The Cityborn

by Edward Willett

  At any moment, Alania knew, Kranz would give the final command to her nanobots, and First Officer Kranz would live again within her. While the Captain side of her might be able to repair and improve the City, the Kranz side of her would ensure that the Officers continued to rule; she knew now that Kranz himself was as delusional as the Captain had been. The “memories” passed down from clone to clone were fairy tales, altered by Thomas Kranz to convince his successors that he had been a great hero, that he had saved them all by preventing the City from carrying out its original programming, which he had made them believe had always been doomed to failure. Kranz honestly thought he was preserving the City even as he presided over its slow-motion collapse, Alania thought. She might have sympathized with him if she hadn’t been expecting to be plunged into the same persistent hallucination at any moment.

  The truth was the City was intended to slowly disassemble itself. Part of it had: the engine that had lowered it safely to its landing place had been scavenged shortly afterward, leaving that vast opening in the center of the Undercity. The metals and rare earth elements and ceramics and plastics of the entire City were intended to serve as the raw materials for new buildings and machines, which would in turn construct more buildings, farm the soil, dig mines, produce clean water. The mysterious Cubes—the impenetrable blocky metal structures on either side of the Canyon—contained robots to aid in that disassembly as well as additional precious supplies for the colonists. Unleashed, the City and the Cubes would transform the Heartland and beyond. The Iron Ring was nothing but a natural mountain range, impassable to aircraft only because the First Officers had made it so. The overcrowded City would empty out, and humans could finally spread out over the entire surface of this new world, free from constraints, free from grinding poverty, free from the tyrannical authority of the Officers and the Provosts, just . . .

  Free.

  Free, as Alania herself had never been. Raised by Beruthi merely to allay any suspicions Kranz might have, constantly watched, regularly programmed, tightly controlled, she had never been free, not once—until she had fallen into Danyl’s realm. And even that apparent freedom had lasted a very short time before Erl and Beruthi had had her under their control once more. Despite her apparent escape, she had still ended up right here, right where Kranz had wanted her.

  Except . . .

  Except that when she had last seen Kranz, he had been fighting Erl.

  Except that Kranz had said he had to give her nanobots a final command . . . and he hadn’t done that yet.

  Except that Alania—perhaps only for seconds longer—was still Alania. She was plugged into the City, yes, and feeling it as her own body, but she was aware of the truth. The truth of the history of the City; the truth of Thomas Kranz’s mutiny; the truth of the perfidy of all the original Officers; the truth of what had been intended for the City when it had been built in Earth’s orbit and loaded aboard the impossibly huge vessel Discovery to begin its long journey.

  In that moment, for the first time in her life, Alania was truly free to act as she deemed fit. And also for the first time in her life, she knew the truth: so much truth she overflowed with it.

  She knew all the First Officer’s secrets, but she also knew the secrets of Ipsil Beruthi, the man who claimed to be Prime of an organization dedicated to providing freedom to the masses but whose real goal had always been to replace Kranz as First Officer. Perhaps he had intended to rule the City more fairly than Kranz, at least to begin with, but he had intended to rule nonetheless, with Erl as his second-in-command.

  Despite Beruthi’s lies, the Free Citizens really existed, and they really did have contingency plans for governing the City once the Officers were deposed. Though Beruthi had never intended for those plans to be implemented, the Free didn’t know that.

  Alania’s final programming still had not been activated. She remained free—and she remained Captain.

  And so she began giving orders.

  She ordered that all Officers be dismissed immediately from their positions, canceling all their command authority and their access codes. Wherever they were in the City, they would suddenly find themselves trapped, unable to communicate or move freely.

  She reached into the City’s computer network and executed the series of commands Beruthi had crafted that would prime the Free to seize control. The first sent a message to Tertius, the third in the chain of command, informing him that he had become Prime and providing him all the information she had from Beruthi’s files about his plans for freeing the city (minus the details of Beruthi’s real plans). Beruthi was dead, and however he had come to it, in the end he had sacrificed himself for the Free . . . and for Bertel and his children down on First Tier.

  Alania transferred full access to the City to Tertius as well and told him how to enter Thirteenth Tier.

  Only then did she turn her attention to the powerful artificial intelligences that supported her but were subordinate to her.

  Planetfall achieved, she proclaimed. Commence colonization protocol, extended schedule.

  She felt the AIs’ acknowledgment, and still she remained free.

  And so she gave one final command.

  Disconnect human-AI interface. Full AI control authorized. AI to self-terminate upon completion of colonization protocol.

  Again an acknowledgment came back—the AIs had been carefully designed not to care about their own self-preservation. They could be terminated at the Captain’s will . . . and she had just willed it.

  Just as she had willed her own termination as Captain, and the moment the AI acknowledged her command, that termination kicked in.

  With brutal suddenness, her vast awareness of the City vanished. Her senses snapped back into the tiny vessel of her own body. Her nanobots severed all connection to the nurturing gel of the command pod.

  Alania’s eyes snapped open, and as agony flooded every fiber of her being, she screamed and screamed and screamed . . .

  . . . and then, mercifully, fainted.

  Danyl fumbled desperately with the smooth sides of the command pod. It refused to open. The lights on the banks of equipment all around him were going out, rank after rank vanishing as he watched, a wave of darkness that swept around the room until all that was left was a single green light on the cabinet into which he had stepped to have his nanobots programmed. Alania’s screams tore at his ears, the agony in her voice unmistakable even through the walls of the pod, but he could do nothing to help her. She was trapped and suffering, and he was useless and helpless and furious and—

  And then, just like that, the pod opened, and at the same moment, Alania stopped screaming.

  Danyl rushed around to the side of the pod and stared down at his sister. The blue-green gel was retreating from her body, the probes of the headrest retracting from her skull. She was breathing. She was alive.

  He didn’t dare try to pull her out. Remembering how cold he had been when Kranz had ripped him from the pod, he looked for their discarded servants’ uniforms, but they were ruined, soaked with Kranz’s blood.

  He realized, suddenly, that Erl had slumped to one side and that he wasn’t breathing, that his eyes were open and unblinking. He knelt beside the man he had once thought of as his father and put a tentative hand to his neck.

  No pulse.

  A flood of swirling emotions tore through him, childhood memories overlaid by more recent ones, all darkened by the knowledge of how Erl had used him, how everything he had believed had been a lie. And yet . . .

  And yet, the man now lying dead before him had been his only family, the only person who had ever shown him affection until a few days ago. It couldn’t have all been feigned. And even if it had, his own affection had not. He had loved Erl, the only family he’d had until Alania had fallen into his life.

  With a shaking hand, he reached out and closed Erl’s eyes.

  Then he he
ard Alania take a deep, choking breath, and he straightened and turned to see her sitting upright in the command pod.

  Alania woke. The pain was gone, but the world around her seemed dim and muffled, as though she were wrapped in thick flannel. The banks of equipment surrounding the pod had all gone dark, their function ended by her last command. Only the cabinet into which they had both stepped earlier remained active.

  Her brother came toward her, his naked body streaked with the drying remnants of the gel in which she still sat and spattered with blood, though from what she could see, none of it was his. He reached the edge of the pod, and then, to her surprise, reached down and hugged her tightly, pulling her to a sitting position, his body warm and comforting against hers. The contact banished the strange feeling of disconnection, and suddenly she was there in her body, and she hugged him in turn, then found herself weeping on his shoulder.

  They stayed like that for a long moment, and then Danyl pulled back. “Are you all right?”

  She nodded. She looked at him, then down at herself. “Um . . . clothes?”

  “Ruined,” Danyl said. “There are weapons, though. When the Provosts arrive—”

  “They won’t be arriving,” Alania said. “Help me out.”

  A moment later, she stood by the command pod with Danyl’s support, holding on with one hand until she was sure her legs would bear her.

  “What happened to you?” Danyl asked.

  Alania didn’t answer for a moment. She had just seen the bodies of Kranz and Erl, the blood congealing on the floor. “They killed each other?” Her eyes flicked to the servants’ uniforms she and Danyl had discarded, soaking in the gore, and shuddered. She agreed with Danyl: she’d rather go naked, even though she was shivering.

  “No,” Danyl said. “They fought. Kranz was about to kill Erl. But I had Kranz’s beamer, and . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “Then how did Erl die?”

  “I don’t know,” Danyl said. “He didn’t look so badly injured that his nanobots couldn’t have healed him. They’ve healed my bruises and cuts.”

  “Mine, too,” Alania said. She stared at Erl. “He killed himself,” she said slowly. “He must have thought I would be taken over by Kranz’s programming. And rather than face the justice of the Officers . . .”

  “But you weren’t taken over,” Danyl said. “Why not?”

  Alania took a brief glance at Kranz’s body, but the sight was too horrible to bear for long. She looked away again. “You killed him before he could give the final command. I was left free. I was left as Captain.”

  “But if you were Captain, and you managed to extract yourself . . .” Danyl looked at the command pod and at the banks of dead instruments. “Who is Captain?”

  “There is no Captain,” Alania said simply. “The Officers have been deposed. The Free Citizens are moving to take power in the City right now. And it will take months, but soon there will be no City, either. It will be dismantled, incorporated into a new City—a proper one without Tiers, without Officers.”

  As briefly as she could, she told Danyl what she had learned and done during her brief tenure as Captain. When she had finished, Danyl shook his head. “It sounds wonderful. But either one of us could still be stuck into that machine. The Free didn’t sign on for the demolition of the City. They’ll try to force us back in here to reverse the process.”

  “I don’t think it can be reversed,” Alania said. “But you’re right. They may try. Which is why I left this one piece of equipment active.” She indicated the cabinet with the single green light.

  “To reprogram our nanobots yet again?” Danyl said. He sounded almost angry. “To do what? Make us forget everything that has happened? Turn us into someone else?”

  “No,” Alania said. “To turn us into ourselves.” She stepped over to the cabinet, and opened the door. “To deactivate the nanobots entirely. They’ll migrate into our guts and turn themselves off, and our bodies will eliminate them naturally. And then we’ll be as ordinary as we always thought we were . . . and no use to anyone except ourselves.” She turned to face him. “Agreed?”

  His face lit. “Agreed!”

  The process was short and painless. Alania stood in the padded confines of the coffin-like cabinet for five minutes. She felt nothing, but the cabinet, speaking in the male voice of the ship’s AI rather than the voice of the old Captain, assured her that her nanobots were permanently disabled. She stepped out again and let Danyl take her place.

  When all that was done, they left the control room, walking out onto the porch of the little white temple.

  The sun broke through the wind-driven clouds high overhead and shone through the crystal dome. Birds and insects danced among the flowers and trees. The gardening robots went about their slow, methodical work, glittering as they caught the light, and ignored them both.

  Alania sat down on the sunlit porch. Her brother sat next to her. The warmth of the sun felt good on her chilled body. Before them stretched the white path, straight to the antechamber and the elevator to Kranz’s office, the elevator neither of them could now access. Eventually Tertius would find his way there. And then . . .

  “What happens next?” Danyl asked, looking up at the sky, eyes half closed.

  Alania studied the path in front of them. Their whole lives, they had been unknowingly trapped on a path just like that one, straight and unvarying, fated from birth to end up right where they had ended up today. But at the end of that path, in the final seconds of their predestined journey, they had managed to deviate from it, and now, at last, their futures spread out before them unplanned and unmapped.

  Instead of one path, they now had many paths from which to choose . . . and the freedom to do so.

  “I have no idea,” Alania said. “Isn’t that wonderful?”

  Danyl gave her a startled look, then suddenly grinned. “It certainly is.”

  Naked as the newborns they had once been and had just become again, they sat in companionable silence and waited for their new lives to begin.

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next

  great read!

  * * *

  Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

  Sign up now.