Godlike Machines by Jonathan Strahan [Editor] Read Free Book Online

meantime we dose him on sedatives, put him under for as long as we can. I don’t want that lunatic running around when I’m trying to steer the Progress through Shell 3.”
    I breathed in hard, trying to focus. “Where is it now?”
    “Still anchored to one of the Shell 2 platelets. I’d like to take a few more samples before I detach, but from then on it’s seat of the pants stuff.”
    She was right: it was a good plan. Better than anything I could come up with, at any rate. We took him forward to the orbiter, opened a medical kit and injected him with the sedative. I took out a tube of disinfectant and a roll of bandage for my gashed hand. Yakov stopped mumbling and became more pliant, like a big rag doll. We strapped him into a sleeping hammock and locked the door on him.
    “He was pissing me off anyway,” Galenka said.

    I move back from the window in Nesha’s apartment. Zvezdniy Gorodok is stirring to a wintery, hypothermic half-life. The snow’s still coming down, though in fitful flurries rather than a steady fall. When a Zil pulls onto the street I feel a tightness in my throat. But the limousine stops, releasing its passenger, and moves on. The man strolls across the concrete concourse into one of the adjoining buildings, a briefcase swinging from his hand. He might have anything in that briefcase—a gun, a syringe, a lie detector. But he has no business here.
    “You think they’re looking for you.”
    “I know it.”
    “Then where are you going to go?”
    Out into the cold and the snow to die, I think. But I smile and say nothing.
    “Is it really so bad in the facility? Do they really treat you so badly?”
    I return to my seat. Nesha’s poured me another cup of tea, which—her views on my sanity notwithstanding—I take as an invitation to remain. “Most of them don’t treat me badly at all—they’re not monsters or sadists. I’m too precious to them for that. They don’t beat me, or electrocute me, and the drugs they give me, the things they do to me, they’re not to make me docile or to punish me. Doctor Kizim, he’s even kind to me. He spends a lot of time talking to me, trying to get me to remember details I might have forgotten. It’s pointless, though. I’ve already remembered all that I’m ever going to. My brain feels like a pan that’s been scrubbed clean.”
    “Did Doctor Kizim help you to escape?”
    “I’ve asked myself the same question. Did he mean for me to steal his coat? Did he sense that I was intending to leave? He must have known I wouldn’t get far without it.”
    “What about the others? Were you allowed to see them?”
    I shake my head. “They kept us apart the whole time Yakov and Galenka were still alive. We were questioned and examined separately. Even though we’d spent all those months in the ship, they didn’t want us contaminating each other’s accounts.”
    “So you never really got to know what happened to the others.”
    “I know that they both died. Galenka went first-she took the highest dosage when the VASIMIR’s shielding broke down. Yakov was a little luckier, but not much. I never got to see either of them while they were still alive.”
    “Why didn’t you get a similar dosage?”
    “Yakov was mad to begin with. Then he got better, or at least decided he was better off working with us than against us. We let him out of the module where we were keeping him locked up. That was after Galenka and I got back from the Matryoshka.”
    “And then?”
    “It was my turn to go a little mad. Inside the machine-something touched us. It got into our heads. It affected me more than it did Galenka. On the return trip, they had no choice but to confine me to the forward module.”
    “The thing that saved you.”
    “I was further from the engine when it went wrong. Inverse square laws. My dosage was negligible.”
    “You accept that they died, despite having no evidence.”
    “I believe what Doctor Kizim told me. I trusted him. He had no reason