Permafrost(18)

I am. You’re the only body I get to control. I have a duty to make sure you don’t end up dead.

So very considerate.

Believe it or not, I also don’t want you to get hurt in any part of this. You’re an innocent party here. I appreciate that you’re angry, but you also have to understand that we’re acting for a greater good.

Such a great good, you can’t trust me with knowing any part of it. How’s that for trust?

Shut up and let me handle this.

The big red doors hissed open on their own as we came near. Beyond was a brighter area, a sort of reception and waiting room with short windowless corridors branching off to the different functions of the department. The MRI section was at the end of one of these corridors, behind another set of red doors.

The space beyond was subdivided into two equal areas, with a glass partition between them. In the first part was the control room for the scanner, with a long desk set with terminals and keyboards. In the other was the scanner itself, with that area kept scrupulously clear of any furniture or associated clutter. The control room was low-lit and spartan, with a technician seated at one of the monitors, clicking away on a computer mouse, taking the occasional sip from a plastic coffee cup.

“Good morning,” the young doctor said.

The technician swivelled around and touched a deferential hand to his brow. “Good morning, Dr. Turovsky. Good morning, Igor.” Then he nodded at me, and flicked an eye back to his screens. “Miss Dinova.”

“Is it working today?” I asked.

“We’ll be fine; it was just a stupid software problem.” The technician was a burly man in his thirties, with a black chin-beard and tattoos showing around his sleeves and neckline. “They made us install a new operating system—you know how that usually goes.”

It’s an MRI machine, Valentina. I’ve already been through it, and it didn’t kill me. What’s changed now?

You have.

Enigmatic to the end. Are you all like that, where you come from? Kogalym, wasn’t it? Or some other Siberian shithole?

I’m telling you exactly as much as I think you need, exactly as much as I think you can handle. No more. But you’re right about the MRI machine. It didn’t kill you before, but that’s because we weren’t inside you then. The postoperative scan? That’s when we dropped something into you. That little spore I mentioned, a pollen-sized speck of replicating machinery, containing one half of a quantum particle system called a Luba Pair. Delivered straight into your neocortex. Military-medical hardware, primed to grow into a living brain and establish sensorimotor dominance. Think of it as a kind of ghostly lace overlaying your own brain, mirroring a similar structure in my own head. We need the MRI machine to get it into you, like a kind of long-range syringe, but once it’s installed and growing, the link maintains itself. That’s what’s in you now, how we’re able to communicate, how I get to drive you.

Drive me. That’s a nice way of putting it.

Only saying it as it is. No point sparing anyone’s feelings here, is there?

And they used to tell me I was blunt.

Face it, Tatiana—we’re probably not so very different. You’re caught up in me, and I’m caught up in something else. Both being used. Both dealing with something big and frightening outside our usual experience. And yes, you were right about Kogalym.

“May I see the earlier images?” the young doctor said, leaning in to the desk.

“I pulled them up for you,” the technician said. “Before—after. You can see that cloudiness.”

“Looks more like an imaging issue, something off with the resolution?”

What’s he looking at?

The control structure, before it was fully grown and integrated. Developed enough to show up on the MRI, but not enough to be seriously affected by the magnetic fields. It’ll be different now, trust me.

Trust you?

You’d better. We’re both in this now.

The technician gave an equivocal shrug. “Only one way to be sure, Doctor, if you think it’s worth the expense of a second scan.”

“I want to be sure for Miss Dinova’s sake,” said the doctor.

“Let’s get you out of the chair,” the orderly—Igor—said.

But I was ahead of him, pushing myself up and out of the wheelchair. What I did next was all choreographed, but it had to look natural. Just as importantly, Tatiana had to let me handle things.

She did.

I made an intentional step in the direction of the desk, meaning to get a closer look at the brain scans. Halfway there, I let my left knee buckle under me. I followed through with the stumble, allowing momentum to carry me forward, while reaching for the desk’s edge, misjudging it such that I knocked the coffee cup over.

All this happened in about one and a half seconds.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered. “I didn’t mean . . .”

The technician pushed back his swivel chair, lifting up his arms in despair as coffee—what had not gone into the keyboard—curtained off the side of the desk in brown rivulets. Igor, who was evidently more practically minded, dashed forward and flipped the keyboard upside down, to stop the liquid getting any farther into its workings. But the essential damage had been done. The screens flickered then froze, none of the displays updating.