“Yes.”
She looked up at me. “One could see how a woman might be driven to protect them.”
I felt guilty for not telling Singer the real reason I took the picture, but it had the effect on Lavinda I hoped it would make. “Will you help?”
She rubbed her eyes, and in that moment I didn’t see the aloof, powerful Majda, I saw an exhausted woman trying to do her job in impossible circumstances. She was the one who’d take the fallout for my actions, yet she was still willing to work with me.
Lavinda lowered her arms. “I’ll see what I can do.”
I was walking to my apartment through Aurora Park in Cries when my comm buzzed. I tapped it on. “Bhaaj here.”
The voice of Royal Flush snapped into the air. “You have to get here. Now.”
“Where?” Why was Royal calling me instead of Jak?
“The casino. Something is wrong.” The comm clicked as Royal cut the connection.
What the hell? I wanted to go straight to the casino, but I’d left my pack at the penthouse, which meant I had no light, water, weapons, or shroud. I took off at a biomech-enhanced run for my apartment, which would probably ruin my elegant, but right now I didn’t give a damn.
Jak’s casino was gone.
I stood where I had last seen his establishment, its walls half above the ground and half below, blending so well, it looked like part of the ruins. No trace of it remained today.
“Max, can you reach Royal Flush?” I spoke aloud, uneasy with the silence of this empty space.
“I’ve been trying,” Max said. “He either can’t or won’t answer.”
I walked around the empty area. Sure, I knew that nanobots in the structure of the casino could take the building apart and rebuild it elsewhere, but I’d never realized they could do such a thorough job in so short a time. Not even a footstep disturbed the dust. That was actually the only indication his casino had been here; the dust lay too evenly on the ground. Left alone for long periods, it tended to pile in drifts against the walls, tiny ones given the slight air currents down here, but enough to see. No drifts here.
“This is strange,” I said.
“Why?” Max answered. “He moves the casino all the time.”
“Yah, but Royal never calls me about it. He said something was wrong.” Ruzik had used the same word before he showed me Hack’s detector.
“I can’t contact the casino,” Max said.
“Comm Dara. She’s bartending tonight.”
“Dara doesn’t have a comm.”
I frowned. “Yes, she does.”
“I don’t have her code.”
“Of course you do. She gave it to me the last time I was at her home.”
“I will retrieve my file of the conversation.”
I headed back to the canals. “Did you reach her?”
“She isn’t responding.”
Our conversation bothered me. “Max, why didn’t you know Dara had a comm?”
“She never had one until a few days ago.”
I stopped walking. “You have a record of my conversation with her about it.”
“Yes, the record came up when you asked me to comm her.”
This was as strange as the disappearing casino. “No, you said she didn’t have a comm.”
“Then I brought up the record.”
“You told me you didn’t know her code.”
“I retrieved it when I brought up my file of the conversation.”
“Yah, but you shouldn’t need to go through all that with me.” I set off again. “You process faster than I talk. A lot faster. When I asked you to comm her, you should have brought up the record and found her code in less than a second.”
“It is odd,” Max admitted. “I will run a diagnostic on myself.”
He said it so easily. I wished I could run diagnostics to figure out myself.
“Do you still have your map of the route to Hack’s cyber den?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Good. I need directions.”
Hack ignored me when I showed up at his lab. He was playing Bronze Warrior with gamers in Cries. He’d become a maestro at the holo-mesh game. It wasn’t only that he designed his fighters better than most players, with a finesse his opponents lacked; his ingenuity also set him apart. He used a blend of the rough-tumble with tykado that in real life, Ruzik’s gang was perfecting, working for hours every day, as much for the pleasure of the athletics as because Ruzik wanted them to outfight everyone else. Hack’s gang worked with them, and that all went into his game here. I wondered how his opponents would react if they discovered that the warrior who dominated their contests came from the Undercity. They’d never know; Hack hid his mesh identity as well as he hid his lab.
I couldn’t wait, though, even if it meant interrupting the Bronze Warrior king. I said, “Hack.”
His avatar executed a roll that sent his opponents spinning in different directions. The holo jumped to its feet, shaking a spear modeled after a weapon used by the ancient warriors of Izu Yaxlan. They had all been women, but today both male and female figures populated the holo table Hack used as a game board.
“Got trouble,” I said. “Maybe bad.”
He held up his hand, one finger pointing upward, while he continued playing.
I squinted at the ceiling. Nothing showed up there except a few stalactites glinting with tech-mech. No, wait, those “glints” were function lights from the signals Hack received from the game. He was rerouting them through his own systems, disguising the source of his transmissions.
Hack dispatched his opponents, then laughed to himself. He snapped his fingers and the board disappeared. Standing up, he turned to me. “Eh, Bhaaj.”
“Good game.”
He grinned, but then his smile faded. “Got trouble?”
“Casino gone. Royal says something is ‘wrong.’ Same word you used.”
Hack tilted his head toward the back room. “Come with.”
I went with him. The detector looked the same as the last time I visited. Its seat resembled the bar stools in Jak’s establishment, covered in dark leather. In fact, it had the same glitter-buttons around its edge. I hoped Hack came by it fairly; stealing from Jak could land you in a shit load of trouble.
The bar stool, however was my least worry. I could fry my brain if I kept using a neural cap with no safeguards. I had to trust that Hack knew his business. Gods only knew what he could achieve if he ever had access to a top-notch cyber lab. He might come up with the Imperialate’s next miracle or he might freeze, his genius smothered by the constrained environment.
As he connected the cap to my brain, I lowered the visor and the world went dark. Whatever heads-up display he intended didn’t work. The machine hummed as I scanned the desert. Nothing. I scanned to the south and found the Lock slumbering in the desert. I had thought before it wanted to kill me, but the sense I picked up now, admittedly filtered through a cobbled-together detector, told me it felt no more emotion toward us than we did toward sand in the desert. It hadn’t “wanted” me dead any more than I wanted a grain of sand to die. I’d brush it away and go on with my business.
I continued my sweep and found Izu Yaxlan. It also seemed quiescent, not sleeping exactly, but simply existing as it had done for millennia. It felt different than the Lock, more benign. It liked its symbiosis with the Uzan, and through him, with the Abaj. The Uzan’s home was part of the machinery that supported the EI. It let him live within it, just as it let my people live in the aqueducts—
Ho! Izu Yaxlan considered the Undercity part of itself. I couldn’t imagine how the canals served that ancient intelligence, yet it left no doubt; whoever built the Undercity had done it in service to Izu Yaxlan. In contrast, it had no interest in Cries. The city didn’t interfere with Izu Yaxlan, so it ignored the desert metropolis.
I continued my sweep across the Vanished Sea. Today the detector seemed to work better. I suspected hadn’t picked up this much the last time because it ha
d taken my brain a while to adapt to the machine, not because the EIs cared enough about humans to hide.
I found another EI out in the desert, a modern system, one that felt military.
Max, I thought. Can you figure out the location where I’m pointing this gun?
The direction, yes. The distance is more difficult. I need the speed and angle of projectiles shot by the weapon. Except it isn’t shooting projectiles.
Can you tell if what I’m pointing at is above ground or below?
If it’s nearby, it’s below ground. However, the gun is aimed slightly upward. If the target is more than a kilometer away, it’s above ground.
What’s out there, both nearby and farther out?
Nearby, it’s rock and curving passages. Farther out, above ground, it’s desert.
Plot it out for me. We’d need to search a large area, but if I’d just found Calaj, she was probably in the desert. Hack would have known if any intruders came near his cyber den.
Done, Max said. I’m saving the maps in a file for you.
Good. Let the Majdas know if might be Calaj. I continued my sweep of the desert—
—and hit the wrongness.
Distance muted the signal, but I had no doubt it was the same EI I’d found before. It felt different from the Lock and Izu Yaxlan. This one wanted to eliminate disorder, particularly the messy humanity that had multiplied on the planet. Malice roiled over me, and recognition. It knew me, not as Bhaaj, but as part of the human infestation on Raylicon.
“Shit,” I said.
“Want out?” Hack asked.
“Yah. Fast.”
He untangled my brain from the neural cap with a deft touch that would put many a biomech adept to shame. “Done.”
I lifted the visor and squinted as my eyes adjusted to the light. “Max?”
“You want me to map the location of that last EI you found,” Max said.
“Yes. Look in the desert, farther away than Izu Yaxlan and to the west. I think it’s nearly at the limit of this detector. Anything out there besides sand?”
“Yes.” He sounded subdued. “The starships that brought the first humans to Raylicon.”
I jumped up from my seat. “That’s it! The EI is in the ships.”
“That isn’t possible,” Max said. “Your ancestors stripped those ships. People have studied them, generation after generation of military experts, engineers, anthropologists, strategists, religious leaders, and anyone else the Ruby Dynasty feels inclined to inflict on them. Nothing is left.”
“Talky EI,” Hack said.
“Good talk.” To Max, I said, “The ships are the EI. Something woke it up.” I shuddered, remembering its malevolence. “I think it destroyed whatever race brought my ancestors here. They managed to deactivate it somehow, before they died, so it couldn’t kill us. Now it’s awake again, and it wants to finish what it started, get rid of messy infestations like, you now, us humans.”
“How is Calaj involved?” Max asked.
“I don’t know!” I regarded Hack, who was listening intently. He probably understood every word. He would have had to learn the Cries dialect to talk with the game players in Cries. I smacked my hand against his detector. “You build. Why?”
“Find wrongness,” Hack said.
“How know anything wrong?”
He grimaced. “I felt.”
“He’s like Calaj,” Max said. “Like you. Like the pharaoh. A genetic throwback.”
“Could that be what Singer means by darkness?” I asked. “Not just the cartels, but also the EI out there?” No wonder she sought respite, if it was flooding her with malice.
“I don’t know,” Max said. “However, she is a powerful psion. What you call EIs are neural-machine interfaces designed to interact with humans who have an unusually large number of neural structures in their brain, some of which enhance brain waves, facilitating nonverbal communication.”
Hack scowled. “Too much talk. What say?”
“A psion’s brain is well suited to linking with the EI,” Max said.
“Humans didn’t make that wrongness,” Hack said.
I agreed. “Felt alien.”
“Your ancestors plundered the ship libraries,” Max said. “They based their EIs on alien tech.”
“Even so,” I said. “I don’t think humans created this one. It’s like an infection in the ships.”
“Selei transform,” Hack said.
I blinked at him. “What?”
“Selei transforms. Pretty math.”
If he understood Selei transforms, he had gone beyond what I knew. “What about them?”
“Transform thoughts,” Hack said.
“I think he means the theory of Kyle space,” Max said. “It involves finding the quantum wave function that describes the behavior of the particles in your brain while you have a thought.”
Hack frowned. “No ken your talky EI.” He pointed to me, then to himself. “Spatial close.”
Interesting. He used the above-city word for spatial. The Undercity dialect didn’t have one. He meant the two of us were close in space. “Ken,” I said.
He tapped his head, then pointed at mine. “You, me, think close, yah?”
“That’s right.” We were thinking about the same things, or at least we were trying to.
“Make fleck spatial places,” Hack said. “Now, not now.”
I had no idea what that meant. “Say again?”
“He means you can plot position as a function of time,” Max said.
Ah, okay. “Yah, ken,” I told Hack.
“Make fleck of thought places,” he said.
“Max?” I asked.
“It’s the Selei transform.” Anticipating my next question, Max said, “Yes, Pharaoh Dyhianna discovered it. She was a mathematician before she ascended to the throne. Apparently she was more interested in studying why her family can use the Lock than in actually being the person who used it.”
Having met her, I could believe that. “How does the transform work?”
“You plot the wave function that describes your thought as a function of position, then transform that function into a space that depends on the thought itself instead of position.”
“That’s a huge calculation.” Doable with our best systems, but complicated.
“It’s how the Kyle works,” Max said.
I’d never been any good at Kyle theory, but I understood the gist of what they were trying to tell me. “Hack, this EI in the ships, can it infect Kyle space?”
“Kyle?” he asked.
“Thought place.”
“Yah, I think. Infect everything.”
“If such a virus got loose in the Kyle mesh,” Max said, “no unprotected link on our interstellar grids would be safe. It could spread across the Imperialate.”
My head was throbbing again. I spoke grimly. “Pharaoh Dyhianna and her nephew, Imperator Skolia, protect the Kyle web. To destroy the interstellar meshes, the EI needs to kill them both.”
XV
Titans
Dara found me while I was running down the midwalk of a canal. She jogged up alongside of me and we ran together, our feet pounding the ground.
“Max commed me,” Dara said.
“Yah.” I slowed down. “Royal commed me. Said Black Mark had trouble.”
“Casino mesh went crazy. Jak closed up.”
“Crazy how?”
“Saying things wrong. Turned off air breathers. Slowed down fire monitors.”
That fit with Max’s strange behavior when I had gone looking for the casino. Whatever had happened to Jak’s systems had affected Max as well.
“Anyone hurt?” I asked.
“Gamblers pissed.” Dara shrugged. “Some fights. Bouncers stop. Jak stop.”
I could imagine. I’d never mess with Jak when he was angry. “Jak good?”
She slanted me a look. “You know better than me.”
“Not funny,” I growled.
She smiled. “Ja
k fine.”
“Black Mark good?”
“Black Mark gone.” She scowled. “I got no job.”
“Will open again.” People would always want to gamble, and Jak would always be willing to take their money. I was far more worried about what corrupted the casino mesh. Had Royal picked up the Vanished Sea EI? It made no sense that it went after the Undercity rather than Cries. Attacking Jak’s casino would have little effect on the human presence on Raylicon.
Unless . . . it was actually attacking Izu Yaxlan. The EI considered the Undercity part of itself, and Jak’s casino had fewer defenses than Izu Yaxlan. Did the Lock or Izu Yaxlan sense this other EI waking up out in the desert? Shit. Just what we needed, three giant EIs stirring from their millennia of slumber to wage war against each other.
“Collateral damage,” I muttered. “That’s us. We’re dead.”
“Eh?” Dara asked.
“Listen.” I slowed to a stop. “Warn Jak, yah? No one use tech-mech. No mesh. No comm. Tell everyone. Tell Darjan. Darjan tell Knights. Knights warn all. Warn riders! No mesh. No one!”
She stared as if I’d lost my mind. “Why?”
I didn’t know how to explain. I barely understood myself. “Aqueducts sick.”
She looked at me strangely, but she nodded. “Will spread the whisper.”
“Good. Go well.” I took off running again.
Dara called after me. “Bhaaj.”
I turned back. “Yah?”
“The healer. Rajin—” She stumbled on the name.
“Doctor Rajindia.”
“Darjan protects her.”
I nodded, impatient to run, but not wanting to turn my back on my closest friend. Darjan’s gang had taken the job of guarding the doctor during her trips to the Undercity. Rajindia had treated a few people for broken limbs and a baby with an ear infection. No one had taken her to the Down-deep yet, but apparently she’d asked to go.
“Good help?” I asked.
Dara hesitated.
“Not good?” Please don’t let this fail, I thought. Please. My people needed Rajindia.
Dara took a deep breath. “Healer says she can do birth proof. For birth certificate.”