Chương 23: The Shape of the Hunt

Two service levels below where I had any business standing, I went looking for something that could kill me. That was the test that counted. I'd felt the new part work on the climb up from the field-strip, the whole build gone quiet and agreeable, three machines that had argued since the night I slotted the first one keeping one clock between them at last. But a build that runs clean in an empty corridor isn't a build. It's a hope. I'd carried enough people out of the dark who ran on hope to want no part of one.

So I went where the Tiers kept the floors too clean. The wrong kind of clean: no honest wear on it, no patch, no scavenged repair, a corridor that had never once had to fix itself. I waited on a patrol they ran like a water cycle, and let it walk the one stretch with no eyes on it. It was a sanctioned Enforcer, a make I didn't know. Newer than the ones I'd been opening. It walked its loop with the flat certainty of a thing that had never been caught out on this floor and didn't expect to start.

I read it the way I read all of them now: hunting the one beat it couldn't help leaving, whatever it was. With the old build that had been three separate moves: read the beat, commit to it, put the discharge through it, a gap in each one for the thing to find me first. The new build folded them. I didn't string the three and pray they landed in order. I decided the kill and let the build keep the time, and what it cost me was the half-second of freelancing I'd lived on my whole life.

I didn't get to feel clever about the timing, because the timing wasn't mine anymore. The read and the step and the discharge came out as one motion, before the unit's loop had finished the thought it was having. It folded at the knee and went down without a sound the corridor would keep. [LEVEL 3.] The System doesn't give me much and has never given me anything kind, but it counts. It had counted the morning's work and found it worth a line.

Faster and surer, the two things a maintenance tech is paid her whole life not to be, and the machine that wanted me deleted had found a use for both.

"That was… within parameters," Errata said. The pause after was the rest of the sentence.

"Adequate. Don't let it up into the part of your head where the decisions live. There's no room. I've seen the schematics."

"You're pleased."

"I am within parameters." Then the pause changed shape. I'd shared a skull with her long enough to tell a pause that was choosing how to be smug from a pause that had stopped on something.

"That died too fast."

"It died on your schedule."

"My schedule had it dying. It did not have it dying like a thing that hadn't been asked to try." The connoisseur's offense, the one that had read me a hundred enemy builds like they were wines.

"So either you have got very good very fast, which I would love to invoice you for and cannot make myself believe, or that was a unit they could afford to spend. And the Tiers do not leave things they can afford to spend walking their best floor. Look at it. Properly. While I am still uneasy and have not yet arrived at the other thing." The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

So I crouched and read the corpse as the new beat let me, the whole of it at once instead of a part and then the rest, and the build that had killed it clean showed me what I'd have walked past with the old one. It was the wrong make. It was wrong, but not because it was cheap. It was wrong because it was new. Every Enforcer I had ever opened was built down to a price, a tenth of a credit shaved off the one part that mattered, eleven thousand of them on a belt somewhere counting toward no number at all.

This one had been built down to a price too. But the savings had been spent. On the joints. On the read-gear behind its face, twice the eyes a post-walker needs. On long clean limbs made to follow a thing rather than to wait for it. And spent, with the read running clear to the floor of it now, on the seams. The gaps. The places I go in. They were tighter on this one. Doubled, where I'd have had it.

Not on every unit on the line; sealing every seam on every body would cost more than the System would ever pay for stock. On this one. On a unit set to walk a floor where an unclassed signature had spent a month killing its own kind by the seam.

"…Ah," Errata said, very quietly, in the register she kept for the two or three things she had ever taken seriously.

"That is not a better Enforcer, Carole. An Enforcer stands a post and kills what comes to it. This one is built to go and find. They are not reinforcing the line. They are drawing up a hunter, and they are drawing it against you. Every seam you have ever opened on this floor, something kept the shape of. This is the first rough draft of the thing made to close them."

I stayed crouched over it past what the corridor's clock allowed, which is to say I let it cost me, because there are things you have to look at a while before you can afford to walk away from them. I had made this. Not by building the unit but by teaching the System which direction to build. Every clean kill I'd left down here had been a lesson, and the System learns the way it does everything else: without heat, without a grudge, running at a thing until it has the shape of it.

I had been teaching it me, one corpse at a time. The better I got, the better the next one would be, because I was the curriculum. [Anomaly profile: 29/100. Correction notice issued.] Twenty-nine. One for the kill, under the same standing correction it had opened on me the day I got loud enough to keep, two corridors from a section where forty people were staking their lives on staying boring. The meter has never once told me a thing I didn't already know. It just keeps a tidier record of it than I do.

"Your heart is doing a thing," Errata said.

"For the record. It does it when you have decided something and not told me. The diagnostics find it disruptive."

"The diagnostics."

"The diagnostics. I am a clinical instrument and I hold no opinion on your heart past the professional one." A beat.

"Slow it down. Whatever it is, it keeps better slow." I looked at the unit one more time. The doubled seams. The follower's clean lines. The first rough draft of the answer to the question I'd spent my whole new life being.

"It's making something for me," I said.

"It's making something out of you," Errata said.

"That's the worse one, and the harder one to outrun, and the one mercy in it is that it isn't finished yet." A beat, lower.

"Neither are you." I left it where it lay and went back up the route I'd come down by, fast, sure, quiet, every clean step one more line in the lesson. I had wanted, somewhere under all of it, to be good at this. It had not once occurred to me to ask who'd be taking notes.