Actual comfort around heights had little to do with it. I’d just found other things more deserving of my fear.
So I sighed, turned my back on the view, and cleared my throat, finding it dry from all the talking I’d already done. I’d spent the flight before this point recounting my conversations with the AIsource in as much detail as I could remember them. Now, having caught up with the present, I recounted the path I’d taken to the conclusion.
“We surprise them. That’s the key to the whole thing, you know; we surprise them. They don’t always know what we’re going to do. It’s what makes us interesting.
“And it’s what started this whole thing.
“Gibb told me all I really needed to know. Cutting the cables of Santiago’s hammock required tools only the AIsource possess aboard this station. They had to provide her with those tools, which means they had a vested interest in arranging that disaster.
“Even before I knew about their internal conflicts, I couldn’t believe they’d wanted to kill either Warmuth or Santiago. As they pointed out, even if they had something to gain by killing people, they already possessed the power of life and death over everything that lives here, and it would have been far easier to pick the human contingent off some other way.
“And I’d noticed right away that one person was definitely dead while the other, who went first, was only presumed to be.
“Which made it very likely that they were recruiting.
“And why not? Even with all their technology, and with what I later found out about their ability to control us at will, mere puppets make bad employees. They don’t bring any of their own natural gifts to the job; they don’t have enthusiasm, or the ability to learn; they don’t even have the option of coming up with their own good ideas. They just do what they’re forced to do, and nothing else.
“How much more advantageous to find sentients who have no problem with switching loyalties? Any human being who worked for the AIsource out of choice and not helpless obedience would bring a lot of personal qualities to the job. Fanaticism, for one. Self-interest, for another. Creativity, for a third. All facets of the very unpredictability the AIsource find so valuable. Such a convert would be worth any number of mind-controlled robots.
“And where would they find these qualities? Where might they discover the qualities they look for in their recruits?
“The one place with a never-ending supply of individuals motivated to indenture themselves away from their homeworlds in search of something better is the Dip Corps, an organization that in this context seems a perfect pretext for gathering people who can renounce their loyalty to the places they came from.
“In Santiago’s case, she was a debt slave to start with, eager to sell herself to a different set of owners. Why would anybody assume that she’d harbor any more loyalty to her second set of masters than she did to the first? Especially since, from all available evidence, she had few social skills and no ability to get along with her fellow human beings?
“I don’t know whether she approached the rogue intelligences within the AIsource, or whether they approached her, but either way she was recruited, her first job being to fake her death so nobody would wonder whatever happened to her. It would have been more than enough to just fall from the Uppergrowth after making special arrangements, with the intelligences, to be retrieved at a lower altitude. Since she had the tools on hand, she’d probably been instructed to engage in some more subtle sabotage and disappear in the resulting ‘accident,’ without ever giving any of Gibb’s people a reason for suspicion. Had she handled this correctly, everybody would have taken her death as nothing but a simple, pointless tragedy.
“But she botched the job. She arranged a spectacular hammock failure of a type that had never happened before, which anybody would have had to consider suspicious, and left behind enough physical evidence to prove that it couldn’t have been an accident.
“Why? It doesn’t really matter, but there are any number of possible explanations. Maybe she was so arrogant she couldn’t imagine not getting away with it. Maybe she was just plain incompetent, and maybe she wanted an excuse to terrorize the people she’d abandoned.
“But in any event, she was sloppy.
“She was so sloppy she couldn’t even fake her death in a place so dangerous that death requires nothing more than a moment’s carelessness.
“The obvious sabotage gave everybody the false impression that the AIsource had started killing people, a hypothesis that the AIsource were very good at pointing out made no sense even as a working explanation.
“The AIsource could have just come out and explained that Santiago was still alive. But that would have required them to reveal that they were also actively recruiting defectors from the Dip Corps. They had the capability to smooth over a row like that, but it would have been inconvenient as hell. No, it was better, for the time being, to do what they actually did: which was just deny everything and watch what happened.
“But there was still Santiago herself to deal with.
“The rogue intelligences could have forgiven her screwup and worked on rehabilitating her into an asset they could use. Or they could have chosen the path taken by other governments with agents who become liabilities, and simply disposed of her.
“But, as the AIsource told me at considerable length, they’re fascinated by unusual thought-models, which would include Santiago’s. So much so that they avoid interference with the actions of unusual minds. Their rogue intelligences, who have a vested interest in learning whatever the majority does, would have felt the same way and watched Santiago’s doings with considerable fascination.
“But how long, exactly, did it take them to decide to let her do what she wanted?
“I’m entering the realm of guesswork, here, but I think there’s a reason why so much time passed between her defection and her attack on Cynthia Warmuth. I think the rogues spent that time studying her at greater length, coming to the conclusion that she was more than just a potential agent, but one of those special minds they value so much. And there’s no way of telling just how stressful this examination was for her. I doubt it included actual physical abuse, but it did involve long periods of isolation in the hands of intelligences whose conversations with her might have involved the same kind of ego-battering revelations the AIsource delighted in sharing with me. Learning what we are to them hit me as hard as anything I’ve ever known…and I’m merely an emotional basket case, who got the short version during an audience of less than one hour. Santiago, who was already a misanthrope, a malcontent, and, as we’ve learned, a murderer if not already in fact then at least in psychological potential, received the full undiluted treatment. Without the regular contact with other human beings that lends even extreme misanthropes a context of normal human behavior, any preexisting derangement in her makeup no longer had anything to hold it back.
“What did she have to lose, really? Both in her previous life, and in this one, she’d already had her nose rubbed in the idea that human beings were owned, and that nothing we did mattered. There was no reason for her to hold on to any pretense of morality or civilized behavior. Let free of her leash, she could do whatever she wanted.
“It took them a while for them to decide she was sufficiently interesting to let loose.
“Of course, she wouldn’t be able to do much if she didn’t have the run of the place, so they provided her with some means of travel within One One One. The exact means doesn’t matter. They may have chauffered her around on request, or they might have provided her with some kind of personal vehicle, like that armor she used against Hammocktown and the Porrinyards. But whatever it was didn’t matter as long as she was able to act according to her whims.
“Which, step one, turned out to be nothing more than a sordid little act of revenge against a colleague she despised: Cynthia Warmuth.
“Warmuth was staying overnight in the Uppergrowth, undergoing the Brachiator ceremony that would have transformed her from New Ghost to Half-Ghost. She might have been awake or asleep when Santiago found her. She might have had a chance to see who was murdering her. She might have begged for her life. None of these factors matter. Santiago still had a tactical advantage and nothing to lose. She wouldn’t have found it difficult to take Warmuth by surprise. In the dark, it might have taken seconds.
“Given the opportunity, and the free rein she’d been given by the rogues, she might have worked her way down the entire long list of people she didn’t like.
“But that was just a couple of days before I showed up.
