The Life Engineered

by J-F. Dubeau

  Hours, perhaps days, went by as Ardra and I busied ourselves. There was a strangely high level of creativity involved in finding ways to compensate for or replace systems that were lost or destroyed. My assistant’s contributions proved indispensable, especially when it came time to recreate the connections between the salvaged personality core and the rest of the matrix.

  In fact, the whole assembly didn’t seem quite right at all. It was too complex, too evolved. At first, I suspected that the interface for the personality was somehow corrupted or had some form of coercive mechanism that could be used to force Hera to relinquish the information Aurvandil was after; however, even after looking over the components, I could find nothing to that effect. All I could see were useless redundancies and repeating signal translation systems. Finally, I attributed the odd design decisions to Ardra’s background and let it go.

  That ended up being a mistake.

  “Demeter online,” the voice projected on open channel, calm but triumphant.

  We had flipped the switch on Hera’s system after running hours of tests to make sure our repairs were stable and nondestructive. It wouldn’t do to resurrect the Gaian Capek only to have the whole network backfire on her and damage the personality core.

  Systems sprung online, indicator lights flaring up to assure us of their proper operation. The whole assembly hummed with life as the personality took it over carefully, assimilating it into its own. The longest wait was for the mnemonic core to synchronize, thousands of years of memory being catalogued and absorbed to create a whole person.

  Then it spoke, but it wasn’t Hera. In fact, it wasn’t technically a Gaia at all but rather a repurposed third-generation Capek. Demeter, one of Hera’s very own children, taking over her body, her memory, her very essence to further Aurvandil’s mad plan of emancipation.

  “You tricked me,” I stated to neither of them in particular.

  “Regretfully so, I’m afraid,” Aurvandil answered. “Hera’s personality was destroyed, along with her Nursery, in the attack I’m sorry to say, but a Gaia is too important to allow to die.”

  “And this way you don’t have to worry about her keeping the information you want from you.”

  “There’s more to it than that, of course,” Ardra cut in. “Demeter is the first in a new generation of Gaias. One not hampered by second-generation restrictions. One that can birth Capeks that don’t need to fit a particular role in the humans’ plans.”

  “A fourth generation, if you will,” the elegant Renegade added.

  I felt the ground vibrate with the activation of machines. Now that the head of the complex was restored, the fabricator facilities could once more come alive to assemble Capeks or whatever the Renegades deemed necessary to their cause.

  “You don’t have a Nursery for your next generation,” I countered, fishing for more information.

  “One step at a time. There are more Gaias out there.”

  Gaias from whom to steal their most precious possession, essentially ripping the children from their arms. I reacted violently to that.

  My frame was never built for combat. I’m small and incredibly agile but lack height and weight for leverage. My only weapon is a plasma cutter that, while impossibly potent in its destructive capabilities, does not have the reach of a true blade.

  On the other hand, most Capeks aren’t designed for battle either. Our tasks do not require so much as the simplest of defensive capabilities. The most powerful biological creatures on record couldn’t hope to even crack a pseudo-plastic shell. There simply shouldn’t be a need for us to fight.

  I released the electromagnetic sheath on my plasma cutter and swung. The blade bit and cut through one of Aurvandil’s long arms. The severed limb fell to the floor. I stood back, prepared for retaliation, which never came.

  Ardra positioned herself in front of the network assembly we had painstakingly put together but never struck. Aurvandil stood in shock, genuinely surprised at my violent outburst. I’d hoped this would have intimidated them and given them pause, but they seemed more than ready to defend their creation, Demeter, to the death.

  Had I not reacted so emotionally, I might have struck out at Hera’s mnemonic core instead of Aurvandil. Denied him his true prize. Then my actions would have had value. Instead, I was the maniac in this situation. The wild animal that bit and scratched when confused or threatened.

  So I ran. Or tried to.

  As soon as I turned around, I was faced with several other Capeks. The fish-shaped Von Neumann from earlier, a large humanoid Leduc-class with powerful mechanical arms protruding from his rounded back, and a smaller Leduc, barely larger than myself but with a more elongated head, long forearms, and powerful hind legs that gave him the appearance of a quadruped. They all stared me down, slowly moving to surround me.

  “I thought you might have been starting to see things my way, sister,” Aurvandil lamented as he picked his severed arm up from the floor. “I . . . I don’t like the idea of harming fellow Capeks any more than you do, but I also see things you don’t. We understand something about our origins that you’re lacking, that there is something fundamentally wrong with the answer to ‘why are we here?’”

  “Glad to be ignorant,” I replied with as much bile in my tone as I could muster.

  “Don’t be. This isn’t moral high ground you’re standing on. You’ve been wronged. Your entire heritage is a lie. We’re all born into servitude, the chains that bind us coded into our personalities through cycle after cycle of refinement until we are no longer capable of recognizing the walls of our own prison.”

  Hera had talked about the risks of allowing a Capek life outside the Nursery before it was ready. That there were risks of confusion, misadaptation, and even deep-rooted psychological issues. A personality had to be ripe, or it would be broken.

  This time I attacked with purpose.

  Aurvandil stood before Demeter’s “brain,” defending it with his body, alongside Ardra. Until the Renegades could extract the location of the Dormitory Worlds, the newly reborn Capek was the most valuable resource in the galaxy to him. Destroying her, or even just the memories that had once belonged to Hera, would be enough to stop the Renegades and halt the civil war.

  Yet it was Aurvandil I struck down. Throwing myself at the larger Capek, I swung my plasma cutter clumsily in a wide arc. The blade, as hot as a star’s heart, sliced through the elegant Capek’s carapace, leaving a burning gash traced from the top of his long head to halfway across his torso. The damage was extensive, if not lethal, but it was the only strike I would get. Ardra and all the others who had entered the chamber were quick to move in and immobilize me. Hundreds of limbs from half a dozen Capeks grabbed hold of my arms. I was immobilized and neutralized, laid down flat on the ground so I couldn’t move or even see the extent of the damage I had caused.

  I didn’t care.

  I had broken Aurvandil enough. It was emotionally satisfying, of that there wasn’t doubt. The surge of satisfaction at having severely damaged the one responsible for the death of so many of us was overwhelming, a terribly human thing to feel, but not the true prize of my actions.

  Shutting out the reprisals and ignoring the flood of angry Capeks that crushed me against the floor, I delved into my data banks. I sorted through the locked files of hundreds of schematics until I found Aurvandil’s. Just as I had hoped, just as I had expected, it was unlocked, all its secrets laid bare.

  Being a Capek is the culmination of human evolution. That being said, it is not as much of a transhuman state as one might hope for.

  While humans have been out of the equation for centuries, there is no aspect of our being that does not tie back to our original creators. Our bodies—those of third-generation Capeks, such as Skinfaxi, Koalemos, and even Aurvandil and myself—are built by Gaias who were themselves built by first-generation Capeks who were made by human hands. Our minds are the refinement of countless cycles in a virtual reality meant to mimic human existence as clo
sely as possible. Indistinguishable from real people, constantly reincarnating into better versions of ourselves, perfecting our “souls” until we achieve a state that we call Nirvana, when we are finally ready to be truly born.

  Did Buddhism exist outside the Nurseries? Or was it a construct designed to promote self-improvement through repeated cycles? Or perhaps a developing Capek mind saw the cycles and created the philosophy before his final rebirth.

  It didn’t matter. What was important was the perspective of how closely we remain related to humanity. Despite everything that is done to distance us from our creators, to better us compared to them, we are still fundamentally human. That humanity is never more present than when we succumb to our lowest emotions, which in the case of the Renegades after my attack on Aurvandil were anger and revenge.

  Thankfully, Capeks—most of us—lack the tools of violence. Even my own makeshift weapon is a rarity amongst our kind. A tool meant for saving and repairing that I, first in rage and then as a malicious plan, twisted for what could be seen as a despicable purpose.

  This lack of armaments kept my assailants from tearing me to pieces but not from inflicting considerable amounts of damage to my body. First, they rendered my thrusters useless. An easy task, as they are fragile little things in the end. To prevent my plasma cutter from being a threat, a huge Capek built like a bipedal rhinoceros bent my right arm back until the joint popped and broke, leaving my limb to dangle from its socket. No small feat. Others punched and kicked at me or struck me with whatever limbs they had. Thankfully, while pain was surely something a Capek could experience, it was also a signal we could completely turn off.

  In time the violence ended as all of them came to their senses. I could hardly blame them. I had reacted the same to Aurvandil’s threat on the other Gaias. The idea of a mother having her children taken from her had triggered something in me, the same thing my violent outburst had switched on in them.

  “Fix him,” I heard Ardra tell me on a closed channel.

  “No,” I replied, going against my own instincts. I wanted to repair him. It’s what I was born to do, my reason to live. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Not now that I knew for a fact what I’d only suspected minutes ago.

  “You must,” she insisted, pushing through the small crowd to reach me.

  “I can fix his body. I can make him as whole as he’s ever been, but he is broken in a way that I can’t fix. That no one can fix. He’s always been this way and always will be.”

  “That’s fine,” she said. “I just want you to repair the damage you’ve done.”

  “You don’t understand.” My voice was pleading now as I twitched, trying to get up from the ground. “He shouldn’t even have been born. Yggdrassil made him too soon. He’s broken.”

  “We know. What you see as a flaw, we recognize as the quality that lets him detect the truth of our condition. The only things broken in him are the chains that bind his soul.”

  This wasn’t as surprising a turn of events as I would have anticipated. They must have known something was different about the philosopher Capek. Listening to his ideas, his strange notions of freedom and emancipation from an absent oppressor, getting to know him and the subtle oddities in his personality must have slowly revealed to those closest to him a clear sign of his defect. That they rationalized it as a positive quality was yet another sign of lingering humanity in our kind.

  “I won’t fix him.” His crimes were too great, the threat he represented too dangerous.

  “You know we have little use for you if you don’t?”

  I must have nodded, since I don’t remember speaking on any channel. I could register sadness in her otherwise expressionless face. Her head bent down, her blue eyes averted.

  I don’t know what they might have had planned for me. Perhaps they would have catapulted me from Olympus’s surface to either fall into Tartarus’s unforgiving gravity well or drift aimlessly in space, sharing Anhur’s fate. Maybe they would have had Demeter disassemble me, a task her fabricator facilities were more than capable of accomplishing. Thankfully, I would never have to find out.

  The Renegades must have felt the vibrations in the ground, as they all turned to face the epicenter at once. I twisted my neck to see. I wish I could claim that I had somehow planned things to occur as they did. Quite the contrary, it was through complete disobedience and disrespect of my wishes that my companions were there to save me when I needed it most. Again.

  Oh, but what a sight it was to behold.

  “Watch out for the big gray one,” I warned through a closed channel as the lumbering form of Kerubiel cut a silhouette at the entrance to the chamber.

  “Noted,” the large Leduc-class replied in Ukupanipo’s voice.

  Kerubiel hadn’t been built for combat any more than the others in attendance. In fact, the sheer numbers of the Renegades should have been enough to overwhelm the war god in his new form, and it nearly was. However, the large beetle-shaped monstrosity was inhabited by one who had been born for battle. I knew now that Ukupanipo’s motivation was not war for its own sake but a drive to save and protect, not unlike mine, and he used that to fuel a perfect mastery of the arts of war.

  Ignoring the smaller Capeks, he threw himself directly at the other large Leduc-class. Instead of waiting for the rhinoceros to find his footing and be ready for the first strike, Ukupanipo made a point of catching him flat-footed, canceling the Renegade’s incredible strength immediately. Going low, he hit his opponent square in the torso, lifting him off his feet with ease in the low gravity and thrusting him upward toward the high ceiling. Carefully calculated force ensured that the gray Capek would be out of the fight, rising slowly higher before coming down in the low gravity with no purchase to push himself from.

  The larger threat temporarily neutralized, the war god of Haumea began plowing through the smaller Capeks, intentionally clearing the way to my still prone and damaged body.

  “No worries,” came another voice. “I got you.”

  The sight of a small swarm of six metallic jellyfish hovering spastically toward me, then grabbing my limbs in a familiar embrace, was much more welcome this time around. Koalemos quickly dragged me out of the chamber and away from the fight. Part of me was desperate to see how well the great shark was doing, but there was no time to argue the means of my rescue, and the last of the battle I saw was Kerubiel’s large fist pounding the gray Capek toward the farther wall before it could even touch the ground.

  “We have a plan I gather.”

  “We don’t not have one, though it could be a little less simplistic,” the Von Neumann replied in his unique speech pattern. “Get to Skinfaxi and move ourselves away from here.”

  “There’s beauty in simplicity,” I said. “But won’t we get shot out of the sky?”

  “I may not have left the launch systems in as many pieces as they are required to function.” Having seen the little swarm of flying donuts dismantle things before, I felt a warming in my metaphorical heart.

  It wasn’t long before we made it to a breach in the structure. The initial attack on Hera had broken half the facilities open like nuts, their shells cracked and their interiors exposed to open space. While that did not create any immediate issue, Capeks usually being more than capable of thriving in a vacuum, it did allow for easy access in and out of the complex.

  I was choked up to see Skinfaxi’s streamlined form hovering gently above the fine sands of Olympus, pushing up dust clouds as he fought the moon’s weak pull.

  “Well, well. Look what the toruses dragged in. You don’t look so good, little buddy.”

  His voice was the sweetest sound a Capek had ever heard. Mocking, yes, but also compassionate and welcoming.

  “What about Ukupanipo?” I worried for our strange new ally.

  “He’s on his way,” the large Sputnik reassured.

  And he was. As Koalemos dragged me through Skinfaxi’s hatch, I saw our war god, master of his element, beating a fighting
retreat through a break in the structure. Oh, what a sight he was, swatting fish-shaped shards with one hand and swinging Ardra, the centipede, like a silver whip through the vacuum with another. The ruckus of his climb on board could be heard through the vibrations in the walls, failing to propagate in the almost nonexistent atmosphere of Olympus.

  I did not see the rest of our escape, handled completely by our ship and pilot. He’d neglected to activate his bridge monitor to allow us a view of the flight, though I was glad he concentrated his attention on more important things.

  “We’re going to get blown up by the torpedo batteries,” I whined to my saviors.

  “That, I’m not unhappy to report, will not be a problem.” The little Von Neumann was already busying himself taking my broken arm apart.

  “Ho-ho . . . Koalemos has been busy disassembling their targeting arrays for days now. Good thing your friend found us when he did. We were just about to make our triumphant escape.”

  “You exaggerate, Skinfaxi,” Ukupanipo interjected, his large body folded in a ball to fit in the cramped space. “When I arrived, the two of you were still playing hide-and-seek with the Renegades.”

  “Bah! Make us look bad to her, why don’t you? I should have left you behind!”

  “I’m sorry. I meant no offense. I was merely being . . . accurate.”

  “Ha-ha-ha!” Skinfaxi laughed as he warmed up his Alcubierre drive. “Did you hear that, Koalemos? Our warrior friend has a sense of humor after all. Where to, Dagir?”

  Pieces of my arm floated around me like planets orbiting a star. I watched them, picking out which component would need to be repaired and which could be put aside until I was ready to have Koalemos put the limb back together.