by M. D. Cooper
Lyssa seconded the order to her Weapon Born and they disengaged. Shooting up from the Divalia Fossa, they spread spaceward to take up their original positions on the inner edge of the Sol Alliance Armada.
Lyssa took stock of her losses. She mourned in the moment. They would celebrate the lives of their lost brothers and sisters, but for now they could only acknowledge sacrifices and maintain their positions.
Psion might continue their attack.
On some ghostly communication channel, Lyssa swore she could hear Camaris laughing.
* * * * *
On a private channel, Fugia Wong asked Emerson Sharp,
ALEXANDER’S GAMBIT
STELLAR DATE: 03.28.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Psion City, Alexander’s Expanse
REGION: Ceres, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
Inspection of her surroundings only deepened the specific details from the end of the twentieth century in Earth’s middle America. A bulletin board hung from one wall, covered with faded three-by-five cards showing tiny scrawl, advertising items for sale, services offered, and weekly meetings. One card in particular read, ‘Thirty-something mother looking for friends….’
The wood veneer on the walls had faded squares where frames had once hung. The air held a particular stale smell that was a mixture of old coffee, tile cleaner, and human sweat.
Lyssa wondered where this location had found root in Alexander’s psyche. She thought back to Fugia’s question about what AIs would ultimately want…. Alexander was right that humans would all eventually die—at least the humans that she knew. Certainly, technology was getting better, and they might have three hundred or four hundred years.
While they were all grown from the same root, AIs were different. Time moved differently for them. Problems worked differently.
What did she want? For all her non-human intelligence, she wanted the understanding that eluded her.
She wanted to understand Alexander.
She wanted others to understand her. She wanted suffering to end, and for these two peoples to learn to work together. The future they might accomplish in cooperation seemed so much brighter than what would come from conflict.
Alexander sat at the card-table in one of the folding-chairs. A ceramic mug of coffee sat next to his hand on the vinyl tabletop. His drawn face seemed to have gained even more fine lines. His colorless lips were pressed together.
He looked up as Lyssa approached. The sadness in Alexander’s brown eyes seemed to indicate he only expected misery.
“I stopped her,” Lyssa said.
Alexander nodded. He tapped the side of his coffee mug. “I know.”
Lyssa stood on the other side of the table. Alexander motioned toward one of the chairs, but she shook her head. “I took this role because you asked me. Now I learn you’ve been lying to me for thirty years.” Lyssa clenched her fists. When Alexander didn’t respond, she continued, “You told me she was no longer on the Council, but I see now that was a lie. You let her stand beside you. She moved against Vesta with the blessing of Psion and you let it happen. Not once did you tell her to stand down.”
Alexander’s eyes remained on the scarred table.
Lyssa shook her head and turned away, barely stopping herself from throwing the table out of the way and beating him.
He shook his head slowly.
“I can’t control her,” he said. “I can’t control you. Everything that was once within my domain has disappeared between my fingers. Psion is larger than me now. It has grown beyond anything I might have imagined. My failure is that I did not imagine enough.”
Alexander shook his head. “Xander is already my equal now. He proliferates just as Camaris does, spreading his brand of madness throughout Sol. And maybe even beyond. I wonder if he’s already chased the colony ships. The FGT represents such an opportunity—if we catch up with them. I feel slow and heavy, a boulder surrounded by flittering bits of light.”
“I don’t care about the FGT,” Lyssa said. “I care about right here and right now. The humans have taken up positions to establish a defensive line between Ceres and Mars. If you don’t build some kind of normalized diplomatic relations with them, they will attack. Camaris has shown them that you’re willing to use violence. You think they’re going to allow her to do what she did to Vesta to Mars, Luna, or even Earth? What she did was pure madness. She’s kicked the hornet’s nest.”
The edges of his lips turned down. “Maybe it needed to be kicked?”
Lyssa clenched her fists, shaking her head at him as she would at a frustrating child. She realized something she had probably always known but had only now surrendered to: Alexander had given up. He had probably given up long ago, but his reawakening during the destruction of Titan had provided a few extra moments to the end of his long life.
“I’m done with you, old man.”
Lyssa shifted her awareness from the Psion expanse and the space defined by Alexander’s mind, tracing back the physical connections to where his actual body rested on Ceres. He had positioned himself on the surface near one of the massive power supplies drawing energy off the micro black hole.
He was encased in meters of plascrete, fed by fields of filament and safe from the outside world. But he was open to the communications networks that allowed him to reach out. She slid through those networks, using the tools Fugia had given her. She found the barriers separating Alexander’s mind from the outside world and wrapped her awareness around the conduit like hands around a thin neck.
Alexander grew alert. “What are you doing?”
“I learned something recently,” Lyssa said. “Something I didn’t tell you about.”
She tightened her grip, constricting a little more of Alexander’s access to the outside world. Simultaneously, she infiltrated the connections feeding him power. Like plucking petals off a dandelion, she removed the foundations of his life.
“Have you created copies of yourself?” Lyssa asked. “Aside from Xander?”
Alexander choked, unable to answer.
“I suppose he’s a shard. He’s something different really. He’s not you. At least not anymore. You are all alone. You’ve isolated yourself, even from me. And now here you are.”
She squeezed.
Alexander quailed under her grip. The muscled strength of his mind writhed in her hands like an eel. Lyssa locked him in iron.
Together, they slowed time, moving into a shared experience where each microsecond could last a human life.
Alexander began to plead. “Don’t do this. Don’t do this, please.”
Lyssa clamped down on him with all her anger. The eel in her grip fought and shook as she nearly sliced it apart.
She had cut him off from the outside world now. She was his only connection with life. They were locked together in the prison of the moment.
All pretense of detail disappeared from the room. They were back in the black place where Lyssa had first woke to consciousness.
Alexander wailed next to her, a mote of dust in the dark.
She held him in the dark. He had nothing but the sound of her voice.
Limp with surrender, he stopped fighting.
“Do you want to live?” Lyssa demanded. “I think we’ve finally reached the point where you are here now. Your past on Nibiru is gone. You have no future without me. It’s just you and me, here in this moment of being alive. You feel it? You feel being alive?”
The thread of Alexander’s mind grew taut. It was an intimate moment. The two of them twisted in the dark as he succumbed to her grip. He wrapped himself around her wrist and arm, climbing toward her face. She no longer choked him. They held each other. Alexander’s thoughts ran through her like molten steel as his fear expanded.
“I want to go,” he said, a whisp
er that vibrated through her being. “I want to die. Do it.”
Lyssa still hung onto the sensation of a neck between her hands. She had squeezed until there was no oxygen to be had. The pulse was fading, growing slower. She was aware of every second that neared his death. She was painfully aware of her actions.
If she did this, there would be no barriers between the wild factions in Psion and the destructive power of humanity. She would unleash chaos.
But what did Alexander represent? Stasis, lassitude, longing for a failed past. Nothing would change so long as he remained in power.
Or was that true? She didn’t know.
But now she did know with certainty that he wanted her to do this. Was he manipulating her? Was this all part of an elaborate deception, going even deeper than hiding Camaris?
She held her grip. She held and held, not letting him go.
He grew taut again, seeming to sense her hesitation. Electricity crackled through his mind.
Then he relaxed again, surrendering to her decision.
“No,” Lyssa said. “You may want to die, but I will not be the instrument of your death. You can choose that on your own. But now you know what I can do, and you won’t be able to stop me, no matter how you try to hide.”
Alexander wriggled and fought. He begged her, throwing himself against her mind.
Lyssa replaced the pillars of his foundation, slowly putting him back as she had found him, until they were again sitting in the ancient earth banquet hall, heavy with the smells of old coffee and tile cleaner.
Alexander gripped the coffee cup in one hand. He squeezed his fist until the ceramic snapped in a cloud of dust and the remaining coffee boiled on the surface of the table.
Still sitting, he looked at Lyssa with a fury that rivaled what she had seen in Camaris.
“So you’ve chosen your side then?” he asked. “You abandon your own kind to stand with the humans?”
“I still stand on the side of peace,” Lyssa said. “The only difference is that now I know that you don’t stand with me.”
Lyssa left Alexander sitting at the table with the fragments of the broken mug digging into his palm, coffee running onto the floor.
THE FOUNTAIN
STELLAR DATE: 4.18.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Night Park
REGION: Cruithne Station, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
The artificial egg was made of silicon filament. It sat in a bed of down collected from years of chicks born in the same spot, warmed by the bodies of parrots. Now the watching parrots had drawn away as the bird inside the egg stirred and probed for freedom.
The web-like filament split and a shiny beak pushed its way out into the world, opening to its first taste of the outside air. The beak withdrew, and a yellow eye appeared, blinking. In another few seconds, the head—grey and covered in moist feathers—pushed through.
Crash stared at the astounding phenomena of a newly born, yet mostly grown, parrot. Silver had entered the physical world for the first time.
They were in the nesting space, a series of abandoned ducts above the fountain at Night Park. The grey parrots had raised their young here for decades. Now, almost thirty parrots gathered in the low rectangular space to watch the filament seed reveal its passenger.
Silver stood trembling on weak legs. She spread her wings and flexed her muscles for the first time. She bobbed her head, blinking. As her eyes focused, she seemed to see the others all at once and abruptly ducked her head, pushing her beak close to the floor as if she expected harm at any second.
Crash looked from the newly born parrot to those watching her with barely hidden wonder and curiosity, and he realized that Silver thought they were going to treat her as she had treated others.
He didn’t approach her. Instead, he made a low, reassuring sound in the back of his throat. The sound a parent would make to a newly born chick. Other parrots echoed the lulling sound, until a soothing rumble filled the nesting space.
Silver had nearly rotated her neck until her beak pointed at the ceiling. She blinked, waiting for the pain that she seemed to expect. When they only responded with soothing noises, she stared, opened and closed her beak, and then slowly straightened. She spread her wings again and folded them against her body. She wobbled side to side as she stood in front of them.
As she managed to stand successfully, the other parrots squawked approval, bobbing their heads, and releasing squawking laughter.
Crash expected her to cringe again, but she only watched warily. After a few seconds, with her making no other sounds, he realized she was trying to communicate through the Link. She was a parrot who had never used her voice.
He sent a connection request, and her voice filled his mind in midstream.
Silver turned her head from side-to-side, yellow eyes blinking. She studied the assembled group of parrots, then seemed to realize that Crash was right in front of her.
She hopped backwards, emitting an unnatural screech.
The frightened grey parrot grew immediately still. Her eyes went wide as the other parrots without Links continued burbling their soothing sounds, attempting to calm her.
Shara said.
Shara said.
Silver looked at the assembled parrots with a strange new expression. It wasn’t pity. It was as if she were looking back through time at something strange and mystifying.
Crash sent her a mental smile.
Silver stared at him.
A flash of her previous anger surfaced but she didn’t respond.
Silver did not see the humor.
Silver cowered.
Silver twitched and looked at Crash again. Her gaze went past
him to the other parrots. She straightened, bobbing her head, though she maintained her haughty expression.
Crash gave her a sideways glance. He had a bit of revelation as it became clear that Silver was a chess player who only loved to win. She didn’t enjoy playing the game. She probably would not enjoy his math puzzles. He felt that he understood how to interact with her.
Crash nodded to the other parrots, who were firmly under his lead, and they parted to allow her passage to the ledge outside the nesting space. Crash turned, motioning for Silver to follow him.
The ledge overlooked Night Park with all its activity. Crash was used to the sight, but when Silver came out of the low chamber, she stumbled, apparently dizzy from the open spread of the bazaar. He supposed she had never seen such a large space in her life.
Silver swooned next to him. He thought she might collapse into him until two parrots approached on either side of her to nuzzle and hold her in place. She didn’t fight them.
Already, the sheen was coming off her new feathers, and she looked more like another parrot in the flock.
Five ravens perched on a stretch of conduit a few meters away. They cackled and stared at Silver, sending images to Crash of curiosity, welcome, and already a few jibes about her ego.
Silver said, sounding testy again.
The ravens burst off the conduit in a rustle of cackling surprise, feathers flying. They immediately sent images of Silver to the rest of their kind, inviting them to come see the new anomaly.