Men and Machines I

by Charlie Nash

  Charlie woke me hours later with a shake, his hand cold from hours outstretched on the track ball.

  “I worked it out,” he said softly. A blinking green LED lit up his wild eyes. I was awake pretty fast.

  Charlie led me back to the Ranger comms, his words coming in spurts, blocking and unblocking as his thoughts gave way in a tumble. “You can’t get a sense of it, not unless you look real wide, right? Well, but it’s in there you see, like, between the lines? What they don’t say, that’s the important thing.”

  “Say what you mean, Charlie.”

  The sight of Drake rubbing his ugly face injected more clarity.

  “There was no mission plan,” said Charlie slowly.

  “We know that,” said Drake, impatient.

  “On purpose.”

  Drake snorted. “You wake me up for this?”

  Even I smiled a bit, but Charlie, for once, wasn’t deterred.

  “They did it as a Push,” he hissed. A hand whizzed off into space in illustration. Drake’s face fell with mine.

  “You sure, Charlie?”

  Charlie nodded fervently. We sat him down.

  A Push was an experiment the Old Earth military Juntas did when the space systems were new. Took a bunch of guys up by force, set them off in space. No mission, just supplies and random crap, and forgot to mention there was no return. Then, the Junta’s sci-boys would start their fun. They’d fail the life support or the GravDeck, just to see what happened; some were told their family was being held. Then, at some critical moment, the sci-boys would tell the crew they were on their own.

  Pushes were supposed to log character traits necessary for life in the space systems, but anything could happen. Bunch of desperate men in a boat means complex dynamics. Ships were lost. There was anarchy and suicide and kamikaze vengeance crashes. One crew brought their spacerunner down on the Apollo tower. There’s still a crater there. As a program, Pushes were spectacular failures, but the sci-boys were fascinated. Their models expected different results. Then the planet-side journos got wind of it and public pressure shut them down … or at least, made them quiet. But that was Earth. The Junta on Poseidon still flaunted the occasional Push on its books. For political prisoners, or a threat to anyone they wanted silenced. Charlie’s dad had gone on one, way back. That’s one reason Charlie’s the way he is. Almost got myself thrown on one years ago after I salvaged some secrets the Junta didn’t want known; instead, the sci-boys put a chip in my head so I can’t remember what I found. Guess I was lucky.

  But the Deep Deck being a Push was weird. A Push was always done with an old ship, not far from decommission. Even the Junta didn’t waste new infrastructure on something that would likely crash and burn. And the Deep Deck had been better than new; it was new and expensive. Best equipment. A Push didn’t make sense … except if they’d counted on a rare exception. Sometimes, the Push environment drove people into a higher state: bonded, efficient, unstoppable. Of all the Pushes, Charlie only knew of two like that. One where the guys brought their ship back to planet-side and emerged telepathic. Who knows what the Junta did with them. And another where the crew handed the Junta a gift: the Jefe raised his eyebrows and no one saw them again.

  All this passed between Drake and me in an instant, but Charlie was already working the track ball, showing us the systems architecture, the setup, the personal diaries. And it looked like a Push alright. A bunch of top-class sci-boys with no mission sent off into Cold Space.

  I got a cold wash when I understood Angelo’s vision. No one could claim they were just following orders. Instead, the strongest would win; progress and invention would be born and die to keep Cold Space out, and prevent it from eating the minds of all on board. And if it didn’t work, it would crash and burn like all the others. But out in Cold Space, no one would know or remember. Angelo Deep’s vision was fairly cut with crazy. Lou would love it.

  “So what the hell did they come up with?”

  We all turned to stare at the GhostDrives, but I had to put the idea down. GhostDrives were old tech and finicky.

  “No. That’s Lou’s problem. We don’t jack ’em here. If they’re blank, he can’t claim it was us that wiped it.”

  “If they’re blank, he’ll jack us anyway,” complained Drake. But no one moved. No one was going to risk a GhostDrive in the dirty Moon Ranger ports.

  “That why there wasn’t anyone there? ’Cause of the Push?” Charlie said.

  “Been three hundred years, Charlie.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Drake, you see anything when we was there?” Charlie asked in a small voice.

  Drake shook his head. “Creepy but. The plants weren’t runnin’.”

  “Yeah.”

  Charlie didn’t ask me, so I didn’t say anything. Even if I had, don’t think it would have changed things.

  We coasted back through the shell without activity on the comms. People who go out there don’t do it to talk to others, and the company decks don’t advertise they’re there at all. Then three days through warm space, on course for Poseidon and Lou’s hovel. We were still more than a week from planet-side, and about as far from help as you can imagine. Maybe they knew that.

  Charlie came to see me just after the lights went down. We keep a 25-hour light cycle on board; a poor attempt to emulate hard-wired circadian rhythms.

  “Boss.” Charlie only calls me that when he’s really distressed. When he forgets that he’s not supposed to sound like Drake, ‘cause Drake doesn’t like it.

  “What, Charlie?”

  Charlie sat down on the edge of my bunk, rubbing his hands over his face. He was the gray of a sleepless man, but he couldn’t start himself talking.

  “What, Charlie?” I said again.

  “I think I’m seeing things.”

  “What things?”

  Charlie looked up at the ceiling, where a loose panel hung from three corners, showing the bright radiation shield behind. He rubbed at his eyes as he spoke. “Something ain’t right. Could have sworn, when we was on the Deck… I saw something funny… and now, well, something like the same. These ghosty things, here a moment, then gone again.”

  “Charlie?”

  He looked at me then, an empty cavernous look, eyes blank and staring. It made me pause. Charlie was a funny character, but looks like that don’t come from a person. It was a thing that made it; more basic than a person, more fundamental. A look of raw yearning, calculating for a primal need and deciding whether to kill you for it. I’ve seen that look before, but never in a man’s eyes. Charlie shook his head and the look was gone.

  “Boss,” he croaked finally. “Did you see anything, out there? On the Deck?”

  I’m not in the habit of lying. “Couldn’t be sure, Charlie. Maybe, but not till we were off anyways, even then I couldn’t be sure what it was.”

  Charlie nodded, staring out the port into the big black. “Can we check the tapes?” he said.

  That was bold for Charlie. The surveillance buffer was held on the Deck’s HoloGen black box. HoloGen’s run a buffer, but only actually record significant events, which includes the black box being removed, so it would show our salvage. But the HoloGen was my prize, and no one ever put a hand on someone else’s goods. Charlie would never have asked, the Charlie I knew. That should have been my first clue.

  But I said, “Sure, Charlie.”

  We went through every feed, watching ourselves and the otherwise empty Deck, three times through. We saw nothing.

  “Maybe we should try—”

  “Again,” said Charlie.

  I sighed and reloaded. One more time. An hour later, Charlie got up and I watched him go. That’s when I caught it; just at the corner of vision. If I didn’t look directly at the screen, I saw a blip in the frame rate, like creases in feed, a presence hidden under some kind of cloaking. They were there all the time: those things I’d seen in the port as we’d pulsed away from the Deck. One followed Charlie as he moved through the labs, a hologr
aphic shadow touched him while he picked up some tubes. Another traced Drake as he opened a cupboard, lifting a book in a thermaseal case. Ah, fuck, they were everywhere. The whole time they’d followed, shadowed, touched. My stomach volunteered for a turn-out, and I had to look away, swallowing.

  I had no idea what the hell they were. I watched myself on the bridge, but there weren’t any hovering shapes there.

  Then, I got a crawling sensation, enough to make me look around.

  Charlie stood over me, frozen, his face blank and fixed. He had a galley knife in his hand and drool slicked in a long string from his mouth. He wiped his mouth slowly, and stared at the knife like he didn’t know what it was.

  “Charlie?” My voice shook, a rare thing.

  Charlie put the knife on the table slowly, then sat. Blinked twice. “Hm?”

  “What are you doing?”

  He looked up and down, confused. Went white, like he might vomit. “Think I’ll go and lie down, boss.”

  “Good idea.”

  I got Drake.

  While Charlie slept, we cracked the GhostDrive. Drake drank cup after cup of the foul brown liquor he’s fond of. I just got high on the fumes. The research logs were long and stopped suddenly eighty years after the Deck’s launch. Long before that, the entries acquired a Cold Space-soaked lingo that made it new-space Dutch to me. But Drake was educated. He worked it out.

  “They locked them in there, you know,” he said.

  “In the Deck?”

  Drake looked around to see if Charlie was back. He wasn’t. “Yeah. They didn’t tell ‘em about the Push. They brought ‘em out here, told ‘em it was a job in the shell maybe. But then, they boosted the Deck and left ‘em there. That’s what I reckon.”

  “Yeah?”

  “No thrusters. Anywhere.” Drake tapped the plant layouts. “So no steering, no orbit change. Committed and helpless.”

  I shuddered. “Wonder who they pissed off.”

  “The sci-boys? I don’t reckon they did nothin’, ’cept being the best at all this shit.”

  “Why waste them on a Push, then?”

  Drake didn’t answer but laid out the Deck’s starting streams. He showed me how all of them – the biomeds, nanotech, physiology, psychology, microgravity – had run together and become indistinct from the sci-boys themselves. There was one all-consuming objective: to get out. They’d tried every angle to change themselves … viruses, machines, pharma … ways to be consumed and remade, remembered and reformed, over and over. Trying to become something that would last.

  Drake rubbed his eyes. Squinted at the dregs in his cup. Rolled his tongue around like he’d just noticed the liquor tasted foul.

  “Those smart sci-boys and all their tech on a Push means you’re probably gonna get high-tech fighters out of it, right?” he said. “I mean, biomed, nanotech, physiol, all that stuff … Angelo probably expected they’d finish up self-experimenting. Might make sense if you wanted trooper mods, like the Junta does. But what I don’t get? Why the hell would you do it on a Push for three hundred turns? What comes back might not want to play no more.”

  Yeah was all I could say.

  Drake glanced around again, looking for Charlie, then stared me right in the eye. “Why would Deep do it? I mean, the Junta hated him, right? Why try to make something they could steal?”

  I didn’t know.

  “If it was you,” said Drake. “Whadda you reckon you’d want if you got out after all that time?”

  We looked at each other.

  “Revenge,” I said, feeling a cold wash replacing Drake’s liquor in my guts.

  ***Stitching non-concordant thought stream***

  Finally, the alarms are going. There’s two – one slow whoop for the approach vector, one rapid bleep for the life support. That means in twenty clicks, the DistComp will mayday the tower and take over.

  She can try.

  By then, the Ranger will be a heartless shell, spinning helpless towards Poseidon, because I’ve got the black box. It’s the size of my thumb, wires adangle.

  I hear dragging footsteps out in the passage, steps made on inhuman legs. A dull wet thump counterpoints the steps. Then there’s a metallic crash against the door.

  He’s found a tool then. It. It’s found a tool.

  And I’ve got to worry about that, because Drake was always smarter. And that seems to make a difference.

  ***Stitching non-concordant thought stream***

  Charlie never came back from his bunk. Drake went to look about 0930 and didn’t find him. We started a watch.

  We were all strung up, expecting attack, but we didn’t see it coming.

  Without so much as a photon out of place, Drake took a heavy hit, went down fast. The thing that had done it flickered, and I saw it.

  It was Charlie.

  Or at least, something like Charlie. It stood leering, teetering, fixing Drake with one white eye. The moment stretched eternal as I saw: flesh hung from the other eye socket in stringy threads. His fingers were moth-eaten, knuckles split to the bone with the skin dry and raw.

  The white eye swiveled round to me. The thing reached out, and stumbled. I choked on an acid heartbeat and went for the door. By then, once-was-Charlie was vanishing again, his skin going milky then clear. The transparency wavered as if Charlie was fighting against whatever was taking over his body. He took two steps, then fell through the door face first, ending up unconscious on the GravDeck.

  My body moved without me, doubling back for the bridge where we keep the arms all salvagers carry. I closed the bridge port and went to Drake. He breathed shallow; where his head had hit the wall was a bloody spot like a sun. I shook an Armor Special from the arms locker, felt the barrel’s weight. Approached the second port with the Armor cocked and ready.

  But Charlie was gone. I kicked around the floor. Not just invisible. Gone.

  Not knowing if the thing was already inside, I sealed the bridge and changed the door codes. Did a sweep, passing down the passageways like marine guys I’d seen on the telefeeds. Around corners, barrel out. Scared shitless but desperate.

  Nothing.

  Charlie’d done a runner, probably holed up in some hull crack. I got to thinking, and I reckoned Charlie passing out had been the last of his will power. Next time we saw him, there’d be no trace of him at all. So I went back to the bridge and got sealed inside. Only then did I check the Armor. Not loaded. Fuck. And no ammo in the arms locker. Cold Space settled in my stomach; there’d been ammo there when I opened it. And Drake was still out cold. No-longer-Charlie had been back while I was away and swiped it. That’s when the pings started for planet-side approach. Talk about fucked up timing. Poseidon was still several hours and we had a problem to contain. I got tools and started ripping panels.

  ***Stitching non-concordant thought stream***

  The black box is ended, boot-shaped dent in it. I shredded the HoloGen and the GhostDrive with a plasma cutter. Can’t have Lou getting profit outta this. But there’s still the thing behind the door. The planet-side research bins are pretty sharp, they’ll try to study it. So if it gets down, it’ll be out, no question.

  ***Stitching non-concordant thought stream***

  Drake woke eventually. Came round groggy, one pupil fixed and dilated. He didn’t make much sense. But I knew what he was trying to say. That we were rooted and never going home. That the Deep Deck’s tech was taking over. Something superior, a survivor. He mumbled about picomachines and reworking the body. About regeneration and spreading, things I hadn’t read in the logs but he had. In a conscious moment, he railed about the sci-boys on the Deck; that whatever was left of them hadn’t come with us because the Moon Ranger was too small for mass escape, but they could send agents. So, if I landed, it would be as one of them, and the rest of the verse to follow. I told myself he was damaged, that he wasn’t making sense, but he was.

  I did another sweep once those pings came on, buoyed up on a swig of Drake’s brew. I wanted to know what l
urked in the Ranger; I wanted to end the problem. I wanted to believe I was going home.

  I found Charlie. He was lying on the GravDeck, near his bunk. He’d taken a knife to his face and gouged out his temple, soft pink brain dripping red into a puddle. Made me think of strawberry sauce at a Poseidon candy bar, so I spent a minute heaving up nothing on the GravDeck.

  And Charlie had done it all right. One last courageous act. I told Drake, and he mumbled about disinhibition. He said the disassemblers started in the front of the brain, where they could start pulling apart. Drake reckoned that’s why Charlie was seeing things, why he’d gotten bold. The things got in through the eyes, optic nerve like a pipe to the brain. And as they went, the disassemblers couldn’t avoid setting off signals. Then, they got into the frontal lobes: undoing the brain parts that keep you socially in line. Eventually, it would remodel everything it wanted. That’s why the skin looked all raw and dry. Wasn’t cut up at all, just being stripped for parts one angstrom at a time. The Deck sci-boys must have thought they were immortal, but once your brain gets taken over, there were no rules anymore.

  I didn’t touch him.

  But I got to thinking about why the thing would try to kill Drake. Ah. I stopped. Got a notion: bold Charlie, knows he’s done for, but tries to kill Drake, the smartest guy on the ship. Because he knows the things are already working on Drake.

  I got the cold chills again, but this time, the ones that come when you know you’re alone and being hunted.

  Went back to the bridge.

  The gun was gone. And so was Drake.

  ***Stitching non-concordant thought stream***

  He’s gone quiet out there but I can hear the keypad bipping as he pushes keys. I’d shut down the system, but the doors failsafe to open. And even without the thing, there’s not much air out there, and I won’t choose to suffocate. That’s a joke around the ship ports. Way back, when the boats were first on the ocean, a sailor’s death was drowning. Now, out here, it’s bug-eyed death in the vacuum.