‘Okay, let’s get to it, shall we?’ said Aelvor. With a shrug he extended his own two additional metal limbs. Thorn noted incredibly complex hands on them consisting of two sets of three opposing fingers, selector discs for multiple optic and s-con interfaces, and a telescoping device that appeared to end in just a very sharp spike, but which he knew to be the presenting head for micro-manipulators—the rear section probably containing thousands of different micro-tools. With ‘hands’ like those Aelvor could probably remove von Hellsdorf’s brain through her ear and reassemble it outside her head.
As Aelvor moved in the telefactor immediately withdrew its connection to the woman’s aug.
‘The Sensic’s definition is not the finest but, through its synaptic links, it should be possible to run a memory search program. Unfortunately from her we’ll now only get mnemonically associated fragments—there’ll be no chronological order to them.’ He now made connection with his extra limbs to von Hellsdorf’s aug. ‘You may get a few seconds of childhood where she, say, picks up an apple and bites it. The next fragment may equally be her eating another apple, seeing some child from the perspective of adulthood, or being bitten on the tit by a lover.’
‘Curiously, I do know what mnemonic means,’ observed Thorn.
Aelvor grinned, ‘Of course you do, but with most of my processes running a thousand times faster than… normal, I find I have to make a deliberate effort to communicate by ordinary speech, so I over-compensate. You do realize Jack could easily do what I’m now doing, but AIs are very chary of the haiman inferiority complex and so like us to be included.’
Jack’s voice then spoke from the telefactor. ‘Your inferiority complex seems sadly lacking today, Aelvor… Incidentally, I have just monitored an adrenal surge in the patient.’
‘Memory fragment,’ said the haiman. ‘She just recalled a particularly protracted orgasm.’
Thorn noted how the patterns in Aelvor’s abnormal eye were flickering and changing.
‘Increase in salivary amylase, and stomach acids,’ Jack noted.
‘Crab paste on toast,’ Aelvor explained.
‘Heart rate high, enzymic—’
The woman was suddenly covered in sweat, then the capillaries in her skin turned bright red. One of the telefactor’s arms swept down, knocking away Aelvor’s connection. Thorn felt something slam into his chest and throw him back.
Hardfield…
He hit the wall and slid down. Subliminally he saw the same thing happen to Aelvor. Smoke boiling from the ceiling revealed a laser stabbing up from the telefactor. It reached out blindingly fast, its manipulators hooked under the woman’s armpits, dragged her upright, then with her it rocketed through the hole it had cut. The ensuing blast bowed the ceiling, and a column of fire washed down through the hole. Shortly after, the telefactor crashed back through, blackened, its shell buckled. Very little remained of Jane von Hellsdorf. The air stank of burning bacon.
The Jerusalem dropped out of U-space and cruised into the Cull system. In his own quarters Cormac called up the required views on his screen, and once again looked upon his old adversary. Then, whilst he observed Dragon hanging manacled over the ice giant, he cleared his mind and tried to find the gaps in his memory of events here. He recalled Skellor taking control of the local population and using them as hostages to ensure Cormac’s own surrender. He recalled being a prisoner in some Jain substructure aboard the Ogygian—the colony ship that had originally taken Cull’s inhabitants there from Earth. He recollected being utterly under Skellor’s control, but then things started to get a little fragmentary. He knew Cento had concealed himself aboard the Ogygian and, while a kill program in that ancient ship’s computer held Skellor in thrall, the Golem sabotaged the drive to bring that ship into an inescapable orbit around a brown dwarf. The King of Hearts—a rebel AI attack ship—had then fired grapples onto the Ogygian, and while Cento held onto Skellor, Cormac went out to sever them. Somehow he ended up on one of those grapples, and the King’s AI, rather than killing him for preventing it obtaining the Jain tech that Skellor possessed, had released him to deliver a message to Jerusalem: Honest, I didn’t get any, don’t hunt me down and kill me. But how did Cormac himself escape from that Jain substructure inside Ogygian?
Cormac could only assume that Cento must have released him from the enclosing structure, but something still bothered him about that. He closed his eyes and linked into Jerusalem’s servers, then created a search program to find himself there. Jerusalem had recorded him, repaired his brain, then downloaded that recording back to his repaired brain. Cormac felt certain the AI retained a copy… and there it was.
‘You will find that difficult to access,’ warned Jerusalem from the intercom in his quarters. ‘Your gridlink does not possess the capacity to sort out that mess.’
‘My mind is a mess?’
‘All human minds are a mess. Your gridlink is designed to access computer and AI systems, which are formatted much more logically. Anyway, since it is your own mind that you are attempting to look into, you will be in danger of cerebral feedback and might well end up in a psychotic loop.’
‘Well, then, you do it for me. I want to retrieve a memcording covering the time from my arrival at the brown dwarf up to when I ended up on that grapple.’
‘I fail to see why.’
Drily, Cormac stated, ‘Memory is something past, but experiencing a memcording is current.’
Jerusalem made no reply to that, but the link was made and the memcording flowed across. Cormac loaded it, experienced it. The first time through was hard for him, since the survival mechanism of memory always dulled the pain and the sickness originally experienced. The second time through, he saw it:
He fired five times into Skellor’s head, forcing the man back against the wall. Not enough though—Skellor was no longer human. Two shots to the chest, more to the knees as he tried to spring, and a hand blown apart as it pressed against the wall. Then Cento, scissoring his legs around Skellor’s waist, was tearing away wall panels to embrace a beam behind.
‘The cables,’ Cento urged over com.
Another clip into the gun. Back towards the blown screen… and there, at the corner of his vision, Jain substructure formed around the shape of a man rooted to the floor, its shell unbroken but no man inside it.
I was inside.
‘I would like to believe,’ said Cormac out loud, ‘that it is just an unfortunate accident that so critical a part of my memory is missing, but I am by nature a suspicious person.’
Jerusalem replied, ‘Your mind needs to heal further before it can accept that. It is something you did that you do not comprehend.’
‘Return it to me.’
‘I cannot. The human mind is a fragile structure at best. The memory of what you did then could be like the inverse of a keystone, especially with your mind in its present condition.’
‘I didn’t think I was that bad.’
‘Why do you think it has taken you so long to start reviewing your memories of that time? Doubtless the explanation to yourself is that only now are those memories relevant to your coming encounter with Dragon.’
Cormac wanted to sneer at that suggestion, but found he could not. Instead he said, ‘Can you at least tell me, in general, what I did?’
‘Oh yes: you used your own mind to translate your body through U-space,’ Jerusalem replied.
Cormac went cold. He shivered. That was purportedly what Horace Blegg could do, but Cormac no longer believed Blegg to be what he claimed. Could he be wrong about that? But he just could not encompass what Jerusalem had told him and felt himself teetering on the brink of some abyss. He tried to dismiss it, to focus on the now.