Peter Watts - Beyond the Rift

“And you just weren’t up for it, were you? You had to let me run free when my body was… off …”

There was something in her voice he’d never heard before. He’d seen anger in Jean before, but always the screaming inarticulate rage of a spirit trapped in flesh. This was calm, cold. Adult . This was judgement , and the prospect of that verdict chilled Stavros Mikalaides to the marrow.

“Jean, they don’t love you.” He sounded desperate even to himself. “Not for who you are. They don’t want to see the real you, they want a child , they want some kind of ridiculous pet they can coddle and patronize and pretend with.”

“Whereas you,” Jean retorted, her voice all ice and razors, “just had to see what this baby could do with her throttle wide open on the straightaway.”

“God, no! Do you think that’s why I did it?”

“Why not, Stav? Are you saying you don’t mind having your kickass HST commandeered to shuttle some brain-dead meat puppet around a room?”

“I did it because you’re more than that! I did it because you should be allowed to develop at your own pace, not stunted to meet some idiotic parental expectation! They shouldn’t force you to act like a four- year-old!”

“Except I’m not acting then, Stav. Am I? I really am four, which is just the age I’m supposed to be.”

He said nothing.

“I’m reverting . Isn’t that it? You can run me with training wheels or scramjets, but it’s me both times. And that other me, I bet she’s not very happy, is she? She’s got a four-year-old brain, and four-year-old sensibilities, but she dreams , Stav. She dreams about some wonderful place where she can fly , and every time she wakes up she finds she’s made out of clay. And she’s too fucking stupid to know what any of it means—she probably can’t even remember it. But she wants to get back there, she’d do anything to…” She paused, seemingly lost for a moment in thought.

“ I remember it, Stav. Sort of. Hard to remember much of anything when someone strips away ninety-nine percent of who and what you are. You’re reduced to this bleeding little lump, barely even an animal, and that’s the thing that remembers. What remembers is on the wrong end of a cable somewhere. I don’t belong in that body at all. I’m just— sentenced to it, on and off. On and off.”

“Jean—”

“Took me long enough, Stav, I’m the first to admit it. But now I know where the nightmares come from.”

In the background, the room telemetry bleated.

God no. Not now. Not now…

“What is it?” Jean said.

“They—they want you back.” On a slave monitor, a pixellated echo of Andrew Goravec played the keypad in its hand.

“No!” Her voice rose, panic stirring the patterns that surrounded her. “ Stop them!”

“I can’t.”

“Don’t tell me that! You run everything ! You built me, you bastard, you tell me you love me. They only use me! Stop them!”

Stavros blinked against stinging afterimages. “It’s like a light-switch, it’s physical; I can’t stop them from here—”

There was a third image, to go with the other two. Jean Goravec, struggling as the leash, the noose, went around her throat. Jean Goravec, bubbles bursting from her mouth as something dark and so very, very real dragged her back to the bottom of the ocean and buried her there.

The transition was automatic, executed by a series of macros he’d slipped into the system after she’d been born. The body, awakening, pared the mind down to fit. The room monitors caught it all with dispassionate clarity: Jeannie Goravec, troubled child-monster, awakening into hell. Jeannie Goravec, opening eyes that seethed with anger and hatred and despair, eyes that glimmered with a bare fraction of the intelligence she’d had five seconds before.

Enough intelligence for what came next.

The room had been designed to minimize the chance of injury. There was the bed, though, one of its edges built into the east wall.

That was enough.

The speed with which she moved was breathtaking. Kim and Andrew never saw it coming. Their child darted beneath the foot of the bed like a cockroach escaping the light, scrambled along the floor, re-emerged with her cable wrapped around the bed’s leg. Hardly any slack in that line at all, now. Her mother moved then, finally, arms outstretched, confused and still unsuspecting—

“Jeannie—”

—while Jean braced her feet against the edge of the bed and pushed.

Three times she did it. Three tries, head whipped back against the leash, scalp splitting, the cable ripping from her head in spastic, bloody, bone-cracking increments, blood gushing to the floor, hair and flesh and bone and machinery following close behind. Three times, despite obvious and increasing agony. Each time more determined than before.

And Stavros could only sit and watch, simultaneously stunned and unsurprised by that sheer ferocity. Not bad for a bleeding little lump . Barely even an animal …

It had taken almost twenty seconds overall. Odd that neither parent had tried to stop it. Maybe it was the absolute unexpected shock of it. Maybe Kim and Andrew Goravec, taken so utterly aback, hadn’t had time to think.

Then again, maybe they’d had all the time they’d needed.

Now Andrew Goravec stood dumbly near the center of the room, blinking bloody runnels from his eyes. An obscene rainshadow persisted on the wall behind him, white and spotless; the rest of the surface was crimson. Kim Goravec screamed at the ceiling, a bloody marionette collapsed in her arms. Its strings—string, rather, for a single strand of fiberop carries much more than the required bandwidth—lay on the floor like a gory boomslang, gobbets of flesh and hair quivering at one end.

Jean was back off the leash, according to the panel. Literally now as well as metaphorically. She wasn’t talking to Stavros, though. Maybe she was angry. Maybe she was catatonic. He didn’t know which to hope for.

But either way, Jean didn’t live over there any more. All she’d left behind were the echoes and aftermath of a bloody, imperfect death. Contamination, really; the scene of some domestic crime. Stavros cut the links to the room, neatly excising the Goravecs and their slaughterhouse from his life.

He’d send a memo. Some local Terracon lackey could handle the cleanup.

The word peace floated through his mind, but he had no place to put it. He focused on a portrait of Jean, taken when she’d been eight months old. She’d been smiling; a happy and toothless baby smile, still all innocence and wonder.

There’s a way , that infant puppet seemed to say. We can do anything, and nobody has to know —

The Goravecs had just lost their child. Even if they’d wanted the body repaired, the mind reconnected, they wouldn’t get their way. Terracon had made good on all legal obligations, and hell—even normal children commit suicide now and then.

Just as well, really. The Goravecs weren’t fit to raise a hamster, let alone a beautiful girl with a four-digit IQ. But Jean—the real Jean, not that bloody broken pile of flesh and bone—she wasn’t easy or cheap to keep alive, and there would be pressure to free up the processor space once the word got out.

Jean had never got the hang of that particular part of the real world. Contract law. Economics. It was all too arcane and absurd even for her flexible definition of reality. But that was what was going to kill her now, assuming that the mind had survived the trauma of the body. The monster wouldn’t keep a program running if it didn’t have to.