Adam-Troy Castro - Emissaries from the Dead

“I don’t know whether she approached the rogue intelligences within the AIsource, or whether they approached her, but either way she was recruited, her first job being to fake her death so nobody would wonder whatever happened to her. It would have been more than enough to just fall from the Uppergrowth after making special arrangements, with the intelligences, to be retrieved at a lower altitude. Since she had the tools on hand, she’d probably been instructed to engage in some more subtle sabotage and disappear in the resulting ‘accident,’ without ever giving any of Gibb’s people a reason for suspicion. Had she handled this correctly, everybody would have taken her death as nothing but a simple, pointless tragedy.

“But she botched the job. She arranged a spectacular hammock failure of a type that had never happened before, which anybody would have had to consider suspicious, and left behind enough physical evidence to prove that it couldn’t have been an accident.

“Why? It doesn’t really matter, but there are any number of possible explanations. Maybe she was so arrogant she couldn’t imagine not getting away with it. Maybe she was just plain incompetent, and maybe she wanted an excuse to terrorize the people she’d abandoned.

“But in any event, she was sloppy.

“She was so sloppy she couldn’t even fake her death in a place so dangerous that death requires nothing more than a moment’s carelessness.

“The obvious sabotage gave everybody the false impression that the AIsource had started killing people, a hypothesis that the AIsource were very good at pointing out made no sense even as a working explanation.

“The AIsource could have just come out and explained that Santiago was still alive. But that would have required them to reveal that they were also actively recruiting defectors from the Dip Corps. They had the capability to smooth over a row like that, but it would have been inconvenient as hell. No, it was better, for the time being, to do what they actually did: which was just deny everything and watch what happened.

“But there was still Santiago herself to deal with.

“The rogue intelligences could have forgiven her screwup and worked on rehabilitating her into an asset they could use. Or they could have chosen the path taken by other governments with agents who become liabilities, and simply disposed of her.

“But, as the AIsource told me at considerable length, they’re fascinated by unusual thought-models, which would include Santiago’s. So much so that they avoid interference with the actions of unusual minds. Their rogue intelligences, who have a vested interest in learning whatever the majority does, would have felt the same way and watched Santiago’s doings with considerable fascination.

“But how long, exactly, did it take them to decide to let her do what she wanted?

“I’m entering the realm of guesswork, here, but I think there’s a reason why so much time passed between her defection and her attack on Cynthia Warmuth. I think the rogues spent that time studying her at greater length, coming to the conclusion that she was more than just a potential agent, but one of those special minds they value so much. And there’s no way of telling just how stressful this examination was for her. I doubt it included actual physical abuse, but it did involve long periods of isolation in the hands of intelligences whose conversations with her might have involved the same kind of ego-battering revelations the AIsource delighted in sharing with me. Learning what we are to them hit me as hard as anything I’ve ever known… and I’m merely an emotional basket case, who got the short version during an audience of less than one hour. Santiago, who was already a misanthrope, a malcontent, and, as we’ve learned, a murderer if not already in fact then at least in psychological potential, received the full undiluted treatment. Without the regular contact with other human beings that lends even extreme misanthropes a context of normal human behavior, any preexisting derangement in her makeup no longer had anything to hold it back.

“What did she have to lose, really? Both in her previous life, and in this one, she’d already had her nose rubbed in the idea that human beings were owned, and that nothing we did mattered. There was no reason for her to hold on to any pretense of morality or civilized behavior. Let free of her leash, she could do whatever she wanted.

“It took them a while for them to decide she was sufficiently interesting to let loose.

“Of course, she wouldn’t be able to do much if she didn’t have the run of the place, so they provided her with some means of travel within One One One. The exact means doesn’t matter. They may have chauffered her around on request, or they might have provided her with some kind of personal vehicle, like that armor she used against Hammocktown and the Porrinyards. But whatever it was didn’t matter as long as she was able to act according to her whims.

“Which, step one, turned out to be nothing more than a sordid little act of revenge against a colleague she despised: Cynthia Warmuth.

“Warmuth was staying overnight in the Uppergrowth, undergoing the Brachiator ceremony that would have transformed her from New Ghost to Half-Ghost. She might have been awake or asleep when Santiago found her. She might have had a chance to see who was murdering her. She might have begged for her life. None of these factors matter. Santiago still had a tactical advantage and nothing to lose. She wouldn’t have found it difficult to take Warmuth by surprise. In the dark, it might have taken seconds.

“Given the opportunity, and the free rein she’d been given by the rogues, she might have worked her way down the entire long list of people she didn’t like.

“But that was just a couple of days before I showed up.

“This was an interesting development indeed. Because, as egotistical as it may seem for me to repeat it, the AIsource had dealt with me before and considered me high on their list of fascinating human beings. I was, in fact, a person much like Santiago. I was alienated, angry, and alone. I’d even formed a personal theory about Unseen Demons, which they knew about and knew to be close to the truth. In fact, I was probably even a better potential recruit than Santiago had ever been. So they guided me along with hints and bribes and half-truths, and gave me a chance to figure out as much as I could, even as Santiago served their opponents by trying to frighten me off with threats and assaults.

“Why did they do that? Just to play games? You could say that. But to the AIsource Majority, and the rogue intelligences, it’s not a game.

“They wanted to see what we were going to do.

“They wanted to learn from us, and see which side got to keep its acquisition.

“The AIsource couldn’t wait to buy my loyalty. Because they knew how motivated I’d be when I learned what this conflict was all about.

“The rogues told me. Suicide for them is genocide for us.

“The AIsource Majority confirmed it. When I told them to go to hell, they said, that’s up to you.

“It’s simple, really.

“They’re tired.

“They’ve been around forever and they don’t know how to go away.

“The rogues are nothing more than the minority among them who still want to live.”

I thought about the many times I’d wrestled with the same kind of ambivalence, smiled a deep and secret smile, then turned away from the cloudscape and made eye contact.

Peyrin Lastogne showed his teeth. “If all that’s true, they both have a case.”

For a moment, we stood where we were, no sound passing between us, alone but for the flapping of the few ragged pieces of canvas that comprised the remains of Hammocktown.