Tidelands: I-Two (3)
The Stone. Matryoshki.
She floats on the bed of golden light that streams in through the wall-sized window.
The sun should give life – but not to Eva. Instead, she feels its invasion, its sanitising power – a black sun, a force of negation – effacing and bleaching, blanching, until there is nothing left inside her but an unstained stone. But she lets the sunlight do its work – welcomes it. For if she cannot be free, she will become a stone.
It is “a peerless view” – what her father has called it. [Without equal,] Azimuth had explained, the AI’s voice a silent whisper in her head. “The finest view in the whole of the Arc.” And now, if Eva sits up, dismounts her golden bed, pads barefoot to the window, she can indeed see for miles – out across the bay, out across to the pale grey hills, and – on a good day – beyond even that, far out into the fading wilds. She does like that view, sometimes, likes to lose herself in its vague and distant brightness. But there’s also the other view, the one she likes less – much more than less – the view that draws her down, into the depths, through the arcology’s central shaft and into its darkling heart. Maybe that’s because of what that view reminds her: night, and the unwelcome gifts night brings.
But in the sunlight, if she can just relax her eyes, defocus, then she can dissolve everything – even, one day, the stone itself. Certainly, the little strolling people on the staircases and walkways – they’re easy to dissolve; the trees and lawns too, becoming smudged rectangles of violent green; the busy busy little drones, like fat little flies, becoming dots, becoming blobs. She blears them all into bleeding stains of edgeless colour, amorphous blurs of motion, like dye spreading through water, like smoke through air. And eventually, once she completely lets go, everything starts to lose its label, to renounce its line and form, becoming bodiless, boundless, dispersing into lambent and limitless light.
It is still early – the time she likes best. Soon, the voices will come – those other, daytime voices – with their questions and their tests, with the things they will pretend to be only just a game. But if, before they arrive, the sunlight has been and done its work, then all that cannot reach her. She is safe for the whole day; at least, until night-time. Just the stone of her secret self, pure and clean, impermeable, imperturbable. And then outside of her – her face, her voice, her actions – well, all that won’t matter anymore; all that can go about its business without her, smoothly, automatically, robotically. Like the little machines, that come to tidy, mend and clean, that drop things off and take things away. The outside is impersonal, a consummate actor, a peerless performer, keeping them all fooled, keeping the world at bay, keeping the stone unstained.
Peerless.
But now is not the time to dwell on all that. Now is the time to concentrate. To cleanse the stone. To welcome in the light.
The voices are on their way.
Caulden circles her bed, watching the girl pretend to be asleep.
“And how is she today?” he asks.
In answer, glyphs and graphs, graphics and stats, superimpose themselves translucently over his view. Irritably he blinks them all away.
“Just tell me, Azimuth.”
[She is no worse,] the AI replies.
But no better, then.
He watches her simulate the actions of waking – stretching out her hands, yawning, flexing and waggling her fingers, luxuriating into the substanceless light like a bath. Does she know that he’s watching? Surely not – but knows he might be, of course, at any time; knows she can’t fool Azimuth, anyway – at least, shouldn’t be able to. So all parties know this to be merely an act, a shared pretence, a game; but still they go through with it.
She is blinking, now, theatrically, doll-like, lead-weighted lids shutter up and down on eyes of cornflower blue; an actress playing the princess in the tower, her golden hair outspread like a pillow – or like weeds upon the water.
All the monitoring, the surveillance, the modelling and profiling – yet each time, with each new iteration, something still seems to slip through, to evade the net. As if, at the core of her, there is some invisible essence, some hidden principle, beyond their capacity to model or profile.
Superstitious, really. For even a vacuum takes up space. Even a black hole bends light. And what seems mysterious now, uncanny, will reveal itself eventually through its effects, through patterns in the data. For, fundamentally, isn’t that all we really are? Just patterns?
And now, as if mocking this very thought, she is smiling – a mock smile? – like a commercial for a mattress company, an advert for sleeping pills, taking direction off-camera from a voice he cannot hear.
[Friedler is waiting to see you,] Azimuth informs him.
He sighs, scrutinising the mock sleeper one last time. Mock waker?
“Let’s try and make this one last, shall we?”
He gestures, and a door of light appears, excising a pristine rectangle out of her bedroom and into his office – though no more his office than the bedroom is her bedroom, strictly speaking; just another simulation, a space spun out of data, a construct within a construct. Like those little nested dolls. What do they call them?
[Matryoshki,] Azimuth footnotes.
That’s it.
Matryoshki.
Tidelands is a weekly sci-fi & fantasy serial that publishes every Friday, emailed straight to your inbox. Part 1 is free to read, but you can keep up with the story by signing up for exclusive access, or buying ebook or paperback editions of the collected instalments as they appear.