Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,65

no,” Chan was muttering, the words seeming to resonate in some back corner of my mind.

“Okay. So you pump a few dozen test subjects full of Bliss, they get erased, and you put them on a rocket to the sun? I don’t get it,” I said. “How does that solve the problem?”

Ingles sighed. Moved away from the bar at last, taking a few staggering steps to the couch where he dropped down without a hint of grace. “We didn’t have a couple dozen test subjects,” he said. “We had seven.”

Once again, the images from the derelict ship flashed through my head. Rows upon rows of dead. The video of the other me popping cores. The ambulatory corpse. “No,” I said. “There were thirty people on that shuttle. I was there.” Not quite accurate, but Ingles knew what I meant.

“Yeah,” Ingles agreed. His bravado dropped and he seemed to be deflating in front of my eyes, folding in on himself. The pistol was held loosely now, almost forgotten. “But we only introduced Bliss into seven of them. The rest…” He trailed off. Shrugged. “I guess you could say they got infected.”

“What?” I exclaimed.

“We’re so fucked,” Chan’s voice sounded in my head.

“The nanites were always designed to be self-replicating,” Ingles went on. “No sense in having a happy customer having to come in for another treatment when we could just reauthorize the current one over the Net. They were not designed to be able to spread from one person to another. But the AI was smarter than us.” His gaze dropped to the pistol in his hand. He contemplated it for a long moment, before continuing. “It evolved. All in accordance with its primary mission, of course.”

“Why didn’t you push the fucking self-destruct?” I snarled.

“We tried. But the AI disabled that as well. It realized it couldn’t make us happy if we could push a button and kill it. All well within its programmed parameters.”

“Okay.” I sighed. “So, you loaded the infected—taking proper measures to prevent further infection, I hope—onto a shuttle and sent it off to the sun. Great. From what we got from my branch, you seemed pretty fucking successful. Why bother trying to erase us?”

Ingles laughed. Or maybe he sobbed. It was hard to tell. “You’re here, aren’t you? You managed to track us down. That means one of you had to get a message out. Had to set something up so that your new branch would be able to pick up the trail. Only one way to make sure that didn’t happen.”

“Wipe us out of fucking existence?” I growled. My gun hand seemed to come up of its own accord.

“Yes,” Ingles replied.

“Then why in the hell are you being so casual about all this? Why are you telling me anything?” I demanded.

“Because none of it matters anymore.” He looked up, not at me, but toward a blank wall of his home. “Activate wallscreen,” he said. The flat white shimmered to life, and a single image filled the screen. I recognized it. I should. It was from my viewpoint. Or rather, my branch’s viewpoint. It showed the door to the derelict shuttle from right before the other me had started to cut his way in. It showed the three neat holes bored through the metal that I’d been unable to explain.

“We failed,” Ingles said. “The nanobot AI escaped the shuttle.” He waved one hand vaguely toward the ceiling, though I knew his gesture was meant to go higher, to space itself. “It’s out there, somewhere.” He gave me a death’s-head grin.

The speakers built in to the home crackled to life and Chan’s voice—what I thought of as Chan’s real voice, even though I knew it wasn’t what her current coil sounded like—filled the room. “How long? How long until this… this nano-swarm makes its way to another ship, or a station? Or a fucking moon?”

The laugh that burst from Ingles had no humor in it. It sounded more like a sob. “I don’t know. Months? Years? We don’t even know how the bots are propelling themselves, much less how fast they can accelerate. Don’t you get it? We lost control of them. They’re changing, evolving, and they’re not doing it according to any plan of ours.” He shook his head. “If they make it to a population center, and eventually they will, then we’re done. Bliss may be a bunch of fucking robots,” he slurred, “but it’s damn smart. And I can guarantee you that if Genetechnic found a