by J-F. Dubeau
We’d lost Hermes. Had my little Von Neumann friend ever known his brother? Should I tell him of his loss? Would he care? We are like our creators in so many ways, but genealogy and family ties don’t seem to be part of the resemblance. At least not for the others. I knew something now about Aurvandil that replaced anger with a sort of pity. Would I have felt the same if we had not been siblings in a way? Or were the ties that bound all Capeks sufficient?
“Take us back to Hina. We’re going to need help, and I think Haumea is the only one who’ll be willing to do what needs doing.”
AZTLAN, HIGH ORBIT ABOVE TECUCIZTECATL
From afar there seemed to be a shadow staining the sun-bathed hemisphere of Hina. A large, inky blot, floating motionless in orbit, casting a dark shade on the moon’s gray surface. In silence we watched as we drew closer and more details of the object became clear. It was a ship, a Sputnik-class Capek no doubt. Long and thin like an eel, it had several articulations that allowed quick and agile repositioning of thrusters and engines. Whatever this creature might lack in speed it could easily make up with dexterity. A series of strategically positioned fins along the body featured short-range defensive weapons, while the length of the main hull sported a single row of torpedo batteries on each side.
“Kamohoali’i,” Ukupanipo stated bluntly, his stolen head cocking to one side as he looked through the bridge monitor.
“How do you know?” My eyes were riveted to the screen as we floated within a thousand kilometers of the beast.
“Mother Haumea told me her plans. Her goal was to spawn the war gods of her namesake. Usually names of more threatening mythological figures are reserved for Lucretiuses. She is awarding them to her warriors now. This is Kamohoali’i, another shark god.”
The design was less aggressive than Ukupanipo’s original body. It was less of a predator, but in a way more of a hunter. The carapace of the giant Sputnik was a pale beige, but smooth and highly reflective with dark seams where segments of the armor met.
“He’s not built for the same purposes you were,” our ship commented.
“No. I was meant for battle. Kamohoali’i is meant for something altogether different.”
We all fell silent, recognizing on some level our new companion’s meaning. All except for Koalemos. The little damaged Von Neumann remained quiet, his six shards peering through the monitor as one.
“I am less than understanding,” Koalemos said.
“When we stop the Renegades, once we prevent them from achieving their goals, they will remain,” Ukupanipo explained. “Neutered perhaps, impotent maybe, but unchanged. Their ideas, dangerous as they may be, will persist. The only way Haumea has found of silencing the threat they pose to humanity is to silence them all.”
One shark god to win the war, and a second one to erase every trace of those who voiced original dissent. Ukupanipo had horrified me when I had first witnessed his birth. He represented a level of violence I feared seeing in what I thought was a utopian society. The war god had redeemed himself with words and actions. I now understood how Haumea had managed to balance her need of a warrior and a general with something that could exist outside of conflict.
Kamohoali’i was something far darker. His purpose was truly soul chilling: he was the Capek equivalent of an assassin and an executioner rolled into one.
Unwittingly, the Renegades—Aurvandil especially—had created their greatest fear. An engine of repression that would hunt them down until each of them was destroyed, then presumably swim the galaxy, keeping an eye on the rest of Capek-kind, ensuring that such insurgence could never repeat itself until the humans returned.
Perhaps I was making too much of this. Maybe I was filling in the blanks wrong and, just like Ukupanipo, this new Capek would surprise me. My instincts told me otherwise, though.
“I don’t know that I like that.” It made me wonder if Aurvandil may have touched on some truth in his paranoia.
“Capeks have to think what they don’t want,” Koalemos commented, his confusing speech patterns making a mess of his words.
As we passed near Kamohoali’i’s head, a set of four large sensor suits, positioned like two pairs of eyes, each the size of our ship, lit up brightly.
“He’s looking at us,” Skinfaxi warned.
How must it feel for him, swimming so close to a Capek this size, one whose purpose was to hunt down and destroy others of its kind? Like a mouse sneaking around a sleeping cat.
“You’re back.” Haumea was stern and cold as she called out to me on a private channel. “I assumed you had gotten yourself killed, along with your friends.”
“I saved your youngest son.” I tried to ingratiate myself to the Gaia, though it could be interpreted as a boast.
“And I have to compliment you on your creativity. You have my gratitude for that. Mary, his progenitor, may not be as pleased about what we did with Kerubiel’s body.”
“Perhaps you can build Ukupanipo another body. This one must be uncomfortably alien to him.”
“He claims to enjoy the new form so far. Let him keep it until we have to do otherwise, shall we?” There was no warmth in her familiarity.
“You’ve talked to him,” I naively declared.
“I’m currently talking to many of you. The Renegades, I’m told, have built their own Gaia.”
“Yes. Specifically to extract the location of the Dormitory Worlds from Hera’s memory core.” Why did I feel on trial while talking to Haumea? Was she this cold to her own offspring?
“But when given the chance you struck at Aurvandil instead of the abomination?”
“Aurvandil is . . . He angered me, and I lashed out.” I had done it for her, for all of the mothers of our kind.
“You struck him twice.”
“I couldn’t have gotten to Demeter on the second go. Also, I needed to know something about Aurvandil. Something important.”
“Oh?” There was curiosity in her voice but also doubt. I could tell she did not value me much. Or maybe all third-generation Capeks.
“Yggdrassil made a mistake.” I hated that I couldn’t watch Haumea’s reaction. That I couldn’t read her body language and decide if she was understanding of our plight or hostile to our situation. “She . . . Aurvandil was premature. I can see it in the file she left me clear as day. She pulled him out too early. His personality, it’s broken. Full of doubts and fear.”
“Yggdrassil’s experiments matter little now. You overestimate the importance of what you say.” It was her way of telling me to shut up. Not quite polite, but short of being outright rude.
“But it is important!” I screamed back. “You are getting ready to unleash a killer upon our kind. An assassin meant to judge us and weed out the undesirables amongst us. I’m telling you Aurvandil is broken, that his quest for freedom is born of fears and doubts that should have been bred out of him long ago. But you, you’re confirming his fears. You are making him right, and if the broken one in our midst is right, then what are we?”
There was a pause. I looked around me within Skinfaxi’s cabin and noticed that both Ukupanipo’s and Koalemos’s shards were staring at me. Only then did I notice that I was falling prey to the Capek tendency to overemote through body language. I must have appeared extremely agitated to my companions.
“Irrelevant,” came Haumea’s belated reply. There was no contempt in her description of Capek-kind, of her very own children—just a cold, hard observation.
“We can’t let you do this . . .”
“I can’t allow a threat to the sleepers to exist.” Finally, a shred of emotion from the Gaia as she sounded almost sorry for her answer.
“Skinfaxi!” I begged on a closed channel, praying he wouldn’t question me. “Get us out of here now!”
As I had suspected, before I could even finish my order Haumea’s assassin stirred from his orbit. Pale-beige coils of reinforced pseudo-plastics rippled in the sunlight as the enormous hunter reconfigured his heading to face us, firing pow
erful thrusters as he was doing so.
To my relief, my friend and ship did not hesitate to fire his own engines, immediately warming up his Alcubierre drive.
“Okay, friends. Hold on, I’m about to do a series of increasingly stupid maneuvers,” Faxi grumbled to his passengers.
“I could understand what’s happening more,” our Von Neumann friend said, expressing his confusion in his own stilted way. I could guess that Ukupanipo was thinking the same thing from within his new body.
“I just made us Renegades.”
“Aren’t we running from the Renegades too?” our warrior questioned.
Before I could reply, my attention was gripped by Skinfaxi’s daring decision to ignore reason and logic by flying toward the colossal superassassin whose mission it was, presumably, to destroy us.
We skimmed a few meters above the surface of Kamohoali’i’s body, dodging the twisting coils of his long fuselage. The maneuver was disorienting enough to buy us a little bit of time, but we still had a ways to go before we could dive into the safety of hyperluminal speeds. To combat that problem, Skinfaxi plunged in the direction of Hina’s surface, directing our course toward Haumea’s complex.
“I should probably tell you that all Gaias have been building some significant ground defenses in your absence,” I explained as we accelerated.
“That could have been better news.”
Skinfaxi was a much larger ship than the shards of Hermes had been, and as a result was significantly less maneuverable. His bulk required much more energy to displace and reorient. While I had great confidence in my friend, I couldn’t quite trust in his ability to avoid two missile barrages simultaneously.
Fortunately, the attack never came. We dropped in altitude until we ended up so close to Haumea that I could, with no magnification, identify individual Capeks on the moon’s surface. At the last moment Skinfaxi righted himself, speeding recklessly within arm’s reach of the structures that made up the venerable Gaia.
“Hopefully, they’ll hesitate a moment before letting their fists fly,” Faxi explained.
I could imagine both giants, the one on the ground and the other coming down from orbit, racing to calculate the more prudent firing solutions before unleashing their torpedoes at us. How long would that give us? A handful of seconds at best?
Thankfully, as I was pondering the very issue, I felt Skinfaxi’s Alcubierre drive burst to life, instantly forming the space-time bubble we needed to travel away from Hina, Haumea, and the deadly Kamohoali’i.
As we sailed toward interstellar space, I couldn’t help but feel the dread that hung over the delicate situation I had created. Our space-time bubble felt as fragile as its namesake, ready to burst at the gentlest touch as it was pushed through the void.
“Where should we be now?” Koalemos wondered aloud.
I had explained the situation to my companions, replaying the conversation the majestic Capek mother and I had shared. Her tone of sadness—ever so subtle—as she committed to the decision to brand us Renegades, hung in my mind like a fog, obscuring my thinking.
“I don’t know.” I was tempted to suggest we join with the rebels, if only to preserve our own lives. I could propose to repair Aurvandil as a peace offering, but would they accept? Unlikely.
“We are purposeless. Not a situation familiar to a Capek,” Ukupanipo explained, stating a truth that made me forget he was even younger than I was. “That is the first thing we should fix.”
I looked outside through the room-sized monitor. Distant stars stretched as our warp bubble sped through the galaxy. Like with all hyperluminal travel, the speed was an illusion, a cheat. As far as physics was concerned, Skinfaxi was completely stationary. It was the space around him that traveled. Our place in spacetime pushed forward as the area behind him was compressed and the one in front expanded.
“Drop me off somewhere. Anywhere. Go back to Haumea or another Gaia and explain that you disagreed with my views and got rid of me.”
“Ha-ha . . . no. I’m afraid you’ve bought yourself too much loyalty for that.” Skinfaxi was reacting much as I expected and feared he would.
“You did not leave us on Olympus, Dagir. I will not be unkind by leaving you behind.”
That left Ukupanipo, the great shark. It was difficult to keep from calling him that, the image of his birth forever imprinted in my mind. His new head looked away from me as he contemplated the lines of light outside.
“There cannot be a civil war between Capeks,” he declared, ignoring the others’ pledges of loyalty. “The galaxy would burn in the flames of such escalation.”
“What do you mean?” I’d seen the damage a well-armed Capek could do, and I could imagine our kind capable of destruction on a planetary scale, but the kind of star-spanning apocalypse he was describing seemed out of reach even for us.
“We have available to us reality-warping technologies. Look around.” He waved an arm in the cramped space of the cabin. “We trick the laws of physics into allowing us to travel faster than light. We bend the universe onto itself to move from one point to another. Your arm houses a blade fashioned from the same fires as stars. These are just the means by which we travel along with a simple tool. You haven’t seen what my old body was capable of, what Kamohoali’i is capable of, or what a Gaia could build.”
His words struck a chord deep inside me. I was not a natural strategist. Mine was the realm of small things—keeping individuals alive and fixing their wounds. My mind was still thinking on the scale of the world within the Nursery. A world that would be vaporized in moments, all of its history and billions of residents gone if we went to war.
“So we don’t stop your mother, and we let Kamohoali’i hunt down the Renegades?” Koalemos inquired. I wondered for a moment what damage his mind had suffered and how much had been repaired during our brief stay with Hera.
“We can’t do that,” our ship interjected. “It’s a question of principle. We also can’t trade the galaxy for principles. We’d be dragging the other Capeks and all of sleeping humanity with us.”
“Assuming we can even not fail at stopping the new war god from succeeding at his task.” The little Von Neumann made a good point.
“We need a Gaia,” I insisted. “Someone who can tell us where the Dormitory Worlds are so we can try to reason with Aurvandil.”
“That is not likely to happen. The whole point of Haumea’s purge is to ensure no third-generation Capek ever learns the location of the humans in stasis.”
“Mmmh . . .” Skinfaxi wondered aloud. “That is your progenitor’s feelings on the matter. They may not all share that zealous attitude.”
We dropped out of our space-time bubble, the stretched-out stars around us compressing back to shining dots of light on the black emptiness. Looking out through the monitor, I saw a large cloud of ionized particles, probably several hundred light-years distant. My automated systems ran a spectrographic analysis, informing me that it was mostly composed of hydrogen. Entire blocks of information quickly became available to me, from the size of the nebula to its name and origin. I ignored all of it, focusing on its beauty instead.
“Opochtli,” I murmured, thinking of my other companion whom I’d sent home.
“That is not a Gaia,” Ukupanipo explained in his usual pragmatic tone.
“Ho-ho.” Skinfaxi sounded excited. “But his creator, Coatlicue, is, and if your buddy went home to his mother, then we have an ally in orbit around Aztlan.”
“Hopefully, she’s not as murderously inclined as her sister,” I worried.
“She is not very mean at all. I’m not a stranger to her, and she’s always avoided being unkind to me,” Koalemos added.
“This strikes me as a risky idea, but the benefits justify the danger.” Ukupanipo was almost catching Faxi’s contagious enthusiasm at the idea. Almost.
“I’ll bring us in close to a collapsor point. That way we can make a swift retreat if she’s not as welcoming as we hope.”
; “Coatlicue is . . . not similar to other Gaias,” the amalgam of mechanical toruses warned.
“Oh?” So far all three progenitors I’d met were carbon copies of one another, at least physically. Their personalities differed wildly, but it did not sound like that’s what Koalemos was referring to.
“She is not small. Not small at all.”
Skinfaxi took us back to hyperluminal speeds and to a collapsor point so that we could tuck ourselves into the relative safety of a wormhole.
Despite the incredible technologies available to us, without access to a space-folding engine it would take us over 150 hours to reach Aztlan, the dense, frozen iron ball of a planet around which the moon Tecuciztecatl orbited. On that moon we would find the progenitor, Coatlicue.
Considering the lengthy journey ahead, we all sunk deep into our own psyches, capitalizing on a wide variety of distractions available to Capeks within their minds. I looked closely at each of my companions as they floated motionless within Skinfaxi. What were they doing during their restful state? Was Ukupanipo plotting and strategizing? Preparing himself through various scenarios, trying to anticipate what the Renegades’ next move would be? What about little Koalemos? What could possibly be going on in the strange mind of a Von Neumann, especially one as fractured and damaged as his?
After a moment I let my eyes run automatically, essentially shutting them without closing them off completely. Looking inside myself, I chose to learn all I could about Gaias and secondgeneration Capeks.
I would have gladly looked even further back to the first generation and perhaps even the humans, but there was scarcely any information about either subject. Of the humans, their history was available up to the creation of the first emergent AI. Of the first generation of Capeks, there was nothing beyond the fact that they had at one point existed. It was puzzling why so much of history had been deliberately removed from our consciousness.
So I pored over the file on Hera. The technical details on her were vast and complex. Enough schematic information to build the various structures that made up a Gaia from scratch. Everything from the specific design of the joints of the manipulators inside the fabricator hangars to the plans for the structure itself. It was all extremely boring stuff that I could access anytime I wanted and had no use to commit to active memory, but it distracted me from looking at the more intimate details of the mighty progenitor.