Vortex

fanatics whose faith had stranded them on a dead and deadly planet. With Isaac, it was still possible to believe Vox was a community of like-minded pioneers poised at the vanguard of human destiny.

Only days after the disaster in the Wilkes Basin, Isaac had mastered the ability to speak fluent Voxish. His motor skills improved to the point where he could walk unassisted, his body went from frail to remarkably robust, and the reconstructed portions of his skull began to look almost normal. The croaking, screaming creature Turk had known was gone. The newly and unsettlingly articulate Isaac had been released from medical care, though he still lived and slept in the rooms where he had been treated. Lately he had conducted vague but ingratiating interviews with scholars and managers, the contents of which were publicly broadcast. He praised Vox for its dedication and endurance; he expressed his admiration for the wisdom of the founding prophecies. For days now he had been traveling around the city like a tourist, sometimes mobbed by curious children whose equally curious parents hung back shyly and didn’t dare speak.

I had followed all this on the newsfeeds. Vox was listing toward insanity, and the abject worship of Isaac Dvali was just the latest symptom. I told myself to expect more of the same. “Expect the unexpected,” Allison had written in her diary. Not an original sentiment but always apt.

And I believed I was well braced for surprises… but I was shocked beyond words when Isaac showed up at my door, pale as a mushroom and bright-eyed as an infant, smiling and calling me by name: not Treya but, amazingly, Allison.

* * *

I was afraid of him, of course.

I didn’t know what he wanted and I was instantly terrified of the attention he would attract—must already have attracted—just by being here. Somewhere in the nearby corridors and walks his minders were surely hovering. The hidden ears and eyes of the Network were pricked and focused.

But all he said was, “May I come in?” And I nodded, mutely, and let the door slide shut behind him.

Somehow I found the courage to ask him to sit down.

He remained standing. “I won’t stay long.” He spoke in English. It was the language he had been born to, I reminded myself. Under all the layers of synthesis and reconstruction there was still at least some fragment of the Isaac Dvali he once had been, a boy raised in the Equatorian desert by people whose urge to make contact with the Hypotheticals had been almost Voxish in its intensity. He was, like me, like Turk, a divided and incomplete soul. He was also, at least potentially, a very dangerous one.

Apart from his pale skin, his eyes were his most striking feature. When he looked at me my first instinct was to wince. He told me not to be frightened and I said, “That’s not so easy.”

“You came to my suite when I was sick,” he said.

“You remember that?”

He nodded, smiling. “I’ve learned a lot about you since then.”

“About me?”

“From the Network. I know who and what you are. And I think it would be useful if we can talk to each other. I won’t hurt you. And I won’t tell anyone about your plan to escape.”

For months I had been training myself in the art of inscrutability, as a way of keeping that one simple secret. Now the charade had collapsed, and I was too shocked to move.

“No one can hear us,” Isaac said.

“You’re wrong,” I managed to say.

His smile was insistent, maddening. “The Network sensors in this room are disabled. They’ll stay that way as long as I’m here.”

“You can do that?”

“Because of what I am, because of what the surgeons put inside me, I can influence the Network and even the Coryphaeus.”

Was that possible?

The Coryphaeus was the sum and master of the Voxish collectivity, a nested hierarchy of quantum processors distributed throughout Vox Core. Even a nuclear attack had only temporarily silenced it. It had never occurred to me that the Coryphaeus could be influenced. But there had never been anyone like Isaac before, either. He had been deeply infused with Hypothetical biotechnology since birth, and his neural implant hadn’t simply been added to his brain; his brain had been regrown around it.

“It’s true,” he said. “At least for now, you can speak as freely as you like.”

My heart was pounding. But since Isaac apparently knew about our plan—and since he had announced it out loud—I could only hope he was telling the truth. “You can really shut down the sensors?”

“Yes, or make sure anything they observe is left unanalyzed.”

“But if you already know about…”

“Your escape,” he said. I flinched again. “You were extremely clever about hiding it. Pulse, respiration, cortisol traces in your sweat and urine, all those markers have been at elevated levels for weeks; but the effect was indistinguishable from emotional stress. Stochastic and heuretic indicators—the things you did or didn’t say or do— took the Coryphaeus much longer to analyze. But you would have been found out eventually.” That Buddha smile again. “If I hadn’t intervened.”

I took a breath and said, “Then… how did you know?”

“The Coryphaeus was already beginning to draw inferences. I extrapolated from that. The details aren’t clear to me, but I guess you intend to steal an aircraft and take it through the Arch to Equatoria.”

“Close enough,” I whispered.

“And I hope you succeed.”

“Does that mean—what are you saying? Do you want to come with us?”

His smile faded. “That’s not possible. When I was reconstructed, important neurological functions were delegated to remote processors inside the Network. Only part of me lives in this body. You understand that, don’t you? That a person can have more than one nature?”

“… Yes…”

“I can’t come with you, but I may be able to help.”

“Help how?”

“Turk can’t pilot an aircraft until his node is functional enough for him to gain access to the vehicle’s controls. But once the node is fully functional, he won’t be willing to leave. I assume you understand how narrow that window of opportunity is.”

“Obviously, but—”

“Right now Turk sees himself as facing a choice between escape and bondage. Once the node begins to influence his brain, it may seem more like a choice between escape and forgiveness.”

Forgiveness for what? I wondered but didn’t ask.

“The point is, I can warn you when he’s close to that line. And I can help by diverting the attention of the Coryphaeus at the critical time. We can talk about it in more detail later on, but I want you to know you have a friend and an ally. I hope you’ll think of me that way.”

He sounded so much like a precocious child who wanted to be liked that I almost forgot to be afraid of him. But when he stood up and moved toward the door I nearly panicked. “Wait! The Network surveillance in this room, is it turned off permanently?”

“No, I’m sorry. There are limits to what I can do. Unless I’m physically present, you should assume the Network is listening.”

I forced myself to stand close to him. The skin on the right side of his face was seashell-pink and almost poreless, imperfect because it was too perfect. His eyes were softly radiant. “One more question.”

“What is it?”

“Are you—you know, what they say you are?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“What the prophecies say you are. Can you really talk to the Hypotheticals?”

“No,” he said. “Not yet.”