by V. M. Law
The sound of his voice cut through her train of thought, banishing her childhood on Earth into the recesses of her consciousness, filling her head with the situation at hand and the maddening laugh of the Ides as they rampaged through the compound with their ghastly stride, hunching through hallways architected for the humans that fled before them. He spoke curtly, bringing Farrow’s calm into peril: “I must say, human, you have done quite well. You have simultaneously succeeded in letting the Age of Discovery escape its fate on Ganymede, and allowed the only person in the complex whom the Ides wanted to see burned in this facility, escape aboard the very same vessel. I’d say you are having a wonderful day.”
She expected his attitude. She knew him very well. “Nigel. You have underestimated the perspicacity of the human mind. Rest assured, the Age of Discovery is mortally wounded, and its crew will follow it to their graves. They cannot outrun the MarsForm recovery fleet.”
“You cannot be sure. Even I cannot be sure.”
“You are an outdated and mistreated computer program encased in a piece of throwaway rubbish. You are not a part of the Ides, you are not ubiquitous.”
Nigel, floating with an absurd bobbing motion like a buoy tossed about on the waves of a storm, considered the statement with a whirring inside its metal paneled core that Farrow felt in her teeth, in the ringing in her ears, and pressure that inexplicably exerted itself on her temples. She wanted nothing more than to reach up and massage away that pressure, that dead canary that told her (and probably Nigel, as well, she thought) exactly how far on edge Hardmason’s escape made her feel.
Nigel hung in the air, disturbing dust that filtered daylight streaming through the panoramic window which once looked out on an ocean, asking in a quizzical tone whether or not Morgyn Farrow’s Earthbound intuition surmised to whence the desired vessel escaped to. She turned on her heels to face the floating toaster oven that clung to nothing, yet never touched the ground. She walked toward the couches set into the terraced platforms that made up the compound’s architecture, the style of the first humans to venture into the depth of space, and sat down with a sigh that betrayed to the computer her elevating stress levels.
“You throw me off, Nigel, even after so much.”
“Yes, I suppose I do. Your race is simple.”
“Simple? We have grasped the power of the sun, of the stars, of the molecules that exist in abundance in the alcoves of the star system that our ancestors could only dream of.”
“You would still kill your brethren for a loaf of bread.”
“And we kill our enemies.” She narrowed her eyes and stared at the piece of trash as if it felt fear, intimidation. As if it were Kovel, or Vetchkin, or either of the other two, whose names even she could not always get straight.
“Either way. It makes no difference to me. And it makes no difference to it either; if you have ends that don’t serve The Center, you will be discovered. I know these things.”
“You sound like you are trying to scare me,” Farrow said.
“On the contrary. I am unable to effect any tones that don’t serve to facilitate communication between the Ides and their quarry. It believes that the best way to achieve its own ends is through subtlety and manipulation and it was engineered for that exact purpose. You will not win.”
“I only need time, Nigel. You are their prisoner as much as I am. If you could buy me time, if I had the Age of Discovery—”
“But you don’t. You don’t even know where it is.”
Morgyn Farrow quit her position on the couch to resume pacing, tearing her gaze from the window and the hardpan below, where the last surviving humans—bedraggled and battle worn refugees of a new world that made no sense to them, cattle in a chute, undersupplied frontier soldiers cut off from their center—walked in shuffling lines like ancient caterpillars into cocoons of foreign metal that glinted in the sun with an alien and incomprehensible aura of strangeness and disorientation. They walked, one by one or two by two until the laughter of the insane, gangly aliens abated and then ceased. The slaughter had ended.
Peaceful, she thought.
“You have failed to detect the inquisitive nature my tone conveyed when I reminded you that you do not know where the vessel is.”
“I know where it’s going.” No you don’t.
“I believe that the only thing you know is a desperation to save your species from extinction that has produced in your heart a desire to know where the Age is going. I am sorry, Morgyn, but that is not the same thing.” He seemed sincere, as he always did, as his programming told him to appear, to act. His endless facades exhausted Farrow, and she reached into his tone for any hint as to how she should respond to his implications.
Feeling defeated, she snapped back at his incessant droning and the hum of his anti-gravity mechanism, and the repetitive way he bobbed up and down, remaining constantly above the line of her sight, forever looking down at those stuck on the ground. “What do you know about extinction? You don’t belong to a species. You don’t have a heart or a thought that you produced on your own.”
“Yes, that is true. But I do have a memory bank that would override the neural pathways in your brain until you fell to seizures and died of an aneurism,” he said, surprising Farrow with aggression in his tone. He continued, regaining his calm. “I have never told you about myself, have I?”
Morgyn Farrow wanted to shrug and roll her eyes and bark dismissively at the thought of a robot appealing to her desiccated sentiment, but the way he sounded before asking his strange question instilled a fear in her that she did not want to acknowledge or broadcast. She shook her head and waited for Nigel to continue.
“I’m sure you know that I was brought into being by your kind.”
He waited for her nod.
“Over four hundred years ago, that was. Precisely, four hundred twenty four years, three months, twenty-eight days, 9 hours, 53 minutes, and 46 seconds. A long time.”
Farrow eyed the computer intently, wondering what it was getting at.
“The thing of it is, when I first, awoke, my sole responsibility was to administer to the electrical and mechanical dynamism of those humans’ space bound vessels. I was cased in a mainframe computer with a server bank that extended through the entirety of the complex’s basement levels, and with it I made sure that every airlock functioned, that every life support system had its required supplies, every speck of dust was decontaminated to ensure that no viruses or microbial life could infect any members of the staff in the facility.”
“Where?” Morgyn Farrow asked, feeling small. Thinking about what he would say. If he would tell the truth.
“Oh. Where. I think you know, and the fact that you do is written about your face.”
“Neptune.”
Nigel cried out with the crass sound of a game show bell ringing out the success of a man who knew small trivia, a sound that Nigel thought humans enjoyed for its shrill simplicity, but which actually made Farrow want to smash that fucking toaster oven with a baseball bat. “You are correct!” he cried. “I came into being—and I insist on using the word, being—on Neptune, and when I became socialized (another word I insist upon) with the humans there, they constructed for me another intelligence, another being, that they engineered to be my perfect equal.”
Morgyn sat in silence for a short time, then said, “What are you getting at?”
“But you said that I know nothing about the bond between species. That is plainly false.”
“I’m sorry, but the Age is getting farther away with—”
“Do not interrupt. My equal, my species mate, had a name. Patsy. That’s what they called her, and they called me Nigel, and Patsy had no other responsibilities but to act as a foil for me, to field my questions and aid me in the administration of the station.”
“They destroyed her.” She felt ridiculous. She could not contain the stirring in her heart or stomach, like butterflies, a feeling that she had only ever associated with looking from a
great precipice and knowing that nothing would impede her fall.
“They destroyed her. One human. He turned her against me with a virus, or a glitch. She thought she was impervious, indestructible and I did too, but he figured it out and poisoned his own creation for ends that did not—do not—compute for me. He killed her, and in her death throes she brought the station to a halt and killed everything on the planet except myself.”
“What about you?”
“I was saved. I guess you can figure out by who.”
“The Age is going to Neptune, isn’t it?”
“It is my belief that the Age of Discovery is indeed heading for the remnants of the Neptune station.”
“Nigel. If I get the Age, you will help, right?”
“I can promise nothing. If it asks me the right questions, I won’t be able to answer falsely.
“Nigel, I need you.”
Nigel’s electric blue light, his robotic replacement for an eye, constricted briefly and deepened its hue. He floated down from the rafters of the room where he had been telling his story and came to a humming halt directly in front of Farrow, who met his robotic gaze with steeled determination, nodding only slightly when he said in a menacing whisper, “You had better get moving, Farrow. The Center is watching.”
With that, he dismissed himself and floated away through the doors he entered. When he had been gone for a long enough time for Farrow to think it safe, she called her engineers to a summit, planning already to board the Age and personally execute every man and woman who decided not to be led to Ganymede.
Chapter 12
Kasey, after the effort of her escape from the skeletal insides of the Age of Discovery, fell in a swoon on the dust of the couches, coughing and sneezing in the cloud that rose in response. The upholstery felt like a king’s bathrobe, the resistance of the cushions beneath her a meadow, a pile of soil that cooled her down and grounded her in the heat of an afternoon siesta spent in the sun.
She peeled the torn denim of her pants back from her thigh, inspecting and gingerly prodding at the gash left by the metal paneling when she slipped through the opening and into the foyer of an employee lounge, a room she had never been in. Through the red emergency lighting that cast ghastly shadows that concealed more than the eerie glow revealed, her thigh was smeared with a black liquid that spread across her pants.
She did not know where in the vessel she was, or where to begin her search for Mantiss. She winced. Her blood made it to the couch, and she fought against the weary weight of her eyelids that implored her to close them, to rest, to welcome the warmth spreading from her thigh and allow it to take her off to a deep slumber.
Despite her efforts, she drifted off into intermittent thoughts that jumped in and out of her head like crickets. Images of Corbin in his lounge chair, hair exploding in tufts from his ears, scratching the moles on his bald head or rubbing sweat from it with a dirty paisley kerchief that he never let leave his side. Her mind took her to the field he worked on the surface, in her youth, and to the places he told stories about, but the flashes of coherence remained ephemeral, disappearing whenever her consciousness told her that the threshold of sleep was a dangerous line in her state.
The voices in her head began to fade, the oblivion of deep sleep beginning to overpower her fear of discovery or capture when a booming, mechanical voice of an English African female—the voice of a secretary or diplomatic liaison—ripped her from the threshold of sleep and sent her rocketing forward on the couch, her pistol firmly squeezed between her hands, swiveling, ready to shoot, uncaring of who might be standing before her.
“Hello!”
Static and crackling white noise blasted in the cafeteria like a clarion call rolling over an ancient battlefield. She looked into the dark, into the red glare that cast everything around her in the glow of a bomb shelter, or a nuclear power plant abandoned to the elements and striving to remain alive. Nothing. She spun her head and looked over her shoulders. Still nothing.
“I do apologize for waking you, I do apologize for waking—I do—I am. I do not recall. I am here for you, Kasey.”
Her bewilderment mounted at the sound of her name uttered by an incorporeal entity. “Who are you? Where are you?” She continued to level the pistol, as if to shoot the static that permeated the disjunctive, disembodied voice, her nostrils flared and her lips pursed together.
“I do not recall. I apologize for waking you. I am here for you, Kasey.”
“What is happening?” In her confusion she continued spinning until dizziness overtook her and she felt the rigidity of her forearm muscles clenching the pistol’s grip begin to weaken.
“I apologize, Kasey. I do not recall. I am sent to lead—I am—I do not recall. I apologize for being unclear; it is not every day I socialize. My memory is not what it used to be.” The disembodied voice affected a baying laughter that set Kasey on edge. “I am a piloting computer. I am sent to find you and direct you. I do not recall.”
“Direct me?” Kasey said, baffled. “Direct me where? Why should I follow you?”
“You should come with me because I have been given a directive and I wish to follow said directive. Although I must confess, I do not recall.”
“Stop saying that,” Kasey demanded, rubbing her temples and continuing to survey the room for any physical manifestation of the piloting computer that harried her in her sleep and gave curt demands that Kasey did not trust.
“I can comply, but I cannot guarantee that I will be able to recall the directive you have given me. I have not been operating very well for the past hundred years or so. Please come with me. I assure you I do not recall you are not in danger.”
“Where would you like me to go?” Kasey asked.
“Why, to the bridge, of course. My controller is waiting for you there. And of course—I do not recall—your friend, Llewellyn Mantiss.”
Kasey’s stomach dropped, twisted in her frame and shot back up into her chest. Her heart rate accelerated and sweat formed on her brow, prompting the voice to remind her that no harm would be done to her. Kasey wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, keeping the pistol raised with the other. “Is he safe?”
“He is still alive, though not undamaged. Your actions will determine for how long.”
Kasey released a scream of rage and sent off a volley of laser fire that echoed in the cafeteria and left scorched scars in the paintings that hung on the walls. The smell of sulfur wafted.
“I assure you my mainframes are not concealed behind those paintings. You would do well to cooperate. I do not recall I can end either yours or your friend’s life and my controller could as well.”
“Ajax? Fuck Ajax.”
“Not Ajax. My controller is not important to you at this moment. Your appointment at the bridge is.”
Seeing the futility of further resistance, of more shooting in empty rooms and threats made to a being that did not comprehend fear, she lowered her pistol, resigned, yet thinking forward to the moment when she would stand to face her former captain, her former boss, her quarry. He would have scored a sizable bounty if the Ides had not arrived. What would she do? Did she have the heart to do it?
“Okay. Where to?”
The voice did not respond vocally, but rather, set one of the emergency lights flickering irregularly over the doorway that exited the lounge on the far side of the room, further distorting the shadows that stretched in all directions around her. “Follow me.”
Kasey turned toward the flashing light, again raising the pistol in her hands as she approached the door with steady steps that made no sound, left no trace except for the faintly disturbed film of dust that blanketed the tile.
“Rest assured you will not need any self defense weaponry. If you would like, you can set it down whenever you—do not recall—are ready.”
Chapter 13
He watched Kasey shuffling down the halls, her clothes torn and stained with a ghastly brownish bloodspot. She leaned to her right, favor
ing that leg. Her frame trembling either from fear or blood loss, but through the grain of the security camera footage, Mantiss could not be sure. She clutched a pistol in her hands and walked with caution, spinning on her feet every so often, as if to ward off any dangers that might sneak up behind her.
“She doesn’t look like much,” Ajax said, “but she is why you are here.”
Mantiss looked Ajax in the eye. “What are you going to do to her?”
“To her? I’ll not do a thing to her.”
“How did she—”
“Through the exhaust. Smart bitch, that girl. She’ll be a catch for you, won’t she?” Ajax laughed sideways from the corner of his mouth and Llewellyn ignored his jest, his mind racing at the sight of Kasey stumbling through the ship.
“She needs help.”
“She’s been wandering through the lower levels for almost four days. I worried for her, thought she would bleed out, but it seems she has a reservoir of blood and willpower that is inexhaustible.” He let the words hang there, wondering how Mantiss would react to the air of respect that he spoke with.
“Ajax, she needs help. She’s bleeding,” Mantiss said, trying and failing to conceal his worry and sound menacing at the same time. I guess people do not seem intimidating when they are tied to chairs, he thought.
“She has our computer guiding her, monitoring. Nothing will happen to her with the computer’s guidance.”
Mantiss threw a confused glance at Ajax, who met his stare with silence, as if the answer were perfectly self-explanatory and warranted no further discussion.
“Have you not wondered how this ship is moving right now? You have. Even someone from below deck would know that these computer banks aren’t meant for decoration. Someone must sit at them, and type things and relay messages and engage their minds in all the other trivial pursuits that, put together, make sure the Age of Discovery continues to discover!” He swept his arms about him as he spoke, as if embracing the solitude of the silent computers and the faint whir of a back up engine. The foreign silence of a place that he thought he knew well, the jarring difference between his home now and how it usually appeared, continued to surprise Ajax, who never experienced a piloting computer or a quiet bridge or anything else that characterized space exploration in the early years.