Scratch Monkey (34 page)

The interior of the
Bronstein
wasn't configured for gravity: under the stress of even half a gee the hull would concertina like a tube of foil. Still, there was enough volume for one person to live in for years. Its cylindrical segments were split by hexagonal blue grids with spidery furniture clipped to them. Storage lockers lined every outer wall, adding to the shielding thickness of the hull. Oshi made her way to the command module and let the gentle hammock tie her into place. The main display sparked into life, shifting colours like a rainbow. She grinned, hollow-eyed before the light that washed across her face.

"List shipboard systems status," she requested.

"Ship personna is not active at present. General status is green for launch level three and holding at T minus one thousand seconds. Exceptions to status occur in three subsystems --" the bootstrap autopilot rattled on emotionlessly, flashing through entity-relation diagrams with faulty nodes highlighted in blinking red. Oshi followed it with half her mind.
Bronstein
, she mused;
what would you say if you'd lived to see this day ...
She'd learned about him, and the others the ships were named after, under the tuition of the Superbrights. Lev Bronstein had been in the grave for over fourteen hundred years. An interesting historical curio, prophet of a religion that exploded from birth to death in less than two centuries: someone had seen fit to resurrect his memories for this ship. Like the sister-craft, the
Kennedy
and the
Thatcher
and the
Hitler
... the entire fleet was named after the charismatic dictators of an historical era. Had they ever dreamed of their heirs overrunning the galaxy, taking the stars by storm? Oshi blinked and concentrated on the ship-status readings.

" -- anomaly in flow-rate through coolant circuit three indicative of probable pump fail-urrre ..." the voice of the autopilot suddenly slurred, like a mechanical transcription device running down. "
Service interrupt: systems coming up. Sentience will be resumed shortly. Incoming message:
hello Oshi."

"You again." Oshi glared at the face in the display tank, relieved that it wasn't a major systems failure.

"Me." The disembodied head nodded. "Had some trouble with synchronicity; we're living at a fluctuating timebase in here. There's only a thousand of us drawing unlimited process time allocation, but the rest of Pascal is a real meat farm. It was never intended to hold a billion evacuees. Seriously thrashing, halfway to hyperslow time already. We're waiting for your status, Oshi."

"Oh, that." Oshi rubbed her brow wearily. "The status ..." all of a sudden a flicker of fire returned to her eyes. "Looks good. Downloads are proceeding: if the tapeworm doesn't learn to sing in time, well ... I've got a little treat in store for it when we leave. What's new at your end?" She watched the display alertly.

Boris looked away from her with disembodied eyes. "We think it's turning critical. We're not sure yet, but we figure we know where the Ultrabright ship's come from. System about fifty light years core-ward. Anyway there's a bit of inference ... we figure it's getting ready to listen for something. That's why it's drifting; when it fires up that drive it kicks out enough hard radiation to obscure an incoming broadcast. It's waiting for a download. A
big
download. Real soon now."

"How long?" Oshi asked calmly. Palms sweating, brute metabolism scavenging excitement from glands and nerves she had long since ceased to pay attention to --

"We don't know." Boris spoke slowly and clearly. "Best guess is within six months. It's in high orbit around Turing now. It just made an aerobraking pass -- should have seen that coming. The astrophysics team think it's generating another black hole. They also expect Wirth to detonate pretty soon. The hole it dropped through Wirth's lithosphere is evaporating, losing energy through Hawking radiation. When it goes it will release the mass energy of the last hundred kilotonnes of mass in about a hundred milliseconds. When that happens, we loose our last assets apart from the colony and Pascal Dreamtime.We need to launch soon, Oshi."

"Ahh." Oshi watched Boris through half-closed eyes. "Two days should suffice, I think."

"Good."

"What has Mik come up with?" she asked, opening her eyes.

"Same as before: we hijack the ship, download our entire Dreamtime into it, and move it on out of the system. But the specifics are a lot more concrete now. We've got a think tank running a simulation of what an Ultrabright berserker looks like from the inside. We've got five hundred soldiers uploaded and unfrozen, in training. They'll run the attack drones locally. We need the meat-body fleet on site; Pascal will be thirty light-seconds away when we make rendezvous. That's too far for remote control, and we can't be sure of taking out the berserker with a one minute time lag in the loop. Anyway, Lorma's team have been working on the architecture. It probably follows a standard Expansion processor design: modular, scalable, universal symbolic microcode at the bottom of the abstraction stack. We've been inventing viruses. Really low-level stuff designed to tip it into NP-stasis. Idea is, we get just
one
drone in where it counts then patch into the main communications bus. Then reboot, and we find ourselves in posession of one portable Dreamtime."

"What happens if we're wrong, and there's already an Ultrabright downloaded into it?" asked Oshi.

Boris stared at her. "Then God eats our brains, of course." His head faded from view in a blur of increasing granularity, phasing into a featureless blob of voxels. "I'll let you get the pre-flight finished. Call me when you're ready."

Oshi looked at herself in the mirror and pulled a face. Stress and radiation sickness had drawn strange lines across her forehead. She shut her mouth and glanced aside; the feeling that she was being watched persisted until she looked up. I'm g
etting too old for this sort of thing
, she thought.
Need a new body. New identity, new life. Rinse the old memories down the bit bucket.
She didn't dare think about what she'd do, if -- when -- she convinced her inner censor that she had completed her task. What she'd do when it discharged her from Superbright indenture. It hovered over her like a sword suspended by a hair: a sense of being watched by the ghost of her own lost past ...

Somewhere below her a wire-cage hauled a large cargo pod towards the open front end of the
Bronstein
. She felt the jolt as docking spines meshed, but she had a distraction: Wisdom was downloading the control set for the ship in a flurry of memes and data objects.
Oh Ivan
she thought,
this would have been something for you. You always loved flying
. A few metres away, a tank full of partly congealed skeletons and nanoassemblers was plugging itself into the shipboard blood supply. Oshi looked round again, found herself trapped in the spartan sanitary module between the exercise controllers and the lavatory. A moment of fear shook her to the core:
am I losing my memory already?

She grunted in self-denial, then squeezed through the hatch of the cramped module and made her way to the bridge.

The flight deck was a cramped cylinder two metres in diameter and five metres long. Free-fall webs hung opposite a wall-sized screen; there were no physical controls. She anchored herself at the mid-point and looked at it. At present the screen was feeding through a view from the hull retinas; an expanse of grey hull metal. It was as if the ship lay at the bottom of a well the size of a world, with stars visible in the sky beyond the top of the shaft.

As she shuffled into place, a window blinked for attention. She stared at it in mild annoyance, broken out of her reverie by the golden flash. "Yes?" she asked.

"Oshi." The voice didn't belong to Boris. She jolted upright, attentive.

"Who is it?" she asked, trying to sound calm. The screen cleared to show a pale face. Raisa.

"Me, Oshi. I wondered if you were lonely."

Oshi bit back an acid reply, recognising her agressive sarcasm for what it was. "Not particularly," she said as casually as possible, trying to drown the thunder of her heart in a well of calm.

"Then maybe your biotelemetry is lying. How's it been?"

She stared at Raisa's image. "What do you expect me to say? Do you remember what happened, or did anyone tell you?" Her mask slipped for a second and her reflection shimmered in the screen, naked in its anger and pain. "I saw your corpse. The tapeworm tried to use it as a lure for me." She stared at her until her image blurred again: with growing surprise she realised that the problem was not in the screen but in her tear ducts.

"Oshi, what can I say?" Raisa's tone of sympathy sounded transparently insincere; Oshi wondered for a moment what she'd seen in the woman. She felt curiously distant from her emotions as she watched her.

"You can start by not saying anything about it," she suggested. "If you had anything else you wanted to talk about ..."

She hesitated for a second or two. "I did," Raisa said. "But it's also about what we're doing. About the plan."

"Yes, well. So you've got plans. Who hasn't?" Oshi tried to keep sarcasm out of her voice.

"Stop fooling. I mean the long-term plan, Oshi, where we're all going. Out of this system -- the stuff Boris is feeding us. There's a problem. I don't see how the hell we're going to get away with it in the long term. You follow me?"

"Yes. But if all goes well we will meet in another two months, in the flesh. Maybe we can talk about it then?"

"Oshi!" Raisa's face twisted with exasperation. "It's not like that. I'm not doing this to mess up your ego! Look, I'm trying to help everybody. Not just in the colony, but outside it;
everyone
. Hijacking a starship is cool. It may work ... but what then? We're going to be sitting at ground zero. The Superbrights will try to stop us. If what you told me is true ... where do we go from here? Your old masters won't take kindly to a starship full of renegades spreading the news of their crimes. Have you ever seen what happens when someone declares war on the Superbrights?"

She paused expectantly. Oshi felt himself gripped by a nauseous tension. "I can't do anything about that yet, Raisa. Got too much to think about as it is. Maybe later?"

"They'll have booby-trapped the colony. Somehow. They're insidious. Even if they never heard of us, there'll be some kind of trap."

Oshi shrugged. "Who the fuck knows? We'll find out soon enough. Look, maybe we'll somewhere outside the sphere, where they can't get us. Where we can build a new world free of interference by predator intelligences. Or maybe we should stay on the ship, tip it onto a one-way trip into the future, trade real-space time for virtual colony space. But until we've got the starship it doesn't
matter
."

"Oshi?"

"Yes?"

"Why do you hate me?"

They stared at each other in silence for a minute: Oshi too surprised to speak, Raisa waiting for an answer.

"Hate you? But I don't ..."

Coloured static filled the screen. Oshi stared in disbelief.
She cut me dead
, she realized.
The cow!
She stabbed at a manual control with stiff fingers.
She thinks I hate her?
The thought was so odd that Oshi almost laughed aloud. Then another thought occurred to her, with all the clarity and force of an electric shock.
What if she's right?

Bite the bullet
, Oshi thought, ironically.
Or the ice pick
. She looked at her hand. It shook slightly.
Thirty days; is that all it takes
? She was feeling weak, weak from lack of company. No-one to talk to; no-one at all. She hadn't seen another real, live, human face for nearly five weeks now. She looked up. Above her head the wallscreen blocked out a horizon of stars. Dumb indicators blinked, a constellation of emergency displays hard-wired into the ships control network.

"Ready?" she asked.

Lev Davidovitch Bronstein snorted irascibly. "Yes!" He poked his pince-nez up the jut of his nose with a blunt finger, stained black with ink. "And what do
you
want?" he demanded. "I'm very busy, you know. Not a moment to waste!"

Oshi ran a hand through her hair, probed tangles that melted away before her fingers. "I want some information," she said. "Something that needs your skills."

The AI simulacrum -- far less than a Superbright -- glanced over his shoulder then turned back to Oshi with an irritable snarl. "Alright. What is it?"

"Comm connection through the axial redoubt, please."

"Hah! And for this you distract me!"

A window opened in the main screen.

"Control?"

"
Control here."
For some reason it seemed to prefer to use wisdom to talk to her. Oshi cringed in her crash web, then forced herself to stretch out.

"
Have you received any communications for me recently?
" she asked.

The window filled with a bewildering array of hierarchic, tabulated information: an old-fashioned filesystem. "
I had to utilize large object access protocols to store incoming calls. All communications channels into the axial redoubt are saturated with messages for you."

"
What?
" Oshi stared. "
Pipe one in --
"

A familiar face grinned at her. "Hello, Oshi! The singer's head is half-exploded, did you know that?" A smile of leeches gaped at her. "I am the whirlwind! I love you massively. Come do my head in! I give your eyes to the policeman's boot and you can be my valentine." Something white and squamous coiled in the background. It was wearing army boots on a multitude of very human legs. "What do you say?"

Oshi stared at the screen, appalled. The tapeworm had learned to talk, combining and recreating speech and memes -- transmissable ideas -- the way it recombined genes.
I'm being propositioned by a runaway semantic engine!
she realized.
Or does it simply want to eat me?
"No."

The face wept tears of green ichor. "Oh, you never loved me! I'm desolate! I hurt, Oshi, you did this to me! Please don't make my elephant sneeze ..."