“What year is it?” she asked, as if the question had just popped into her head.
“What year?” The pressure of the knife increased.
“Is there a problem with my diction?”
“No,” Dreyfus said hastily.
“Not at all. The year is two thousand, four hundred and twenty-seven. Why do you ask?”
“Because I’ve been inside this place a very long time.”
“Long enough to lose track of the year?”
“Long enough to lose track of everything. I had my suspicions, though.” He caught a note of proud defiance in her voice.
“I wasn’t so very far off the mark.”
He’d still not seen her face, or any part of her save the gauntleted hand holding the knife.
“Are you a member of the Nerval-Lermontov family?” he asked.
“Is that who you are looking for?”
“I’m not looking for anyone in particular. I’m a policeman. I’m investigating a crime. My inquiries brought me to this asteroid.”
“Alone?”
“I came in a ship, with my deputy. We were attacked during our approach and the ship was damaged.
We could have limped back to Panoply, but we decided to see if we could use the rock to get a message to them quicker. That’s what my deputy’s doing now. I also wanted to see what was worth attacking us to protect.”
The knife scratched against his skin. It felt cold. He wondered if it had drawn blood yet.
“You’ve seen it now,” the woman said, obviously meaning the ship in which they were floating.
“Tell me what you make of it.”
“It’s a Conjoiner spacecraft. That’s as much as I was able to tell from outside. I came aboard and I’ve seen this.” He meant the room full of dismembered sleepers, the ones that the woman said she had been eating.
“That’s all. Now are you going to tell me what this means?”
“Try moving,” she said.
“Move an arm or a leg. I won’t stop you.” Dreyfus tried, but although he could move his limbs, they encountered stiff resistance against the interior of his suit. He was effectively paralysed.
“I can’t.”
“I’ve reached into your suit and disabled its motor and communication functions. I can turn them on and off as easily as I can blink. With the suit immobilised like that, you won’t be able to move or remove it. You’ll starve here and die. It would take a long time and it would not be pleasant.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“So that you understand, Prefect. So that you grasp that I have complete control over you.” The pressure from the knife eased.
“So that you understand that I don’t need this to kill you.” Her hand pulled away.
“You must be a Conjoiner,” he said.
“No one else could perform a trick like that.” When she offered neither confirmation nor denial, he said, “You must be from this ship. Am I right?”
“So you are not completely incapable of deductive reasoning. For one of the retarded, you must be quite bright.”
“I’m just a prefect trying to do my job. Are you being held captive here?”
“What do you think?” she asked, with acid sarcasm.
“Let’s establish some ground rules. I’m not your enemy. If someone is keeping you here against your will, I want to find out who they are and why they’re doing it. We’re on the same side. We should be able to trust each other.”
“Shall I tell you why I have difficulty trusting you, Prefect? A man like you came here already. He saw what was being done to us and did nothing.”
“What do you mean, a man like me?”
“He wore the same kind of suit.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“I mean exactly the same kind. If a prefect is what you are, then this man was a prefect as well.”
“That’s not possible,” Dreyfus said. But even as he spoke he recalled the link that Sparver had found connecting this rock to Panoply. “Could someone else have come here, making independent inquiries?”
“Perhaps. But if so, how could Jane Aumonier not have known about it? I saw him myself. There was no mistake. I could not see into his head, and I can’t see into yours. Your kind never carry neural implants, do they?”
His own voice sounded distant and strangulated.
“This man… does he come on his own, or are there others?”
“Only the man comes in person. But there are other visitors.”
“You’re confusing me.”
“That is because they confuse me. I know when the man comes because I sense the electromagnetic noise from the opening and closing of airlocks. I sense his suit, although I can never get close enough to paralyse him. But the others don’t arrive like that. Suddenly they are simply here, like a change in the wind. One in particular makes her presence very clear to me. She likes to walk in our heads, as if she is taking a stroll through an ornamental garden. She toys with us. She takes pleasure in our confinement, in our distress.”
“You’re talking about an artificial intelligence, then. A beta-level simulation, something like that. A simulacrum that looks and acts like a real person, but has no interior life.”
“No,” the Conjoiner said carefully.
“I am talking about something vastly more than that. A mind like a thundercloud, brimming with terrible lightning, terrible darkness. It was never a beta-level simulation. It has the structure of human consciousness, but warped, magnified, perverted. Like a mansion gone wrong, a great house turned evil.”
“Does she have a name?”
“One,” the Conjoiner affirmed.
“She professes to hide her true identity from us, but I have seen through her concealments. She is too vain to hide herself perfectly. She desires to be known, I think.” Dreyfus hardly dared ask.
“Tell me the name.”
“She calls herself Aurora.”
“I made no mistake,” Thalia said.
“I swear I did everything by the book.” Thory’s eyes had shrunk to nasty little dots.
“Then maybe the book is wrong. Every second that we don’t have abstraction will cost our standing with the lobbyists. You have no idea of the financial hurt I’m talking about. Each and every one of us is a stakeholder in Aubusson society. Damage the habitat’s finances and you damage us. That means me, personally.” Thalia’s voice had become absurdly timid and small. She felt like a schoolgirl being required to explain late homework.
“I don’t know what the problem is.”
“Then perhaps you should start investigating!” Thory glared at her with venomous intent.
“You broke this, Prefect. It’s your responsibility to fix it. Why don’t you start, instead of just standing there like a petrified tree?”
“I… don’t have access,” Thalia said. Under her tunic she could feel a cold line of sweat trickling down her back.
“They gave me a six-hundred-second window. I used it. There’s no way back in again.”
“Then you’d better think of something else,” Caillebot said.
“And be fast about it.”
“There’s nothing else to do. I can run some superficial tests on the pillar… but without core access, I can’t see into its guts. And this has to be a fundamental problem, something really deep-rooted.” It was Parnasse’s turn to speak. His voice was a low rumble, yet everyone listened to him.
“They only gave you a single one-time pad, did they, girl?”
“Just the one,” Thalia said.
