The transit module had come to rest in the first ring.
‘Tour’s over,’ Keldra spat as she unclipped herself. ‘You know where your cabin is.’ She pushed Jonas out of the module and then closed its doors and departed for the second ring.
A few moments later, as he closed the door of his cabin, he felt the gentle drifting sensation of the ship rotating to reposition its sail. Keldra had changed course.
Jonas sat at the desk in his cabin and pushed the lid of the useless terminal down until it was flush with the desktop. He flexed his fingers like a pianist about to play. His hands were steady, but he could feel the nervousness in his chest. It was just possible that what he was about to do would trigger Keldra’s implant and kill him.
‘Open virtual office,’ he said.
Nothing happened.
It had been too much to hope that Olzan had left his implant on the default settings. Most administrators with implants set the commands to something more personal. There was no point in making them obscure – no one could use the implant but the person in whose brain it was implanted – but if Olzan had set the command to something idiosyncratic then Jonas might never be able to guess it.
‘Access admin functions,’ he said. That had been his command when he had been Gabriel’s administrator back on Oberon. Still nothing. ‘Virtual office, open. Open office. Open desktop. Admin functions. Admin office.’
It took Jonas a few minutes to get through all the command combinations he could think of. If Keldra had a bug in his quarters then she’d know what he was trying to do, but he didn’t think she did: implanting him had been a spur-of-the-moment decision, and since then he’d been either in his quarters or with her the whole time, so there was no time in which she could have planted anything.
No luck with any phrase that he tried. If the trigger was an obscure voice command then he might never find it, but it was possible that it was something non-verbal.
He clapped his hands together and then pulled them apart, as if conjuring the virtual desktop out of the air. Nothing. He tried clapping twice in quick succession. Three times. Four, five, six. Any more than that and it felt too unwieldy to be convenient. He didn’t think Olzan would have wanted to start applauding the air whenever he wanted to work.
Perhaps clicking his fingers would be more Olzan’s style. He tried once. Twice. Three times—
Icons exploded into the air in front of him, whirling around for a moment as they tried to anchor themselves in space, before settling onto the surface of the desk like ghostly ornaments. In the centre of the desk was a rectangular pad with the implant’s general status report.
2510-AUG-14
Last login: 2503-FEB-03
Warning: Possible implant damage. Diagnostic needed.
0 unread messages.
Jonas waved his hand through the icon representing the implant’s saved memories. A list of memories scrolled onto the middle of the desk, each identified by a time/location stamp. There were a few dozen, covering the years from 2498 to 2503.
Jonas scanned down the list and found Olzan’s memory of giving Keldra the tour. It was dated 2502-NOV-01. There were half a dozen memories after that point, the last one recorded on the same date as Olzan’s last login to the virtual office. If there was something he could use against Keldra, it would most likely be in one of those later memories, recorded while she had been on board.
The next memory after Keldra’s tour had a timestamp of 2502-DEC-14. Jonas attempted to play it.
Implant malfunction. Playback unavailable.
Of course. That would have been too easy. He guessed the implant malfunction was deliberate hacking on Keldra’s part. Implants were Earth-tech, their workings only partially understood. It might be that disabling the memory playback was easier than deleting the stored memories themselves.
He tried a few other memories. All the memories after Keldra’s tour were similarly locked.
He tried the memory of Keldra’s tour. He knew the implant could play that one…
Implant malfunction. Playback unavailable.
Jonas smiled. It seemed that Keldra’s hacking was imperfect. If the right trigger phrase had got around the block for that memory, then it was possible that different triggers – phrases, images, or sensations – would allow him to play back other memories.
He had to hope there was something in one of those memories that would help him to manipulate Keldra. The implant meant that he couldn’t overpower her, or slip away into a city; but if he played her right, she would deactivate the implant and let him go.
Finding the triggers for the other recordings would take time, if it was possible at all, but he had the entire journey to Columbia – or wherever the Remembrance was headed now – in order to try.
The woman stood close, her face filling the recording servitor’s view. She pushed a strand of long black hair from her face and smiled, nervously, as if not quite comfortable with recording a message through an expressionless servitor.
Jonas looked out through the servitor’s eyes. He felt a ghostly sense of dissociation from inhabiting the servitor’s body, but he retained his sense of identity: the servitor had no identity of its own to override his. This was a memory that Olzan had received as a message, rather than one he had recorded himself.
He had been thinking of Gabriel, he realized. That was what must have triggered the memory. He and Gabriel had used servitors to record messages for one another when they had been apart. As well as being able to record all five senses, a servitor recording had the advantage that it didn’t leave a trace on the city datanet: no one could read it without physical access to the servitor on whose implant it was recorded; the perfect means to carry on a clandestine love affair.
Jonas had treasured the messages Gabriel had sent him over the few years they had known one another. Awkward and endearing, gradually becoming more intimate as their professional relationship changed into friendship and then something more. He had intended to keep them after he’d had his admin implant removed in order to pass as a true-born, but the black market surgeon he’d used had damaged it beyond repair. Now all he had were his natural memories of Gabriel, and those were too painful for him to think of often.
‘Olzan, I’ve got news,’ the woman said. She had a mellifluous Belt Three true-born accent, the type of voice that Jonas had spent the last six years affecting. ‘I talked to father again, about us. He’s not angry any more. He says he would have liked me to marry a true-born, but he wants me to be happy as well. He’s…’ She looked away for a moment. ‘He’s not a bad person, Olzan. He just wants what’s best for the family. Next time you’re here, you should talk to him some more.’ The woman paused, as if waiting for Olzan to reply, but of course, the servitor said nothing. ‘Listen, he says a new job has come up,’ she continued. ‘Something a bit different from what you normally do, something important. I don’t know what it is. He’ll send the details. But he said that, if you do it, he’ll pay for the treatment, so we can get married.’ She moved closer, put a hand on the servitor’s shoulder. Jonas found its lack of response unnerving. ‘You’ll be part of the family, Olzan. We can have children, and they’ll be true-borns. Just one more job and we can be together.’
She leaned in and kissed the servitor, a long, slow kiss, and the message ended, leaving Jonas alone in his dark cabin.