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"Are you saying it thinks it's a little boy?" Florimel said, an edge of angry amusement in her voice. "A little boy with a dog? In a hole?"
"Perhaps, but that is rather simplifying it." Martine bowed her head for a moment. "Please, give me the chance to think out loud, Florimel. I do not have the strength to take much argument."
The other woman flushed a little, but nodded her head. "Go on."
"It may not think it is a boy, a human child, but if this truly is an artificial intelligence, something that has become almost human, imagine how it does feel. What did Dread say, in that moment on the mountain when he appeared like a giant? 'Your system is still fighting me, but I have learned how to hurt it.' A metaphor . . . or not? Perhaps when the system, with its growing individuality, did things the Brotherhood did not want it to do, they had to check its efforts with something it perceived as pain."
Paul had a sudden, nightmarish memory of the Other straining against its bonds, an agonized, Promethean figure. "It thinks of itself as a prisoner."
"A prisoner in the dark. Yes, perhaps." Martine took a breath. "A thing being punished for no reason—tormented as the Devil torments people, for the pure enjoyment of another's suffering. And so it has sat in its darkness for years—at least three decades, maybe more—hoping that one day it would be saved from its pain and set free, and singing a song that a little boy sang at the bottom of a deep, black well." Her face suddenly contorted in anger and unhappiness. "It is terrible to think about, no?"
"You think it has done these things . . . against its will?" Florimel asked. "That what it did to my Eirene and the other children, to your friend Singh—all these things it was forced to do, like a slave? Like a conscripted soldier?" She looked shocked. "It is hard to think that way."
"Oh, Jesus, the angel." Paul could hardly breathe. "In the story. Is that why . . . why Ava appears the way she does? Because the Other thinks she's an angel?"
"Perhaps." Martine shrugged. "Or because that is the only way it can imagine a human female who is not part of the legions of pain-bringers. And there is the image of the river as well—certainly we must all find that familiar by now."
"But even if you are right, what good does this do us?" Florimel said, breaking a long moment's silence. "The Other is defeated, at least the part of it that thinks. Dread has taken over the system. Look at this place—the Baghdad of Haroun al-Rashid, all vanished under a glacier. Dread is not an unwilling monster. He has turned this whole imaginary universe upside down just to amuse himself."
"Yes, and with the Brotherhood dead or dispersed, he is our true enemy." Martine leaned back against the wall. "I'm afraid you are right, Florimel—my idea means little. If nothing we did before could affect the Other, I ca
Paul sat up. "Aren't you forgetting something? Like the fact that we have friends who are still out there? Maybe we can't do anything to bring down the system, maybe we can't touch this murderer-turned-virtual-god I've heard so much about, but we can bloody well try to find Renie and the others."
For a moment it looked like Martine would lose her temper—Paul saw color bloom on the cheeks of her sim-face. "I have not forgotten, Paul," she said stiffly. "It is my curse that I forget almost nothing."
"I didn't mean it that way. But if we can't do anything to stop Dread, we can at least try to get out of this network. The Grail Brotherhood is dead as a doornail, so what are we fighting against anyway? You lot may have volunteered, sort of, but I sure as Christ didn't." Paul felt his anger swirling uselessly and tried to calm himself. "Right, then. So what's our next step? If the Troy simulation is offline, how can we get to Renie and the others?"
"We do not know that same trick would work twice anyway," Florimel pointed out. "It was my impression that the Other somehow wanted us to come to it—that it made some kind of special gateway for us. If the artificial intelligence is enslaved now, or at least defeated, then I doubt. . . ."
She paused because Martine had held up her hand, fingers spread, like a sentinel who hears a stealthy footstep outside the camp.
"I think you are right," Martine said slowly. "I think, along with Paul's angel, the Other tried to bring us to itself, somehow. It wanted something from us."
"But we have no idea what that might be," said Paul.
"Just wait for a moment!" The blind woman's angry flush returned. "My God, let a person think. It . . . the Other . . . wanted us for some reason. To help it free itself? As in the story?"
Paul frowned, trying to understand where her thoughts were going. "It . . . it takes the story literally? It wants us to get it out of its hole?"
"Out of its imprisonment, yes, it could be."
"Which one of us is the dog?" Florimel said with heavy sarcasm. "I hope we are not expected to volunteer."
"The dog. Of course!" Martine nodded her head violently. "Oh, could it really be? Perhaps I am right. Let me say this, however foolish it sounds." She raised her hands to her head, eyes tightly shut. "Renie told me once that all the sims I have worn within this network look very . . . unexceptional. Is that true? Almost like generic sims."
"Yes, I suppose," said Florimel. "So?"
"She told me that only in Troy did I look like a specific person. But that was because in Troy I was given a specific character made for the simulation—Cassandra, the king's daughter. All the rest of the time I have been in some version of this original peasant sim from Temilún, and it is not as detailed as yours is, Florimel, or as the false Quan Li's was."
"Granted. What does that mean?"
"We are all of us interfacing with this system as almost pure information, yes? Whatever our real bodies might look like, we exist on this system only as minds—as sense-memory and conscious thought, correct? And the system sends information back to us along the same neural pathways."
Paul looked over at T4b, expecting the teenager to be a
"Ah." Martine sat up straighten "But there is no such thing as 'this sort of environment.' We have seen that already—it is unique! Unique in that we ca
Florimel grunted. "You are still not explaining. . . ."
"Perhaps the network—or more specifically, the operating system, the Other—can interface with not just our conscious thoughts, but our subconscious thoughts as well."
"What? You mean, read our minds?"
"I do not know how it might work, or what the limits might be, but think! If it could reach into our subconscious, it could implant suggestions that we ca
"Jesus." Paul suddenly began to see it taking shape. "But that would mean . . . that it wanted you all to stay on the network. What about your friend Singh? It killed him."
"I do not know. Perhaps the security system part of the Other, the part that guarded entry, to the network, was under more direct control by the Grail Brotherhood. Perhaps it was only when we had made our way inside that the Other could truly see us, contact us." She was growing excited. "If it was trying to act out a story somehow, the story of the boy in the well, it might well have decided we were the allies it was looking for!"