by Kyte, Adrian
She ramped the speed up to fifteen times. A graph showing the thermal transfer level had gone into the red, she dreaded some computer voice warning her. She reduced the processing rate to ten times normal. Had to be some way of increasing cooling.
Of course. ‘Reduce ambient temp to 278Kelvin.’
It took a few minutes before she felt the chill. She then restored the data rate to fifteen times. It kept within acceptable thermal levels for only about twenty seconds.
‘Reduce temp by another six degrees.’
Again within acceptable levels, this time for fifty-two seconds.
‘Reduce by another three degrees.’
‘Warning,’ the flatly impassive computer voice said at last. ‘Temperature may be adversely low for operator.’
It nevertheless complied. Only in a lab was it even possible to reduce the temp below freezing point. She wondered, though, if this unusual request had sent an alert to someone in authority.
Zoraina, on entering the lab had had a notion of what her next action would be, but now the plan seemed increasing vague. Something about setting up a partial interface so she could monitor without a full immersion. It was a complicated process involving a stimulant drug and a lower phasic pulse amplitude. She tried to visualize in her mind each step of the process, but now the first step seemed an effort too far, as if her mind would not translate the necessary instruction.
The cold was having a numbing effect; thinking in general becoming slow. Should she have worn warmer clothes, a thermal jacket? Of course. It was obvious now. Maybe there was one in this lab. Have to get up, look around. Just a simple matter of pushing up off this stall. But somehow the thought wasn’t connecting with the action needed. Just an increasingly distant desire. Everything increasingly distant.
Let it all go, she thought. Fade away.
Part Seven: A Kind of Life
56
Roidon truly believed he could not be surprised by them any longer, chiding himself for falling into the trap of imagining how he might assist the Elusivers. A scenario where he’d be in an alliance – strategic rather than ideological – using his acquired knowledge of the Kintras’ logic; disguising himself as one of the captured. Or even allowing himself to be captured.
No. The Elusivers had something very different in mind. And what it involved exactly he was not sure.
He was in space. Not as a man, metal or otherwise. Roidon was a starship. His organic brain still fully intact. At least he imagined it to be. It was a curious feeling; there was a vague sense still of his old human body – an almost-numb paralysis. Yet his mind felt unconstrained. He perceived outer space, could focus on any star, and in an instant was able to switch his attention to his interior. His interior: that was of a more pressing concern, it contained a high yield thermonuclear device, about seven hundred megatons worth. And he was on a direct course for the Kintra-machine hub. A suicide mission, naturally. That was not his main objection, however.
He remembered the conversation, aware that it may be his last.
‘If the intention is simple destruction,’ he said to the Elusiver, ‘then why not send an AI controlled ship?’
‘The Kintra can master any artificial entity.’
‘And not an organic mind?’
‘In this scenario we cannot be sure. They would not anticipate that as a possibility. To do so would likely be illogical.’
‘You presume.’
‘They regard organic as vulnerable. Unethical for any advanced species to send against will.’
‘But not for me, huh? Not someone who doesn’t care whether he lives or dies.’
‘Precisely.’
Roidon did not even bother arguing any further. It seemed like the Elusivers had underestimated the Kintra by a ludicrous degree.
The last known location of the machine hub was eight thousand light years away. Roidon now felt the transition into sub-space, a momentary mental numbing sensation, followed by a flash of light that may have been the space around him or just in his mind. Then: only darkness.
Internal now, only. Monitoring any activity within. There was nothing, no-one aboard. This, Roidon reflected, is how it truly feels to be lonely. It was the knowledge that there would be no one ever again in his life, the appreciation of how it mattered to be with others. The belief he once held that he could be okay alone on Earth, or at least get by, now stark as only an illusion. Despair always the cousin of loneliness, knowing that life would not improve but get worse. His only comfort that death was likely to be swift.
But there was another emotion, one he could chose to view as the neurological remnants of his psyche, or let it truly wash over over him. He chose the latter, he chose to feel it. Anger. Not entirely anger at the Elusivers. But at himself for being such a fool, for letting himself believe that these beings could exhibit any camaraderie or humanity for someone with a common cause. Instead he was a thing to be exploited, perhaps even belittled. Roidon had to admire that. It seemed he had been outsmarted. Obvious when the end of the line is clearly in sight. Though really what were his options? Remain at the B’tari base? Drift forever unconscious, only to die, if not captured by the Kintra. Either of the two provided no future, no purpose. How often had people blamed themselves for a poor decision only for that, in retrospect, to have been the best choice – the choice that felt right at the time with the best available information? Then the unpredictable twists and turns of circumstance, the road less travelled, unknowable. The worse thing, surely, was to hesitate, to mull over every possible consequence. No. That way you do nothing; that way stifles action.
I’m here now, that’s the reality and no point regretting or lamenting a lost life that might have been. Be glad for what it was, he tried to convince himself, a bonus. Not existing is the default.
The ship exited subspace. A graphic informed him of the Kintra-machine base. A tiny dot fifteen million kilometres away. He was on a set course. He tried consoling himself with the thought that at least the Kintra would suffer a devastating loss. Surely they could not neutralist the threat, surely the Elusivers had ensured that?
Within visual range. The Machine structure was like a spider’s web of silver-grey connected spokes, but with a beetle at its centre – a dark mirrored metal dome with legs extending. Roidon, though, struggled to accept that this was their hub of operations.
Something approached. A probe. It scanned his vessel, then returned to the hub. A larger vessel now. Inevitably it fired at him; warnings came up of systems damaged, although not enough to risk setting off his payload. He knew he was already within sufficient range to cause devastating damage. He was even disappointed by such an obvious approach. Yes, he was now unable to use engines. Yes, he had no shielding for essential systems. Those were irrelevances, he appreciated, as the countdown warning activated; some kind of trigger response system, he realized
And what do you turn your mind to in the last minute of your existence? So much. So much unresolved; his life, the nature of the universe, of existence. The conundrum. Nothingness for eternity? How curious. And how curiously serene he felt at that prospect. Not quite total acceptance, more an acknowledgement.
And the voice crowding his thoughts got louder. ‘Roidon. We can save you.’
No you can’t, he thought. Every failsafe is in place. Embrace the inevitable.
Twenty seconds. His mind raced once more, but only for a few seconds, then settled on these such simple words of a philosopher he could not name: When you die the universe ends.
With twelve seconds left his perception began to shift. He was no longer aware of the rest of his ship. He was moving away from his ship. A separate entity. And then the ship moved away from him increasingly rapidly until it was just a dot. Yet the flash of white was so bright it dazzled him, though he knew he was safe. With no air to be disrupted there could be no damaging blast wave. And now he was being carried by the probe into the web.
Hope. Could there be any? A future?
; He’d been here before. This white room. He was back in his organic body. Or at least a body that looked like his.
Its voice metallic. ‘Another chance, Roidon. We indulge you as much as we forgive your transgressions,’ the machine entity said, from all about him but with no appearance.
‘No. No more deals. No more sides.’
‘Then we eliminate you.’
‘Okay then. I don’t care.’
‘We understand you to be lying.’
‘I understand I am in the midst of a war in which I want no part.’
‘They played you, Roidon. Does that not hurt your pride?’
‘They played me. You played me. What difference does it make? And as for pride, I’m beyond that.’
‘Our study of your psychology suggests no significant diminution of ego.’
‘You don’t even have any concept of what it is to be living.’
‘Yet we give you life. They take it away.’
‘They failed this time.’
‘They will try again.’
‘Why should they bother?’
‘Because you are an inconvenience. Because you have no affiliation.’
‘Then why should your relationship to me be any different?’
‘We retain the knowledge of your work in assisting our ascendancy’
‘By default. We defeated the Elusivers not in aid of you.’
‘That does not negate the outcome. Therefore we indulge you.’
‘A sense of fairness! Well, in that case, send me back in this body to Earth.’
‘We will provide you with the means to do so and to live in freedom, on one condition.’
‘Go on.’
‘That you destroy the Elusivers ship in which they held you.’
Roidon considered that ... for all of two seconds. ‘OK. It’s a deal.’
In what seemed like an instant later he was on the flight deck of a ship, travelling in some kind of hyperspace, seated – in what was recognizably his organic body – in a luxurious but functional chair, a console array surrounding him. And he knew, without compunction, he would carry out the Kintra’s request.
* * *
57
The thing stopped him only a few metres from his car. A metal creature – an arachnid about ten centimetres high. When it approached, scuttling lithely across the parched ground, he initially thought it was some desert creature, the rare type that was specially adapted to this hot arid environment. After all, he wouldn’t have expected something familiar. But this thing regarded him with a disturbing intelligence. Its eyes on stalks jutting forward, following him as he moved around it.
‘What do you want from me?’ he asked, not really expecting an answer.
A creaking sound emanated from it, but the words were there in his mind: Your central neural pattern.
‘You want my mind?’
Affirmative
‘Why?’
For the data.
‘What use would you make of it?’
To enrich ourselves.
Now Torbin was quite prepared to believe he was hallucinating. The heat had been relentless in stifling his higher reasoning. And on the surface this creature defied all rational thought. Yet there was something familiar about it. Something not only in its shape but in the way it regarded him that brought about a surge of recognition, a tingling through his body as if a mild electric probe had touched his spine.
‘No,’ he said to it, having curiously a sense that taking his neural pattern involved dying in the process. ‘I value my life.’
We are here to optimize life. Humans are imperfect. We can transpose you into a more highly adapted being.
‘I don’t like the sound of that,’ he told it.
It is inevitable you will cease to exist in your current form. We offer immortality.
‘I’m fine as I am, thank you.’ He manoeuvred around the creature only for it to move nearer as if magnetically drawn. His car irised opened and he jumped in, flinging himself on the seat. He turned to see the creature moving toward the car, to only be closed off from entry at the last second.
‘Take me home,’ he told it. Then reconsidered. ‘No. Take me to Edurnal labs.’ – his last place of employment. The ground rushed away, the undulations of the desert a blur.
The encounter with the creature hardly seemed real. Could it really be the product of a nascent psychosis? He needed something to anchor him to reality. Emelda had been his obvious first choice. Yet his image of her was pallid, lacking detail, like trying to remember someone from a dream despite the sense of it having been vivid. But even the fading memory of a dream has some emotion associated; now he just remembered a woman he was attracted to. Could it be he no longer loved her? She had been distant lately, unresponsive. And the sex: a sense of failure every time. It was as if they had only been together for a few weeks – when he was still desperately trying not to disappoint her. And yet he could bring to mind memories going back years – of their meeting, of holidays. But something had broken the spell. Of course, he told himself, it had to have been the accident. Perhaps it was he that had changed, some crucial aspect of his personality that only others could see, that only someone who knew him so intimately. This is why he had to find that connection with one important part of his past.
But when the car touched down at the Edurnal labs, there was nothing. It meant nothing.
‘Why?’ he said out loud.
He listened, if only for some imagined voice. Yet he was hearing something: a bass sound so low as to be more felt than heard; it had been there in the background for a while, he realized, just hadn’t paid any attention to it. It reminded him of a rumble from a whale. It stopped for a few seconds and then resumed. He couldn’t decipher anything from it so got out of the car, walked to the security gate.
The automated system still accepted his scanned ident, opening the gate. After all, he was still an employee here even though he felt like an impostor. No, that wasn’t quite true, he soon reasoned. It was as if – a dream, where what should be the familiar is instead intimidating.
The low rumble continued. Maybe this was a new experiment, the sound resonating. He knew that very low frequencies can bring about paranoia and fear. He was standing in the courtyard, unable to walk while his mind was filled with the image of a gigantic tokamak chamber creating immense energies. And, the thought then struck him, whatever research this place was primarily engaged in he was only ever on the periphery of it. They were doing something that was out of his competence league, and – at least since the accident – his employers were merely humouring him, accommodating his mental affliction. But he knew if he went in there today his number would finally be up. No more allowances made for such ineptitude.
‘Get me out of here.’ He wasn’t sure why he said those words. They felt like an instinctive plea.
He looked around, for something, someone to approach this lost and now quite vulnerable man. His sight was drawn upwards as the sun broke through, dispersing clouds, into his eyes. And it seemed to intensify.
Then the strangest thing. He was no longer in his place of work but eight thousand kilometres south, back in the hot semi-desert of Nevada. Standing facing the shack where Roidon did his research.
Torbin collapsed onto the hard cracked ground. Even though the heat was penetrating through his pants from where he sat, and the sun stinging his neck, he could not get up. The heat, if nothing else, was in some perverse way a balm to his mental torment. Let it consume me, he thought.
Then a shadow spread over. He felt himself being lifted off the ground and hoisted along into the shack. The cool air bringing Torbin to his senses.
‘I don’t know why this has to be so damn accurate,’ commented the man he now knew to be Roidon.
‘Accurate?’ Torbin questioned, his mind still in turmoil.
‘Never mind. Can you get down the steps by yourself?’
‘Yes. I think I can.’
He followed Roidon down into
the lab area, that question still repeating in his head – accurate? When the lights went on it felt like an oddly welcoming sight. Familiar; workplace familiar. He surveyed round to see if it remained as how he last remembered it and took comfort in the array of shiny flashing equipment.
‘Is there something I need to know,’ Torbin asked, ‘about what happened to me?’
Roidon nodded, sagely, as if he knew everything about Torbin. ‘I guess I’d have to tell you sooner or later, there were bound to be inconsistencies a man like you would pick up on.’
‘Don’t keep anything from me. Is it about the accident? Something’s happened to my mind, hasn’t it.’
‘Your true mind is safe – as far as I know. What you are in here is a copy, and this is a simulation of reality. A highly accurate one as am I.’
As Roidon explained further, Torbin felt any strength drain from his body. His legs now giving way as if a marionette had had its strings cut. Roidon caught him and helped him onto a chair, and said, ‘I can only imagine this to be on a par with being told you’re an illegitimate child, by a most trusted and loved parent.’
No, this had to be worse, he thought but couldn’t even speak.
‘All right, I understand there can be no real comparisons to what you’re going through right now,’ Roidon sensed. ‘It hasn’t been easy for me either. But I’ve learned to just get on with the work.’
‘Work.’ Torbin forced the word out. ‘What work can we do here if it’s not real?’
‘As a scientist, you surely understand the validity of running simulations to find a suitable model? Well, that’s all we need to do. Here where it’s safe to experiment.’
A cacophony of thoughts spun around Torbin’s mind. He shook his head. ‘I’m not right,’ he admitted. ‘Not right in the head. I’m no use to you here.’