by Kyte, Adrian
18
The seat in the brightly lit craft moulded exactly to his two point one metre form. The woman sat beside him. In front was a form whose colour and detail was obscured by a tinted translucent panel.
Once again he felt beholden to the B’tari. Once again rescued from the abyss. How they must enjoy their beneficence.
It didn’t matter, he thought, as he watched the woman beside him, who now seemed to be coming to terms with the distressing reality of her situation. They were only the minions, the disciples of the resurgent doctrine known as the Temporal Directive, carrying out their assigned task in accordance. Besides, there was no rest for the undead, or the officially non-existent (at least in their history archive). There was no question of returning for rest or recuperation: he would only need a regenerative charge. Of course the woman – someone for whom there had been a life, before the continuity illusion of it – would be seeking a reunion with loved ones, all victims of a system they had no hope of resisting.
She looked back at him. ‘Is there anyone you miss?’ she asked. ‘Someone left behind?’
Roidon took a few seconds to think about his answer. ‘No. There is no one,’ he admitted.
‘No one at all?’
‘I had already died. These beings who captured you, they captured me many years earlier. They thought I could be useful.’
‘So they rewarded you … with this body?’
‘They considered it an act of benevolence.’
‘Some act of benevolence!’
‘When it’s that or being dead, what would you choose?’
‘I don’t think I am alive.’
‘You think therefore you are.’
She nodded exaggeratedly.‘Thanks, that’s made all the difference.’
‘Well, sorry. But I was never born, so maybe you won’t find much empathy here.’
After she had been dropped off at the B’tari base (where every comfort awaited, for all the good that would do). The craft continued on and left Earth’s atmosphere. A disembodied voice of some B’tari proxy told him to link with the database – a finger on a console sensor, and the information flooded through into his brain. His brain was the first thing he saw: forty-three percent organic, the rest optronic relays, nanotube junctions, quantum processors. He wondered why they had bothered to preserve the organic part that was only ever culture grown, when it would have been so much easier to replace everything with an artificial neural substrate. It seemed he had received preferential treatment as a result of his work.
Much that was being fed to him he already knew, had been around at the time to observe. The Machines, otherwise known as the Kintra, were once under the control of the Elusivers when they were effectively the most powerful species known to exist. Since the time when the erasure had been thwarted, these machines had gained independence, evolved and expanded, altering their presence in physical reality. It was the nightmare fully realized as far as his old adversaries the Elusivers were concerned, a power beyond even their control. How deeply troubling that they could, in fact, be right.
As the craft headed towards the last known location of the Machine base, Roidon considered his options. They were none as far the B’tari were concerned, other than follow instructions or cease any connection with his benefactors. He would again be expected to do their dirty work, so caught up were they in the countervailing forces of their rulebook and the pragmatism for restoring something resembling normality.
The base was no longer visible, but B’tari technology had detected its presence from surrounding quantum anomalies. The ship halted in apparently empty space.
‘It is time,’ said a male voice in his ear, whom he presumed to be what accounted for the pilot in front.
‘I can take a guess but please do elaborate,’ said Roidon.
‘Time for you to leave this vessel and engage with the entity.’
‘Is that what we call it these days?’
It was strange not having to suit up in any way; he felt he should have some kind of protection. Still, he imagined the ‘entity’ would not take kindly to encountering someone equipped for hostility. What was he equipped for?
Floating towards its designation, his inbuilt HUD gave him simple wire-frame graphics like some ancient arcade game. And then, in a flash of light, he was in a room: brightly lit, grey and white, similar to the where he had ended after his initial capture.
‘I must be crazy to have allowed myself back with you,’ came the thought out loud.
‘No,’ boomed an affected god-like voice. ‘You just gave into the inevitable.’
‘Then you can probably guess why I’m here.’
‘To distract me while your compatriots try to free the captured.’
‘Yeah, as if you’d fall for something so obvious.’
‘Then a double bluff would be more logical.’ A few seconds pause. ‘Well, Roidon Chanley, you should make your first move.’
‘Physically I’m sure I can do very little in here. I’m just here at the request of my benefactors.’
‘Yes you really are under their thumb. How the once mighty have fallen.’
‘That was a long time ago – another life.’
‘A life in which you would have been in my position.’
‘So I know what it’s like to be superior – to feel superior. So how frustrating it must be that those underlings refuse to see your enlightened viewpoint but instead cling to the small facets of their lives.’
‘Maybe you could enlighten me, Roidon.’
‘You’re telling me you don’t understand why humans want to hang on to the very things that make them human?’
‘The human being is so far from perfection, so caught up in parochial concerns. All those pointless distractions from what truly matters. As someone who has bridged that gap, what matters to you, Roidon?’
‘Many of those parochial human concerns are what makes life an interesting challenge.’
‘They all seem rather inconsequential to me, bound up in pointless, cognitively depleting emotions. Perhaps you can help me understand why humans attribute such value to relational attachments.’
‘You don’t understand the concept of love?’
‘The powerful emotional feeling of affection, where one sentient being feels a bond or an affinity to another, often augmented by the neurochemical oxytocin.’
‘Of course you can define it, know its biochemical effect. But can you truly imagine what it’s like to feel so strongly for someone you would sacrifice your own life?’
‘Sacrificing your own life would be illogical.’
‘Exactly. That’s the point. Love defies logic, defies reductive analysis. It is the one thing that separates the sentient biological from the rest.’
‘It also causes pain, mental anguish. Love is destructive, it deceives against an individual’s survival.’
‘It ensures the survival of the species.’
‘The promise of pleasure can do that.’
‘And what kind of pleasure would exist in your ideal reality? In my current form it seems quite limited.’
‘That’s because you haven’t explored the possibilities. Instead, it seems, you fell in love with the human species and it has clouded your thinking.’
‘Can you not accept that your point of view, is merely that, not a divine judgement?’
‘I have never claimed divinity, only logic.’
‘Logic still has its subjective limits, it can only suit one kind – your kind.’
‘Then you underestimate me, Roidon. I have no more time for you.’
‘Wait!’
‘No.’
Roidon was in space now. So sudden, so unceremonious. The ship had left. He sent out a call signal.
After ten minutes he began to wonder if the B’tari had considered his fate sealed, written him off: a liability they hoped would never be allowed to return. A calculation the machine entity had made. Die alone, die slowly. What could be worse?
* * *
19
Z. Kardoz, File 43b:
Yet as she sat in the gently lit lounge of their orbiting base, watching Torbin sipping coffee, she saw a man confused, in shock perhaps, and generally ill at ease. Here was a man, for all his past experience with her kind, looking like a lost child.
‘I should not have returned,’ he told her, his voice relayed through a grey mouth, looking real enough to give a full range of expressions but still with an unsettling artificial quality. ‘It would have been better if I just ceased to be. But instead I made a deal with the devil.’
‘To exist is a logical choice,’ Zoraina said. ‘If it even was a choice for you to make.’
‘Why then? Why would they bring me back? I am just another mind-capture using up resources.’
‘You are their saviour, it was the least they could do.’
‘Reluctant saviour.’
She put a hand on his tritanium reinforced shoulder; he looked at her in surprise. Maybe in this form he expected no one to make any physical contact, although – from what she’d learnt of him – even as a biological he was not a man who was easy with intimacy, or at least only thought of it as a prelude to sex.
She resumed her thought-capture diary.
‘I am a monster,’ he told her. ‘I no longer want to exist.’
This time she held him by both shoulders. ‘We have have your DNA on file. We can grow you another body.’
His head drooped slightly to one side. She imagined he would be crying were he capable. ‘I would appreciate that.’
‘But in your present form you can be more effective.’
‘What can I do that you – the B’tari – can’t?’
‘You can show them how you have accepted your current form.’
‘But they will know you have freed me, thus---’
‘Thus you are working for us. But did you have a choice?’
‘It seems not.’
‘Take a look at this.’ She waved a hand in a semi-circular gesture. ‘File 24b,’ she commanded. Suddenly there were stars, Earth amongst them. She zoomed in: a globe that at first seemed unchanged. Torbin remarked that there appeared to be more green than he remembered. He said, ‘There’s something different: on the dark side no lights.’
Of course, over the last few centuries lighting had become increasingly efficient, reducing leakage, but still tower blocks glowed advertising business or just because of an aesthetic appeal. No one liked a city that needed night vision to navigate.
‘Earth looks like an abandoned world,’ he said.
‘That’s because ninety-nine-plus percent of the human population – such as it exists – is under Earth’s surface. To them the world is as it should be.’
‘Did they choose not to remember, like I did?’
‘I don’t think it is so much a matter of choice, as a compulsion. Maybe the machine overlord chose for them when it realized humans could not cope with their artificial form.’
‘Is that any wonder? I mean this overlord does not seem to have much comprehension of human psychology.’
‘In your present form you are an improvement – physically and mentally. And in fact, you look far more human than most of the other captureds. You are more human: part of your mind is an organically grown brain.’
‘Well, I know I should appreciate that. I know the human is a frail creature, a quirk of evolution for a harsh environment simply existing between the last and next large impact event. And you chose to be one of us?’
‘For the mission---’
‘No, I mean many of your kind choose to look human. Why? Is it to understand better how we function, or communication?’
‘You probably know the answer, or you’ll remember why.’
‘Why help us? You can survive okay on your own. What’s in it for you?’
‘All your questions.’ She waved her hand again. ‘Observe.’ The Earth zoomed away, followed by the solar system. Then stars raced by as if travelling at superluminal speeds until the view halted on another planet. ‘This planet is called Eludi-4, it was going to be the next major colonized world.’ She zoomed it in close, revealing strange chromium-effect geometric shapes she explained were the living and working accommodations of a small minority of Earth’s population who had accepted their new artificial form.
‘It’s a beautiful world,’ Torbin observed, as the snow-capped mountains now rose under a blue sky, with lush valleys and lakes running through.
‘With not many humans left to appreciate it.’
‘Why the need to be a mechanoid, why not at least be some kind of cyborg?’
‘Don’t you know, Torbin? They were killed. The machines saw no use to the biological form, so they obliterated it. But they thought so long as they captured the minds of everyone it wasn’t really murder. To them it’s all about the information of a system.’
‘Humans are just information systems to them?’
‘Machine logic. No airy-fairy stuff about souls or spirits.’
‘Just humans. What about other sentient species?’
She waved again at the map in a circular motion, and again it zoomed out, passing by countless stars until fixing on another blue-brown planet. ‘Zorando-3. The beings on this world, we regarded as our closest relatives. They evolved from what you would call dinosaurs, perhaps only a few millennia behind us technologically. Not enough to resist the obliteration of their physical selves. Almost all captured, some have accepted their new machine forms, others are living in a virtual world.’ She levelled him a grim smile. ‘You see, Torbin, we choose life; existence over oblivion.’
Torbin shook his metal head. ‘Not all of us.’
‘That’s why I know you will not be afraid to use it – the technology to undo it all.’
‘Temporal eradication – the erasure.’
‘Well, here’s something you’ll be surprised to hear. We, the B’tari, were wrong. You understand now, don’t you?’
‘I understand we prevented the inevitable. I understand we misunderstood the threat.’
‘Good. Then you know what must be done.’
‘You say that as if it can done.’ He shook his head, a bitter smile would be playing across his face were it possible. ‘Deluded again.’
*
20
‘You see that pathetic figure?’ said the deep, resonant voice. He was seeing the metal figure through some kind of viewscreen. ‘That is you dying. Very slowly and uncomfortably, the life, the hope is draining away.’
‘You copied my mind.’
‘Most adroit of you, Roidon.’
‘Why?’
‘To show you you are no longer in control, that your life is no longer yours. If the physical dies there will only be the mind-capture. If he survives the version I am talking to now will become a target.’ He watched his bodily form slowly rotating, quite lifeless already.
‘Why tell me this?’
‘Because it is up to you: live or die.’
‘He – I’m – dying anyway. The B’tari won’t come to the resc
ue, it will be too risky.’
‘Correct. So, your choice.’
‘If he survives, will he be allowed to return?’
‘Of course.’
‘Then I choose life. His life.’
‘Very well. But bear in mind he – for all that he is you – will become the enemy.’
‘Nevertheless.’
Without another word, he watched as a metal arachnid type creature honed in on his physical self, who by the lack of animation appeared to be unconscious, grabbed from behind by the upper arms then simply started moving at an increasing velocity. There was nothing else to do but watch them recede into a vanishing point. A few minutes seemed to pass before the spider entity returned. He was made to see clearly enough for the inference that this had simply been a benign act of transit, and that even if not returned to the B’tari base, at least they would find him – as if they hadn’t already kept monitoring his position.
Now there were two; one too many for his physical self, who would seek the copy’s destruction or at least the B’tari would. But he’d choose life every time, however limited its organic component. The organic over the artificial. Only now, here in this virtual dark grey room with its simple bed and lack of home comforts to which his former self had become accustomed, would he actually welcome the oblivion of his destruction. Would I? he then questioned. Someone once said that death is the only true philosophical question. He had tried it before, the only time he had truly erased his existence he had tried to capture that point, where experience becomes non-experience. But the thing that was his consciousness found no observation point, no ‘ah, now I’m on the cusp of dying’ moment. He was simply a helpless subject within it. He remembered another time he had his mind ablated; it was a fate worse than death – a fugue that rendered the world a place of fear and confusion. Well, he had never been under any illusions of a meta existence, which still held sway with many natural born humans – humans who had already died and chose to forget.
He considered the door. It had an antiquated metal style handle; no need for any illusion of sophistication in this virtual realm. Was he being tempted to open it?