Kern’s laptop originally belonged to one of Chiron’s coders, who seems to have died—it was idle for forty-two years, then one day found itself with an unknown user. This user, it decided, was Spanish-speaking, illiterate, unsupervised, probably traumatized, perhaps twelve, and young for his age. Recognizing a client, it launched its game, which, she sees, was lovely, its texture taken from fairy tales and the Icelandic Eddas.
Through great pains and many tricks the laptop coaxed him through the equivalent of an eighth-grade education, until, feeling his attention wane, it played its trump card, a second-person shooter designed around the principle that the best way to engage an unsupervised adolescent boy is with the promise of a really powerful gun. Nominally a gothic melodrama about an alien invasion, the game was frantically maneuvering to give him what he’d need to grow up and survive. (The climactic boss fight was on a satellite called the Void Star, which, according to the comments in the source code, was a cryptic joke, an oddly hopeful reference to an archaic programming language in which void star was a reference to a thing of mutable kind, which spoke to the coders of the chance for metamorphosis.)
Postgame, the laptop tried to get him to learn useful skills—nursing, computer programming, how to maintain and operate now desperately obsolete drones—but he was only interested in its library’s books on martial arts, physical training and war; he’d study one book obsessively, reading it hundreds of times, and spend days playing fight videos one frame at a time. His journal records his scientific austerities, and how meticulously he drove himself, all apparently toward becoming a kind of secular saint of battle, a quixotic and obviously absurd goal in which he somehow succeeded.
It’s time to decide what to do with him, and potential futures unfurl before her like a chimerical lucid dream. She could send him to the fighting circuits in Japan or Russia or get him a job as a martial arts instructor in some stable city in the West, but though he’s strong in war he’s weak everywhere else and would be defenseless against the bad women and bent managers and really whoever happened by—Akemi the memory ghost had snapped him up in less than a minute—so she changes tack, considers foster families, tutors, boarding schools, an apprenticeship with a cabinetmaker in Vancouver, but he’s too old and too strong to be told what to do and moreover those lives would lack the luminous intensity of battle and in every one the balance of probability has him drifting back down into the criminal life, hiring out as muscle and falling in with vicious men he’ll come to think of as his brothers, and despite her frustration it’s fascinating to see how personality is destiny. The damage will express itself, she thinks. His victory is he’s had his time.
When she finds it, she feels giddy and almost ill because it came so close to slipping by, but there in a video of the darkened stands of a live-steel match in Taiwan a roving spotlight finds Kern staring into the arena’s center and his face seems to kindle as an officiant raises a katana newly from the forge of the swordsmith Masamune.
There’s been a Masamune since the fifteenth century, she finds, and the current one is almost a hundred years old; she looks into his email and financial records, sees the forge is deep in debt and his only surviving son is unsuitable, and she intuits his unspoken terror that it all ends with him, that he’ll be the one to have let down the line, and that’s it, the one opening in all the systems of the world.
“I found it,” she tells Thales, relieved, showing him.
Her time at the top of the mountain already seems remote. Had she really thought she could predict the weather, much less history?
She closes her eyes, lets herself fall.
*
She alights on sand. She falls to her knees, opens her eyes onto brilliant blue sky. She’s on a strip of beach, scoured and empty. Low roar of waves breaking on one side, and there, on the other, the high city, not far away, half-obscured in fog. She looks up into its heights, wonders what her other self is feeling.
A shadow on her. She looks up into the face of a young woman, very pretty, perhaps Asian. Her name is Akemi—she’s the memory ghost who’d co-opted Kern—and Irina sees she’s a composite, with some of Irina’s own memories from the clinic in Malibu. She’s been edited, repeatedly and to the core, and doesn’t know what to do.
“Let’s say this is a fairy tale,” Irina says. “Let’s say you can wish for whatever would make you happy.”
Akemi recoils, turns, runs, stumbles in the surf, as though fleeing for her life. The magician’s back, she’s thinking, and there’s no refuge.
It occurs to Irina to explain but it’s time to finish up so she looks into Akemi’s memory and finds an evening in Los Angeles when she’d been walking by the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard and it had occurred to her that the street was like a boundary, sprawl on one side and on the other wooded hills where lights glimmered through the trees, a place where it looked like one couldn’t be unhappy but forever unattainable, so Irina turns the lower reaches of the high city into hills where lights come and go as wind moves the branches, and she makes it evening, and puts Akemi there, sleeping, up in the garden by the pool of the Chateau, and when she wakes she won’t remember she’s a ghost.
The last vestige of her augmented memory flares, crumbles, vanishes for good.
Thales is sitting beside her now.
“Are you satisfied?” she asks, finding herself desperately, almost humiliatingly in earnest. “Have I held up my end?”
“I’m satisfied,” he says.
She’s still holding the key to the gate in the wall now miles above them. “For you,” she says, pressing it into his hand. “A last gift.”
This has been the great event of her life, but now her story is wrapping itself up and shutting itself down. She hears waves breaking, hissing, and the sky is a dark blue grading into black, and it’s fading, fading …
68
Beyond Is Hidden
Night now, and waves hissing on the beach, though there is no beach, just the impression of a beach and a mosaic of borrowed detail.
Closing his eyes, Thales sees all the fragments of information drifting by like innumerable particles of sediment—there’s the immigration hall’s clamor, Akemi’s dream, Irina’s conversation with a demon on a cliff. There are motes of Irina’s experience, Akemi’s, his, others’; there’s the memory of a girl, Lillian, sitting on the marble lip of a fountain in her garden, her smilodon kitten a warm, struggling mass on her lap—her father had given it to her, had said it was hormonally locked into kittenhood, the species having just been brought back from the dead—running her fingers through its coarse, tawny fur, she wonders if he’ll try to bring her back too. There, nearly whole, is the mathematician’s trick for writing death out of life, which it withheld from Cromwell, who by now is past the need of it, and all of it is dispersing.
He feels like he’s floating in an ocean of recent history.