The Scorpion Rules (39 page)

Da-Xia and Elián both looked at me.

“Greta,” said Talis. “You should get some sleep.”

I glanced upward, to the fading sky, and inward, for the clock. “Is it late?”

“It's been a big day,” drawled Elián. My datastore compared that drawl to previous examples and tagged it as defensive hurt/anger, though I was not sure why he was hurt/angry. His friend (Greta) had been in pain and danger, but everything was fine, now.

“It's not particularly late,” said Talis. “Nevertheless.”

“All right.” I turned to go to my cell.

“Go with her,” said Talis, softly.

No one answered him.

“One of you,” he said. “I don't care which. Keep her isolated, but one of you go with her. Call me if she screams.”

I remembered that Greta had wondered if Talis could sleep, and later if Talis needed sleep. In the days that came after my death, I learned: a body needs sleep. Greta's, just then, needed vast stretches of sleep, to settle the uproar the grey room had made in the organic brain. A body's mechanism for that settling was, of course, dreams.

So it—she—I. I dreamt. Intense, disordered dreams. Near to dawn on that first night I dreamt a disjointed version of the business with the apple press, and woke up gasping, my hand (I had forgotten to have it knit) pierced with pain. “Xie—” I heard my rough voice rise, uncommanded. “Xie!”

She came scrambling to me. “Greta!”

“I dreamt—”

For a moment our eyes locked, and something happened that went beyond registration or recognition. Da-Xia drew air and leaned backward. The moment seemed to vibrate between us. Then she let the air out again as both breath and name: “Greta? Greta, come back to me . . .”

“Why would I come back to you?”

I was puzzled, because I hadn't gone anywhere.

At my words, Da-Xia's face shattered into a configuration Greta had never seen before. She ran from the room.

From then on Elián sat with me.

They wouldn't let me out of my cell, but that didn't trouble me. I was tired. I slept; I ate. Elián sat with me, or more often worked at pacing a groove into the floor.

We were waiting for the Swan Riders that Talis had mentioned. When they came, we—Talis and I—would go with them to the Red Mountains, the flooded bit of the Rockies that was home to master copies of the surviving AIs.

“Why do I need to go with you?” I asked Talis when he came to visit. “I hardly know you. I don't even like you.”

Elián snorted, and Talis ignored him. “Ah, come on, I'm profoundly compelling. Everybody says so.”

“Also, I've never been on a horse.”

“Okay, that bit could be a problem.” Talis shrugged his most profoundly compelling shrug. “We'll work it out. But you need to go, Greta. Think of it as . . . finding yourself.”

“I'm right here.”

Which made both Elián and Talis stare at me.

So. We waited.

There were three Riders coming. One would take over the Precepture. The other two would escort Talis and me.

“Strength in numbers,” said Talis. “Just in case.”

Elián, the son of a great line of strategists, turned sharply at that. “In case of what?”

“In case of anything. Discretion is my favorite part of valor.”

“I'll bet,” said Elián.

“As for you, Elián Palnik . . .” Talis grinned and I tagged it as a predatory grin, meant to disturb. “They're bringing you a horse and a map.”

The word was ambiguous. “A smartmap?” I asked. A smartmap could find locations from positioning satellites, detect water and catalog plants, provide current information on settlements and cities, more.

“If it's not a smartmap,” said Elián, “then you might as well shoot me in the head.”

“Ooo, tempting!” Talis tilted an eyebrow twenty-three degrees. “Greta, dear. Does anyone in the Precepture have a gun?”

“I don't think so.” I turned to Elián. “Do you know how to use a horse?”

That made him laugh roughly: a laugh with tears behind it. I was not sure why.

Two days, three.

In the day it was glorious. My body sat in its little cell, but inside me the data seemed infinite. I could close my eyes and picture a library like a forest, its columnar shelves going back and back, and no glimpse of an end to them. Whatever I needed, came—leaping, eager, easy. Someone left a pitcher of asters and coneflower outside the door, and I sat for three hours staring at them. Through my new eyes the homely flowers—the whole world—shone as if new.

The organic memories rose too, more often, now that the brain was not so acutely injured. I had lived eleven-sixteenths of my life within the walls of the Fourth Precepture: there were memories soaked into the stone. The organic mind pushed at the inductive webbing; the webbing shoved the organics into correct positions, and both were me.

I dreamt and dreamt.

I was becoming something—twofold. When I leaned on the wall, I remembered that the stones were cooler at night, and remembered that the specific heat of granite was only 790 joules per kilogram. They were two different kinds of memory, and having both was not always easy. My skin was both my skin and a mesh of sensors. Sometimes I was sure it would not hold me, that I would come apart like sugar in water. Sometimes I simply knew I was larger than my own skin, and the thought did not bother me.

On the third night I dreamt that I went up among the graves. I walked in grass and tangled plants up to my waist. They brushed my arms. The sky was so open that if you made a sound there, it was tiny, swept away. I came to a crater and I climbed down into it, and stood in the open, blasted space. Scratching through the plants had left my bare arms and legs blistered. My limbs were thick with blisters the way a stem gets thick with frogs' eggs, my body encased in translucent, gelatinous polyps. I sat down and waited for them to hatch.

Not once in the dream was I afraid.

But I woke sharply and felt swollen and—

I leapt up. I ran my fingers down my arms, my legs, turning my sensors up as high as they would go.

“What's wrong?” said Elián, rolling over in Xie's bed.

“Perhaps it is nothing,” I said. “It is nothing. A dream.”

I let my arms fall to my sides. There was nothing, nothing.

No, there was too much. Too much in me. Surely it would break me open.

I felt my body shivering—no, shaking.

Elián had staggered out of bed to stand in front of me. In the darkness he touched my hair, softly. “It's not nothing.”

“The AIs—” I said. The
other
AIs. It would be factual to include myself in the grouping, but the phrasing did not come naturally. “There is a statistical cluster of anomalous neurological events on the third day after the upload. What was once called ‘skinning.' ”

“Yeah, I remember. The Abbot made Talis warn you.” The cell was starlight-dim, and Elián was only a shape. I turned up my infrared vision to try to see him, but it made him look ghostly. I could see his eye sockets, as if he were a skull. He squinted and pushed his fists into those hollows. I looked away.

“So, skinning—what happens?” asked Elián. “What happened to the AIs?”

They had died. Mostly they had died. They'd gotten caught in a feedback loop, overloaded, died. I said nothing.

I felt Elián's hands settle on both my shoulders. “Greta? What did you dream about?”

“Hatching,” I said. “I was . . . hatching.”

“You're obviously not going to
hatch
.”

No,
I thought. I was not going to hatch. I had two skins, but there was nothing inside me, nothing to come out, because there was nothing in my heart.

Unless. Unless there was.

“I think . . . ,” I said, slowly. “I think you should keep me away from Xie.”

“But you—” Elián cut himself off, not quite able to say it. “Greta, don't you remember how you feel about Xie?”

I said nothing.

Elián stared at me in the darkness—almost four seconds of silence, which might have been his new record. But of course he couldn't hold it. “Come on,” he murmured, and pulled me to him. “Come on. Talis said you should sleep. Sleep. It's late, or early, or something.”

“It's four thirty-seven.”

“See?”

But there were eggs in my sleep, eggs made of skin. My body stood there in the darkness, with Elián's hands holding my upper arms. My skin was rigid.

“Come on.” I tagged his tone as coaxing: I had heard him speak thus to a skittish goat. “Lie down. I'll sit with you. I'll keep you safe. Just lie down.”

There was really nothing else to do. Elián sat down at the head of Xie's cot, pushed the pillow down to rest beside one leg, and patted it as if I were a dog he were inviting up. And like a dog—like a machine, like a good hostage—I obeyed. I lay down with my head at his knee. I could smell Xie on the pillow; smell Elián, too. Smell is the first sense to develop in utero and retains powerful connections to the primitive mind—particularly to the amygdala, which processes emotion. More succinctly, it triggers memory. As I lay there, my limbic system struggled into life. Deformed memories crawled loose from my damaged brain. Landed all over me like moths. I was covered in them.

Then Elián put his hand in my unlocked hair. Not much weight, but some. He was holding me down, pushing me under. And that was enough. I was tired enough, damaged enough, that I did sink away.

When I woke up, Da-Xia was there.

I knew at once that she was going to kill me.

X
ie. I fluttered awake, and she was leaning over me.

I leapt from the cot and backed away from her.

“Greta?” She extended a hand toward me. A structure inside my parietal lobe lifted the sensation of her touch into my nervous system. My lips flushed; my stomach tightened. The sensation dropped down across my one, two, three skins, like water rolling down steps of ice.

Cascade.

The other AIs. They had died.

And this is what had happened to them. They had layers; they had two skins, two sets of memories, two ways of thinking. Some of them, a few of them, had found a way to live with that, to build a new self on that strange and shifting foundation. But most had not. Give one of these self-less creatures something that powerfully stimulates both sets of memories, the two memories rise, reinforce each other, feed back, overload.

I had backed all the way into the wall, and it was not nearly far enough. Our cell was small and thick with memories.

“Greta?” said Xie. “I only wanted—”

Strong light was coming through the glass ceiling, high morning, 9:53 a.m. The stones at my back were heating already. Their specific heat was 790 joules per kilogram. I grabbed them desperately.

“Greta?” said Elián.

“Get Talis,” whispered Xie.

“He said, if she was screaming—”