“Are you saying that the gates are alive and thinking on their own?” Naomi asked. The tremor in her voice was almost like fear.
“No. I’m also not saying they aren’t, but as biological systems go, this is really pretty simple.” She paused. “I was trying to be reassuring.”
“Not sure it worked,” Jim said.
“Didn’t,” Naomi agreed. “Really didn’t.”
Elvi shut off the wall screen and used a handhold to turn toward them. “I’m sorry. I’ve been deep in this for so long, I get happy when I find anything that isn’t overwhelmingly complicated. I have a friend from my postdoc who spent five years modeling protein cascades in trout livers. I’m supposed to do that depth of analytic work in half an hour five times a day. It’s been inhumane.”
“I’ve been running a guerrilla government with shitty communications, thirteen hundred different isolated systems, and literally billions of people who think whatever they’re looking at is the most important thing there is,” Naomi said. “I know how you feel.”
“Let me try again,” Elvi said. “There’s good news. Ever since the rings began radiating like this, there hasn’t been an event in any system. No loss of consciousness. No change in any basic physical constants or the laws of physics. No more San Estebans with massive numbers of people dying with no warning or defense.”
“Not sure that makes sense, Doc,” Amos said. “They weren’t able to stop it.”
“They?” Naomi asked.
Amos gestured at the dead wall screen as if it would show what he’d meant to say. “The ones that made all this. They got killed. They didn’t have a way to stop it once it started. They shut down the gates to try and quarantine themselves. Nothing stopped the attacks.”
“Not for them, no,” Elvi agreed. “Which makes this very interesting. And there is another factor. The shared consciousness thing? One effect was that people came away with impressions from lives that weren’t their own. Some episodic memories. Some procedural. I’m sure the data Colonel Tanaka’s collecting will fuel a billion doctoral theses on holographic memory-encoding paradigms, but one of the things that keeps coming up was an awareness of a man who was present but wasn’t there. More than two percent of the people who experienced the event talked about him. And he’s in my dataset too. Cara’s seen him. The other one.”
They all turned to the girl. For a moment, she seemed smaller, more vulnerable. Like the girl she’d once been. Elvi expected her to speak, but Amos was the one to answer.
“Duarte. You think it’s Duarte.”
Fayez shrugged. “He was massively altered with protomoleculebased technologies. He popped himself out of a coma and went missing. And now this? Yeah, it’s our best guess.”
“So when he went missing, he vaporized? He’s a protomolecule ghost now?” Amos said. “Haunting the network?”
Jim looked ill, and Naomi put her hand on his elbow, squeezing lightly. Cara looked over to Amos, and Elvi couldn’t tell if the girl was uncomfortable that he was there or if she was looking to him for protection.
“I have no idea what happened to him, physically. But it is possible,” Elvi said, “that he’s been using the work we’re doing here to . . . piggyback. That he’s aware of the things Cara and Amos are aware of. That he’s finding some separate application for it.”
“That he hauled himself up out of a coma more powerful than before,” Jim said.
“It’s a theory,” Elvi said.
“What do we do if you’re right?” Jim asked.
Elvi steeled herself. “I think we should try a dual dive. Put Amos and Cara in separate sensor arrays, bring out the catalyst, send them both into the library together. Up to now, Amos’ experience has been mediated by their connection. If Cara and Amos are together, it could very plausibly give them more control than Cara’s had going by herself.”
“Control’s good,” Amos said. “What do we do once we have control?”
“We try to talk to him.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Tanaka
Tanaka knew as soon as they made the transit that the trail had gone cold, but it took time to confirm it.
Gewitter Base was Laconia’s largest military installation in the Bara Gaon system. Made up of three rotating rings spinning around a central zero-g dry dock, it housed nearly seven thousand permanent officers and personnel. Two Storm-class destroyers remained on constant combat patrol around the station, monitoring all traffic through Bara Gaon’s ring and tracking the commercial traffic moving through the system.