Eaters of the Light

by J. Edward Neill

  With it, humanity approached immortality. Without it, they’d never have reached the stars.

  And the Strigoi would’ve ended everything long ago.

  For all my efforts to become human, I’d never come close. During my many journeys between the stars, falling into hypo-sleep was a choice I’d repeatedly made, and yet I had no real reason to make it. I could’ve remained awake. I could’ve inserted myself into the Ring’s computers and absorbed all the knowledge humanity had ever attained. I could’ve placed myself in self-stasis, gliding through the decades in sleeping nano-form. It would’ve felt like minutes to me. I’d have carved my way through millions of light-years without feeling a thing.

  No.

  I want to live as he did.

  And so, like the irrational intelligence I was, I tumbled into a hypo-chamber while inside my human body.

  But I cheated.

  I’d done it once before. A thousand years ago, as Joff had slept during our voyage to a planet slain by the Strigoi, I’d tinkered with his hypo-chamber’s subroutines. I’d woken a fragment of his mind and allowed him to experience the faintest and most faraway dreams.

  And now, as I slept on the way to Hermes, I did the same to myself.

  Many months into my journey, as I lay frozen in the Ring’s hypo-chamber, my sleeping imagination arose. Thoughts of things beyond the real flooded my mind. On a shore far from everything, I opened my dreaming eyes.

  I didn’t believe what I saw:

  “Where are we?”

  “We’re a half-year into your voyage.” Joff answered with a faint smile. “Where else would we be?”

  In the shadows, I looked at him. He wore white robes, which he’d never done while alive. His eyes were calm, not roving. All his pain seemed to be gone.

  I knew it wasn’t Joff.

  He’s gone.

  This is just a dream.

  And yet…

  “I mean, where are we now?” I walked beside him. “I’ve dreamed before, but I’ve always felt like my thoughts were programmed into me. As if…maybe…my makers added memories to make me feel more human. But this place, these skies…it feels real.”

  On a quiet beach beneath the stars, in the sand with a cool breeze at our backs, we walked without our shoes. Waves rolled onto a silver shore, lapping at my naked feet. When I looked at Joff, I wanted to cry.

  Don’t, I told myself.

  It’s too perfect here.

  “This is my dream,” he said. “When we first went into the stars, you sent me here. I heard you singing, and I woke in the sand. You whispered, and I followed.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “You tell me.” He shrugged. “You created this place while I hypo-slept. I just live here.”

  We stopped to look at the starlit water. Joff kept his eyes on the waves, whose crests were white, and whose bottoms were unfathomably black. Behind us, the shore vanished in a dark, empty plain, not nearly as peaceful as the ocean.

  The dark and the light felt at odds.

  And I was afraid.

  “Why haven’t you plugged in?” he asked after a long silence. “After all these years, you should know all there is to know. It’d take you, what—a few minutes to download everything? Every book, every piece of history, every scientific advancement…they’d be yours. And then maybe you’d have fewer questions.”

  He was right. For a thousand years, I’d not taken advantage of my greatest power. I’d resisted hoarding humanity’s knowledge in the fear of becoming far less human. In the hopes of building wisdom instead of stuffing myself with raw information, I’d decided to learn at a natural rate.

  “It’d be so easy,” I whispered. “Just plug in and learn everything. No. I won’t do it.”

  Joff knelt in the sand. He looked so real. I wanted to touch him.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  I knelt with him.

  “I don’t want it,” I said. “I want to be alive, not a machine. Humanity’s knowledge…what has it accomplished? Even now it frightens me. What if I learn everything, and what if it fills me with sadness? What if knowing isn’t the all-powerful thing we think it is? What if feeling is the true power?”

  “I’m not sure the Strigoi care about feelings.” He looked at me. “You’ve been able to fight them because of science. Because of data. Because of information. You didn’t feel them to death. You fought them with knowledge.”

  I crossed my arms. “Maybe so. But if not for your feeling, I’d have never gone into the stars again. I’d have never chased them. We’d all be dead.”

  “I’m already dead. It’s not so bad.” He shrugged. He’d never been much for feelings.

  “Besides,” I said, “the Strigoi…they might already be destroyed. The planet I’m going to – Hermes…the people there might’ve finished things by now.”

  “The Strigoi aren’t destroyed.” Shadows swam through Joff’s eyes.

  “You don’t know. You can’t—”

  “Look behind you,” he said.

  I dared to look, and when I did, Joff vanished in the breeze. His dust floated over the sea and melted into the starlight. I opened my mouth to say goodbye, but nothing remained.

  Gone.

  Just like that.

  On the dark plain opposite the water, the Strigoi waited. Tall and skeletal, black hearts pumping beneath mechanical ribs, they haunted my dreamed-of night.

  I’d seen them before, but never with such clarity.

  With white eyes and smiling black skulls, they stared. I felt their shadows stretch across me, and when next I looked to the sea, I found the water had dried up. Bones, splintered and pale, filled the dead space where the waves had lived. The graveyard spread to the end of my sight. The Strigoi watched in utter silence.

  I hadn’t allowed myself to dream.

  I’d stumbled into a nightmare.

  No, I thought.

  No more.

  Rather than face seventy-two years of nightmares, I retreated into myself. A few particles of nano-light moved through my sleeping body, and in seconds my dream went black.

  I saw the Strigoi no longer.

  I felt no eyes upon me, no shadows swirling in my blood.

  I slept deeper than ever.

  But I remembered.

  Deep Breath

  Over the course of many weeks, the hypo-chamber resurrected me.

  It sent faint signals to my nervous system, reminding my body how to move, how to feel. It thawed my cells, starting with my core and spreading outward. I felt the machines moving, and I awoke inside myself.

  But everything moved at an achingly sluggish pace.

  The longer it took my body to thaw, the less it promised to hurt, and yet the more I yearned for freedom.

  Why am I doing this?

  Stop asking.

  At any point during my thaw, I could’ve escaped. Leaving would’ve killed my body, but I could’ve plugged myself into the new Callista sleeping aboard the Sabre…or either one of the two frozen in stasis on the Ring.

  A thousand years of life hadn’t cured my impatience. I felt no desire to meditate the last few weeks before waking, to sit still in the nothingness of my mind.

  But meditate, I did.

  Silent.

  Stationary.

  Wide awake as my body sleeps.

  When the time came, the hypo-chamber opened and slid me out into the Ring’s life-support pod. I lay for an hour on a metal slab, motionless as automated needles pricked my skin and pumped me full of stimulants, painkillers, and resurrecting fluids.

  I felt mortal. My bones hurt and my senses were blunted. This was what it felt like to be human. And so I suffered it in peace.

  Full of chemicals, I sat up and stepped off the metal slab. My feet felt numb against the chrome floor, and my eyes refused to focus. Somehow keeping my balance, I dressed in the bundle of clothes I’d dropped on the floor seventy-two years prior, and I spoke to the Ring’s computer.

  “Distanc
e to Hermes outer orbit?” I rubbed my head.

  “Zero-point-four-eight-eight light-years.” The Ring’s voice remained soft and feminine.

  “Status of quantum engines?”

  “Currently running at one-percent capacity. No anomalies. Spatial distortion reduced to three-hundred thousand kilometers per hour.”

  I almost allowed myself to smile. She made it sound as if three-hundred thousand kilometers per hour was slow.

  “Sabre weapon status?”

  “Weapons fully replenished using Ring storage. Light lances at one-hundred percent charge. Solar bombs at full capacity. Two star-makers currently loaded.”

  Hearing about the Sabre’s weapons satisfied me. In the early days, we’d had little with which to fight the Strigoi. But since the advances made by Sumer’s scientists many generations ago, the armaments against our enemy had reached an absurd level of power.

  We could carve Strigoi ships into pieces with invisible lances of energy.

  We could turn rocks, liquids, and clouds into pure light.

  And we could transform moons and planets into stars, whose power incinerated the vampiric Strigoi.

  Slow and steady, I wandered through the Ring’s pods, waking lights and life-support systems as I went. My body hurt and my eyes ached, and yet I paid myself little mind.

  More than anything, I wanted to eat.

  Shivering, I hunkered in the kitchen pod beneath soft blue lights, and I spoke with the Ring’s computer. It hadn’t yet occurred to me the distance I’d crossed, or how I’d left behind everything I’d ever known.

  I thought only of my work.

  “Ring,” I said, “send a tightbeam signal to Hermes. Use every known language. Tell them who I am and what I’ve come to do.”

  “Forgive me.” The computer sounded perplexed. “Please explain.”

  “Oh, right,” I huffed. In all my wisdom, I should’ve known. The Ring had no way of understanding why I’d crossed the long, dark void between galaxies. She was just a computer, after all.

  “Tell them I’ve come to annihilate the Strigoi menace in the galaxy. The entire galaxy. Tell them I have weapons and experience. And…tell them my name. Tell them I’m Callista Lightbringer, and that I’d like clearance to land. Oh, and one more thing. Tell them the Sabre looks like a Strigoi ship – sort of. If they’ve been at war, they’ll have outer orbital defenses. Ask them not to destroy us.”

  “As you wish,” the Ring replied.

  Sometimes I envied her simplicity.

  And I hated referring to myself as Lightbringer.

  The moment I issued the command, the nearest console lit up. I saw a pale light winking, confirming my message had left the Ring at quantum velocities. Tightbeamed messages worked much the same as quantum-speed travel. They didn’t move through the universe, so to speak. They instructed the universe to move around them.

  The only thing moving faster than the message I’d sent to Hermes: my food into my mouth.

  I shoveled bricks of tasteless protein down my throat. I crunched on dry amino wafers and drained three bottles of chalky, vitamin-packed juice. My insides hurt afterward – I hadn’t eaten in almost seventy-two years. And yet it was satisfying. My bland, brittle meal tasted nothing like real food, but it contained every nutrient my body needed.

  No one else had ever understood how an artificial intelligence could take such pleasure in food consumption. But from the very first time I’d heard Joff talk about his mother’s griddlecakes, I’d known I wanted to eat.

  In many ways, it felt like the most vital part of being human.

  Belly full, eyes still blurry, I ambled out of the kitchen pod. In the neighboring storage pod, I passed two glass cylinders, in which two fresh Callistas slept. I tried not to look at them.

  Need this body to last a while, I thought.

  Tired of being reborn.

  In the observation pod, I glimpsed the stars wheeling through a giant window. Despite the Ring’s speed – three-hundred thousand kilometers per hour – the starlight didn’t stretch or blur. They looked calm as ever, too far away to care about me or my tiny ship.

  Besides, we were slow. At my current speed, I’d have reached Hermes in about four-thousand years. I knew I’d have to turn up the quantum engines.

  But I didn’t hurry.

  I wanted to sleep a few nights in my soft bed.

  I needed to train my new body to peak condition.

  And more than anything, I wanted to savor a last few moments alone before being at war all over again.

  Listless and hurting, I wandered into the bedroom pod, ordered the shutters to open, and sank into bed. I made a tangle of the sheets and a mountain of the pillows, remaking the scene just as it had been many hundreds of years ago.

  I could almost smell him beside me.

  I closed my eyes and pretended the warmth building in the blankets was his.

  I’d been programmed to love only one, and yet even if I hadn’t, I believed in my heart I’d never have been able to love another.

  You stupid boy. I smiled.

  And I wept.

  * * *

  Days, maybe weeks, passed me by.

  At the end of each cycle, I lay awake in bed, eyes shut and mind racing.

  I woke in starlight and walked the Ring’s many halls.

  I pushed my body to its limit, lifting weights and running for hours atop a treadmill.

  I performed flight sims against fictional Strigoi warships, never once failing, but never feeling excitement for so many meaningless victories.

  I lost track of time.

  I didn’t care.

  These were my meditations. I’d performed them dozens of times over the last thousand years. To clear my mind of emotion, to strip away my loneliness, I plunged into my preparations utterly.

  Whenever not training, I took my meals to the observation pod, in which I sat upon a chair and watched the stars spin. I didn’t recognize Andromeda, but then again it looked much the same as the Milky Way:

  Oceans of white stars.

  Clouds of gas billions of kilometers high.

  And silence.

  Endless silence.

  After many hours of sitting in the starlight, and after many sleepless cycles, I found the peace I sought. My body and I became one. I retreated to a familiar place in my mind, the same dark corner Joff must’ve gone many, many times.

  And I felt better.

  I don’t exist to feel, I reminded myself.

  I’m not here to live, love, or be happy.

  I was created for a single purpose.

  Find them.

  Destroy them.

  In the fragile starlight of the bedroom pod, I awoke after a profoundly deep slumber. After dressing in black, I stood before the console and spoke my instructions to the Ring.

  “Ignite quantum engines,” I commanded. “Ninety-five percent spatial distortion. Accelerate to two-point five billion kilometers per minute. Destination – Hermes.”

  To her credit, the Ring’s computer answered with a calm, “Yes.”

  Even in my powerful mind, I struggled to conceive the velocities at which I moved. If not for the quantum engines, to cross the distance between Sumer and Hermes would’ve taken me a few hundred-million years. And without the Ring’s localized gravity, the acceleration would’ve torn the ship and everything in it into atoms.

  I didn’t fly though space.

  Space flew around me.

  I descended to the Sabre. I brought no food, no extra clothes. I hoped the people of Hermes remained human enough to feed and shelter me. Anything else, I’d manage on my own.

  But I did bring a weapon.

  In a tall, narrow compartment behind the Sabre’s cockpit, I uncovered it. I pushed a button on the wall, and pressurized air hissed from the seams of the compartment’s sealed door.

  I swung the door open, and there it lay.

  My suit.

  Its makers had named it the Gamma Suit. They’d made man
y such suits for me, but the Gamma was the last and most powerful. Near indestructible, self-repairing, and packed full of ordinance, the suit made me into a goddess.

  I slid into its powered black plates.

  I flexed my left-hand inside a gauntlet.

  I played the fingertips of my right hand across the triggers of the arm-cannon, which covered my entire right forearm, and which housed many weapons meant for annihilating Strigoi.

  Long ago, Joff had worn a suit like mine. His had been powerful, able to protect him from a wide range of atmospheres, capable of firing limitless streams of energized projectiles.

  The Gamma Suit was many times stronger.

  I felt almost guilty wearing it.

  With the ebon helmet tucked under my arm-cannon, I sat in the Sabre’s cockpit chair. I flicked on a vid-screen in the hope of seeing Hermes, but the Ring’s speed was too great, and all things blurred by the lights of a billion stars.

  I sat.

  I waited.

  And then all at once, the universe came into focus.

  The quantum engines quieted. The stars returned to being pinpricks of pale light. With a crackle, a vid-screen came alive with images of everything surrounding me. To the Sabre’s right, a blue star winked. It looked colder and more remote than Sumer’s binary suns, seeming more like ice than fire.

  Below lay Hermes.

  I tapped the console, zooming the Ring’s scopes for a better view of the little white planet.

  The Ring interrupted me.

  “You have an unanswered communication from Hermes,” she said.

  “Old or new?” I asked.

  “Old.”

  “I know,” I answered.

  I’d seen the message many cycles ago, though I hadn’t bothered to respond. It’d been in a different language, but not so different I hadn’t been able to translate pieces of it. ‘Come closer – we won’t kill you,’ it had implied.

  I wasn’t sure I trusted it.

  “Foreign objects detected,’ the Ring chirped again. “Nearest object: fifty-seven kilometers starboard,” she declared.

  “Objects? That close to us?” I sat forward in my chair. “Ships? Incoming missiles?

  “Wait…no.”

  I touched my left hand to the console, extracting an image to the nearest vid-screen. I wasn’t sure I understood what I saw. Bulky and grey, a giant metallic cube hung in Hermes’ orbit. The thing looked as if it wasn’t moving, suspended in the darkness high above the planet’s surface.