The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [36]
Darkness slammed in from all sides. Her field of vision suddenly shrank to just her right eye and she couldn’t feel her body, no hands, legs, no mouth, nose, no feeling, no senses apart from one eye and a section of blue sky.
‘That Hegemony nanodust … really, it is such versatile stuff,’ came Talavera’s voice, close and rich with an unreal intensity. ‘I’ve got it shutting down pathways around your personality centres, mainly those to do with motivation and mood. Should keep you nicely torpid, and when you wake up after it’s all over, it’ll be a very different galaxy. Who knows, you might like it!’
Silence closed in. The blue sky turned grey-silver and an array of square silvery recesses emerged, a lattice of them, lines converging towards the distance. She was herself sinking into one of the recesses, drifting down into its shadows. There was brief flash of anger but it soon faded. The need to oppose Talavera frayed away and defiance dissolved into passivity. Becalmed, Julia’s awareness was simply content now to stare up out of her square niche. Even when the light above shaded away into unbroken darkness, there was nothing in her that felt like responding.
… initialising contingency state … initialising contingency state …
The odd phrase appeared on the niche wall, pale blue glowing letters that pulsed over and over.
… initialising contingency state …
It seemed familiar, one of the autofeatures she’d coded into the polymotes at the start.
… initialised … nano-intrusion has been mapped … reroute partitioned cortical nodes? y/n …
A small glowing star sat above the y/n options and she found that she could will it to move in any direction. When she placed it over the y, other words appeared.
… stepped reconnection initiated … pov focus translocation initiated …
Suddenly she was in motion, a headlong blurring rush that made a bewildering number of abrupt changes in direction. All while a sharpness of mood crept back into her thoughts, bringing understanding in its wake. This reprieve had been effected by one of the polymote copies following its imperatives – subvert enemy systems, enhance and expand Julia’s scope for action. By now the dizzying, angular journey had slowed and it seemed that she hovered next to a dazzling, quivering, thrumming geyser of light passing horizontally through a sequence of crystalline rings. It was the dataflow of the virtuality chamber, the inflows and outflows, currents specific to each of the five metacosms that Talavera was running.
Time is limited, said the polymote. Do you wish to send a message via this vessel’s tiernet connection?
Hearing the polymote as a disembodied voice in her mind was unsettling. I have no mouth, she wanted to say. How can I …
You may do so by speaking the words in your mind.
‘I see. How much time is left?’
The nano-intrusion was easily fooled. However, cortical imbalances will exceed their capture tolerances in less than an objective minute and trigger alerts. Subjectively you have a longer period.
‘I want to observe the other Enhanced. I want to see what she’s done.’
Without warning her point of view plunged straight into the searing brightness of the dataflow.
She saw Konstantin’s laboratory, vast and intricate as a city, its districts cluttered with complex arrays of glassware, or stacks of analytical devices, or towers of monitors and servers. Yet a dark hush hung over it and many areas were shadowy or swathed in inky darkness. Toward the city centre there were still lights and flickering glows, signs of activity.
Irenya’s metacosm was a garden with a fountain and a stream and a wooden bridge and a bird table and willow trees. Only the garden was overgrown, the willows were half-strangled by masses of thorns, the fountain was dried up and cracked and the stream stank of decay. It was raining and from behind the tangled bushes came the sound of crying.
Thorold had not succumbed, not completely. Under an icy grey sky he was hauling a cart of stones up a bare mountain track.
The last was Arkady’s. Talavera had already infected him with the Hegemony