Lucrezia took a few moments to decide how best to extract the information in the chip. She scanned it with light, inserted probes into the minuscule sockets, laved it with a chemical bath. Then, satisfied, she extended an arm to the socket behind my ear and we conjoined.
Information hit me in a blizzard and I pulled away, yelping as we disengaged. ‘It’s blistered! White noise!’
‘The sensoria do seem to slip,’ Lucrezia agreed. ‘Some of them are corrupted.’
‘Try to find a clean section,’ I said.
‘No, I think we should wait,’ Lucrezia said. ‘Allow me to work on it first.’
I made a decision not to mention my find to anyone else on the team. Not yet. I had a feeling it would be taken from me, appropriated by Elenov, who was the senior historian. I wanted to keep this artefact to myself. Would it be like opening a tomb? I’d done plenty of that in my time and what I’d found inside them had only been rags of old lives. I could tell you what the owners of those bones had eaten for breakfast the day they died, but no way could I tell you what their long-shrivelled eyes had once seen, nor what they had perceived once they’d translated those images into thought.
By midnight, Lucrezia told me she had the problem sorted out, although she seemed reluctant to proceed with our joint investigation. ‘I could process this information myself, then play it back to you. In my opinion, the data is unstable.’
‘So what’s on it?’
‘A personal recording, an electronic journal perhaps. A note-book... It’s fragmented, and beyond my ability to repair completely. Allow me to extract the existing data.’
I shook my head. ‘No, Luce. I know my hardware is less sturdy than yours, and my software more likely to crash - irreparably - but whoever made that recording is a kind of ancestor of mine. We need feedback, human feedback. I’m sure it will be of more value.’
Lucrezia cannot sigh, but her retinue of hums are most eloquent. She hummed. ‘I trust I am absolved from blame should this experiment prove unwise?’
‘Of course.’ I waved her caution away. ‘Let’s jack in! Let’s ride!’
The first seconds were fried. Gone. All I got was white noise and snow. My excitement plummeted. Maybe the whole chip was dead, despite the promising results of Lucrezia’s initial tests. Maybe whatever was left could only be accessed by her. The boiling spectrum of random visual noise would give me a serious headache.
‘It’s no good, Luce,’ I said, readying myself for disengagement. Then, unexpectedly and abruptly, it all bloomed in my mind. Pixels converged into perspective, and a sense of remote time formed around my inner eye. A virtual world shivered into focus.
The data was empathic. Whoever had recorded it had wanted to share it utterly. This was more than a mere archive document, much more.
I sensed myself as female, slim, and in perfect health. I was striding along a swaying bridge, which was suspended from diamond fibre cables, between two bamboo cage towers. I glanced to the side, but the world below was wreathed in mist. Still, from the vague, shadowy shapes I could see, I estimated I was about a thousand metres up in the air.
I was aware of myself, but she too was aware of herself. We shared her body, or her non-local soul. It was difficult to determine, but the experience was at once euphoric and terrifying. She was aware of me, perhaps, only as a possible future audience. Disorientating. I could recall information about her, as if I’d known it a long time. She was eighteen years old, with dark skin and a mass of braided hair. Her name was Shade. She wore a leather jacket, lacquer-dyed with multi-coloured spiral patterns. Beneath it she wore old trousers and a cotton T-shirt, their colours bleached and faded. A string of shells hung around her neck. As I became aware of this necklace, a memory formed: water-hiss, foam. The trinket had come from a souvenir booth by the beachwalk. Gradually, I became aware of the device that linked us. She was not using it as an implant via a neural socket, but it clung to the crevice behind her ear, extending a web of microscopic, bio-plastic filaments over her scalp. Somehow, these filaments interfaced with her mind. I was not familiar with this technology, but because I was able to use a more conventional method to extract this information, the device clearly had an array of methods to link with a human brain.
There was a strange clarity of sound around us; multi-coloured noise of natural acoustics, voices remixed by wind. The girl was walking, walking, salt wind grazing her skin as she talked aloud, recording.
‘This account will be of my life and my work - my mother’s work too, although she’s dead now. There are enigmas about the past, and my mother’s love of history and mystery have been passed on to me. I want answers. I want to know what happened here, why everything changed.
‘The legends say that people came down from the sky, and sometimes I think they’re just stories. Other times, I get a feeling that the truth has been wrapped up in myths, to hide it. Anyway, now I have this device, and it will help me. And I’m passing the information on to you, future-souls.
‘Heat - she was my mother - said my father came from one of the rust islands out in the ocean. He was called Alchemist. I reckon I inherited all my tech-know from him. Long before I was born, Heat worked on trying to discover the truth about history, the history of this place, and the rust islands. I never knew my father, never saw him. Heat wouldn’t tell me why they parted, or even whether he was dead or still alive.
‘This device I’m using now was his. When he met my mother, it had been in his family a long time, a kind of relic. No-one used it any more, although he would show it to my mother and talk about what it could do, if only someone could work out its secrets. It’s like a psychic probe, and it can look into minds, but the mind it reaches most efficiently is that of the land itself. It reads memories, picking up traces of information that float around; thoughts, residue of events. My mother tried to get it to work, but couldn’t, so she just wore it around her neck on a thong, a keepsake of her love affair with Alchemist. It came to me when she died. And, you know, I think it was waiting for me. I didn’t bother trying to fix it with any of the tools he left at my mother’s house. Half of them are arcane to me - I don’t know their function. Heat used some of them as ornaments.
‘Anyway, I cleaned the device as best I could, bathed it in moonlit water, hung it out beneath the sun, buried it in quartz for twenty-eight days. And it came alive for me. I put it behind my ear and it took a hold. With my thoughts, I ask it to record, and it does. It’s the same for receiving data.’
Shade’s voice fell to silence, although I could still detect some sweet echo of her thoughts. Wistfulness, questions. She stood gripping the segmented bamboo rail of the bridge, and through her, I could feel its warm smoothness. She peered down the estuary, towards the ocean, but it was hidden now by a low-skirt mist. She narrowed her eyes, looking for silhouettes in the fog. It was as if she was talking to me, yet at the same time, it was me who was talking.
‘If you look really hard, you can still see the rust islands at night from here... I want to go out there, but whenever I make the preparations to hire a scudder, I just change my mind. Feel uneasy about it. Perhaps all that talk of ghosts when I was kid somehow stuck in my head.’ She laughed aloud, then sobered. ‘It’s dangerous though, lots of ways to die out there: stray viruses, rusting hulks, blow holes, whirlpools, poisonous flotsam, you name it.’
Grey out, shadow out, migraine fuzz. Pain!
I couldn’t disengage fast enough. It was like an electric shock.
‘Shut if off, Luce, shut it off!’
Ghosts of sea-air currents; my breath. For a moment, I was dreaming in between the two worlds; micro-circuits and myths. Deep disorientation.
Lucrezia checked my vital signs. I checked out normal. ‘Enough for one day?’ suggested my AI with concern.
I slept for a few hours, hot and uncomfortable on my narrow bed, despite the air conditioning. Then, I stumbled out of the cabin into the blinding, white sunlight of morning.
My friend, Truce
, was hunkered down in the grey dust next to the truck, sorting samples, his naked back plastered with unattractive UV filter. He turned round as I shambled towards him.
‘Hi there, Serami!’ He frowned. ‘What you been up to in there? You look ragged.’
I decided not to tell him. ‘Was sleeping,’ I said, elaborating a yawn.
Truce stared at me for a moment, his nose wrinkled up. ‘Have you heard that Lena can’t make contact with the retrieval bus?’
I shrugged. ‘No. What’s the problem? Interference?’
‘Maybe. She’s been getting weird responses from the Facility too. Can’t get direct access, but just receives recordings.’
‘There could be any reason for that,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘I know.’
Our stares locked, though neither of us voiced our thoughts. We’d had problems getting the licence, never mind the funding, for this dig. The most paranoid of us thought there was a cover up going on, that certain individuals high up in the Historical Facility didn’t want to risk us upsetting any of their air-tight little theories about the past.
Before we’d left the Organic, Elenov had tried to requisition a craft of our own, but had been denied. We were out on our own, an unimaginably long way from the nearest inhabited world or station. Until the retrieval bus came, we were stranded. I didn’t want to think about the implications of that just yet.
Truce made an effort to brighten up. ‘It’s no problem. Lena will make contact with someone eventually.’ He jerked his head at the sky. ‘There are a lot of people out there.’
I had visions of us being rescued by some rusting old merchant freighter, having to spend several lifetimes in cold storage to get back home. I smiled. ‘Yeah, course there are.’
On the second day, as Lucrezia and I progressed with our study of Shade’s recording, we discovered that the visuals or the sound would quite often muzz out completely, leaving a forlorn static that sounded like some long-distance alert beacon. By dusk, I was beginning to wonder whether the remainder of the chip was unreadable. Then Lucrezia found another clean space.
In the red evening light, I climbed the lookout tower on the left bank of the estuary and went to sprawl in the late light. Tilted on my foam-bed, I could look into the horizon where the sea skies swallowed another sunset, stubbing out the day. Sometimes, there’s a mist out there and the island lights seem webbed and smeared, like a dream receding, losing clarity, becoming opaque.
I took Lucrezia from my pocket and we plugged into the next place in the old recording where the degeneration decreased.
Immediately, I was on-line.
I could see a city: ziggurats within transparent ziggurats, shattered in places to create yawning canyons. The elements had carved a chaotic expression from the city remains. Strange mosses grew on the metals. The landscape was a camera obscura of the sequinned night-sky: blue-white and acid yellow glows of chemical light, and the shivering pulsations of firelight; illuminations that signalled human life.
I saw skeletal towers of bamboo and crystal fibre and massive domes that looked partly vegetable, partly manufactured. Ribbons of aerial walkways intersected high overhead, and below them lay a labyrinth of wider, silvery trails: canals. The city was beautiful in its chaos, but was this a culture emerging from destruction or sinking into it?
Shade climbed down from the walkway but, for a while, only static filled my head. I felt impatient, angry. No, don’t go! Shade’s senses had degenerated into noise, but for audio.
Then, a new voice filtered in: male. The words he spoke were disembodied and at first, I could make no sense of them. I recognised, in Shade’s mind, a frisson of interest. She desired this man, but she planned to hide the fact. He was the subject of study, and she must remain objective.
Abruptly, the visuals were restored, and I saw him through her eyes. Dark, thin, with penetrating black eyes. His hair hung to his waist, and his face was scored with ritual scars.
They were sitting on either side of a table, with rough cups set before them. The sweet taste of a fruity liquor was in Shade’s mouth. From her mind, I picked up the man’s name, which she was repeating silently like a mantra, throughout their conversation. Firetongue. He was renowned for his forthright speech; an Earthwalker, a member of a secretive clan who claimed to guard ancient knowledge. She was unsure how much he’d tell her, but was reassured by the fact he’d agreed to speak to her at all. Perhaps she fascinated him.
He took a sip of his liquor, gazing at her with amusement. ‘You must know, that among my clan, only shamans may use the earth-ways,’ he said.
Shade knew she must be careful, delicate with her words. ‘This is not the earth-ways, Fire. I’m following my mother’s tradition. She was a historian.’
Firetongue wrinkled up his nose. ‘Yet you want to know what you think I know.’ He smiled. ‘Why does an historian want to learn the secret language of the earth?’
I could feel Shade’s heart racing, yet her voice was serene. ‘Well, it’s not exactly that. History leaves traces - all around us, and I use a special device to pick these traces up.’ She lifted her hair to show him where the device nestled around her ear.
‘Sounds like stealing to me.’
Shade shook her head. ‘Really, it’s not. Let me explain about it. Whenever an event occurs, it leaves a kind of energy behind it; a memory, like a photograph. The device I use searches everywhere for transmissions, but it’s easier to catch things at night, because then I can relax and concentrate.’ She leaned back and smiled. ‘I am the aqueduct that meanders from one mountain-top to another.’
He grinned back at her. ‘It still sounds like stealing to me. An easy way to take the thoughts of the earth. You should work to earn that knowledge.’
Shade lifted her hands to him. ‘OK, I know your people use psychotropics and starve their bodies and have weird spiritual experiences. But they’re not historians. My method might seem too easy to you, but I want the information for a different reason.’
‘Which is?’
‘I think we need to know the truth now. People conjecture about the past, and make up myths about it. Everything’s got wrapped up in stories.’
Firetongue laughed. ‘If your device is so powerful, what do you need me for?’
Shade shook her head. ‘Some things have been... I don’t know... protected, perhaps. I think your people, the Earthwalkers, have retained a lost and forbidden knowledge.’
‘And you want me to share these secrets with you?’
She shrugged, wondering whether she’d spoken too plainly, perhaps offended him. ‘Not all your secrets, no. I respect your traditions. But all I need is one clue, just one, and then me and my device can work out the rest. I don’t want to strip your gods of divinity, Fire. No matter what I discover, your beliefs are still valid.’ She felt, too late, her last remark was patronising.
Firetongue studied her for a moment. ‘What are your thoughts on gods, then?’ He seemed to be testing her. What were the answers he wanted to hear?
Shade cleared her throat, snatching time to compose her answer. ‘I’m not saying I think they were human, but...’ She paused. ‘The legends speak of a primitive race who lived here, who had no knowledge of their own. Then the gods came from the sky, cast out by their own kind, and they owned forbidden knowledge. This, they passed to the people, who began to worship water, who built their temples and their cities around networks of canals, designed in specific patterns. It all means something, Fire. There’s a secret in the patterns. Something...’ She raised her shoulders in a shrug, daring to glance into his eyes. His expression was bland. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
The intensity of her desire to learn his secrets, and the certainty that he could help her, flooded my awareness in a dull, unassuageable ache. I observed her feeling of need, that she must convince him to speak with her, trust her, and, finally, share his mind with her. It was all so real. I was there, with her, a discarnate entity within her brain,
afraid she’d sense my presence, that I’d distract her. I wanted to advise her how to proceed, how to coax Firetongue to co-operate, sure that simply by thinking the words, she would hear them. Ask to share his mysteries. Ask him to show you his way...
Then Lucrezia buzzed in, to remind me this was just a recording and would I like her to stop the show for now?
I decided to give it a rest for the night. Lucrezia had bitched about me experiencing the recording twice in one day, and she was right to complain. Her welfare relied upon my well-being, and I couldn’t blame her for her acts of self-preservation. Nobody wants a second-hand, empathic AI.
My body ached and tickled as it recovered from the sensory-noise effects. I found it hard to co-ordinate mind and body for a while. As I stood up, flashback images pulsed behind my eyes and I wondered whether I was steady enough to brave the ladder to the ground.
Lucrezia discreetly expanded flight vanes and noiselessly rose to a hover. She obviously did not trust my balance enough to snuggle back into my pocket.
I was OK until I reached the bottom when, suddenly, a city manifested around me. I saw steel and plastic cables, interwoven with vines and twisted tree-limbs; gantries of bamboo and wood; rope-nets and metal sheets; habitation platforms and a canal aqueduct that meandered overhead, from one mountain-top to another.
This must be a memory, I reasoned bravely, trying not to panic. I observed objectively as the images shivered slowly from a scattering of pre-thought into linear recall. Then it was gone, and the rubbish heap extended all around me, filled with the ghosts of a lost age. Only the estuary was beautiful with its firefly lights. I felt depressed again.
‘Luce!’ She alighted on my shoulder. ‘I got flashback then.’
‘Not unexpected.’
Lucrezia buzzed around my head as I walked back to the settlement. ‘Tell me what you experienced this time,’ she said.
I related all that I could recall. ‘Our dead friend is poking around in the past, I think, like we are. But it was getting a bit creepy. I was assimilating too much, making it part of my reality. Not good.’