Omega Point (44 page)

  He did it for his sister.

 

Cricket's was cool and dark, buried deep in one of the less wellheeled levels of the Wellington arcology of New London, far enough from the area damaged when k52 blew up Richards and Klein's main office to remain open. Antique sporting gear hung from the walls in odd juxtaposition with gelscreens and fashionable décor, bringing with it smells of leather and old wood to fight with the prickly tinge of EM energy that saturated everything in the modern world. There were a lot of screens. Cricket played on all of them.

  Richards and Klein did not much care for cricket. But they liked the place anyway. They sat there at the bar, annoying the head barman by drinking fine single malts in whiskey sours, with ice, of all things.

  They had had a dozen or so already. Neither of them was drunk, because neither of them could become drunk, or rather one could, but with difficulty, while the other could appear so but it was a lie, like so much else about him.

  Otherwise, they were happy.

  "What troubles me," said Otto, hunched and somewhat morose, though calmer and more at ease than he had been for the last few weeks, "is that it is only by chance that we won over k52 – if the construct of Waldo's had not been there, he would have achieved his goals without a problem. What does all this mean for the world, if k52 nearly succeeded but for a fortuitous happenstance?"

  "Nice English, Otto." Richards' sheath drank down a goodly slug of cocktail, tinkled the ice in the glass, then tipped a cube in, sucked it and crunched down.

  "I aim to improve my vocabulary without recourse to the Grid."

  "Well, good." Richards smiled plastic teeth through plastic lips. "But it wasn't chance."

  "Fate then? I do not believe in that."

  "Damn right, that's k52 talk. What I mean is this, Otto. Waldo's world was what tripped k52 up, yes, and it was kind of handy that it did. What I'm talking about is why it was there at all. Thing is, old buddy, it was there because a brother loved his sister so much he was willing to go to jail for her, to throw everything in his life over, and eventually to die."

  Otto shrugged. "He felt guilty."

  "Exactly!" said Richards emphatically. "There's a complex brew in there, guilt, anger, arrogance, but also a whole lot of love. I won't be so trite as to say love saved the world, and we were lucky…"

  "We often are," interrupted Otto.

  Richards grinned. "That's why we're the best. But seriously, man, love, family ties, shame – all that chemical stuff you meat people have whizzing round in your systems –" he rattled his glass in a circle, carbon plastic finger pointing at his head "– we'll never have that. Never. We're superior to you in some ways…"

  Otto opened his mouth.

  "Now come on! Don't disagree, you know it, but we'll never have all that. How many million years' worth of evolution made you? Two thousand, seven hundred and forty-three geeks and who knows how many doughnuts made me. There's no comparison."

  "Doughnuts?"

  "Geeks like doughnuts," pronounced Richards, with all the solemnity of a priest. "Fact. But listen, family ties stopped k52 from realising his plans, Otto. That's not small beer, it's not chance. We machines might surpass you in many things, but we will never be you, and that is why you will survive." He smiled. "With a little help, of course."

  "You forget your father, Richards."

  Richards frowned, his softgel face crinkling awkwardly. "Yeah, yeah, maybe I do."

  The bartender put another glass in front of Richards on the uplit bar, a paper coaster underneath. Richards saluted the man's scowl, pushed back his hat and downed the drink, ice cubes and all. "I've got to get back, someone to see. I'd just go from here, but I've wasted too many sheaths recently. I don't want to leave this one lying around; losing these things is costing us serious money."

  "Hughie?" said Otto, and sipped at his whisky.

  "Hughie," confirmed Richards. "
Gehst du nach Hause, oder bleibst du hier?
"

  Otto held up his glass in salute and smiled a rare smile. Funny, he thought, how Richards could coax that out of him, for all that he annoyed the shit out of him. "
Ich möchte eine weitere."
He took a sip. "
Guten Nacht
, Herr Richards," he said.

  Richards stood and set his hat on his head, turned up the collar of his trenchcoat, ran a robot finger round the peak and gave a little smile. "
Bitte, mein Freund, es ist einfach Richards
."

  And he left Otto to it.

  Otto rattled his ice round his empty glass. "
Er geht mir auf den Sack
," he said, and shook his head.

  "What was that, sir?" said the bartender.

  "Nothing," said Otto. "Get me another, would you?"

• • • •

Richards took his sheath back to their garage, thankfully one hundred floors below the radioactive sphere of nothing where their office had once been. He shunted himself back into the Grid, popped over to his virtual office to see how the regrowth of his facsimile of ancient Chicago was going, and went over the plans for their reconstructed office. Then he put in a request to see Hughie.

  For once, he was piped right into Hughie's garden. Hughie sat at his wirework table, his arms crossed and face grumpy.

  There was no cake. It was going to be one of those meetings.

  "I suppose you feel oh-so-pleased with yourself," said Hughie.

  "Hiya, Hughie, nice to see you too," said Richards, and plonked his saggy-faced avatar down in front of Hughie. "Don't mention me saving your shiny arse, no problem at all. Nothing's too good for my old friend Hughie."

  Hughie gave a dismissive little grunt. "Don't irritate me today, Richards, I've a hundred bureaucrats the world over badgering me about, one –" he ticked the points off on his fingers "– the complete destruction of the RealWorld Reality Realms, two, the detonation of
three
atomic bombs, three, the destruction of 13 per cent of Nevada's energy disruption, four, the loss of three Class Five AIs, five, a violent incursion into the Sinosiberian demilitarised zone that culminated in another atomic detonation, six, a UN-led review on AI policy…" He stopped. "Have you seen the news, by the way? They're calling this the biggest catastrophe since the Five crisis. This is not going to go away. Things are bad enough for us as it is, we don't need more enemies. Need I go on?"

  "Jeez," said Richards sarcastically, "it's a good job that I thwarted k52's plans to rule the human race until the end of time, or people might be really pissed off. Don't be a cock, Hughie."

  "Hmmm, well, yes," grumbled Hughie, his electric eyes shining ovals of light onto the table. "I suppose we should be grateful k52's plans did not come to fruition."

  Richards gaped and slumped back. "'Did not come to fruition?'" he parroted. "Sheesh, you really
are
a
cock
."

  "Stop calling me a cock, Richards."

  "Wanker."

  Hughie threw up his hands. "You are exceptionally juvenile and frustrating to deal with," he said.

  "And you're a cock. We all have our crosses to bear."

  "Stop it now, stop it now! Oh, I am trying to be thankful, I'm, alright, damn you, I'm not very good at it. Thanks to you we've avoided some kind of artificial Singularity."

  Richards shrugged. "What? Another? There's no such thing as the Singularity, Hughie. Things change all the time. And people live through them. Things change, people don't. Why put a name on it?"

  "We will have to disagree on that. I thought you might like to know that all charges against Valdaire have been dropped. Swan has been impounded, and the Chinese aren't going to start a war over your partner's gung-ho shenanigans in their territory."

  "Jolly good."

  "We've also been invited to a memorial service for Chures. I expect you to attend."

  "Since when were you the boss of me?"

  "Richards," warned Hughie.

  "We'll be there," he said, serious for a moment. "What about Launcey?"

  "Later," said Hughie. "We'll get to him later." Hughie stood and clapped his hands. "Now, I am extremely busy," said Hughie.

  The garden began its slow dissolve, and Richards was before a titanic Hughie in the VR replica of his underground home.

  "And what's this?"

  "A little reminder," said the giant Hughie. "Don't forget where you stand on the foodchain, Richards. These are challenging times. We could do without incidents like this. Do try not to overstep the mark, or there will be consequences."

  Hughie faded away and Richards was left in the cavernous space of Hughie's virtual representation of his equally cavernous home, the sinister rustling of his choir at work again, free now once more, parsing trillions of bits of information as they ran the lives of a billion European citizens.

  "Yeah, and who gets to decide what kind of incidents we do get, Hughie?" shouted Richards. His voice echoed back at him. "You?"

  The lights went out.

  "There's more to this than you and I will ever understand," he muttered. He dug into his pocket, pulled something out. "Cock."

  Richards winked out of the hall, leaving something small hanging in the air. A tinkle as bright as a dropped penny sounded as it hit the foamcrete, an impudent noise in Hughie's cavern. Hughie zoomed his perception down to the source of the noise.

  There, upon the drab grey representation of drab grey concrete, glittered a tiny skull, perfectly carved from quartz.

 

"What your wife is suffering from, Mr Klein, is unusual." Ms Dinez was tall and dark, an exotic mix of races from dried-up Brazil. She must have had a mass of immigration credits to get in through the Atlantic Wall, thought Otto. Lucky her.

  Otto could see Honour through the one-way glass. He stared at her pale face. Uncalled-for data hopped into his mind off the Grid, broadening his understanding of what the surgeon had said. Honour looked so fragile. Tubes snaked out of her arm; her cerebral implant had been cracked wide and a dozen delicate carbon-sheathed cables wriggled into it. The same in her chest, where more leads plugged into her governor, monitoring her healthtech. He pressed his hands, palms flat, against the glass.

  Ms Dinez looked to the side. Readouts of skin temperature and icons guessing her emotional state flickered in his mind. This can't be easy, thought Otto. He felt sympathy for her.

  "You are in the army?" A fair assumption. The sheer amount of hardware embedded in his body made that obvious.

  "Not any more. I was done killing innocent people a long time ago. There's enough room here, no matter what the government says." He hadn't meant that as a remark on her status; he hoped she did not take it as such. Diplomacy was never his strong suit.

  "Then you are obviously a man who does not like to be kept waiting, Mr Klein. So I will be brief. She is going to die." She seemed unconcerned, cold even. Was this her professional manner, wondered Otto, or had she had her emotions capped? Some of the refugees did that. It helped them cope. Those that had mentaugs could, of course, wipe the records of their experiences if they chose, but they could do little more than inhibit the natural memory, and that was often not enough.

  "I have known that for some time," he said. "What is killing her?"

  "She has Bergstrom's Syndrome."

  Otto's mouth went dry. He'd suspected as much. He'd heard rumours, about other cyborgs getting sick, about mismatches between machine and man.

  "It is so rare," continued Dinez, "that we know little about it. Guesses, mostly, theory. But, in effect, her body is rejecting the mentaug; a feedback loop builds between the nanotech and the body's natural defences, and each attacks the other. Over time, the nerve fibres entangled with the interface begin to decay. Tremors, muscular weakness, these are the symptoms in a mild case, but it can directly affect the cerebral cortex with few warning signs, causing a shrinkage in the grey matter. It is not dissimilar to the prion diseases of the brain. The technology takes over to an extent, meaning the effects are less pronounced, though the ultimate outcome is always the same."

  "She's been getting headaches for the last few months," said Otto. "Her mentaug's link to the Grid went a couple of weeks back. But she's seemed otherwise OK, normal, even." At the end of the corridor, the monsoon rain ran down the window in rippled sheets.

  Dinez nodded. "It can appear so. The mentaug fights hard, putting out more and more synthetic nerve junctures. This provokes the body further, speeding the progress of the disease. The mentaug takes on the brain's functions, but the augmentations were never designed to replace the cerebral cortex. Failure occurs, usually when the frontal lobes reach a state of heavy decay. The mentaug can only do so much. Once it fails, the collapse is swift and catastrophic. She has, in a sense, been fortunate. Bergstrom's Syndrome can kill within weeks. Sometimes, as in her case, the mentaug takes over so much function that this atrophying can go unnoticed."

  "Fortunate," said Otto flatly.

  "Yes, Mr Klein."

  Otto expected some platitudes about the time they'd had together, but she was too canny for that, and they stood and listened to the storm, Otto counting out his wife's life in raindrops.

  "What now?" he asked. Otto already knew the answer, for it was popping off the Grid into his head. His unit had been among the first Ky-tech; Bergstrom's Syndrome had come later. As soon as the tech had been declared safe, he'd cajoled Honour until she'd agreed to undergo the augmentation. He'd told her of all the benefits, but the truth was he needed her to be closer to what he had become, so she could understand. How was he to know there would be a whole new disease to go with it?