Firefall

  He went for some neurotrope cocktail on the rocks. I stuck with Rickard's.

  "Still old-school," Pag said.

  "Still into foreplay," I observed.

  "That obvious, huh?" He took a sip. "That'll teach me to try the subtle approach with a professional jargonaut."

  "Jargonaut's got nothing to do with it. You wouldn't have fooled a border collie." Truth be told, Pag's topology never really told me much that I didn't already know. I never really had much of an edge in reading him. Maybe we just knew each other too well.

  "So," he said, "spill."

  "Nothing to spill. She just got to know the real me."

  "That is bad."

  "What'd she tell you?"

  "Me? Nothing at all."

  I gave him a look over the top of my glass.

  He sighed. "She knows you're cheating on her."

  "I'm what?"

  "Cheating. With the skin."

  "It's based on her!"

  "But it isn't her."

  "No it isn't. It doesn't fart or fight or break into tears every time you don't want to be dragged off to meet its family. Look, I love the woman dearly, but come on. When was the last time you tried first-person fucking?"

  "Seventy-four," he said.

  "You're kidding." I'd have guessed never.

  "Did some third-world medical missionary work between gigs. They still bump and grind in Texas." Pag swigged his trope. "Actually, I thought it was alright."

  "The novelty wears off."

  "Evidently."

  "And it's not like I'm doing anything unusual here, Pag. She's the one with the kink. And it's not just the sex. She keeps asking about—she keeps wanting to know things."

  "Like what?"

  "Irrelevant stuff. My life as a kid. My family. Nobody's fucking business."

  "She's just taking an interest. Not everyone considers childhood memories off-limits, you know."

  "Thanks for the insight." As if people had never taken an interest before. As if Helen hadn't taken an interest when she went through my drawers and filtered my mail and followed me from room to room, asking the drapes and the furniture why I was always so sullen and withdrawn. She'd taken such an interest that she wouldn't let me out the door until I confided in her. At twelve I'd been stupid enough to throw myself on her mercy, It's personal, Mom. I'd just rather not talk about it. Then I'd made my escape into the bathroom when she demanded to know if it was trouble online, trouble at school, was it a girl, was it a—a boy, what was it and why couldn't I just trust my own mother, don't I know I can trust her with anything? I waited out the persistent knocking and the insistent concerned voice through the door and the final, grudging silence that followed. I waited until I was absolutely sure she'd gone away, I waited for five fucking hours before I came out and there she was, arms folded in the hall, eyes brimming with reproach and disappointment. That night she took the lock off the bathroom door because family should never shut each other out. Still taking an interest.

  "Siri," Pag said quietly.

  I slowed my breathing, tried again: "She doesn't just want to talk about family. She wants to meet them. She keeps trying to drag me to meet hers. I thought I was hooking up with Chelsea, you know, nobody ever told me I'd have to share airspace with..."

  "You do it?"

  "Once." Reaching, grasping things, feigning acceptance, feigning friendship. "It was great, if you like being ritually pawed by a bunch of play-acting strangers who can't stand the sight of you and don't have the guts to admit it."

  Pag shrugged, unsympathetic. "Sounds like typical old-school family. You're a synthesist, man. You deal with way wonkier dynamics than that."

  "I deal with other people's information. I don't vomit my own personal life into the public sphere. Whatever hybrids and the constructs I work with, they don't—"

  —touch—

  "Interrogate," I finished.

  "You knew Chelse was an old-fashioned girl right off the top."

  "Yeah, when it suits her." I gulped ale. "But she's cutting-edge when she's got a splicer in her hand. Which isn't to say that her strategies couldn't use some work."

  "Strategies."

  It's not a strategy, for God's sake! Can't you see I'm hurting? I'm on the fucking floor, Siri, I'm curled up in a ball because I'm hurting so much and all you can do is criticize my tactics? What do I have to do, slash my goddamn wrists?

  I'd shrugged and turned away. Nature's trick.

  "She cries," I said now. "High blood-lactate levels, makes it easy for her. It's just chemistry but she holds it up like it was some kind of IOU."

  Pag pursed his lips. "Doesn't mean it's an act."

  "Everything's an act. Everything's strategy. You know that." I snorted. "And she's miffed because I base a skin on her?"

  "I don't think it's so much the actual skin as the fact that you didn't tell her. You know how she feels about honesty in relationships."

  "Sure. She doesn't want any."

  He looked at me.

  "Give me some credit, Pag. You think I should tell her that sometimes the sight of her makes me shudder?"

  The system called Robert Paglino sat quietly, and sipped his drugs, and set the things he was about to say in order. He took a breath.

  "I can't believe you could be so fucking dumb," he said.

  "Yeah? Enlighten me."

  "Of course she wants you to tell her you only have eyes for her, you love her pores and her morning breath, and why stop at one tweak how about ten. But that doesn't mean she wants you to lie, you idiot. She wants all that stuff to be true. And—well, why can't it be?"

  "It isn't," I said.

  "Jesus, Siri. People aren't rational. You aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're—we're feeling machines that happen to think." He took a breath, and another hit. "And you already know that, or you couldn't do your job. Or at least—" He grimaced— "the system knows."

  "The system."

  Me and my protocols, he meant. My Chinese Room.

  I took a breath. "It doesn't work with everyone, you know."

  "So I've noticed. Can't read systems you're too entangled with, right? Observer effect."

  I shrugged.

  "Just as well," he said. "I don't think I'd like you all that much in that room of yours."

  It came out before I could stop it: "Chelse says she'd prefer a real one."

  He raised his eyebrows. "Real what?"

  "Chinese Room. She says it would have better comprehension."

  The Qube murmured and clattered around us for a few moments.

  "I can see why she'd say that," Pag said at last. "But you— you did okay, Pod-man."

  "I dunno."

  He nodded, emphatic. "You know what they say about the road less traveled? Well, you carved your own road. I don't know why. It's like learning calligraphy using your toes, you know? Or proprioceptive polyneuropathy. It's amazing you can do it at all; it's mindboggling that you actually got good at it."

  I squinted at him. "Proprio—"

  "There used to be people without any sense of—well, of themselves, physically. They couldn't feel their bodies in space, had no idea how their own limbs were arranged or even if they had limbs. Some of them said they felt pithed. Disembodied. They'd send a motor signal to the hand and just have to take it on faith that it arrived. So they'd use vision to compensate; they couldn't feel where the hand was so they'd look at it while it moved, use sight as a substitute for the normal force-feedback you and I take for granted. They could walk, if they kept their eyes focused on their legs and concentrated on every step. They'd get pretty good at it. But even after years of practice, if you distracted them in mid-step they'd go over like a beanstalk without a counterweight."

  "You're saying I'm like that?"

  "You use your Chinese room the way they used vision. You've reinvented empathy, almost from scratch, and in some ways—not all obviously, or I wouldn't have to tell you this—but in some ways yours is better than the
original. It's why you're so good at synthesis."

  I shook my head. "I just observe, that's all. I watch what people do, and then I imagine what would make them do that."

  "Sounds like empathy to me."

  "It's not. Empathy's not so much about imagining how the other guy feels. It's more about imagining how you'd feel in the same place, right?"

  Pag frowned. "So?"

  "So what if you don't know how you'd feel?"

  He looked at me, and his surfaces were serious and completely transparent. "You're better than that, friend. You may not always act like it, but—I know you. I knew you before."

  "You knew someone else. I'm Pod-man, remember?"

  "Yeah, that was someone else. And maybe I remember him better than you do. But I'll tell you one thing." He leaned forward. "Both of you would've helped me out that day. And maybe he would've got there with good ol'-fashioned empathy while you had to cobble together some kind of improvised flowchart out of surplus parts, but that just makes your accomplishment all the greater. Which is why I continue to stick it out with you, old buddy. Even though you have a rod up your ass the size of the Rio Spire."

  He held out his glass. Dutifully, I clinked it against my own. We drank.

  "I don't remember him," I said after a while.

  "What, the other Siri? Pre-Pod Siri?"

  I nodded.

  "Nothing at all?"

  I thought back. "Well, he was wracked by convulsions all the time, right? There'd be constant pain. I don't remember any pain." My glass was almost empty; I sipped to make it last. "I—I dream about him sometimes, though. About— being him."

  "What's it like?"

  "It was—colorful. Everything was more saturated, you know? Sounds, smells. Richer than life."

  "And now?"

  I looked at him.

  "You said it was colorful. What changed?"

  "I don't know. Maybe nothing. I just— I don't actually remember the dreams when I wake up any more."

  "So how do you know you still have them?" Pag asked.

  Fuck it I thought, and tipped back the last of my pint in a single gulp. "I know."

  "How?"

  I frowned, taken aback. I had to think for a few moments before I remembered.

  "I wake up smiling," I said.

  IT WENT BAD from the moment we breached. The plan had called for precise havoc along the new beachhead, subtly arranged to entrap some blood-cell-with-waldoes as it sought to repair the damage. Our job had been to set the trap and stand back, trusting Sarasti's assurances that we would not have long to wait.

  We had no time at all. Something squirmed in the swirling dust the moment we breached, serpentine movement down the hole that instantly kicked Bates renowned field initiative into high gear. Her grunts dived through and caught a scrambler twitching in their crosshairs, clinging to the wall of the passageway. It must have been stunned by the blast of our entry, a classic case of wrong-place-wrong-time. Bates took a split-second to appraise the opportunity and the plan was plasma.

  One of the grunts plugged the scrambler with a biopsy dart before I even had a chance to blink. We would have bagged the whole animal right then if Rorschach's magnetosphere hadn't chosen that moment to kick sand in our faces. As it was, by the time our grunts staggered back into action their quarry was already disappearing around the bend. Bates was tethered to her troops; they yanked her down the rabbit hole ("Set it up!" she yelled back at Sascha) the moment she let them loose.

  I was tethered to Bates. I barely had a chance to exchange a wide-eyed look with Sascha before being yanked away in turn. Suddenly I was inside again; the sated biopsy dart bounced off my faceplate and flashed past, still attached to a few meters of discarded monofilament. Hopefully Sascha would pick it up while Bates and I were hunting; at least the mission wouldn't be a total loss if we never made it back.

  The grunts dragged us like bait on a hook. Bates flew like a dolphin just ahead of me, keeping effortlessly to the center of the bore with an occasional tweak of her jets. I careened off the walls just behind, trying to stabilize myself, trying to look as though I too might be in control. It was an important pretense. The whole point of being a decoy is to pass yourself off as an original. They'd even given me my own gun, pure precaution of course, more for comfort than protection. It hugged my forearm and fired plastic slugs impervious to induction fields.

  Just Bates and I, now. A pacifist soldier, and the odds of a coin toss.

  Gooseflesh prickled my skin as it always had. The usual ghosts scrabbled and clawed through my mind. This time, though, the dread seemed muted. Distant. Perhaps it was just a matter of timing, perhaps we were moving so quickly through the magnetic landscape that no one phantom had a chance to stick. Or maybe it was something else. Maybe I wasn't so afraid of ghosts because this time we were after monsters.

  The scrambler seemed to have thrown off whatever cobwebs our entrance had spun; it surged along the walls now at full speed, its arms shooting ahead like a succession of striking snakes, slinging the body forward so fast the drones could barely keep it in sight, a writhing silhouette in the fog. Suddenly it leapt sideways, sailing across the width of the passageway and down some minor tributary. The grunts veered in pursuit, crashing into walls, stumbling—

  —stopping—

  —and suddenly Bates was braking hard, shooting back past me as I flailed with my pistol. I was past the drones in the next instant; my leash snapped tight and snapped back, bringing me to a dead drifting stop. For a second or two I was on the front line. For a second or two I was the front line, Siri Keeton, note taker, mole, professional uncomprehender. I just floated there, breath roaring in my helmet, as a few meters further on the walls—

  Squirmed...

  Peristalsis, I thought at first. But this motion was utterly unlike the slow, undulating waves that usually rippled along Rorschach's passageways. So hallucination, I thought instead— and then those writhing walls reached out with a thousand whiplike calcareous tongues that grabbed our quarry from every direction and tore it to pieces...

  Something grabbed me and spun me around. Suddenly I was locked against the chest of one of the grunts, its rear guns firing as we retreated back up the tunnel at full speed. Bates was in the arms of the other. Seething motion receded behind us but the image stayed stuck to the backs of my eyes, hallucinatory and point-blank in its clarity:

  Scramblers, everywhere. A seething infestation squirming across the walls, reaching out for the intruder, leaping into the lumen of the passageway to press their counterattack.

  Not against us. They had attacked one of their own. I'd seen three of its arms ripped off before it had disappeared into a writhing ball in the center of the passageway.

  We fled. I turned to Bates—Did you see—but held my tongue. The deathly concentration on her face was unmistakable even across two faceplates and three meters of methane. According to HUD she'd lobotomized both grunts, bypassed all that wonderful autonomous decision-making circuitry entirely. She was running both machines herself, as manually as marionettes.

  Grainy turbulent echoes appeared on the rear sonar display. The scramblers had finished with their sacrifice. Now they were coming after us. My grunt stumbled and careened against the side of the passage. Jagged shards of alien décor dug parallel gouges across my faceplate, tenderized chunks of thigh through the shielded fabric of my suit. I clenched down on a cry. It got out anyway. Some ridiculous in-suit alarm chirped indignantly an instant before a dozen rotten eggs broke open inside my helmet. I coughed. My eyes stung and watered in the reek; I could barely see Seiverts on the HUD, flashing instantly into the red.

  Bates drove us on without a word.

  My faceplate healed enough to shut off the alarm. My air began to clear. The scramblers had gained; by the time I could see clearly again they were only a few meters behind us. Up ahead Sascha came into view around the bend, Sascha who had no backup, whose other cores had all been shut down on Sarasti's orders. Susan had pr
otested at first—

  "If there's any opportunity to communicate—"

  "There won't be," he'd said.

  —so there was Sascha who was more resistant to Rorschach's influence according to some criterion I never understood, curled up in a fetal ball with her gloves clamped against her helmet and I could only hope to some dusty deity that she'd set the trap before this place had got to her. And here came the scramblers, and Bates was shouting "Sascha! Get out of the fucking way!" and braking hard, way too soon, the scrambling horde nipping at our heels like a riptide and Bates yelled "Sascha!" again and finally Sascha moved, kicked herself into gear and off the nearest wall and fled right back up the hole we'd blown in through. Bates yanked some joystick in her head and our warrior sedans slewed and shat sparks and bullets and dove out after her.

  Sascha had set the trap just within the mouth of the breach. Bates armed it in passing with the slap of one gloved hand. Motion sensors were supposed to do the rest— but the enemy was close behind, and there was no room to spare.

  It went off just as I was emerging into the vestibule. The cannon net shot out behind me in a glorious exploding conic, caught something, snapped back up the rabbit hole and slammed into my grunt from behind. The recoil kicked us against the top of the vestibule so hard I thought the fabric would tear. It held, and threw us back against the squirming things enmeshed in our midst.

  Writhing backbones everywhere. Articulated arms, lashing like bony whips. One of them entwined my leg and squeezed like a brick python. Bates' hands waved in a frantic dance before me and that arm came apart into dismembered segments, bouncing around the enclosure.

  This was all wrong. They were supposed to be in the net, they were supposed to be contained...

  "Sascha! Launch!" Bates barked. Another arm separated from its body and careened into the wall, coiling and uncoiling.

  The hole had flooded with aerosol foam-core as soon as we'd pulled the net. A scrambler writhed half-embedded in that matrix, caught just a split-second too late; its central mass protruded like some great round tumor writhing with monstrous worms.