Flight of the Vajra (79 page)

“Let me guess,” I said, “you’d ask him yourself,
but his public office isn’t even taking your calls?”

“He says he’s going to be issuing a statement
tomorrow.”

Oh
, I thought. “Most likely after chewing
our ears. We’re supposed to be meeting with him later today, and that’s all I
can tell you because that’s also all I know.”

“I wouldn’t ask for more unless you gave it to
me.”

“And given that Ulli’s going to be there as well,
she’d probably lodge one of her toes in my eye socket if I did.”

“There’s a few other questions everyone is asking,
which I’m gambling you’ll have answers to. Who was this unidentified accomplice
of Marius’s, for one? Actually, let me ask it this way: Is it wrong for me to
assume you’re trying to answer that question right now?”

“Oh, no. Not wrong at all.”

“And what about the details of the agreement?
Marius traded all the hostages for that protomics dealer and for an
entanglement-engine module. What was so important about those things that he
was willing to kidnap over a hundred people, including Cioran, and hijack the
entire city’s infrastructure to do it as well?”

He had, by degrees, turned around from the edge of
the roof to face me, and was now leaning forward, hunched down with his hands
on his knees.

“We have an idea,” I said, “but even
we
think it’s absurd. But if it’s right, I guarantee you this: when this is all
over, you’re going to come back to me and say, ‘I can understand why you didn’t
want to talk.’
 
”

“It’s not over?”

“It’s not even
started
. And . . .
yes, that’s off the record.”

Anjai’s laugh was made mostly of frustration. “
Is
there anything you can tell me, off the record, let alone on?”

“Stick around,” I said, and laughed too. “It’ll be
worth it.”

I couldn’t convince Anjai I wasn’t laughing at him.

After Anjai left,
still shaking his
head, I turned off everything that didn’t absolutely need to be there and
concentrated on the simulation once again. The obvious thing to do, even if it
wasn’t the most efficient, was to start as far back in the program’s lifecycle
as I could and step it forward. The earliest incarnation of this thing was that
bier/coffin structure I’d unearthed on my own, and which I’d seen Aram emerge
from. Implication: the former was the assembly framework for the latter.

Start with the coffin, provide the full gamut of
programming available from the Aram sample, and step forward. A minute, an
hour, a day, ten days at a time. Dumping the state of the machine told me the
coffin’s external surfaces were configured to expect certain environmental
conditions—very little light, a good deal of liquid water, nutrients, a power
conduit. A receptacle near the foot of the coffin was for protomic substrate.
The requirement for darkness confused me, though: the programming didn’t
suggest it was a physical requirement, but more like a conditional setting. I
was even able to find what looked like an options manifest where that could be
toggled off.

What’s most missing from this thing, I thought, is
an instruction manual.

Probably missing on purpose, I thought. If you have
one of these things, it’s assumed you know what you’re doing with it.

The accelerated, simulated month flicked by at the
rate of a day every five or six minutes. Inside the coffin, layers of substrate
were extruded from the floor and lid of the box and sealed themselves together,
thousands of times, to form a mannequin-like blob. Parts of it knurled inwards
to form orifices; other parts of it subdivided to create fingers and toes; hair
extruded like unmowed grass. But there was nothing within that shell.
Artificial dermis, I thought; nothing unusual about that by itself.

Another segment of the program, which I had
manually disengaged, contained a routine some several hundred megabytes long.
Barely five percent of it was actual code; the rest of it was self-unpacking
data. It looked suspiciously like the kind of code I’d seen in medical
applications—

A DNA dump, I thought.

This whole thing
is
a womb, a womb for
hatching lots of bouncing baby Arams. The total “gestation” process would take
a month and change, modulated at the cellular level by a whole ocean of
protomics.

There was no way I could throw enough processing
power at the problem to simulate the actual gestation of an Aram, so I did what
any good programmer would do: I faked some test data, and skipped ahead as far
as I could.

Twenty simulated days later, a previously-untapped
section of the code was called, and one of my emergency surveillance
breakpoints kicked in. I’d set up the debugger to alert me if any part of the
swaths of code I hadn’t seen before were called, and this library had remained
completely untouched during the whole construction process. It was a network
library. This thing was trying to get on the CL grid and obtain a connection to
something.

More programming, I thought. This thing’s just at the
first stage.

—
Kallhander, I think you may want IPS’s
proxying analysis for this one
.

Kallhander connected, saw what I was pointing at,
and set right to work routing the simulation’s network proxy through the IPS’s
own stacks.

—
We were preparing to perform our own replay
analysis of the Aram source code
, he CLed,
but I gave them enough
excuses to do something else first. I imagined you would have more insightful
things to say anyway.

—Why, thank you. I’ve already got enough here
for a career or three.

—Henré, this thing is attempting to connect to
a repository on the planet’s grid—it looks like an encrypted file store.

—Ten to one that’s the second-stage payload for
this thing. A synaptic playback, from the look of it. First you build the body,
then you repopulate it with memory.

—
Bear in mind, we still have Aram’s body in
stasis. Now that we know how the program works, it shouldn’t be difficult to
customize its behavior.

—Wait. You suggesting we put him back into one
of these things, rebuild him from what’s left, and—?

—It would certainly save time over
reconstituting him from scratch, yes.

—Odds are you could do it faster than Marius
could, too. From looking this thing over, I get the impression it was designed
to make the most of very few resources—or to be used in a place where you might
not be able to check up on it regularly. There’s nothing that says the process
couldn’t be sped up on your end, right?

—
Only up to a point, but it would be a matter
of days and not weeks for the kind of regeneration involved. Anything less than
that introduces an unacceptable margin of error.

—This all reminds me of something. Given all
this, I’m surprised Marius didn’t seem all that interested in reclaiming Aram
and doing the same thing. I wonder why. It sounded like he could use all the
extra manpower he can get.

—You noted before the relationship between them
seemed fractious at best. Perhaps Marius decided he wasn’t worth the
. . . maintenance.

—Or he had plenty more of these where he was
going.

Which was—where? I thought.

—Also,
I went on,
this isn’t the first
time I’ve heard of or seen something like this. Extrude-it-yourself companions aren’t
exactly rare, just illegal and easily ferreted out. That and they weren’t found
much in the wild. They pop up on worlds where that sort of thing was at the
very least done by people who had the good sense to keep it confined to their
kitchens and bedrooms.

—If my own suspicions about this particular
model are on target, it ought to be kept under guard and on lockdown.

Armies, I thought. Armies on demand, and without
oversight. All you need is enough soil, literal and figurative, to plant the
seed in.

Which raised the question: who originally sowed
this particular seed in the first place?

Kallhander continued to deepen my fears: —
Again,
as you said, it’s not as if this is the first time. There have been military
applications of the same process in the past, but they could always be closely
identified with a particular world. This matches nothing on file; it’s a rogue
product.

—That much we both knew, I’m sure. How long
would it take to get things set up on your end?

—It’s happening as we speak. We should begin to
see results by sometime this evening—say, after the meeting with the Prince.

—At this rate, I think I’d rather talk to the
regenerated severed head.

—
His memory system did appear to be stored in his
chest, but I fear I’m not far behind you.

I suddenly had
half a day to kill. Enid
and Cioran had made up and were being thoroughly friendly, planning the concert
they hadn’t been able to give before. Ulli had jetted off ostensibly to bend
the Prince’s ear ahead of time; Kallhander had his hands full. Ioné was keeping
watch; most likely she’d seen my earlier Do Not Disturb Unless The House Is On
Fire warning and decided to let me be for now.

Like a still pond daring me to jump into it, an old
urge came back to mind. All that cumulative monkeying around I’d been doing
with the Aram program, both in its fragmentary early versions and in its
complete iteration just now, had left me feeling that much more emboldened to
go dig back up the analyses of the
Kyritan
and give them a new look-over.
Even as late as a month ago, the mere thought of doing such a thing sent me
scurrying back to whatever it was I had already been doing, emotional tail
between my mental legs. But now the urge to do that had grown, watered and
nourished by everything I’d been immersing myself in. It now seemed less like a
danger or a horror than some kind of macho dare, a way to prove I really had
come as far as I’d believed I did. The files were all still there in my CL. I
never throw anything out, even if the urge to do so eats into me from all
sides. There’s always just enough of me that’s not been eaten into that knows
better.

With no clouds in sight, the whole of the
cityscape around me looked as if it had been sputtered with molten sun. It
reflected at me from all those windows and from so many other facets that
happened to be pointed my way. On top of all this unfolded the CL-simulation
model of the
Kyritan
—first in its space-faring state, then detached and
linearized for elevator travel, then re-bound for planetary surfaces. The model
squirmed and wrung itself like a protein strand, flexing through each of these
states, as I overlaid it with the live telemetric data gathered from the ship’s
own sensory surfaces.

Unexpected and catastrophic system integrity
failure across several of the ship’s structural nodes.
Those nodes had been
the backbone of the ship in and around the main ballroom and its auxiliary
lounge; their failure had allowed the ship to wrench itself open like a peapod
being twisted in opposite directions, with one explosive jerk. But there
couldn’t have been a tenth of that much failure before the sensory surfaces would
have started screaming sixteen different red alerts, and nothing like that had
been logged up until the moment things actually failed. Things like this don’t
happen to a ship’s hull unless you
tell
it to do that. There was no
trace of such a command, but there wouldn’t be if someone had covered their
tracks.

I turned and walked to the other side of the roof,
where the ocean threw pinpricks of noon back at me. The beach had been vacuumed
and sifted clean, its sand the dusky color of Nishi’s skin. I remembered once
seeing the canvas of her back stretch tight as she bent forward to wrap her
feet, right before she leapt into the ring and sent her opponent home with a
dislocated pelvis after five rounds. I’d been tempted to lose respect for her,
but I’d never given in, and now that I thought about it I’d also never lost
hope that she’d find respect for me again—especially if I’d done something
worthy of restoring it. Like all I was elbow-deep in now.

I galloped back downstairs, edited my suit and
jacket into something a little more amenable to running, doffed my shoes, and
sent myself bounding along the sand in a slow jog as I turned over the
Kyritan
models in my head some more. I had at least two kilometers of beach to myself
in either direction, so I would only need to turn around and retrace my steps
very occasionally. I’d also broken out the Aram models, out of a frustrated
sense that the true connection between the two would present themselves, but
all I could think of was the obvious. One of these had to have been on board,
had ostensibly been responsible for the failures in question, and had concealed
his tracks behind the entropically-obscured crypto Kallhander had unveiled. Or
so went the current theory.

I ramped myself up to a full-blown jog and ran
back through the timeline of the Aram simulation until it was nothing more than
a hollow box. Back and forth, like a lifecycle model—although of course there
was only so much of the lifecycle I could see unfolding in the simulation itself,
and that was only because I had been—

“Cheating,” I said out loud, and almost fell into
the surf.

What other explanation was there? Someone had
hooked into the sensory surface nexus of the
Kyritan
and supplied it
with fake data in real time. Do that long enough while toying with cosm knows
what else, and of course things will fail. The system has no other way of
knowing except for its own eyes and ears. If you cut an end run around all that
. . .

I stood there, hands on knees, half bent over and
panting as I tried to piece the whole fractured pie back together. Not a likely
scenario, I told myself. The only way to do it is if you’re in possession of
the system master key, and there was only one person who had that: me.