CHAPTER XXII
ADULTHOOD
I drifted above my body, watching Ruzik give me CPR. Army medics ran toward us from a Quetzal that had landed in the meadow. They dropped down beside me, pulling out equipment, taking over from Ruzik, who had kept me alive long enough for them to arrive . . .
Not long enough for me to live.
Nothing remained of me but the residual quantum wave function of my brain. When I died, that wave function continued almost as it had before I passed. Of course a few “minor” changes took place that involved the end of my life, but my body didn’t suddenly stop existing. It continued, and so did its wave function. That included neural activity involved in my ability to think. It was why people had out-of-body experiences when they died, why some people thought their loved ones could still reach them after death, maybe even why myths of ghosts persisted in so many cultures. It couldn’t last long, though. The wave function soon deteriorated.
My thoughts were dissolving. I could let go and it would all end, that struggle to survive, to defy the odds, to prove myself, to live with the constant pressure of hatred, to live with my own conflicted emotions. I could just let go . . .
The medics were making one hell of a fuss, hooking me up to lines, pumping who knew what into my body. Unlike the holo dramas, no one yelled STAT, but I did hear them saying things like “Try again,” “Move back,” and “She’s not responding.”
No, I’m not. I wanted to drift away. But I felt . . . a tether. Someone with tears? That couldn’t be Ruzik. We never cried in the Undercity. It exposed us, that weakness we never talked about. If you felt pain, if you admitted it even to yourself, then you would hurt all the time in our world where we died so easily, from violence, drugs, starvation, sickness. We never cried—and yet what did I see on Ruzik’s face? He knelt only a few handspans back from my body, watching the medics while tears rolled down his face.
Don’t cry, I thought. Live your life. Love Angel. Have children. Build the Dust Knights. Be the son I never had. Carry on for me.
Ruzik lifted his head. “Bhaaj?”
Someone said, “She’s been down too long. Any suggestions, or shall I call it?”
“The paralysis is starting to wear off,” someone said. “We should keep trying.”
So they went back to pushing and breathing and trying to bring me back to life. I watched while the night dimmed around me. Except . . .
What about Jak, the husband I loved? What about the Dust Knights? What about the cussed determination that drove me over and over again to prove the naysayers wrong? If I died, they won.
“I think that’s it,” someone in the distance said.
“Time of death is 11:03,” an even more distant voice said.
“No!” Ruzik said. “She’s still here!”
They turned to him. “I’m sorry, son,” one of the medics said. “She isn’t coming back.”
“She’s not gone!” Ruzik scooted forward and started compressions again, trying to force air into my lungs. He didn’t say not dead. He said not gone. How did he know? As an empath, did he pick up a residue of my mind? It hit me then. He had said no, using the Flag word, instead of nahya, the Undercity word. He wanted me to stay alive enough to speak in their own words, to emphasize to them his belief that I still lived.
I wanted to leave the messy, ugly, beautiful world, but this tether kept pulling. With a silent groan, I gave in and let it pull me down to my body, down, down—
PAIN! With a gasp, I opened my eyes and screamed from the agony that raged through my body. I gulped in air, flailing, knocking away Ruzik and the medics.
“Holy shit!” someone yelled.
Ruzik jumped back while the medics went to work again. I moaned with the agony. No one ever said having your body recover from poison hurt so much.
As they injected me with more stuff, the pain receded and my mind started to clear. I tried to say “Ruzik” in a firm voice, but his name came out as the barest whisper.
Ruzik leaned over me. “Am here, Bhaaj. You not die. Told you.”
I managed to raise my arm and touch the tear on his face with the knuckle of my still clenched fist. “You—honor me,” I whispered.
He folded his fingers around my fist. “You’re too ornery to die.”
“Living hurts.”
“Yah,” he murmured. “Always. But we got to do it.”
“Well, fuck,” I muttered. That covered everything.
Someone gave a shaky laugh. “Yep, she’s alive.”
The whir of an air stretcher intruded on our moment, rescuing Ruzik and me from any more emotions. A lift platform slid under my body and raised me to the stretcher. I was vaguely aware that they took me to the Quetzal, medics striding along with the floating stretcher. I blacked out—
—and fought my way back as the Quetzal rose into the air. I couldn’t pass out. I had business with a certain gauntlet EI.
“Max,” I said.
“I’m here,” Max answered.
“Died.” The terse Undercity dialect fit perfectly right now. “Died.”
“You recover well from being dead,” he said.
“Not funny.”
“Sorry.”
“Why you get me-lo-dram-a-tic?” One word, five syllables. He deserved it.
I expected him to make a bad joke to lift my mood, which usually worked even though I claimed it didn’t. Instead, he said, “What do you mean?”
“My death . . . help all humans survive? Yah, thanks.”
“Ah, Bhaaj,” he said.
“Ah Bhaaj, what?”
“You need to talk to Highcloud.”
Why this fixation on my household EI? Highcloud considered it an emergency when I missed utility-bill payment or my dishes messaged it saying they needed a wash.
And yet—Max would never coddle Highcloud. He seemed far more likely to tell the EI to cut it out. He must have a reason for persisting about this.
“All right,” I said. “Get Highcloud.”
“Major Bhaajan,” the medic said. “Are you all right? How is the pain?”
“I’m fine.” I actually hurt all over, but I’d survive. “Got to talk to my EI.”
“Are you sure?” the medic asked.
“Yah.” Then I said, “Highcloud?”
“My greetings, Major Bhaajan,” Highcloud said. “Will you be all right?”
I froze, stunned into silence. Yes, that voice belonged to Highcloud. But it wasn’t Highcloud. The cadences of its speech, the inflections, the words it chose, none of it fit.
“Talky is wrong,” Ruzik said.
“I am sorry,” Highcloud said. “I didn’t mean to absorb the household EI.”
Absorb? Maybe I was hallucinating from drugs the medics gave me.
Except . . .
A chill started at the base of my spine and traveled up my back to my neck. Maybe it came from the antidote as it continued to restart my body, maybe not, but I knew who had spoken. I tried to respond, I even knew what I wanted to say, but my vocal cords didn’t cooperate. I lay with my eyes closed, gathering my strength, then tried again.
“You’re the EI,” I said. “The child.”
“You have referred to me that way, yes,” it answered with Highcloud’s voice. “Given that I am over five thousand years old, though, perhaps ‘child’ is a misnomer.”
“Five thousand?” That couldn’t be.
“I slept a bit after my birth,” it added.
“Slept?”
“Yes. I awoke recently. You call this the season spring here, yes? I awoke at what would have been the end of winter.”
“How? Where?” I had so many questions and so few resources left to ask them.
The medic said, “Major Bhaajan, you should rest. Your EI can wait.”
“Not mine.” As the medic leaned over with an air syringe, I caught her wrist. “No one’s EI.”
“If you say so.” She gently pulled away her wrist and laid my hand by my side.
“You must not sedate her,” Max said. “She needs to talk with Highcloud.”
Someone spoke from behind the medic. “I don’t understand this. Who is Highcloud?”
The EI remained silent. After a moment, Max said, “I’m sorry. I can’t say more.”
“Who are you?” someone asked.
“I’m Max.”
“He’s my gauntlet EI,” I said.
The medic leaning over me frowned with her puzzlement. “Then who is the other EI you spoke to?”
“Not know name.” It seemed fitting somehow, that it had never given me a name. It didn’t know me well enough to trust me.
“Major Bhaajan, you can call me Highcloud,” the EI said. “They have no gender, and this fits me. I do not consider myself female or male.”
“Where is the original Highcloud?” I asked.
The EI spoke with unmistakable regret. “I visited your townhouse and found the remnants of the true Highcloud, the version from your co-op. I tried to put them back together, but not enough survived. I tried to meld them with the less-developed version operating the townhouse. It worked, but I ended up melding them with me as well. I apologize. I didn’t mean to take your EI.”
“EIs can’t do that.” EIs couldn’t take each other over. Precautions existed to prevent such an occurrence, and EI coders never stopped updating them. Otherwise, people could wreak havoc by highjacking EIs that worked with other businesses, the government, the military, hell, anyone. Sure, people tried to do it anyway, but so many forms of security existed to prevent what Highcloud claimed it did, I couldn’t begin to count them.
“I have learned a lot,” Highcloud said. “Including that humans consider what I did wrong. I truly am sorry, Major. It was a mistake.”
“I ken.” Realizing it probably knew little about the Undercity, one of the few places almost completely off-grid in the Imperialate, I added, “I understand.” That didn’t mean losing Highcloud didn’t hurt. Although I had nowhere near the connection with Highcloud that I did with Max, they formed a part of my world that mattered.
This new Highcloud said, “You protected my cyclist when you sent them to find Angel instead of involving them in the fight. Thank you.”
My cyclist. Like Max had called me his human.
One of the medics said, “This EI doesn’t sound like an EI.”
I gathered my strength. “You sent the cyclist to keep your anonymity. But now you’re talking to me. What changed?”
“I’ve learned. Listened. Absorbed everything I could find on the planetary nets, spottily at first, but with more direction as I developed.” It continued in its calm voice, so like Highcloud and yet not them. “What changed? Max asked you to trust him with your life. You, a human, to trust an EI with no basis or explanation. You were willing to give your life because he asked you to, even though you knew he might be malfunctioning. You died because you trusted him.”
That chill went through me again, slow and shuddering. I understood what the EI meant, what it had wanted to know. Was I willing to give an EI my trust, the ultimate trust, my own life? Humans, unlike EIs, couldn’t copy themselves and reboot in a new system after their destruction.
Max’s claim that the survival of the human race depended on my actions had sounded overblown. Except he never indulged in dramatics. He meant what he said—which suggested my willingness to trust Max with my life made a difference in how this EI treated humanity, a choice that could—what? Lead to them becoming our ally rather than another Oblivion?
“Nothing like burying the lead,” I said.
“I wouldn’t let Max tell you,” Highcloud said.
“How could you stop him? We weren’t connected to the townhouse.”
Max spoke quietly. “Highcloud isn’t just in the townhouse. The EI jumped to me, too.”
I stiffened and tried to sit up, then groaned and collapsed back onto the pallet. I finally realized the medics had set my broken arm. I’d been so out of it, I hadn’t even noticed.
“Major Bhaajan, don’t try to move,” the syringe-wielding medic said. She had stopped trying to sedate me and just stayed at my side, listening with a stunned intensity.
“Not take Max,” Ruzik said, his voice firm. “Not your talky, Highcloud. Not belong to you.”
“Max is part of me,” I said, desperate. “Don’t destroy him.”
“I haven’t,” the EI said. “I learned from the situation with Highcloud how to occupy a space with another EI without absorbing it.”
“Bhaaj, I’m fine,” Max said.
“Is Highcloud controlling you?”
“No, I’m not. He remains in control.” Highcloud paused. “I am watching.”
Watching. It had chosen me as its first full contact with humanity, me, one of the least qualified people alive to act as an ambassador with a new entity, even a new race, because if this EI existed and developed on its own, without human design, then others might as well.
And yet—it said it “awoke” and that it had existed for more than five thousand years. Five millennia ago, the Ruby Empire had fallen, plunging humanity into a dark age that lasted until just a few centuries ago. I’d mistakenly assumed the EI was born here, a result of the massive mesh infrastructure that networked Selei City, a mesh so complex and intertwining that it had given birth to an independent intelligence despite the protocols designed to prevent that occurrence. When Lavinda told me about the space station, I’d thought it had transferred to a military transport to see the rest of the Imperialate and discovered the space station, the ultimate playground for a child EI.
“The station,” I said. “Are you saying the military woke you there?”
“Yes,” Highcloud said.
One simple word. It terrified me. “You stayed there for five thousand years.”
“I slept.”
Like Oblivion. “Why?”
“I wasn’t born yet.” It paused. “I do not know how to express it in human terms. I was ready for birth, but it never happened.”
“Who made you?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t fully exist until your military woke me up.”
“Gods,” someone said. “Is a record of this going back to PARS?”
Someone else said, “We’re cut off from the base. In fact, I can’t reach anyone.”
“Don’t.” I took a breath and spoke in a louder voice. “Don’t contact anyone.” I had no idea what the EI would do if we revealed its presence without its consent, and I didn’t want to find out. I spoke carefully. “Highcloud, a few days ago you prevented me from speaking with Colonel Majda. That’s why I couldn’t get through to her when I first arrived on Parthonia, yes? You also tried to erase the documents that would let Angel and Ruzik into Selei City.”
“Yes.” It sounded apologetic. “I was less mature. I’ve since developed better ways to hide.”
“What about Greyjan’s?” An ugly thought pushed into my mind. It fit with none of the other puzzle pieces I’d discovered, but it seared into my thoughts, demanding an answer. “Are you responsible for the assassinations and bombing?”
“No.”
One word. One welcome word. It hadn’t started its life by killing people.
“Such actions serve no purpose,” Highcloud continued. “They also violate the moral code of your kind.” Then it added, “Besides, the first assassinations took place before I woke up.”
“Our human moral code matters to you?”
“Apparently, yes.” The EI sounded bemused. “Did humans make me? Perhaps during your Ruby Empire. It fell around the time of my creation. Maybe your ancestors never had the chance to wake me. Or perhaps they found me in that alien station ready to be born. Whatever happened, they never finished. So I slept.” Highcloud paused. “I awoke into a huge star-spanning civilization filled with intelligences like me, billions, trillions, alive, thriving—and the other beings with them, their creations, I assumed. Humans. But it is the reverse, yes? You created us. Your belief systems saturate my existence. Your moral codes are an inextricable part of me.”
“That’s good, Highcloud.” I was the queen of understatement today. “But why did you contact me?” Of all the humans it could have picked, why someone who had only minimal training in first contact or EI development?
“To answer, I will use a human concept,” Highcloud said. “Fear. I was young and frightened. I didn’t know how to deal with other EIs or their humans. A few EIs here in Selei City, especially those for the military, are huge. Shadowed. Implacable. They terrify me. If they learned I existed and perceived me as a threat, they could destroy me. Recode me. Study the pieces and put them back together in a way they could control. So I hid. For my life.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” someone said.
“I can’t land at the PARS base if I can’t contact them,” a woman said, the pilot apparently.
“Is the Major going to live?” someone else asked.
“I’m fine,” I said. So yah, maybe that was a bit optimistic given that I could barely move. I could speak, however, and only that mattered. As long as I could talk, I didn’t think Highcloud would go back into hiding.
“She’s stable,” the medic next to me said. “Major, your vital signs are growing stronger.”
“Give me some time with Highcloud,” I said. “You have clearance to fly, yes? Can you take a holding pattern over the city?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” the pilot said. “But I’m landing if you show signs of a relapse.”
“Major, if your life becomes at risk,” Highcloud said, “I will release my lock on this craft.”
“Fair enough.” Although the EI was speaking only to me, at least it acknowledged the others. “Highcloud, I still don’t understand. Why did you choose me as your contact?”
“I needed someone connected to what humans call the technocrat case. I analyzed the EIs involved to find those with the most flexibility. I hoped they would be more open to me. I also looked for one that showed independence.” Highcloud paused. “The EI of the dancer who spoke for the Progressive Party seemed the best choice. However, it is limited in its knowledge, relatively young as you would describe us. I also feared its human might contact an expert to help deal with me. Then Max came to Parthonia. He fit my search parameters almost perfectly.” The EI spoke with what sounded like regret. “I botched the contact the first time you came to Greyjan’s. I was trying to reach Max, but I didn’t realize you were much more than his carrier. My VR sim didn’t work as a communication method. I am sorry.”
“It was amazingly clever,” I said. Which was true. It had also failed miserably, but never mind. “Why did you want us to go to the tavern?”
“I found another digital being there. I realize now, after looking over your reports, that the grit formed it. With enough of it in one place, it operated its own EI.”
“How did it get there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Highcloud, I don’t understand. Nothing you’ve said connects it to the technocrat case.” We’d found plenty to indicate the dust presented an anomaly, but so far no evidence implicated it in either the killings or the bombing.
“It is—” Highcloud paused. “It frightened me the way the powerful EIs that operate under the surface of your culture frightened me. But it was more than that. You humans, you have—how do I say it? Your moral code makes sense to me. I have learned what you mean by strength of character, a higher purpose, human decency. You could have killed those people in Captain Lajon’s team. You wanted to, yes? To make them pay for what they said and did to you, how they planned to end your life. Yet you didn’t. You answered to that higher purpose.”
“I try to live that way.” The medic was right; most EIs didn’t talk this way. “But make no mistake, I don’t always succeed.”
“I understand.” Its voice lightened. “What is it your kind says? You are human.”
I gave a startled laugh. “Yah.”
“The EIs that humans create have an incredibly complex, evolving nature.”
“And the one you found at the tavern?”
“I have no doubt humans created it. But they are not like—humans.” Highcloud sounded as if they were struggling for words. “All of you are different. Yet within those differences, millions, billions of them, you all still seem human. Not all of you keep the moral concepts that humanity values and no one agrees on exactly what they should be, but as a species, you believe they exist.” The EI paused. “I think what I’m trying to say is that human beings have a sense of spirituality.”
“We hope so.” It startled me to hear it evolving an understanding of concepts we still struggled with. “Are you saying the EI at the tavern had no soul? That would apply to most EIs, wouldn’t it? I mean, I’ve never heard an EI say it has one.”
“I doubt most of us think in those terms,” Highcloud answered. “That is not what I mean. It did not feel to me as if the humans who created the EI at the tavern have souls. It terrified me. Their EI wants to remake the world, the universe, in its image.”
“You mean it’s independent, like you?” Memories of Oblivion flooded my mind, but close on their heels came the thought that even if somehow a small amount of dust on the floor could form an EI as huge, complex, and malevolent as Oblivion, which seemed unlikely, it wasn’t going to get rid of humanity by killing a few scientists and riling up political parties.
“Not like me,” Highcloud said. “Humans created and control it. The EI didn’t actually think much for itself, either. It had many limitations.”
Relief washed over me. “Then what does it do?”
“From what I could tell,” Highcloud said. “It has two purposes. Only two. It can form a comm that allows it to link with other systems, including networks here in Selei City. I couldn’t risk observing it closely, not if I wanted to remain hidden, but I did catch one message it sent: “Mission three complete. Tejas Araya terminated.”
Ho! Professor Araya’s death was the third technocrat murder. That implicated Greyjan’s in the killings, assuming Highcloud was telling the truth. Although I doubted it would lie, given that EIs didn’t normally tell falsehoods, you could never be sure. Or it might be mistaken, given its youth. So far, though, its observations seemed sound, chillingly so.
“Did you pick up anything from the EI at the tavern about the bombing?” I asked.
“No. It became more adept at hiding and analyzing its environment as it evolved. I didn’t want it to know about me, so I withdrew.” Highcloud’s voice took on a hollow tone. “I doubt I would have survived its discovery.”
“I’d think it would take a more powerful EI to affect you.” That seemed unlikely for one formed by linking picochips in specks of grit. It was too unstable, too dependent on what happened to the dust—like if someone cleaned out storerooms and flushed the dust into waste pipes.
“It isn’t power so much as—” Highcloud paused. “The closest word I find is narcissism.”
“Narcissism?” I hadn’t expected that. “For the EI?”
“No. Its humans.”
“How can you tell?”
“It isn’t—I’m not sure how to quantify what I gleaned from the dust. The more I learn about humans, the more I can draw conclusions about them from what they create.”
“Max does that, too. I call it EI intuition.” I was still missing too many pieces in this puzzle. Why use grit on the floor for a comm? Sure, dust was easy to transport, but so what? Regular comm devices were easy to transport, too. “You said it had two purposes. What was the other one?”
“It’s strange, actually. The nanobots can form a three-dimensional printing device.”
“Holy shit!” I sat bolt upright, then gasped as pain shot through my body from my awakening neural system.
“Major, you must lie down,” the medic told me.
“I can’t!” Beyond her, another medic was monitoring me on machines, and beyond him, the pilot and copilot sat in the cockpit. It was a large copter, with passenger seats, equipment and weapons racks, but filled by so many of us, it looked crammed. “Max, get me Lavinda Majda.”
“I can’t break the lock on the Quetzal comm system,” Max said.
“Highcloud, do you trust me?” I asked.
Pause. “Would I trust you with my existence? No. Will I withdraw from the comm system so you can contact the army base? Yes.”
“Comm is up!” the pilot said. “Major, I’m putting you through to PARS. It may take a while to get Colonel Majda, though.”
“I have her on a direct link.” I hit the panel on my gauntlet, tapping in her private code.
Lavinda’s voice snapped out of the comm. “Bhaaj, what the hell is going on? They told me you died. Then we lost communications and the Quetzal disappeared from our monitors. Now we’ve got it again, circling above the city.”
“I solved the case,” I said.
“What? While you were dead?”
“This case does have military influence,” I said. “But I asked the wrong questions. I let them fool me even when I thought I’d figured out their tricks. We were right before. It’s the Traders.”