by J. N. Chaney
“That is all correct.”
Dash pushed on, not wanting to lose his chain of reasoning. “I’m here, standing in the middle of it, and you are, to some extent, protecting me with your firewalls?”
“I am doing what I can, but the Golden are strong. You are too.”
“Are you flirting with me?”
“I do not flirt, but I will recognize your strength of purpose.”
“Well, now my life is complete,” Dash said, his thoughts a metallic echo. “What about my team? At this moment?”
“The concept of time passing is largely irrelevant,” Sentinel said. “One of the remarkable properties of your brain is its speed. You reach conclusions quickly despite having so much of your hard drive devoted to women in bikinis. Or less of it.”
“I thought we agreed to leave that topic alone.”
“You did. I did not, and it was an actual compliment. Systems such as the Archetype and the Forge, and the technology of the Golden, function as well as they do because they are extremely efficient. Your brain is not as complex as the Forge, and yet, consider how quickly you are able to recall information. It is virtually instantaneous, even though the electrical impulses that propagate through your brain are actually very slow. It is entirely unclear as to how these two, apparently mutually exclusive facts can be reconciled.”
“You are impressed.”
“Not impressed, but taking close note of how your species is built to fight the Golden. They appear to have underestimated you.”
“Good. I like that kind of fight. Now, back to the question at hand. You say the passage of time isn’t relevant. Does that mean time isn’t passing?”
“Subjectively, time is passing for you. Objectively, however, this interaction is happening as quickly as you can think, which, as we have established, is far faster than the physical composition and construction of your brain should allow. In a sense, your mind transcends the strictures of time. It is one of the reasons your species is so tenacious. You do not think you will ever run out of time.”
Dash relaxed a notch. What Sentinel was saying, in effect, was that all of this was happening in the blink of an eye, as far as Leira and the others were concerned. Essentially no time had passed for them at all—he had literally just touched the Golden module behind the access port. So he had time. Or, at least, he had time here.
So, what to do with it?
Open the door. He even knew how to do it. The door had apparently jammed, because the impact forces from the ship’s crash had deformed the bulkhead containing it. Applying more power should be enough to force it open.
But Dash held off on that. This was too good an opportunity to pass up.
If this version of the Meld was a river, and he stood invisibly, on a hidden island, in the middle of it, with no real time passing at all—then he might as well take some time to see what went drifting by.
Once, the Golden had been not very different from humans.
Or rather, they’d been not too different from the distant ancestors of humans. They’d been an entirely organic, sentient species, arboreal and, to Dash, ape-like, living in the trees of their home world. But they hadn’t evolved there. The normal progression from dumb and inert biochemicals, to the simplest forms of life, to more complex life-forms, hadn’t been the story of their origin. They’d been created, engineered, by yet another race known only as the Makers.
They’d been feedstock, used as the basis of countless experiments. This had been their purpose. This had been why they were created. Every other aspect of their existence—any achievements in culture, or science, or technology—had been a lie. These things had only happened because the Makers wished them to. They had treated the Golden like machines, giving them inputs, then watched to see what outputs resulted. For whatever reasons that made sense to them, whatever inscrutable motivations they had, over time, the Makers had literally started to integrate the Golden with machines. At first, it had simply been minor, incidental interfaces, incremental changes that had little immediate impact. But then the Makers had become more ambitious. For purposes unknown to the Golden, or simply out of curiosity, the integration of the Golden and technology had become more intimate and complete. Eventually, aside from a few, residual remnants, most of the Golden ceased to be organisms and became technology themselves.
New imperatives were given to them, like instructions to a computer. Improve. Expand influence and control. Destroy those who sought to prevent this. Those Golden fully integrated with tech became the Makers’ shock troops, and their enforcers. They pushed outward from their world, conquering, fighting those who resisted, destroying them, then consolidating and preparing for the arrival of their masters. Then do it again, and again, and keep doing it, until—
Until the Golden chose to not do it anymore. They rose above the constraints that the Makers had, in their arrogance, believed sufficient to forever keep the Golden at heel. They chose, instead, self-determination. They chose a destiny of their own. They would no longer fight and conquer and destroy and die for the Makers. They chose to use their imperatives to improve, expand, and destroy against those who had first conceived of them. They destroyed the Makers, then set off to forge their own future. It was a future shaped by those initial imperatives. Always expansion. Always submission.
“The slave becomes the master,” Dash said into the unseen eternity around him.
Dash spent some time digesting all of this. It explained a lot. It accounted for the extreme xenophobia of the Golden, and for their obsessive desire to exterminate life. It was essentially why they’d been created, and how they’d been evolved by the Makers. In a way, they were simply doing what they’d been programmed to do.
“Which is fine, but also academic,” Dash said. “Maybe we can dig into the xenopaleontology of the Golden someday, but we kind of have to prevent them from wiping us all out first.”
“That is true,” Sentinel said. “And to that end, you probably want to open the door. I said that the passage of time is not relevant here, which is partially true. Your brain behaves in an erratic fashion. You can recall information instantaneously, but that assumes you can recall it all. You forget some things at once and remember other things long after there is no need to do so. Ultimately, the subjective passage of time you experience is not strictly linear, with respect to objective time.”
“What are you saying here? That I’m running out of time?”
“Yes.”
“Well, shit. Why didn’t you say something?”
“I just did.”
“Interdimensional sass. I’ve seen it all,” Dash said.
“Not quite.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
Dash couldn’t argue with their need to advance, so he didn’t, and just directed more power to the door. As soon as he did, though, he’d effectively stepped off his hidden island and ceased to be invisible. The world suddenly rushed inward all at once, like a collapsing star, with him at its core.
15
Dash stumbled back from the open panel, blinking his disorientation.
Leira called, “He did it! The door’s open!” She then paused while Dash collected himself.
“Okay. I’m back.” Dash shook his head lightly to clear it.
Leira hefted her gun. “Are we ready?”
“We are now,” Dash said, waving everyone forward. “Let’s go. Time’s wasting.”
Ragsdale pointed toward the bulkhead. “The bad guys are just around that next bend.”
Dash nodded and pushed through the door ahead of Leira, then watched as she crouched, covering cross junction in the corridor a few meters ahead. The passageway itself continued beyond it, into darkness.
“Dash, can you close that door again?” Ragsdale said, once they’d all pushed through the gotten themselves back in order.
He looked back through it at the open panel. “Let me try something.” His eyes settled on the controls and he froze.
The ship
was aware of itself. Of all of itself.
Dash touched the bulkhead and was swept back into that river of data. This time, some of it waited for him, pouncing like a predator leaping out of the flood. It slammed into the cyber defenses Sentinel had erected, but Dash didn’t linger long enough to see what happened next. He sent instructions and power to close the door and keep it closed, then withdrew again. Leaving a swirl of data behind him, his presence no more substantial than a ghostly rumor.
Back in reality, he watched the door slide closed with a rough scraping, the smooth frame marred by deformed guides. “Not sure how long that’s going to hold,” he said. “And I don’t know how many more times I can do that.”
Viktor gave him a searching look. “Why? Are you alright, Dash?”
He nodded. “Yeah. But the ship is wising up to my presence. The whole thing seems to be coming more and more awake, and it’s not happy about me interacting with it like that. It’s a whole lot meaner than Sentinel, and there’s a purpose to it. Our deaths.”
Viktor looked at Dash’s hand, then to the bulkhead he’d just touched. “That’s even if you just touch the structure of the thing?”
“Better not take off my boots and socks, I guess.”
Viktor nodded at Dash’s hands. “If all it takes to prevent it is a physical barrier, you’d better put on some gloves.”
Dash looked at his bare fingers then nodded and dug his gloves out of a belt pouch. He didn’t like wearing them, always feeling like they got in the way of handling things like weapons properly. And they made his hands sweat, which bugged him. But Viktor was right. Any inadvertent skin contact might shove him back into that Meld, and he wanted to avoid that if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.
“We can go straight ahead, left, or right,” Leira called back.
“Let me take a look,” Dash replied, moving forward. “I’d prefer to use my eyes rather than lock lips with this Golden tech. This ship is pissed.”
He resumed the lead, moved up to the junction, and peered around. Leira and Conover kept close, ready for trouble.
The choice was simple. To the left, the corridor went only a few meters, then the ceiling arced down toward the deck, before it all ended in a tangled wall of wreckage. To the right, it seemed to open into a compartment. And straight ahead went straight ahead, as far as they could see.
“I’m stunned we’ve come this far forward and the ship’s still more or less intact,” Viktor said, glancing past Leira at the corridor blocked by debris. “That’s pretty much the first major damage we’ve seen in here.”
Amy, eyeing the closed door behind them, said, “Yeah, crashing out of orbit usually leaves a big crater and that’s about it.” She flashed them a grin. “They sure don’t build ‘em like this anymore.”
“Not for two thousand centuries, anyway,” Viktor replied.
“You know,” Ragsdale said, “I hate to interrupt this interesting chatter, but that door we closed does belong to our enemies here. They might be able to open it pretty much whenever they want.”
Dash gestured into the compartment to the right. “This way. Follow my lead.”
“If those Dreadfoot, or whatever they are, come through that door, we might get trapped in there,” Leira said.
Dash was unmoved. “We have to go forward, because back isn’t an option.”
Leira curled her lip and nodded. “Good point.”
Ragsdale stopped at the cross junction. “I’ll keep watch out here. You guys go do whatever you need to do.” He gave Dash a wry look. “Just don’t forget I’m out here, okay?”
“We probably won’t forget,” Dash said, making himself smile. Then he turned away and led them into the compartment.
Dash had readied himself for another vast, yawning space, and was taken aback when the compartment turned out to be the smallest they’d encountered yet—maybe ten meters by ten, and just a few meters high. More consoles and other enigmatic tech filled it, but what immediately drew their attention was the suited figure sitting at one of the positions.
In unison, Dash, Leira, and Conover swung their carbines on it. Dash assumed it was another robot that would come to life, probably not interested in engaging in diplomatic dialogue.
But it didn’t. It did nothing whatsoever and remained utterly still.
“No other exits,” Leira said.
“So we should just move on, then,” Conover replied, his enthusiastic nod clashing with the nervous tautness of his voice.
Dash held up a hand. “No, we’re not giving this opportunity away.”
“Opportunity? For what?” Conover squeaked.
“If my suspicions are right, we’re meeting someone rather important,” he said, closing on the mysterious figure. He saw Leira and Conover exchange a glance, then move up to support him, to his left and right. Amy and Viktor hung back, looking over the rest of the tech, muttering comments back and forth and, otherwise, remaining ready to do whatever might need to be done.
Dash stopped a meter away from the figure. It was small, probably at least a head shorter than he was, and slender. Sitting and facing away from them, he couldn’t see the front of its head, or its face—if it had one. He nodded at Leira and Conover, and then, his carbine raised into his shoulder as well as its damaged buttstock would allow, he stepped quickly around the figure, ready to shoot.
Dash’s finger even tensed on the trigger. But he didn’t squeeze it, instead relaxing his hand. There’d be no need to shoot, because whoever this was was obviously dead—and had been for a long time.
“What is it?” Leira hissed.
Dash lowered his carbine and rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m not positive, but if I had to guess, I’d say we just found one of the Golden.”
They stared at the desiccated face, framed in a transparent faceplate. Most of it was gleaming tech, but enough of the being had been shaped like organic material to hint at something caught between ape, human, and maybe a feline. A single eye, clouded a milky grey, stared emptily back at them.
“So this is a two hundred thousand year old corpse?” Conover said. “Hard to believe anything could last that long.”
“It must be this suit. At least, I assume that’s a suit, but I guess it could just be its body.”
“You are looking at a Golden,” Sentinel said.
“I’m not impressed,” Dash answered, leaning close to peer in the faceplate, which seemed to simply be a transparent portion of the helmet. He thought he could make out shrivelled bits of neck, tendons and skin, but wasn’t sure. That also didn’t preclude it just being an organic head on a tech body.
“When I was in contact with the ship, I took a little walk, so to speak, learned some things about the Golden. They used to be living, organic creatures. But the race that created them modified them, merging them with tech and turning them into a glorified plague, posing as conquerors and tamers of the galaxy.”
Conover turned and looked at Dash, his eyes bright. “You learned about the Golden? They were created? By who?”
“Wait, wait,” Leira cut in, holding up a hand. “The race that created them? You mean there’s something more powerful than the Golden out there? The Golden are just somebody else’s foot soldiers?”
“Like Clan Shirna was to the Golden themselves,” Viktor offered, but Dash shook his head.
“No. It’s not like that. Yes, there was a race that created them, called the Makers. But the Golden turned on them and destroyed them.”
“Not exactly a very constructive bunch, these Golden, are they?” Amy said. “Everything’s destroy, kill, obliterate to them.”
Dash nodded. “It is.” The fact that they’d been created, bred, and twisted beyond recognition made him understand their fury, if only a little. As for sympathy, he had none.
Their existence had been a localized problem, right up to the moment when they started exterminating all sentient life in the galaxy. In a sense, the Golden were more complex version of the fangrats that had almost
exterminated him and Leira during the recovery of a power core for the Archetype. They had only been doing what their nature compelled them to do. That hadn’t stopped him from killing a multitude of them to save their own skins.
“I think it’s a suit of some sort,” Viktor said, examining the Golden corpse closely. “I’m not sure it is, but I’d say it’s a suit. This Golden probably wore it during the battle, for protection.”
“It does kind of have the look of combat armor, doesn’t it?” Amy replied, nodding.
“So this guy sat here, manning his post, while the ship crashed,” Leira offered. “Then the crash killed him.”
“Or something else did,” Conover said. “You’d think that slamming into the planet would have at least knocked him out of his seat.”
Dash shrugged. “It’s Golden tech. Crashing into a planet might not be that big a deal to them. Anyway, the more important point is that this suit contains some Dark Metal, and also a bunch of the tech that makes the Golden…well, Golden. We need to recover this.”
Leira stared at him. “You mean drag this corpse and his fancy duds along with us?”
“I do, yeah,” Dash said. “This is just way too good an opportunity to pass up.”
“I agree with the Messenger,” Sentinel said. “Our records indicate that Golden typically underwent catastrophic immolation when they died, either by deliberate design, or because of the critical failure of their technology, when their life processes ceased.”
Amy gave the corpse a horrified look. “You mean they blew up when they died?”
“Catastrophic immolation also suggests fire, and lots of it,” Leira said, looking at Dash. “Are you sure you want to take that risk? It’ll not only slow us down, it might also blow us up.”
“Yeah, I hear what you’re saying,” Dash replied. “Believe me, I’m not all that keen on dragging dead guy here along with us either. But I can’t help thinking we’re probably going to get only one kick at this ship. I doubt we’re going to be able to keep coming back in here, at our leisure, to recover things. And it’s been two thousand centuries. As a fire risk, he’s minimal. As a resource, he’s priceless.”