The Atlas Paradox, page 19
“So,” she continued to Dalton’s younger self. “You have some form of memory.” That paired with his reasoning skills meant animations could think, to some extent. Some cognitive activity was occurring beyond simple programming or biological instinct. “Do you remember anything aside from me?”
“I remember waking up here,” said Dalton. He suddenly looked listless, as if he had only just remembered his constraints.
“When was that?” Parisa asked.
“This is boring.” He wasn’t looking at her. He had crossed the room to the bars on the tower window, observing them as if they had not been there before. “All of this is so very boring. Did you know that I have surveillance now?” he asked in the same breath. He flicked the iron of the bars. “Someone is watching me.”
Parisa had never thought to check the specifics of the view outside the castle window. “Wasn’t someone always watching you?” she asked, inching toward it. She saw only forest, the outlines of a maze, glimpses of various bends within the labyrinth below. Dense foliage and heavy fog, but nothing of magical significance.
“This is different.” Dalton’s animation turned around with a deep sigh of impatience. “Are you going to get me out?”
“I’m trying,” Parisa said.
“Good. But I’ll need help,” he said. “So that he doesn’t win again this time.”
“Who, Atlas?”
“That’s the part he doesn’t understand,” Dalton continued, which was neither confirmation nor denial. Just the ego of a man not paying close attention to the conversation at hand. “He can’t always win, you know. He barely managed it before. The likelihood of doing it twice is even smaller now. Smaller every day, every minute. And you,” he added with a shrug of recognition. “You’re changing things.”
“Yes,” Parisa said. She felt quite certain that was true.
“So he won’t win again. And he knows it. You’d think he’d be more careful.” It remained unclear whether he was speaking of Atlas, but she never got the chance to press the point. The smile on Dalton’s face went brilliant, almost blinding, when he turned it on her. “People are never careful when it comes to you, are they?”
“Not even remotely,” Parisa confirmed.
Which was true, as she had not, strictly speaking, been invited in for this particular visit.
Actually, the evening had begun with Dalton (the corporeal version) cornering her in the reading room about her topic of independent study.
“I don’t understand,” he said without preamble, showing her the page she’d submitted as her official proposal.
“What’s not to understand?” Parisa countered, glancing at the page. “I wrote it in big letters and everything.”
The sheet of paper contained one word: FATE.
“Parisa,” said Dalton in a voice that sounded a bit like please don’t embarrass me at work, “is there perhaps something less … cerebral, that you might consider in terms of a proposal?”
“First of all, I am cerebral,” she told him. “By definition. And secondly, I meant it in terms of Jung’s blueprint.” Meaning psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who believed that humanity contained some atavistic properties as a collective. “The idea that everyone is born with access to some larger, interconnected subconscious. Something we share as a species, instead of something determined for us as individuals.”
Dalton obviously did not believe her, though she couldn’t imagine why. She was always so very forthright. Hardly ever worth suspecting.
“I know you’ve been trying to understand the sentience of the archives,” Dalton said. (So okay, she did have her moments.)
“Tell Atlas snitches get stitches,” Parisa replied. “It’s colloquial but he’ll know what it means.”
“It wasn’t Atlas,” Dalton sighed, before catching himself. “And what I meant was—”
“Wait. It wasn’t Atlas?” That left Reina as the most likely option, which was almost impressive. So Reina had taken a moment to notice that things were happening on earth? How deliciously out of character for her. “Since when is Reina confiding in you?”
“She isn’t,” said Dalton, who was unfortunately keeping things very tightly sealed. Not that it wasn’t possible to slip into his thoughts if Parisa really wanted to, but the effort of uncovering what she already knew felt too taxing for the moment. “But if you’re trying to manipulate the archives in order to see how they work—”
“I was under the impression that the archives couldn’t be manipulated,” Parisa said.
“Of course not, but—”
“So why would I even try?” she added innocently, batting her eyes for effect. “And anyway, the blueprint concept seems perfectly scholarly to me.” The truth? She was trying to understand the sentience of the archives. Unlike animations, which Dalton had previously hinted (and Callum had confirmed) were alive but not fully sentient, the archives appeared to be sentient but not fully alive. Parisa herself had made use of the primordial consciousness within the house, following patterns that felt to her like thought. Was the library not simply a lifeless vault of knowledge, then, but to some extent a brain?
She had been considering it ever since the implication from Callum’s projection-self during his ritual that the archives were tracking them in some way. What need would the Society, via the archives, have to track its occupants? There was nothing meaningful to glean from the data points of their behavior unless the goal was ultimately to model them, predicting what they might do next. Which, if that was the case, could only mean either villainy or proof of concept. If it was the Society, then that was uninspired and dull. It made them no better than Web 2.0. But if the archives were actually learning the behaviors of its initiates—if the task of nurturing the archives, making them grow was not, in fact, a metaphorical assignment—then that was a tick in the column for atavistic blueprints after all.
If Parisa’s class of initiates could each be predicted by something that did not technically qualify as alive, then wouldn’t that affirm, in some way, the concept of a collective conscience, a predestined fate? Either that or it would simply prove the Society’s unlawful surveillance, which would be predictable as far as sinister plans went, but still worth knowing. Whatever the outcome, Parisa felt an answer worth divining before she left the confines of this house and never looked back.
But Dalton still did not look convinced, and so she remembered that a bit of intimacy would be called for here. Sharing was caring, to put it another colloquial way. Or in this case, the reverse.
“I have been thinking,” Parisa remarked, “about dreams.”
“Dreams,” echoed Dalton. This time he sounded more curious than patronizingly disappointed. While Parisa resented being pressured into telling him the truth, she couldn’t deny it was occasionally effective.
“Yes, dreams.” Nico, by virtue of disclosing the nature of his dream-traversing friend, had given her the idea that dreams were the intersect of time and thought. “They occur on a shared astral plane. Potentially in the fourth dimension.”
“Mm,” said Dalton, thinking.
“And when I enter your dreams,” she added carefully, “I encounter the same thing. Almost as if a piece of you lives there permanently.” Almost as if. Exactly as if. “Don’t you think that’s interesting?”
But she seemed to have crossed back into problematic territory, because the light in his eyes was snuffed out as quickly as it appeared. “Parisa—”
“You were the one who brought it up,” she reminded him. “That it was you who made that animation of Rhodes’s dead body.” They were very nearly arguing, which as a rule Parisa didn’t do. Certainly not with a lover, which was a waste of everyone’s time when better, more satisfying things could always be done in the name of conflict resolution. A person had to care about the outcome of a fight in order to pick one, and Parisa never did. “Am I supposed to forget about that now?”
Dalton shook his head. “It’s impossible for me to have made that animation. I have no explanation for it.”
“No,” Parisa corrected. “You have no explanation for it, and therefore you suspect it to be impossible. But I know you,” she reminded him. “I know your mind.”
That had been his error. He had let her in, and now she knew him. He had let himself be known—which Parisa would be the first to say was a critical mistake.
“I know,” she continued, “that you recognized your own magic the moment you saw it. I know that you know that to be true, whether it’s possible or not. You made that animation,” she accused him, and he flinched. “Your methodology is the only thing up for debate. So trying to persuade me not to ask you how or why is never going to work.”
They were facing each other head-on, his arms folded over his chest, hers combatively on her hips. There they were, a portrait of conflict. For all her usual rules, for all her better judgment, she had still managed to walk into a trap.
Dalton would not like this, the sudden abandonment of subtlety simply because she’d gotten frustrated, lost her patience, spelled things out. It was close to a demand, which wasn’t sexy, and certainly wasn’t seductive. This was as domestic a disagreement as anything Parisa had ever allowed. You’re wrong, no I’m right. Amateur hour. Why had she even bothered with any of this? Two years in one place was two years too many. That, or as she suspected, the library was draining something from her. In this case, her better judgment. She couldn’t help feeling her thoughts had begun to chase themselves in circles, overworking until all that remained was nonsense and rot.
She was still in the process of tacitly sulking when Dalton’s hand snaked out to her waist, his palm brushing over her hip. “Let’s not fight,” he said. Which was terrible in its way, because he acknowledged they were fighting and evidently did not mind.
Intimacy. Disgusting. It was invasive and repellent, which Parisa shoved aside to avoid worsening things, or deepening them. “What do you propose instead?”
“I’ve missed you.” He leaned in, skating his lips along the side of her neck in a way that might make a softer woman sigh. “You’ve been very intent on destruction these days.”
“Not destruction.” She didn’t want to destroy the archives. Just to understand them. Though if they were revealed to be completely repugnant in any way, then yes, fine. She could burn that bridge when she got to it. “Though I suppose it has left a bit of tension in my back,” she mused, glancing up at him through her lashes.
“Let me fix that for you” was Dalton’s suggestion. Things progressed and she had enjoyed their usual talent for escalation. Slipping into his thoughts was no trouble from there, almost the work of an open invitation. Fairly simple, all things considered.
Hm.
Too simple, perhaps?
There it was again, the bombardment of thought. Parisa was unaccustomed to fighting with her lovers, true, but in retrospect, something seemed to have disrupted the usual sequence. It was one thing for Dalton to back down from a fight, but quite another to have left his mind so open. It was a careless, untroubled slip of routine that now seemed out of place against the backdrop of Dalton’s faultless control. Because after all, she knew him. For another man, the error of leaving the front door unlocked was commonplace and occasionally expected. Dalton Ellery was an ordinary man in many ways, but not this.
Suddenly Parisa was sure, painfully certain. There was no chance her access to his head on this specific night had been an accident—or worse, something romantic, some rose-tinted trick of the light as she might have otherwise believed it to be.
Something was wrong.
Convincing Dalton to do something he usually wanted to do with her was no noteworthy feat on its face, but a door left ajar on the same occasion? That could only mean the presence of an intruder come and gone, the imprint of an idea left behind like fingerprints in their wake.
The sudden sense of vulnerability abruptly woke her from a trance. Hypothetically, of course, not actually—because in actuality, she was still inside Dalton’s subconscious, visiting with the fragment of his other self.
Parisa looked again at the image of younger Dalton, surveying the walls of his mental fortress, and wondered how she had not thought about this before. Dalton usually was careful around her, so what was the explanation for any of this?
“Do you see what he does?” she asked his younger self, the animation. “Your host. Do you keep track of him?”
“I know what he does.” His younger self was irked, borderline infantile. “He reads. And reads and reads and reads and reads and—”
“Right.” Well, fuck. She must have missed something, then, and the more she considered what it might have been, the more concerned she got. “I’ve got to go.”
“Wait.” Dalton’s fragment flickered again, reappearing next to her. “Are you coming back? I told you, there’s someone watching me.”
“I’m sure he’s watching you all the time,” she said, only half listening. After all, Atlas seemed to always know when she’d been in Dalton’s head too long. Come to think of it, why hadn’t he pulled her out already? Curiouser and curiouser once again, only more annoying and worse. “I just have to do someth—”
“Wait.” Dalton’s face was suddenly close to hers when he stopped her again, closing his fingers insistently around her wrist. “Parisa.”
She felt a shiver that she hadn’t anticipated at his proximity. Like the real Dalton—or whatever one could call the version of him that she currently suspected of having been tampered with—this Dalton had a beautiful simplicity to his construction. Clean lines, hard angles. Parisa, who was herself a work of art, appreciated the sophistication of his minimalism. His proximity was powerful, enlivening.
“You know, don’t you?” he said in a low voice. “Why you keep coming back.”
An involuntary shudder climbed the notches of her spine. “Of course,” she breezily assured him. “I love a good mystery.”
“That’s not what this is.” His hand loosened around her wrist, becoming tender. “You know me. You recognize me.”
Of course she recognized him, she had another version of him accessible to her whenever she liked—this, or something equally coy and weightless, was what she meant to reply. An answer unaffected by him or his closeness lingered on her tongue, waiting, though she knew what he meant. That something in him was not only recognizable, but shared. Something about him called to her.
She said nothing. His eyes were liquid with something, dark pools of suggestion that should have had no effect on her. She knew how chemistry worked far too well to let herself be swayed by biological pinpricks of desire. She had slept with him tonight already, would sleep with him again, probably many more times without much effort.
And yet when he leaned closer, she couldn’t quite summon a reason to pull away.
“You’re not real,” she commented. Even now, he was too false to be mistaken for corporeal; too unformed to be the distraction he so strangely was. He was at best an idea, or a question. It was like having a sexual attraction to a flavor or a state of mind.
“Aren’t I real enough?” She could feel his smirk against her mouth. “I’m real for you. I’m undeniable to you in at least one sense.”
“Which is?” It suddenly felt unwise to exhale.
He seemed to know it. There was trouble alighting on his lips.
“I’m what you’ve been waiting for,” he said.
Parisa woke up with a gasp, tearing free from his astral hold to find herself beside his sleeping form. In a flash, the gloom of the castle tower became the dark of the Society manor house, one abyss traded for another. She took a moment to place herself, mouth dry and thoughts disoriented. The familiarity of Dalton’s sheets gradually drew her back, as did the house’s sentience stirring around her.
After a moment she turned her head, contemplating Dalton in his sleep. He was twitching a little. Presumably she had felt like a bad dream, which she tried not to feel too guilty about. After all, she had other things to do.
She gathered her clothes, dressing quickly in the dark, and padded across the gallery to their residences in the west wing. The rooms were empty, which was disconcerting. She placed her hand on the wall and shook her head with sudden fury, forcing her scattered thoughts to reconfigure themselves before she turned angrily to the stairs.
She hadn’t the faintest idea where Tristan and Nico were, but the moment she sensed Callum and Reina sitting together in the painted room, Parisa understood exactly what must have transpired. At this time of night it was too odd a pairing, the confluence of two strange bedfellows who ought to have killed each other rather than share a proverbial (and certainly not literal) bed—unless something else was at stake. Reina had always had a strange obsession with Dalton, and surely Callum would know how to capitalize on an opportunity, however pointless it was.
Parisa had known she was looking for an intruder. She’d forgotten that she already knew exactly where to find one.
“How’d it go?” asked Callum, toasting her with a glass.
Parisa remembered for a moment with a sudden, sharp sensation of unfettered rage that she probably should have killed Callum. Months ago, last year, yesterday. Never mind about not having a reason to; never mind that he was nothing, hardly even worth it. It turned out that the reason was that she simply did not like him, and that was reason enough for her.
Callum could clearly feel her resentment. He smiled, taking a sip from his wine, a Bordeaux that caught the light insidiously. “I do hope the good Mr. Ellery was at least as attentive as normal,” he assured her. “In the end it wasn’t as if it was something he didn’t want to do, anyway.”
“That couldn’t have been easy,” Parisa said through gritted teeth. Dalton was a lot of things, but easily influenced was never one of them. Even for her, the effort to persuade him of anything was a strain.
