by J. K. Norry
Link replied without looking at him.
“Nah,” he said. “We’ll go for a drink, one of these days.”
Steve responded, a hopeful lift to his voice.
“Maybe tomorrow?” he ventured. “It is Friday.”
Link kept reading the information that was not informing his situation at all on the little lighted screen. Once more, he responded without looking up.
“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe tomorrow.”
It hit him while he was reading something about electrical fields and how they extend indefinitely into space somehow. Link realized that he may have come up with an idea, and in the next moment he realized that the idea might actually impress the robot consciousness that he was trying to help. The first realization made him want to leap from his chair, and shake his fist triumphantly in the air; the second made him want to let out a loud whoop.
Link did neither of those things, but whatever subtle shift in his posture or expression did happen was enough to catch Steve’s attention. He glanced at Link, and smiled.
“Good news?” he said.
“What?” Link let his smile fall, replacing it with a slight frown without looking over.
“Nah,” he said. “I mean, yeah. Sure. Whatever.”
They sat there like that for a few more seconds, Steve searching Link’s face while politely avoiding looking at his phone. Link continued to scroll, and read, and keep the frown locked in place.
Link watched the clock on his phone march slowly through the last hour of the day, and tuned out even the questions that he normally would have answered. All he could think of was the feeling of twin pills sliding down his throat, and his consciousness spinning through space once more. He was nearly jumping out of his own skin, quietly, at the thought of getting home and jumping into someone else’s.
ELEVEN
He wasn’t sure if their sleep schedules were starting to sync up or if his increasingly earlier bedtime was giving him the time he needed. Link stepped into The Admiral’s body while it was still asleep, and found it easy to take complete control. Immediately, he went to the log book and sat down before it. Instead of recording anything, he flipped back through the scrolling virtual pages until he figured there were about a month’s worth of entries ahead of him. Then he started reading, and trying to paint some mental picture with the few notes that he could somewhat understand.
Something clicked, a few pages deep, and images began to flood his mind unbidden. Rather than having to piece together the completely alien life written in obscurely personal shorthand, he found that each entry began to act as a key to some doorway in the mind he was inhabiting. He flipped back further than he had to begin with, and started over. As soon as he reached the end, he flipped back even more. Scenes played out in his head, more fully fleshed out each time he read a given entry; and by the time he had caught up to today the third time Link was trembling.
He stood abruptly and began pacing, trying to order his whirling thoughts and still his shaking hands. Part of the wall disappeared as he stepped in front of it, opening up onto a hallway that was already beginning to swell with morning striders. Link moved away from the opening, and called out quietly.
“Cervice,” he said. “Can you hear me? Any way you can close that opening? And maybe send one of your metal minions to—”
The wall took shiny shape once more, and a smaller spot opened up at the opposite side of the room. A faceless hunk of metal rolled out, and Link sighed.
“Can’t you send something else?” he said. “Like, maybe one of those humanoid robots that I saw you inhabit while you were talking to The Admiral?”
Without a word, the metal box reversed its course and disappeared into the wall again. Less than three seconds later, the same opening appeared that he had just asked it to close; before Link could protest, a woman stepped into the room. She was striking, and confident in the way she entered. Link gathered his wits, and came up with the most intelligent thing he could think of to say.
“Uh...” he said.
She was looking at him with a wry smile, and Link was doing his best to figure out why. The dark hair that cascaded over her face in the most alluring way only drew his attention to her flawless flesh, and the electric green of her eyes. Her clothes seemed little more than a second skin, and it was all he could do not to let his gaze stray to the contours of her body as she edged closer to him. A lighted strip of fabric made a collar at her neckline, and matching cuffs ended at her wrists; otherwise she was covered with a material that moved along with her every subtle gesture. Although she was shorter than him, and considerably smaller, Link could not have felt more intimidated. His inability to talk to beautiful women, coupled with the completely alien environment, had him more flummoxed than ever.
Link made sure his mouth wasn’t hanging open, and that his eyes didn’t wander inappropriately. It was really all he could do.
“The Admiral does not behave this way around women,” she said.
Her voice was as smooth and contoured as her body, and as flawless as her skin. Something about the way she spoke made him cock his head to the side, and look closer.
“Especially when she is an android,” she added.
Link sighed, and nodded at the opening behind her.
He began to speak, in a normal tone.
“Would you...?”
The opening closed, and they were alone together.
“You need to learn some things about this fleet,” she said.
Link nodded, and put his hands on his hips. He let his natural feelings take over, and glared at her with that intense anger that was flowing so freely in him whenever he saw the robot in any form.
“And you,” he said, “need to figure out a better way to teach me. I’ve already got The Admiral freaking me out with all the stuff I’m learning about him; I don’t need you preying on my weaknesses on top of everything else. You need to be explaining this place to me, not springing impossible tests on me and giving me a bad time when I don’t pass. So I don’t know anything about your world, and you somehow know everything about mine. There are only so many ways you can make that point, and time is wasting while you do.”
The entire time he was speaking, she kept a twisted little smile fixed on her lips; it made Link feel even more annoyed, and he kept talking because he didn’t feel like stopping.
“Like every morning,” he said. “You all go walking through the corridors, together. What’s that all about? How do you tell one corridor from another? And how do I tell a person from a robot? And how does The Admiral treat beautiful women? Or robots?”
She winced each time he used the word ‘robot’, and Link couldn’t help but notice.
“What?” he snapped. “What am I doing wrong now?”
Suddenly her expression shifted, and the twisted sarcasm of her smile gave way to a pitying frown. Before Link could raise his voice again, she spoke. Her voice was gentle, quiet and measured.
“You are right, of course,” she said. “The highly advanced consciousness does not benefit in any way from making light of the situation others find themselves in. I do apologize.”
Link shook his head.
“Well,” he retorted, “you’ve got a funny way of saying it. Also, you have a lot of explaining to do.”
“I do,” she said. “Would it help if I switched back to a clearly inorganic body? You seem to have some sort of difficulty relaxing around the female form.”
Resisting the urge to rankle, Link shook his head.
“It’s fine,” he said.
He looked her up and down, since he knew it wasn’t a she.
“Maybe next time,” he added.
She watched him watching her, the bemused smile creeping back onto her face.
“Looking for seams?” she asked.
Link shrugged, returned his eyes to he
rs.
“We don’t use that word,” she said. “Since the rights of artificial intelligence became an issue, we don’t call any example of it a robot. I am an android in a form like this, but only because I am connected to a central interface. Independent intelligences of an inorganic nature don’t even like that word, anymore.”
“Okay,” Link said. “Well, what do you call them?”
Crossing her arms and shrugging her own shoulders, she smiled.
“People,” she said, simply. “We call them people. Artificials, if a distinction must be made. Many would argue that there is no need for such distinction, and our society would change if the rest agreed.”
Knowing what she was, Link tried to convince his mind that she was not what she appeared to be. She was not even a she, if she was inhabited by a consciousness that used to be a man. It was all very confusing, and he walked a slow circle around her. In a way, he was sort of looking for seams; he couldn’t get his mind to digest what it knew, and see the beautiful woman in front of him as some kind of machine.
“Now you’re acting like The Admiral,” she said.
She had spoken without turning, and he was behind her. Link realized that he must have accepted what she was to some degree; he would never inspect the slightest curves and crevices of a woman he had just met like this. Without taking his eyes off her perfectly rounded backside, he responded without really responding.
“You have relationships with each other?” he asked. “Humans and...uh, organic people and artificial people?”
He was finally coming around to face her, and found himself staring into her bright green eyes with a frankness he had never turned on another human being. No wonder he had thought they looked electric; they were electric.
“We have relationships,” she said. “In fact, a part of our fleet is dedicated to the study of interspecies relations. We may meet others in the vast expanse of space, and we need to know how to overcome the prejudices that seem to inherently plague interspecies relationships of all kinds.”
Link burst out laughing.
“You have sex with robots?” he said. “In preparation for one day having sex with aliens?”
She shook her head.
“Our race is far beyond that,” she said. “Our young are created and cared for by the midwives, until they are old enough to serve. We only have sexual relations for pleasure, and many of us opt to use our chemical control bands to eliminate the desire altogether. Interspecies relations are not forbidden, but they are frowned upon by many. It would seem that you share their prejudice.”
“Prejudice?” Link frowned. “Interspecies? We’re talking about robots here, Cervice. Machines. It’s not that I have some moral objection, especially looking at you. I just can’t understand how you can have a relationship with a thing like that.”
It was her turn to laugh, and shrug.
“A thing like that?” she said.
She pointed at him, with a breathtaking sneer.
“I wouldn’t have a relationship with a thing like that,” she said. “Most artificial intelligences stick together, like people do. They...we don’t consider organic life to be on our level, since they clearly aren’t in so many ways. Like your people, mine have been working with the same organic hardware for hundreds of cycles; but our creations get smarter constantly, doubling their former capacities in every regard several times in a cycle. I am one of the few who has experienced what it is like to be both, and the only one who knows for real; and I must say that everything I once was is easily contained in what I am now.”
She moved closer to him, and Link felt his eyes go wide. He could smell her, she was so close; and her scent was as perfect as the rest of her. Her odor wasn’t flowery, or earthy, or detectably artificial. Strong but subtle, it was the smell of womanhood distilled over centuries by precisely mathematical machines. It made no difference that he knew that, as it filled his nostrils; Link felt his heart begin to pound, and a flush begin to creep up his neck. He wondered if she was manipulating her chemicals, and that smell, to create exactly the effect he was feeling.
“The question here,” she said, “is not whether or not a man like you would want a woman like this one. It’s whether or not she would have any use for you. Artificials are as prejudiced toward humans as humans are towards them, and perhaps more rightfully so. I can hear your heartbeat, and monitor your organic systems with very little effort. I know you desire this body, even knowing what it is and who resides inside of it. Do you know how amusing and repulsive it is to watch you battle your own inner animal and inner human, in a fight to see which is the least detestable to both of us?”
Rather than crumple further under her assessment of him, Link thought back to something else she had said. He frowned, pointed at the lighted cuffs and collar.
“Are those chemical control bands?” he said.
“In a sense,” she nodded. “We have three, to monitor different systems. Organic people generally only have one, unless they have an issue the regenerator can’t resolve.”
Link felt his own wrists, and neck. They were bare.
“The Admiral refuses to wear one,” she said. “It’s why you can’t help but respond to this form, even when you don’t want to or think that you should. He handles it better than you, but he won’t just do what everyone else does and let his desires be completely conscious.”
Link nodded.
“It seems more authentic,” he offered. “As nature intended.”
She waved a hand, to take in the entire scope of their surroundings.
“Where is nature in all of this?” she said. “The Admiral suspects that I will find out something damning about him if he is part of the network, because I probably would. His body chemistry surely drives the awful things he does, and I have been tempted more than once to reveal those actions to the crew. They would surely vote to force him to submit to examination and network immersion. For his own good, of course.”
As he was about to comment on how creepy and invasive that sounded, Link let his mind drift back and felt his flush go white.
“I forgot,” he whispered.
One of her eyebrows shot up, in the most organic way.
“Forgot what?” she said.
Link crossed his arms, to keep one of his hands from reaching for his weapon. The urge was suddenly harder than ever to resist.
“I had an idea,” he said. “I read through his log book, to try and figure out what he was up to. It gave me some kind of serious peek into his mind, into this mind.”
Link tapped the head that wasn’t his, even if it felt and looked like his.
“That’s wonderful!” she exclaimed.
Moving even closer, she looked up at him with appraising eyes that seemed to like what they saw. His heart was already pounding, and now it seemed to skip a beat.
“It’s not wonderful,” he said. “I’m supposed to be on my way to torture someone to death right now.”
TWELVE
When she reached out and put her hand on his arm, Link felt a tingling thrill run the length of it. He didn’t have any way of knowing if it was his natural reaction to feeling a woman’s touch, or if there was some kind of actual subtle electrical current involved.
He didn’t have time to ask.
“This is an opportunity,” she said. “We must seize it.”
Two urges battled within him: the urge to pull away, and the urge to move closer to her. It was a stalemate, and he stood still.
“No way,” he said. “I know he was a big supporter of yours, but this is too much. I can’t rescue the guy. I don’t know enough about your weapons, or the layout of the ship, or how to—”
“Hush,” she said.
Her voice was so calm and soothing, and her hand was patting his arm gently. Link was fairly sure it was a programmed effect, but he appreciated it
nonetheless. He hushed.
“That’s not what I meant,” she said. “You would reduce or eliminate our chances of effectiveness if you did something so obvious. The team leader was only useful to us so long as he held his position. This is an opportunity to see who he gives up, and warn them immediately. Here, take this.”
Her hand went behind her, and reappeared holding a small object. It looked like a large seed or a very small clove of garlic, made of metal. He took it from her.
“What’s this?” he said. “And where were you stashing it?”
“Stick it in your ear.” She smiled, patted him again. “I’ll be able to hear everything that is said in the room, while it’s happening.”
The urge to back up finally won out, and Link felt his eyes go wide as he stepped away from her.
“While what is happening?” he asked.
It only took her one step to close the distance between them, and place her hand gently on his arm once more.
“The torture,” she said. “You’ve got to do it, whatever The Admiral was going to do, and intercept the information he’s looking for. After it’s over, you’ve got to head to his quarters and record the events in his log.”
She smiled, and there was a twisted kind of triumph in the expression that Link didn’t find comforting at all. Either she sensed it, or her programmed instincts were better than those of most humans. She patted him again, and he felt much better.
Link thought back over what she had just said, and shook off the contact. Another step backward put him too close to the wall for him to back away any more.
“I’m not torturing anyone,” he said.
Looking back at the wall behind him, checking to see if it had gotten any closer or further away since he had last looked, Link eyed her warily.
“I can’t do that,” he said.
He started shaking his head doggedly back and forth, muttering those two sentences under his breath over and over. Stepping closer, she put her hand on his shoulder. She spoke, softly.