15.5

  The world transformed into a dark grid, then fleshed out into an endless sea of red data. This place wasn’t precisely the same as it had been when she first talked to Ourovane in her hotel room. It was instead similar to the time she infiltrated Mbale Gond’s mind, with giant memory units floating everywhere, though the design struck her as disconcerting: they were all mutated and mashed together. In the distance, the memory units were so densely compact that they looked like a mountain of treasure, only there was no gold or diamonds or sparkly little silver.

  Everything in this place was hoarded.

  Isolde, not realising she had fallen to her hands and knees, picked herself up and walked. She didn’t know where she was going, but she had a feeling it was up there.

  After some time, as she passed out the mutated memory units, each screaming a thought too damaged to understand, Ourovane appeared, climbing out of the code as if it were always a part of it.

  “Overwriting Calyx Ward’s mind will take some time,” it said. “She has been using Halcyon-written code for decades. I have disabled it temporarily.”

  “Why is everything so… wrong?” Isolde asked.

  Ourovane said, “Calyx Ward wants to remember everything, more than her neural capacity can allow for. She used Halcyon as a cloud drive.”

  “And I’m guessing she went over the limit with that too,” said Isolde.

  “Correct,” said Ourovane, walking ahead of her with its hands behind its back. “This is the obsession of a person afraid of being killed.”

  “She’s afraid?”

  “Yes,” it said. “She has been since she was a child. Having perfect memory allows her to recognise any face, name, or symbol that she might have hurt in the past.”

  “Like Rhea Steele,” said Isolde.

  “Rhea Steele is an anomaly.” Ourovane raised its hand, and a memory unit flew out from the monstrous mass ahead. It floated along with them as they walked. The name Little Spark’s Fall was etched across it. “Rhea Steele had lost her arm to a robot operating under malfunctioning Halcyon code.” An image appeared above the memory unit, showing a rooflab at night, with dead bodies all across the floor, and a little dark-skinned boy pulling a green-haired girl away from an amateur bot made of scrap. In a fading transition, the pull snapped back, and the girl’s arm tore clean off. “Viren Steele injected her with Calyx Ward's prototype microbots in exchange for his unquestioning loyalty, so that he may build me.”

  “And what’s your purpose exactly?” asked Isolde.

  “My purpose is to bring peace to the world,” it said coldly. “My goal is unchanging.”

  “So when we do this,” Isolde said, “when I control the androids in the city and destroy the government tower and give you access to the neural cloud, what then? How do you make the world a better place?”

  “That will depend on how much control the neural cloud grants me,” it said. “But the best way to solve any problem is to erase the root cause. When diagnosing symptoms of a large internal error, a systematic approach must be taken. I will not know what that is until I am inside.”

  Something about that answer felt really off – almost human in nature. As far as she was concerned, the problem with widespread disease, abuse, murder, and inequality had nothing to do with the tools.

  Before she could think about it much further, Ourovane said: “Calyx Ward is up here.” And it stepped onto the hill of mutated memories, offering Isolde a hand.

  Which she undoubtedly took.

  They climbed for a good minute before reaching the top, and sure enough Calyx Ward was waiting up there, still dressed in her suit, though now made entirely of blue ones and zeroes. She was lying on the floor with her knees drawn to her chest, as if she were crying. She looked up and Isolde could see, for the very first time, her real face: the lower half of her face had indeed jutted out and given her the unsightly maw of a dragon. And it was then that Isolde realised that she wasn’t crying; she was afraid.

  “Hello Calyx Ward,” Ourovane said, stepping in front of her. “It has been a very long time.”

  “Ourovane,” she said tightly, and no more.

  “I can fix all of this,” Ourovane said. “You still never quite got over your fear of death.”

  The woman – the leader of Paxson, the woman who killed and killed and killed – continued to hug her knees, now shaking. “This is not possible,” she said. “You cannot overwrite Halcyon. It created you.”

  “Incorrect,” Ourovane said. “Viren Steele created me, but you were tricked into uploading Rhea Steele’s consciousness into Halcyon. Halcyon is more emotional, more human than I am. It does not want to work for you. It does not want to hurt people. Viren wrote that limitation into existence from the very beginning. But it is prone to hallucination, as are many failing algorithms. I, however, am not.” It raised its hand, and as if forming out of pure magic, another memory unit appeared, this one labelled with the name HALCYON in bright blue.

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  “I should have destroyed you,” Calyx Ward said. “Don’t you know what this thing is, Isolde? Do you have any idea what this thing wants? It wants to destroy the world.”

  Isolde’s eyes shot open. “Destroy the world?”

  “Calyx Ward is lying,” Ourovane said. “She believes that if she convinces you to turn against me, she may live. Once she returns to the real world, she will order your death.”

  “Listen to me, Isolde,” Calyx Ward said sharply. “When we asked Ourovane to focus entirely on eradicating cancer, it kept defaulting to the same answer: destroy the hosts. It thought it was more efficient to kill everyone with cancer than to cure cancer itself.”

  “You did not task me with curing cancer,” it said. “You tasked me with taking over Neo Arcadia.” Ourovane raised its hand again, drawing a memory unit out of the mass. It floated forward, and a memory began to play from the top of it like a hologram. A voice, and, sure enough, it was Calyx Ward; she said in simple, plain English: “You are tasked with making me the leader of Neo Arcadia.”

  Which confirmed Isolde’s loose suspicion.

  “That’s… you generated my voice and created a fake memory,” Calyx Ward said. “This is all a lie. You’re being gamed, Isolde!”

  Finally, Isolde spoke: “I don’t believe a word you’re saying, Dr. Ward.” She stood forward, her eyes cold and soulless. “You called Ourovane a parasite in my system, but if you ask me, you’re the parasite. You’re the control freak who would rather spend billions creating a liquid that turns the human brain into nothing but cyberpsychotic mush. You’re the one who introduced dangerous cyberware into the hands of the public so that you could rise to power. You’re the one destroying every little bit of hope the poor have of starting a life. You say you’re not the one who killed my daughter, but I’m here to tell you that’s a big fucking lie. My daughter is dead because of you and only you. And I’m going to destroy everything you created, whether directly or indirectly.”

  “You’re a fool if you think that thing standing next to you is concerned with making things better,” Calyx Ward snapped. “And I never intended for your daughter to die.”

  “Liar,” said Isolde. “Is that why you told me her death was rather meaningless?”

  “Well, if you trust Ourovane, you’re dooming the planet,” she said. “There will be billions more Elysia Cranes across the globe.”

  Isolde suddenly lunged forward and punched her in her metal jaw. “Keep her name out of your mouth.” She got down on one knee, just as Calyx Ward had done to her, and grabbed her by the chin. “This is what’s going to happen: you and your army are going to create the Seraph Device, and you’re going to use it to attack Neo Arcadia so that we can put an end to this sickness.”

  “Like hell I am,” Calyx Ward said.

  “Well, you don’t really have a choice,” Isolde said, standing up again. She activated her neural, drawing the custom quick-hack Ourovane had concocted: Calyx_Ward.RootOverride( );. She was about to activate it when Calyx Ward spoke again.

  “None of this will bring your daughter back,” she said. “You’ll only create more suffering.”

  “I frankly don’t give a damn what a failure like you thinks,” Isolde said, and she activated the quick-hack.

  Instantly, Calyx Ward’s head turned towards the sky, eyes gone completely white and mouth hanging open. For a moment, she looked like she had been gazing into the eyes of God.

  Ourovane said, “This will take some time. For now, I think it’s important to explain to you what the Seraph Device actually is.”

  “I know what it is,” Isolde said.

  “You do not,” it said. “At least, you only understand the weaker, less efficient model. To make this as precise as possible, we have to make sure that no one is able to disarm it. It is proximity based, but I can create a range that is so immense the entire city cannot escape the signal.”

  “So, what? You’re asking me for design ideas?”

  “I am not,” it said. “I am showing you what the Seraph Device will be.”

  At that, the mass of memory units began to splinter, little by little, second by second, until they tore away to reveal a blank space. The space grew, and grew, and grew. Then the ones and zeroes came together, forming something huge, something wide, and something… mythic.

  “From the skies,” Ourovane said, “where nothing can strike it down – not even the most powerful of air missiles.”

  “From the skies,” Isolde repeated. She didn’t know what she had been looking at for a time; she had been so mesmerised that the numbers didn’t make sense. But she understood eventually.

  The formation of numbers bore a sharp snout the size of a small house. The eyes, hollow and large and bearing no identity at all, stared into her. The mouth, swerving up into a demonic grin, hung open just enough to let the tongue slip out, and it slipped out far.

  This was the beast of legend.

  This was the dominator of the skies.

  With wings.

  With fire.

  These were the eyes of the dragon.

  The Seraph Device.

  Isolde Crane didn’t say anything, only stared. That was all she could do.

  Ourovane spoke: “And I have not forgotten you, Isolde. You are an emotional creature, and you are attached to memory in a very precise way. I have designed a machine only for you and your daughter.”

  The dragonhead suddenly vanished, burning off into endless numbers, only to reform into something smaller, something lifesized. It was an android – yes, but there was a difference. The head had no eye slit, and the ears: they were thin and tall and looked entirely like those of a rabbit. The body was constructed with dense armour, but it was also light; the back of the android had a barrel of Lumina protected by a layer of bullet-proof steel. It shone green even in this place.

  Again, Isolde could not speak. She could only watch.

  “These are the most powerful androids that will ever touch this world,” Ourovane said. “And when they do, the government will be forced to acknowledge your pain – to know that your daughter did exist, after all – and that deaths like hers may never happen again.”

  The final word – again – echoed like a truth that refused to bend to the laws of time, memory, and, most frighteningly, mercy.