John Wright - The Golden Age

The rapier was not sheathed, nor had it ever been; Scaramouche had merely transferred it to his left hand where Phaethon could not see it, holding it casually so that the tip was near Phaethon's hand. The flounces of Scaramouche's shoulder did not rustle as he struck. It was a mere twitch of motion; the rapier tip slapped Phaethon's palm. Stung, his fingers flexed; that was all that was needed for the circuit to interpret this as "accept" gesture.

In the Middle Dreaming, Phaethon's brain was suddenly jarred, not with the promised memories but with a sensation of numbness, horror, cold, and pain. His vision collapsed into a tunnel, walled with spinning red and black, and the message, inserted without words instantaneously into his mind was this: Xenophon has slain you. Fool, you cannot escape from death by hiding in a coffin far away; you cannot escape from retribution for your treason by shutting the memories of what you did to me away. You know your guilt; now fall.

In the middle of the haze of his vision, there stood Scaramouche, still grinning. Phaethon tried to raise a hand, tried

to activate an emergency circuit, to call out; he could not.

He saw the smiling Scaramouche, with a flourish, toss the rapier to his other hand and execute a lunge. The Red Manorial program surrounded the sensation of being stabbed in the neck with unimaginable pain and fear. He felt cold steel slice scalpel-like through vein and throat and frozen muscle, scraping vertebrae; he felt hot blood pulse out, warm and rich, and heard the whistle of his severed trachea.

Then, nothing.

THE MEMORY

Then there was no pain. He was nothing but a pair of gloves hovering in the darkness, surrounded by a semicircle of cubes and icons. In the distance was a spiral circle of dots.

For a moment, as Phaethon scrambled to pull the razor-sharp sword from his neck, the gloves were curled into claws, batting at the air. An octagon of red appeared in the air above, indicating that the system could not interpret these gestures.

Then Phaethon felt clear-headed, relaxed, and alert. Then he raised his left forefinger, the gesture for status.

The status board unfolded from the main desk top cube. The self-display showed that he was still Phaethon Prime (Relic, for legal Purposes) Rhadamanth [Emergency Partial].

Good. Usually when he woke up like this, it was because he had just died, and a backup self was waking up out of a Noumenal Mentality bank. So, despite the appearances, he had not died.

The pain had been enough to trigger his emergency sub-persona, however. Calm and quick thinking, the subpersona Phaethon was playing now had originally been written to deal with sudden accidents in space. It was a persona Phaethon had developed himself, not purchased; he doubted there was

any public record that he had it; he doubted the enemy knew he had it.

Then he looked at the back of the wrist of his left glove; the gesture for time display. The count of time was accelerated to the maximum rate, so that little or no outside time was passing. His mannequin body had probably not even hit the ground yet.

By reflex, he (or, rather, the emergency persona) had switched from his slow biochemical brain to his superconductive nerve-web backup brain. That was why his thoughts were racing. After the emergency was over, the biochemical brain would be updated with whatever thoughts or conclusions he had reached in fast-time.

The emergency persona's reflexes had also shut down the emotional centers in his hypothalamus, and cut off his mid-brain from carrying through with the normal physical reactions accompanying the shock and blood loss associated with massive laceration. That was fortunate: he saw that there were buried command lines in the Red Manorial sensorium routine that exaggerated the pain and fear and suffering, as well as instructions to write semipermanent phobias and "emotional scars" into the victim's thalamus and midbrain. The Red Man-orials were nothing if not dramatic.

Phaethon deleted those commands without further ado.

He did not feel any pain or fear or wonder; the emergency persona he was playing did not have those capacities.

The connection and ongoing systems annex showed that a group of unregistered signals had come through his Middle-Dreaming circuit. The first group was simply a sensorium simulation, intended to create the internal and external sensations of instant, violent death. More interesting was the semisuperintelligent virus that had ridden into his core systems, disguised and rerouted itself, and exited from his brain through one of the monitor circuits that connected him to the medical apparatus sustaining his body.

His glove touched a box to the upper right, opening his diagnostics. A dozen windows unfolded like a fan of crystal playing cards. There were traces of the virus still present in I

his security buffers. These were self-defensive programs developed ages upon ages ago, historical oddities, but which Silver-Gray tradition required that he waste brain space carrying. They had been installed the day he graduated to full adulthood.

More than one of the defensive programs had an analyzer to reproduce the viruses it was trying to destroy. The virus, in this case, had not been successful in erasing all those traces. It was almost as if a guard dog were to still have bits of an interloper's hide in its teeth.

Another routine at his command was an information re-constructor. Usually it was used in assessing damage to meteor-punctured space-construction servos or remote units by resurrecting dead software for examination. As if the interloper's hide could be cloned to produce a picture of the interloper, this routine enabled Phaethon to deduce a working model of what virus had just passed through him.

The virus had been self-aware, somewhat smarter than a human being. It had been a melancholy creature, knowing itself to be doomed to a brief microsecond of existence, and puzzled about the outside world it had deduced must exist somewhere. But these philosophical ruminations had not made it hesitate in its duties. It had not paid much attention to Phaethon's security programs, any more than a man engaged in a life-or-death struggle was aware of a mosquito.

For the virus entity had been at war. (It Was more apt to call it the "virus civilization"—during the last part of the third nanosecond, the scattering and fragmentary records showed that the entity had reproduced into thousands, developed a strange sort of art and literature and other-interactions for which Phaethon had no names, trying to come to terms with a brief, vicious existence.) The virus civilization had fought several engagements with the security surrounding the Eleemosynary Hospice public-casket interface.

The Eleemosynary Composition, after all, had programs, records, and routines dating back through the mind virus battles of the terrible Fifth Era, and even some of the Establishment Wars of the very early Fourth Era. Eleemosynary was

an old, old entity; it still had old reflexes, and very deadly

ones.

The viral civilization, ruined and wounded, had nonetheless won those wars and disabled major sections protecting the interface between Phaethon's unconscious real body and the outside. The virus had been commanded to override the medical programs controlling Phaethon's real body, and have the servos shut down his heart, nervous activity, and negate any backups. Another part of the viral civilization (which had formed something like a special crusader class or order of warrior-poets) was destined to leave Phaeton's brain when the death signal went out, and trace that signal through the Nou-menal Mentality, corrupting and erasing every version of his personality that came on-line, reproducing and hiding and reproducing again, waiting nanoseconds or centuries, howsoever long it should take, in case any copies of Phaethon stored somewhere else ever connected once more with the Mentality, and then waking to strike him down again.