“And your point is?”
“Somewhere out there, a machine has to be simulating her. More than likely she’s controlling her takeover from within a single habitat. It probably isn’t one of those she’s already taken over, since she wouldn’t want to risk being wiped out by one of our nukes. Unfortunately, that leaves almost ten thousand other candidates to consider. If we had all the time in the world, we could comb through network traffic records and pin her down. But we don’t have all the time in the world. We have a few days.”
“You think she has free roam of the networks?”
“Almost certainly. She’s stayed under our radar for fifty-five years, which means she can move herself from point to point without difficulty. But she can’t duplicate herself. That’s a limitation embedded in the deep structure of alpha-level simulations by Cal Sylveste himself. They cannot be copied, or even backed-up.”
“Perhaps she’s got around that one by now.”
“I don’t think so. If she could copy herself, she wouldn’t be so concerned about safeguarding her own survival. She’s scared precisely because there’s only one of her.”
“But the notion of ’machine’ is nebulous, Prefect. Aurora might not be able to copy herself, but there’s surely nothing to prevent her from spreading herself thinly, using thousands of habitats instead of one.”
“There is,” Dreyfus said, puffing as he reached the observation deck.
“It’s called execution speed. The more distributed she is, the more she has to contend with light-speed timelag between processor centres. If part of her was running on one side of the Glitter Band, and another part on the far side of the Band, she could be afflicted by unacceptable latencies, whole fractions of a second. She’d still be just as clever as she is now, but the clock rate of her consciousness would have slowed by an intolerable factor. And that’s her problem. Being clever isn’t good enough on its own, especially when she’s trying to win a war on ten thousand fronts. She has to be fast as well.”
“There’s a lot of supposition there,” Veitch said as Dreyfus approached him cautiously, Sparver, Saavedra and her whiphound close behind.
“I agree, but I think it’s watertight. Aurora can’t afford to be spread out, therefore she has to be running on a single machine, inside a single habitat. And that means she’s vulnerable to a counterstrike if that habitat can be identified.”
“And you’re hoping the Clockmaker can pin her down?”
“Something along those lines.”
Veitch looked puzzled, as if he knew he was missing something obvious.
“It would need access to the networks.”
“I know.”
“You’re insane. What if it escapes, loses itself in the networks the same way Aurora did?”
“There’d be a risk of that, but it’s one I’m prepared to take given the alternative. I’d rather have a monster on the loose if it’s a choice between that or dying under Aurora.”
“Do you have any idea what the Clockmaker did to its victims?”
Dreyfus thought of everything he had learned since gaining Manticore. Examining those new, fresh memories was like opening a wound that had just begun to scab over.
“I know it did bad things. But it wasn’t indiscriminate. It spared more than it killed. Aurora won’t spare a soul.”
“Show him what it is,” Saavedra said.
“He may as well know what he’s talking about letting loose.”
“You’ve searched him for weapons?”
“He’s clean. Show him the window.”
Veitch stood back from the monitor panel.
“Take a look for yourself, Prefect.”
“It’s on the other side of this glass?”
“Nearly. We usually keep it away from the window. I’ll rotate the magnets to bring it into view for a few moments.”
Dreyfus glanced back at Saavedra, waiting for her permission to move. She nodded. He joined Veitch and stepped onto the small pedestal beneath the viewing window. Two upright handrails provided support on either side of the armoured porthole. Dreyfus touched the pale-green skin of the reactor and felt it tremble under his hands. The tremor was irregular, with powerful surges.
“How did you get it in here?”
“There’s a door on the other side, for swapping out the magnets. We kept the Clockmaker in a portable confinement rig while we moved it from Ruskin-Sartorious. We had to move fast, since the rig’s only good for about six hours. The Clockmaker was testing it all the time, flexing its muscles, trying to break out, even though we did our best to stun it before the relocation.”
“Stun it how?” Dreyfus asked.
“With a heavy electromagnetic pulse. It doesn’t put it under completely, but it does subdue it. But by the time we arrived here, it was back up to full strength. We got it inside and locked down with the big magnets just in time. You know how a tokamak works?”
“More or less.”
“Normally the magnets trap a ring-shaped plasma, steering it away from the walls. You heat and squeeze the plasma to a few hundred million degrees, until you get fusion. There’s no fusion going on inside there now. Just hard vacuum, and the Clockmaker. We had to adjust the magnets to create a localised bottle, but it wasn’t too difficult.”
“It’s still trying to get out, isn’t it?” He touched a hand to the reactor’s throbbing skin again. He was feeling the Clockmaker’s exertions as it tested the resilience of those magnetic shackles.
“It never stops trying.”
Dreyfus looked through the window. At first he saw nothing save a deep-blue darkness. Then he became aware of a faint pink glow encroaching on the darkness from his right. The glow flickered and intensified. To his left, Veitch made delicate adjustments to the configuration of the trapping magnets. The pink became a halo of flickering silver. The silver brightened to incandescent white.
“Why does it glow?”
“The field’s stripping ions off its outer layer, a kind of plasma cocoon. When we collapse the field, the Clockmaker appears to suck the plasma back into itself. It doesn’t suffer any net mass loss as far as we can tell.”
“I can see it now,” Dreyfus said, very quietly.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
Dreyfus said nothing. He wasn’t exactly sure how he felt. He had thought of the Clockmaker many times since losing Valery, but the appearance of the thing had never been something he dwelled upon. He had been concerned only with its effects, not its nature. He knew from the victims’ testimonies that the Clockmaker was amorphous, capable of shifting its shape with fluid ease, or at least of conveying that impression. He knew also that some of the survivors had spoken of a humanoid form underpinning its quicksilver transformations, like a stable attractor at the heart of a chaotic process. But those accounts had barely registered. It was only now that he truly appreciated that this was no ordinary machine, but something more like an angel, rendered in glowing white metal.
It hung in the tokamak, pinned in place by magnetic fields fierce enough to boil the electrons off hydrogen. Any normal machine, anything forged from orthodox matter—be it inert or quick—would have been simultaneously shredded and vaporised by those wrenching stresses. And yet the Clockmaker endured, with only that silver-pink halo conveying the extreme physical conditions in which it floated. It had the vague shape of a man: a torso, arms and legs, the suggestion of a head—but the humanoid form was elongated and spectral. The details shimmered and blurred, layers phasing in and out of clarity. For a moment the Clockmaker was a thing of jointed armour, recognisable mechanisms. Then it became a smooth-surfaced, mercurial form.
“He’s seen enough,” Saavedra said.
“Move it away from the window before it breaks confinement.”
Veitch worked the controls. Dreyfus watched the Clockmaker recede from view. He was glad when it had gone. Though its face was featureless, he’d had the overwhelming impression that it was looking straight at him, marking him as a subject for future attention.
