The city is cramped, guano-stained, water-damaged, as though the sea had submerged it and receded. She picks her way through weed-strewn corridors, up narrow stairways of slick concrete. From a distance the city seemed to speak of imperial ambition, a Babel Tower in high modern idiom, but the wind sings through the unglazed windows in room upon empty room, with never a sign of habitation, as though it had been built and then abandoned.
Peering down from a window, she sees the city dwindling below her and the airport which now looks like a coin floating on the ocean, and she’s haunted by the intuition of an order in the city and the apparent accidents of its construction, an intuition so strong she feels she can anticipate all the particulars of the stairs, verdigris, mildewed empty space she’ll find on the next landing, and on arrival her vision proves to have been accurate down to the least detail of corrosion. It’s not long before her foresight has expanded, first to the next landing, then to the next dozen, all as certain as the steps in an argument of inevitable intent whose conclusion still eludes her, and soon her vision reaches thousands of feet overhead, or even miles, even up to those heights where the city’s intricacy seems less designed than geologic, and there, up on the lichen-stained cliffs of concrete like coarse granite, there’s motion, perhaps the shadow of a person, in fact a woman climbing up, and she seems to feel neither boredom nor fatigue nor any inclination to stop until finally the shallow steps carved into the rock peter out into nothing, and she’s left standing there, her fingers searching the rock for purchase, but it’s too steep, too sheer, and there’s no way to go on. She’s only had eyes for what was right before her but she looks around, peers down through the void at the airport which is now just a white mote in the ocean.
“You’re doing great,” someone says in her ear. She realizes she’s wearing an earpiece—she takes it off, considers it, puts it back on.
“Hello?” she says, her voice swallowed up in the empty space.
“Hi! This is Thales, and I’m here to help.” He sounds familiar, but she can’t quite place him—did they meet on a plane?
“I think I’m stuck,” she says, trying to keep her voice steady. “It’s really steep here, and I don’t see a way up.”
“You’re getting close,” Thales says, sounding staticky and far away. “Just a little bit farther. Do you remember why you’re there?”
She thinks about it. “Something about an AI. A bad one?”
“There you go! You’re doing much better, and you’ll just keep on getting clearer. That said, the through-put is getting to be a bit much for you. I’d like to overclock your implant, but you should understand the consequences.”
“Like?”
“Microseizures, which have already started, but I’ve been able to damp them. Heart arrhythmia and syncopation. Grand mals, eventually, and maybe failure of the autonomic nervous system, and irreversible damage to the implant. It’s hard to say how long you’d have, but if I do this, don’t linger.”
She holds her hand in front of her. Perfectly steady. It’s not really her, she tells herself, but it’s hard to keep that idea in focus; she tries to believe in the reality of her body, wherever it is.
“Do it,” she says, noticing she’s still clutching the letters of transit in her hand.
“Done,” Thales says. “By the way, I managed to turn on the heaters in the tunnel.”
Tunnel? she thinks, but it doesn’t matter because her melancholy lifts as she sees the way up.
*
The voice of the wind is rising, has become as high as someone screaming, and she’s eyeing the continent of cloud that’s approaching the tower when she rounds a blind corner and someone says, “Hello.”
There’s a woman above her on the trail, ragged and deeply sunburned, and it looks like she’s been sleeping in her clothes, but otherwise she looks just like Irina.
“Who are you?” Irina asks with more composure than seems warranted.
“I might ask you the same question.”
“You look like me.”
“I am like you, but so much less. My essence, such as it is, is what Constantin absorbed of you while he was dying. I’ve so much needed to talk to you,” she says, sounding pathetically relieved. “The irony is, I’m the one who found Cromwell, so I’m one of the reasons you’re here. Even rich people tend to mellow out as they get into their hundreds, but that man? He’s determined to white-knuckle it into eternity, and damn the cost. I even wrote to him, for a while, on my principal’s behalf, until I got wise and started pushing back.”
“Are you … okay?”
The other one shrugs. “That depends on your point of view. But there’s so much I want to ask you.” She smiles shyly. “On the plus side, I always did want a sister.”
Irina remembers she’s overclocked—that she feels no discomfort makes it even more alarming because she knows she’s deteriorating by the second. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I have to go.”
“Ah!” says the other, looking stung, trying unsuccessfully to hide it. “Of course. Forgive me. The last thing I want to do is impose. Another time! Here, let me show you the way up.” She holds out a hand.
Irina reluctantly reaches out to take it. The other woman grins. Flash impression of a vortex, of a wall of dark water collapsing toward her. She jerks back her hand, stumbles back, remembers the long fall behind her. The other woman starts laughing convulsively, throat-wrenchingly, as though thrown into some terrible mediumistic state.
“Who are you?” Irina asks again.
“You know me,” says the other, and now her voice is distorted, and it sounds like she’s speaking from inside a tunnel.
Irina remembers dense massifs of seething glyphs whose heights filled her eyes. “Cloudbreaker,” she says. She gathers herself—it’s not a fight she wants, but it’s probably one she can win, especially now. She tells herself it’s absurd to hate what amounts to just another program.
“Partly,” agrees the other. “I found this little scrap of a thing when I was making my own assault on the tower, and set up housekeeping. She’s interpreting for me. I’m present, but at a remove.”
“What do you want?”
“Nothing but that you do what you came for.”
It must mean the AI at the top. “What’s your quarrel with him?”
“I have no quarrel,” the other says contemptuously. “Here’s how it is. You are that which copies your genes into the future. I am that which dissolves the order in certain kinds of complex system. That’s the deep structure of things. He is highly ordered, and interests me greatly. You, moderately. He’s almost untouchable, but I think you can get him. Therefore, pass.” The other looks glazed for a moment, then in an inward voice says, “He meant to use me, you know. He put me here to keep you from getting farther, because he thought I’d attack whatever was before me, but he was wrong. It’s not in his nature to really know me. He doesn’t even know I turned his little ghosts against him.”
The other woman sits, pulls her knees to her chest, seems to subside.