by Isaac Hooke
Tanner swung again, but the machine intercepted the blow with its free arm. Those steel pincers closed around the iron leg and silently cracked it in half.
The machine struck out with that arm. Tanner was hit, and he stumbled over the terminal, sprawling backward onto the desk.
The machine returned its attention to Ari and smashed her faceplate. The last of her oxygen misted from the opening.
"No," Tanner said, climbing to his feet.
The machine smashed its pincers into her helmet a second time. Fragments of skull and brain tissue splattered her suit.
"No, no." He was watching her die a second time.
The machine tossed her body away like so much trash, and then swiveled its bloody pincers toward Tanner.
The other two machines approached from opposite sides of the desk.
Tanner took a running leap and landed heavily beside the machine he'd partially blinded. He ducked a swing from its metal arm and, resisting the urge to go to Ari's body, he made his way toward the pile of crumpled desks that formed a ramp beneath the window.
It felt like he was wading in a snowdrift. The artificial gravity of the ship remained active despite the depressurization, and the bulky suit weighed 150 lbs by itself. Add in his own weight, and he was lugging around 300 lbs. Not an easy load, to say the least. He almost wished he was wearing some of those motorized leg gyros under his suit.
He struggled to the top of the ramp, and looked back. The iron golems were rolling over Ari's spacesuit, making sure she was thoroughly dead.
His vision blurred, and his knees buckled slightly. Though he felt like giving up, Tanner had to live. Otherwise she'd died for nothing.
The machines turned toward him.
"Goodbye Ari." He blinked away the tears and jumped out.
The instant he left the ship the natural gravity of the moon took over. He landed lightly in the ice and nearly took a tumble. The gravity outside was almost 1/7th the simulated earth gravity. Even including the weight of the suit, he was now only 42 lbs.
He adapted quickly enough, and bounded more than two paces with each step. The surface felt a little slippery, which was expected, and he found that he had to lean in the direction he wanted to go, keeping his center of mass forward.
He activated the helmet light, brightening the somewhat murky landscape. The light had an oddly sharp quality. There was no diffusion, because there was no atmosphere for the light to diffuse in. He looked down. The light reflected from the surface almost blindingly, and he quickly quartered the intensity.
According to the archives, Ganymede was covered in a mantle of ice. Indeed, the yellow surface reminded him of pictures of pack ice he'd seen in the archives, replete with giant icebergs rudely protruding from the surface. On average, the icy crust of Ganymede was 100 km deep, but this area was at the top of a mountain range, and if he looked carefully he could see the outline of the yellow mountains encased in the ice below. A layer of sand, grit and silicate sheathed the ice in places—debris from the aerial bombardments that had dug through to the rock below.
He did his best to avoid the icy shards and debris that scattered the surface, not the easiest task given that the rubble ranged in size from fist-sized crags to boulders bigger than houses. Still, he had surprising energy levels, despite the fact he hadn't eaten in two days. Adrenalin could do that to you.
A surge of guilt filled him as he bounded across the moon. Ari should be here with him, at his side.
But she wasn't.
He'd left her in that room.
Dead.
From the starry heavens, the Great Red Spot of Jupiter looked down at him, accusing, mocking.
Tanner glanced back, the cone of light from his helmet swinging toward the ship.
All three machines had piled onto the surface in pursuit. The malevolent red beams of light on their heads shot back and forth, scanning the immediate vicinity as the machines ran their pathfinding algorithms. The metal goliaths drove right over the smaller ice fragments, but like Tanner had to divert around the bigger boulders. Still, those grooved rubber treads were designed for terrain like this, and their speed more than compensated for any obstacles.
The machines were gaining on him.
CHAPTER TWO
Tanner was still looking over his shoulder when his boot hit the jagged edge of an ice fragment. He stumbled, and it took him a few strides to regain his balance.
He knew he couldn't outrun those machines, so he bounded over a series of progressively taller fragments, heading for an ice boulder that was a little taller than a full-grown man. There was no way the machines would be able to reach him on that, not with those treads. When Tanner landed on top of the boulder, he stopped too suddenly and almost fell off the other side. He recovered his balance, turned toward the three machines, and waited.
Listening to his own harsh breathing, he remembered something.
"Nitrox levels?" he said, well aware that his exertions were costing him precious oxygen.
The suit responded instantly, projecting a message onto the helmet glass.
Estimated Oxygen: 5 minutes.
Five minutes? There was supposed to be an hour left.
"Switch to the reserve," he said. "The reserve!"
Another message flashed.
Reserve Currently In Use.
Shit.
He was done. Might as well give up now. Trapped out here on the Ganymede surface, three murderous machines closing in, five minutes to live... there was no way he could make it back to the ship in time, even if he could defeat the machines.
Despair overcame him and he sank down on the boulder, deep down, and he didn't think he'd ever get up again.
Ari had died for nothing.
Ari had—
No.
It wasn't over yet.
He wouldn't let her death be for nothing.
He wouldn't give up now, though everything seemed hopeless.
He would fight to the end.
He swore it in his heart.
He swore it to Ari.
"Once more unto the breach." He stood.
The three machines approached, treads bobbing malevolently over the small fragments that littered the ground. The machines spread out, coming at the boulder from different angles, and dug their pincers into the ice, perhaps hoping to find handholds. They succeeded only in chipping away fragments.
The machines began rearranging the surrounding pieces of ice on the surface, pushing some, picking up others, and soon a rough ramp began to take shape, formed of three rows of similarly-sized fragments, each row smaller than the last. The machines set more fragments on top of those, and bashed them into place until the ice broke and filled in the gaps.
The machines worked methodically, and surprisingly fast. The ramp was three-quarters done now.
Tanner considered making a break for it. But he realized he'd rather die fighting than on-the-run. He'd make his last stand here.
He waited, trying to keep calm, trying to conserve his oxygen, hoping the machines would finish their little ramp before his air ran out.
They did.
Two machines took up guard positions on opposite sides of the boulder in case he still decided to jump. The first machine swayed up the ramp.
It was time.
Tanner grabbed the wireless access port from his belt and repeatedly slammed the pointed end into the ice boulder until a fragment broke off. He lobbed the shard at the approaching machine's head.
He missed.
Tanner broke off another fragment. He took careful aim this time, and threw the ice at those glass eyes—
This time he managed to hit the machine, but still missed the eyes, and the ice bounced harmlessly away from the cross-guard on its head.
The machine stalked onto the boulder.
Crouching, Tanner gripped the wireless access port like a dagger.
CHAPTER THREE
Tanner was just about to launch himself at the machine when a stream of light arced p
ast, low in the sky.
An attack.
The strike landed roughly fifty paces away.
A sun-bright flash blinded him. He felt the impact of multiple rocks striking his suit, pressing the material into his chest, and he was flung from the boulder. He heard cracking glass, and knew his faceplate had been hit, and for a moment he thought it was going to shatter. Although there was no atmosphere to carry the sound waves of the impact, he heard the persistent scrub of grit against his suit from the fragments of ice and rock the attack had thrown up. It sounded like a hundred termites burrowing into wood.
He still couldn't see—the white afterimage of the flash consumed his vision.
He hit the ground and immediately bounced. He hit again, and again, skimming across the surface. His impacts increased in frequency until he found himself in an all-out roll. He felt the jab of several small fragments of rock and ice from the surface, and a part of his mind worried that the jagged edges would compromise his suit. He rolled and rolled.
When he finally came to a stop, face-down on the surface, he was still breathing.
Dizzy, but breathing.
So the suit hadn't been punctured at least.
Something nagged at the back of his mind, something important that he couldn't remember, and just when he had it nausea overcame him and he dry-heaved. It was probably a good thing that he hadn't eaten in the past two days, because he would have tarred the entire inside of his helmet. Still, the bitter taste of bile crawled up his throat and made him dry-heave three more times.
He waited for more hurtling rocks, or any other signs of ongoing attack, but none came. The last attack he could remember had occurred two days ago, the same attack that had forced Ari and Tanner into the spacesuits in the first place. A fresh attack was long overdue.
But the attackers had fired just once.
Why?
He turned over and lay on his back. He still couldn't see anything—though the white afterimage had faded, now everything was black. The attack would have had to penetrate deep to dig up a dust cloud as big and persistent as this. He gingerly rubbed his glove across the cracked faceplate in case there was grime or something else coating it, but the view remained dark.
He checked his helmet light. The indicator said it was active, though he saw no cone of light whatsoever. Prudently, he turned it off.
He was alone in the dark, with only the sound of his breathing for company.
And then he remembered what it was that he had forgotten.
"Nitrox?" he said.
The suit projected a message onto the helmet glass.
Estimated Oxygen: 90 seconds.
"Shit!" Tanner scrambled to his feet. Fight to the end.
He slipped and fell. He tried to stand, and slipped again, this time striking his helmet against the surface. His skull jarred and his teeth rattled, and more cracks threaded across his faceplate.
Tanner sat partially upright, supporting himself on one elbow. He paused a moment to catch his breath. The cloud was beginning to clear, and he could see the faint outline of his gloves in the darkness.
That's when he noticed a form lying beside him.
He turned on his helmet light.
It was Hoodwink. His skin had a bluish-purple discoloration, and was very dry, like the shriveled surface of a raisin. His body was bloated by the gaseous byproducts of the bacteria in his guts that had survived until the body became too cold.
Ari and Tanner had taken the only available suits in the control station, and when the glass had shattered, Hoodwink had been sucked out onto the surface, rolling away in the low gravity.
And so here he lay.
Tanner deactivated the helmet light, and lowered himself to the ice. He stared upward into the murk.
He was done.
Fight to the end?
This was the end.
He'd end here, on the surface of a moon four hundred million miles from Earth, beside the only man who'd ever revealed the truth to him. Beside the man whose daughter he loved.
He'd end here, beside Hoodwink.
CHAPTER FOUR
Death by asphyxiation. The archives claimed it was like going to sleep. A peaceful, gentle sleep. Gas exchange in the lungs continued as normal but resulted in the removal of all oxygen from the bloodstream. After 7 to 10 seconds, the deoxygenated blood reached the brain and loss of consciousness resulted. Death from hypoxia—oxygen deficiency—followed gradually after two minutes.
During those two minutes, when the oxygen-starved brain stem ceased to function, the heart stopped. Without the flow of blood to maintain the appropriate balance of calcium and other minerals in the cells of the body, the organs ballooned. The brain wasn't immune, and calcium flowed into the brain in massive doses, creating a sudden electrical current as the brain swelled. After that final outburst of potential energy, all electrical activity in the swollen brain ceased.
The brain stopped functioning.
But what happened to the psyche?
He remembered sifting through the archives months ago, after posing the question that had been on his and everyone's mind the day after a particularly harrowing attack from the machines, when one of the children had been lost.
What happens when we die?
People's realities are bounded by what they know, what their senses can perceive. A world of objects and occurrences external to the self. A persistent-state world that existed before us, and will continue to exist after us regardless of whether we believe in it or not.
People assign arbitrary meanings to events and observations, and their minds catalog those meanings in appropriate drawers. Familiarity leads to habit, habit leads to assumption, assumption leads to reality. What we see and hear must be real, and must be the only reality there is. When someone dies, they go to sleep and never wake up. There's nothing more to life than that.
Right?
When Tanner had first learned about electromagnetic waves in the archives, he was astounded. Imagine, invisible light that passed through objects and could be used to carry messages. Waves that existed whether people believed in them or not. A reality atop our own. How many other such hidden realities were there? How many hidden worlds? Worlds upon worlds upon worlds, all of which existed whether we believed in them or not.
"What the hell are we?" he said.
The lungs injected oxygen into the blood. The heart pumped that blood. The arteries and veins and capillaries distributed that oxygen-rich blood to the organs and muscle tissue. The bones provided the framework that held it all up, and produced the blood. The muscles offered mobility. The sack in the abdomen provided the specialized organs used to digest and egest, along with organs that produced the chemicals called hormones. The spinal cord gave the reflexes, and acted as the intermediary between the mind and body. The brain coordinated it all.
The brain. The root of consciousness. Where thoughts formed words and actions.
The brain gave rise to the self. The psyche. The soul.
Did it really?
"What the hell are we?"
Tanner remembered reading about two ancient Earth figures, Aristotle and Plato.
Aristotle believed that the psyche, or consciousness, was the end-product of the human body, and that when the body died, the psyche died with it.
Plato believed in dualism. That the psyche existed independently of the human body, in a dual plane of existence, and that when the body died, the psyche lived on.
Tanner still had the image in his head from the archives, taken from a painting in a church, that depicted Plato, shown with his long gray beard, pointing at the heavens, while Aristotle, walking at his side, pointed at the earth.
Which was it then? An afterlife in the heavens? Or eternal darkness in the ground?
According to the archives, after those two minutes of dying, when hypoxia followed and all electrical activity between the swollen neurons faded, and the physical processes that determined what we call consciousness completely ceased, t
hat state called clinical death was declared. With technology being what it was, people could be brought back from that precipice up to eight hours later, assuming proper tissue cooling. Brought back with no brain or bodily damage whatsoever.
Those who returned sometimes reported having been conscious over the death period. They described the events of the resuscitation from a point in the room other than their own bodies. Others told of a sense of peace and contentment. Or seeing their lives replayed. Or ascending a tunnel of light and seeing friends and relatives who had passed before them.
The death throes of a dying brain? The outcome of a chemical process that acted on those parts of the brain responsible for cognition and perception? Kind of like being on the Inside? But that couldn't be possible, not when there was no physical activity in the brain, no electrical impulses, just a non-functional mass of swollen gray matter, the tissue slowly necrotizing.
Unless consciousness was more than electrical impulses.
Unless human beings were more than just the mass of neurons in their heads.
Unless one could be dead, yet still tethered, however tenuously, to the body, so that when one was revived one could report these things.
But if that were true, if a human body could attain consciousness where no consciousness was possible, then what truly happened when one died, and that final tether was cut?
Would Tanner cross some final Forever Gate?
Would he find himself in limbo? Purgatory? Heaven? Hell?
Maybe one of the eight levels of paradise? Valhalla maybe?
Or perhaps he'd awaken in the nine hells. Maybe Tartarus? Would he see the River Styx?
What about the Fields of Aaru?
The seven gates of the House of Osiris?
Maybe he'd be reincarnated according to the deeds of karma, his 'Atman' attached to one of those test-tube babies on the ship. Or maybe he'd be born into another species on some far-flung corner of the galaxy. Or how about reborn as one of the Enemy? There's irony for you.
Either way, Ari had done it all before him. She was the pioneer. She'd blazed the path, and she waited to guide him on the other side.