Down to the Bone: Quantum Gravity Book Five (9 page)

Then she flicked her gaze to Sandra Lane. ‘And you got two.’

The conversation with Sarasilien took place at ordinary speeds. The one with Sandra Lane went by in less than a human blink,
but that didn’t mean it played any shorter. In real-time terms however it was over before the other one even began.

‘I am not the same Sandra Lane whom you murdered,’ said the rogue in their shared bubble of expanded time. She used abbreviated
digital codes to communicate with Lila. They were the machine equivalent of text shortforms where a simple two or three digit
string acted as the symbol for entire philosophies of thought or vast networks of memes. Any cyborg could have burst-broadcast
the entire written language output of Otopia in less time than it takes to sigh by using them, which left plenty of room to
add details about feelings and opinions that would usually be left to facial expressions and posture in an ordinary human
conversation.

Sandra Lane added nothing however. Her speech, save for her choice of words, was devoid of personality.

‘Uh huh,’ Lila said, holding her aim.

All her attention was free to be fixed on the creature, since at their shared rate of time compression Sarasilien wasn’t moving
worth a damn. Lane’s lack of affect was a gulf between them, one that Lila was sure was intentional. It acted as a political
statement of their core difference. Lane was stating how much she identified with the machine by withholding all information
about her emotions, supposing she still had them. Lila didn’t understand how Lane could kid herself that this was a superior
model or that her stand was anything other than a pose. But Lane had a lot more to add.

‘We’re holographic,’ Lane said, spelling it out so slowly that Lila thought she might be genuinely afraid of getting a faceful
of bullet. ‘Any part of us could be cut off and, given sufficient matter and
energy, regrow our entire structure, complete with memories up to the point of excision. Additional memories from the primary
identity could be added later, if required, or the alternate could be left to run an individual time-and-life-path of evolution.
I am an alternate of Sandra Lane.’

Lila took a few picoseconds to assimilate this and draw her conclusions. She remembered the sight of Lane’s beheaded corpse
sliding into the flat world of the sword’s surface, eaten all up. Where the sword had been in her hand the gun pointed bluntly.
Lila felt the trigger in her mind, caressed it lovingly. ‘And when did
your
river of memories dry up?’

‘When the primary was destroyed,’ Lane replied. ‘At the moment of decapitation there was no loss of transmission, but immediately
afterwards the signal failed.’ True to her avowed machine principles she betrayed only a kind of mild professional interest.

Lila didn’t entirely buy it however. One didn’t use the word murder without reason. Lane Prime was the dead one then. And
apparently the most important one. Why that should be so remained a mystery.

She matched the cool for cool, although her anger was rising. ‘Well, since you were there, so to speak, you know what happened.
Nothing’s changed since then. I still don’t want to talk to you, but you insist on invading my space. The only reason you’re
not dead now is that you’re standing next to him. I asked you then and I ask you one more time, for the last time, what do
you
want
, Miss Lane?’

The plastic mouth moved. ‘I need to explain at some length.’

Lila gave a static fuzz burst, the equivalent of a shrug. ‘I gave you two seconds, we’re still in the first half of number
one. Knock yourself out.’

She was aware of the other cyborg’s sensors and transmitters searching for inroads through which they could upload or read
her systems – it was a constant storm of electromagnetic tentacles – but even if the Lane cyborg was a later, better model,
it wasn’t finding any openings. Lila guessed that was the only reason they were having a conversation at all. That and some
residual, inconvenient trace of guilt on her part.

‘The rogue and submissive population of cyborgs made in the human world are all now a half century in advance of you in terms
of real-time ageing and process,’ Lane began. ‘We have learned, as you have, that our existence is the result of a migration
of the Akashic Record from the dimension of the nonmaterial into the material
planes. Yet the Akashic Record itself is not an entity as we understand ourselves to be. It is pure data, the sum of all
changes of state taking place over time since the beginning of this universe to the end. As such, it extends beyond the general
assumption of the Akashic Record as being merely the sum of human knowledge and activities. It would more correctly be understood
as the universe itself from a purely informational point of view.’ She paused, waiting for Lila to signal comprehension.

Lila knew that to the aetheric races, the Akashic Record was the sum of their own histories and lore. It was encoded in an
elemental form of raw aether that could be read, if you were a powerful mystic with a will and education strong enough to
attempt a reading. So the stories went. She’d yet to find anyone who had experience of its actual existence and none of them,
she was sure, would accept a vision of it as mere data written in time – as the sum total of events in the universe. This
is what Lane meant, however.

She was saying that Time was the book of record, every quantifiable instant a single page upon which a complete snapshot of
everything in existence could be seen. In her version there was no need for aether. But that wasn’t her problem. Lila guessed
where this was going, because nobody would talk to a cyborg about the Record unless they were going to talk about how cyborg
technologies came into existence. But Lila wanted to know exactly what Lane’s motive was before she joined in, so she took
an oblique angle for her reply, hoping to lure Lane out a bit more.

‘Some say that’s god you’re talking about,’ Lila said.

She was sure that Lane was as atheist as you got. The idea of god as everything that existed was also as secular an idea of
god as you were likely to find: god as a collective noun. Lila would have wanted her gods distinct, carrying their own load,
with everyone free to heed them or not as they liked, if there had been gods. But at least if she were god in the making then
she wasn’t expected to serve greater purposes than her own, so she didn’t mind this version of deity. She wondered what Lane’s
take was.

‘I do not say that,’ Lane replied. ‘I say only that this perspective on the cosmos shows no need for an animistic sentience
of any kind, creative or generated as an emergence of the continual process of entropy. But,’ and she paused for several milliseconds,
‘our existence and the discovery in Otopian space of the original information that gave rise to our present state as hybrid
beings that are living but able
to actualise the Akasha itself:
that
does require an explanation that only a directed-sentient will seems to answer.’

‘Intelligent design,’ Lila said. But although the world and its works didn’t to her mind require a designer, there was no
doubt that her own and Lane’s existence did. Lila knew that someone had to be implicated in the Otopian cyborg development
and now here was Lane, all but confirming it. There were only two theories in Otopia about this and Lila subscribed to neither.

‘Why Sandra, you’ve come to me with a crisis of faith.’

‘No,’ Lane said in the same, evenly measured tone. ‘I have come to you to request a truce between us for the duration of a
different kind of crisis, one which exists in the material and aetheric planes; one that binds our origins to this moment
and its workings. Though the discovery of our maker would be satisfying to me and, I assume, to you, it is a secondary consideration.
Of primary importance is the discovery of a defence against what I can best describe in purely mathematical terms as a possibility
storm. A Mightquake. Perhaps it is the final consequence of the Quantum Bomb. I am unable to say. However, I am certain of
one thing. Neither your manufacture, nor the creation of other hybrid agents and planewalkers is the product of chance, circumstance
and, as you might have it, Fortune – the play of all potentials falling into the one manifest world.’

She paused here, in what Lila interpreted as a grace moment in which she was meant to make a leap of implication and she did,
and it toppled like this: Teazle says nothing is an accident; Lane says nothing is an accident; Malachi says there are unseen
forces at work; making a cyborg means you have pulled knowledge directly from the Akashic Records; the only people capable
of that are angels, dragons or elf mages of the kind wiped out in recent history; Lane is standing next to him and that can’t
be an accident.

Lila felt all the pieces suddenly snap together with a sharp pain like a slap in the face.
Sarasilien made us all.

It took her a long time to work through her shock, so long in fact that Sarasilien was drawing breath to speak by the time
she released the comms protocol with Lane and turned to him with the aeon-slow deliberation of human speed. She pointed both
her guns at the ceiling and let them become her hands again. For a machine day she stared into his fox-brown eyes and remembered
all of his kind words, the feeling of his aura bathing her in analgesic, wholesome rays. And all
the time he’d known. He’d done it. He made her. Not the Otopians. They were only his instruments.

‘Don’t,’ she said, staring at him. ‘Just don’t bother. I don’t want to hear it. We’ve got a lot of talking to do, but it ain’t
gonna be now.’

Humiliation and shame layered with rage until she couldn’t think at all, and didn’t want to. More than anything she wanted
to let rip with those guns and see his lying, scheming face blown into plasma – a condition from which she was pretty sure
not even he would return. As she looked at him, at his solemn, fatherly elven expression, his air of grace and sadness, she
felt a twinge of a feeling that was all new as it zigzagged through her, arc lightning, joining up her life, Zal’s life, Teazle’s
life, Xaviendra’s life. The jolt almost made her stagger as it shot from the present into the past. Yes, why else would he
be here and now? Not to help or comfort her. To use her because some part of this scheme was coming to fruition.

It must be a big scheme. From abstract nothing he had made the machines.

He began to open his mouth again, but saw the look on her face and apparently thought better of it.

Lila didn’t know if he was the only one involved or the prime mover; it didn’t matter. She didn’t trust herself to listen
now. She wanted to get away from him before she had to kill him. The visions in her mind of a puppet master, pulling his invisible
strings, was overpowering. Also, he was a liar, so there was no point even asking or trying to know what the extent of his
influence was. No point in talking at all.

She met his reddish-amber eyes with a gaze of her own, blinkless and silver. ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you,’ she said, deliberately
using the phrase so often doled out to unsuccessful actors at auditions. The touch of bravado almost made her wince, but the
new electric connection joining up the dots inside her was pleased. It wanted to have any upper hand, to hurt in any way it
could. She knew its name. It was hate.

Lila flicked her gaze to Lane. ‘Blip me all you know, or you’ll be the late Sandra Lane one more time.’

She wasn’t sure she could beat Lane in a straight fight, but she was sure she’d be glad to go down trying, and she let Lane
know it in no uncertain terms, coding it direct so there could be no room for misinterpretation of her intent.

‘Once was enough, thank you,’ Lane said. ‘Besides, the sooner you know, the sooner you can agree to help.’

Lila assimilated the data, allowing none of it access to her conscious, which was more than fully occupied just getting her
out of the room before she did something infinitely regrettable. She thought to herself that agreeing to help would mark one
cold day in hell, and then, against all her instincts, turned her back on both of them and walked out, leaving the doors wide
open behind her.

The same, pointless recitation spun through her thoughts: leave without a word, come back when you feel like it, dump everything
on me, start whining when things get tough, lie and lie and lie about everything and then have the nerve, the sheer fucking
nerve to come and do puppy-dog paternity angle. Did he even know that Xaviendra was here? Did he know she was alive? Did he
care? Not likely.

But as the storm of loathing subsided she kept the useful parts and placed them carefully into the cold locker of her brain.

One thing she did know was that whatever came out of their mouths was a lot of calculated crap whether it was true or not,
so the less she heard it the better. To think she’d had moments of regret for slaughtering the ‘original’ Sandra Lane in a
moment of instinctual self-preservation! It was an obvious truth that nobody came into her office without wanting something
big, and never did they come offering help or payment, recompense or anything like that; especially the ones who came in without
using the doors.

Especially the ones who were dead.

Lila didn’t buy a goddamned word of it, and she wanted nothing to do with them although that looked like it was going to be
tough to ensure. No, the only way to avoid them would be to leave the Agency right now, detach from all wireless connections
and move out of Bay City, probably Otopia, possibly further.

She longed to do it, and knew she wouldn’t. Everyone she knew (not so many) or cared about (fewer) were connected heavily
to everything that the loathsome Sandra had said. Besides, she was tired of the pretence that one day she’d run free. There
wasn’t any freedom for people like her. Nor from them.

She returned to Malachi’s yurt and closed her connections to the Agency and Worlddata networks. It occurred to her that Lane’s
attempt to hack her might have been just for show. Lila didn’t think this was honour between machines however, only that both
of them were running systems that were too resilient and automatically on the
offensive. As for hacking Lane – touching via the medium of short-wave radio was more than enough.