Carnival

Nice to know I’ve still got his mark stamped between my eyes.But he went, as Vincent must have known he would.

“What frequency does it use?” Julian asked, and Kusanagi-Jones told him. And then queued and transferred the archive copy of Kii’s program as soon as the protocol connected.

“What exactly are you planning?” Vincent hadn’t done more than step sideways and lean back against the wall before the door. Kusanagi-Jones knew without turning that his chin would be dropped insouciantly toward his chest, his ankles crossed.

“Julian’s been working on quantum decision trees,” Lesa said.

“Fractal,” Julian corrected, without looking up from his displays and the holographic array floating in the air before him. “Fractal decision trees.”

“Which means what, in layman’s terms?” It almost sounded as if Vincent knew what was going on. Which was fine with Kusanagi-Jones, because he certainly didn’t. He could code a little, hack a wardrobe license as well as anybody—which was to say, not very well at all—but whatever Julian was doing with confident, sweeping gestures of his hands over the holopad was beyond him.

“House has its own programming language,” Lesa said. “Julian’s been learning to code for it.”

“It uses four-dimensional matrices,” Julian said. “You would not believe how tricky.” He looked up, and seemed to realize that Kusanagi-Jones was still standing behind him, peering over his shoulder with a befuddled expression. “This is going to take awhile,” he said, with a child’s sublime confidence in his field of expertise. “You might as well get something to eat. I won’t have anything done before tomorrow.”

“But what,” Kusanagi-Jones said, folding his hands together to keep his fingers from tightening, “are you doing?”

“Kii’s a computer program, right?” Lesa said. “I mean, he’s Transcendent. He’s a machine intelligence. So theoretically you could rewrite him—”

“A virus,” Vincent said.

“A worm,” Julian corrected. “Or more like…like…repurposing the worm he wrote for Miss Kusanagi-Jones.”

“Call me Angelo,” Kusanagi-Jones said, unable to contemplate the specter of this infant calling him Miss anything. A week was overtime on this planet. Ten days was beyond the call of duty.

Julian glanced sideways enough to grin. “Anyway, we’ve got a worm. I just have to, you know, tweak it.”

“It’s not Kii,” Kusanagi-Jones said reluctantly. It was such an arrogant, audacious plan. Exactly the sort of thing Vincent would come up with, really.

He hated to punch holes in it.

“What do you mean?” Lesa asked. She had sat back down on the bed, and Kusanagi-Jones was glad. He’d seenher feet, even if she was determined not to show the pain.

And Vincent was looking at him, too. When he’d rather hoped that Vincent would pick up the thread and do the explaining. “It’s the Consent,” Kusanagi-Jones said. “Not a hive mind, really. But the community makes up its mind and Kii does what the Consent decides. Democracy by decree. Everybody votes, and whatever gets voted up retroactively becomes everybody’s idea. Biochemical. So when Kii says it’s not his decision, he’s not saying anything more than the truth.”

And anyway, he didn’t care how good the New Amazonians were at programming for their adopted domicile, he didn’t believe for a second that the child could actually hack a Transcendent brain. And he didn’t think any of them wanted to live with the consequences of failure.

Lesa stared at him, eyebrows crawling under streaked hair, and then folded her hands over her lap. “Biochemical.”

“Yes.”

“Except it can’t very well be biochemical if he doesn’t have any damned biology, can it?”

“A programmed approximation of biology,” Vincent said. “The important part is he’s not an individual once the decisions have been made. He’s a happy cog, a bit of the machine.”

Lesa nodded slowly. And then she looked at Julian. “So what do you think he’d do if we cut him off from the Consent? Isolated him? Let him…make up his own mind?”

This time, it was Vincent’s gaze on the back of his head that turned Kusanagi-Jones around. They traded a look, and Vincent slowly shook his head. “I get the impression he’s been edging up to the limits of his authority to help us. Julian, do you think you can do that?”

Julian shrugged. Lesa drew one foot up onto the bed, wincing. She cleared her throat. “I toldyou he was a genius.”

Julian, head bent over the terminal, snorted. “Mom. Please.”

Kii listens.