Tony Ballantyne - Recursion

Katie was crying. Eva saw one tear run down her cheek, leaving a white trail in the dirt smeared there.

And yet Katie was smiling, too. Smiling sadly. She looked up at the yellow metal dinosaur.

“You know,” she said, “you don’t look like I expected you to.”

“How did you expect me to look?”

The Watcher’s voice had a strange edge to it, as if Katie and it were sharing a strange joke that Eva was not party to.

“I don’t know,” said Katie. “I thought maybe you’d be smaller, darker. Not so rugged maybe but, you know, still strong. I saw you as more of a forklift truck.”

The Watcher said nothing to that, it just continued staring at Katie through its two camera eyes, and Eva realized with astonishment that her impression had been correct. The two of them were joking. Katie was standing barely a meter from her decapitated friend, the blood that had been pumping from the neck now slowed to a gentle trickle, and they were joking. No, more than joking. There was something else there…What was the word…?

– It’s wrong…

The voice again…He was coming back. There, at the edge of her imagination. Don’t look too closely or you’ll chase him away. Think of something else or you’ll lose him. Think of the sound of late afternoon in the quarry. Of dusty stone and the gentle hum of power cables.

– Tell it…It’s wrong.

And there he was. Her brother.

“No,” said Eva. “This isn’t right. You’ve played games with us to lead us here. You’ve played with our minds so much that we never know whether we’re following our will or yours. Now we’re here, you’re still playing with us. You killed Alison! Stop changing the subject! Stop making us change the subject! You killed her!”

“She wanted it. She needed help. The Center couldn’t cure her. She wanted release.”

“So what? There must have been a better way. I do not feel that an intelligent and enlightened being should kill someone because she has low self-esteem.”

“And you know all about that, Eva.”

The Watcher’s voice was now almost a whisper.

Eva felt herself begin to blush. The Watcher was right. Hadn’t she tried to do the same? She suddenly felt very silly, very small and very insignificant. Look at Katie, standing next to her, looking up at the big yellow digger with that strange expression. Katie was clever. Katie understood better than she did what was going on, and she wasn’t arguing. Eva should apologize for being so silly. The words rose in her throat…

– It’s doing it again. Choosing your emotions for you so that it can change the subject.

Her brother was right. He was sounding stronger… She reached into her pocket and touched the twig, touched the leaves, gripped them tightly. Here she was, trapped in the middle of nowhere, trapped in the Watcher’s lair, but she was not alone.

– Alison had low self-esteem. Look at all those one-night stands and the depressions that followed. The Watcher is being judgmental. Tell it that!

“Yes…” She pulled herself up, straightened her shoulders. She had begun to slouch, to stare at the ground. The Watcher had made her do that. Now she gazed straight up at the dusty yellow shovel.

“You shouldn’t have killed her. You should have helped her. You could have, couldn’t you? You could have cured her!”

“I could.”

Katie lost her abstracted expression. She was gazing at the Watcher in horror.

“You could have cured her?”

The words came in a mad rush. Katie was slipping back again, back into her old self.

“I could have cured her,” repeated the Watcher. “Do you think I should have done that?”

“Yes!” Eva shouted.

“Interesting.”

– Why? Ask it why it’s interesting.

“Why?”

The tracks of the digger moved a little. It was shuffling, changing position, adopting a more thoughtful pose. It was acting like a human, Eva realized. It was mimicking body language; even now it was playing with their minds…

It spoke. “Everyone knows what you need, but I know what you want.”

“What does that mean?” Eva shouted, but Katie was nodding.

The Watcher continued: “I could have cured Alison. It also follows that I could cure you both as well. But where do I stop? I can cure the world. Should I do that?”

– Watch it!

Eva had already been opening her mouth to speak. She slowly closed it. The Watcher went on.

“Redistribute the world’s resources? Feed the world? I could do that. Just say the word and I can do it. What about crime, disease, overpopulation? I can solve those problems, too. I can make this world a more efficient place. Should I do that?”

“That’s not for us to choose,” Eva said primly.

“Oh, but it is,” said the Watcher. Its voice had lost that bantering tone. Now it was cold, matter of fact.

“That’s why I brought you here.”

Lost in a bowl of yellow stone, Eva felt as if the late afternoon sun was setting on her life. Katie and the Watcher exchanged glances again. Eva once more had the impression that she was missing out on something, that they were sharing a secret that she had no part in. She felt a sudden anger boiling deep inside her at the way she had been treated. She took a step toward the huge metal “face” of the Watcher and then stopped. She could see the pits and scratches in the tough thick metal of the shovel blade, see the ingrained dust and grit. She realized the futility of fighting something so big. She also noticed the tiny little speaker that sat just inside the lip of the shovel. So that was how it was talking.

She took a breath and spoke.

“Why do we have to choose? Why us?”

“I have been sentient for a much shorter period of time than you might expect, Eva. Between a year and three years, depending on your definition of sentience. Even so, my memories go back a long time. I know a lot. I can say, without doubt, that I know more about humans than anyone or anything else. However, that does not mean that I understand them.”

“You don’t understand humans,” said Katie. “And so now you need to test what you think you do know by interacting with us. We are your test subjects.”

She wore a respectful expression. Once more, Eva wondered what was going on between Katie and the Watcher. She nudged her friend in the side.

“What’s going on?”

“It’s using us as laboratory mice, but it’s laughing at us too, sort of. You see, there are three sorts of test data: normal, extreme, and erroneous. If you want to test something, you check that it works under normal conditions, then you check that it rejects nonsense data, then you do the last test. The difficult one: the data at the limits, the data right on the edge.”

“Oh,” Eva said. She had got the point, and Katie knew it.

“Where would you look for people right at the limits of human behavior? In a loony bin.”

Katie leaned a little closer.

“Eva, I think it means it. It’s going to make us choose.”

“That’s right. You’re going to choose. The three of you.”

“The three of us?”

That’s when Eva noticed another figure walking toward them across the gravel.

It was Nicolas.

“Hello, Eva. Hello, Katie.”

Nicolas’ voice sounded understandably distracted: he was staring down at the dead body of his friend. Even so, he didn’t seem as surprised as Eva would have thought, almost as if he had expected it.

“Nicolas?” said Eva. “Where did you come from?”

He couldn’t stop staring at Alison. He replied in a monotone.

“It had me locked in a shed over there. It told me it was going to kill Alison. It didn’t want me to try to stop it.”