Chapter #30When a Lie Detector Lies by: Seuzz   "Uh, you having problems back there, guys?" you call. And your heart hammers all the harder for your having been so calm up until this point.
But the voices drop to murmurs. Cox and Liu still have their weapons trained on you, and Patterson is giving you a queer and hostile look. Gallion just looks frightened.
You sweat in the seat and shut your eyes; but if you're going to get shot you want to see it coming so you snap them back open again. Your mouth has gone dry, and you can't catch your breath.
This was what it was like for Patterson last night, you think. And for Liu. But this is worse, ten times worse, and not because it's happening to you. Now you're on the end of a frame-up, some very clever work by some very clever bastard, and it's worse because you don't share the frame-up with another, and so everyone is looking at you and thinking that you—
"Let him out."
You start at the sound of Knotts' voice. "I said let him out," she repeats. "Lower your pieces and get him out of there."
But no one moves. "Are you sure, boss," Liu asks.
Knotts curses and yanks loose the restraints so violently that it hurts. "The fuck is going on," you ask in a quavering voice.
"We're letting you out, and then we're gonna run a few more Patterns, and then the elves are gonna take at look at the machine. And when they're done we're going to carry it to the curb and dump it with the rest of the garbage! Now everyone out of here, except Cox and Liu!"
* * * * *
"It was compromised, like the rest of our shit," she says at the all-hands meeting that follows a few hours later. You're in a spare office on the fortieth floor, one Vulcan has lent to Dey. You can see the envy and fury in the boss's soul: This "spare" office, kept for unwanted guests, is larger and more lavish than his own office back at Diana.
"It's been giving everyone a clean bill of health, but it hasn't been patterning them," Knotts continues. "Plante is writing a memo to explain the technical details, and they'll have to design the new one from the ground up to guard against the virus that got into this one—"
"More action from Crazy Ivan?" Cox asks.
"Of course." She sighs, deeply and bitterly. "But the gist is— You all know that each of you has a unique mental pattern, but that the patterns drift over time, because of course things are always changing inside your head. That's why, at the end of our usual three-month check-ups, your new pattern won't exactly match your old one. But the variations themselves tend to occur at a regular rate, in regular places, and themselves in regular patterns. The elves say they can even predict with ninety-eight percent accuracy what the new pattern will look like.
"So, no one has noticed anything janky going on, because we've been getting Patterned at three-month intervals, and the results have been exactly in line with what the elves expected us to show after those three month intervals. But Plante did notice something a little odd about Kips's pattern last week, when we looked at him and Cox after what happened to Davenport. Cox was due to be patterned anyway, and his results turned out on the button. But Kips was early for his test, and his pattern showed more variation than Plante would have expected. At the time Plante just put the greater variation down to 'job spice'."
You're aware that you're attracting glances again, and do your best to ignore them.
"So, Kips was patterned only last week," Knotts continues. "But his pattern this morning didn't show a one-week variation on his last result. It again showed a three-month variation. And no one's job is that spicy."
Murmurs run around the room, and they stare at you even more openly.
"After we finished patterning everyone," Knotts says, "Plante looked deep inside the software, and found a virus carrying more of Crazy Ivan's 'Workers of the World' bullshit in the documentation. It reprogrammed the Patterning unit so that it still runs, but it doesn't actually scan anyone. Instead, it just pulls up the last stored results from its library and algorithmically generates a 'three-month variation' based on the last scan, and stores that as the new result."
Her face hardens. "You could Pattern a dead gerbil, and if you told the machine it was me when launching the scan, it would return my Pattern with a three-month variation built in. The machine hasn't been telling us what we want to know. It's only been telling us what we expected to see."
There's a stunned silence as it sinks in: Anyone here could have Scotty's pattern, and the machine would never have caught it.
"Hang on," says Liu, leaning forward. "If it's doing this with everyone, and not just with Kips—" His eye is feverish as it turns on you. "Shouldn't all of our results this morning have shown a three-month variation?"
"Yes, and that's exactly what happened," says Knotts. "With you and Gallion and Patterson— And with me and the elves— it wasn't as noticeable because we were a lot farther than a week from our last session. Plante noticed it while testing you, noticing that everyone was showing greater than expected variations, but things have been spicy lately, so he didn't say anything. But when we hit Kips's results, it was too much."
"Hang on, didn't you see the same wacked-out results with Cox?" you ask. Knotts nods. "Then why didn't you freak out then? You tested him before me."
She shakes her head. "We tested him and Liu after you and Patterson. I know what I told you on the phone this morning, but I wanted you and Patterson to think Cox and Liu had been tested and cleared before we got to you. I wanted to see how all you guys would act if you thought you were going into the machine after the others got a clean bill of health."
"Oh Jesus." "Christ!" "Fuckin' hell."
"How long has the machine been infected," Dey asks.
"Within the last six months. Not until after we got Patterson's initial scan."
"Could we use the shadow-mind, compare its results to the ones in the Patterner's library, to get an accurate read on the variations?" you ask.
"I already asked that," Knotts says. "The Moustache says the shadow-mind works on different principles. You can't correlate the results of one with the other. Of course," she adds, "we'll start using the shadow-mind this afternoon to confirm identities."
"That's a waste of time," Dey says sharply. "I've told you—"
"Think about it, Julian!" Knotts' voice rises instantly to a shriek. "Crazy Ivan got into the Patterning mechanism!"
"He got into everything at Diana! That's why we're here!"
"But he didn't just cripple it like he did everything else! He reprogrammed it so that it would not be able to spot an imposter! Why would he do that if there wasn't an imposter he didn't want us to find? And why leave it running after killing everything else unless he wanted to lull us into a false sense of security?"
"Or maybe he wants us to think there's a mole," Dey angrily retorts. "Maybe he's trying to get into our wetware, too. We call him 'Crazy Ivan' for a reason, Knotts, and it's not just because he's a wacked-out socialist cuckoo-bird with a taste for Dadaist street theater! We call him 'Crazy Ivan' because he makes everything crazy, including, it's starting to seem to me, you!"
"What's the harm in checking, sir?" you ask. Your tone is very calm and polite, since someone here has to play the grownup.
Not that your tone wins you any credit, for Dey's eyes flash angrily at you. "The harm is that you'll put everyone through the shadow-mind and you still won't find your boogeyman, and then you'll make up an even crazier conspiracy theory! No, what you do, Knotts—!" He raises his voice over hers until she shuts up. "What you do is you put Greystoke in the shadow-mind, and then you put his mind into one of your agents, and then he will tell you there's no such person as Scotty, and that this whole thing has been a gigantic Gaslight operation against us. Why aren't you doing that now?"
"Because, sir, someone already fucked up the shadow mind once, and I don't want to risk it again until I've caught the—"
Dey explodes: "There is no— Oh, fuck it!" He rises. "Come with me, all of you, come with me. Knotts, tell the staff to start making a shadow-mind of Greystoke, now. Once you've done that, you'll learn the truth anyway. One of you will know it, and he'll tell the rest, so there's no point keeping it a secret any longer. Just come with me."
There's no more arguing. Knotts goes with Dey, but sends the rest of you down to temporary quarters, to watch each other as you unhook Greystoke, re-sedate him, and move him to the bay containing the shadow-mind. Then you all join Dey and Knotts on the floor below, in a windowless conference room behind two sets of shielded doors. It's airless and parched, as though all the life has been vacuumed out of it. The cloth seat cushions crackle with static electricity as you take your seats.
Dey stands at the front of the room in front of a white screen. "What I'm about to show you is one of the most deeply classified secrets in Dark Stars. I won't tell you how many levels of secrecy there are at Dark Stars, because I don't know myself. But this information is three security grades above what any of you have clearance to see.
"You're all convinced one of the celebrities is a shapeshifter, the mother of all shapeshifters, and that he's been screwing with you. And you keep believing this even though I've been telling you there is no such celebrity.
"Well, you're not wrong, but I'm not wrong either. The celebrity you call 'Scotty' exists, all right. But we caught him a long time ago. Scotty is dead." You have the following choice: 1. Continue |
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