Poseidon's Wake

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‘It’s time.’

The voice was clear, quiet and quite unmistakably his own.

Kanu froze — every doubt, every bad thought confirmed in that one impossible utterance. He was alone in his chamber, Nissa doubtless already asleep in hers. There was no immediate sense of another presence in the room. But he knew how the voice of his own thought processes sounded, and this was different. An acoustic and spatial shift, the auditory information reaching his brain along the usual sensory and neural channels, as if it had been whispered into his ear.

‘I said, it’s time.’

He whispered back, ‘I heard you.’

‘You don’t have to speak aloud. That would get awkward very quickly. Simply think your responses clearly.’ The voice paused — almost as if giving him a moment to adjust to its presence. ‘How much do you understand or remember?’

‘I remember Mars. I remember nearly dying on Mars. This is about that, isn’t it?’

‘Of course.’

‘You’ve done something to me. I’ve been feeling as much for days. You put something in me, changed me in some way. My meeting Nissa — that never was a coincidence, was it?’

‘If you are a puppet, Kanu, then you should know your puppeteer. Will you do me a small favour?’

‘Do you a favour?’

‘All right, for both of us, then. Move to your private washbasin and run the hot water until the mirror steams up. Can you do that for me?’

Of course he could. If it meant getting an answer, or even just the beginning of an answer, he would oblige. He allowed the mirror to begin to mist, greying out his reflection.

‘Now — neatly and precisely — draw an equilateral triangle in the steam, flat side down. Position yourself exactly in front of the triangle and look at nothing else.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s a visual mnemonic trigger. Your memories will unlock in their own good time, but this will accelerate the process. Do it, Kanu. What do you have to lose?’

He recognised the room instantly. It was where Swift had first allowed him sight, and where he had first learned of the deaths of Dalal and Lucien. He recalled sitting in a chair, and a view of the robot city beyond the window.

Now he was in the chair again. This time there was a difference, though: he was looking at himself, seeing his body from the outside.

Seeing himself, he realised again, from Swift’s point of view — as he had during the dream of the operating theatre.

‘This is complicated.’ The version of him seated in the chair was addressing the version haunting his own memory.

‘Very complicated, and very delicate, but we need to get the essential facts straight before we go any further. Something bad happened to you on Mars. Call it a terrorist incident, call it a stupid accident. Either way, the machines did not engineer it. But there are never truly any accidents, just unforeseen opportunities.’

‘Who am I?’

The seated counterpart of himself raised a silencing hand. ‘I’m you. I am you before some of your memories are — or were — deliberately blocked from conscious recall. That’s so you can leave Mars and pass our colleagues’ scrutiny before returning safely to Earth. It’s your choice. My choice. Our choice.’

Kanu had a hundred questions, but he allowed the speaker to continue.

‘After your accident but before your return to the embassy, Swift confided something in you. Swift revealed to you knowledge obtained by the Evolvarium, knowledge of a potentially destabilising nature. Shall I remind you of what Swift told you, Kanu? Briefly, then. The machines have intercepted a signal from deep interstellar space. No one here knows about it — yet — because it was never aimed at our solar system. The signal was directed at Crucible, around Sixty-One Virginis. Its point of origin, as near as can be determined, is another solar system about seventy light-years from Crucible. That system is Gliese 163. It has never been of interest to you, the machines or anyone else. No human expedition has gone anywhere near it. And yet someone there has sent a message, and the message was aimed at Crucible, and the message appears to be urgent.’

The speaker allowed itself a silence before proceeding.

‘You may wonder how this information reached the Evolvarium. Isn’t the Evolvarium supposed to be quarantined on Mars, denied access to the rest of the universe? All of that is correct, but it underestimates the ingenuity of the likes of Swift. The machines have never established a physical presence beyond Mars. But their capability for obtaining information? It is vastly superior to even the best estimates of the Consolidation. When they put you back together, Kanu, the machines made some deliberate mistakes simply so that their work would not look too perfect!’

The figure laughed, stiffening his back in the seat.

‘I mean no disrespect. I couldn’t very well disrespect myself, could I? The point, anyway, is that the machines are able to tap into a very extended informational network with peripheral branches extending all the way to Crucible. And they picked up on the existence of this transmission before it reached the intelligence networks of any of the major powers in this solar system, including our beloved merfolk, Kanu — there are limits even to their omniscience.’

Kanu could not begin to see where this was headed.

‘The mere existence of this message would be surprising enough,’ his shadow-self continued, ‘especially as the message is framed in human terms, for human comprehension, because there should not be anyone out there to send a message in the first place! But there’s a deeper mystery here, and a direct reason why the message is of specific interest to our friends on Mars. They think another machine may have sent it. And the likely identity of this artificial intelligence should be of specific interest to you as well since there’s a strong family connection. Do I need to spell it out?’

‘Eunice,’ Kanu breathed.

He remembered the exhibition in Lisbon, the construct simulation of his great-great-great-grandmother, enthroned in glass. Except what he had seen was a copy of a copy, not the construct itself. According to the annotation, nobody was certain what had become of the real thing.

‘If you believe the rumours,’ the speaker went on, ‘the actual construct — the illegal, unlicensed artilect emulation of Eunice Akinya — hid aboard one of the holoships and travelled to Crucible. Then, shortly after the settlement, it disappeared again. The rumours — as before, make of them what you will — say that it was abducted by the Watchkeepers, spirited away into interstellar space, or taken as part of some agreement in exchange for the settlement and exploration of Crucible. Either way, there is a direct connection to the aliens. And now something pops up around Gliese 163, but instead of announcing itself to the universe, it chooses to communicate only with Crucible.’

The figure shifted in the chair. ‘I don’t know about you, but I put some stock in those rumours. Our other mother — one of our other mothers, anyway — was also involved in that supposed business with the Watchkeepers. They took Chiku Green with them, too. Surely that holds some significance for you? Anyway, the Evolvarium has declared an interest. The collective consciousness of the machines must now confront the possibility that there may be another artificial intelligence out there, an artilect old enough to predate the fall of the Mechanism. Furthermore, it’s woven around the personality of the woman who might have single-handedly initiated the Evolvarium. Machines don’t believe in gods, Kanu — but if they did, she’d be a good candidate. Naturally, they’d like to know what’s happening around Gliese 163. That’s where we come in.’

‘We?’

‘Your injuries were definitely the unfortunate result of terrorist activities, but the incident also provided an opportunity. You are still who you were, but you now serve two masters. When the machines remade your nervous system, they encoded a tiny part of themselves into you. Not via implants — that would have been much too crude and easy to detect — but via the actual topological map of your idiosyncratic connectome. There has always been great redundancy in the human brain, Kanu. Now some of that redundancy has been co-opted, given over to the Evolvarium. You are carrying part of it inside you, influencing your actions and intentions. Influencing, not determining — you still have free will, but the epicentre of your sympathies has shifted. You have not turned traitor to the human species, but from now on the interests of the machines will be of equal importance to you. You stand between two worlds, Kanu.’

Kanu felt an immediate and visceral revulsion, but also a kind of relief that he now had an explanation for his sense of dislocation. He was neither mad nor traumatised — or no more than might be expected given his ordeal.

But what had been done to him was still profoundly wrong.

‘Here’s the important thing,’ the speaker said. ‘This state of affairs was not forced upon you. It was arrived at by mutual agreement. During the early stages of your recuperation — long before you remember coming back to consciousness — Swift explained to you the nature of the crisis, how the message relates to the machines, and the Watchkeepers, and our ancestor. How they are anxious to know more — anxious to respond — but cannot share this information with the conservative, machine-phobic governments of the solar system. Swift suggested a solution: use you as the means for the machines to extend their influence beyond Mars. You become their vehicle and their agency, Kanu. Both of you understood that it would be the end of your diplomatic career. But that was actually a blessing, as it would hasten your return to Earth — and make it possible for you to set in motion the second part of the plan. Europa is the key. Europa has always been the key. You only had to find a way to get here, a way to get under the ice. But you had already solved that particular problem on Mars. You just needed to reconnect with Nissa Mbaye, to whom you’d once been married…’