She tries to orient—the place’s scale and all the empty overhead space seem to serve no purpose but to assert the grandeur of … where, exactly, has she arrived? The faces around her are closed and unreadable, their blurred ethnicities telling her nothing, and then, behind her, someone calls her name.
Whoever he is, he’s fighting his way toward her through the crowd, and now and then she sees his hand waving over the bowed heads, but however great his determination, the press is so dense that it’s plainly impossible that he’ll ever get any closer, but she finds herself responding to the need in his voice, and to his bravery, and tries to hold her ground, bracing herself against the flow and discreetly driving her elbows into the midriffs of strangers but even so she’s borne on, and now she can see the crowd is funneling her toward double doors where a uniformed guard is checking passports.
“Irina!” cries a boy as he bursts between two stupefied travelers and his evident joy at having reached her disarms her remaining skepticism. He’s young, and looks like tech money, but has the self-assurance of someone much older. “It’s done,” he says breathlessly. “I got you more power, in fact a lot more than you’ve ever had before. Your problems with your memory should be getting better.”
“Problems with memory aren’t my foremost concern,” she says drily.
“I’m Thales, by the way,” he says, as though he hadn’t heard her, pronouncing it like Portuguese—TALL-ehz. Then he leans in close and whispers, “This isn’t really happening. You’re on the central node, the one Cromwell couldn’t find. You have to find your way up through a sequence of abstractions, but it’s going to feel like climbing through a city. You’re going to the top to find the big AI, the worst one, the one who’s been making it all happen. Get as close as you can and then destroy him.”
“Papers, please,” the guard says, like the words are meaningless phonemes he’s been intoning for a thousand years, and she turns to find he’s right behind her. She checks her breast pocket but her passport isn’t there, neither the real one nor the fake one from Greece, and her purse is missing, and as the crowd presses her forward she’s starting to panic, but then in her pants pocket she finds some kind of passport-sized credential and for want of other options offers it to the guard with such sangfroid as she can muster. The guard flips through the document, then hands it back saying, “Welcome back, doctor,” though she has no doctorate, but she nods grimly as he ushers her on and when she looks back the boy is gone.
*
She’s striding down a long tunnel of translucent pale glass, relieved, when she thinks of it, to have put immigration behind her.
She realizes she’s alone in the tunnel, has been for a while. She stops, looks behind her, but no one else is coming.
A detached, musical female voice recites an endless list of airport codes, gate numbers, times, but it’s strange, because she knows all the codes, these are codes for airports that don’t exist.
She almost walks past a waiting room full of TVs mounted over rows of identical chairs but stops when she realizes there’s a girl there. The girl is by herself, very thin, prepubescent, staring forlornly up at a television.
Irina approaches, hesitates, asks, “Are you all right?”
The girl looks at her, then back up at the TV. “No,” she says, sounding deeply worried. “I don’t know how to do this.”
“Do what?”
“My doctor told me I had to watch these and decide if the man is trustworthy but I don’t know how I’m supposed to tell.”
“Doctor?” Irina says. “Is he traveling with you?” The girl ignores her, wipes her nose on the back of her hand and seems to be trying to concentrate. Irina looks up at the screens, all of which have the sound off and show identical close-up shots of Cromwell and Magda in a room full of candles. She wants to help but feels compelled to go onward, so as she turns she says, “The answer is no. You can never trust him,” and then she’s striding away.
The glass tunnel ends in double doors. Baggage and customs must be next, which will be congested, oppressive, loud, and it’s like a reprieve when the doors open onto silence and hard sunlight.
She steps blinking into tropical heat, the doors sealing themselves behind her. She’s on a narrow concrete balcony high over the sea. In front of her is a narrow white bridge, arcing through the air toward a tower, or a cluster of towers, a sort of city rising up so high that for a moment she thinks it’s the space elevator, but no, it’s not that, this is something else.
No guardrails on either the balcony or the bridge. Tort laws can be weak in the tropics but this is absurd. She sidles up to the balcony’s edge—it’s a long way down to the sea, which seems unreachably remote, as distant as the sky. She can just make out the white breakers creaming against the city’s base.
Did she come here on vacation? She looks into her other memory but finds nothing as it’s churning almost at capacity, which must be an error because that only happens when she’s reading glyphs. Oddly, her implant has more space and computing power than she remembers, much more, in fact she hadn’t thought there was so much in the world.
She decides to go back into the airport, find someone in authority who can explain what’s going on, but a sign on the doors reads RE-ENTRY STRICTLY PROHIBITED.
She stares up at the city, wondering how it was built—the construction problems seem insurmountable. She cranes her neck but its heights are lost in the distance. It looks like there’s nowhere else to go. (Had someone said she was going to the top?)
The white bridge feels narrower than it looked. Gulf of space on either side. It will be fine, she tells herself, all she has to do is walk in a straight line, she can do that. As the wind brushes her she makes herself not hunch.