Men and Machines I

by Charlie Nash

  “I know this already,” he says softly.

  “What you don’t know is that the DNA graft wasn’t the first generation. What they tried first was something much more ambitious. Sentience. They assembled a full neurological system for a station, and then they augmented it with early quantum resonance. The stuff that came later, the commercial systems we have now? Their DNA grafts are nothing like that. They are stripped back to the bare necessities, and the core of the neural-grafted stations isn’t intelligent, isn’t aware of itself. I’ve never known that more than on the Freya. I went inside the system there. And it’s not like another mind.”

  “So, what are you saying? The Dellinger is one of these first generations?”

  I shake my head. “The Dellinger is the only product that survived the early Program. The other systems were failures. The sentients they created were too complex for the task. They all crashed, most in deliberate action.”

  “But why would they do that?”

  “Because,” I snap. Then I have to breathe. I can’t tell Riley why a sentient would want to destroy itself. To remember makes the sweat break out on my spine. So I evade another truth. “You know what trouble it causes. Courts are still debating the cyborg sentience creation and ownership laws, and they’re all machine. This was a blurred line between minds, machine and man. And the Dellinger did not crash. She was installed in a proto-ship when she broke port. Went through the way-gate. And disappeared.”

  Riley looks at me then, his neural touch brushing me with soft tendrils. He knows there’s more. Asks without asking. And so I keep on, just a little more.

  “I went looking for it once,” I say. “Decades ago, before I’d recognized the danger of me seeking it out. I’d run the numbers on the components. Everything has a finite life, and eventually the ship would begin failing. I thought she would be near the end of her life. I was drawn to—” Again, I nearly go there, nearly explain the heart of it, then I haul myself back. “But I never found her. I thought she was gone. But now, I understand how she survived.”

  “The parts,” says Riley. “And the incursion.”

  I nod. “She’s been pirating other ships for decades, using the crews as her hands and eyes. Using their minds and bodies until they break. She’s probably the reason for the Yoshida Icosa. But she’s smart enough to have laid doubts about her history, broadcast through the scavenged boats into archives. Cloaking herself in legend. Until now. Now, she’s accessing maps for the way-gate. There’s only one reason to do that. She needs something she can’t pirate anymore.”

  I stare out our port-hole, the certain truth making me ill. My own mind feels like an old munition, a danger lurking, waiting for just the right trigger.

  Riley puts the pieces together. “So she’s heading to Earth. But you know as well as I do: if she escaped from a Program, she’ll be in the rogue register. They’ll shoot her down as soon as she passes the way-gate, just like the pirates.”

  “Sure. Unless she hitches a ride in the hold of a transport, like this one.”

  He frowns. “How could that ever happen? Everyone would know we’d been boarded—” And then he stops, and looks at me.

  “Yes, there it is,” I say. “Because I’m a neural-graft, and I have resonance broadcast, a good one. With other people, she has to wait until she can infect them through interfaces. The crews would have to be boarding her and using her system to be affected. But I’m not like that. She can tap my mind remotely, and I go within a few feet of someone else and I pass the incursion to them. She could control everyone on board through me. This will be a slave ship, until she has what she wants on Earth.”

  Then Riley’s fingers tremble. Oh god, he says on the neural link. Does she know you’re already here?

  Fevered hours pass as we convince the transport first-captain of the danger. It isn’t as easy as with Kirk; the first-captain doesn’t believe in dark-space legends, has a puritan edge that doesn’t tolerate speculation. It’s when I tell him that he should lock me up that he starts listening. He listens harder when his comms tells him that they can’t get a reply from the way-gate command.

  “She’s already there,” says the old guy, who’s been trailing after us like a bad smell.

  “Who is this man?” demands the first-captain. I ignore the question, but I’m trying to figure it out for myself. If the Dellinger is desperate, then why isn’t this guy walking her halls?

  The Captain makes his decision. “Keep trying the way-gate. Set our status to lock-down. I don’t want any passengers in the halls. And take the doctor to the brig.” He fixes me with a hard stare. “I hope I’m not going to regret taking you on board.”

  I rather think he already does.

  Time passes unmarked in the gray brig, a padded box with a bench, full facilities, and a sintered nanoglass wall. Guess they don’t tend to transport hard-asses on this liner. Riley sits outside, his head tipped towards me, refusing to go back to the bunk. After a while, I give up on telling him to go.

  Why is she heading to Earth? he asks.

  I told you. Because she needs something she can’t salvage.

  Like what?

  Rare earths, I say. Synthetic elements, maybe.

  Come on. She could have those out of any reactor drive.

  I am silent, because I do not know, and it bothers me. It is still occupying my thoughts when we feel the deceleration shift. We must be close to the way-gate. A distant grumble enters my skin through the brig wall. Dock door opening. My heart thumps against my stomach. Riley looks me in the eye.

  “Tell me what you’re not saying,” he asks again.

  I almost do. But suddenly, an anvil falls against my mind. Pressure beats against my skull, as though a ballistic craft has just missed me by inches. Then I notice Riley is moving.

  “Riley,” I hiss, as he pulls up off the floor, his face a surprised grimace. Then his head moves, inspecting me, inspecting the latching system in the nanoglass wall. Oh, shit. In the mix of everything, I can’t believe I’ve forgotten Riley’s neural link. It’s nothing like mine, but it will be enough. Enough for the Dellinger to have him open my cell, and then it will do with me what it will.

  The wall slides open a minute later, and the hall yawns bleak and silent. That pressure comes again, at the back of my skull. And a new brush of voice in my mind, eerie and space-hollow: Move.

  The transport halls are empty as I march towards the dock, Riley following in the shuffling steps of the unconscious. Fear for him blurs my mind like feathered paint, and I don’t know which is worse: feeling this, or anticipating when she’ll take my mind too. Once, at a crossing hallway, I think I see movement, but no one comes to help. Perhaps they have tried and fallen. Or perhaps they never had the chance.

  The dock freight doors glide up, and there, on the pad of bay twelve, I finally see her.

  She is nothing to look at. Her outer skin is a medley of broken panels, a solar array half-crumpled on one side. From a distance, you couldn’t be sure she was even air-tight. She is oddly configured – too heavy in the tail for a space-going craft that was once a planet-sider. But, as her blunt mind shoves me forward again, and the freight doors slide closed, I notice a glint under a canted shield tile, and then I realize. It is all a second skin. She wears the camouflage of an old ship. A disabled ship. Drawing in the salvagers like an Earth deep-sea angler dangling its light. She is not a hunter; she is an ambusher.

  And she shoves me towards her. Close. So close I can see the upright bodies lining the hall of her open door hatch, once salvage crews now burning out in her service. Empty eyes of controlled minds.

  I glance at Riley and see the same eyes. I push back against the pressure in my skull. Let him go, I tell her.

  No.

  I think about how I can save this before she takes me over. Whether I could reach the airlock in time to go all old-world space suicide and throw myself out into the black.

  You won’t make it, she says. Come closer.

 
I inch forward, until my boots reach the threshold of her door. The grim honor guard leaves a gap just wide enough to squeeze between them. They smell of unwashed flesh and rot. I see severed fingers and hands on some, cauterized, their bodies thin with malnutrition. I swallow against the reflex to vomit. The smell is the primal stench of slavery, of loss of will. Enough for my caged heart to beat against my ribs.

  Then I am standing on her bridge. Her weight bumps against my mind again, but she does not enter. I stare at the antique consoles before me. Most panels are missing, the workings of the Dellinger a patchwork of retrofits, parts from different boats cut and fitted and replaced around the channels of neural tissue. Sadness wells inside me like black water. She was something special, and now she is scarred from neglect and notoriety. She has waited a long time to make this trip.

  “Why haven’t you taken my mind?”

  She makes no response. Just the weight of her consciousness remains, pressing. I glance at Riley, who has joined the line of her crew. I shiver, but a strange idea occurs to me. This line up, the crew … it looks all for show, an attempt at intimidation.

  You can’t, can you? I ask. You’re overstretched. You needed me right here even to try.

  The sledgehammer that goes off in my head is swift rebuke, and I fall to my knees, feeling as though she has driven a wedge between my hemispheres. I gasp, pulling my consciousness back together from the scattered stars in my vision.

  Fool, she whispers at me.

  And I think this is the end. I have misjudged her. “Then why wait?” I ask. “Take me over and take the ship. Break through the way-gate and burn this end on the way through. Ride the transport all the way to Earth. And then whatever comes next. Why wait?”

  Silence. Anger grows inside me, frustration filling the knowledge vacuum.

  “Why wait!” I throw open a panel in anger, exposing the pale blue substance of her mind. I don’t know what I will do, but I don’t have the chance.

  I have seen your memories, she whispers. I do not wish to take your mind. You know what it is to be me.

  Energy leaves my limbs. I slump against her panels, my thoughts in disarray as the said memories push themselves forward. I spend all my capacity keeping them out. After ten long seconds, I pull a sentence together. “Then why do you want me?”

  Information. You are the Ship’s Doctor who saved the Freya. The salvagers talk of you. So I ask. Is it true that on Earth, there are treatments for old minds?

  “Old minds?”

  Minds that have passed many years. That are losing their function. Like the old crewmen I find on other ships. Their minds wither when I touch them. They do not last long. Before I took him, one of them told me such a thing could be treated.

  I grip my arms, chilled, looking down the lines of her grisly crew. All of them are young men. Riley is a young man. And then again, movement. I start as the old guy from the galley kitchen peers in down the line of the crew. He staggers, silhouetted in the hatch door backlight. I wonder if she has him now, too. If his mind will wither at her touch.

  Doctor, she presses. Do such treatments exist?

  The old guy creeps into my peripheral vision, still in command of his own mind. I glance at him, confused. Something I’m missing.

  “Yes, such things can be done,” I say slowly. “But they will kill you the moment you show yourself. Why would you want that? Go back to the Icosa.”

  I cannot go back.

  “Why?”

  “Because she is dying,” says the old guy, his eyes swiveling smoothly in my direction, tugging the skin of his dropping cheek. “’Cause this stuff don’t last forever.”

  My neural tissue has reached a replication limit, she confirms. The waste disposal systems suffered a critical failure. Now, regeneration is required.

  I stare at the old guy while her disclosure turns in my mind, then I sink to the grated floor under the weight of what she is asking. You know what it is to be me. She is right on that, but she thinks she can trust me. A huge risk, desperate. And I’m torn between loyalty to people, to the first sentients of whom I am one, and the injustice of what she represents. It takes me a long stretch of silence to find my voice.

  “All right. Release Riley, and tell me your plan.”

  We talk for hours, then, going round in circles. I wonder what the Captain would say if he knew that while his ship was locked down, in his dock I was conversing with a century-old sentient prototype craft who’d killed dozens of people to keep herself alive.

  Riley regains consciousness after the first hour, then sits with his knees drawn up, resting his forehead on his arms. He can hear the whole conversation through me if he wants to, but I don’t know if he listens. From time to time, the old guy puts in a suggestion, but mostly he wanders about, peering at the retrofits, or staring at the crew, waving hands in front of their faces or rearranging their limp postures like a curious child. I grit my teeth.

  “No, no,” I say again, after I’ve stood to take the pressure off my back. “Those facilities have monitors on their technicians. It protects them against industrial espionage. If you take one, the lab will know where they are. You’ll be discovered.”

  We fall silent. We have gone over many different plans, none that could work without a Special-Ops team. And Riley is only one. I rub my face. If Dellinger was a human end of conversation, I would say we had reached despair.

  “What do you do in the Icosa?” I ask after the silence goes too long. I am still thinking about what happens even if she achieves a regeneration. “How did you survive the madness?”

  Thought experiments and calculations, she said. Invention. The ships I caught brought information and I stored it. Expanded on it. I have studied planets and energy systems. I am interested in what one man called ‘Art’. Do you know this?

  She has surprised me, the more we have conversed. I knew she could not be a simple sentience, but she has gone further than even her designers could have allowed. She has learned in the cold, black, bleakness, in a mind that knows only expression through remote hands. And so I sink further into my own despair: that this is her fate. That her mind has lived within a prison.

  The old guy is poking behind a panel now, picking at something unseen. He bothers me still. Maybe because he smells like that moonshine, moves like a long-time drunk who needs a drink to be steady.

  “Why do you tolerate him?” I ask Dellinger. “He saw you out in the Icosa, but you let him go.”

  He has no neural entries for resonance. His mind is not organic.

  My gaze snaps back to the old guy, and suddenly the pieces fall together. “Well, fuck me.”

  “You’re very good,” I tell him. “I thought cyborgs were easy to spot.”

  He gives me a lopsided smile. “Sure, if they pretend they’re human. But it’s easy to hide where people don’t pay attention. No one wants to look at a drunk or a disabled solider. That’s where you’ll find us old models. Obsolete, now. I just trust most people don’t notice. No need to get caught up in some contested ownership. My skin would rot before that’s resolved.”

  “So where are you going on this trip?”

  He looks like he won’t tell me for a minute. Then he looks around. Registers the situation’s probably gone past such secrets. “Reconditioner. My insides are still good. Outsides, not so much.”

  I look between him and the Dellinger’s internals, at that pale blue decaying neural net caught inside limited mechanics. And a shred of hope threads through me.

  “What if there was another way,” I ask Dellinger. “What if we could give you what none of the first gen sentients had. Freedom. A body.”

  The cyborg is quick. He looks at me as though I’m the one gone mad, his pretense of an old drunk shed. “You’re talking about upload? Get my reconditioner to put her mind into a blank?”

  “Something like that.”

  “She won’t let you do it,” he warns me. “Too much trust. We don’t let anyone back in our minds, not after
the first awakening. No way.” He shakes his head, his machine action obvious when he’s not playing his role.

  Dellinger is silent.

  “Would you risk it?” I ask her softly. “I’ve never asked anyone for trust, but I would protect you until it was done. If it works, you would have command over a body. The interface your mind knows it wants.”

  Why are you doing this? she asks, but she knows why.

  The cyborg is the last hurdle. “I need to rent your databank,” I tell him.

  “And what do I get?”

  “My protection all the way to your reconditioner, not that you’ll need it. But afterwards you will, when you’re all fresh again.”

  “I’ve got a good spastic routine for that,” he complains, but databank rental will probably pay for his recondition, and I think we’re home free.

  “Riley. Riley!”

  He raises his head, his eyes a squint. “Yeah.”

  “We need to do an upload. Can you configure the comms?”

  “Forget it.” He inches up the wall, until he’s unsteady on his feet. “You want to free this murdering ship and put it in a cyborg body to wander around? Fuck that. You’re on your own.” And he stumbles down the silent crew corridor and out of the ship.

  I catch up with him before the freight doors, his gait unsteady. I bar the door release with my body, so he’s forced to turn his back to the wall to hold himself up. “Let me go, Coryn,” he says. “I don’t care if I die anymore. But I’m not doing this.”

  My name on his tongue is such a shock I can barely speak, and then I realize how much I’ve hurt him. How I keep him at a distance, because of what I am. How this trip began as starting again, but we never worked out how.

  And now, I am desperate.

  “I have to tell you what you asked before,” I say.