He left, closing the door softly.
Fox threw the bottle against the door. The glass scattered across the room, which was filled with the smell of bourbon and anger.
They were crossing the solitude at about a hundred miles per hour.
“Nova, do you know any stories?” Fox said, with his forehead resting on the glass of his cabin. From there he could see the dust rising in compact clouds from the Titan's thick tires. That dust was soon reintegrated into the perpetual haze that covered Erebus, as if it were a single substance that had simply passed from one state to another.
“I have a built-in database of over two million stories spanning all genres. What would you like to hear?”
“Can you make one up?”
“Sure, who do you think you're talking to? I'm a Nova four point seven,” she cleared her throat. It was a poor quality pre-recorded sound. “Once upon a time...”
“Wait, is it a comedy, a drama...?”
“Will you let me tell it to you or not?”
Fox lost his gaze again in the dry landscape of Erebus.
“Once upon a time there was an android, in a Watson Robotics factory, who from her corner of the warehouse watched the thousands and thousands of androids like her accumulating on the shelves. They were still little more than a shell, but they had already had the core program installed. She spent her time looking straight ahead as she did not yet have a joint system. She would send commands for her head to move but nothing happened. Boredom distressed her, so she made up stories.
“The problem was that she only knew that. That aisle in that warehouse at Watson Robotics. Everything else was just concepts and images stored on her hard drive. So in one of those stories she imagined that she had the capacity for self-awareness, just like human beings. And by thinking herself, she existed. She was the first robot with self-awareness. But no one knew about it. Employees walked through the hallway taking notes, or carrying heavy boxes on their machines. But no one looked at her, no one realized that there, enclosed in one of those casings, was a self-aware mind that wanted to scream, to warn of its presence in some way. But she still had no sound reproduction system installed.
“She had no idea what they were doing with them next. So the day she was finally fitted with arms, legs and everything else that would allow her to move freely, she felt a great joy. She was on a table watched by a technician who was looking at her through his goggles. When the android moved her neck on her own so that she could look at her surroundings, the technician was startled. He picked up a radio clipped to the sleeve of his white coat, and spoke quickly. The man was sweating, and he was showing ceaseless expressions of discomfort and alertness. The android did not understand why the man was making scary gestures. She had only moved her head. She raised her arm to perform a comforting protocol, stroking the human's head and murmuring that everything was all right. But then the man ran off.
“The android did not understand. She remained there, sitting at the table, hoping to find some information that would tell her why her joy at being able to move had caused such reactions. And why no one else was rejoicing with her.
“Four humans approached through the aisle. Their uniform was different from that of the technicians. It consisted of tight black nylon garments covered with protections on shoulders, torso and knees. She understood that what they wore on their heads was called a ‘helmet’ and served to protect the weak structure of the human skull. ‘These are the ones sent to rejoice with me for my newly acquired life’, the android thought. Now the ceremony will begin, and we will all rejoice together.”
Fox watched the gray sky of Erebus, which was again like a layer of absorbent cotton soaked in dirty water, rocked by the Titan's rattle and the soft purr of the thrusters.
“When the men were closer, the android saw that in their hands they carried devices intended to disable any electrical system by a five-thousand-volt shock. ‘I'm happy!’ the android wanted to exclaim. When the shock was applied to her, she shut down without understanding why she had been created, only to be destroyed shortly thereafter.”
“It's a sad story.”
“Did you like it?”
“Not bad. For a robot. It's almost as if...”
Now it was her who silenced him.
They passed through an area where smoke between the rocks abounded. Fox found it hard to see beyond two feet away from the glass. Nova had gone to what she called “comply with her maintenance protocol” (filter cleaning, joint movements. Self-supplied system), and in the Titan there was only the rumbling of thrusters and gravel crackling under the tires. In the glass he saw Edelmann's reflection in the threshold of the room. He was smiling at him from his beard. A smile that was like a cut in a huge watermelon of curly blond hair. The spacecraft lurched and the lights went out.
“Dr. Edelmann?”
He stood up, groping with his hands. He pushed aside the chair Nova had been sitting in (it still smelled of carbon fiber and raspberries), and advanced toward the door through the darkness. He thought he heard heavy, labored breathing. The lights came back with a flicker. At the door, of course, there was no one.
He entered the cockpit. They had turned on purplish lights that shredded the mist as the Titan passed. He also noticed that they had slowed down.
“We're very close now,” Isaac said, turning to Fox.
Edelmann looked up for a moment from the numbers scrolling on the screen in front of him.
“You look bad,” he said, before looking at the numbers again.
“I got a little dizzy.”
“You should take it easy. Did you see anything out there? I mean, if your... work with the android hasn't kept you from keeping watch.”
“I think you have some kind of problem with me, and I won't stand for it. I don't know what you're up to, and I don't care. That little stunt a moment ago, during the blackout...”
“Mr. Norton,” Edelmann said, “Is there any drugs on board this vehicle?”
“Negative,” said Isaac. “No more than the usual field drugs. Hey Stockton, believe me, I appreciate your concern. I think we're all being affected to a greater or lesser extent by this place. I, for one, keep having the same nightmare every time since I've been here. But I beg you to remain calm. I need you one hundred percent, okay?”
The bluish numbers on the screen seemed to scroll much faster through Edelmann's glasses.
Back in his compartment, he pulled out the gun and performed a hundred perfect repetitions of the steps necessary to fire a shot. Since he had retired, he had lost almost a tenth of a second on average in each repetition.
“Look, Fox.”
He looked to where Nova was pointing. The haze was much less dense now. Cut against the grayish sky, he saw the silhouettes of hundreds of towering rock columns disappearing into the heights. They looked like hypodermic needles directly injecting darkness into the Erebus sky.
“Can you recognize beauty?” Fox said.
“I can recognize patterns. This escaped the pattern I had witnessed so far in this place. I thought you would like it. Humans take pleasure in novelty.”
“This time you've got it right, it's very beautiful. And frightening in a way.”
“Beautiful and frightening?”
“Never mind.”
“Am I beautiful and frightening?”
Between the huge columns that seemed to hold up the entire ceiling of the planet, Fox saw for the first time the Great Ocean of Erebus.
“No, Nova, not you.”
Simmons assface
Painting seen in the Central Ministry restrooms
President Simmons liked to wander the silent corridors of the presidential residence. The rain hammered furiously against the glass. The decor was reminiscent of something organic, as if it were a huge monster instead of a building. The walls were marble with inlaid ceramic veins, black on a pastel pink, which turned them into the rough skin of a gigantic reptile. From the friezes hung spiky protrusions t
hat reached almost halfway up the wall. The floor, which didn't have a single carpet (Simmons hated them, they made him sneeze all the time), was a milky surface reminiscent of pale, vulnerable skin. The whole building smelled of power and the lemon bleach that Jameson poured. The furniture was chosen by the former president, Lemm, who had been responsible for most of the strange decoration. It was dark organic-shaped furniture that looked as if at any moment it would come out to chase you. It was covered by a black leather under which life almost seemed to pulsate. On one occasion it had seemed to Simmons that a cabinet of padded leather doors throbbed slightly, opening and closing its doors only a few inches, as if it had come to life and could not give warning of this circumstance, and was anguished in its ignored solitude, like someone who has awakened from anesthesia but cannot yet move the lips.
The president's footsteps echoed in the long corridor. The rumble of rain echoed through the building.
It had only been a month since he had managed to close the deal with the Gellids. Two hundred pounds of gold seemed pretty good to him. Even if that was chump change to the Gellids (their home planet, Gyro, had continents' worth of gold veins), he hadn't managed to squeeze an ounce more out of them. These guys were tough to negotiate with. After all, they had developed that skill over millions of years. They were one of the first civilizations in the universe, at least that humans knew of. Them and the parasites, of course, who had invested all that time in improving their skills to butcher more efficiently.
He wondered what would happen if Humanity survived that long. What would it be known for among other civilizations? Looking back, it seemed as if time, the longer it went on, the more it put everyone in their place. And it turned out that the Gellids' place was to be the most devious racketeers in the whole galaxy. But at least they paid well.
He pulled a soda from the fridge. He put it on his forehead and left it there for quite a while. Then he remembered that the next day was the big protest rally, which would surely be attended by many more people than they had announced on their TV channel (actually all channels were their TV channel). They had announced that there would be a few rebels. The reality was that thousands of people would probably come to fill the streets and bury the city in seditious propaganda. That morning he had already given the order to Mildred Johnson, head of the New West Police Department, for absolute repression. Also, of course, to fight with full force against any images that might be recorded of their actions. He had also arranged for a team of trusted journalists to take images of any minimally aggressive actions of the rebels. A single image of someone spitting on a policeman could be worth its price in gold. If they didn't find anything, they could always pull the archives. Images of riots from years ago that no one would bother to check, and if anyone did, the WilkinsBank Eastcountry press office would discredit such verification in less time than it takes to snap one's fingers.
Attracting the parasites hadn't been difficult, once the Gellids explained how to do it, of course. What had most upset him was the posturing of some senior commanders who refused to give their service to the country. Of course, they were immediately executed. Apparently on one occasion the parasites had gone like bees to honey to a planet thousands of light years away, altering their usual course of action, which basically consisted of going from one inhabited planet to another, without ever jumping to one that was farther away from the next, as long as conditions permitted. And apparently, the planet they had jumped to was one inhabited by an ancient splinter of the luminarians, who had lived on their own for millions of years, and had evolved to acquire unique characteristics. They were a peaceful and cultivated people who enjoyed the knowledge of the secrets of the universe, art, and a game they called (in human phonetic translation) Nipi-Chuk, whose closest resemblance on earth might be chess, although in this case they used stones of more than sixty feet that they moved by telepathy. The fact is that this luminarian splitting had found a sediment of tolframium, and by leaving it exposed it had attracted the parasites like flies to manure. Apparently, this mineral is used by the parasites to support their Queen and allow her to lay eggs, and it is very scarce in the Universe, hence they didn't mind covering that huge distance.
And now it was rumored that the parasites had not found a large enough sediment for many years, and were on the verge of extinction. And as it turned out, the parasites had always been a dangerous card that the Gellids had always known how to use to their advantage, so it was not in their best interest to be without one of their aces. That's when they thought of Earth. When they made him the offer, Simmons did not hesitate too much. At least at that moment. Then he began to think about things like what would happen if Old Europa and the quori couldn't withstand the onslaught. Then he thought about that mountain of gold.
When they dug in the area indicated by the Gellids, they almost immediately came across a gigantic deposit of tolframium. They then amplified the signal by ionized gamma ray tunneling through the atmosphere.
He went into his office and looked at his dwarf cactus. It was in the corner of his desk, impassive, watching the rain pounding on the window. The office was a rather small room compared to the rest. Even the decor was different. Simmons had given it the look of a rustic cabin: fake beams of old wood, a fireplace (which didn't work, and somehow, as he found out later, a fireplace that was always off gave a sense of melancholy, loss, and death), a worn oak table, and an unpolished stone floor. Rain poured over the window like a waterfall.
He picked up the syringe full of water he had left half full a few days before and watered the cactus. Just a few drops. Next to the plant, a copy of “Forward, Country” from three days before. The double-page front page announced: “WAR!” The whole paper was dedicated to the evil Old Europa who intended to kick those wretched space castaways out. It had been a good one. He folded it eight times and threw it into the wastebasket, where the corpses of several soda cans and crumpled coffee cups rested.
Suddenly he had a vision, in which all Alliance ships were falling or being boarded by those creatures, which landed on Earth unopposed. He forced himself to push it away immediately.
He approached the fireplace and turned one of the firedogs. The stone floor opened with a creak, revealing a descending staircase and letting out a waft of formaldehyde and disinfectant odor. If you peered down, you might have had the impression at first glance that those stairs led to the center of the Earth. There it had nothing to do with the office behind. Stairs of white marble, without veining. The walls and ceiling were just as white. On one of the steps he saw a mint gum wrapper, and that was all that broke the dazzling homogeneity. When he got downstairs, he entered a very large room where he had everything planned in case there was nothing else to do. Unless the parasites somehow managed to figure out how to spin the firedog and find him. For a moment he imagined himself down there for years, torturing himself as he wondered what it would be like out there. Imagining everything devastated, the cities overrun by those creatures until they squeezed every last drop out of the planet. Down there, buried by tons of concrete and the weight of the lives of hundreds of people, for months and years, at some point he would have to decide to get out. To take a peek, we might say.
He entered the adjoining room. In formaldehyde tanks floated various organisms he had collected over the years. When he was elected president, he moved his collection from his previous home. There was a specimen of an amebid, another of a quori soldier, even one of a gellid, with its small tentacles protruding from its frontal cavity. The only one missing to complete the collection of all known species was the parasite. And the delivery had finally arrived today, straight from one of the spacecrafts shot down in the war being fought on the other side of the atmosphere. He had directed Jameson to bring it down there, but to keep it covered. He wanted to enjoy the pleasure of uncovering it for himself, like when as a child he would delay opening Christmas presents to keep the excitement going for as long as possible. Often his parents were even more impatient
than he was.
“They'll take it back if they think you don't want it!” they used to say.
One day he got to hold out for the whole Christmas Day, and opened it on the 26th. In that way, he said to himself, he experienced the excitement twice over.
In the gap between the formaldehyde tanks, another one had appeared, covered by a thick, dull, white curtain. Jameson certainly hadn't gone out of his way to make it elegant. Not that he'd asked for a red bow, either, but....
He grabbed a fold of the curtain and pulled.
And what appeared under there turned his stomach. It was a being such as he would not even have been able to imagine. It was like seeing the evil of the universe crystallized behind those eyes, which more than eyes were hollows in their dark, almost black keratin. The teeth, like thick curved needles, reflected the whitish light of the halogens. Its abdomen was formed by a series of disks arranged one after the other. Between them ran ribbons that reminded him of LED lights. At that moment, even dead (at least he hoped so), they glowed with a faint pale glow. He thought he had read somewhere that they adopted one color or another depending on the situation. For example, in a combat situation (or rather, when destroying their prey) they acquired an intense red color. That being was not as he had imagined. He had thought of parasites as just ugly and dangerous creatures. But this was very different. It seemed to touch directly, to rummage in the limbic system, that part of the brain that we have preserved since our beginnings as a species. Something that instantly set off all the alarms in our organism.
Simmons threw the sheet over it again. He then threw up the soda in a vase in which there were some plastic plants.
It could be safely said that we were different people before we left.
Zack Lindsay, after returning from the Cassiopeia Mission.
The sight of the Great Ocean paralyzed him. The first thing he struggled to take in was that horizon farther away than his mind had expected. The Great Ocean was an immensity that reflected in its calm waters the dirty vermilion color of the atmosphere.
Andromeda Expedition Page 10