The Island of Hope

by Andrei Livadny

A narrow utility corridor took them to a shaft that reached the very surface of the spheroid. The exit was safe – it was concealed by a dilapidated control room riddled with shell-holes that offered a view of a steel desert stretching out for dozens of miles.

  Simeon helped Yanna to climb inside the control room and froze, scrutinizing the close horizon. She sat down, also peering into the distance. They'd done it many times before. The control room was their favorite place in this part of the steel planetoid. Yanna had got used to the magical colors of the metallic island, but she constantly discovered something new, as if she was gradually, step by step, discovering the stern beauty of crimson colors and their many hues.

  The blurred outline of a spiral nebula rose above the ragged horizon. Clusters of starlight froze overhead in the bottomless coal-black sky; a few blood-red dots were sliding past: the spheroid's satellites.

  The ragged steel desert underfoot sloped towards the close horizon; here and there, frameworks of hull structures or whole bodies of destroyed spaceships towered over the Abyss.

  This was their world. Their Island of Hope. Five years ago they'd met inside its heart inhabited by mechanical death. It was a miracle – two children who'd survived and matured, transforming into a young man and woman. Two saplings of life, seared by nuclear folly, sealed within their pressurized premises, had then made their way to the surface, defying the law of probability.

  They were utterly happy but also sad.

  Simeon and Yanna loved each other stronger than a brother and sister, more passionately than any amount of young lovers could – they were two parts of a single whole, shuddering at the thought of the time when they had lived separately.

  The inspection finished, they left the control room and went to the spheroid's surface. The safe tunnel leading to their dwelling was within ten minutes' walking distance.

  Habitually Simeon scrutinized each detail, the slightest motion or change in the familiar landscape, but the process was practically subconscious and didn't prevent him from thinking. Lately he had often felt some dissatisfaction. The more he read, the narrower the steel sphere of the Island of Hope seemed to him. Here, there were no other colors except for the crimson radiance of the nebula, there was no spaciousness except the immense abyss of the cosmos. He tried to imagine other planets — living planets with millions of people inhabiting them, but his imagination was like a caged bird thrashing against the bars – it returned time and time again to the poor reality of the steel labyrinth.

  He was unaware of his own maturity and of the fact that his future worried him. For a few years already, survival had ceased to be a pressing matter. More and more often he turned his thoughts to the stars, especially as he knew perfectly well: the spacecraft forming the spheroid had used to travel through space.

  * * *

  How nice it was to be back home!

  Simeon stepped out of the airlock, removed his helmet and froze.

  Something was wrong.

  His mind didn't yet have the time to work out the reason for this vague anxiety when his hand closed around his MG; he stepped forward, shielding Yanna with his body, and listened.

  The air hissed as it was pumped under pressure down the sealant of the internal hatch; a tired valve in a regenerator's pump moaned rhythmically, begging for a replacement; control panels beeped. But now a new note added to this familiar white noise: a sound completely alien to these premises, a deep and hollow hum coming from the library.

  Yanna dug her fingers into Simeon's shoulder. She heard it too: a deep, menacing drone full of dormant energy.

  "What's that?" she whispered.

  "Don’t know," Simeon shook his head, taking a step forward into the transparent tunnel leading to the life-support automatics. By association, he remembered the day he'd first come here, stealthily advancing along this same corridor exactly as he was now.

  The noise grew. Now it sounded like an overloaded generator about to explode; the growing tension lingered in the air, almost tangible.

  A strong clear note added to the deep drone.

  The sound vibrated in the air, echoing from the walls and changing its pitch until it finally transformed into a precise and harmonious rhythm. Simeon unclenched his fingers. His MG slid down its holster. Faulty generators weren't capable of synthesizing music. He took the last step towards the library's door. The pulsing melody was pouring into his mind; it was gentle and velvety like the cosmic gloom filled with icy stars, intense and unrestrained like the bubble of thermonuclear reaction; it was calling him, disturbing and questioning — the perpetual motion of a human mind.

  Andor stood at the center of the library.

  The melody that had at first frightened and then fascinated Simeon, was streaming out of the concealed intercom loudspeakers. The bulkheads vibrated with the rhythm.

  Silently Simeon shook the android's hand stretched out to greet him. He looked into the robot's eyes. His quizzical stare was filled with silent reproach. Andor was too unpredictable and tended to rely too much on the young intellects of his human masters.

  "This is the Cosmic Symphony," the android explained quietly. "It was composed many centuries ago on the planet Earth, the historical cradle of mankind. I've found it in a record library on one of the cruisers."

  "Andor, you're a gem!" Yanna exclaimed. Her fear was gone, her eyes glistening with pleasure.

  Music was everywhere. It was pouring from one compartment to the next, following the two young people and the android.

  Was Andor aware of the psychological effect of certain sorts of music?

  They sat down at the table, but Simeon suddenly felt that he could neither talk nor eat. For some reason there was a hot, suffocating lump in his throat. He put aside his fork and raised his eyes, unable to express his agony. Tormented by doubts, dissatisfied and haunted by new unknown desires, he could finally name his frustration. The subconscious fear of the unknown had died in his heart, replaced by the anticipation of a new loss and something else, yet unidentified, that this Cosmic Symphony had stirred in his heart.

  Probably Andor hadn't meant anything of the kind when he'd discovered this memory crystal amidst the debris and carbonized bodies, its discs containing the last surviving music file. He hadn't expected this reaction from Simeon when he decided to play the file in the library.

  Simeon felt the melody stir bitter feelings in his heart, similar to the foreboding of inevitable loss.

  A nostalgia for the stars he'd never known.

  The unrestrained celebration of human nature, a subconscious craving for enigmas that had made the first cave-dwellers throw back their heads and peer into the bottomless abyss of the Universe.

  And a painful, annoying question: who are they, the people who permitted mechanical creatures to torment their children?

  The reality of the Island of Hope burst again, this time due to the questions put forward by the mind of a grown-up man.

  Without a word, he rose from the table and left the compartment almost at a run.

  It had happened so fast that Yanna was taken aback. She jumped to her feet to follow him, but Andor softly prevented her from doing so. "I know where he's gone. Give me a few minutes," the android said.

  * * *

  A machine's mind is not without its ghosts. Especially if the said machine is a rational creature and the formation of its intellect took place in extreme conditions when all criteria of what's real, wrongful or correct had become a mere convention depending on the agendas involved.

  In this respect, Simeon and Andor were very much alike. Both had been born and grown up here, among the dead. It was probably for that reason that they understood each other without a word.

  The android had forever remembered the first spark of his consciousness.

  'ACTIVATION! ACTIVATION! ACTIVATION!'

  The command surged through the control circuits of his photon processor. The words "he opened his eyes" would have sounded funny. He was not a man. He simply saw light.
>
  It had been a narrow compartment cluttered with memory crystals, computer disks, paperwork and spare parts. The light was dim and red.

  The emergency signal came on the internal display. His processor awoke and, in mere nanoseconds, performed a complete analysis of the situation and came to a logical conclusion.

  He turned his head. The cameras mounted behind the lenses imitating his eyes registered the picture of a man kneeling beside him. He was young. His clothes were covered in blood, his hair in disarray; his eyes feverish. He was obviously under the influence of some strong anesthetic.

  The man was clasping a deep lacerated wound in his side.

  "Request priority command!" Andor heard, then realized that the phrase had been synthesized by his own voice module.

  The man wheezed; his head shook. He stared at the android, his eyes filled with agony.

  "It works," he managed, wincing. For a while the man hoarsely breathed, trying to stop his shuddering.

  "A human being in agony," an impassive verdict appeared on Andor's internal display screen.

  "You're my creation. I spent half my life building you. Such a shame

  I won't see what you will become. Look at me," The hoarse whisper of the man was forever engraved on his memory cells. "Idiots! They've annihilated the planet," the man strained to bring his face close to the android's. "I therefore name you Andor. All information about the Universe, all possible and impossible data — you have it all. Base command: survive."

  He collapsed. Red froth covered his lips.

  At the time, Andor had been only ninety seconds from the moment of activation. His creator couldn't have possibly imagined all the potential of the photon processor with its speed-of-light neural exchanges. All systems were initialized in under ten seconds; in twenty more seconds he'd read and logically processed his behemoth databases. After one hundred and ten seconds, Andor had become self-aware.

  He kneeled down before the dying man.

  As if on cue, he opened his eyes one last time.

  "Priority command: survive," he wheezed in a barely audible voice.

  His creator's eyes closed. He died.

  Andor was on his own now.

  After seven hundred and twenty seconds of his conscious existence he had left the compartment to enter the insane world of the spacecraft cemetery.

  * * *

  A narrow corridor led the android to a dead end. Here the wall was covered in a complex pattern of broken lines. Andor raised his hand and traced some of them, forming the letters O and H. The remaining lines were a decoy.

  Hissing its air compressors, part of the wall moved aside, revealing the entrance to an airlock. The internal hatch was wide open. Andor stepped in and found himself in a circular corridor with compartment doors at equal intervals. Part of the wall panel had broken off, exposing snaking clusters of cables and pipes.

  Andor stopped at a door with a sign reading "PILOT ROOM". The lock's photo cell and the servo-driver were out of order, so someone had cut the lock out. He pushed the door aside and entered the room of the LX assault raider.

  Simeon stood with his back to the entrance, his hands resting on the cannibalized control panel. A monitor glowed before him. The floor was strewn with print-outs of electric diagrams.

  "What do you want?" he asked without turning to Andor.

  The android perched on the edge of the navigator's seat. "I thought you might need help."

  Simeon turned round and frowned at him. "When will you stop lying? You could have restored this spacecraft a long time ago! All this time you've done nothing! You let me run around the spheroid hunting rusty robots and never said a word about this!"

  From the passionless face of the android it was impossible to tell what was going on inside his logical circuits. Still, it seemed to Simeon that he'd noticed some inner struggle.

  "Do you want to rejoin people?" Andor asked.

  Simeon turned pale. "Did you really think I would spend my life chasing after machines on this galactic dump?" he asked bitterly. "Then why did you upload my biorhythm data to the teaching module? I wish I hadn't learned anything!"

  Andor rose and approached the vandalized console. Every year he looked more human. They considered him to be their teacher. No. Sooner or later Simeon would have acquired the necessary knowledge without the android's assistance. Andor felt torn apart as never before. He was neither a robot nor a living being. But for the presence of Yanna and Simeon, he would have lost his mind ages ago.

  "The expectation of a holiday is always better than the holiday itself," he cited, brushing his plastic-coated fingers across the console's contacts. "That world you want to return to has produced killing machines and this spheroid. Besides, there's a high probability of its civilization having perished in the galactic war!"

  Simeon licked his suddenly dry lips. "We..." he struggled to find the right words, "we've reached the limit of our resources here."

  Andor took his time to reply. That was absurd: why would he need time to collect his thoughts! Simeon was well aware of his mind's speed.

  "I couldn't force my ideas upon you," he pronounced at last. "You're right, of course, it would have been quite possible for me to rebuild everything here within these last few years. But I had no right to do that. Now I see you've grown up. All that you've done, you've done it yourself. True, I gave you the opportunity to learn and acquire some information, but that was all. You are a human being. You have your own identity. So you make your own decisions. You found this spacecraft with the aid of the Island of Hope logbooks. You've managed to get a good understanding of how it works. The hunting for battle machines has already bored you out of your mind. You are a man. And I'm only your creation."

  Simeon stared at him in amazement. "I'm sorry," to life he finally said. "It's this music. I was at the end of my tether." Obeying an involuntary impulse, he put his hand on Andor's shoulder.

  The robot turned round. It wasn't for the first time Simeon had the impression that he was desperate to come to life.

  "Well, guys, have you discussed all your secrets?" Yanna's voice sounded behind them.

  Simeon started. Yanna stood in the doorway, smiling at them. Dimples appeared on her cheeks. "By the way, I played with my doll here something like seven or eight years ago," she couldn't help laughing.

  Seeing her, Simeon felt an enormous sense of relief. . "We must try," he summed up. "I don't think we have an alternative."

  8.

  A furious crimson octopus sprawled its tentacles, pulsating in a drawn-out agony, spewing new protuberances into the darkness glittering with stars. A flattened sphere sped along its unstable elliptical orbit around it, trailing in its wake a thousand-mile long tail of flickering debris.

  This had been their world. Their Island of Hope.

  Now it was slowly moving toward the back observation screens.

  Simeon tore himself away from the control panels to cast one last glance at the tiny planetoid which had been his home for t twenty long years.

  They didn't know what future had in store for them. Maybe Andor sitting next to them was right and their civilization had perished, having burned itself in the furnace of a new galactic war. Then Yanna and himself might become the last hope for its resurrection. But it was also possible that things had worked out for the Earthlings and that they were heading toward blossoming new worlds.

  In any case, they would never forget their Island.

  They had no need for words. Simeon's hand lay on the helm. Through the glass of his pressure helmet he saw Yanna's face streaked with tears.

  The spaceship hovered over the ragged steel desert. Then its stern lit up like a man-made sun, obscuring the light of the agonizing nebula; the spaceship began gathering speed, rapidly turning into a blinding dot in the sky.

  They took the path to the stars.

  PART THREE

  FORT STELLAR

  9.

  "Hey, Johnny, come have a look! What the fuck is this? What
a cheek!"

  The duty navigator leaned over the monitor. The scarlet dot was still at the bottom of the screen – the object which his partner had just referred to so enthusiastically was still a very long way away, almost out of their radars' range.

  "Hm, I don’t know what the computer’s doing! It’s raving mad!"

  John Selkirk couldn't work out what was going on, either. Having received a signal from the object, the on-board computer of their space cruiser had automatically started a search and identification procedure, and now a most absurd structure appeared on the display. This must have been the first time he'd ever seen their powerful cyber mind at a loss: the computer had failed to ID the object, plastering the screen with disorganized diagrams of all sorts of spaceships.

  A navigator doesn't decide anything. Selkirk respectfully touched an intercom key. "Sir, this is the duty navigator. The radars have reported an unidentified man-made object. It's not in the database. It is armed."

  "Coming."

  Chains of alarm lights flashed on board the Tri-Solar Confederation cruiser. Behind the sealed gates of airlocks, launching pods opened up one by one, releasing flocks of space fighters into space. Gun turret operators hurried to slump into their seats and activate their equipment.

  The object was approaching. Senior watch officer stared at the monitor in the pilot room. "Cancel the guns," he commanded. "Let's see what the multiplexers will show."

  Powerful electronic telescopes began their unhurried motion, groping after the object. Finally an image of the approaching spaceship showed on the displays in the pilot room.

  "Not a hypersphere one," commented the navigator, peering at the screen with genuine interest.

  The huge disk-shaped body was patched in several places by cermet5 plates welded to the hull. Antennas bristled, pointing in every possible direction; the tightly closed gun ports were barely seen behind them. The parabolic dishes didn't rotate; not one navigational light could be seen, and as for the bowl of the photon reflector mounted on telescopic supports outside the ship's bottom, it had long lost its sheen, apparently inactive for a long time.