Lightless (29 page)

“I know,” Althea snapped.

“So then tell me,” said Domitian, as sharp as she had been, “can you or can you not fix this ship?”

Again Althea could not answer.

“Give me an hour,” she blurted out when it seemed Domitian was about to break the silence. “Give me one more hour, and then, if I can't fix it by then, you can…you can do whatever you're going to do.”

“An hour,” Domitian said, and Althea ignored Gagnon's visible exasperation. “One hour and no more.”

She left before he could take it back.

The ship's cameras watched Althea Bastet step out into the hall and close the door to the control room behind her. For an instant she stood still, her hair curling chaotically out around her face, barely bound anymore by the band that once had held it back. She began to walk, and the ship watched her as she walked in the direction opposite to the white room.

Althea knew that if the dead man's switch was flipped, it would destroy the computer, euthanize it, wipe it from existence and leave only the computer's shell, the computer's corpse, drifting through space. The ship would be left under manual control of the crew, who would operate it like ancient earth scientists testing galvanism, who set a corpse to jumping or shrieking with the touch of electricity to the right limb or piece of the brain.

Althea Bastet went to the weapons cabinet and opened it. She took a key from a hook that once had held the cuffs that now held Leontios Ivanov, and she dropped it into her pocket.

Down the hall she walked, down the winding hall, toward the white room.

If the dead man's switch was flipped, there would be no computer to repair, nothing but dead synapses and the fading echoes of an aborted life.

At the door to the white room, Althea stopped and took a long, slow breath. Her hands were trembling when she reached into her pocket and came up with a handful of wire, the long flat blade of the box cutter, and, shining bright and small, the silver key to Ivan's cuffs.

She dropped the rest back into her pocket absently, hardly paying attention to whether the items made it into her pocket or fell onto the floor, and pressed the key into the palm of her hand.

The
Ananke
watched her open the door and walk into the white room.

Althea was still no more conscious of when she had made the decision to go to Ivan than she had been the first time she had visited him. The decision, it seemed, had been made subconsciously, and she was left only to carry it out.

Without speaking a word to Ivan, she crossed the expanse between the door and the table in the center of the room. It seemed longer than it had before, the silence in the room overwhelming, the lights and the white walls and ceiling and floor all too bright for her eyes.

Ivan was watching her without speaking as she came up beside him. When she finally reached out to move, she knew that she had left the mark of the key in white and red on her palm.

She reached down first to his right wrist, which was closer to her. His skin was very pale against hers when she lifted his wrist so that she could reach the keyhole in the lock.

He watched her. She could feel him watching her, and she did not look at him.

She leaned over him to reach for his other arm. She knew that she should not—it left her vulnerable if Ivan reached up and grabbed her—but she could not quite bring herself to care or to believe that he would hurt her.

Something snagged her open hip pocket, probably the chair's armrest, so she shifted and freed it, then lengthened the chain on Ivan's left hand.

Then she pulled back, dropped the key in her pocket, faced Ivan, and said, “The mission of the
Ananke
is to discover how to reverse entropy.”

Ivan frowned, somewhere between incredulous and confused.

“If entropy can be reversed,” Althea said, “the System can create more efficient engines. We can create better terraforming devices. Without entropy, liquids don't have to mix, water can be kept uncontaminated, heat doesn't need to disperse; we can finally warm the outer moons up enough to have a proper biosphere. There will be no energy crisis. Every ship can have a relativistic drive, not just the lightweight ones. The System will be able to control the outer moons better. One day we'll be able to colonize planets outside of the solar system.” Some of the wonder of the idea that had struck her when she first had heard it years ago came back to her now and in some small measure calmed her fear and despair. “Perpetual motion would be possible, Ivan,” she said. “Every physical process reversible. Time goes in the direction of increasing entropy; if we had control over whether entropy increased, it would be like having control over time. We would have the power of eternity.”

Ivan's mouth was hanging slightly ajar; his eyes had gone very wide, and Althea could see the full circles of blue, reflecting on their surfaces the bright white walls, the bright white ceiling, and herself with the light coming through her hair like a halo.

“That's why this ship is so well protected,” Althea said. “That's why it's kept such a secret. Imagine anyone but the System having that kind of power.”

“That's not possible,” Ivan said. “The laws of thermodynamics are the laws of reality. They can't be broken.”

“Gagnon has some theories. I don't understand them completely, but I don't need to. They have something to do with the black hole, I think, which is why the
Ananke
has a black hole instead of just a dense sphere for gravitation—but the computer, that I understand. The
Ananke
…she…” It was hard to put foreign inhuman languages, math and code, into simple, short spoken words. “The computer identifies the entropy,” Althea said, hands outspread, fingers curled, as if she would capture the correct way to communicate in her hands like a firefly, “and it turns it back into work.”

“What you're saying, then,” Ivan said, leaning forward but with his hands still pressed flat to the rests of his chair, not taking advantage of the lengthened chains, “is that the computer is designed to take chaos as an input and produce order from it.”

“No,” Althea said immediately, and then on revision, “No, not really.”

“The greater the entropy, the greater the number of states a system can have,” Ivan said, leaning forward, alight, and seeming a different person for this sudden energy. There was color in his cheeks and his eyes were bright, but it looked more like the flush of fever than the glow of health.

“Yes,” Althea said slowly.

“So you start with a system of low entropy—low chaos, high order, only a few states,” Ivan said. “Maybe only one. And then you add a little bit of chaos—a little bit of entropy—and suddenly the system is broken up into many different states.”

“Chaos isn't a thing,” said Althea, frustrated. Ivan was still alight with that familiar look of a scholar faced with the solution to a problem, but she had no idea where he was heading. “You can't ‘add' entropy to a thing.”

Ivan waved his left hand dismissively. The lengthened chain clattered. He said, “But you can increase the number of states the computer can have.”

It was Althea's turn to be briefly struck dumb by the implications.

“Mattie's ‘little bit of chaos,' ” she said. “I thought you meant an error. I thought you meant he put some sort of…replicating random virus into the system.”

Ivan shook his head.

“The
Ananke
's computer can exist in a few predetermined states, right?” he said. “Normal functioning, high alert, basic functioning only, that sort of thing.”

“He added states,” Althea said slowly, testing the sense of it.

“He added states,” Ivan confirmed. “Strange ones. Like ones where some of the cameras don't save their footage but the computer functions normally. It was just supposed to confuse the crew, nothing more. And then he changed the computer so that it would cycle through them at random.”

It was possible, just—but there was no way Mattie would have had the time to do it. “He was only at the computer for a few minutes,” Althea said.

Ivan grinned, and the wolf was there again in that smile. “You didn't even find his lock picks,” he said. “Do you think that was all he had hidden on him?”

“A computer drive.” Of course. But even so, the drives would be able to contain only generic programs; Mattie would have had to alter them for the
Ananke,
which was like no other ship in existence. He could have managed it—just—but the complexity of some of the behavior Althea had witnessed…“I still don't see how—”

“We've done this a lot of times,” Ivan interrupted. “I promise you he could've done it in the time he had.”

It still didn't make sense to Althea, not completely, but it had to be true. There was no other possibility.

“So the computer just fluctuates between these states at random?” Althea asked, turning her mind back to the problem at hand and feeling for the first time in a week as if she might have some way to fix this.

“Mattie adds a set of states,” Ivan confirmed, “sometimes a very large set, and then the computer fluctuates through them like a person having mood swings. That's how we coded the
Annwn,
actually. We got the idea—”

He stopped.

It was so abrupt and unnerving that Althea said, a little too loudly, “What?” and it echoed through the white room.

“That's how we programmed the
Annwn,
” Ivan said, slowly but building up steam, and Althea knew that expression from its having been on her own face, from seeing it on the faces of colleagues before—Ivan coming to conclusions, connecting the facts faster than he could speak.

“We had Annie—the
Annwn
's computer. We programmed her to switch between states depending on sensory triggers,” Ivan said. “Emotions. She would react emotionally to stimuli.”

“It's a computer,” Althea said. “It doesn't have emotions. It can't react emotionally.” Of course Ivan had changed one of a machine's best qualities just so that it would react emotionally to him.

“Right,” Ivan said. “It was just a simulation. The
Annwn
wasn't able to switch between states on her own; we had to program everything into her. We told her what triggers would make her happy, sad, angry. She was completely manufactured. She couldn't figure out triggers on her own because she wasn't designed to deal with multiple states that way.”

The faintest glimmering of where Ivan was going began to shine in Althea's mind. She said warningly, “Ivan.”

“The
Ananke,
” said Ivan, his eyes fever-bright, “the
Ananke
. She can handle chaos. She's designed to take a set of states and organize them. She's designed to figure out how to switch between states on her own. She figures out her own triggers.”

“No, no, no,” said Althea, but he wasn't listening to her at all.

“Imagine it,” Ivan said over her protests. “Imagine the
Ananke
having to organize herself. There would have to be some degree of self-awareness from that, don't you think?”

“Ivan, this is stupid.”

“Imagine it,” he insisted. “If it did happen, the
Ananke
— Ananke wouldn't know how to interact with people. She would be worse than an infant, because she wouldn't have the necessary instincts. She would have to learn from first principles.”

Perhaps this had been a mistake. Perhaps Althea never should have come into this room.

“But Ananke's smart,” Ivan said, and she wondered if he really was mad, as his file said. “Of course she is. She's brilliant, more brilliant than any human that ever existed. She would learn.”

Althea paced away, trying to settle the anxiety that rose up again in her stomach, but Ivan's voice pursued her.

“She'd start by learning what got a reaction—the alarms got a reaction, didn't they? Just like a baby crying to its mother,” he called out over the distance to her, and she turned back around.

“Stop it, please,” she said, but again he seemed not to hear.

“Next it'll learn to speak,” said Ivan, and if he meant to be mocking her, he seemed to be very serious. “The ship has a voice-processing system, too, of course, doesn't it? I imagine it'll learn how to communicate through text before verbally, but it can convert between sound and text already. And she's been listening and watching, too. The cameras are all working; they're just not showing what they see to you.”

“Stop!”

“She's probably been trying to talk to you in her native language,” said Ivan, unstoppable, eerie and pale, “in code, but sooner or later—and probably sooner—she'll figure out the languages of humans.”

There had been strange code that Althea had seen, strange and seemingly meaningless, but it had been a mere artifact of whatever Gale had done and had nothing to do with the madness Ivan was speaking.

“She's probably processing her own linguistic data stores even now,” Ivan said. “If you don't kill her first, she'll speak to you, Althea—”

“Stop!”
Althea shouted, and her voice filled up the vast room and rang out in echoes long after the first sound had passed.

Into the silence that followed the death of the echoes, Althea said, filled with a hurt she did not want to consider too closely, “I came to you for
help
.”

Ivan's eyes were round and blue and without guile. “I
am
helping you,” he said.

“No, you're not!” Althea cried, and found that she was again near tears. “You're not. You're making things up, and you're lying to me, and…”

“I'm not lying to you!”

“Yes, you are!”

For a moment they stared at each other. Althea hoped helplessly that if she just waited another few seconds, Ivan would take it all back and tell her what she needed to know to fix her ship.