* * *
“The Lord will take control of you. You will dance and shout and become a different person.”
“We were probably fractured during most of our evolution,” James once told me, back when we were all still getting acquainted. She tapped her temple. “There’s a lot of room up here; a modern brain can run dozens of sentient cores without getting too crowded. And parallel multitasking has obvious survival advantages.”
I nodded. “Ten heads are better than one.”
“Our integration may have actually occurred quite recently. Some experts think we can still revert to multiples under the right circumstances.”
“Well, of course. You’re living proof.”
She shook their head. “I’m not talking about physical partitioning. We’re the state of the art, certainly, but theoretically surgery isn’t even necessary. Simple stress could do something like it, if it was strong enough. If it happened early in childhood.”
“No kidding.”
“Well, in theory,” James admitted, and changed into Sascha who said, “Bullshit in theory. There’s documented cases as recently as fifty years ago.”
“Really.” I resisted the temptation to look it up on my inlays; the unfocused eyes can be a giveaway. “I didn’t know.”
“Well it’s not like anyone talks about it now. People were fucking barbarians about multicores back then — called it a disorder, treated it like some kind of disease. And their idea of a cure was to keep one of the cores and murder all the others. Not that they called it murder, of course. They called it integration or some shit. That’s what people did back then: created other people to suck up all the abuse and torture, then got rid of them when they weren’t needed any more.”
It hadn’t been the tone most of us were looking for at an ice-breaking party. James had gently eased back into the driver’s seat and the conversation had steered closer to community standards.
But I hadn’t heard any of the Gang use alter to describe each other, then or since. It had seemed innocuous enough when Szpindel had said it. I wondered why they’d taken such offence — and now, floating alone in my tent with a few pre-op minutes to kill, there was no one to see my eyes glaze.
Alter carried baggage over a century old, ConSensus told me. Sascha was right; there’d been a time when MCC was MPD, a Disorder rather than a Complex, and it had never been induced deliberately. According to the experts of that time, multiple personalities arose spontaneously from unimaginable cauldrons of abuse — fragmentary personae offered up to suffer rapes and beatings while the child behind took to some unknowable sanctuary in the folds of the brain. It was both survival strategy and ritual self-sacrifice: powerless souls hacking themselves to pieces, offering up quivering chunks of self in the desperate hope that the vengeful gods called Mom or Dad might not be insatiable.
None of it had been real, as it turned out. Or at least, none of it had been confirmed. The experts of the day had been little more than witch doctors dancing through improvised rituals: meandering free-form interviews full of leading questions and nonverbal cues, scavenger hunts through regurgitated childhoods. Sometimes a shot of lithium or haloperidol when the beads and rattles didn’t work. The technology to map minds was barely off the ground; the technology to edit them was years away. So the therapists and psychiatrists poked at their victims and invented names for things they didn’t understand, and argued over the shrines of Freud and Klein and the old Astrologers. Doing their very best to sound like practitioners of Science.
Inevitably, it was Science that turned them all into road kill; MPD was a half-forgotten fad even before the advent of synaptic rewiring. But alter was a word from that time, and its resonance had persisted. Among those who remembered the tale, alter was codespeak for betrayal and human sacrifice. Alter meant cannon fodder.
Imagining the topology of the Gang’s coexisting souls, I could see why Sascha embraced the mythology. I could see why Susan let her. After all, there was nothing implausible about the concept; the Gang’s very existence proved that much. And when you’ve been peeled off from a pre-existing entity, sculpted from nonexistence straight into adulthood — a mere fragment of personhood, without even a full-time body to call your own — you can be forgiven a certain amount of anger. Sure you’re all equal, all in it together. Sure, no persona is better than any other. Susan’s still the only one with a surname.
Better to direct that resentment at old grudges, real or imagined; less problematic, at least, than taking it out on someone who shares the same flesh.
I realized something else, too. Surrounded by displays documenting the relentless growth of the leviathan beneath us, I could not only see why Sascha had objected to the word; I could also see why Isaac Szpindel, no doubt unconsciously, had spoken it in the first place.
As far as Earth was concerned, everyone on Theseus was an alter.
* * *
Sarasti stayed behind. He hadn’t come with a backup.
There were the rest of us, though, crammed into the shuttle, embedded in custom spacesuits so padded with shielding we might have been deep-sea divers from a previous century. It was a fine balance; too much shielding would have been worse than none at all, would split primary particles into secondary ones, just as lethal and twice as numerous. Sometimes you had to live with moderate exposure; the only alternative was to embed yourself like a bug in lead.
We launched six hours from perigee. Scylla raced on ahead like an eager child, leaving its parent behind. There was no eagerness in the systems around me, though. Except for one: the Gang of Four almost shimmered behind her faceplate.
“Excited?” I asked.
Sascha answered: “Fuckin’ right. Field work, Keeton. First contact.”
“What if there’s nobody there?” What if there is, and they don’t like us?
“Even better. We get a crack at their signs and cereal boxes without their traffic cops leaning over our shoulders.”
I wondered if she spoke for the others. I was pretty sure she didn’t speak for Michelle.
Scylla’s ports had all been sealed. There was no outside view, nothing to see inside but bots and bodies and the tangled silhouette swelling on my helmet HUD. But I could feel the radiation slicing through our armor as if it were tissue paper. I could feel the knotted crests and troughs of Rorschach’s magnetic field. I could feel Rorschach itself, drawing nearer: the charred canopy of some firestormed alien forest, more landscape than artefact. I imagined titanic bolts of electricity arcing between its branches. I imagined getting in the way.
What kind of creatures would choose to live in such a place?
“You really think we’ll get along,” I said.
James’ shrug was all but lost under the armor. “Maybe not at first. We may have gotten off on the wrong foot, we might have to sort through all kinds of misunderstandings. But we’ll figure each other out eventually.”
Evidently she thought that had answered my question.
The shuttle slewed; we bumped against each other like tenpins. Thirty seconds of micromaneuvers brought us to a solid stop. A cheery animation played across the HUD in greens and blues: the shuttle’s docking seal, easing through the membrane that served as our entrance into Rorschach’s inflatable vestibule. Even as a cartoon it looked vaguely pornographic.
Bates had been prepacked next to the airlock. She slid back the inner door. “Everybody duck.”
Not an easy maneuver, swaddled in life-support and ferroceramic. Helmets tilted and bumped. The grunts, flattened overhead like great lethal cockroaches, hummed to life and disengaged from the ceiling. They scraped past in the narrow headroom, bobbed cryptically to their mistress, and exited stage left.
Bates closed the inner hatch. The lock cycled, opened again on an empty chamber.
Everything nominal, according to the board. The drones waited patiently in the vestibule. Nothing had jumped out at them.
Bates followed them through.
We had to wait forever for the image. The baud rate was less than a trickle. Words moved back and forth easily enough — “No surprises so far,” Bates reported in distorted Jews-harp vibrato — but any picture was worth a million of them, and—
There: through the eyes of the grunt behind we saw the grunt ahead in motionless, grainy monochrome. It was a postcard from the past: sight turned to sound, thick clumsy vibrations of methane bumping against the hull. It took long seconds for each static-ridden image to accrete on the HUD: grunts descending into the pit; grunts emerging into Rorschach’s duodenum; a cryptic, hostile cavescape in systematic increments. Down in the lower left-hand corner of each image, timestamps and Teslas ran down the clock.
You give up a lot when you don’t trust the EM spectrum.
“Looks good,” Bates reported. “Going in.”
In a friendlier universe machines would have cruised the boulevard, sending perfect images in crystal resolution. Szpindel and the Gang would be sipping coffee back in the drum, telling the grunts to take a sample of this or get a close-up of that. In a friendlier universe, I wouldn’t even be here.
Bates appeared in the next postcard, emerging from the fistula. In the next her back was to the camera, apparently panning the perimeter.
In the one after that she was looking right at us.
“Oh…okay,” she said. “Come on…down…”
“Not so fast,” Szpindel said. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine. A bit — odd, but…”
“Odd how?” Radiation sickness announced itself with nausea, but unless we’d seriously erred in our calculations that wouldn’t happen for another hour or two. Not until well after we’d all been lethally cooked.
“Mild disorientation,” Bates reported. “It’s a bit spooky in here, but — must be Grey Syndrome. It’s tolerable.”
I looked at the Gang. The Gang looked at Szpindel. Szpindel shrugged.
“It’s not gonna get any better,” Bates said from afar. “The clock is… clock is ticking, people. Get down here.”
We got.
* * *
Not living, not by a long shot.
Haunted.
Even when the walls didn’t move, they did: always at the corner of the eye, that sense of crawling motion. Always at the back of the mind the sense of being watched, the dread certainty of malign and alien observers just out of sight. More than once I turned, expecting to catch one of those phantoms in the open. All I ever saw was a half-blind grunt floating down the passageway, or a wide-eyed and jittery crewmate returning my stare. And the walls of some glistening black lava tube with a hundred embedded eyes, all snapped shut just the instant before. Our lights pushed the darkness back perhaps twenty meters in either direction; beyond, mist and shadows seethed. And the sounds — Rorschach creaked around us like some ancient wooden hull trapped in pack ice. Electricity hissed like rattlesnakes.
You tell yourself it’s mostly in your head. You remind yourself it’s well-documented, an inevitable consequence of meat and magnetism brought too close together. High-energy fields release the ghosts and the grays from your temporal lobe, dredge up paralyzing dread from the midbrain to saturate the conscious mind. They fuck with your motor nerves and make even dormant inlays sing like fine fragile crystal.
Energy artefacts. That’s all they are. You repeat that to yourself, you repeat it so often it loses any pretense of rationality and devolves into rote incantation, a spell to ward off evil spirits. They’re not real, these whispering voices just outside your helmet, those half-seen creatures flickering at the edge of vision. They’re tricks of the mind, the same neurological smoke-and-mirrors that convinced people throughout the ages that they were being haunted by ghosts, abducted by aliens, hunted by—
—vampires—
—and you wonder whether Sarasti really stayed behind or if he was here all along, waiting for you…
“Another spike,” Bates warned as Tesla and Seiverts surged on my HUD. “Hang on.”
I was installing the Faraday bell. Trying to. It should have been simple enough; I’d already run the main anchor line down from the vestibule to the flaccid sack floating in the middle of the passageway. I was — that’s right, something about a spring line. To, to keep the bell centered. The wall glistened in my headlamp like wet clay. Satanic runes sparkled in my imagination.
I jammed the spring line’s pad against the wall. I could have sworn the substrate flinched. I fired my thrust pistol, retreated back to the center of the passage.
“They’re here,” James whispered.
Something was. I could feel it always behind me, no matter where I turned. I could feel some great roaring darkness swirling just out of sight, a ravenous mouth as wide as the tunnel itself. Any moment now it would lunge forward at impossible speed and engulf us all.
“They’re beautiful…” James said. There was no fear in her voice at all. She sounded awestruck.
“What? Where?” Bates never stopped turning, kept trying to keep the whole three-sixty in sight at once. The drones under her command wobbled restlessly to either side, armored parentheses pointing down the passageway in opposite directions. “What do you see?”
“Not out there. In here. Everywhere. Can’t you see it?”
“I can’t see anything,” Szpindel said, his voice shaking.
“It’s in the EM fields,” James said. “That’s how they communicate. The whole structure is full of language, it’s—”
“I can’t see anything,” Szpindel repeated. His breath echoed loud and fast over the link. “I’m blind.”
“Shit.” Bates swung on Szpindel. “How can that — the radiation—”
“I d-don’t think that’s it…”
Nine Tesla, and the ghosts were everywhere. I smelled asphalt and honeysuckle.
“Keeton!” Bates called. “You with us?”
“Y-yeah.” Barely. I was back at the bell, my hand on the ripcord. Trying to ignore whatever kept tapping me on the shoulder.
“Leave that! Get him outside!”
“No!” Szpindel floated helplessly in the passage, his pistol bouncing against its wrist tether. “No, throw me something.”
“What?”
It’s all in your head. It’s all in your —
“Throw something! Anything!”
Bates hesitated. “You said you were bli—”
“Just do it!”
Bates pulled a spare suit battery off her belt and lobbed it. Szpindel reached, fumbled. The battery slipped from his grasp and bounced off the wall.
“I’ll be okay,” he gasped. “Just get me into the tent.”
I yanked the cord. The bell inflated like a great gunmetal marshmallow.
“Everyone inside!” Bates ran her pistol with one hand, grabbed Szpindel with the other. She handed him off to me and slapped a sensor pod onto the skin of the tent. I pulled back the shielded entrance flap as though pulling a scab from a wound. The single molecule beneath, infinitely long, endlessly folded against itself, swirled and glistened like a soap bubble.
“Get him in. James! Get down here!”
I pushed Szpindel through the membrane. It split around him with airtight intimacy, hugged each tiny crack and contour as he passed through.
“James! Are you—”
“Get it off me!” Harsh voice, raw and scared and scary, as male as female could sound. Cruncher in control. “Get it off!”
I looked back. Susan James’ body tumbled slowly in the tunnel, grasping its right leg with both hands.
“James!” Bates sailed over to the other woman. “Keeton! Help out!” She took the Gang by the arm. “Cruncher? What’s the problem?”
“That! You blind?” He wasn’t just grasping at the limb, I realized as I joined them. He was tugging at it. He was trying to pull it off.
Something laughed hysterically, right inside my helmet.
“Take his arm,” Bates told me, taking his right one, trying to pry the fingers from their death grip on the Gang’s leg. “Cruncher, let go. Now.”
“Get it off me!”
“It’s your leg, Cruncher.” We wrestled our way towards the diving bell.
“It’s not my leg! Just look at it, how could it — it’s dead. It’s stuck to me…”
Almost there. “Cruncher, listen,” Bates snapped. “Are you with m—”
“Get it off!”
We stuffed the Gang into the tent. Bates moved aside as I dove in after them. Amazing, the way she held it together. Somehow she kept the demons at bay, herded us to shelter like a border collie in a thunderstorm. She was—
She wasn’t following us in. She wasn’t even there. I turned to see her body floating outside the tent, one gloved hand grasping the edge of the flap; but even under all those layers of Kapton and Chromel and polycarbonate, even behind the distorted half-reflections on her faceplate, I could tell that something was missing. All her surfaces had just disappeared.
This couldn’t be Amanda Bates. The thing before me had no more topology than a mannequin.
“Amanda?” The Gang gibbered at my back, softly hysteric.
Szpindel: “What’s happening?”
“I’ll stay out here,” Bates said. She had no affect whatsoever. “I’m dead anyway.”
“Wha—” Szpindel had lots. “You will be, if you don’t—”
“You leave me here,” Bates said. “That’s an order.”
She sealed us in.
* * *
It wasn’t the first time, not for me. I’d had invisible fingers poking through my brain before, stirring up the muck, ripping open the scabs. It was far more intense when Rorschach did it to me, but Chelsea was more—
—precise, I guess you’d say.
Macramé, she called it: glial jumpstarts, cascade effects, the splice and dice of critical ganglia. While I trafficked in the reading of Human architecture, Chelsea changed it — finding the critical nodes and nudging them just so, dropping a pebble into some trickle at the headwaters of memory and watching the ripples build to a great rolling cascade deep in the downstream psyche. She could hotwire happiness in the time it took to fix a sandwich, reconcile you with your whole childhood in the course of a lunch hour or three.
Like so many other domains of human invention, this one had learned to run without her. Human nature was becoming an assembly-line edit, Humanity itself increasingly relegated from Production to product. Still. For me, Chelsea’s skill set recast a strange old world in an entirely new light: the cut-and-paste of minds not for the greater good of some abstract society, but for the simple selfish wants of the individual.
“Let me give you the gift of happiness,” she said.
“I’m already pretty happy.”
“I’ll make you happier. A TAT, on me.”
“Tat?”
“Transient Attitudinal Tweak. I’ve still got privileges at Sax.”
“I’ve been tweaked plenty. Change one more synapse and I might turn into someone else.”
“That’s ridiculous and you know it. Or every experience you had would turn you into a different person.”
I thought about that. “Maybe it does.”
But she wouldn’t let it go, and even the strongest anti-happiness argument was bound to be an uphill proposition; so one afternoon Chelsea fished around in her cupboards and dredged up a hair-net studded with greasy gray washers. The net was a superconducting spiderweb, fine as mist, that mapped the fields of merest thought. The washers were ceramic magnets that bathed the brain in fields of their own. Chelsea’s inlays linked to a base station that played with the interference patterns between the two.
“They used to need a machine the size of a bathroom just to house the magnets.” She laid me back on the couch and stretched the mesh across my skull. “That’s the only outright miracle you get with a portable setup like this. We can find hot spots, and we can even zap ’em if they need zapping, but TMS effects fade after a while. We’ll have to go to a clinic for anything permanent.”
“So we’re fishing for what, exactly? Repressed memories?”
“No such thing.” She grinned in toothy reassurance. “There are only memories we choose to ignore, or kinda think around, if you know what I mean.”
“I thought this was the gift of happiness. Why—”
She laid a fingertip across my lips. “Believe it or not, Cyggers, people sometimes choose to ignore even good memories. Like, say, if they enjoyed something they didn’t think they should. Or—” she kissed my forehead — “if they don’t think they deserve to be happy.”
“So we’re going for—”
“Potluck. You can never tell ’til you get a bite. Close your eyes.”
A soft hum started up somewhere between my ears. Chelsea’s voice led me on through the darkness. “Now keep in mind, memories aren’t historical archives. They’re — improvisations, really. A lot of the stuff you associate with a particular event might be factually wrong, no matter how clearly you remember it. The brain has a funny habit of building composites. Inserting details after the fact. But that’s not to say your memories aren’t true, okay? They’re an honest reflection of how you saw the world, and every one of them went into shaping how you see it. But they’re not photographs. More like impressionist paintings. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Ah,” she said. “There’s something.”
“What?”
“Functional cluster. Getting a lot of low-level use but not enough to intrude into conscious awareness. Let’s just see what happens when we—”
And I was ten years old, and I was home early and I’d just let myself into the kitchen and the smell of burned butter and garlic hung in the air. Dad and Helen were fighting in the next room. The flip-top on our kitchen-catcher had been left up, which was sometimes enough to get Helen going all by itself. But they were fighting about something else; Helen only wanted what was best for all of us but Dad said there were limits and this was not the way to go about it. And Helen said you don’t know what it’s like you hardly ever even see him and then I knew they were fighting about me. Which in and of itself was nothing unusual.
What really scared me was that for the first time ever, Dad was fighting back.
“You do not force something like that onto someone. Especially without their knowledge.” My father never shouted — his voice was as low and level as ever — but it was colder than I’d ever heard, and hard as iron.
“That’s just garbage,” Helen said. “Parents always make decisions for their children, in their best interests, especially when it comes to medical iss—”
“This is not a medical issue.” This time my father’s voice did rise. “It’s—”
“Not a medical issue! That’s a new height of denial even for you! They cut out half his brain in case you missed it! Do you think he can recover from that without help? Is that more of your father’s tough love shining through? Why not just deny him food and water while you’re at it!”
“If mu-ops were called for they’d have been prescribed.”
I felt my face scrunching at the unfamiliar word. Something small and white beckoned from the open garbage pail.
“Jim, be reasonable. He’s so distant, he barely even talks to me.”
“They said it would take time.”
“But two years! There’s nothing wrong with helping nature along a little, we’re not even talking black market. It’s over-the-counter, for God’s sake!”
“That’s not the point.”
An empty pill bottle. That’s what one of them had thrown out, before forgetting to close the lid. I salvaged it from the kitchen discards and sounded out the label in my head.
“Maybe the point should be that someone who’s barely home three months of the year has got his bloody nerve passing judgment on my parenting skills. If you want a say in how he’s raised, then you can damn well pay some dues first. Until then, just fuck right off.”
“You will not put that shit into my son ever again,” my father said.
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“Yeah? And how are you going to stop me, you little geek? You can’t even make the time to find out what’s going on in your own family; you think you can control me all the way from fucking orbit? You think—”
Suddenly, nothing came from the living room but soft choking sounds. I peeked around the corner.
My father had Helen by the throat.
“I think,” he growled, “that I can stop you from doing anything to Siri ever again, if I have to. And I think you know that.”
And then she saw me. And then he did. And my father took his hand from around my mother’s neck, and his face was utterly unreadable.
But there was no mistaking the triumph on hers.
* * *
I was up off the couch, the skullcap clenched in one hand. Chelsea stood wide-eyed before me, the butterfly still as death on her cheekbone.
She took my hand. “Oh, God. I’m so sorry.”
“You — you saw that?”
“No, of course not. It can’t read minds. But that obviously — wasn’t a happy memory.”
“It wasn’t all that bad.”
I felt sharp, disembodied pain from somewhere nearby, like an ink spot on a white tablecloth. After a moment I fixed it: teeth in my lip.
She ran her hand up my arm. “It really stressed you out. Your vitals were — are you okay?”
“Yeah, of course. No big deal.” Tasting salt. “I am curious about something, though.”
“Ask me.”
“Why would you do this to me?”
“Because we can make it go away, Cygnus. That’s the whole point. Whatever that was, whatever you didn’t like about it, we know where it is now. We can go back in and damp it out just like that. And then we’ve got days to get it removed permanently, if that’s what you want. Just put the cap back on and—”
She put her arms around me, drew me close. She smelled like sand, and sweat. I loved the way she smelled. For a while, I could feel a little bit safe. For a while I could feel like the bottom wasn’t going to drop out at any moment. Somehow, when I was with Chelsea, I mattered.
I wanted her to hold me forever.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“No?” She blinked, looked up at me. “Why ever not?”
I shrugged. “You know what they say about people who don’t remember the past.”