The Colonel Read Online Free PDF Page A

lives and assets only to discover we can bring down the lightning after all. And because—” She taps the fake fingernail with a real one. “Because what if this is from Theseus , and you never get another chance?”
    â€œIf. You don’t know?”
    â€œ You don’t,” Lutterodt says, and the temptation pulls so relentlessly at his soul that he barely notices she hasn’t answered the question.
    The device sits between them like something coiled.
    â€œWhy?” he asks at last.
    â€œThey come across things, sometimes,” she tells him. “Spin-offs, you might say. In the course of other pursuits. Things which aren’t necessarily relevant to the Bicams, but which others might find meaningful.”
    â€œWhy should they care?”
    â€œBut they do, Jim. You think they’re beyond us, you think we can’t possibly understand their motives. It’s an article of faith with you. But here’s a motive staring you in the face and you can’t even see it.”
    â€œ What motive ?” He sees nothing but leg-hold traps, gaping on all sides.
    â€œIt’s how you know they’re not gods after all,” she tells him. “They have compassion.”
    *   *   *
    They don’t, of course. It’s manipulation, pure and simple. It’s clay being shaped by the potter, it’s a hotwire to centers of longing in the heart of the brain. It’s the pulling of strings that reach all the way into the stratosphere.
    Unbreakable ones, apparently.
    Zephyr’s claws click furtively in the next room as he opens the cache. There are directories within directories here: files of raw static, fourier transforms, interpretations of signal to noise reduced to least-squares and splines. It all opens instantly and without fuss: no locks, no passwords, no ruby sweep of laser across iris. (He would not have been surprised if there had been. Why couldn’t those giants have reached up from the Planck length to snatch his eyeprints from some quantum-encrypted file?) Maybe none of that’s necessary. Maybe everything’s embedded in some invisible failsafe, some impossible mind-reading algorithm that scans his conscience in an instant, ready to wipe everything clean should he be found guilty of violating the hive’s trust.
    Maybe they simply know him better than he does.
    He recognizes the faint echo of the microwave background, stamped across the data like a smudged fingerprint from the dawn of time. He sees something like a transponder code in the residuals. He has to take most of the analyses on faith; if any of this was sent from Theseus , it either passed through some very heavy weather en route or the transmitter was damaged. What remains appears to be the remnants of a multichannel braid, its intelligence woven as much into the way its frequencies interact as in the signals themselves. A data hologram.
    Finally he extracts a single thread from the tapestry: an arid stream of linear text. The metatags suggest that it was gleaned from some kind of acoustic signal—a voice channel, most likely—but one so faint that the reconstruction isn’t so much filtered from static as built from the stuff. The resulting text is simple and unadorned. Much of it is conjectural.
    I MAGINE YOU ARE S IRI K EETON , it begins.
    The Colonel’s legs buckle beneath him.
    *   *   *
    He used to go to Heaven once a week. Then once a month. Now it’s been over a year.
    There just hasn’t seemed to be any point.
    It’s not a hive, not the sort that falls within his mandate anyway. Heaven’s brains are networked but it’s all subconscious—interneurons surplus to current needs, rented out for the processing power while their waking souls float on top in dream worlds of their own imagining. It’s the ultimate business model: Give us your brain to run our machinery and we’ll keep its conscious