The Machine's Child (Company) Read online

  The Machine’s Child

  TOR BOOKS BY KAGE BAKER

  The Anvil of the World

  The Graveyard Game

  In the Garden of Iden

  Mendoza in Hollywood

  The Life of the World to Come

  The Children of the Company

  The Machine’s Child

  The Machine’s Child

  ________________

  Kage Baker

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  NEW YORK

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

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  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are

  either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  THE MACHINE’S CHILD

  Copyright © 2006 by Kage Baker

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Edited by David G. Hartwell

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Baker, Kage.

  The machine’s child / Kage Baker.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-765-31551-9

  ISBN-10: 0-765-31551-3 (acid-free paper)

  1. Dr. Zeus Incorporated (Imaginary organization)—Fiction. 2. Immortalism—Fiction. 3. Cyborgs—

  Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.A4313M33 2006

  813’.54—dc22

  2006005723

  First Edition: September 2006

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cui hunc librum dedicem?

  Katiae, cauponae ad Viridem Virum.

  Mater actoribus bonam cerevisiam aequo pretio praebet.

  The Machine’s Child

  PROLOGUE:

  ONE EVENING IN 2302 AD,

  THIRTY MILES OFF THE

  GALAPAGOS

  There was a spark of light on the wide sea, no other visible in miles of rolling darkness. It wasn’t a fixed point. Sometimes it seemed to wink out, sometimes to wander along the line of the black horizon, only to double back on itself in an aimless sort of way.

  Anyone crossing the surging distance toward it would have seen gradually the pale outline of a ship, the spark resolving into a window in her aft cabin. Her running lights were extinguished. She had no fear of encounters on that empty sea where she stood on and off, nor any desire to let passersby know she was there.

  Closer to, now, and the observer would have found her size staggering. Four great masts, a sequoia forest of reefed sail, her shrouds and spars quartering the night sky like Mercator lines. White and sleek as a sleeping seabird, all smooth modern form; but through that yellow window, a glimpse of an older style. Dark wood, rich paneling, red and blue and gold. The interior seemed to have been designed by someone very fond of pirate films. Much brass and elaborate carving, to the point where taste was definitely in question. The cabin’s centerpiece was its vast bed.

  What the observer saw next would depend on who, or what, the observer was.

  A human observer—though it is unlikely a mere human could swoop in with such omniscience—would see a single man lying in the exact center of the red-and-gold pirate bed.

  The man was sleeping, sprawled in exhaustion. There was a certain tension in his long body that failed to relax even so, and his eyes darted behind his eyelids in uneasy dreams. He had not slept well since the night when Mars Two had died, with all its citizens, as the result of his error in judgment. His name, by the way, was Alec Checkerfield, and he was the seventh earl of Finsbury.

  He was a lanky fellow, quite tall but built solidly. He wore pajamas violently patterned with palm trees and vahines, not at all the kind of thing you’d expect a hunted man to wear. He had a long broken nose, and high broad cheekbones. When he rolled over, he exposed something strange twining up the back of his neck. It looked like a silver tattoo, in a pattern of vaguely Celtic-knot complexity.

  It was not a tattoo, however. It was a subcutaneous wire hooking Alec up to the artificial intelligence sailing his ship, for Alec was a cyborg. Not at all some human-machine hybrid with a whirring ocular implant and a toneless voice, oh dear no; that sort of fashion went out generations before Alec was born. In any case, being a peer, he could afford the most elegantly understated cybernetic implants.

  So much for what the hypothetical human observer would notice.

  It would be rather more likely that a surveillance drone would see all this, zooming in across such distance, noting such detail. And a surveillance drone, having the ability to tune in to the ship’s system, its cameras and indeed to Alec’s own cyborged brain, would see a great deal more.

  It would see, for example, two other men lying in the bed, at extreme arm’s length from Alec on either side, who appeared to be his nearly identical brothers.

  The virtual man who slept, or tried to sleep, on the left, looked slightly older than the other two. He lay stretched on his side, one hand under his pillow as though groping after something he’d hidden there. He wore only ivory-colored drawers of an antiquated design. His name was, or had been, Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax.

  The virtual man on the right was not asleep at all. He lay on his back like an effigy on a tomb, clad in a flowing white shirt of even more antique design, his arms crossed on his chest. He gazed with an expression of despair on the gimbal lamp, which rocked gently as the ship crested each rolling swell, and which had dimmed itself to the comforting glow of a nursery light. He wasn’t comforted. His lips moved for a while in silent prayer. Tears welled in his eyes.

  He could hardly be blamed. He found his present situation bizarre and intolerable, as you might if you, too, were Nicholas Harpole, burned as a heretic in 1555 but now inexplicably alive and drifting in a twenty-fourth-century ship, with a pair of your clones.

  He looked away from the lamp and up to the single red eye of a surveillance camera. After a long moment he ventured to say:

  “Spirit, dost thou watch in the night?”

  Instantly awake, the virtual man on the left rolled over and sat bolt upright, taking aim with the very real pistol he’d fetched from under his pillow. Its muzzle was a bare two inches from the face of Nicholas on the right, who recoiled from it. Alec, between them, opened startled eyes but lay motionless, staring at the pistol in confusion.

  Any hypothetical human viewer would be confused, too. Without a way to tap into Alec’s brain, he or she would have seen only the man in the bed’s center sitting up, pointing a gun at empty space to his right. And the cold glare and military bearing of the man were not those of anyone who would ever wear vahine-patterned pajamas by choice. This was because virtual Edward had just seized control of Alec’s real body.

  Edward! Belay that! said a gruff male voice, from a speaker concealed within a carving of a Spanish galleon. It was the voice of the artificial intelligence that ran the shi
p, and not—as one might be forgiven for supposing—a pirate hiding behind the panel.

  Edward exhaled, shaking, but did not lift the pistol.

  “Ghost or no ghost,” he said through his teeth, “if you start that damned praying again, I swear I shall kill you.”

  “Do it, Homicide,” said Nicholas, “an thou darest!”

  Edward regarded Nicholas, moving the pistol away only regretfully. During his life, which had ended abruptly in 1863, he had been what was known at the time as a Political; which meant he had done things for Queen Victoria’s government that would have horrified that good lady, had her cabinet ministers ever seen fit to tell her about them.

  Alec began to hyperventilate. He wasn’t a particularly oversensitive person, but his nerves had been rather strained lately.

  “Are you nuts?” he yelled. “That’s a disrupter pistol! In bed? You want to burn a hole through a bulkhead? How’d you get it out of the locker, anyway?”

  D’you really reckon he’d tell you, Alec?

  “You don’t know either, do you, machine?” said Edward with a sneer. “When your little pivot-lenses aren’t turned on the locker, you can’t see it. And neither one of you noticed,” he added, turning to Alec and Nicholas.

  Well, now, Mr. Bell-Fairfax, sir, thank you for telling me, to be sure. It’ll be a cold day in Hell afore I takes an eye off you again. Put that bloody pistol away.

  Sullenly Edward set it on the bedside table. “I may as well, after all,” he said. “Since I’ve precious little chance of sending Nicholas to Heaven, where he belongs, instead of this wretchedly crowded bed. But you’re a fool to sleep without a weapon in reach, Alec, you really are.”

  “Sleep? How am I ever going to get any sleep?” said Alec, flailing with his fists. “We’ve got work to do tomorrow! How are we going to break into Options Research if you two fight all the time?”

  Stand to! You calm down, now, matey, old Captain Morgan’ll take the helm. That goes for you too, Mr. Bell-Fairfax, yer worship.

  Muttering, Edward lay down and punched his virtual pillow savagely.

  A word or two of explanation might be helpful at this point. Neither Edward nor Nicholas were ghosts, technically; but during their respective lifetimes each had carried in his brain, quite unknown to himself, a sort of black box. This device recorded in electromagnetic analogue every sensation, thought, and emotion experienced from the moment of its installation (immediately after birth) to the moment of death.

  These recordings were made because neither Edward nor Nicholas were human, technically. They were Recombinants, as Alec was, and they had been made (very, very illegally) by an all-powerful cabal of scientists and investors known collectively as Dr. Zeus Incorporated, or more usually just the Company, which also possessed the secret of time travel, among other things.

  For reasons that will not be gone into immediately but involved ensuring its own existence, the Company had needed a Recombinant. A prototype was designed, DNA engineered to produce it, and three test embryos cloned from one blastocyst. They were then scattered across time, implanted in human mothers by hard-working immortal Company operatives. Being, after all, test runs, the prototypes were not made immortal.

  Nicholas and Edward, completely unaware of their destinies, nevertheless fulfilled them and died untimely if necessary deaths, whereupon the recorded sum of their lives went into their Company project files. Alec, however, had not died.

  Like his—clones? brothers? other selves?—Alec had certain abilities completely unguessed-at by his shadowy creators. Unlike them, he was born into an era of advanced technology. When, as a child, he had been given a cybernetic companion, he had not only been able to modify it to suit his tastes, he removed the safeguard that prevented it from breaking any laws in the fulfillment of its primary directive, which was to protect and nurture him.

  The astute reader will have guessed that little Alec had liked pirate stories.

  Captain Morgan (as Alec had named his companion) persuaded adolescent Alec to have himself modified with implants, so that he could exist simultaneously in three-dimensional space and in cyberspace with the Captain.

  Being a sensible artificial intelligence, the Captain set about solving the mystery of Alec’s existence. Upon discovering that his fairly unhappy childhood could be laid directly at the door of Dr. Zeus Incorporated, Alec and the Captain embarked upon a campaign of revenge and exposure. Unaware they were being cleverly manipulated by the Company to accomplish its goals (I said it was all-powerful) they stole one of the Company’s time shuttles and had a number of adventures that ended more or less disastrously for Alec and a lot of other people, though not for the Company.

  With its purpose for Alec fulfilled, the Company relaxed, confident in the expectation of his disposal when the time shuttle exploded, as it was scheduled to do. This failed to happen, however, because:

  In the course of his adventures with the time shuttle, Alec blundered into a Company penal institution located deep in prehistory. There he encountered one of the Company’s cyborg slaves, the hapless Botanist Mendoza, an immortal marooned in the past for reasons which included her knowledge of the Company’s Recombinant project. She had discovered Project Adonai by sheerest chance, when she had the misfortune to encounter, fall in love with, and fail to prevent the untimely deaths of first Nicholas and then, three hundred years later, Edward.

  She was, moreover, a Crome generator, the only immortal with a bizarre condition cursing its possessors with apparent psychic ability. Consequently her emotional health was not quite what was desired in an immortal, which was another reason she’d been confined to the agricultural station.

  Upon meeting Alec, Mendoza slept with him, accepted his proposal of marriage, and passed on to him certain classified information to assist him in his goal of bringing down Dr. Zeus Incorporated. She also disconnected the explosive device on the shuttle that was intended to destroy Alec once his usefulness to the Company ended.

  When, after several tragic accidents, Alec managed to equip his very large yacht with a time transcendence drive so he could go back to rescue Mendoza, he discovered that Dr. Zeus Incorporated had got there first. The unfortunate lady had been arrested again, and consigned to some even more obscure prison. Plundering Company files in his furious attempts to discover where she had been taken, Alec inadvertently came across the Recombinant project data. Most unwisely, he downloaded the whole thing, learning thereby the extremely unsavory truth about his own existence and, moreover, receiving the entire contents of both Nicholas’s and Edward’s black boxes.

  Alec promptly had a nervous breakdown. Goodness, wouldn’t you, at this point? And, unable to assimilate Nicholas’s or Edward’s memories, Alec developed a disassociative personality disorder and gave them independent individual existences, complete with virtual physical bodies in cyberspace.

  At least, that was the only rational explanation for what happened.

  After attempting (and failing) to administer drugs to banish Alec’s unwelcome guests, the Captain decided to let them stay, since both Nicholas and Edward had strengths and skills that might prove useful to Alec.

  Got it? All clear so far?

  The Captain’s experiment was not proving an unqualified success, since the three Recombinant gentlemen discovered they couldn’t stand their own company, and struggled constantly for control of the one real body they shared. One thing upon which they did agree, however, was the urgent necessity of finding and rescuing Mendoza.

  To this end, they hunted down their guilty creators and extracted at gunpoint the name of the prison where Mendoza was now confined: a site known only as Options Research.

  Then they fled, away through time to an empty night ocean, where they were presently attempting to rest while the Captain devised a plan for Mendoza’s rescue.

  A soothing tone emanated from the speaker, double-pitched to Alec’s and Edward’s differing brainwave patterns. Alpha rhythms were induced. Both men relaxed instantl
y, unconscious in seconds. A human observer would have seen the bed’s single occupant watching the light once again, weariness and infinite regret in his eyes. This had become Nicholas Harpole’s habitual expression, and he was now solely in control of Alec’s body.

  From where it had watched in a corner a creature emerged, a nightmarish thing like a steel scorpion with a skeletal face. The human observer might be excused for starting, for this was no virtual creature; it was a quite solid servounit enabling the Captain to manipulate objects in real space. It extended a mechanical member and grasped the pistol, scuttling away with it to the weapons locker. Even Nicholas, who had begun to get used to its appearance, edged back when it passed him.

  Here, Nicholas, lad, said the Captain soothingly. What aileth thee? What can I fetch thee?

  “Hast thou no mortal form?” asked Nicholas, shivering.

  To be sure I have, lad. A tiny holoprojection cone emerged from the camera and seconds later a man appeared to stand beside the bed, big, black-bearded and villainous-looking, though his expression was kindly. Nicholas stared, fascinated even as he was repelled. He jumped when a hologram of a chair materialized behind the Captain, who sat down into it. “There now. Nothing to frighten thee.”

  “I charge thee, Spirit, tell me! Dost thou serve the devil?” Nicholas demanded.

  “No, sir, not I.”

  “Dost thou serve God, then?”

  “Well, no, sir, being what I am, which is to say no more than a device. I was made to serve Alec, sir, d’you see? Like a clock or a lute, to tell him the hour or cheer his heart. Or a dog, to guard him as he sleeps. Too low a creature to be damned or saved. Therefore, fear me not.”

  “How canst thou speak with a man’s voice?” asked Nicholas.