“Well,” I said, “I’m not going to just let you have mine. There has to be some kind of quid pro quo.”
“I’ll help you get control of the ship.”
“Not good enough.” I was enjoying this. I reminded myself not to enjoy it too much, and that she was probably playing up her investment to make me think I had more control over the situation than I did.
“You’re an engineer,” she said, after studying her fingernails for a while. “You build the connectors. That way you can assure yourself that I won’t do anything untoward. You can just design it out.”
I considered it. Farweather seemed to have a more advanced opinion of my jury-rigging skill than I did.
Huh, who knows? Maybe she was right about that. In the very least, it was flattering.
Also probably her intention. But I was willing to take it where I could get it for the time being.
Was I willing to try to steal her memories without her consent?
It was a matter of life and death, wasn’t it?
Hell, I thought. I’m already a walking war crime. How much more ethically compromised can I get? But how much more ethically compromised did I want to get? There was Farweather, blinking me, as a perfect example of what moral relativism led to.
“Look,” she said. “I’m not a neuralistics expert. I know next to nothing about how rightminding works. What do you think I could do to you?”
“Then what good does it do you to get access to my fox?”
She smiled. “Well, I do happen to have the codes to unlock your Recon and see what’s under it. So I don’t actually need to be an expert. I just need to input a series of keys that will allow you to access the original memories. It’s unconstitutional for Justice to actually erase old memories; they have to just bury them.”
I knew enough about Recon and machine memory to know she was broadly accurate. Besides, changing and editing machine memories didn’t actually change meat memories. Time and exposure and the brain editing itself to remove conflicts between what the fox told it and what it remembered for itself handled that problem. Meat memories were notoriously unreliable.
I frowned down at my fingernails. They were a mess; the poor diet was having an effect on me. “You just . . . happen to have them.”
Bright-eyed, she shrugged. “Besides, if I harm you too badly, I’ll starve before help gets here.” She rattled her chain significantly.
“You could eat my corpse,” I said cheerfully.
“Won’t stay fresh long enough,” she answered, deadpan. “Besides, there’s still the problem of hydration.”
? ? ?
I’m an idiot.
I went for it.
It took me a couple of diar to take apart and reconstruct some of the equipment from her kit and my kit (including some of my helmet controls and com) to make a rig that I was pretty sure would let her read my senso without writing to it. She could give me the access codes and the encryption keys, and I would enter them. Then I’d share the senso-memory with her, which was the real reason we needed the rig; her tech and mine weren’t entirely compatible, though an AI probably could have navigated it, and we were both a little chary of just hooking up our alien parasites and letting them talk to each other.
This system also meant that I couldn’t just paralyze her with a virus and go rummaging around in in her machine memory, but I suppose it made me a better person not to be engaged in coercive control of somebody else’s fox in an attempt to steal access to their memories. More’s the pity.
Not that I would ever have anything so illegal in my possession as a bit of code that could bust into somebody’s fox. Especially after spending a couple of decians in the company of a pirate who wanted to own and control me, without much to do except stare at the walls, fail to get control of the ship, and think up projects to keep myself busy.
Perish the thought.
She didn’t like my conditions, but she agreed, which suggested to me that whatever might be hidden in my head—if anything was hidden in my head—was something that she and her pirate buddies expected to be very valuable.
And that meant I wanted to know it too.
? ? ?
I had her come to the very end of her chain, and turn around so her back was facing me. The leads on the primitive rig I’d knocked together weren’t long, and I certainly wasn’t going to come within range of her fists if I could help it. I suppose she could have stretched way out and pummeled me. But all I had to do was scramble away from her, and I would probably manage to escape without being harmed too badly or taken captive.
It would have been nice if we could have done it all passively, but the helmet receivers I’d salvaged needed to be right up against one’s skull to pick up signals from the fox, and I hadn’t figured out yet how to use our Koregoi symbiotes as antennae to broadcast from our foxes, as if we were dressing up as old-fashioned radio stations.
That was a joke. Of sorts.
I adhered two patches to the back of Farweather’s neck, right under the base of her skull, and felt them stick on snugly. The leads ran back to the machine, and while she sat there patiently I drew it as far back as they would allow, and then walked back another couple of steps before adhering the patches to the analogous place on my own body. The stickum was cold, and the receivers a little uncomfortable. Their edges weren’t as rounded as I would have liked; they were meant to be contained inside and padded by the lining of the helmet.
Still, they ought to work for what we needed. At least, when I flipped the toggles, the tiny lights on my jury-rigged electronics started dancing softly into brilliance, one by one by one.
I sat staring at her back, feeling . . . nothing, not even the prickle of a microcurrent across my scalp. If it hadn’t been for the pretty little flicker of those status lights, I probably would have thought the thing wasn’t getting any juice and reached out to check that I’d remembered to hit the power button.
Yes, it happens even to seasoned engineers.
Then I felt the shape of words forming inside my head, like the sound of my own thoughts.
Hello, Haimey.
The voice had a distinct sound to it, and it wasn’t very much like Farweather’s voice—it was deeper and more resonant—but the intonations were the same. Everybody’s voice sounds different in their own head.
Well, I answered. I guess that worked, then.
Are you ready for the codes?
I laughed. Not even . . . remotely.
There was a pause, and I felt her groan in disbelief and suffering. “That was terrible,” she said out loud.
It’s who I am, I answered.
I turned my attention to my internal interfaces, while keeping half my mind’s eye on Farweather. It was even trickier than it sounds, frankly, because I couldn’t safely let the attention I had on her waver, but I also needed to run through the monitors and find my way into their operating system, which was an intentionally complicated task. You didn’t want any random teenager mucking around with the inside of their own head. It had too much potential to end badly.
I wonder if I consented, I thought, and realized as I thought it that some part of my mind was taking for granted that Farweather was telling me the truth when she claimed that Judicial had reconstructed my machine memories, and thus allowed them to reshape the meat memories in their image.
I thought about those memories, tried consciously to call one up without accessing my fox for corroboration.
But it wasn’t memories of Niyara that rose to the surface. Instead, it was memories of a more literal surfacing. I thought of the Prize, rising out of the Saga-star’s accretion disk in mysterious response to my presence.
As I thought of it, I felt Farweather’s surprised, mocking delight. Oh, babes. You thought that was you?
What do you mean? I answered.
The ship. Emerging from the Well. You thought you had something to do with it? It came when you called because you’re so special?
I didn’t answer. My cheeks burned. My eyes smarted.
Of course I had.
How precious. Honey, I control this ship. I always have.
She hadn’t controlled the gravity when I slammed her against the deck, had she? I reached out to do it again, viciously, wanting to slap the glee out of her—
I stopped myself. Just in time.
That was not who I was.
Assuming I was anybody, I mean.
Then she asked, point-blank: Did Niyara ever tell you anything she said would be important later? Did she ever give you anything? An upload? Something physical?
I kept my face and mind as still as I could—not that she could see my face where she was sitting—which was probably as much of an answer as if I had gasped out loud.