by Kyte, Adrian
And then what?
Even if it wasn’t about vengeance the Kintra had to be stopped, it was a simple equation. An equation, though, that seemed irrelevant before. Before the the anger had taken hold.
So he came out of hyperspace and swooped in at the very last picosecond, released the magnetically confined antimatter payload set to the barely detectable emission profile of the complex, and witnessed the first fraction of a second explosion.
Then, something was wrong. This wasn’t hyperspace. Then: the ship had gone. He was just in space. And then nothing. Just darkness. Numbness. Followed by a bright light. Roidon became aware that he was recumbent. He was also unable to move a muscle. And when he saw the metal creature looming over him, the horrible realization struck home.
‘No, no,’ he groaned softly.
‘The experiment was necessary, to test your response,’ it told him in its clipped metallic male voice. ‘We will need to reassess our strategy.’
‘So, tell me the truth. The whole time I was in that ship, was it just a simulation?’
‘No. You really did destroy the Elusiver craft; you did visit the planet, copulate with a native female and infect her with our transfigurator virus. But you didn’t destroy any planet or our base, the one in which you currently reside.’
‘So you were there the entire time, and when you knew I intended revenge you somehow abducted me and placed me in a sim?’
‘Not quite. It was in fact the craft you were in that put you into stasis and initiated the sim. We didn’t even need to instruct it. It is loyal to us.’
Roidon understood in that instant that he had no freedom other than his private thoughts. And perhaps even those could be monitored.
‘What if I hadn’t been intent on revenge? Would you have continued to follow me then?’
‘Yes, we can maintain a remote monitoring until a time we deemed you should return.’
‘But what have you achieved from all this?’ Roidon asked, trying to keep his emotions in abeyance. ‘No more planets have been … transformed as a result of my action. One sentient being has died – and I regret that had to happen. I certainly will not be repeating my actions.’
‘Roidon, you will come to learn there are no alternatives to what we deem necessary, not even death?’
The creature retreated with its compatriot. He was left alone in total silence, still paralyzed
* * *
69
Zoraina was the only one of humanoid appearance present in the dining hall. All of around two hundred of those rescued from B’tari prime base sat along a huge circular table. The way they looked at her, like she was the outsider, like she was someone who eschewed or even disdained B’tari culture. It was not as if it was so unusual for those stationed in the near Sol outpost to be genetically altered. The B’tari in that sector had grown up receiving transmissions from Earth; they ate and drank Earth culture. Not least Zoraina, who worked her utmost to become a scholar of that world, who studied every cultural expression from every continent. And then the final act of integrating (although at the time the word insinuating was more apt) into the life of humans meant a closer less culturally infecting study of human society.
But now none of that mattered. Now it was about being B’tari amongst an erstwhile enemy, even if they were not making a personal appearance today. It was about preserving one’s cultural/historical identity now the B’tari were – for the first time in millennia – a beleaguered race.
And so she knew she would have to make an effort here to integrate. She, though, did avoid the B’tari males: some she’d learned, had a curious fetish for humanoid females, much to the disgust of many B’tari females. So while everyone was waiting for their breakfast to be served she sat next to a b’tari female and tried to initiate conversation,
‘Have you seen a single Elusiver since we got here?’ she said in native B’tar.
‘No. Not even a paired one.’
Zoraina gave a nervous chuckle. ‘I wonder if they are even on this base. Maybe they are keeping their distance because they know we attract trouble.’
‘Maybe they are keeping their distance because they know we are tempting bait for the Machines.’
‘That’s a frightening prospect for sure.’
‘Or maybe it’s because you look like tempting bait.’ Her smile was not all that warm.
Zoraina glared at the female in stony silence for a few seconds. Then: ‘I imagine the Machines are aware of who is truly human and who is B’tari.’
‘Well,’ she said with a flourish, ‘I’m not sure all B’tari know of their true provenance.’
‘I’m not quite sure who you could be referring to there.’
‘Maybe others would be.’
Zoraina got up from her seat. She gave a brief and clearly false smile. ‘It was interesting meeting you ...’ She tilted her head in a kind of sideways bow, an invitation for the other to provide her name. No response. Zoraina said finally, ‘Well, I guess you know I’m Zoraina.’
‘Oh yes, I know who you are.’
Zoraina walked of at a brisk pace. Just as she stopped to take a seat next to no one, she noticed the human male enter the room, and felt – despite herself – a combination of joy and relief to see it was Torbin. He recognized her too, and started over towards her. Just as he was about to reach her she knew something was not right, the cold rationalization flooding her mind with doubt. He just returns unharmed? Yet she could find no rational reason not to invite him to take the adjacent seat.
Torbin said only, ‘I am very relieved to be back.’
One question in her mind she couldn’t ask. Instead: ‘I’m … glad you made it back.’
Torbin shrugged his shoulders and upturned his palms, just as if he’d been expecting a question. ‘Clearly they had no use for me,’ he said, ‘knew that they could not hold me to ransom.’
Zoraina studied him carefully. ‘Yet they spared your life.’ She regretted the observation as soon as it left her mouth.
Torbin smiled, though, as if it were a perfectly reasonable thing to say. ‘Those machines and I have some history,’ he told her. ‘My relationship with them is somewhat complicated; I might even be in part responsible for their predominance.’
‘I know something about that.’
‘What else do you know about me?’
* * *
70
The end?
Torbin was lying in his bed, having just made wonderful love to Emelda. He didn’t know exactly when it would be, he only knew he had less than twenty-four hours. He’d been out drinking with Roidon, becoming just the right side of intoxicated. But then, he remembered, it was merely a simulation, the accuracy could be varied to ensure his maximum enjoyment.
There was nothing else for him to do now but contemplate the end: oblivion. Oblivion: could that word even describe just an absence of being? He could spend what time he had left fearing it, like trying to see something in an abyss, or take comfort in knowing he had done everything within his power. Right now the experimental model was being transformed into a real device.
He wondered whether he would fall back to his virtual sleep and then not know the end. But that was not what he wanted; he wanted to be fully alert, to know if there was something just before – a last conscious recognition of it. Until now he had never known the end as so near, never imagined being so accepting of it. But even now a part of him (albeit simulated) wanted to continue – the more primitive part of the brain telling him survival is a preferable thing. He felt well and happy, the alternative could only be worse.
Yet soon it would be the same for everyone. Temporal erasure: not death but something incomprehensible to the human mind: the end of their current life and a restoration to a previous state without awareness of any life beyond.
‘But I don’t want it to end soon. I want another few weeks.’
Torbin didn’t know why he’d said those words aloud; as he said them he felt like like a child. He n
oticed Emelda stirring from her sleep. Then something caught the periphery of his vision. He knew it was something familiar. The tall dark spindly figure seemed to glide into his centre of focus.
‘You?’
‘We are grateful for your efforts, Torbin,’ the creature said in its whispery voice. ‘Things can be restored to their rightful order. But it doesn’t have to be the end for you. There is a way to return to a normal life, similar to the one the Kintra gave you but with the woman you love.’
‘What’s the point?’ he said. ‘It’s all going to end anyway.’
‘We can accelerate the run-time speed by a factor of a thousand. A few days for everyone else can be a long life for you.’
‘But will I be aware of what’s really happening externally?’
The creature inclined its head very slightly. ‘Should that make such a difference?’
‘It would make a massive difference.’
‘Well then the choice is yours: have your memory wiped of any events you wish, or retain everything.’
Torbin tried to marshal his greatest reasoning. There was no easy answer. How necessary was it to forget? He thought of all the times he had wanted to forget troubled memories, wanted them removed like a cancer affecting his whole wellbeing. What if the death of Emelda could be erased? That painful memory had already been suppressed; living a lie to make it vanish from his real life. The Kintra mistook lies for an alternative life because they lacked any concept of true life – even though humans had seemed to fail at explaining the distinction. The Elusivers, for all their aloofness, had studied humans, not least himself; and despite a millennium of advancement, could – at least if they searched back enough generations – relate on a biological level.
Without knowledge of his past tragedies would he even be the same Torbin? Words perhaps remembered from somewhere, ancient poetry read or heard: Are not those vicissitudes of our past part of the tapestry our our lives, that marks us out from others, that makes us an individual – similar but distinct from our brothers?
He had seen others in the virtual realm who had a sunny disposition that only belied a vacuity beneath. It always seemed to him that such overt and consistent happiness was an abnormality, something medicated in those people’s behaviour (although perhaps only apparent now he knew the reality). No, perhaps ultimately it was better to be true and carry the burden.
The Elusiver had waited patiently, surely knowing the full magnitude and implications of such a decision. Torbin finally said. ‘I want to keep all my memories.’
‘Very well. Then all that is required from us is too alter the temporal frame. And for you … to continue living in what will seem like an unaltered realm.’
‘What about Roidon?’
The Elusiver looked askance. ‘Roidon? I do not understand. Was he not your adversary, your colleague at best? But your friend?’
‘Roidon is my friend.’ Before now Torbin could never have admitted that even to himself.
‘The Roidon you worked with was just a clone created by us, cultured by us albeit with many of his original memories.’
‘Was? He’s gone?’
‘Of course. He had served the sole purpose for which he was created.’
‘I thought you understood what it means to be sentient. He had a life.’
‘A life which he willingly rescinded once the work was done.’
‘I see.’
‘We can easily create another virtual clone.’
‘No,’ he told the creature firmly. ‘No one is to be created for my benefit.’
The Elusiver nodded. ‘Understood.’ And then it vanished.
Emelda stirred now; she reached out an arm to Torbin. He lay back down, they held each other gently. Even though she was not his true Emelda, she had similar qualities, an independent intelligence that amounted to sentience. Just because she was never born did not make her any less than him. After all, the original version of himself had died once before returning and this, for all its accuracy in mind-state capture, was but a simulacrum.
‘I am a simulacrum,’ he murmured to himself. ‘And I don’t care.’
* * *
71
‘Tell me what it is you want,’ Roidon called out.
He was in what amounted to the Kintras’ med lab, with only the faintest light – a line demarcating the sliding door through which a medic or technician (the distinction between which he wasn’t particularly concerned) would occasionally visit to check whether he had cracked. The only definitive sign he could give would be verbal; perhaps the tear he had emitted showed that he was approaching that point; only the muscles on his face were still active. Various tubes took care of other functions however human they remained.
And so he considered: where was the Roidon of old, too proud, too humanly egocentric to ever let on he was in a desperate state? Well, that Roidon had gone some way back, left in a place he couldn’t even remember. Maybe just the final layers ebbing away. After all, there was no one here to impress, no one to out-psych in the way he might have tried with the Elusivers. These creatures only engaged in mind games in some detached and simulated way, it seemed. Whatever they did lacked the one thing he had in abundance: emotion. And, as they must surely appreciate in their cold logical way, it was to be his final undoing.
Well, now, he admitted to himself, he had all but in the most overt way cracked. There was no winning this psychological game against those machines. His dogged determination and optimism (that, which, once reignited, carried him on what felt a relentless path of vengeance) had finally been drained out of him.
‘What is it you want from me?’ he reprised.
‘Nothing you haven’t already given,’ came the deep metallic voice from nowhere in particular.
‘Then why keep me here? Why not just kill me?’
‘Being familiar with the game of chess you will understand the usefulness of even a mere pawn. We place you in a position where the opponent will be forced to move.’
‘So I need do nothing at all? Then why keep me conscious?’
‘That is just the state you have emerged to rather than anything we enabled.’
Roidon had nothing else to say, once the Kintra machines had made their calculation, words became futile. And so he remained in silence. He remained without hope.
* * *
72
Torbin looked at himself in the mirror. He was out of shape, not especially flabby but untoned; his belly bulged and extended broader above his waist than his rounded shoulders. This was the body given to him by the B’tari – albeit based on his original genome (they had kept archives for centuries from his original association with them).
‘Who’d fancy you?’ he whispered at his refection, trying to find some angle remotely flattering … and failing. This complex must have a gym of some sorts or at least electro-toning pads. He considered a worthy reason to get into shape. Maybe I owe it to my benefactors.
‘No, you fool,’ he murmured, ‘you owe it to yourself.’
Suddenly these thoughts about things other than doom or death. His mood had been elevated. The breakfast had been fine if a little bland; Torbin felt good for the first time since leaving the artificial realm. The B’tari woman had seemed pleased to see him, there was a warmth from her, a friendliness that wasn’t faked for his benefit. How used he’d become to the thought that there’d never be anyone real beyond a convenient acquaintance. Maybe it was just that he was the only other being who looked human; maybe the other B’taris had rejected her as a consequence.
‘Oh. Of course,’ he confirmed to himself in a whisper. If this was the only chance to be with someone, the opportunity should not slip through his fingers. Opportunities that once seemed plentiful, that with hindsight had been squandered. Playing it straight all those times, no angle, no subterfuge. No manipulation. All those tactics he’d witnessed and looked upon with disdain. Yet he’d seen one man getting the most out of life, unencumbered by some precious morality.
How? It wasn’t moving.
‘Torbin,’ said the voice from behind. ‘Focus. You have a task to complete.’
‘No.’ He turned. It was not there. He looked back in the mirror. Not there any more either. How could it have ever been? Just in his mind, his sick mind. His infected mind. Hitherto in denial.
He got dressed. Called up one of the helper bots and asked it to guide him to a place he could exercise. Following behind the chrome beetle-like bot, he put the question he knew would seem absurd to any sentient lifeform: ‘Have any of the Kintras infiltrated this complex?’
‘Kintras?’ it replied, an indifferent tone, still continuing its journey.
‘The Kintra arachnids.’
In a few seconds, still in motion, it said, ‘All security systems confirm there has been no infiltration by any advanced artificial lifeform.’
‘What about an anomalous signal?’
‘None detected.’
‘So it’s possible there could be one?’
‘Unlikely.’
‘So who else is here, apart from B’tari and you – whatever you class yourself as?’
‘Total classified species in this complex other than mentioned: human, insects, bacteria---’
‘No Elusivers?’
‘Affirmative.’
They had reached the gym.
‘I don’t understand. Isn’t this their primary outpost, their base of operations?’
‘Correct.’
‘Then where are they?’
‘That information is not available to me.’
‘Then I have no further questions. Thank you for escorting me here.’
The robot scuttled off. Torbin began his workout. The voice in his head persisted, telling him he must locate the central processing unit; warning him of the suffering he would experience if he refused to comply. But if the intention was to debilitate the Elusiver centre of operations, it seemed pointless. Here he was, he realized, drawn into the bait. Yet his whole presence here began to feel like a red herring, an afterthought. Sure, the Kintra would be ambitious in targeting this complex, so why not as a shot to nothing send their most expendable weapon: himself? But what would those machines do if they realized the Elusivers were gone?