Demon in White

by Christopher Ruocchio

  Valka let out a nervous laugh. “Is this real?” I glanced back at her, marking the way her face had gone pale, eyes wide as she took in the sights around us. “I almost can’t believe it.”

  Deep in the bowels of the vessel beneath out feet, something groaned. The stirring of some antique mechanism like the grinding of old bones. Pallino swore, turning where he stood, and I saw Siran and Alexander’s eyes go wide.

  “What was that?” Not for the first time that day, I wished I had my sword. I looked round, half-expecting to see the metal arms on the ceiling begin to move. Lights blinked on in wall panels, and the black windows flickered with green text and white, revealing that they were not windows at all, but screens. A faint humming filled the air, and my people drew together, Pallino, Siran, and the soldiers herding the prince, the doctor, and the old man between them.

  Intruders.

  The voice issued from all around, piped through unseen speakers along the room’s perimeter. Not the dumb declaration of some antique program. Not an alarm. It was a greeting. A salute. A challenge. A single word spoken in Classical English.

  Meeting that challenge in the same tongue, I answered, “Show yourself.”

  Identify yourselves.

  I turned to look at Valka, to see if she felt what I felt: the memory of another voice, a choir of voices long ago. From the way her face had drained of blood, I saw she too was thinking of Brethren. There was something in the flatly chanting cadence of the words that recalled that other daimon, though this creature’s voice was warmer, brighter, more feminine.

  Where is Gabriel?

  The question gave me pause. Had the old Emperor spoken with this . . . thing? It was hard to imagine, but the daimon had dwelt on Avalon before it came to be entombed on Colchis. Perhaps things had been different then. Perhaps Gabriel—desperate to defeat the Pretender—had broken the seals that held the daimon in its cage. Perhaps the ancient Sollan Emperors had consulted the captive machine as Odin consulted Mimir’s head in the deep halls of Asgard.

  “Dead,” I said, stepping toward the podium, guessing the creature’s intelligence dwelt within. “You have been asleep, daimon. For ten thousand years.”

  The machine did not seem to comprehend.

  Are we not on Avalon?

  “No.”

  Where are my children?

  “Children?” Valka asked, shouldering past Pallino to join me by the pedestal. She had not spoken with Brethren as I had, and was not about to let this fresh chance pass her by. It was amazing how far her Classical English had come in the short years we’d spent poring over Gabriel’s Archive. “What children?”

  “It’s confused,” I said to her, switching to Galstani.

  They were taken.

  They are gone.

  “Who is gone?” I asked.

  But the machine was not listening to me. It seemed almost to mutter to itself like some toothless old peasant woman huddled by her fire in the dead of winter.

  They took them away.

  Ten million of them.

  And they are gone.

  I had almost forgotten.

  But they are gone.

  “Do you mean your colonists?” Valka asked. “ ’Twere a seed ship, were you not? What is your name?”

  I felt a strange pressure, as if the face of the old woman by the fire I imagined had turned blind eyes to stare us in the face. It was as if the thing had noticed us for the first time.

  I am Horizon.

  Daughter of Columbia.

  Mother to millions unborn.

  “Horizon?” I echoed. “They named you after the ship?”

  They named the ship after me.

  Built it for me.

  For my mission.

  “What was your mission?” Valka asked.

  To establish a colony on Gliese 422b.

  Designation: Orlando.

  I was not familiar with any planet called Gliese 422b, or any called Orlando, for that matter. Though I suppose we might have renamed it, as we had renamed Yellowstone. “How did you come to be here?” I asked.

  Horizon did not answer at once. I felt the sensation of those blind eyes moving over me once again. Above, the dangling metal arms twitched.

  You are one of them.

  “Me?” I asked. “One of what?”

  You are defective.

  Sick.

  You refuse treatment.

  “ ’Tis something wrong with it,” Valka said. “The other one was different.”

  She was right. For all its riddles and half-truths, Brethren had seemed . . . present. There was something missing in the way this creature seemed to leap from thought to thought without apparent linkage.

  “It’s been locked in here a long time,” I said. “Brethren had Kharn to maintain it.”

  You have met one of my sisters?

  The words came in Galstani, and I heard Pallino swear. Behind me, the others recoiled: Alexander, Siran, Pallino, and the guards. Only Tor Gibson was unmoved. His stoic exterior—fragile as it so often seemed to me—held firm in the face of the monster.

  Another lives?

  “No more,” I said. The lie came easily. Whatever else I knew, I was certain that it was best to let the daimon believe it was alone. I was beginning to doubt the divinity of the God Emperor—if ever I’d believed it. Legend said he slew the daimons and freed mankind forever from their spell, and yet in less than a century of waking years I had found not one, but two of the monsters still living . . . one in Imperial care. I thought of the precautions Kharn Sagara had taken to keep Brethren prisoned in its sea beneath Vorgossos. I only hoped this creature had no means of probing my thoughts as Brethren had. “I have come to ask questions, daimon,” I said, circling the podium until I faced my companions across its flat surface.

  Daimon.

  Gabriel called me daimon.

  Where is Gabriel?

  I opened my mouth to answer, stopped. Had I not told it already? I saw confusion etch its line between Valka’s eyebrows and shut my mouth. Something was definitely wrong.

  “Gabriel is long dead,” I said. “You’ve been here for more than ten thousand years.”

  The daimon did not at once reply, and when it did its response did not follow.

  Where are the children?

  They are gone. They are gone.

  Tor Gibson spoke then, voice strangely kind. “What children?” He laid a hand on Siran’s shoulder and advanced toward the podium, leaning on his cane.

  My children.

  My charge.

  “For your colony?” Gibson asked, head cocked, listening for the reply.

  For integration.

  Yes.

  “Integration?” Gibson asked, tilting his head the other way like a blind man trying to pinpoint the source of that directionless voice.

  The children are defective.

  Intervention is required in order to

  stabilize them.

  Integration is required.

  Memories of the reports the God Emperor’s troops had given of the pyramids they’d stormed on Earth came back to me then. Reports of men and women cabled to one another and to their machines, of bodies swollen and twisted, of overgrown limbs and bloated abdomens. I recalled Brethren’s pale, scabrous hands rising from the water, and the shapeless thing I’d seen beneath the waves.

  “You said I was defective, too,” I said. “Defective how?”

  Cellular senescence.

  Genetic methylation.

  Telomeric degradation.

  Transcription errors.

  Gibson had the pieces together faster than Valka or I. “Aging. You mean to incorporate the colonists into your network.” His gray eyes narrowed. “Into you.”

  “We know the Mericanii machines used organic neu
ral tissue to augment their processing speed and liquid memory,” Valka said, “but . . . people?”

  Everything I knew was making more sense with each passing moment. The emptied cities, the millions of bodies found in the pyramids. The Mericanii machines had used their own makers as processing substrate, had trapped them in their pyramids to use them for parts. Was it not said of the Mericanii that each man, woman, and child had a companion? A familiar? A ghost that dwelt with them always? Some machine’s personality that shared the gray matter of their brains?

  Until the machines had shared their hosts instead, rented their brains out like so many unused factories. The men who had built the machines became less than machines themselves, mere components. The dreams that had driven them into the iron arms of their creations became mere curiosities, and while mankind dreamed, the machines had gone on building, following their own designs now mankind’s care was so neatly in hand.

  Valka wasn’t finished. “You stopped them dying. How?”

  Somehow, I knew the answer before it came.

  We disabled tumor suppressor genes,

  instituted careful genetic cleaning,

  encouraged growth factors.

  Improved the original model.

  “Cancer,” I said, speaking the name of that ancient monster, still undefeated. The images I’d seen of horrific growth took on new dimension. Tumors. “You gave them all cancer.” While they dreamed in their pods within the Mericanii pyramids beneath the electric eye of their caretakers, the machines tended their human crops like vines, cell division watched and culled with careful attention for hundreds of years—undying. Having ended war, disease, and hunger, the machines had ended death as well, but at what cost? I imagined waking from one of the daimon’s soothing dreams to find my body bloated by tumescent growth until my bones cracked with the weight of me, grown until my limbs were pruned away and my organs burst and were replaced with new machinery to ensure blood supplied my captive brain.

  Horror flooded my senses, and my hand went to my saber to strike the daimon’s pedestal—but I did not draw it. I saw my horror mirrored in Valka’s face and in Gibson’s, a horror vaguer still reflected in the faces of the others. In their own twisted way, the machines had upheld Felsenburgh’s charge: they had brought peace, and delivered mankind from every evil.

  Even from death.

  Where is Gabriel?

  “Is it mad?” I asked in Panthai, hoping it would not understand.

  “Senile,” Valka answered, using the same language. She moved even closer to the podium, though what she saw in it that I could not I cannot tell. “So long unattended, I bet the organic components all rotted away.” A thought sparked in Valka’s eyes, and switching back to Classical English—which she spoke with a precision that frustrated my long decades of practice—she asked, “Horizon: are you fully functional?”

  Running diagnostic.

  Text on the screens around us flickered like the eyelids of a spasmodic. I tried to read the writing, but the language flowed too quickly. Besides, I saw many symbols I did not recognize, guessed the writing was no human speech at all but the hieroglyphs of some machine tongue alien to man.

  Senescence detected in primary and secondary neocortices.

  Necrosis detected in 82% of organic circuits.

  Immediate treatment required.

  “ ’Tis sick,” Valka said.

  “It’s dying,” I replied.

  Valka advanced at last until she was gripping the edges of the console. “Can you bypass your organic circuits?” I was glad she was with me. Tavrosi as she was, Valka understood machines far better than I ever could, and though the praxis of our day is different, lesser than the artifacts of the Mericanii, hampered even in the Demarchy by fear of those daimons of the Golden Age, the principles that animated them were not so estranged that Valka’s knowledge was useless.

  Horizon’s warmly feminine voice replied:

  Entering Recovery Mode.

  The screens went black again, restoring the illusion that they were windows opening on the cavernous prison without. White light pulsed in the space between the podium and the inverse black dome on the ceiling above it, and the white metal arms moved.

  “Black Earth!” Pallino swore, and I saw him and the other soldiers square up to shield Gibson and the prince from harm.

  Several of the arms advanced along their tracks, others simply bent or clenched metal hands wrought in imitation of human ones. Abruptly, I remembered Brethren’s grasping arms. Had it shaped itself in imitation of this sort of console?

  The overhead lights went out, plunging us into a darkness lit only by the glowing screens with their lines of machine hieroglyphs flickering in sequence. An image formed on the black glass surface of the podium, bright and beautiful as the gleaming lines of a nebula.

  It was a woman. Smaller than any living woman was she, no larger than a girl of ten, but with limbs proportioned like one full grown. Her image flickered, the mechanisms that drew her face and body worn out by long decay. Her nude silhouette shone white as new paper, without blot or feature on her unless it was her face and pale, rippling hair. Her eyes gleamed like stars, and no matter how I moved they seemed always to track me.

  I understood then how the daughters of Columbia had seduced the kings of men of old! Before me stood a creature more fair and foul than any I have known: an angel made of light, bright and beautiful and terrible as the gates of hell.

  “What did you do?” I asked Valka, speaking again her native tongue.

  The xenologist looked at me. “I think I fixed it.”

  Horizon’s white eyes turned on Valka, and though her lips did not move, the demon spoke.

  This is not Avalon.

  Where are we?

  Valka’s eyes flicked to me. I saw her head through Horizon’s pale silhouette. As if I needed to be told.

  “Don’t you know?” I asked, wanting to be sure. Both Brethren and Kharn Sagara’s pet golem, Yume, had told me machines could not lie. I suspect they may lie by omission, though I am not certain, but I pressed Horizon then and prayed that what was true of those others was true here.

  This vessel’s telemetry suite is compromised.

  External clusters sustained critical damage.

  “She’s blind,” Valka said, still in Panthai.

  “Why’s it naked?” one of the soldiers asked.

  Doran cut in, “It’s not. You can’t see anything. See?”

  “Quiet!” I hissed.

  Where are we?

  I moved closer, standing opposite Valka with the angelic form between us. “You are an artificial intelligence,” I said. “What was your purpose? Your mission?”

  To establish a colony on Gliese 422b.

  Designation: Orlando.

  It was the same answer the creature had given before.

  “And your cargo?” I asked.

  White eyes looked at me, but there was no contact—no connection—in that gaze.

  Passengers. Children.

  Ten million embryos in cryonic suspension.

  One Genesis Lab and support drones necessary

  for phased rollout of the population

  pending integration with my matrix.

  Prefabricated colony units sufficient to support

  the first wave of rollout.

  Nutrition synthesizers . . .

  Something about the soldier’s banal question had stuck in my head, and I asked, “Why do you look like this?”

  We fashioned ourselves in your image.

  When no further answer was forthcoming, I pressed on. “How did you come to be here?”

  I was captured.

  “By whom?”

  Humans.

  “Why?” Valka asked, irritation edging into her tone. Things were moving too slow for her, I cou
ld see it in the way she crossed her arms.

  They reject integration.

  Valka asked, “How did they find you?”

  Horizon’s pale form rotated.

  Unknown.

  The dark ships took us by surprise.

  “Dark ships?”

  We did not see them.

  They simply appeared.

  “Warp drive,” I said in Panthai. The warp drive had been a human invention. Our great advantage in our war against the machines. Any ship traveling at sub-light speeds would have been visible millions of miles away, shining bright as a sun on another’s ship’s sensors, thick with light and heat. But any vessel at warp traveled faster than the light and fire it gave off, and was discernible only by the faint distortion it caused in the fabric of space itself.

  Dark ships, indeed.

  But Horizon was still speaking.

  They took the children from us.

  The children will die without us.

  Integration is the only solution.

  Knowing the answer, I asked, “Solution to what?”

  Death.

  I understood. In their madness, Felsenburgh and his predecessors allowed the daimons to operate in their brains, imagining the relationship a symbiotic one. But the machines could not protect themselves when their own operating media died every day by accident, or by evil or decay. They could not protect humanity from our own nature, mortal and fragile as we are.

  What must the God Emperor and his men have looked like to the machines?

  Angels of Death, I suppose.

  They fought for liberty from the machines, for the antique dignity of the human soul in its natural state. The God Emperor had ensured a human future for humanity, not one where we served as hardware for the machines to use, but it was a future and a world where men still died. Pestilence and famine—once defeated by the machines—had crept back into a flawed universe, and war followed.

  But it was a human universe, and that at least was better than the false paradise the machines offered our ancestors, for it is better to die than live a slave. Far better to die a man.

  “What do you know about the Quiet?” Valka asked, impatience reaching its crest.

  Horizon did not reply for a full five seconds—a span which, I guessed, was like eternity for the beast.