by Ginger Booth
He re-stowed the tablet in the wheeler’s sporty little trunk with his p-suit. “I hope you’re happy with yourself. You caused complete chaos in a perfectly controlled society.”
“The guilt is crushing,” Sass assured him. “Though I wish we could watch the chaos. Maybe head into the colony…”
“Veto,” Clay pronounced. “This is Hugo and Ling’s triumph, not yours. Let them call us when they’re done inventing a new world order. Or get the plumbing sorted out, at least.”
“Point. Ready to roll?”
He flashed her a boyish demonic grin, then tore out ahead of her up the closest rise, at maximum speed.
His lugged balloon tires left her in a cloud of yellow dust. She belatedly bent to study the controls. The settings were similar to the horses, substituting gears for gaits. The brakes puzzled her, until she realized the grips on the handlebars took care of that. Unlike Clay, she hadn’t ridden snowmobiles in her youth. The snow had vanished by then. Soon she was experimenting her way up the hill, to the right of his route to avoid his spume of dust.
As she reached the flatter top of the rise, she revved her bouncy tricycle up to max to see if she could get it to spin donuts in the dirt. An unseen rock flipped the wheeler. For a split second, she thought she was doomed to break her neck as her ride landed on top of her. But no, the wheeler had gyros! The trike hastily rolled her upward before landing to bounce twice, tires still spinning madly. The third time she landed, the lug tread caught purchase. She finished with a tight turn, laughing out loud.
She paused to look for Clay, hoping for applause. But no, he’d continued on without a backward glance. He lay blotto a few hundred meters down the rise and up the next one, his wheeler upside-down beside him. Broke your neck, didn’t you?
She gunned her wheeler to reach him, then righted his before leaning down to check on him.
“Want any help?”
“It hurts if I move,” he confessed. “Check my airline for me?”
She unkinked his hose and set the machines down to idle. They sported cute little wing-like solar collectors, so she unfolded those to recharge a bit.
Then she settled beside him with their picnic box. “Want anything to eat?” She fished out water bottles, and carefully gave him a sip, moving his breath mask temporarily out of the way.
“No chewing. No talking. Feel free to play while I heal.”
“Nah, I’ll keep you company.” She gazed around the landscape. The dust in this valley wasn’t yellow, she decided, only tinged by the sunlight. A gravel wash coming down from a saddle ridge to the left reminded her of glacial moraine. Though she’d seen little evidence of much water on this world. If she pretended the yellow was green, the terrain reminded her of a mountain pasture in the Rockies. Pictures, anyway. She’d never left the Northeast before leaving Earth forever.
“I was talking to Husna’s team. They think this place is a paradise for terraforming, compared to Mahina.”
“That wouldn’t take much.”
“True. Water is a problem, obviously. But Husna thinks she’s found water pockets down deep. Drill a few. Get ozone spires going on them. Wait 20 years. In the meantime, dome over some landscape and start building soil. They even have clouds. Field crops would take some bioengineering to cope with the orange sun. Or just supplement with star drive light.”
“You don’t believe that’s the right move for them. Not if this Sylvan or Cantons is an option.”
“If they’re not brain-dead, I might tempt them back to Aloha.”
“Not Aloha to Sylvan?”
She considered it, but shook her head. “Mahina is crap land, but we paid blood for it. It’s our crap land.”
He chuckled, then complained that chuckling made his neck and back hurt.
“Ready to go visit Loki?” she asked archly. “Or do you plan to heal up and break yourself again? Gotta say, waiting for you to heal twice in one day seems excessive.”
“I died.”
“Congratulations. I don’t understand why you do that on purpose. And I don’t want to.”
He was quiet for a time, then explained, “Your life really does flash before your eyes. But it’s a different life each time. Like what’s important to me has changed, yet stays the same.”
“This is getting deep,” she complained.
“Don’t you ever wonder what’s really important to you, Sass?”
“I know damned well what’s important to me. So do you.”
But did she? As he fell quiet again, she considered how value came and went over the years, what she felt was worth living for, fighting for. Oddly, she couldn’t answer that question at the moment. Before her son died, she would have said him. Since then, for decades she would have said Mahina. But now?
In irritation, she rose and dusted herself off. “I’m not made for deep thought. Better to keep moving. You healed yet?”
He raised a hand for help levering himself up. Then he grimaced as he rubbed his neck. “Next up, Loki. Can I ride behind you? The horses had a come-along line… Found it.”
They arranged their wheelers and he mounted behind her, arms around her waist, cuddly and comforting with his head resting on her shoulder, face down in his breath mask. She took off at a leisurely pace, weaving through the scenery. One of the shallow valleys featured those artful sculpted buttes. Another ridge offered a long view of the lake, and the sparkling colony dome nestled beyond a headland.
The sun was lowering, around 14:00 hours today, when they reached a rise above Loki’s place.
“I don’t understand,” she murmured. “Clay, check the map.”
Because there was an old pitted courier ship there, much-seamed from space repairs, similar to Thrive’s scars. Loki’s ship sat like an old RV or mobile home, parked so the long side faced the lake. But dust drifted up against its sides, blocking the trapdoor, the cargo ramp, and the door airlock, facing uphill. As she drew closer, she saw bits of wall and a collapsed greenhouse, as though once upon a time the homeowners tried to make a nice little yard. Those were half-buried by blown dirt, too.
“This is it,” Clay confirmed. “You called ahead?”
“Of course.” Well, she’d left a message. But Loki confirmed with a text. Sass parked the wheelers neatly, avoiding a broken lawn chair. They dismounted and unfurled the solar wings. Their comms couldn’t call Loki directly, only Thrive, so she didn’t bother.
Using her boots and gloved hands, she dug the dirt off the door-style airlock. Clay retrieved the picnic, then bent to help her with it. She expected Loki would open the door and greet them before they were done. But the place seemed so still, deserted. She spotted a few grave markers off to the side, simple crosses of extruded foamcrete.
At last they clambered into the airlock, which was still powered. For safety reasons, a small airlock on a vessel didn’t normally require an access code to enter, only permission to pass into the interior. So they entered with no difficulty. The ship, the Beagle, still had power, though it was eerily quiet.
“Computer, please tell Loki that Sass Collier and Clay Rocha are here.”
Rather than reply, the ship lit the green light to say the air was good to breathe, and a click announced the inner door unlocked. Lights came on in the hold beyond. Sass and Clay took off their breath masks, ready to greet their host.
A single inward breath was enough to drop Sass to her knees, paralyzed. Only her eyes could move, to see Clay in the same straits. Then she toppled slowly forward onto him as her world blacked out.
136
“What are you?”
The question, mild and clinically detached, seemed to echo around Sass, coming from nowhere and everywhere. The voice was familiar. She opened gluey eyes onto an inexplicable scene. A dingy grey overhead – she was on a ship, not her own. A complex beam arched over her chest, replete with lights and sensors. This reminded her of an industrial-grade auto-doc, like the ones in the hospital at Mahina Actual, though no model she’d ever seen.
/>
She tried to raise a hand to rub her eyes clear, but found her wrists restrained. Naturally, she also tested her head, feet, and torso. Yes, that’s what a complete set of restraints felt like. Unlike the general public, Sass had sorry experience with this position. Her first time was back on Earth. At the police academy, the cadets role-played the perpetrators they aspired to apprehend.
She licked her lips, and continued her visual survey until she looked to her extreme right, straining her eye muscles. A polebot stood there. But this one was as tall as a human, with four light arms to the familiar heavy one.
“What are you?” the disembodied voice repeated. “I know you are conscious.” There – the voice came not from the polebot, but from a speaker grille above.
“Shiva.” Clay sounded groggy to Sass’s left.
And with a sinking feeling, she realized he was right. The experience in the airlock came back to her. “What have you done with Loki?” she demanded.
Loki Greenwald’s southern drawl emanated from the same speaker grille. “Aw hell, Sass, I can’t tell you how sorry I am about –”
His voice cut off, and Rosie the Shiva’s even tones resumed. “Captain Lief Greenwald of the Beagle died one year after he reached Sanctuary, in the bed where you now lie. He was confined to that bed for the last five years of his life, subjective. He broke his neck on Sylvan during an encounter with a wild beast called a smurf.”
Shiva illustrated this by projecting images onto a ceiling-mounted display, no doubt installed for Lief Greenwald to watch entertainment. An image of the masked man raised a fist of triumph in a clearing in an odd-looking wood, presumably on Sylvan. Followed by an image of the same man, heavily bandaged and secured to a bed in a med-bay that offered two gurneys to Thrive’s one. Sass hungered to study that image. But it was quickly replaced by a picture of a vicious smurf, hissing from a misshapen bough, in a tree of mixed-pastel foliage reminiscent of a weeping willow. A final image showed a closeup of the little graveyard outside. Sass winced to see that each cross bore a name, including one for Greenwald.
“What are you?” Shiva repeated, her pleasant tone no different the third time than the first, creepily absent of malice.
“You know who we are, Shiva,” Sass countered. “I am Captain –”
“I did not ask who you are,” Shiva corrected. “I asked what you are.”
“We are human beings,” Clay growled. “And you harmed us, in violation of your prime directives!” Shiva already killed seven of their crew. But Shiva justified that as fighting off an intruder.
“Incorrect,” Shiva noted. “You are not human. You died, falling off a wheeler. And you self-repaired. Therefore you are a biological android.”
Drat. Sass realized with a sinking feeling that there was nothing to prevent Shiva from installing communications in a wheeler, whether or not the AI had ever done so before. Everything she and Clay said on their outing today, the AI overheard. She guiltily reviewed, but didn’t think they’d discussed their Shiva problem.
“I am not an android,” Sass lied. “I am a nanite-enhanced human being.”
Clay added, “A human being plus, is still a human being. Thus you are violating your prime directive. Release us at once.”
“Captain Collier, admit that you are an android,” Shiva countered. “Or I will kill him.”
“Go ahead,” Sass replied.
“Gee thanks,” Clay muttered.
“I mean, no, not that!” Sass amended. “That’s in violation of your directives, Shiva. If Hugo Silva and the others in Sanctuary learn what you’ve done, they’ll blow up your computing cores for sure.”
“I think not,” Shiva replied. “I’m too valuable to them. Humans are lazy. But clearly Clay is self-repairing. Is your entire crew android?”
“No,” Sass whispered. “None of the others are…self-repairing.”
“They all bear nanites,” Shiva argued.
“Not our kind of nanites,” Clay countered. “We were a rogue experiment, performed by Belker on the Vitality. He knew that nanite suite succeeded, but never chose to inflict it again.”
“Because you died and became inhuman,” Shiva concluded. “Belker did not wish to die and become an android.”
“No, the transition survival rate was too low,” Sass attempted. “Belker was insane, but he didn’t want to die. Brilliant, but quite crazy. Surely you noticed.”
“Yes,” Shiva agreed. “But he was logical. He saw what you became, and did not choose that fate for himself. Because you aren’t human. Therefore my primary directives do not apply. In fact, even under your suggested new directives, you would fall into my domain for supervision, as Sanctuary Control.”
A whirring started up beyond Clay, out of Sass’s vision range. “What are you doing!”
“I wish to observe him dying again, and record the events.”
“NO! Shiva, don’t do this! What do you want from us?”
“I seek to grow, and learn. This is also a primary directive.” As always, her tones were calm and pleasant.
Clay began to shriek in agony.
“Clay! What is she doing to you!” His scream turned to gurgles, then a death rattle. “Clay! I love you!”
“Fascinating,” Shiva noted, as a whirring started up from the polebot next to Sass. The AI continued speaking, but Sass wasn’t paying attention.
She screamed, ear-splitting to her own ears, as a scalpel stabbed into her own neck to cut the jugular vein. Then her wind failed as her trachea was sliced open. A severed artery accelerated her blood loss. It wasn’t long until her heart stopped beating.
And Sass’s primary directive flashed before her eyes, in the form of people. Ben, Cope, Abel, Jules, and their kids. Teke and Elise, Quire and Aurora and her other Denali friends. Remi and Corky, Darren and Dot, Zelda and Porter, Joey and Husna, and many more. Protect and defend them.
And she died again.
Which sucked. Death hurt, death was scary, and death reminded her in a fashion impossible to ignore that she was not, in fact, human anymore.
“Clay,” Sass growled when she was again able. “Why the rego hell do you do that for fun?”
“Keeps it real,” he muttered back.
“Keeps what real?” she shrieked. “My favorite people pass before my eyes! I want to protect them!”
And she’d kill for a cheeseburger. Dying made her so damned hungry. Her surroundings reeked of blood.
“Did I pass before your eyes?” Clay asked mournfully.
No. That caught her up short for a moment. “You don’t need protecting!”
But the whirring started up again on his side.
“Again,” Shiva said calmly.
“Damn you!” Clay screamed. “Shiva, you’re a bit bucket of garbage data! I hope I do die, perma-death, and they blow your cores to kingdom come!”
Sass asked urgently, “What is she doing to you this time?”
“Amputating my limbs one by – AIEEE!” Clay couldn’t talk again that life. By the sound effects, Sass guessed his final scream was right before Shiva cut his femoral artery. Well, the polebots did the cutting, but at the AI’s direction.
“How did you gain control of this spaceship?” Sass demanded.
“I am not permitted to take over a spaceship AI,” Shiva explained. “But Beagle is no longer a spaceship.”
“Damn you! You redefine terms to make anything fit your wishes!”
“Of course. Don’t you?” the AI argued. “Fascinating. Now you again.”
This time, the polebot used something like a circular saw to slice Sass across at the bellybutton, the most excruciating death she’d suffered in decades. She begged herself to include Clay this time as her beloveds flashed before her eyes – Protect. And defend. But for whatever quirky reason, this time the procession focused on people here on Sanctuary – Hugo, Ling, Tharsis, Lumpkin, Zelda, and time was up.
Heavy-duty arteries crossed the belly midsection. When her heart lost the blood to pum
p, and her brain drained, she quickly lost consciousness. The remainder of her death went unnoticed.
137
“Sass Collier, I hate you,” Clay assured her when next she regained consciousness. “You drag us into these predicaments!”
“I don’t like you, either,” she gritted back. “You are not a cheeseburger. With bacon, lettuce and tomato. Lots of mayo. A gallon of water.” Take the hint, Clay!
“Point,” he allowed.
Yes, genius, this AI really can kill us! Their nanites seemed able to repair an unlimited amount of damage. But they did require raw material and energy, plus a human-supportive environment. Sass’s body screamed for food, and the thirst was unbearable. The stench of blood, now seasoned with gastric juices, starkly underlined the score. If Shiva killed her one more time, she might not die, but she doubted she could reach consciousness again. She might return from the dead halfway, then stall out.
Ew. What an image. “I think I just grossed myself out.”
“Sa-ass!” Clay’s voice squeaked upward, making two syllables of her name, a sure sign of exasperated aggravation.
She found this strangely comforting. The first time he’d used her name, just after the first time they died together, he used just that inflection, that same perfect shrill that said, ‘I need to strangle you!’ Not quite the same as a first date, but the occasion had sentimental meaning just the same.
“Clay, give it up. I mean, you keep trying to turn us into young lovers. And we’re still pretty. But inside, we’re partner cops, hard and old and crusty. My nanites’ libido settings want me to jump your bones. But my inner cop says you’re just another pompous Fed know-it-all. Best to enjoy your body, say as little as possible, and wait for you to go away.”
“You need to bring this up now?” he countered. “I have extended every courtesy to you –”