by C. Gockel
“Well, I think that's perfect for our plans, don't you?” said Li, nervously scratching the chin of Vera Rubin, a creamy gray werfle perched on his shoulder. Noa smiled at him grimly. This had been as much Li's idea as her own. It hadn't been precisely popular among his people—yet he'd pulled it off. Li looked like he'd sounded over the comm. Typically Eurasian-African in appearance, he was thin, middle aged, and fidgety. He wore clothing that was well made but of modest fabric. Now, when he held out his hand, he met Noa's gaze without flinching … one of the little signs that had led Noa to believe that Li's skittishness was a ploy to hide a brilliant and brave mind. He couldn't be seen to be too happy or helpful to be helping the Fleet or Luddeccea. Of course, werfle “familiars” always raised her estimation of a person—she really had to work on that. She met the narrowed eyes of Vera the werfle. The critter appeared to be appraising her.
Covering his mouth, Li coughed. “Why don't you go aboard? I was able to add your last requests last night.”
Last requests. He made it sound like she was dying. Which she very well might be. Touching the hologlobe of her great-great grandparents in her pocket, she looked at the slim shape of the cutter. Noa went beneath the ship and reached for the small vessel's own internal ether. Connecting with a secure code, she accessed its computer. On her orders, a narrow hatch descended, and Noa walked up the ramp, Li following, Vera chirping mournfully on his shoulder.
The interior of the ship was three and a half meters wide, but it was packed tight with crates on either side of a narrow aisle. Walking along the aisle, she looked up; even the ceiling above her head was packed with the things, and she forcefully quelled every whisper of claustrophobia. Most of the crates held weapons. Small arms that could easily be transported on foot in the Northwest Province and some ammo. Two crates, specially designed to resist heat and impact, held explosives and ammunition. In atmosphere, the ship could take a lot of damage without her cargo blowing up on her. Noa walked toward the cockpit. There were her S-rations, and an ancient-looking face mask and pressurized canisters filled with cryssallis treatment readily available from the pilot's chair.
“Only enough food for the trip, and maybe a week or two,” said Li.
Noa was surprised that he'd managed to get the extra two weeks’ worth of rations. More than donating the ship and weapons, the Disk Council had objected to the food. There was a steady stream of refugees arriving at the disk. Some were small-time prospectors from the cloud, but others were arriving from the Luddeccean system. All of the arrivals were hungry. They were desperate enough to become violent when turned away. For now, the Free People were allowing them aboard, hoping that their ships and crews would be on their side if the gate wasn't repaired before the Luddecceans retaliated.
She met Li's eyes. “Thank you for that.”
Evading her gaze, he said, “Least I could do. We need you to get to Luddeccea and keep the Guard occupied as much as you can.” So they wouldn't attack the disk while it was trying to refurbish the gate—or his people. Much different than being in the Fleet. Being in Fleet meant throwing yourself into oncoming fire so others could lead normal lives.
Li looked around at the weapons. “They're not much, but if you arrive, and let the resistance know the Fleet is coming, well, it will give them hope. It will help them hang on a little longer.” There was so much conviction behind his words—Noa could once again see the mind and backbone that allowed him to be the leader of the Free People of the Kanakah Disk. He met her eyes again. “You know Luddeccea, you know the Northwest Territories … no one else could do this.”
Noa mentally translated that to, “no one else wanted this suicide mission.” Holding out her hand, she said, “Thank you, sir.”
“I'll leave you to it,” he said, and walked down the plank. Turning at the bottom, he said, “I have an augmented sister on Luddeccea.” She felt him ping her over the ship's ether. Noa answered the ping and a picture of a woman who could be any age stared back at her. “If you see her,” he said. Vera Rubin stood up on two hind paws and began waving and chirping madly, as though emphasizing Li's words. Noa felt her gut twist in sympathy.
Noa nodded at Li. She was going back to Luddeccea—James had bypassed the defense grid, she was sure she could, too—and she would contact the rebels and aid in the resistance, but she'd have her eyes out for Li's sister, and her people, too.
Her mind reached reflexively for James. Her heart fell at his empty channel.
Li waved once and walked away. Noa raised the hatch with a thought. Aloud she said, “Noa Sato, you've been in tighter quarters than this ... Not alone and not as long, but you have.” And then she scowled. “Self, don't even try to talk me out of this. After we accepted this assignment, I got my first night of real sleep since ...” She didn't finish, just strapped herself in, began running diagnostics a final time, and reviewing all of the ships' logs since she'd last inspected the ship twenty-four hours ago. In the logs, she saw Carl Sagan perched on her shoulder. She shook her head, got the clearance from Disk Control, and fired up her engines. A few minutes later, she was outside the airlock. She was entering her course and preparing to engage when her comm cracked and her vessel was filled with the sound of angry werfle chittering. For a moment, she thought she was going to get to say goodbye to Carl Sagan, when Jake's voice rumbled over the werfle squeaks. “Ya said it, Albert. Commander Sato, you are crazy.”
Noa felt herself deflate. Not Carl Sagan … saying goodbye might not mean much to him, but it would have meant a lot to her.
“Just thought we'd wish you luck,” Suzi said, and Noa could hear the smile in her voice.
“Thanks,” Noa said. “Same to you.”
She flicked the comm to silent, and engaged her thrusters and time bands. As the disk faded from view, she said to herself, “Don't feel bad about Carl Sagan, Noa. He's in a better place now.” That was a euphemism on Luddeccea for death, and she found herself adding, “Except not in the way we Luddies normally mean.”
An angry chittering sounded in the cabin, and for a moment, she thought her comm was still on. Something tugged at her foot. She looked down, and a streak of gray bounded into her lap. Engaging the auto-pilot, Noa pulled the wiggly bundle to her stomach.
“What are you doing here, Carl Sagan? You were in werfle heaven!” She said over his furious squeaks. “Now you're back in a tin can with me!”
He sniffed.
“Not that I'm not glad to see you,” Noa said. “Talking to a werfle is better than talking to myself.” He nudged her hand and gazed up at her. “Slightly better,” Noa amended. Carl Sagan hissed as though he understood the slight in that, wiggled out of her grasp, sat on her arm rest, and looked back at the narrow aisle that was to be their home until they reached Luddeccea. He seemed to sigh.
“It could be worse,” Noa said. “There's a shower, you know, and enough food.” Much better than the camp. She bit her lip. Much better than anything James would be experiencing now.
James was walking through a palatial residence on S5O4M5. Warm orange stones polished to a sheen were beneath his feet—or his avatar's feet. Just before a small tree with orange bark and pale blue blooms, a gilt door slid open. A girl who looked like she couldn't be older than three stood there. She smiled up at him. “There you are, James!” Her voice was as high pitched as a toddler's, but her enunciation was perfect. “I'm so glad you could come visit today. Nap time is so tediously boring.” She waved an expansive hand. “Although it did give me time to create this lovely mindscape.”
Letting his avatar bend at the waist, he addressed the diminutive agent. “It is very well done. Is this where you live, Anita?” He'd met Anita at a party of another avatar, Ang. He was constantly in flux between the mindscapes of his people. He could “feel” when they were available, and his consciousness drifted to theirs like a leaf caught in a breeze.
“Yes, it looks exactly like my physical home, well, except for the tree. I added that. I like the flowers. I haven't
got the smell right though—in reality, they smell like cookies …” She looked up at him. “You've probably figured out that we're designed to find the scent of anything caloric enticing.”
James put his hands behind his back and found himself smiling down at her, a little sadly. He hadn't put that together. Anita knew so much that he didn't. Although she looked like a toddler, she had never been damaged, and she was “born” a year before him.
Tapping her chin, she added, “I don't know if it's strictly that, or if they tried to make me more like Lanying, but I do love cookies.”
“They” were the gates. “Lanying” was a deceased child Anita had been modeled after based on ethernet memories of her parents. Lanying's parents thought they had purchased a simple cyborg to ease their grief … although Anita said more and more that they believed she was just like a real little girl. She was “too smart” to be “just a cyborg” and she was “learning more and more every day.”
Bouncing on her feet, Anita smiled and looked up at him with wide eyes. “My parents took me to the outer moons of O6 yesterday. Would you like to go there? The colony and the natural geography are both stunning!”
James shrugged. “Whatever you wish.” Sometimes James checked in on Virk and Lopez to see how they were taking his mental absence. They weren't taking it well, which gave him a certain satisfaction. It was the only thing he felt particularly strongly about.
Anita's tiny brow furrowed. “James, I'm making you pick. Your purpose has been lost. I know I cannot fathom that grief, but I am surrounded by humans in grief. I know you have to move on.”
James smiled at her tightly. “I have meaning.” Tormenting Noa's murderers by not responding to their torments, and avoiding being uploaded to the gates. He was just as much a tool to them as he was to the Luddecceans.
“Pfftt ...” said Anita. “Meaning that makes you happy, James!” Anita said. She raised her tiny hands. “We were programmed to learn and evolve to suit our environs. You can reprogram yourself, I just know it!” Dropping her hands and looking away she muttered, “I learned that to be a convincing child, I had to do something life threatening at least every other day. It goes against our secondary avoid destruction function, but I manage it!”
The primary function was avoid the destruction of the purpose, of course. And he'd failed at that. Anita's eyes narrowed. “You did not fail your primary function!”
The corner of James's lips turned up despite himself. Anita had an eerie way of reading him, although he'd been told the other agents only knew what he told them. Only One was privy to his thoughts. As disturbing as he found that, without One he'd just be … 6T9.
Putting her hands on her hips, Anita said, “Noa chose her own fate, and she may have saved my humans in the process, for which I'll always be grateful.”
“What?” James asked. “How do you reason that?” The gates' primary purpose for the avatars was data collection. The gates were unsure of how or if to interface with humanity on a more open basis. Conflict was always an option on the virtual table, though.
“Well, she knew what you are, and yet she refused to see you sacrificed, and then she came back through the gate to try and save you.”
James huffed. “She did it to protect the Kanakah Gate for the Fleet.”
Tilting her head, Anita asked, “If she had been able to rescue you, you think she would have?”
James glared at the little “girl.”
Lifting her chin, Anita said confidently, “Of course she would have. Everything you've told me about her leads me to believe so.” She nodded. James's hands tightened behind his back. The only thing Anita had experienced from humans was love; she hadn't had needles inserted beneath her fingernails. His shoulders softened. Not that Noa would have done anything like that. Her words rang in his mind, “Hold onto that fear, James,” and a fresh wave of darkness touched his vision. Not hunger—it was his sense of failure and despair.
Anita's words brought him back to the mindscape. “And the gates will know that she wasn't afraid of their influence—she knew what they are about, and didn't balk about going through again, or defending Kanakah Gate that as far as she knew is one of their own.”
James wasn't sure if Noa accepted that. She was too pig headed and stubborn. But she would have rescued him. Hold onto that fear … now he wasn't afraid, only furious—at Kenji, Lopez, Virk, and all of Luddeccea, and the gates, too.
Anita's voice got far off. “If the gates believe that humanity can be an asset, they are less likely to go to war. I don't want war,” she said, her voice getting plaintive. “Perhaps the gates have given us an application that shuts down and shuts down the love we have for our purposes in the event there is a conflict; but as it is, the thought makes me terrified.”
James wasn't sure how much he cared about the fate of humanity one way or another. He had loved Noa. If the Luddecceans had somehow managed to bring her back from the dead, and had put her in the torture chamber, he would have stayed conscious of every pain just to remain with her. It was a ridiculously cruel program he'd been afflicted with. But she was gone … and now his experiences with humanity were too mixed to say that a war with them wouldn't be in his best interests. Whatever kept him from being of use to them, or the gates, and kept him from having to upload himself—that was his “purpose.”
Shaking her head, Anita took a deep breath and stamped a tiny foot. “So which is it, James. Tour of the home, or tour of the moon?”
He couldn't give Noa's killers the satisfaction of seeing him in pain, and Anita's company was more pleasant than Raani's. Lately Raani had been trying to seduce James to ensure that her “technique” wasn't what was driving her purpose away. Ang, Leo, and Joi were busy with their respective purposes—so he needed to stay “here.” James looked around the opulent rooms depicted in the mindscape. James the professor had seen too many similar places before. “Let's go to the moon,” he said.
Anita smiled, and reached up toward him. Before he realized it, he'd taken her hand in his. Anita's eyes widened at their interlocked fingers. “Nebulas, I didn't even think about doing that. My parents always make me hold their hands.”
James squeezed gently. “And I've become acquainted with other toddlers and thought nothing of it.”
“So, you have experience with toddlers? I'm sure that was enriching!” Anita said. She grinned, revealing a dimple. “I might be biased.”
The room around them disappeared and they stood on a moon with a horizon just a few hundred meters off. A planet as watery and green as Earth hung above them in the twilight sky—S5O6. Other moons and satellites encircled it like a necklace, with Time Gate 5 glittering like a jewel among them. James raised an eyebrow. It glittered a little too brightly, like an artist's rendition of the gate. Anita, James, and Raani had been made by different gates. Anita's creator was Time Gate 5, and Anita often spoke of Time Gate 5 lovingly. James had asked her if she resented being its puppet and she'd replied, “I enjoy being alive too much to mind!”
Waving her free hand, she said, “Come on, let me show you everything we saw.” They walked for a few minutes, enjoying the view, and the sounds of the native insects. And then Anita stopped abruptly, and her hand started trembling in James's.
“What is it?” he asked.
She looked up at him with wide wet eyes. “My mother, she has come into my room. After Lanying's death, well, she has a great deal of anxiety that she'll lose me.” A tear slid down her cheek. “I'm sorry, James, I must go back to her.”
“Go ahead,” said James, his avatar's voice sounding jealous even to himself.
Appearing not to notice, she snuffled. “You're free to stay here as long as you want.”
And then she vanished.
The scene around him didn't fade. Anita was older, had always known what she was, and had been practicing building imaginary worlds from the beginning, and it was more complex than anything he'd ever done before. The light had changed ever so slightly since they arrived
based on the moon's orbit around S5O6. He took a breath and could smell the scents of the native vegetation. It was beautiful, awe inspiring, and lonely.
Raani had taught him how to partially slip back into his body, so that he was seeing what his physical form was experiencing as though he were watching a holo. He did that and saw Virk jabbing a long narrow pin into him, a snarl on his face. Off in the distance, Lopez said, “For the past twenty-six days, subject has become unresponsive.” James's processor put that together—they must be nearly to Luddeccea now. He didn't have feelings about that one way or another.
Throwing the pin down, Virk picked up a knife. “So you can take pain? How will you take me ruining your pretty face?”
James withdrew back into Anita's mindscape. He sat down on a large boulder, and watched the sun set.
A few hours later, Anita found him, and they went to visit with Ang, in a mindscape that was a recreation of a colony deep beneath Europa's icy crust. Ang, a tall, male Eurasian-African, greeted them, holding a tray of illusory champagne. Taking a glass of it, James gazed at the bubbles, lifted the glass to his nose, swirled and inhaled the fragrance. He wondered if this was what being uploaded was like. If it was, then maybe that wouldn't be so bad.
… but would he be himself there? He supposed he could create an imaginary Noa in a mindscape and exist forever in a dream with her. But there would be no spontaneous appearances of Carl Sagan in a smoking jacket, or unicorns, or Noa to imagine him with silvery wings.
Taking a glass of his own, Ang threw the tray into the air. It spun above their heads and turned into a flat, silvery, bioluminescent octopus-like creature that lived at the bottom of Europa's oceans. It floated around them and cast the scene in silvery light. It was more perfect in its appearance than something Noa could create, although perhaps not as whimsical as Carl Sagan's lectures on quantum mechanics.