Spin State - Chris Moriarty [94]
“You’ve got me all wrong, Cohen.”
“Do I? Then what are you so afraid of?”
“Nothing,” she snapped. “I’m just not interested in being the next stop on your tourist trip through the human psyche.”
He looked away and muttered something she couldn’t quite hear.
“What did you say?”
“I said that’s exceptionally nasty, even for you.”
The room suddenly felt too small, too hot. Li turned away and began checking the walls, trying to find some chink in them.
“Look,” she said after a long, uncomfortable pause. “I didn’t mean—”
“Forget it. It was stupid of me.”
“So what’s with the kid?” Li asked when the white silence had become too thickly oppressive to stand any longer.
“Ah.” Cohen undid the laces of his sneakers and started putting them back on his sock-clad feet. “I thought you knew that. This is Hyacinthe.”
“I thought you were Hyacinthe.”
“He’s one of the things I am. He’s my original, bedrock interface program. And, of course, the man who invented me.”
Li had a sudden urge to laugh. “As a ten-year-old?”
“Actually he was fourteen when this was done. It’s old video footage. He used it to create the original VR interface. I guess you could say it was my first ’face. I tend to fall back on it when I’m pushing the limits of my processing capacity. As at present, unfortunately.”
“Can’t we get out?” Li paced the room’s perimeter again.
“No. And sit down before you drive me incurably mad. You’re safe as long as I’m here.”
But just as he said the words—as if someone were playing a nasty joke on them—he was gone again.
Li was back in the dark place.
This time she knew she was underground, in the mine. But that was all she knew. Water dripped from an unseen ceiling, splashed in an unseen pool. A damp, chill air current wafted up from some underground river too far off for her to hear.
She cut to infrared. No good. She was instream; she saw only what the person controlling the simulation wanted her to see.
“Light a lamp,” Cohen’s voice whispered from somewhere near her left ear.
Her hand reached out to where it knew the lamp was. Picked it up. Primed it. But her fingers fumbled with the wick, as if they had become sudden strangers to this familiar task. As she adjusted the flame, she brushed the inside of her hand against the hot barrel of the oil reservoir and heard the sizzle of burning skin.
“Shit!” she said, putting her hand to her mouth instinctively, sucking at the blistered crescent of flesh.
“Sssh,” Cohen said. “You’re fine. Tell me what you see.”
She held up the lamp and saw an uneven floor of hewn rock running away in all directions. Pillars of light marched in long ranks from one end of the space to the other, gleaming like ivory in the lamplight. The ceiling arched overhead, supported by undulating veins that fanned from one Bose-Einstein node to another in an infinitely repeating, fractally complex spider’s web.
“It’s the glory hole,” she told Cohen. “Sharifi’s glory hole.”
But it was the glory hole intact, unburnt and unflooded and full of softly whirring and clicking equipment. The glory hole before the fire. A generator hummed in one corner. Optical cables snaked across the floor between thickets of diagnostic machinery. Crooked teeth of crystal jutted from floor and ceiling.
The mouths of the earth, Li thought. Wasn’t that what Compson had called them?
“Is this where the hijacker took you?” Cohen asked.
She raised the lamp and turned in a slow circle. To her left a steepening upslope followed the line of the vein, echoing the mined-out chamber on the level above. To her right, the portable virusteel ladder led to the chamber and drift above, and to the long slippery stairs out of the Trinidad.
“Is this it?” Cohen whispered—and she realized for the first time that the whisper was not behind her but inside her. “Is it your memory or someone else’s?”
“Someone else’s.”
“Whose then? Think.”
Her hand moved reluctantly, as if she were keying