Emissaries from the Dead

us anywhere inside this station.

“Maybe the dragons are among the distractions you use to hide a much more important deception.

“Everybody here has seen your floating remotes, your maintenance machines, your fliers. We’ve all understood that they transmit back everything they see, but even they’re not everywhere. How can they see everything, even on a station that belongs to you? I’ve been thinking about that, and it’s occurred to me that you must have other eyes we haven’t thought about. I spent some of my time on the Uppergrowth brainstorming about where some of them could be. I thought, well, maybe the Uppergrowth itself is visually sensitive; there’s no reason it couldn’t be transmitting images back to you. And I thought, well, all those little black insects I see flying around: maybe they’re not part of the environmental balance here at all but, rather, swarming miniature eyes. And then I thought, well, that’s interesting, let’s take it a step further. If the AIsource have spy machines that small, nothing would prevent them from having spy machines even smaller.”

You are speaking of nanotechnology, which is nothing new. Even your people know that art. And again, we fail to see your point. It is our station. We are within our rights to use any monitoring techniques at our disposal.

“Yes, you are, but once again, that only reinforces the question of this chamber. Again: if you’re everywhere aboard this station, why insist on this fiction of a special, isolated location where visitors must go to parley? And why support that fiction here, when in the rest of inhabited space you use floating flatscreens for ambassadors?”

Do you have any answers, Counselor?

“Only one.

“This room is here for one reason and one reason only. The only possible reason.

“It’s a theater.

“It makes you tactile.

“You want the human beings posted here to think of you as having a specific location: to ignore what we know, and think of you, instead, as creatures who can be approached, dealt with, and then left behind—when the fact of the matter is that you’re everywhere. And that leads to another, unavoidable question: Why would you be so careful to maintain that illusion here? Why would it be so bad for us to feel—really, really feel—how ubiquitous you are aboard this station?”

The AIsource sounded amused. Why?

“Because the second we do we also start wondering why you would need to limit those capabilities to this particular patch of real estate. We start wondering, what’s so special about this place.”

Ah.

“We start wondering if your ambassadors, all over inhabited space, also exist only as distractions. We start upgrading our estimates of just how powerful you are. We start wondering how much you can influence. We start wondering—”

—if, the AIsource concluded for me, we’re inside you.

My heart lurched inside my chest like a creature that had long considered itself safe inside its cage but which now hammered against the bars in a desperate attempt at flight.

I had not expected them to admit to it so readily.

I thought of neighbors turned to vicious enemies between one second and the next, a little girl turned to something worse than animal, an innocent turned to war criminal.

Tens of thousands, inside everybody. Some only a few molecules thick, but large enough to have forged an integral connection with your nervous system. It helps us nudge you this way, or that way, from time to time: not constantly, of course, as that would be a gross intrusion on your free will, and an utter waste of your ability to forge a fresh and informative perspective, but from time to time, whenever you need to be influenced.

My voice came close to failing me. “And your…insurgents…the rogues…your opposition party…”

…your so-called Unseen Demons…

“…they influence us the same way?”

Already asked and answered, Counselor.

“They can make us kill people we don’t want to kill?”

And worse things.

“How do I know they’re the ones who controlled us on Bocai? That it wasn’t you?”

You don’t. But since you have our honest assurance that at times we have had to do things just as terrible, you should be able to accept that we wouldn’t evade responsibility for some crimes while freely acknowledging others. We, meaning the ones speaking to you now, are innocent of that one.

I had seen some of this, but not all of it. Now my head was proving too small to contain it. Blood burned in my ears, and I closed my eyes, trying to fight my way out of the black emptiness that had always threatened to swallow me whole.

Worlds away, the AIsource chided me. Come now, Counselor. You should be taking it better than this. After all, you came here today specifically to tell us that you’d figured most of this out.

My own voice sounded just as distant, but as long as I concentrated on it I still had a grip on sanity. “I had. You said you had three gifts for me. One you’d already given, one you were in the process of giving, and one you hoped to give me at the conclusion of this business.”

Yes.

“It wasn’t until a few hours ago that I figured out what the first gift was. I happened to look at my fingertips and notice how much they’d healed since my arrival.”

They do look much better now, the AIsource confided, in an absurdly confidential tone.

“Before I…came here, I…bit my nails. Every time I needed to concentrate, I gnawed a finger. Sometimes, when the problems were thorny enough, I gnawed them bloody. But that stopped with my first visit to this room. Ever since then…every time I faced something that puzzled me…I felt this sickly feeling that there was something I would ordinarily be doing, that I was being kept from doing.”

It is an unhealthy habit, Andrea Cort.

“It was also free will.”

Which you do still possess, within certain boundaries.

“You freed me of that habit just to show you could.”

We thought it would help boost your investigation.

“And the second gift? The one you said you were in the process of giving me? That little tweak you gave to my emotions, which allowed me to respond to Oscin and Skye?”

That was a little more complicated. But it didn’t impinge on your free will as much as the suppression of your unfortunate habit. It just freed you to act on feelings you haven’t ever allowed yourself to acknowledge. You could have just as easily decided that you weren’t attracted to the Porrinyards, and sought out Lastogne or Gibb instead—or, for that matter, not acted on the changes in yourself until you returned home to New London and had a wider number of alternate candidates.

I didn’t ask about the third gift, the one they’d said I wouldn’t receive until after our business was done. I was too furious. “What gave you the right?”

If you truly prefer the way you were, we can put your inhibitions back. But we don’t think that’s what you want. Sometimes, the greatest gift is the one given in secret.

“Bullshit,” I said, furiously. “You were just demonstrating a point!”

We were not just demonstrating a point. As we have said many times, Andrea Cort, we respect you, and believe we have many things in common. We feel that once our business is concluded here our ultimate ambitions will be even more aligned. But yes, making the point was an attractive benefit.

“That wasn’t all,” I said, my rage still building. “The Brachiators called you the Hand-in-Ghosts. Gibb’s people,