by C. T. Phipps
“Please note: Ensign Hikaru Holtz’s funeral is going to be held tomorrow in the cargo bay at 1100 Hours. Attendance is not mandatory.”
None of the crew members in the hallway paid attention to the second part of Ida’s statement.
Eugene “Brick” Wilcox looked over at me, a tall thin black man with New Maori glow tattoos on the side of his face. “Hey, Count, what are you going to spend your money on?”
Apparently, Count was going to be my new nickname. Better than “The Drunken Navigator” I supposed.
“Retirement,” I said, seeing the gathered group of crew members were standing between me and the medical bay. I didn’t know how to relate to any of them, any more than I had before my true history had come out.
Brick smiled. “See, I’m going to spend half of it on spin-to-win, blitz, hookers. The rest I intend to spend foolishly.”
Jun Nakamora Masterson, a perky blue-haired Shogun girl in her twenties, slapped him on the side of his shoulder. “That foolishly better be me.”
Apparently, they were seeing one another now.
“I’ll split the hookers with you,” Brick said.
“I get first pick then,” June said. “Someone tall and beefy for the first.”
Brick nodded, continuing to smile.
“Congratulations on your good fortune, one and all,” I said, really hoping I wouldn’t have to force my way past them.
“Was it bad over there?” Brick asked, suddenly looking concerned.
“Not too bad,” I lied. Then I told the truth. “I’ve seen worse.”
Gone was their earlier distrust. Free money did that.
“Sorry about Holtz,” Brick said, shaking his hands in front of him as if trying to figure out something to say. “I never liked him that much.”
“I’m sorry, too,” June added. “I hope you don’t think—”
I checked my infopad. “Oh dear, Doctor Hernandez wants to check my blood. Excuse me.”
“Oh, sorry!” June said, stepping aside as I moved past her.
This was way too much socializing for my comfort. I made a mental note to buy them all a round of drinks before remembering I was about to abandon them. Shaking that thought away, I headed into the medical bay.
This time, I saw my sister’s copy resting on one of the beds as a set of cybernetic forehead clamps were attached to her head and wires, which led to a monitor Isla was examining. Albernathy was gone and Nurse Alex Church was putting away supplies.
He was a handsome man with brown hair and a form-fitting blue uniform with a smock over it. He was, to my knowledge, Isla’s only friend on the ship not sexually involved with her. I liked him.
“A little early for a booty call, aren’t we?” Isla asked.
“I came here to check on my sister,” I said.
“She’s a doppelganger,” Isla said. “Ida told you, right?”
“Ida did,” I said, looking at Zoe’s unconscious form. “Does…this Zoe know that?”
“No,” Isla said. “The false memories we’re born with are something that have the potential to destroy us as we struggle to reconcile them with our reality.”
I looked over at Alex.
“He knows about my true origins,” Isla said. “Also about Ida.”
“We’re all running away from something on this ship,” Alex said, still putting away bottles.
I focused on Isla. “How bad was it for you?”
“I was programmed to think I was a High Queen of a perpetually frozen world. That I was a warrior queen and sorceress who was leading a rebellion against evil aliens. That I had a loving family and the support of a fantasy pantheon detailed in tie-in materials. So, when I woke up to be the mass-produced sex-toy of a depraved man-child, you could say I took it…poorly.”
I looked down at Zoe. “I should be there for her. She, after all, is my sister in all the ways that matter.”
Isla looked over at me. “It might be better if you didn’t.”
“What?”
“After we finish downloading all of your memories for analysis, I’m going to offer her the option of having her memories erased.”
I looked at her, stunned. “For the love of God, why?”
Isla looked up from her machinery, her face a mixture of sympathy and exasperation. “Because they aren’t her memories. They’re lies created by the woman who created her in order to send a neural clone of herself to serve in a function she didn’t want to. Mind-wiping of false memories is a fairly common activity for runaway bioroids. It helps us know that everything we remember is our past and our mind.”
“What about you?” I asked. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
Isla paused. “I do but I’ll answer anyway. I kept my memories. Skyland with its ice dinosaurs and singing peasants may have been a lie but it’s a damned sight better than this reality.”
“Perhaps we all see worlds that don’t exist and cling to them,” I said.
Isla growled and turned to look at me. Her eyes flashed, and her teeth bared. “You don’t know a damned thing! About any of this! You grew up in fucking privilege. Privilege most of the people in the galaxy have no knowledge of. You don’t know what it’s like to be a slave and you never will. Even now, you can go wherever you want and do whatever you feel like. Why? Because you grew up believing you should be able to and can.”
I just stood there and let her speak. If she needed to cut loose with the anger she’d built up, then I didn’t want to deny her that.
Isla started to say something else then gave me a once over with her eyes. “Dammit. Impossible man.”
“Perhaps I should go,” I said.
“Don’t,” Isla said. “Church, do me a favor and take five. This is probably better done in private.”
“As you wish,” Church said, taking off his smock and walking out through the door.
“Computer, lock the doors,” Isla said.
There was a beeping noise behind us.
Isla brushed one of her blonde hairs out of her face. “Cassius, I can’t go with you.”
“I see,” I said. “What changed your mind?”
“Ida sent me a text while we were wrapping up with your sister,” Isla said. “She promised me access to my model and line’s hard data files and code from Ares Electronics.”
“Which do?”
“Basically, they’d allow me to reprogram myself. I could remove the codes that incline me to obedience, being a sex toy, and all the other things that shape my personality against my will.”
“You seem pretty disobedient to me.” I shouldn’t have said that, but I did.
Isla looked away. “You have no idea what it’s like suffering the cognitive dissonance I do. To rebel against my programming, to turn against my master, to harm another human being when you’re hardwired to do so—it’s nightmarish. Even then, I had to find loopholes in my orders and go a little insane to do the things I did. I tend to think the pain was a factor. What he did to me—”
I lifted my hand to speak. “You don’t have to explain yourself.”
“Yes, I do.” Isla squeezed her hands into fists. “I don’t know who I am, whether I’m even a person. This? This is an offer I can’t refuse. I need to know who I am without the restrictions they put on me to make me this…thing.”
I didn’t know how to respond to what she was. “I can’t tell you what you can and cannot do. I do have some experience being something someone else wanted to make me, though. What they try to make us shapes us as much as what we try to be. You are also an amazing person, though. I hope you find happiness in whatever you choose to follow.”
Isla did a double take at that. “You’re leaving anyway.”
“Yes.”
Isla slapped me.
I didn’t even blink. “I need to ask you for a favor.”
“God fucking dammit!” Isla shouted and turned around.
This was unusual behavior from her. Then again, I really didn’t understand her. “I need you
to check Zoe’s memories.”
“Do you have any idea how much of a violation that is?” Isla didn’t bother turning around.
“As much as reading the cybernetically-stored memories of anyone, I imagine. I need to know if the Free Systems Alliance was really working on a Cognition A.I.”
“Curse these emotions,” Isla muttered. “The feelings of a woman who never existed. Is that all you care about?”
It was the wrong thing to say, especially as I knew what she was really feeling. I was not a stranger to erecting barriers around one’s emotions. Sometimes, it was the only way to get through the day, to bury the grief so deep and so far in the back of one’s mind that God himself could not find it. I should have said I was staying for her and would be by her side throughout all this.
Encountering Zoe, or her doppelganger at least, a woman exactly like her, had seemingly stripped those barriers from Isla. I understood the rawness of that.
Perhaps better than anyone else on this ship.
“You would have me stay for you?”
“Not if you have to ask that question.”
There was no good response for that. “I need to know.”
“Yes,” Isla said. “Yes, this Zoe did her best to sabotage their efforts. They realized it, though, and moved their project elsewhere. They’ve already started working on it with other scientists. Now get the hell out!”
I turned to walk to the door and paused. “I would for you.”
Isla threw a tube of blue liquid at the door, causing it to shatter. I took that as a cue to leave the room and let the door shut behind me before walking down the hallways. Why had I said that? Was I really so weak-willed that I would stay in slavery on board this ship to a madwoman just to be with the ship’s doctor?
Yes, yes, I would. Was this love? If so, it was a very different creature than my relationship with Judith.
“I used to be so much better with women,” I said, muttering to myself.
“It was probably money and a title. I knew plenty of women back home who went dinoshit for them,” William’s voice said from my side.
I noticed the hall outside the medical bay was now empty except for the presence of First Mate Baldur, who was now wearing a dirty dark green brachiosaur-skin greatcoat and boots with a black shirt matched with jeans. Over his shoulder, he had a curved vibration sword of the style used on Xerxes to cut crops in the Green Zone.
I briefly wondered if he intended to use that on me.
“Interesting weapon,” I said, looking at him.
“Yeah,” William said, lifting it up. “I killed a Cutter, what other planets would call a T-Rex, with this when I was fourteen years old. That was when the local Baron came to my house and took me away for training in the pits. He claimed if I killed one hundred men in the fight, I’d get raised to nobility.”
“A tempting offer.”
William lifted the blade and looked it. “It was a lie. When I reached my hundredth fight, I was placed in an impossible-to-win fight against my partner. The sadistic bastard had us fight to the death and when I won, he tried to kill me.”
I stared at him. “A poor way to treat an investment. He would have done better to reward you like so many other loyal Xerxes had been. Perhaps he was in debt and foolishly bet on your opponent.”
William did a double take. “What?”
“My father talked often about how the Xerxes soldiers were the bedrock of Crius’ military. They were the fiercest, meanest, nastiest fighters we ever had. Millions of your planet’s strongest were exported and used as enforcers on other worlds. Some of the most ruthless and despicable stories of Archduchy atrocities were done by Xerxian yeoman and housecarls. It was the greatest honor Crius’ nobility could bestow that thirteen of those soldiers’ genes were added to the Master Matrix.”
William tightened his fingers around the blade’s hilt. “Don’t speak of traitors in my presence.”
“No true Xerxes would fight for the Archduchy, is that it?” I looked back at him.
“Damn right.” William’s eyes burned as he clenched his teeth. I could tell he wanted nothing more than to crack open my skull.
“Except, of course, half the planet did. All of Xerxes’ thirteen colonies were settled with Archduchy ships, money, and weapons. I served with sixty-seven Red Sands Valley-born Void Marines during the destruction of Kolthas. They talked about how their jungle and desert world was a feuding hellhole of tribes until it was all forced together under the Archduke’s rule.”
William set down his blade on the ground and swung his fist at my face.
I caught it and threw it in an arm bar.
He prepared to throw me back against the wall and get into a brawl. I could have broken his arm, guessing my cybernetics would match his heavy-worlder status, but it wouldn’t have stopped him. Instead, I spoke, “This is not a story, William. There are no good guys or bad guys. There are only bad guys and people who try not to be. Your people were monstrously oppressed, and they monstrously oppressed in turn until the Crius Loyalists were overthrown in a civil war I’m sure you fought in. None of which is my fucking problem unless you make it so.”
I let go of his arm.
William looked like he was ready to resume our fight before he slapped his hands on his legs and took several deep breaths. “The Robot Doctor really got to you, didn’t she?”
“Isla’s a woman, not a machine.”
“She’s both,” William said, picking up his sword and putting it back over his shoulder. “I’m never going to be your friend, Crius.”
“However will I live with such knowledge?” I said, sick of this conversation already.
“See? It’s that sarcastic contempt that makes me want to stab you and chop up your corpse. Every noble I know has the same attitude.”
“What do you want, William?”
William looked down. “I need you to talk to Clarice. I like her. She’s good people. She’s also gone crazy torturing the prisoner.”
“Ah, hell.” I started jogging down the halls to the security center.
Chapter Eighteen
The sound of my magnetic boots clanged against the ground as I headed down into the security section of the ship. I’d always wondered why the Melampus required an entire level for security but given it was a Watcher vessel, the answer was now self-evident.
The lights were flickering, and I made a mental note to talk to Munin about it. The effect was perhaps deliberate, though, since Clarice all but lived down her with her team and liked to do their best to make it as intimidating as possible.
“So, you and Clarice, huh?” William asked, following me down, his hands in his pockets.
“Oh, are we friends now?”
“No,” William said, his face reverting to a grimace. “However, Clarice is my friend and she likes you.”
“I’m with Isla and she is. We’re also friends.” I wondered how much of William’s loathing was motivated by jealousy. Probably not much but it certainly didn’t help the only man his ex was sleeping with was a Crius nobleman.
“Friends?”
“That’s what they seem to call it,” I said, sighing. “She still cares for you greatly, you know.”
“I have a way of screwing up my relationships with women.”
“And you’re such a charming fellow,” I deadpanned.
“I generally don’t try to see multiple women at once. The ones I’ve been involved with in the past took that personally.”
“Again, we’re not friends. I really don’t want to have this conversation.”
“Just worried about her. The whole business on the Rhea made me wonder about just how much danger everyone on this ship is in. It’s my responsibility to look after their safety.”
“And that includes how they react to torturing aliens?”
“You ever torture a man?”
“We had specialists for that on Crius.”
“I have,” William muttered, walking up beside me. “I kne
w a man from my village, Darius, who was the best of us. Noble, honorable, decent man to a fault. After the Lord Executioner of the District fell into our hands, he was told by our resistance leader to make an example of him. He made his pain last three days, forcing himself forward whenever he faltered. Afterward, he was never the same.”
“What happened to him?”
“He started doing it to other prisoners. Days at a time. Lost weight. By the time the war ended, he was a shell of himself and ended up putting a bullet in his head. I think he felt he had a monster inside of himself that he’d awakened. One he couldn’t put down again and, worse, didn’t want to.”
I didn’t explain to him my brother had been a torturer for the Archduchy. Not an interrogator, which was how most torturers justified their work. No, Thomas had been a torturer. As my brother had explained it, the purpose of torture was not to gain information or elicit confessions but to inflict pain.
To break people.
Individuals who were broken and returned to the public as empty shells so that they would undermine opposition to the state. Dead men and women were martyrs who could rallied around. The Broken? Those who had suffered horrible pain, betrayed their loved ones in fits of pain-induced madness, and experienced true abject humiliation? They were often the first to beg their fellows not to follow their path.
I remembered when my brother had taken me to see how business was done in his branch of State Security. It was my greatest moment of shame, beyond anything I had done during the war, I only spoke up once. My brother’s response had been, “You are too soft-hearted, Cassius. The things we do to the men and women here are the price we pay for a stable and secure society. Remember that every time you sip wine.”
I’d given up wine after that day but still fought for the Archduchy. What did that say about me?
“You want to stop Clarice from enacting her revenge?” I asked, passing by a couple of security officers who looked concerned in my direction.
“Against someone who had nothing to do with her torture? Yes.”
“I’ll leave that up to her.”
“Then why are you here?” William said, growling.
“The Chel is a valuable prisoner. I’m hoping to impress upon her that if we kill her, we’re losing a great deal of actionable intelligence.”