Chương 94: Cost of Climbing

To keep climbing toward the thing that was painting a target on that roof, I needed reach I didn't have. So I did what I always did when I didn't have a thing: I went and pulled it off something dead, and I ran it before I'd finished reading it. That was the mistake. It was also the only move left on the board, which is the trouble with most of my mistakes. The climb had stopped forgiving me two strata up.

The sorting-logic got denser the higher I went, the routes folded tighter on each other, and my read kept landing a half-second late: close enough to live on, not close enough to stay ahead. I proved it the hard way at a junction where two sweep-lines crossed. I read the gap, I moved for the gap, and the gap was not where my read had put it.

I got a shoulder against cold housing and held still while a sweep passed near enough to taste, and the only reason it didn't log me was that it wasn't looking for a thing pressed that flat against its own wall. Luck. I don't build on luck. Up here the floor read faster than I could scavenge, and the corrector's filing sat somewhere below and behind me, patient, closing the distance one scheduled inch at a time.

The space between what I could read and what I needed to read was the exact width of the thing that was going to get me killed.

"You're landing late on your reads," Errata said. She'd felt it too: the half-second, the wall, the sweep that should have logged me.

"Three times since the gate. You used to be early."

"I used to be lower."

"That's the whole sentence, isn't it. Lower was survivable on what you've got. Up here, survivable costs more than you're carrying."

"Then I go get more."

"There it is. The four most expensive words you know." Reach. I needed to see further than I could see. I found it in a dead servitor the System had paved around: a husk older than the floor it was buried in, precursor-class, the kind of thing the machine pours itself over and never digs out. Its core was still warm, as those old things stayed warm, a banked ember of something that used to look at the world for a living.

"Tell me you're not," Errata said.

"I'm reading it."

"You're not reading it. You're shopping." A pause while she ran it alongside me.

"Fine. Here's the listing. Precursor-class, one owner, deceased. It would give you the reach to read three strata up like it was the back of your own hand. It also rejects the host about a third of the time on contact, and when it rejects you, you spend whatever's left of you being a cautionary tale somebody scrapes off a wall." A beat.

"But it's the reach you need. And I can't fully read it — which means the thing hunting you can't either." Quieter, the wrongness she didn't quite name riding along under the pitch.

"So slot it. Let me watch you."

"That's not a sales pitch. That's a dare with a warranty."

"It's both. I contain multitudes. Slot it."

"What's wrong with it that you're not saying." A pause, and from Errata a pause is a paragraph.

"It's old. Older than the parts I know how to be afraid of. I can read what it does. I can't read what it's for." Then, brisk again, shoving past her own answer, as she did when she'd said a true thing by accident.

"Which is a problem for a later that may not arrive. Reach is a problem for right now. Slot it." I slotted it. The grammar of the thing sat wrong against mine the way a hand sits wrong in the wrong glove: close enough to fool you, off enough to ruin the work. It didn't want a host. It wanted a reader, and it had spent however many thousand years not finding one, and it met my Synthesis like a lock meeting the one key cut for it. That was the part nobody else could have done. You don't install a precursor core.

You convince it you're worth waking up for. I read its logic until its logic turned and read me back, and somewhere in the middle the two grammars stopped fighting and started agreeing, and the agreement was the install. [INSTALL: assay-core, precursor-class. Host architecture non-standard. Integrating — unstable.] It hurt going in. Not the clean hurt of a kinetic core seating wrong.

A deeper one, like being taught a language by having it poured straight into the part of you that already held opinions about everything. [Host integrity: 73%. Continued operation not recommended.]"There it is." Errata, the disappointed mechanic now, the bedside manner gone.

"That seam at seventy-three is the part fitting wrong, and I want it on the record that it's the part, not me being dramatic. You'll want to dampen it before it dampens you." Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"Noted."

"You say noted like it's the same word as fixed."

"It's six letters. So is broken."

"The seam you won't let me touch keeps making that noise, and it gets louder, not quieter. Dampen it before the floor does it for you."

"After the climb. Reach first."

"Reach first," she said. Then the reach came in, and for a second I forgot the seam entirely. It bloomed. There's no honest word for it that isn't a dealer's word. The strata above me unfolded: routes I'd been guessing at stood up and named themselves, the sorting-rhythm three floors over laid itself out like sheet music, the arithmetic that ran this whole place turned legible in a way it never once had been for me. I could read further than I'd ever read.

The climb that had been closing in my face opened back up, wide and clean and mine. [LEVEL 32.] That's the dopamine. I won't pretend it isn't. The number ticks, the wall you couldn't take becomes a stair, and for one bright breath you are exactly as dangerous as you've spent your whole life telling yourself you are. I took the breath. I'd earned it. I'd pulled a reader's eye off a dead god and made it serve, and nobody in three strata could have done it but me.

"Tell me that's not the most beautiful thing you've ever stolen," I said.

"It's the most beautiful thing you've ever stolen." A beat.

"I'd enjoy it more if I could find the bottom of it. Cores have a bottom. You hit it, you flinch, you move on. This one just keeps going down."

"Then we don't look down."

"That's my line. You're using my line, which means you already looked." I tried it on the architecture first, because that's what I'd bought it for. I read the sorting-rhythm two floors up the way you'd read a paragraph: where the line paused, where it ran fast, where a body could cross it between counts. It was beautiful work.

"Third floor runs a four-count," I said.

"Gap on the fourth. There's my stair."

"You read that from here." Something careful had come into her voice.

"You couldn't do that yesterday."

"I can do it now."

"I know," she said.

"That's the part I'm watching." The seam bit once while I did it, a hard grinding hitch right as I committed to a ledge-read, the integrity number dropping a point and the part arguing with the part of me it had been poured into. I rode it out with my jaw locked. Errata didn't say I-told-you-so. She logged it, which was worse. That was the cost I could see. You pay a cost you can see and you forget it by the next ledge.

It's the one you can't put a number on that's already moving in while you're busy being grateful. Then I came up over the lip of a work-floor, and the new eye looked where I pointed it, and it told me a truth I hadn't asked it for. There were people on the floor. Conscript labor: survivors who'd run the arithmetic the other way and decided being useful beat being processed. Forty, maybe fifty of them, feeding a sorting line, ordinary as only frightened working people are ordinary.

A woman with her sleeves tied off at the elbows. A kid too young for the rig he was strapped into. Two old men splitting one load between them because neither could lift it alone. And the new read in me sorted them. It didn't ask my permission. It went down the line the way it had been built to go down a line, and it hung a value on each of them. Load-bearing. Load-bearing: the woman keeps the station running, so she stays. The kid's output doesn't clear the threshold, so the math drops him.

The two old men cost one worker's feeding for two workers' weight, so the math drops them both. Expendable. Conforming. Within budget. It read a roomful of people and handed me back a manifest, and for one clean second the manifest was the truest thing in the room. I shook it off. I want that on the record too. That I shook it off, that I made myself look at the kid and see the kid — the bitten nails, the rig three sizes wrong — and not the number the new eye had hung around his neck.

I put the people back where people go. It took work. It should not have taken work.

"Your pulse just—" Errata started, in the telemetry voice she used right before she turned a thing into a joke so I wouldn't have to feel it. She stopped. A half-beat of her saying nothing, which from her is its own kind of alarm.

"I'm not going to dress that one up," she said at last, flat, no architecture left in it.

"I saw what you saw. Put it down."

"I put it down."

"Put it down all the way."

"I'm trying. The eye doesn't come with an all the way."

"Then I'll be your all the way," she said.

"When it sorts a room, you ask me what I see. I'll tell you it's a room. Climb." I didn't tell her I wasn't sure that was a promise either of us could keep. I let her have it, because one of us needed to believe the eye could be argued with, and it wasn't going to be me. We climbed. The reach was real. It carried me up two more strata before the next sweep cycled, found me a seam I'd never have read cold, did the exact thing I'd bought it to do. Every bit of it worked. Every bit of it was earned.

The part gave me the reach. What it took, it didn't take all at once: just one second where I looked at a room full of people and saw a manifest, and meant it. I shook it off. I keep saying that like it's a thing a person can do all the way.