I sat, awkwardly. It is difficult to sink to sitting without one’s arms. Talis reached up and put one of his capable, stolen hands flat between my shoulder blades, steadying me on the way down.
“Thank you,” I said.
“I—” he began, and something flashed across his narrow face, some piece of ordinary humanity that was so strange in him that it took my breath. “I’m sorry about your hands.” I stared into his eyes. The littlest doubt fluttered there. “Rachel dreamt . . .”
He let it fall into silence. I let the silence hold.
“Rachel dreamt—” His eyebrows pulled together. And then in a different tone, cheerful and metal-bright. “Rachel had inductive webbing implanted in her brain, you see, so I could inhabit her. All my Riders have it. Also a datastore, here”—he slapped his ribs as if striking a drum—“because otherwise I wouldn’t fit. And they dream! Rachel, she has all these lovely squishy chemical body things that pull at my thoughts. Lets me think differently. Stretch out a little. It’s one of the tricks for a long life, stretching.” He yawned until his jaw cracked, and he stretched his neck, pulling an ear toward one shoulder. Head sideways, he grinned at me. “And that wraps up today’s edition of Michael Talis’s Top Tips for Becoming a Successful AI. Now, what were you saying?”
He’d guessed.
Of course he had.
“The grey room, the upload.” I was fumbling after the words. “It requires my consent?”
“The grey room doesn’t. Obviously it’s nice to have, and the Abbot—he’s done a brilliant job here, getting you kids to sign off. But the upload . . .” He paused, nudging my bare toes with his bare toes. “Yes—consent at a minimum. It’s not just any mind that can hold together through the spooling. An unwilling one doesn’t have a hope.”
“What . . . ,” I said, rather faintly, and did not know how to finish it.
“You have to be smart. Disciplined. Ambitious doesn’t hurt. Stubborn as a mule with a toothache. Reasonable tolerance for pain.” He made a pop with the air in his mouth. “All in all, Greta, I’d say you have a fair chance. But we can’t do anything until— Oh!” Something strange happened to his face, as if his eyes had swung inside him, and then out, faster than one could see. “You shut off the snowstorm! That’s brilliant! Did you kill Burr?”
“I—” I said. “No.”
He scrunched up his nose as if I’d offended him by smell.
“I think Elián broke his arm,” I offered.
“Well,” Talis chirped, “that’s something! Let’s hope my little weapons demonstration is convincing. Cumberland isn’t huge. They only have so many cities to spare.”
“Talis—”
“Or!” he interrupted. “I could kill you! Sorry, forgot for a second. If you’re dead, they have no leverage against the PanPols at all.” He looked over the top of his glasses at me. “That’s quite noble of you, you know.”
“Talis,” I tried again. “They want to leave. They just want to leave.”
“Oh.” Another blink. “Well, that’s anticlimactic. And not acceptable. There’s a price to pay for attacking my Preceptures. It needs to be high.”
The Abbot’s cell was very small, very blank. It had no outlet, no place to rest the eyes. Talis’s quick, strong will seemed trapped in it, like a bird. A bird battering itself.
“I will consent,” I said. “I will consent to the upload. I will become AI. But only if you will let them go.”
Talis tipped his head, taking my measure. I was aware, suddenly, that he was very close to me. And—despite Rachel’s slight, young body—he was very powerful, very male. “You think I want you that badly?”
It was hard not to pull back. But I did not. “I think you might.”
“And why’s that?”
“The AIs,” I said, softly. “There aren’t many of them.”
“No.”
“You want there to be more.”
Softly in turn, he said, “Yes.”
“That’s why,” I said. And saw it hit home.
Here is something that you learn when you spend a lifetime in rigorous study of the history of war: the weaknesses we perceive in others are often the ones we fear in ourselves. Talis was, famously, someone who knew how to use love—parent-child love—as a lever. How to turn grief into power. Well. Two could play at that game. The AIs were his family, and most of them were dead.
Talis ran his tongue slowly over his teeth, as if counting them. A moment ago I’d glimpsed something human in his face, something that could easily have been taken for heartbreak. It was gone now. He was raven-eyed, bright and frank, and he smiled at me before he spoke again. “So that’s what I want. Swell. Glad we understand each other. Though—gotta say, you’ve got some nerve, pushing at it. The stakes must be high for you.”
It was halfway to a question. To a negotiation. State your demands, he was saying. So I did.
“Let the Cumberlanders go. And let them take Elián Palnik with them.”
“Ah, Elián! So it’s young love!”