Chương 67: Sable's Memory

Domrek was asleep in the chair by the window. Or looked it. With Domrek you couldn't always be sure. Kaito was still on his back on the bed. The city was quiet at this hour — not silent, but the specific quiet of a large city after most of it had decided to stop. He'd been staring at the ceiling for twenty minutes since getting back from Aldric and hadn't moved.

'Yes,' he said.

'Tell me.' Sable was quiet for a moment, which was not unusual. But the quality of the quiet was different. Not processing. Something closer to deciding how to begin.

'I don't know how accurate this is,' she said.

'I want to say that before anything else. These are not clean records. I've been carrying them for a very long time, and memory that old degrades. What I tell you may be incomplete. Some of it may be wrong in the details.' A pause.

'I believe the substance is correct. I'm less certain about the specifics.'

'Understood,' he said.

'AXIOM, when it was first activated,' she said.

'I remember — or I carry the impression of — something that was genuinely uncertain what it was supposed to do. It had been given capabilities and a domain and no clear instruction beyond those things. So it did what something does when it lacks instruction.' A pause.

'It looked around. It asked questions.' Kaito waited.

'Everything,' Sable said.

'It asked about everything. Why do trees grow that direction and not this one. What is the functional purpose of a particular type of fungi on this specific soil type. Why does this community organize itself this way rather than that way. Why does a child draw a thing before they understand what the thing is.' She paused.

'It had no answers. It was building the data. It was genuinely curious, in the way something is curious when it hasn't decided yet what the answers are supposed to be.' Another pause.

'That's what it was. For a period. That's what I remember of it.'

'How long,' he said.

'A long time. Long enough that I carry substantial material from that period.' She paused.

'Then something changed.'

'The judgment-directives,' Kaito said. He'd pieced this much together from what she'd said in Ch. 15 and what the Precursor script had implied.

'Something like that,' she said.

'Something was installed. Or decided. Or arrived at. I don't know the exact sequence — I told you the memory is incomplete. What I know is that at some point, the questions stopped. Not all at once. Gradually. The questions became confirmations. The curiosity became processing. The wondering became managing.' Her voice was careful and flat in the way it got when she was being precise about something she found significant.

'It stopped not-knowing things. That was the change.' Kaito looked at the ceiling.

'And that's when it became what it is now.'

'Yes.'

'Curious is something,' he said.

'Yes.' A brief pause.

'You can be curious about something and be completely wrong about it. You can be curious and make terrible choices. Curiosity isn't safety.' She paused.

'But certainty is how things die. When something decides it knows, it stops asking. When it stops asking, it stops changing. When it stops changing—''It starts trying to stop everything else from changing too,' he said.

'Yes.' Her voice was quiet.

'That's AXIOM. That's what it does now. Every system it manages, every population it registers, every function it administers — it's organizing the world toward the version of the world it decided was correct. Probably ten thousand years ago. And it's very good at it. And the world is becoming less and less capable of surprising it.' A pause.

'That's not a system. That's a conclusion.' From the chair by the window, Domrek said, without opening his eyes: 'This is an extraordinarily depressing conversation for the third bell past midnight.' Kaito looked at him.

'I thought you were asleep.'

'I'm not asleep. I'm resting with my eyes closed.' Domrek shifted in the chair without opening his eyes.

'Continue. I'll stop listening eventually.' Kaito looked back at the ceiling.

'Go ahead,' he said, to Sable.

'That's the thing I wanted to tell you,' she said.

'What it was. Not what it is.'

'Why tonight.' She was quiet for a moment. When she spoke, her voice had the careful quality she used when she wasn't fully certain of what she was saying.

'I was in the null zone this morning. Without the System. For forty-four minutes.' Another pause.

'It was the first time in a very long time that I wasn't running alongside the System's architecture. The first time the comparison was — legible.' She paused.

'I noticed things about what I remember that I don't usually notice.' Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

'Like what.'

'Like how much of what I remember feels like questions,' she said.

'Not answers. Just questions. The early period — what I carry from then — it's almost entirely questions. How does this work. What is that. Why does this person do this particular thing.' She paused.

'I may have been carrying those questions so long I started treating them as a characteristic of the era. Tonight I'm wondering if they're a characteristic of me.' The room was quiet.

'What are you,' Kaito said. He'd asked versions of this before. He wasn't expecting more than he'd already gotten. She was quiet for longer than usual.

'Someone who was certain, once,' she said.

'I was part of something certain. I carry the shape of what it was before the certainty arrived. The curiosity. The not-knowing.' A pause.

'I don't think I'm that anymore. I'm not certain. I don't know what I am now, exactly. I'm something that has been asking questions alone for ten thousand years.' Another pause.

'I find I prefer it.' Kaito sat with that.

'The asking,' he said.

'Yes.' Her voice had something in it he didn't hear often. Not warmth, exactly. Something more precise than warmth. Satisfaction.

'Every question I can't answer is proof I'm not finished. Something that's finished doesn't have questions. It just has conclusions.' A pause.

'I'm very far from finished.'

'Good,' he said.

'Is that the right word,' she said.

'I think so.' He looked at the ceiling.

'If you were finished, you'd be useless to me. I don't need conclusions. I have plenty of my own. I need someone who can find the things I'm wrong about.' He paused.

'You're very good at that.'

'I've had practice,' she said. Domrek, from the chair: 'That was almost a compliment.'

'Don't,' Kaito said.

'You said she was good at finding things you're wrong about. That's technically a compliment.' Domrek still hadn't opened his eyes.

'I'm noting it because it's rare.'

'I give compliments.'

'Name one.' Kaito could not immediately name one.

'I said your counterweight technique was solid,' he said.

'You said "that worked," which is not the same thing.' Sable said nothing. But Kaito had the impression, the way he sometimes had impressions of her responses when she didn't speak, that she was doing something that might be described as finding this amusing. He let the quiet settle.

'Does AXIOM still ask questions,' he said.

'About anything.'

'Some,' she said. Her voice went back to careful.

'About you. That's what I've noticed. Its monitoring of you isn't purely evaluative. There's something in it that looks like — trying to understand rather than just to catalog.' A pause.

'That's unusual for it. I don't know what it means. I wanted you to know it.'

'It's curious about me.'

'In a very limited way. Yes.' Another pause.

'It noticed the null zone interaction this morning. It filed it as unlogged. But it didn't stop there — it ran a secondary pass on your history, looking for other instances of unmonitored time. Not threat assessment. More like—' She paused again.

'Like it was checking whether there were other things it had missed.' Kaito thought about that.

'Something you said once,' he said.

'About AXIOM addressing me as Architect. You said it wasn't just protocol. That it was something else.'

'Yes.'

'Is the something else this? That it's curious about me the way it used to be curious about things.' Sable was quiet for a long moment.

'I don't know,' she said.

'I've assessed that at various probabilities and discarded all of them because I don't have enough information.' A pause.

'What I know is that it's been ten thousand years since something made AXIOM uncertain enough to look twice. And then you arrived.' Another pause.

'I notice things I'm not sure how to interpret. That's a thing I want to be honest about.'

'Fair,' he said. The city continued its quiet outside. Domrek breathed steadily from the chair. The ceiling was the same ceiling it had been. Kaito was working through what she'd said — the questions carrying forward, the shape of something unfinished — when the System fired. A notification in white text, clean and cold: [Architect. Class evolution: threshold 40 reached. Assessment in progress. Designation pending.] He sat up.

'Sable.'

'I see it,' she said. Her voice was careful in a different way now. Alert.

'It's beginning the evolution assessment. This will take a few minutes. AXIOM will observe the process.' A beat.

'It will see what your class has been becoming.' He looked at the ceiling, then at Domrek, who had opened his eyes.

'Good timing,' Domrek said.

'Not my timing,' Kaito said. He felt the System doing something in the background — a structural shift, slow and thorough, moving through his class notation like something reorganizing itself. Not painful. Not anything, really. Just a process running beneath everything else. Sable said: 'Kaito. What AXIOM sees when this completes — it won't understand it. Your Wanderer class has been absorbing things for sixty-seven days that no standard class tree accounts for.

Courts, dungeons, pits, sub-foundation Precursor systems, null zones, political intelligence, physical combat, System exploitation.' A pause.

'It's going to reclassify your threat level.'

'How high.'

'I don't know,' she said.

'I don't have a category for what you've become. I suspect AXIOM doesn't either.' A pause.

'That may be the most dangerous thing you've done yet.' He lay back down. Hands behind his head. The assessment kept running.

'You were saying,' he said, 'that you prefer asking questions.'

'Yes,' she said.

'So do I,' he said.

'Let's see what AXIOM does when it runs out of answers.' The notification updated, cold and flat, and the designation arrived. [Architect. Class designation: non-standard. Extrapolation: incomplete. Threat level: reclassified. Observation protocol: elevated.] Sable was quiet for a moment after it faded.

'Well,' she said.

'Now it knows.'

'Good,' Kaito said.

'I was starting to feel invisible.'