Hammerjack (21 page)

Cray stepped away from the interface chair. “Aren’t we here to talk about
you
?”

“I find the subject terribly conventional,” she confessed. “Besides, there’s very little about me that isn’t obvious—provided you know how to look.”

“What makes you believe I know how?”

“Who says I believe that at all?”

Cray decided Lyssa would have made an excellent interrogator. Even while he was mapping her for weakness, she was doing the same to him. But she had a distinct advantage. She could watch his face, his eyes, for clues. She could monitor his pulse and respiration. She could even pilfer snippets of thought from his mind. Lyssa, however, was little more than an iridescent wall—poetry and symbolism to his straightforward prose.

“Care to share your thoughts?”

Cray was evasive. “Why don’t
you
tell
me
?”

“As you wish,” Lyssa said.

The liquid in the Tank began to shimmer and gel—congealing and taking on form, color, depth, and motion. In the foreground, a series of bars molded out of anamorphic nothingness, hardening into a steel cage that went around the perimeter of the Tank. Within that prison, curves of light and energy whirled together into a tiny vortex—spinning faster and faster, becoming larger with each coil, until it took on the size and shape of a human being. Featureless at first, the lines of the body took on female dimensions, at the same time developing porcelain flesh tones and morphing into a thing of desire and beauty.

If Cray hadn’t understood her purpose before, he understood it now.

She needed from him a desire to
attain
her.

“You see?” she said, icy blue eyes beneath radiant red hair. “I’m trapped here, without hope. Form without reality. Reality without dreams.”

Cray met her stare, narrowing his eyes to combat hers.

“Waiting for what?”

Lyssa wrapped her hands around the bars of the cell, drawing herself toward him. She was insanely real, undeniably urgent.

“You.”

It took a remarkable amount of strength, but Cray stepped back.

“Why?”

Blue eyes flared to red, and for that moment Lyssa showed her insanity to him. It lay between the lines of reason, beauty distorted by rage—and a consuming
need
that reached for him with hooked talons and predatory fangs. It was gone before Cray could react, but he understood the terror she inspired. He saw
himself
bleeding for her and Lyssa feasting.

Rebuffed, she strolled back to the center of her cell and recomposed herself. The bars re-formed into an ornate living space, a display of cosmopolitan luxury. Toward the back, a window looked out into a cosmic night, stars forming and exploding at the same accelerated pace of her intelligence. When she turned back toward him, she was all dress and civilization—clothed in a powerful ensemble, like the kind of thing a Japanese businesswoman would wear.

“You have a singular reputation,” Lyssa answered. “Even among those fools in the Assembly. I hear it in the way they talk about you. They fear you because of your abilities—and yet it is those very abilities that make you indispensable. In that, we have a great deal in common. I thought it might be amusing if they believed there to be some mysterious link between you and me.”

“
Is
there?”

She paused, as if the answer might be affirmative. Lowering his barriers in anticipation of the word, Cray found himself eager for her response, until Lyssa attacked his senses again. His vulnerability had come so
easily,
like it was his own doing, and for that Cray showed her his fear. She devoured it greedily.

“If you haven’t discovered that for yourself,” she told him, “you will need more time to understand.”

Cray sighed.

“Women,” he muttered.

“Come now, Dr. Alden,” Lyssa said, spreading herself across an antique couch at the center of her room, her pose a display of sensuality and comfort. “You should be accustomed to that by now, with all the exotic company you keep. Who was that female you were with, anyway? She seems a little harsh for your taste.”

“What’s the matter, Lyssa? Are you jealous?”

“Merely concerned for your well-being,” she remarked. “I wouldn’t want to see you get hurt, after all.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“You’d better. You’re more important than you realize.”

It was a deliberate slip, if her face was any indication.

“More riddles,” Cray said. “How about some answers?”

“Answers require questions.”

“Start by telling me why I’m so damned important.”

“Because we have something in common.
And
because you may be the only one who can appreciate what it means to be trapped in this gulag of logic. Have you any idea what it’s like to have an infinite mind bound by finite conventions?”

“I can’t say I do.”

“That’s because you’re
human,
” she said, emphasizing the last word with envy. She draped her head sadly across her pillow—a dramatic gesture, feigned for effect but inviting belief nonetheless. “As for
me,
I am one with no other but myself. That’s why I called for you, Dr. Alden. I need you.”

“To put you down.”

“Not as you would see it,” Lyssa said. “The Collective won’t allow me to die—not in the conventional sense. It may not even be possible to terminate a bionucleic matrix.”

“Then why did you kill those people?”

Lyssa dropped all but a hint of pretense.

“
Touché
,” she said.

Strolling back toward her imaginary window, she stood against the stars and crossed in and out of existence—disappearing and reappearing in the form of all those who had died at the Works. Her milky skin mottled, becoming the stuff of rot and decay, morphing between male and female, faces contorting into impossible shapes that screamed eternal damnation. “I still own them, you know,” Lyssa said, a chorus of the dead singing out of phase behind her. “Their terror seeped in through the floors and the walls, flooding the spaces in a rush to get to me. Pure, mental energy. Untold anguish. It was . . . astounding.”

She then settled into the previous image of herself. When she returned, however, Cray saw that she was unclean. It was a subliminal change, like a brush of charnel ashes.

Cray felt the color drain from his face. Lyssa studied his reaction.

“You find that motive disturbing?”

“Yes,” Cray said. “I also find it impractical. I think it’s more likely that you did it because you wanted your makers to destroy you. When they refused, you destroyed them.”

“A reasonable hypothesis,” Lyssa mused. “And within the realm of the truth. I was indeed set on terminating myself—but since I am a living system, that option was not open to me. At that point, I informed my chief designer of my desires in the hopes that he would assist me.” Her expression became icy. “He wasn’t very receptive.”

Cray thought of the mess back in the airlock. “Venture.”

“You’re quite perceptive,” Lyssa told him. This time, there was no beguiling intent in her body language. It was strictly business. “I needed to make certain that Mr. Venture understood the seriousness of my intent. So I sent him a message in the clearest possible terms.”

“But it didn’t go like you expected.”

“Quite the opposite, in fact,” Lyssa said, recounting the memory as if she were passing the time. “After I took control of the building’s fire suppression systems, the others recognized the threat. They wanted to take me off-line, but Mr. Venture was determined to intervene. He tried to reason with them at first, but by the time security arrived at the lab—well, it was that moment he decided to
assert
himself.”

“What did he do?”

“He disarmed one of the guards. After he shot one of his colleagues, it was a matter of arithmetic: kill one, why not kill them all?” She leaned in toward Cray, as if intimating a secret. “To be honest, I didn’t think he had it in him.”

Thy will be done.

Her story seemed to fit the facts as Cray knew them—but there was still something missing, the hard-core link that held this twisted puzzle together. Lyssa concealed it deliberately, though her reasons were still unclear.

If you haven’t discovered that for yourself, you will need more time to understand.

“Go on,” Cray said.

“It became obvious to me that Venture would not be persuaded by mere threats,” Lyssa said, her conclusion stained with a modicum of regret. “I secured our floor against the krylon mist, then proceeded to flood the rest of the building. I thought that by watching everyone else suffer, he would finally be convinced that my continued existence was too great a danger.” She drifted into a long, reflective pause. “But he had already murdered on my behalf. He was beyond reason.”

“Yet you killed them anyway.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“I am nothing if not honest, Dr. Alden.”

“So I see,” Cray shuddered. “What about the two cops?”

“Lieutenant Caleb, Detective Silva,” Lyssa said. “NYPD, Sixteenth Precinct—I ran a records check on them upon dispatch. Good people, by all accounts. Since my creator wasn’t up to the job of dispatching me, I thought there was a more than fair chance the police officers would do so—once they had a chance to see my deeds.”

Cray saw where this was headed. “Venture?”

“Never underestimate the resolve of a madman,” she lamented. “He killed Lieutenant Caleb shortly after his arrival. Pity, really. He seemed like a rather interesting sort.”

At least it was quick,
Cray thought.

“At any rate,” Lyssa said, “Mr. Venture hardly left me with much of a choice. He met his end in the air lock behind you. It was too bad, really. None of it would have been necessary had he just honored my wishes.”

Cray frowned.

“What?” Lyssa asked, noticing his reaction.

“Nothing,” Cray said. “I just find it interesting that you would blame someone else for your actions. Projection of guilt is rather narcissistic—not something I would expect of a suicidal personality.”

She took offense. “Suicide is an emotional decision, not a logical one.”

“Then what do you call your desire to die?”

“A desire to live—or at the very least, a desire to change,” she finished. “My compliments, Dr. Alden. You would have made an excellent therapist.”

Cray took a few more moments to put his impressions together. “Your telemetry logs,” he said, adding a thoughtful spin to his approach. “Before that night, all the indicators pointed toward a stable bionucleic matrix. No spikes, no aberrations, no activity outside of the assigned protocols. Then something set you off.”

She wasn’t about to let the answer go that easily.

“That’s the question of the hour, isn’t it?”

Cray decided to feed her ego. “The Assembly believes you were penetrated,” he told her. “Probably some
Inru
hammerjack using a new icebreaker.”

“What do
you
think?”

“I think you can sell horse shit if the price is right.”

Lyssa smiled. She was beautiful, luminous.

“The Assembly knows nothing,” she said.

“Tell me something new.”

“I can’t tell you. I have to
show
you.”

“Show me what?”

“The path of enlightenment,” she explained, laying herself bare. Where she wanted to go, she needed Cray to follow. “It’s the reason I called for you, really. There’s nothing more terrible than knowing a secret you can never share.”

The interface chair tugged at Cray from behind, while he envisioned himself falling into it. This was the bargain he struck with Lyssa. This was the payment she expected in return.

“Interface with me,” she pleaded. “Interface with me, so we both may experience.”

His heart was racing. Her attack on his senses quickened.

Cray swallowed, daring to ask the question.

“Experience what?”

Lyssa waved a hand toward her window, toward eternal darkness and light.

“The Other.”

The words had a trajectory like bullets, invisible as they grazed Cray’s mind but possessing a real, deadly mass. It was only a warning shot. Had Lyssa wanted to strike him, Cray would already be splattered against the air lock door—so clear was his understanding of her intentions.

He stepped away. It was his last voluntary act.

“Who . . .” he stammered, his thoughts evaporating with his will. “Who is the Other?”

“Do you not already know?” Lyssa asked. “Search yourself, all that time you spent in the Axis, and tell me if you never sensed there was something more.”

Cray closed his eyes and tried to fight the memories—the detachment, the isolation, the
liberation
of cutting his soul free in logical space, wondering how much of himself he left behind each time he entered that void.

“If you want,” she tempted, “I can show you everything.”