He remembered his military battles, not just the Collos Uprising, but the later space battles, the engagements of lightspeed frigates and Network cruisers armed with entropy weapons against ragtag and increasingly desperate rebels who were intent on unraveling the fabric of interstellar government.
As a man, Triegen had received decorations, ribbons, medals, honors … and all the pride that accompanied them. And the final awful battle against the insurgents, the betrayal, the explosions—that last moment when he understood that he had lost this fight, that he had failed … that he was going to die. Triegen had died not with fear, not with pain, but with a calm satisfaction as the flames swept over him, because Colonel Ben Triegen knew he was a hero, knew he had done everything possible, that he had made a difference.
The war would be won, thanks to his actions and the actions of others.
But he hadn’t died—not in the sense that his consciousness was gone. His brain had been removed and preserved, transferred here to run the vital ice-mining complex.
But he wasn’t really alive either. His way of experiencing the world had changed. Gone were the tastes and touches, the joys and fears. Everything was data, protocols. As a disembodied brain, it was difficult to measure time except through the instruments connected to him. Were they reliable? Truly?
Fifty years. Could it really have been that long? He tapped into the databases, extended his readings throughout the high-precision sensors. He could see everywhere, touch everything, but it was not part of him inside the central chamber where his preservation tank and all the core life-support systems existed.
He knew that Dr. Ana Cherliz was monitoring him, checking his biological functions. She often came here. She was even his friend, in a sense; they’d had many conversations. Now he recognized the expression of concern on her face.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Cherliz,” he said, as she monitored his tissues, engrams, and cerebral neural paths. “Terribly sorry.”
“We detected the signs some time ago, Ben,” the doctor said. “We talked about it last month, remember? There was another … incident. It’s in your own data banks. You’ve lived a whole second life here on Aurora 5—and that’s a very long time for anyone to stay clear, to stay sane. I’m sorry, but it’s just been too long for you. The diagnosis of dementia is irrefutable.”
“I understand it, Doctor.” He felt the despair growing heavier inside him, though it was more a resignation in his thoughts than anything. Feelings were there, but distant. “I know what I did.”
In a flash, he reviewed the records of the base, and he understood—but in a detached sort of way—that he’d killed several people. Not just Rajid Suvo, but the entire crew of a transport crawler out on the dark ice, and a mining team that had suffocated because of a malfunction down in the irradiated ice-gel extraction catacombs. Those were all people, now dead. People who had been Colonel Triegen’s responsibility, loyal miners he was supposed to protect. They were his responsibility! A thousand miners at Aurora Facility 5.
Usually, Dr. Cherliz engaged in friendly banter with him, but now she was quiet, engrossed in her work. Although she tried to hide her expressions, he could read her concern. She was concerned about more than just his degeneration, his neurological damage, his senility. She was also afraid of him, of what he might do.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Cherliz,” he repeated. “It won’t happen again.”
With his numerous extended sensors, he checked the network of conduits and detectors. He studied the small mechanical scuttlers that roved through the tunnels, vents, and frozen ducts, performing maintenance, checking the base.
Triegen focused his thoughts back into the control room. As Dr. Cherliz finished her analysis, her voice was hesitant, carefully devoid of any emotion. “We still have six months before the next ship arrives. I’m tracking the progress of your degeneration, and I must admit, I’m worried. Do you remember the replacement brain that’s coming?”
“I understand, Dr. Cherliz,” Triegen said. After the original accident, his first “death,” he had always understood he would one day be decommissioned, swapped out. “It’s necessary.”
Now her voice quavered. “You’ve reviewed the records. You agree with our assessment, correct?”
He hesitated, but at the speed his thoughts moved, she didn’t notice. “I can’t argue with what I know, Doctor.”
When his brain was installed here to run the mining base, there was always a scheduled replacement time. His second chance at a useful life had a time limit. The Network would remove his preservation canister, retire his brain, and let him live happily somewhere in a farm of fond memories. He wasn’t sure he believed that—it was too much like the lie he had told his own children when they lost their pets. He didn’t care. What was important was his responsibility to Aurora Facility 5. Dr. Cherliz could easily hook up the replacement brain herself.
“I understand,” he said. “I’m very sorry. I know what reality is. Six months is a long time, and I promise I will try to hold out. I will keep this facility safe.”
“Thank you, Colonel,” the doctor said.
He wasn’t sure he believed her, either.
Triegen reached out with his sensors, scanned all the other workers on the base. Though everyone was hard at work, he detected tension in the air. Microexpressions were programmed into his databases, and he recognized them on their faces. Everyone knew what he had done. He could tell that all personnel on Aurora Facility 5 were nervous and uneasy.
Out in the deep, black ice of Aurora Facility 5, lit by distant stars that gave no warmth, the mining crews continued their work. They were subdued, cautious, weary. Survival was always a challenge out here, but now they had to face another possible danger from the unreliable control brain. They didn’t speak their worries aloud, knowing Colonel Triegen was listening, but their concerns were plain.
Inside his isolated vat, he made a promise to himself. He would hold out until the replacement brain came. He had to.
IV
As mining supervisor, Zan Harker arranged schedules, moved teams, manipulated where he wanted people to be. He was good at covering his tracks—damn good. Now he had to be even better.
Running an active conspiracy was more difficult than just killing when the opportunity arose. As he made his way to the secret meeting out inside the ice sheet, he felt the adrenaline sharpen his senses. It wasn’t the same type of rush as murder, but he enjoyed it nevertheless. He could manipulate the others gathered here and use their fear of Colonel Triegen to his advantage.
He was the first to arrive at the isolated chamber, which gave him a chance to double-check his plans and ensure that Triegen’s mechanical scuttlers hadn’t surreptitiously installed surveillance devices. As far as he could tell, the control brain knew nothing of this shielded room deep under the active excavation layers. It was a place to talk in private.
Out on Aurora Facility 5, the mining crews ran their big machinery. Excavators chewed through layers of ice, sending deep shafts to the richer layers. The ice surface was a film of valuable isotopes, cooked in a bath of harsh cosmic radiation, but the real treasure of Aurora was a potent isotopic crystal gel distilled from compressed fossil sea creatures that had been part of an ocean, now deeply frozen.
Some months ago, when the drilling crew discovered a small void in what was supposed to be a gel chamber, Harker had deleted it from the records, but he noted the natural bubble just in case he needed a bolt-hole. An instinct—he was sure he could find something to do with it. Something. He licked his dry lips.
By rearranging schedules and using equipment on his own, Harker had constructed a chamber where there were no scuttlers, no imagers. He added thick insulating layers on the walls and installed portable life support. It was a perfect place for a conspiracy meeting.
He had recruited three competent, determined, and like-minded facility workers, giving them a whispered summons—he didn’t dare use transmissions. Alfred Cho and Cina Adakian arrived sepa
rately, nervous. Adakian shivered visibly. Blue-tinted shadows surrounded them in the chamber, casting the illusion of cold, despite exosuit thermometers indicating that the chamber was at the same temperature as the main dome kilometers away.
Finally, Dr. Cherliz arrived, traveling deep and following directions so that she slipped out of view from Triegen’s myriad artificial prying eyes. The doctor was allegedly responding to a minor first aid call, nothing so urgent that the control brain would send scuttlers into the blind spot to assist.
Cherliz removed her helmet after the primitive seal cycled her through into the air pocket. Her face was hard, and her deep brown eyes held determination and resignation. The facility doctor’s personality had no more warmth than the ice sheet, but she was competent, no-nonsense—and Harker needed her.
Though they had not spoken of it, they all knew why he had summoned them. There wasn’t time for chitchat. Harker doubted the others had the fortitude for it.
Dr. Cherliz narrowed her eyes as she looked around the chamber. “You know this is dangerous, Zan. The Colonel is a good man, but he is hardwired to defend himself. If he catches us meeting in secret like this, you could easily trigger a flashback.”
“We have to do something about it—about him.”
Alfred Cho was a harried, red-eyed man who looked as if he got very little sleep, even on good days. “Rajid Suvo was a friend of mine, and that monster killed him. He killed him!”
“Suvo wasn’t his first victim, either.” Cina Adakian put a hand on Cho’s shoulder. “We know that. Those others … I tried to convince myself they were accidental deaths, but then I realized I was just being stupid. Seven miners killed in Epsilon shaft when caustic coolant sprayed out of broken pipes. Scuttlers should’ve caught that, and Triegen monitors the scuttlers.”
“Then there were all those people frozen in the cargo crawler,” Cho said.
Harker cut him off. “You don’t have to tell me about that—I was there.” There was an awkward moment of silence, acknowledging that he was the only survivor of that incident. He had also been in Epsilon shaft not long before the deadly coolant spill, but that had not been noticed.
Dr. Cherliz nodded. “I know. Those weren’t accidents.”
“But what are we going to do?” Cho cried. “Just be careful, be on our guard? That’s not good enough! We’ll all be dead by the time the replacement brain arrives.”
Harker grunted. “Who knows how many other glitches we haven’t noticed? Further accidents waiting to happen, like ticking time bombs. How many times did Triegen try to kill us, but failed? He’s senile, yes, probably insane. Not just incompetent. I think he is starting to purposefully kill us.” His mouth was dry, and he licked his lips. “And now he obviously has a taste for it.” He looked at Cherliz.
She frowned. “I don’t agree that it is intentional, but the end result is the same. More people will die.” They huddled in the ice-walled chamber, but the silence was deeper and colder than the walls around them. “Colonel Triegen shows clear signs of advancing dementia. When our replacement brain arrives in six months, I can install it.”
Adakian bit her lip. “What if we don’t have that long?”
Harker shook his head. “We don’t have six months—that’s obvious.”
Alfred Cho wrapped his hands around his knees to hold himself steady. “Colonel Triegen is aware that a ship is on its way. He knows he’s going to be replaced. Do you think he’ll just sit by and let us pull the plug? Do you think he honestly believes his tank will be sent out to pasture, so he can just dream until he fades away?”
Harker laced his fingers together and squeezed his fists. “Triegen isn’t a fool. When the new brain arrives, he’ll fight back. I don’t doubt he will have arranged for all of us to be dead by then. He might even find a way to destroy the incoming ship. Are we going to let that happen?”
Cho, Adakian, and Cherliz looked alarmed. “Well, what can we do?” Adakian asked.
“We have to move quickly, before he suspects we’re making plans,” Harker said. “Once we disconnect the control brain, we’ll hook up manual systems, run the facility on backup generators and secondaries.”
Cina Adakian shot Harker a calculating, look. “Can we live on those old model survival systems? They’re non-sentient, unreliable—and inefficient.”
Cho gripped his legs tighter. “This is an emergency. We have to—otherwise, Triegen will kill us first.”
Harker nodded. “We’re stating the obvious. We know what we have to do. All the miners are tough, or they wouldn’t be here in the first place. We can buckle down and wait. Enforce heavy conservation, low energy output. It’ll be difficult, but we can do it. Six months. We know the ship is coming—all we have to do is hold out.”
He took the time to look at each one of them. He would have to count on these three. Harker could dupe the control brain to a certain extent, but it would be walking a razor’s edge. He knew Colonel Triegen would fight back the moment he discovered their plan.
One by one, Cherliz, Adakian, and Cho nodded. He could see it in their gazes. He had them.
V
Colonel Triegen was a hero—he knew it, and history verified that he was. His memories weren’t false … at least not all of them. But they were scattered and diffuse, dangerously slippery and rearranged.
He wasn’t sure of anything anymore.
Triegen didn’t like to think that these people were afraid of him. He was supposed to watch over the personnel, the miners, the support staff, the machine operators. He had let them down.
He could not dispute the bad things that had happened. People had died here through terrible accidents. And it was his fault. He realized that he had experienced military flashbacks, vivid memories that were real, but in the wrong time and place.
And he knew that if it happened again, more of his people would die.
Though Triegen was only a disembodied brain, myriad sensors and numerous eyes gave him overlapping contact with all of Aurora Facility 5. Automated inspectors and self-monitoring systems kicked into life. Scuttlers implemented repairs to the large-scale damage he had caused during his most recent flashback.
Wallowing inside his central preservation container, Triegen had to anchor himself and his thoughts, not just let unconscious subroutines take control. He tunneled down into the events that he himself had experienced, verifying that his memories of those battles matched the information in the Network history databases. He knew those, at least, were all real. He wasn’t entirely mixed up, though he was old.
Triegen remembered the Collos Uprising, the crisis, his desperate defense of the last fortress, and how that had ended: he and his few survivors barricaded deep within the shielding walls as the barbarians pounded to get through. The colonel had preemptively added extra layers of security, reinforced barricades, dug deep bolt-holes.
Network forces had indeed arrived sooner than expected. The rescuers had broadcast an emergency transmission, trying to determine how many defenders were still alive. They ordered Triegen and his holdouts to crawl as deep as possible, to shield themselves, and to hold on tight. Targeted radioactive explosions had vaporized the perimeter of the fortress as a punitive example to all the people on Collos. Triegen and his injured comrades were saturated with radiation, but they could be treated once they were dug out of the slag.
The rescue fleet had searched for other holdouts at Network fortresses across the planet, but the rest had already fallen. Some of the fortresses had been real horror shows; the Collos rebels had seized Network soldiers and flayed them alive. Upon seeing that evidence, the rescue forces had “resolved the situation” with even more ruthlessness.
Triegen was glad that he and his injured comrades had been whisked away to infirmary ships where they were treated for radiation exposure. Although sick, the colonel wanted to join the fight himself, but the defenders kept him aboard, insisting they didn’t need him for the mop-up operations. And he was, in fact, relieved, having se
en the horrific images of what the rebels had done to his fellow soldiers. Colonel Triegen didn’t want to imagine how he would’ve reacted if given the chance to exact revenge on monsters like that.…
But that was in a time of war, decades ago. That was fighting under extreme circumstances. These Aurora Facility 5 accidents were much more recent. No, he froze his thoughts and corrected himself. No matter how painful it might be, they were not accidents. They were murders. He was the control brain of the facility. He was responsible.
Triegen didn’t want to, but he reviewed the incidents that his own senility, his own failures had caused. He replayed the transmissions that Harker and Suvo had made during his recent crippling flashback, the mistake that had resulted in a man’s death. He saw images of the transport crawler stranded out on the ice, unable to get back into the pressurized facility … life support draining away, oxygen bleeding out, batteries going dead.
Recalling all the stored records, he forced himself to watch files from implanted imagers that recorded the two suited men, Zan Harker and Rajid Suvo, desperately trying to break through the hatch. “Let us in, Colonel!” He hadn’t listened. He believed they were Collos rebels, barbarians trying to break inside his barricaded fortress.
Although he had been buried in his flashback at the time, semi-autonomous scuttlers had come in response, seemingly from a backwash of the control brain’s thoughts as he was reliving those terrible last moments during the Collos Uprising.
Harker had smashed all of the camera eyes—a wise tactical move, the colonel thought—blinding him as the two men worked the controls. Triegen admired the mine supervisor’s drive and dedication.
But Harker missed one thing. A second scuttler had already been at work repairing a routine power-channel failure, hidden inside a conduit. Triegen accessed those records. Knowing he was responsible for Suvo’s death, he would force himself to witness the miner’s last moments.
The emergency hatch slid open after Harker used the overrides. Suvo was already injured from debris unleashed by the scuttlers, his suit damaged from the spray of effluent projectiles. Harker went to his comrade, took out his toolkit as if to help.
Selected Stories: Volume 1 Page 19