“Like I said, she won’t do that because the timelag would slow her thought processes down to a crawl.”
“All the same. If she is to coordinate a takeover, she must make use of the network infrastructure to send commands and receive intelligence.”
“Yes, but she’s obviously become expert at concealing herself. We just don’t have the overview to pick out the signal from the noise.”
“Whereas you think the Clockmaker may be able to.”
“That’s the idea.” He was growing increasingly irritated at having to repeat the argument he’d already presented to Saavedra and Veitch.
“Paula, why are we going over this again? We don’t have time. Either you agree or you don’t.”
“I do agree,” she said, so quietly that he almost didn’t catch the reply.
“It’s your only hope of survival. Put one alpha-level mind against another. What could be more logical?”
That was when Dreyfus had the first tingling suspicion that something was very wrong.
“Paula?” he asked.
She turned away from him so that he was looking at her face in profile. Silhouetted against the illuminated wall, her body held the erect pose of a dancer about to begin some demanding routine. Dreyfus saw that there was something attached to the back of her head, neck and spine. It was like a thick metal caterpillar, a segmented thing with many legs. Her sleeveless black vest had been gashed open from neck to coccyx. As she turned even more, he saw that this was also true of her skin. He could see her backbone, grinning white through meat and muscle. The caterpillar had dug its needle-tipped feet through to her spinal nerve column.
Quite without warning, she dropped to the floor.
Dreyfus lay perfectly still, paralysed by the horror of what he had just witnessed. It must have found her, tortured or tricked her just enough to extract the basic details of Dreyfus’ mission. Then it had slashed her open and made her into a meat puppet.
Now it was done with the puppet. On the floor, Saavedra twitched and spasmed like a fish out of water.
“You’re here,” he said, finding the strength to speak.
“You’re with me, aren’t you? In this room. You did escape after all.”
There’d been a humming sound all along, but it was only now that his ringing ears became fully attuned to it. Moving his neck by the tiniest of degrees, he looked around to face the other side of the bed, opposite where Saavedra had been standing. That side of the room was dark, but he was still aware of the form waiting there. It was larger than a man, towering towards the ceiling, stooping over to fit into the confined space. The red light gleamed off a dripping chrome ribcage, off the sickle-shaped fingers of a huge metallic hand, off the hammerhead width of a huge eyeless skull. The humming intensified. To Dreyfus, it became the most malevolent sound in the universe.
“What do you want with me?” he asked, expecting no answer.
But the Clockmaker spoke. Its voice was surprisingly soft, surprisingly avuncular.
“It was very brave of you to come here, to find me. Did you expect that it would end like this?”
“I didn’t know what to expect. I had no other choice.”
“You expected to persuade me to help you?”
Dreyfus licked his lips. They felt as dry as clay. His heart was trying to tunnel its way out of his chest.
“I only wanted to show you the way things are.”
“With Aurora?”
“Yes. She won’t stop. You’re the only thing that can touch her. Therefore she has to destroy you. And she will, sooner or later. Unless you destroy her first.”
“Aurora will murder all of you.”
“I know.”
“What makes you think I’m any better?”
“Because you didn’t kill everyone in SIAM.”
The Clockmaker sounded amused.
“And that gives you hope? That makes you think I’m the lesser of two evils?”
“I don’t think you’re evil. Not really. I think you’re furious and driven, like an avenging angel. You’ve been hurt and you want to give back some of that hurt. I think that makes you bad. But I don’t think it makes you evil.”
The Clockmaker contorted itself even more, bending at the middle to lower its upper chest and head to only a metre above Dreyfus. Still he could see only highlights, where the red light caught a sleek metal edge. The head, which had appeared hammer-like only a moment ago, now had the form of an anvil.
“You presume to know what I am?”
“I know who you are,” Dreyfus said, each word feeling as if it might be his last.
“I know what they did to you, Philip.”
The Clockmaker did not answer. But something sliced through the air, one of its arms moving so quickly that the motion became a scything blur of darkness and shadow. The whipping arm touched Dreyfus’ forehead. His skin felt suddenly cold. Something trickled into his eye, warm and stinging.
“I know what they did to you,” he repeated.
“They took you and burnt out your mind, trying to extract an alpha-level simulation. Then they dumped your body in a fish pond and made it look like suicide. They only wanted those alpha-level patterns for one thing, Philip. Not to give you immortality, but to help them program a machine that could travel into the Shroud without being ripped apart. You’d survived, where others hadn’t. They made a robot and loaded your alpha-level simulation into it, in the hope that something in those brain patterns would make a difference.”
The Clockmaker was listening. It hadn’t killed him yet. Perhaps it was planning something worse than death, some ingenious new cruelty that would make even Jane Aumonier’s eleven years of sleeplessness seem like a kindness.
“They must have sent you into a Shroud,” Dreyfus continued.
“One within a few light-years of Yellowstone, so that you had time to go there and back before you showed up in SIAM. That’s what happened, isn’t it? You were sent into the Shroud as a machine running Philip Lascaille’s alpha-level simulation, and you came back… changed, just the way Philip had all those years before. Something inside the Shroud had remade you. You were still a machine, but now you were a machine with alien components. And you were angry. You were worse than angry. You were a machine that knew its soul had been stolen from an innocent man, a man who’d already been driven half-mad by the things he’d seen inside the Shroud.”
Still the Clockmaker loomed over him, the mantra-like rhythm of its humming beginning to fill his brain, squeezing out rational thought. Dreyfus swore he could feel its breath, a cold, metallic exhalation like a steel breeze. But machines didn’t breathe, he told himself.
“I don’t know how you ended up in SIAM,” Dreyfus went on, “but I’d guess you were in a state of dormancy when you returned from the Shroud. The people who’d sent you there didn’t really know what to make of you. They knew they’d got back something strange, but they couldn’t begin to comprehend your true origin, your capabilities, what was driving you. So they transferred you to the people in the Sylveste organisation best suited to probe the nature of an artificial intelligence. More than likely, the scientists in SIAM had no inkling of where you’d come from. They were fed a story, led to think that you were the product of another research department in the institute itself. And at first you were very obliging, weren’t you? You were like a newborn baby. You made them happy with the clever things you made. But all along you were recovering memories of your true nature. The fury was welling up inside you, looking for a release valve. You’d been birthed in pain and terror. You naturally assumed that pain and terror were what you were meant to give back to the world. So you did. You began your spree.”
After a silence that stretched on for centuries, the Clockmaker spoke again.
“Philip Lascaille is dead.”
“But you remember, don’t you? You remember how it felt to be him. You remember what you saw in the Shroud, the first time.”
“How would you know?”
“Because I recognised your face in Delphine’s sculpture. You were communicating through her art, finding a channel to the outside world even when you were a prisoner.”
“Did you know Delphine?”
“I knew her after she was murdered, via her beta-level simulation.”
“Why was she murdered?”
