‘Make sure you don’t hit the skeleton,’ the android said.
That didn’t even deserve a response. ‘Ready?’ she asked.
‘Rhetorical question.’
Yirella braced herself and ran at the junction, pushing hard. She let go – and stopped abruptly, arms waving for balance. Do NOT fall forwards. The chair rattled along, sliding easily into the boundary, where the frantic air currents whipped around it. Passed the skeleton –
And the android vanished. So fast it didn’t even leave a blur.
Yirella let out a long breath of relief. The chair remained in the same position for a few seconds then – she thought she saw something behind it, a shadow moving with the speed of a lightning bolt. A small wheeled platform with a single column standing vertically in the middle appeared, racing out of the boundary. The Ainsley android was standing on it, along with a quartet of similar androids – genderless this time, and with a skin colour remarkably similar to her own.
‘What happened?’ she asked.
The four black-skinned androids dismounted and hurried off along the corridor.
‘Hey,’ she spluttered in outrage.
‘I’m really sorry,’ the Ainsley android said, as it left the platform.
‘What? Why?’ That it was acting defensively was giving her a bad feeling.
Her personal icon appeared in her optik. She hesitated to open it, guessing the memories were going to be bad. ‘Just tell me this. Can we deflect the time flows?’
‘I believe so, yes. Our others have gone to begin the process.’
Yirella opened the icon . . .
*
. . . The sensation was like waking, consciousness rising from foggy darkness, bringing with it the memories of who she was and what she’d done to restore her identity. She self-identified – there were no doubts, no biochemical anxiety for the Ainsley android. Nonetheless, its passage through the gradient was excruciating. Its internal network suffered an avalanche of glitches, while the array in its chest underwent random failures. She thought she was losing her mind . . . which in a way she was. She countered by putting the precious memories into deep store while she travelled through the gradient, the chair’s little caster wheels taking agonizing days to complete a single rotation. Full awareness rushed back in as the crazy time fluxes smoothed out and time was whole again. She stood up and hurried into the stairwell, climbing up to deck twenty-five. It had aged. Some of the lights were dark. Every air grille had engendered dust streaks rising like black flames on the walls. Colours had faded on doors, walls, trapping her in a world of bleak pastels. The floor outside the tactical cabin had lost its tread, the thin laminate worn down to the metal below.
How long? she wondered.
There was no one in the cabin. But there had been. A huge dune of rubbish filled more than half of the room – mainly old meal trays with smears of food that had long since dried and hardened but still gave off a putrid stench. Wait. Huh? The android has a sense of smell? Why? She hurriedly shut the door again. They must have been using the tactical cabin as a rubbish dump. Then the size of the pile registered. Saints, how many trays were in there? Hundreds? No, more like thousands.
How long?
‘Tilliana. Ellici. Alexandre?’ she called. No reply. The android’s management routines were complex; she had to concentrate to use the communication architecture. There was a functional sub-net in this section, though some of the nodes had dropped out. A maintenance log icon expanded, supplying her with failure details. The nodes had started to crash eleven years ago.
Eleven years? She expanded the log’s details. Her mouth opened to cry out in dismay, hand coming up to cover it. The disassociation was complete. The hand was white – her hand – and for a moment she couldn’t understand why. Then she remembered she was in the android body. Strange how she’d adapted within minutes. But the shock of realization had been great enough to break that cosy accommodation. According to the log, the nodes had originally disengaged from the Morgan’s full network ninety-seven years ago.
‘Oh, Saints, no. No, no, no!’ That cannot be right.
She began to run, opening every door. The tenth compartment was a canteen. There were a lot of meal trays piled up here, too, fresher than the conference room. Not all the food was dry, and the smell was intense. The wall panels around the food printers had been removed. Somebody had repaired the machines; two had been opened up and partially dismantled, their intricate components plumbed into the remaining printer with crude hoses and cables. She accessed the printer’s menu; it was very limited, mainly soups and soft bread rolls. Some fruit flavours were still available, and the dairy option could produce milk and cheese. Solids were error-tagged; they only came out as a paste now. All the nutrient tanks were redlined, with barely five per cent left.
Yirella staggered back out of the canteen. There was a clinic on the deck below; if Tilliana, Ellici and Alexandre had survived, they’d need that. She made her way down the stairwell, forcing herself to hurry. The clinic door was open, its mechanism not working. Inside, the five medical bays had all undergone repairs, their casings removed to expose the delicate systems inside and the rudimentary alterations that had been performed on them. The android body didn’t have the routines for involuntary muscle shudders, but she certainly felt as if she’d shivered.
She went back out into the corridor and looked down at the floor, seeing worn tracks. There were several cabins that had been used. The first she went in was dark, its texture walls inert; the same with the second. As she approached the third, she could hear orchestral music. When the doors opened, it was so loud she hesitated on the threshold before she went in. The cabin’s texture had reproduced Turin’s splendid Teatro Regio opera house in its original eighteenth-century form. The auditorium was
