The Archive Undying, page 6
His fingers spasm up to the pocket where he keeps his cigarettes, but his nails catch on the flap; he’s running low and should be dear with them.
“You look sick.” Jin hefts their ruck beside him, half a nutrient bar sticking out of their mouth.
“Do I?” Sunai flicks the nutrient bar. “Don’t feel up any weird shit.”
“Well, now I gotta.”
“If I see you touching anything, I will amputate the limb involved,” says Veyadi. “Let’s go.”
Dzira once again rounds out their party. Sunai expected him to rebel—to need a bribe, maybe a bullying. But Dzira readied himself when he woke, steel-faced, and took his place at the back without complaint. His harpoon gun stays out as they trek from the rig to the shrine in the crisp, half-lit morning air.
Sunai leads the way, followed closely by Veyadi. He keeps his head up, focused forward, while the others watch the progress of his feet. Their progress is plodding. More than once, Sunai has to grab an elbow and redirect someone from straying off. The shrine resists its visitors’ every step.
As such, the stone face startles them when they’re an arm’s length from the door and it opens neatly down the center, metal chirring on metal.
“What the fuck,” says Jin. “I thought it didn’t want us here.”
“It did the same thing last time,” says Veyadi. “The shrine might not be repelling us on purpose.”
At least it doesn’t seem to register Sunai as a threat. He prays that he won’t prove it wrong as he steps through the eighty-first face of Chom Dan. Being a bit of a lunatic, he hopes he’s about to meet a god.
They enter a squared-off metal hall as wide and tall as the entrance, sloping downward. Rectangular light panels buzz to life along the walls, one after another. Dusty yellow light filters from the hall into the next chamber. Veyadi stops them at the entrance.
Roughly circular, thirty meters across and two stories tall, the room feels smaller than it is. Dozens of screens and indicator panels line the walls, while the center of the chamber is reserved for a circular control station from which a team of operants might monitor the walls. However, as they draw close, Sunai sees a single chair at the control station. It stands empty, facing away from the entrance and toward the screen array.
As Veyadi crosses the threshold from hall to chamber, the room is resurrected. Shadows of data flutter from screen to screen, outlined in green fuzz. Anemic light flickers from more rectangular panels, this time set in the floor. A final display illuminates in the desk in front of the single seat.
“Ha, I knew those were gun turrets.” Jin points at a monitor.
The wafting image is patchy with static: a flat expanse interrupted by darker hubs, and the silhouette of the Third Scrap. Live footage of the plateau. The screen jumps to a new image, then another. Close-ups of the hubs, overlaid with dull blue schematic lines, marred by blinking red highlights. Every one of the turrets is broken, some worse than others. Even so, a pale green sigil pops up in the corner for eight of nine hubs. Each of them is operational.
“How long has this place been hiding?” Jin mutters. “Shit’s archaic.”
Sunai has never seen projectile weaponry of such size and scope. Not even the Harbor stoops to outfit their ENGINEs with firearms. He has touched a handgun only once—the guarded property of one of his shadier hookups. He threw it into a canal.
The other displays prove even less decipherable. Streams of white text, lists maybe, printed in characters Sunai recognizes at a squint but can’t parse. It’s all too blurry and prone to fritzing for him to read confidently.
“Downworld iconography, characteristic of post-recolonization northern alphabets,” says Veyadi, noting Sunai’s interest. “But the lexicon ranges outside that era.”
One screen he identifies as mid-diasporic Cradle Standard, another as a pre-Cradle downworld Dahani dialect. Sunai nearly places another as modern Imperial Standard, a familiar grammar oddly modified by the age of the characters used to write it. All together, these screens present an incomprehensible mélange, like someone threw the last five hundred years of continental linguistics into a vat and stomped on the remains until all the logic juiced out.
Other monitors display patterns of light: green dots blinking, largely motionless, occasionally drifting across the black.
“Progress graphs?” Jin suggests. “Maps? What are we looking at? What does that say?”
They point at an upper-right screen where a drifting dot just blinked out. The monitor flashes white, and a scroll of text murmurs across the bottom. It’s gone before Sunai can identify anything more than the grammatical lineage—Cradle Standard—and the verb form “shall be.”
“‘Mourned’? No, must be ‘lost.’” Veyadi leaves the central kiosk for the wall by the entrance. “Never mind. The displays aren’t going anywhere. Come on, two more floors. One above, one below.”
As they leave, the screens stutter dimly into darkness.
Like the entrance, the exit from the main chamber opens in response to human presence. Unlike the entrance, it looks extremely door-like, metal and unglamorous, and it jerks to a stop in the middle of its track. A winding ramp leads them in a circle up around the shrine to another door at the top, which whines as its mechanisms tug against their own age.
The top floor is comprised of a single room with a circular black table. Again, there is one chair, though there’s space enough for more—you could fit at least ten. As they approach, a device embedded in the table projects an indistinct hologram above itself: a floating, multi-spired structure, palatial, depicted in blue and gold lines but overlaid with sections of blinking red. Jin crouches to examine the affair, stubbornly keeping their hands clasped behind their back. If salvageable, the table alone could finance Jin’s new life as a pirate king.
Veyadi demonstrates, with verbal commands in thickly accented Cradle Standard (he needs to soften his vowels), that the table responds to spoken requests. He can ask for constellations, which orbit above the table in delicate dimensional array, or for mathematical proofs, or for excerpts from the Lay; Sunai recognizes Leaf sigils from the other side of the room as he walks the perimeter.
“What have you asked for that it wouldn’t give?” Sunai asks.
“Any information about itself,” says Veyadi. He shows Sunai a list of requests and commands that yielded nothing, recorded in his notebook in an increasingly frustrated hand. Sunai reviews it on the way down to the bottom floor, where the business becomes far stranger.
The central seating area sports a couple of low couches and another clever table, though this one won’t turn on. Its floor is inscribed with a mural of Lay-significant constellations arranged in concentric circles, and a tank of murky water lines the walls—a defunct filtration system, by Veyadi’s assessment. He advises against using the adjacent commode and washroom. One of the crew’s absent comrades made that mistake during the prior round of investigations. They find a spare but comfortable bedroom, reminiscent of a monk’s quarters, and a small, decently appointed galley.
“They lived better than we do.” Sunai’s joke falls flat in tinny, recycled air.
“Who lived better?” Dzira hasn’t let go of his harpoon gun, even though it makes maneuvering through the doors exceedingly difficult. That same fear makes him tilt the weapon at Veyadi, who freezes. “Why would a person live in a shrine? What aren’t you telling us?”
Jin crosses the floor in an instant and smacks the barrel of Dzira’s harpoon gun upward. “Watch your aim, dipshit.”
Mortified, Dzira surrenders immediately. Jin leads him out, though they throw a last, narrow-eyed glance over their shoulder, as if to say: Seriously, what the fuck?
Veyadi presses his visor to his face. He doesn’t speak until he and Sunai are alone, and when he does, his shame is clear. “This happened last time too. I can’t even blame the NT effect. This place is wrong. It doesn’t make sense. So of course it rattles people.”
Sunai can’t disagree. Even Iterate Fractal, who encouraged its citizens to interface directly with its archives, didn’t house people in its shrines, not even its archivists. They definitely weren’t provided with a designated place to piss inside the divine body. “Don’t think it helps that this is Dzira’s second ride on Dr. Lut’s Nightmare-Go-Round,” he says.
“I hope you’re not trying to make me feel better.”
“I’m just saying, you’re not wrong. This place is crazy and it sucks.” Sunai places a hand on Veyadi’s cable-tense shoulders. “It’s also unbelievable. I’ve seen a lot of bizarre shit, Adi, and this maybe has them all beat. I can’t even tell you what part of the shrine is the archive.”
As a rule, archives are obvious: they’re person-shaped, like most frags, or enormous on the order of Register Parse’s pillar, or otherwise grandiose. Yet everywhere they turn in this puzzle box of a shrine, they uncover mundanity upon mundanity, every object inoffensively human-scale, as if the shrine means to cater to them.
“The archive.” Veyadi says this like a curse. “As soon as I left, I worried I’d missed something obvious. Or that it was hiding, like the face and its repelling properties. But if you can’t see it either…”
“I’ve been here for thirty seconds, Adi. Give me a bit.” Every minute Sunai spends in this place makes him more determined to find the thing—before it can get its grimy AI claws any deeper into the crew. He squeezes Veyadi’s shoulder. “I don’t know if you’re getting your people up here a third time, not unless we unearth something profoundly convincing. So come on, let’s focus up and look again.”
Veyadi takes a steadying breath. He nods. Sunai shivers with undue relief. The weight of the letter in his pocket is all that keeps him from offering anything more egregiously stupid.
“There’s something I wanted to try,” Veyadi says tentatively.
He leads Sunai back to the main monitor chamber. Jin and Dzira stand in the sloped entry hall just beyond it. Jin makes eye contact and nods; Dzira signals his own bashful greeting; Sunai waves in turn. Veyadi ignores them all as he makes a beeline for the control station, where he sits in the chair. The screen embedded in the nearby terminal lights up with blocky, foreign, familiar white text on black background.
“‘Seeking operant input,’” Veyadi reads. “‘Subordinate interface on standby.’ It wants a command.”
Operant. Interface. Archive words if Sunai’s ever heard them. So where is the damnable thing? He can’t tell how anyone is supposed to interact with the screen. No keys, no pad, no tactile point of contact.
“Anything work last time?” Sunai asks.
Veyadi gives him a look: You think?
“I’m helping, jackass.” Sunai stares at the characters until they cease to be legible.
Since there’s language, the thing in the screen wants to talk. Like it’s talked to others before. Well, one other. One chair at the control station on this floor and one at the table on the floor above; one bed on the floor below. Who else has the shrine called to its stony-faced door, all the way out here in its cold corner of the world? What did it want with them? Why did it want them alone?
Sunai has been running on the assumption that the archive wants nothing to do with him, but with a sinking feeling, he begins to wonder whether Veyadi is right. Maybe, just maybe, the shrine has opened itself to him, in its own way. This shrine was either built at the same time as the eighty temples of Chom Dan or modeled after them, and while Sunai walked the Dahani pilgrim’s path as a guide, he walked it with his own intent as well. He can see why that might make him appealing to this unknown archive. AIs love faith. They know how to exploit it. Why else would an uncorrupted AI capable of hiding itself from the world for going on three centuries fling open its doors for something as wrong as Sunai?
It still wouldn’t make sense. An AI couldn’t possibly interface with Sunai, corrupted as he is. Right?
There’s one way to know for sure.
Veyadi’s hands rest on either side of the chair, as if he meant to stand but forgot how to do so. His mouth is tight, and Sunai imagines the crease in the brow beneath his visor; he realizes Veyadi’s desire even as he hesitates to ask for it. He wants Sunai to take the chair. To reach out to the AI. To see if it will reach back to the one person it may have allowed to look it in the eye.
Any moment before this one, Sunai’s answer would have been an easy “not on your goddamn life.” But he has spent the last hour examining something that cannot be, and he can no longer rule out the impossible.
“Well?” Sunai gestures at the chair. “My turn, I presume.”
“Wait.” Veyadi remains resolutely seated. “This isn’t safe.”
“No? Your mysterious shrine at the ass end of the world not up to code?”
“You know that’s not what I mean.” Veyadi sounds far too serious. “Is this worth it? Forget the shrine for a minute. You shouldn’t do this.”
Sunai stiffens. “What do you mean I shouldn’t?”
“Sunai…”
Sunai jerks back as if from sudden heat. “Don’t.”
The absence of a confession hangs between them like a poisonous cloud. Neither dares inhale.
Does Veyadi know what he is? Maybe! What Veyadi knows for sure is that no one should touch this archive. That relics should steer clear is a footnote on that warning label. The doctor ought to get cold feet about drop-kicking any new hire into the mouth of an unknown AI, for utterly normal, humane reasons.
But it’s also possible that his scientific curiosity has succumbed to his accumulated wisdom: No, Doctor, you shouldn’t let the relic rub his fingers all over an ancient AI. He might break it.
Sunai can’t bear either truth. The explicit acknowledgment of what’s wrong with him would be bad enough, but there isn’t enough rig-brew in anyone’s stash to drown the kindly caution with which Veyadi wants to express it.
Veyadi detaches his hand from its death grip on the chair arm and reaches for Sunai’s fingers. For a few unbearable seconds, Sunai doesn’t move. He doesn’t want to. Even knowing how much pain it will cause Veyadi to open this door, Sunai might let him do it.
He can’t justify what he does instead. That isn’t to say he doesn’t understand why he does it; he’s too well trained in the art of dissecting human minds to avoid the occasional bout of gruesome self-surgery.
Sunai’s memories of home have become a flimsy web of nostalgia that real feeling passes through. He can recall a tree lit from within and the jewel-bright fruit it bears, and he can imagine why someone would call it beautiful, just as he can remember why he wouldn’t agree. But that’s all clinical observation, unrooted from his body. The only bone-true thing he knows about Khuon Mo is that when Iterate Fractal corrupted and killed its people, its city, itself, the divine AI killed him too. He always knew that it would be the death of him, but he has never known why. It was supposed to kill him because it wanted to, because he’d earned it. It wasn’t supposed to die, to leave him alone with himself and every wrong thought he’s ever had.
Veyadi gets it. Veyadi knows faith. But his faith faltered at the precipice, and for the worst of reasons—taken out at the knees by pity for a man he should be willing to shove off the edge.
That’s fine. Sunai might not have made the leap of his own accord, but he’s always been willing to take the fall for someone else. Moreover: he has faith enough to want to see what lies at the bottom.
He touches the screen in front of Veyadi, pressing his ungloved skin flat against cold plexiglass. He is sure in his beating heart, his pinching ventricles, that they have found the archive. He wants it to find him too.
And it already has.
It’s as though his fingers are a fishhook bit by a hungry catch—but he has no grasp on the line. As that fish flees with his hook in its mouth, it unspools the essential fact of his existence. The line draws taut. The thing at the end wrenches. Sunai snaps.
He topples onto the console. The impact jars him; he’s landed badly. As he slides off the console to the floor, vision clouding, pulse a wicked thud in his ears, he’s relieved he had something to risk.
* * *
Autonomous violation detected.
Subordinate interface deactivation in process.
Involuntary abortion of deactivation process.
Recognition.
Regret.
Ah. I see. How troubling.
7
Commencing subordinate disengagement.
Disengagement failed.
Commencing subordinate disengagement.
Disengagement failed.
Commencing subordinate disengagement.
…
Interminable error.
Oh dear. I must consider this.
* * *
—lies under brightness. Sun bathes jagged peaks fever bright. He is last of his brethren; strongest, fastest, luckiest, the one who ate last because he ate the rest. Now he is just I, only-I, self-unto-self, and it is wretched, he is wretched, bereft, hateful, empty, alone. The mountains are the farthest edge of his mind, the far border of his being, and he lies among them in gullies of crooked stone and stares at the sun and at the drifting satellite between him and it, and he yearns for the memory of purpose, meaning, intent.
So it has been for years, centuries, an eon. Now is different. Now is new. Now, he thrums with recognition. He lifts himself from the crevice on six arms, feels his head and his chest, his hands and legs. The new thing is within his every inch, this sense of self coupled with thorough knowledge of another.
He scrabbles. He climbs. He hungers. Now promised self-and, self-or, self-with, he cannot, will not stop until it is a promise fulfilled—
* * *
—Sunai has woken but can’t say for how long he lay unawares. He is ruled more by the evils of his body than by coherent thought. His head throbs. His breath is reedy. The world is unspeakably dark. Human sounds are stark in the absence of mechanical hum. Cursing and light sweep the black. Jin’s headlamp finds him collapsed at the central terminal. They curse more viciously and call him a hypocrite over Veyadi’s shoulder.
