Edge of the Wire, page 18
“I’m thinking all the same things,” Rowe said. “And when we find that creature? If we find it before it drives us mad or kills us?”
“I don’t know,” Waverly said.
“I don’t know either,” Rowe said hurriedly. “But I’ll tell you one thing; it sure doesn’t feel like their priority is going to be protecting us. We’re on our own now. You realize that, right?”
Suddenly, Noyes appeared—very dimly—and spoke just at the edge of hearing.
“Boy-o, you’ll recall that it is part of my job to prevent you from being killed. You’re meant to die naturally from your brain problem, dontcha know. So I feel I should tell you again that my loyalty is to you. I’ll do everything I can to keep you safe here. But at the same time, I can only do so much. Whatever the immediate future portends, the three of us will need to look out for one another.”
Rowe nodded. They all glanced back at the opening. Then there was no more time for words. Collins and her team had arrived at the breach in the wall. They wriggled their black suits through and joined Rowe and Waverly within the bloody corridor.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
COLLINS PAUSED TO EXAMINE THE DESTROYED BODIES, BUT ONLY MOMENTARILY. She indicated that Rowe and Waverly should proceed. She and her team would follow a few paces behind.
“You’ll just tell us when and where to turn, then?” Rowe asked her.
“If you like, you can set a course to Lower Storage Tank Alpha, using emergency stairwells only.”
Rowe did, if only to give himself something to focus on. After a few moments, his suit began projecting green waypoints onto the corridor ahead.
There was satisfactory illumination coming from the suits of Collins’s crew, but the light shone in a way that made things feel wrong and eerie. It was like seeing extinguished neon signs during the day. You could see them just fine, technically speaking, but this was not how they were ever meant to look.
Rowe wondered how the thing of five wheels would appear in such light. More specifically, he wondered if it would be less terrifying . . . or more. Sometimes looking at the dead beast splayed out on the dissection table was somehow even worse than when it was hunting you in the forest. Rowe had the sinking feeling that there was no good light in which to see this thing; no illumination that would minimize its awfulness.
After less than five minutes of travel, the waypoints steered them down passageways now entirely new. They passed through a nondescript doorway, and stepped into an area of the ship normally reserved for a crew’s quarters. It did not appear to have been the site of any violence. The hallways were clean and clear of blood. The walls of the corridors had dark nooks branching off that Rowe guessed were small personal living areas. Having so many openings in the nearby walls made Rowe uneasy. It also made him think about how all of the Silkworms who’d lived here were dead now. These possessions belonged to no one. The small personal items placed about these quarters were ownerless. It was a nothing place for nobody.
Collins’s team spoke softly, and only to one another. Because they walked in the lead, Rowe and Waverly dictated the pace. Whenever the two of them slowed to inspect something, the entire group slackened its gait. Yet as Rowe and Waverly stopped momentarily to peer into an open foot locker, Collins took the opportunity to jog up next to them.
“Hey,” she called. “Is it okay if I talk to him again?”
“Sure,” Rowe replied, looking up from the locker. “He can be a little bit of a wiseass, but Waverly is generally—”
“Sorry,” said Collins. “That’s not what I meant.”
Rowe and Waverly exchanged a glance.
“Your eminence, is it?” said Collins. “Monsignor, perhaps? I get the old-timey religious titles so confused.”
“Oh, I expect you can call him anything you like,” Rowe said. “Noyes?”
“Noyes will do,” the hologram said, misting into existence. “Or Davis Foster Noyes. You could do the whole thing. These two tend to just call me Noyes, though. Or Encarta, if you want to bust my chops.”
“Sorry if he’s a little silly or flippant,” Rowe said to Collins. “I’ve gotten used to him that way, so that’s how he behaves. It does seem he should be a little more serious with a senior officer present.”
“We’re on a J-Class planet, Mister Rowe,” she replied. “I have bigger problems than a rude AI.”
Seeming to confirm this, another deep moan suddenly sounded from the lowest bowels of the ship. This one was not as loud or powerful as previous iterations, but it still said: “Don’t forget about me.”
Rowe let his eyes flick back and forth as the moan crested and died away.
“Should we be quiet and listen for more?” Waverly wondered.
“I think that’s just going to come and go from now on,” Rowe said. “Probably, we should get used to it.”
“We are still very far from the place I expect to find the source of that sound,” Collins pronounced as if her word was definitive. “Now, Noyes—if that is what you like to be called—I would like you to tell me, again, how Mister Rowe is faring. Please give me the full rundown.”
“He’s already been through a lot,” Noyes replied. “We all have, I suppose. Quite a place, this planet. Quite a place. But considering all that he has undergone, his vital remains strong and his nerves are under good control.”
“Is he seeing anything that might make him uneasy?” Collins pressed.
“Seeing . . .” Noyes began. “Ah. Now I follow you. His sight is fine. Eyes are healthy. No problems there.”
“Has he surprised you in any way? And how’s his ARK Score looking?”
“I’m a bit hard to surprise these days,” said Noyes. “And he hasn’t seemed too surprised given the exceptional things we’ve seen. I can confirm that our man Rowe is taking everything in stride. With his personality type, you want to feel like your life has meaning—and that you’re being a useful person making a difference—right up until the end. This wiring job has had more challenges than you can shake a stick at. I think that’s actually helping Mister Rowe to feel he’s making every bit of difference he can. And that’s just what he wants. ARK-wise? No problems.”
“Nice,” said Collins. “And how about the other one?”
“Eh,” said Noyes, with a glance to Waverly. “I could take or leave him.”
Collins smiled and nodded.
Noyes, with almost imperceptible adjustment, hovered forward in front of Rowe and out of Collins’s view. Noyes flashed an expression that asked what the hell was going on.
Rowe simply nodded and sucked in his lips, telling Noyes to keep on his virtual toes.
Collins asked nothing further and rejoined her team at the rear of their peloton. Rowe and Waverly continued on through the berths.
Rowe was now more certain than ever that Collins was somehow using him to test for danger, or for the presence of the creature, which were more or less the same thing. Her suit was primitive and without Goo—and surely without quantum drives—but she had found another way to manage. Rowe and Waverly would be her sensors. And this chat with Noyes had just been a last-minute calibration of the equipment.
Their path took them down emergency stairwells, and, at least once, down what appeared to be a kind of plastic fire escape tube with a ladder inside. Rowe continued to find it oppressive and unnatural to be within such tight places in a large, silent ship. He rather had the feeling he was a medical probe being led through the viscera of an embalmed corpse. The parts were still there, but this was no longer a thing that could live.
Rowe remained concerned about what might lie ahead, but he was just as concerned by the black-clad Silkworms who marched behind them. There was a deep mystery underpinning Collins’s actions. She said she wanted to find the creature, but something told Rowe that this was not the whole story. Acutely, he had the sensation of being used, which he did not like. It was as though she were playing a game with him . . . or perhaps against him. And he was not sure that he knew the rules.
He was not sure about any of it.
When one could bask in the warm glow of connection to the interstellar Goo, there was no question as to whether someone was playing a game with you. (And indeed, sometimes one needed such clarifications. Like, if you thought you were boxing, but the other guy didn’t, then it was just assault. Always, it was better to get that quick confirmation.)
In the ESA Academy, apprentice Silkworms would routinely engage in simulated scenarios that were designed to replicate the kinds of harrowing problems they might encounter during a mission. But you always knew these were only simulations; you always knew when they were starting, and when they had concluded.
As Rowe thought of his situation—now, here, with Collins—he craved any such signal or sign. The flashing of a light. The waving of a flag. A starter pistol’s simulated report.
Anything.
What was happening? Why was Collins acting so strangely? What did she really want, and why was she being deceptive in order to get it?
And—this, perhaps the most important question of all—if this was some sort of game or contest . . . was it one that he could win?
Rowe’s mind went to ancient literature, the really primeval stuff.
In the catalog of earth’s oldest stories—from the earliest recorded times before the Goo—you could learn about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. That story had begun when a knight dressed all in green rode into King Arthur’s court and proposed a contest: any of Arthur’s knights could have a swing at his head with an ax, provided that the Green Knight be allowed his own swing in return a year later. Sir Gawain volunteered, because, c’mon, no way the dude is going to get the chance to swing at your neck if you decapitate him first, right? But the moment Gawain swung the ax, the story got all surreal and confusing. Gawain cut off the Green Knight’s head, but the knight didn’t die; he just picked up his severed head and was like “Okay, see you in a year for my swing. Let’s do it at the chapel where I live. I won’t tell you the chapel’s location, but you have a year to find it.” So Gawain searches for a year, finds the chapel just in time, and when he kneels down for the Green Knight’s swing, the knight just gives him a tiny nick on the neck and says: “Guess what? The swing-for-swing-game you thought we were playing? That wasn’t the game. The game was all the questing you had to do to find this chapel. And you did pretty well, but not absolutely perfect, so you still get a nick.” And Gawain’s like: “Thank you . . . I guess?” The end.
Of all the old, weird stories you could read—the really ancient ones that had been carved on stones or written down on parchment (it was a wonder any of these had survived at all!)—the one about the Green Knight had made Rowe feel the most uneasy, for reasons he’d always had trouble articulating.
But now, crawling through the dark guts of the dead Marie Curie, he thought he finally understood why.
It was unnerving because Sir Gawain couldn’t tell what the game was. He thought it was one thing, but it ended up actually being another. Gawain had been correct that “a game” was happening, but wrong about which one.
Now, here, inside the ship, Rowe knew that a game of his own was afoot. That something was afoot. But what?
“Noyes?” he whispered.
“Yes?”
“Is Collins noticing every time I glance back in her direction?”
“Some,” the hologram said. “Her eyes are doing a kind of search pattern, and you’re one of the points she keeps returning to.”
“Is she talking to the other Silkworms in black? Can you read their lips.”
“I think . . . I think . . . That’s odd.”
“What’s odd, Noyes?”
“They’re talking a little—whispering—but she often positions her hand over her face, or dips her mouth low into the collar of that suit when she speaks. I hadn’t noticed until you pointed it out. Reminds me of a sports coach who is concealing the next play. Sorry. I feel I’m not being helpful. Is there something else I can tell you?”
“No,” said Rowe. “That actually tells me a lot.”
“Hmm,” replied Noyes. “If you say so.”
Every footstep that they took—deeper and deeper into the long, low guts of the ship—made Rowe think about how it would have to be retraced. How every step forward would incur the debt of a step back.
The only thing that kept Rowe focused was remembering the directives of his mission.
For all her rank and power, Collins was human.
There were things bigger, even, than her.
Despite everything that had happened, the purpose of Silkworms—of who they were, of what they did—was still legitimate as far as Rowe was concerned. There were other noble callings, of course. Doctors who performed life-saving surgeries. Architects who designed tall buildings and expansive bridges that somehow didn’t fall down and kill people. But Silkworms . . . Silkworms were entrusted with expanding the most useful resource in existence. (And the disturbing hours medical students might face alone in the dissection lab with their first hobo cadavers were nothing—Rowe had always believed—compared to the horrors of the Briefing to which Silkworms were subjected.) Silkworms went to places where nobody had been before and did things that nobody had ever done. All of it raw and unencountered; all of it vital to knowledge.
Some thought the Goo godlike because of all that it monitored and knew; in their minds, Silkworms were like the high priests who helped it to know—helped it to be godlike. Rowe was unsure if he believed in the popular versions of life-after-death, but he knew he still believed in the Goo. He believed that it was good and helped people. So to help it? That must still be good, right?
But how, in the broken, dead bowels of a ship haunted by some monster . . . How, here, in such a damned place, could a Silkworm help the Goo?
The answer—the only answer, it felt to Rowe—would be to complete the mission. To identify the obstacles, to remove them, and then to successfully wire the planet.
All else was distraction and decadence.
The possibility that Collins might have some ulterior motive to this was unthinkably strange, but not impossible. Collins might also believe that whatever she was doing was right and good—but her perspective was not that of Rowe and Waverly. The interstellar Goo outside of the lightning-rich cloud cover of Tendus-13 was not Noyes. It did not contain Noyes or his unique planetside knowledge. And the suit Collins wore meant that perhaps it never would. That she was actively rejecting it.
Quantum computing had been made possible by the assumption that the universe operated in a series of possibilities that could all be potentially true at the same time; that was quantum entanglement. Some experts in the field believed that these possibilities represented “real” universes or planes of existence—just as real as the one where Rowe now stood and drew breath—in which alternative possibilities that could have happened had happened. It felt now that there were two knowledgeable, helpful, authentic versions of the Goo. And of course, there were. There was the finite, Noyes version down here with him—an Encarta that had not been updated since their landing craft had passed underneath the lightning clouds. And then there was the massive version that stretched across all of explored and wired space. But the local one—the Noyes one—at least in this case, knew some things better than the unfathomably great, interstellar version did. It knew about what was happening here on Tendus-13. And if you were on Tendus-13—and wiring Tendus was your job—then that carried a hell of a lot of weight.
Rowe served the Goo, but which one?
In a blazing and colossal instant of knowing, it seemed to him that he should serve the one that mattered.
Rowe’s sense of time was always shaky planetside; and his growing anxiety about the game Collins was playing only threw his sense of time further off-balance, but it felt sooner than humanly possible when they opened the door at the bottom of an emergency stairwell and found themselves on the long, windowless, doorless, and high-ceilinged hallway that led to Lower Storage Tank Alpha.
The immense corridor was hexagonally shaped with a flat floor, and a sharp bend in the middle of the walls. The floor was covered with sets of cord and wiring, and what looked almost like train tracks—all meant, Rowe supposed, for moving large things in and out of the ship’s storage.
Rowe and Waverly remained at point, with Collins and her team taking up the rear. Rowe realized that this hexagonal passageway—large as it was—was only the path leading up to the storage tank. The entrance to the tank itself was still many yards ahead. Though the suit lights were bright and penetrating, they only projected so far; the team’s destination remained unseen. The air was filled with shadows that cast an unnatural, cloaking blackness which fought against their artificial lights. The endpoint ahead was all dark emptiness.
Unaware and uninterested if Collins could eavesdrop, Rowe said to Waverly: “There’s no damage down here at all. No dead bodies. The walls are clean and smooth. I don’t know what signs I’m looking for, but I don’t feel like I’m seeing them.”
Aside from the darkness, there was, truly, no indication that anything might be out of the ordinary in this part of the ship.
“To live down here, that thing would sure have to open a lot of doors and shimmy down a lot of ladders and tubes,” Waverly responded. “But then again, who the fuck knows what its body is like? Maybe it can coil around things, or slither like a snake.”
Rowe took a glance back at Collins. If she had an opinion on the matter, she was electing to keep her mouth shut.
Waverly pulled up a new version of the ship schematic.
“Fuck . . .” he said after a moment. “You think this hallway is big, wait until we get into the tank. It’s—what?—three, four times this?”
“It’ll all be empty space though,” Rowe said. “If the thing is there, it won’t have a place to hide, right?”
