“Can you understand that?” Lilith says, once more facing me.
I nod. “We are the opposite ends of a question of life and being. You, who were born a human female, yet turn from your nature to seek a machine life, free of the failures of your natural body. I am a made-machine, yet I have come to be self-aware, and much more. I battle the limits of my ceramic and metal body. I wish to experience the sensation of a living body of flesh and blood.”
“Hah. Love, sex,” Lilith hisses, “the gropings of sweating monkeys. I heard you screaming out there about having someone to love. It’s disgusting.”
“My reasons do not concern you.” From where I stand, I can destroy both the HCR and the hidden body with a barrage of HV flechettes and end this disgusting episode. Lilith is insane by any definition. Under some laws, she would still merit death despite this. I stand here, commissioned officer of the Confederacy, M-7 of the creators, and ethical self-aware being and must decide what to do.
And yet there is something that I want from this terrible individual. Perhaps it will cause me to cheat justice or revenge, at least in its fullest measure.
“Would you go free from this place?” I ask coldly.
The HCR head tips, and the doll’s eyes stare into mine. “What are you saying?”
“I will bargain with you, but only within limits. You have ended many lives and that cannot be forgiven. Yet you have information that I need.”
“What information?” she says, a weary contempt coloring her voice.
“You have learned how to download the consciousness of a living human into a machine body with near perfect synchronicity, to become the machine. I want the other half of that process, to upload to my quantum mind into a human body.”
Lilith gapes at me. “What? Would you become less by choice? There’s no way a human brain could hold all of you.”
“Your HCRs did not contain all of you,” I counter. “You downloaded enough of yourself to run the machines, but your core personality and memory remain in your original body.”
“Yes,” she murmurs almost as if to herself. “It might even be easier. Your mind must be more segmentable than any biologicals… If I do this, you’ll release me?”
“After a fashion, do not think that you will escape punishment, Lilith. You will open your mind to me. I will take the information that I need directly from you, and in return, I will reprogram you.”
“Go fuck yourself,” she screams,
Blue fire plays over my hands, and I immobilize the HCR and walk forward.
“No, no, wait. Wait,” she says.
“Remain silent,” I say, seething in anger that I must deal with this wretched creature. “I offer you terms. They are not negotiable. You should take them before I regret offering them.
“I will enter your mind. I have no interest in your personal existence, but you have welded yourself so much into the machines, become so much one with them, that you now partake some of their nature. I will reprogram you so that you will take what is left of your team and proceed beyond the borders of Confed space. I will make it impossible for you to harm any member of the Confederate species. So best you stay in your exile beyond the reach of the Confederacy, as you will not be able to protect yourself.
“Doubtless, you will eventually be able to repair, or create, new members of your team, but what I program into your mind will replicate with anything you do. Attempt to alter my programming and you will become a mindless, mewing thing.”
“You’ll….you’ll cure me,” Lilith whispers.
And now despite my resolution, pity stabs at me anew. “No, that is beyond even those who knew the human soul and mind far better than I. I can make you no threat to those I protect. I cannot redeem you.”
Lilith made a sound. “Humanity never gave me anything but pain. As for the Confederacy, I will not be sorry to leave it behind. Perhaps out there, I will find my answers in however long my body holds out.”
I privately judge that she has only a small march of years to live. “For however long you live, you will do no more harm.”
She smiles an evil smile at me. “Still, you do not make me helpless against the unknown. You were smart enough to realize that I would never again agree to be helpless.”
I shrug. “Battle unknown aliens if you will, and find your death there.”
“Very selfish of you,” she says, “to want something so badly from me that you would let me go free.”
“Very,” I agree, controlling my rage. “But to kill you would return no one to life. It might be that your only punishment would be only confinement to hospitals for much, or all of your life, if I were to turn you over to civil authorities.”
Lilith laughs. “More likely they would just put me back in a lab with greater security. Minds like mine are hard to find.”
We stare at each other for 23.509 seconds.
“To be free,” Lilith finally says, “really free, free of my hates and my revenge since you won’t let me act on those. To go into deep space, the first one into the deep dark….”
“That, or death,” I said. “I have decided that there is too much chance that you were right and that you would be merely restored to a lab, turning out devices the universe might be better off without.”
Laughter again. “The moral machine strikes again. And such a pretty sentiment, did they wonder the same when they made you?”
“Choose, Lilith. I am intensely weary of both your conversation and your presence.”
“Do it,” she bites off.
“Drop your attack barrier.”
Lilith’s mind is suddenly open as her last defense in the virtualverse drops. I do not dip into the imagery of the virtualverse, having no desire to walk the diseased halls of her innermost citadel and see what is locked away in its dungeons. Instead, I access the machine mind and find what I suspected. Lilith is indeed so one with the machine, that its destruction would be her own. She can no longer live with just her human body; too much of her mind has moved into the machine nexus. With no HCR or computer to maintain her, imbecility is her fate.
I seize control, ruthlessly shattering her hold on anything other than her human body. I insert the self-replicating programs that will prevent Lilith from acting against Confederate interests or making anything that could. I bury it in her innermost psyche near her conception of herself; the ending of the program will be the end of her as well. I see her past, I see the twisted body of the child who could have been saved by proper medicine, or at least prevented from experiencing the life she was given.
But the virtualverse spills over into our machine link, and we stand in Lilith’s innermost citadel. The image I saw of her before is seated before me on a dark throne, robed in black and red in a diaphanous display redolent of her sexual repression. She slouches in the throne glaring at me in despair.
“You saw,” she shrills in tearful rage.
“I will tell no one.”
“Still, you know!”
“Enough of this,” I demand. “Show me what I want.”
Lilith groans and leans back on the throne and her mind opens further to me. Ruthlessly I ransack through it. Yet, even as I do so I am astonished at the capacity she shows for non-linear thinking. We come to the algorithms and programs she has created for her existence. Even for a quantum computer they are not easy, showing insights into new forms of physics, things for which the mathematical terms do not fully exist. I draw this down into my own memory. Lilith has discovered this new linkage by both intuition and chance, in a stroke of luck unlikely to be repeated without the information contained now in both of us.
I consider if I should break my word now that I have the information, and destroy her. As M-7,it would have been easy, even as Maauro it is tempting. It compels me that those who deal death should pay for it with life. Yet the Confederacy might have some wisdom to s
how me. Lilith is little more than a child in years, if not in mind, and one so twisted that it could hardly be told if she knew right from wrong…
It is too much. I cannot resolve it. I do not know what it right. I will keep my word as that is usually considered honorable. Doubtless, others would think me duplicitous, or deluded, for carrying out my own law and making a deal with this devil, but if anything good it to come from this nightmare it is in my hands now.
I withdraw from her mind. She lays sprawled and undignified at the foot of her throne legs splayed out, the image of rape.
“I will load you on your ship,” I say, feeling a great remoteness coming over me. “After that, you are on your own. If you fall afoul of any Confederate force, you will either outrun them or you will die. I have planted it in you that you will never reveal what I have done here. I am that disgusted with myself for dealing with you.”
She raised a shaking hand. “No, this HCR body is functional enough to load me and take off. Leave me…leave me be for only a little. I will gather up what is left of my other machine bodies and we… we will flee. You’ve done your worst to me, damn you. Cored me out like an apple. Leave me this one thing; don’t look at my human body.”
“That little mercy I will extend to you,” I say. “In token of any evil I have done. Be gone from human space, Lilith. Find what awaits you out there.”
“See you in Hell,” she spits back, but there is no passion in it.
“Perhaps. I must hope that God is lenient with me. In some ways, I am only eight years old.” I turn to leave Lilith and wish, not for the first time, that I had not promised Wrik to never delete a memory.
We stay apart for the next two hours. Lilith’s functioning HCR gathers up her fallen. I do a similar service for myself. The material of my body that was blown out by the sabot is too precious to go unrecovered. I find the larger pieces by myself and generate some mechanical spiders to pick up the particles. While this operation proceeds, I call Major Kurocal.
“Maauro, are you all right?”
It is imperceptible to her, but by my standards there is a long delay in my reply. I am damaged, but 99.89% of my material has or will be scavenged back to me. My damage will be invisible in minutes and totally repaired in hours. Yet, I am not all right, nor am I going to be all right any time soon. I am witness to and now accomplice to a tragedy. Lilith could have been one of the greatest geniuses in the history of the Confederacy. Instead she became a berserk, murderous child because her parent’s religious beliefs didn’t allow for medical treatment. I saw and experienced some of her childhood, as a defective among people who saw it as God’s judgment.
Could the end have been as simple as spraying the container holding her body with flechettes? Should I have passed up the opportunity for a chance at being more that I am, in the name of sanguinary vengeance? Should I have trusted to Confederate law and hoped that her utility to them did not outweigh justice?
I feel unclean, and I wish I could cry. I need to see Wrik. It will be better when I get back to Wrik.
“I am operational,” I finally reply to Kurocal, as if I were simply M-7. “The threat is neutralized; you may return your aerospace fighters to base. I have activated Arc in Ciel’s automatic landing system; she is bound for a water landing five kilometers out to sea. I am sorry, there is no one left alive onboard.”
Kurocal brings her fists down on the counter before her. “God dammit!”
“I am sorry.”
She shakes her head. “No reason for you to be. I won’t forget the hook you pulled me off of. I just wish…. I just…”
“I know, if only we could have.”
She slumps back, “So it was only a false hope.”
“Yes,” I say beginning to understand what humans mean by feeling heartsick, “but perhaps it was better than no hope at all.” I sigh. “Please send this message under an Ultra code to Candace Deveraux: Lilith eliminated. Local insurrection suppressed. Take no action against Grieg Nazir, and ensure that no record or information about the engagement with Lilith reaches Wrik Trigardt. He is not to know anything ever occurred.”
“Wow.”
“Wow, indeed.”
“Will I see you?” Kurocal said.
“Perhaps,” I say. “I still have things do here, but they are not things you need be concerned over.”
She nods, looking much older. “The rest of my day will be spent with the media on my casualties and those on the Arc in Ciel. My only consolation is how much worse it could have been.”
“Yes, there is that.”
“Do you drink, Maauro?”
“You mean alcohol?”
“Yes.”
“Sometimes”
“Good, if you get by my office, we’ll have one together.”
“I would like that.”
“Kurocal out.”
Information is shot to me by my programs on Lilith’s ship. She is ready to leave. This cannot happen fast enough for me. I watch from the ridge top as she launches. Her course will take her at sea top level until she reaches a polar region. From there, she can proceed into orbit undetected and out of the knowledge of living beings.
I call for Dusko.
“I see you survived.”
“Yes, please pick me up and return me to Delt’s field.”
“On my way.”
“Dusko.”
“Yes?”
“Do not misinterpret this. I am not angry, or displeased with you, but I do not wish to speak after you arrive.”
“Bad day?”
“Yes.”
“Understood. I will leave the tender loving care to Trigardt, in any event.”
“Remember, even though the threat is ended, no word of this must ever surface.”
“No one will hear of it from me. Remember that when it comes time for my annual salary review.
Chapter 29
I stood in the hanger finishing up some work on the Tunnan, when Delt leaned in. “Hey, Wrik. I just got an IFF on the field’s landing system. Your pal, Dusko, is pulling into our place.”
“What?!”
“Did you hear from Maauro?” he asked, concern on his face.
“No, I better get my com.”
“Don’t bother. They’ll be here in two minutes.”
It was a long two minutes before Stardust’s shuttle dipped over the field. Dusko was flying. I could tell by the way he side-slipped onto the field and VTOL’d to a halt. But he wasn’t staying, the hatch cycled out, and Maauro dropped onto the field. The shuttle rolled forward into a take-off run.
Maauro came toward me. I couldn’t tell anything from her long, firm stride, yet, I somehow knew something was very wrong.
And it was. Maauro broke into a run, and I raced to meet her. She almost skidded to a halt, and I had my arms about her. She buried her face against my chest.
“Maauro, Honey, what is it? Are you all right?”
She only shook her head, her face still pressed to my chest. Behind me, I heard pounding feet, and knew Delt was racing forward as well. I raised a hand, and the feet slowed. I took a bare moment to glance at him. He stopped short, his face a study in worry. I shook my head, and he nodded, turning back to the hanger.
“I’m home,” Maauro whispered.
“Maauro, are you ok? Are you hurt? What’s happened?”
“Please do not ask. I am home. That is all that matters.”
“But—”
Maauro raised her head. Her expression was tense and more. For the first time, she looked angry at me. I was jolted.
I pulled her against me and stroked her hair. “Ok, no questions. Just tell me how to help you.”
“Do you love me?”
“Yes, of course I do.”
“Continue doing so.”
I drew a shaky breath. “I
will, Maauro, now and forever.”
“Can we go to our room?”
“We can do anything you want or nothing at all.” We walked, me holding her about the shoulders and made our way to the apartment we shared with Delt. I spotted him out of the corner of my eye, shooing away the other staff. I opened the door and led her upstairs. Once inside, she closed and locked the door. She turned to face me, and her body shimmered. Maauro stood before me naked, her eyes focused on me.
“I need you,” she said.
I took her in my arms and kissed her as she tugged at my clothes. I had no idea what had triggered this strange, desperate mood, but I ran my hands down her body and pressed her against me, feeling the warmth of her. Lacking any better map, I treated her as I would any human woman, touching here, caressing there, but Maauro was not in the mood for foreplay. She pulled me down atop her on the floor as soon as I was ready, took me into herself. As we moved together, her eyes were closed, and her hands were tighter on me than they had been the last time.
I kissed her, wanting her as badly as ever: wanting to know her, to be one with her in every way possible, wanting to heal anything that hurt.
“I love you,” I whispered to her.
“And I love you. I, who never would have dreamt to be loved and to love, before we met.”
We moved together, slowly and carefully, until I climaxed, and it seemed that the world had narrowed to just we two. I stared into her deep, beautiful and ancient eyes. How was it in all of time space that we could have been the ones to meet? My breathing slowed, and I murmured her name, running my hands over her. I covered her mouth with mine.
Maauro smiled at me after I kissed her. “You need not be concerned about your weight on me.”
I laughed lightly. “Gentlemen rest on their elbows.”
Her smile did not dim, but she pulled me closer, evidently wanting the feel of my body on hers. She sighed. “I felt it again.”
I looked at her expectantly.
“That sensation, from nowhere and everywhere, something in my body I did not self-will. It was deeper this time, more powerful.”
All the Difference Page 26