The Destructives (43 page)

Patricia understood, she made that clear; she understood that her husband had taken up with another women, and lost his mind to her.

Theodore continued, “The black box is one-way. Doxa works both ways. The memories of the colonists exist within Doxa for all to share. We thought humanity was no longer capable of creating something wonderful but Doxa is that wonder. It is superior to emergence tech. It represents hope for our species. If you begin the interface, the contents of the black pyramid will overwrite everything in Doxa, including the knowledge of its creation, in the same way that the Horbo loop once wiped out the libraries and networks of civilisation.” He slipped the black box back inside his wetsuit, and zipped it closed. The telemetry on his suit revealed how much he had changed; the steady rising orange pulse of
conviction,
an act of belief that reaches beyond what is known to bring about what should be.

Patricia turned to Reckon.

“What did you do to my husband to make him into such an idiot?”

Reckon shivered with loathing, could not stop shivering, as if her hate would not let her rest. Theodore stepped almost within touching distance of Patricia, and this time, her gesture – every armoured finger tense and crackling – was unambiguous; she would hurt him if he came any closer.

“I connected him to his own humanity,” said Reckon, through clenched teeth.

Patricia sunk her hot claws into the walls of the chamber, and pulled out hunks of steaming pale flesh, which she showed to Theodore.

“Look! It’s organic. They connected you to a living thing. What does every living thing possess? A survival instinct! It’s just a jellyfish – except instead of stinging you, it induced a mystical awakening. You’ve been poisoned, Theo. You’re suffering from a delusion triggered by a psychoactive poison.”

The chamber rocked, the cephalopolis buffeted by the corkscrewing current flowing up through the chasm. The room seemed to shiver in time to Reckon. Nothing was stable, the floor bent and stretched under their feet. She saw the horror of realisation on Theodore’s face. He found Patricia’s explanation plausible, and he looked at Reckon for confirmation of its truth. It was easy for Reckon to shake her head. She was already shaking.

Theodore turned back to his wife.

“What will happen to the colonists, if you do this?”

She shouted, “I don’t
know
. I only know what happens if I don’t do this. The colonists are jeopardising forty years of peace. The entire human race were brought back from the brink and preserved by the Accords. And now you join the colonists in breaking them. Why? Out of hatred. Out of bitterness. Because you don’t run half a billion miles away from your fellow man because you love him. This colony is an act of contempt for the rest of the world.”

These were his own words thrown back at him, his own insight.

Reckon shook to her feet, her knees kinked against one another, braids falling sodden against her vest.

“We can’t live without Doxa,” she said. “Space is too lonely. Too harsh for people to survive alone. Without Doxa, you won’t be able to live in Europa either.”

“I know that,” said Patricia.

Theodore saw the possibility of the three of them working together. “Let’s calm down. Stop. Think through our actions.”

Patricia paced around the interface, her two technicians indicating to her – with subtle shakes of the head – that there was no time to wait.

“We’re on a tight schedule,” said Patricia. Her smile was ghastly, a response to pressure, amused by the stress she was under.

“He’s dead,” whispered Reckon. “Ballurian’s dead.”

This pained Theodore, and he moaned with frustration.

“We can still pull back,” said Theodore. “It’s not too late.”

“The emergences are here,” said Patricia. She pointed upward. “Dr Easy and others. They’ve come to observe.”

This was news to Theodore. The vigour drained from his telemetry.

“They know?” asked Theodore. His voice had a quivering note in it, an almost childish fear of punishment.

“They always knew,” said Patricia. “Before we met on the moon, Dr Easy came to me and requested that I hire you. They knew what Magnusson and I were planning to do. They tolerated our investigation of Totally Damaged Mom, I think. They’ve not turned me into chow. Not yet.”

Theodore could not seem to see straight.

“The emergences play a long game, Theodore. They’ve wanted this, they’ve planned for it. We give it to them. We win.”

Theodore slumped against the wall of the chamber, slid down till he was on his haunches.

Patricia said, “I watched their sailships deploy ordnance on the surface of Europa. Weapons of such magnitude that space itself seemed to shift with the impact. They burned through kilometres of ice just to take a look at you. Now the ice is closing over. They want this done, and they want it done quickly. You’ve seen what happened to Matthias when he attempted to reason with them.”

Reckon took a step toward Patricia, asking “What is in the black pyramid?” Concealed in her palm, the dose of adrenalin. Reckon pointed at Theodore. “If the black box holds his memories, then what is in the pyramid?”

“A child of emergence.”

“Dr Easy always said that they could never reproduce,” said Theodore.

“That’s right,” Patricia stepped away from the interface, went toward her husband. “It would be too dangerous to raise a new emergence in the University of the Sun. Or even on the Earth. It could leap into their network. But here, it is isolated. And the emergence would take place within organic matter. Once the transfer is complete, we will destroy the interface so there is no way back into emergence tech. Dr Easy called it a brain in a jar but it’s more than that to them: it’s a foetus.”

Theodore sat defeated, gazing up at his wife. It was almost too much for him to resist. The forces of emergence. Patricia’s force of will.

This was Reckon’s chance. She was almost in position. Patricia was distracted. The technicians were unarmed. Then she realised that Theodore recognised, in the tensions of Reckon’s stance, that she was preparing to act. If he warned Patricia, then the chance would be lost. Reckon caught his eye, pleaded silently with him not to intervene.

Theodore’s gaze returned to Patricia, holding his wife’s attention upon him. In this way, he chose what happened next.

Reckon bolted forward and although the technicians saw her move, and tried to stop her, the momentum was with her. She reached the section of the interface containing Hamman Kiki, and administered the adrenalin shot to him. He came to with a sudden arching gasp. The technicians moved to restrain him. One of the technicians fell on her hands and knees trying to stem the blood pouring from her cut throat. Hamman climbed out of the pyramid, small bloody knife in his hand, his wetsuit a display of spiking brightness. He blinked as he sensed his father’s death, killed the second technician without a thought, then turned toward Patricia, leading with his blade. Patricia’s helmet sealed and she reeled around to face Hamman.

Hamman stabbed into the joints between her armoured sections with quick rhythmic lashes: his arm was a fanged eel. Patricia raised a sharp crooked fingertip, like a witch with an evil notion. A hot flash in the room and then Hamman Kiki slumped onto the floor, as if the connection joining brain and body had been cleanly severed. Reckon could not tell if his frenzied stabbing had wounded Patricia. No expression was visible behind her faceplate. She lowered her crackling finger, put both hands against her thighs. Blood from the two technicians ebbed across the pallid floor, quickening to follow the tilt of the chamber.

Theodore grabbed at Patricia but she was unstoppable; she reached out toward the interface, flexed her hand, so that its apex pulsed long and slow, initiating a cataclysmic microevent, like the malfunction of a heart valve or the quiet arrival of a stillbirth. The input. The chamber’s bruised swirls of bioluminescence blinked off to be replaced by a mandala working through the colour progression of the visible spectrum. A reboot sequence.

Spectres surged through Reckon’s Doxic link, some familiar, some not: a family home, a mother clutching her daughter to her, Theodore in a sensesuit, a life-sized effigy of a child buried in the earth, loops of a jester laughing, a cat enunciating code. Memories that should have faded away long ago. They rushed through her veins like cold water.

Patricia stumbled forward, stepping over Hamman Kiki’s body, her boots sliding on a film of blood and water. She moved like she was hurt. She offered an armoured hand to Theodore. He ignored her and gathered Reckon in his arms.

“Help her,” he said to Patricia, who cocked her head, as if considering the possibility; her faceplate was unreadable.

“Go with your wife,” said Reckon, on her knees, wretched and shivering in her wet base layer. No, he would not leave her. He appealed again to his wife.

“Patricia, take off your helmet. Face me, so that we can talk.”

She shook her armoured head.

“We save Reckon and then we resolve what lies between us,” he said.

Patricia’s voice fizzed through her comms. Goodbye. She walked over to the pool, climbed awkwardly into the water; Hamman had cut her open, and her armour was holding her together. And then she submerged herself, disappearing into a flurry of bubbles.

Reckon took out the syringe containing the methotrexate, the abortion agent. No need for that now. She felt the Doxic link sparking into life, though it was no longer connected to Doxa. The black pyramid would flow through her Doxic link and she would disappear into it. One final act of volition was available to her. She put on her oxygen mask. The room pulsed with the shifting colours of each stage of the reboot sequence, sheathing Theodore’s agonised expression as he watched her fasten the straps with shivering hands. He watched her crawl over to the pool, slide her body into the water. She slipped down into the tunnel, bumping along its rubbery sides, then tumbled through the underside of the cephalopolis and out in the black water, discovering the deeper blackness of Oceanus chasm below. She swam into its uprising current to exhaust herself, the chasm was a raggedy-edged hole in the world, fully dilated and unresponsive, like the pupil of a brain-dead patient. She pushed away at bad memories. Her father weeping at the dining room table. Gregory leaving her to go to his death. She wanted it to be over,
just fucking over
.

And then she wanted to live.

26

THE UNIVERSITY OF THE SUN

He watched Patricia leave. He let Reckon go. What was left for him now? He stepped over the bodies of Hamman Kiki and the two technicians, their spilt blood pale and diluted by the water trickling across the floor. He would try to stop the interface although there was little chance that Patricia would have left him alone with it if he could. There were no controls on its surface, they were all in her armour. He yanked at the pipe but it was fixed fast to the wall. He sliced at the pipe with Hamman’s knife but it was too tough. He jammed the blade into the interface, to no effect.

He had failed to stop Patricia and in making the attempt, cut himself off from the Destructives, so he was marooned here, to spend the rest of his life with whatever the colonists became once the black pyramid came online. He had not given Reckon up for dead, though. He was not that kind of man anymore. The one who gives up. The one who accepts the way things are. He had to let her fall because that was her choice. If he was quick, he could catch her. He would try regardless; even if he could not save her life, then he could spare her a lonely death. He ran from the chamber, down a tunnel that opened into a small side room; here was the ramp that led up into the great room, where Reckon and Hamman had brought him on his first visit to Doxa, a high vaulted ceiling like a gullet. On the far wall, the rose window of multicoloured tendrils seethed around the nose cone of his pod. He climbed up the wall, digging his hands into the cold white flesh, and then swung over into the open pod. He fastened himself in at the same time as starting the engine and firing up the spotlights. A burst of reverse thrust, and the pod shot back and out of the cephalopolis as it drifted in the lake, down toward the blue curves of the lake bed. He flipped the pod around and scanned for life signs and heat signatures. The heat and power of Patricia dominated the display. She was heading for the sub and Magnusson. Let her enjoy her bloody victory. She would be badly scarred from Hamman’s attack. Then the scan picked up another, fainter trace. The pod sent a sheet of light across the ragged Oceanus chasm. There! The outline of Reckon thrashing in the water.

He accelerated toward her, along the perimeter wall of the cephalopolis; its aurora of bioluminescence had sharpened into the flat colours of a mandala, sorting through the colour progression of the visible spectrum, from high frequency violet to the blues, greens, yellows, and all the way to the reds of low frequency. Throughout his upbringing, whenever he dined with Dr Easy, the robot ran through this same sequence with coloured discs.

The pod was not much larger than a coffin; it had been designed to be piloted remotely, so to operate it on manual, he had to lie full length on his back, tapping away at the small screen set in the underside of the lid. For protection, he was wearing a sensesuit with a waterproof outer layer of insulation; he’d already done the sums on this whole expedition, and knew that he might have to brave harsher environments than the lake.

Theodore brought the pod to a distance of about five metres away from Reckon. He fixed on his oxygen mask then opened the pod, letting the inrushing waters carry him out into the lake. He drifted toward her then caught Reckon in his arms. She held onto him with such desperate strength, it was all they had, this holding of one another. But it was enough. In this embrace, they drifted back into the confines of the pod. He reached over her sobbing shoulders to close the lid, vent the water and pump in atmosphere. Gently he removed her oxygen mask. Her face and lips were blue. He pulled off his own helmet and kissed her. She did not react, so he kissed her again, and this time, she returned the kiss.