inspected?”

“I’m clean,” said Sandy.

“And your own killswitch?”

“I said I’m clean.”

In a tone that left silence around the table.

“We’ve managed to make some nano-scale inroads into Cassandra’s own killswitch,” Ibrahim said for Sasa’s benefit. “It hasn’t been disconnected, it’s too well integrated into her brainstem, but the trigger is now less sensitive, and one of our experts feels the micro-battery charge may be susceptible to degradation over the years. Her implants have been so heavily shielded now that it seems highly unlikely anyone could trigger the killswitch by remote.”

Sasa nodded. “There’s something else odd,” she said. “The brain structure’s a little different. The neural groupings just aren’t where we’d expect in some places. It’s almost as though the brain was developed using one of the alternative generation methods.”

There were puzzled faces about the table.

“Getting synthetic synaptic tissue to behave like a real brain was always the hardest thing,” Sandy explained for the table. This part of GI physiology she did know. “They tried many different methods. We still don’t know how the process of narrowing it down worked, but there’s evidence they started with lots of different methods, then boiled it down to a couple that worked. One method is mainstream, and was used to create just about every GI ever made. And the other created me, and Mustafa, and Jane—the extra-high-des GIs. What Dr Sasa is saying, aren’t you doctor, is that this is neither of those two.”

The doctor nodded, brushing African braids back from her face. “This looks like a third generation mode,” she agreed. “Which we didn’t actually know the League were still working on.”

“Because they’re not,” said Sandy. “But New Torah is.”

More silence at the table. “The League government insists otherwise,” Chandrasekar ventured.

“They say a lot of things.”

“Cassandra,” Ibrahim ventured. “Do you have proof, besides Eduardo?”

“No,” said Sandy. “But I’ll get some.”

Sandy walked into the safe house’s wide dining room unannounced, and various important people turned to stare at her.

“Excuse me,” the head of a very large communications firm asked, “but who is this?” Mustafa Ramoja rolled his eyes. Some of the guests did recognise her, with murmurs and gasps.

“I’m sorry,” said Mustafa, “I wasn’t expecting company, but it seems the CSA has sent some anyway. Perhaps we can do this another time.”

“Anyone thinking of reporting my presence here today,” Sandy told the gathering as they hurried for the doors, “might want to reflect on how I know who all of you are, and where all of you live, and how none of you are really supposed to be talking to the League without a Federation government representative present.”

Doors opened and they filed out. Mustafa just watched Sandy, with resigned respect. Sunlight spilled through big windows onto a spartanly modernist floor, wide and spotless. Polished slate here, then two steps up to polished timber, and a bar. The look was so League, Sandy thought. So “future.” If one were stupid enough to presume that one could decide what the future looked like.

“Have you any idea,” Mustafa asked her, ascending the two steps, “how long it took me to get that group together?”

“Far longer than it took us to find out you were doing it,” said Sandy. Security came into the room from the outside, wondering what the problem was. They took one look at Sandy, recognised her, and paled. Wisely, they made not even a twitch toward their weapons.

“It’s all right, Trudi,” Mustafa sighed, walking behind the bar. “She gets past even the best of us. You can go.” The security guards left, and closed the doors. “Though I had thought our security here a little tighter. You didn’t trigger anything?”

Sandy shook her head. “Tanushan IT is superior even to the League, I’ve learned new tricks while I’m here.”

“It does make sense, I suppose. Drink?”

“Whisky. Straight.” Being unaffected by alcohol didn’t mean she didn’t enjoy the biting taste. Mustafa poured. “New Torah’s making GIs, I see.”

“Do you?” He poured a glass for himself, and walked to her. “You’d be the first person to see that.”

He tossed the glass to her, whisky and all. Sandy caught it neatly in her fingertips, and not a drop spilled.

“You knew what he was,” said Sandy, watching him closely. “I’m sure you were under orders to bring him in yourself. Yet you sent us after him. Why?”

“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Unless you wanted us to know what your government won’t admit,” Sandy continued. “Unless you went against their express orders. But you’d never do anything like that, would you, Mustafa? Disobey an order? From the most moral, enlightened government in the human universe?”

Mustafa walked to the windows and gazed out. Linked into the room network by means of devious infiltration even a League safe house was not equipped to stop, Sandy sensed the network suddenly change. Autistic mode. Sandy walked to his side.

“Disobeying one’s government,” Mustafa said quietly, “is not the same as abandoning one’s people.”

“Ah,” said Sandy. “So you’re following ISO orders. Which somewhere along the line have deviated from the League government’s.”

“Politicians can be stupid.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I wanted you to help Eduardo,” said Mustafa. “I did not wish him dead, though it’s not exactly surprising. Either way, New Torah needs to be stopped.”

“And you think that the Federation might do it?” Sandy asked incredulously. “With the risk of war, with your mob still claiming New Torah as their own?”

“No one really controls New Torah today,” said Mustafa. He was very grim, with none of his usual elegant amusement. “Our government abandoned them on the pretext that those systems were not economically viable. Well, now it turns out that New Torah has found a way to make itself economically viable. Only now, League administration doesn’t want to hear about it. New Torah is too difficult and too embarrassing. We abandoned a lot of people to an awful fate when we left. Millions of people.”

“And now they wouldn’t have you back even if you tried,” Sandy surmised. The safe house was obviously ISO run from top to bottom for Mustafa to be talking so openly, even with the network systems jammed. She did not mind League officials hearing her, but Mustafa would. “How bad is it?”

“Well, first,” said Mustafa with a hard edge of sarcasm, “most systems descended into bloody turmoil and economic collapse. The wealthy, the elite, the most well educated all found passage elsewhere. Those left behind were hardnosed working class, often without families, attracted by high wages and the prospect of fortunes. The Torah Systems were not a place to go for those interested in a grand vision of civilised virtue. There were many good people, just not enough.”