Prodigal (19 page)

“Not that I’m aware of. Then again, Mr. Bostic is not famous for sharing information with his employees.”

“Anything strike you as odd?”

“My dear,
everything
strikes you as odd when you haven’t had a nap or a drink for as long as I have.” The two of them stopped outside an airlock, its entrance sealed by a translucent revolving door. “But he did seem especially agitated that we hadn’t yet developed a usable personality profile for Lyssa. I informed Mr. Bostic that this required close personal contact with the unit—which, as we both know, is rather problematic given the circumstances.”

Lea averted her eyes. There was an uneasy pause.

“I’m sorry,” she said, a token gesture at best.

“No need to apologize,” Talbot said, while Lea keyed an access code on the panel next to the airlock. “Lyssa is an intelligent being and entitled to choose the company she keeps.” The pressure seal disengaged with a loud hiss and the door rolled open. Talbot took a conspicuous step back as Lea entered. Beyond this point, he was not welcome. She didn’t like shutting Talbot out, but there were some things she just couldn’t disclose—some secrets she needed to keep.

“I will confess some jealousy, however,” he finished. “Perhaps one day, you’ll trust me enough to explain Lyssa’s curious fixation with you—and why she refuses even to speak with anyone else.”

“It’ll happen, Drew,” Lea assured him. “Soon.”

“Of course,” he said, clearly not believing a word.

Talbot stayed in the same spot as the door rolled shut, an impressionistic blur in the thickness of carbon glass. Lea watched him until the image peeled away, and she was alone in an atmosphere of sterilized air. As microrads scrubbed the impurities from the surface of her body and clothes, she made no excuses that he was anything but right—but like the microbes on her skin, her remorse over it died a quick and necessary death.

You don’t want to be in here, Drew. You don’t want to know what I know.

An inner door slid open behind Lea, letting in a flood of conflicting impulses broadcast on a frequency only she could hear. The multitude of voices gradually melded into one, while she gathered her ebbing reserves of control. Coming here was an addiction in many ways—always tearing her up but never satisfying her need. Already the rush propelled through her bloodstream, beckoning her with an alien yet welcoming touch.

Lea fell into its embrace.

A tapestry of colors brushed the edges of her vision, a spectrum that implied warmth and familiarity. Lea’s first impulse was to run toward it—but then she remembered where she was.
Watch out for the euphoria,
she had been warned, back when these encounters were new, and she didn’t know what to expect.
Never forget that I’m not the only one in here.

Heeding that advice, Lea steeled herself against the onslaught—sifting her own thoughts and emotions from the chaff of sentience that floated around, plucking her consciousness from the particles of dust. After a few moments, she reached a state of equilibrium and focused all her faculties on generating a stable perception of her surroundings. It was like rendering a computer model from tiny pieces of data, an abstract sense of self projecting outward until a concrete reality formed around it. Lea suddenly became aware of the floor beneath her—a stark white platform that tapered into walls of equal brilliance, a halo effect that gave the impression of vast emptiness. Then the dimensions of the chamber fell into place, everything confined to a few square meters.

The transition made Lea dizzy but passed quickly. It happened every time, the confusion of reentry not unlike waking from an intense dream. She heard the inner door closing behind her, locks snapping into place and cutting her off from the outside. The space wasn’t much bigger than a prison cell—just a featureless, rectangular chamber that could have doubled as a deprivation tank—but to Lea, this was the one place she could truly feel free. On the inside, there was no such thing as pretense, no reason for secrecy—just the total liberation that came from being where surveillance could never follow.

An interface chair stood at the center of the chamber, electrodes sprouting from its head. Body straps dangled at its sides, suggesting dark relics that had never been used. Lea ran her hand along the chair’s contours as she walked inside. She had thought about it many times, imagining what it would be like, but had never dared to plug herself in. It was already far too easy to lose herself in here, even without the hard link. If she ever did try it, Lea doubted she would ever leave.

Instead, she perched herself on the end of the chair and rested her elbows on her knees. Directly in front of her, a glass screen stretched from floor to ceiling, across the entire width of the room. Her own reflection stared back at her from its surface, while behind an abject darkness seemed to swallow all light.

“I’m back,” she said to the Tank.

Lea waited a few moments for a response, but heard nothing. She stood and approached the glass, and only then did she realize that her reflection hadn’t moved with her. Frozen in still life, only its eyes followed her.

“That your idea of a joke?”

“Give me a break,” the reflection said, the voice of an old friend—not some approximation of speech. “Try losing
your
corporeal self sometime. You gotta take your fun where you can find it. Besides,” it finished, dissolving into dark matter, “it worked, didn’t it?”

Lea turned aside, her lips parting in a smile. She did her best to hide it, but her unseen companion knew her too well.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” it said. “You need to do that more often.”

“Maybe I will,” Lea said, one hand hovering over the Tank, just short of touching the glass. “When we can stop meeting like this.”

“I know a great place for sushi just up Church Street.”

“Sounds great.”

“It’s a date, then. Hold on a sec while I put something on.”

A bloom of color appeared beneath Lea’s hand, delicate strands of electricity radiating from her fingers. It swirled into a tiny cyclone, which quickly gathered speed and spread outward, drawing in blackness and ejecting a stellar mass of light. In an instant, the entire Tank was filled with oscillating constellations—ribbons of color assuming shapes and proportions, dividing and recombining like primordial life. Lea tried to follow the patterns, to find the logic inside the madness, but they only shifted in response to her stare. What existed inside the Tank was chaos personified, creation and evolution all rolled into one entity.

This is what God saw when He first got the idea for the cosmos.

Those elements gradually coalesced into a more concrete reality—at least in conventions Lea could understand. Novae and nebulae stretched themselves across the Tank, dramatic colors fading into white and forming a mirror image of the chamber where Lea stood. Planets and stars fell into one another, taking an amorphous shape that warped itself into an exact copy of the interface chair. Its back was turned to Lea, surrounded by strings of interstellar particles that sublimated out of an illusion of empty space—bright electrons assuming a spin state around one another, orbiting closer and closer until they gelled into human form. The glow subsided as it settled into the chair, which slowly rotated around to present its occupant to Lea.

The image of Cray Alden stretched out there, hands behind his head as if relaxing in a hammock on a hot summer day. He appeared so real that Lea started toward him, before the glass—and everything else that separated them—stopped her.

“You know how to make an entrance,” she said quietly.

“Nothing but the best for you,” he replied, cocking his head curiously. “Didn’t mean to make you blue, though. Maybe I should stick with the whole encapsulated universe thing.”

“No,” Lea told him. Seeing him was always more intense than she expected, more vivid—a clash of the physical and the spiritual. “Please…it’s not just you. It’s a lot of things. Just…” She hesitated over how much to say, while he looked on and studied her. “Just don’t go anywhere, okay?”

“No place I’d rather be.”

“I can think of a few places.”

“Sounds intriguing. You got a plan to bust me out of here?”

He was kidding, of course—a way to get Lea to accept his condition. How he came to be at peace with it was something she could never comprehend.

“Cray, I—” she began.

“Vortex.”

He cut her off at the sound of his human name. His tone was sympathetic but firm, as was his expression. Though Lea still thought of him as Cray Alden, he had insisted since his transformation that she call him by his hammerjack name—his own delineation between what he was and what he had become.

“Vortex,” she repeated.

Satisfied, he gave her a wink. He leaned toward her, while the construct around him shimmered in spots, the chamber breaking up and rearranging itself until he could assert more control over his environment. Even when he finished, gaps still remained—open gashes through which the flotsam of his bionucleic matrix moved in an iridescent flow. They opened and closed at random, rips in the fabric of his manufactured reality.

Something on the outside trying to look in.

Vortex released an impatient sigh.

“She gets jealous,” he explained. “You never know what’s going to set her off.”

On that cue, a cacophony of voices joined in a disjointed chorus. Mostly screams, they penetrated the walls of the construct—psychotic rants behind closed doors, like the halls of an insane asylum. Vortex waved them off, but couldn’t banish them entirely.

Lea shivered at the sound. She hated the idea of having
her
with them, a revenant spirit probing for a way to reenter the world—but she was as much a part of the matrix as Vortex, perhaps even more.

“How often does Lyssa come knocking?” Lea asked.

“All the time,” Vortex explained. “She likes to listen in on our conversations. Makes her feel connected.”

“Any problems?”

“Just the usual.” He slipped out of his chair and paced across the virtual chamber, looking up at the breaks as he went. They followed his every step, blinking like jagged eyes—just the sort of omnipresent shadow Lyssa liked to cast. “She’s always hanging out there on the edges, testing the limits of my consciousness. I don’t know if she’s mapping my defenses or just looking for company. With Lyssa, you never can tell.”

“So you’re in direct communication with her.”

“More than I want. But we’re both trapped in here, so it’s not like I have much choice. I try to humor her when I can, but her shit gets old pretty fast.”

“Like what?”

“Just mind games,” Vortex admitted. He turned back toward Lea and strolled up to the glass. “Psychouts, power plays—whatever you want to call it. Lyssa likes to think she wears the pants in this relationship, that she’s the dominant personality. I guess she figures if she can keep me off-balance long enough, it’ll happen.”

“What do
you
think?”

Vortex shrugged.

“I’m the one talking to you,” he said. “That’s worth something, right?”

“You don’t sound so sure.”

Vortex grinned. “
Now
you’re starting to sound like a systems shrink,” he laughed. “Don’t worry about me, Lea. We all have our encounters with duality. It’s one of the things that makes us human—or in my case,
keeps
me human. The only difference is that you have a conscience whispering in your ear, while I have an SI with psychopathic tendencies.”

He came off as glib and confident, just the way Cray Alden would. So much of his personality had survived the transition, it was easy for Lea to forget there wasn’t really a man inside the Tank. But she also knew that Cray used these kinds of tactics to conceal deeper truths.

Lyssa has him worried, even if he won’t admit it.

“But we’re not here to talk about me,” Vortex said. “We got bigger issues, like your mission in Chernobyl. How did that intelligence I uncovered pan out for you?”

Lea withdrew a little. She considered softening the news, but her hesitation tipped him off that something was wrong. Besides, it was all but certain he would find out the next time he took a pass at the CSS domain. Even though he was supposed to be a closed system, Vortex had fingers in virtual subnets across the globe—a modification Lea herself had engineered as part of his “therapy.” By mirroring outside networks to the CSS domain, she gave Vortex a localized link to the Axis—where he sniffed through millions of bits of seemingly unrelated activity, generating a real-time profile of the entire
Inru
organization. Without him, Lea could have labored for
years
to uncover what Vortex found in a few short months. He was the primary reason her hunt had been so successful.

Until now.

Vortex frowned. Even Lyssa held back, her voices going still—a radio tuned to an empty channel.

“What is it?”

Lea looked away from him when she spoke. She didn’t want Vortex to blame himself for what had happened—not when she was still beating herself up over it.

“You were right about enemy communications,” she explained. “They had a facility there, exactly as you expected. There was just a problem with the timing. We arrived on scene before the
Inru
contingent, and there was an ambush with heavy fire.” She paused. “Four of my people were killed.”