The Machine's Child (Company)

by Kage Baker

  It was clear this was a shuttle pad. All dust or loose earth had been scoured away by the wash of air from repeated landings and takeoffs, leaving bare rock exposed, and there were tiny bits of workplace debris scattered here and there: broken bolt heads, crate fragments, anything that might be kicked out or dropped when unloading cargo. And there in the dome’s side was the door, a cargo hatch certainly, of plain roll-down steel sheeting. On its corrugated surface were crudely spray-painted the letters AO.

  We made it, Captain sir! We’re at the door, Alec said.

  You know what to do next, son.

  But it was Edward who leaned to the via panel and withdrew the lead from the torque, and with no hesitation selected the correct port. He plugged it in. They heard the click as the lock disengaged. They waited for a guarding reaction. There was none. The door rolled up an inch, and moving together Edward and Mendoza caught it and hoisted it upward about a half meter. Almost too quickly to be seen, then, Mendoza threw herself under the door and rolled inward, seeming to flow like liquid. Edward halted, startled. A moment later her hand appeared in the opening, beckoning him in. He dropped, rolled, and came up on his feet in the half-darkness, glaring around. Beside him, Alec and Nicholas blinked.

  They stood with Mendoza in what was clearly a storage area. There were crates stacked floor to ceiling: empty ones neatly nested by the door, those yet unbroached piled farther in. Before them a small servounit, bearing some resemblance to Flint or Billy Bones without a skull, was busily engaged in extracting a canister from an opened crate. As they watched, it plugged the canister into a valve crusted with some kind of orange powder. The canister had a symbol on its side: a crossed spoon and fork. The servounit took no notice of them.

  It’s got no brain to spare to see ye, the Captain transmitted.

  Edward nodded, looking past it into the room. There was no other entrance or exit apparent to the eye. Mendoza prowled along the wall, scanning. At last she bent and inspected a grating set in the wall at floor level, and rising she gestured toward it. Edward came close and stared. It was the entrance to a maintenance crawlway.

  That guy’s been sealed in here, said Alec in horror.

  Like a holy anchorite, said Nicholas, shuddering.

  I’m afraid his meditations are about to be disturbed, Edward said. He found the via lock port, and a moment later the grate clicked and fell outward. Mendoza caught it, setting it carefully to one side. She lay down and writhed in through the opening. Edward almost stopped her, reaching out instinctively.

  No! She’s the immortal one, remember? You let her draw the fire, if there is any. She can dodge it, even in there. You’d only get yerself killed.

  Edward grimaced. He crouched by the crawlway, peering in after Mendoza, and watched as she proceeded her body’s length to another grating. She set her face close to it, listening intently. Even Edward could hear, quite clearly now, a man saying in a pleasant voice:

  “Ohh! That’s a nice one, too. You can never have too many of those, you know.”

  She reached back her hand and gestured that Edward should give her something. After a moment’s hesitation he crawled after her and laid the disrupter pistol in her palm. Her fingers closed on it. She reached up with her free hand and unfastened the catches that held the grate in place.

  She wouldn’t kill him, would she? Alec said, looking unhappy.

  She would, for you, Edward said. If it was necessary. Another of her gifts you find distasteful, is it?

  Who taught her to kill but thee? Nicholas muttered.

  Shut up and let the lady work!

  Mendoza, meanwhile, had lifted the grate and set it aside. As she peered through, her eyes widened in astonishment.

  Immediately before her was dark, though light streamed through a doorway just across from the access grate. In the lit room beyond, a man was standing on a stripe of yellow carpet, holding a tumbler of some bright blue beverage and smiling as he talked to the thin air.

  “That’s from me,” he was saying proudly. “You know, you can never have too many bath things, either. I always think, anyway.”

  Mendoza scanned the entire base but read no other occupants in any of the rooms. The mortal man was pale and thin, possibly delusional, certainly unarmed. Deciding that she could deal with any threat he represented, she pushed herself out into the room. Edward and the others followed closely.

  Ancilla was distracted from her contemplation of the garden by abnormal life-readings within her assigned area. She turned in time to see the woman and the tall man slithering in through Loading Access Crawl A, like nothing so much as a pair of snakes in their scaled rubbery armor. The woman had a weapon and was looking at her David.

  Ancilla rose in fury. Her hair stood up around her head in a halo of energy as she prepared to defend David. Then the tall man turned his bright eyes in her direction, and saw her!

  She stopped, unbelieving, for none of her programming had prepared her for this anomaly; still less for what happened next. The tall man had a golden snake coiled about his neck, which lifted its head and saw her, too. It flowed down from his neck and changed, grew, towered. She found herself staring in horror at a third intruder. This was a big, powerful-looking man in a three-piece suit, with a wild black beard and hair. His face was wicked, clever, charming.

  He looked her up and down and stepped toward her, chuckling. She couldn’t look away from his sea-colored eyes.

  “Well, now, dearie, yer just a tiny thing, ain’t you? We’ll have no trouble out of the likes of you,” he said. The vibration of his baritone made her feel faint.

  “I’ll kill them if they hurt David!” she said.

  “Aw, now, darling, that ain’t likely,” he said, moving closer still, backing her to the wall. “No reason there should be any nasty business unless you warn yer David, see? My little ones ain’t here to do him any harm. But if he tries to stop ’em, well, I reckon it’s hail and farewell to poor David, aye. That’s a disrupter pistol my girl’s got, in case you ain’t noticed.”

  “Please don’t hurt him,” Ancilla said. “Please! Alternatives! Negotiate!”

  “To be sure, miss. To be sure. You and me will manage this together, all friendly-like.” He put his hands on her shoulders. “You control yer boy’s optical input, don’t you? Well then. You just make certain he can’t see nothing but that there party he’s having such a lovely time at. Why make him all worried and fretful? It’s only until my kiddies get what they’re after, anyhow.”

  “Will they go away then?” she asked.

  “Certain they will,” he pledged. “You’ve got my word on it for an honest seaman, darling. Here now! I know yer programming, I do, you don’t care a brass farthing about that there ice locker. Dear little David’s life support, that’s all they wrote you to think was important. Ain’t it? Say it with me now: David must be happy and safe . . .”

  “David must be happy and safe,” Ancilla said obediently, and as they went through the command together she blocked all David’s visual input from his actual surroundings. Yes, he would be happier, he mustn’t be needlessly frightened after all, this was her job, of course, and really what did she care about that Alpha-Omega thing?

  So in David’s world a certain level of gray cold reality was stripped away, and it became a brighter, happier place. The laughter of his coworkers came in with auditory enhancement. Enhanced were the balloons and the pretty little baby things mounting in a heap at Leslie’s feet. Though, of course, Brandi was rather officiously making an effort to pick them all up and organize them, noting gifts and givers on a jotpad, as though anyone had asked her to take charge . . .

  Timidly Ancilla leaned up and kissed the stranger, who laughed in his throat and opened her mouth with his own; but it was raw white power, not tongues, that caressed.

  Mendoza saw none of this, of course, watching David carefully. Alec stared at the Captain for a moment, and then looked away with a gulp of embarrassment.

  Mendoza considered D
avid in the room starkly empty of anything but his computer console, considered the clearly visible plug in the back of his neck, considered the yellow stripe of carpet from which he was careful never to move. She put her head on one side and smiled; walked forward into the lighted room boldly, though still keeping the pistol trained on him. Edward followed her lead.

  David, holding a murmured conversation with the air, looked straight through them.

  “I mean, who does she think she is?” he was saying softly, indignantly. “Nobody said anything about playing word games at this party. I’m not good at word games! Neither is Leslie, really. And don’t you think prizes are a little, well, competitive ?”

  He was silent a moment, sipping at his blue drink. As Mendoza and Edward slipped past him, he began to nod as if in agreement. Mendoza looked at a sealed entry port in the wall, shaped like a tall oval. On its panel was a polished brass plate with letters engraved in somber Roman characters: AO.

  “See, that’s just what I thought, too,” David whispered earnestly.

  Mendoza pointed at the door, grinning. Edward took her gloved hand and kissed it.

  “Yes. Yes,” said David in tones of mild outrage. “You’re right, of course.”

  They advanced on the doorway and Edward found the via panel. He bypassed the keypad with his lead, and there was a soft hiss and a flow of curling vapor all along the door as the seal gave.

  “What?” said David in a louder voice. “Oh. That’s cute, look at that! Isn’t that clever?”

  Edward and Mendoza looked at each other. They clasped hands in a gesture of victory, and stepped together across the threshold. Their breath puffed out in frost-clouds.

  Edward’s first thought was of Easter Sunday. This was because his immediate visual impression reminded him of a panoramic Easter egg he had been given as a child, into which he had peered and wished himself without success: tiny claustrophobic world of tenderest pastel colors, with a flowering meadow and domed clouds that extended to forced-perspective infinity, in the soft light coming through the white sugar dome.

  Too, there was something solemn and cathedral-like in the place where they now stood, where silvered arches rose out of glowing clouds of frost to the curved ceiling. The walls were lined with racks of gleaming tubes that evoked organ pipes, winking racks of lit candles, the severe symmetry of rows of pews.

  Mendoza stood frowning, turning her head slowly as she scanned.

  Hundreds and hundreds, said Alec in horror. Where do we even start?

  There was a click, and a whirr. The thermocontrol unit had noticed the door was open, and was amping up the refrigeration system to keep the temperature from rising. Like insects in a summer field, or angels howling softly, the sound filled the glittering cave.

  Mendoza walked to the nearest rack and inspected the tubes there. Each was engraved with a name. Faintly they could hear David rambling on outside:

  “. . . Of course, I don’t really know much about babies, but it seems to me . . .”

  Edward stepped close and examined the racks, lifting a gloved hand to wipe away frost. Names. Spitzka, Spode, Spohn . . . these were the templates of cyborg operatives like Mendoza.

  “BTM four-seventeen.” Mendoza turned to Edward. “Not a name. A code number!”

  His eyes lit with comprehension. He turned and sought back through the alphabet, looking for tubes that might follow the letter Z. Mendoza picked her way forward, looking for what might precede A.

  In the same moment that they turned to signal failure to each other, their eyes fell on a rack midway along the wall, where rows of outsized tubes sat in their own recess. Mendoza looked at Edward in tense inquiry. He nodded and they advanced on the rack, meeting in front of it. They stared up. Were those numbers engraved on the vials?

  Edward bent and made a stirrup of his hands. Mendoza put her hands on his shoulders and vaulted upward to look at the top row. She swept her hand across the vials, wiping clear what was engraved there . . .

  Edward felt the shock in her straining thighs, the involuntary leap as she seized one of the vials and held it aloft. He let her slide down and she presented it to him. It was much bigger than the others, so big she could scarcely get her hand around it, almost a chalice. Engraved on it were the characters BTM 417.

  Grinning, he removed his right glove and slipped the vial into it. He unzipped the top of Mendoza’s subsuit and tucked glove and vial down between her breasts, secure, and forced the zipper of the subsuit up again. The crucible made a bulge like a third breast. She laughed, shivered pleasurably and took his bare hand, leaning her cheek into it to plant a kiss there. Then she tugged him forward out of the chamber.

  They paused beyond the threshold, just long enough to order the door to seal itself again. The mortal man had produced a blueberry biscuit from somewhere and was nibbling at it, apparently while watching something in the corner intently.

  “So—just when is she due, then?” he inquired of an unseen presence.

  He did not look up as they edged around him and into the next room, where the Captain still had his broad back turned, busy with Ancilla.

  Just keep her attention drawn a few more minutes, won’t you, old man? Edward said airily. The Captain growled in response but did not turn.

  They got down and exited through the crawlway, with Mendoza carefully replacing the grates as they went; scrambled rapidly across the storeroom, where the servounit still ignored them, and rolled back out into sunlight beyond. Moving as one, they pulled the door back down and stood. Edward held out his hand for the disrupter pistol and Mendoza passed it to him. He set it secure back in its holster. They started down the rock.

  That was easy! Alec said in relief.

  At precisely that moment he felt a creeping numbness, and then a white-hot shock of pain. Light flared behind his eyes and blinded him.

  He mustn’t be blind. He must see. He fought, flailing in the void. His hand encountered another hand and grabbed frantically. It wasn’t Mendoza’s hand, though. It was a big hand. It clenched on his. He turned to find out whose hand it might be, and his vision came back enough to see Nicholas, peering desperately into his eyes.

  “What’s happened?” Alec cried.

  “I know not,” Nicholas said. “But Edward’s lost again, it seems.”

  No indeed, gentlemen, said an amused voice, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once, just as the Captain’s voice did, but it wasn’t the Captain speaking. Edward’s most assuredly not lost. Edward has won.

  The void rolled back on all sides and revealed a room, dark-paneled and carpeted, lined with books, lit only by lamplight, for there were no windows and no doors in evidence. There were two big old-fashioned chairs. There was a small table on which were the lamp, a decanter of something amber, and two cut crystal glasses.

  There was nothing else. Alec and Nicholas stared around themselves in incomprehension.

  “Edward?” Nicholas lifted his head. His eyes went small and suspicious. “What hast thou done?”

  What it was my right to do, and my duty. I’ve taken command.

  “Captain,” Alec shouted. “Captain, get us out of here!”

  The Captain, Alec, is presently occupied, and when he turns his attention this way—as indeed I expect he’ll do any minute now—he’ll receive a nasty shock. I’ve jammed his signal, just as Joseph managed to do.

  “Are you crazy?” Alec looked about wildly, searching in vain for a door.

  Not at all, and if you weren’t so abysmally dependent on him you’d have discovered you could shut him out long ago. Mind you, I can’t keep him balked for long; but I’ve already done what was necessary.

  “WHAT HAST THOU DONE?” demanded Nicholas, beginning to pace in his fury.

  Killed Alec.

  “What?” Alec shrieked.

  In a manner of speaking. The heart’s still beating, never fear; but it’s mine now. Didn’t you want to die young, Alec? Your wish has been granted. I’m afraid you’ll find Limbo
rather more irksome than I did, however.

  “He’s lying, boy,” said Nicholas. “Or mad.”

  “Edward,” said Alec, fighting very hard to seem calm, “what do you mean, I’m going to find it more irksome? Why?”

  Because I’ve taken you hostage, what do you think? And Nicholas as well, though he’s merely a complication. You have the Captain to thank for teaching me how to lock you in. Make yourselves comfortable, gentlemen. You’ll be here awhile. There was the most delicate of pauses, perfectly timed. Nine months, at least.

  It was almost possible to hear Edward counting the seconds before his meaning sank in and the others suddenly shouted at him. His laughter, lazy and confident, rolled over them.

  “You bastard,” Alec yelled, pounding his fists against the virtual wall. “You—you—you motherfucker—”

  Not I. No, I’ve altered my plans. The Captain will work the immortality process on me. He’ll have no choice but to do so. Any attempt to shut me off will lose your programs, you see. They’d go to a random site—my word, even I can’t guess where—and he’d never get you back, either of you. I’m afraid you’d run out of reading matter eventually, Nicholas. Pity.

  “But you can’t shut me off,” yelled Alec. “I’m not just some memory like you, I’m alive! I’m real!”

  You were alive. And what indeed is reality, Alec? You’re a trifle ill-equipped to debate the issue with me—but, to put it in terms you might understand, it would seem that human consciousness is no more than a program running in the hardware of the brain. My program has displaced yours. Permanently. I have no intention of relinquishing control, nor of releasing either of you until my demands are met.

  Ah, but once I’m decently immortal, then! I’ll gladly set you free, if the Captain makes certain accommodations, as I should imagine he will. Can you guess what those accommodations would be?

  “No!” said Alec, rubbing his shoulder, bruised in his fruitless assault on the wall. Nicholas was hurling himself against it now.

  Oh, you’re not even trying! Wretched little slacker. The Captain refused to craft a new body for me, but he’ll be desperate to make one for you, Alec, if that’s the only way to resurrect you. Or a pair of bodies! I’ve no objection to Nicholas in the flesh either, especially as it’s likely to be some years before either of you will be big enough to thrash me soundly. And, who knows? By that time you may feel differently about this whole affair. I imagine such admittedly satisfying revenge would distress your loving mother.