advantage of being able to spend longer — subjectively, at least — on a given problem.
And, for a while at least, it worked.
TEN
‘You’re turning into a monster,’ she said.
I answered, ‘I’m turning into whatever it takes to beat the Spire.’
I stalked away from the shuttle, moving on slender, articulated legs like piston-driven stilts. I no longer needed armour now: Trintignant had grafted it to my skin. Tough black plaques slid over each other like the carapacial segments of a lobster.
‘You even sound like Trintignant now,’ Celestine said, following me. I watched her asymmetric shadow loom next to mine: she lopsided; me a thin, elongated wraith.
‘I can’t help that,’ I said, my voice piping from the speech synthesiser that replaced my sealed-up mouth.
‘You can stop. It isn’t too late.’
‘Not until Childe stops.’
‘And then? Will even that be enough to make you give up, Richard?’
I turned to face her. Behind her faceplate I watched her try to conceal the revulsion she obviously felt.
‘He won’t give up,’ I said.
Celestine held out her hand. At first I thought she was beckoning me, but then I saw there was something in her palm. Small, dark and hard.
‘Trintignant found this outside, by the Spire. It’s what he left in my room. I think he was trying to tell us something. Trying to redeem himself. Do you recognise it, Richard?’
I zoomed in on the object. Numbers flickered around it. Enhancement phased in. Surface irregularity. Topological contours. Albedo. Likely composition. I drank in the data like a drunkard.
Data was what I lived for now.
‘No.’
ELEVEN
‘I can hear something.’
‘Of course you can. It’s the Spire, the same as it’s always been.’
‘No.’ I was silent for several moments, wondering whether my augmented auditory system was sending false signals into my brain.
But there it was again: an occasional rumble of distant machinery, but one that was coming closer.
‘I hear it now,’ Childe said. ‘It’s coming from behind us. Along the way we’ve come.’
‘It sounds like the doors opening and closing in sequence.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why would they do that?’
‘Something must be coming through the rooms towards us.’
Childe thought about that for what felt like minutes, but was probably only a matter of actual seconds. Then he shook his head, dismissively. ‘We have eleven minutes to get through this door, or we’ll be punished. We don’t have time to worry about anything extraneous.’
Reluctantly, I agreed.
I forced my attention back to the puzzle, feeling the machinery in my head pluck at the mathematical barbs of the problem. The ferocious clockwork that Trintignant had installed in my skull spun giddily. I had never understood mathematics with any great agility, but now I sensed it as a hard grid of truth underlying everything: bones shining through the thin flesh of the world.
It was almost the only thing I was now capable of thinking of at all. Everything else felt painfully abstract, whereas before the opposite had been the case. This, I knew, must be what it felt like to an idiot savant, gifted with astonishing skill in one highly specialised field of human expertise.
I had become a tool shaped so efficiently for one purpose that it could serve no other.
I had become a machine for solving the Spire.
Now that we were alone — and no longer reliant on Celestine — Childe had revealed himself as a more than adequately capable problem-solver. Several times I had found myself staring at a problem, with even my new mathematical skills momentarily unable to crack the solution, when Childe had seen the answer. Generally he was able to articulate the reasoning behind his choice, but sometimes there was nothing for it but for me to either accept his judgement or wait for my own sluggard thought processes to arrive at the same conclusion.
And I began to wonder.
Childe was brilliant now, but I sensed there was more to it than the extra layers of cognitive machinery Trintignant had installed. He was so confident now that I began to wonder if he had merely been holding back before, preferring to let the rest of us make the decisions. If that was the case, he was in some way responsible for the deaths that had already happened.
But, I reminded myself, we had all volunteered.
With three minutes to spare, the door eased open, revealing the room beyond. At the same moment the door we had come through opened as well, as it always did at this point. We could leave now, if we wished. At this time, as had been the case with every room we had passed through, Childe and I made a decision on whether to proceed further or not. There was always the danger that the next room would be the one that killed us — and every second that we spent before stepping through the doorway meant one second less available for cracking the next problem.
‘Well?’ I said.
His answer came back, clipped and automatic. ‘Onwards.’
‘We only had three minutes to spare on this one, Childe. They’re getting harder now. A hell of a lot harder.’
‘I’m fully aware of that.’
‘Then maybe we should retreat. Gather our strength and return. We’ll lose nothing by doing so.’
‘You can’t be sure of that. You don’t know that the Spire will keep letting us make these attempts. Perhaps it’s already tiring of us.’
‘I still—’
But I stopped, my new, wasp-waisted body flexing easily at the approach of a footfall.
My visual system scanned the approaching object, resolving it into a figure, stepping over the threshold from the previous room. It was a human figure, but one that had, admittedly, undergone some alterations — although none that were as drastic as those that Trintignant had wrought on me. I studied the slow, painful way she made her progress. Our own movements seemed slow, but were lightning-fast by comparison.
I groped for a memory; a name; a face.
My mind, clotted with routines designed to smash mathematics, could not at first retrieve such mundane data.
Finally, however, it obliged.
‘Celestine,’ I said.
I did not actually speak. Instead, laser light stuttered from the mass of sensors and scanners jammed into my eyesockets. Our minds now ran too rapidly to communicate verbally, but, though she moved slowly herself, she deigned to reply.
‘Yes. It’s me. Are you really Richard?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Because I can hardly tell the difference between you and Childe.’
