I might have screamed — but if I had, I don’t think anyone could have heard me. I didn’t hear anyone else’s scream.

Twenty

Invaders from Beyond

The impression that I was in the process of being unceremoniously killed can’t have lasted more than five or six seconds, but time really does become elastic when you’re in the grip of that kind of terror. The moments stretch as your mind tries to make the most of the little time you have left, and the terror is compounded by the tortuous strain of their extension. My IT must have been doing its best to help, but IT can only deal efficiently with the underlying physiology; consciousness remains a mystery, which works in its own strangely creative ways.

In retrospect, I suppose I should have been glad of the terror and the way it expanded to fill the horizons of time, on the grounds that it offered further evidence that I really was alive and that I really was myself. Alas, I wasn’t capable of being grateful at the time.

When the moment came to realize that I was actually in the process of being saved — that the walls were bearing me away to the pod where I was supposed to be, snugly and securely cocooned against any probable disaster — I was in no mental state to seize the realization. More hideous seconds had to tick by while I was lost in confusion, unable to recognize the mercy of my situation.

Somehow, the pod didn’t feel like a pod at all. My internal organs still seemed to be jostling for position, but now it was impossible to tell whether they were still confined by my body wall. I had a peculiar sensation of having been turned inside out. It was false, but it was the kind of illusion that my clever IT couldn’t even begin to cope with.

Subjectively speaking, it took a long time for me to reconcile myself to the fact that I wasn’t dead, or dying, or in pain, or mad…and that all I had to do to retake control of myself was to accept that I was still alive and still in the game. “In the game” was, I realized, the best way to think about my predicament. I had played my share of scary games while wearing a full-body VE suit. I had done this sort of thing for fun, and still could, if I could only calm down and go with the flow.

It wasn’t until I finally opened my eyes that I realized that I wasn’t blind. The ship’s AI could feed information to me exactly as if I were in a VE immersion suit — which, in essence, I was. Even then, it wasn’t until I had been looking out into a visual field filled with mile-high letters saying

PLEASE REMAIN CALM for at least three minutes that I remembered that I could still interact with the pod. I didn’t have to settle for the default setting.

“What’s happening?” I demanded, as soon as I figured out that I could make demands and get answers.

The answer I got wasn’t reassuring, but it wasan answer.

“The ship is under attack,” the voice of Child of Fortune’s AI autopilot told me. It wasn’t shouting now, but its slightly breathless timbre seemed perfectly appropriate to the gravity of the news.

“By whom?” I demanded, incredulously.

“I do not recognize the attacking vessels,” the AI told me.

It took a couple of seconds for the implications of that statement to sink in. Child of Fortunewas a state-of-the-art ship, if not quite the pride of the Saturnian fleet then not so far behind. It had to be programmed to recognize any spaceship built or employed within the solar system.

What the AI was telling me, indirectly, was that we were being attacked by aliens. Aliens from God-only-knew-where were trying to murder Adam Zimmerman. And me. Not to mention Niamh Horne, Christine Caine, Mortimer Gray, Michael Lowenthal, Michael Lowenthal’s bodyguard…

That was when it first occurred to me that the AI might be lying. I was, after all, in a VE suit, prey to any manufactured illusion the AI cared to feed me. I wasn’t even completely sure that I had been in meatspace before the melodrama had got under way, and given that this was melodrama through and through, the hypothesis that it was all fake couldn’t be ignored.

I tried to think it through.

If the AI was lying about the attack, then what I was involved in was a kidnapping. The ship had been taken over, and whoever had taken control of it was kidnapping Adam Zimmerman. And me. Not to mention…except, of course, that if the ship’s AI had been programmed to do all this, then it must be Niamh Hornewho was kidnapping Adam Zimmerman. And me. Not to mention Michael Lowenthal, etc, etc.

Or must it?

I didn’t like Niamh Horne, but the scenario that gave her the role of evil mastermind seemed, nevertheless, to be a much less worrying alternative than the ones in which we really were being attacked by aliens from God-only-knew-where, or hijacked by persons unknown. It was bad enough to have to worry about the posthuman races going to war with one another, without factoring hostile aliens into the picture, and the probability that anyone else could have masterminded the hijack of Niamh Horne’s ship seemed slim. In which case, Niamh Horne surely had to be the one who was playing us all for fools…

Nothing dispels terror more efficiently than a conviction that one has been taken for a mug. Emotional arousal is negotiable, and fear can be readily transmuted into anger.

“You lying bastard,” I said to the AI. “Tell me the truth. Where are we going? Why? In my day, one of the major driving forces behind the evolution of the artificial idiots the people called sloths into the artificial geniuses that people called silvers was the demand for sims that could answer the phone, filter the desirable calls from all the silvery junk, and reply adequately to those callers who only required simple responses. It would be an oversimplification to say that the principal functions of everyday AIs were telling lies and spotting lies, but it wouldn’t be too far off the truth. Ergo, I knew better than to imagine, even for a moment, that telling an AI to tell me the truth would be a viable command — but I was under stress, and we all do stupid things when we’re under stress. Even AIs do stupid things when they’re under stress.

“We are heading away from the sun,” the AI told me. “Should we contrive to evade the continuing pursuit, I shall seek guidance as to an appropriate destination. For the time being, I am making every effort to avoid being destroyed or captured.”

I had no alternative but to think: What if it istrue?

“Show me,” I demanded — but the supersilver came over all pedantic and didn’t respond until I made myself clearer. “Show me the ships that are attacking us,” I said, glad to be able to be businesslike.

The virtual space surrounding my gently cradled head was abruptly filled with starlight, but the controlling intelligence moved swiftly to dim the background glare and pick out four objects that might otherwise have faded into it. The viewpoint zoomed in, tacitly admitting that the image I’d be getting had been heavily processed in the interests of clarity.

One of the objects was easily recognizable as Excelsior. The other three seemed, at first glance, to be more closely akin to the microworld than to the Titanian ship. Unlike the vessel I was on, whose furled “wings” had linked it in my imagination to a seabird, the things that were pursuing us looked more like a small school of squid, all jetting along with their bunched tentacles trailing behind.

They were shooting at us, and hitting us almost every time. At least, they seemedto be shooting at us, the way spaceships in VE space operas that were dated even in my day shot at their targets. I knew that the lines the AI was tracing across the image were diagrammatic representations, and that they would have to be diagrammatic representations even if there really were ships pursuing us, shooting all the while. It had always been the requirements of melodrama rather than respect for realism that had forced tape programmers to depict space combat in terms of beams of colored light, but there was no other way for real spaceships to represent real combat in a readily perceptible fashion. Given that there was nothing out there that a naked human eye was actually capable of seeing, the only way for Child of Fortuneto answer my request was to feed me a fiction, together with the insistence that it was as accurate a representation of the reality as it could contrive.