“What kept you?” the Flatline asked, and laughed. “Told you don’t do that,” Case said. “Joke, boy,” the construct said, “zero time lapse for me. Lemme see what we got here….” The Kuang program was green, exactly the shade of the T-A ice. Even as Case watched, it grew gradually more opaque, although he could see the black-mirrored shark thing clearly when he looked up. The fracture lines and hallucinations were gone now, and the thing looked real as Marcus Garvey, a wingless antique jet, its smooth skin plated with black chrome. “Right on,” the Flatline said. “Right,” Case said, and flipped.
“–like that. I’m sorry,” 3Jane was saying, as she bandaged Molly’s head. “Our unit says no concussion, no permanent damage to the eye. You didn’t know him very well, before you came here?” “Didn’t know him at all,” Molly said bleakly. She was on her back on a high bed or padded table. Case couldn’t feel the injured leg. The synaesthetic effect of the original injection seemed to have worn off. The black ball was gone, but her hands were immobilized by soft straps she couldn’t see. “He wants to kill you.” “Figures,” Molly said, staring up at the rough ceiling past a very bright light. “I don’t think I want him to,” 3Jane said, and Molly pain- fully turned her head to look up into the dark eyes. “Don’t play with me,” she said. “But I think I might like to,” 3Jane said, and bent to kiss her forehead, brushing the hair back with a warm hand. There were smears of blood on her pale djellaba. “Where’s he gone now?” Molly asked. “Another injection, probably,” 3Jane said, straightening up. “He was quite impatient for your arrival. I think it might be fun to nurse you back to health, Molly.” She smiled, absently wiping a bloody hand down the front of the robe. “Your leg will need to be reset, but we can arrange that.” “What about Peter?” “Peter.” She gave her head a little shake. A strand of dark hair came loose, fell across her forehead. “Peter has become rather boring. I find drug use in general to be boring.” She giggled. “In others, at any rate. My father was a dedicated abuser, as you must have seen.” Molly tensed. “Don’t alarm yourself.” 3Jane’s fingers brushed the skin above the waistband of the leather jeans. “His suicide was the result of my having manipulated the safety margins of his freeze. I’d never actually met him, you know. I was decanted after he last went down to sleep. But I did know him very well. The cores know everything. I watched him kill my mother. I’ll show you that, when you’re better. He strangles her in bed.” “Why did he kill her?” Her unbandaged eye focused on the girl’s face. “He couldn’t accept the direction she intended for our fam- ily. She commissioned the construction of our artificial intel- ligences. She was quite a visionary. She imagined us in a symbiotic relationship with the Al’s, our corporate decisions made for us. Our conscious decisions, I should say. Tessier- Ashpool would be immortal, a hive, each of us units of a larger entity . Fascinating . I’ll play her tapes for you, nearly a thousand hours. But I’ve never understood her, really, and with her death, her direction was lost. All direction was lost, and we began to burrow into ourselves. Now we seldom come out. I’m the exception there.” “You said you were trying to kill the old man? You fiddled his cryogenic programs?” 3Jane nodded. “I had help. From a ghost. That was what I thought when I was very young, that there were ghosts in the corporate cores. Voices. One of them was what you call Win- termute, which is the Turing code for our Berne Al, although the entity manipulating you is a sort of subprogram.” “One of them? There’s more?” “One other. But that one hasn’t spoken to me in years. It gave up, I think. I suspect that both represent the fruition of certain capacities my mother ordered designed into the original software, but she was an extremely secretive woman when she felt it necessary. Here. Drink.” She put a flexible plastic tube to Molly’s lips. “Water. Only a little.” “Jane, love,” Riviera asked cheerfully, from somewhere out of sight, “are you enjoying yourself?” “Leave us alone, Peter.” “Playing doctor….” Suddenly Molly stared into her own face, the image suspended ten centimeters from her nose. There were no bandages. The left implant was shattered, a long finger of silvered plastic driven deep in a socket that was an inverted pool of blood. “Hideo,” 3Jane said, stroking Molly’s stomach, “hurt Peter if he doesn’t go away. Go and swim, Peter.” The projection vanished. 07:58:40, in the darkness of the bandaged eye. “He said you know the code. Peter said. Wintermute needs the code.” Case was suddenly aware of the Chubb key that lay on its nylon thong, against the inner curve of her left breast. “Yes,” 3Jane said, withdrawing her hand, “I do. I learned it as a child. I think I learned it in a dream…. Or somewhere in the thousand hours of my mother’s diaries. But I think that Peter has a point, in urging me not to surrender it. There would be Turing to contend with, if I read all this correctly, and ghosts are nothing if not capricious.” Case jacked out.