The Scorpion Rules (38 page)

Yes.

The grey room. The beams—gone. The collimators and emitters, no longer firing, are supercooled points, as blue as stars in my overlaid vision—and the lights are out. And I am floating alone in darkness, in stars.

Information.

The memory of making love with Da-Xia presents itself on the recently accessed list, below the origin of the term “cascade failure” and the theory of quantum chromodynamics.

Clock.

Twenty-nine minutes, fifty-four seconds.

Since when?

Since the command count received.

Recently accessed memory: counting breaths.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven—partial list of digits/real numbers/positive integers. Someone counting breaths. Greta. Time to check on Greta.

She is not breathing.

Rectify: command breathe.

She takes a breath.

Inventory: datastore running hot; redirect lymph for cooling. Severe bruising, frontal boss of the skull. Residual currents in inductive webbing. Hormonal imbalance: adrenaline, cortisol, serotonin. Minor fracturing, metacarpal of left thumb; scaphoid carpal of left wrist.

That is—

(Hang on, Greta. Hang on fiercely.)

That is ironic, isn't it?

Why?

Recently accessed memory: struggling against the straps. Breaking. Compare. Twice broken.

Ironic, because—

I should breathe again, shouldn't I?

I take a breath.

And.

To claim that . . . I had been tortured. To be
I
was to claim that. Review the file apple press: terror, pain.

What advantage in that? Easier to close the file. Close the
I
.

The memory comes without me calling for it, this time, rising in the organic structures and overlaying itself on the webbing, so that I feel it twice: Talis's blue eyes, which are Rachel's eyes, and Talis the bird behind them, trapped.

Stubborn as a mule with a toothache. Reasonable tolerance for pain. All in all, Greta—

And another voice:
There is a fair chance that what's left of you won't be recognizable. That you won't, in any meaningful way, survive.

Recognizable. I recognize this body, Greta's body, wrapped around me like a dress, constricting.

My ribs cannot move—I cannot breathe. I am only a painting, and yet I need to breathe. Then the artist—and it is Elián, of course, Elián—

Elián. And Xie, taking my hand. I know it by shape. Da-Xia.

I am not a painting. “Greta?” Her voice comes softly. I hear the tears move behind it. “Oh, please . . . Greta?”

I open Greta's eyes.

They are both there, Elián Palnik and Li Da-Xia, and each is fumbling with a buckle at my hands. Talis is leaning against the far wall with his foot tucked up, looking casual but with all his sensors on full: he is blazing like something falling to Earth.

The buckle on Da-Xia's side comes free. She seizes that hand, lifts it toward her face.

That hand is broken.

“That hand is broken,” I say.

“Oh!” Flushed, she puts the hand back. “I didn't—”

“I've overridden the pain,” I say. “You can hold it if you want to.”

“Oh,” she says again. She does not pick the hand back up.

Elián frees my other hand but does not touch me. “Can we get these screws out?” he asks Talis.

“It's called a halo,” Talis says, straightening up and stretching. “Isn't that right, angel?”

“I'm not an angel,” I say.

Angels are pure souls without bodies. Demons are the ones who possess, and ghosts are the dead, still living. I might be either a demon or a ghost, but—but—

“What are you, then?” says Talis softly, privately, his sensors aglow.

I know it is important. I am as curious as he to discover the answer. We wait through 3,451 milliseconds of processing silence.

“I'm a monster,” I say.

A smile comes onto his face, then, like bindweed growing across a grave. “Welcome to the club.”

U
nbolted, unbuckled, I sat up and made an inventory. The organic structures of the brain were of course disrupted by the mapping current, and presumably the damage there would be extensive, but it didn't matter. The datastore had captured both the memory and the sub-memory “instincts” that drove necessary functions—breathing and whatnot. From the datastore these moved through the inductive webbing. It was working flawlessly, pushing and pulling the brain exactly as it needed to.

Meanwhile the body. Its physiological death seemed to have been brief; the damage was minimal. The bruising to the skull could potentially have implications; I made a note to look into it. The rest was little more than aches and pains, and bothered me not at all.

I laced my fingers together and pushed my palms out, cracking the joints—a huge rush of data there. Fingertips reporting, tendons stretching, ears cataloging the cheerful pop of cartilage, the left thumb and left wrist flaring for attention like a child's sparkler.

“Don't hurt her.” Da-Xia. A crack in her voice.

I turned to her, blinking. Another rush, a cascade, of data. The subtle intricacies of reading meaning from the expression on her face: it was the most challenging thing I'd yet been called upon to do. Oh, it was glorious, feeling my new intelligences flipping through the memory of every time I'd seen her face, building the database, gaining mastery. I
liked
mastery.

But I could not read her now. “What do you mean?”

“The hand?” She put her fingers on my forearm. “You said it was broken.”

“No. What do you mean, ‘
her
'?”

She hesitated. “Greta.”

“I am Greta.”

And I was. I was a perfect duplicate of her memories, and at least for the moment wore her body. The only complication, in fact, was that the organic structures of memory did (at least in part) still exist. The datastore flipped through its catalog of Da-Xia's remembered face, looking for a fit for the current expression (immobility of the mouth, widening of the eyes). But meanwhile other memories rose from the squishy, murky depths of the mind—fragmented by the mapping, struggling like newly hatched butterflies. Da-Xia's face.

That image. It had come from, from—Greta. I am Greta.

“I am Greta,” I said again.

Da-Xia put her hand flat on my cheek. “You're not.” And then she turned and left the room.

Elián hesitated. “Are you— I mean, are you all right?”

“Certainly,” I said.

Talis said, “She's in minimal danger at the moment. Go with Xie.”

“Don't tell me what to do,” snapped Elián. And then he went with Xie.

I blinked at Talis, who blinked at me. Was it semaphore? Code? I couldn't decipher it.

“You're bleeding.” Talis pulled a one-sided smile and retrieved something from his pocket. It was a wipe in a small packet. He tore it out, reached up, and smudged away the blood from the compression wounds left by the halo screws. “Antiseptics, coagulants,” he said. “Stuff to force the scars.”

“It stings.”

He made a shushing noise. “Yeah. I know.”

“So I am in minimal danger?” I was not afraid. Though (my datastore was providing me with a complete catalog of the fates of AIs of the First Wave) perhaps I should have been.

“At the moment,” Talis said again.

The datastore agreed: statistically, historically, any deterioration was likely to happen later.
Skinning.
I wondered what provoked it.

Talis frowned at me. “Don't worry about it now.”

I obeyed, and easily. “Help me down,” I said. “I want to see everything.”

Outside the grey room, the world glittered with colors I was only beginning to see. Information overlays seemed infinite in their richness. It was—

Somewhat dazzling. Even the hallway, which I did not remember as interesting, was hung with information, gleaming virtual lights. It was like a Christmas tree.

The organic mind whispered about taffeta figured with flowers, champagne punch, and interview cameras. A nightmare.

My ribs felt oddly tight.

When I took the next step the complex dynamic equilibrium of keeping balance failed me. I staggered and fell to my knees.

Talis crouched beside me. “Dizzy?”

“No.” Dizzy was not what I was. The patellae reported on the force of impact, substantial but not damaging. Silly to think that would once have been a message of pain. I tried to get back up but again balance eluded me.

Talis's voice was soft. “Close your eyes.”

I obeyed. Greta obeyed. Something in me was glad to close that
I
.

“There,” he said. “Reducing stimuli will always help. Remember that. Don't be afraid.”

“I'm not afraid.”

“Keep your eyes closed, and get up.” I got up. “A few steps.” I took a few steps. “Got it?”

“I'm a roadrunner.”

“That's my girl.”

I opened my eyes. We were at the door of the misericord (late Latin “
misericors
,” meaning “compassionate”; noun, “a room in a monastery where the rules are relaxed,” or “a small dagger for delivering a death blow to a wounded opponent”). Xie was standing there, folded against Elián. He had an arm wrapped around her. They were looking at us. And they were shielding the doorway.

Talis's eyes went wide. He strode over and shouldered past them. In the doorway he stopped.

The datastore, which had been mulling through the names of the AIs who had died, provided me with the human names of two who had lived.

Michael Telos.

And Ambrose Devalera.

Talis looked in at the supine wreck of the Abbot and said, “Oh.”

I could see Talis's limbic response—his heart rate picking up, his skin conductivity rising. I wondered why he was allowing that, and I was not sure what it signified. “I wish someone had reminded me,” he said, and he sounded purely petulant, as if he were discussing an overdue library book.

“He asked us not to,” said Elián.

“Oh, and naturally you obeyed him,” snapped the AI. “Just for the change.”

“What will we do?” Da-Xia was ever practical. The Abbot had run the Precepture. Now he was dead. He had meant the running of the Precepture to be my job, but I was not ready to take it on. And in any case it sounded dull.

“Hmmm.” Talis's limbic response was subsiding. “Well. I've got Swan Riders incoming, to take Greta and me to the Red Mountains. I can put one of them in charge.”

I looked over at the Abbot. He lay like a discarded toy. He'd been such a finely made machine: it was sad to see such a finely made thing broken. The heat blush on Talis, his psychogalvanic response—could it be that? Could it be grief?

“Someone . . .” Xie hesitated. “Human?”

“Oh, you know,” said Talis, tugging at an ear. “Roughly.”