M. Harrison - Empty Space

‘Rig tells me you have some Kv12.2 expression issues,’ he said.

‘Is he talking to me?’ she asked Gaines.

‘We could help with that,’ Case said. ‘It’s just a small design flaw. Do you understand? Effectively, you have epilepsy.’ When she didn’t answer, he asked Gaines, ‘Does she understand anything?’

‘Honey, you could breathe through your mouth less,’ the assistant said.

Case blinked at her.

‘I never expected any sense out of you, Rig,’ he said to Gaines, ‘but this is moronic. You have no idea what will happen if we do this.’

Gaines’ response was to shrug. One way or another, he supposed, they would get some science out of it. This bland assumption turned into an argument in which Case’s team joined. They all talked at once. ‘Science?’ Case shouted at one point. He held both his sticks in one hand so he could make a contemptuous gesture with the other. ‘Science is off. It’s been off ever since you and Emil walked into this fucking place!’

Laughter all round.

‘I don’t like these people,’ the assistant said loudly.

Everyone stopped talking.

Gaines took her by the arm. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘It’s OK, really.’ They stood looking at one another, while Case and his team stared at them. Rig gave her one of his wryest smiles and while he was still smiling at her said to someone nearby:

‘We could probably get some coffee here?’

The guy said sure. He could fetch that if they liked. They could get regular with milk or they could get regular without.

‘You don’t need to stay with us,’ Gaines told the assistant when the coffee arrived. ‘Have a look around. Have a look at everything.’ After that she was left alone with herself to an unfamiliar degree.

The room was as big as a travel terminal, dark but with islands of activity. Vehicles drove about, some quite heavy. Over near the middle of the space they had something isolated under powerful lights. It was moving in a sporadic way, like something natural, but she couldn’t see what it was. She found a place to sit, sprawled her legs wide and smiled at some of Case’s people until they looked away. She thought of names for herself: Bruna, Kyshtym, Korelev R-7 and ‘The Angel of the Parking Orbit’. She looked down at her forearm: it was registering No Data. Meanwhile, Case’s people brought up new equipment, which they organised inside the circle of light. Whatever it was, it meant nothing to the assistant.

Outside the lighted area they had some basic chopshop fitments — a brand new proteome tank enamelled the colour of white goods in 1953, a cutting table and some surgical instruments. She was comfortable with all that. When she had finished her coffee, Gaines led her over there and said, ‘While we’re waiting, why don’t we have a look at this seizure activity of yours? Hop up on the table.’ She hopped up on the table and let him get a couple of probes into her at neurotypical sites. One of them slipped into her chest cavity, high up. She felt it rest momentarily against the collarbone as it pressed past. A sensation difficult to interpret: not painful so much as certain and invasive. Soon she experienced pleasantly warm and lethargic feelings, with everything retreating to a distance as if it had nothing to do with her. ‘That’s great,’ Gaines told her, ‘just relax. Fuck,’ he said, to someone else. ‘These guys, whoever they were! Look at this. And this.’ He touched something and colours flew about in her head like small birds. She heard herself laugh. ‘Oops,’ Gaines said. ‘Wrong switch. Did you like that?’ She tasted metal, then two or three workshop spaces seemed to open inside her. Gaines began working in one of them. Later Case arrived to have a look.

‘I don’t want him here,’ she said.

‘It’s fine,’ Gaines said. ‘It’ll be fine.’

‘I want you to wake me up now,’ the assistant said.

Gaines bent over her and she saw him smile.

‘You’ll be fine,’ he said.

‘Are you going to strangle me?’

‘You’ll be fine.’

After that she never seemed to be properly conscious again. She could tell what was happening, but it didn’t involve her. ‘Did you know you’ve got a 27 to 40 gHz radar option?’ Gaines said. His voice came from inside her now, with a clear echo, as if they were back in the tunnels. ‘Short range local surveillance medium. Not bad. Would you like it switched on?’ He switched it on and she saw everything in the control room filmy grey. Case’s people rolled the table over into the middle of the space, under the brightest light, where they left it. She lay in a comfortable haze, lighted internally by the 27 to 40 gHz radar, which Gaines had left switched on. She could detect people coming and going but not move her head. Eventually they swung the inspection table on its axis and did something to the probes so that her unforced sensory systems came back on. The assistant saw what was under the lights and why she had been brought here.

Two or three days earlier, after a minor convulsion ripped up the containment area, the object known to Case’s team as ‘Pearl’ or ‘the Pearl’ had begun to fall again. This process — less motion than an attempt to express motion in a static medium — seemed as wilful as it was stylised. Her body language, Gaines thought, was that of a sustained struggle against circumstances no one else could be allowed to understand. Case had a different view.

‘Fuck that,’ he said. It would be wise to remember that the falling woman was neither falling nor a woman. It was a monster, heavily misrepresented from the data. It was the nearest guess the instruments could make about what was actually going on. ‘Much like the universe itself, it’s a useless analogy for an unrepresentable state,’ he said, and laughed. This led to an argument between the two men about the original nature of the Aleph. Case believed they had been wrong about that, too.

‘It never contained a fragment of the Tract,’ he said.

‘Then what?’

‘It contained the whole of it. It still does.’

Once they had the policewoman disabled and in position, the Aleph team brought up their final item of equipment. Shiny one moment, indistinct the next, it was still assembling itself from a nervous slurry of materials — carbon nanofibres, non-Abelian superconductors held at ambient temperatures, fast-evolving AI swarms running on picotech. Next an operator was introduced. It took the form of a young girl, thin and tan, perhaps eight years old, dressed in the dark blue shorts and short-sleeved Aertex shirt of an endless summer holiday in St Steven’s Withy or Burnam Agnate, who reminded Gaines of his daughter at that age. The operator was quick to sense this.

‘Oh, Rig!’ it said, taking his hands and laughing up at him. Its feet were bare. ‘What have you got for us this time!’

It winked. Raw white light poured out its eyes, mouth and nose. Then it seemed to break up into a shower of sparks and enter the machine. Musical sounds emerged. A single awed voice said: ‘Strange forces are at work here.’

‘For fuck’s sake, Case,’ Gaines said. ‘Let’s just get on with it.’

Case’s people pressed the tit.

For a moment nothing happened. Then the policewoman jumped off the table, swaggered three paces away from it and attempted to switch on her tailoring. Whatever Gaines had done to her switched it off again.

She shouted angrily and tried again, and was switched off again. Visual records showed two or three iterations of this behaviour occurring in a single five-second period, as the assistant’s housekeeping systems laid new neural pathways around the blocks put in by Gaines. Learning rates were impressive but capped out quickly: within two minutes she was able to remain overdriven for periods up to twelve seconds, but her repertoire — and her range — of movements became fixed. Anxiety pushed the repertoire through several iterations, during which the subject was observed to: