Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

grow old.’ Easy
enough to say, when you’re twenty-two and don’t
believe that ageing or death have any personal application in the
first place. But to my surprise, Mer-rial laughed.
    ‘This one isn’t genetic, any more than the
other,’ she said. ‘It’s – ’
    ‘Infectious,’ said Fergal. ‘Or is it
contagious? I can never remember.’
    ‘Whatever,’ said Menial. ‘It’s, urn,
sexually transmitted.’
    She sounded almost embarrassed.
     
    Fergal, it seemed, was still welcome in The Carcon-ade, and
even Druin, when he passed him at the bar, was affable towards
him. I guessed, myself, aftermy third litre and sixth whisky,
that the tinker Internationalist was anxious to show us his
friendly side. I remained unpersuaded by it, but decided to make
the most of it while it lasted. I had still not assimilated the
news that I could expect to live longer than I’d ever
expected, and it would take me long enough to do it.
    ‘So what,’ I asked him, at a corner table in the
security of the raucous din around us, ‘was that thing
Menial found? The AI?’
    ‘It’s… a planner,’ he said. ‘A
mind that can coordinate an entire economy. Something we’re
going to need, some day.’
    ‘After your glorious revolution?’
    ‘Yes, and maybe before. It’s a revolutionary
itself.’
    ‘So what are you going to do with it?’ I
asked.
    Fergal might have been, as Jeanna had said, able to hold his
drink. He may well have not done or said anything without
calculating its effect on the vectors of his purposes. But
I’m sure it was a reckless impulse that made him say what
he said next.
    ‘It’s on the ship. Well, a copy of it,
anyway.’
    He was looking at me, not at Menial, as he spoke. He
didn’t see what I saw: the momentary flash of triumph and
delight on Menial’s face. That glimpse, as much as his
words, must have drained the colour from mine. And then – I
could see her dissembling – by the time Fergal turned to
her, she looked even more shocked than I felt.
    ‘Why the hell did you do that?’ she asked.
    Fergal leaned in and lowered his voice. ‘I learned a few
things from the AI,’ he said. ‘Its memories go right
up to a few days before the Deliverance. It knows nothing about
what happened but it does know that the Deliverer had control of
nuclear and other weapons in space. So the possibility that
– youknow, what we feared – was true is too strong to
ignore. But at this stage – hell, if the mission were
aborted, or if the ship were destroyed, God alone knows how long
it’d be before we’ll see another. There was only one
way to do it, and that was to make a copy and let it into the
ship’s own seer-stone control systems. Out of sheer
self-preservation, the copy would be forced to take the kind of
fast-reacting control over the ship’s drive that would let
it dodge through any debris that’s still there.’
    ‘Would that work?’ I asked Menial, who was staring
at Fergal as though seeing past him.
    ‘Oh, aye,’ she said, without looking around,
‘we couldn’t do that ourselves, but an AI would be in
with a chance, I reckon. But what happens once it’s
up?’
    Fergal grinned. ‘It just sits in the centre of a new
communications web, that’s all. A useful thing to
have.’
    ‘Bloody dangerous, you mean!’ I said.
    ‘Don’t worry,’ said Fergal, realising
he’d gone too far. ‘It’s not going to interfere
with the satellite. It’ll just… gather information.
For the future.’
    ‘Oh God!’ Menial exclaimed. ‘You’re
out of your fucking mind! That thing is a deil! It’ll have
the world in a new Possession before you know it!’
    ‘It’ll be our Possession,’ Fergal said.
    Tours, you mean!’
    Fergal stretched out his legs.
    ‘And what would be wrong with that?’
    He looked at our appalled faces and burst out laughing.
    ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he said.
‘There’s no way it can do anything without having
people to work with, and there are no such people yet.’ He
placed athumb on Menial’s chin for a moment ‘As you
fine well know.’
    She smacked his hand away, none too gently.
    ‘That was not funny,’ she said. She got up with
unsteady dignity. ‘I’m going for a piss.’
    Fergal watched me watching her thread her way through the
throng. If he detected the tumult in my thoughts he gave no
sign.
    ‘No chance of persuading you, Clovis?’
    ‘Not a chance in hell,’ I said, still