The Forever Watch (42 page)

People want their children's children to be spared the burden of these secrets.

The cycle of life and death on the Noah is set in stone. The decades go by, and humanity is made to forget rather than heal.

Only, sometimes, mistakes slip through the cracks.

Most of our neural Implant functions have to do with monitoring our health, to warn the Retirement Office when a citizen is about to become symptomatic. At times, the automated monitors fail to catch the occasional rapid progression of the disease, and the remains are seen before they can be cleaned up. As with Callahan. Sometimes entire groups of witnesses need to be Adjusted. A child dying in a classroom. An old man drinking in a bar.

Occasionally, one of the weaker G-1s escapes into the unmapped regions, necessitating long, dangerous hunts in the dark. The Enforcers are not meant to combat dangerous crewmen; the police and ISec handle that. The Enforcers' true purpose is to keep the G-1s contained.

After keeping us waiting for an hour, the doors slam open, and Karla stalks in.

“What next?” I whisper.

She examines us,
reads
us, and smiles crookedly. She seems satisfied with our reactions to the Induction. She is all business and briefs us on Ministry operations. All of the ship's staff, including the Enforcers, have been put at the disposal of Information Security for the duration of the crisis, except for a skeletal crew of specialists required to keep basic ship functions going, as well as maintain lockdown on the G-1 Prison City.

The gates separating each section of the Habitat have been closed. One by one, the sections are being pacified by a combined force of ISec field agents, Enforcers, policemen, volunteers, and Adjusted conscripts.

“Pacified?” Barrens clenches his fists. His knuckles pop.

She lights another cigarette with the fire of her talent. “After the combat guys destroy all resistance, Behavioralists are sent in. One pocket at a time. Those who are willing to focus on the mission have the last month of their memories edited. Every single other survivor is Adjusted. The deepest form. We are still on the defensive here in Paris Section, until reinforcements arrive and it is our turn.”

When I ask her why, the indignation flames her cheeks pink. Barrens asks too. Her anger presses us back in our reclining chairs. I keep asking. About the drop in efficiency. About why such extremes are needed.

“Why can't you just dull their emotions? Enough to get them to submit? Why turn them into puppets? Given enough time, they'd still be willing to carry out the mission, even knowing that we all have the … Mincemeat. The first-gen crew managed.”

Her laugh is half-crazed, veering from genuine amusement to insincere scorn. “So naïve. Back then, humans were held together by the shared trauma of witnessing the end of Earth. The Council has written off this generation of crew. Free thought is too dangerous for them now.”

“I don't under—”

“Of course you don't understand! You two, two … fuckwads!” Karla tosses the cigarette away, incinerates it with a thought. Her power flings the ashes into a trash can. She sighs, lights another. “Oughta pull the guts out the ass of whichever of your mutineer friends decided it would be a great idea to put Psyn in the fucking
food supply
. The cheap grain/protein mash that most people have to eat for one or two meals every freaking day.”

Nobody believes in God, any God. We are raised to believe only in ourselves, in our responsibilities, our duties, on this long, lonely watch as the Noah traverses the space between the stars. I want to pray for someone to fix this. All those people, slowly being driven to psychosis.

But there is only us. We have to make this right.

“Can you picture it? Psyn making everyone edgy. Then the announcements and memories and documents and Mincemeat being broadcast on the Nth Web.”

Barrens's hands are gripping the table between us so hard, I hear the material flexing, starting to crack. “Okay. We get it.”

“Do you? This is nothing compared to how much worse it can still get.”

What is she saying?

“It is terrible, knowing about the Builders, about the disease. But why would that stop the mission? It is still the only hope for our species.”

Karla's lips twist into a sly smile. “Imagine a secret so much worse that just knowing it will cause a critical mass of the population to choose chaos, choose failure.” She blows smoke, directs it to linger around us, needles of irritation shaped like grim gray butterflies. She spits into the dregs of her coffee. “All that stuff you just learned. That is not the secret of secrets.”

What?

Barrens puts his hand on mine, shakes his head. “No.” He bites his lip hard enough to cut it. “It won't help us fix this.”

“Oh-ho!” Karla cocks her hip to one side, blows a kiss to him. “Oh-ho! Loverboy is starting to understand! He glimpses the forbidden fruit.”

“But—”

Hana. I don't want to know any more. We need to focus.

Survival is basic human instinct. Nothing can make so many people give up, not with the indoctrination we all grow up with. We are all taught from birth of the importance of the mission, it is explicitly taught by our Keepers, and more subtly reinforced with subliminal messages in our stories, in our music. No. Give up on the human race itself? Wait.

I collapse, fists against my skull. Just skimming the border puts the taste of death on my tongue.

“Dempsey!” Barrens's hands on me, gentle. “What's happening?”

“Please,” he begs Karla. “Stop it!”

She laughs. “It's not me doing that.” Ugly. Hateful. Karla's laughter is the most expressive vocalization she's got. “Every time you think in dangerous directions, ISec programming in your Implant will erase a little bit more of you. Better discipline your thought patterns—too much, and it will start scarring the wetware. You'll get seizures, go nuts. It's a security measure, to guard us, we guardians of dangerous data.

“Now, if you'll stop fucking around questioning procedure, we have work to do.”

Karla points a finger at Barrens. He jumps to his feet, staggers back.

Leon!

He presses his hands to his face. Breathes deeply.

“Just giving the man his assignment, darling.”

He is pale. But he steadies himself and drops his hands. Fumbles for one of his cigarettes. His face is stone.

“I—”

“You have your mission.” Her eyes flash green. “Go.”

Barrens looks away. He won't meet my eyes. He presses his lips to my forehead and murmurs, “See you later.”
Don't ask me, Hana. I'll still have to do it.

He stalks away.

“And now, you. While you slept, I took the liberty of
reading
your memories.”

What? But … How? That usually takes a Deep Adjustment session. It—

“Don't look so shocked. The package I put in your brain back at the detention center also includes a back door into all memories acquired after its installation. Surely you didn't think I gave you the keys just like that?” Karla blows a few more smoke butterflies about me. “Hah. And now this indignation from you. Delicious. Worry not, darling, I don't care how good he is in bed. And out of bed. I was saving time, or did you want to waste one week in debriefing sessions?”

I focus on the trembling of my fingertips. What could I do to her even if I wanted to hurt her?

“Excellent. Hold that attitude. Now. I have run your plan by the data researchers. That AI of yours is really something. They agree that your approach is our best chance for regaining control of the Nth Web.”

Wait. What? She's still calling it mine? “So. Impressed, were they?”

“Oh, yes. Very. They say you are the most brilliant machine learning savant of the age. For centuries, people have dreamed of artificial intelligence. They theorized about it, wrote stories about it, and failed at every attempt to make a real one, where you alone have succeeded. And in your spare time. They say that if your viral argument cannot grant you control over it, nothing can.”

How can she not know Archie's origins? Even now, I cannot get hold of my thoughts. They race over and over through my conclusion that Archie's growth is because of the Builders' algorithm fragments. Maybe I started it, but Archie is as much a product of the ship's environment as it is of my design.

“We've set up a software-development center for you down the hall. Room E55. You have a team and everything; better than the amateurs you had with you in the tunnels. You need to improve it, finish it. Chop-chop! Get control of your toy and we can bring the Nth Web back up, communications, ship controls, everything. It is only your creation that allowed this childish uprising to get this far. With it on our side, ISec will ensure nothing like this ever happens again.”

She can't read my thoughts about Archie. At all. Not even through her back door into my memories. How?

I am already walking out of her office.

Almost afraid to try it.
Archie?

A cheerful chirp sounds inside my skull. Impossible. Archie should be completely nonfunctional without the Network linking its components spread throughout the ship.

How?

I get a flicker of imagery, a young girl who looks like me, but is not. In my thoughts,
it
is there. And I understand. Ever since it first showed me the memory from the Builders, it's been there. It is in my head, in my dreams, riding on the nanoprocessors of my Implant. Just one part, one unit in the swarm. But the most important one. The true spark of sentience.

The last ghost of the Builders' intelligence, or perhaps the first being of a totally new form of life, exists in my head.

30

Karla may be an exceedingly powerful talent and a genius in many ways, but she is not a programmer, and the software-development center she said was ready for me is anything but ready. Its machines are centuries-old terminals. They probably date back to the first-generation crew. There are actual physical keys that click as we type.

The first task of my team is to adapt software to interface between the low-level machine language that runs directly on the hardware, and DREAM33, the latest version of the high-level language developed by the Noah's crew over the centuries. These ISec specialists might be able to work directly with alien assembly language, but I cannot. The bottom-level language requires intimate knowledge of the underlying structure, using unintuitive commands manipulating memory addresses, pushing data from here to there, adding this or that; it is clumsy and unforgiving and requires knowledge of quantum mathematics to even begin to properly manipulate the circuitry. DREAM abstracts away the intricacies of the hardware, lets a programmer deal in ideas and content and logic.

What is to be done with Archie must be precise and reliable.

At least, that is the lie I tell these young, gifted teenagers who look at me with a mixture of revulsion and awe. To them, I am a reformed traitor, but I am also the one to reach the holy grail of true AI, even if by accident.

It takes a day and a half to make the necessary modifications to the existing terminals.

Then it is my turn, and I show them what lies beneath Archie's skin.

I show them the same node map and structural-comparison tool I used in those last days of Barrens's Sanctuary. On our screens, those multicolored clusters of Archie's structure stretch out, so many stars across the black sky of the Nth Web. It is only a reconstruction pulled out of the snapshot from just before ISec pulled the plug on the Network.

As I show off a cladistics diagram suggesting the growth and differentiation of the differently behaving subtypes of the program children over time, I also construct for them a basic map of where I believe the most vital functions of Archie are hidden throughout these families.

So many glowing lines, so many windows showing comparisons across the populations, statistical analyses of polymorphisms in the code.

We sit at our desks, side by side, in front of banks of display tablets and keyboards wired into the terminals, tapping away, studying the intricacies of Archie's emergent structure. They propose strategies to probe the different populations to a finer granularity to better track where the control cluster might be.

All the while, I hide from them the results indicating the data contamination from the Builders.

In truth, all the real programming I need to do is in my head. I only need to make Archie's core, that kernel of sentience in my head, understand. I already know Archie likes me. What is required is for the two of us to understand each other. Once I can explain what I need, I am confident this central piece of its intelligence can handle propagating instructions to the rest of the Analytical Nodes once we bring the system back online.

I do not get close to my team of five. I just remember their names and faces. Maybe it is my constant fatigue, or just the accumulated stresses of … Barrens calls it “the Year of the MindFuck.” But I don't want to get to know these fresh-faced young people who look so focused and determined and idealistic. I am too numb.

I make little changes to what I already came up with back in the Sanctuary. I let them optimize it and test it against what existing subgroups of Archie are present in the Paris vertical farm's Analytical Node. Mostly particles focused on pattern recognition. They add more functions to the local copies of the swarm, preparing it for the greater role it is to assume: communications and data management across the ship.

Nothing humans have devised is an improvement on the alien hardware that came with the ship. Our tablets are clumsy, portable imitations of the hard-line terminals built into the Noah. Our neural implants are the crudest adaptations of the Builders' subtle nanotech augmentation.

All our improvements have been in software, and even in that, we have not caught up with the original work of the aliens, which is still too complex and different for us to even touch.