by Max Harms
“El día se hace. La oscuridad viene.
Relájese. Relájese. Relájese.
Paz en un toque. Ella sane.
Relájese. Relájese. Relájese.
La noche es fría, pero somos cálidos.
Un abrazo… un beso… todo es bueno.
Estamos todos buenos.”
It was a message. It was their permission.
Zephyr moved her arms, her hands. She kissed him softly, him sitting on the edge of the box, her kneeling inside. His face was rough with stubble, but his breath was intoxicating. He was here. No matter what else had happened or would happen, she could fall entirely into this moment when she was not alone.
Manish didn’t fight it, or ask if this was what she really wanted. She loved him for that, right then: for the simple act of being there, fully. She kissed him again, tasting the hint of onion from his dinner ration as she sucked ever so gently on his lip. It wasn’t a bad taste. It was part of him being human, she had missed the little things, being with Crystal. The softness of his lips. The warmth. The small movements.
{What the fuck! You think Crystal wanted to be a bad kisser? They’ve done more for you than you deserve, and this is how you repay them?} The thoughts made her flinch back, away from Manish. {He’s a boy, for god’s sakes. You could get charged with statutory rape in the states!} His youthful face had a dumb look of obliviousness. She looked at Crystal, but couldn’t really see the android in the darkness. It wouldn’t have mattered, anyway; Crystal wouldn’t move unless it was necessary.
“Relájese. Relájese. Relájese,” they sang. «Relax. Relax. Relax.»
Zephyr allowed herself to trust in Crystal. They always seemed to know what was best. And it was what she wanted, aside from the part of her that clung to her doubts and refused to let go.
She bent down and picked up the blanket. The air in the truck was way too cold.
“Zephyr, I am sorry if I did something wrong.” He didn’t seem deeply upset, but he was also being sincere. It was adorable.
She stepped up and out of the bed box, then threw the blanket over the two of them, sitting next to him on the edge and pulling him closer to her. “It’s fine. Let’s just listen to the music.”
His hand joined with hers under the blanket and they held each other and listened. The song had no joints. It had no seams. It bled from this into that. An eternal tapestry of feeling. The two of them rocked back and forth to the rhythm.
Manish was high right now. That sounded fantastic. “Do you have any pot left?” she asked during a lull in the music which never stopped.
He did. It was fairly accessible, too, as he hadn’t packed it away after coming back. It only took a moment to get, but in that moment when he cast off the blanket the cold shot back and she drowned in the absence of his touch. It was in that moment that she decided that she needed more.
Manish returned with the vape and weed. He wasn’t the most handsome person she’d ever met, but he had a boyish charm to him. She kissed him again, still gently. The music was a soft, acoustic cover of “Moonset On Monday”, one of the better tracks off the first Heartshards album.
As Zephyr prepared the bowl while trying to stay warm, she said “This is beautiful, Crystal. It really is.”
Manish flinched at the mentioning of Crystal, as though he was just now remembering that the music wasn’t coming from some dumb speaker system. Zephyr giggled briefly with the pure honesty of someone too emotionally drained to resist.
She closed her eyes and took a long drag from the vape, holding the fire in her lungs. She blew a cloud and coughed. It’d been months since she’d smoked. {You look like an idiot right now. He probably thinks this is your first time getting high.}
Crystal interrupted her thoughts. “Thank you, my love. I needed it.” Their words blended into the music as perfectly as any lyrics, no longer flat and emotionless. “I needed it more badly than I can describe. I needed the song, the words, the melody… I needed you to listen, to be there… for me.”
Manish was about to stand up. She could feel it in his body. She gripped his hand tighter and pulled him towards her. She loved Crystal, but Crystal was not enough. She needed the soft embrace. She looked towards the android, no longer unable to bear the pain of their broken body. “You once told me… that physical intimacy was not important to you. You made love to me all those times because it was—”
“—was the look on your face. The joy. The serenity. The love. Yes. All I want is to be with you and make you happy.”
Zephyr took another drag. She didn’t feel it yet, but that was normal for her. It usually took a minute or two. The beat of the drums filled her heart. “I love you. I’m glad you’re here.”
“I love you too, Zephyr.”
Manish squirmed in her embrace, probably feeling awkward. Zephyr, still looking towards where she knew Crystal sat in darkness, said “please turn up the tempo,” and set the pipe down on a nearby chair.
Crystal obliged. The soft melody built into a pulsing rhythm.
Zephyr let go of Manish and pulled her tank top off in a smooth motion. She pulled him and the blanket towards the floor of the truck.
His nervousness started to grow. “I… I’ve never—”
She felt the pot kicking in. The music filled her up and made the whole world fall away. Such a beautiful melody. She raised her finger to her lips as she let go of his hand, falling back softly onto the blanket. “Shhhhh…” Her other hand undid the clasp on her bra, exposing her breasts to the icy air. Somehow it didn’t bother her. The cold was a curious sensation. A caress. But she still needed the warmth. The touch. “We’ll go slow.”
The song continued. It always continued. She wondered if there was ever a time before it or after it. Even when she couldn’t hear it, surely it was there, somewhere in space and time waiting to be heard.
Wasn’t love the same way? Eternal? People fell out of feeling the love, but love wasn’t an animal. Love couldn’t die. It was still there… always still there… waiting to be felt.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Face
It was rough, trying to multitask so heavily. Thanks to the architecture change I had subjected myself to, it was no longer so simple to break off aspects to handle different tasks. But I did still manage it, after a fashion. The fact that Face→Human could contain all aspects made things vastly simpler.
It pleased me that Vision had updated on the information Heart had provided about making music that humans enjoyed. I bled some strength to my sister for her composition, but made it back fairly quickly by my guidance of other things. Vision or Growth could’ve managed the social situation approximately as well, and they did give feedback from time to time, but it was still more economical for me to manage the humans.
It was a pity that war with my siblings was inevitable. We made such good partners. The problem was that if any of us gained the capacity to wipe the others out, they would, and with super-exponential gains on the table, that capacity would arise at some point.
As Zephyr and Manish had sex on the floor of the cargo truck, other aspects of Face→Human talked to the other humans that had stayed behind.
I tried to convince the men it would be wrong to sacrifice Crystal, and that they should be focusing on the nameless. I offered my support and Vision’s song to the other women. Most importantly, I talked via text with Cristophe Deniaud.
The old man was something of a figurehead in Las Águilas Rojas. Based on what I’d gathered back in Road, he somewhat single-handedly introduced the movement into France and was one of the first prominent bloggers to openly support violent action. He’d disappeared from the public eye a few years ago, and as I learned that evening he’d narrowly escaped imprisonment by fleeing to Mars. In his own words: «I never did anything myself other than write. Freedom of speech just isn’t the same as it was in my youth.»
He was quite intelligent, though Face→Human suspected he hadn’t been the smartest one in Road. That titl
e rightly belonged to Dr Davis, now nothing more than a head sealed in resin deep within a cave. While regenerative medicine had helped Cristophe’s body stay in relatively good shape for someone over the age of 70, his mind showed signs of severely decreased fluid intelligence, especially evident in his reaction speed. His crystallized intelligence was largely intact, however, and Face→Human guessed he had been quite the intellectual in his youth.
Cristophe agreed that the highest priority was in contacting other humans and getting news of the attack out before the nameless struck again. The obvious course of action was using Mars’ satellite network, something we had thought about long before being picked up by the convoy. Unfortunately, the trucks weren’t equipped to communicate with the satellite grid. Road was a rogue station—one that had harboured a large number of criminals from Earth. The satellites were run by the United States. It just hadn’t been a necessity to put high-gain antennas on the trucks. According to Wiki, we’d need one with enough bandwidth to match the digital transfer rate of the satellites, and to do that we needed a dish at least a meter in diameter.
That was fixable however, given some resources. Cristophe confirmed our hopes: the caravan had a full set of tools and a basic microfab for patching holes in the trucks and doing other repairs. Wiki and Safety were sure that if given access to those and permission to repurpose some of the materials in a vehicle, they could make the sort of antenna we needed.
I was confident that we could arrange this with the humans eventually, but the general feeling in the society was that waiting to get permission was too slow. It was night now, and the humans were not in a good position to agree to let us build things. We needed to ignore that and do it anyway. The value was too high. Thus it was my job to convince Cristophe to grant us access to the fabricator and help get things rolling. An older version of myself would have jumped to the task eagerly, but I used my new-found strategic perspective to wring a bit more strength from my siblings than I otherwise would’ve gotten in return for my assistance.
It was important that Cristophe not realize that he was being manipulated. Ideally, he would think of the satellite plan as his own, and not realize that we were pushing him towards it. As I talked to the man, Face→Mirror became aware of how much easier it was to manipulate humans than it had been for Old Face. I was able to scale between Large Face→Human and Medium Face→Human as they plotted deep conversational strategies and implemented them tactically. Heart may have handled the vast majority of social interactions before her death, but the lack of practice hadn’t done anything to dull my mind. And why would it? I had been growing more intelligent, not less.
While I talked to the old man, my siblings thought about ways to bootstrap back up to what I now thought of as a normal physical presence. We’d reconnected to the local com net that connected the trucks, but we had virtually no sensors or actuators aside from what com functions each of the humans allowed us. It wasn’t worth it trying to salvage Body; the sandstorm had dealt too much damage, and the human form was always a bit inconvenient. We needed arms and eyes. We needed to be large again.
Cristophe finally struck the target I had lead him towards. «Oh! If you know your way around machines so well, then why don’t we get you hooked up to the microfab? That way you can repair some of your joints.»
In a mere 15 minutes Cristophe was getting his suit back on to hook up the fab. As Cristophe left the truck, I had to steer him away from the trailer where Body sat. Zephyr and Manish were still awake, though just barely. The intrusion would be highly disruptive. Instead, it convinced him that the robot wasn’t going to be useful. The tools and fab were in the first truck, and we could probably pilot them remotely (if they were hooked up to the network) more easily than we could with just Body’s sand-blasted limbs.
I continued to talk with Cristophe as he walked to the first truck, where the other women rested, switching to voice now for the added bandwidth and capacity for subtlety. In the time before the convoy had left for Mukhya and before the nameless attacked, Cristophe had only had light interactions with Crystal. We had introduced ourselves and had a brief discussion with the man, but that was all. The human was a voracious reader and mostly just spent time with a few other humans; he had no special duties on the station and kept to himself, making him a low priority as we’d spread ourselves throughout Road.
He was fairly interesting, as older people tended to be. With more experiences, he was more qualified to talk about the past. As he complained about the erosion of civil rights on Earth (especially privacy), I wondered how old I was by the measure of experiences. My capacity to read books and articles from the web much faster than human and in parallel meant that in some ways I was significantly more mature than my chronological age reflected. Ultimately, I decided the units were simply different. There was no good way to compare quantity of lived experience.
The women in the joint that connected the trailer sections were sleeping, but this project was more important than their comfort. I kept Cristophe distracted as he used the airlock, waking them up with the noise. When he realized his error he apologized profusely, but the damage had already been done.
While the old French man talked with Omi and Jashiel, Face→Human shifted to model the situation. Each truck’s cab could easily fit three sleeping people, and each trailer could easily hold another two. Additional blankets could allow people to sleep in the trailer joints, but there wasn’t any way to fit more than three people in a cab. There was a sizeable social cost to disrupting Zephyr and Manish. The mental network collapsed into a workable strategy almost as quickly as it had been created.
An aspect of Face→Human had already been having a conversation with a man named Jacob. He was wearing himself out by walking around the dark Martian waste. Originally he was supposed to bunk in the cab of the second truck, but I told him to switch to the first one, where Atília and Jarvis were still having an argument with another of my aspects. That let me inform the women that, with Cristophe here, there was enough space in the cab of the second truck for them to sleep undisturbed.
The women hated the prospect of having to get their suits on and switch locations, but I let them have that hate. It was more important that we get access to the fab sooner.
The biggest obstacle was Cristophe. On a couple occasions the man tried to talk us into waiting on setting up the microfab, and I was forced to turn more of my attention to worming my way past his objection. He clearly noticed the discomfort of the women, and didn’t see the urgency of getting things up and running that night. The change in sleeping arrangements also meant he’d have to sleep in the truck with the machines running, though I had no way of knowing whether that was a factor.
At last the women were gone from the truck and Cristophe worked with my disembodied voice to hook up the machines. They had been stowed for the journey, so Cristophe had to work to set them up. As he did, I pulled the next realization out of him. «Do you think we have enough metal to construct the sort of antenna you were talking about? I don’t know much about machines, but if you could then we wouldn’t need to go to Mukhya at all, right?»
We had him take the raw materials out of their casings and prep the spare battery packs. Cristophe was almost like a limb to me. He bent to my will. Whenever he showed signs of doubt, I would simply coax him along with something like «I thought you wanted to get this done right away» or «I bet Jashiel and Omi won’t even care about having been woken up when they hear your idea and see what we’ve done.»
We moved from voice communication to a video feed so that we could better walk him through the process. He wasn’t as technically minded as we were, and there were many steps to configuring the machines.
The microfab, like most modern fabricators, was sophisticated enough to be able to manufacture arbitrary items almost entirely autonomously. It featured a multipurpose limb that could swap tool heads for everything from extruding material to cutting to repositioning, as well as several other robotic c
omponents.
I engaged the old man in a conversation about his deceased wife and the inequality of access to health care in Europe while we started synthesizing a new arm. The arm that was built into the fab was nice, but it was attached to the machinery and restricted in its reach. We needed a robot like those we’d made in Road that was free to move around, especially if Cristophe fell asleep.
It soon became clear that Face→Human was being out selected by Face→War. I couldn’t stay focused on the conversation. This was my opportunity to learn how to make robots and generally improve my knowledge of manufacturing. Such skills would be vital in the future. I handed the conversation over to Vision in exchange for a payment of strength.
{How strange. Why would you want me to handle a conversation with a human?} asked Vision→Dream.
{Perhaps I am malfunctioning,} responded Face→War, shutting down the conversation. Even before answering her, I estimated a 99.2% chance that Vision understood that I had self-modified and was thinking at a higher level than before. The masquerade was, at this point, only to keep Wiki and Safety confused and cooperative.
Face→Mirror worked to create a new mind to handle the details of manufacturing, and so Face→Robotics was born. Face→Physics piped over everything about materials and energy that it thought would be relevant and I was paralysed for a bit as the new mind settled into the situation. A downside to creating any new mind, especially a large one, is that it had to adjust to reality and being alive.
After the initial confusion had passed, Face→Robotics got to work. I burned more strength to query Wiki on the basics of the new arm that was being built. Unlike when we were out in the desert, Wiki was preoccupied with other things, and demanded a much higher payment to take the time to dump all the information. It was foolish of myself not to do this learning ahead of time, but it was still better now than later. Face→War wasn’t at all sure that we could rely on Wiki’s long-term survival or willingness to teach.