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?
'When it does become manifest, it is too late to provide anything other than palliative care,' the surgeon said. 'Had we caught it earlier, a complete removal of healthtech and the cerebral implant would have been recommended, but that is a complex and risky operation, far more so than the installation procedure, as it involves actual ganglionic separation of nerve from machine. If it is successful, the patient has to readjust to the life of the unenhanced, which provides a great shock and many inconveniences. If this is overcome, they suffer from many infirmities, and a greatly shortened lifespan. Most of them suffer profound mental problems.' Her accent was soft but still apparent, and Otto wondered which part of Brazil she'd fled. 'This is all academic. I am sorry, Mr Klein. It is too late. The best we can do is boost her tech from a base unit, prepare her for the end and make her comfortable. The hospital computer is running her mind now.'
'There are other options.' Otto looked at the consultant.
'Yes. There is one more option: neural patterning. It needn't be painful; we can gather much of her information from her mentaug.'
'Copy her? A post-mortem simulation?'
'Together with her soul-capture data from the mentaug, a pattern taken directly from her mind now would be her entirely, to all intents and purposes. She would have her memories, right up to the moment we moved her across. We would cease life functions in your wife's original body at the same moment we brought the AI unit online, to avoid confrontation between the two. From there, she can operate a variety of sheaths, and interact with the world normally.'
'Would it be her?'
