vN The First Machine Dynasty(66)

He looked around at the rusted walls and the filthy water at his feet. "It's fine. Better than prison, anyway."



They splashed through water, following an arrow pattern marked out in more glowing tape. It was mostly unnecessary, though – they could hear a woman's voice singing up through the steel. As they opened another hatch, it grew clearer and louder. Now Amy knew it was a recording: she heard a full band backing the woman up. She didn't recognize the song; it sounded sad, with a deep voice twisting up into high notes to emphasize some long-ago hurt. They entered a vertical shaft equipped with a thin ladder that left dark streaks on her fingers. Javier watched her through his legs, and slid the rest of the way down the ladder when she had cleared it. When they turned, they found another door, this one marked with the words "The Doctor Is: In." Music blared through it. Amy smelled rose incense.



Javier gestured at the door. "Ladies first."



The door stuck a little, but with some shouldering it popped open with a deep, pained groan. Inside, a man in a smoking jacket, a very long plaid scarf, loose linen trousers and treaded beach slippers sat in a caramel-coloured leather armchair before a massive display unit that unfurled from the ceiling of the container and stretched down to the floor and across to each of the adjoining walls. Behind him, a door peeked open on what looked like a workshop – she saw pieces of drones on the floor. Onscreen, Amy watched views of the museum gently fading in and out: families, years, damage, the same buildings collapsing over and over before building themselves back up again. She saw herself loom large on the display. The man raised his hand and brought it down. As he did, the music lowered in volume. He turned in his seat.



"Hello, Amy."



The man stood up and strode across a panelled floor strewn with intricately patterned carpets. He was round: round body, round, rolling walk, round head that shined under the light of blown glass lamps overhead. He made a little bow to Javier. "It's nice to meet you both. I see the two of you have met Rover." He opened an antique cabinet and produced two fluffy towels from elaborate scrollwork. "Please."



Amy started drying her hair. "Thank you." She wiped down her arms. "You're Dan Sarton?"



"Guilty as charged." He gestured at the display. "I know it doesn't look like much, but it's mine and it's not crowded with students, funders, or any other human allergens."



Amy looked around. "It's not really much of an office."



"Oh, dear, no. This isn't my office. This is where the museum keeps the backup servers. They handle the rendering load when one goes down for maintenance. Saves a lot of energy on cooling, as you might imagine." He lowered the music still further. The same high sound they had heard earlier took its place. "There are still fans, of course. You can understand why I block them out. But I still prefer to spend my time here if I can."



Amy looked at the display. Currently, it showed a group of people watching educational footage of the old city – how the landfill undergirding the city's oldest buildings was of poor quality, how the soil was prone to liquefaction, how the whole thing was quite literally built on sand. "Why did Rory want me to come here?" she asked. "I'm not bluescreened."



"My work in Redmond had to do with what we might call the vN immune system," Sarton said. "I hypothesized that bluescreen events were really failsafing events in disguise – that for whatever reason, the iteration in question had begun to failsafe, but gotten stuck."



"So you know all about broken failsafes," Amy said.



"I thought I did. Then you came along." Dr Sarton made kissing sounds at a large lump of red silk cushion in the corner, and it promptly inched its way across the floor and curled around Amy and Javier's ankles. "Have a seat."



They sat. The cushion was warm, and it purred slightly. "Please don't mind the stains," Dr Sarton said. "I sometimes sleep here."



Javier muttered something behind his hand that sounded a lot like "Chimps…"



"The vN immune system is comprised of two parts," Dr Sarton said. "The first is exterior – your body remembers what it should look like, and edits out the damage that occurs. The second part is interior. You're protected against a wide variety of worms, memes, viruses, and so on. Most of that is unnecessary because you're not actually wired to a network. Connected models were considered, early on, but there was a very serious concern that if and when the failsafe failed – as the result of a hack, or a virus, or an emergent property – the failure might spread virally among vN."