The Island of Hope

by Andrei Livadny

  Now Simeon reached for it with confidence. The surprisingly light and strong spacesuit felt as if he'd known it for ages, up to the smallest wire and tiniest indicator. Father kept helping him, even after his death.

  Yanna looked at him, uncomprehending as he froze, lifeless, his heart overtaken by memories that took him far away from the storeroom.

  At last he started, getting rid of a vision, and turned to her. His expression was pained.

  “Why?” she asked, faltering. “Why are you going?”

  Simeon sighed and began to pull on the spacesuit. He clicked the weapon belt on, fastened the MG to it and moved his shoulders. Not sensing the usual weight of an oxygen cylinder felt weird. He put his finger on the converter’s button. His lungs filled with the air mix that the device made from pills stacked up in its holders. A stack the size of his hand was sufficient for a day’s breathing.

  Right until now Simeon hadn’t traveled further than a couple miles from home, except for emergencies. One oxygen cylinder that he could use with his light spacesuit only lasted him seven hours. And now he could take on the world!

  “Thanks,” his heart was breaking.

  Yanna burst out crying again. “Why?” she repeated obstinately, sobbing.

  He couldn't explain. He himself didn’t understand what it was that made him do it. He couldn't define it, let alone explain it to Yanna. He simply knew that he had to leave the place inhabited by a machine. At a certain point, he very nearly stayed, but then his heart filled with such icy cold that he almost screamed.

  A twelve years’ life in a vacuum, amid the constant combat between cybernetic systems. Some of the adults who'd lived their entire lives on their peaceful little planets had lost their sanity witnessing it. He'd grown up here. He was a part of this nasty, impossible world, and no sooner had he begun to perceive the most elementary notions of the world than he got the cruel rules of the game. Now he would like to break them, but he couldn’t. To consider the situation from a normal point of view and understand it, to believe Yanna he would have had to grow mad. And to forget his dad.

  Then he sighed as if he had found a way out, grasped another spacesuit and held it out to the girl.

  She got shy, but quickly controlled herself.

  Yanna’s trembling fingers at once got tangled in locks and fasteners. Simeon helped her, carefully checked the function of life support systems and shut her helmet himself.

  “Let’s go,” he said through the communicator, taking her by the hand.

  Yanna nodded, unable to utter a word. Maybe, for the first time in her life she was properly frightened.

  Andor appeared in the door opening. He silently watched the preparations while Simeon was loading the pack with holders containing oxygen tablets and with charged compact generating sets.

  “Good-bye, sir,” the android uttered calmly when they moved towards the airlock. “Yanna, will you return?”

  “Sure, Andor.” She replied, though being in that moment quite unaware of any further development of events.

  They passed the airlock.

  In fact, Yanna had never left her protected apartments. Simeon saw the girl’s face turning pale and growing a sallow hue once they stepped into the gloom and walked through an enfilade of ruined halls.

  Yanna’s breath became intermittent and accelerated. She was shivering, Simeon felt it even through the thick material of pressurized gloves.

  The flashlights of their helmets sliced through the darkness, revealing more chilling details of a combat between men and machines that had unfolded here in former times.

  Finally they saw the airlock next to which Simeon, almost suffocating, had noticed the glowing sign that had saved his life. The same sign was repeated on the inner side, but here the characters glowed red, as if dooming anyone who dared exit to certain death.

  END OF PRESSURIZED PREMISES

  Simeon was aware that he was probably being cruel, but he didn’t see any other way of revealing his feelings to her, of making her understand the true meaning of the phrase about the impossibility of the truce between man and machine.

  He led the girl into a vestibule. The light of their two flashlights illuminated the eerie contents of the cramped cabin.

  “There,” Simeon said hoarsely when she suppressed a shriek at the sight of two charred corpses. “That's what happened to my father," he managed, suppressing his hatred. “They tried to do the same to me hundreds of times!”

  * * *

  The way home proved to be long.

  For the first time in his life, he was not in a hurry to return. This was unbelievable: only a few hours ago he'd been suffocating, but now there was plenty of oxygen. He could do what he wanted. By simply touching a button inside the pressure helmet with the tongue he could drink some water or get a food pill.

  Nevertheless Simeon was moody.

  Only yesterday a similar spacesuit would have been his dream come true.

  Then why wasn’t he happy now?

  Hundreds of questions ripped his mind apart. The world around him was imperceptibly changing; existence as he knew it was slowly but inevitably collapsing.

  Father’s tales about human beings had turned to reality.

  'Where did Yanna come from? Who are the people that died when defending her shelter? What is Andor and, generally speaking, how is it possible that there’s a robot not trying to kill me? Perhaps it’s faulty?'

  Slowly Simeon scrambled through the sinister interiors of the gutted spaceships that used to belong to his ancestors, trying for the first time to comprehend the eerie world of mechanical wreckage.

  The corridor arched.

  He turned a corner and found himself in front of a mangled doorway.

  A massive hatch had been torn off its hinges by the old explosion and now hung overhead, stuck in the wall just under the ceiling. A wide crack gaped alongside it. Its edges were blocked with debris, half-sucked in by depressurization: deformed seats, crumpled paperwork, crushed memory crystals, some rags and fragments of devices and weapons.

  Approaching the door, he caught sight of a human torso. Still clad in a tattered uniform, it was pinned to the hole with the rest of the debris. No spacesuit. The man's glazed-over eyes were distorted with agony.

  Simeon shrank back. His father’s body must have been floating somewhere in the vacuum, looking exactly as this one.

  The feeling shattered him. All the corpses filling the spheroid had at one time been living men.

  * * *

  He was deeply shaken by his epiphany.

  The boy’s mind was still unable to grasp the full horror of reality, but the understanding that had just dawned upon him was sufficient enough to plunge him into shock.

  He aimlessly trudged along tangled passages for a long time, mechanically hopping from one shell-hole into another. The clear and familiar world of the steel labyrinth had unexpectedly changed, as if the mask of the ordinary had been torn off it. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? Simeon was aware of something new, horrid and incomprehensible, intruding into his life, making it yet less comfortable, yet more complicated and lonely, as if he hadn’t so many other troubles.

  He would grow up first, and only then would he realize: just in those days, after his father’s death, his meeting Yanna and Andor, his intellect really began to produce new ideas, although the process was rather distressing. The facts and notions that Andrei had sought to transfer to Simeon, became clearer and yet clearer to him, and these separate bits of other people’s experience that he inherited, would eventually help him to fit together a fragile and awful mosaic of the reality surrounding him.

  * * *

  For the next three days, he was busy. He'd finally found his way home and caught some sleep in his cramped room. Then he ventured out to the nearest stores to fill up on water and food, but the usual excitement of ++++a challenge had gone.

  Not quite understanding what was happening to him, he got angry.

  Several times he'd ab
andon whatever he was doing and climb out onto the surface of the spheroid. He'd sit there for hours, gazing at the crimson nebula and the rampant contours of battleships amid the distant stars.

  Simeon was overwhelmed with melancholy as he knew that there was life not very far from his shelter. And even the existence of Andor didn’t bother him as much as before.

  'I'll kill him,' Simeon thought. So, he chose the simplest solution for the robot problem.

  Finally, by the end of the third day, he couldn't stand it any longer. He headed back to see the girl.

  6.

  "Oh, Simeon! Simeon! I'm so happy you're back!" Yanna rushed out to meet him and threw her arms round his neck, the shock of her silky hair covering the boy's helmet like golden tinsel.

  He was taken aback for a second, but Yanna's sincere joy broke the fragile ice. Simeon raised his visor. The hatch behind his back hissed shut.

  The girl's eyes sparkled. "Andor and I were so worried," she admitted.

  The boy tensed up. His right hand lay on his gun. "Where is he?"

  Yanna followed his gesture. Her gaze betrayed fear. "Don't know. He went out. He didn't say when he'd be back."

  Simeon's fingers released the handle of the weapon. It was of little consequence. The android wouldn't catch him unawares again. As far as Simeon was concerned, he was as good as dead. He didn't want to think of the robot now – Yanna's joy filled him with the exciting and unfamiliar sensation of happiness. It was a new, pleasant and strange feeling, even better than the taste of oxygen or an accurate shot.

  "Will you go again?" Yanna asked with badly concealed anxiety.

  "No," Simeon shook his head. "I've come to stay."

  He removed his helmet and followed Yanna to the community room. On a table next to a wide open bookcase lay a book open in the middle, next to a glass filled with pink liquid.

  Yanna sat down on the couch. "I was worried," she admitted as she watched Simeon remove his spacesuit. "Andor said you'd be back, but I didn't believe him."

  Simeon frowned. The idea of the robot was quickly becoming as obsessive as a toothache.

  They kept silent for some seconds, unable to control the feelings overwhelming them both and not knowing what to say. Both were too grown up for their age. Their daily problems would have broken any child of ten or twelve. But subconsciously they remained children. Their world was simple to the point of absurdity, bot at the same time excruciatingly complex.

  They knew no grown-up tricks: they didn't know how to lie or deceive, their consciousness was free from all the complexes and conventions developed by our millennia-old civilization.

  They could only say what they felt, which made their hearts sensitive like live wires. Their lives had been shattered; their world was collapsing while fusing their two hearts together: the unity of two experiences and two identities.

  Yanna watched Simeon fold his spacesuit. He'd intruded into her life amid all the ideas and reveries she'd borrowed from films and books. He had destroyed her world, showed her the vacuum and the gloom reigning behind the walls of her dwelling — so fragile and accident prone.

  Terrified, she was on the brink of tears. She didn't remember how she'd got home that day; the silence and emptiness surrounding her after Simeon's departure had stupefied her.

  He too had experienced something similar. Simeon wouldn't say why he was attracted to this place. Now the tense silence was hurting them both.

  They were too pure, too naïve — too wise. But also cruel: two little living beings lost in the boundless dark of the Universe amidst the cold and deadly chaos of metal drifting through a vacuum.

  Simeon gave a faint smile. All of a sudden his face lit up. He was about to say something but Yanna, noticing the change, couldn't restrain herself any more. Joy, relief, an incomprehensible bitterness and a tenderness strange in a ten-year-old girl – all these flooded over her as she ran up to Simeon, flung her arms round his neck and clung to him, shaking with sobs.

  Somewhat scared, he moved back and looked in her face.

  A tearful Yanna gave him a happy smile.

  * * *

  Yanna woke up early in the morning before the artificial daylight ceiling fixtures had lit up, replacing the dim night lighting in the compartments. She stayed in bed for a while, half-believing what had happened the day before.

  Then she felt anxious. Andor had been absent for two days. It had happened before that her instructor left the protected modules for a long time, but Yanna, not knowing what dangers lay behind the main airlock, had never been really anxious for him. Or rather, she knew it theoretically, but to hear of something and to see it with one's own eyes are two different things.

  She sighed and got up. She took a peek into the adjacent room and stood for a while in complete darkness, listening to Simeon's broken breathing. Then she went to the galley and began making breakfast. For the first time in her life, Yanna had no idea what the coming day had in store for her. What if Simeon would make her suit up again and step out of the main airlock? The thought was awful. The contents of hundreds of books she had read kept intruding upon her mind. What once had sounded like fiction or looked like a collection of stage props was now turning into reality. There were other people besides her. There were huge spheres called planets out there. She wasn't unique, nor was her room the center of the Universe.

  Immediately she thought of Andor. Where was he? She couldn't help worrying about her old mentor.

  And her parents? Simeon had told her that he'd had a father who'd been killed by a battle machine. Then, where were her own father and mother?

  But what if...

  Yanna's legs gave way under her as she realized clearly: Simeon's father had been killed by a robot. What if her parents, too... Whose carbonized corpses were those in the battered airlock?

  So gradually, the war mentality began to creep into her mind.

  After breakfast Yanna dragged Simeon off to the library. He followed her reluctantly. They hadn't heard from Andor yet, but quite a few other machines aroused his suspicion, including an odd motionless apparatus with two opal-black screens placed in the library.

  Yanna laughed sincerely, not understanding how one could be afraid of a universal library processor.

  The two children like two halves of one large mind. Simeon's part contained all the hands-on survival experience in the inhuman conditions of the spheroid. His mind stored only the knowledge he could have obtained during everyday struggle. Yanna, on the contrary, knew lots of things; she was literally crammed with all sorts of information, but she was unable to apply it and would for certain have perished had she had to venture outside.

  Yanna approached the computer in the middle of the room. Its indicator lights kept flashing cheerfully, but the two monitors in front of the seats remained black. Warily Simeon walked around the machine, keeping his hand on the handle of his weapon just in case.

  Yanna opened the central panel and produced a thin plastic headband hooked up to the machine with wires.

  "Put it on," she said, "and sit down."

  Simeon tensed up. "Why?".

  Yanna smiled; dimples appeared on her cheeks. "Don't be afraid. I want to show you people. This headband helps me learn."

  After a second's hesitation Simeon obeyed. He didn't want to disappoint Yanna. Besides, he kept his right hand closed around his MG, so it wouldn't be a good idea for the machine to suddenly spring to life and point a weapon at them.

  "Close your eyes," the girl sank into the opposite seat. Yanna was unaware that she was performing a revolution in his life – how could she have known the wonderful potential of the ordinary processor so familiar to her?

  Simeon put on the headband and lowered his eyelids. He felt a weak prickle in his temples.

  He didn't see the opposite monitor light up, streaming with incomprehensible messages. Yanna had never seen anything like that, either.

  POTENTIAL INTELLIGENCE TEST: 170 POINTS

  REAL KNOWLEDGE TEST: 28.1
POINTS

  PERSONALITY TESTED. ANTISTRESS INDEX: 127 UNITS

  AUTOMATIC TRAINING PROGRAM ACTIVATED

  Simeon felt something pierce his arm. He tensed up, about to spring back to his feet, then succumbed to a pleasant weakness overtaking him. A

  A soft female voice echoed in his mind,

  "Relax. Don't open your eyes. Now you will hear a brief course on the history of the Galaxy. The information will be transmitted directly into your brain."

  Later Simeon could barely remember what happened next. He seemed to have lost all will of his own.

  Yanna wasn't surprised seeing him sunk into a trance. Admittedly she was disappointed he couldn't talk to her for some time. The girl had experienced similar phenomena more than once and didn't consider a direct neurosensory contact with a machine to be something supernatural or dangerous.

  The primary course lasted four days. Simeon ate and slept without in fact realizing what he was doing and then returned to his seat, which was actually a very complex diagnostics and life support machine.

  The sophisticated automatics of its teaching module could not make him a genius. Having determined his brain's potential, the machine's processor simply uploaded to it a certain amount of general education information. The teaching module didn't pursue any concrete aim; its actions were akin to the behavior of a wave rolling onto a desolate beach where, half-buried in sand, lay an empty bottle. The wave would fill it with brine and recede, totally indifferent to the change in its contents or in the bottle itself.

  Yanna quietly entered the library.

  Simeon slumped in his seat in front of the computer terminal, his white-knuckled fingers clutching the armrests.