by Alex Oliver
“It is all right. It's your duty too, I know.” Felix's cheek lay along the top of Nori's head, and he nudged to one side to bring it into contact with the skin of his temple. How could this wordless, formless touch feel like the single thing that could save him? The only thing that could ever comfort him again? How could he believe that? He was human, not some kind of burrowing pack animal. He didn't need litter-mates and skin contact. He didn't need this.
Oh, but he did.
An idea sprang up like a flame from a lighter, and everything was warm inside and avid. “You could come with me,” he said, stepping away from the wall, away from the precipice. He'd have to make more of the nano. It would take a couple of days. They need not part right now. “We can both do this. Then we could be together, share our thoughts completely.”
Yes! Why not? “Why not? I know you've only had my misery to share so far, but imagine sharing the wonder and the discoveries we might make. We don't need bodies after all. You and I. We're better than that.”
Felix pulled away from the hug only far enough so Nori could see the folded skin and dark shadows under his eyes, but his mouth had flowered out again, no longer thin and tense. “You want me to come with you?”
“I always want you with me,” Nori said, discovering that he meant it even as he said it. It was slightly worrying that sometimes he didn't know what he was thinking until he heard himself speak. Would those thoughts be permanently invisible once he was under?
“I would come with you.” Felix smiled, though it was a weary and solemn smile. “And I see why you have to go. But I promised the Captain I would look after her world for her, and I want to be sure someone is out here protecting you. Perhaps I could talk to you through the head set? Bryant was there for a moment, before I panicked and ripped it off.”
“Yes.” Nori brought both hands up to cradle Felix's jaw. The prickle of four o'clock shadow against his palms made his hands feel more alive than they ever had, and when he leaned in to press his lips against Felix's, his mouth felt the same – woken, sensitive, foreign in a way that felt meaningful, but that he didn't honestly want to repeat.
Felix put a hand to his mouth as though they'd been sharing that thought. “Then it's not really goodbye,” he said. “Perhaps I'll bring my bed down here and sleep in your doorway like a guard-dog.”
Nori laughed, surprised. “That's so sweet! And I could make an avatar out of pontoth and sleep with you.”
“If it wouldn't dissolve me in the night,” Felix agreed, looking brave at the thought, and a little gray about the cheeks.
“It doesn't exactly kill you, you know,” Nori was delaying the moment of truth now. Stalling for time. “It disassembles you into a blueprint it can reassemble at any time.”
Again, Felix's flinch didn't need telepathy to register.
“I mean,” Nori apologized, pushing the plunger on the syringe until a droplet of nano solution slid out of the tip of the needle. No more talk, it was time. “That I wouldn't do that to you. You can always sleep safe with me.”
He tapped on his left arm to raise the vein, and when Felix turned his face away, he pushed the needle in and delivered the accelerated nano.
He expected the dizziness, the black out from which he woke to find himself lying limp on the ground, cradled against Felix's chest, Felix's fingers petting through his hair. He didn't expect to wake to find the doors to the inner sanctum closed. “Whuh?” he managed, putting a hand down on the floor to try to push himself further upright, and finding it reluctant to peel back off again, covered with little black filaments like Felix's beard.
“The doors closed by themselves about five minutes after you fell,” Felix said. His voice sounded thick and raw, as though he had been weeping this whole time. “I don't know if you were aware, at the time, but Aurora told me Bryant was tested before the Destroyer accepted him. She said he had to go through it a couple of times before he passed.”
“I won't fail,” Nori slurred. His face felt strange, his tongue stiff. Every time Felix's gentle fingers brushed against the feelers in his hair, a burst of white noise seemed to go through his whole body, and he found himself tasting citrus fruits and the whole of the wavelength of red light. “Is there a key? How do get the doors open so I can get to the test?”
“I don't--” Felix said, helping him as he tried to get to his feet.
There weren't enough feet. Nori's brain kept trying to find the other four and flicking through bursts of panicky adrenaline when they were missing. His center of gravity was ridiculously high. How did anyone walk so far off the ground? The shifting of balance involved in locomotion on only two feet was distractingly complex. He had severely underestimated the changes he was going through and he wanted to take it back.
But he also wanted to prove he could do anything Bryant could do. Faster, easier, better.
And the truth was that though his human eyes saw the closed, carved panel as a weird and unattractive overbearing design of giant cogwheels, something else in him saw it as a spiraling of pathways, like the ritual dancing spiral in the interlocked vines above the city. It was that unearned knowledge that guided his hand to the hollow place, shaped like the mouth of the carnivorous lash-vine flower, and made him reach inside as though the first of the answers were in there.
Felix shivered beside him when he drew his hand back and showed the sliver of skin that had been sliced off, still oozing blood. Nori was supremely confident that the first test was passed, that the doors would open, and they did.
A second even more highly-decorated wall had closed around where Bryant lay. Stepping into the room between the frescoes felt like stepping into an airlock. A sense that the protection against the void was thin here – that death waited just outside the doors.
They shuffled further in, and only when they reached the podium in the center of the room did Nori wonder if Felix had been recognized as a separate person from himself. Felix had not once taken his supporting arm from around Nori's waist. If you counted limbs, they had eight – closer to the Louse's conformation of six legs and two pincers, than a human's two of each.
“I shouldn't have let you come in here,” Nori pushed Felix towards the doors, reluctantly. “Can you get out?”
“I've no idea.” Felix didn't try to look either, frowning at the walls. These hatches hadn't been there before, had they? Nori would have remembered their brassy gleam, and the ridiculous locking wheels that closed them. “Where's the light coming from?”
That was a good point. Though they had left the lantern outside and though there was no visible light source at all, nevertheless Nori could see perfectly, sharply, as though everything was outlined in bitter-lemon illumination.
The console in the middle of the room beckoned him with the promise that it would contain the information he needed. He put a hand on it just as Felix finished unwinding the first wheel lock and hauling the heavy hatch open.
Felix's expression of incredulity and incomprehension was a blessing to the universe, outlined in the blue-white light that spilled out from the stasis chamber beyond. Nori was distracted from whatever it was the console was trying to tell him by a flash of amused nostalgia for the days when he'd thought Felix was a full time idiot. He wasn't, but a little dash of idiocy every now and again was kind of cute.
“It's a child,” Felix whispered, bemused. “A human child. How would a human child have got here? And why half-transparent? Is it a ghost?”
He shoved the body back into the freezer and turned. He was too far away, Nori realized suddenly, with a wild, wakening fear. If this was an illusion, what would happen to Felix if he saw through it, if the room itself realized that he and Felix were not a single creature but two, one of whom had no permission to be here?
“Or am I seeing things?” Felix asked, suspicious.
The whole room burst into flames.
“It's not real,” Felix chanted to himself as he backed away from the flames by the doors, being herded towards the c
onsole and Nori. “None of it was really here. It can't hurt me.” But the flames caught the hem of his trouser-leg, melting it against his skin, and he screamed and chuffed with the pain as he leaned down to smother them with his bare hands. “It's not real. So why does it hurt!”
“The flames may not be real, but the pain is,” Nori flung his arms around Felix out of no better instinct than the need to protect. In fact it probably helped him more than Felix, who was watching the ring of fire around the walls slowly close in on them and trying to peel the petrochemical residue of his trousers out of his wound at the same time. “It's manipulating our brains to make us perceive things that aren't actually there. But the perception of pain is pain, and I don't know--”
As if a switch had been flipped, the flames doubled in height. The air was barbed in the mouth, blazing. Felix turned and set his back to the worst of the fire. He was a little taller than Nori, and broader across the shoulders, and in his shadow the ferocity of the heat was almost bearable. And still, even now, wherever their skin touched the same mute but powerful exchange of something flowed on, grounding Nori and calming him.
Calming him enough to think. True, none of this was real, but pain produced stress in the body, and stress produced a cocktail of unpleasant, damaging hormones. The experience of being burnt alive would damage Felix physically as well as psychologically. Plus, if this room could influence his brain enough to make him pass out, it could surely also influence it in other ways. If it could influence nerves, it might be able to kill them. The longer Felix stayed in here, unprotected because he was still only human, the more chance of the test felling him with a stroke or an aneurysm.
Another reason to solve this thing in record time.
“That's good,” he said, sinking to his knees, doubling over so Felix could curl himself over Nori's back and blanket all of him in that bubble of cool and comfort. Just for a moment. Just while he thought. “That's good, I…”
He put both his palms down on the floor, and this time did not resist the pull of the planet. Letting go of his body, he felt himself slide down his arms and into the stone. Oh, the programming in here was busy as a swarm of bees, circling around every bit of data it was gathering on Nori, extrapolating, analyzing. But that was okay – that was good – because Nori could easily see which lines of code centered on him. He followed them back into the tree structure of their protocols, digging easily down beneath what the test was trying to make him believe was happening, and right into the architecture of what it wanted from him.
There was the subroutine that told it what to do if an unauthorized person sneaked into the chamber while a testing was in progress. It explicitly called for death--for being so presumptuous, for seeing something that was meant to be holy, set apart by terror and awe.
Nori's skin was telling him that Felix was shuddering now. He was, covered in a cold sweat that seemed to him to be boiling away, poaching him in his own juices. No, no, no, no, no, he thought, disastrously conscious that his mouth was so dry that the insides of his cheeks were cracking. You don't get to take Felix.
The many safeguards on that piece of code said the Lice had been really definite about this rule. Nori couldn't take it all apart in the time he had. So instead, he found the code that identified Felix as a person and changed that. All of a sudden, Felix was an enormous mirror-eyed lemur, and there were no rules that said that pets were not allowed.
“Have you got this?” Felix huffed into his ear. “Something changed. It's not as bad as it was but I really want out. I want out of this.”
All of a sudden, Nori felt a little bad for Bryant. Even now, even while trembling, Felix's touch and his voice were grounding for Nori, continuing to remind him of reality. Bryant had had to do this alone. Bryant had had to do it in several tries. It must have taken some guts to come back for a second go, when the memory of being roasted alive was still fresh.
“Hold on a moment more. I am getting there.”
He'd found a statement of what the test was supposed to prove – that the candidate had enough mental and physical fortitude to withstand the experience of being immobilized and pierced by tubes. That the candidate had an overwhelming desire to serve as the machine's user – no half hearted consent would do. That the candidate was prepared to subordinate the needs of their own DNA and bloodline to the needs of the whole. That the candidate had sufficient moral hardiness to kill, even to kill individual children, in order to be an effective defender of the whole nation.
Bryant had not passed all of these tests, but at the time the machine had thought he was the only candidate, and it wanted a candidate. It wanted to be properly awake again, wanted to have someone to think with, to speak with. It was… lonely, bored, fractious, and Bryant's ability to keep coming back with new angles to try had been seen as an acceptable substitute for the desired ruthlessness. It was something the Lice hadn't thought to include, but the Destroyer had learned to value since.
You are perfect for me, he thought, almost wishing he hadn't met Felix, so he could plunge into the depths of communion with the machine without a single regret. And I'm perfect for you. Let me show you.
With a feeling as if these controls had been made for him, he unraveled the ancient code, switching off the illusions, switching off the pain. The Destroyer nosed at his fingers like a sharp shark as he did it, but didn't bite, and he sensed that it was startled, confused. Like many employers before him, it had never met a programmer like him, and it wasn't sure if it loved or feared him.
“Guh,” Felix uncurled from around his back and briefly hid his head in shaking hands before bending down to examine his un-burned legs. “Oh, the door's open. You did it!”
Nori collected enough of his consciousness together to look out of his own eyes and saw the antechamber restored to its normal appearance, with both doors open and the dark force-field retracted on the inner chamber. Perhaps he should go there and make some physical attempt to get Bryant out of the hollow that was the Louse equivalent of an operator's chair.
Instead he grabbed Felix's hands and bracketed them around his own face, breathing in the fear and sweat scent, repulsive but welcome at the same time.
You did not pass the test, came the thought, gliding up from the floor, swimming in Nori's veins.
Because I am more advanced than those who made the test. You know that.
He could feel it reassessing, re-writing itself until it did know. He could feel too a sense that Bryant had been holding it back, a hope that Nori would be more amenable to killing off the parasites. This one had barely looked at the child during the test, after all. Perhaps his indifference would be easier to work around than Bryant's Hypocratic oath.
A user is already in place. There is no need for another.
“A mistake was made,” he replied, out loud if the turn of Felix's head was any indication. “You have the chance to put it right. Disengage Bryant and put me in his place.”
“Right now?” That was Felix, the note of betrayal in his voice inexplicable and hurtful.
“You knew this was the plan. It's not going to get easier if we drag it out. I thought you'd be glad to have him back. You and your Captain.”
Felix's face seemed to grow narrower. Perhaps it was just his eyes and lips that thinned. “I will be glad to have him back. But not at the expense of losing you instead. I know you think you're in some kind of competition with him, but not for me, you're not. Not for me.”
He is resisting the suggestion that he be detached, Cygnus 5 said.
Even though his heart was breaking for Felix, and his body seemed to be shrinking at the thought he would never touch him again, Nori couldn't help but be amused by the planet's bemusement. Humans, right? They messed up the best of programming and mystified everyone, including themselves.
And the user has all override functions. I cannot force him out.
“Well, maybe I can persuade him,” Nori offered, straightening his clothes and hair and getting to his feet so he
could walk over to the wall behind which Bryant lay and arrange himself in a position of relatively human repose. He set his back to the wall, sitting upright, his legs stretched out in front of him, his hands flat on the floor beside his hips. His hair stirred on his head like the spines of a sea urchin, reaching out behind him and fastening onto the wall, and already he could feel the Destroyer more clearly--all its ghosts and its little creatures, swarms, schools, veins of ore--with exquisite and growing clarity. How much better would it be in the user's chair, designed for this, rather than in some second rate, jury rigged contraption outside?
Bryant, he thought, I'm here. I took the gene splice. Gather yourself up, you can go home if you like.
After only a few gentle nudges and admin re-writes, the Destroyer showed him what Bryant had last been thinking about. He was disappointed to find it was something as mundane as kids. Campos's daughter, and the simulation the test had cobbled together for him, to which the sentimental idiot had even given a name.
This isn't what you wanted for your future, is it? He asked. Bryant had done a good job of pulling back from him, but not good enough. He could sense disapproval and disbelief, and a hope that thought of itself as a torment, because it was a hope that must not be given in to.
You wanted… he opened more files. The Destroyer knew a hell of a lot about Bryant. It just didn't understand how to interpret it, and had therefore marked the knowledge as low priority. You wanted to start up your bio-modification surgery again. To marry and have a family. You still can – I can take over here.
And you wanted to be alone, on a planet sized computer by yourself, Bryant surprised him by knowing this. He must have picked it out of his head when they were linked some time, either just now or last night. How the hell am I supposed to trust the future of the human race to you? I hand over, you let it wipe us all out, and you live forever with all the processing power you dreamed of, and pontoth to rebuild whatever you like. Nah. I can't let you.