Chương 59: It Rejects Her

I was three doors deeper into Operator ground than I'd ever taken us, and the core was holding me at its level the whole way down. That was the trade I'd made with the Operant Governor a build ago, the part I'd slid into my chest off the perfect unit that all but killed me for it. It bought me a level I never had to hold myself, and it charged for the privilege. The old predator pieces ran hot and wanted watching; the Governor wanted arguing with.

It held me steady at its own off-pitch idea of steady, a half-degree wrong, smoothing me reasonable in rooms where reasonable would get me taken, and more than once I'd fought it for my own feet while it did its level best to keep them under me. I'd long since filed that down to a tuning quirk: a known tax, the price of the one part that did the thing none of the others would. A thing I managed.

So I went down into the deep lanes as I went everywhere now, palm laid open on the live grammar of the place, reading how far the clean routes ran this far in and where the watched dark pinched shut. Learning the machine better than the machine knew itself: the only wall I had left to set between the floor and the people asleep under it. One junction more and I'd have the turn I'd come for. Every door I'd come through tonight had cost a little more than the last.

That was the arithmetic of going down: the floor read depth as intent, and intent it answered in kind. I'd felt the net draw a notch tighter at each threshold, somewhere far above me, pulled taut now that the thing on its end had stopped drifting and started to swim. I'd judged I had the depth in me to spend it. I'd judged it on a part whose worst I was sure I'd already met: a thing that steadied me wrong and made me argue for my own legs, and since I let it in had never once done worse than that.

I'd taken the off-pitch for the whole of it.

"You're humming," Errata said.

"I'm not humming."

"Not you. The Governor." The pause she takes when a reading won't sit flat.

"That off-pitch it always sits at. It's been creeping for three weeks, the same wrong note grown louder, and down here it's gone and found something to reach for. Could be the depth. I'd just like it on the…" The core turned over. It wasn't a fault. I knew faults; System parts died as the System did everything, tidy and accounted for, a light switched off and a box to tell you so. This was something else.

The off-pitch wrongness I'd spent weeks managing rose under my sternum like something waking inside its own sleep, and the wrong note I knew broke into one I'd never heard. It reached, a long slow flex against the inside of me, taking the measure of a body and disliking it. [Host integrity: 63%. Continued operation not recommended.]"There it is." No joke in front of it now.

"Carole, that part isn't holding a level. It's hunting for one. Its own. You're not it, and it has just worked that out." My hand was at my chest before I chose to put it there, pressing, as though I could hold a thing still from the outside. It climbed under my palm, and it wasn't pain. Pain I had a register for, pain the dry voice in me deflected without being asked. This had no edge to deflect.

It was just wrongness, intimate and patient, a piece of something old turning over in me and finding every place I didn't match the shape it remembered. System junk, when it turned on you, turned off. It quit, it seized, it went inert and heavy and stupid. This did the opposite of quit. It had wants. It pushed toward something with the slow certainty of a thing that had done this before, in a body that fit, and it meant to find that body inside mine or wear a path through me looking for it.

"Talk to me."

"I am talking to you. I've been talking to you about this exact part since the day you let it in." She wasn't gloating; she was reading, fast, the words coming off the same place the read came off.

"It wasn't made for a host like you. It wasn't made for a host at all: it learned to sit level a long time before there was a you-shaped thing to sit level inside, and just now, this far down in the dark, it remembered that. It would like to go back to being whatever it had been. Through you, if it has to."

"You said it fit wrong." It came out thin.

"Day one. You said it fit wrong." This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

"I did." A beat, the nearest she came to mercy.

"Put it on record that I was right, and then don't ever make me say it again. Press harder and listen. I get one go at this." The reach crested. I felt it find the top of whatever it had been climbing, and shove. The shove went out of me into the room: my whole careful nothing of a signature lit at once, loud as a flare in a corridor that had never heard me, a year of quiet steps spent in a single bright second I couldn't take back. [Anomaly profile: 53/100. Sustained correction: priority raised.] It didn't sweep for me. It closed. Down the deep lanes I'd spent the night learning, doors I'd never have gotten through unbolted themselves in sequence and stayed open. A clean clearance path laid straight to where I stood, by someone who read these lanes the same patient way I did and had been waiting on the far end of the noise. I'd come down here to learn the net. The net had come down to learn me. [Retrieval converging. Asset located. Please remain available.]"Integrity fifty-four," Errata said, flat.

"Forty-six now. I'll keep the rest. You can feel them as well as I can read them. Listen. You can't calm it; it isn't yours to calm, and we've no build to cut it out of you, only a corridor and about nine seconds. So we don't fight the part. We use the mistake it's about to make."

"What mistake."

"It overshoots. Every climb I've watched, it overshoots the top and hauls everything the other way to compensate, and on the haul, for half a second, it pulls you flat. All of you. The build, the noise, your whole signature, dead and cold and nothing for that net to read. That's the seam: not the part itself. The part is what's killing you; the error in the part is what gets you out."

Then, fast, before I could weigh it: "And in the interest of full disclosure: when it tears loose it takes the housing, and I live in the housing, so for once my advice is pure self-interest. Wait for the drop, not the climb. The drop."

"How will I know it?"

"You'll feel the floor fall out from under your own signature, everything you are gone quiet at once. Don't reach for it. Don't try to hold yourself together. Be the hole it makes, and go through while the net's still looking at where you used to be." The clearance path finished opening. Three doors back, unhurried, the net began to walk in.

I stopped pushing against my chest and laid the read flat instead: not on the part, on the shape of its reaching, the thing Errata had watched climb for three weeks while I was too steady to feel it. I found the top of it the half-second before it did. I felt it crest, and shove, and start to drag itself back down, and on the drag, on the cold violent overcorrection where it flattened everything in me to haul itself level, I went with it. I let it pull me out.

For one breath I was nothing: no build, no Heat, no woman the floor had a line for, a dead spot crossing a seam in a closing net while the net read the corridor and found it empty. Somewhere above me a reader that had been certain of me a half-second before lost the certainty and had nothing to set in its place. I felt the corridor get looked at: looked at in earnest, the patient straight-line attention that never quartered and never guessed, the one mind down here that hunted as I did.

I felt it pass across the cold dead nothing where I was, and find nothing, because nothing was there to find. Then it moved on, because a reader good enough to catch me was a reader who'd be fooled by the same thing that would have fooled me. I was through and four doors gone before it came back into me: weak now, and small, and somewhere else, the reach spent. The core never switched off. It went quiet: the particular quiet of a thing that has decided to wait. The idle never came back.

I climbed up and out of the dark with my hands shaking for the first time in a month, unlevel, running raw on the old hot parts that wanted watching and getting none. A capability gone out of me until I could find the time and the cover to build it back. The steadiness I'd stopped thinking about was a thing I'd have to do on purpose now, badly, by hand, as I had before I'd ever owned a part that did it for me. I'd traded that part for a level I never had to hold myself.

The bill on it had just come due all at once, in the worst room I could have been standing in to pay it.

"It's looking the wrong way," Errata said, quiet on the line.

"We'll want to be a great deal farther from here before it stops." I went. The whole climb up I could feel the thing in my chest not sleeping: stilled, not dead. An old patient wrongness that had spent weeks letting me believe it the steadiest part of me, and had only been waiting for the deep dark to remember it had never wanted to be in me at all.