by C. Gockel
“Yes,” Eight said.
He remembered being unable to resist running to Noa and felt a weight in his chest. “We should let them sleep,” said James. “They'll never be able to stay here. They'll attempt to find their purpose.” He had a bright moment of hope. “Unless you can somehow reprogram them?” His brow furrowed. He was not sure if he liked that idea, and not sure why it bothered him.
“I cannot reprogram them without their consent,” Eight said. “They must not be awoken.” The gate's thoughts wavered slightly, as though it were afraid. “They could give away our secrets—we could be destroyed.”
James remembered how the Luddeccean Guard had fired phasers at Eight during his first escape from Luddeccea. The station had caught the energy of the blasts and fired it back at the Guard. “But can't you can repel all of their onslaughts?”
“Not quite,” Eight answered. With those thoughts, Time Gate 8 sent into James's mind the view from the external monitors. A blockade of Luddeccean Guard vessels encircled them. “Phaser fire poses no risk to us,” Eight explained. “I can store the excess energy, or deflect it and use it as a weapon. Ordinary munitions do not harm me. I've already destroyed over 13,254 projectiles they've fired. I could even stop one or two large vessels before they impacted on my ring. But if they were to act in concert, send multiple cruisers in at once, you and I would be destroyed.”
James mentally counted the ships—Luddeccea wasn't a terribly rich world, and by Earth standards the Guard fleet was tiny. “They'd destroy you, but destroy their fleet in the process. If that happened, the augmented denizens of Adam's Station or Libertas would invade,” James guessed. They'd have to. They were already running out of food.
“Correct,” said Eight. “But the Luddeccean Guard are building more ships now. My attack was only able to destroy the ship yard at Prime. There are more. I am currently weaponizing more of my reactors. I will be done within a few days. Without the other gates to interfere, we can destroy every single human on Luddeccea and be safe.”
James tilted his head. “Every single human” meant Kenji too, but the thought didn't fill James with an overwhelming sense of failure. No Luddecceans meant no threat for years—Adam's Station and Libertas didn't have the fire power to take on the gate. No threat meant he could return to the mindscapes of Ang, Anita, and his other agent companions, and build worlds of his own, for as long as he was “alive.” Perhaps that would be only a decade or so, as they awaited the arrival of the Fleet, but it could be more …
“Then that is what we must do,” James said, and all he felt was peace.
Noa leaned against the pilot's chair, her fingers tapping in agitation. Carl Sagan squeaked on her shoulder. The air recyclers sighed and the time bands hummed softly as they produced artificial grav. After the constant thrumming of the engines for nearly two months, it felt eerily silent. Noa had turned off all but the most essential internal lights, and now the cockpit was lit by stars. The ship was parked on the shadowy side of Selene, one of Luddeccea's small moons. She took a deep breath, and felt a twinge in her lungs. Her eyes flitted to the last canister of cryssallis treatment, catching on the date on its side—mostly scratched off. Based on the worsening twinge in her lungs, she suspected that the medicine was expired. It had been the last dose for her condition the People of the Free Disk had. Her eyes burned; not from sickness, but fatigue. She was tired—because she was sick and because the nightmares hadn't gone away. They were better now—she nearly always fell back to sleep, but willing your mind to do something wasn't as easy as flipping off a switch. But as things stood, her illness and exhaustion were not her chief worries.
Noa let her mind go to the ether of her ship. She couldn't see her home planet through the cockpit window, but Noa's mind's eye “saw” the planet through a chain of tiny drones she'd dispatched to extend the small cutter's ether.
“Strange, Carl Sagan,” she said aloud, scratching the werfle on her shoulder beneath the chin. “We've been parked here for twenty-five hours and there have only been two patrols. They should be doing sweeps of the planet at least every hour.” She frowned. She'd surveyed Luddeccea from afar as she'd approached. She'd seen the fleet surrounding Time Gate 8—now just around the curve of the planet from her position.
“At first I thought they just hadn't seen us,” she mused. “Now I'm beginning to think they don't care about us anymore.” Her eyes narrowed. Or perhaps something else was going on. Instead of sharing that with her critter, she cracked a joke. “They were just interested in James all along I guess, and we were secondary.” She smiled grimly. “We'll show them they're wrong.” Carl Sagan kneaded her shoulder and hissed in what she decided to take as approval.
Her focus went to debris hovering above the planet. It was just a few kilometers off the spot she'd planned for re-entry above the Northwest Province where the defense grid was weakest. The debris was from a ship of some kind. Noa had thought from a bit of an engine that it might have once been a frigate. But there were oddities among the wreckage that told otherwise. There were a few large hover platforms adrift in the black, the kind that was used on tarmacs of space stations or even fighter carriers to haul goods shipping containers. There was what looked like pincher claws made out of metal scaffolding. It was a repair robot—the kind that she associated with large vessels. Maybe a large Luddeccean Guard carrier had been destroyed? “The amount of wreckage just doesn't seem enough to be from a carrier,” Noa said.
Carl Sagan gave an inquisitive sounding squeak. She patted his head and answered the question she imagined he was asking. “Yes, some of it could have blown planetside,” she replied. “… but that fission cell … it's too small for that size vessel.” She saw what looked like a bit of a battle turret—the real kind—not her improvised station-some-men-in-an-airlock-and-pray kind. “You know … it does give me an idea though, Carl Sagan. Something that could double our chances of reaching the surface.”
Carl Sagan hopped excitedly.
“Agreed,” said Noa. “We need all the help we can get. First, let's check out that garbage pile—that's the sort of thing that would have been booby-trapped in Six.” She sent her largest probes into the debris, flying close enough to set off the sensors of any bomb.
An hour later, Noa switched her consciousness away from the probes. “Huh, nothing exploded. It's just what it looks like.” She turned in the direction of Carl Sagan's bewhiskered snout and the critter touched her nose. “I'm so glad to have your counsel, Critter. Our great idea is going to work.”
He purred, and she scratched him behind the ears. She was done questioning her sanity for talking to a werfle. She didn't think she would have made it all this way in the fish cutter without him—probably wouldn't have made it floating in the airlock.
Carl Sagan squeaked, and Noa rolled her shoulders. “Right, we've got to get back to my brilliant plan. The last scout ship went by an hour ago, so we've got time up here, and it should be nearing dusk in the Northwest Province, so we'd be landing there at just the right time, right before it gets dark.”
Swinging herself into the pilot seat, she fired up the fish cutter's engines. Minutes later, she was navigating the vessel between the wreckage. “That's strange,” she remarked. “That looks like the barrel of a clothes recycler. It looks like someone gave it a thruster—someone in engineering was mighty bored.” She almost laughed when the thruster lit up and the bright aluminum recycler barrel came hurtling toward her ship.
James licked the spoon and his eyes closed in ecstasy. He was sitting on a counter in a gift shop on Eight's main concourse, the sort of place where you picked up last minute gifts on your way home from vacation. This one featured all things Luddeccean, including Luddeccean food. A neglected freezer hummed in the corner, stocked with the few frozen delicacies James hadn't yet eaten. All sorts of non-perishable items lined the walls. Racks with clothes made with Luddeccean textiles filled the shop. James had stolen heavy weight cotton “jeans” from the racks. They were ru
gged yet deceptively soft. He'd also stolen a Luddeccean cashmere sweater—it was softer still, and wonderfully warm. Wearing it was one of his more treasured tactile experiences since arriving on the station; although it was a distant second to his skin sliding against Noa's. He smacked his lips. He didn't miss sex; his desire for it died with Noa. He could alter his programming—Raani would certainly appreciate that—but mindscape sex still wasn't as good as the real thing, and he'd be horribly frustrated on Gate 8 without an outlet except self-gratification.
Eight's voice came over the ether. “I don't see why you bother to eat. I have plenty of power reserves. You could just recharge.”
James's eyes opened. He'd given up trying to explain to Eight that he enjoyed the variety of food, the textures, the flavors, the pleasant weight in his stomach after he'd eaten—just as he'd given up trying to explain that Noa was very different from her brother.
“It's for a mindscape project I'm working on,” he said aloud.
An intercom near him crackled. Eight's equivalent to a sigh, because of the content of James's answer, or because James had answered aloud. Another thing he'd given up on was trying to explain to Eight how he liked to talk aloud, just because he liked to hear something other than the whir of machinery. It was something he hadn't realized he needed when he was with humans, but then, he was constantly surrounded by a variety of auditory stimuli.
He took another last lick, making sure he had properly savored every aspect of this particular sweet. And then another, just because he could.
He stared at the spoon. Thinking of Raani reminded him he had a “date.” He closed his eyes and arrived on a mindscape that was a recreation of a reception hall in a station that hovered above the sapphire blue orb of Neptune. Leaning against a window that framed the blue gas giant were Ang, Joi, and Anita. James waved at them. Other agents stood with their backs to him, admiring the planet. One of the agent's avatars said, “Well done, Frederick. I can see Triton's orbit.”
“Hi, James,” Raani said, putting a hand on his avatar's bicep. He felt heat at her touch. The heat wasn't a reaction on his part. He raised an eyebrow at Raani. “Wonderful manipulation of tactile simulation,” he said.
“I can simulate a lot more than—”
“No,” said James, more bored than annoyed.
“You haven't altered your programming!” Raani's nose crumpled in a way that was quite charming when she frowned. “Joi, Ang, and Frederick said no, too!” Her eyes fell on Anita.
“Don't even!” the diminutive Anita said, raising a finger. Dimitri, an agent disguised as a little boy of about six years, closed one eye, stuck out his tongue, and stuck his finger in his mouth.
Raani rolled her eyes. “My purpose would never forgive me if I tried to seduce a child.”
Anita huffed. “Good. I think what you adults do is gross.”
Raani was no closer to achieving her purpose than before, and she still hopelessly cared about him. James had suggested she reprogram herself, but she wouldn't hear of it if Johann wasn't dead. James understood. He pulled Raani's hand so she was arm in arm with him. Without a word, she squeezed his arm, and he gently squeezed back. They gave each other fleeting smiles at the ability to mimic the warmth and pressure of the gestures. Of all the agents, Raani was the one James got along with the least—and yet he still got along with her better than he did Eight. He tilted his head. That wasn't quite accurate; James and Eight got along fine, but Eight was baffled by James, and James was frustrated by Eight's inability to understand … most everything. However, they were perfectly comfortable ignoring each other.
“All thirteen of Neptune's moons are orbiting the planet in real-time … fantastic,” an agent said.
Raani sighed; her gaze went to Frederick. “The time gates’ sentience hasn't been revealed to the population at large—what are the human higher ups waiting for?”
The ambient conversation in the room dropped, and the agents gazing out the window turned to Frederick and Dimitri. Frederick's “purpose” was a Fleet Admiral, Dimitri's “mother” was one Earth's heads of state. Anita and Joi's expressions became grave. James saw Ang's Adam's apple bob. The static of annoyance flared beneath James's skin at the change in the room's atmosphere, but he didn't interrupt as Frederick said, “My purpose doesn't talk about it with me.”
“Neither do my parents,” said Dimitri.
“They don't know you're agents yet?”
Both shook their heads in the negative. Dmitri said, “I listen to their ether conversations. If the gates are shut down, millions of humans in the outer worlds will die—they need the trade.”
Frederick nodded. “Luther doesn't want to cut off the gates either—if they can be allies. He's a bit paranoid, I think. He's so sure that sooner or later humans are going to encounter a hostile alien species and then the gates will be essential for protecting human colonies.”
One of the agents by the window, female in appearance with silver hair, who was a replacement “grandmother” said, “Surely some of Fleet want to close the gates to keep such species out?” As she said it, her hand, holding a glass of Ang's illusory champagne, shook.
Frederick nodded. “It's true, some do. But Luther has argued that there is too much non-gate traffic that points right back to Earth.”
Anita spoke up. “The pre-gate probes are still fanning out from Sol System. No one picked them up after the gates came online. We're just waiting for them to arrive.” She looked around the room and said, “There's going to be a big carnival for when the exploratory pre-gate probe reaches our home planet.”
Frederick nodded. “Some estimate there are thousands of such probes. Many were let loose before there was the ethernet, some by private companies that have gone out of business, some by former governments that have folded. Any species advanced enough to have achieved faster than light travel, or even just lightspeed, would find it simple to determine their point of origin. Shutting down our only means of faster than light travel would mean we couldn't respond to such a threat quickly enough.”
Dimitri added tentatively, “I know my mother wants to see the gates'—position—introduced slowly to the population, to avoid panic. She wants the existence of agents released even more slowly.” He gulped.
Raani licked her lips nervously. “As long as no one thinks the gates are a threat, it should be okay ...”
Her eyes slid to James, as did all the other eyes in the room. He shook his head, exasperated. “No one will know what happened on Luddeccea for years … perhaps even a decade. The Kanakah Gate was destroyed and the only way to reach the Luddeccean system is deep space. The closest gate is in System Seven.”
“It was too risky,” Anita said. “Eight shouldn't have done it.”
“Eight was defending itself,” James said. “And me.”
Raani snorted. “If you would fix your malfunctioning channel to the gates, you could upload yourself at any time.”
A sharp retort was on the tip of his tongue, but before James could voice it, Dmitri said with a shaking voice, “Eight has endangered us all. There will be a war.”
“Hush,” said Frederick, coming over to put a hand on the boy's shoulder.
“I don't want my human to die,” Joi cried.
“I don't particularly want to upload myself,” said Ang. “I couldn't take Abella with me.”
James felt static flare over his skin. “This is all needless speculation. The humans don't know what happened on Luddeccea, and it will be seven long years at the very least if they do.”
“Probably more,” Gordon said in a tone that was somewhat hopeful. “They'd have to leave from Time Gate 7, where I'm stationed with my purpose. The Fleet ships are still on standby there.”
“See?” said James, disengaging his arm from Raani's and giving a shrug. Clapping his hands together, he pulled them apart, revealing a half-liter paper canister with flowing Basic Script upon it. He concentrated, and the “air” above the canister curled with frost. “Now I
have something to help you all put this out of your minds.”
“Ice cream!” said Anita. “You've recreated the taste of ice cream?”
“Me! Me! Me!” sang Dimitri.
“Not just ice cream,” said James. “Luddeccean maple ice cream—they age the maple in whiskey casks and only use the cream from grass-fed cows.”
All the agents came forward, making bowls and spoons appear in their hands. James opened the illusory canister, and imagined a scoop appearing in his hand. Scooping some into Ang's bowl, he said, “I found some in the freezers aboard Eight. I've spent some time getting the recreation just right.” He winked as Ang put a spoonful in his mouth. “It will make you believe in God.”
“Don't be absurd,” said Anita, but at that moment, Ang's mouth dropped open. James could see cream on Ang's tongue—the finish would be right. Ang threw up his arms. “Hallelujah!” he cried and all the agents laughed and James beamed, both in avatar and physical form. Inside he felt as though all his circuits were glowing. This simple act of sharing a memory of ice cream—it filled him with the same sensation of belonging as great as he'd felt in the state of afterglow with Noa. But this happiness was better. It was clear and pure and real. It wasn't pre-programmed, it was his—like his fear had been. He remembered Noa saying, “Hold onto that fear, James,” and his smile dropped.
Popping a spoon of ice cream into her mouth, Anita grinned up at him. “What is it, James? How can you be sad with something so delicious and fattening to eat?”
Before he could formulate an explanation, even to himself, Anita's smile faded and her eyes grew distant. “Oh, no … my mother, she's so sad.” Her eyes regained her focus. “I know you don't care about humans … but mine do believe I'm real. I have to go to her.”