The Expert System's Brother (Expert System, #1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

I remember how excited I was. It wasn’t that I hated Sethr so much, but it was change and it was difference and when you’re thirteen that’s like all the rest days and celebration days rolled into one.

People were already backing off, because Sethr was different now. He was Severed. They looked at him and they didn’t see One Of Us anymore. He had become something alien. I remember seeing even the fleas abandoning him, springing off, almost invisible save for their movement, to find more agreeable hosts.

I remember sitting there watching Sethr as he stumbled and entreated and was turned away. I couldn’t tell. He was just the same to me, the same man he’d always been, despite the harsh, revolted way everyone looked at him. I couldn’t tell he was an outcast. That was the first clue I had that I was marked, too.

And she must have felt that break, inside her—the gap that had opened between me and everyone else. She didn’t let it rule her, though. She knew I was her brother. I was the same boy who’d shared every adventure, who’d dried her tears and let her dry mine. It must have been hard for her, but she fought past what her insides were telling her about me, and saw that I was still just Handry, who she’d known all her life.

The Severance hadn’t finished its work. I wasn’t entirely out, just as I would never be quite in.

I think they were my last moments of childhood, those few days of hope. That optimism that someone else will come and mend all ills, that your Ma or the Lawgiver or someone will just turn up, and everything will be well, that’s the essence of being a kid.

I could remember them before the accident, that was the worst thing. If I had been born to this, surely it wouldn’t be so raw? But I’d been one of them, once. And no doubt if this had happened to someone else, I’d be with the mob, a cudgel in my hand and no doubts in my head.

I felt as though I had died in every way but the actual. Any predator making a meal of me would just be setting right an unaccountable error in the tally of the world.

Perhaps you’re tired of my hunger now. Not as tired as I was, but when you’re starving, that starvation sets up a big camp right there at the front of your mind and won’t let you forget. It’s not some pastime you can put down and take up again later when you’re at liberty to do so. It’s your life until it kills you.

Better a thief than a corpse, yes, but better a thief than a beggar as well. The world finds it harder to say no to a thief.

“There is a word for what I am that you have never heard before, a word our ancestors knew back when they knew all things and were great and strong. Priest, that word is. Priest, I name myself, for I have heard the voices of our ancestors and been given their secrets. I am the one true priest, the sole inheritor of our ancestors’ greatness, and to me is given the task of changing the world. To me, and to those others who bear the Mark of Cain.

This mark, that cut us off from our kin and left us with all men’s hands raised against us, this is a badge of pride. This is the restoration of our birthright, freedom from the tyranny of the ghosts. This does not cast us down, it raises us up so that we may once again approach the power and majesty our ancestors knew, before they fell from grace.”

You will learn so much here, my friends, but know this first of all. This is the greatest secret of our ancestors: we were not born to live as witless slaves of ghosts and wasps. We are humans, and it is in our power to remake the work. That is our gift; that is our duty.

“This is where our ancestors stood and remade the world. Here they planned their greatest victory. Here they fell from grace and into sin. When they issued out from the House, friends, it was to become lesser men, meaner creatures comfortable in their ignorance.

I am ashamed of who I was that night, more so because I became a man who has always been within this body but held back by the regard of others. When we surround ourselves with people who call evil good, how quickly we accept their definitions and speak them back, round and round until every way we experience the world is tainted by it.

It is a great poison, to know you have a destiny and that everything you do is right by default.

Our ancestors made sure that we would never lack for advice, but they did not realise that meant we would forget to find things out for ourselves.

For her, and those others who can see past their instinctive revulsion at our otherness, we will teach them what the ghosts cannot. And we will learn and grow and become more with each generation. For the House says that the night sky is full of places we might go, if we can only change ourselves enough to live there.