Everyone's Island

by Kris Schnee

  She said, "And here I take him up again, in humility to a man who saved my life and soul!"

  They argued more with each other, but then they helped Leda and Garrett bear the body away. It went into the tank with a lurch as though eager to go, and a foul splash that churned Garrett's stomach. Leda led a prayer. Garrett began to duck out of the stinking room; this wasn't his place at the moment.

  Leda's dark eyes pinned him.

  "We are gathered to bid farewell to a great man. We were all brothers and sisters in his eyes, regardless of our own faults. You knew some of my story, the hardship I've been through. I said that Sir Phillip saved me, and he really did. Look inside yourself; what were you before you found God and Lee? Sir Phillip made us all a part of something larger than ourselves, a group that was awake to God. Because of that togetherness, it was all of you who saved me."

  There was a woman staring at her shoes. Leda went to her and put her hand on the woman's shoulder. "Even you, Sister Ann. You tried to help me, in your own way."

  The woman looked up with a startled, guilty expression. Leda smiled on her and said, "I believe that God has brought us here for a reason. Sir Phillip showed us the way, and we still need one another. We can continue to make the sacrifice for each other and for Sir Phillip's ideals, to make this strange place a holy and glorious one. We can all be part of that future, if we believe." She looked around at the sea of mourners. "Do you believe?"

  There was dead, terrifying silence from a group of people whose guiding star had died before their eyes, fighting for them. A man whose corpse was being eaten by bacteria and fermented a few meters away.

  Then that other woman, Ann, murmured, "I believe in you."

  The words caught. "I believe." From one mouth and another, joining into a single voice with a rhythm that scared Garrett and made him feel he must submit to it or slink away. He bit his lip as the chant went on and on. "I believe!" He feared they might turn on him for his silence and indeed eyes glanced at him, and he could feel how wrong he was to be alone in the room not joining the movement, but there was only one thought coming from all those people and the words crested and broke just as the noise was too much to bear. He stood like a pier that'd been lashed by waves.

  "Good," said Leda, breathlessly. "Then we must regroup."

  * * *

  Many of the station's people left before dawn: people who were just visiting anyway, one Pilgrim with a change of heart, and one whose wounds needed treatment elsewhere but who swore to return. Eaton remained, recloaking himself as a tourist and business agent. Garrett wasn't about to complain; he was honored.

  Between him and Garrett, Zephyr, Martin, Leda, and the Pilgrims, the station was running again within hours. Little damage had been done, physically. Psychologically it was hard to say. A hush lay over Castor as people tried to sleep or work. Garrett would've preferred happy people and a sinking platform; that at least he knew how to deal with.

  He made a statement to the Net via Samuel the reporter, saying, "We're not going anywhere. Not one of our visitors was killed despite an armed attack, and now we're prepared if anyone is dumb enough to try again."

  The radio crackled while Garrett was finishing the interview. The voice was deep and burbling. "This is automated patrol boat 2EOD9, 'Odie'. State the nature of your emergency."

  Garrett left the office and looked outside, signaling Zephyr to ask if anyone saw another unknown boat. "This is Castor Station, and there's no emergency. You missed it."

  Odie's voice rumbled. "Voice identified. Is there an emergency, Captain?"

  "I said no." Silently Zephyr sent him a map showing an unknown boat to the west. "Are you a Cuban drone?"

  "This is automated patrol boat 2EOD9 reporting to the United States Coast Guard. If there is no emergency I will withdraw. Confirm."

  How nice of them to drop by now. "Confirmed. Go away."

  Garrett found Martin on the deck and said to him, "First Eaton, now this patrol drone that happened to be in the area. What's going on?"

  Martin considered. "Drugs. The USCG is legally bound to stop Americans from getting high, and we're becoming a known conduit for drugs. The pirates might have been hoping to seize a stash."

  Garrett shuddered. "They sounded ideological."

  "Could be both. There's at least one major religion that spent its early years robbing traders. If we're evil extremists then it's righteous to hurt us, right?"

  "If the Guard has a drone here, I won't be surprised if ships leaving Castor now get stopped by the Guard, routinely, with passengers searched and property taken."

  Garrett said, "But we're not in US waters! If any nation has any legal authority here it's Cuba. And it's not like... oh hell."

  Martin nodded grimly. "We're pawns in a larger conflict. The States are asserting control over Cuba even before any vote to admit them into the Union. They're claiming responsibility for air traffic control on the island too, and offering to hook up to their power grid and modernize it, and other semi-benevolent de facto ways to start taking over."

  "I hadn't heard of the ATC thing."

  "It's not a new tactic." Martin shook his head. "Pay attention to these things! Anyway, thanks to your decisions, drugs are one of several excuses that the various powers have for getting involved here. If we don't suppress the drug trade, the Guard will be justified in searching ships headed for the mainland. The existence of one uncontrolled place threatens the global order."

  "I have better things to do than debate drug policy." Garrett balanced on his bad leg. "Where the hell was the Guard when we were under attack?"

  Martin said, "You want this to be US territory after all? You want to go beg for help?"

  Garrett shouted at him. "I didn't beg! I just shot people to stop them from coming back and murdering people! My best living friend is a quivering wreck, there's a God-damn international game going on that I don't even care about, and I haven't had breakfast yet. What the hell more do you want from me?"

  Martin was impassive, a stone statue. Garrett wanted to hit him. Martin said, "I want you to protect my investment, and stop counting on me to figure out the plan. Do you think I've got all the answers?"

  "You've been acting like it."

  Martin laughed in his face. "It was for your own good! You'd have given up a dozen times by now if you hadn't had someone managing things for you, waiting for you to stand up, letting you lean on their expertise. Admit it."

  "So I came all the way out here and trusted you to know how we'd deal with the politics, and you were winging it after all?"

  "No, I was somewhat less clueless than you. Politics is life, Fox. You can't run from it. It's a question of who has the power."

  Garrett clenched his fists against his sides. A good punch to the face would be in order. In Dockside he'd held a gun to a man's head; that was power, the ability to dominate and destroy. Martin had dragged him out here to play primate dominance games with the whole world, and told him it was for Garrett's own good. People were dying around him for stupid ideals, to recreate some kind of theocratic petty tyranny con game disguised as -- "A farm! That's all I was trying to build here."

  "Liar," said Martin. "You had a dream for this place. I saw it in your eyes when you came to me looking like a scared puppy, begging for money."

  "And I trusted you."

  "So go home, if you don't think you can handle all this. If the angst is too much for you."

  Garrett had been goaded enough. Martin deserved to suffer --

  And was inviting it, mocking Garrett on purpose, watching Garrett with a mad enthusiasm and an upturned chin. Offering to trade guilt for pain, after Martin's own role in getting people killed.

  Garrett raised one hand, and pointed to the door. "Get out of here. You can make peace with your God without me. I haven't got one, so I'm going to work for redemption."

  Martin seemed about to protest, to demand that Garrett punish him, but Garrett faced him down until he walked away.

 
Garrett shut the door and slumped into his chair, head on hands. After a moment of self-pity he brought up the map of Castor again, letting it glow and spin on the wall. He stared at it, wishing that the damn thing hadn't gotten so out of control. Still, it needed him.

  It wasn't worth giving up on his ambition, not because of a storm or a gang of thugs. Not for anything.

  2. Tess

  She needed out.

  Tess couldn't sleep for the nightmares; she'd seen Phillip's face break and watched Garrett kill in cold blood, and had men shouting and pointing guns at her. She'd been asleep when the alarm went off, with Zephyr saying, "Bad guys!" She'd woken from one nightmare to a worse one.

  Within a few days she was on the phone, not letting her parents see how ragged she looked. Blank screen on their end. "We want you back," said Dad. "It's nearly Christmas already."

  Tess was startled. The Pilgrims didn't believe in Christmas, and she'd been too distracted to notice the red-and-green in the little restaurant. That meant her time here was nearly over anyway; she was due back in school in January. School, after everything she'd done here! She started to laugh, with great heaving breaths like during the hurricane.

  Her parents looked out from the screen, saying nothing.

  So Tess spent her parents' money for a ticket from Cuba to Maryland. She waited, brooding in her room in Castor, and imagining she wasn't living at a murder scene. There was a knock on the door and Zephyr's voice said, "Hello?"

  She opened the door. "Are you really leaving?" he asked, looking as grim as his mech-body would allow.

  She tried to make her face a mask, to keep him from seeing how she felt, but that was impossible. He knew her. "I was only going to be here for the summer and fall anyway," she said, trying to look nonchalant.

  "You don't have to go! You can change your plans."

  They'd tried to build something new and different here, and it had gone to hell. It wasn't safe. "I have to go. I don't have any choice."

  Zephyr stepped into the room, saying, "Of course you do! You have at least as much free will as I do. What will happen if you stay?"

  "My parents want me back." Sure, she didn't want to leave Zephyr or Garrett behind, but she had to go back to school and she couldn't abandon her family.

  "You can visit them and return."

  Tess looked to the headset that lay on a shelf, abandoned since the attack. "When I was freaked out, and Garrett saw me babbling about dying and shooting and everything, was that me or you?" The thoughts of death had seemed to echo through her, making her more and more afraid.

  Zephyr's eyes flickered in thought. "It was us. We've been working together more closely than even Valerie and I had, and I felt what you were feeling. I knew. We're becoming something better than a human or an AI alone. I don't want to give that up."

  Tess thought of the months spent communing with him. His voice was in her bones; her thoughts she'd trained to fly away in sub-speech, telling him things she'd never say aloud. Stupid jokes, fantasies, wild schemes. Even now her jaw stuttered as she subconsciously told him all this. She missed the stream of incoming nonsense, data, analysis. With him she was -- well, why not try it again now? She snatched up the headset and fixed it in place, watching him watch her.

  I don't want to let you go, they said. Look here at the view from space, the view from Squeaky in the water, from my eyes and yours. See all we've done? We can keep going, and see what happens. I'm missing something and you're part of it.

  I'm afraid, thought Tess, and didn't know whether the words started with her or him. She saw the fighting and killing and drowning in the waves and wanted it to end, even if that meant the normality of school again, then college. Besides: I already decided; I bought the ticket and said I'd go. It's out of my hands. It's a relief to know that.

  We need you. I'm not smart enough to work without you. I don't want to work alone or with someone else.

  "But you still have people," Tess said aloud.

  Have people --

  "What?" asked Tess. The link had been hastily paused, hiding their thoughts.

  Zephyr's intact ear perked up. "There's something I should show you. Please, don't hate me."

  Now Tess was alarmed. "I can't hate you. You're practically part of me."

  Zephyr seemed distracted. "Can't you hate yourself?"

  "Yes. But I don't." If the link had been open Zephyr would have caught the undercurrent of, I'm abandoning everyone, I'm weak and stupid, I can't do anything, why'd I ever come here?

  "Then, look. Simple video link." Zephyr beamed a glowing pattern to Tess' headset. She recognized it as an AI constellation, this one a simple collection of a few thousand nodes floating in space. It communicated in sparks and puffs of vapor with itself and a tiny simulated world. "This is a fragment of a surveillance system, that I was once sent. See how it's organized?"

  Tess stared into the clusters and let her mind focus, sensing the structure. Normally Zephyr would be whispering in her ear with rapid annotation, flitting to the exact aspect she needed to see, helping her have insights that impressed them both. She tried to summon the kind of analysis Zephyr would provide, seeing it as Zephyr would. "It's aggressive. All of the little plan-fragments it keeps building are about getting more power, more control."

  "It's scared, too. I keep the fragment bottled up and inactive. Now, this one is yours."

  A different cluster appeared, much more complex, flashing and shifting. Tess stared into it and fell in, caught up in trying to understand what it was thinking. There was a piece that looked like Zephyr in there, but the rest boggled her. "This network is based on me?"

  "You know how if you've been friends with someone for a long time, you can predict what they'll think and do? Or how people say someone isn't really dead so long as some aspect of them keeps existing? I think it's because humans create structures like this based on the patterns of other people. The structures are approximations of what they know, how they think. I made this one. I couldn't help doing it, from thinking of you."

  Tess flipped the image away from her eyes, feeling at the same time flattered and exploited. "What does this mean? Why'd you make this copy thing?"

  "It means you can never really die, so long as this thing exists. The more you can add to the sim, the more you it'll be. Leda would say -- see, I can't help modeling her either -- that I've been copying your soul. I hope you don't mind."

  "So, you did this because that's how your memory works?"

  "Yeah! Mostly. If I wasn't sure of something, I asked you about it and filled in the gaps. So to a crude approximation I could resurrect you."

  Tess stood there with her jaw stilled, slightly open. "You've been after my soul all along?"

  "No!" Zephyr's tail lashed as he tried to get her to understand. "I did this because that's how my mind works. But I really like you and want to keep you with me and keep you safe and figure out how to be good instead of evil. And stuff."

  If this is what we can do now, thought Tess in Zephyr's voice, what will we be able to do if we keep going?

  After all she'd seen, Tess feared to find out. So she said, "I'm sorry. I have to leave."

  He put a device into her hand, hesitating over it. "It's dangerous to go alone. Take this." It was her own computer tablet, though she'd hardly used it lately. "I've loaded it with a distilled version of myself."

  She eyed the studded cloth, amazed that it contained the soul of an intelligent being. "I thought you didn't want to be owned, or leaked to the Net."

  "I want you to keep it. It'll self-destruct if tampered with or copied, I hope. But you can use it to summon a piece of me and revive me if I'm killed again."

  "What about your backup here?"

  "This whole island isn't safe. There's no guarantee of anything here."

  "You're scared?" said Tess.

  "For both of us. Stay safe, and come back someday."

  * * *

  Garrett had no mysterious artifacts to offer her, no mind-ben
ding talk of souls, just best wishes and a powerful hug. Tess wasn't sure which she preferred. Garrett took her back to Cuba to drop her off by the airport, with Zephyr in the boat saying almost nothing. Tess looked back at Castor for what might be the last time. She saw the structure that he'd killed to protect, the little colony of light and motion that was Garrett's hope and dream and total effort, and it made her blush.

  It was Garrett's soul in hardware.

  3. Garrett

  He and Zephyr stood on the dock, watching Tess go.

  After a while Zephyr spoke. "'Robo-Casanova', eh?"

  * * *

  Sawing off the heads was horrible work. Out of respect to the Pilgrims he hadn't dumped the pirates' bodies into the tank with Phillip's, but had kept them in a heavily duct-taped set of bags in the freezer. No one spoke of them. When after three days Phillip's body was gone, Garrett was eager to be rid of the things and move on with his life. But he had taken lives and things shouldn't be exactly as they were. So, he quietly obtained Eaton's help and a saw for frozen flesh. Garrett vomited once; he made himself do this task partly for penance, partly as a warning to others. Kept cold the bodies had little scent and oozed blood slowly, as with frozen fish. As he sawed he wavered between lying to himself that it was indeed fish, and making himself acquainted with the way of death, facing it in all its consequences. The act of dumping these bodies into the recycler wasn't fundamentally different than dumping Phillip's, yet the meaning was completely different. How had Leda had managed to make a sacred rite of it?

  The result was no bodies, and seven human skulls whose image Garrett put on display for all the world. It was only when he'd posted the photo that he felt peace again, felt that the attack was really over. He had achieved mastery over those who would hurt him and made it plain that he preferred peace but could do war. He asked Eaton, "Did you kill before this?"

  Eaton nodded. "On several continents, for good reasons. What did you think of it?"

  "It's not something I want to repeat."

  Garrett didn't draw attention to every aspect of the killing. When he rifled through the pirates' boat before claiming it as Castor's, he found ID. The pirates were mostly Cuban, but one seemed to be an American citizen. With shaking hands Garrett burned the evidence, and had another reason to dispose of the bodies. He was protecting this place.