by Michael West
Dylan’s mouth fell open in disbelief. He looked at this woman, clasping her hand in his without touch, bringing his creation closer for inspection. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen—his woman, his goddess.
“We need to get away from here,” he told her, looking around the drab, worn house on which he paid not one but two mortgages. “This is not a place fit for us. A god and goddess should have a palace on a high mountain from which to rule.”
He remembered paintings he’d seen of Zeus on Mount Olympus and the ground quaked beneath his feet. The walls of his ranch home crumbled as stone pillars and marble facades seemed to sprout from the very earth. Dylan had the sensation of being in an elevator that was rapidly climbing. He looked through developing stone archways and saw clouds falling by, then closed his eyes—visualizing a mountain that grew until it surpassed the height of Everest, grew until its summit nearly sliced open the bubble of atmosphere surrounding the Earth. And then, as suddenly as it began, the eruption stopped.
When he opened his eyes again, Dylan saw that he was standing in the great hall of a palace of marble and gold that sparkled in the failing sunlight. At the far end, a stone staircase led to a pair of jeweled thrones. Pleased with what he had forged, Dylan led his new bride up the steps to take their seats. “This,” he said as he caressed the armrests, “is truly a dwelling fit for the king and queen of the world.”
His bride nodded her agreement, but said nothing.
Now that he had the power of creation, Dylan had no need for the beings that crawled across the face of the earth below. They knew the old Dylan Mercer, the meek and mild Dylan Mercer who had been afraid of his own shadow. They would never accept him as all-powerful. They would never willingly serve him. “The old god so hated the world that He washed it away and started fresh, filling it with those who would worship Him. I’ll do the same, only better. What He cleansed by flood, I’ll purge by flame.”
With that simple proclamation, he envisioned dormant computers spitting launch codes into every missile silo across the globe. He saw rockets scream to life, thrusting from forgotten burrows on blazing shafts of glowing smoke. In his mind, he watched them arc across the heavens, guided by chips no larger than a thumbnail while atomic reactions within their silky warheads lay slumbering in dreams of light and dissolution.
Dylan smiled. “Soon, the Earth will die and be reborn from its ashes like a mighty phoenix. Then my work will—”
He never finished his sentence.
The pointed warhead of an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile burst through the marble wall above his thrown, the wall he had erected in the path of its trajectory. Dylan watched a rain of heavy debris fall toward him. Before he could think to wish it away, a great chunk of stone slammed into his face. His skull shattered like fine china, his powerful brain was crushed to pulp, and far below, the world he so despised was purified in the nuclear fire.
To Know How to See
Something was wrong with Lee’s face. A small comet passed the Ambrosia’s cockpit window, and Sean Corbett saw its streaking tail reflect off the man’s skin, shimmering across his cheek and forehead, across the bridge of his nose, as if they were the sculpted features of a wax mask instead of true flesh.
Lee’s glassy eyes lifted from the electronic book he’d been reading for the past hour. “What’s the matter?”
The comet vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, leaving the cramped chamber dimly lit by the soft glow of monitors and LEDs that littered its consoles. Sean rubbed his eyes, convincing himself it had been a trick of the light. “Nothing, sorry.”
Lee shook his head, muttering something under his breath as he resumed his studies.
Sean continued work on the instrumentation checklist, making notes with a pen clutched in metallic fingers. While drilling on Titan six years ago, a rockslide crushed his right arm. At first, he’d been unable to pick up a glass without shattering it, or use the bathroom without crying out in pain, but after six months of physical therapy, and years of experience, he could now perform even the most delicate of tasks. There was no feeling in the prosthesis itself, but this morning, he awoke to find his shoulder throbbing—a dull, deep pain, like a toothache. He chalked it up to a pulled muscle, downed a few painkillers, and went on about his duties.
Though it was now his shift in the pilot’s seat, there was very little for Sean to do. Ambrosia took the reins as soon as they cleared the asteroid belt. She would need a human touch when they approached Nautilus station, but for now, their ten-member crew simply took turns babysitting her systems.
After a few minutes, Sean’s attention returned cautiously to the man sitting next to him, examining his skin once more, finding it pale...shiny, without a single hair or blemish. It just didn’t look real.
“You okay?” Lee asked. The skin above his left eye tore as he spoke, split like rubber stretched thin.
Sean’s eyes widened. His mouth fell open in stunned silence.
“What’s wrong?” Lee turned his head toward the cockpit window, as if expecting to see some stellar phenomenon occurring behind him. Finding nothing of interest, he turned back to Sean, the rip in his forehead now larger—a gaping, bloodless wound that ran from his hairline to his eyebrow.
Something moved in that darkness.
Sean squinted, trying to see what it was. Peering into Lee’s torn forehead was like looking through a crack in a raven’s egg. He saw shifting, flapping bits of strange anatomy that were far from human.
Panic flooded Sean’s brain as he realized he was being watched. The thing beneath Lee’s façade had trained its hidden eyes upon him. Did it know that its disguise had been compromised? Was it looking for signs that Sean was aware of its existence?
He turned, focused on the instrument panel for a moment. The tiny space suddenly felt even more confined. His galloping heart demanded more oxygen, but there seemed to be none left in the control room. He had to get out of there.
“I think I’m gonna be sick,” Sean said aloud, and it was the truth. He glanced at the hatch behind them. It seemed so far away. “I have to...I gotta go see the doc.”
The Lee-thing nodded. “Okay, man. Need me to walk you down there?”
“No!” Sean said too quickly. He felt a blast of air from an overhead vent. His skin was now slick with sweat. “I can make it.”
With deliberate calm, he rose, managed to squeeze between the seats without touching the imposter, then took a backward step toward the exit. His left hand shook, but his prosthesis was cool and steady. He pressed a green-lit button to open the hatch and ducked as he stepped quickly into the narrow corridor beyond.
The Lee-thing stared at him.
“I’ll see you later,” it said.
Sean punched the button, closed the hatch, sealed the alien in. There was a fire alarm next to the door. For a moment, he considered breaking the glass, bringing the rest of his shipmates to his aid. Instead, he ran for the Medlab, for Carla.
***
“Do you actually love me?” she asked.
The voice came across Sean’s headset, each word punching a hole through the steady rattle of his own respiration. He twisted around, his heavy boots leaving marks in the obsidian dust. “What?”
Blue-white lights rimmed Carla’s faceplate, making her pale, freckled features glow like a beacon in the darkness. She wasn’t looking at him. Instead, she used the small keyboard sewn into the wrist of her environment suit, typing survey notes about the asteroid into her log. “I said—”
“I heard what you said. I just can’t believe you’d even question it. Of course I love you.”
Her brown eyes met his through the glass. “The computer could have picked another woman to be your partner on this trip, then you would’ve fallen for her instead of me.”
“Not a chance.”
A smile, but her voice remained serious, “You sound pretty sure about that.”
“Carla...out of all the hundreds of women the company co
uld have paired me with for these last two years, you were the most compatible. Computers don’t lie.”
Exhaust vapor erupted silently from the back of her helmet, crystallizing. “So this is love because a machine says it should be?”
“No, the machine said it would be because it is.” He studied her, becoming mildly annoyed. Where was she going with this? “Look at the rest of the crew. Not every pairing turned into romance.”
“So the computer was wrong about them, but it’s right about us?”
“Yes.” Now frustrated, he glanced at the monitors on the robot drilling rig and saw that it had shattered a bit boring into the heavily cratered, rocky terrain. Shit. Sean quickly changed frequencies on his intercom. “Orpheus...stop.”
The machine withdrew its smoking auger, the metal glowing bright red, and its cameras stared back at them as if to question why they had not noticed sooner.
Sean flipped back to Carla’s channel, then scaled the side of the rig. “I’ve got to change that.”
“Need any help?”
He rotated the housing. In the cargo hold, he could hear it click when it moved into position, but out here, in this vacuum, he had to rely on feel. “I think I got it.”
Carla nodded at his right shoulder. “Do you miss your real arm, the one you were born with?”
“When it first happened, yeah, sure I did.” He climbed down to one of the seven support struts that extended from the sides and front of the rig, then hopped onto the surface, clouds of obsidian particulates billowing around his boots.
She took the decapitated bit from his hands and handed him a replacement. “If they could have given it back to you, would you have taken it?”
The memory of that day flashed in Sean’s brain: coming to, being told that his arm had been ground to a pulp. He swallowed, trying to push it all back down. “That wasn’t an option.”
“But if it had been,” she prodded, “would you have opted for reattachment, or for the mechanism?”
He snickered humorlessly. “At the time, I guess I would’ve been happy to get my real arm back.”
“And now?”
Sean pulled himself back onto the rig with more ease than other men. “I’m sure there’s a point to all this?”
Carla shrugged. “I was just thinking about how much we’ve given up for the sake of our respective careers, wondering if it’s all been worth it. You lost your arm.” She put the ruined drill bit into the tool chest at the back of the rig. “And I gave up my womb.”
He paused for a moment, wondering if he should say something, not knowing any fitting words. Sterilization was mandatory for deep space travel. Simple mathematics. Air, food, water, and supplies had to be rationed, carefully calculated for a set number of people. Adding a baby into the equation, perhaps a year or two away from the nearest outpost or settlement, could put everyone’s lives in jeopardy.
Carla asked, “Have you ever seen artificial gestation, been to one of the nurseries?”
Sean grunted, twisting the new part into place. “Can’t say I have.”
Her gloved hand raked the chest of her suit, her frustrated fingers unable to fiddle with the silver Saint Albert medallion and chain buried beneath the insulated fabric. Albertus Magnus, she’d told him, was the patron saint of scientists, her protector, and she never took it off, not even when she showered. “Picture row after row of glass tubes filled with oxygenated liquid, each one home to an embryo at a different stage of development. I saw parents smiling in on their unborn children, showing the still-forming fetuses off to friends and family. There was this adorable, curly-haired little girl. She tapped on the glass, the way kids used to do with aquariums.” Carla raised her fist and acted it out. “Her father tried to get her to quit, but she just kept tapping and waving, trying to get that baby inside to open its eyes and look at her. Everyone was so happy, so proud, but it just left me feeling really sad and...cold, like something beautiful had been taken away in the name of progress.”
Sean tightened a few bolts with his wrench. “That sounds odd, coming from a scientist.”
Carla was silent for a moment, and he glanced down to see her searching for words, her lips parted, her eyes off to the side, then downcast, her hand still on her chest, trying to play with the hidden medallion and chain.
Finally, she said, “The scientist in me sees the gain, but the woman in me feels the loss. Our flesh and blood bodies have become disposable, obsolete. We give them up piece by piece without so much as a second thought. As soon as we discover a way to download our consciousness into a mainframe, everyone will opt to do it. True immortality.”
“That wouldn’t be you,” he told her, “it’d be a copy.”
“But it would be everything I know, which is everything that makes me me.”
He slid his wrench back into his tool belt, then nodded at her wrist. “You can type everything you know into that log, and it wouldn’t make it alive, just...thorough.”
“Well, alive or not, people will do it in droves, just give it all up and stop being human altogether.”
He climbed down from the rig to stand in front of her, rubbing his shoulder through the fabric of his suit. “Would you do it?”
Carla shrugged. “Probably not.” Her eyes locked with his through the glass of their sealed faceplates. “I don’t think I want to sacrifice anything else.”
Sean took a step toward her. “What’s going on?”
“The mission’s almost over,” she said, “and we’ll have some tough decisions once we reach Nautilus, whether or not to renew our contracts, what we’ll do if we don’t sign up for another tour, where we’ll—”
“You’re thinking about leaving Nova Mining?”
Her face grew somber, and her eyes rose to the countless moons that drifted across the horizon. “It’s certainly an option.”
***
Medlab was free of the clutter that appeared throughout much of the ship. Doctor Edwards had music playing, relaxing orchestral tones. Four beds lined the far wall. They were empty now, but if there had been patients, Sean thought the music would have put them to sleep.
Carla was in a small corner she’d appropriated from the doctor, hunched over an ocular probe. Auburn curls spilled across the shoulders of her tan flight jacket, and her delicate fingers adjusted the controls, increasing magnification. The core samples Orpheus had mined were grouped on her glass tabletop. She analyzed each in turn, looking for a rich vein of ore.
Sean reached over and touched her arm, giving her a start.
“Jesus.” Her jacket was unzipped, and she clutched at the white blouse beneath, pulling it tight across her breasts. “I thought you were on Bridge duty this morning?”
“I am...I was.” His mind was still racing, incredible visions of concealed aliens being chased by rational, logical concerns about his own sanity.
Carla rolled her eyes, the Saint Albert medallion that hung from her neck rising and falling with her chest as she giggled. “Come to take me to lunch?”
No, I’ve come to see if I’m losing my mind.
He studied her eyes, her skin, the beauty mark just above her glossy red lips. He touched her cheek with his trembling left hand, felt its warmth, and knew she was very human.
She frowned. “Sean...Did something happen up there?”
“Have you seen Lee since we’ve been back on the ship?”
Carla shook her head and continued to look him over. “I don’t think I’ve seen anyone but you and Doctor Edwards since we went through decon last night. Wasn’t he up in the cockpit with you?”
“Yes, but...” Sean paused, deciding to be cautious until he knew more. He extended his arm, took her soft hand in his metal fingers, and his shoulder flared with pain, igniting sparks within his eyes.
“It’s still bothering you.” She studied his prosthesis with concern.
“I’m fine.”
“Liar. Look, while you’re here, you should at least let Edwards take a look at it.”
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Sean glanced across the room, seeing the doctor’s office in the opposite corner. Clear liquid ran down the glass walls that separated it from the rest of the lab, creating waterfalls that, like the music, were meant to calm those being treated.
“You’re right,” he told her. “I’ll talk to the doc, see if he can help me.”
“Good.” Carla kissed his cheek, then grabbed two small display pads off the table—the most recent downloads of her technical journals. “I’ll wait for you in the cafeteria.”
She pulled away and Sean reluctantly let her go. He thought for a moment, then said, “If you see Lee, just...keep an eye on him. Don’t get too close.”
“Okay, you’ve officially scared the shit out of me. What—?”
“I’ll explain it all over lunch.”
Carla nodded, then disappeared down the corridor with her books.
Sean stepped over to stand in Edwards’ doorway. The man had his back to him, studying a large monitor that filled the rear wall. “Knock-knock.”
Edwards turned. His eyes lay hidden beneath a visor that allowed him to see temperature fluctuations, perform diagnostic scans, and be linked to the Medlab’s computer. A red and blue patch on the breast of his lab coat labeled him the ship’s chief medical officer—the ship’s only medical officer, truth be told. He smiled, his lips surrounded by the stubble of a three-day-old beard. “Corbett. How’s it going?”
“I was about to tell Carla something, but I thought I should run it by you to see what you thought first.”
“I think I’m honored.” A metal desk filled the center of the room. Edwards sat in the high-backed leather chair behind it, then motioned to a smaller seat nearby.
Sean went into the office, watching the Medlab entrance through watery glass; afraid Lee might walk in at any moment.
Edwards pressed a button on the edge of his desk, turning the smart glass opaque, preserving their privacy. “So, what’s on your mind?”