The Machinery of Light

What do you mean it’s really her?” says the Operative.

“Now we got him excited,” says Maschler.

“Now you got me wondering what kind of bullshit you’re trying to fucking pull,” mutters the Operative. “There’s no way that Montrose is so stupid as to turn the Manilishi over to Szilard.”

“Unless?” asks Riley.

“There’s no unless. That’s not the Manilishi—”

“Hold that thought,” says Maschler.

The woman’s eyes open.

I don’t understand,” says Haskell.

“You don’t have to,” says Sinclair.

His face is coming into view now—the one she remembers from four days ago. Its eyes are wide. Its lips are parted. She feels herself being pulled in as though by an undertow—feels like she’s already gone under.

“You broke into the InfoCom systems,” she says.

“On the contrary,” he says. “You broke out.”

Did you just kill that guy?” asks Linehan.

“He didn’t feel a thing,” says Lynx.

Linehan can believe it. None of the people around him seem to be aware of much. The corridor stretches away, sleepers racked every step of the way. Plastic medbeds, looking disconcertingly like trays, are stacked upon one another, ten per each two meters of corridor.

“Easier to think of them as meat,” adds Lynx.

Sarmax vaults into the room; the camera-feed that Spencer’s giving him merges seamlessly with what’s actually sitting in the room, wearing the uniform of a major in Russian intelligence and the smile of a man who’s way ahead of everything. Sarmax brings his guns to bear.

“Don’t fucking move,” he says.

“Glad you could make it,” says the man.

Carson,” says the woman.

The Operative stares at her. She sounds just like Haskell.

“Claire?” he says.

What the hell’s going on?” says Haskell.

“Exactly what I planned,” says Sinclair.

“We’re all just your puppets?”

“More like all just part of the pattern.”

Meet the Martians,” says Lynx, as he starts running jacks into the wires he’s ripped from the walls. Linehan keeps an eye on the corridor while he does so, trying not to think about all those staring eyes …

“What the fuck are you talking about?” he asks.

“That’s where they thought they were going.”

“What was the point of having them here on a warship, then—of lying to them?”

Lynx shrugs. “To make the overall lie that much more convincing?”

Spencer drops from the duct into the room, takes in the scene. There’s a buzz as Sarmax opens up the one- on-one.

“Who the fuck is this?” he demands. But Spencer says nothing—

“You don’t recognize me?” asks the man.

“Should I?” asks Sarmax.

“Here’s a hint: you killed me once already.”

It’s very simple,” says the woman.

“I’ll bet,” says the Operative.

“I’m Claire,” she says dreamily.

“You’re on drugs,” says the Operative.

“Are those two things so incompatible?”

“You’re a clone,” he says.

“Not quite,” says Riley.

“You really want to discuss this in front of her?”

“Why not?” says the woman. “I’m at peace with it.”

“With what?”

“Being God,” she says.

Anything but that,” says Haskell.

Sinclair laughs. “You think you’re God?”

She’s starting to wonder. Because all of a sudden her purview is stretching all the way to that shuttle in which Carson and Maschler and Riley are approaching Szilard’s lair. The ship that contains the cargo that’s made in her own image—the woman whose mind she’s now inside. She can’t control what that woman’s saying. All she can do is watch.

Though she really doesn’t want to.

“I think I’m going crazy,” she tells Sinclair.

“Crazy enough to believe you’re the one to judge the living and the dead?” He chuckles, and it’s somehow almost obscene. “You’re so much more than that bullshit.”

“I just want to be a normal fucking human being.”

“Your flesh is as close as you get to that.”

“My flesh is locked into a tank while a bodyless machine goes to town on it—”

“Control? Let it keep on flailing away.”

“But it’s about to enslave me—”

“Again, you’ve got it backward.”

Lynx has ripped out a panel of the wall. Wires link him to the electronics behind it. All the bodies around him are breathing except for one.

“So who was he?” asks Linehan.

“Who?”

“That guy you just killed.”

“Luckless.”

I’m Alek Jarvin,” says the man.

“Fuck,” says Sarmax.

“Prove it,” says Spencer.

“The same way you could prove you killed me?”

Spencer gets the dilemma. Nothing’s certain these days. Not when faces are malleable. The man they shot to death in the floor of that safehouse back in Hong Kong, who looked exactly like a rogue CICom handler—he could have been a plant. Could have been hired to play the part—could have been manufactured— without knowing how the role was going to end. There’s no way to know for sure.

Though it’s possible to narrow down the options.

“You stole something from me,” says the man.

“Which you stole from Matthew Sinclair,” says Sarmax.