Godlike Machines

by Johnathan Strahan

  “Why are you here, Wune?”

  “Because I’m a Remora,” she offered. “Remoras are humans who got pushed up on the hull to do important, dangerous work. There are reasons for this. Good causes, and bad justifications. Everything that you see here . . . well, the hull is not intended to be a prison. The captains claim that it isn’t. But now and again, it feels like an awful prison.”

  Then she hesitated, thinking carefully before saying, “I don’t think that was your question. Was it?”

  “Like me, you are alone,” it pointed out. “Most of the humans, Remoras and engineers and the captains ... these humans usually gather in large groups, and they act pleased to be that way . . .”

  With a serious tone, she said, “I’m rather different, it seems.”

  Alone waited.

  “The hull is constantly washed with radiation, particularly out here on the leading face.” She gestured at the galaxy. “My flesh is immortal. I can endure almost any abuse. But these wild nuclei crash through my cells, wreaking terrible damage. My repair mechanisms are always awake, always busy. I have armies of tiny workers marching inside me, trying to lift my flesh back to robust health. But when I’m alone, and when I focus on my body’s functions, I can influence my regenerating flesh. In some ways, with just willpower, I can direct my own evolution.”

  That seemed to explain the odd, not quite human face.

  “I’m out here teaching myself these tricks,” Wune admitted. “The hull is no prison. To me, it is a church. A temple. A rare opportunity for the tiniest soul to unleash potentials that her old epic life never revealed to her.”

  “I understand each of your words,” said Alone.

  “But?”

  “I cannot decipher what you mean.”

  “Of course you can’t.” Wune laughed. “Listen. My entire creed boils down to this: If I can write with my flesh, then I can write upon my soul.”

  “Your ‘soul’?”

  “My mind. My essence. Whatever it is that the universe sees when it looks hard at peculiar little Wune.”

  “Your soul,” the walker said once again.

  Wune spoke for a long while, trying to explain her young faith. Then her voice turned raw and sloppy, and after drinking broth produced by her recyke system, she slept again. The legs of her lifesuit were locked in place. Nearly five hours passed with her standing upright, unaware of her surroundings. When she woke again, barely 20 meters of vacuum and hard radiation separated them.

  She didn’t act surprised. With a quieter, more intimate voice, she asked, “What fuels you? Is there some kind of reactor inside you? Or do you steal your power from us somehow?”

  “I don’t remember stealing.”

  “Ah, the thief’s standard reply.” She chuckled. “Let’s assume you’re a machine. You have to be alien-built. I’ve never seen or even heard rumors about any device like you. Not from the human shops, I haven’t.” After a long stare, she asked, “Are you male?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m going to call you male. Does that offend you?”

  “No.”

  “Then perhaps you are.” She wanted to come closer. One boot lifted, seemingly of its own volition, and then she forced herself to set it back down on the hull. “You claim not to know your own purpose. Your job, your nature. All questions without answer.”

  “I am a mystery to myself.”

  “Which is an enormous gift, isn’t it? By that, I mean that if you don’t know what to do with your life, then you’re free to do anything you wish.” Her face was changing color, the purple skin giving way to streaks of gold. And during her sleep, her eyes had grown rounder and deeply blue. “You don’t seem dangerous. And you do require solitude. I can accept all of that. But as time passes, I think you’ll discover that it’s harder to escape notice out here on the hull. The surface area is enormous, yes. But where will you hide? I promise, I won’t chase after you. And I can keep my people respectful of your privacy. At least I hope I can. But the Great Ship is cursed with quite a few captains, and they don’t approve of mysteries. And we can’t count all the adventurers who are coming here now, racing up from countless worlds. Maybe you don’t realize this, but our captains have decided to take us on a tour of the galaxy. Humans and aliens are invited, for a fat price, and some of them will hear the rumors about you. Some of these passengers will come up on the hull, armed with sensors and their lousy judgment.”

  Alone listened carefully.

  “My reasons are selfish,” Wune admitted. “I don’t want these tourists under my boots. And since you can’t hide forever in plain sight, we need to find you a new home.”

  Horrified, he asked, “Where can I go?”

  “Almost anywhere,” Wune assured. “The Great Ship is ridiculously big. It might take hundreds of thousands of years just to fill up its empty places. The caverns, the little tunnels. The nameless seas and canyons and all the dead-end holes.”

  “But how can I find those places?”

  “I know ways. I’ll help you.”

  Terror and hope lay balanced on the walker’s soul.

  With those changeless human teeth, Wune smiled. “I believe you,” she offered. “You say you know nothing about your nature, your talents. And I think you mean that.”

  “I do.”

  “Look at the chest of my suit, will you? Stare into the flat hyperfiber. Yes, here. Do you see your own reflection?”

  His body had changed during these last few minutes. Alone had felt the new arms sprouting, the design of his legs adjusting, and without willing it to happen, he had acquired a face. It was a striking and familiar face, the purple flesh shot with gossamer threads of gold.

  “I almost wish I could do that,” Wune confessed. “Reinvent myself as easily as you seem to do.”

  He could think of no worthy response.

  “Do you know what a chameleon is?”

  Alone said, “No.”

  “You,” she said. “Without question, you are the most natural, perfect chameleon that I have ever had the pleasure to meet.”

  5

  Simply and clearly, Wune explained how a solitary wanderer might secretly slip inside the Ship. Then as she grew drowsy again, the Remora wished her chameleon friend rich luck and endless patience. “I hope you find whatever you are hunting,” she concluded. “And that you avoid whatever it is that you might be fleeing.”

  Alone offered thankful words, but he had no intention of accepting advice. Once Wune was asleep, he picked a fresh direction and walked away. For several centuries, he wandered the increasingly smooth hull, watching as the galaxy-majestic and warm and bright—rose slowly to meet the Great Ship. Now and again, he was forced to hide in the open. Practice improved his techniques, but he couldn’t shake the sense that the Remoras were still watching him, despite his tricks and endless caution. He certainly eavesdropped on them, and whenever Wune’s name was mentioned, he listened closely. Never again did her voice find him. But others spoke of the woman with admiration and love. Wune had visited this bubble city or that repair station. She had talked to her people about the honor of serving the Great Ship and the strength that came from mastering the evolution of your own mortal body. Then she was dead, killed by a shard of ice that slipped past every laser. Alone absorbed the unexpected news. He didn’t understand his emotions, but he hid where he happened to be standing and for a full year did nothing. Wune was the only creature with whom he had ever spoken, and he was deeply shocked, and then he was quite sad, but what wore hardest was the keen pleasure he discovered when he realized that she was dead but he was still alive.

  Eventually he wandered back to Ship’s trailing face, slipping past the bubble cities and into realm of giant engines. Standing before one of the towering nozzles, Alone recalled Wune promising small, unmonitored hatches. Careless technicians often left them unsecured. With a gentle touch, Alone tried to lift the first hatch, and then he tried to shove it inwards. But it was locked. Then he worked
his way along the base of the nozzle, testing another 50 hatches before deciding that he was mistaken. Or perhaps the technicians had learned to do their work properly. But having little else to do, he invested the next 20 months toying with every hatch and tiny doorway that he came across, his persistence rewarded when what passed for his hand suddenly dislodged a narrow doorway.

  Darkness waited, and with it, the palpable sense of great distance.

  He crawled down, slowly at first, and then the sides of the nearly vertical tunnel pulled away from his grip.

  Falling was floating. There was no atmosphere, no resistance to his gathering momentum. Fearing that someone would notice, he left the darkness intact. Soon he was plunging at a fantastic rate, and that’s when he remembered Wune cautioning, “These vents and access tubes run straight down, sometimes for hundreds of kilometers.”

  His tube dropped 60 kilometers before making a sharp turn.

  The impact came without warning. One moment, he was mildly concerned about prospects that he couldn’t measure, and the next moment saw discomfort and flashes of senseless light as his neural net absorbed the abuse. But he never lost consciousness, and he soon felt his shattered pieces flowing together, making healing motions that continued without pause for three hours.

  A familiar voice found him then.

  Lying in the dark, unable to move, something quiet came very close and then said, “The cold,” before falling silent again.

  He didn’t try to speak.

  Then after a long while, the voice said, “For so long, cold.”

  “What is cold?” Alone whispered.

  “And dark,” said the voice.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  The voice said, “Listen.”

  Alone remained silent, straining to hear any sound, no matter how soft or fleeting. But nothing else was offered. Silence lay upon silence, chilled and black, and he spent the next long while trying to decipher which language was used.

  No human tongue, clearly. Yet those few words were as transparent and simple as anything he had heard before.

  Once healed, he seeped light.

  The engine’s interior was complex and redundant, and most of its facilities were scarcely used. Except for the occasional crackling whisper, radio talk never reached him. He could wander again. Happy, he discovered a series of nameless places where the slightest frosting of dust lay over every surface, that dust never disturbed. Billions of years of benign neglect promised seclusion. No one would find him in this vastness, and if nothing else happened in his life, all would be well.

  Centuries passed.

  Technicians and their machines traveled through these places, but always bound for other, more important locations.

  Hiding was easy inside the catacombs.

  The Ship gave warning when the overhead engine was about to be fired. Great valves were opened and closed, vibrations traveling along the sleeping tubes. A deeper chill could be felt as lakes of liquid hydrogen were prepared for fusion. Alone always found three sites where he could quickly find shelter. His planning worked well, and he saw no reason to change what was flawless. And then one day, everything changed. Alone was sitting inside a minor conduit, happily basking in a pool of golden light leaking from his inexplicable body He was thinking about nothing of consequence. And then that perfect instant was in the past. There was a deep rumble and the ominous feel of dense fluids on the move, and before he could react, he was picked up and carried along by a hot viscous and irresistible liquid. Not hydrogen, and not water either. It was some species of oil dirtied up with odd metals and peculiar structures. He was trapped inside juices and passion, life and more life, and he responded with a desperate scream.

  Tendrils touched him, trying to bury inside him.

  He panicked, kicked and spun hard. Then he pulled his body into the first disguise that occurred to him.

  Electric voices jabbered.

  A language was found, and what surrounded him said in the human tongue, “It is a Remora.”

  “Down here?”

  “Tastes wrong,” a third voice complained.

  “Not hyperfiber, this shell isn’t,” said a fourth.

  No voice spoke twice. This oily body contained a multitude of independent, deeply communal entities.

  “The face is,” said another.

  “Look at the face.” Another.

  “You hear us, Remora?”

  “I do,” Alone allowed.

  “Are you lost?”

  He knew the word, but its precise meaning had always evaded him. So with as much authority as possible, he said, “I am not lost. No.”

  In an alien language, the multitude debated what to do next.

  Then a final voice announced, “Whatever you are, we will leave you now in a safe place. For this favor, you will pay us with your praise and thanks. Do this and win our respect. Otherwise, we will speak badly of you, today and for the eternity to come.”

  He was spat into a new tunnel—a brief broad hole capped with a massive door and filled with magnetic filters, meshed filters, and a set of powerful grasping limbs. The limbs gathered him up. He immediately transformed his body, struggling to slide free. But his captors tied themselves into an enormous knot, their grip trying to crush him. Alone felt helpless. He panicked. Wild with terror, fresh talents were unleashed, and he discovered that when he did nothing except consciously gather up his energies, he could eventually let loose a burst of coherent light—an ultraviolet flash that jumped from his skin, scorching the smothering limbs—and he tumbled back onto the mesh floor.

  A second set of limbs emerged, proving stronger, more careful.

  Alone adapted his methods. A longer rest produced an invisible but intense magnetic pulse. The mechanical arms flinched and died, and then he changed his shape and flowed out from between them. The chamber walls and overhead door were high-grade hyperfiber. With brief bursts of light, he attacked the door’s narrow seams. He attacked the floor. Security AIs made no attempt to hide their presence, calmly studying the ongoing struggle. Then a pair of technicians stepped through an auxiliary door-humans wearing armored lifesuits, complete with helmets that offered some protection to their tough, fearful minds.

  The man asked the woman, “What is that thing?”

  “I don’t damn well know.”

  “You think it’s the Remoras’ ghost?”

  “Who cares?” he decided. “Call the boss, let her decide.”

  The humans retreated. Fresh arms were generated, slow and massive but designed just moments ago to capture this peculiar prize. Alone was herded into a corner and grabbed up, and an oxygen wind blew into the chamber, bringing a caustic mist of aerosols designed to weaken any normal machine. Through the dense air and across the radio spectrum, the humans spoke to him. “We don’t know if you can understand us,” they admitted. “But please, try to remain still. Pretend to be calm. We don’t want you hurt, we want you to feel safe, but if you insist on fighting, mistakes are going to be made.”

  Alone struggled.

  Then something was with him—a close, familiar presence-and the voice said, “The animals.”

  Alone stopped fighting.

  “They have us,” said the voice.

  He listened to the air, to the empty static.

  But whatever spoke to him was already gone, and that’s when a low whistling noise began to leak out of the prisoner—a steady sad moaning that stopped only when the ranking engineer arrived.

  6

  “I think you do understand me.”

  He stared at the woman. Except for a plain white garment, she wore nothing. No armor, no helmet.

  “My name is Aasleen.”

  Aasleen’s face and open hands were the color of starless space. She was speaking into the air and into an invisible microphone, her radio words finding him an instant before their mirroring sound.

  The woman said, “Alone.”

  He wasn’t struggling. Doing nothing, he felt his power
growing quickly, and he wondered what he might accomplish if held this pose for a long time.

  “That’s your name, isn’t it? Alone?”

  He had never embraced any name and saw no reason to do so now.

  With her nearly black eyes, Aasleen studied her prisoner. And as she stood before him, coded threads of EM noise pushed into her head. Buried in her organic flesh were tiny machines, each speaking with its own urgent, complex voice. She listened to those voices, and she watched him. Then she said one secret word, silencing the chatter, and that’s when she approached, walking forward slowly until he couldn’t endure her presence anymore.

  He made himself invisible.

  She stopped moving toward him, but she didn’t retreat either, speaking quietly to the smear of nothing defined by the giant clinging limbs.

  “Twisting ambient light,” she said. “I know that trick. Metamaterials and a lot of energy. You do it quite well, but it’s nothing new.”

  Alone remained transparent.

  “And I understand how you can alter your shape and color so easily. You’re liquid, of course. You only pretend to be solid.” She paused for a moment, smiling. “I once had a pet octopus. He had an augmented brain. To make me laugh, he used to pull himself into the most amazing shapes.”

  Alone let his body to become visible again.

  “Step away,” he pleaded.

  Aasleen stared at him for another moment. Then she backed off slowly, saying nothing until she had doubled the distance between them.

  “Do you know what puzzleboys are?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer.

  “Puzzleboys build these wonderful, very beautiful machines-hard cores clothed with liquid exteriors. Their devices are durable and inventive. Their best machines are designed to survive for ages while crossing deep space.” Aasleen paused, perhaps hoping for a reaction. When she grew tired of the quiet, she explained, “Puzzleboys were like a lot of sentient species. They wanted the Great Ship for themselves. Thousands of worlds sent intergalactic missions, but my species won the race. I rode out here on one of the earliest starships. Among my happiest days is that morning when I first stood on the Ship’s battered hull, gazing down at the Milky Way.”