dropped them. She has focused on the man in the tank again, staring at him with wide black eyes.
The Captain sighs.
“Go to sleep now, darlin’,” he tells her. Her eyes close and she relaxes completely, sinking back into the pillows. Coxinga pulls up her blankets for him.
The Captain stands regarding Mendoza thoughtfully. After a moment he extends a yearning hand and places it on her brow, as flames leap up through his illusory fingers.
His gesture of affection is not meant for her, though he’s quite fond of Mendoza, in his way; Artificial Intelligences are just as capable of devotion ashuman beings are. She’s a well-behaved and obedient cyborg, but what really matters is that she loves
his boy
. Somewhere behind her brow, in a locked file, his boy’s consciousness is trapped. So is that of a similarly disembodied gentleman named Nicholas Harpole. Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax shut them both in there, and only Edward knows the code to release them.
The Captain has taken care of Alec since Alec was five years old. He’s not quite sure what the other two entities are. They were once living men, earlier versions of Alec produced by the same Company responsible for creating him from recombinant DNA. When they had served the Company’s purpose and been killed, an electromagnetic recording of their personalities—memories, emotions, skills—had gone into storage in their files and remained there, inactive, until Alec accidentally downloaded them into his own brain while fleeing from the Company into the deep past.
The result was a remarkable case of multiple-personality disorder for Alec and a continuing logistical nightmare for the Captain. The only thing on which the three gentlemen wholeheartedly agreed was the fact that they loved Mendoza, who had known each of them in their successive incarnations.
Nicholas Harpole, who lived in the sixteenth century and was a scholar and heretic, managed to adjust somehow to massive culture shock and loss of the foundation on which his religious beliefs stood; but then he was an extraordinary man.
So was Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax.
Edward lived in the nineteenth century and was a political agent for the British Empire. He absorbed all the virtues and most of the vices of that massive institution, along with the cold-blooded practicality that enabled him to do his very unpleasant job. He died heroically in the service of the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society, an earlier version of Dr. Zeus Incorporated. His subsequent discovery that they lied to him most of his brief life has not been received well and, unfortunately for his creators, Edward has read
Frankenstein
.
He doesn’t think much of his other selves, either.
He dismisses Nicholas as a medieval zealot, limited by ignorance and religious superstition. Cybergenius Alec is in his opinion a dunce, the inevitable product of a soft and degenerate age, and worse: for Alec had been naïve enough to smuggle weapons to a particularly foolhardy group of rebels, and the result had been the destruction of an entire colony on Mars. Hence Alec’s flight, with technology he’d stolen from Dr. Zeus, into the past.
Edward’s perception of these other selves has decided him that
he
alone is fit to inhabit Alec’s body. His effort to achieve this state of independence hasbeen partly responsible for the accident that brought him, maimed and broken, to the regeneration tank, and Mendoza to her present state of impairment, and Alec and Nicholas to … well, to the place they now inhabit.
But even if the accident had not occurred, Edward’s efforts to kill Alec should have been in vain. Edward is, after all, only a recording, nothing more than a program Alec himself is running, in disassociation response to the psychic trauma of having two additional lifetimes thrust into his memory. Or is he? Why can’t Edward be shut off?
And what exactly has happened to Alec and Nicholas?
In the Library
The room has no windows and no doors.
No
The Captain sighs.
“Go to sleep now, darlin’,” he tells her. Her eyes close and she relaxes completely, sinking back into the pillows. Coxinga pulls up her blankets for him.
The Captain stands regarding Mendoza thoughtfully. After a moment he extends a yearning hand and places it on her brow, as flames leap up through his illusory fingers.
His gesture of affection is not meant for her, though he’s quite fond of Mendoza, in his way; Artificial Intelligences are just as capable of devotion ashuman beings are. She’s a well-behaved and obedient cyborg, but what really matters is that she loves
his boy
. Somewhere behind her brow, in a locked file, his boy’s consciousness is trapped. So is that of a similarly disembodied gentleman named Nicholas Harpole. Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax shut them both in there, and only Edward knows the code to release them.
The Captain has taken care of Alec since Alec was five years old. He’s not quite sure what the other two entities are. They were once living men, earlier versions of Alec produced by the same Company responsible for creating him from recombinant DNA. When they had served the Company’s purpose and been killed, an electromagnetic recording of their personalities—memories, emotions, skills—had gone into storage in their files and remained there, inactive, until Alec accidentally downloaded them into his own brain while fleeing from the Company into the deep past.
The result was a remarkable case of multiple-personality disorder for Alec and a continuing logistical nightmare for the Captain. The only thing on which the three gentlemen wholeheartedly agreed was the fact that they loved Mendoza, who had known each of them in their successive incarnations.
Nicholas Harpole, who lived in the sixteenth century and was a scholar and heretic, managed to adjust somehow to massive culture shock and loss of the foundation on which his religious beliefs stood; but then he was an extraordinary man.
So was Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax.
Edward lived in the nineteenth century and was a political agent for the British Empire. He absorbed all the virtues and most of the vices of that massive institution, along with the cold-blooded practicality that enabled him to do his very unpleasant job. He died heroically in the service of the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society, an earlier version of Dr. Zeus Incorporated. His subsequent discovery that they lied to him most of his brief life has not been received well and, unfortunately for his creators, Edward has read
Frankenstein
.
He doesn’t think much of his other selves, either.
He dismisses Nicholas as a medieval zealot, limited by ignorance and religious superstition. Cybergenius Alec is in his opinion a dunce, the inevitable product of a soft and degenerate age, and worse: for Alec had been naïve enough to smuggle weapons to a particularly foolhardy group of rebels, and the result had been the destruction of an entire colony on Mars. Hence Alec’s flight, with technology he’d stolen from Dr. Zeus, into the past.
Edward’s perception of these other selves has decided him that
he
alone is fit to inhabit Alec’s body. His effort to achieve this state of independence hasbeen partly responsible for the accident that brought him, maimed and broken, to the regeneration tank, and Mendoza to her present state of impairment, and Alec and Nicholas to … well, to the place they now inhabit.
But even if the accident had not occurred, Edward’s efforts to kill Alec should have been in vain. Edward is, after all, only a recording, nothing more than a program Alec himself is running, in disassociation response to the psychic trauma of having two additional lifetimes thrust into his memory. Or is he? Why can’t Edward be shut off?
And what exactly has happened to Alec and Nicholas?
In the Library
The room has no windows and no doors.
No
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