by C. Gockel
The ether erupted with cheering. Sterling and Gunny jumped out of their seats. She heard them thumping James on the back. “You made it!”
“6T9’s diagnostic protocols might need to be updated,” James said, his voice very close. Something about his words made her breath catch. She glanced back and saw him beside her chair, his blue eyes on hers.
“How do you feel?” she asked over the ether, imagining a ball of light and tossing it to him.
Silently, over the channel just between them, he said, “Like a ghost.”
Chapter Eighteen
James sat on the bridge at one of the cannons. Several people had suggested he leave the bridge, but he couldn't bring himself to leave Noa.
Monica was beside him. In an agitated voice, she asked, “Are you teasing me? I’m really too tired for it—”
He glanced up at her. There were dark circles under her eyes. He didn’t feel sympathy; he felt antagonistic. Now he knew why. He was a machine and she didn't like machines, and she especially didn't like humans bonding with machines.
“Take a breath,” she said, a stethi-amplifier hovering in front of his chest. She tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. He took a deep breath and she scowled at her read-out. “You’re fine … no water in the lungs … no risk of secondary drowning.”
“Back from the dead again,” James said, the words slipping out easily, although inwardly he shuddered.
A line formed between her brows. “Apparently.”
James’s left hand trembled on the chair’s armrest. Before Monica noticed, he dropped it so that it was between his body and the seat. “I think 6T9 was performing functions beyond his capability,” he said.
Monica’s lips pursed. “That’s the thing … sex ‘bots have secondary subroutines that are very good at minor medical diagnosis. It’s necessary for when they take part in more volatile … activities.”
At the helm, Noa erupted, “Dr. Monica! Death is not a minor medical diagnosis!” Through the ether, a white ball of light bounced from her to him. His eyes slid to her profile. Her skin was warm and brown against the colorless blur of lightspeed, and there was the curve of a smile on her full lips.
Noa had reservations about human-machine relations, too. But she had recoiled at the dismembered 'bots in Ghost's lair, she hadn't wanted to leave 6T9 behind in the sewers, or on Adam's Station. She had accepted the decision to save the mech suits. She had said she didn't care what he was. He took the ball of light she imagined and tossed it back to her and saw her smile wider. His skin hummed, and he wanted her … More than James Hiro Sinclair had ever wanted a woman.
He wasn't Professor James Hiro Sinclair … the professor had probably just been a convenient alias for the time gates to exploit because the man had stored virtually every one of his thoughts and experiences in a time capsule. They'd given him all his memories, his looks, even his upper-crust Earther accent. It might be part of the damage he received when he was shot down, but he didn't have that man's essence. He wasn't thoughtlessly heroic, he wasn't passionate about human history or humanity, he didn't love his parents. But he could still be filled with awe and wonder at the universe—the burrow-like habitat of Adam's Station, the beauty of the S8O5 hovering in Atlantia's sky, the whisper of snow. And he wasn't completely devoid of feeling. He cared about Oliver, probably more than the original James ever could. He liked 6T9. He could empathize even sometimes with Manuel; Manuel had loved his wife. James loved Noa. He might not be human, but he was alive.
Noa … he had been helplessly drawn to her after his accident. Maybe just because the giant computer he was connected to predicted she was the person most likely to get him off Luddeccea?
A movement on the periphery of his vision caught his eyes. He saw Monica follow his gaze to Noa and then slide back to him and go to his cheek. “That was a deep cut in your face … it’s strange that it healed so quickly.”
James shrugged, and Noa said, “His parents worked for Fleet. He got some pretty incredible nanos pumped into him.” That was a hypothesis they had between them, but Noa spoke it like truth. He wanted it to be true …
Voice more somber, Noa asked, “When will Ghost wake up?”
“The sedatives will keep him out for another eight hours,” Monica said. Monica had told them that that when he'd first woken from unconsciousness, Ghost had been hysterical, sure that they would be captured. She'd explained they were safe at lightspeed and had given the lie that James had given everyone else: Ghost, right before slipping into unconsciousness, had sent the course to James's ethernet channel, probably by accident. James himself had been unconscious as his augments struggled to keep him warm, and so was unable to acknowledge or to send it right away. And when he woke up, he hadn't realized the data was in his neural interface until the last possible moment.
Backing away, Monica glanced once more at Noa and then at James and said, “I need to get back to sick bay and check on him before I turn in.”
James knew that at some point he and Ghost would have a confrontation. But Ghost had a secret, that for whatever reason, he didn't want to share. James was certain the confrontation would be private … and he had time to prepare.
Wren came in escorted by Gunny and Sterling. Noa and Chavez yawned on cue. The three men had had time for a power nap during Noa’s stint at the helm.
Noa stood from her chair and she met James’s gaze. She dismissed Chavez, gave some quick instructions to Wren who would be pilot, and Sterling, who would be copilot and Wren's babysitter. And then she headed toward the lift, James beside her.
In the lift her hand hovered on the controls. “Are you hungry?”
“No,” he said, eyes searching the floor. He wasn’t hungry. He lifted his eyes to Noa’s, and holding her gaze, imagined their ball of light and passed it to her across the ether. Instead of sending it back, she let it grow in the space between them like their own personal sun. It heated his skin as much as if it had been real.
A few minutes later, they were in her quarters. As soon as the door shut behind her, Noa asked, “Do you want to talk about it?”
For a moment the words were a jumble of sounds tumbling over each other, and then he put together what she was saying. Do I want to talk about my attackers on the roof? He didn't want to talk ever of being an android or cybernetic construct. I am more than a construct. I am alive.
“No.” He blinked down at her, reached out and touched her neural interface. Where was the divide, really, the increment of mechanization that made you a machine? If you felt, thought, dreamed and loved … surely you were human?
Gazing up at him with her wide nearly black eyes, she whispered, “Is there anything you need?”
He dropped his hand down along her jaw. “I need you.”
Noa leaned into him, and when her eyes fell on his lips, he felt heat there. He couldn’t kiss her, but she could kiss his bottom lip, catch it gently in her teeth, and softly tug. And he could pick up her hand, with its missing fingers, pull her scars to his lips and meet her gaze. He didn't suggest the hard-link, and neither did she. There were no perfect versions of themselves—Noa had all her scars, and he couldn't even return her smiles. But together, they were whole.
* * *
An app woke Noa up. As her consciousness slowly returned, she found her face pressed on James’s shoulder, her legs thrown over his. Blinking up at his face, she found his eyes were open, focused on the single cabin window. Her eyes fell upon the scar on his cheek; it was a raised region of skin, the same color as the skin around it, not pink or scabbed like it would have been on an unaugmented person. She let a hand drift down his chest. He wasn’t as warm as he’d been last night. When he’d taken off the enviro suit she’d almost sent him to the medbay. But then things had heated up between them, and the suggestion never made it out of her mind.
James caught her hand and turned his head to her. His face was expressionless.
“Do you want to talk about it now?” she asked. He’d said no th
e night before, but his wakefulness, and his thousand-kilometer stare belied it.
James looked away and shrugged. “It was just same-old-same-old. He said I was possessed by the time gates …” His eyes shot back to hers, his lips parted, as though he’d said something terrible and revealing.
“Possessed by time gate aliens, demons, or djinn?” Noa said with a smile.
James said nothing for a beat too long. But then he whispered, “Does it matter?” His voice and expression were too serious, but that could be his malfunctioning augments.
Noa lightly smacked his chest and grinned. “No, it doesn’t. Crazy is crazy. And you can't argue with crazy.” She slid her hand down his side. The scar from the phaser fire that had clipped him on Luddeccea was completely gone—the advantages of having parents who worked in high tech, and who were rich, she supposed.
She had always told herself not to try and understand “crazy” too much, but her mind wandered, and her mouth wandered right along with it. “If you're an archangel, and an archangel is a demon, a djinn, or an energy being … what does that make me, the heretic?” She asked, using the code-name the Luddeccean Authority had given to her.
Catching her left hand, James pulled it up to his lips. “Hopefully, someone who believes in me.”
“Well, I don't believe that you are a demon or djinn,” Noa mused aloud. “Which only leaves 'energy being,' which is still crazy.” She propped herself up on her elbow. “I mean, why would alien energy beings want to possess the body of someone who didn’t have any control on the planet they would like to take over?” She blinked. “You're a history professor. You're not in a position to take over any planet.”
Turning his head to hers, he raised an eyebrow. “I can think of a reason why energy beings might want to possess a body.”
Noa blinked, waiting for him to elaborate. He pulled her on top of him, and Noa had a sudden inkling of what he was getting at. “You think energy beings would possess a human so they could have sex,” she said. She narrowed her eyes, though she felt anticipation, not ire. “Very funny,” she managed to say with a straight face—which was an accomplishment as his hands drifted down her spine.
James tossed a ball of light across the ether and flipped their positions. “You think I’m joking, but I’m really not,” he said, his blue eyes searching hers.
“So this is all about the experience for you …” Noa managed to tease as he bent down and nuzzled her neck. “Being with a human …”
“No,” James murmured next to her ear. “It’s about being with you.”
* * *
The holo with his sister’s image flickered and went dark. Kenji waited. Her signal was being lightbeamed from her ship to the nearest gate, and then instantaneously transmitted from there to Kenji’s desk on Time Gate 8. They could have spoken mind-to-mind, but she understood that Kenji didn’t like the buzzing in his brain that came with mind-to-mind conversations, and she admitted she liked seeing him. Kenji tapped his fingers, counting down the minutes until her image appeared again.
Noa was in System 10 … the time gate there was situated at the cloud that encircled the whole system like a shell. There was a mining colony in the cloud, but there were reports that there was a moon around the fourth planet that might be suitable for human habitation. Last he’d spoken to Noa, she was on her way to the moon. He tapped his fingers on his thigh, and then Noa appeared once again. He blinked and looked at the clock at the holo’s base. It had only been three minutes. They must have left the moon. The distance from the gate in the cloud to the moon was over ten light minutes.
Noa was seated at the desk in her cabin. “Hey, Little Brother,” she said. “You’re going to love this!” She dumped a bunch of papers on her desk. “Paper!” She waved a hand. “They’ve all got retinal scan chips, and thumbprint seals. It's paper because these reports are precious. They won’t allow them to be sent through the ether. Oh, no, there is a one-in-a-trillion possibility that they might be hacked.” She held up a finger. “What is it that is so valuable, you might ask? Have we discovered another Earth-like planet, or one as mineral rich as the asteroids in Sixth?” She waved the finger. “Oh, no! What is so important is—” What followed was a string of very colorful curses mostly relating to lizzar, their excrement, and their scale lice. Kenji found himself smiling at their originality. Noa slouched back in her chair. “I’ve just spent the last forty-eight hours going through one hundred reports exploring almost every aspect of this moon’s blue-green algae.” She counted down on her fingers. “Its metabolism, how long it can survive sustained freezing, how hot it can get before it expires, its resiliency to every known man-made compound and non-native Earth elements, and,” she held up a thick stack of papers, “the stability of its DNA and its likelihood to evolve.” She rolled her eyes. “Thankfully there is no other life form on the moon.” She stared at the camera, eyes wide and nostrils flared. “That we’ve discovered yet!” She took a breath, and held up another stack. “But there is more! All for blue-green algae that looks like the vomit of a jaundiced lizzar. Nebulas, Kenji! I’m sometimes glad the Luddeccean settlers set out before we were part of the Republic, otherwise we would have spent our childhood with our butts parked on asteroids waiting for the Committees on the Preservation of Extraterrestrial Life to make up their minds about settling planetside.”
Noa threw her head down on the stack of papers, thumped it several times, and then muttered, “I should have stayed a pilot. Getting shot at is more bearable than this.”
Raising her head, she said, “But how are you? What are you up to?” The picture flickered, indicating the end of the monologue, and the transmission. This time, Kenji tapped a button so the frame would freeze and he was looking at his sister’s face.
He rocked in his chair, excited by the news he had to relay. “I’m doing well. I’ve been invited to take part in a conference on Luddeccea on the ethics of new technologies. I’m sure you’ve heard about the new Dirac transistor. Their implementation raises all sorts of ethical conundrums.” His eyes scanned the room. He knew Noa would only want the “broad strokes” so he sought to condense the innovation to its very basics. “It is so small and efficient that it introduces the possibility of the rapid development of artificial intelligence. That is a danger we have to consider if we allow that tech to come to Luddeccea.”
He sat up straight, proud that he’d been chosen to be part of the council—and that he’d summed up their deliberations and still spared her the technical details.
He waited three minutes for his transmission to reach her, and then three more for her response. A light flickered at the base of the holo, and he was treated to another scene of Noa, this time waving a hand and saying, “The Dirac transistor is still in research and development—decades, maybe centuries away from use. But even if it wasn’t, why? Why do they care?” Clutching the edge of the desk, she leaned closer to the frame. “If artificial intelligence developed, we should be overjoyed! We have been looking for alien intelligence for three hundred years. At least if we had AI, we’d have found something—” She began banging her head again. “—other than slimy, disgusting, lizzar innards of blue-green algae!” She threw up her hands, as though singing a hymn and declared, “We wouldn’t be alone in the universe anymore! Hallelujah!”
Kenji’s breath caught. He felt sweat break out on his hands and on his forehead. The holo flickered, showing the end of the transmission, and then went blank. And he sat panting, staring at the holosphere, gasping for breath. The danger to human life that such an event would engender … potential enslavement of the human race, the probability of an AI-human war … both had been topics among philosophers since before computers had been created! He exhaled, let himself calm, and realized the more likely reason for Noa’s outburst. “You’re joking,” he said. He waited tensely for the six minutes it took for her reply.
The holo flickered and showed Noa’s eye, just centis from the camera. His big sister, upon occasion, could
be quite “the ham.”
“Am I joking?” she asked, and fluttered her eyelashes dramatically.
Kenji sat back in his seat, relieved. “Yes, you are.”
Although her transmission hadn’t ended, Noa looked up at the ceiling and touched her neural port. She was receiving some sort of signal and had forgotten about him. Kenji’s fingers curled on his thighs. Aloud Noa said, “Nebulas, the captain said we could receive transmissions.” She had a tendency to talk aloud when she used the ether. It amused Kenji greatly as a child. Now it reminded him she wasn’t paying attention. He rolled his eyes and his gaze went beyond Noa to the barest hint of the curve of a planetoid behind her ship. His mouth dropped open. It was the moon she was supposed to be investigating … but there wasn’t a time gate within three light minutes of that moon. Which meant … Was there another gate? Noa looked at the screen and gave a tight smile. “I’m so sorry, Little Brother. I have to go.” She waved a hand. “Something came up. I love you.”
“No wait.” Kenji jumped from his own desk. “Noa, tell them you’re joking!”
* * *
Kenji awoke breathless and sweaty in the bunker. He threw his hands to his head. “Noa, tell them you’re joking,” he whispered. He’d never said that in real life. He hadn’t realized at the time the cost her comments would have. She'd never had the opportunity to recant, to say it was only a jest. The ethernet conversation had been heard by the time gates, and they'd pegged her as a sympathizer. They'd sent an agent, disgustingly similar in appearance to her ex-husband, to shadow her, for what ultimate purpose he wasn't sure. They were shadowing other humans, too. Scattered across the galaxy, the names Kenji had intercepted didn't seem to have any connection between them. Not all of them were guilty of being “alien intelligence” sympathizers. One of the other targets of the time gates on Luddeccea was an extremely religious little old man who rehabilitated injured werfles of all things. Premier Leetier had seen that he was relocated to a re-education camp for his own protection.