Men and Machines I

by Charlie Nash

  I move before I’ve thought, and the heavies block my path.

  “You can’t move the station,” I say.

  Riley’s worked up too, kicking against the heavies trying to put him in a chair. “What the fuck did you do? Put a damn chip in my head? What? How’d you get in here?—”

  They’ve soon got a gag on him. They tape his shoulders and ankles to the chair, leaving his hands on the keys. It looks like a spaghetti western, just without the train. My brain sees it comical, but there’s no smile computed to follow.

  I tilt up my chin.

  “You can’t move the station. The core’s infected.”

  Freya fills half my mind. I notice the stains on the room panels, dirty marks on the floor beneath console chairs. I tap the feed from Freya’s video lenses, fuzzy and confusing in their overlay. I can’t do multiple channels at once. Still, there are people moving about in the hallways, spooning food in the mess.

  The images come into the display feed, and Riley gives me a despairing look, lips pushed into the gag.

  No quarantine. We both know it.

  “Commander,” I stumble over my words, trying to be slow and clear. “Order the station back to lock-down. Do it now.”

  The Commander gives me a meditative look. Taps a finger along that perfect jaw, the same one he gave his son.

  “You know, Doctor, that was a pretty clever move. Quarantine. Nearly gave us a right problem. Station gave you a heads-up, I imagine? Much harder to get out of the docks when there’s a lock-down. But I need everyone in the Great Hall for the pictures when we send the demand. And I’d think twice about being so clever again.”

  He lounges in the first-captain’s chair. The bound first-captains, miserably prone, stare from their eye corners.

  “It’s not about you,” I snap. “The last doc passed the infection to the crew. Now you’ve got them milling about like pigs in a feed barn, happily infecting each other. The core’s compromised. You can’t adjust orbit under infected conditions. She could miscalculate and send you spinning into planet-side, get it?”

  The heavies move in. One is bald, tattoo running over his ear. The other has acne scars on his cheeks. Like an old B-grade movie.

  “You touch me and I’ll run your brain out your ear holes.”

  Pity I need them a bit closer. I would have done it without thinking. Just having mindless twitchy thugs inside her ops, fingering their weapons, running grubby fingers over her keys while they lick their lips makes me wild and dangerous. At least Gibbon and Murphy have righteous intent.

  “Enough, Doctor.”

  The Commander looms just out of reach. He’s seen my wild eye. Hasn’t he just. He dares to come close.

  “My, wasn’t our encounter fortunate?” he whispers. “Otherwise, I mightn’t have known who I was looking for.”

  He is trying to shame me. He should know better. You don’t learn about a person from half an hour in their bunk. I pointedly look at his crotch, and eventually he coughs, draws his weapon. He presses the muzzle under my chin.

  “Now, you and my son are going to do a little orbit correction. You better hope that you’re as good as your reputation —- keep us from falling out of the sky. Because, when those feds come looking for us, like you know they will soon, they’re going to have to look over half the damn sky.”

  He emphasizes the point with an arched eyebrow. I meet his gaze. His eyes are grubby brown, the kind that looked better in the low light. This is why I leave them behind. But his skin looks well in the dusky light. And my urge curls itself, remembering his touch. Shut it, traitor.

  “The infection will spread to everyone,” I grind my teeth, knowing it will do no good. “You won’t have anything to bargain if they all die.”

  Pressure on the gun increases. He leans in, his breath hot peppermint. A bedroom voice. Just a little closer.

  “I don’t need them alive for long,” he says and winks. Pushes me down beside his son.

  I close my eyes, not in fear but because otherwise I might lash out and kill Riley with him: flick off that tiny switch they put between my amygdala and motor cortex and unleash the damage. But now they’ll send guards to the hall to be infected, too. Some of them will live, pass it to the feds, who’ll get on another shuttle… I squeeze my eyelids hard, pressing on the part of me in step with Freya. Can you hear me?

  Riley’s already got the screens moving, parsing through the pre-pulse checks. But he’s going about it the slow way, burning time. We can’t keep it up for long. The old man’s not that stupid.

  There’s a hatch under my feet, Riley says.

  His lips don’t move. It comes to me from his hardware, like Freya’s voice, all in my head. There’s more behind those eyes, I knew it. Standard grafts do not transmit.

  He counts to three and we duck. Don’t know how he shifted the tape. Riley has the clips out before the heavies have reached for their weapons. I drop in a slither, synthetic pants on smooth vent chute. Riley loads seal charges as he falls, and the cover hits home with a zing of hot plasma. Commotion is suddenly far behind. I collapse my legs as we hit the end and roll, but Riley lands like a sprung cat, with unnatural grace. He looks at me with those red moon eyes and I feel the pull of interest in another person beyond wanting to use their body for relief. First time in a hundred years. I look quickly away.

  We’re in the massive duct exchange, continuous dull gray panels. Tubes enter and leave made in foil lighter than air. A hard space. Our voices echo.

  “We have to leave,” he says, not breathless.

  I recoil.

  “I can’t leave,” I say, but my mind keeps going. You can’t understand. What it’s like to be jacked in, a servant to a being greater than yourself. Serve, befriend, command. Medicine between beings dissimilar, but similar enough.

  “You don’t understand,” urges Riley. “He’ll take down the whole thing. It’s happened before. And if they find you, he’ll torture you to get the station.”

  Freya vibrates within me.

  “The escape pods are disabled anyway,” I say.

  He makes a face.

  “There’s still the shuttle in the dock,” he tries.

  I have to smile. “It has a coolant blockage in the MaximII, won’t make return without parts.”

  And there’s more. Freya shows me the pictures: the military shuttles jumping from Far Space, puffs of violet plasma marking the void. They’re fast-pulse craft, they’ll dock in less than fifteen minutes.

  I turn to Riley, but he’s already seen; our link is open broadcast already. Dammit all. Not what I wanted.

  “We have to stop them. Infection will spread.” I say it quickly, to cover we, it’s foreign, unfamiliar, feels wrong on my tongue. Instead, I go to the air-light foil and tear it with a nail. Out on the maintenance deck, air rises in a choking furnace, heading for reconditioners. Freya’s skin feels wafer-thin beside me, her blue-medium pulsing oxygen to the core. I run for the core room, to pass the line I promised not to cross, to override the DNA programs. To take her over, a child’s mind corrected by force for its own good. A coup of my own.

  “Where—” yells Riley, but he’s already far behind.

  The core room gleams, a manufactured beehive. Riley catches up as I try to unscrew the quarter turns with my fingernails. He is silent, intense, gets his multi-tool. Has the hatch off in rapid staccato movements. The part of me in sync with him presses against my skull, but the blooming mass of neural program running with Freya crowds him out. And that fact brings a new emotion. Here, under her massive mental shadow, I am afraid. Like what I’m about to do is sliding down in slick grease, no rope, no ladder.

  But I can’t stop; it’s begun. I fall, but I reach out to Riley for the chance to get back.

  I think I ask him to hold my hand.

  Never gone down this road before.

  Our minds don’t meet, not exactly. It’s hostile take over, by a far superior force. She’s an evolving neural-grafted core, but it’s n
ot a human mind. Her channels don’t handle the traffic volume. I have to conserve, force thoughts to a trickle, but then she lets me through. I know because I forget my body. My voice becomes hers, metallic and flat. A ghostly sliver of my brain remains connected to my shadow. I’m fully jacked, even without implant hardware, jacked by quantum resonance.

  And for my compulsive desire, no room in the channels. That drive holds back, dammed by the narrow bandwidth. A freedom I’ve never known.

  I see the world black, white and gray: her security feed. Ops have blacked theirs out, but they’ll be running the decks to chase us. The masses mill in the Great Hall; bodies already slumped feverish against panels washed drab gray. Right now, their bodies are amplifying the virus, the smartest program of all. Spawning generations, shuffling combinations. One that’ll return a core eating super cell. And there on the external cams are the military feds, two minutes out. Ready to carry the infection across the verse.

  They have to be stopped.

  I turn my mind through her systems, looking for the dock controls.

  I find them like they’re my own memory. She’s set to allow, wide open for dock.

  I try to close the port, but she resists. The military shuttles have override codes.

  For when people try to take over the ship. I try to explain, but her programs haven’t met human jack-in before. She can’t evolve, hardware too slow to adapt to me. But my software is faster at that. I look for subroutines, exceptions, sensors to short. There are possibilities, but time is running thin.

  I push harder, I need more room. Then I feel a snap.

  Oh, god, my lifeline. The link to my body.

  I lose my own senses in that instant; no touch, no sight, no sound. I get weightless steel, CC feed and vibration in its place. I see myself on the core-room feed, the only one in color. There’s a halo shimmering yellow and green around me and the core. Riley shields me, holding me up, his skin false-color red in the vision. His lips move, but I can’t hear; there’s only faint vibration. I’m detached. Lost. I freak. My fear rushes through the bandwidth like scale in a pipeline. It’s complex. Thick. Sticky. Unsupported by Freya’s narrow channels.

  And the fed shuttles link with the dock lugs.

  I push my thoughts to overdrive, working the loopholes, routing around the override. It’s not enough. I struggle on, even as my sight strays to Riley and the strange female body.

  It shouldn’t be this hard.

  It shouldn’t.

  I stop.

  I wonder why I can look and still keep the pace on preventing the dock. Parallelism. Freya has something that my human mind has never done.

  In that instant, I am gone. I fragment, oneness lost in a white space scream. My mind divides, runs beside itself. I don’t keep track, there is no me.

  The feds pressurize their airlocks, but the inner doors blink red, forbidden. Riley senior and his team stuck between red blinking doors in the vent house, black and gray fatigues bleeding pixels in the feed. Didn’t feel it happen. Is this what it’s like? Machine. Loop. Feed. Distribute. Allow. Deny. Imperative on imperative. No sense of self.

  Thought decays; horror the last emotion. Deconstruction of self-awareness. True oneness with a non-sentient machine. And then I know what happened to the Selenium. Her doc jacked in like this. I feel what he must have felt. The last impulse is suicide, because you reach the edge of your dream – oneness with the machine – and find only endless night beyond. Touching the void. Digital chasm. Feels like death, like I’ve felt before. A rush of oh god don’t let this be what I am forever.

  The color feed flits across multiple visions. Riley hunches low over a body that won’t support itself. His red aura burns fierce; the yellow-green around the shielded body wanes and flickers. He raises his face to the lens, lips moving soundlessly.

  His cheeks glisten.

  The color feed consumes my multi-channel mind, zooms until the red glow fills the bandwidth. The other channels run decaying bypasses with the pulse drive, programming a course override, to send Freya down like the Selenium, a hot steam death in Artemis’s oceans. Division. Red and blue. Life and life’s end.

  The pre-pulse alarms strobe. Riley’s face is a tortured mask. He calls something inaudible, lips reading please. But it’s too late. The temp is ramping in the pulse. Hot burn. Liquid silicon comes to boil. Ready to burn down to Artemis … she needs only my signal to go …

  … the last sensation is a brush of pure red heat.

  Thin and precise.

  A bee’s wing, lighter than air, in frantic beat.

  I smell charred plastic, an acrid stench. Gravity pulls uncomfortably, reminding me I have a body. It takes a long minute to realize my thought is scrambled, that I’m still trying to run parallel when my human mind only does serial consciousness.

  I open my eyes, and it’s Riley’s face I see. The red aura is gone, but we are still connected, and now I recognize his as that delicate brush of pure red heat.

  “You followed me in,” I mumble.

  “You cooked the circuits,” he returns. His eyes lift to the wall with a smile. I see smoke haze, and realize with pain that I can’t hear Freya. My mind tries again to push itself into parallel, pushes hard. I see Riley’s red eyes dilate to crescents as he feels me do it. I reach the limit and pass out.

  I have a sense of sleep coming and going across days. A tide rising and falling. I wake and find the world white: sheets, walls and curtains. Clear tubes jacked in my arm, running through a blue-faced machine. I let the familiar thrill tingle my skin; it starts in the ache around the cannula, reaches my neck and raises the hairs. I remember being very young, starving myself for a week to get jacked to one of these machines. The next time, I threw myself down some stairs.

  “What’s so funny?”

  Riley’s face appears in my vision, his red eyes large and searching. But his voice is soft, and I know he’s already seen what I remembered.

  He shakes his head.

  “Didn’t you get it bad?” he asks softly.

  I nod, knowing what he means. Men and machines. The junctions where they meet. Then, with a jolt, I remember where I am.

  “What happened?” I sit up quickly, alarmed. “Freya? The coup?”

  Riley steadies my shoulder.

  “You melted everything. The comms, the dock gates. They couldn’t send their demand. Took the feds four hours to patch a manual override. Even then they only got into the dock.”

  “How long?”

  He grins.

  “Five days.”

  I laugh suddenly, a sound I don’t think I’ve heard in ten years.

  “Five days?”

  “They were plenty pissed when they got out, I assure you. But, by then almost everyone was exposed, no more transmission, so says the med doc.”

  Riley’s red eyes look towards the curtain briefly, beyond which I can hear soft bleeps of clinical machines, fluid suction and masked voices.

  “Everyone got it,” he added softly. “Three hundred critical. Ten already dead.”

  “Your d—”

  “Gone with the feds,” he cuts me off, shrugging. “He’s not…never mind.”

  I find my hand has closed around his, squeezing painfully.

  “We’re in isolation here. With a few who weren’t exposed, just to be sure till they get the vax. Two more days.”

  I close my eyes then. The weight of all that’s happened settles on me fully. I try to reach out for Freya again, but she’s silent. My throat chokes on it and a tear slides from my eye.

  Riley leans his head against mine.

  “You don’t need to worry. Her comms are shorted, but she’ll regenerate. They’re sending a new doc on the next shuttle.”

  I nod, not trusting myself to speak. Not wanting to appear weak, changed. But I am changed. I can’t see a core the same way again. It wasn’t the nirvana I’d envisaged.

  “You know,” Riley says softly. “You didn’t let me finish before. I once saw som
e footage in the Star Ops. Deep subliminal training stuff. I didn’t remember enough. It only came to the surface when you… when we… Anyway, it was one of the routines they use to instill the higher function controls. The courage, honor, selflessness rap. Things to keep you going when there’s no hope, nothing to gain. Put yourself on the line for your team. You understand?”

  I suddenly know where he’s going.

  He shakes his head. I name the emotion in his eyes this time. Awe and wonder. Worship.

  “Me,” I say simply. Me on that boat that never left port. The infected one. The one that wasn’t contained, that bled her core into the air tanks. Me, who pushed the four hundred commissioning crew through the clean airlock, who ran back to run overrides so they’d make it out. Running code while choking on the poison, the four shots of adrenaline before anaphylaxis set in. Knowing I was finished. Should be finished. Smelling death, ten months in a coma.

  “You,” he repeats.

  “I’m not what I was then,” I warn.

  “None of us are.”

  The look passes between us. The one that says we’re together on something, that we know there’s a darkness within us we can’t shake, secrets that keep us from settling. My urge is still there underneath it, growing again, but it’s lower somehow, changed, manageable. In my subconscious bandwidth.

  Riley smiles slowly.

  “I hear Earth is regressed as hell these days,” he says.

  Across the silent communication, his mind is full of plans.

  “What’s the name of the fast shuttle?’ I ask. The one in the port, the one that brought me here, the one with the fucked MaximII.

  “The Salvation.”

  I laugh. Salvation to Earth. Just the place. A go-line, a start-over. With a month on a boat just to get there, time enough to expect a glorious home we’re barely seen. Then time to walk her squalid ports. Stare at the amber sky. And quickly remember why we left.

  But then, we’ll be on another boat, another hybrid out into the black. And I’ll remember how things begin.