Roboteer

by Alex Lamb

  ‘I think you’d better break out the handler’s shock key, don’t you, Captain?’ said John. ‘Just in case.’

  The shock key was the software code Ira could use to shut Will down via a neural blast to his interface. It was intended for emergencies and supposed to be harmless, but one time in ten it caused brain damage. The entire procedure and the key that went with it were, in Ira’s opinion, hideous anachronisms. They dated from the early days of roboteers when they’d been practically autistic. Ships had required safety features like the shock key to handle screaming tantrums, not to shut down functional adults like Will.

  Ira’s mouth pressed into a thin line. The moment Will became a member of his crew, he’d come under Ira’s protection, and Ira wasn’t going to give him up any time soon. He wondered if Will understood. In their haste to pull data from Ulanu’s network, Ira had put Will in jeopardy, something he’d sworn to himself he’d never do. Letting Will leave the ship broke that oath a second time. It was only when it looked like that policy was doing more harm than good that Ira had been prepared to relent. He would have preferred to keep Will safely in his muscle-tank for the rest of the mission.

  ‘Point taken,’ he said. ‘I’ll bear it in mind.’

  ‘Glad to hear it,’ said John, ‘because here’s my professional assessment, just so you know where I’m coming from.’ He held up a hand to mark off his points. ‘One: we have an alien aboard, alignment and objectives unknown. Two: this alien has made threats. Three: this alien has already engaged in at least one aggressive act. Four: the alien has manifested a biohazard threat to human life. Five: this alien has gone way out of its way to intimidate us with its supposed firepower. Six: this alien has deliberately resisted our attempts to remove its influence from this ship in a way that frankly pisses me off. Now, I like Will’s story about as much as everyone else, but it looks pretty clear to me that whatever this alien’s goal is, it’s not the same as ours. It’s not about which theory we like best, Captain. In war it’s always about the set of things that might be true. You know that.’

  ‘I hear you, John,’ said Ira. ‘You’ve made your case. I’ll activate the key.’

  John’s shoulders slumped in relief. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  Ira smiled. In truth, he had no intention of touching the key. As soon as he activated it, it would be wired into the rest of the ship’s network, making it trivially straightforward for John to co-opt if he ever became frustrated or scared enough to disobey orders. That John could break through the key’s security protocols was something Ira didn’t doubt for an instant. But it had been clear that unless John received some kind of reassurance, he wasn’t going to relax. Ira was gambling that by the time that John figured out what he’d done, it wouldn’t matter. Ira didn’t abandon his own people – not for anyone. He dearly hoped his loyalty wouldn’t have fatal consequences for them all.

  10: HANDS ON

  10.1: WILL

  Will stared out at the immense tangles of cracked tubing as they weaved their way between the Fecund habitats. Through them, he could make out the alien starship that had been the focus of their investigations. He’d never seen anything so pretty look quite so menacing.

  ‘You brought me here,’ he muttered to the thing in his head. ‘Now you can damn well explain what it is you wanted me to see.’

  ‘What was that?’ Rachel asked from the seat behind him.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Will. ‘Talking to my demons, that’s all.’

  ‘They say anything?’ she asked, not quite carelessly. Will wished there was some way he could put her fears to rest. But he’d probably have to start with his own.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said.

  He strained around in his seat to try to give her a confident smile. It wasn’t easy – the cramped shuttle didn’t leave much room for maneouevre, and the seats were a tight fit even without the pressure suits they were wearing now.

  The shuttle was designed for short trips outside the Ariel. It had four seats arranged in single file, and Will and Rachel were in the front two. It was meant to be used when all the starship’s gravity devices were safely off, but even so, it needed to be extensively radiation shielded. Thus its interior was cramped, and the only view they had of the proceedings was fed to them from external cameras.

  Will watched as they passed between the arcing fronds that curled around the starship’s core and sidled up to the blank, rusty face of the hull beyond. They anchored the shuttle against the exohull and crawled along the access tube to the small airlock.

  Will found himself floating there looking at Rachel as the air cycled out of the chamber. She gazed back at him, her mouth set in an expression of easy confidence, but her eyes said otherwise.

  ‘Here goes nothing,’ she quipped cheerily.

  The outer door slid open and Will got his first look at the universe through his own eyes in over a month. And what a view it was. Around him on all sides lay the featureless brown horizon of the hull. In the direction that his brain immediately wanted to call up, there arced the silver-black branches of the frond structures, like a canopy of monster trees that glittered in the harsh starlight. Above them was a sky full of floating stuff, like clouds from some heavy-metal hell – gunmetal clouds with thorns.

  Below his feet, where ground should have been, was the hole they’d be exploring – a huge black chasm large enough to drop a small apartment building through. It had looked big through robot eyes, but not this big.

  ‘That’s some view,’ said Rachel breathlessly.

  Their robot chauffeur slid up beneath them. Will had arranged for one of their escort machines to give them a lift into the ruin’s interior. It was a standard free-space waldobot, a dozen metres long with a pair of fuzzy giant’s hands on the end of powerful articulated arms.

  Part of the reason for the scale-shock was that Will was used to looking through waldobot eyes and judging the hands to be the same size as his own. In reality, the robot could squash his head between its thumb and forefinger analogues without noticing.

  Despite knowing that everything inside the ruined ship had been dead for aeons, Will was glad to have the waldobot along. He and Rachel clipped their suits to the maintenance rings on its back.

  ‘You ready?’ he asked.

  She exhaled hard. ‘As I’ll ever be.’

  The robot tilted ninety degrees so that it was pointing down into the hole and then turned on its searchlights. Bottomless, shadowy depths filled with twinkling snow revealed themselves. Will urged the robot on. They descended into the dark.

  Without the sense of detachment afforded by robot senses, the ship’s tunnels looked sinister. The whole place was a mess of long, snaking corridors and junctions that prevented the mind from imposing any kind of orientation. The dead, grey ribbing on the walls had an unpleasantly organic appearance.

  After a while, Will realised that without the software map running in his sensorium, he wouldn’t have a clue where they were or how to get back. They’d be lost for ever in this maze of plastic gullets.

  ‘Any idea where we’re going?’ Rachel asked him eventually.

  ‘I have a place I want to start,’ said Will. ‘While I was reviewing John’s search attempts, I found somewhere that gave me a funny feeling. I took some robots there to check it out, but that was all I got – a feeling. I’m hoping that being there in person will make a difference.’

  ‘This whole place gives me a funny feeling,’ Rachel muttered back.

  Will’s starting point was at the blunt end of the bulb shape, near where the stems of the outer fronds attached. It was a long, twisting ride away, through several kilometres of surreal interior. Will noticed that the further into the structure they travelled, the thicker the ice around them became. It clung to the walls and stuck out in jagged clumps – more evidence for Amy’s theory that the Fecund had been amphibious.

  At last, they reached the place. It was a near-spherical space, barely large enough for their robot to enter, where eight
of the tunnels met. About a quarter of the chamber was filled with ice and some of the tunnels were completely blocked off.

  ‘This is it,’ said Will.

  He squinted around at the tunnel openings, willing them to have some significance for him, but nothing happened. This was just another grimy, frozen junction like all the others they’d passed.

  Was his helmet blocking his sense of connection? If so, then the Transcended could forget the whole thing. Will wasn’t going to take it off. There had to be some other way of making him more connected to the space. He had an idea.

  ‘Hold on,’ he told Rachel, and unclipped his suit hook.

  ‘What’re you doing?’

  ‘I’m not sure, but don’t worry – I promise I won’t do anything stupid.’

  ‘You’d better not,’ she warned. ‘If you go weird on me, I swear I’ll pull rank on you.’

  ‘Yes, Ma’am,’ said Will with a grin.

  He pushed up from the robot and glided towards what he thought of as the ceiling. When he reached it, he grabbed hold of the ice to secure himself. The moment he did so, all became clear. A new memory asserted itself and overlaid the room like a fairy enchantment.

  ‘There!’ he exclaimed, pointing towards an aperture wedged tight with dirty grey bergs. ‘We go that way! No wonder I couldn’t see it – it’s blocked!’ He pushed away, back towards the waldobot, and reclipped.

  ‘Watch out,’ he told Rachel. ‘I’m going to dig.’

  Will swapped his perspective into the waldobot’s idling mind and started ripping the glittering chunks away from the opening with massive, eager hands. Soon there was a gap large enough for them to squeeze through.

  It felt right. The answer to all their problems wasn’t far away. It was just a shame they’d have to leave the robot behind.

  ‘Come on!’ Will urged. He pulled himself over the ice and clambered impatiently through.

  ‘Slow down,’ Rachel told him firmly. She grabbed his ankle as she caught up and drew him gently back. ‘Here,’ she said, and attached a cable from her suit to his. ‘That’s better.’

  Some childish part of Will was annoyed by this limitation. He was about to tell her it was unnecessary, that it would get in the way of his progress, but then he locked eyes with her and saw the look on her face.

  Don’t push it, her eyes said. Will realised suddenly just how hard Rachel had worked to keep the mood on this little adventure light. She wanted to help him, but there was a limit to how crazy she was prepared to let him get.

  ‘What’s the rush, Will?’ she asked levelly.

  Will’s excitement drained away. More than anything, he wanted her with him on this journey. She was the one person aboard the Ariel who still seemed to believe in him.

  ‘Good point,’ he said quietly.

  They advanced more slowly after that, picking their way over the debris and clinging to the slick ribs of the tunnel wall where necessary. They reached another junction. It was just a fork this time, but Will still had to choose a route. He hung there, looking this way and that, the lights from his helmet illuminating the equally unappealing choices.

  ‘So, which—’ Rachel started.

  Will cut her off. ‘Shhh! Did you hear that?’

  There had been a sound, or something like a sound. It might even have been a voice.

  Rachel gave him a look. ‘We’re in an evacuated tunnel, Will. There’s nothing to hear.’

  ‘I know,’ said Will. ‘But I still heard something.’

  And then it came again – not so much a sound as the implication of one. A beckoning, leading them to the right.

  ‘This way,’ said Will, pointing.

  The tube led them to another habitat core, though this one was markedly different from the ones John had found. The cabling running into it was far thicker.

  ‘So what happens now?’ said Rachel. ‘We go in?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Will. ‘Let’s see if we can get that airlock open.’

  From his previous robotic forays, Will had plenty of experience with the manual controls on Fecund locks. Despite a dead mechanism encrusted with ice, the simple hatch opened after just a few minutes’ work. Rachel’s extraordinary strength came in useful. Will did little more than supervise. She kicked the inner hatch open and drew back to let him enter.

  ‘Ladies first,’ she said, gesturing at the open doorway.

  Will pulled himself inside, his helmet lamp scanning the darkness.

  ‘See any good corpses?’ she asked. It was clear from her tone that the thought of brushing up against dead aliens in person didn’t appeal to her a great deal. She lacked Amy’s fascination with medical matters.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Will.

  He yanked himself through the cluttered space, using the tattered silk ladders as handholds. More often than not they shredded to nothing when he grabbed them. As he neared the far wall of the habitat, he saw something that stopped him cold.

  ‘Make that a yes,’ he muttered.

  Strapped into a row of couches were Fecund bodies, or parts of bodies. Their eyes and limbs had been surgically removed and fat bundles of cables sewn directly into the stumps and sockets. Will didn’t need to be told what he was looking at. These were the Fecund equivalent of roboteers. Will stared into their mutilated, eyeless faces and felt faint.

  What kind of lives must these poor creatures have had, forever disassociated from their own bodies? A fate like this made the glutinous embrace of the muscle-tank look downright benign by comparison. No wonder the senses for the new SAP puzzle he’d been given didn’t feel like natural fits. They weren’t. They were meant to mimic the experiences of the beings that lay before him. Will had wondered why there was no correlation between the internal senses like balance and the external ones like sight. It was no surprise when the subject’s physical body was in one place and the things he would have observed were in another.

  Furthermore, the sight mapping on the puzzle had appeared to include a touch analogue, something that struck him as a crazy and purposeless addition. Now the reason became clear: visually mapped waldo control. The alien roboteer would have received data about his remoted hands in the corners of his field of vision, like a heads-up display seen through a visor.

  He wrapped his arms about himself and shivered.

  ‘I found it,’ he said.

  ‘Found what?’ Two seconds later, Rachel’s hand landed on his shoulder as she took a look for herself. ‘Good God,’ she exclaimed. ‘That’s revolting.’

  The more Will thought about his solution to the puzzle, the more right it felt.

  ‘I’ll need my tools,’ he told Rachel.

  He shut his eyes and focused on his sensorium link to the distant waldobot. It was tenuous, but still intact. Through it they had contact with the shuttle, and from there Will could reach the Ariel. He dragged the software he needed into his suit’s processor.

  ‘Why do you need tools, Will?’ Rachel asked nervously. ‘What’s the significance of this thing?’

  ‘This thing is the key,’ he said. ‘It’s what the Transcended want me to see. The new puzzle makes sense now. It had all these sensory features that didn’t add up, as if whatever mind it was designed for was in two places at once. Well, guess what: that’s exactly what they meant. ‘Hold on,’ he told her. ‘I’ll open the puzzle, then we’ll get out of here.’

  ‘Will, no.’ She dug her fingers into his shoulder and glared at him. ‘You’re going too fast again. Wait and do it back aboard the ship.’

  Will shook his head. ‘I’m supposed to be here,’ he said.

  ‘Says who?’ she snapped back at him. ‘In case you’ve forgotten, the last time you talked to aliens you were out for hours while your body filled up with virus. I have no medical supplies here, no way of getting to your skin. It could kill you.’

  Will met her gaze. ‘It won’t kill me,’ he said softly. ‘That’s not what they want.’

  ‘Will, you don’t know what they want.’
<
br />   Will sighed. ‘I do know that this could mean the difference between us getting home and being stuck out here for ever.’

  ‘But why open it here?’ she demanded. ‘Will, it’s not rational. I’m going to call Ira.’

  ‘Don’t,’ said Will. ‘Please.’ He grabbed her hand as it reached up to touch the comm-badge on her breast-plate. ‘This is what I’m supposed to do,’ he assured her. ‘I can feel it. I wish I could explain it to you but I can’t even explain it to myself. Hugo said he hated the drip-feed of information. Imagine what it’s like to get that inside your own head.

  ‘Look, if the Transcended wanted us dead, they’d have killed us by now. If they wanted to control my actions, they wouldn’t have done such a lame-ass job of guiding me. We’re here because they want us to learn. It’s the only answer that makes sense. That means we have to trust them. We follow the lesson plan or we sit here rotting till the air runs out. It’s our choice.’

  She gasped and glanced away. ‘How am I supposed to find my way out of here if you go offline?’

  ‘I won’t, I promise.’

  She shut her eyes for a few seconds. ‘You’d better be right about this.’

  Will smiled. ‘I am, don’t worry.’

  He turned his attention back to his home node. Now that he knew what he was aiming for, the puzzle was a simple matter of compensating for the artificial sense map with some blockers and remappings of his own. His mistake before had been imagining that he’d be able to correlate the SAP with a single coherent experience model the way he did with his own robots. This was more like partial thought-sharing with another handler.

  Will started the program and panned back to regard his work. It was clumsy. And the SAP was clearly pulling data from somewhere in the Ariel because it was running very slowly. That didn’t matter, though. He wouldn’t notice once he was in there.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ve cracked the puzzle. My guess was right – the SAP’s a sense map of one of these poor bastards.’ He waved a hand at the ancient handlers. ‘Looks like the Transcended want us to know how they felt. I’m going to run it now. It might take a little while.’