Ai407 turns its blank face towards Halliday.
“What’s that look for?” he says. “Carry on, that way.” He points ahead, then pulls his hands under his thighs. He feels suddenly conscious of the aye-aye’s own stubby limbs.
Red light bathes the trundler as they enter the passage. Before Halliday’s eyes have adjusted to the light he hears a noise that is tinnier than the hum of the motor. It sounds like a mouse scratching below floorboards.
The walls of Tithonium Chasma are pillar-box red. The canyon is enormous, as if this is the true Martian surface and everything above is mountainous.
He sees the squat, tractor-like sculptors immediately, even though they are dwarfed by the rockface. One of them scratches at the right wall of the canyon. A cloud of dust rises around its suction funnel. The other two are facing away from the trundler as if surveying the work of their colleague.
Halliday peers up at the walls. Breath fogs the inside of his helmet, clearing from the top down. First he sees a sculpted stone bicycle that leans against a boulder. Further along the canyon, stepping stones dot a stream with static, sculpted wave crests. A young boy is frozen mid-leap with just the tip of one shoe touching rounded stone.
He cranes his neck. Standing apart from the canyon wall is a structure that towers above him, somehow too large for him to have noticed straight away. It is a steep hill with more stone waves lapping at its base. On top of the hill is a sculpted building with sheer sides that reflect the red light. Its towers are almost the height of the canyon walls.
He senses Ai407 standing beside him. The aye-aye is staring upwards at the wall where the sculptor is still at work. Here, the rock has been carved into less representative forms. It takes Halliday several seconds before he sees that it is the enormous figure of a man. His body is distorted, bent forward into a loping run. Flames surround his head like a lion’s mane. His mouth is wide open and twisted in agony.
“Jesus,” Halliday says. His voice is little more than a breath, “What is this?”
He flinches as Ai407 says, “It is a nightmare.”
“But who the hell has nightmares like that?”
The aye-aye shields its eyes.
“I do.”
*
Halliday forces a smile as Reverend Corstorphine steeples his fingers and settles into his chair, which is the only fully complete item of furniture in the chapel. Though the structure of the building was completed a month ago, backlogs at the Sandcastle sculpting foundry have delayed the pews. Only a hanging tapestry smuggled from Earth interrupts the bare white walls. It is embroidered with the words, ‘The sky above proclaims his handiwork’.
“I have long suspected as much,” Corstorphine says. The chair creaks.
“That they have nightmares?” Halliday says.
Corstorphine chuckles. “Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.”
Halliday wishes that there were a desk to separate them. “Except the aye-ayes aren’t sons and daughters, or men, young or old.”
In the opposite corner of the chapel, beside a tea tray on the floor, a kettle comes to the boil. Corstorphine crosses the room and bends to fill two mugs, handing one to Halliday. “It’s only instant, I’m afraid.”
Halliday accepts the mug and wishes he hadn’t. He would prefer to take nothing from Corstorphine. People like him charge interest on a debt, however small. Before he knows it, he’ll be given chapel duties like the rest of the team. He had been rash to approach the Reverend with his findings. It had been a moment of weakness.
Corstorphine sips his drink noisily, then rests the mug on his belly. “Dreams are only echoes. Expressions of an experience not fully processed. The dreams are not the thing. Tell me again what you saw.”
Halliday describes the scene at Tithonium Chasma again. It is easy, as he has thought of it often in the days that have passed. The boy in the stream, the castle, the burning man. What can it mean?
When he finishes, he rubs his face. He has drunk the coffee without realising it. “It’s a vision of Earth, that much is clear. And, as far as I know, Foxglove’s aye-ayes were constructed back there, then shipped over with the rest of us. But that doesn’t really explain anything. What do you make of it all?”
“Well. I’m happy to say that it supports a pet theory of mine,” Corstorphine says. “I must thank you for coming to me with this information.”
Smug bastard. Halliday resents the bait but takes it anyway. “What’s your theory?”
The Reverend’s eyes travel upwards. Above him is only a prismatic white space.
“That the aye-ayes possess souls.”
*
After Halliday awakens it, Ai407 stands loose-limbed in the centre of the workshop. Sleepy and sulky. It waits for him to speak.
“Who is your father?” Halliday says, finally.
Ai407 doesn’t answer.
Maybe he phrased the question badly. He bends to look into Ai407’s sunken eyepits. “Who is your AI template?”
The aye-aye replies instantly. “Felix Ransome, the son of Professor Elias Ransome.”
Halliday gasps. “The Elias Ransome?”
“Professor Elias Ransome.”
So these aye-ayes were among the first on Mars, or at least their AI subroutines were. All this time, Halliday has been working alongside antiques.
Back on Earth, twenty years ago, Elias Ransome had been a key player in aye-aye technology. He worked for years, developing faster and more efficient chips and behaviour routines. But the true breakthrough wasn’t an issue of computing power. Ransome bestowed on the aye-ayes the gift of imagination.
Aye-ayes were technically advanced, but in practical terms they were imbeciles. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Teach an aye-aye to fish and it’d bring you shoals and shoals, fine. But give it a single fish without also providing clear instructions and it would just stare at the fish for a lifetime. What was missing was imagination, and Ransome provided it. Or rather, his then eight-year-old son, Felix, donated it via an imprint of his brain patterns.
Halliday waves to dismiss Ai407. The aye-aye clambers back onto its plinth and arranges its short arms so that its weight is supported by the extended rods. As the rods retract, carrying the aye-aye backwards into the housing, Ai407 turns its blank face towards Halliday. Halliday shudders. He glances at the rows of aye-ayes in their sarcophagus-like closets. They are all on the same network. They are family. They are all little Felix Ransome’s children, able to function only because they had once been inspired by his gift for invention and his developing moral code.
