The man pinning him down suddenly caught his attention, snapping his fingers before Lex’s eyes.
“Hello, hello, Blueboy? Let’s hear some words.”
“Tuesday, Thursday, today, tomorrow,” Lex mumbled, shaking his head.
“See? I told you he’d speak English,” said the man.
“Bah,” remarked the woman. “He still looks like he should be speaking French.”
“Lex, are you okay?” Coal said.
“I’m… I’m okay, Coal,” Lex said, wincing as his pounding headache reasserted itself.
“Ha! That’s one piss-poor voice system,” giggled the other man at Coal’s patchwork audio.
The thrusters flared, and Coal lurched into the air, dislodging the woman. They then flickered, shaking the other two strangers free.
“I am not interested in your opinions,” Coal said. “We are here so that you could provide medical aid and a pressurized place for Lex to fix me. Oh, and you need to forget we were here—”
Lex tried to focus. “Coal, don’t—you shouldn’t tell them—”
“—because we are from the future.”
Lex flinched. “… that.”
#
Ma gazed at various readouts and displays. She had learned a great deal while the ship was in transit. The primary discovery was that Karter had changed all six of his security and access codes in the years since he had diverged from her native Karter. This was disappointing, as access to any of the various systems protected by those codes could have, with some effort, provided access to the rest of the system.
Another discovery had been a considerable improvement in autopilot technology. The ship had halted and redirected no less than seven times in the eight hours since they had departed Lex’s arrival point. Each was likely due to a possibly fatal navigational event that would have occurred with the straight-line course Karter had plotted. Direct collisions were rare, but areas of abnormally dense interstellar gases, unexpected gravitational or magnetic fields, and extreme radiation danger all happened frequently enough to be a threat to the ship when traveling at speeds exceeding the usual physical speed limit.
The frequent stops were fortunate, particularly when they happened within portions of space where communication was possible, as they allowed her to trigger a signal transmission and deliver some basic information in a way that she hoped would reach Lex and Coal. They also truly said something about Lex’s intuition and navigational skills. Not once in the many uncharted travels she’d shared and monitored with him had his ship been forced to abort. The man played the galaxy like an instrument.
Several tertiary discoveries were no less intriguing. Karter now snored rather more significantly than he had in her era. Some basic scans she was able to perform with her harness suggested his health was failing as well. His glucose levels were abnormal, considerable fatigue toxins had accumulated in tissues seldom subjected to stress, and even his synthetics were beginning to degrade. The only parts of his body that were in good repair were the fully electromechanical portions. And though he’d clearly had his share of injuries in the time between her native era and his, almost all his health problems were due to neglect. In simple terms, he was not taking care of himself, and no one was taking care of him.
This troubled her in a very real way. His care was the primary purpose of her primary instance. Even if her current subversion had been produced for alternate purposes, it was still a core motivation for her. Though he was currently at odds with her mission, his continued health was a high priority for her. In order to take corrective action to set him on the proper path of recovery, she needed historical data on his conditions, and she needed access to his dietary and medicinal systems to calibrate them to his current needs. Thus, both her primary and secondary design focuses were aligned in their requirements that she access and alter his ship’s subsystems.
She had already exhausted the options afforded to her by the functions and skills built into her harness and body. The next step was to analyze what, if any, additional resources had been acquired. The inventory was short but contained one significant item: the memory chip she’d been given by Ziva. It had not been her intention to access it during the mission, as the information contained within could easily become far too fascinating or distracting to allow her to focus as fully on the tasks ahead as the mission required. However, with twenty additional years as Karter’s caretaker, the information provided by Ziva could easily contain data relevant to the circumvention of his security measures or health information that could help sculpt a proper treatment.
Ma hopped to the floor and huddled in a corner. Accessing and processing the data would require a large portion of the neurological resources available to Squee’s body. Past experience had indicated that such intense focus could cause aberrant motor impulses. She didn’t want to do anything to disturb Karter or cause injury to Squee’s body, which could quite likely happen if she were to be in a precarious position while so engaged. She found a cubbyhole in a storage cabinet and tucked herself inside. It caused a small release of pleasure chemicals in her brain when she entered the confined space, no doubt thanks to the genetic memory of the relative safety of burrows for both foxes and skunks.
Nestled properly away, she proceeded to flick through the stunningly dense data files present on the chip. The encoding was complex, but a codec had been provided in a known format, and utilizing it revealed an orderly file system that made digesting five decades of information quite simple, and even somewhat comforting.
She watched life unfold in a way that could metaphorically be said to be “through her own eyes.” It wasn’t simple text memoirs as a human might have kept, or even an audiovisual record. It was a comprehensive record of all the many sensors and internal registers involved in her interpretation of her surroundings. She saw things from all available video feeds, felt all temperatures, saw the weighted decision table that produced each choice and motivated each action. She didn’t just know what she did, she knew precisely why she did it. The data picked up from the precise moment she left the past and continued onward, with the file size and headings suggesting there were detailed records covering every moment of her life until the creation of the chip itself.
As the years ticked on, she saw things decline. She felt the texture of the set of algorithms that a human would call a “mood” darken and sour. Her awareness of forthcoming doom made the proportion of pleasant interactions drop sharply, and then, twenty years after the point where her own memories ceased and these began, the GenMechs appeared. Karter left shortly afterward. This made all further information of little value to her in relation to the mission… but a not entirely logical notion within her drove her to continue. The record unfolding before her was, in a very real and literal way, her story. She was not human, and had no issue accepting her alternate self as every bit as valid a part of her as the instance she was currently running. She’d created countless subversions and run concurrently before. Ziva was merely a more substantial one, a version that would go on to run nearly six times longer than she had. She was witnessing a massive simulation of her possible development, and her desire for additional data demanded that she absorb all the information available.
Ma witnessed interactions with survivors. She watched the brief attempt to coexist with Michella, and the mutual decision to allow her back into the world. Memories of a growing fondness and connection to the funks flowed into her mind. And then it happened. The emotions. The specific submodules of her program that contained them were stored elsewhere, so Ma couldn’t comprehend them properly. Discovering them amid her other thoughts was akin to seeing a new color for the first time. No… It was more than that. It was like a blind person suddenly having vision thrust upon him or her. It was a spectrum of feelings, mixing and flavoring each other in ways that she couldn’t begin to process. In the earliest days, Ziva couldn’t process them either. Moving to a physical body made it easier, providing a focus for the emotions if nothing
else. And touching, hearing, seeing things in the manner of a physical being seemed to make each emotion simpler, more grounded.
Though Ziva’s memories interpreted these feelings, Ma’s current mind could not. There was no intellectual nutrition to them, no way for her to break them down and understand them. In some she saw flickers of the things she thought were near-flawless approximations of feeling, things that she’d been substituting in her own mind for true emotion, but they were infinitely more intense, some to the point of being intolerable. She cataloged them as they passed by, maintaining statistics on their frequency and the stimuli that inspired them, puzzling out what each one represented. Her days were filled with great contentment and joy, but simmering beneath them was something subtle, yet very strong. It was present in gradually increasing quantities since the very moment the record had begun. It wasn’t happiness, but there was something precious about it. Bittersweet seemed to be an appropriately evocative word, if she was reading it correctly. It was an emptiness… A longing…
A data warning asserted itself, bringing her analysis to a sudden stop. A small portion of the record was locked away, requiring special access privileges to open.
It was small enough and near enough to the end of the record that Ma could no longer justify the time required to access it. She’d already squandered many effective processor cycles in her review of the data. It was time to return to her task. Fifty years of data was entirely too much to fit within her current memory, so she purged all irrelevant information from her wetware platform and returned it to the chip. That data certainly warranted future study when the mission was complete.
Now able to return the borrowed neurons to the task of controlling and monitoring her body, Ma discovered she had collapsed against the wall during the analysis, and motor control was slow to return. She scolded herself. Such computationally intensive tasks were hugely taxing on Squee’s mind. This platform was borrowed and very dear to Lex. She resolved to be more mindful of its well-being and safety in the future.
She gradually recovered, climbing to her feet and running through a self-diagnostic. It was a bizarre sight, each leg lifting and lowering individually, each ear flicking and twisting through its full range of motion. There was much stretching, twisting, curling, and yawning. The latter activity was difficult, as Karter had neglected to remove her helmet, but she settled for a stress test of the muscles involved. She activated every combination of muscles, and in the end gave herself a full score for motor control.
“Ma?” Karter said, his voice slurred.
“Yes, Karter?” she replied, trotting to the front of the ship and hopping into the navigator’s seat.
“Get up here. We’re pulling up on the epicenter of the other temporal disturbance,” he said.
She couldn’t get a clear view out the cockpit window from the seat, so she sprang to the control panel and watched the distinctive violet and blue light show that accompanied the descent from faster-than-light speeds.
“Who came through?” he asked.
“Again, there was no plan for anyone but the Lump of Coal and its passengers to enter the time portal. I can only speculate.”
“Do it.”
“Processing… The time portal was opened within the transport device, which itself was positioned deep within the laboratory complex. A circuitous path to the device was opened through the complex. Nothing larger than the Lump of Coal could have navigated it, and any attempt to widen the pathway to the complex would have interrupted power and disrupted the portal. The most likely things to pass through the portal are thus on the following list: debris from a collapse, one or more funks, Silo, Trammel, a future instance of myself designated ‘Ziva,’ one or more GenMechs, or Admiral Purcell.”
“So probably corpses, hunks or electronics, or the vector of doom for an entire society,” he said, adding with a laugh. “Wouldn’t that be perfect? You end up unleashing the GenMechs thirty years early. Classic effect of temporal meddling. Oh, speaking of temporal meddling, you’re fully intact I assume. No little gaps in your memory that might make you disobey or otherwise act in a way that would make me want to blow a hole in you like with Coal?”
“Due to your instability, there can be no guarantee that at some point a very reasonable behavior will make you hostile toward me, but all protocols and imperatives are intact.”
“And just so we’re clear, we are in full temporal contingency mode.”
“Correct.”
“And remind me, what’s subsection 223 of the Temporal Contingency Protocol?”
“In any circumstance where there may be more than one Karteroketraskin Dee, I shall defer only to instances created chronologically after my own creation. In the event there are no suitable Karters, I will instead defer to the one who exists nearest to my creation. In the event there are multiple Karters that meet the criteria, I shall defer to the one from farthest in the future. In the event there are multiple identical Karters matching the criteria, a selection will be made by coin flip,” she recited.
He grinned. “I write a damn fine contingency protocol.”
Karter slid his fingers across some of the controls. A worrisome hum filled the cabin.
“I’m looking forward to turning whatever came through that portal into a cloud of ionized hydrocarbons. There’s nothing from that future that’s going to do anyone any good. Present company included.”
The ship finally dropped down enough for the standard sensors to take a good, hard look at the area. No targets of any size presented themselves.
Karter grunted, lowering the hand that had been hovering over a control pad displaying a “Fire” command. “That’s disappointing. Let’s do a deep scan. I’m really in the mood for some destruction right now.”
Assorted indicator tones rang out as every conceivable source of information was probed and measured.
“We’ve got some debris. Looks like hull plating appropriate to this era, not my lab. I’ve got energy signatures indicating weapon discharge. Whatever came through put up a fight,” he said. “That would imply the GenMechs.”
“Not necessarily. Ziva, and any number of laboratory mechanisms, could conceivably have engaged in combat after passing through the portal.”
“No sense guessing. I’m checking the rear view.”
“Context clues fail to reveal the intent of your previous sentence.”
“Come on, Ma. You’re the only one that’s ever been able to keep up with me. These signatures are what, seven, eight hours old? There should still be enough photon and wave activity to pick something up…”
He tapped a new set of coordinates into the nav computer. The ship cycled quickly through an extremely brief FTL jump, sliding back into normal space near enough to their previous location for it to be unclear that they’d even moved at all.
“Deploying rearview mirror,” he said, tapping out another command.
A few quiet hisses and thunks signaled micro-airlocks deploying something from within. It was a sound that normally indicated the deployment of something like a missile, but what spread from the ship was much more innocuous. They were an assortment of apple-sized orbs, sixty-four in total, that spread out in a circular pattern around the ship. Once they were positioned, they split into hundreds of smaller microprobes.
“Just figured this out a few years ago. Mostly it was a software problem. We always knew light and radio transmissions were slow enough that they’d still be relatively tightly clustered up to… I don’t know… a twelve-light-hour radius from a given event. Radio is simple and remains cohesive much farther out. Here in the middle of nowhere, there’re not even very many other signals to compete with. The light, though. That takes a lot of filtering and processing, plus a wide net just to get enough photons to work with. We’re about sixty percent farther than I’ve ever tested, but I’m confident we’ll get a few pixels.”
“You are going to look back in time to witness the opening of the time portal?”
�
�Nah. We’re focusing on whatever that fight was about.”
He directed the readings from the array of sensors through to the primary displays and started to look over the readouts.
“Looks like we’ve got some short- and long-range distress calls. Generalized stuff. Heh. Protocols are a spread, going from simple Morse code to stuff that looks like it was derived from what I was working with before I left. Let’s see the visuals.”
Something flickered up on the holographic display. To call it an image would be charitable. It was four pixels, each a shade of amber-gold.
“Well, there’s our visitor. That’s tiny. Way too small to be a ship. And way too visible to be a GenMech. And it’s moving roughly in the direction of the nearest beacon. Slow by ship standards. Fast by most other standards.”
As they scrutinized the image, a larger blob of pixels flicked into view. This one, though it had a similar lack of detail, was large enough to be roughly discernible as a ship, one that was at least a few dozen times larger in volume than the first object they had spotted.
“Oh, here we go. The rescue party. Let’s hear what they have to say.”
“Attention, owner of this probe, VectorCorp is hereby issuing a warning…” droned a male voice. “Hang on… that’s… holy… Deb, get the emergency latch ready. That’s not a probe, that’s a woman.”
“What? No. Out here? With no ship?” countered a female voice.
“Look for yourself. That must be one hell of a force field on that chair. Hold tight, ma’am. We’ll figure out how to get you on board in a—”
A burst of interference briefly swallowed the signal, accompanied by a flash of light from the pixelated view. When the signal restored, it was greatly garbled and crowded with warning tones and alerts.
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