Redemption Ark

Lyle made no attempt to escape. He knew that his fate was sealed. He would have been lucky to avoid the death penalty just for refusing to comply with the boarding order, but even if he had wriggled out of that — and there were ways and means — there was nothing that could be done for him now. Since the Melding Plague, when the once glorious Glitter Band had been reduced to the Rust Belt, acts of vandalism against habitats were considered the most heinous of crimes. The forty-three dead were almost a detail.

Lyle Merrick was arrested, tried and sentenced. He was found guilty on all counts relating to the collision. His sentence was irreversible neural death. Since he was known to have been scanned, the Mandelstam Ruling was to apply.

Designated Ferrisville officials, nicknamed eraserheads, were assigned to track down and nullify all extant alpha— or beta-level simulations of Lyle Merrick. The eraserheads had the full legal machinery of the Convention behind them, together with an arsenal of plague-tolerant hunter-seeker software tools. They could comb any known database or archive and ferret out the buried patterns of an illegal simulation. They could erase any public database even suspected of holding a forbidden copy. They were very good at their work.

But Jim Bax wasn’t going to let down his friend. Before the net closed, and with the help of Lyle’s other friends, some of who were extremely frightening individuals, the most recent alpha-level backup was spirited out of the hands of the law. Deft alteration of the records at the scanning clinic made it appear as if Lyle had missed his last appointment. The eraserheads lingered over the evidence, puzzling over the anomalies for many days. But in the end they decided that the missing alpha had never existed. They had done their work in any case, rounding up all other known simulations.

So, in a sense, Lyle Merrick escaped justice.

But there was a catch, and it was one that Jim Bax insisted upon. He would shelter Lyle’s alpha-level persona, he said, and he would shelter it in a place the authorities were very unlikely ever to think of looking. Lyle would replace the subpersona of his ship, the alpha-level scan of a real human mind supplanting the collection of algorithms and subroutines that was a gamma-level persona. A real mind, albeit a simulation of the neural patterns of a real mind, would replace a purely fictitious persona.

A real ghost would haunt the machine.

‘Why?’ Antoinette asked. ‘Why did Dad want it to happen this way?’

‘Why do you think? Because he cared about his friend and his daughter. It was his way of protecting both of you.’

‘I don’t understand, Xave.’

‘Lyle Merrick was dead meat if he didn’t agree. Your father wasn’t going to risk his neck by sheltering the simulation any other way. At least this way Jim got something out of deal, other than the satisfaction of saving part of his friend.’

‘Which was?’

‘He got Lyle to promise to look after you when Jim wasn’t around.’

‘No,’ Antoinette said flatly.

‘You were going to be told. That was always the plan. But the years slipped by, and when Jim died…’ Xavier shook his head. ‘This isn’t easy for me, you know. How do you think I’ve felt, knowing this secret all these years? Sixteen Goddamned years, Antoinette. I was about as young and green as they come when your father first took me under his employment, helping him with Storm Bird. Of course I had to know about Lyle.’

‘I don’t follow. What do you mean, look after me?’

‘Jim knew he wasn’t going to be around for ever, and he loved you more than, well…’ Xavier trailed off.

‘I know he loved me,’ Antoinette said. ‘It’s not like we had one of those dysfunctional father-daughter relationships like they always have on the holoshows, you know. All that «you never told me you loved me» crap. We actually got along pretty damned well.’

‘I know. That was the point. Jim cared about what’d happen to you afterwards, when he was gone. He knew you’d want to inherit the ship. Wasn’t anything he could do about that, or even wanted to do about it. Hell, he was proud. Really proud. He thought you’d make a better pilot than he ever did, and he was damned sure you had more business sense.’

Antoinette suppressed half a smile. She had heard that sort of thing from her father often enough, but it was still pleasing to hear it from someone else; evidence — if she needed it — that Jim Bax had really meant it.

‘And?’

Xavier shrugged. ‘Guy still wanted to look out for his daughter. Not such a crime, is it?’

I don’t know. What was the arrangement?‘

‘Lyle got to inhabit Storm Bird. Jim told him he had to play along with being the old gamma-level; that you were never to suspect that you had a, well, guardian angel looking over you. Lyle was supposed to look after you, make sure you never got into too much trouble. It made sense, you know. Lyle had a strong instinct for self-preservation.’