Among the records of labs and chairs funded are the plans for a university Cromwell will found in Magda’s honor upon her death. He’s hired architects, bought up thousands of acres in the plains of central Canada. Delicately phrased correspondence with his attorneys suggests he hasn’t told her. Her cenotaph will be at the center of the campus, a sort of Hellenistic ziggurat, its torches whipping in the wind; it speaks to her of desolation of spirit raised to an imperial intensity.
Cloudbreaker is thrashing, close to failure now—she sees it touch an arbitrage AI, the same one from her last visit and still connected to something off in the net, the connection slipping under W&P’s firewall, and she wonders if W&P ever noticed. She expects Cloudbreaker to destroy it but instead they form a link, start exchanging data.
A dozen counter-intrusions systems lock onto her and she wastes a precious fraction of a second disemboweling them though she knows her time is ending and then she finds another email from Andy Simoni with the subject “Mnemosyne”:
“Akemi’s become a part of the texture of things. By which I mean, I found an image of glowing pillars of smoke in the nighttime LA sky, as seen through her eyes, drawn on the wall of an alley in San Francisco—the match is exact down to the details of foveation.
“How did I find it? We’re sending her memories off god knows where, so I wondered if they’d turn up somewhere out in the world. I used a large quantity of your money to rent servers to do image searches for everything she’s seen since surgery. This drawing was the first hit, but I focused the search and found more. They were all by this graffiti artist who goes by ‘LEdERER.’ He’s of the favelas, keeps the company of thieves and is paranoid enough that I couldn’t invade his privacy without putting him on alert.”
There are images from Akemi’s memories—some she recognizes from LEdERER’s show. Cromwell’s made archival prints of four of them and used them to decorate his outer offices. There’s a link to a mission report from Hiro, apparently Cromwell’s security chief, about his attempt to rendition LEdERER, how a street fighter named Kern got to him first and took the phone, which has its own file, but she’s distracted by the interrogation video of a vaguely street-looking girl named Kayla who looks hunted and forlorn as she slouches on her chair in a sterile-looking room. Someone off-screen asks where they can find Kern and she says, “You absolutely promise you just want to talk to him? Please tell the truth. It’s important to me.”
Shuddering motion that must be Cloudbreaker’s death throes and she braces for a hard exit but Cloudbreaker is still there, whole and somehow replete-looking, and all the security AIs have vanished. She looks a fraction of a second into the past, sees it swallowing them whole, and for a moment she’s bemused—had it been drawing them in all along?—but all that’s important is that now she has this wholly unexpected time.
Cloudbreaker brushes against her implant.
She finds the stranger’s most recent email, sent three days ago, in fact while she was in her debrief at W&P. It reads: “I’m changing the terms. Akemi Aalto will no longer do. We need Irina Sunden.”
Cloudbreaker is scrabbling at her implant, though by now it should know better—her implant’s security is so dense a direct assault is pointless—and as she thinks this her implant’s security collapses.
The first thing Cloudbreaker does is disable the off switch of her implant’s wireless and she opens her eyes onto hard light on the rooftops, the swallows diving through the air as it siphons off copies of her memories.
She clasps her forehead in her palms despite the gesture’s obvious futility as memories of her mid-thirties are copied off into the ether, and she wonders if this is what being raped is like, and if there’s nothing she can do except wait for it to be done, but then she remembers the router in the tower, her sole present point of connection to the net.
She runs up the tower’s stairs toward the router as Cloudbreaker takes copies of the years after college.
The router is bolted into place so as she tears it off the wall as Cloudbreaker takes the memory of her first trip to the Mayo, her diffidence and discomfort and how her batteries of detailed and perfectly informed questions eroded first her surgeon’s patience and then his self-regard.
The power cord is screwed into the router and she wastes two seconds trying to yank it out and is starting to think she’ll spend the next few minutes running through the villa searching desperately for a screwdriver when it occurs to her that the router is hanging from the cord in her hands, so she swings it through a wide arc into the wall, really putting her hips into it, and on the second swing, as Cloudbreaker takes the memory of her dinner with Philip, the router shatters into tiny pieces that bounce off the walls and sting her face and hands, and, as though exorcised, Cloudbreaker is gone.
She leans against the wall, slumps to the floor, turns off her wireless.
38
Thought Purely
In the morning Thales searches for his brothers over the groomed sand of the hotel’s crowded beach. They hadn’t come back to the suite the night before but for them this is hardly unusual behavior and even behind his sunglasses the day is too bright, though the sunbathers are like shadows and the container ship on the horizon is a patch of darkness on a blaze of clouds. He almost trips on a girl lying prone on a towel, awkwardly untying her bikini top, and once he’d have found some reason to linger, he thinks, but now he looks down at her and just sees the curvature of skin stretched over layers of fat and muscle and the striations and eczema on the backs of her thighs.
He spots Helio, not twenty yards away, heading for the waves, longboard under his arm. Whatever his brothers’ faults, their family loyalty is unwavering and they’re sure to take his part. He labors over the sand and seizes Helio’s shoulder and then recoils, because it’s a stranger who turns to him, his face a mask of blank inquiry. “Sorry!” blurts Thales, so taken aback he speaks in Portuguese, and as the stranger turns back to the surf he tells himself that out here under the sun behind his polarized glasses it’s only natural to mistake one body for another.
He stands there sweating through his shirt and scanning the beach though he now feels certain that his brothers aren’t there and in lieu of whatever sense of abandonment or desolation he just wants to know what’s happening. If pure thought led anywhere but in circles he’d have solved the problem long since so it’s therefore time to act, but what is there to do, and who is there to ask, and then he remembers the ragged woman who’d accosted him on the hotel patio, how she’d said she found him by staking out the clinic, and the force of her conviction that both she and he were somehow victims, so he heads up the beach toward the hotel’s garage.