you and decided whether or not to let you in.”
“Tech ain’t got no eyes,” I said. Then I thought of the bolt gun, and how the bolts chased the thing they was aimed at. “Most tech doesn’t, anyway.”
“That’s true. But it wasn’t always a question of looking at your face. You see this?” Ursala held up her hand with all the fingers spread out wide. “The lines on your fingertips, they’re different from anyone else’s. So there might be a pad or strip somewhere on the tech that could take the imprint of your fingertips and check them against its memory to see if it knew you. If you matched, it would work for you. If you didn’t, it shut you out. The patterns of colour in your eyes could be used in the same way. They’re unique too.
“But the best method, and the one that became pretty much universal in the end, was what they called bio-sampling.”
“I don’t know what that is,” I said.
“It’s very hard to explain. Suppose I said that the tech tastes the sweat on your skin. And everyone tastes different.”
“Okay,” I said. I was thinking of Spinner’s sweat that day in the lookout when we kissed and when we tumbled. How it had made me feel to smell and taste her, and how different it was from any smelling or tasting the world had put my way before or since.
“It wasn’t really sweat that the tech was testing,” Ursala said. “It was something else that was even harder to fake. Something called DNA. It’s in every part of your body, invisible, and that includes the surface of your skin. The tech was so clever it could examine your DNA quicker than you could blink your eyes. And there was no arguing against what it decided. It knew exactly who you were. You were either on the nice list or the naughty list. And if you were on the wrong list then the very best that would happen to you was that the tech wouldn’t wake up. If you were unlucky, it would wake up and scream an alarm, or send a shock through you that would knock you out.”
She was in full flood, her eyes all shining as she talked, but when she stopped she lost the sense of where she was and sat still, staring at the table. I think the wine had something to do with it – and maybe the fear that had made her drink the wine in the first place. The fear that Catrin Vennastin might come against her in the dark.
I asked a question, aiming to start up that flood again. “But the first time you picked up that tech,” I said, “it wouldn’t know you. How could it? Ursala, I seen tech decide for itself to let someone use it, when they picked it up for the first time. It happened to my friend Haijon. I was there.”
Ursala give a shrug, like that wasn’t nothing, but her face was sad. “What you saw wasn’t what you thought you saw, Koli,” she said. “In the world that was lost, it was just a matter of following the instructions. You took the tech out of the box, powered it up and configured it. It woke up knowing there was a user nearby. All you had to do was introduce yourself.
“And after that… well, any authorised user can register someone else. You tell the tech to accept and log the next person who picks it up – to put them on the nice list – and then you hand it over.”
I was still struggling, but now I was trying not to believe what Ursala was telling me. It was too awful if it was true. If it was true, then nothing else was.
“But the Ramparts…” I said. Then I started again: “I didn’t see no…” Okay, that wouldn’t do it neither. “Nobody done any of that when we had our testing in the Count and Seal. The tech was just set there, on the table, and we choosed what to touch. There wasn’t anybody telling it who was who, or giving it orders. We would of seen. Everybody would of seen.”
Ursala smiled, kind of cold, like I was helping her argument – holding the plank so she could nail it in, as they say. “Yes. You would have seen. So all of that gets done earlier. By the time you come to the testing, Catrin Vennastin has already decided which way