He said his name was Choi. He said his family was Digger, Level Three, Harvest Quarter. In my head I translated it into English as Digger Choi.
“And you’re Treya, Worker, Outrider Therapeutics.” Sneering at the Core honorifics.
I heard myself say, “My name is Allison Pearl.”
“We read your internal tags. You can’t lie.”
“Allison,” I insisted. “Pearl.”
“Call yourself whatever you want.”
I put my disobedient hand into the bowl of food and cupped it to my mouth. It was a globby green muck that tasted like mown grass, and I lost about half of every handful, but my body accepted it hungrily. Digger Choi stuck around until I was finished, then took the bowl. I was still hungry. Digger Choi refused my request for seconds.
“Is this how you treat your prisoners?”
“We don’t take prisoners.”
“What am I, then?”
“A hostage.”
“You think I’m that valuable?”
“You might be. If not, it will be simple enough to kill you.”
Because I could move my body again, the Farmers took the precaution of tying my arms behind me. They left me like that all night—in some ways it was worse that being paralyzed. And in the morning they pulled me out of the cart and frog-marched me to another one, identical in all ways except that it contained Turk Findley.
During the transfer I was able to survey the Farmers’ encampment. We had reached the island that contained Vox Core, but here at the periphery it still looked like an out-island—an uncultivated wilderness. Locally, all the fruit-bearing trees had been stripped to feed the marching Farmers.
There were a lot of them. An army of them. I estimated maybe a thousand warm bodies in this meadow alone, and I could see the smoke from other encampments. The Farmers were armed with makeshift blades and machine parts filched from harvesters and threshing machines… weapons that would have been laughable in the face of a fully Networked Core militia; but under the present circumstances who could say? The Farmers themselves were all dark and wrinkled, descendents of the long-ago Martian diaspora. Digger Choi escorted me through a mob of his Farmer compatriots, who gave me hard looks and shouted a few hard words.
The cart he dragged me to was larger than the one I’d been dumped in. From the outside it was basically a box on two wheels, with long poles out front so an animal or a robot or an able-bodied Farmer could drag it. Simple tech, but not as primitive as it appeared. The Farmers’ carts were made of a smart material that transformed random bounces into forward momentum. They were self-balancing and could adapt to rough terrain. They also made a suitable prison, if your prisoners were securely bound.
Turk was securely bound and so was I. Digger Choi lowered the rear wall of the cart, pushed me inside, and locked the barricade behind me. I rolled up against Turk Findley, whose hands were also tied behind his back, and we spent an awkward moment sorting ourselves out and bracing our legs so we could face each other. Turk was badly bruised—he had put up a serious fight when the Farmers took him. The skin over his left cheekbone was cloudy black, fading to green. His left eye was swollen shut. He looked at me sidelong and with unconcealed astonishment. Probably he had thought I was dead, killed when they tore out my limbic implant.
I wanted to say something reassuring but I wasn’t sure where to start. He remembered me as Treya of Vox Core. And that was true enough: I continued to be Treya, in a sense. But only
I had two histories. Treya had described Allison Pearl as the virtual mentor who had acculturated her to twenty-first-century American customs and language. “Allison Pearl” wasn’t real, the way most people use that word. But I was Allison now, fully installed, fully functional; it was Allison who was running the show—I was, as the Managers used to say,
And anyway that wasn’t the biggest problem we were facing.
“You’re alive,” he said.
“Obviously.”
He gave me a curious look, probably because it wasn’t the kind of thing Treya would have said.
“I thought they killed you. All that blood.” It had dried to a brown bib on my tunic.
“It wasn’t me they killed, it was my Network interface. The node sits over my spine so it can talk to my brain. The Farmers have implants too, but they must have disabled theirs as soon as the Network failed. They hate the nodes because the nodes keep them docile and useful.”
“So they’re, what, slaves? This is a slave rebellion?”
“No—it’s not as simple as that.” Being Allison Pearl, I held no brief for the social structure of Vox. But I had a powerful secondary memory of Treya’s fierce loyalty. Treya wasn’t a bad person, even if she was a drone. I didn’t want him thinking of her as some kind of slave overseer. “These people’s ancestors were taken captive centuries ago. They were radical bionormatives, part of the Martian diaspora. They refused to be assimilated, so they made a bargain, their lives in exchange for agricultural labor.”
Turk was still giving me uneasy looks—the blood on my clothes, the way I was talking—and I figured it would be best to explain as bluntly as possible. “They cut out my node,” I said. “Treya was a translator, right? For years she accessed Allison Pearl as a secondary personality. She ran me like a junior mind, if you understand what I’m saying. And a lot of her own memories and personality got sourced out to the Network. We were all tangled up, me and Treya, but the node always made sure Treya was the controlling entity. But now the node’s gone and I’m dominant. She must have ceded a whole bunch of neural real estate to me over the last decade. Big mistake, from her point of view, though she could hardly have expected a tribe of insurgent Farmers to cut out her Network interface.”
“Excuse me,” Turk said slowly, “but who am I talking to again?”
“Allison. I’m Allison Pearl now.”
“Allison,” he said. “And Treya’s, what, dead?”
“The Network can still embody her if it wants to. She’s
Turk thought this over. “The future seems like a pretty fucked-up place sometimes.”
“If you can just take it on faith that I’m Allison now, maybe we can get on with the business of trying to save ourselves.”
“You know how to do that?”
“The point is, we’ll die unless we get somewhere safe before Vox crosses the Arch.”
“That might not be possible. You saw the sky before dawn? The Arch is at zenith, a straight line across the meridian. That means—”
“I know what it means.” It meant we were dangerously close to the crossing.
“So what’s safe, Allison Pearl, and how do we get there?”
The Farmers had eaten their breakfast and gathered their gear, and now they were ready to resume their march on Vox Core. A couple of men picked up the draw-poles of the cart, which had the effect of rolling us around like peas in a skillet. It made conversation awkward. But I told Turk what he needed to know. He was almost up to speed by the time we caught our first glimpse of the ruins of Vox Core.
3.
Turk was a quick learner, though the ten thousand years he had spent among the Hypotheticals hadn’t taught him much. Well, how could it have? In fact he had never really been “among” them, even though it was conventional to talk about the people who passed through the temporal Arch as if they had been touched by vast hyperintelligent powers. Treya believed he had spent those years in glorious communion with the Hypotheticals, whether he remembered it or not, but now that I was Allison Pearl it sounded like so much quasi-religious BS. If
