The Changeling Game, Chapter 61

61.
We Do This So You Will Live

Audrey.

Audrey, wake up.

Come, little larva.

Audrey, you must wake up now.

She was lying on the mats of the recreation room, her hands folded over her abdomen. The room was still and quiet. No music played; SensAI usually had guqin music going during their Tai Chi sessions.

Where was SensAI?

She sat up slowly, looking around. Her chrono indicated that their session should have ended half an hour earlier. She was supposed to be reading a civics text by then, not…

…what, exactly? Why had she been sleeping on the floor?

She remembered coming into the recreation room and beginning the Tai Chi session with SensAI, but…

Had they called to her? In the middle of the session? She had a strange, nebulous memory of hearing the voices of the Apeiros. Asking her for… help?

She climbed to her feet. She was still dressed for Tai Chi. Whatever had happened…

There’s another missing spot in my memories, she realized, and shivered. Whatever had happened had been lifted from her mind, for a third time.

“SensAI?” she asked, hesitant.

His holographic form appeared in front of her, a form that his profile data referred to as “Morita,” a slightly plump Asian man several inches shorter than her, sporting a more-salt-than-pepper mustache and goatee. “Yes, Marianne? Are you ready to continue?”

“I, um… not yet. Do you know why we stopped?”

“You asked me to leave because you needed to do something. You didn’t say what.”

There would be a message for her. She was sure of it. Something to explain, at least a little…

Ten minutes later, she hadn’t found any on the consoles. No signs of redactions, either. Which meant… what, exactly?

“SensAI, could you play back the room’s security recording of our most recent Tai Chi session, please?”

“Of course, Marianne.” He vanished. In his place, a holographic version of her appeared, entering the room and invoking him again.

“Please play forward at high speed until I ask you to pause.”

In front of her, as she watched, she and SensAI began to go through a variety of Tai Chi poses, almost seeming to move at normal speed rather than the slow and precise motions that had played out in realtime. Suddenly, the holographic Marianne stopped mirroring SensAI’s motions and went still. An instant later, he vanished.

“Pause there, please. Roll the recording back to five minutes before you left.”

Once again, Holo Marianne and SensAI were in front of her, frozen in the “Carry the Tiger Over the Mountain” position. She took a deep breath.

“Resume playing at normal speed, please.”

There she was, before herself, slowly moving through the different poses that SensAI was modeling for her, managing an almost-precise replication of his posture and gestures. And then, suddenly, she went still. SensAI paused his movements.

“Marianne?” he asked. “Are you well?”

Holo Marianne didn’t answer. She stared out into space. Slowly, her body relaxed into a stable, standing posture.

“Marianne, do you need assistance?” he asked, his voice taking on a tone of concern.

“No,” Holo Marianne said softly. “End session. Please go now. I need to do something…”

“Very well. Call for me when you are ready to continue,” SensAI said, bowing, and his holographic projection faded.

Holo Marianne stood quietly, looking straight ahead, for several minutes. Slowly, the calm vanished from her features, replaced by escalating fear. Her breathing quickened and she lifted one hand as if trying to grab something in front of her. Her face twisted in a strange kind of agony—

—and then she gasped, panting, looking momentarily relieved…

…before her expression crumpled and she began sobbing.

“I’m sorry,” she cried out, falling to her knees. “I’m so sorry… I didn’t know… I swear, I didn’t know…”

“What… the… fuck?” Marianne asked, watching herself from mere feet away.

“I’ll break them,” Holo Marianne gasped, curling on her side on the floor. “I’ll break them all… for you… I swear I will…”

It looked like she was listening to something.

“I’ll find a way!” she shouted at the air, rolling onto her back. Her sobs were wracking her whole body. “I have to… I have to… I can start with this one…”

As Marianne stared at herself from less than an hour earlier, the sobs abruptly ceased. Holo Marianne’s back arched and she gasped, and then slowly relaxed. For several minutes, she lay, limp, on the floor.

And then, slowly, she began to sit up.

There was something strange, wrong about the way she was moving, Marianne thought. Something unnatural. It was as if she didn’t know how to handle her own limbs, didn’t know how to bend and unbend. It was almost like watching someone manipulate a doll…

Holo Marianne slowly, awkwardly, rose… and turned to face the place where Marianne stood.

Her expression was blank. Her eyes were glazed. Her mouth opened…

And for a few moments, nothing came out except strange, experimental sounds. Vowels and consonants in no particular order. As if something that had never had a mouth before was trying to manipulate one for the first time.

“What the fuck?” Marianne asked, staring at her holographic face in horror. “Did I have a brain hemorrhage?”

“What…” Holo Marianne said. Her pronunciation was strange. Her voice was off. “We…”

Marianne gasped. Something was speaking through her body on the screen, and she was damn sure she knew what.

“Have… taken… must… ssssstay… lost…” Holo Marianne’s mouth moved strangely, uncomfortably, forming the words with enormous difficulty. The eyes were still glazed.

“Oh holy fuck.” She was right. It was them.

“…We… do… not… do… this… to… hurt… you…”

Her speech was becoming a little more natural as they went on, as they learned how to use her mouth.

“…We… do… this… so… you… will… live…”

Marianne could feel her heart hammering against her ribs. What had happened? Why had they taken her memories again?

They’d known she’d see this. This was the message that had been left for her. For her protection? How had she—or they—known that she’d be standing right in this spot while she watched it?

“…Do… not… try… to… find… the… answer…”

They were speaking in English. Had they learned it from talking to her? Or were they picking through her brain for relevant bits of lexicon to enunciate?

“…We… love… you… little… larva… Aud… ree… our… daughter…”

Oh my god…

“Destroy… this… recording… and please… do not… assssk… why…”

Holo Marianne, puppetiered by the Apeiros, turned away and lay down on the floor, both awkwardly and carefully, before folding her hands across her abdomen and closing her eyes.

“P…please advance the recording at high speed to two minutes before I summoned you back, SensAI,” Marianne said, her voice shaking.

According to the holographic version of her chrono, Holo Marianne’s eyes remained closed for the next half hour, until she stirred again and sat up, looking confused… and human again.

Her hands trembling, Marianne moved to the room’s command console and accessed its security settings. She isolated and erased the recording, starting five minutes before her strange fit had begun. Then she erased the last portion of SensAI’s data file, starting at the same timecode. Using her most powerful Ghost Code, she doctored the files to make it appear that there had been a minor glitch with the cameras, a memory board, and the holographic equipment in the room, which she had subsequently repaired. She knew all of the commands by rote, accessed them with no trouble… and tried not to give in to the gray shakes the whole time.

They had asked for her help… and whatever it was that she had helped them with, it had almost broken her. Until they had taken it all away.

She could feel it, too: a new empty space in her mind where memories should be. Part of her kept instinctively worrying at it, the way her tongue had kept slipping into the spot where she’d had a missing tooth when she was years younger. In the formerly perfect tapestry of her memory that stretched out for slightly more than thirteen and a half years… there was a new hole, one of several that littered her recent weeks.

And she had just done to SensAI what they had done to her.

Somehow that felt worse. She had cooperated in her prior memory loss, after all, and the Apeiros had told her, afterwards, that they would never take anything she needed, only things that would somehow harm her. And given just how badly she’d been freaking out before they took control of her body, it seemed plausible that that was still true. Disturbing as it had been to watch…

They had taken the memories for her sake.

What she’d done to SensAI hadn’t been for his sake at all.

In the last month, as she had settled into her routines even more, she’d formed genuine relationships with each of the AIs. Trust and friendship had developed, and she had just violated both of those. SensAI would never realize that she’d deliberately wiped a small chunk of his memory; he would think that it had been an electronic glitch, since fixed, that had occurred while she was fortunately nearby and could repair it immediately. Aside from a doctored log in the maintenance file about the fix—much like the redactions in EntertAIn’s log files from the month before—there would be no sign that it had been anything else.

That didn’t make it right, though. “SensAI?”

“Are you well, Marianne?” SensAI appeared in the room again. “It appears that some time has passed since we had our session.”

There was nothing else she could do in this moment except play the role. She smiled over at him. “Fine, thanks. Looks like we had a short in one of the memory boards. You lose any time?”

SensAI paused and then nodded. “Roughly an hour. It appears to have begun during our Tai Chi session.”

“That’s what I thought,” she told him. Oh, you fucking liar. “Should be good now, though. Self-diagnostic?”

Another pause and then SensAI nodded. “No memory degradation is detected aside from the offline time. Did anything significant happen?”

She shrugged. “You kinda faded out in the middle of the session. I’m glad you didn’t lose anything outside of that time.”

“Did you wish to resume, Marianne?”

She glanced at her chrono and sighed. “Can’t… it’s almost time for the isomorph back into U1. I’m due on the flight deck just as soon as I change.”

It was their longest Star Jump yet, a full day and a half in length, and her dreams had been weird when she’d gone to sleep after it began. U37d felt a little creepy to her. It was part of her five-shape now, but she’d felt a strange sense of unrest with it and was looking forward to no longer being in it. She would have to ask the Apeiros if there was a way to push a four-space back out of her five-shape.

Talking to them was going to be creepy, too. She loved and trusted them—

Wow, really? How long have I felt like that? It was almost like the moment, during the first high tide in New Marrakesh, when she’d realized she loved Kyra and that, somehow, a sister-bond had forged between them.

—but there was a part of her that still felt a little violated.

Although the Nephrite Undine was still in U37d’s wormhole when she reached the flight deck, AIngineer had already opened the front shields. Blankness greeted her when she focused just on the view within U37d; in the other ’verses, the stars spun and danced in a way that reminded her, again, of how they sometimes moved in the space the Apeiros inhabited.

Funny. The “creepy” feeling she’d had since their entry to U37d no longer seemed to be with her. Maybe because they were almost out of it?

The swirling stars were slowing, resolving… and then they appeared on the screen before her, visible in all of the ’verses she was connected to.

“Travel through wormhole completed,” AIngineer announced. “Isomorph Drive disengaging. Transition to U1 commencing…”

She felt the usual gentle shockwave pass through her as they moved from one ’verse to another… and something else, something different. Relief, and exhaustion… and…

…gratitude?…

And a chilling sense that those emotions weren’t her own, but someone else’s.

But whose? She was the only biological life form on board the Nephrite Undine, and she already knew that she couldn’t “read” any of the AIs the way she’d been subconsciously reading other people for years. It was exposure to their thoroughly unreadable minds that had made her realize she’d been doing that at all.

So what was she sensing?

“Transition to U1 complete,” AIngineer announced. “All systems nominal, no anomalies detected. Ion drives powering up for journey to the next Jump Point. Data exchange with Beacon 1372 underway.”

That meant news updates. She kept meaning to look up the physics of how it worked, but tiny data courier drones also traveled between the Star Jump points, at speeds that no habitable spaceship could withstand, delivering and collecting updates. The news dumps that the Nephrite Undine received upon reentering U1’s space were rarely more than a week old, regardless of which part of the Federacy they had come from.

Nerving herself up to it took a few minutes, but she finally felt ready to read about the disaster in New Casablanca. Her disaster. The one she had caused.

Sitting down at the Comms Officer’s chair, she activated the data screens and keyed in her search parameters.

New Casablanca | Spaceport | Recent Articles

A long list of headlines spooled out in front of her.

The final death toll had been forty-two people; two of the individuals who had initially been among the missing had turned up, unharmed, elsewhere in the spaceport, and Salman Idrissi had recovered from his critical injuries. Marianne made herself read the obituaries of each of the dead. The overwhelming majority had been security personnel, but a dozen civilians had been in the mix as well. She read the civilian obituaries last, and Nadia’s articles last of all.

Nadia Heydari’s family was suing the spaceport, and its security firm, for reckless endangerment and wrongful death, drawing from testimony Officer Idrissi had provided.

Wait, what?

She followed the links, only growing more confused.

CEO of New Maroc Security Solutions Resigns in Wake of New Casablanca Spaceport Scandal

She scanned the article, growing more perplexed.

…Testimony by the sole surviving member of the security team that opened fire on Makarov and Heydari, Salman Idrissi, has revealed that his team was specifically ordered not to wait for a “clear shot” but to fire upon Makarov immediately. While most of the comms records appear to have been lost, Idrissi’s claims are corroborated by a single remaining recording, in which Idrissi, and others on his team, are heard questioning an order to “take the shot” while Heydari was still in the line of fire…

Why would they have done that?

“The whispers are that they’re considering taking out a contract on you themselves…”

Had the orders come from Quintessa? Or… had Makarov’s friend turned on him after he was exposed?

None of the articles mentioned Makarov having an accomplice, someone who had helped him finesse his way through a security checkpoint while carrying a whole arsenal of deadly weapons. That was bizarre. But some of the articles claimed that a great deal of the security recordings that ought to have been on file hadn’t been. It was another, more minor, scandal about the handling of the “incident.”

After another search, she realized that all the footage of her, what little there might have been, was missing as well. There were only a few pieces of vague eyewitness testimony about a woman recognizing Makarov and alerting security.

General Toal had been onsite in the aftermath. It was doubtful that he was behind every bit of footage that had disappeared, but he had probably covered her tracks.

She wondered, suddenly, what he would have done if she actually had been under arrest—as she had believed she was at the time—when their paths had crossed.

Whatever he had to, she thought, to protect the Meziane family and the Scarlet Matador survivors.

From her, if need be. He’d undoubtedly been relieved to find out that she had, improbably, made it offworld, and was glad to know he’d seen the last of her.

None of the news had made her feel any better about the situation. She had a feeling she wouldn’t have much of an appetite for dinner.

Enough. You have homework to do.

She and EntertAIn had worked out a schedule of quizzes on her makeup work, adding to them as she completed new modules. So far, she had aced them, but the holes in her normally eidetic memory—of which she now had a new one—had left her worried that other things might begin disappearing, too. If the AI had noticed just how juvenile all of her study material was, she’d made no comment. None of the AIs had commented on any of the handles she had sticking out, things that pointed to her being younger than it said on paper, or the fact that she was now three full inches taller than her ID claimed she was.

Sometimes it bothered her that they didn’t seem to notice any of it, that the plausible explanations she’d cooked up were never asked for. Other human beings might be oblivious to some of the oddities—and she hoped they would be—but the AIs, she worried, were more perceptive. Or should have been.

One module and two quizzes later, she returned to her cabin—currently the docking pilot’s cabin, with a comfortable “long twin” bed, small fold-down desk, and access to a private lavatory and a shared shower—to do her brain-wave baseline training before dinner.

What… the fuck…? Her starting scan was nuts.

Just what had she been doing when she’d been standing around in the recreation room? These were the waves of an active esper, not even one who’d gone a few hours without using their abilities.

While she hadn’t managed to hit a baseline reading yet, she’d gotten pretty close in the past… and suddenly she was all the way on the other side of the poles.

I can’t go home with waves like this, she thought with dismay. Okay, focus…

It took an hour before she could get her brain waves down to her normal starting point. Her head was beginning to pound when she finally stopped and went to eat dinner.

In spite of her conviction that she wouldn’t have much of an appetite, she was ravenous. She felt, she realized, as if she hadn’t eaten in days. She felt much the way she had after she’d raided the Quintessa Corporation lab.

She hadn’t felt like that earlier, though. It was the struggle to control her brain waves that had brought this hunger on. And the exhaustion, too. She could feel her mind clouding up a little.

Shit, I wonder what my readings are like right now…

“Marianne?” MilitAIre’s voice—masculine, with a “Boston” accent—came over the speakers. “When you have a moment, could you come by the Security Room?”

He had waited to ask until she was done eating and had returned her bowl—CommissAIry had served up a huge shepherd’s pie for dinner, and she had powered through the whole thing—to ask. He knew she had a moment. In fact, she realized, all the AIs always timed their requests for the precise moments when she was best able to accommodate them.

“I’ll be right there,” she told him. She’d find out what he needed her to do, and then go to bed a little early.

The Security Room was one of the most heavily fortified areas of the ship. In addition to housing the manual controls for a surprisingly large array of weaponry on the Nephrite Undine’s hull, it contained firearms and hand-to-hand combat weaponry that the crew might need if the ship was ever boarded. Piracy, apparently, was on the rise, along with another alleged threat that sounded like a creepy spaceways legend, and the latest civilian ships were bristling with armaments. One of the Sirius Shipping training modules she needed to do—and was actually overdue for, but MilitAIre hadn’t pushed her on it yet—was the use of such weaponry. She hadn’t really trusted herself around it, mindful of her prior suicide attempt and how dark her thoughts still were. Maybe he was about to insist that she begin learning how to handle some of the weapons?

Just not tonight, please… She was stuffed and sated on food, but that was only making her fatigue even more profound. She’d bargain for a morning start.

She almost didn’t hear the lock engage as she entered the Security Room and the door closed behind her. Almost. Her hearing was, after all, better than most people’s.

“Thank you for coming, Audrey. Please sit down.”

She was already seated when she realized what MilitAIre had just called her.

Oh. Fuck.

“We have a great deal we need to discuss, Miss MacNamera.”