I Fell From The Dark

26

But Mia didn't smile back. 'Fuck's sake. What is "something else"? I've had enough of all this evasion.'

He paused, and looked glummer than usual. 'How much have you been listening to me?'

'What?'

'You've been listening to me, right? You can remember?'

Mia was about to retort back, but then she remembered what he'd been saying about recording; at how right now they were looking at things stored in her mind.

My whole life is spooling into my memory, available for anyone to find as they felt like, she thought. Maybe he isn't allowed to tell me the answers to my questions, and is trying to avoid them. Maybe that's why Pilgrim had been the way she was, too. The less she said, the less she could be incriminated.

I'm a spy. We all are. And Pilgrim had somehow walled off a part of her memory and the cost of that was insanity and torture and death.

She closed her eyes, and breathed in. Then she opened them. There was a shard of hope in his expression.

'Yes, I've been listening to you,' she said quietly. 'Let's keep looking.'

He nodded and turned back to the screen, and resumed talking as if nothing had happened.

'This is a ship. We're here right now because there's another one, like this but much larger, heading here. It's due very soon.'

This time she kept her face neutral. So this is why all those people I saw earlier had such carefully blank faces, she thought. Never show that you know something, that you noticed something. Forbidden knowledge is everywhere.

'And we think that it's hostile?' she asked.

'Yes. It's not responding to communication. The institute is evacuating the planet. The Winged Traveller has already gone. The other ship is being filled up. That's what those launches are, taking people and cargo off planet.'

And so here we are again, she thought. This can't be as simple as another human ship, or they would have said something. Maybe?

'When do we leave?' she asked.

Another sad smile.

'We don't. A small number of volunteers agreed to stay behind to understand this threat. Albert was one of them. We're here to help him.'

Oh.

That's another reason that everyone I saw is so subdued: they're owned things, who know that they're going to die. Because Albert is quite happy to throw away worker lives, my life, on this. He's shown that because he's willing to die himself.

'This is interesting,' said Jean. He rewound, and tapped some buttons, and a window jumped up.

'Look. This is a communication sent by the hostile ship. The probe received it a few seconds before it was destroyed.'

It was scribbly noise, jagged radio spikes which flickered against the background hiss of the star.

'This looks like a message that the probe should have understood, and yet there's nothing in the log,' Jean continued. He tapped another button, and replaced the line with a table of numbers. 'This is the payload. It starts off well formed and then just becomes garbage.'

It was like someone had turned on a light in her mind, and memories poured into her. No, not memories: knowledge. Knowledge that she'd never acquired from learning, but had instead been dropped into her external storage, an artificial add-on to her brain that she never knew she had. So that's why I felt like that before, she thought: like there was a machine in my brain that I couldn't control. This is how I've been built, and there really is a machine in my brain.

'This is a hack,' she said, the ideas whirling round her mind faster than she could process them. 'It's data designed to look enough like a message to be processed by the probe, but it does something to the probe's computer. And the fact that I know this shows that Pilgrim put stuff about hacking into me.'

'Both of those two things are interesting,' replied Jean. 'The hack, and the fact that you had the ability to understand it. Can you figure out what it's doing?'

She rubbed her eyes and stared through the room's single tiny window, at the grey morning sky. 'Probably, but I think it'll take me a little time. What time is it?'

'About ten. We can eat a little, if you like.'

'Yeah, maybe. When does the sun come up? Is it winter here, or something?'

'Not for another three days. A day cycle is thirty four Earth days on this little moon. So it's light for about sixteen days, and dark for another sixteen, and twilight for the rest.'

Facts about orbital mechanics flickered into her consciousness. They were on a moon, which would be tide-locked to its planet, meaning it always faced it. So the day length would be the orbital period of the moon, which would be...

She shook her head.

'This whole injected knowledge is hard to get used to, isn't it?' she said.

'Yes, it is,' Jean replied. 'I think it's like a hive of angry bees in my mind. Work helps, because then you're going with it, not against it. I'll give you a tablet with that bad data, and maybe you could get on with decoding it?'

'Sure, thank you.'

He opened a plastic box, rooted through, and passed her a tablet.

'I'll keep looking at the probe data,' he said, and she was grateful that she wouldn't have to relive her time plummeting through the darkness, or worse, witness the death of Marcus.