Zion's Fiction

by Zion's Fiction- A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature (retail) (epub)

  She opened another door that led to a small room lit by spheres hovering near the ceiling. It contained one desk and three chairs. Nuphar sat at the desk, raised her hands in the air, and a keyboard materialized in front of her.

  Shir and I exchanged looks and sat down in the chairs facing her.

  “I programmed this keyboard,” she smiled at us, “based on old blueprints.”

  She typed our names and titles on the holokeyboard, then raised her head. “We must plan our expeditions. Even if your world is in war, there are always historians who want to get to the Library, and we’re extraterritorial, independent of any nation or period of time.” She was frowning and licking her lips as she typed.

  Shir leaned forward and laid his hand on the keyboard. Nuphar looked up at us. “Don’t do that,” she said, frowning even more.

  Shir cleared his throat. “We have something … There’s something you should know.” He looked at me furtively.

  I knew what he wanted me to do. I was senior, so I had to take the lead. I took a deep breath. There was an oath. A short one. We’d recorded it dozens of years ago. I hadn’t dared look at it since. “Can we connect with your screen system?” I pointed at her desk. “Something small, we don’t need an entire hall.”

  Nuphar looked at Shir, and again at me. “Is it important?”

  I nodded.

  She frowned. “Well, we’ll return to your reader cards momentarily.” She typed, and connection instructions floated in my vision.

  Shir laid a hand on my shoulder and squeezed it slightly by way of encouragement. I laid my hand on the desktop and made contact with the central computer. It was old software, but I managed to fit one of the protocols to my own software and broadcast.

  An old me, thirty-four years of age, in tattered uniform, with blood stains on my face, looked straight at Nuphar. Nuphar looked at me, and returned her eyes to the figure that used to be me. I activated the simulation.

  “I, Romi Potashnik, being of sound mind, do hereby put my consciousness and my body in the hands of the Supreme Generator,” said my projected self and took a deep breath. It wiped its eyes and added: “We shall never stop, we shall never cease, we shall never desist.”

  The simulation ended. Shir put his hand beside mine and his oh-so-young image appeared above the desk. “I, Shir Ben-Yair, being of sound mind, do hereby put my consciousness and my body in the hands of the Supreme Generator. We shall never stop, we shall never cease, we shall never desist.” He saluted, and the image froze.

  Nuphar looked at us. “Is this for the record?”

  “No.” Shir gave Nuphar a direct look, capturing her eyes. “This was recorded one hundred nine years, four months, ten days, and three hours ago.”

  Nuphar looked like she was about to smile, but her smile vanished before it could reach her lips.

  “This is my last recording as a Human Being,” I said, and Nuphar shifted her glance to me. “I don’t know how many times I’ve been reconstructed since.”

  “You aren’t….” Nuphar’s eyes moved back to Shir. “Both of you … ?” She bit her lip and shook her head. “No, of course you aren’t,” she whispered. “Your facial expressions, your gait, the way you understand each other much too well.” Now she directed her glance at me. “Are you telepathic? Do you have a way of broadcasting your thoughts to each other?”

  I opened my mouth to reply, but Shir was faster: “No.” He loosened his clenched fist. “We can broadcast subvocally, but that’s not possible in here.”

  Nuphar’s giggle was a brief one. “All frequencies are blocked in here; we don’t want to disturb our readers,” she said.

  We smiled in reply. This seemed like the correct response. Nuphar’s smile froze and disappeared.

  “But you do look human. Our scans identified you as human beings.” She closed her eyes. “Metallic skeleton and human skin?”

  “Of course. All over our bodies.” I cleared my throat. “Otherwise we couldn’t have penetrated space-warp fields.”

  “Of course not,” she repeated. Nuphar opened her eyes and looked at me. “Explain. Now.” She spread her fingers, and the keyboard rematerialized underneath her hands.

  “It would be faster if we downloaded all our knowledge directly into …” began Shir, but he fell quiet as Nuphar turned her eyes to glare at him.

  “Listen, kid.” She straightened her back. “I am a Librarian, a sixth-generation Librarian. I’ve been doing this since before you were born. Or created. Or assembled in a lab.”

  “Grown in culture,” said Shir.

  Nuphar raised her hand. “I couldn’t care less. I’ve been doing this many more years than you can imagine, so don’t you tell me how to prepare information for cataloging. We’ll download everything to the Library’s memory, of course. But first I want your story in general outline, so we can determine how to start processing the new information by subject headers.”

  Now she looked at me. “Proceed, for future generations.”

  I wanted to tell her that there won’t be any future generations, at least not on Earth, but Shir made a coughing noise, and I started telling her. About the invasion, about our inability to prevent the aliens’ taking over our planet, about lost technologies, about the relentless slaughter. About the moment we found out that what they really wanted was the Moon, and that they came to Earth just to rid it of vermin that might have interfered with their designs. About the deal that sealed the fate of all the members of the Silence Unit. I did leave out the sense of loss, the physical pain that came with each explosion, and the mental anguish when memories started flowing to newly activated backups. As well as the need to go on functioning even though everything we were meant to defend was gone.

  Space-warp fields know how to seal themselves against anything mechanical and protect whatever they surround from external detonations. But they are sensitive to living matter and can recognize intelligence. Our combination of living tissue and intelligence can confuse them long enough for us to detonate the charges hidden inside us. The first invaders got the Moon, and Humankind remained on Earth to protect it from repeated invasions by other aliens who coveted exactly the same resources.

  “But humankind….” Nuphar did not complete this sentence. She looked at Shir, at me, back at him. “But why? Whatever for? If there are no more human beings….”

  “Because this is our destiny,” I replied. “We need to defend Earth.”

  “The Prime Directive says, defend Earth for Humankind,” added Shir.

  “But there is no humankind anymore,” said Nuphar again, tearfully. “No more human beings. Whatever for … why … ?” She raised her hands from the keyboard and buried her face in them. Her head remained between her palms, her hair hid her face from us. Her shoulders were trembling.

  Shir raised his eyebrows and tilted his head in her direction. I nodded. We are not capable of genuine compassion.

  Nuphar sighed and raised her head. Her eyes were red. I made a note to add this item to the programming of my next backup. She sniffled, put her hands on the desk, and the keyboard reappeared beneath her hands. “Go on,” she said. “Dates. Locations. Major battles. How many invasions there were. Go on.”

  We didn’t reply. Nuphar raised her voice. “Come on, robots, start talking.”

  I cleared my throat.

  “And don’t make this noise.” Nuphar straightened up. “You don’t have to breathe. You’re just a machine in a humanlike bag.”

  “But we do breathe,’ said Shir. Despite his stiffened body, his voice was calm. “We have pain fibers. We feel and behave like Human Beings.”

  “But you are not human beings,” Nuphar raised her voice again. “You’re just … just …” Her voice broke. She snuffled again. And again. But this time she didn’t lower her head or shift her glance. I looked at her.

  “If we weren’t here, you’d have had nowhere to come back to,” I said.

  “We’re not coming back,” Nuphar interrupted me. She wiped
her nose. “There’s nowhere to come back to. We’ll seal the Library and move on, like always, and stop again in three hundred years to see if anything may have changed.”

  “Nothing will have changed.” Shir sat very straight. “We’ll go on exploding, and when you come back you’ll find Earth still …”

  “Full of machines,” Nuphar completed his sentence for him, and there was a sting in her voice. She glared at me. “Do you wish to make a protest also?”

  I nodded.

  “So come on. Proceed.” Nuphar spread her fingers over the keyboard.

  “I just think,” I said quietly, “that this decision is not up to you.”

  She did not answer. She just looked at me.

  “There are more than two thousand Human Beings in here. As you told us yourself. You explained that you live in an organized anarchy. The decision whether to stop, move on, or come out must be made by all. Otherwise you’ll be trampling all over their rights.”

  Nuphar continued to stare at me. I returned her gaze. My internal programming said that after ten seconds I must blink, and after thirty seconds I must lower my eyes. These intervals were set by Romi Potashnik when she created the very first backup.

  After half a minute, I lowered my eyes. I waited. The room was silent.

  Nuphar sighed. “Okay,” she said finally. I raised my head. She removed her fingers from the keyboard.

  “I’m going to call a general meeting.” She bit her lower lip. “And you will not interfere.” She hesitated for a moment. “This is an order, hear?”

  We nodded. She could not change our programming, but we knew we’d better not point out her mistake. Romi and Shir had programmed us, inputting the spectrum of permitted responses to Humans and specifying the chain of command. They had not known that Humankind was going to be wiped out in its entirety three hours after they completed their programming and that these reactions would become redundant, since there would not be any Humans to obey.

  The meeting hall was crowded and noisy. I was unable to figure out the rules by which this was organized. Some shouted, some stood up on the desks and stomped their feet, some sat by and only made comments. Nuphar did all of the above, sometimes standing on a desk, sometimes stomping her feet, sometimes heckling speakers, sometimes doing all at the same time. Nobody ran the discussion or controlled it.

  We sat at the side of the room, ignored by all, having done our job. I was worn out and couldn’t follow the discussion anymore. My internal counter said it was more than twelve hours since we had entered the sphere. I needed food and sleep. Shir, on the other hand, looked livelier. His programming said that the later the hour the more alert he will be, except for those five hours and twenty minutes he spent restlessly turning over in his bed each night.

  Shir turned to me. “They’re about to wrap it up,” he said.

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “Noise is abating.” He pointed at my head. “You really should upgrade your decibel counter.”

  “Then it’s decided.” Nuphar’s voice got louder, and everybody shut up. “We stay here. We’ll cut short the next waiting period, and in the meanwhile we’ll see whether we can create weapons or some means of defense for the Silence Unit.”

  There were scattered cheers and a few clapped their hands, especially the ones who stood on their desks. Nuphar turned to us. She was all sweaty and her face was flushed. “You can go back home now.” She smiled, but this time the corners of her eyes did not move when she stretched her lips sideways. “We thank you for everything.”

  “We are not going back home.” Shir’s voice was quiet, in comparison with the hubbub that surrounded us just a few moments before.

  “So go back to your pods,” said Nuphar, her foot drumming on the top of the desk where she stood. “What’s important is that you get out of here.”

  Shir spread his hands. “We do have homes. We live in a way designed to make the Superiors believe Earth is still populated.” He added, pointing at me, “Romi has a live-in partner.”

  Who had remained in bed and asked me to take care. This was my only recollection of her. I never knew if Romi kept all other memories of Yonit to herself deliberately, or maybe this was all she had managed to upload to her backup. She didn’t even create Yonit. I created her, from the limbless body that waited for my first backup to come back home.

  “Excellent.” Nuphar folded her arms on her chest. “Then go back home.”

  I stood up, and Shir stood behind me. “We can’t go back home. We must destroy the vestibule.”

  Noise exploded in the room. Shir made a face. “That’s why I don’t upgrade my decibel counter,” I whispered in his ear. He only nodded.

  Nuphar raised her hands. “Silence!” she shouted. After her third attempt, the room grew a little quieter. She put her hands on her hips. “What do you mean, destroy the vestibule? The vestibule connects us with this Earth of yours. If you ever want to see humans again….”

  I shook my head. “That’s too dangerous. We must defend Humankind.”

  “Which means you,” Shir completed my sentence for me, gesturing at the room. “If anyone could penetrate the vestibule, they would be able to destroy the lot of you.”

  Nuphar straightened up. “Only humans can….” she began, but then fell silent. Her face grew pale.

  “It won’t matter at all,” shouted a voice from the crowd. I turned to where it came from. The source was a man with a white beard, wearing a purple robe and a skirt. He stood up, straightened his robe, and addressed me. “This is what you’re saying, isn’t it? That after enough information-gathering stops, they will have figured out how to breach the vestibule and kill us all.”

  “Why should they?” Nuphar raised both her hands and her voice. “It makes no sense. Why should they attack us at all?”

  “Because you are an invading species.” Shir stepped forwards, swinging his glare all over the room. “You might decide you’re interested in the Moon. Or Venus. Or Uranus.”

  I snorted. “Nobody’s interested in Uranus. Miranda, if anything.”

  “We are not an invading species!” cried Nuphar. “We are human beings. This planet belongs to us!” Shouts of agreement from all around her. She folded her hands. “I refuse to surrender without trying. We shall fight. We shall defend ourselves.”

  “We shall defend you,” said Shir. “This is what we’re here for.”

  An older woman stood up, wearing a golden crown and holding a scepter in her hand. “If you destroy the vestibule, we’ll never be able to come back,” she said. “Our Mission will have become pointless.” She climbed on her chair and pointed her scepter at us. “You will have destroyed humankind.” The room thundered again.

  Shir and I exchanged glances. He shrugged. It was no use talking to them. Anyway, once we’d be out of here we’d decide for ourselves what to do. Our programming said, defend Humankind at all costs.

  We sat back. Nuphar climbed down from her desk. She came to us, sighed, pulled up a chair, and sat down in silence.

  The white-bearded man spoke louder now. “They want to bury us here.” He raised his hands. “They want us to remain in this Library for good.”

  Waves of discussion swept the room like a thunderstorm, splitting and rejoining again. Someone offered to give shelter in the Library to all of our kind before the destruction of the vestibule, as a reward for saving Earth, and was immediately shouted down in protest: the Library was for Humans only, and we were most definitely non-Humans. A voice cried out that by the same token they could invite the aliens in. Shir cringed where he sat. I laid a hand on his knee in encouragement. He laid his hand on mine.

  Nuphar grew rigid suddenly and looked at me. “How did the aliens discover the space-warp field?”

  I shrugged. “We don’t communicate with the Superiors about anything beyond immediate defensive measures.”

  She moved her eyes to Shir. “And all these invading species, are they the same kind of aliens?” she asked.

/>   Shir shook his head. “The data systems passed on to us by the Superiors indicate different biologies, with no evolutionary connection.”

  Nuphar’s face blanched. “And they all started arriving during the past two hundred years, more or less?”

  I nodded.

  “And you’ve never asked why? How come they all arrive at the same time to the same place?” She sighed. “Whatever happened to curiosity? Your bosses didn’t program you for it?”

  Shir straightened his back. “Curiosity, that’s what killed Humankind. This is what made those first people enter an alien spaceship rather than destroy it as soon as it was discovered.”

  Nuphar turned her eyes from Shir to me and back again. She nodded, slightly, and stood up. She climbed onto the desk, raised her hands and cried out, “We’ve reached a decision.”

  My throat constricted. I didn’t want to leave. There were Humans here. There were the smell, and the warmth, and a sense of Humanity. But I had to leave. Shir grasped my hand. I didn’t have to look at him in order to realize that he felt the same.

  “The problem with robots,” Nuphar made a gesture in our general direction, “is that they only obey preset programming. They don’t ask why. They don’t know why aliens are attacking Earth. They don’t know why aliens are mining the Moon. They don’t even know how come so many aliens developed, at the same time, a space-warp that yields to human tissue.” She turned to us and spoke more softly. “They defend us without realizing that it was we who destroyed humankind.”

  The room fell silent all at once.

  Nuphar bit her lower lip. She was speaking only to us now. “A time-warp field works exactly like a space-warp field, except that instead of existing everywhere simultaneously, it exists everywhen simultaneously.” Her voice steadied a bit. “Last time we were here, we left clear instructions about the date and location of our return. Obviously, parts of those instructions must have leaked out, away from Earth.”

  “No.” Shir got to his feet, dragging me with him.

  “And that’s why the aliens are coming. They want to complement their space-warp fields with time-warp as well.” Nuphar smoothed her robe using both hands.