Sunday had equipped the construct with a suite of routines to maximise the effectiveness of the simulation, even when the aug was thin or local data traffic highly congested. Those same routines made Eunice’s conversations all but secure, even with only modest levels of quanglement. Perhaps Eunice would be able to sniff a way into the dome using the same box of tricks.
Sunday wasn’t optimistic about that. Unless there was something inside capable of surveilling – a security camera, a robot, a distributed sensor web – they were back to square one. And why would there be anything like that in an abandoned encampment?
‘OK, I’ve found a way in. Impressed, granddaughter? Damn well should be. I’ve lost none of my edge.’
‘Yes, I’m . . .’ But Sunday trailed off. Was it right to be impressed that software had done the job it was designed to do? Wasn’t that exactly the point of it? ‘Just tell me what we’ve got.’
‘Active ching, my dear. There’s a . . . robot. Someone left it in there, and it’s still motile.’
‘Someone just
‘Do you want the ching or not? You don’t need to know the coords – I can put you through from my side.’
‘Where will I end up?’
Eunice gestured vaguely. ‘The dome to the left of us, I believe. It doesn’t really matter, because I’ll be right with you and I know the layout of the place. Once inside, we can make our way to my quarters.’
‘Give me the bind,’ Sunday said.
It was, by some distance, the crudest ching she had ever experienced – cruder even than the proxy she’d used on the Moon, during Chama’s expedition through the Ghost Wall. She had a point of view, but no sense of being elsewhere – her body, as far as her mind was concerned, was still in the rover-suit. When she tried to look around, her viewpoint juddered like a camera with a sticky bearing.
‘Are you here?’ Eunice asked. She was standing next to Sunday, cradling her helmet under one arm. The helmet, Sunday was astonished to see, had gained a custom paint job in the seconds since she had last seen Eunice.
A lion’s roaring face, coloured gold and ochre, with startling blue eyes and a toothsome, red-lined jaw gaping around the visor.
‘Very nice,’ Sunday said.
‘There’s no air, according to your sensors, but it feels odd to wear a suit in here.’
A circular window crowned the apex of the dome, but it didn’t admit much light. Sunday’s robot had a torch built into its head, which must have activated as soon as the ching bind went through. She steered its dim yellow beam around the airless room, picking out a miserable assortment of junk and detritus. The room looked as if it had suffered an earthquake, or been looted. There were bunks, equipment lockers, ancient and broken computer systems. Printouts, photographs of loved ones, children’s drawings were still fixed to the in-curving walls.
Her robot was slumped, knees drawn up to its chest, back to the wall. She tried standing up. The robot hesitated, then jerked into shambling motion. It had a limp and its fine motor control was shot. It was obviously very damaged, which might have been the reason it had been left to moulder in the camp. There was something attached to its chest, a kind of mechanical spider with jointed white limbs and a flattened crablike body. Sunday presumed it was a repair bot that had broken down in the process of trying to fix the larger unit.
She dislodged it with a stiff flick from her forearm and gauntlet. The fingers were seized into uselessness, like a frostbitten hand.
‘This way,’ Eunice said, picking a path between piles of junk.
They navigated the connecting corridor between the domes, Eunice looking back impatiently as Sunday struggled to keep apace. Decompression, when it happened, must have been sudden. There were flashfrozen plants, their vines still curling around the corridor walls. When Sunday touched them, they snapped into green shards like brittle sugary confections.
‘I don’t like this place. Hope no one was here when the pressure went.’
‘Do you see bodies?’
‘No.’
‘It was abandoned long before it fell into decay, I’m sure of that. No one’s been inside these walls for a very long time.’
‘Why would they? It’s the dead past. Anyone sensible has got better things to do with their time.’
Eunice flashed her a cocky smile. ‘Then what does that make you?’
‘Find your room, then let’s get out of here.’
The main dome had interior partitions with pressure-tight doors between them. The doors were all open now, the air long since fled. There was a lounge/commons area with a round table, its black top engraved with a zodiacal design, and brightly coloured chairs that were normal enough save for the fact that they had seat belts and foot stirrups. There was a mug still on the table, with a snap-on plastic lid and a drinking nipple. Sunday moved to examine it, but the robot’s seized-up grip wasn’t wide enough to grasp it and she knocked it off the table. The mug drifted to the floor without breaking. On its side were the words
‘This way,’ Eunice said. She stepped through one of the partition doors, Sunday following into the room beyond.
Sunday waggled the torch beam around. ‘Sure this is it?’
‘Yes, quite definitely.’ Eunice didn’t need to explain herself. If she was certain, it meant that the records placed her in this part of the Indian base. There would be images, movies that had been gorged by the construct’s ravenous curiosity. ‘But I may not have been the last occupant, and there’s no reason they’d have kept this place as a shrine to my greatness.’
‘Then we’re wasting our time, aren’t we?’
