Written in Light

by Jeff Young

  Ray deliberately forced himself to get up and leave the room, but only after he pressed “save.” When he rolled out of bed eight hours later, he began to wonder just what he had.

  Ray walked through the park, scattering pigeons. They came to rest again after he passed. He walked up to a park bench already occupied by a little old woman and sat down. She peered at him through her glasses with their little gold chain and grasped her bag of breadcrumbs close to her chest. He gave her a broad grin and unfolded a piece of paper in front of her. “What do you see?” he asked, leaning forward.

  Her jaw dropped down so that the little wattle of loose flesh below her chin rested on her glasses’ chain. Eventually, he folded the paper up. She sat there for a second. Her head swiveled around to stare at him. “What is that?” she asked.

  That stumped him. What did he have? “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. Looked like black-and-white squiggles. It sure did make me feel good, though. I felt like a little girl in a field of daisies with a big fresh-made cookie.”

  He stood up, and her skinny arm shot out to stop him. He stepped back. “Can I see it again, mister?” He kept backing away, slowly folding the paper over and over. Her hand flailed in the air after him. The paper went into his pocket, and then he turned and ran.

  Later, when he got home, he sat there in the dark with his head in his hands. He had a picture of happiness. That remained the only explanation he could accept. Or rather a picture that caused happiness, maybe that felt more accurate. What next? He resisted the urge to pull out the paper and have a look to banish his anxiety.

  What the hell had he been thinking? He’d gone out and used a little old lady as a test subject. Hardly what the FDA would consider a reasonable test. Did this fall inside the purview of the FDA? It wasn’t a drug. But it did alter one’s mood. He felt certain of that. He had the golden goose in his pocket. Now he needed to find a way to make sure it stayed his. He stood up and walked into the other room, flicked on the computer, and pulled up the website on copyright, trademarks, and patents.

  Ray stood in front of the mailbox. The envelope slid out of his hand and into his future. With that, he took his best shot at keeping his discovery, but the cat doesn’t go back into the bag once it’s out.

  ~*~

  -An unscrupulous patent clerk copies Happy Daze37, and within hours it escapes his grasp and finds its way onto the Internet.

  -Two days later, the first soft drink can bearing the overlaid symbols rolls off the production line.

  -A billboard with a blurry version of Happy Daze37 as part of its advertisement for a women’s perfume causes multiple-car pileups.

  -A week later, five jets equipped with smoke-writing gear create a version of Happy Daze37 in the air over a battlefield, and the resulting confusion allows embattled forces to withdraw.

  -The Dazer virus strikes unsuspecting computer users and flashes Happy Daze37 in between the screen flickers. Electric bills soar.

  -A handful of religions attempt to adopt Happy Daze37 as their own symbol, and a similar number denounce it as a tool of evil.

  ~*~

  Ray opened the envelope and looked over the latest subpoena—Mabel Kirk’s lawyer once again. Where the hell had she found somebody to represent her in a crazy case like this? Just dumb luck she was on that park bench and even dumber of him to expose her to Happy Daze37. If her lawyer could prove he’d created it, then Ray could become either famous or infamous. If he could prove he’d made it, he’d own the hottest property ever. Of course, he’d also have to deal with the psychological damages suit she filed, which could ruin any publicity he gained. It felt insane. Did he want to be labeled as responsible for the damage done to the Dazers? Absolutely not. Addictive personalities swarmed to Happy Daze37 like flies. The Dazers littered the streets, parks, and any public place simply staring away. Most wore sunglasses with Happy Daze37 etched onto the lens.

  Ray looked at the copy of Happy Daze37 stuck on his refrigerator. It did nothing for him anymore. Soon the impact would fade. Dazers were a temporary phenomenon. But he remained happy. The part that made Mabel unhappy was his returning two more times to show her the picture again. Then he refused to give it to her. He had to be sure, but the look on her face fascinated him. Nowadays, he wandered through the park staring at their upturned faces. Occasionally, he’d stop and ask them what they saw. The responses varied. Apparently, lots of things made people happy, but Happy Daze37 seemed to evoke them all.

  Ray never expected that the simple fact that he had found a way to make others happy would satisfy him more than looking at his discovery. The mere fact that every person that he saw felt happy because of him made him happy. It would come to an end soon. He knew that, but then no one really tried to do much to the original. Ray, however, was willing to experiment. He now had a portfolio full of happiness just waiting, as many colors as the rainbow. A simple solution, as long as they were happy, he would be too.

  Occam's Dagger

  Jack watched the corpse tumbling from ceiling to wall to floor to wall to ceiling yet again as the ship turned. The crew ‘bot, Jack of Hearts, feet magnetized to the floor, remained the only stable point in the hallway. Debris brushed against it, and globules of gore spattered against Jack’s metal epidermis. While designations like ceiling and floor were meaningless in a space vehicle, humanity seldom let such details go, and so his creators programmed Jack with them as well.

  The unit reached out a hand to a terminal and attempted to link to the craft’s pilot intelligence. Nothing. Jack’s activation must have occurred due to the lack of ship’s control. As an android and limited in capabilities, it still knew psychologists felt human beings reacted better to things shaped like them. Primary programming forced Jack to look over the victim, verify their state, and attempt whatever help necessary.

  Jack’s thermals registered a body temperature low enough to indicate that the violence occurred several hours before. The android secured the body to the wall using the Velcro on the victim’s jumpsuit. Since Jack couldn’t reach the pilot-mind, the android wasn’t able to make a positive identification. From the sounds Jack could distinguish, there were still many other people alive on board the ship. The lack of gravity and the rotation of the ship continued to cause them distress. But something else rang through the halls—prolonged screaming.

  Slowly putting everything together, Jack assessed the situation. As if done by someone without solid footing, the angle of the wound to the victim looked odd and implied that the attack occurred after the ship became unstable. Nothing indicated this was an accident, therefore homicide remained a possibility. Primary programming kicked in again: Preserve the humans.

  Jack swung down the hallway, thin legs pistoning to provide momentum, the round visual port on its head swinging from side to side. Loose items tumbled through the air. With the ship wobbling instead of rotating, travel became treacherous. Jack considered the problem too big to handle on its own. In the storage locker, the unit opened the compartment where the rest of the crew ‘bots were kept. Someone had already been there. Cabling lay all about the compartment. The remaining three androids had been violently disassembled. Filings and shorn pieces of plating tumbled along the floor, disturbed by Jack’s passage. The other Jacks, the standard complement of four robotic assistants, Clubs, Spades, and Diamonds had been destroyed. Following the screams, Jack set out in search of the human in the greatest need.

  Jack looked briefly up the central corridor. The android could see the dark hollow where the blue-green casing of the pilot-mind should rest. Interface optic pieces were scattered all about. When Jack turned the corner near the Galley, the unit ran into a screaming woman. She pushed off the wall, repeatedly stabbing on Jack’s carapace with a chipped knife. Jack quickly disarmed her and then pushed her down to the hull plating.

  The ‘bot looked her over. Her eyes wouldn’t focus on the android, looking instead past its shoulder. She continued to beat on its carapace a
nd scream. Jack pushed her arms further into her off-white jumpsuit, tying the sleeves together. Pulling her legs up, she kicked. Jack should have fallen backward, but the android’s feet were firmly magnetized to the decking, and instead, in reaction, she shot off through the Galley and out into the far corridor. Looking at the dagger and cross-referencing the images from the corpse, Jack believed it had found the murder weapon.

  Jack turned its head to survey the Galley and discovered someone watching the entire altercation. The human across from Jack blinked and looked at the sandwich in his hand. He tore a large bite out of it and leaned over to look out the doorway. The woman continued screaming. Jack noted that the man also wore magnetic boots. He cocked his head and looked at the backup with a curious smile. He clomped over to Jack and reached out, and tapped the etched heart on Jack’s carapace. “Hiya, lover boy.” Then he took another bite.

  “Who are you?” Jack asked, shuffling over to the corridor way looking for the erstwhile attacker.

  The man looked briefly at the orange jumpsuit he wore and said, “Eddie,” smiling brightly.

  Jack looked him over. He seemed to be in good physical condition. His boots left dirty footprints, and Jack automatically checked them against the footprints he had seen near the victim. No match. Eddie’s grimy jumpsuit bore the blazon “EDE086642”. Was the human being truthful or merely inventive? Jack could not be sure.

  “Eddie, did you see the woman enter this room carrying the knife?”

  “Yup, and she shrieked her head off too, until you came along. You know like ooooooaaaaahhhheeee!” He broke into a large grin. There were breadcrumbs scattered throughout his beard.

  Jack rapidly revaluated Eddie and dropped his estimated IQ by several points. “Eddie, you are not safe. There was a murder. Come with me. You should wait in a locked room until I find the attacker.”

  “So, loverboy, how do I know you didn’t chase her in here?” Eddie replied, pointing to the knife in Jack’s clutch, swinging the sandwich about, and scattering more crumbs.

  “Eddie, androids cannot allow humans to come to harm.”

  “Look, loverboy, you’ve got blood on you. Well, if you want to be technical, I got blood on me. This ship’s in a bad way, and if I didn’t know better, then I would guess that there are still other people out there who are getting hurt. Maybe we should save ‘the who did what’ till later. Let’s see if we can help anybody. But since you got the knife—you go first.”

  Jack found that rational. Even if it could not use the knife, at least now it controlled the weapon. The android led the way down the corridor after the woman. While they stalked along, Jack went over the images recorded of Eddie. There was blood on his suit, but it wasn’t in a spatter pattern. Jack found itself over-analyzing the situation, but that was all that could be done until they found the source of the problem. It remained to be seen what Jack could do to subdue whoever had jettisoned the pilot-mind and destroyed the other crew ’bots.

  Eddie stopped to stare momentarily at a flickering light. When he realized his protector forged ahead, he clunked along heavily in the magnetic boots to catch up with Jack. His head swung from side to side. “So where did Miss Congeniality go?”

  Jack listened, differentiating sounds once again. Without answering Eddie, the android turned left and walked up two junctions. A man struck Jack from overhead. While his mass did not equal Jack’s, he broke the hold of Jack’s magnetism. They tumbled until one of Jack’s feet once again stuck to a hull plate. The unit’s attacker beat at Jack with his fists. Jack eventually got a hand around the man’s neck and applied pressure to his carotid artery until he passed out. Jack pushed his attacker’s arms into his jumpsuit and tied the sleeves around him.

  “You killed him,” Eddie blurted, backing away, his sandwich floating near his head.

  Jack snatched the sandwich out of the air and held it out to Eddie. “I incapacitated him. Here…”

  Eddie stepped forward enough to snatch the sandwich from Jack’s grip and then gave him a wide berth as the android turned. He looked possessively at the sandwich and then glared at the android. They continued forward.

  Twelve people gathered in the aft cargo area, every single one still conscious, busily harmed each another. Two men pummeled the ribs of a third, desperately holding onto their victim as they tumbled. Her legs wrapped around a stanchion, a woman in a red jumpsuit systematically broke the fingers of a whimpering man who hung in midair. A woman and a man held another woman in a stranglehold, their struggles leaving them bouncing about the bay.

  All this chaos happened in null gravity. Trash, cargo containers, and tools floated about as the ship continued to drift. Jack found it difficult to make out all the combatants in the confusion. It realized right away that it could separate several but not all of the fighters. Statistically, Eddie would probably do little more than eat his sandwich and watch.

  Jack sampled the air. There were no contaminants, no raised oxygen levels, and no increases in radiation. Jack’s primary motivation forced the android into action. A plan formed in the unit’s mind as the android moved forward.

  Eddie stood in the doorway, a bemused expression on his slack face. Jack moved quickly toward the sleeper bays, and then the unit heard, “Hey. Hey, don’t leave me here with the maniacs. You’re supposed to protect me!”

  Jack’s processors whirred along. A portion of the android’s mind registered Eddie’s complaint. But the unit now considered several issues. What caused all the passengers to lose their minds? What left Eddie unaffected? Who killed the first victim? Quelling these questions was the ultimate concern: preserve the humans—but how?

  Jack stopped in front of the cryogenic racks. Passengers ordinarily slept away their journeys. That brought up two very important questions: Why were the passengers conscious? Where was the ship now? Without the pilot-mind, Jack could not come up with any answers.

  Reaching out, Jack took the primary gas lines in its left hand. The various gases that allowed the humans to be frozen were stored in large tanks overhead. Now that the android had the lines in hand, Jack found itself unable to rupture them. The unit’s mind realized that the best way to stop the humans from harming themselves was to put them all to sleep. To do that, though, Jack would have to lower the ship’s temperature past the point of their survival. Cryogenics, essentially, killed the passengers and revived them. Even though Jack knew this could save all of them, it still could not kill them. The android’s joints locked up, and error indicators flashed on its monitor screens. Frozen in a loop, dagger in one fist, gas lines in the other, Jack froze. Eddie looked at it, wide-eyed.

  Eddie, however, had no such compunctions. “Wait, let me guess. If we pull that out off the wall, the ship will stop spinning? Is that like the gyro-something-stabilizer-whatever bit? Here let me have a go.” He clunked up to the cryo unit and settled his feet on either side of the gas line’s junction. He hesitated a moment as to the final disposition of his sandwich and settled on clamping it between his teeth. Eddie grabbed the lines and pulled. Nothing happened until, after some inspection, he found the complicated red release handle. Then, with the white smog billowing about him, Eddie fell blissfully asleep, his feet magnetically stuck to the hull.

  Only then could Jack move. Now the android had to drop the thermal controls, or all the passengers would perish. It spared one moment to pull Eddie’s sandwich out of his mouth and tuck it into his jumpsuit pocket. Jack moved through corridors toward the bridge, dodging the tumbling bodies of sleeping humans.

  Several hours later, with the sleepers settled, Jack surveyed the remains of the bridge. The ship stabilized and started back toward the inner solar system. Jack settled into the bay the unit usually occupied in the storage locker. Now Jack had plenty of time to attempt to analyze the strange events.

  ~*~

  Pintel looked over the report on the handheld. He hated these drifters. You never knew what lie inside until you popped the seal, he thought. Check all the right
boxes, fill in the lines, but what if no line existed for what he’d found aboard the Solcentric Health shuttle? What if the evidence from the crew android made no sense? Cadmen stalked by him, running the undock sequence to free their patrol ship. “What the hell?” Pintel exclaimed, dropping the handheld.

  Cadmen looked at Pintel, turned back to the viewport by the airlock, and waved once. “Bon voyage, that’s what.” He leaned down and picked up the recorder.

  Pintel looked away. The passengers were all declared criminally insane. They were also all listed as deceased in Solcentric’s record with times of death before the shuttle launch.

  “So, it’s a cleanup operation?” Pintel asked, grabbing the handheld back from Cadmen.

  Cadmen turned away and crossed his arms. “Who takes care of our healthcare, Pintel? What if next time you’re down with a slug in you, they don’t move fast enough? Of course, they loaded up the shuttle with the no-win cases and shot them off without enough fuel, a non-functional pilot-mind, and headed for the outer rim of the solar system.”

  He swung back, jabbing a finger hard into Pintel’s shoulder blade. “How many of our men went down bringing them in? Too bad a shuttle’s worth of the worst criminal freaks took a one-way pleasure cruise. Or are you still worried about the poor, confused android, Jack of what-the-hell-ever?

  Cadmen nodded toward the back of the ship where Jack fitted, strapped to the wall. “The android will be just fine. We wiped the unit’s mind down nicely, already for reassignment. After all, it wouldn’t do for Jack to remember killing all those nice people by putting them in cryo without the proper procedures.”

  With a wicked grin, he tossed the bag carrying the dagger from hand to hand.