I said nothing.
Elián stared at me in the darkness—almost four seconds of silence, which might have been his new record. But of course he couldn’t hold it. “Come on,” he murmured, and pulled me to him. “Come on. Talis said you should sleep. Sleep. It’s late, or early, or something.”
“It’s four thirty-seven.”
“See?”
But there were eggs in my sleep, eggs made of skin. My body stood there in the darkness, with Elián’s hands holding my upper arms. My skin was rigid.
“Come on.” I tagged his tone as coaxing: I had heard him speak thus to a skittish goat. “Lie down. I’ll sit with you. I’ll keep you safe. Just lie down.”
There was really nothing else to do. Elián sat down at the head of Xie’s cot, pushed the pillow down to rest beside one leg, and patted it as if I were a dog he were inviting up. And like a dog—like a machine, like a good hostage—I obeyed. I lay down with my head at his knee. I could smell Xie on the pillow; smell Elián, too. Smell is the first sense to develop in utero and retains powerful connections to the primitive mind—particularly to the amygdala, which processes emotion. More succinctly, it triggers memory. As I lay there, my limbic system struggled into life. Deformed memories crawled loose from my damaged brain. Landed all over me like moths. I was covered in them.
Then Elián put his hand in my unlocked hair. Not much weight, but some. He was holding me down, pushing me under. And that was enough. I was tired enough, damaged enough, that I did sink away.
When I woke up, Da-Xia was there.
I knew at once that she was going to kill me.
31
FLIGHT
Xie. I fluttered awake, and she was leaning over me.
I leapt from the cot and backed away from her.
“Greta?” She extended a hand toward me. A structure inside my parietal lobe lifted the sensation of her touch into my nervous system. My lips flushed; my stomach tightened. The sensation dropped down across my one, two, three skins, like water rolling down steps of ice.
Cascade.
The other AIs. They had died.
And this is what had happened to them. They had layers; they had two skins, two sets of memories, two ways of thinking. Some of them, a few of them, had found a way to live with that, to build a new self on that strange and shifting foundation. But most had not. Give one of these self-less creatures something that powerfully stimulates both sets of memories, the two memories rise, reinforce each other, feed back, overload.
I had backed all the way into the wall, and it was not nearly far enough. Our cell was small and thick with memories.
“Greta?” said Xie. “I only wanted—”
Strong light was coming through the glass ceiling, high morning, 9:53 a.m. The stones at my back were heating already. Their specific heat was 790 joules per kilogram. I grabbed them desperately.
“Greta?” said Elián.
“Get Talis,” whispered Xie.
“He said, if she was screaming—”
“She is,” said Xie, who knew me. “Go.”
Elián bolted.
“I’m here, Greta,” breathed Xie. “I’m here. I see you.”
The light fell across her, her skin, the bright darkness of her hair— The organics offered a memory as clear as anything from the datastore, and more brightly lit: Da-Xia stepping back to regard the haircut she’d just given me, her voice roughened with loss and desire. There. There you are. The datastore replied with the same memory. It echoed; looped; reinforced, it rose. Oh, I could see her, feel that moment: the shudder of anticipation and realization; fear and longing—the cord inside me pulled tight.
“Greta?” said Xie. “Is it you? Can you come back?”
She was turning me inside out.
“Stop,” I begged her. “Stop, stop, stop.”
Currents in the brain— I was overloading. Inside, outside, again and again. How can one person be two things? How can two things be one person? I was turned inside out so many times that I had no outside—no protection, no defense. It was surely as deadly as losing one’s skin.
I closed my eyes and held them closed, and held on. Colors—color. I began counting breaths. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
Partial list of real numbers/positive integers. My knees gave way, and I sank down against the wall. Six. Seven. God. I remembered that the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius were important, so I read them all in four hundred milliseconds. Eight. Nine.
A crash of noise—someone coming in at a run. I ignored it, kept my eyes closed. I was standing on thin air, and it would hold me, so long as I didn’t look down.
Hold on, Greta. Hold fiercely.
Ten. In front of me: Talis. Even with my eyes closed I was sure of it. I could smell the horse-scent that clung to his clothes; I could feel the current of his active sensors, sweeping into me. “Get her on the cot,” he said. “She’s going into seizure.”
Someone—Elián—scooped me up. The pillow again. The smell.