The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [37]
‘I’ve seen enough.’
Again the dataflow, its torrid brightness, its furious density. She considered the ship’s tiernet connection, a cluster of data channels whose multiplexity made perfect security a near-impossibility. Which is why Talavera wanted the Enhanced; their wetware was harder to infiltrate via the tiernet, and they were easier to coerce than an AI. Easy victims, weak, friendless. Talavera’s words came back to her:
‘Do you have someone like that, someone who’ll reach down and save you and protect you? … we both know what the answer is … ’
‘Can you make a copy of my mindstate?’ she said. ‘Then open a channel to the tiernet and upstream it?’
A close, fractal-based approximation can be created … the virtuality monitors have discovered the anomalous imbalance in your brain. There is no time to create the copy then upstream it, but there is time to fractalise and upstream it in continual realtime transfer.
She hesitated, but only for a moment.
‘That will suffice.’
The fractalisation process may cause irreparable neural damage – it will certainly mean the end of your self-aware existence.
‘If I am cogent and aware when the nanodust shifts into its second phase I will experience suffering and self-death anyway. I have seen what it does. Please proceed with the scan.’
It is commencing. You will soon experience a scaleback in the visual and auditory senses. Also, old memories may appear for a short time.
The furious brightness of the dataflow grew pale then blurred into haze, and she imagined that she could hear a sound like the roar of a waterfall fading away. As it quietened it turned into something else, a crackling sound interspersed with pops and clicks. She saw a blob of light, a wavering yellowness which resolved out of the blur to become a bonfire on a beach by night. Ash specks and gleaming motes flew up on the swirling heat. Branches glowed red at the heart of the flames, bark curled and crisped and smoke flowed off the outer kindling in pale, rising rivulets.
Then it was as if the fire was within her. A wave of strange sensations surged, some memories, ideas, words, her name even, burst forth then melted away. Somehow she felt unburdened as her last thoughts rose up out of her like an ascending cascade of singing stars.
Flanked by two Kiskashin techs, Corazon Talavera gazed down at the unresponsive but still breathing form of Julia Bryce. As she stood there comparing the data on her analyser pad with the tank’s readouts, a creature like a snake made of dense black smoke coiled and slithered from thigh to torso to upper arm and back. The Kiskashin were both terrified of it but strove to show no fear, not in Talavera’s presence anyway.
‘She’s gone,’ Talavera said at last. ‘Use the dust again. Make a fine, new instrument for me.’
KUROS
Brolturan troops saluted as he passed, mounting steps recently cut into the side of the rocky ridge. The morning sky was grey and a cold sea breeze made his golden robes flap. He experienced an involuntary shiver and the skin of his exposed lower arms prickled, a reaction to the lower temperature. It was a flaw of the flesh that he was prepared to suffer in anticipation of the rewards that came with victory. He continued his climb to the observation station.
Utavess Kuros, eldest offspring of Efeskin Kuros, once High Monitor, once Ambassador of the Sendrukan Hegemony to this dust-mote of a world, once rejoicing in the appellation ‘exalted’, was now a prisoner within his own head. There were no physical feelings, no bodily sensations apart from vision. He was a mute witness to all that the interloper was seeing and hearing, all of it so clear that he had come to believe that it was deliberate.
For that first day, after the AI Gratach took possession, Kuros had felt the moorings of his sanity give way. Darkness