Surface Detail

“I think you will. In fact, I may never have been able to stop you from remembering, or at least from passing on what you have learned. Hmm. That’s irksome.”

“Please explain?”

“The distributed device within your brain and central nervous system, which I have, annoyingly, only recently become aware of, will have recorded its own memories of this encounter and would be able to transmit them to your own biological brain. I strongly suspect it has already transmitted our conversation so far… else where. Perhaps to the drone you arrived with and the ship you arrived on. That is very unusual. Unique, even. Also, most irritating.”

“What are you talking about? Do you mean a neural lace?”

“Within a sufficiently wide definition, yes. It is certainly some thing similar.”

“Well, you’re wrong. I don’t have a neural lace.”

“I think you do.”

“And I know I don’t.”

“I beg to differ, as those who are right have always begged to differ from those who are wrong but refuse to admit it.”

“Look, I would know if…” She heard her voice trail off, her jaw going slack as the relevant string relaxed, leaving her speechless.

“Yes?”

She was pulled upright. “I do not have a neural lace.”

“But you do, Ms. Nsokyi. It is an unconventional example of high exoticism, but it would pass most people’s definition of just such a device.”

“This is absurd. Who would put such a…?” Again, she heard her voice die away as she realised.

“As I believe you may have just started to suspect, I think Special Circumstances did.”

Yime Nsokyi stared at the thing in the middle of the great dark sphere. It had given up representing pan-human sexual organs to become a little black scintillating mote, then nothing, then she seemed to be flung backwards from it, trailing her strings rippling behind her, flying through intervening walls and structure as though they weren’t there, her clothes flapping madly in the howling gale of her backward-rushing regress, her strings, whipped to destruction, suddenly snapping off in the maniacal slipstream as she was missiled back towards her cabin. The wind noise rose to a shriek, her clothes were torn off her body as though she’d been caught in a terrible explosion and she plunged naked and howling into her bed in a great burst of ripped fabric and slowly spouting, wildly frothing water.

Yime came to in what felt like a struggle with reality itself, writhing and choking in the midst of the slowly descending waters. She was still wearing the sodden night-dress, though it was bunched up round her armpits. The huge room was lit by something strobing white and pink. She coughed, rolled across the punctured bed through the remaining pools of water and hauled herself over the raised edge, looking for the drone.

The drone lay on its back, spinning on the floor. That didn’t look good, she thought, as she fell out of the bed.

“I think we need-” she began.

A bolt of violet lightning speared down from the ceiling, crashing into the drone and puncturing it, blowing a fine yellow white mist towards her; the mist was incandescent, the sparks within it setting fire to whatever they touched. The drone had been holed straight through and split almost in half by the blast. Spatterings from the mist of molten metals hit her legs, burning a dozen tiny holes in her skin. She screamed, rolled away across the damp floor. She felt her pain-management system cut in, slicing off the red-hot-needle sensations.

A knife missile bounced out of the front part of the drone’s fractured casing. It flew towards her. She thought she heard it start to say something, then it too was bludgeoned by a violet bolt from above, blasting it apart. A white-hot fragment tore past her cheek, another tugged at the night-dress where it had part fallen back across her chest. Smoke and flames seemed to be all around her. She flattened, started to crawl away as fast as she could.

There was the whip-crack of a supersonic boom, making her ears close up. Suddenly a knife missile was there, a metre in front of her. It flicked upright so that its shimmering point-field was aimed straight at the ceiling; another violet lightning bolt slammed down, hammering the knife missile’s blunt end halfway into the floor.

“CROUCH! CROUCH NOW! CROUCH POSITION! CROUCH POSITION!” the missile bellowed at her before a second bolt blew it apart and something smacked her hard in the side of the head.

She had jumped half-up and was already crouched in the Emergency Displace posture – ankles together, knees together, bum on heels, arms wrapped round her legs, head sideway to her knees – by the time the drone got to the first “POSITION”.

Cerise fire filled the air all around and a terrific thunderclap slapped across her, trying to force the air out of her lungs. For an instant everything went utterly quiet and dark. Then suddenly she was squeezed, compressed to the point where she could feel her bones start to bend, hear her spine creak and knew that if she hadn’t been under the pain-control regime she’d be screaming in agony.