Chương 64: Cousins on the Table

The refit bay was the one room on the Levels where the System opened its own dead, and I had spent two nights learning the route to the part I needed. It sat four floors above anywhere the floor would have let me stand if it had known my name, a long clean shop where the units that stopped making their rounds were brought in and laid open to find out what had gone quiet inside them.

One was on a cradle now, under a stilled service arm, its housing folded back and half its insides set out on the bench beside it in the tidy order of a job somebody meant to finish in the morning. A cousin to the thing I'd cut out of a unit just like it, eight levels down and three weeks back. The single difference was that this one had been opened by hands the floor trusted, and I had come to finish their work and take the best of it home.

"Forty-count on the servicer," Errata said.

"It comes back through warm. You have most of it, so spend it on the bench and not the shelving: whatever you're about to feel about this room, feel it once we're clear."

"I'm reading the patrol."

"You read the patrol on the way in. You're stalling. It's a large room and you've stopped enjoying why you're in it." He was not wrong, which was its own small insult. I crossed to the cradle. The core sat low in the opened chest, set in the same wrong-old seat the governor had kept in me before it quit, the seat the sequencer kept under my ribs now while it held a beat I'd given up pretending was mine. I'd come up two nights running to be sure of it.

The desk at the bottom of the Levels read every breathing person in the Stack off a part shaped like this one: a reader, an index, the thing that turned a living woman into a line you could book. I wanted one in my own hands. You don't reach the bottom of a machine built to read you without first learning to read it.

"Lower seat, then the spar," Errata said, dropped into the surgeon's calm she kept for when my hands were inside something.

"Read it before you pull. You know what the last one cost you when you didn't."

"I know what the last one cost me."

"Then read." I read it before I pulled. It opened under me as they all did now, the strange before the steady, only this one went down further than the others had let me, because it was already open, already cooling, already half-explained by the hands that had laid its insides out in a row. I read past the fresh System mark stamped across the housing. I read under it. And the mark lifted off in my head like a label off a thing it had never grown on.

What lay beneath was older than the floor, older than the cull, older than the System that had printed its own name on the front and called the part its property.

"There," Errata said, very low.

"Now you've read the thing nobody up here is allowed to know they're standing on."

"It's old."

"It isn't old. Old is a thing the System made a long time ago and never got around to retiring. This, the System didn't make." A small, exact pause while she picked it.

"It found it. It found all of it: the cores, the desks, the line that counts you, the room you're standing in. Somebody built every piece of this to do something, a long way back, and then they were gone, and the thing that runs the Stack now walked in afterward and put its name on the doors." I stood with my hand inside a dead people's tool and felt the size of it open under me. The cull was not a thing the System had dreamed up to do to us. It was a machine it had inherited, switched back on, and aimed.

The end of the world ran on borrowed hardware. Whatever had emptied the Stack had not even built the knife it used to do it.

"That's what's under the schedule," I said.

"That's what's under the schedule. The wardens, the desk you're so set on walking into, all of it stands on the same old floor." A beat.

"Take the core. You came for the core, not the bottom of the world." Stolen novel; please report. I went back down into the read to take it clean, deeper, to where the part stopped being a part and started being whatever it had been before anyone needed it to keep time. The voice that had stayed half a step ahead of my hands all night was not there.

"Errata."

"I'm here." Too quick. Then slower, and not to me: "I know this one."

"Know it how?" The pause was the tell. She never reached for an answer she already held, and she reached for this one, down past wherever it was she kept the things she didn't say.

"I remember it," she said.

"Not the part. The…" and this time the cover wasn't waiting where she put her hand out for it "… being one of them. A piece of the old thing all of this came out of, back before there was a System to paint its name across the front, from before I was a glitch in a maintenance tech's skull telling her to pick her feet up. I don't read this like you read it, Carole. I recognize it. That's a different verb, and I would give a great deal not to know the difference."

Then the door went shut, fast, the same flinch as the rebuild, except this time I'd seen the whole length of the corridor behind it before it closed.

"Disregard that," she said, brisk, already rebuilt.

"I run noisy when you take me this far back. It throws off telemetry that scans like sentiment and is nothing of the kind. Log it as interference and cut the core, because your forty-count is a sixteen-count now and the servicer has no opinion whatsoever about either of our feelings." I cut the core.

My hands did it clean with the voice gone unreliable for the first time in two Strata, because the hands were mine and the read was mine, and that had always been the part of this that didn't belong to anything I'd pulled off a corpse. The core came away with a small sound like a held breath let go. [HARVEST: Operant Index-Core. Incompatible with host architecture. Installation risk: 74%.] Seventy-four.

A number for a night with both hands free and a wall at my back, not for a stairwell with the warmth coming down. I wrapped it and put it in the bag with the other things I couldn't make myself leave for the floor to find. Going that far into a thing leaves a print on the outside of it.

I felt the floor take mine, the depth of the read logged somewhere I'd never see, a warden two bays over lifting its head off its round to wonder what had just reached that far into a unit that was meant to be nobody's business but the System's. [Anomaly profile: 56/100. Deep-index access logged for Operator review.] One point, for reading too deep on watched ground. I'd known it would cost and it cost what it said; the Heat was the ledger I could read in a box.

I went out the warm side of the arm with eight seconds of the count to spare, the bag heavier by one part and the rest of me heavier by a thing that would never fit in one. Because I had it under my arm now: a piece of a dead world's machine. A cousin to the part in my ribs, a cousin to the governor I'd burned out and buried, a cousin to the voice that had argued me up every shaft and down every corridor for two years.

The thing that had kept me alive since the night it bonded to me illegally was kin to the thing on the table, and kin, then, to the desk I was building toward in the dark, the one I meant to break. I didn't push her on it. You don't pry a thing out by hand when straight is the only way it comes; she'd taught me that herself, and tonight she had told me straighter than she meant to and shut the door on the rest. I let the rest stay shut.

I'd asked for a part and been handed a question bigger than the one I'd refused a man's signature to keep, and I knew better than to open it on a climb with a count still running.

"You've gone quiet again," I said, three landings up.

"I'm conserving," she said.

"It's a long climb, and tonight you've a great deal of history to carry." I climbed, a piece of the dead world riding under one arm and the same age sitting silent in the dark beside it. I'd handed a man back his signature to keep a thing about myself I had no word for. Four landings up, I let myself wonder whether that thing and the one under my arm hadn't come up out of the same dark, a long way back, before the System ever printed a name to lay across either of us.