Moving cautiously toward him, Joanna said, “Hector’s dead? What happened to him?”
“The . . . the Thing.”
“Thing?”
“It kill him.” His face screwed into a scowl, and his eyes squeezed shut, and he trembled as if words were coins in a stubborn purse and he were trying hard to shake them loose. “Lake thing.”
As Joanna came face-to-face with Jimmy, his eyes opened, and his deep sockets were cups of tears. People had always said that Jimmy felt nothing that other people felt, nothing except perhaps hunger and weariness and physical pain. So much for both common wisdom and the arrogance of the medical elites.
She put a hand to his tortured face. “Lake thing?”
“It hid the lake.”
“Hides in the lake?”
“Yes.”
Ganesh Patel seemed to materialize beside them. He’d diagnosed Jimmy by his appearance. “Treacher Collins syndrome with additional birth defects.”
“So they say,” Joanna confirmed. “He’s been . . . been my friend since childhood.”
Jimmy’s tears spilled through the fingers with which Joanna stroked his cheek.
“Jimmy, my friend, our friend,” Ganesh said, his voice soft, musical, compelling. “What do you know about the thing in the lake?”
“It hid the lake. It uses.”
Joanna said, “Through Jimmy, it told me that it’s forbidden to control creatures of high intellect, but it has contempt for him and considers him fair game.”
“It’s spoken to you through him?”
“Yes. Earlier today. And often when I was a child. Back then, I thought it was . . . just Jimmy, my secret friend.”
“Forbidden by whom?”
Joanna recalled the picnic in the orchard all those years ago, just her and Jimmy, when he’d said, If I had found someone like you sooner, Jojo, I might have begun the awakening. Now, remembering, she said, “Forbidden by the prince.”
“Prince,” said Jimmy Two Eyes.
Ganesh sensed the Jungian pattern coming to fulfillment.
The room could comfortably hold thirty or more in a cocktail party, but it felt crowded now as seven people gathered close around Jimmy Alvarez with the sense, the urgent expectation, that this extraordinary individual and this woman who had been secret friends in childhood might at this penultimate moment produce the insight that would save them all.
As Joanna Chase met Jimmy’s stare, of necessity shifting her focus from one of his offset eyes to the other, she dredged from memory a moment during a picnic in the orchard, when she was eight years old. She spoke of a game they had played, a story they had made up together. About a prince and his retinue who had been under a spell for a long time, awaiting an awakening. But it really wasn’t a game. Ganesh realized that the Other, through Jimmy, must have been speaking metaphorically, allegorically. The prince might well be the head of an expedition traveling a thousand light-years or more in suspended-animation pods. In this allegory, only Jimmy—only the Other—could wake members of the expedition, the mission. Did that make the Other a king if it had power over a prince? No. So what was it? What was it if not a king, the father of the prince?
Jimmy and Joanna spoke simultaneously, “Machine.”
Ganesh thrust his phone at her as she spoke.
She said, “I remember now. That day in the orchard, the Other, speaking through Jimmy, said it was a machine. I told Jimmy he was being silly. We’d just been eating cookies and cupcakes that I’d brought. He had frosting on his chin. Machines don’t eat cupcakes.”
“An AI,” Ganesh said. “A thinking machine. The commander of the ship, essentially the ship itself, is an immortal AI.”
“Gone to God,” Jimmy said.
Ganesh put a hand on his shoulder. “What do you mean?”
“Sleeping prince.”
“Dead? How do you know?”
“I saw when.”
“When what?”
Jimmy closed his eyes tight and strained to find the words. “When Thing . . . it make me.”
“Make you?”
“Hurt Father.”
“Oh, dear Jesus,” Joanna said.
“It hurt prince too.”
“When?” Ganesh asked.
“Same when hurt Father.”
“Today?”
“Yes.”
“All of them? All of them who were in a spell?”
Jimmy opened only his wild, dark eye. “Yes. I saw all the princes killed under lake.”
If the AI had exterminated the expeditionary force, it must have decided that contact with humanity would be a grave error. It had pitched off the crumbling edge of sanity, plunged down a well of madness, that particular genocidal madness into which Asher Optime’s misanthropic ideology had led it. Its threats to extinguish humanity had progressed to imminent holocaust.