Philip Reeve - A Darkling Plain

“Sometimes she is just Anna, for days and days,” said Fishcake, hoping that Popjoy would take the hint, destroy the Stalker part of her, and save his Anna. “It was the Anna bit that wanted to come here, so you could help her. I think Anna Fang is trapped inside her somewhere, and sometimes when she remembers who she is, the Stalkerish side shuts down…”

“The ghost in the machine…” Popjoy looked at him and winked. “I’m afraid not, lad. Nobody returns from the Sunless Country, you know.” He selected a long, thin probe from the tray and inserted it into a crevice of the Stalker’s brain. The Stalker’s head lifted with a jerk; her dry lips moved; she whispered, “Stilton … I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to hurt you, but it was the only way—”

“Anna?” said Fishcake eagerly.

Her eyeless, desiccated face turned toward him. “Fishcake?”

“It’s her!” Fishcake told Popjoy, “Keep her! Hold on to her! Don’t let the other one come back!”

Popjoy was busy with his probes and instruments. He didn’t even bother to look at Fishcake. “You have it all wrong, boy,” he said. “These memories aren’t a person. They’re just residue that the Stalker brain has scoured out of the dead brain cells of the host. Eighteen years too late, mind, but better than never…”

Something sparked, down inside the Stalker’s head; the flash lit up the inside of her mouth, which had fallen open.

She jerked again and said, “No tricks, Popjoy.”

“What, you think I’d sabotage my finest work?” cried Popjoy hurt. “I am just making a few minor adjustments.”

“You have found the Error? The memories? Remove them!”

“Great Quirke, certainly not!”

“Remove them!”

“But Excellency, they are what distinguish you from the mindless Stalkers, the battle models… They are what make you the finest Stalker of the age; the pinnacle of Resurrection technology…”

Either Popjoy’s words or the pleading tone that had crept into his voice caught the Stalker’s attention. She nodded cautiously, prepared at least to hear him out.

“Those memories have always been there, submerged beneath the surface,” the Engineer explained. “They give you levels of experience and emotion that no other Stalker of mine can draw on. Recently, thanks to the damage Mr. Grike inflicted, they have become intense, overwhelming your conscious mind. But we should soon be able to strike a healthy balance.”

“What are they?” insisted the Stalker. “Where have they come from? Why do I remember being Anna?”

“I’m really not sure,” admitted Popjoy, groping for a tiny pair of pliers and setting to work. “The fact is, the brain I fitted you with isn’t quite like anything else I’ve ever seen. Certainly not one of those clunky modern models we London Engineers built, and not like old Mr. Grike’s, either. It’s much older, and much stranger.

“You see, when your friend Sathya first took me to Rogue’s Roost all those years ago and ordered me to bring Anna Fang back to life, I panicked a bit. I knew it was impossible. So to buy myself some time, I set up an expedition and took a Green Storm airship out into the Ice Wastes, hunting for an Old Tech site that I’d heard rumors of ever since I was an apprentice in dear old London. The Engineers had looked for it but never found it. I had better luck. Right up to the top of the world we went; so far north we started going south again. And there, half buried in the snows of a tiny, frozen island, we found a complex built by some forgotten culture that must have flourished in the days before the Nomad Empires. Inside the central pyramid sat a dozen dead men and women on stone thrones. Some had been crushed by roof falls or encased in ice, but there were a few who, when we entered their chamber, began to whisper to us in languages we couldn’t identify. They were Stalkers, of a sort, although they had no armor or weapons, and they’d clearly not been built to fight.”

“Then why?” asked Fishcake’s Stalker.

“I think they were built to remember,” said Popjoy. He rummaged in a drawer for a set of Stalker’s eyes and started wiring them into his patient’s sockets. “I think that when great leaders of that culture died, their scientist-priests would take the body to the pyramid at the top of the world and stick a machine in their head, and there they’d sit, remembering. They’d remember all the things they’d done in life, and pass on those memories to their successors, and tell the stories of the times they lived in so they’d never be forgotten. Except they were forgotten, of course; their culture vanished from the earth, and the Nomad Empires that came after them picked up a crude version of the same technology and used it to build undead warriors like old Mr. Grike.

“That pyramid was the only relic of the first Stalker builders, and I’m afraid my Green Storm minders dynamited it for fear some other scavenger would stumble on the secret. But in one of the smaller buildings, among a lot of religious paraphernalia and irrelevant old texts, I unearthed an almost complete Stalker brain. I took it back to Rogues’ Roost for study and repairs, connected it to a brain of my own design that controls your motor functions and suchlike, and installed the whole caboodle in the carcass of old Anna Fang.”

The Stalker tilted her head on one side. “So am I Anna Fang?” she asked.

“No, Excellency,” said Popjoy. “You are a machine that can access some of the memories of Anna Fang. And they give you strength.” He replaced her mask and skullpiece, fastening them into place with neat new bolts. “You want to make the world green again; you yearn for it. That’s not because you have been set to obey Green Storm instructions, like some brainless battle-Stalker, but because you can subconsciously remember how much Anna Fang wanted it; you can remember what the townies did to her, and to her family, and how it felt when those things happened. Her memories, those feelings, are what drive you.”

“I remember dying,” said the Stalker, not in the hesitant voice of Anna but in her own harsh hiss. “I remember that night at Batmunkh Gompa. The sword in my heart, so cold and sudden, and then that sweet boy kneeling over me, saying my name, and I couldn’t answer him… I remember it all.”

She unplugged her cable from the severed Stalker head and slung it aside. When she reinserted the cable into her own skull, her new eyes filled slowly with green light. “Now it is time for us to go.”

She stood and turned, and Popjoy’s smile faded. “Excellency, you can’t leave now! I need to make further tests and observations! With your help I might be able to make more like you! I’ve spent so many years trying to repeat my success with you, and all I’ve been able to turn out are tin soldiers and silly curiosities.”

“You have an airship?”

“Yes. A yacht, in the hangar behind the house. Why?”

“I am not Anna Fang,” said the Stalker thoughtfully. “But I am here to do what she would have wanted. I shall take your ship and fly to Erdene Tezh. There I shall speak with ODIN.”

“No!” said Popjoy. “No!”

“You have heard of ODIN, I see.”

“My old Guild … But even they … It was impossible, the codes are lost—”

“The codes are found,” the Stalker said. “They were recorded in the Tin Book of Anchorage. I saw them on Cloud 9. I have carried them safe in my head ever since.”

“It’s madness! I mean, ODIN … Don’t you understand the power of it?”

“Of course. It is the power to make the world green again. Where the Storm has failed, ODIN will succeed.”

Popjoy clenched his plump hands into fists, as if he were about to attack her. “But Excellency, what if it goes wrong? We barely understand these Ancient devices. Remember MEDUSA! ODIN would be incomparably more dangerous than MEDUSA…”