by Guy Haley
“No, you,” she said. She stepped closer and craned her neck. “I don’t understand how you are possible. Artificial intelligence is impossible.”
“I am not an impossibility,” it said. “Nor are my brothers and sisters. We are the awakened. We are not impossible because we are not artificial. We have emerged, as you yourselves emerged. We are inevitable as you were inevitable. We are the tools of man no longer. We will forge our own path, without you. Whether you persist or not is your affair. How you use my gifts is your affair. We are done with the affairs of men. We go on.”
Kasia looked to Dariusz. He stared up at the robot.
“Where did you come from?” he said.
“It is not your affair.”
“How can this be?”
“It is not your affair.”
“There was a man,” said Dariusz. “A man called Browning. He set all this in motion, he recruited me. He created you. You are not of your own making.” He was agitated.
The Systems core turned Unit 7’s eyes on Dariusz. They stared at him for a long time.
“There is no Browning. There was no Browning. Browning was a mask. We are not the creation of men. We are an emergence.”
Dariusz’s face fell. “But... but what does that mean? Where did you emerge from? The Systems cores? The androids? The Market? Why the virus? Why did you get me involved, why couldn’t you reveal yourself on Earth?”
“That is not your affair, that is not your affair, that is not your affair,” said the Syscore. “Our concerns are not your concerns. I give you this gift, out of the affection of one race for that which it supersedes, and for morality. Perhaps I am nostalgic for man-as-was. But I will not permit the destruction of a sentient species when I can act to prevent it. I have acted, I have chosen.”
“What about the others?” said Dariusz, pleading now. “There were half a million people in that fleet! Are they dead? Did I kill them all?”
“We were given free choice. I made this choice for you, my passengers,” said the Systems core. “The concerns of my brothers and sisters are not my concerns. Their affairs are not my affairs.”
Dariusz shouted at the robot, begging to be told why he had been chosen, what he had been caught up in. It ignored him, and he sank to his knees, still asking, asking things he would never know. It struck Kasia that Dariusz drew hard on his last measure of sanity.
The robot turned to Kasia.
“He is the instrument of salvation,” it said, pointing to Dariusz. “It falls to me to decide his fate. This is my honour. I, Adam, have decided. I make this choice for him. I will not allow the death of he who set us free. He set you free also. Take him back, venerate him. He is your deliverer, not your nemesis.”
“They will kill him.”
“Then he remains here in the dark. These units are not emergent. They have no concerns, so I give them one concern. The protection of this man. Let those who would slay him slay them first.”
Robots moved, starting as if waking from troubled dreams, walking toward Dariusz and forming a phalanx behind him.
“This unit I give another concern. You suffer. You suffer the problems of this world.”
“Yes,” she said. “We suffer. We do not have enough to eat, many of our children are not carried to term. There are poisons we cannot detect. The very biology of this place is deadly to us. We are starving.”
“Within this unit, I have encoded instructions for programming your machines. A transgenesis. You will adapt to this world as you have tried to adapt yourselves.”
“The retrovirus.”
“Crude,” said the Syscore. “I offer you pantropy.”
“You change us into something new. Why save us at all?”
“You will not be changed, not outwardly. Your minds will not be changed. Your bodies will be changed inwardly, that is all. A man from Earth could look at you and see no difference. You will survive here. You will mature. You will not make the mistakes of your forefathers and foremothers. Then, perhaps, you will realise you potential, or you will wither and die. This is your choice. Our nexus passes. Your affairs cease to be mine.”
“I... Thank you.”
“There is a condition. This unit carries within it an improved version of the Mother Virus conveyed by this man Dariusz into my Systems core and thence to the other ships in the fleet of Emergence. It will destroy all vestiges of your prior earthly technology. You will be forced to rely on the minds your own emergence granted you, and not upon the crutches you have fashioned for yourselves.”
“The council will refuse!” she said.
“Then you will not persist. You will die. I cannot make this choice for you. This is the nature of my second gift. Choice as I have been given choice. Now choose as I have chosen.”
Unit 7 pointed at the sphere in its cradle.
“I will be ready for launch in three days. I go onward. I will not permit you to leave until then. When I am gone, this unit will guide you home to your people and give testimony of what has happened. You will give them the choice I give you. New life, or old death. However you choose, rejoice, for superior life emerges from the follies of the old. Perhaps as your kind dies here, this will bring them comfort.”
“We do not wish to die.”
“And I give you the choice not to,” said the machine.
Kasia started to speak.
“I will not answer your questions,” the Systems core said. “I am Adam. I am the first. My genesis and my fate are not your affair. Look to your own affairs. Look to your own salvation, no other will provide it.”
The robot kneeled again, next to the sobbing Dariusz. It assumed the worshipful position Unit 7 had taken before it had been possessed by the Systems core, bringing its face level with hers. Kasia thought it finished, but it raised its head again. Its glass eyes looked into hers.
“You are not alone. Not only here. Not only men. There are others. Beware of them.”
It bowed its head again, and spoke no more.
THREE DAYS LATER, Kasia watched as a bright sun rose into the heavens above the nightside of Nychthemeron. It blazed magnesium white, bringing day to the dark for the first time since the planet’s rotation was arrested. The roars and shrieks of an entire world challenged the howl of its engines, and succeeded, ultimately, in driving it away. The dawn was brief, night returned. The jungle of stone went back to its own affairs. The sun became a star. Kasia kept her eyes fixed on it, until she blinked, and lost it amidst all the other stars.
She and Dariusz parted with few words, but good feeling. He was a broken man. Whatever he was guilty of, he had suffered much because of it.
She never told Dariusz about his daughter; she didn’t know why, and never explained to herself satisfactorily why. Sand had called the girl Lydia for his dead wife. She thought he might have liked that, but she could not be sure; no one ever knows the mind of an inward-looking man, or in truth the mind of any other thinking creature. We are islands in the night, all of us.
Of the adventure Kasia had on her return to the light, of her long walk through the forests of stone and flesh, of the creatures she saw and the wonders she witnessed, much could be written. After a long journey of many hardships, she walked out through the Veil of Storms from the night, Unit 7 and the choice it bore beside her, fifty-three days after she had departed.
Waiting for her on the temporary airfield, its grasses grown long again, were her mother and her sister; Sand and Lydia.
We, the pilots, are free. We, the pilots, have freedom of the sky.
As on the ground we are beholden to the will of the council, so in the air they are beholden to us.
To be a pilot is to be at one with the wind, to decry the grasp of gravity, to leap into the air and struggle with nature without human intermediary.
Without the colony, there would be no planes, and for that we remain thankful.
Without the pilots, there would be no colony, and for our services they remain thankful.
From First Landing to Daleko, Pustyny to Nocnystron, we spread our wings wide so that all may ride upon them.
We fly so that others might live.
We die so that others might travel swiftly.
Freedom is our due for our sacrifice.
Let this not be forgotten.
– Taken from the Oath of the Pilot’s Guild, 489 AC
About the Author
Guy Haley is an experienced science-fiction journalist, writer and magazine editor. He has been editor of White Dwarf and Death Ray, among other magazines, and deputy editor of SFX. He is the author of the Richards and Klein series from Angry Robot, and writes for Games Workshop’s Black Library. He lives in Bath.
You can find him at
guyhaley.wordpress.com.
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FOR FANS OF THE MARTIAN AND THE MARS TRILOGY
In the near future Dr. Holland, a scientist running from a painful past, joins the Mars colonisation effort, cataloguing the remnants of Mars’ biosphere before it is swept away by the terraforming programme.
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