The Cityborn

by Edward Willett

  She froze as a multilegged robot scuttled into view like a giant insect. In the familiar voice of the City computer, it calmly said, “The Captain welcomes visitors. However, you must leave your weapons in the antechamber.”

  “What will happen if we don’t?” Alania asked.

  “This unit is authorized to use force to prevent weapons from entering this space,” the robot replied with that same lack of emotion.

  Alania looked at Danyl. “I don’t think we have any choice.”

  “First the key, then our weapons,” Danyl said. “The bloody Captain will be telling us to strip naked next.” But he unbuckled his belt, slipped the slugthrower holster from it, and placed the weapon on the low table in front of the couch. Alania put her beamer down beside it. Then she turned back to the door. “May we enter?”

  “The Captain welcomes visitors,” the robot said and scuttled out of view.

  Alania cautiously stepped through the door.

  She found herself on a porch, looking out into a vast open space. For an instant she thought they had somehow been transported outside, because the light that flooded around them was pure sunlight. Looking up, she saw the sun shining in a patch of blue sky, though it vanished a moment later as the tattered remnants of the rain clouds that had soaked them that morning in the Middens swept over it. Then she saw the faint shimmer between her and that open sky, and she realized the entire Tier lay beneath an enormous dome of some material that looked crystal-clear from this side but appeared opaque from the outside.

  “Wow,” Danyl breathed, and Alania nodded as she lowered her gaze and stared around at the rest of the Tier. Thirteenth, abode of the Captain, had none of the jumbled, cheek-by-jowl, haphazardly constructed structures of First or the beautiful but rigidly constrained, blocky stores and mansions of Eleventh and Twelfth. In fact, it had only a single building: simple, round, roofed with a white dome that echoed the crystal dome high above, surrounded by a portico supported by slender columns.

  The domed building rose like a jewel from the center of an emerald-green lawn. Gardens radiated out from it: artfully arranged flowerbeds and groomed shrubbery, surrounded at the rim of the space by enough trees to give the illusion of a deep forest. A path paved in crushed white stone stretched from Alaina’s vantage point through the gardens to the central building.

  The pastoral vista, easily half a kilometer in diameter, was alive with movement, but none of it was human. White birds flitted between the distant trees, jewel-like birds with iridescent feathers darted or hovered among the flower beds, and robots glittered as they moved through the garden, tending the plants.

  Alania glanced back through the antechamber to the elevator. How long before Kranz emerged from it? Does the prohibition on weapons apply to him, too? she wondered. The notion that “The Captain welcomes visitors” was so outrageous it had to date back to the dawn of the City. Perhaps even Kranz, for all his power, could not change the programming.

  But the Captain surely can, Alania thought, and she and Danyl stepped down from the porch onto the white path.

  The movement of the robots in the gardens instantly ceased as their sensors locked on the two humans. Their footsteps crunched on white stone, and the rest of the Tier was so quiet—at their appearance, the birds had stopped singing—that the sound seemed absurdly, dangerously loud. They walked the two hundred meters or so to the white building without speaking.

  Steps led up to the portico and then to a closed door that looked to be made of solid gold. Alania and Danyl mounted the steps, and the door swung silently inward. Within the building’s dark interior, small lights—a few green, a few yellow, a great many red—burned like stars.

  Alania exchanged a wide-eyed glance with Danyl, and then the two of them stepped into the presence of the Captain.

  Behind them, the door swung shut again.

  THIRTY-THREE

  ERL’S OLD QUARTERS had long since been given to some Officer who hadn’t committed mutiny, but the secret compartment beneath the back steps still opened at the touch of his old ID tag, revealing an ordinary duffel bag. He pulled out the bag but left the powerful beamer it contained concealed inside it for the moment. He needed to reach Quarters Kranz without being arrested, and running through the streets with a weapon didn’t seem like the best way to accomplish that goal. What he did pull out was the high-level City access key Beruthi had made for him two decades before.

  Kranz was minutes ahead of him, Alania and Danyl mere minutes ahead of them both and no doubt already on Thirteenth by now. It could well be that whatever was going to happen would happen before Erl could possibly be there to take a hand in it . . . but if he didn’t try to make it and that hand was needed, he would always regret it.

  Not that his personal “always” would be very long in the event that Kranz succeeded in turning Alania into a new Kranz/Captain hybrid who would rule for the next five hundred years.

  Down on First, with its constantly shifting walls and ever-changing buildings, twenty-year-old knowledge of the City’s layout would have been useless. But on Twelfth, where nothing ever changed, Erl knew exactly how to reach Quarters Kranz with as little risk as possible—almost certainly, he thought, the same way Alania and Danyl had reached it.

  Half a block from his old back door, he used his newly acquired key to open the unmarked door in the side of a robot storage shed and descended the stairs inside to the infrastructure level two stories beneath Twelfth Tier’s streets.

  Kranz arrived at his quarters dangerously close to being out of breath, which simply would not do, since it might suggest to the underlings and Provosts gathered there that he was in less-than-total control of events . . . or of himself.

  Partially to preserve that illusion and partially because he was in too much of a hurry, he did not waste any breath berating Lieutenant Commander Trishel, who would, Kranz vowed silently, soon find herself stationed in the newly pacified Middens, preferably somewhere near—better yet, under—the broken sewer pipe.

  “Weapon,” he snapped instead, holding out his hand, and the Lieutenant Commander handed him a beamer. Then Kranz strode at a quick but carefully unhurried pace to the main elevator and rode it up to the fourth floor, Trishel stiff and silent at his side.

  There was blood on the floor outside his office, whose doors had been forced open. A quick glance showed him that the painting had been pulled aside from the Captain’s monitor, an illicit key had been inserted into the elevator lock—no doubt Beruthi’s work again, damn him—and the wood on the inside of the office doors had been scarred by bullets, revealing the armor plates beneath. Kranz’s eyes flicked to the monitor. It remained unchanged from that morning. Whatever was happening on Thirteenth, the Captain remained in place, as she had for almost five centuries. Which meant he still had time, plus one very great advantage over the two Cityborn who had preceded him to Thirteenth Tier: he knew exactly what replacing the Captain would mean.

  Well, and one other advantage: the First Officer was the only person allowed in the Captain’s presence while armed.

  The key in the lockplate, frozen in place while the elevator ascended, had popped partway out once the car reached Thirteenth. Kranz pushed it in, but it refused to work for him. Irritably he snatched it out, tossed it aside, pulled his own key from his pocket and shoved it in. Then, beamer held loosely in his right hand, he strode to the golden doors. A moment later they slid open, and he entered the familiar gold-and-white confines of the tiny car.

  The doors slid closed, and Kranz ascended, as he had so many times before, to the sanctum sanctorum of the Captain. He entered the antechamber with his beamer raised and ready, but the small room was empty. “Welcome, First Officer,” said the voice of the City—the voice of the Captain.

  He strode past the model of United Earth Ship Discovery, ignored the photograph of the Earth and moon on the opposite wall, and snapped, “First Officer Kran
z: security override,” at the robot that appeared in the doorway. The robot moved aside without challenging him.

  He stepped out beneath the crystal dome. A thundershower had rolled in in the outside world, shrouding Thirteenth Tier in gloom. The usual robots moved around the garden, tending the flowers and bushes, and birds and insects flitted among the blossoms, but nothing else moved.

  Which meant, of course, that Danyl and Alania were already inside the Captain’s control chamber and that he needed to hurry.

  There was no one to see him now, no one to impress with the calm, cool demeanor of the First Officer, and so he ran, feet crunching on the crushed white stone of the path, beamer raised.

  As the golden door of the strange little building swung closed behind Danyl and Alania, the interior lit, revealing white walls and a floor covered in gold-streaked marble.

  At the center of the room was a table of solid metal on which rested a kind of squashed cylinder, like a giant seedpod. Cables and tubes ran into the pod from banks of equipment on racks all around it, their indicator lights the red, green, and yellow sparks Danyl had seen in the shadowed interior when the door first opened. Video screens showed cryptic numbers and traces above the equipment banks.

  But above that . . .

  Danyl gaped at the underside of the dome. “Alania,” he breathed. “Look.”

  Alania looked up and gasped.

  The dome showed stars: stars impossibly bright, in impossible numbers. They were clustered and blue in the center of the display, widely spaced and tinted red around the outside. Green letters just off center read, “ETA 36:226:12:42:06,” the right-most number ticking down second by second.

  A series of cryptic messages swirled around the fringes of the image, strings of letters and numerals meaningless to Danyl, all of them blinking red.

  He tore his gaze away from that astonishing and vertigo-inducing view and frowned at the strange pod. He stepped closer. There was a window at one end providing a view of the interior. He leaned down . . .

  . . . and yelped and stumbled back as he saw an ancient face, little more than deeply wrinkled parchment-like skin hanging from a skull, staring back at him with wide-open bright-blue eyes, eyes the color of Alania’s.

  Eyes the color of his own.

  The Captain.

  The Captain.

  Until that moment, he still hadn’t really believed she was real and certainly hadn’t believed she could be whole and alive. He’d pictured her as no more than a brain in a jar, or perhaps an animated corpse, anything but an actual woman with an actual face and actual eyes that could stare back at him through the walls of her confinement.

  Alania shot him a startled look, then stepped forward herself. She peered down at the Captain’s face for a moment, then took a step back. She seemed much calmer about what she had seen than he was until she reached out a hand to steady herself and he realized her face had gone white.

  “She’s real,” Alania breathed, echoing his own terror and amazement.

  Danyl took a deep breath. “Yeah,” he said. He forced himself to step forward again and look down into that impossibly wizened face. Maybe the eyes just happened to be open, maybe there was no consciousness behind them, maybe . . .

  But the eyes flicked to him. He leaned forward. “Can you hear me?” he shouted. “Blink if you can.”

  He yelped as a voice answered him: a voice he knew well, the voice of the City computer, the same calm woman’s voice that had spoken to him a million times from his teaching machine. “Of course I can hear you,” the voice said. “Welcome, son.” A pause. “And daughter.” Another pause. “Where is First Officer Kranz?” it said, but now it held a peevish tone he’d certainly never heard in the computer’s voice. “Surely he should be here for this.”

  Danyl shot a glance at Alania, who simply shrugged, looking as bewildered as he felt. “Um . . . he sent us on ahead,” he said.

  “He’d better hurry,” the voice said. “I’m dying, you know.”

  The tone was matter-of-fact, indistinguishable from the tone the teaching machine had used while instructing him in atomic theory or quadratic equations. It gave him a disconcerting sense of déjà vu. “I’m . . . sorry?” he said, because what else did you say when someone said they were dying, even someone centuries old and encased in a sarcophagus?

  “No need to be sorry,” the voice said. “I’m more than ready for it. I’m just disappointed I won’t live to see the first colony seed launched toward planetfall.”

  “Colony seed?” Danyl said carefully. “Planet . . . fall?” The words made no sense. What was a planet, and what could make it fall?

  “We thought it would happen much sooner,” the voice continued. “But the initial candidates all proved unsuitable. I am confident the next on the list will prove amenable to colonization. The computer will of course upload all necessary knowledge regarding the current state of the ship during the transition.”

  Danyl gave Alania a bewildered look. From her wide-eyed return stare, it seemed she had no more clue than he did what the Captain was talking about. But she mouthed one word to him, “Kranz,” and he nodded and turned back to the Captain.

  “It’s urgent that we proceed,” he said. “Could you . . . review the . . . procedure . . . for me?”

  “Surely the First Officer has gone over it with you?”

  “Of course he has,” Danyl said. “But he wants to be certain all goes well.”

  “Very well,” the Captain—the City—said. “The procedure is simple. I initiate it, of course; only I, as Captain, can transfer control to my replacement. Once I initiate transfer, it cannot be stopped. The first step will be the final programming of your nanobots to enable you to interface with the ship controls. Without that programming, the ship will reject you.”

  Danyl desperately wanted to know why the Captain kept calling the City a “ship,” but he didn’t want her to change her mind and insist they wait for Kranz, so he said nothing, listening intently.

  “Once the programming is complete, I will withdraw from the system.”

  “Won’t that kill you?” Alania protested.

  “I certainly hope so,” the Captain said. “The extraction process itself is not lethal, but it is clear from my vital signs that only extraordinary intervention from the command pod and my own nanobots is currently keeping me alive. The nanobots might keep me breathing and conscious for a few moments after extraction, but that time will be brief. Don’t worry, you won’t have to deal with my remains. There are robots standing by to take care of the unpleasantries.

  “Once I am out of the command pod, you will have fifteen minutes to take my place. Simply remove all clothing and lie down in the pod. The machines will do the rest. There will be some disorientation as the necessary adjustments are made to your brain and nervous system, but you should find it manageable. When I assumed command, I found that my simulation training had done an adequate if not stellar job of preparing me. No doubt the simulations have improved over the course of the flight. I imagine you will find it easier.”

  Erl had made Danyl spend a great deal of time training in simulations, but none of them had been related to the process of taking control of the City’s systems. Yet here they stood at the feet of the Captain, achieving at last what Erl and Beruthi and Yvelle and countless others had died to accomplish. There could be no going back to their old lives—they had no old lives. And the First Officer could arrive at any moment with his own plans for replacing the Captain . . . with Alania.

  Danyl’s heart hammered in his chest. His throat constricted so that he could hardly speak. And yet somehow, he did.

  “Very well,” he whispered. “Initiate transfer.”

  “The magic words,” the Captain said, “that I have been waiting so long to hear.”

  A tall cabinet standing next to the sarcophagus—the command pod—open
ed like a closet, revealing a human-sized space inside. “Please step inside for nanobot programming,” said a male voice.

  Danyl glanced at Alania. She looked pale. “Are you sure?” she whispered.

  He nodded.

  She swallowed, then suddenly enveloped him in a hug. He stiffened, but then his arms went around her and he returned the embrace. She felt warm and solid, and he suddenly wished he’d grown up with her, that he’d really known what it meant to have a sister, to have any kind of family.

  “Good luck,” she murmured.

  He nodded and released her. Then he strode to the open cabinet and stepped inside.

  The door closed, and a hum rose around him. His skin prickled as though tiny insects were crawling all over it, a sensation he had felt whenever the docbot had given him his regular examinations. But the surge of warmth that followed was new: warmth and a feeling of well-being, of euphoria. He suddenly felt strong, invincible, able to do anything.

  Able, in fact, to control the City.

  But also . . . able to remember something he’d forgotten, the newly powerful nanobots reforging connections to memories that had been blocked until that moment. He’d thought his sessions with the docbot had only lasted minutes, but now he knew—he remembered—that they had they in fact lasted for long, uncomfortable hours, hours during which he had been conscious but unable to control his body, hours he had promptly forgotten immediately afterward.

  Why hadn’t he remembered that until now?

  The answer came to him in a flash. Because the nanobots can rewrite memories.

  Beruthi had told them as much, told them that Alania’s nanobots had already been preprogrammed to rewrite her memories when she became Captain, to turn her into a copy of Kranz. Clearly the Captain’s memories had also been altered—her strange talk of “planetfall” and commanding a “ship” was proof of it. She didn’t even seem to know that she had been in that command pod for centuries. Kranz—every First Officer Kranz since the beginning of the City—had lied to her, made her delusional, wiped and manipulated her memories.